Dan O'Huiginn

The Economist has what seems at first to be a gloomy outlook on antisocial Britons staying at home:

The decline in visiting friends and family at home is harder to explain. Inflation-busting petrol prices may have deterred people from making social trips, whereas they have to keep shopping and going to work. Because new cars are more fuel-efficient than old ones, and because their price has risen less than other items, the cost of motoring has actually fallen in real terms. But, since many people focus on the cost per litre of petrol, rather than the cost per mile, rising pump prices may have had some effect on travel patterns.

I’m insanely glad that Harvard is piling into the general rage at Elsevier &c, money-sucking parasites on the work of academics. I’m really starting to believe we’ll see open-access academic publishing become the norm, even obligatory, in the next 5-10 years. That is, exactly how it should have been all along.

This is SO MUCH more exciting than mining asteroids. The current system is ludicrous even by the usual standards of university-bureaucratic idiocy — we figure out how the world works, then lock away the results.

Commercial academic publishing made some sense in a world where articles needed to be printed and distributed, at considerable expense. Now the entire industry only makes sense as rent-seeking.

There’s a wonderful, gently cutting commentary on this by Dr. Tim Leuning. Dr. Leuning is both an economic historian, and editor of an Elsevier journal. So he knows what he’s talking about when he writes:

What I strongly dislike is the [Elsevier] Chief Executive claiming that the objections of Elsevier’s critics are based on ‘misstatements or misunderstandings of the fact’. He should be honest and state that in many cases his journals have an element of monopoly power which as a commercial, capitalist company he is determined to exploit as fully as possible. I would respect him were he to say that. For him to claim otherwise is simply false

I claim no connection between these paragraphs, except that I enjoyed them all:

Laurie Penny at her furious best:

And why is it that women are not permitted to be creative without having to speak for the entire condition of womankind? The most exhaustively discussed new cultural artefacts in recent weeks – ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and Lena Dunham’s new HBO show ‘Girls’ – are being treated as if they were straight memoirs, rather than, in one case, a piece of redrafted fan-fiction based around a story that was originally about vampires? Is it because we don’t believe that a woman can truly create fiction or write meaningfully without drawing entirely on her own experience? Is it because mainstream culture still lacks a language to talk about women’s issues and women’s lives that is not at once confessional and riddled with lazy stereotypes? Is it because most ‘fictional’ women are still created, cast and directed by men? Is it because we don’t believe women can actually be artists?

Current standard gossip on Bo Xilai, via B&T:

Wang did ask for asylum, and was carrying the Neil Heywood file. He claimed he’d been investigating it and was shut down by Bo and now feared for his life, but they got the strong impression this was a cover, and that what had happened was that he’d been investigated for corruption, was worried Bo was deserting him, and grabbed the biggest piece of dirt he had. So Heywood wasn’t the motivator, but there was, at the least, something dirty about his death.

Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard:

Science fiction writers love to think of what they’re doing as one really crucial, contemporary form of literature — a literature of ideas with elements of speculation and an estrangement effect.

Rock critics are just the same: they crave that validation from mainstream art criticism, but they also like being the renegade form. Ballard exemplifies this meta aspect of science fiction, although he goes beyond it as a great cultural critic.

Online retailers have deeply explored how to find similarities between their customers. Users who bought X also bought Y and its variants are omnipresent and widely developed.

There’s a strange absence, though, when it comes to making visible the ongoing relationship of a consumer to a product. How much brand loyalty do they display?

To take an example: I’m currently planning to buy a new laptop. I’m very interested in build quality. Testing by experts isn’t much good at exposing flaws in build: it’s near-impossible to simulate the effects of daily use over a period of years. Aggregated user reviews are more helpful: lots of complaints about cracked screens probably reflect a common problem. But they’re biased towards defects which are discrete, and big enough to inspire angry reviews.

