Book: Never Hit a Jellyfish With a Spade: How to Survive Life's Smaller Challenges by Guy Browning

Never Hit a Jellyfish With a Spade is a collection of short weekly articles that Guy Browning wrote for the Guardian several years ago. As is always the case with this type of compendium, you have hits and misses but there are much more of the former than the latter, making it a worthy read.

This book provides ideal relief for those morning and evenings when the hay fever blocks the nose and dulls the senses, making it difficult to read improving books and a criminal offence to read Wodehouse, since to do so would be like going to a top-notch restaurant when you've lost your sense of smell, i.e. an exercise in self-defeat.

*** 1/2 (tip: it's a book to dip in and out of, enjoying a few articles at a time)

A few choice quotes:

On how to ... make toast
 Cold toast is a very sad affair and gives a small insight into death - something you've known and loved, that was warm and comforting, but is now cold and stiff and destined for the bin.

On how to... make tea
Two sugars is the norm for working people. Tea without sugar is an admission  that what you do in life doesn't require that much effort. If someone else is making tea for you, it's best to ask for three sugars because people who don't take sugar can't stir tea properly (generally because they haven't got enough energy)

On how to... have a cold
Of all the nasty things you can pick up these days, a cold is relatively minor. However, the amateur dramatics it gives rise to are spectacular. Horrific wasting diseases that confine you to a bed mean that people have to actively seek you out in order to sympathize. A cold, on the other hand, is a portable complaint.
... Just about the only consolation for having a cold is the lovely deep husky voice that goes with it ....Interestingly, the voice is at its most husky on the telephone, especially when explaining your absence to colleagues at work.

On how to... do extreme sports
Extreme sports boil down to thinking up great new ways of killing yourself and then extracting the death part at the last moment.  ...It's vital if you're going to do any kind of extreme sport to dress like you're a surf dude and to shout 'Whoaaaaa!!!!' when you're doing it. Turning up in a comfortable tweed jacket and doing something extreme while whistling nonchalantly just makes everyone else feel as though they're wasting their time.

I'm still only part-way through this book and will post more quotes later...just needed to post something as it's been pretty quiet here recently!

Nature article: The Big Fat Truth

Nature recently published a comprehensive article looking at what the data have to say about BMI and mortality risk. The conclusion is that the relationship is far less clear-cut than is commonly thought.

It's well worth taking the time out to read the whole piece.

Daniel Dennet quote

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

(a quote from Daniel Dennet's latest book, via Kottke)

The first time I have disagreed with John Kay ... (he's still the dude though)

The Companies Act has in recent years been revised to incorporate a broad stake-holder focus. The over-riding objective is still shareholder value, but now decision making must also give due consideration to wider stakeholders such as suppliers, employees and the environment.

In a recent article, John Kay refers to this broader stake-holder approach as a basis for arguing that aggressive tax avoidance strategies pursued by directors may not fit as an appropriate behaviour.

I am probably missing several pieces of the puzzle but my instinct tells me that since our tax regime operates not on a principles based approach but on a rules based approach (as do all tax regimes, I imagine), it is the rules that need to be tightened, not the behaviours or companies. I believe the modus operandi for companies remains and should remain profit maximisation. By all means give a nod to all the stakeholders in this context, but it is a nonsense to pander to them at the expense of profit. Paying less tax enables the company to distribute more wealth to shareholders or to reinvest more capital into the business. It's true that if you were the only entity aggressively avoiding tax the ramifications on profitability could be severe if there was a massive public backlash. However, so long as multiple conglomerates are in on the wheeze, the damage to reputation is likely to be negligible.

Nadal vs Djokovic - Roland Garros Semi-Finals.

Some highlights from the Nadal vs Djokovic semi-final at Roland Garros. Great tennis.

Taleb's inventory

The spiky, Nicholas Nasim Taleb gives some nice responses in the Weekend FT's Inventory:

Ambition or talent: which matters more to success?
Both concepts are modernist nonsense. Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

What would you like to own that you don’t currently possess?
Nothing.

What’s your biggest extravagance?
Books, books and books.

Adam Smith quote - 10 of 10

"The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine, too, can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and Burgundy in Scotland? But if there would be a manifest absurdity in turning towards any employment thirty times more of the capital and industry of the country than would be necessary to purchase from foreign countries an equal quantity of the commodities wanted, there must be an absurdity, though not altogether so glaring, yet exactly of the same kind, in turning towards any such employment a thirtieth, or even a three hundredth part more of either. Whether the advantages which one country has over another be natural or acquired, is in this respect of no consequence."

