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Posts in Category: politics

Bitcoin Is Doomed And So Are We

I recently had an epiphany. It doesn't end well.
Posted by Steve Gould Tuesday, June 7, 2022 12:32:00 AM Categories: Bitcoin crypto Economics Microsoft politics Tech technology Thought

I had an epiphany last week. Do you get those? Suddenly the clouds part and you see the way forward in a moment of clarity. Only rather than being a positive experience, this one was dark. Very dark. End of days dark.

 
gold and silver round coins
Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash

This is going to be a tough one to explain as it is a bit technical. I'll try to simplify as best I can.

I had a similar epiphany the first time I used the World Wide Web. I was already an Internet user as I'd been working in the field since the late 80s. I'd been sent a CD with the first Mosaic web browser on it. When I fired it up and clicked on a link, this buzzed the modem, dialled up the Internet and pulled down an external web page from a server in California. I knew in an instant this was transformative. I could see this was going to make the Internet available to the man in the street. I instinctively knew we would all soon be shopping online and that one day, delivery would be as important, if not more, than retail premises. Soon after, I quit my comfy Civil Service job and embarked on a career in the private sector doing all things Web related.

My most recent epiphany wasn't quite so instant. It came about through watching a couple of unrelated Youtube videos, coupled with a little insight into digital money, a subject that has interested me for sometime.

I first grappled with the notion of digital money when I read an article about the invention of Bitcoin. I recall I was sufficiently intrigued to print out the article and put it to one side with the intention of downloading the software and investigating the brave new world of Bitcoin mining. In the manner of 'boat-missing' that characterises my life however, this was 2009 and I was in the process of moving from one side of Spain to another having met a new lady on Facebook. I never returned to the article. Had I done so I may well have mined enough Bitcoin to be a multi-millionaire by now. Call me Captain Hindsight!

Now I won't get into a protracted explanation about how Bitcoin works or we'll be here all day. For the purposes of explaining my epiphany it's sufficient just to know that Bitcoin enables a financial transaction to take place between two individuals anywhere in the world, without the need for any intermediary. There is no need for a bank or any other kind of money manager taking a cut for providing the infrastructure in between. All you need is the Internet and the right software at each end (remember that bit - it becomes important later!) This means you have personal sovereignty over your own money. You are your own bank. Now I think 'the powers that be' don't like this notion. My epiphany is that events are conspiring to prevent us enjoying our own financial independence.

The first video that kicked off this train of thought was by a savvy Australian called Naomi Brockwell

whose YouTube channel is a watchable way to keep up with the latest news in crypto, privacy etc. In the video she alerted me to the new EU law which is planning to ban people from running their own crypto wallets, instead forcing them to use regulated exchanges ( https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_3690 ).

So going back to what I said earlier, it is currently possible for you to download software like Bitcoin Core on to your personal computer and be your own bank. Over the years, Bitcoin exchanges have sprung up that can run crypto wallets for you. However they're the weak link in the chain. If you've ever read any horror stories about Bitcoin fraud or hacking in the press, chances are it was an online exchange that is the victim (or culprit). E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox

I was initially quite sanguine on hearing this news as it would be almost impossible for the EU to block or adequately police Bitcoin given that I can run whatever the hell software I like on my own PC. Then I watched the second video. This is by a veteran PC repair guy called Jody Bruchon who is new to me, as it was a video YouTube's algorithm suggested as one I might find interesting. They weren't wrong!

I won't go into all the gory details but long story short, you may be aware if you are a PC user that Windows 11, the latest incarnation of the operating system imposed on us by Microsoft, has some very specific hardware/firmware requirements. As the video explains, there are some potentially sinister issues with this, as it means Microsoft is taking control of the software you are able to run on your own computer.

[BTW, Jody contacted me to request I also include his follow-up video which addresses some comments in the original video Here it is…]

Like me, you may have been slightly affronted when you got your first smartphone and discovered that you could only run apps on it that you downloaded from the app store. Jody is suggesting that this is the way Microsoft may be headed. Even alternative operating systems like Linux can only be installed now on a Windows 11 compatible PC because they are issued with digital keys by Microsoft. If those keys are denied at some point in the future, Microsoft could force all PC owners to use only Windows and software it has vetted through it's own app store. And, by extension, that app store could potentially deny users from downloading software that allowed them to run their own crypto wallets.

I don't want you to think of me as a conspiracy theorist, but do you see where I'm going here? My guess is the EU didn't think to introduce such draconian, freedom-busting legislation all by itself . Occam's Razor suggests to me it was probably arm-twisted by 'the powers that be'. I doubt Microsoft is really going to all this trouble to lock down personal computers for commercial reasons. There is a lot of resistance to Windows 11 and many people are already jumping ship, deciding to run Linux on their PCs instead, so they are potentially risking the loss of many customers. Occam's Razor leads me to think it is more likely that 'the powers that be' are arm-twisting Microsoft to lock down software with the express intention of ambushing the very notion of personal financial sovereignty. This is because there is a lot at stake. In fact, everything is at stake.

