Withered Hand video

I rather like this video that goes so badly with the song that it actually goes very well.

Well worth checking out the other songs by Withered Hand.

Warren Buffett and the business of life - by Alice Schroeder

Anyone with an interest in investment should find this a valuable read, it is also a well written account of an interesting life.

To qualify each of those statements, although there are some broad lessons to be learnt for investors, this is not a handy book of investment tips for the novice. Buffett made some horrendous mistakes in his investments, though by and large they make for more interesting reading than his successes. There was no great secret to his investment success. It was largely down to an enormous amount of hard work. Work searching out investment opportunities, work studying investment and business both specific and general. He worked to build up his capital, from the odd business while still at school to getting investment capital from relatives. He worked hard to be honest, scrupulous and above board in all his doings. Over time his business scaled up from one finding small undervalued and unfavoured businesses, to a white knight stepping in to save troubled businesses. The abiding impression is that investment is a serious business that entails a lot of hard work.

As billionaires go Buffett actually led a fairly uneventful life. He liked his home comforts, familiar food, he was loyal to his friends and through overwork tended to neglect his family, something he came to regret later in life. It was not a life of high adventure. But it was a life where commitment and principle were brought to bear, where he formed his own views and stayed true to them. In fact he is probably more likable than admirable. That is not to say there is nothing to admire, just that by the end of the book he comes across as a very decent person.

It is also worth pointing out that this is a long book, it weighs in at over 700 pages, in a small font. This is not just an account of Buffett, at times it also feels like a portrait of most of the people he met, and most of Omaha too. That said where it slowed, it was generally for a reason, setting up a context for what would later prove to be key events.

The author is to be commended, it is well written, thorough, clearly a labour of love. I would hope that most people would find it of interest, though suspect that it will appeal mainly to investors.

Why doesn't Moore's law apply to everything else?

From Wikipedia

"Moore's Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[2] All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well.[3] This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[4][5] Moore's law precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.[6]

The law is named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who introduced the concept in a 1965 paper.[7][8][9] It has since been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long term planning and to set targets for research and development.[10]"

This is exponential growth, that could be charted with a logarithmic scale. The implications of this being, that things don't just increase by a regular amount, they increase a lot, every time. The rate of increase accelerates, it accelerates to inconceivable levels very quickly. Just do the maths, if the Romans introduced two rabbits to Britain, and the rabbit population doubles every year. After ten years there would be 1,024 rabbits, ten years later there would be 1,028,576, ten years later there would be 1,073,741,824.

There are some good talks on TED about the implications of Moore's Law by Ray Kurzweill. It is also interesting to hear engineers from the semiconductor industry talk about living with Moore's Law. No engineer wants Moore's Law to stop on their watch. In fact the underlying paradigm tends to shift to let Moore's Law continue, so vacuum tubes went out, and quantum computing appears on the horizon.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/barrett091021.mp3

Anyway, this is all great. Listening to TED talks and Moore's Law evangelists does fill you with the gee whiz desire to aww shucks let put on a show and save the orphanage and save Africa while we are at it.

[aside - while the capacity of our computers has increased, how we use them has not changed all that much, software does not change much.]

But working in public policy none of the issues I come across seem susceptible to that sort of improvement. Child Poverty rates, life expectancy, levels of morbidity, public perceptions of safety and wellbeing.

None of the systems that we work through seem to be susceptible to that sort of improvement either. Is parliament 1,024 times better than it was ten years ago? Is our legislation 1,028,576 times better than it was twenty years ago?

Why is this so? Could we improve our lives at the same rate that we could improve our technology? What would a world look like that was changing in this way?

I believe that we are potentially on the brink of a new world. Just as Bill Gates left Microsoft to run his charitable foundation, applying an engineers rather steely logic to improving our human lot as a species, we too need to learn from engineers.

[aside - just what would a multi billion dollar charitable foundation run by Steve Jobs actually look like? It would certainly be tasteful, a little exclusive and pricey, and probably end up giving people things that they did not know they needed, yet.]

Engineers are not optimists, they are pragmatists, mix in a bit of venture capitalist, and you get a pretty unsentimental logic. Decide what you are going to do, decide on metrics that really measure achievement. Deploy resources to achieve this, measured against strict milestones based on actual achievement, not just measures of resources input. Constantly reality check what you are doing. Avoid the disengagement from reality that comes from building a product that no one wants, or will not achieve what you are after.

