Bill Gates and Richard Branson are making sizable donations (conveniently unsized in the reports) to groups engaged in geo-engineering research and advocacy. This is the speculative science that will solve our climate change problems by dicking about with the atmosphere.
While it's some way short of full-blown terraforming, the megalomania quotient is pretty high. Branson has previous when it comes to looking down on us puny humans, literally so given his progression from balloons to sub-orbital spacecraft, while Gates is clearly a big dumb objects kinda guy at heart.
Of course, this may just be part of their respective programmes to be recognised as benefactors of mankind, which my University of Life diploma in psychoanalysis tells me is down to guilt arising from the sharp practices that set them on the roads to riches in the first place (86-DOS and tax evasion).
Actually, maybe the guilt isn't such a big deal for them. Maybe this is just the ultimate Ozymandias kick. Instead of "the weather forecast, sponsored by PowerGen", we can look forward to "the weather, courtesy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation".
Mind you, that would be better than having the clouds repeatedly forming into the shape of a bearded, smirking man's face.
Monday, 6 February 2012
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Even the Internet is no match for our powers
The London Olympics could "crash the Internet", according to today's Observer:
The Internet didn't break during the Beijing Olympics, so are we to believe it has become more fragile in the last 4 years? Maybe the Chinese are ideologically opposed to remote access.
Probably the biggest demand shock that the Internet experienced was on the 11th of September 2001, when everyone who had access went online. As I recall, it didn't melt all over the keyboard then either. What happened was that certain news sites (i.e. specific server farms) failed to respond due to demand way above the norm. In effect, a benign distributed denial of service attack (DDOS).
The net itself was fine, which you could prove by accessing other sites that either weren't attracting increased demand or had sufficient capacity to cope (e.g. Google, which remained up albeit slower than usual). We know that variance in demand will decrease as the volume of demand increases, so the Internet (and various server farms) will only become more reliable over time, assuming the infrastructure keeps pace with the growth in the number of users (up from under 9% of the global population in 2001 to 32% now). And that's without considering the efficiency gains of content distribution networks and other forms of caching.
This network meltdown is yoked together with the existing horror story concerning travel:
For comparison, when Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham, Charlton and QPR all play at home (which they do this season), the combined crowd is about 175,000. Obviously these games take place on a Saturday and/or Sunday, but usually within a shorter space of time (typically 1pm to 7pm).
What the quote above doesn't explain is that the estimate of trips already includes over 1 million bods who aren't residents or commuters (see page 17 of the TFL report), i.e. they are tourists or day trippers. Given that hotel capacity hasn't increased by that much, and many who might otherwise have visited London will avoid it in 2012, there will surely be a lot of substitution in the visitor flows, and that's without factoring in the impact of residents fleeing the capital for the duration.
I saw a map published recently that marked the "traffic hot spots" across London, with the implication that you should avoid these areas. One of them covered Wimbledon and most of the A3 through Wandsworth. As someone who lives in the area, I know from experience of Wimbledon fortnight that congestion is limited to a small area at Southfields Tube station, and that the locals cope (grudgingly) each year.
Both of these themes (Internet chaos and travel chaos) exemplify more than the quotidian desire to grumble about how shit everything is, or could be, and the more profound anxiety that we are just the wrong kind of snow away from societal breakdown. They also reflect an almost millenarian attitude towards the Olympics. We are approaching something unprecedented.
This was also on show with the much publicised "training exercise" in which Marines stormed a hijacked Thames ferry. This would actually be one of the least likely cunning plans for a terrorist group, but it made for some seriously sexy shots of boys in powerboats, which you don't normally see outside of a Bond film.
It was when I learnt that this exercise was codenamed Operation Woolwich Arsenal Pier that the penny dropped. The whole thing is a massive attempt at psychic compensation for the utterly damp squib that was the Millennium Dome, which the ferry passes en route to Westminster.
We want to believe that the Olympics will be worthwhile, but knowing full well that the much trumpeted legacy will be the usual broken promise, and suspecting that plucky failure will be our lot when it comes to the medals, we're left having to over-dramatise the impact of the event on travel, security and now (gawd 'elp us) the Internet.
Unless Godzilla emerges from the Thames on the 3rd of August, chewing the mangled corpses of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, it's all going to be such a letdown.
