Weeknote, Sunday 26th June 2022
This has not been much of a week. I missed last week's week note because I was sick: I had been coughing for a few days and generally felt tired and run down. I managed to work through it from Monday to Wednesday, but Thursday decided that I had to take a day off work in the hope that a bit of rest would set me back on my feet. In fact, Friday was worse. The cough continued and I felt absolutely exhausted.
This has been affecting Kim too and at one point on Friday we had decided that this might be something which only antibiotics were going to clear, and so we would call the doctor today (our doctor doesn't work weekends, but there are emergency services in place). I even looked up what the symptoms were of TB. That's how bad I felt.
On Friday night I had a terrible night's sleep, unable to sleep until about 2am, but on Saturday morning I woke up and for the first time in a week felt vaguely human. I am still not entirely well, but I don't feel the kind of levels of awful that I didn't. I am still coughing, but instead of being a long, hacking thing it's now, as the doctors say, "productive" – a sign, I'm told, of being on the mend.
And that meant that finally – after what seems like but probably wasn’t a whole week of being cooped up – I got to go out, down to Whitstable for a couple of hours. First coffee in Blueprint, which has both good coffee and the kind of tiny collection of well-curated books which makes me whimper with delight, and then to Harbour Books.
Harbour is probably my favourite bookshop in the world. Its collection is incredibly well pieced together, with particular prominence to women writers of all kinds. It’s the first general bookshop I’ve seen where there are more women authors on display than men, and that’s incredibly gratifying. What I love about it is that I’m absolutely certain to find a book in there I have not heard of but instantly want to read, often from a new author.
All this lead to a couple of hours of pleasure: sitting in the garden on a bright evening, with a cup of tea and a book to read.
Reading
Buyer Beware by Sian Conway-Wood. There are lots of slightly hokey books that I’ve read about consuming less. This is the first one which I’ve seen which not only tackles how to consume less, but looks at both the psychological tricks which manufacturers and retailers used to get you to consume more and takes a view on the way that capitalism itself is structured.
Next in the never-ending book stack is Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, which I’m actively having to stop myself from diving into instantly (“finish the book you’re reading first, Betteridge!”). You probably already know Barnes is a great writer, but if you don’t, then you really need to know it. There’s an old phrase from Clive James who wrote “all I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light”, and although James was writing about himself (writing about himself was really most of what he did) it could have been about Barnes.
Writing…
Very much curtailed this week. Writing is one of the things which suffers badly when I’m ill, particularly when I’m trying to fight through it and work. If I work when I’m ill, which I did for the first three days of the week, then I don’t have any energy at all to write in the evening.
What I did manage to write on Saturday was a small wall of angry social media posts. The demise of Roe vs Wade in the US affects many friends and hundreds of millions of women, and it fills my heart with anger and sadness. It put me in mind of Peggy Seeger’s Song of Choice:
In January you've still got the choice
You can cut the weeds before they start to bud
If you leave them to grow high they'll silence your voice
And in December you may pay with your blood…
The weeds are all around us and they're growing
It'll soon be too late for the knife
If you leave them on the wind that around the world is blowing
You may pay for your silence with your life
We – I – believed for far too long that the progress we had made on women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, the rights of minorities was part of a forward march of progress which could never be revoked. Roe vs Wade is the first large-scale unwinding of that, the literal cancelling of a fundamental right for women. We didn’t cut the weeds of fascism early enough, and now we have to work harder to clear them before, as Peggy wrote, it’s too late for the knife.
Watching…
Pistol, Danny Boyle’s utterly brilliant and completely batshit story of the Sex Pistols. What Boyle has done is great: taken fragments of Steve Jones’ book Lonely Boy and turned them into poignant little moments in motion.
Weeknote, Sunday 12th June 2022
One of the many useful things about writing a week note is it give you a regular reminder that life is as much about doing as thinking about doing. But this week has been a lot of watching and tinkering: with WWDC happening and new releases of iOS, iPadOS and macOS, my inner nerd has emerged like a raging hulk.
Every year I tell myself I won’t race to install the first developer releases of all the new operating systems. Every year, within 24 hours, I’ve become too excited to wait until the public betas. This year was no exception, particularly because the new version of iPadOS offers the feature which I have been wanting for years: proper support for second monitors.
And Stage Manager for iPadOS really will be that most clichéd of things: a game changer, at least for me. I have preferred using the iPad as a device over the Mac for years. However, I haven’t been able to do use it as my main machine because it doesn’t work on a screen size that I’m comfortable using for a long time.
I’m not going to write in detail about iPadOS 16 just yet — I think it deserves a post of its own — but this year might be the one where I finally give up on having a Mac laptop and just use the iPad as my portable Apple device. There are drawbacks, even though the software is almost in the right place, but the advantages now eclipse those drawbacks.
Reading
I’ve gone back to one of my most annoying reading habits: being unable to settle on what book I want to read next, so bouncing from book to book without really feeling I’m achieving much reading. So this week I’m going to settle on A. L. Kennedy’s On Writing, which I have been flirting with for a while.
Writing
In a massively mediated society, understanding how media works is incredibly important if people are to avoid being controlled by what they read, see and hear. I have worked in publishing now for 27 years, which always feels weird when I say it, so I have picked up a lot about how media works.
This is why I’m on a bit of a mission to educate people more about publishing in general and reporting and editing in particular. It struck me when reading Twitter that most people don’t understand what an “editorial line” is and how it interacts with what you see and hear. So I wrote something on what an editorial line is, to hopefully help people understand it a bit more.
Watching
If you haven’t watched the first episode of Ms Marvel, you are missing out on a treat. I think of it and Wandavision as the opposite ends of the scale for how Marvel treats its TV shows. Wandavision was incredibly clever and genuinely frightening, with an impact across the whole of the MCU. Ms Marvel is funny, smart, and endearing. After the mess that was Moon Knight, it’s a great comeback.
Meanwhile, on the internet…
The situation at the Washington Post with reporters attacking each other on social media sounds like an absolute mess. I have an elementary rule about work and social media: I don’t talk about work on social media. I don’t even mention the business I work for on social media. Same rules here: I’ll never talk about my work.
Occasionally, that makes writing these week notes challenging! I spend 37.5 hours of every week working, none of which I will talk about here. That, at least, means I have to push myself to talk about the more personal side of my life.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Londoners don’t particularly want to return to the office. I’m not surprised at all — the notion of going to a place to work is weird unless your work physical requires you to be there. For any kind of what we used to call “knowledge worker”, who spends their life on a computer all day, the internet makes that pointless. Rethinking the role of the office is vital, but the government can also play a part by improving and cutting the cost of public transport.
What is an "editorial line"?