Governments and central banks around the world are currently engaged in the development and testing of digital currencies - (CBDC - standing for Central Bank Digital Currencies). The aim is to do away with cash altogether, then the government will have complete control over the money supply. They will literally be able to track where every penny goes.

Now you may be one of those flag waving 'God Save the Queen' types who trust the government and thinks it should be doing everything in its power to protect us from those dastardly criminals and funders of terrorism. To that I'd say absolute power corrupts absolutely. We're entering a new era beyond Big Brother, where the government could, for example, attempt to control inflation with negative interest rates - literally taking money out of your account to limit your ability to spend, and there will be nothing you can do about it because you have no cash or crypto to move your money into. They could seek to make you healthier by restricting your expenditure on certain types of foods - 'no sausages for you this week citizen Smith, you're going on a diet. We're banning you from spending your money on certain foodstuffs - only lettuce leaves for you'.

You may think this is science fiction but China has already for some years had a system of social credit scoring where offenders are punished by being denied travel tickets etc https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4 China is further down the road to the development of a CBDC than any other nation, already having trialled it in some states and it will be interesting to see how that pans out. We tend to think that the difference between China and the West is of state control. China isn't a democracy they say, China has the communist party and central planning, while the West has the freedom to choose its leaders via the ballot box. Do we though? Or are our two party systems really as independent as they may seem?

I don't think it an accident, fashion or fad that all countries are moving towards CBDCs, I think it is arm-twisting by ‘the powers that be' It is a global system that we won't be able to vote out. Real power isn't with the jackboot, the gun or the ballot box, it is in the control of money. The race to eliminate personal sovereign money i.e. cash and crypto will be the end of liberty and personal freedom. For thousands of years we've enjoyed that freedom but I fear in the next five to ten years it will be taken away from us and we will never get it back. 'The powers that be' that control the money will have achieved absolute power. And will they be corrupt? Absolutely!

Note this a backup of the most I originally made on Substack

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Brexit: What's Next for Britain?

A few thoughts on where things are headed in coming decades.
Posted by Steve Gould Saturday, December 12, 2020 11:34:00 PM Categories: Black money Brexit Economics Geopolitics politics

 

I've been keeping this blog fairly free of politics but this weekend I seem unable to be thinking about anything other than Brexit. In a way, today is the most significant day since the referendum, if, as we are told, it is the last day by which a deal can be made. Though the last day of the withdrawal agreement is the 31st December, the thinking is there wouldn't be enough time to author and ratify an agreement beyond today.
 
So the question that is on my mind is what is next for Brexit. I'm not thinking short term here. Whichever way you slice it, 2021 will start out as a humiliating fiasco. Whether a deal is achieved or not there will still be months of disruption as new ways of doing things are explored and new, unintended consequences of Brexit arise to surprise us. The only question here is how long it will take things to settle down to some sort of normality.
 
No, I'm thinking more of what will happen to Britain in the decades ahead. Geopolitics is a little trickier than it used to be. Immediately following Bretton Woods, the end of WW2 and the exploding of two nuclear weapons in Japan, American might and money was the only game in town. The USSR grew and was, probably for the purposes of political expediency, demonised by America to be a greater threat to its dominance as a world power than it ever really was. Then the USSR fell and for a brief period of time it seemed the world was for the first time truly mono-polar.
 
More recently though the US has become increasingly indebted and less innovative and industrious. Meanwhile the EU has expanded, its currency becoming increasingly important on the world stage, and China has undergone massive economic growth. Despite Trump's efforts to stop China eating America's lunch, she remains a massive industrial power and the growth of her domestic market with a new and enriched middle class means China is here to stay, even with her exports reduced. It is now looking as though the future will consist of a tri-polar world in which the major players will be America, the EU and China, with other BRICS countries emerging and aligning themselves with one of these three main players. I see this as the new world stage into which Britain as an 'Independent Sovereign Nation' has to fit.
 
Old world, old money thinking sees Britain as a nation of traders who straddle the globe buying and selling stuff. We're the nation who started the East India Company after all. The trouble with this 'old skool' thinking is that the world is moving from physical to virtual. If I wanted to order a ton of spice in 1600 when the EIC company was formed, the only way to do it was to travel to India or wherever the spice was grown and to do a face-to-face deal. These days all you need to do is go to alibaba.com and you can find dozens of spice suppliers all competing with each other to deliver to you your ton of spice at the lowest price. By way of experiment I requested quotes for a particular chemical I was thinking of importing into Spain last year, and I was still receiving emails months afterwards from prospective suppliers. Global trade is so fluid these days, the only thing in the way of a deal is the lack of a free-trade agreement, which is why Brexit seems so absolutely nonsensical to me. I was looking into exporting olive oil a few years back and I was struck by how the trade agreements the EU already has with various third-party countries make the process to arrange an export to most parts of the world very simple. The idea that Britain is opting out of these in order to make its own bespoke arrangements seems to me to be a recipe for disaster. The EU has at its disposal an army of around 800 trained and very experienced trade-negotiators who are bashing out new global deals all the time. Britain has Liz Truss! As Britain does not manufacture anything of note, I just don't see a future for Britain as either an exporter or some kind of trading intermediary buying from one country and selling to another, as in an increasingly virtual world there doesn't seem a way to add value. We can add markup but in a world where sales are increasingly made directly, who wants intermediaries taking a slice?
 