The warning, in the Cabinet Office's official advice, Preparing your Business for the Games, says that the country's telecoms system may be unable to cope with demand to access the internet in certain areas. Businesses are being encouraged to offer staff flexible working arrangements to try to ease the pressure. ... The government believes that encouraging businesses to allow staff to work from other offices or home, or at different times, is key to easing congestion in the capital this summer.It's easy to laugh at the utter thickness of this. If London-based employees stay at home and dial-in, this merely shifts Internet usage between nodes rather than increasing it (unless the implication is that out of sight of our bosses we'll over-indulge in video-streaming). Given the dynamic routing design of the beastie, this isn't going to cause any capacity issues within the bounds of normal traffic fluctuation (e.g. a Monday vs a Sunday).
The Internet didn't break during the Beijing Olympics, so are we to believe it has become more fragile in the last 4 years? Maybe the Chinese are ideologically opposed to remote access.
Probably the biggest demand shock that the Internet experienced was on the 11th of September 2001, when everyone who had access went online. As I recall, it didn't melt all over the keyboard then either. What happened was that certain news sites (i.e. specific server farms) failed to respond due to demand way above the norm. In effect, a benign distributed denial of service attack (DDOS).
The net itself was fine, which you could prove by accessing other sites that either weren't attracting increased demand or had sufficient capacity to cope (e.g. Google, which remained up albeit slower than usual). We know that variance in demand will decrease as the volume of demand increases, so the Internet (and various server farms) will only become more reliable over time, assuming the infrastructure keeps pace with the growth in the number of users (up from under 9% of the global population in 2001 to 32% now). And that's without considering the efficiency gains of content distribution networks and other forms of caching.
This network meltdown is yoked together with the existing horror story concerning travel:
The Games organisers predict that on 3 August 2012, the first day of the track and field events, London's public transport will experience an extra three million trips on top of the 12 million made on an average workday.According to TFL (a 2007 report), the average number of trips per person per day is 2.8, which means that the extra 3 million trips would be accounted for by just over 1 million additional people. The total Olympic venue capacity across London is 386,000. These will host up to 3 sessions during the day, so it is conceivable that 1 million spectators or more will be on the move, albeit staggered over more than 12 hours (events run from 10am to 10pm).
For comparison, when Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham, Charlton and QPR all play at home (which they do this season), the combined crowd is about 175,000. Obviously these games take place on a Saturday and/or Sunday, but usually within a shorter space of time (typically 1pm to 7pm).
What the quote above doesn't explain is that the estimate of trips already includes over 1 million bods who aren't residents or commuters (see page 17 of the TFL report), i.e. they are tourists or day trippers. Given that hotel capacity hasn't increased by that much, and many who might otherwise have visited London will avoid it in 2012, there will surely be a lot of substitution in the visitor flows, and that's without factoring in the impact of residents fleeing the capital for the duration.
I saw a map published recently that marked the "traffic hot spots" across London, with the implication that you should avoid these areas. One of them covered Wimbledon and most of the A3 through Wandsworth. As someone who lives in the area, I know from experience of Wimbledon fortnight that congestion is limited to a small area at Southfields Tube station, and that the locals cope (grudgingly) each year.
Both of these themes (Internet chaos and travel chaos) exemplify more than the quotidian desire to grumble about how shit everything is, or could be, and the more profound anxiety that we are just the wrong kind of snow away from societal breakdown. They also reflect an almost millenarian attitude towards the Olympics. We are approaching something unprecedented.
This was also on show with the much publicised "training exercise" in which Marines stormed a hijacked Thames ferry. This would actually be one of the least likely cunning plans for a terrorist group, but it made for some seriously sexy shots of boys in powerboats, which you don't normally see outside of a Bond film.
It was when I learnt that this exercise was codenamed Operation Woolwich Arsenal Pier that the penny dropped. The whole thing is a massive attempt at psychic compensation for the utterly damp squib that was the Millennium Dome, which the ferry passes en route to Westminster.
We want to believe that the Olympics will be worthwhile, but knowing full well that the much trumpeted legacy will be the usual broken promise, and suspecting that plucky failure will be our lot when it comes to the medals, we're left having to over-dramatise the impact of the event on travel, security and now (gawd 'elp us) the Internet.
Unless Godzilla emerges from the Thames on the 3rd of August, chewing the mangled corpses of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, it's all going to be such a letdown.
Friday, 3 February 2012
The farce that launched a thousand quips
Grim times for "JT, the man"©. His latest loss of the England captaincy has resulted in a sackful of traditionally crafted wooden jokes being emptied over the Internut. Most of them turn out to be the same painful and somewhat irrelevant take on Lady Bracknell: "To lose the England captaincy once may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose it twice looks like carelessness".