Journalism isn't the most transparent of trades. And a trade it is -- despite the best efforts of all involved in my working education, I'll never think of journalism as a profession. But like all trades, it has its methods and modes of action, and people who aren't journalists often don't know what they are. One of the elements we don't talk about is the editorial line, what it is, and how it manifests itself in publications.
An editorial line is a set of beliefs about what is essential to your audience and desires to make that audience understand that certain things are important. Good journalism is balancing the two. Journalism which is only about what the audience cares about, is really just entertainment. Journalism which is only about what you believe is vital for the audience to start thinking about, is really just propaganda.
Editorial lines have an impact in two places. First, there's the selection of stories you choose to publish. "Magazine" comes from the Middle French word "magasin", which means a warehouse or store, and like a warehouse, it's a collection of disparate things chosen by humans. And, also like a warehouse, it's not finite: you can't publish every possible story. So instead, you must decide what stories to put together in your collection. So you are always choosing which stories to publish based on that balance of what the audience wants and what you believe is important for the audience to know or believe.
The second place the editorial line manifests is in the angle of the story. Every story has an angle, a direction which the writer wishes to take the reader along. Although the first duty of any reporter is to report the facts, you can't write all the facts: facts are interlinked and often rely on more facts to prove they are true. So you have to choose what facts to report.
And, of course, you have to interest the reader, which means moving them along in the story, keeping them engaged with it as you go. This is why salaciously-written stories are often so successful: salacious comes from the word salire, which means to leap on something with lust. Salire is also the root of salient, as in "the salient point" -- something all good reporters get to as quickly as possible to draw the reader into the story.
How you draw people into a story -- how you choose which points are salient, whether something needs to be salacious, and so on -- depends on the editorial line. But, of course, you might not have an explicit editorial line on every topic. Still, you have a good idea of what the audience is interested in, which is how the audience feels about the world and what things your publication believes they need to care about more (or less). Based on that, you can understand what points are salient to them in a story.
Are editorial lines set by the politics of the owner and editor? Partly: but more important in any publication is the politics of the intended audience. Remember, you're not trying to brainwash them: if you are, then you are propagandists, not journalists.
Weeknote, Sunday 5th June 2022
This might be abbreviated as we have just returned from spending a long weekend camping with some lovely friends. Memo to self: take more pillows. And a titanium back. Oh, and of course, it rained, because this is England in June. I am fond of camping, though, at least the whole sitting outside with a campfire reading a book bit.
Apparently, there was some kind of jubilee celebration too? Must have missed it.
After much fooling around, I managed to get Scrivener 3 working on Linux via Wine. In theory, this should be easy, but there are a lot of configuration bits and pieces to go through to make it work, and annoyingly the articles which tell you how to do it have some minor errors in the options they suggest. Now I've got it done, though. I have been able to completely nuke the Windows partition from my ThinkPad, as there are no other Windows applications I need to use on it.
Watching
Episode three -- sorry, "Part III" -- of Obi-Wan Kenobi was OK. I'm not really getting drawn into it, which has been true of quite a few of the Netflix/Disney+/Amazon Prime series. I haven't even really got into the second series of Russian Doll. Maybe it's me?
Reading
While spending time stuck in a tent, I finished Neal Asher's Weaponized. Asher's speciality is space opera on the cusp of horror, with a different take on what a post-scarcity society run by AIs would look like compared with Banks' Culture. In this one, Asher comes back to a theme that he used in his first novel, Gridlinked -- that of what it might be like to be so altered by technology that you start to lose your humanity. Where Gridlinked looked at this from the perspective of computing tech, this time around, it's about genetic engineering of a sort.
If you've read and liked Asher before, you'll enjoy this one, but parts of it definitely felt like Asher-by-numbers, and I'd like to see him abandon the Polity Universe -- although he would probably end up suffering the same experience as Gary Gibson, dropped by his publisher after he started writing novels which weren't like his Shoal sequence:
The thing I learned writing for Pan Mac was that publishers expect you to write books as much like each other as possible. In many ways, this actually makes sound business sense. It means readers come to you seeking the specific type of experience you can provide them with, and it also makes it easier to market you. You always knew with an Iain M. Banks Culture novel what you were going to get. Ditto with an Peter F. Hamilton book, or even a Clive Cussler book, and so on and so on.
My problem was that no one fucking told me this, so I had to figure it out largely for myself. Unfortunately, I had a problem: I get bored easily. Worse, while I have no trouble generating story ideas, they aren't automatically ideas that fit in the context of starship+aliens+space travel. Or rather, I had plenty of mediocre ideas for space operas, but brilliant ideas for entirely different kinds of books.
Having read that and Alistair Reynolds' Eversion in a row, it's time for a change of tack, and I'm not sure what I'll read next. I might finish off D. B. C. Pierre's Release the bats, which is about as far away as you can get from space and aliens.
Weeknote, Sunday 29th May
Three days in the office this week! THREE WHOLE DAYS. Commuting is such an odd thing: spending an hour on a train to get to a place where you do the work that — mostly — you could also do at home.
One positive thing is that it means I get to cycle down to the station, which is both physical and mental exercise for me. The physical bit is when I come back –– uphill all the way –– and the mental part is mainly on the way down.
I changed the setup for my desk (again). Having a monitor in front of the windows on my desk is efficient, but it feels like I’m blocking out the view. And what is the point of having a window if you don’t enjoy the view?
Next weekend we are off camping with friends so obviously we had to go out today and buy about £200’s worth of camping equipment to replace the things we have either lost or broken since the last time we camped. That was for a festival… four years ago. FOUR WHOLE YEARS.
Reading
I finished Tripp Mickle’s After Steve,and I have a lot of thoughts about it which I’ll save for a longer post. It’s slightly strange reading history that you were there for.
Next is a change of pace: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds has been one of my favourite SF authors for a while, but the last couple of his books were a little disappointing, so I’m hoping this gets him back on track.
Writing
Mostly just journaling this week. Of course, I say “just journaling”, but it’s probably the most essential writing. So I’m happy with that.
Watching
The first whole week of no Sky TV meant that we watched a lot less TV, perhaps predictably.
We waited until today to watch the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobiand it was a treat — I’m already looking forward to the next episode, which we can watch in a couple of hours.
Apple's "repairwashing"
Cory Doctorow on Apple’s cement overshoes:
"In fact, nearly every part of Apple’s official repair process was worse than the iFixit equivalent. The useless battery-seating press kept knocking the battery out of alignment, and the fancy torx drivers were choresome to use. All of this compounded Apple’s repair-hostile design: swapping the battery requires three different screwdriver bits, removing the speaker, and managing a cluster of hidden fasteners that hold down the fiddly ribbon cables. Apple’s official tools don’t have (industry standard) magnetic tips, so Hollister spent a lot of time chasing minuscule pieces of metal around his workbench."