Speaking of intermediaries, another area that is about to change dramatically on the world stage is money. China has for several years been developing and trialling the world's first Central Bank backed Digital Currency (CBDC). They are already leading the field and more recently America, Europe and other countries have started researching the idea and publishing policy papers and so forth, making noises that they are about to do the same. The lure of a cashless society is too good for the banking community to pass up and clearly there is a fear that if China's CBDC gets a head start, it could ask its trading partners to use it, suddenly threatening the place of the dollar as the world's leading currency. Obviously this is all very new and it is quite difficult to foresee how things will pan out, but again, the odds are that there will be three main CBDCs, the Digital Yuan, Dollar and Euro. As with crypto-currencies one of the main characteristics of CBDCs will be transparent accountability. It will become much more difficult to launder dirty money through currencies that have an online ledger. Given the chequered history of UK banking institutions and London's existing reputation among anyone from Mexican drug lords to Russian oligarchs as the go-to place to launder money already, my guess is Britain will resist the race towards introducing a CDBC for the Bank of England and instead, the fiat pound will become the central clearing house for the world's black money.
 
As I see it, that's a Britain Johnson & Co are quite happy about. It seems to me that this government is more mendacious than any other in British history. I sense they have no vision for the British people, nor do they care what happens to them, as long as they keep making money. It's clear they have a desire for small government and I fear without the stabilising hand of the EU, centuries of hard-won social and employment protections are about to be thrown out of the window. The welfare state and the NHS will be gone, quite soon I should imagine. Health & Safety and pesky employment regulations will be thrown on the bonfire. I should imagine Scotland will fight for and probably win independence. As the realisation of what is being done to Britain starts to sink in, the will in Scotland to escape the Tories and rejoin Europe will become compelling. The situation with Ireland may take longer to fester but the north of Ireland will become a gateway for smugglers to bring contraband into Europe and measures introduced to counter this will increase tensions and will bring pressure on Britain from the EU and America to reunite Ireland. Again, though publicly affronted, the Tories will be privately delighted to lose Scotland and Northern Ireland, as in their view there will be less money going out and more for them to secure fortress London, which will, as the decades roll by, start to resemble some 18th century Bahamian island beloved by buccaneers and cut-throats.
 
I don't think it is accidental that many of the current crop of Tory nationalists did their degrees in history or classics. It came as no surprise to me yesterday to see Johnson's government boasting it will have gunboats ready to defend British fish. Their thinking is aligned with the glory days of Agincourt and Waterloo. They think in terms of Empires and battles, a mindset that is out of step with the modern world. The days of the opium wars and gunboat diplomacy are long gone. France is a nuclear power (the only one in the EU post Brexit) and China, Russia and America dwarf Britain in military might. I can't help thinking that if the British government continues on it's current selfish, belligerent path, there will come a time, given the way the world is shaping up, that it will end up being put in its place by being on the receiving end of a bloody good kicking!
 
 
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Happy Birthday Donald Trump

..but why are you so unpopular?
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, June 14, 2020 11:49:00 AM Categories: politics Racism Sexism
 
When Sting released "If I lose my faith in you" in 1993" no one could have imagined this line from the song would be so prescient:
 
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me
 
Yet here we are in 2020 and there is both a game show host in the Whitehouse and in 10 Downing Street.
 
(In the case of The Whitehouse, Donald Trump was the presenter of the US television reality TV show The Apprentice, that adjudged the business skills of a group of contestants. Boris Johnson was a guest presenter on the British topical news quiz 'Have I Got News For You' on four occasions.) 
 
Today, the 14 June 2020 is the President's 74th birthday and for weeks now the good people of Twitter have been conspiring to flood the service with pictures of Barrack Obama just to piss Trump off. Despite his media popularity prior to becoming president, Trump's average approval rating is languishing at 40% which is the lowest of any president in modern times.
 
Obama Portrait 2006 Yougov puts Johnson's popularity at 39%  and, in another poll specifically related to his handling of the COVID crisis, the Daily Express reported on Jun 9 that Johnson had "the lowest approval rating worldwide" 
 
Why then have they become so unpopular? Could it be that they share certain flaws?
 
Both men have a number of things in common. They both bat for their respective country's mainstream right-wing parties, the Republicans and the Conservatives. They've both achieved media popularity through a lot of self-promotion, cultivating a somewhat roguish images with colourful personal lives. Both know how to showboat for the cameras, whether it be Johnson waving Union Flags while hanging of a zip line, or Trump putting his hair on the line in Wrestlemania 23. 
 
Also somewhat sinisterly, they have both dodged accusations of links to foreign interference in the democratic process, with Trump narrowly avoiding being impeached and Johnson so far refusing to publish the Russia Report by the Intelligence and Security committee which may contain details of outside meddling in the Brexit referendum in 2016.
 