The remainder include a few heroic attempts to yoke the player (who looks like he was born to wear a stocking over his head - something about his physiognomy, not his criminal predilections) together with the de-knighted Fred Goodwin (who looks so tight-lipped you couldn't imagine him eating except through a straw). This post is one of them.
I suppose it is possible to see Terry as careless, but that seems to me to be merely a symptom of his enormous sense of entitlement. He does and says things that he thinks he will get away with, because in his mind he deserves to get away with them.
He is careless in the way that courtiers at Versailles in the reign of Louis XIV would apparently dump in stairwells and the less visited corridors due to the lack of toilets (a slight exaggeration, but based on a truth - I love the way the comment re "the smell" comes in the section straight after 'The politics of display').
Media reports regularly claim that he is admired by his peers across all clubs, however when non-Chelsea players talk about him the overriding sense one gets is one of discretion. Not dissing a fellow pro is not the same as admiring, let alone liking, him. The willingness of Rio Ferdinand and Emmanuel Frimpong to break cover this week shows that this "massive respect" was only courtesy.
Despite it being the less popular sarky remark, the parallel of the Chelsea captain with the former CEO of RBS strikes me as the more significant.
A sense of entitlement breeds contempt for the opinion of others and over-confidence in your own judgement. While both undoubtedly had talent, and worked ferociously to get themselves into a position to fully exploit it, they were also the recipients of great luck: being in the right place at the right time, vis-a-vis Abramovich/Mourinho and the banking boom. Ultimately, both were found wanting (ABN Amro and South Africa).
The news that both of them sought super-injunctions over alleged affairs rather adds to the sense that what they have in common is a massive ego. A super-injunction has come to be an admission of guilt in combination with a demand that this guilt not be broadcast.
The remainder include a few heroic attempts to yoke the player (who looks like he was born to wear a stocking over his head - something about his physiognomy, not his criminal predilections) together with the de-knighted Fred Goodwin (who looks so tight-lipped you couldn't imagine him eating except through a straw). This post is one of them.
I suppose it is possible to see Terry as careless, but that seems to me to be merely a symptom of his enormous sense of entitlement. He does and says things that he thinks he will get away with, because in his mind he deserves to get away with them.
He is careless in the way that courtiers at Versailles in the reign of Louis XIV would apparently dump in stairwells and the less visited corridors due to the lack of toilets (a slight exaggeration, but based on a truth - I love the way the comment re "the smell" comes in the section straight after 'The politics of display').
Media reports regularly claim that he is admired by his peers across all clubs, however when non-Chelsea players talk about him the overriding sense one gets is one of discretion. Not dissing a fellow pro is not the same as admiring, let alone liking, him. The willingness of Rio Ferdinand and Emmanuel Frimpong to break cover this week shows that this "massive respect" was only courtesy.
Despite it being the less popular sarky remark, the parallel of the Chelsea captain with the former CEO of RBS strikes me as the more significant.
A sense of entitlement breeds contempt for the opinion of others and over-confidence in your own judgement. While both undoubtedly had talent, and worked ferociously to get themselves into a position to fully exploit it, they were also the recipients of great luck: being in the right place at the right time, vis-a-vis Abramovich/Mourinho and the banking boom. Ultimately, both were found wanting (ABN Amro and South Africa).
The news that both of them sought super-injunctions over alleged affairs rather adds to the sense that what they have in common is a massive ego. A super-injunction has come to be an admission of guilt in combination with a demand that this guilt not be broadcast.
Thursday, 2 February 2012
Emptor caveats
The general state of the economy, together with the paucity of big money transfers during the Premier League transfer window, is being interpreted by Goonerholic and others as evidence that January was a buyer's market. In other words, we could have afforded to pick up a spare striker, among other goodies, relatively cheap.
While I do think we're light up front, and thus only an RVP ankle away from a serious problem, I'm not sure the characterisation of the market is correct. First of all, the market in top-class players is always a seller's market because of the scarce product, which is why they cost so much in the first place.
Unless you want to take a hit on the cost of current players, you'll still want to sell at a reasonable price even in a so-called buyer's market. Even Man City are refusing to let Tevez go cheap, and there is no evidence that clubs are seeking to liquidate their player assets. The number of transfers in January 2012 was much the same as a year ago.
The headline news is that January transfer spending at £60 million is down 70% on last year, however that is largely due to 2011 being bloated by the combined £108m of business done for Torres, Carroll and Suarez, which was almost half the total of £225m. For comparison, January 2010 saw only £30m spent, although that was atypically low as the following chart shows.
