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.

I’m an immense fan of Eliot Higgins’ work, reporting on conflicts by correlating publicly-available satellite images against youtube videos and social media. It’s stunning just how much you can find out, and how few people are doing so.

This report, also summarized in the Guardian, is a case in point.

They are trying to verify claims of Russian artillery firing over the border into Ukraine, last summer.

They use google maps to look at the craters left by shelling:

From a crater, you can tell roughly which direction the attack came. Doing this when you’re on the ground is fairly straightforward, and many soldiers are trained in “crater analysis”. Doing it from satellite photos is a bit shakier, but with 800+ craters on the photo, you can get some idea.

You take a crater image like this:

compare it to a model from a US military manual:

and decide that the gun was somewhere off to the north-east.

Do this with all the craters you can find, to give you an overall picture of the direction(s) the fire came from. Then trace the route back on google maps. With luck, you’ll find some trace of the firing positions on the map:

In this case, it turns out that the guns were fired from inside Russia. QED.

Some people have quibbled about the reliability of aerial-only impact analysis. And, looking at (roughly) the same images as Bellingcat, I can’t always see enough marks to agree with their analysis for every crater. The general pattern is compelling, though, as is the match between craters, tracks in the firing areas, and youtube videos. Overall, though, this is a far clearer analysis than anything else out there, either in the media or being reported by NGOs. And they are almost unique in including enough information that, if you want, you can repeat their process step by step and confirm their conclusions

It’s ten years to the day since Hunter S Thompson obliterated himself in the most American way, with a shotgun to the head.

Whenever I reread his books, I’m struck by how he was so much more than the crazed self-destructive hedonist of myth. He was constantly trying to understand his world, and above all to make sense of America. Even

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

is subtitled

A savage journey to the heart of the American Dream

. It’s a topic he keeps coming round to, especially in his diary of the ’72 presidential campaign which re-elected Nixon.

Above all, there’s a constant sense of dashed optimism, from someone who had seen the birth of a culture he believed in, then watched it be destroyed in infacy by the counter-revolution of a heartless mainstream. Here’s one of many passages where he laments that death:

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant….

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened….There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda….You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.


So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high—water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I’ve been enjoying this series of lectures on Surrealism, given by Dawn Ades at Oxford a few years back.

Among other things, it’s nice to have my fondness for surrealism validated by an Important Person. Because whenever I bring it up around Serious Art People, they tend to react with patronising disdain, much as though I’d just said ABBA were my favourite band.

Better, though, is the attention Ades gives to the surrealist journals, I love it when artists try to explain what they are doing, and it sounds like the surrealists did so more thoroughly and with less bullshit than just about any other art movement out there.