But government policy does not work like this. Public policy generally starts with a very unclear idea of what it is setting out to achieve, and even this is fuzzy and changeable, based more on political defensibility than rigourous logic. With only an unclear idea of what is the target, it is unsurprising that there is a lack of meaningful metrics to measure achievement. The political debate around the achievement of these fuzzy objectives is also suboptimal. Those responsible for delivery often have very polarised interests. For example those closest to delivery can always argue that they are not delivering because they need more resources. In reality they are unlikely to get more resources, so this is an undefeatable excuse. Those further away from delivery can always argue that there were adequate resources but they have been used ineffectively.

There is also the elephant in the room that in effect although we all like to talk about a few major initiatives, in reality most resource is already committed to ongoing work, or lost as unproductive overhead, or lost to chaff type work. You add a new task to someone's job,

but they already had a lot of work to do, = ongoing work

they need to train up and claim for expenses = unproductive overhead

and you ask them to give you detailed reports every month and answer your questions = chaff type work.

net result is not much progress.

For a commercial business, you might deploy software engineers to your new project, but in doing so you would close down the work they were doing before.

Most of what government does is not of much interest to anyone, and certainly not to politicians, but by and large it does need to be done.

If government is to become more focussed on delivery then it needs to have a far better understanding of what it is actually doing at the moment. Then it is simply a case of deciding what to do, what not to do, what to do differently. There need to be clear objectives, and clear metrics for delivery.

The debate has to move from simply being one about how much is spent to one on what outcomes are being achieved. We should challenge any claims about money being spent, asking instead what it has achieved.

The political debate also needs to move from one of easy soundbites, the media needs to move from kneejerk criticism based on juicy quotes and not evidence, the public needs to engage more deeply, realising that government services are complicated and difficult, but still capable of improvement over time. Modern technology makes government more transparent. It makes everything more transparent. It should be easier to see potentially useful metrics and apply them.

If this system of clear objectives, clear metrics, measurement against actual delivery of outcomes can be achieved then as a systems change it will lead to exponential growth. If government were only 5% more effective each year, in sixteen years it would be twice as good, and in twenty four years it would be three times as good, and in thirty years it would be four times as good. The real gains are to be had from improving systems and not from just allocating resources. But every step in improving systems is a step away from how it used to be done, for many of us it is a step into the unknown and unknowable. But we live in a competitive world, the only businesses that continue to thrive are the ones that are nimble and adaptable. They always live on the brink of the unknown. We should distrust the overly familiar and unchallenging.

Susan Boyle

This has certainly been the year of Susan Boyle, now enjoying phenomenal success. But what will happen to her when she loses her looks?

dawn of the sofa surfers

If an iPod was the size of a room and cost over £1Million then they probably would not sell all that many.

I have used laptop computers for years. However combining a laptop with unmetered, always on wifi, so that you have wire free internet connectivity, and an internet that actually has compelling content, puts all the balls in the right place. Sitting on a sofa browsing the internet suddenly adds a whole new dimension to entertainment that was not available before.

Personally I do a bit of browsing, a bit of keeping up with my RSS feeds, a bit of exploring Google suggested blog articles, a bit of watching TED talks. I don't really know what the rest of my family does, but they do manage to find content that interests and engages them.

Being able to sit on your own sofa with a laptop is a different experience from sitting at a desk, however ergonomic your chair is. You sit on a sofa when you want to relax, you might read a book, browse a magazine, chat with friends, watch TV. It is time for yourself, when you are not some corporate drone chasing deadlines.

I recently bought a second laptop, one of the new aluminium Apple Macintosh laptops from the Apple Refurb store. There is just something about the design of the unibody laptops, suddenly everyone in the house wants one. It is a pleasure to handle, it is lovely to touch and stroke, it has a pleasing heft, the trackpad is much more intuitive and easy to use, the screen is a thing of beauty. It is almost as if they set out to create a magazine sized piece of aluminium jewelery. In the past I might spend the evening sitting on the sofa with the one and only family laptop sofa surfing. Now that we have two, I can be sitting on the sofa, with my wife, while we both sofa surf. Similarly anyone else in the family, if they get onto the laptop can spend their time sofa surfing.