What I want to know is: do users who buy a Vaio buy another one three years later? Or do they switch to Dell? I really want is a measure of user loyalty. And we have one: it’s easy to count how many users will re-order the same product, or another from the same product line. Do customers who bought X tend to re-order X? Or do they switch to X’s competitors?

This information is readily available to any online retailer, or even to an offline seller tracking loyalty cards or credit cards. But I’m not aware of anybody making it visible to users. Why not?

On Liberal Conspiracy, a member of the legal charity Reprieve flags up a quite astonishing government proposal: to deny criminal suspects the right to hear the evidence against them. Under the proposed expansion to “Closed Material Procedures” (CMPs):

once the minister has made the call that there is ‘sensitive’ material involved, the court goes into lockdown, and the citizen (along with the media) is excluded — as a result, they will simply not know what claims the Government is making about them.

Through this secret process, the only person putting forward the defense case would be a “Special Advocate” — who would not be allowed to commuicate with their client.

Liberty argue, reasonably enough, that:

Being able to present evidence to a judge without the other side having the chance to refute it or even know what it is obviously gives the Government a huge advantage in legal proceedings and the potential to present a very one-sided or misleading version of events.

Even the Northamptonshire police feel that the proposed legislation:

is very widely drafted and could result in its misuse. This could be used to encompass material concerning crime prevention tactics, police informants and intelligence led operations.
The impact of the overuse of CMPs would be to damage the UK reputation of a free and fair democracy.

Finally the Mail, of all places, reports the views of the existing Special Advocates, the lawyers working with the existing system of Closed Material Procedures:

They submitted a very thorough and telling response to the consultation. These are the lawyers who have the greatest experience of the system and they were unanimously opposed to the very broad extension of CMPs.

“I am the man who arranges the blocks”

Tetris and Communism: not an obvious combination. They make for a glorious song, though, in the form of A Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris. Take revolutions, breadlines, broken ideals and dreams of brotherhood, and turn them into…blocks. Falling endlessly from the sky:

What gets to me, I think, is the worker’s face. Sometimes he’s downtrodden, sometimes triumphant. Sometimes he’s a sculpture-worthy proletarian hero — clutching a sledgehammer, his gaze stoically fixed into the distance. Always there’s something grotesque about him, an unnerving manic undertone. Revolutionary glee shifts into a forced grimace: “Long live Stalin! He loves you! Sing these words, or you know what he’ll do“. This is a one-man mob, permanently caught up in the passionate trauma of one historical moment after another.

And when the end comes, it’s beautifully understated:

I work so hard in arranging the blocks
But each night I go home to my wife in tears -
What’s the point of it all, when you’re building a wall
And in front of your eyes it disappears?
Pointless work for pointless pay
This is one game I shall not play.

A nice fact, and one that seems too neat to be true: theft of motorbikes declines when the law requires helmets. The idea is that you might pinch a motorbike if you saw it left unattended. But if you don’t happen to be carrying a helmet, it’s going to be much harder to ride away on it:

After Texas enacted its universal helmet law, motorcycle thefts in 19 Texas cities decreased 44 percent between 1988 and 1990, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Motorcycle thefts dropped dramatically in three European countries after the introduction of laws that fined motorcyclists for failure to wear helmets. In London, motorcycle thefts fell 24 percent after Great Britain enacted a helmet law in 1973. The Netherlands saw a 36 percent drop in thefts in 1975 when its law was enacted. And in former West Germany, where on-the-spot fines were introduced in 1980, motorcycle thefts plummeted 60 percent [source]

The implication, surprising to me, is that most motorbike theft had been opportunistic. Getting hold of a helmet doesn’t seem a very high bar for the would-be thief.

The angry unemployed graduates were right: todays youth have been thoroughly shafted by the baby-boomers. It’s taken me a long time to accept that. I remember reading bloggers like Laurie Penny, sharing the rage but disagreeing with the diagnosis:

After the crash of 2008, Generation Y realised with a rush of horror that no matter how good we were or how relentlessly we hammered our minds and bodies into the grooves laid out for us by our parents, our teachers and a culture of mandatory capitalist self-fashioning, everything was definitely not going to be fine. Instead, we are going to spend our lives paying for the excesses of our parents, who have bequeathed us a broken economy, a stagnant job market and a planet that’s increasingly on fire.