It’s tough to see Apple’s self-repair programme as anything but, as Cory puts it, “repairwashing”. What Apple should be doing is building phones and computers which are easy to repair. The company has the best industrial designers in the world. If any business can make things that are upgradeable and serviceable without thousands of pounds of equipment, it’s Apple.
Weeknote, Sunday 22nd May
I spent some time restructuring my setup in Ulysses for writing. It had spiralled completely out of control, with countless filters, folders, workflows and who knows what that I had developed – and promptly abandoned – over the years.
Instead it now has a clean structure which focuses on what kind of writing it is; Blog posts; Books; Newsletters; and a catch-all bucket for other kinds of creative writing, whether that is short stories or exercises. There’s also a single bucket for Ideas, and I use tags to annotate those ideas according to kind. Some are observations, where I’ve seen something and attempted to capture it. Some are fragments: a line from a character, something that just pops into mind. And then there’s blog post ideas, which range from a single line to a few half-developed paragraphs.
This is all part of a move to try and have less-but-better tools, and to stick with them and use them consistently. I’m an absolutely terribletool hopper, moving from software package to software package depending on mood. This is a very destructive habit if you want to make things, and one that I want to get out of. It’s hard: half a lifetime of playing with new software and hardware for a living makes it awfully tempting to try new things.
Reading
I have temporarily put other books on hold while I wade into Tripp Mickle’s After Steve, which is an excellent account of the post-Steve Jobs era at Apple. I’m about half way through and really enjoying it. The level of research is excellent, although I don’t think that the structure Mickle has adopted – which bounces between Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive as point of view characters – actually does the narrative of the book any favours.
Writing
Nothing completed this week but I have been hammering what I think are three good ideas into shape.
Watching
Friday was our last day of Sky subscription, which meant a desperate race to watch all the hundreds of hours of content we had recorded (we didn’t make it). It’s odd going back to just the thirty or so channels, but also pretty refreshing: I can’t lean on the crutch of just diving into whatever’s on the Sky movie channels as a default option.
If you’re my age, 2 Tone will have been an influence: the documentary “2 Tone: The Sound of Coventry” is well worth a watch, not just for the great music but also for the fantastic background. It does not, though, answer the most important question about 2 Tone: why did Jerry Dammers never get his teeth fixed?
Meanwhile, on the internet...
Elon Musk continues to be an ass. This interview with his first wife is really interesting, and one passage from it really stood out: Musk telling Justine that her grieving for the loss of their first child was “emotionally manipulative”.
Speaking of assholes… anything Musk can do Ellison can do better.
Weeknote, Sunday 15th May 2022
Yesterday we went to London (a trip into the big city!) for the Art Car Boot Fair, held in Kings Cross. There was some decent work there, and it was nice afterwards to look around the various shops and food places around Coal Drop Yard. Unfortunately, it's not that long since that part of Kings Cross was, to put it mildly, less than pleasant. I remember going to a warehouse event there and feeling pretty threatened when walking back late. And while "gentrification" gets a bad rep, this does feel like it's made a shitty bit of London much better.
On Friday, we saw Everything Everywhere All At Once, an incredible movie. One of the few pleasures of lockdown was when cinemas were open, but no big blockbuster films were being released. Because of this, and because people were understandably reluctant to go and spend an evening locked in a small dark room with others, we sometimes had the whole cinema to ourselves, which was actually rather lovely.
Canterbury is getting another Curzon soon, a larger newly-built cinema, but the current one is staying open to focus on arthouse movies and more minor releases. It will be great to have more movies on. Even though I love a big dumb science fiction movie, I've rediscovered my love of smaller films in the last couple of years.
Reading
Context by Cory Doctorow. I haven't read much of Cory's fiction, but I'm a massive fan of his non-fiction work, and I'm also a sucker for collections of essays. So this is well worth a read.
Writing
I did a lot of writing last weekend…
Just why did a company owned by a former UKIP leader pay Andrew Bridgen £500?: There are quite a lot of connections between UKIP and Tory MPs. Almost as if UKIP became the Tory party.
The New Victoriana. This was a piece I originally wrote for Rewired back in 1997. Sadly Rewired went offline a while ago, but it's in the Wayback machine, and I thought it would be good to bring it back to life. It's one of the articles that I'm most happy with, although the writing is a bit juvenile in other ways.
Dipping my toes into Linux (again). When I bought my ThinkPad X1 Carbon last year, one of the thoughts behind it was to start using Linux again -- and I finally got around to installing it a couple of weeks ago. I liked it so much that I nuked the Windows partition altogether, and since then, I've been using the ThinkPad much more. In fact, it's probably become the device I use more than any other.
Watching
Everything Everywhere All At Once was our Friday night movie at the Curzon, and it was easily the best film that I've seen this year. It's a fantastic movie: there's so much to it that it's tough to encapsulate. Just go see it.
Meanwhile, on the Internet…
Google I/O has been on. It's a much less focused event these days, as Google has moved away from an approach of big fixed calendar announcements and releases towards drip-feeding more though the year. So instead, they talked about Android 13 and a new cheaper version of the Pixel 6 and teased the release of a Pixel Watch and a tablet next year.
Of course, Google's focus on the tablet has been seen before. From the Nexus 7 to the Pixel C, the company has tried -- and failed -- to create hardware but has been unable to get traction for Android as an operating system for tablets.
I hope that this isn't yet another false start because if it is, then I think it's the end of the line. And this time, Google must get enough developer support to build apps optimised for larger screens.
Just why did a company owned by a former UKIP leader pay Andrew Bridgen £500?
Here's an interesting one. According to the register of members' interests, on 17th November 2020, prominent Tory MP Andrew Bridgen received £500 for writing four articles from a company called "Open Dialogus Ltd". "Open Dialogus" now has almost no presence on the Web.
It's website appears to have been taken offline earlier this year, and its Twitter account has vanished. Fortunately, the Web Archive exists, so you can get a flavour of the kinds of content it published: criticisms of lockdowns, support for various flavours of Trumpist nonsense...
And Andrew Bridgen, writing about "The Legacy of Greville Janner"...
"Open Dialogus" had no employees; its one and only filing showed it still managed to lose £30,000, yet still paid an MP £500 to write, or at least put his name to, four rather dull blog posts.
The sole director of Open Dialogus is Daniel William Emmerson, and it took a while to track him down. But it looks like he is, in fact, the former chair of UKIP North West Hampshire, who was suspended from the party after some kind of disagreement.