The inter-relationship of those three players indicates that gross spending is an unreliable guide as the same money can be counted multiple times. The £50m for Torres was recycled into £35m for Carroll and £23m for Suarez, so a net spend of £58m on a turnover of £108m.
Deloitte's method is also questionable because they combine transfer windows based on the calendar year rather than the season. Thus 2011 looks much bigger than 2010. In fact, if you redraw the chart by season, it makes more intuitive sense: a noticeable drop in 2009-10 (after the 2008 financial crisis) and less volatility since then. 2011-12 has seen a reduction in spending on the previous year of 7.6%, which is a bit more boring than a 70% year-on-year decline for the January window alone.
A better way of looking at the market is to consider net spending, i.e. a club's purchases less its sales. Over the 5 seasons from 2006 to 2011, the total of gross sales for the 20 current league clubs was £2.7 billion (a little less than the £2.9b in the above chart due to relegation/promotion), but just £1.1 billion net (41% of gross), giving an average per season of £219 million.
What's undeniable is that Arsenal are top of the league (or bottom, depending on your perspective) in terms of financial husbandry, achieving a net profit of £31m on a turnover (sold + bought) of £202m. What this implies is that the supposed £50m war-chest is mainly the product of player trading, not the fruits of the new stadium. Alternatively, it may mean the war-chest actually stands at £80m. Perhaps we're building up a bid for Lionel Messi.
In contrast, Man City are bottom (or top) of the league over the same period having spent a net £434m on a turnover of £538m, most of it since the Abu Dhabi takeover in 2008. In other words, their project to win the title has so far cost them not far short of half a billion in player transfers. If you add on the other costs (salaries, agent fees, management, backoffice etc), they've probably spent over a billion to date. Their current income will come nowhere near matching this, which ultimately UEFA's Financial Fair Play rules will require. No wonder they won't offload Tevez for buttons.
Gary Cahill's transfer to Chelsea, for a reported fee of £7m, is also being put forward as evidence of a buyer's market. This is little more than the £6m Arsenal supposedly bid last summer. At the time, the belief was that Bolton were looking for £12m, for a player with one year on his contract and a £17m buy-out clause. The drop in their asking price is more likely to reflect the fact that Cahill could walk for free this summer. It also suggests that Arsenal's "parsimonious" offer was probably a fair one. Bolton will have lost a further million or so on wages since then.
Arsenal's problem is that even in a supposed buyer's market, there simply aren't enough top-quality players available, particularly in January. The 31 year old Bobby Zamora has just cost QPR £5.1m, having cost Fulham £3.6m at the market peak in 2008. We could easily have afforded Zamora, but it is questionable as to whether that would have improved the squad in terms of quality.
While I do think we're light up front, and thus only an RVP ankle away from a serious problem, I'm not sure the characterisation of the market is correct. First of all, the market in top-class players is always a seller's market because of the scarce product, which is why they cost so much in the first place.
Unless you want to take a hit on the cost of current players, you'll still want to sell at a reasonable price even in a so-called buyer's market. Even Man City are refusing to let Tevez go cheap, and there is no evidence that clubs are seeking to liquidate their player assets. The number of transfers in January 2012 was much the same as a year ago.
The headline news is that January transfer spending at £60 million is down 70% on last year, however that is largely due to 2011 being bloated by the combined £108m of business done for Torres, Carroll and Suarez, which was almost half the total of £225m. For comparison, January 2010 saw only £30m spent, although that was atypically low as the following chart shows.
The inter-relationship of those three players indicates that gross spending is an unreliable guide as the same money can be counted multiple times. The £50m for Torres was recycled into £35m for Carroll and £23m for Suarez, so a net spend of £58m on a turnover of £108m.
Deloitte's method is also questionable because they combine transfer windows based on the calendar year rather than the season. Thus 2011 looks much bigger than 2010. In fact, if you redraw the chart by season, it makes more intuitive sense: a noticeable drop in 2009-10 (after the 2008 financial crisis) and less volatility since then. 2011-12 has seen a reduction in spending on the previous year of 7.6%, which is a bit more boring than a 70% year-on-year decline for the January window alone.
A better way of looking at the market is to consider net spending, i.e. a club's purchases less its sales. Over the 5 seasons from 2006 to 2011, the total of gross sales for the 20 current league clubs was £2.7 billion (a little less than the £2.9b in the above chart due to relegation/promotion), but just £1.1 billion net (41% of gross), giving an average per season of £219 million.