The more one considers the parallels between Trump and Johnson, the uncannier it becomes. Both have been in charge of their respective countries during the 2020 fight and against Covid-19 and both have failed spectacularly to contain the disease by delaying lock-downs that were in any case insufficiently comprehensive nor were they enforced with much vigour.  Both are still failing to implement the most basic tracking and tracing that many countries have had in place for months.
 
Both have a tetchy relationship with the press, preferring to address the nation directly through social media or prerecorded video. When they are forced to appear in front of the press, they have both banned journalists of national mainstream media outlets who have previously dared to report them in an unfavourable light.

Also, and rather unfortunately in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent avalanche of 'Black Lives Matter' protests, both men have been accused of racism, claims which they of course vehemently deny. Johnson wrote in the Spectator in 2002 that "..the problem with Africa is that we are not in charge any more". Referring to Blair's visit to Africa in the same year, Johnson wrote in the Telegraph  "What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies," he wrote, referring to African people as having "watermelon smiles." In defence, Johnson dismissed the words saying they had been "taken out of context." Trump meanwhile has a lengthy Wikipedia entry entirely devoted to cataloguing his racial views making it as easy to find evidence of his racism as shooting fish in a barrel, from calling African countries shitholes to calling Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers. 
 
Both Johnson and Trump have a similar track record when it comes to the LGBTQ community, with Johnson calling called gay men 'tank-topped bumboys' in a 1998 Telegraph column, while Trump has just distinguished himself by rolling back Obama era healthcare protections for transgender patients two week into Pride Month.  which is the latest in a series of rollbacks of transgender rights. You couldn't make it up!
 
Almost inevitably then both men are similarly accused of sexism. From Johnson's long career in journalism there is a seemingly endless source of quotes where he demeans and patronises women, from advising his successor at the Spectator to "Pat her bottom and send her on her way" when referring to the journal's publisher  Kimberly Quinn, to once claiming that "Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts". 
 
Trump of course was famously caught on tape speaking of "grabbing them by the pussy". His history of sexism and misogyny is longer than Johnson's. 'The Week' has a list of "61 things Donald Trump has said about women" which is staggering! The guy just doesn't have a part of his brain that audits whether what he is saying about women is appropriate or not. One of my particular favourites was the time when he and his daughter Ivanka were interviewed on 'The View' and he cringingly said if she wasn't his daughter he'd probably be dating her. Eew!
 
So many happy returns Mr Trump but you know what? If Marilyn Monroe was alive today I don't think she would be seductively singing you happy birthday!
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Why isn't the world worshipping Elon Musk?

Some thoughts the Tesla/Space-X boss.
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, May 3, 2020 5:26:00 PM Categories: Africa Dreams Economy Envrionment Philosophy politics Sustainability Tech technology thinking Thought

 

We all know who Elon Musk is, Tesla, Space-X yada yada, yet he seems underrated by the press and positively despised in the comment section of tabloid newspapers. I'd like to address that here by highlighting some of his thought processes. Normally I aim to blog about 1000 words for a nice bite-sized read, however to cover Musk's brain in such limited space will be a zesty challenge so please forgive if I overrun!
 
Musk is seen by some as a nutcase who smokes dope on the Joe Rogan show, makes unfortunate Tweets about the 'pedo guy' and who got into a very public altercation with rap artist Azealia Banks about acid-taking etc. Only last Friday (1st May 2020) he made a seven word tweet that devalued Tesla stock by $14 billion dollars. Yet despite his maverick social media profile he is capable of thoughts of the loftiest brilliance.
 
I can't for the life of me remember where I originally read it (and I've been unable to find a source - doing a weekly blog doesn't allow as much time to research as I'd like), but the thing I first heard about Elon Musk that really impressed me was the simple idea he had to validate the ownership of bank accounts for use with PayPal. I was a web developer back in the 1990s involved in building e-commerce websites. We used to do them from scratch in those days before generic e-commerce platforms had matured, so I was familiar with the problems involved in taking and making payments online. Systems soon evolved to take payments by credit cards since the card companies had a more modern infrastructure, expiry dates, CV codes etc. Banks however, with their systems rooted in the dark ages had no way to validate the ownership of an account online. Say a client sent you an email with his bank account and you needed to send him some money for the exchange of goods, how did you know the bank account was actually his and not that of some hacker? 
 
Elon came up with the simple yet brilliant idea of paying two micro-payments to the account, say $0.34 and $0.83. The client had to read these numbers from his bank statement and enter them in the PayPal website. Musk had therefore generated the equivalent of a PIN number to verify the account. At first I thought how dumb, to give money away to verify a bank account, but as I thought more about it I realised it was genius. The two numbers would never cost PayPal more than $1.98, an expense which would easily be offset by the reduction in fraud and that would enable PayPal to transact directly with bank accounts, which had much cheaper transaction costs than anything else. You could for example send cash via say Western Union, but then the Western Union agent, usually the post office, would need to be paid to validate the identity of the payee by physically checking the passport which is a costly process in comparison. So from then on, I hailed Musk as a genius capable of conceiving ideas the like of which I could not. 
 