Since then - like most right winders, Emmerson has taken to YouTube. Here he is talking about Open Dialogus, and it certainly doesn't sound like he's changed his political views since his UKIP days (he openly called for Johnson to go because he's not right-wing enough):
Of course, Emmerson has plenty more videos on YouTube - and here he is saying that he knows Brigden and Mark Francois, and they are "the only true conservatives":
In other words, it appears Andrew Bridgen MP was paid £500 by a company run by a former UKIP local leader who promotes policies at odds with those of his party and doesn't actually consider any of his Conservative colleagues to be real conservatives (other than Mr Toad).
And - perhaps most importantly - there's another question: how did Bridgen come to know - and get paid by – a former UKIP local leader? Where did they, and presumably Francois, meet? Perhaps he can tell us.
The New Victoriana
In 1997 I wrote a piece for the long lost and much missed Rewired about a cover story from Wired. It was one of the first pieces I wrote which appeared online, and it's probably one of the angriest things I've ever written. Although reading the Wired piece back I think I might have been a bit harsh, I think I on to something.
Originally published on Rewired, July 7th 1997
Wired 5.07 arrived late in Britain, a couple of weeks after it had first hit the streets of San Francisco. When it did make it, when I finally got around to reading Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden's cover feature, my reaction was that if they wanted to print a piece of science fiction, why didn't they get Arthur C. Clarke to write it?
The biggest problem with the feature is that Schwartz, whose well-known views frame the article, only wants to think to one level of difficulty, and his determination to be optimistic makes him refuse to think beyond that. For example, technology will save the environment because "infotech... makes much less impact on the natural world." And yes, at the simplest level he's right -- the environmental impact of sending something digitally rather than via FedEx is lower.
But this ignores the environmental cost of creating the infrastructure in the first place. Where do all those plastics used in PCs come from? How much water is wasted and polluted in the process of PC and chip manufacture? Problems like these are simply ignored by Schwartz, who would presumably just wave his magic techno-wand and make them go away.
Another example is transportation; Schwartz sings the praises of the hydrogen cell. He ignores the technological problems that need to be solved -- fair enough, within the boundaries of this work of "speculation" -- but then claims that "the only waste product [is] water." Yes, at the end of the line -- from the car itself -- that's true. But what are the waste products of producing the hydrogen cells in the first place? What is the environmental impact of all that additional water in the atmosphere?
An even worse error is ignoring the impact of the simple production of more cars. When the combined populations of China and India are rich enough to afford the Western standard of a car or two (or more) per family, then you have an awful lot of steel, aluminium, and copper to find somewhere. What's the impact of the additional mining, smelting, more factories, and so on? These issues, the less obvious ones, are the most important of all -- and Schwartz ignores them.
To add insult to injury, the cover line, "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world," doesn't even reflect the feature. Schwartz's approach to Africa is typical of this; while the developed world gets ever richer, Africa gets biological warfare, ethnic conflict, and increased poverty (except, of course, in 'enlightened' South Africa). The only solution is the eventual intervention of the rest of the world.
Yeah, of course what Africa really needs is more intervention from white men. As if the West's interventions in Africa for the past 300 years haven't been damaging enough. Schwartz appears to see the problems of Africa in total isolation from the rest of the world, as if the exploitation of African resources by the West wasn't continuing to damage the African economy -- and, incidentally, provide us rich folk with some of the cheap commodities we take for granted. As if the problems of Africa could be cured by a quick dose of Western culture. As if "enlightened" multinational companies didn't continue to prop up oppressive dictatorships in order to ensure that business continues smoothly -- without the troublesome peasants complaining about the destruction of their livelihoods and environment in the race for "progress".
Schwartz is just as dumb about Europe, and is particularly naive about Britain. Yes, Britain's official unemployment rate is much lower than much of the rest of Europe's -- but that has more to do with the way that successive governments have massaged the figures, rather than any huge reduction in unemployment. School leavers, people on training schemes, anyone over 55 -- all are excluded from the figures, which makes our level look marvellous. A better measure might have been the OECD's economic rankings, which Britain has been sliding down for two decades, or that the poorest 10% of Britain's people are poorer in real terms than they were 20 years ago (while the richest 1% are much, much richer).
But Schwartz evidently doesn't keep up with European news. Far from Britain being the only "laggard" in the race towards the single European currency, it looks likely that no one will be ready for 1999. Even Germany and France, the two bulwarks of the Euro, are set to fail to meet the economic criteria for entry into the single currency. Schwartz would claim that this is due to their welfare state systems; others, perhaps less ideologically committed to the destruction of welfare states, might point to the crazy cost of pan-European initiatives like the Common Agricultural Policy.
But all that can be avoided by that old fashioned panacea, "strong leadership". Yes, the people of Europe must suffer when their welfare systems are dismantled, and if they complain strong leaders will push them forward. No matter what they want, this is good for them. This is where Schwartz starts to turn the stomach, but it gets worse.
The crisis in China caused by the difference in wealth between the city dwellers and the peasantry is avoided, by authorities "occasionally using draconian measures". This offhand way of describing torture and oppression sickens. I wonder whether Peter has ever read an Amnesty International report about China, where one of the favorite "draconian methods" is to insert an electric "crowd control baton" (read as "cattle prod") into the vagina or anus and turn it on, full blast?
Perhaps in the big picture world that Schwartz lives in, such oppression doesn't matter. After all, if you can convince yourself that utopia is just around the corner, that all we have to do is be optimistic, then it'll all be worth it in the end. Sure, this Long March will have some casualties, but what revolution is bloodless? The fact that, once again, the casualties will be the poorest and weakest people in the world doesn't appear to matter to him.
In the "Goofy Leftists Sniping at Wired" topic in The Well's Wired conference, I called Wired's revolution "a nasty Victorian counter-revolution". Schwartz' feature typifies that new Victoriana, with its attitude to Africa with its calls for "strong leadership", with its optimism about progress, and ironically, given the "global" nature of Schwartz' vision, its flag waving for a particular nation. Yes, the dear old USA, the country that's "first among equals" must lead the way into this techno-utopia, guiding those backward folks in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
Just as Britain saw itself as the guardian of the world's affairs in the last century, a shining beacon of civilization that would bring order and good conduct to the world, so the strong leadership of the US will enlighten us all.
Well excuse me, Peter, but some of us want no part of another age of Victorians. Some of us "just don't get it"; and don't want it, either.
Dipping my toes into Linux (again)
I'm no stranger to Linux. I went through a phase in the noughties of running it, partly inspired by the moves from Mark Pilgrim and Cory Doctorow, and for a while, I used a boxy fat Dell Inspiron running Ubuntu. That wasn't a great experience: Ubuntu was renowned at the time for its ease of use and friendliness to non-technical users, but all too often, I found myself having to dig into command lines and tweak drivers. Unlike Cory, I didn't have a hotline into Canonical.
