why digital natives don't care about hard drive sizes

My first computer was an Apple laptop, a powerbook 165c. However it was better known as a 4x80, that is it had four megabytes of ram and eighty megabytes of hard drive. Obviously those figures now seem ridiculous, a mobile phone is probably better specified. I am typing this on another Apple laptop (my third) with 8 gigabytes of ram and 250 gigabytes of hard drive.

Accordingly I belong the that generation that tends to classify a computer by the ram and the hard drive. The maxim being that you cannot have too much of either. However I suspect that for those who have grown up digital, used to a perpetual ever accessible wifi signal, constant internet, instant twitter, instagram etc etc, these old metrics are of little interest.

The tendency now is to have each device as a mere portal to your online identity, so you can access the same apps and data on whatever you are sitting at, or happen to have in your hand. In the Mac world apps will run on iOS and Mac OS, there might be some data on the device, but the parent data, the true data, that is all in the cloud, available for download.

The idea of taking a load of photos with a camera and storing them on your hard drive is just alien to such digital natives. The idea of having documents on your hard drive is likewise odd, by and large the digital natives barely understand where data is held, because it is all held for them in the cloud. Because if it is not there on the cloud, visible, shared, open to comment, then it does not really truly exist. The digital nomads have moved into a world where everything is online, any device just lets you plug into the online identity that you have created for yourself.

There are downsides to this, what happens when nostalgia hits and you want to see those old photos, what happens when you have invested all that time and effort in an online service that is no longer there, what happens when someone makes a botch and irreplaceable data is corrupted. But that is the world that we are in already, to some extent or another we are all dependent on the cloud and the ever accessible internet.

We have all thrown out the atlas and now just have to trust to googlemaps.

[the prompt for writing this was backing up my daughter’s laptop and finding that the thing is practically empty!]

What is China doing devaluing the yuan?

What is China doing devaluing the yuan?

China as a nation is certainly inscrutable, but they are no fool. So why on earth would they want to devalue the yuan. The traditional answer was that by devaluing your currency you boosted exports (your own exports were now cheaper for others to buy) and you deterred imports (any imports you made were now more expensive for your residents to buy).

While this might once have made sense for some economies it hardly makes sense now, especially for China. Their exports are already a fair chunk of the world industrial production, there is no plausible competitor for them, the amount of the devaluation is trivial, and would in any event just be swallowed up elsewhere in the supply chain as extra profit for someone else. The Chinese people really don’t import much, although there is a luxury goods market in China, by and large the problem with the Chinese economy is that there is no real consumer economy. The Chinese people save, they don’t spend.

So I am assuming that there is a reason why the Chinese are devaluing, but if it is not one of the traditional reasons then what is it?

Overseas loans - Massive amounts of capital flow out of China, but my assumption is that any such loans would be denominated in the debtor country’s currency, so the American debt to China would remain in dollars, so yuan devaluation makes no difference.

Positioning themselves for a future free floating currency - possible but is it really worth the trouble.

In the absence of anything better, my guess is that there is an air of panic in China. No economy is stable in and of itself, but there can be few economies more dependent on others than China’s. It is a country that produces vast amounts of goods for export, then does not spend the resulting income, having to also export capital, hoovering up investments and encouraging debt across the world. The Chinese economy is so out of balance, with a ridiculously small internal consumer market, that it depends on other countries to buy its goods, and also to receive its loans and investments. When the economic pace starts to falter in the rest of the world, China has nothing to fall back on.

Has China become the cuckoo that outgrew its little surrogate parents.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/china-2015-is-not-china-2010/?_r=0 Paul Krugman piece that I saw after I wrote this]

the land between the cities

I would like to offer a few personal observations about the state of the British countryside and reflect on what these might mean for the future of the land between our cities.

I can remember stories of farmers on the Islands simply abandoning their sheep, as it would cost them more to take the sheep to slaughter at an abattoir on the mainland than the carcass was actually worth. Commuting along the same route over decades, I have seen the once damp corner of a field, turning into an abandoned corner, and finally a whole forgotten field, at last under no pretence of cultivation whatsoever. From fences to drainage, the state of the farmland is deteriorating before our eyes. The knee high Ragwort is everywhere at this time of year, its bright yellow flowers predicting a bumper crop of further airborne seeds. But Ragwort is a notifiable weed, toxic to livestock and you can be prosecuted for having it on your land.

Even worse, the Daily Mail is full of stories about Japanese Knotweed, an invasive species with roots that will tear through concrete, or Giant Hogweed, with a sap that is not exactly toxic, but will remove your skin’s natural ability to defend itself against sunlight, resulting in horrendous blisters for the unwary. Clearing a patch of these species can cost £3,000 and even then it is not certain.

Elsewhere the BBC reports on dairy farmers buying up milk from supermarkets and giving it away, in protest at their inability to get a decent price for their product.

Nowadays we just take it for granted that we do not build ships in this country, that is just not something that we do here anymore. What if farming were to go the same way. What if the land between the cities just ended up like the urban brownfield sites and unused petrol stations that no one wanted. Too expensive to remediate, not worth the trouble, in the wrong place.

Will the countryside end up like Pripyat, the abandoned city outside Chernobyl, all feral dogs and forgotten classrooms.

Will our countryside end up as a post apocalyptic landscape, with the irony that there was no apocalypse.

Perhaps now is the time to start to ask ourselves what do we want the countryside to be there for, and how do we get to there?