Month: April 2020

From Michael Lewis’ 1991 collection of columns ‘The Money Culture’, about the then-recent Financial Services Act in the UK:

I recently spoke with a man widely regarded as one of the most astute and scrupulous investors in London. He manages nearly GBP 2 billion, some of which belongs to him. The Act essentially assumes that he is inclined to front run his clients — buy shares with his own money, then nudge the price with his clients’ money. The Act therefore requires him to execute orders for his clients before he does anything for himself. He hasn’t time for this. Often the markets are crazy, and he has not more than 30 seconds to buy or sell at a price. What he has always done is execute orders simulataneously, and give his clients the best price. He will copy with the Act by simply excluding his clients from whatever quick decsision he is making. Clients will effectively not get the full benefit of his wisdom. If I were a client I would be screaming for less protection.

– What the British can learn from American History

While there are several articles online about Newton and Shakespeare having been splendidly productive while in forced isolation, let’s not forget that Nehru wrote The Discovery of India while in jail during the Quit India movement.

PS: this was Nehru’s ninth, longest and final jail term, from August 1942 to June 1945. Over his life, he was in jail for over 3,250 days.

Some time ago I had a simple realisation. I have maintained plants at home for over a dozen years. I enjoy the days I spend taking on planned gardening tasks, often losing track of time. 

But it’s the daily maintenance – watering, rotating, trimming, spraying – that takes up most of my time. I scheduled this during my mornings, multitasking while getting ready for the work day. 

I resented mildly having to keep track of plants that needed more or less frequent watering, at having to slide my windows to reach plants in the corner. I resented those plants that had ant or big infestations no natter how early I caught it. Because I was distracted and hurried, I poured water from a tumbler into my pots instead of sprinkling it, causing the characteristic depression you see around stems. 

One day, having to spend time spraying bug repellent on a plant it dawned upon me how I had turned something I loved, a hobby, into a daily irritant and a mild annoyance. 

I quickly asked myself if tending to my plants was something I liked doing, or if it was the end result, healthy balcony gardens, that I was interested in. If it was the latter, I’d be better off delegating daily maintenance to someone. But I did like the process. More than the outcome, in fact. 

I also happened to read about the extraordinary ecologist and model Summer Rayne Oakes who has hundreds of plants in her apartment.

Watering the plants takes “about a half an hour every day, which I view as more of a meditative experience,” Oakes says. “And then once a week I probably spend a good hour, hour and a half doing composting, clipping back, that kind of stuff.”

That gave me some perspective. I don’t have as many plants, but they are a significant number. I should expect to spend more than a couple of minutes every two days with a bucket. 

Since then I have made adjustments to my morning schedule so spend a lot more time with the plants than earlier. I probably do more regular work on ridding them off bugs, but it makes me feel better than resentful. Doing this consciously has changed not just the plants’ health but my relationship with them. The garden is exactly the same but it is now a small source of joy and curiosity, instead of of irritation and anxiety. 

This change probably sounds trite. But it’s helped me be more deliberate about a few other everyday things I took for granted or did on autopilot.

At the same time, people younger than me baulk at having to manage their own stuff. As a mobile-first generation, their PCs/Macs are an afterthought. They see regular television and radio as old-world (broadcast) streaming services, and Prime/Hotstar/Alt-Balaji/Netflix as the logical next stage. they have never had to store anything, never had to back it up. They lament a TV show or music album no longer being available because a service chose to not renew a licenss, but they move on quickly because they know it’ll just show up sooner or later on another service. Impermanence is not a bug, it’s just part of the experience. 

My world of downloaded and organized libraries built up incrementally over decades seems not just an anachronism, but a different branch of evolution altogether. 

For many, having one’s media stored primarily in a format one isn’t comfortable with also affects the way one uses that media. I know a few older people who have all the music they like on their phones. They have streaming service subscriptions. But because it’s no longer on cassettes or CDs – in fact, their houses no longer have players for them – they just listen to music less. I know others who were gifted a Kindle with access to an unlimited range of books, including titles they grew up with that they said they’d longed to read. From what I know, the Kindle experience just didn’t take.

It’s unfortunate – they have more music to listen to, more books to read, more flexibly than ever, yet their lives are somewhat less rich because of this.

Of course isn’t always true. Many people have successfully made this mental shift in media, understanding deeply that the safely and longetivity of the stuff they own is always a matter of tradeoffs. I too have subscribed to a couple of streaming services – for me they’re a great way to discover new and old shows and movies, and a low-friction way of trying out new genres. If I like them, I can always buy and store them!