I headed back to using the Mac because there were just too many rough edges around using Linux, and the applications available weren't as good as those I was used to. For example, I hated OpenOffice, which looked like an old and clunky version of Microsoft Word. In fact, most of the software I was using looked like something from the late 1990s, the time before user interface design was done by designers, rather than coders moonlighting with a copy of Paint.
Times change. An awful lot of what I do on a day to day basis can be done on Linux. The application I do most of my writing in (Typora) has a Linux version. Firefox has recently become my primary browser. Microsoft has a version of Teams for Linux, which means I can use a Linux machine for my day job.
When I recently bought a new Windows machine, I bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon because I knew I wanted to try Linux out again, and it's a great laptop to run it on. You can buy the model that I purchased with Ubuntu pre-installed rather than Windows (and I was pretty tempted at the time). It's massively over-specified for a Linux laptop, with an 11th generation i7, 32Gb of RAM and a 1Tb SSD, but this means it's also a computer which could last me a long time, especially if I'm not being driven along by the endless hardware upgrade cycle which Microsoft and its partners would love to see you on.
With all that in mind, I decided that the time was right to dip my toes back into the world of Linux. So, after watching a few videos about the various distributions available, I downloaded and installed Zorin OS, a pretty Mac-like experience. It's also very beginner-friendly: it even includes an ingenious way of handling Windows applications by installing Wine and any required supporting files when you first click on a Windows installer.
The installation experience was as smooth as you would expect: Linux distributions are now mature and stable enough that installing on anything but peculiar hardware will be easy. It lets me quickly partition my drive, splitting it between Windows and Linux. It was then a quick task to customise the interface to look more Mac-like, install the applications I wanted, and away I went.
Then two days later, I changed my mind and decided I wanted to use the latest Long Term release of Ubuntu instead. Canonical issues a new long-term support version of Ubuntu every year, which guarantees five years of updates and support. LTS releases tend to be stable, which was also a selling point.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS uses the latest version of Gnome, which has an updated display engine which is smoother than previous versions. I also wanted to work on something as mainstream as possible. I was sold on using just Linux on my ThinkPad and getting rid of Windows altogether. The overall experience had been more than good enough, and I've fallen out of love with Windows 11. So I installed Ubuntu, taking the whole 1Tb SSD for it. Goodbye, Windows 11.
As I had expected, I've had no problems at all with hardware. In fact, some of the hardware that I had expected to have to do some fiddling and driver installation with worked immediately. For example, the fingerprint reader, which I used to log in to the machine, works just as well with Ubuntu as it did with Windows. My CalDigit Thunderbolt dock, which I use to connect to the webcam, display and a few other peripherals, also works perfectly.
The only place where I tripped up a little was adjusting the display to get the UI sized correctly. The display on my ThinkPad is a 16:10 panel which runs at 1920x1200. Running at the native resolution makes text and UI elements a little small; I enabled fractional sizing and bumped it up to 125%, the same as Windows runs. That works, but it leaves the text blurry - not enough to make it unusable, but annoying. The answer was to leave it running at 100% but turn on Large Text in the Accessibility options. The text was now crisp and large enough for me.
And that is all the interface tweaking I've done, other than moving the dock to the bottom and making it look a little more Mac-like, all using the built-in options with no additional software installed.
Operating systems should get out of the way and let you get on with the actual work you do. If you're worried about and twiddling with the OS, you're playing rather than producing. There's nothing wrong with that if you enjoy it. But for people who want to do some real work, the OS shouldn't be something you think about much.
So far, for me, Ubuntu is doing precisely that. I'm writing, not computing. I'm creating, not being bamboozled by a thousand different options. I'm delighted with it, so I really can't write much more about the experience. It's just been simple.
Weeknote, Sunday 8th May 2022
With the demise of the ivy on the back fence came the discovery there wasn't much in the way of a back fence left. The ivy has grown over it; it's evolved through it. In fact, the ivy was really all that was holding up the fence. So technically, the fence isn't ours: it belongs to our neighbour at the back. However, our neighbour at the back is a student house where the landlord really hasn't done much to maintain the garden (hence, of course, the demise of the fence). There's already one fence panel which has collapsed which he hasn't replaced. I suspect getting him to replace these will be another long, drawn-out affair.
Two days in a row in London left me feeling drained. I'm not sure if it's post-covid effects or just a combination of getting older and my body not being well looked after, but I have much less energy now than I had even a handful of years ago. So the only thing to do is try and push through it as gently as possible and be more active.
For me, that means gentle walks and making more of my bike. I miss cycling: it's something that I never really took up in London but had done a lot of in Brighton and before that in St Albans. I have to keep reminding myself that it was long ago. It's about seventeen years since I moved from the coast to the city.
Adventures in Linux
I have converted my ThinkPad into a dedicated Linux computer. I always had half a mind to do this -- it is one of the reasons I went for a ThinkPad rather than a more exciting Windows laptop -- but I was surprised by how much improved Linux was since the last time I used it in anger. Then I remembered that would have been about fifteen years ago; I would be surprised if Linux hadn't improved.
At first, I just partitioned the drive and left Windows on there, but after a day of tinkering, I realised there was absolutely no need to keep Windows about. For emergencies, I have other Windows laptops (my gaming machine may sound like a jet engine, but it's a more than capable computer), and Linux was running more than smoothly enough.
At first, I installed Zorin OS, an excellent distribution if you are coming from Windows and still want to run Windows apps. It has a nice feature which lets you just double click on a Windows application, and it will install Wine and any other bits and pieces you need to run it. You can also make it look like Windows 10 or 11 if you want, and it comes with plenty of software pre-installed.
When I decided to nuke Windows entirely, I also saw that the latest long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu is out, 22.04. I like LTS versions of open source software. You're not at the cutting edge of things, but it will work well for a very long time. Canonical supports LTS versions of Ubuntu for at least five years.
Hence, I'm typing this using Typora, my Markdown editor for Mac and windows, which has a Linux version. I've shifted to using Firefox as my browser across the board, and there's even a version of Microsoft Teams for work. So far, so good.
Ubuntu took a bit more tweaking to get looking how I wanted than Zorin did. In particular, fractional scaling (which bumps the size of the UI up and which is needed for me on a 14in 1920x1200 screen) made text annoyingly fuzzy. The answer was to keep scaling at 100% but use the accessibility features to switch to large text. I wouldn't call it large, but it's definitely bigger (I'd say about 125% of normal) and sharp.
I will write something longer about why I wanted to start using Linux again. The short version is that I'm not thrilled about the direction of travel of either Apple or Microsoft is building in more and more integration which ties you into their software and services stacks. Just using Apple or Microsoft or Google is incredibly convenient, but there might come the point where switching costs become so high that it's really impossible to do. Using Linux and open source software as much as possible is less convenient -- anyone who pretends otherwise is wrong -- but you are paying a long term price.
