Monetising death (II)

Another example here - at the hands of what would appear to be a small group of cowardly Conservatives who seem to have successfully killed a bill which, if passed, would have helped millions of the world's poorest:

[...] The bill aimed to outlaw the investment companies which buy up defaulted Third World debt and sue countries for immediate repayment. The practice has cost the poorest countries in the world over a billion dollars in recent years.

Really not sure how this works, though.  If someone is unidentified, how should they be able to stop any bill?  What kind of democracy is that?

Awful stuff.

(Thanks to Paul for the appropriately irascible heads-up.)

Monetising death

Corporate greed probably knows no bounds, though - as I often look to bring together rather than split apart - I often prefer to think otherwise. 

Nevertheless, the essentially self-serving nature of such entities has been well documented. 

This next story, however, goes quite beyond the pale - even for me.  How to monetise death in one easy lesson.  I wonder if Wal-Mart's subsidiaries do the same elsewhere in the world.  It'd be nice to know if they did.  Driving down prices at the checkouts by benefiting from "dead peasant" life insurance policies would definitely be a no-no in my book.  More on this awful subject and the mindsets it uncovers in this short video - and thanks to Brian Moylan for digging it up.

Questions of immigration and how we may (unhappily) conflate it with crime

A useful piece of analysis here from Paul.  Takes me back to my Comparative Studies course at uni.  Loved that course.  Taught me a lot about how newspapers transmit overarching meanings and prejudices through juxtaposition.  As, indeed, Montgomerie would appear to be suggesting should be done in this particular instance.  You don't have to say it in so many words to suggest it in so many ways.

Influenced me deeply, did that course.

Meanwhile, my main contribution to this debate is here.

Document Freedom Day (and why you should care)

The next day you should consider pencilling into your diaries is the 31st March 2010. This is Document Freedom Day. Really important day. Why? Probably one of those cases where the less you know, the more important it gets.

Our documents, our files, what we generate electronically, should - of course - belong to us. Our photos, our stories, our presentations, our spreadsheet archives ... all of these should be transportable and work in all sorts of programs - and indeed any sort of program.  Being locked into a single vendor always spells disaster in the end.  It reduces competition, increases licence and training costs, makes suppliers lazy and - in the unhappy but not unheard of event that your supplier goes bust - means the babies and the bathwater you've put all your babies in will almost certainly go flying out the proverbial window one day.

Everywhere we look, people are trying to tie us down and tell us that what is ours is not ours. The most notorious example is of course Microsoft's Office Suite, which on numerous occasions creates such awful incompatibilities that successive versions of the software are unable to open its own legacy files.  Or previous versions throw up baleful error messages, claiming corruption of data.  (Now there's an apposite thought).

Who'd possibly be able to sell a program which didn't work with newer examples of itself, if not Bill Gates' empire?  Or more importantly, who'd be able to get away with it?

Cars are another example of how our possessions no longer exactly belong to us. These objects of desire, which lately seem to be losing some of their attraction, and perhaps quite rightly, contain so much software these days - with such infamous results when it all goes wrong (that Toyota car you now really don't care to see either in front of or behind you, for example) - that you might wonder why fiddle with the electromechanical model which provided us with so much relatively secure engineering. The answer to this question? So it doesn't belong to you any more. So you have to take it to the manufacturer's outlet because the garage round the corner can't afford to pay the manufacturer for the legal right to access all that software and do something useful with it.  So that the car becomes so unnecessarily complex that DIY maintenance becomes a practical impossibility.

So that what so many software vendors like to do - lock us into programs that require repeated and unnecessary upgrades in order to continue working at even the most basic of levels - can function as a cash cow of disgracefully shameless proportions.

There is, however, another way.  And this other way is what Document Freedom Day celebrates.  From its own website:

Visible effects of Open Standards are that you can:

• Choose any operating system or application and still be able to read and edit all your old documents.
• Collaborate with others regardless of which software they are using.
• Use any software of your choice to interact with your government.

The less visible effects of Open Standards are that they lead to:

• more competition in software, resulting in better pricing and service
• increased competition in hardware, meaning more innovative and cost-effective solutions
• lower taxes as a result of more effective governmental IT solutions that avoid the cost of lock-in

And that's really why you and I should both care.

As I pointed out recently in relation to medical software, paper was copyright-free and easily transportable, and the notes a doctor made about his or her patient were made intuitively and with the tools to hand that any reasonably educated person would know how to use.  I don't want to seem a 21st century Luddite here, but it is beginning to seem to me that the main purpose of digital technologies is to allow big companies to sell us things we mustn't possess, can never tinker with or modify or improve ourselves and can only repair by resorting to the extortionate prices such monopolistic market conditions will inevitably lead to.