(ends)

Ownership of one’s personal data is a topic close to my heart, and data perservation/integrity are an important aspect of it.

I think there is a strong correlation between the generation one is born in and what medium one is most comfortable with for primary storage of one’s data.

Take one’s music, or movies, or photographs. In 2020, someone who is in their fifties or older is more likely than someone younger to think their data is most safe in physical form – for music and movies, as audio cassettes or VHS tapes or CDs/DVDs. For photographs, as physical albums. 

They are also less likely to read e-books, even on an e-ink Kindle. Anecdotally for me, people who are older don’t contrast e-books and physical books the way some younger people who have preferences do. They don’t talk about the feel of books, their smell, their heft, the uniquness of type or cover, their non-distractive nature. No, they just seem to be unable to consider an e-book a book. It seems to be a conceptual barrier.

All of this is usually instinctive – it’s not that they don’t like technology per se. It’s merely familiarity with the media that they stored and managed their first music, movies and photos in.

Personally, while I had my own audio cassettes, my first camera was a digital one – the good-for-its-time 5MP Sony W1. My first movies were CDs that I ripped to my hard drive. So I’m natively comfortable with my media being digital, that isn’t true of streaming services. 

I like to have my music in my iTunes folder, with all of the playlists I’ve made and ratings, ID3 tags and album art I’ve added over nearly twenty years (it was near-impossible to fetch meta information for Hindi and Marathi film music from the 50s to the 80s back then). I’m much more comfortble with my photos in iPhoto (now Photos), similarly organized into albums, on my Mac. Because open formats are important to me, I am concerned about the single daabase that is my iPhoto Library. And finally, I continue to store my movies and TV shows as files on my hard drive, although it has gotten very hard and increasingly expensive to buy movies/TV shows – even iTunes is now skewed heavily towards Apple+ and streaming.

From a large-scale study:

The new study followed over half a million healthy Norwegian men and women between the ages of 20 and 79 over a 20-year period…

Turns out if you’re a male over 60,

“…drinking boiled or pressed unfiltered coffee raised the risk of death…  due to elevated cardiovascular mortality”.

These are methods like espresso, the Moka pot or French press or Turkish coffee or South Indian filter coffee.

As for filtered coffee, it is

“…linked to a 15% reduced risk of death from any cause, a 12% decreased risk of death from cardiovascular disease in men and a 20% lowered risk of death from heart disease in women when compared to drinking no coffee”

These are methods like the aeropress or Chemex or V60.

I especially like that the article quotes this bit:

“The finding that those drinking the filtered beverage did a little better than those not drinking coffee at all could not be explained by any other variable such as age, gender or lifestyle habits. So we think this observation is true” 

As an aeropress person, this pleases me.

(Part 1)

When the information you publish starts causing serious damage, there will be pressure on your domain provider to delist your domain and on your hosting provider to take down your content. Things start getting quite inconvenient, and you start making tradeoffs. You can move your domain and hosting to providers in countries that are not on the best of terms with the countries that want your content to be removed. Wikileaks has hosted itself on a Russian provider in the past. If you’re a Westerner, this may make for uncomfortable bedfellows.

You can potentially fragment your content, especially if it’s text, and distribute it across notes on pastebin. Then there’s no one target. The problem again is discovery. If you have just a single piece or a small set of documents that could work. But if you want to run a publication, that will be a problem. You could run a channel on, say, Telegram to distribute your posts/episodes. With sufficient outrage, though, Telegram may shut your public channel down. But the lines appear to be if the stuff you’re publishing is child pornography, organising terrorism or fomenting an armed uprising. 

At this point, your only path is to get off the web altogether.

And get on the Tor network, aka the Dark Web. This will likely involve hosting your own web server, off a home computer or a Raspberry Pi. You’ll get an Onion network address, bypass the DNS infrastructure altogether. This means that your site is more or less untouchable (though not 100%) but significantly – massively, in fact – less accessible. It’s only reachable through the Tor web browser. And the distribution probem still remains – because you’re no longer on the regular web, you don’t have a regular domain name. You do have an address – that ends in .onion – but people still need to know it. For broad-based distribution of whatever it is you’re still publishing, you’re going to rely mostly on your visitors on Tor pasting and sharing it via mainstream-web chat and email. 

This is where you’ve ended up. Good luck.

(ends)

Recently, the YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in a news interview that the site would ban videos that contradict WHO guidelines, in fact any information that is ‘medically unsubstantiated’.