It is not a new observation, but I believe that increasingly tv is a background to other more engaging and personalised content that we are browsing on laptops. So the television might be on, with four people in the room, but a couple of them are also browsing the internet, while one of them is reading, and someone else is flicking through a magazine, and all the time they are engaging in low level chit chat whenever one of them comes across something the others might like, so suddenly they are all watching a Youtube video of an acapella version of poker face.

Enjoy the future!

Desinging Futures

Dieter Rams the designer was interviewed by Gestalten to promote a new book and exhibition, and despite a lifetime in design, he said that the challenge for design in future should be around designing how we live, rather than around designing stuff.

http://www.gestalten.com/motion/clipHiRes?id=116

Acquiring stuff is easy, particularly now. We can all accumulate so much stuff that our houses are unpleasantly cluttered, countering our preferred minimalist aesthetic. Or we pay money to have our possesions held in storage, making space to accumulate more.

There can even be a sort of fetishistic love of stuff, the super luxury goods, "design" goods. But I think these are dead ends. An unproductive manifestation of materialism.

The real challenge is for us to determine how we will live. It is surprising that when there are a million designs for chairs, we have so few models for how we might live. There is probably a whole academic discipline, but rather than do any actual research, working for first principles.

We can arrange ourselves formally or informally.

So formal arrangements would be places like work, or voluntary organisations where people are ascribed clear roles and are expected to perform a certain function. In some situations money would be a factor, in others it would not. Another example would be where there are rules or conventions, such as how to behave in meetings or how to play a sport.

Then there are informal arrangements where there are not clear rules. These would include families, or friendships, and potentially flat sharing.

Asking a few questions to figure out how these things work -

why would people participate ?

what do they get out of it?

how do you make them work better?

why would people participate ?

often because they want to, or they have little choice. Looking at a family the adults get something out of the arrangements, mutual support, the pleasure of each other's company and a shared vision. For children participation in the family is generally less optional, but they would share the same benefits, although they would arguably be putting less into the family.

what do they get out of it?

sticking with the family, it is generally an easier way to live. People have scope to specialise, so that they can support the family doing what they do best, and avoid doing what they do less well. Many people find working together more natural and reassuring than working alone. Most people will enjoy company. Over a period of time, a diversity of approaches will reduce risk and increase robustness. Leading to an important point, a lot of the benefits of a family will accrue over a period of time, but they are hard to quantify.

how do you make them work better?

You can make any of these arrangements work better by appreciating the contribution of others more, by communicating effectively about issues, by establishing mechanisms to resolve disputes and reach important agreements. Ultimately there may need to be the sanction of excluding someone, but in practice this should be rare. I think that there does need to be a shared vision where the arrangement is informal. In theory where people are simply paid to work for an organistion, it really does not matter whether they are aligned to the goals of the organisation as long as their incentives direct them productively, but in practice we do seem to be moving away from that sort of purely theoretical model. It is difficult to imagine someone who was completely at odds with an employer, motivated solely by money, being a useful employee. Work nowadays requires too much discretion to be comfortable with people not sharing some overall vision.

Looking forward, I do think that we need to place a lot more emphasis on how we all live together. At the moment it is one of those things like air that we don't see, even although it is all around us.

Perhaps we do need to be returning to extended families all living together in the same house. But if we are, then we need to design our houses differently.

Perhaps we need to move to portfolio careers where people have much more job mobility and can take extended periods out of the work place, supported by family.

Perhaps we need to have a much more flexible idea about what is actually a meaningful contribution to society.

The existing stereotypes no longer work. The welfare state has created a system that incentivises dependency. We need to move to a system that incentivises independence, creativity, flexibility and imagination.

I am not sure that we can afford, or should tolerate a society where all the menial work is performed by university educated migrants, when our own population is unemployed or underemployed, passively consuming and disengaged from society.

We need to re-engineer society and the incentives that it offers so that everyone is able and encouraged to contribute as they can, while people are supported when they need to be. I don't think that breaking society down into the individual atoms of individuals is really helpful in this. There is a limit to what the state can achieve. People should be able to find support amongst their family and friends for the bulk of their issues, with the state providing support as a last resort. Where the state needs to step in it should be seen as a failure of society, and we should seek to reengineer society better.

All this will only work where there is a shared vision of what our society is about, what it should achieve, and where it is going. That is why the war gave society purpose and cohesion. Perhaps if we can create a clear enough vision of success for our future society we can knit together our individual atoms into something far greater than the individual parts.