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  • Filed under: ukraine

    Adam Tooze on Ukraine sanctions

    Adam Tooze gets characteristically to the point on the unfolding war in Ukraine and how it might escalate, at what feels like a particularly critical juncture:

    “Over the last week, we have seen how the reality of war, the shock of moving from hypothetical to reality, changes the calculus. That is the stage we are reaching with the economy next week. The shooting has started. What will be the fall out? The truly concerning prospect should be that a general panic in Russia, triggers a further dangerous and unpredictable military escalation.”

    Putin’s nuclear threats might be a tactic – “escalate to de-escalate” – but they might not be, either. As Tooze cautiously concludes:

    “…the worrying thing is precisely that, as far as the economy is concerned, the chaos is just about to get started. Clearly the economy has not been the determining factor in Putin’s calculus so far. Sanctions were intended to get his attention. Next week will reveal how that message lands.”

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  • Filed under: crime

    The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency

    An incredible story of hustle culture, a con artist, and an introduction (for me at least) to the word “jobfishing”:

    “The Zoom call had about 40 people on it - or that’s what the people who had logged on thought. The all-staff meeting at the glamorous design agency had been called to welcome the growing company’s newest recruits. Its name was Madbird and its dynamic and inspirational boss, Ali Ayad, wanted everyone on the call to be ambitious hustlers - just like him.

    “But what those who had turned on their cameras didn’t know was that some of the others in the meeting weren’t real people. Yes, they were listed as participants. Some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles. But their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people.

    “The whole thing was fake - the real employees had been ‘jobfished’.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    Doing the genba walk

    There’s a feature of many organisations in which those at the top know far less about what’s going on than those at the bottom – with sometimes disastrous consequences. But there’s a cure for it, too.

  • Filed under: technology

    Google Slides is Actually Hilarious

    As someone who spends roughly half their day raging at Google Slides, this was truly traumatic:

    “Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the shrine of PowerPoint and which have never since been revisited, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.

    …

    “Join me on this cathartic journey which aspires to be none of the following: constructive, systematic, exhaustive. I’m too tired for that, dear reader. Consider this a gag reel. A platter of amuse-bouches. A chocolate sampler box of nightmares.”

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  • Filed under: psychology

    The Changing Room Illusion

    A fascinating optical illusion; even when you know what you’re expecting, it still works.

    It reminds me of the “selective attention test” by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, but for me at least that effect stops working once you’re aware of it. #

  • Filed under: crypto

    Abuse and harassment on the blockchain

    Molly White, creator of the fantastic web3 is going just great, explains what seemingly no one else has: the potential for abuse that blockchain/crypto/web3 projects have baked into their technology. It’s concerning stuff, but this lack of regard for the abusive potential of technology is sadly common in the tech world:

    “‘How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?’ is a form of that question that too often goes unasked, particularly given that the demographics of people who are most at risk for abuse and harassment tend to be underrepresented in the industry. Apple apparently didn’t put much thought into how its AirTag location tracking discs could be misused by stalkers and domestic abusers. Target didn’t realize how its attempts to market to expectant mothers might out pregnant teenagers to their families. Slack didn’t foresee how people might use its invitation feature to send people harassing messages they couldn’t block.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    Unintended consequences

    Complex systems rarely respond in predictable ways. Whatever we try to change – companies, other organisations, the environment, technical systems – we run the risk of unexpected behaviour, both good and bad.

  • Wordle variations

    Wordle has taken the internet by storm. It’s fun and simple, two qualities that have inspired a host of interesting spin-offs.

  • Filed under: sports

    Jamaican skier Benjamin Alexander on finishing men’s giant slalom

    A great story from what’s been a great Winter Olympics so far: Jamaican skiier Benjamin Alexander, who only started skiing six years ago, successfully finished his giant slalom race. Although he finished last and was 1m10s off the pace, his philosophy – “if you finish you beat everyone who doesn’t” – seems like a pretty great one for more than just skiing. #

  • Filed under: language

    Love bombing, gaslighting, and the problem with pathologising dating talk

    James Greig examines the “concept creep” of the language we collectively use to talk about behaviour in the dating game. “Trauma”, once limited to life-altering events, now essentially means “anything that hurts me”. “Love-bombing”, a manipulative behaviour that involves showering someone with a disorientating amount of affection at the start of a relationship, is now used to describe behaviour that previously might have been called “a bit keen”. Everyone, it seems, is either a narcissist or going on dates with one.

