My friend Sasha spent the last month guest-blogging at the F-word. It’s all worth reading (although inconveniently not all linked in one place). I particularly like her defence of using the word

pretty

:

When I describe someone or something as pretty – particularly when it’s not someone young and female, which is mostly the case – it feels in some way like a fuck you, a reclamation and repurposing of a word that has dogged me and my gender my whole life….

It feels like some small attempt to redress the balance, to reinvent ‘pretty’ as a universally applicable term of approbation, to bring feminisation into aspiration instead of disparagement. I like its slightly offhand, flippant tone, which completely fails to disguise how heartfelt it really is….

I would also rather live in a world where feminisation and aestheticism wasn’t used to reduce or control or belittle, and reclaiming ‘pretty’ is my (inadequate and imperfect) attempt to build that world.

Profile of Russian hacker group “Humpty Dumpty”. It starts out looking like an idealistic hacktivist network, the “Anonymous International”.

Shaltai’s stated mission is “to change the world for the better, helping to bring greater freedom and social awareness.”

One of the group’s members even quoted the 2009 film Watchmen, saying, “We don’t do this thing because it’s permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we’re compelled. Once a man has seen society’s black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it.”

But in the end, hacktivism turns out to be a publicity-grabbing loss-leader to drum up paid hacking work:

Shaltai Boltai, if Lewis is to be believed, is only a “side project.” The group’s main work is getting hired to dig up information about private and public individuals. The whole company consists of a dozen people.

…

We’re hired by private individuals and groups within the state, and we never work with anyone tied to the drug trade. But we maintain that we’re an independent team. It’s just that it’s often impossible to tell who our clients are. Sometimes we hand over information to intermediaries, without ever knowing the client.

Once upon a time, fairy tales were unspeakably brutal. The Brothers Grimm often take the flak for this, but undeservedly. They didn’t create the aura of homicide and senseless injustice, merely absorbed it from the existing oral traditions. Other European folklore collectors got much the same vibe, as did those from further afield. For much of human history, the stories we told to kids were downright

nasty

.

Today’s children’s literature is, relatively speaking, all sweetness and light. So what changed?

Perhaps it’s about changing attitudes to childhood. Start off with a Romantic idea of the innocence and grace of children. This one was already well underway in the early eighteenth century, and is in the background of some early criticism of Grimms Tales as corrupting. This strand of ideology turns into the Victorian desire to shelter children from the evils of the wider world — a rare chunk of ideology from that time which has only grown stronger in the intervening years.

Or you can take the approach that popular fiction is psychology writ large. Stories, like other forms of play, are about making sense of the world, and particularly learning to deal with its dangers. They may not directly depict the experience of their audience, but some emotional or thematic parallel exists.

The most direct, extreme case is in the games played by children in concentration camps. These might involve imitating guards, or learning deception:

One game of their own devising was modeled after the camp’s daily roll call and was called klepsi-klepsi, a common term for stealing. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at bluffing — for example, about stealing bread or about knowing of someone’s escape or resistance plans. Klepsi-klepsi may have been practice for that skill.

Grimms’ tales make sense in a world of high infant mortality, frequent violence and untamed nature. With childhood becoming safer, the classic fairy tales seem increasingly alien.

It’s interesting to look in this light at the dystopian trend in modern children’s books, with the Hunger Games trilogy as standard-bearers. The danger here is state and society. Survival comes less from honour and courage than from building alliances and navigating structures of power. All of which, I’d say, is a pretty decent approximation to the state of the world today.

Alex Harowell has an interesting post about the economics of unemployment at AFOE.

In a strong economy, career paths tend to stay within a specialism, developing increasing experience and skill, and hence steadily increasing productivity. Or if somebody switches careers, it’s more a case of

reculer pour mieux sauter

, taking a temporary setback to end up somewhere more productive.

That doesn’t work in a recession. People who lose their jobs in bad circumstances are more willing to accept a new one, even with much worse pay and prospects.

In the long term, this is often a Bad Thing, both for them and the economy. They get onto a different career path, one coming more from desperation than choice, and will find it hard to switch back:

The unemployed are suddenly driven off their optimal productivity path, and are usually under pressure to take any job that comes along, no matter how suboptimal. Until they get back to where they were before the crisis, on their new paths or on their old ones, the economy will forego the difference between their potential and actual production.

The long-term cost of this depends on how desperate the unemployed are to take just any job that comes along. It’s better for the economy if they stay unemployed for a while before returning to a high-productivity career, rather than getting locked long-term into something less productive.

i.e. it all depends how society treats the unemployed. If you cut benefits, treat the unemployed like shit, and hussle them into whatever job is available (UK), you set the country up for long-term under-productivity:

If the unemployed sit it out and look for something better, you would expect a jobless recovery and then a productivity boom – like the US in the 1990s. If the unemployed take the first job-like position that comes along, you would expect a jobs miracle with terrible productivity growth, flat to falling wages, and a long period of foregone GDP growth. Like the UK in the 2010s. And if your labour market institutions are designed to prevent the information destruction in the first place, with a fallback to Keynesian reflation if that doesn’t cut it? Well, that sounds like Germany in the 2010s.