What's undeniable is that Arsenal are top of the league (or bottom, depending on your perspective) in terms of financial husbandry, achieving a net profit of £31m on a turnover (sold + bought) of £202m. What this implies is that the supposed £50m war-chest is mainly the product of player trading, not the fruits of the new stadium. Alternatively, it may mean the war-chest actually stands at £80m. Perhaps we're building up a bid for Lionel Messi.
In contrast, Man City are bottom (or top) of the league over the same period having spent a net £434m on a turnover of £538m, most of it since the Abu Dhabi takeover in 2008. In other words, their project to win the title has so far cost them not far short of half a billion in player transfers. If you add on the other costs (salaries, agent fees, management, backoffice etc), they've probably spent over a billion to date. Their current income will come nowhere near matching this, which ultimately UEFA's Financial Fair Play rules will require. No wonder they won't offload Tevez for buttons.
Gary Cahill's transfer to Chelsea, for a reported fee of £7m, is also being put forward as evidence of a buyer's market. This is little more than the £6m Arsenal supposedly bid last summer. At the time, the belief was that Bolton were looking for £12m, for a player with one year on his contract and a £17m buy-out clause. The drop in their asking price is more likely to reflect the fact that Cahill could walk for free this summer. It also suggests that Arsenal's "parsimonious" offer was probably a fair one. Bolton will have lost a further million or so on wages since then.
Arsenal's problem is that even in a supposed buyer's market, there simply aren't enough top-quality players available, particularly in January. The 31 year old Bobby Zamora has just cost QPR £5.1m, having cost Fulham £3.6m at the market peak in 2008. We could easily have afforded Zamora, but it is questionable as to whether that would have improved the squad in terms of quality.
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
Why is finance impenetrable?
There's an argument that finance is complex and opaque because if it were transparent, we'd be put off investment due to the stark reality of risk, i.e. that many investments fail, relatively or absolutely. Most people want a guaranteed return, which is an oxymoron as nothing that produces a financial return can be guaranteed, at least outside of fairy tales.
This certainly rings true when you consider mortgage endowments in the 80s and 90s. The mis-selling was as much an unwillingness on the part of borrowers to consider them as anything other than a one-way bet as a deliberate case of over-promotion by the lenders. We wanted to believe, which is how all cons work.
However, this might be a little too neat, not to mention self-serving. If finance really is magic, the magician may have just successfully distracted us.
The history of trade unions, mutuals, credit unions and national insurance, can all be held up as examples of our pragmatic understanding of risk and how a collective approach can allow us to fund investments that we might not choose to make individually.
Most entrepreneurs avoid risk. They don't remortgage their house, they set up a limited liability company and try to raise funding. Indeed, if you do remortgage your home to bring your better mousetrap to market, that may be evidence that you are unhinged and in greater need of counselling than credit.
The invention of limited liability is generally considered to be one of the keys to economic development since the mid-19th century because it allowed entrepreneurs to "Try again. Fail again. Fail better". In other words, it mitigated risk.
I think we appreciate the reality of risk, but I think we also appreciate the value of social organisation to mitigate it. Limited liability works because it spreads risk out to creditors, who in turn recoup their losses through insurance or by putting up prices, thereby diluting the cost of failure through society.
The reality of risk does not seem to me to be sufficient justification for the willful impenetrability of finance. There's something else at work here, and it isn't maths.
This certainly rings true when you consider mortgage endowments in the 80s and 90s. The mis-selling was as much an unwillingness on the part of borrowers to consider them as anything other than a one-way bet as a deliberate case of over-promotion by the lenders. We wanted to believe, which is how all cons work.
However, this might be a little too neat, not to mention self-serving. If finance really is magic, the magician may have just successfully distracted us.
The history of trade unions, mutuals, credit unions and national insurance, can all be held up as examples of our pragmatic understanding of risk and how a collective approach can allow us to fund investments that we might not choose to make individually.
Most entrepreneurs avoid risk. They don't remortgage their house, they set up a limited liability company and try to raise funding. Indeed, if you do remortgage your home to bring your better mousetrap to market, that may be evidence that you are unhinged and in greater need of counselling than credit.
The invention of limited liability is generally considered to be one of the keys to economic development since the mid-19th century because it allowed entrepreneurs to "Try again. Fail again. Fail better". In other words, it mitigated risk.
I think we appreciate the reality of risk, but I think we also appreciate the value of social organisation to mitigate it. Limited liability works because it spreads risk out to creditors, who in turn recoup their losses through insurance or by putting up prices, thereby diluting the cost of failure through society.
The reality of risk does not seem to me to be sufficient justification for the willful impenetrability of finance. There's something else at work here, and it isn't maths.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)