Open standards widely accepted would go some way to restoring my faith in the digital world.  (In fact, I have recently been hearing about a tangentially related issue - that of open source methods and practices in the development and sale of physical objects: gadgets and so forth.  But that, I suppose, is a subject for quite a different post.)

In the meantime, the control freakery that digitalisation seems to embrace and embody is driving me back into the hands of a nostalgia for all things analogue that quite worries me.

What, exactly, is at the root of my change of heart?  Why don't I see - any longer - this interconnectedness as something to be broadly enamoured of?

What has changed?

And why?

On the virtues of personal sovereignty (and knowing the law)

This is fascinating.



Via John Naughton today.

On the virtues of dumbing down (or barrage balloons of the mind)

Yesterday, I wrote this in response to a rant.  As rants go, it was funny and accurate at the same time - but, as rants go, it was also - at times - insulting.

The hub of the matter to hand seems to revolve around the issue of whether writers who are capable of complex analysis should - simultaneously - be capable of simple exposition.  Is it, in fact, a one-sided duty of those who wish to be seen to be participating in a democracy to - effectively - dumb down their registers, syntax, grammar and language in response to the needs of a majority or, alternatively, is it an equally one-sided obligation of those who wish to learn more (in general, I would like to think the majority) to proactively upscale their ignorance not only via content but also in relation to form? 

That is to say, should we simplify the questions we set or expect those who sit the exams to muddle their way through obtuse forests of trees?

I would like to assume that complex ideas can be expressed simply, that ambiguity can be expressed with clarity, that incoherence can be laid out intelligibly - that, in truth, form which draws attention to itself is simply a barrage balloon of the mind.

I would like to think that for sure - but, in the light of the current problems thinker-leaders such as Barack Obama or Gordon Brown are having convincing people they have a useful handle on the complexities that face us, I begin to wonder if we aren't destined to relive - and perhaps even exacerbate - the kind of divide between those in the know who don't care to explain for a wider audience and those who might like to learn but don't care to learn the high falutin' code that those in the know prefer to use.

Perhaps we need a new kind of specialism to add to all the specialisms our world is currently plagued with: that of explainer extraordinaire.

And we could call it journalism.  Or blogging perhaps. 

And in such a way, bring the sub-cultures of the world together again.

Even as I write these words, I am beginning to suspect that the dominant medium of the second decade of the 21st century will never democratise us or allow us to speak to each other constructively; will never fulfil its early promise.  On its tombstone, writ large, the Internet will be remembered as the grand creator of niches, of a planetary grouping that ended up coagulating in tiny gobbets of incompatible thought - like white blood cells, in fact, now turned uselessly to rhetorical pus.

(I remember in my youth how everyone watched Play for Today - how everyone watched it and the following day discussed the stories, the underlying theses, the pros and contras; that is to say, the issues raised that affected - and bound - a society still able to look at itself more widely. 

Now we have murders in suburbia and housewives desperately consuming.  No wonder we're becoming an atomised shadow of our former selves.)

I'm reverting to another age

The following video, via Tim O'Reilly's Twitter feed, explains why computers are bad for the relationship between doctors and patients.

More here.

I don't know enough about the subject to be sure that the thesis is true.

I do have uncomfortable prejudices, however, which lead me to believe that - in some ways - it may be.

I wonder if it is right that in the same way as presentations all become squeezed into the itsy-bitsy bottle that is PowerPoint, so medical records should find a rigid common software format.  As we medicalise society's ills to a level unheard of a generation ago, at the same time - most curiously - we find ourselves taking doctors' precious time up with more and more IT-related tasks.

Of course, there are clear drivers.  Paper was copyright-free.  There's a whole business and industry to be built on the backs of bespoke software for medical purposes.  More importantly, most people who communicate in a medical context are specialists who have spent years learning how to do what they do - precious years they have been unable to dedicate to the task of knowing when and why software is good or bad.  Plenty of room for pushy salespeople to encourage those who really don't know to buy what they really will never understand.

Yes.  I'm reverting to a bygone age.  Never did think it could happen.

That Coca-Cola jingle which has driven me to distraction (and other Saturday afternoon blues)

Google might be good for finding things that serve to distract you from the job in hand - but when you're looking exactly for something which you are absolutely positive exists, sometimes it's really not up to the task you ask of it.  This lyric, for example:

Coca-Cola
When the midday sun is over
Coke adds life
And everybody wants a bit of life.

Now I challenge you to find this short snippet of a jingle that has distracted me all afternoon. Don't know why. Don't even see that - as an adult of 47 and with so many awful things going on the world - I should allow myself the luxury of such foolishnesses.

But hey ho. There we go.

After much searching on both Google and YouTube, I finally came up with this advert which shows Jack Nicklaus playing golf to my favourite lyrics.



But as one of the commenters points out, the ad we really love was more upbeat and definitely didn't feature the golfer in question.