- Quote from The Invisible Hand by Adam Smith (Penguin Great Ideas series)

Another boring Bernanke speech...not this time

"If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game."

From a great commencement speech given by Ben Bernanke

New video from Lev Yilmaz - Waiting for Life to Begin

In reference to my earlier post, maybe life begins when you buy a Jaguar sports car?

Firefox unresponsive scripts? Problem solved...block 'em!

If you are running Firefox and are suffering from "Unresponsive Script" messages which freeze your browser for an inordinate amount of time, I recommend installing the No Script Add-on.

Thanks to this and the highly popular Ad-Block, my browsings remain fast and uncluttered, despite using an 8 year old laptop with just 512MB of ram.

Jaguar advertisement

Just watched a Jaguar advert which closes with the question "How Alive are You?". I don't know how I'm supposed to respond to this.

Book: The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

 

"The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared" is a wonderful book. The story relates the present day adventures of Allan Karlsson, with alternate chapters telling of Karlsson's amazing travels and central influences on key political events of the past hundred years. We are taken from Sweden to lands afar including Moscow, Los Alamos, Stalingrad, Vladivostock, Bali, Paris and North Korea. On his adventures, Allan Karlsson has meetings and run-ins with the likes of Truman, Oppenheimer, Francos, Lenin, Stalin, Nixon, Churchill and Mao Tse Tung along the way. All this for a man with no interest in politics!

Jonas Jonasson's plain style of writing takes a chapter or two of getting used to but it fits the absurd, darkly comic nature of story very well and lends a fitting layer of innocence to the book. It also makes for a breezy read: after three of four days, I was half-way through this 400 page book and was already thinking about rationing out the remaining pages. Unfortunately for me, the stories pace picked up pace and got funnier and more exciting in the second half, and I couldn't help but to speed through to the end.

Jonasson has surpassed himself with this first book. It has sold some 4m copies so far and deserves an even wider audience.

 ****1/2 (don't read the quotes below if you are planning to read the book)

"Hello? Is that Bali Airport?" he said in English, and received the answer that they should immediately identify themselves of face the Indonesian Air Force.
"My name is Dollars," said Allan. "One Hundred Thousand Dollars"
 ...."Excuse me, Mr Dollars. The sound is very poor. Could you be so kind as to repeat your first name once more?"
...."My first name is Two Hundred Thousand," said Mr Karlsson.

Every day, Allan and Amanda went on suitably long walks along the glowing white beach outside the hotel. They always had lots to talk about, and they felt better in each other's company. They didn't go very fast, because she was eighty-four years old and he was now in his hundred and first year. After a while, they decided to hold each others hand, for balance.

He (Benny, a great character with a brilliant back-story) couldn't remember everything, he said, but you can cover a lot if you sit at a school desk for three decades, and do your homeork once in a while. Benny was an almost-vet, almost-doctor, almost-srchitect, almost-engineer, almost-botanist, almost-language-teacher, almost-sports-coach, almost-historian and almost quite a few other things. And for a bit of variety he had taken some shorter courses of varying quality and importance.

Film: Universal Soldier - Day of Reckoning

This movie started off as a slice of pure B movie heaven. It then went on to surprise by ending on an originally philosophical questioning note that left me in a state of blood-drenched admiration. This time around the main stage is given over to Scott Adkins, with Van Damme and Lundgren now on the same side, as key players in an underground UniSol rebellion movement. All good stuff.

****

Cool bike tricks

Adam Smith quote - 9 of 10

"Men are much more likely to discover easier and readier methods of attaining any object, when the whole attention of their minds is directed towards that single object, than when it is dissipated among a great variety of things. But, in consequence of the division of labour, the whole of every man's attention comes naturally to be directed towards some one very simple object. It is naturally to be expected, therefore, that some one or other of those who are employed in each particular branch of labour should soon find out easier and readier methods of performing their own particular work, whenever the nature of it admits of such improvement. A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it. Whoever has been much accustomed to visit such manufactures, must frequently have been shewn very pretty machines, which were the inventions of such workmen, in order to facilitate and quicken their own particular part of the work. In the first fire engines {this was the current designation for steam engines}, a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows."