    As well as watering down useful concepts to the point that they no longer hold meaning, this language reinforces problematic relationship dynamics:

    ”Using this kind of language can also lead to ‘moral typecasting’: the idea that the world is split between moral agents (people who do either good or bad) and moral patients (people who have good or bad things done to them). What’s interesting is that studies show that we think of people as either one thing or the other, and very rarely a combination of the two…

    “But if you think of yourself as a moral patient and anyone who hurts you as a moral agent, it means that anything you do to them becomes fair game, because you are constitutionally incapable of inflicting harm, and they are constitutionally incapable of experiencing it.”

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  • Filed under: crime

    How Danielle Miller Became a Scammer

    The fascinating story of Danielle Miller, rich kid turned fraudster.

    “Miller and Blas didn’t interact much, but their meeting set off a chain of events that would draw them both deeper into the criminal world than either had gone before. By the time their friendship fell apart, stolen credit cards would be the least of their troubles. “I was interested to know why this mean girl wanted to be friends with me,’ Miller says now. ‘And in the end I think it was because she wanted to use me for whatever crimes we were accused of.’”

    This kind of profile, interesting though it is, is an example of a phenomenon that Chris Dillow has written about extensively: people, and especially journalists, are bizarrely deferential to criminals from upper and upper-middle class backgrounds. Dillow quotes Adam Smith:

    “We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent.”

    As Dillow notes:

    “The sympathy of headline writers is tightly circumscribed. They rarely speak of a downfall or fall from grace after working class people are convicted.”

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  • Filed under: design

    Portuguese canned fish designs

    This collection of label designs from Portuguese fish cans is a treasure trove of typography, vernacular design, and wonderful illustrations. There are thousands to get stuck into.

    Three favourites:

    Image of a sardine can

    (Love the gnomes.)

    Image of a sardine can

    (Does what it says on the tin, I suppose.)

    Image of a sardine can

    (The world’s snootiest sardine.) #

  • Filed under: politics

    Why Boris Johnson is beyond saving

    Andrew Marr, newly anointed chief political commentator of the New Statesman, lays into Boris Johnson and assesses the aftermath of his inevitable departure.

    There’s a sombre, personal thread running through the piece:

    “I have found Johnson personally charming and amusing many times in the past. But at almost exactly the same time as he was hosting his parties in Downing Street, having a high old time lecturing the rest of us, I was burying my father.

    …

    “In the end, it’s all about authority. Belief. Credibility. A prime minister must be able to look his colleagues in the eye, order action, and watch change ripple out. If he can’t do that, what’s the point? You don’t need to be sitting in the grandeur of St Margaret’s, thinking about good men – in my case, my father and Jack Dromey – to feel that politics is at a grubby low point. This is the Tories’ problem. It is patriotic, not partisan, to say it is now their job to clean it up. And fast.”

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  • Filed under: politics

    Adam Tooze on Ukraine

    Adam Tooze’s Chartbook newsletter has a great roundup of news on the unfolding tensions in Ukraine.

    In particular, it has a useful explanation for the strange headlines we’ve seen in the last week or so, in which US, UK, and EU sources have been saying that an invasion is imminent, but Ukrainian sources have been playing that down. Tooze quotes Alexander Clarkson:

    “I suspect the crisis timelines US and EU are focused on are out of whack with Russian elite timelines, that could lead to a build up of Russian troops staying on or close to Ukraine’s borders for months and years, and Ukrainian societal timelines focused on survival over decades.”

    In other words: nobody seems to agree on the length of game that’s being played – but Ukraine itself must always play the longest of long games. #

  • Filed under: coronavirus

    Is the Pandemic Breaking Our Backs?

    From last year, but relevant: the impact of our new working-from-home reality on our posture and the health of our backs:

    “More recently, as the coronavirus continues to keep us mostly indoors, working in improvised offices where ergonomically unsound ironing boards, coffee tables, and laps pinch-hit as desks, our sloppy ways of sitting could be taking a toll. Parked in front of a computer, we tend to tuck under our tailbones, candy-cane our spines, scrunch up our shoulders, and crane our necks forward like wilted sunflowers. According to many experts, for every inch that the head lists off kilter, the force impinging on the neck and the back increases by ten pounds. A survey among seven hundred and seventy-eight software workers in lockdown last spring found that shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain had doubled. Bad posture has been blamed for indigestion, constipation, high blood pressure, cracked teeth, infrequent orgasms, negative thoughts, and difficulty performing arithmetic calculations; somewhere, someone has probably implicated it in the Presidential-election results.”

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  • Filed under: sustainability

    The ESG Mirage

    ESG investing on Wall Street is dominated by the assessments of MSCI, which produces the ratings that large institutional investors and funds like Blackrock use to judge their investments.