* lets ignore the fact that people may choose lower-paid (i.e. less productive) work for non-monetary reasons. Everything else works out much the same

Shortly after discovering Black Mirror, I discovered this discussion of it, on a comedy forum. Here are some of their proposed storylines for the next series:

It turns out that internet trolls are just aliens trying to make first contact.

As a direct consequence of this unfortunate cultural misunderstanding, Earth’s connection to the galactic internet is severely throttled during peak times.

Glitter and Huntley roam freely, sexing children in the open, but getting away with it because they’re passing their penises through the re-animated corpse of Jimmy Saville, using him as a “VPN tunnel” and thus escaping prosecution

THE WESTMINSTER BUBBLE

Britain is ruled by a giant bubble at Westminster. When everyone rebels it floats up above the country and fires on the masses with its DeathStar-style laser guns.

An independent analysis of LHC data suggests that the Higgs boson committed a string of sexual assaults in the 1970s, and high-ranking officials at CERN were aware of it.

Rob Gonsalves paints beautiful images where one viewpoint merges seamlessly into another. Often the transition is between a natural landscape and some human activity. The ‘human’, though, comes in the form of endless ritualistic repetition, so that there is somethign uncanny about them even in the areas where they are obviously human.

Here is more of his work

I’ve seen some truly awful infographics of corporate ownership structures. I’ve even occasionally perpetrated them. But this image is a classic of the genre:

Pretty convoluted, huh?

It’s from Muddy Waters, a much-feted research and short-selling firm. They are arguing that French conglomerate Bolloré owns a lot of itself through intermediate companies. We’re looking here at Financière Moncey, an indirect subsidiary of Bolloré, and the point is to show “how complex the relationships actually are” among these structures.

Look a bit more closely, though, and you’ll see that most of the complexity is artificially added. The diagram is just the same structures repeated again and again and again.

Here it is again, with all the repetitions deleted:

Fair play to Muddy Waters for figuring out the ownership structure. That kind of structure is painful to make sense of, and it’s easy to miss the circular ownership.

But they do seem to be deliberately exaggerating the complexity. Presumably the point is to show that things are so complicated that only their analytic genius can make sense of it. It goes with some snarky digs at analysts in the report itself — “

BOL has likely been misunderstood because the complexity of its structure makes it infeasible to use Excel to estimate the percentage of circular ownership

“. Much as I enjoy their approach, I wish they could make their point without, well, muddying the waters.

Why is nobody using markov chains to generate music playlists?

Playing music on shuffle is shit, full of jarring transitions, incongruous switches of tempo and topic. I masssively prefer listening to a carefully-mixed playlist, either via spotify or youtube, or an old-fasioned radio station like Radio Paradise.

So why not build a semi-shuffle? Start with one song. Look for all the tracks that get put onto playlists immediately after it. Play one at random. Then repeat the process — follow your second track with a random selection from everything DJs decided to play after it.

This is basically a Markov Chain.

It’s an idea blindingly obvious, relatively simple to implement, and in a domain that must appeal to thousands of CS students. Markov chains are immensely popular for toy projects online, since they generate fun output for very little coding.

But poking around online, I’ve not been able to find anybody using markov chains for playlist generation.

Here’s one of the more surreal corners of industrial medicine: crab blood donors. Apparently the best way of detecting some bacterial contamination is to add some crab blood extract to it, and see if it clots. So 250,00 crabs a year are scooped up and part-drained of blood, before being released with just enough blood left that most of them will survive the process.

To make it even odder: crab blood is blue.

[Thanks to Julien for pointing me at this bizarre micro-industry]

I’m always pleased when campaigners about tax avoidance manage to find concrete examples of what they want changed. It takes a lot more knowledge and work, but is much more likely to have some impact in legislation.

So it’s great that 38 degrees have zoomed in hedge fund managers claiming their income as capital gains rather than wages. This not only gives them a lower tax rater, but makes it easier for them to claim numerous exemptions. The end result can be tax of just 12.7%.

Last week they released a report on the topic. It’s written by my friend Mike Lewis, and estimates the tax cost of this ‘loophole’ at £700 million per year.

38 degrees’ proposed solution is to explicitly treat payments to private equity employees as salary. That’s probably the right position for them to take — it’s a good change that might plausibly be implemented.

Personally, though, I’d prefer a much more radical change. It’s abhorrent to tax labour so much more highly than capital. This is something that brings out my inner socialist. The low rate of capital gains tax just shows that the system is rigged in favour of capitalists and against workers.