Related to this, I'm shifting my saved web reading from Matter to Pocket. That's no criticism of Matter as an app or a company, but I do not want to convert reading into another platform, yet another social network. Pocket is now owned by Mozilla, and I trust them to do the right thing. Also, I pay them, and I'm generally favouring paying for services rather than relying on generosity (or, more likely, advertising).
Reading
I haven't done enough reading this week, partly because I've been tired (see above). As a result, the book stack gets ever higher. However, there have been a few long reads online which have kept me reading.
The first was this 1998 interview with Steve Wozniak. Woz, as always, comes across as just a gentle soul. And speaking of tech, this interview with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger suggests there is still life in the old dog.
Writing
I wrote a piece on the prospect of Keir Starmer resigning and how this being a story driven hard by the Tories shows how much they are failing to think strategically.
Watching
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was good, but not excellent: so far, of the latest phase of MCU movies, I think only Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings has been an out and out success. Next week it's Everything everywhere all at once, which I am looking forward to immensely.
Timey-whimy universe bending stuff is all the rage right now. The season-ending episode of Picard managed to bring all the parts of the plot together in a satisfying way, but it still felt like there was far too much going on. And, of course, you can now watch season two of Russian Doll. If you haven't watched season one, you're a fool, just go and watch it now.
Meanwhile, on the internet
Blah blah blah Elon Musk blah blah Twitter blah blah clueless.
On the prospect of Keir Starmer resigning
The pressure from Conservatives on Durham Police to investigate Keir Starmer - and their jubilation when Durham agreed - perfectly illustrate why the Tories have lost their way on strategy. There is no outcome of this where their position is improved.
This isn't hard to plot because there are only two things that could happen. So let's take what they probably think is the best first: Starmer is given a fine.
What happens then is that Starmer resigns, and one of a whole swathe of capable leaders takes his place: Cooper, Rayner, and probably half a dozen others. Labour is the party which acts with honour and cleans its own house, while the Tories refuse to follow the laws they set and don't accept the consequences.
The Tories, though, obviously think Starmer won't resign. He will - because it's the right thing for the party and the country. The Tories are so used to having a leader who cares only for himself they don't believe any other leadership is possible. Think about that for a minute.
Starmer resigning loses some Labour voters. But they don't go to the Tories: they drift to the Lib Dems, and as we saw at the local elections, that's a real threat to the Tories in their heartland. The Lib Dems are the more significant threat in many Tory seats, and Starmer being fined would aid them, not the Tories.
The other option is Starmer is cleared. In this case, the investigation has strengthened Labour even more. No need to dwell on how bad this would be for the Tories.
What all this shows is that Tory strategists are just not thinking ahead. They are only thinking of the next few covers of the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Sun - all of which will move on to the cost of living reasonably quickly either way, either hammering the government (Mail, Sun) or simply lying about it (Telegraph AKA Pravda).
The best Tory strategy would be to dump Johnson. Still, the party has become so infiltrated by extremists because of Brexit that it, unlike Labour, has few talents to turn to. So they are, in political terms, fucked.
Weeknote, Sunday 1st May 2022
A wedding! Friday evening saw the lovely betrothal of an old friend and his darling in Kew Gardens (which has to be one of the loveliest venues to get married in). It was first due to happen in April 2020... and obviously that couldn’t go ahead. Third time’s a charm though.
At first it was a bit strange. This was I think the first big event with friends and family we have been to since lockdown ended, which means the first after an interregnum of two years without the kind of regular clockwork rhythm of social events which, even in my season of life, are like the heartbeat you barely notice until it’s gone. At felt at first like I had lost my cultural mojo: what do you do at these things? How do you talk to people you don’t know?
Normally I suspect the answer to this would be “alcohol” but I’m not the drinker I once was. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve drunk more than a single glass of anything in the past few years. If you imagine that you have a set number of alcohol points in your life before you can no longer drink, mine ran out in about 2008.
However after a while an odd thing happened: we just started talking to people, and somehow the ice was broken. We ended up chatting to a lovely older couple who live not a million miles away from my sister in Norfolk and who I would like to stay in touch with.
At home we finally got the enormous hedge that the council had complained was blocking a street light cut back. It was too high and too thick for us to do it ourselves, so we hired in a lovely tree surgeon to do the work. He also cut down an old silver birch at the end of the garden which had died last year. While it wasn’t in danger of falling – it survived the last storm – sooner or later it was going to go and probably fall straight into one of the neighbour’s houses.
There’s some more work to do in the garden, trimming back a huge chunk of ivy which is gradually dragging down one of the neighbour’s fences towards our side. In theory, it’s not ours to fix. In practice, getting that particular neighbour to replace a fallen fence is such a long and arduous process that it’s just easier if we take care of it. We also need to clear back some slightly overgrown parts of that garden near the now-gone silver birch.
And once that’s done, there’s the vegetable garden at the side to deal with. For those who don’t know our house (which is almost all of you) we have three gardens: a small front garden with the standard English lawn and beds; a larger back garden with a lawn that’s mostly made of moss, some nice mixed beds and several trees, with greenhouse; and a side garden which is about large enough to put a bungalow on. This side garden was where vegetables and fruit were grown many years ago, but it now mostly grass and shrubs. It also houses Kim’s dad’s old shed, which is probably reaching the end of its working life (we have barely touched it).
The vegetable garden needs some mild clearing to make it usable again, along with some beds digging: probably a weekend’s work for a couple of people, at most, if you don’t count removing the shed (which is both physically and emotionally much more tricky). One for later in the month.
Reading
Matt Gemmell wrote a fantastic piece on getting ideas for stories which should be required reading for any writer in any genre or trade.
Anne Applebaum’s article in The Atlantic on “Ukraine and the Words that lead to Mass Murder” is something everyone should read, although it makes harrowing reading. Words lead to dehumanisation, dehumanisation leads to atrocities.
Laurie Penny writes eloquently about their experience of family, and how COVID-19 has impacted on all our expectations of the people around us. And, as she points out, “a found family can break your heart just as much as a traditional one”.
And of course there’s books: I need to pick up The School of Life’s How to survive the modern world again as I’m half way through it but took a break.
Writing
It’s getting a bit embarrassing now that the only thing I’m writing and posting publicly is this. However, I have been collating together quite a few ideas: there’s plenty to write about, there just isn’t as much time as I would like to write it.
Watching
Picard and Moon Knight. I think both of these series are falling into the classic trap of over complication. Not everything has to be as complex as The Sopranos, people. And not every writer can carry it off.