PayPal was not even Musk's first multi-million dollar venture. He'd already founded an online city guide, Zip-2 with his brother Kimbal in 1995 which was sold in 1999 with Musk getting $22million for his 7% share. Prior to that, while in college, Musk has spoken about his musings on the essential matters which would most affect the future of humanity and came up with five things. These were:
 
The Internet
Sustainable energy (both production and consumption)
Space exploration (more specifically the extension of life beyond earth on a permanent basis)
Artificial Intelligence.
Rewriting human genetics
 
Clearly the guy thinks big. Unlike other students with big ideas however, Musk is realising them one by one. With the founding of Tesla in 2014 Musk helped create the first successful new car manufacturer in America in over 90 years. Right now, as CEO, Musk is on the verge of winning a 3/4 billion dollar remuneration payout as part of compensation plan that depended on the company achieving a six-month period of $100 million dollar market capitalisation. This would make him the most highly paid executive in US history. The incredible thing about this is that when Musk negotiated this contract, such a target was unthinkable. The company was only worth $60 billion at $250 per share back then. Musk made it happen, even though he's a part-timer dividing his hours between several other companies. The other somewhat unsung truth about Tesla's success is the way it is transforming the automotive industry away from the dealership model that has pervaded for over a century to a direct model where cars can be bought online. The low maintenance of electric vehicles is also challenging an industry that fed off consumers need for servicing and repair. Musk doesn't just compete in a market, he smashes it to pieces.
 
Musk also heads Space-X, the rocket-company he founded in 2002. In case you've been living under a rock, Space-X has been successful too, winning a number of private and public US defence contracts. By making as much of his rocket technology as reusable as possible, he has undercut the price of all competition for launching satellites. Musk has said many times he sees the future of mankind as multi-planetary. The idea is that by sticking only on planet earth, mankind could (in fact probably will) succumb to some sort of extinction event. Only by having colonies on other worlds can the human race escape such events and survive into the future. This is a lofty goal but one which Musk is edging towards. Again, one of the things that most impresses me here is how Musk is funding Space-X. One of the key planks of the strategy is the Starlink Internet programme, a network of satellites designed to bring Internet connectivity to all parts of the globe. As well as the much publicised plan to bring affordable Internet to poorer countries in Africa and so forth, Musk has another trick up his sleeve. The satellites will exchange data using line-of-sight lasers. Because space is a near vacuum and there is no medium in space to slow the light signals down, transmission of information will be even faster than the fibre optic cable used on the ground. This lack of latency is expected to be of extremely high value to certain commercial sectors that depend on timely information such as stock brokers. The premium service is expected to provide big bucks for Space-X to fund its future developments.
 
Somewhat crazily, these achievements in themselves would be remarkable enough, yet Musk continually applies his brain to disrupt other industries. Tesla's energy grid batteries are beginning to change the way electricity companies handle the storage of electricity, while boosting the future of fledgling solar and wind-power industries. The Boring Company is set to revolutionise travel by establishing a tunnel network that promises to reduce congestion and journey times. Tesla has recently entered the car insurance industry. By using the data from its own network of cars, Tesla can fine tune risk assessments allowing it to offer insurance at up to thirty percent less than its competitors who themselves are tentative about insuring Tesla automobiles because they have only been on the roads for a decade so the old school actuarial data they use is insufficiently mature. Neuralink is Musk's foray into the world of medicine, developing high bandwidth brain to computer interfaces. He also founded and Artificial Intelligence organisation called Open AI. (He's done all this and yet I have trouble finding something to blog about once a week!)
 
Doubtless in all these other industries, Musk has probably figured out the way to get them to pay for themselves, and has envisaged a sneaky way to undercut competition leading to a big disruption in an existing market.
 
The thing that most impresses me about Musk is that his innovations, which drive market change and arguably the direction society is taking, all take place from within the private sector. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool lefty who believes at some level, the state should be planning the future of society through policy, either with a totalitarian boardroom strategy like China or with a presidential "let's get man on the moon" approach like Kennedy. Musk is proving to me that isn't necessary. He's teaching this old dog (and many like me) new tricks! 
 
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The Thief of Time

You've no idea how long I put off writing this blog-post!
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, March 22, 2020 12:46:00 PM Categories: Philosophy politics Spain Thought
 
 
I remember the occasion that I learned the meaning of the word procrastination. It was 1974 and I was in my first computer class. Our teacher, a dear man called Stan Smith, who in a previous profession had been a scientist at Jodrell Bank, had taught us about loops and set us an exercise - to write a program that printed a phrase 10 times. That phrase was "Procrastination is the Thief of Time". Why he broke with the traditional convention in computer programming of having us print "Hello World" is a mystery to me, but for whatever reason I'd learned a new word.
 
verb [ I ]
uk/prəˈkræs.tɪ.neɪt/ us/proʊˈkræs.tə.neɪt/
to keep delaying something that must be done, often because it is unpleasant or boring
 
Perhaps he was being ironic because computers, machines, electronics and robots simply don't procrastinate. As John Conor said in the 1984 movie Terminator, "..when Skynet went live it decided our fate in a microsecond".
 
