Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?
Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck?
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Foretelling
MUST be part of any worthwhile understanding.
(We can all come up on demand with plausible histories after the fact
and “description—often bad description—hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.”)
Speculation’s to finance, what experimentation’s to science:
THE TEST.
No one salubriously rich can claim to understand finance.
Whoever
REALLY understands it is welcome to big bucks any day.
Heard that Douglas Adams’s creation story?
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Same thing may happen with finance:
Any understandable glimmer of it is too good an opportunity not to be instantly complicated away in the efforts to milk it.
This all but an instance of a bigger theory that claims:
your inability to foretell things foretelling abler (smarter) than you.
The future, society, others, and even you, among such things.
There are two ways we can produce automobiles. We can build them in Detroit or we can grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build automobiles. To grow automobiles, we first grow the raw material from which they are made—wheat. We put the wheat on ships and send the ships out into the Pacific. They come back with Hondas on them.
From our standpoint, growing Hondas is just as much a form of production—using American farmworkers instead of American autoworkers—as building them. What happens on the other side of the Pacific is irrelevant; the effect would be just hte same for us if there really where a gigantic machine sitting somewhere between Hawaii and Japan turning wheat into automobiles.
Tariffs are indeed a way of protecting American workers —from other American workers.
David D. Friedman,
Hidden Order
particularly now that my lil sis studies economics, how funny it is that economists are far and away mostly of use to govt’s. While theirs is a fine and beautiful knowledge, the only people that actually pay economists to work
—besides universities, who employ them to train more economists, a nice pyramid scheme— are either bureaucrats or lobbyists warding or manipulating bureaucrats. At first that made me wary, but lately I’ve come to realize that what good economists
(as opposed to bribed sycophants or bad economists) actually have to say to the gov’t is fuck off—stay away, you do more harm than good. Dismantling or even just holding off the gov’t beast is a worthy mission, quite possibly one of the most important.
Yesterday:
The window on the plane to Phoenix, the first stop of the trip to SF, showed the most stunning
(and varied) cloud vistas I’ve ever seen: puffy, chunky, grape-y over the ocean, specks and daubs, strips and archs… We were very late yet just in time to the most spectacular, glaring sunset I can recall. The terrain was flatter than paved and the rare mountain or wrinkle were surreal, engulfed in a 3d-program plane of flatness or marred by veins that were rivers and lakes. I saw city-piercing highways from above for the first time and they were majestic and car choked. The street grid was perfect and every house had a pool.
I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d look at the States in years.
I love the anecdote because it makes the point so well and it rings so true. The statistic surpassed even my dire expectations. And yes, major labels should have acted years ago. May we learn something from their example.
IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,â€? says a person who was there.
In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before—faster than anyone had expected.
Tim Renner, a former boss of Universal Music in Germany, says the majors should have acted years ago. “Then they had the money and could have built the competence by buying concert agencies and merchandise companies,� he says. Now it may be too late.
A recent, furious storm marked the likely end of a particularly relentless rain season. Two stories from the (d)rain.
The first one has all the marks of an urban legend but my father claims it was a very notorious case, appearing in all the major newspapers of the time. Some ten or so years ago, two daughters of a famous doctor returned from a party late at night. A storm having raged not long ago, traffic was a deadlock and the streets were quite literally rivers. To save their friends from a long, slow detour, they got off at the sidewalk opposite their home, not minding overmuch the drench.
They never crossed. They never came home. Their bodies were found in the sewer. An open, overflowed manhole having sucked them that night.
The second story is neither as gruesome nor, really, a story, it’s just a droll scrap from the past. It comes down from my mother who, back in Guzman, her hometown, attended a relatively posh, nun-ran school where the good girls were raised. On rainy days a man used to wait at the school’s exit with the simplest of carts—a wheeled platform with handrails front and back. Booted, he would push the cart himself, across the main avenue and back, charging his passengers some cents of a peso in exchange of a dry crossing. Prim catholic schoolgirls crowded.
It’s because they’re so bad.
Some days ago I bought my first mangaWP on a whim (Kare KanoWP, IH and FurubaWP, IH). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.
They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.
A Fair Ellen (noun) could be a roundabout, inefficient, sometimes extravagant and always pathetic behavior to get around a bug in a product. Particularly when it lingers on long after said bug has been fixed. From Bruce Tognazzini’s inspired collie metaphor.
Albert Payson Terhune, the author who taught the world to love collies (Lad, A Dog , et. al.), once wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post (March 26, 1927 issue) about his beloved collie, Fair Ellen.
Terhune explained that Fair Ellen.. had been born blind, but learned to live quite happily, except for one small quirk:
If I stand beside her kennel yard and call to her to come and be put up, she does not approach me in a straight line, but along an imaginary path which has perhaps six or seven twists and turns.
This used to puzzle me, until one day I saw her run against a wheelbarrow which one of the men had left in the open patch of fairway between the house and her kennel. That was three years ago. Never since then does she come to that spot without making a careful detour around the imaginary barrow.
Her twisting course, along all familiar bits of ground, is due to her effort to skirt some box or rake or other obstruction which at some times she has struck against. She has preternatural memory for such things and for the precise spot in which once they were.
Users do the same thing. Users’ behavior will not necessarily change..[when the bug that brought that behavior into being is fixed]. Once people have learned something no longer works, once they have formed a new habit, no matter how inefficient that habit is, they tend to perpetuate it.
The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).
And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.
Also not to be missed are…
A weird happening today, a phone call, has got me paralyzed and deep in soul-searching. In my rambling thoughts I remembered Dragon Ball, my all-time favorite story as a child. You know, one of the most magical things of this most magical anime, perhaps even its central theme, is how almost every enemy, minor or major, eventually becomes part of the gang, a friend and perhaps even a wife or a husband—there’s Oolong, Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Kuririn, Android 18, the Ox King, Yamcha, Piccolo, Vegeta, Majin Buu, and even Mr. Satan, but I’m sure I’m forgetting many.
What’s more, practically every character is presented mysteriously and ominously at first
(or at times)—
Dragon Ball’s is a world where one is always wary of
The Other, where circumstances always conspire to cast It in a menacing light, and yet one where there’s always camaraderie, friendship, humor, and sometimes even love underneath it all. A world where appearances deceive, where enemies are future friends waiting to be
made. What a naive, beautiful idea.
Let’s see if it works.
Update March 8, 2007: It worked!