Meanwhile, on the Internet…
A long while ago I download Yomu, which is an iOS/iPadOS ebook reader – and then promptly forgot all about it. I recently found it again on my iPad and it’s a lovely little app if you want to read ePubs, PDFs etc and then export your annotations, quotes and comments into something else. It supports export into Markdown, which makes it really easy to use with note taking applications which support it such as Obsidian or Craft. Definitely a good one to check out.
Weeknote, 24th April 2022
A brief note this week: we have only just got back from Oxford so there’s not much time to write.
We were in Oxford in part to see Jesse Darling: No Medals No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford. It’s on for another week, and if you’re in the area I’d really recommend it. Darling’s work is playful, but also fragile, beautiful and sometimes uncomfortable too. Gravity Road, the biggest piece which dominates an entire room, has notes of flight, escape and roller coasters.
Reading
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. The fact that I read this in less than a day tells you two things: One, it’s short; Two, it’s an absolutely fantastic book. I’ll have more to write about it in due course once I’ve sat on it but this is a story which is filled with delight and wonder and optimism and it’s probably exactly what you need to read right now.
Watching
Dune again. It’s probably sacrilege to say that Villeneuve has created something that easily exceeds its source material but he has with this. There’s hardly a frame in it which isn’t some large degree towards perfection. And boy are there some good battles.
Weeknote, Sunday 17th April
A sunny bank holiday feels like such a pleasure after the winter. Our ancestors knew a thing or two about how to break from the bleakness of the cold. Although I've always preferred the cold to the warm (my northern roots showing) there's definitely something about the spring which lightens the mood.
Every time there is a four day week it reminds me how uncivilised five day working weeks are. I never feel like I've had time to actually catch up on the rest which I don't get around to having during the week when there's only two days. And if I actually do anything on the two day weekend I'm exhausted. So thank the lord – literally in this case – for Bank Holidays.
Next week is even better: just the three days before we head to Oxford for a weekend.
I spent a little bit of time this week writing some notes for an article about the cult of productivity, inspired by am "AITA" post from a parent who talked about their child being "unproductive" for a long period of time. There's a lot of productivity gurus out there, and the core advice they have is often decent, but all too often people either beat themselves up for "failing" to be productive, or forget to allow themselves time for things which just bring them joy and aren't time-blocked, scheduled, turned into a project or worse.
Reading
Low-life: Irreverent reflections from the bottom of a glass by Jeffrey Bernard. Bernard falls into that category of "men who are a bit of a shit but life intriguing lives". What's interesting about him is the way that his writing manages to sidle away from the pub bore, despite very little ever happening to him down the Coach and Horses. Other than drinking himself to death of course.
Release the Bats: Writing your way out of it by DBC Pierre. Another fascinating character - I hope that reading both Bernard and Pierre at the same time doesn't indicate some kind of impending mid-life crisis. Decamping to Mexico, buying a boat or spending the rest of my life drunk don't feel like quite the right path.
Writing
The only things that I've written this week have been notes on articles which I might write - it has been dreadfully unproductive and I really do need to get back into the habit soon, before my brain atrophies.
Watching
Marvel's Moonknight is alternately baffling and hilarious. I have only the vaguest idea what is going on. What's interesting is how Marvel is using the TV series format to explore characters which are a little bit deeper and have more to them than the standard movie heroes. With the movies, you don't have the benefit of time to explore the character: it needs to be straight into the action. TV offers more depth, which is ironic when you consider how often TV is seen as the lesser medium.
Meanwhile, on the Internet
You might have heard that some guy called Musk threatened to buy Twitter. When a man with a lot of money gets this jollies from shitposting, the world is a worse place no matter how many spaceships they build. And of course Marc Andreessen – a man who coded a browser 30 years ago and has been coasting on achievement ever since – is just as bad.
One of Pebble's founders wrote a really nice insightful piece on why it failed. The important point for students of leadership: while he had a vision of where he wanted to go, he could never articulate it properly and never used it as a point of reference for what they were doing at the moment.
I've also been doing some reading of accounts of Steve Jobs' return to Apple, and came across this excellent piece by Tim Bajarin. I remember the return for many reasons but one stands out: the announcement went out at about 4pm on 20th December 1996, which also happened to be my 30th birthday. Cue one evening where I didn't get home in time to celebrate much. I also remember the following year's Macworld Boston keynote which Tim refers to, where the giant face of Bill Gates appeared on screen and some in the audience booed. Jobs scolded the audience, saying that we needed to let go of this idea that in order for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose.
I am very much looking to optimise my computer set up at the moment, so this post about an M1 Mac mini and iPad Pro caught the eye. My setup at the moment just feels wrong: I'm trying to do too much on too many devices and it's confusing and causing me vague angst. I need to sell a load of equipment, bite the bullet and just buy a new Mac. Argh. The one thing that's really stopping me is there are no Macs to buy: delivery dates for every single one of Apple's machines apart from the 13in M1 MacBook Pro are backed up to the end of May, with some a lot longer than that.
Related: a great quote from James Clear: ""Look around your environment. Rather than seeing items as objects, see them as magnets for your attention. Each object gently pulls a certain amount of your attention toward it."
#Weeknote- 10th April 2022
It took me a few days but I feel like I’m finally over the bought of Covid which I wrote about last week. I still have a cough, but it’s getting better and of midnight on Wednesday the “government advice” was that I didn’t need to isolate.
That was good, because on Thursday and Friday I was down in Brighton for BrightonSEO. It’s always good to go to something which sharpens my skills a bit and makes me feel connected to the industry I make a living in. It’s very easy, in any job, to become inward-facing and focus so much on your own company that you never really learn from outside.
It was also a good chance to see Brighton again. I lived there for about eight years and had a tremendous time. It cemented that I love to live by the sea, and it’s still surprises me how much just sitting listening to the waves and watching the open ocean relaxes me. I spend too much time cooped up indoors, and not enough time sitting on beaches.
The only downside was getting up at 5am to get there. Despite looking pretty close on the map, Brighton and Canterbury are between two and a half and three hours apart by train. It’s something I’ve said before, but Kent is a big place. It’s also quite isolated: once you get past the comfy commuter belt, it’s a generally poor place, with a lot of both rural and urban poverty. The countryside is pretty, but it’s largely working farmland, and as anyone who has lived in that kind of environment knows that means scrub, old buildings, and industrial-scale agriculture rather than pretty cottages with thatched roofs. Those are all owned by bankers, now, who don’t live in them during the week.
Reading
Reading has been a bit underwhelming this week, which is my polite way of saying I haven’t done much.
Writing
No public writing, either. I did though polish up a couple of short pieces of science fiction I’ve written.