Yes, I thought, you were promised a mirage. Anybody who goes through childhood believing what they are told — “work hard, pass your exams, and the world is your oyster” — is lined up for a rough awakening. Your parents lied to you — but, mostly, they lied because they believed. That doesn’t mean they had it better themselves.

Except, it turns out, they did. And they continue to — the old in Britain are wealthier, relative to the young, than they have been in a very long time. According to the FT:

the living standards of Britons in their 20s have been overtaken by those of their 60-something grandparents for the first time…
The data, which underpins government publications on living standards, takes no account of housing costs or wealth. Had it done so the results would have been even more dramatic, showing median living standards of people in their 20s have now slipped below those of people in their 70s and 80s.

If the figures show it, so does the human reality. My struggling twenty-something friends encounter from their parents a kind of bewilderment. The older generation, often sympathetic, nonetheless rarely comprehend the living conditions of their descendents. There’s a lingering assumption that jobs are out there somewhere, that they will provide a livable income, that housing is a matter of choice rather than desperation.

For all that, I remain very suspicious of the narrative of inter-generational competition. The inequalities within an age group are far, far higher than those between one generation and the next. Class, race, even gender are far greater inequalities. And much of the noise comes from a small segment of the population: the frustrated children of the salariat, being denied entry to a shrinking class. Still, the facts are there: the youth are getting it in the neck.

Jamie of Blood & Treasure despairs over the Tories’ impact on Manchester

It’s different from living in Hulme: that was a neighbourhood that had already hit bottom, and there was a kind of resilience, even the occasional bout of optimism, available from knowing things couldn’t actually get any worse…..

But it’s something else living in a working neighbourhood, which in normal times flails along with its collective head just above the water, being gradually and through the systematic application of government policy suffering a kind of collective punishment; and the organic commerce which had evolved to serve it beginning to go down with it….It’s an odd feeling watching economic repression imposed around you; like living in the middle of a crime in progress.

[tldr: Cory Doctorow speech; go to the source instead]
Cory Doctorow thinks the online freedom movement needs to get over the entertainment industry. They just happened to be the first belligerants in a long war”, he says; the big guns are just getting going.

I’m listening to him at the Open Rights Group annual conference, giving a talk he first presented at Berlin’s Chaos Communications Congress last December.

“The Coming War on General Computing“, is how he titles it. Military metaphors are omnipresent here. Maybe because this is conference is still a boy’s world. Maybe because of the lingering idea of the “electronic frontier”, virgin territory to be fought over. Or perhaps this is the world seen by a generation of video-gamers, where everybody expects to fight through a series of increasingly-powerful bosses until we finally win.

Cory’s war on general computing, then, consists of many powerful interests reacting similarly to the threat of devices which can be modified by their users. “We’d like it to be able to do everything“, they say, “except this…”

Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

The RIAA were the first. “We’d like you to be able to share everything“, they thought, “except our music“. Now computing power is breaking out of the box on the table, into the rest of the world, the same pattern is being repeated. “3D printers are great — if only we could stop them making weapons. Or forgeries. Or sex toys“. “Self-driving cars are great — if only the police could shut them down”.

But it doesn’t work like that. User modification really is all-or-nothing. Trying to shut down one use of a computer means locking down the entire system. “All attempts at controlling the PC will converge on the rootkit. All attempts at controlling the internet will converge on surveillance and censorship”:

We don’t know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we don’t like, is prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware

Cory, as a speaker and activist, is a professional optimist. He thinks we can win this battle — we can force the powers to accept freedom over spyware. But if the nature of computers forces us to be this black-and-white, we end up in an unwinnable fight. No plausible government is likely to allow everything without exception. So, even if they 99.9% of uses are acceptable, the last 0.01% will force us into spyware.