- Quote from The Invisible Hand by Adam Smith (Penguin Great Ideas series)

John Kay always gives me something to think about

In his latest piece, the wise economist John Kay discusses the race to build the fastest communication lines between trading exchanges, in order to provide traders with an edge that is measured in the milliseconds:

 ...Spread Networks has spent an estimated $300m building a fibre optic link through the Appalachians. The shorter cable reduces the time taken to send data by about a millisecond.

I hadn't given much thought to this constant push to be that little bit faster than the competition but Kay saliently points out that being ahead of the pack in this manner is little different to trading on insider information, a key difference being that the latter is illegal:

"Making profits from better-informed knowledge of business or government (where obtaining that might seem an activity of public value) is a criminal offence: making profits from marginally faster dissemination of that knowledge (where achieving that appears to have no public value at all) is a legitimate market practice."

This has little bearing on the armchair investor or indeed on anyone other than high frequency trading community, but it is still interesting food for thought.

More on export subsidies ... why can't we see the light?

A few posts back I briefly discussed the EU's nonsensical idea of whacking a tariff on cheap solar panels from China. After a quick Google search, I find a nice supporting paper from Cafe Hayek:

"Compared to the no-subsidy alternative, we non-Chinese people get larger quantities of valuable outputs at lower prices. From our perspective, it is as if production conditions in China naturally allow firms there to produce at these very low costs. Because economic theory is clear that the home economy benefits if  lower-cost foreign suppliers are permitted to serve the home economy unimpeded by protectionist measures, if the costs of creating these artificially low prices of exports fall on foreigners and not on us, we in the domestic economy should welcome such lower prices, whatever their source."

As to the question posed in the title "why can't we see the light?," the answer is because vested interests, like charity, begins at home.

Giant biscuits for breakfast

For the modern working family who don't have time to make some toast, let alone a cooked breakfast in the morning, the innovative marketeers blessed us with cereals. These flakes or puffs of carbohydrate could be coated in anything from sugar to vitamins and minerals, in keeping with the latest fads. Just pour on the milk and knock it back, and go and do something better and more important than eating (I mean, like what's that about anyway).

Now we witness the evolution. I go to the supermarket and see the breakfast aisle is increasingly given to breakfast biscuits (images below). It has transpired that we are such a busy people nowadays that we must eat breakfast while we are on the move, typically on the way to work. I have a dystopian image of of rows of people seated on tube trains, quietly stroking the glass screens of their smart phones in one hand while eating their adult biscuits with the other: the marketing man's dream. Tap, tap, stroke, tap, bite, stroke, tap, tap, tap.

I imagine the marketing men are already working on a lunch biscuit and a dinner biscuit perhaps (think a meaty middle and sweet, paste-filled tip for desert). It's the logical conclusion. Why stop to eat anything?

For people who think these breakfast bars may be unhealthy, here is Belvita's scientific chart that clearly shows how their biscuit energy is released slowly over a four hour period. Specifically, your energy level will rise to somewhere between the "y" and "d" on y-axis after about three quarters of an hour, after which the energy release remains exactly constant for four hours exactly, and then it's all gone. That's the science.

The EU solar panels fiasco

So the EU is looking to apply some pretty hefty taxes on solar panels imported from China, arguing a case of anti-competitive dumping. I'm struggling to see the logic here. If China wants to distort its markets with the result that we are able to purchase more of its goods at a lower price, then surely this is all to the good? It means cheaper solar panels for consumers and businesses. Some European solar players argue they are being hurt by the cut-price competition but all of this economic resource can be be put to use elsewhere to produce something else that we are good at making, and some of this good can then be exchanged for Chinese solar panels. Also, there is a large industry built around solar panel installation that benefits from the existing situation and will suffer as higher prices lead to reduced demand.

How to end global conflict: tea, biscuits and a game of football

A story from the BBC: 

York Mosque praised for offering EDL protesters tea

A mosque has been praised for serving tea and biscuits to English Defence League supporters after the far-right group arranged a demonstration there.

About six people turned up to protest at the mosque in Bull Lane, York, on Sunday and were invited inside to play football with worshippers.

More than 100 supporters of the mosque had gone there after learning of the planned EDL protest.

Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu said the mosque's response was "fantastic".

He said: "Tea, biscuits, and football are a great and typically Yorkshire combination when it comes to disarming hostile and extremist views."

Was it Yorkshire tea? Were the biscuits digestives, rich tea, or shortbreads, or was there a selection on offer? The details of the potent combination must be recorded for posterity and the information passed along to the Ministry of Defence. Can the conflicts of the world be solved by a good cup of tea and a sit down, followed by an optional game of soccer. It's worth a try.