    The problem with these ratings is that they’re in some strange sense reversed from how one might intuitively imagine them. They don’t measure how positive the impact of a business is on the world; they measure how negative the impact of the world might be on the business. For example:

    “McDonald’s Corp., one of the world’s largest beef purchasers, generated more greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 than Portugal or Hungary, because of the company’s supply chain. McDonald’s produced 54 million tons of emissions that year, an increase of about 7% in four years. Yet on April 23, MSCI gave McDonald’s a ratings upgrade, citing the company’s environmental practices. MSCI did this after dropping carbon emissions from any consideration in the calculation of McDonald’s rating. Why? Because MSCI determined that climate change neither poses a risk nor offers ‘opportunities’ to the company’s bottom line.

    “MSCI then recalculated McDonald’s environmental score to give it credit for mitigating ‘risks associated with packaging material and waste’ relative to its peers. That included McDonald’s installation of recycling bins at an unspecified number of locations in France and the U.K. – countries where the company faces potential sanctions or regulations if it doesn’t recycle. In this assessment, as in all others, MSCI was looking only at whether environmental issues had the potential to harm the company. Any mitigation of risks to the planet was incidental.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    Cadence and speed

    Going faster means doing things more quickly. But it also means setting a regular, sustainable rhythm. But how do you know how fast is too fast?

  • Filed under: statistics

    Novak Djokovic: Doubts over timing of Covid test

    Some fantastic sleuthing by Der Spiegel and a German research group called Zerforschung, highlighted here by the BBC:

    “Doubts have emerged over the timing of the positive Covid test Novak Djokovic used to enter Australia to try to compete in the Australian Open. It was provided to exempt him from rules barring unvaccinated people.

    “However, the serial number on his test on 16 December appears out of sequence with a sample of tests from Serbia over this period gathered by the BBC.”

    It’s a great example of what’s known in statistics as the German tank problem, after the most famous instance of it in World War II. #

  • Filed under: branding

    Start with why, end with wire fraud

    Another thoughtful piece on brand purpose by Nick Asbury, following his first last year. Rather than simply looking externally – focusing, say, on the shallow nature of brand purpose, or the question of whether consumers care about it – Nick instead drills into the ways that purpose can distort the internal culture of a business:

    “Once you’re convinced of the rightness of your cause, it’s easier – consciously or subconsciously – to justify any means towards that end. And right now a lot of companies – whether cynically, genuinely, or somewhere in between – are convincing themselves of the rightness of their cause.”

    In the case of Theranos, focusing on grand missions and purpose actually obscured the fraud:

    “Imagine you’re a journalist or investor quizzing Elizabeth Holmes back when she was in her prime. What would be the harder questions for her to answer? How questions would be tough – how exactly does this device work? When questions would be equally tricky – you’ve been promising this for a while, but when exactly are you doing to deliver? Questions of what, where and who might also demand specifics – what is your current balance sheet, where is your laboratory, who has signed up so far?

    “But ask Elizabeth Holmes why and she will be in her element. She will talk for hours about changing the world, transforming lives, helping our troops on the battlefield, helping our doctors at home… Through a combination of grand vision and personal founding myth, she can hold any audience spellbound.”

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  • Filed under: knowledge

    The danger of isolated beliefs

    Most of the beliefs we hold comes as part of a package, fitting into a broader tradition and forming part of an interconnected web. But what happens when we develop beliefs far outside that web, beliefs that stand in isolation?

  • Filed under: typography

    J for Jim Crow

    Sarah Kramer tells the fascinating story of the typeface “Jim Crow”, and the intersection between typography and wider society.

    The typeface is named after the minstrel character Jim Crow, whose name became a shorthand first for Black Americans and then for the system of laws that oppressed and segregated them.

    The typeface has a fascinating history, and it’s fascinating even that it’s been in constant use for over a century. But to my mind the most interesting moment in its history was its reclamation by Black designers in the 1960s:

    “Graphic designer Archie Boston remembers the moment he first came across the Jim Crow typeface. He and his brother, Bradford, were flipping through thick type specimen books in 1967, looking for a typeface to use in the logo for their new advertising and design agency, Boston & Boston. When he came to the page displaying the Jim Crow typeface, he saw it as the continuation of a white joke at the expense of Black people. He wasn’t surprised: ‘You know, we had grown up in a racist society ourselves. We grew up in Jim Crow.’

    …

    “Yet, aesthetically, Archie and Bradford Boston liked the typeface. ‘It’s strong, it has a gradation, which gives it an uplifting feeling’ Archie Boston told me. The boldness and stripes of the typeface felt almost patriotic to him. ‘I have always been a jokester, I do things to try and get reactions, you know, whether positive or negative.’ So Archie and Bradford decided to turn the Jim Crow joke upside down. The Boston brothers would use Jim Crow as their logotype.”