Humans do procrastinate and me more than most. I don't think I'm alone in this but I'll watch a movie rather than do something arduous like clean the bathroom, but then when I'm watching the movie I'll pause it at a dull moment to go and check Facebook before resuming the movie. In programming terms I'm a recursive procrastinator.
 
I've never found myself able to stop procrastination altogether, so over the years I've developed techniques for working around it. I split my tasks up so that I give myself divided targets, chunking a big job into several smaller ones, then give myself a foreseen ration of more interesting things to entertain myself with as procrastination treats.
 
As we identify procrastination with the evils of modern life like TV, Video Games, Social Media and worst of all, YouTube, one could be forgiven for thinking procrastination was a recent phenomena. Not a bit of it. The Stoic philosophers were writing about how to combat procrastination 2000 years ago. Seneca wrote (In 'On the Shortness of Life' https://archive.org/stream/SenecaOnTheShortnessOfLife/Seneca+on+the+Shortness+of+Life_djvu.txt )
 
It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it's been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it's spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn't notice passing has passed away. 
 
Seneca offered many insights into dealing with procrastination. He advocated structure and planning, anticipating work to be done and analysing it for the pitfalls that await to distract and divert one's attention. Many of the suggestions of Seneca and the other stoics distilled into the writing of Tim Ferris in his famous book 'The Four Hour Work Week', for example in the recommendation that one only checks email once per day. Ferris talks much of the stoics in his works and it amazes me how relevant their insights are when applied to modern life.

It's a shame then, especially with PM Johnson being a classics scholar, that the US/UK governments have not observed the lessons of the stoics. The pandemic crisis of COVID-19 engulfing the world as I write has been met by successive countries, not with decisive action but with procrastination. In fact the World Health Organisation procrastinated in declaring Coronavirus a pandemic. There were over 100,000 cases in all continents save Antarctica before the WHO yielded to the admission. Prior to this it was calling it an epidemic. The distinction may seem a small one but it is quite important. An epidemic can in theory be contained. A country can close its borders and maybe receive aid and medical assistance from outside its borders. A pandemic is confirmation that the whole world is an infected area. Closing borders no longer is an effective way to contain the spread of the disease so that each country has to take responsibility for containing its contagion domestically. It is a starting gun for governments to act.

When the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March it then became up to national governments to take effective action to battle the disease. Spain acted quite swiftly bringing in a total lock-down last weekend. Meanwhile Britain and America are still procrastinating. America has brought in local lock-downs in cities where the infections have been seen. Britain's government have advised people to stay at home but delayed 10 days before taking the decision to close pubs, restaurants and gyms. Most shops remain open and people still have freedom to leave their homes, unlike Spain. It's easy to understand why, they didn't want to cause an unnecessary panic and the economic cost of shutting down businesses will be severe. However the message from Seneca is the relationship between short-term pain and long term gain. The longer Britain and America stave off the decision to bring in a complete lock-down, the larger will be the strain on the health services, the more people will die and the greater will be the socio-economic impact. The thief of time will become the thief of life.

I won't bloat this post with more detailed description of the failings of the UK and US governments in their handling of the crisis but here are some links to stories documenting the issue.

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Fruit picking, a personal perspective.

Thoughts on fruit picking of an ex-pat whose ancestors were agricultural labourers for three centuries.
Posted by Steve Gould Sunday, January 12, 2020 11:49:00 AM Categories: Africa Black money Brexit Economy politics Spain
Fruit picking, a personal perspective.

One of the consequences of Brexit often visited by the media is the future of fruit and vegetable harvesting. The reporting comes in two stripes. The anti-Brexit media report the downsides of course. In a nutshell the 'hostile environment' created by the Tories towards foreigners and Brexit uncertainty has deterred immigrants from EU countries filling the seasonal vacancies in the industry. There are many reports of fruit rotting on the ground and farmers fearing they will be driven out of business completely or forced to relocate abroad. Then there is the Brexit positive media who claim this is all scaremongering. They report on the job opportunities for picking fruit in Britain soaring e.g. "£700 per week job boom" says 'The Sun'. Another common theme in the pro-Brexit media are reports about the development of fruit and veg picking robots, so clearly there is a fall-back in case Britain's youth don't care to relocate to a field in East Anglia to pick strawberries in July.

I've never picked fruit commercially myself. Well I owned a small-holding in Spain for a couple of years but apart from trading several tree-loads of olives to the local co-operative in exchange for virgin oil, I never sold anything, nor was I paid.
 
However that wasn't the norm for my ancestors. A friend of mine who is a whiz at these things came to stay for a few weeks and her parting gift was a family tree going back to 1740. For generation after generation my forebears were agricultural labourers.
 
I knew my grandfather was a farm labourer but not that the entire stock of my family were so as well, male and female. All lived and worked in the same village, Froxfield Hants for centuries. Grandfather Alfred though was a little different. He moved where the work was, over some considerable distance.
 