Curious how some parts of what we are and feel can get so easily buried by these gigantic corporations. Someone, somewhere, obviously feels that those of us who remember this piece of advertising art don't deserve an access any other century would have more than happily permitted.

Just more of the same, I'm afraid. Our memories only have value for these organisations whilst they can be monetised.

And yet if I still buy Coke, in part it's due to that jingle and ad I mention above. An ad I can only remember these days even as I am surely unable to properly track it down. An ad that reminds me of a far more hopeful youth - and most definitely not the bland consumer-orientated histrionics they seem to currently propose to engage our attention with.

Points and specious freebies? Guitar-hero riffs? No sir. Not for me, anyhow. Identification with a musicality and an optimism that spoke volumes. That was (and is) rather more my line, I can tell you.

And so we come back to a lack of a true public domain. If YouTube has done anything useful, it is to create a de facto public domain for the dominant arts of the 20th century, precisely where and when their progenitors - the music, TV and cinema industries - have simply refused to play ball.

I fear that YouTube's glory days are coming to an end.

Monetisation knocks at all our doors.

Ready yourself to become just another soulless consumer.

The beginning which is nigh was - in reality - never more an end than now.

On ranting, sub-cultures and incoherent readings

This article from Dave's place has made me think a little today - which is no mean achievement, as quality thinking time seems to be escaping me of late.

The curious - and different - thing about the Internet is how easy it is to stumble across work which was never intended for the audience one may form a part of.  A lot of what we read may be classifiable as incoherent - not because the writer doesn't know his or her audience accurately enough but rather because a different audience has seeped into the frame.  The incoherence comes from the inappropriate nature of the relationship between creator and receiver.  Clarity and simplicity should perhaps be the objectives of all writers, and thus ways of resolving such incoherence - but however clearly and simply we write, in such an openly accessible medium such as the Internet we cannot avoid confusing some people.  Or, indeed, ending up accused of being obfuscators, elitists, patronisers or - more objectively, as in this case - just plain incompetent.

A revolution, however, requires crossover in industrial quantities.  Not sure that the Internet is actually achieving this any more.  'Seems to me that, more and more, there's so much room out there to debate our thoughts that all we are doing is creating little planetary masses of belief which orbit complex solar systems without ever coming close to the kind of shared experience that could usefully serve to bring societies together.

We may find that in the future we will have so much space that we really won't have to agree - society-wide I mean - on anything.  What a luxury that will be.

A sub-culture of fat PSP players who struggle to get through life as best they can versus a sub-culture of the virtuously thin and politically minded with the advantages of intellect, education and the gumption to be pointedly (even where maybe rightly) sarcastic about all that they see around them?

Either way, barriers are being built on both sides I think.

It's the sub-cultures that are appearing which we really do need to get away from.

(And there I was thinking that it would be the Internet which would have achieved this.)

Another more level-headed day (or exactly where we need salespeople)

Cameron's right.  We do need salespeople.  They fashion a constructive interface between the people who create and build products and services and the people who buy them.  Where they do their job properly, they develop long-term relationships that - at least in the economic world we currently find ourselves in - make that world go round.

They help create jobs.  They help cement understandings that can lead to generally better futures.  But there is one significant issue I have with salespeople and that is that they are chancers.

Chancers are also good for the economy, of course.  Without the limited liability that limited companies afford the entrepreneurial, our world would probably be a much worse place to live in.  There is plenty of evidence that such constructs are on occasions wildly abused - but abuse takes place within any system.  The true litmus test should be whether the upsides outweigh the downsides.  I'd like to believe they do.

The last two years have shown us, however, that when salespeople become hierarchical top-dogs, the definition of leadership ends up being radically bent out of shape.  You only have to see where the financial services sector - in its mad haste for unsustainable growth - has dragged the whole world economy to understand that the job of salesperson is an absolutely worthy, necessary and honourable profession - but most definitely not when located at the top of the tree.

At the top of the tree is where we need very different skills.

The really scary thing is that it would seem David Cameron (along with vast swathes of the Conservative Party) still believes (after the debacle of salespeople-driven private-sector management that has been that above-mentioned experience of financial services behaviours) that we need even more salespeople at the top.  And, what's more, in politics.

Yes.  Like mathematics teachers, engineers and computer scientists, we need more good salespeople if we are to have any chance of succeeding in the future.  But we most clearly do not need them at the top.

Anywhere, in fact.

Full stop.

Rather, we need them as part of a team where more judicious characters have the final responsible say.  We need input from their skills, their intuition, their ability to seek out a line of attack and defend a position coherently - but what we most definitely do not need is a chancer's instinct to go for broke when all around us we have evidence of the terrible consequences of such mindsets.

Do your patriotic duty, Mr Cameron: find your level.

And save your vote for change for another more level-headed day.