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  • Filed under: sustainability

    Stanwick man uses 72-year-old toaster every day

    A quirky “and in other news” story on the BBC:

    “A man who uses his 72-year-old toaster every day said he was embracing the spirit of the wartime generation.

    “Jimmy James, from Stanwick, in Northamptonshire, said the toaster was manufactured in December 1949 and given to his parents as a wedding present.

    “The 69-year-old said it only needed repairing once every six or seven years.”

    But it makes a good point about the durability and repairability of modern products:

    “He said the age of Mr James’ toaster was actually a benefit: ‘Newer ones aren’t always repairable. Manufacturers don’t want us to be able to mend it. They want people to buy a new one.’

    “Mr May said there was ‘a growing pile of waste across the planet,’ with environment pollution and plastics joined by ‘mountains of white goods’.

    “‘We have been caught up in a race to the bottom with a belief that cheapest is best,’ he said.”

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  • Filed under: sustainability

    The regenerative city

    Cities are responsible for 70% of our carbon emissions, and by 2050 some 70% of the world’s population will live in them. How can we make them not just more sustainable, but truly regenerative?

  • Filed under: commerce

    A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff

    Paul Ford summarises the modern disease: not just of buying stuff, but buying stuff for your stuff:

    “Years ago, I asked a friend what kind of case she planned to buy for her shiny new flip phone. She paused, a little offended. ‘I don’t like to buy stuff for my stuff,’ she said. Those words drilled directly into my hippocampus, never to depart. She’s right! I thought. Don’t buy stuff stuff! So simple! I have tried to keep to that principle ever since, and it has gone about as well as you would expect. Sure, I might spend $1,000 on a tech-giant-controlled smartphone, but I only do it every three years (nods sagely) instead of every two. This is how we win.”

    Ford isn’t just taking aim at the easy targets, the shiny trinkets of consumerism:

    “I have come up with a personal Theory of Stuffness, a way to structure and understand my local stuff ecosystem, especially the digital stuff. I divide Stuffworld into the Object, the Enhancements, and the Experience… The Object is the phone. The Enhancement is the Spotify app. The Experience is that of listening to music. In the past, you might buy a record player and spend 10 years curating a collection of really good jazz albums. You’d read the liner notes and learn new things over time, boring your friends in the process. Now you pay a fee, and some approximation of every bit of recorded jazz is just there on every device that plays sound. It used to take a lifetime of reading reviews and trips to the record store, or going to jazz clubs, and a ton of money. Now the cost approaches free. This is the Great Stuff Discontinuity. You just parachute in, like my kids playing Fortnite.”

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  • Filed under: film

    Something Mild: Leo Robson on “Licorice Pizza”

    Leo Robson thoughtfully pulls apart Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest:

    “The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson has various things in common with his work of the past fifteen years, an unignorable run… Like its predecessors, Licorice Pizza takes place at a carefully presented historical moment (Southern California in 1973), and derives key details from an existing source, the early life of the producer Gary Goetzman, here given the surname Valentine… Yet for all the continuities, the recourse to dependable methods and motifs, what defines the new film – and makes it such a monumentally frustrating experience – are properties not previously evident in Anderson’s body of work: obstinate optimism, conceptual muddiness, and a near-total lack of stakes.”

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  • Filed under: web3

    Moxie Marlinspike: My first impressions of web3

    A few months back I linked to Robin Sloan’s take on web3. As a thoughtful person and a seasoned technologist, his view was nuanced and interesting.

    Well, the same is predictably true for Moxie Marlinspike, the legendary cryptographer and technologist who, among many other things, invented the Signal secure messaging app. As someone who shares many of the same aims that the crypto world ostensibly has, and who’s been around for several attempts to revolutionise the world through technology, he’s well worth listening to. He also put his effort where his mouth is, getting more involved than most people in the underlying technology:

    “To get a feeling for the web3 world, I made a dApp called Autonomous Art that lets anyone mint a token for an NFT by making a visual contribution to it… I also made a dApp called First Derivative that allows you to create, discover, and exchange NFT derivatives which track an underlying NFT, similar to financial derivatives which track an underlying asset.”

    His crucial observation is that web3 doesn’t actually decentralise what it promises to, and for reasons that are structural and inescapable:

    “it seems like we should take notice that from the very beginning, these technologies immediately tended towards centralization through platforms in order for them to be realized, that this has ~zero negatively felt effect on the velocity of the ecosystem, and that most participants don’t even know or care it’s happening. This might suggest that decentralization itself is not actually of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people downstream, that the only amount of decentralization people want is the minimum amount required for something to exist, and that if not very consciously accounted for, these forces will push us further from rather than closer to the ideal outcome as the days become less early.”

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