My father Edmund was born in Tolworth, Surrey in 1908. He told me he didn't see his father very often when growing up. Alfred did seasonal work which meant he was away for much of the year. One month he would be hop-picking in Kent, another harvesting turnips in Suffolk and so forth. Money was good when Alfred came back and my father and his seven brothers and sisters ate well. However one year, Alfred did not return. This was before the welfare state remember, there were no benefits to take care of single mothers with eight children, so the siblings who could work did, while my father and his younger brother George were found a place in Bizley Farm School, a charitable institution for borders, where the children would tend crops, manufacture wickerwork baskets, produce honey, cheese and so forth all of which was sold to pay for their farm education. 
 
Dad also picked fruit but he did so to survive. In good old Dickensian manner, the children at the school were largely fed on bowls of gruel, apart from Easter when they were treated to a boiled egg. My father and his friends therefore foraged in the countryside scrumping whatever fruit and veg they could find. They would trap birds, game, pigeons etc. A particular favourite was a hedgehog rolled in mud and cooked on a bonfire. It is a sobering thought that this is not a fairy tale from long ago - this is the real story of my father and these events took place less than a century ago.
 
Anyway, I didn't think too much about picking fruit again until in 2003 when my wife and I moved to Spain. We bought a country house in a small inland village in the north west of Murcia which is very much an agricultural economy. We became friendly with many of the local farmers and after a time, a picture of the black economy emerged. Fruit picking is obviously an activity where time is of the essence. As a crop is about to ripen, people have to be there in numbers not required throughout the rest of the year. In a somewhat 'backward' area of Spain at this time (by which I mean few people had email), there was an unspoken seasonal tradition. Come say, June, the apricots would ripen. A convoy of battered cars would arrive full of itinerant fruit pickers as if out of nowhere. At six in the morning the 'workforce' would gather at a point on the edge of town, and farmers would haggle to get the amount of workers they need at the lowest price. These people were working in black money so they would invariably earn below minimum wage, perhaps two to three euros per hour. After a twelve hour day in the blazing sun the workers would return to their cars, which were normally parked near the river where they could bathe and wash their clothes. This is tough work too. An Ecuadorian woman of my acquaintance appeared one day with her hand in a sling. When I enquired she said she had slipped from a tree and sliced off her little finger. She shrugged and said live goes on, explaining she needed return to work quickly to continue sending money back to her family.
 
As far as I could gather, the itinerant labourers in Spain have a similar lot to my grandfather. They move about, not just in Spain but in other EU countries, providing work where it is needed, often (mostly as far as I could see) in black money. There seemed to be a mix of Moroccans, Bulgarians and South Americans, all of whom had the common thread of being so far down the food chain they never get out of the black money trap.
 
However I have since seen another class of migrant workers in Spain with much better terms and conditions. Indigenous Spanish who are already in the system get much better 'gigs'. I knew a builder, a very industrious chap called 'ni' (short for Antonio) who would go to Switzerland each summer picking grapes, for which he got good money, stamp paid for etc. I understand that the building trade is quiet in Spain during the summer months so this is a popular way for workers who would otherwise be picking up unemployment to get some good money in. Now the Spanish unemployment money is not bad anyway so for this to be the case I reckon the Swiss money must be pretty good. I've heard of similar schemes where town halls in Spain organize groups of people to go fruit picking in France and Italy, again on legal money that is high enough to make it worthwhile. One woman told me she will be doing three months at 3000 euros per month and she will be taking most of that home. 
 
What these subjective, personal and somewhat random observations suggest to me is the future of the farming of fruit and vegetables in Britain is this. With Britain leaving the EU I see it as unlikely that the lot of fruit-pickers in Britain will get any better. On the 19 December 2019 the Johnson government published a revised version of the EU withdrawal agreement which no longer contains clauses on the protection of EU-derived workers’ rights. Robots aside (fruit picking robots are a long way from being viable), a demand for fruit pickers (which has apparently gone from four fruit pickers to each job to four jobs for each fruit-picker) will inevitably drive up wages, so I doubt the British supermarkets will accept the corresponding increase in the price of produce required by farmers for their operations to remain profitable. There are therefore two ways this could go. Either the government will takes steps to make the environment for the unemployed so unpleasant that they will be induced to chase low paid agricultural work to avoid starvation as my ancestors did, or alternative suppliers to British farms will fill the void on the supermarket shelves. The countries that may gain the most out of the latter are non-EU countries with low labour costs that are not the other side of the world and have climates that suit agricultural production. The British government has already had preliminary talks with several North African countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and these may well be smart places for investment in a post-Brexit economy.
 

 

 

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The Jewish Question

I was triggered this week. Here's why
Posted by Steve Gould Saturday, January 4, 2020 5:39:00 PM Categories: anti-Semitism Brexit far-right graffiti Judaism politics right wing
The Jewish Question

So it came to pass I was on Facebook this week and a post came up that caught my eye. A friend of mine, someone I knew in real life, had posted a comment on a group that I'm not a member of, claiming the political left had a long history of anti-Semitism.

