not blogging

Just a rambling blog entry.

In a vague attempt to do something productive over the extended Christmas break, I moved all my computer passwords onto 1password, a password management software doohicky. This jinxed Rapidweaver that I use for updating my website, so that took a wee while to fix. Also it has been just unbelievably cold lately, so I have been feeling pretty lethargic. However starting to get back into a more productive routine now. Hence a quick rash of blog postings today.

Christmas now seems like an age ago, it was a fine chance to catch up with my reading, I now have four books on the go, which is really a couple too many, so I will try and slim things down to just reading the two books. Also caught up with my RSS feeds. The whole place was inches deep in ice, or on a bad day slush, so it was just the sort of time for sitting on the sofa not doing terribly much.

It does not actually feel much warmer now, but at least the inch thick layer of ice has finally gone. Getting back to work was a bit of a shock to the system, and suddenly the weekends seemed to last about a nanosecond. Finally feel like I am getting back into a bit of a routine.

Day off on Friday getting the central heating looked at, hopefully getting the central heating fixed. Being at home waiting was all the excuse I needed to watch the Apple Keynote. Steve Jobs looking skeletal explaining why the iPad is the future of computing, without full application of the reality distortion field. Part of the problem with the presentation was that the price was actually the killer, the iPad at £1000 is a duff product, at half that it is possible, at anything under that it is incredibly tempting, but a device like that really does rely on the "it just works" factor. If it does "just work" then it should sell by the shedload, if if has all sorts of glitchy annoying doohickery then it won't. Also a bit wary of the way you have to buy absolutely everything off iTunes. Might be looking at buying an iPad or two for the family when they come out.

Also rewatched the recent BBC Arena documentary about Brian Eno. He came across as a rather genial soul, incredibly smart, pottering about with his various interests. Despite being an Art School graduate I did not get the impression that he had a strong visual sense, if I had his money and time I would be living in something that looked like John Lautner's Scottish holiday home. Also more likeable in person than he might seem in the written interviews. I suspect that his interests and enthusiasms simply exhaust people, it did look like Paul Morley was stiffling a yawn at one point.

Other news, I've installed bumptop, a desktop interface thing. There was a TED talk about it years ago, and it has now finally come out on the Mac. Most people seem to think that it is pointless eye candy. I actually quite like it. It allows you to create a virtual 3D desktop, so there are various walls around your desktop. So you can pin things to the wall, or leave stuff in the middle to get done. It does seem to slow down loading, but I like it, and will probably stick with it. The various OSX interface tweaks like Expose, Spaces, etc left me cold, I never quite got my head round them, and Quicksilver is a bit too hardcore. I like simple visual metaphors, so I know where I am with Bumptop.

Back at work, getting busier and busier, but also starting to get the hang of what I am doing, so not so bothered wondering whether I am actually doing anything of any use. Enjoying the work, and getting to know and like my work colleagues even better. The extra travelling and extra hours just trying to make progress are slimming down the time that I have not at work, but I'll try and rationalise a few commitments over the year so that I find a decent balance.

Finally, been listening to the LSTN series on the Urban Outfitters websites (different UK and US versions) being particularly struck by the following which does stick in your head,

Customer Service

I know that big business is attempting to personalise the service that they can offer. So I get a personalised screen every time I arrive at Amazon, and a wishlist that I can publish to the world.

But micro businesses are taking this to a whole new level. We got a cheery postcard from the person we rented a holiday cottage from this year, when my wife orders from eBay retailers she gets a cheery postcard with her order, when I order shareware I can email the developer with questions or suggestions, I can comment on Redbubble and the designer of a teeshirt will amend it to reflect my comments.

The classic split used to be that a business was a commodity business or it was not. Perhaps there is a split between the micro business with micro business standards of service and the macro business with macro business standards of service. If you cannot make a compelling case that you are offering a high quality service at either the macro or the micro level, then perhaps it is time to start looking for a new business to be in.

doing digital

Maybe it is just me, but for some reason when I do something digital I always feel that it is somehow less worthwhile than something that is less digital.

So an email not worth as much as a letter, reading a website is not worth as much as reading a newspaper, organising a computer's hard drive is not worth as much as tidying up a room, sorting out my webpage is not worth as much as fixing a cupboard.

There is a certain satisfaction to be had from posting a real letter, but I suppose we had better get used to living in a virtual world.

Reinventing the Working Class

I have long disliked the term working class, it seems to hark bark to the First World War and outdated mindsets. However it clearly denotes something. There is an element of what was the working class that is now adrift. Living in sink estates, detached from employment, perhaps for generations. These people were the perfect workers and soldiers that built the British Empire, but now they seem to lack purpose, and they languish largely out of sight and out of mind.

When I went to secondary school the year was streamed at the end of second year, and suddenly half the year was lumped together into a group that had very little in the way of academic aspirations. I don't think any of them were terribly bothered by this, in a few years they would be done with school and glad of it. As long as there was a huge demand for unskilled labour, in the shipyards, on the land, in service, etc etc this arrangement worked perfectly well.

The nature of that society was that there was still a need for a huge army of general purpose infantry, with a smaller need for an officer class, and an even smaller need for a lofty general class above that. The system worked, it produced what the society needed in about the right proportions, people were generally happy with their lot. The bright, ambitious and hard working might seek to better their lot, the unfortunate or unmotivated might drop down the social scale, but an accident of birth, provided your breeding and determined which stock you belonged to.

But society has changed, the government believes that the way to a stronger economy is through a better educated workforce. If they can populate the country entirely with university graduates then the economy will thrive. Of course there are a residue of unskilled jobs, but if British people do not want them then economic migrants from overseas will relish the opportunity. Such guest workers have been common across Europe for generations.

If half the school population has no academic aspirations then suddenly you have a great many people without a place in this modern economy. There remain the traditional working class unskilled and skilled jobs, but with the loss of heavy industry and the move to a more skilled and flexible workforce, a sizable chunk of society no longer has much to offer. Having little to offer, they have little to gain. They sit detached from society, aware of aspirations and lifestyles that are as foreign to their lives as a fairy story.

I believe that this is more an issue of culture than ability, but cultures take generations to change. In the meantime there remain a considerable number of people who are largely detached from the economy and society. This cannot be right or just.

It is not that there is nothing that these people can do, it is not that they do not want to do anything. It is not that they lack value and dignity.

I would propose that the government starts to mobilise those who want, to join a peace time army. An army that can be deployed across the world to build infrastructure and social capacity. There is a proliferation of failed and failing states across the world. These need good government, decent infrastructure, society and not anarchy. In this country we have a multitude of people that are not only up for the task, but are more than capable of it. The major world powers are still to fixated on winning wars, we need to increase the peace. Increase the world supply of decency, honesty, trust, compassion. We do this by driving out corruption and inefficiency, providing adequate governance and infrastructure across the world. This need not be democracy and the first world as we understand it. Maybe these countries can leapfrog us to some better post Oil future society.

We have a vast supply of underutilised talent that we should use for good, before it is turned to ill use. The lesson across the world is that people have a huge potential, and we should be harnessing that for the good of all, before society is corrupted and degraded by a disenchanted minority.

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.