Watching
A lot of sport, and the next episode of Picard.
Meanwhile, on the Internet…
Megan McArdle wrote a really good piece on why it’s time for major institutions to get employees off Twitter. It’s actually mostly a piece about why Twitter is bad for journalists, and to that extent I agree with a lot of what Megan is saying. Journalists massively overestimate Twitter’s importance, largely because all their journalist friends are on it. It’s an echo chamber for media and that leads to some pretty horrendous results: journalism is already too much of a chummy club without it being amplified online.
Something which will surprise no one who has being paying attention: UK offices are emptying as large numbers of employees get Covid. Who could have possibly predicted that bringing people back into the office in uncontrolled large groups would lead to lots of them having to take chunks of time off sick? You can see this affecting services too: I was delayed coming back from Brighton on Thursday after two trains in a row were cancelled owing to a lack of train crew.
Weeknote: 3rd April 2022
It's a week since I tested positive for Covid which means it's been a week when not much has happened other than a large amount of lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. Having done exactly that on Monday, I tried doing some work on Tuesday, only to collapse back into bed in the afternoon. Friday was the first day where I could actually get through an entire day without feeling so drained that I had to retire and I still feel ill. Bearing in mind that I am vaccinated, boostered and have had it before I dread to think what I would have been like without the essential jabs. And let no one tell you it's "just like a cold now", because it isn't. It's like the worst flu you've had, but lasting longer and being far more infectious.
All of which means I'm in isolation, possibly until Wednesday. Legally of course I could just completely ignore the fact I'm infectious and wander around maskless giving every vulnerable person I meet a disease, but I have more morals than the government so I'm not going to do that.
Annoyingly the enforced isolation comes at precisely the moment I was feeling like emerging from the wintering I've been going through – getting the bike out, travelling more (we are supposed to be down in Brighton next week, but with Kim also now isolating there's no guarantee we can). The past few weeks I have finally started to feel like life is getting moving again, and enjoying it.
Being sick, and so being unable to do the amount of energy-sapping meetings (virtual) as normal also meant I had time to do more writing, and it's underlined for me how much I miss it. It's really only in the past five years that my work has moved from writing words to doing spreadsheets/presentations/management and having some space and time to write made a huge difference to how I feel. All of which means I need to carve out time (and protect it) for writing.
Some of that writing – shock, horror – was actually fiction, which is an area that I don't normally delve into at all. It started with a simple writing prompt and ended up as a solid couple of thousand words in a couple of hours. I'm not saying they are good words, but they're words.
Reading...
Astounding Days by Arthur C Clarke. This is Clarke's "science fictional autobiography", packed full of anecdote about the mid-century science fictional London and his own work. I've been listening to a lot of Clarke short stories lately, as I have all five volumes of them via Audible, and they're great to fall asleep to. I have heard the first half of "The Sentinel" many times: its end, less so.
Writing...
What will it take to change people's minds about Brexit?
Watching...
Picard: it's getting good.
Meanwhile, on the Internet...
Terry Pratchett pockets a palmtop PC: A short video clip of Terry being interviewed about libraries caught my eye and thanks to some super-sleuthing from Rob Manuel and Jay Grooby I was able to identify the device that he was using to write – an Olivetti Quaderno from 1992. This was a pretty unique mini-laptop which had no pointing device at all, and a really weird placement for the numeric keypad. It also has one of the most weird promo videos of technology history, which is an hour long. The first minute is entirely composed of a women's gym class and the camera's focus is mostly the instructors breasts. If any Italian speakers can tell me why, I'd love to know.
Neil Cybart wrote about how Apple is now in a league of its own, and looking at tech at the moment it's hard to disagree. A great example of this is Universal Control which is an absolute game-changer, and something that only Apple can do thanks to the degree of work they put into underlying technologies and integration.
Jason Snell reviewed the Apple Studio Display and like everyone else loved the display while hating the webcam. Apple really messed up with the software for this.
What will it take to change people’s minds on Brexit?
I do wonder what the level of poverty and misery is that Brexit supporters are willing to inflict on their fellow citizens before they start to think “hang on, I might have made a bit of an error here”.
I suspect the answer is “quite a lot” for a couple of reasons. First, for many, winning the referendum was the first time in maybe a decade they had felt like they had any control over their lives, and were on the “winning” side. Once you have had that feeling, it takes a lot to shift you away from the position of winning: you’re emotionally attached to it in a way which is very, very deep.
Second, though: Brexit was largely delivered by the old, the conservative (small c) and less well-educated. None of those demographics are known for changing their minds often.
What’s also interesting is how the number of people who believe we were right to leave is remarkably consistent. Yes, as of today, 49% believe we were wrong to leave compared to 39% who believe we were right, and the gap has been widening since the middle of last year, but the gap widened in 2020 to about the same amount and then bounced back.
I would love to understand more about the factors moving those polls, because I think it’s almost certainly less obvious than most people think. But it’s clear that there is a rump of probably around a third of the country which believes Brexit was right no matter what the consequences they have seen so far, and are likely to believe the same in the future.
While it’s tempting to think that people are sick of hearing about it and tone down the anti-Brexit rhetoric (I’m looking at you Keir) it’s clear that the underlying attitudes and issues which are driving that 39% are going to be influencing British politics for a long time.
“We survived”
You see a lot of this: “we survived”. It’s called “survivorship bias”, and it’s the error of focusing on those who got past an event while ignoring those who did not. It’s VERY common with people who want to make out “the good old days” were great.
The classic example is in war, of course. You’ll have seen this image on various Twitter threads, from WW2 research: The bullet holes on returning aircraft show areas where a plane could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base. Engineers were smart enough to then reinforce the other bits. Clever engineers!
So how about our survivor of poverty? Well we all know that mortality rates for children under 5 have fallen dramatically, as you can see from this graph.
In 1800 in Britain, a whopping 329 children failed to survive their first five years of life. Today that number is four. And the progress is global: since 1990, the number of child deaths per 1000 has fallen from 93 to 37 - still far too high, but a huge improvement in a short space of time.
What does this have to do with Sylvia and her indoor toilets? Well, as you can see in the graph above child mortality rates declined massively from 1900 - 228 per 1000 - to 1950 (44). So those post-1950 boomer births benefitted massively from improved sanitation, vaccination, and living conditions. When Harold MacMillan said in 1957 “you’ve never had it so good”, he wasn’t lying.
But this dramatic fall between 1900 and 1950 masks a further one since: the child mortality rate in the UK is now… 4. Since 1950, we have reduced the number of children dying in early childhood by 90%.
So yes, Sylvia remembers a happy, healthy childhood. But that’s partly because if weren’t healthy you were much less likely to survive to the age of five. And of course, you aren’t around to talk about it today.