The comment he made was in response to the daubing of anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue in North London on Hanukkah. The post read:

Anti-semitism has long standing roots on the Left - read Marx on 'The Jewish Question' - and please remember that Muslims are brought up, in varying degrees, to loathe Jews and for some indeed - it takes but a few - to envisage a world where they are wiped out. The Left are allies of a certain stripe of Islam so don't immediately jump to the facile conclusion that the 'Far Right' is responsible. The rise of anti-semitism has coincided with large numbers of Muslim migrants into Europe, some of whom deeply resent Judaism and 'nationalist' parties have arisen in response to this and the increasing emphasis on pressing for a monolithic European 'government'. The 'Far Right' was a risible minority until these two processes were underway.

I was immediately angered by this. Triggered if you will. Now the friend in question (no names no pack drill) isn't your typical Britain First thug. He's an educated man with a degree from the LSE of all places. He is well read and has a house full of books. I was aware he leaned to the right as I've enjoyed many late night alcohol-fuelled discussions with him, during which times we've never had too many violent clashes.

In my experience and of what I have read, the very notion that the left is anti-Semitic is a nonsense. The communists famously battled alongside the Jews in the battle of Cable Street against Moseley's British Nazis in the 1930's. It was the nazi's spouting anti-jewish slurs and propaganda during the 70's that necessitated the formation of the anti-nazi league. During 2019 election there was even an anti-Labour proppo starring Maureen Lipman that listed the life-long links that previously existed between the Jewish community in Britain and the Labour party. But then later in the video one gets to the nub. This horrendous piece of anti-Corbyn propaganda is part of a much larger and more sinister campaign by the right deliberately designed to smear Corbyn as anti-Semitic.

Going back to my friend's original post, if you have read 'On the Jewish Question' you'll know that it was far from being anti-Semitic. Marx wrote it in response to an essay by the German philosopher Bruno Bauer, who himself was arguing that Jews should renounce their religion in order to be free in a secular society, clearly an anti-Semitic position that Marx was attacking. If instead of reading the whole piece you only dip in and grab snatches of it one can easily confuse it as being anti-semitic because Marx uses many quotes from Bauer which have anti-semitic language in it. Also the language Marx used is perhaps a little less delicate than we would use today, but one has to consider the essay was written in 1843 in a time when the phrase anti-Semitic had yet to be coined. Marx also used irony and takes Devil's Advocate positions which go over a lot of reader's heads. Let's not forget too, he himself was Jewish! This leads to misconceptions about the piece such that even some Jewish scholars argue among themselves whether Marx was being anti-Semitic or not. It is this has been taken advantage of by the right who have cited the piece many times since around the year 2000. One can see the cited articles in Google Ngram searches and by searching for mentions of the book with the advanced Google search tag site: e.g. "on the jewish question" site:telegraph.co.uk

Clearly my friend's claim that anti-Semitism has deep roots on the left is completely without foundation. The far right however have been solidly anti-semitic since Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and that has manifested itself in various forms with the rise of the right. My suspicion is, that like many people my friend has been the victim of right-wing gaslighting.

Further clues follow in the rest of his comment which is pure Mainstream Media 'dog-whistle racism' as seen everyday in the Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph, Star etc etc.

1) He suggests Muslims hate Jews. There are about 1.5 billion Muslims on the planet, I'd be surprised if some of them weren't brought up to hate jews as are some Christians, but it's simply a racist stereo-type to regard being Muslim as automatically anti-semitic.

2) The left are allies of a certain 'stripe' of Islam. Hmm, not sure which stripe that is. Does he mean the Palestinian stripe who has had their lands occupied by Israel in defiance of UN resolutions, or does he mean the stripe of Islam opposed to the war being waged by the Wahabbi's on Yemen? Tell you what, we'll leave that for another blog post.

3) The rise of anti-semitism has coincided with large numbers of Muslim migrants into Europe. Has it though? He was saying earlier how old the roots of anti-Semitism were in Europe because of the political left. Is there more anti-Semitism in Europe now than there was in the 1930's? Clearly not.

4) ..'nationalist' parties have arisen in response to this [sic. large numbers of Muslim migrants into Europe] and the increasing emphasis on pressing for a monolithic European 'government'. This is a Brexiteer trope. The increase in Muslim migration to Europe is a direct consequence of American meddling in the Middle East and the notion that there pressure for a monolithic European government is also a distopic fantasy from the minds of Bannon and Farage. Anyone who believes this is barmy but anyone who believes this and uses it to accuse the political left of being anti-semitic is clearly of a dangerously confused mind.

So I politely replied to my friends post rebutting his arguments I also added the following:

"What is a crime against intellectual freedom is the notion that any criticism of the State of Israel is automatically antisemitic, and the recent decision by the Tories to prohibit public bodies like universities and local authorities from supporting the BDS movement. That's worse than Thatcher supporting apartheid."

Of course the unanswered question here is who hoodwinked my friend and the electorate into thinking Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party were anti-Semitic, but that is a theme for another blog post on another day!

 

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