This sort of content ruins everyone’s online experience by polluting search results, gaming recommendations and fooling the credulous among us. But nevertheless, this got me thinking about censorship, and how one can make one’s online writing, recordings or videos resistant to being taken down. 

If someone else is hosting your content, you have quite limited control on its availability and access. This goes for videos on YouTube, writings on Medium, newsletters on Substack, podcasts on iTunes, even apps on the iTunes App Store or Google Play Store. These companies’ terms are opaque, constantly changing, are vague and often inconsistently applied. 

Content on your own domain and hosting is more resilient. No central authority can take it down, and it won’t disappear if the service – say, Medium – goes out of business or is bought. Certainly no algorithms will run on your self-hosted content, determining what is and isn’t a violation of the current terms. 

However, publish something objectionable enough and it goes viral, there will be consequences. Governments may pressure ISPs into blocking your domain, rendering it inaccessible. Search engines may refuse to index it or will demote it in their results. This frequently happens with torrent discovery and pornography websites. You can always get a new domain, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole. There’s also the question of getting word out about your new domain.

(Part 2)

The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s recent call to arms to build has understandably received wide distribution and near-unanimous approval online. It’s a rare piece of uplifting writing in times like the present.

The basic argument is that current events, specifically the pause in the global economy as a result of the pandemic, as well as America’s response to it, has laid bare problems across several sectors. Therefore, goes the call, this is the time to make big bets, tackle all of these shortcomings, and build the future of our dreams.

I think it is worth reflecting on why the world we should have been living in doesn’t yet exist. Why, as Peter Thiel quipped, “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”.

Capitalism, which Andreessen is surely a votary of, finds the most efficient way to allocate resources (capital, labour, IP and so on). Clearly it has funded projects and companies that were different from those that would have better prepared America for the pandemic. It has funded different opportunities than K-12 education, supersonic aircraft, delivery drones, monorails – all examples from his piece. In other words, the very entrepreneurs that Andreessen believes in, a belief he has built a career on, have chosen to work on other stuff. Why?

Andreessen lays the blame at the feet of inertia.

I think it is only a part, and not even a major part, of the problem. It is not merely a problem of paucity of ideas, nor the desire to act on them. The problem is one of broken systems.

America – as also India – needs to use this pause to reflect on its systems. In America’s case, the political system with its hopeless partisanship and buying of influence. The financial system with its addiction to Rescue Capitalism. The venture capital system with its herd mentality and Valley-centric bubbles. The healthcare system with its byzantine intermediaries. Entrepreneurs and corporations alike will work on those opportunities that these systems will most readily reward, and the results are there for all to see.

The problem is that systems are not sexy. Systems thinking, and considering second and third order consequences, is out of whack with our time’s almost mindless obsession with Speed – “instant gratification”, “quarterly results”, “immediate relief” – and with Execution. Systematic analysis and consideration is dismissed as ‘over-thinking’ and ‘over-intellectualisation’.

The reality is that today’s world is the result of interconnected, interacting, interesting but nevertheless complex and likely faulty systems. It is the inertia to examine these systems, not the inertia to implement ever more audacious ideas, that is the reason we find ourselves dissatisfied with the state of the world.

And fixing those systems? That is going to call for a lot more audaciousness than any idea ever will.

I sometimes think about how we take technological progress for granted. Not only can it stagnate, in some cases it can even be lost. My favourite example is that the ending of the 1998 movie The Parent Trap would not be possible today:

Both realize they still have feelings for one another, but decide it is better to go their separate ways. Elizabeth and Annie later board a flight for London, but when they arrive, they find Nick and Hallie waiting for them (having taken a faster flight on the Concorde). Nick realizes his previous mistake of not going after Elizabeth…

Less immediate to everyday life, the Space Shuttle is no longer operational; reusable space vehicles are a thing of the past. I saw on TV both the landing of the last Concorde flight in 2003 and the last Space Shuttle landing, of Atlantis, in 2011.

Yet another curious example is that of low-background steel. in short, some medical apparatus and instruments like Geiger counters need to be able to detect minute quantities of radiation. But since the decades of atmospheric nuclear tests in the 40s, 50s and 60s, it is no longer possible to produce steel that is not contaminated with what are called radionuclides. The only way humanity can now make such instruments is by repurposing steel from sunk world war 2 warships.

This thread has several examples of technological regress in the past. While our world today deals mostly with the problems of too much technology-driven disruption, it’s worth being aware of how knowledge and capabilities can also be lost.