Of Greeks and gifts

I'm rapidly coming to the opinion that my father was right about Germany.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, he was the only person I knew who didn't think it was an unreserved blessing. As he saw it: for the past 40 years the whole of German policy had been focused on the single goal of reuniting the country, and with that achieved, it would soon turn its attention outward. The rest of Europe had reason to fear.

In the 1990s, when "European integration" was in vogue, he shook his head and muttered darkly about German imperialism. Something about the country's geography and history. I got a glimmering of what he meant when I briefly studied the life of Frederick the Great, but I still thought that tying it to the present day was paranoia. Besides, I reasoned: as long as they didn't start building an oversized army, what's the worst that could happen?

Then came the Eurozone, and he threw up his hands in horror and prophesied doom and catastrophe and the next European war. Those with long memories may recall that, in the beginning, there were "strict rules" about who could join the Eurozone: you had to have public debt below something, a defecit consistently below something else, exchange rates stable over N years and so forth. He predicted - correctly - that those "strict rules" would, quietly and without fanfare, be relaxed, because otherwise Italy wouldn't get in, and without Italy, the Germans wouldn't see the point. It's the Holy Roman Empire all over again.

Again I laughed at his fears. Clearly, his generation has a chip on its shoulder about the Germans, but that was all a long time ago. Me, I've been to Germany several times and I've met any number of Germans, even known a few. They're perfectly normal people. Nothing scary about them.

Now we have the Greek crisis. And suddenly, it's Germany that's playing the heavy.

The Greeks have created an economy where they can run a primary budget surplus (i.e. before counting debt repayments) even with over 25% unemployment. That's no mean feat.

More importantly, though, it's stupid. Governments are supposed to increase spending in recessions (defined loosely, but "over 25% unemployment" would qualify by just about any plausible yardstick) and reduce it afterwards. But the terms of the Greek bailout allow no such latitude. Greece is required to run a primary budget surplus - a large one - every single year for the next 20 years, come boom or bust. The Germans should know from their own history what happens when you impose terms like that on a country: it happened to them in 1919, and within ten years they were setting a benchmark for hyper-inflation that stands to this day.

Realistically, I think the Greeks have two options: they can leave the Eurozone peacefully, or they can declare war on it. I'm honestly not sure which outcome the ECB is currently trying to trigger.

An open letter to Mozilla

Dear Mozilla,

First, about me. I'm probably one of your loyaller users. I've been using Firefox since it was called 'Mozilla'. I remember Phoenix and Firebird, and I've used every major version of Firefox since the name began. I have Explorer, Chrome, Safari and Opera all installed, but Firefox is the one I use daily.

I don't mind the ads. I recognise desperation when I see it, and I sympathise. I think a lot of the interface changes are pointless, but I'll live with them if that's what you enjoy doing.

But I wish you would get around to doing something useful with this hilarious release cycle of yours.

The web is getting slower. (Cite. This article is about e-commerce, but the problem is much wider than that.) And you're not helping with that. You seem to think that the solution to slower websites is faster Javascript.

Wrong. Javascript is fast enough, thank you. Making it faster, at this point, will just encourage authors - sorry, 'content creators' - to write ever-more-bloated crapware on their sites. The last real technical boon to web speed was preloading, and you mastered that more than five years ago - everything since then has been "deckchairs on the Titanic"-level tweaking.

What we need isn't a more seamless or faster browsing experience; what we need is control over the browsing process.

Let's consider, for a moment, the scourge of auto-playing videos. These come in two flavours: the ones that start playing as soon as you open the page, and those that give you a n-second countdown to click a button to stop them. On a slow or unresponsive system, such as mine often becomes when I've got a few apps open, there's no difference between the two - either way, as soon as I switch to the tab, I'm condemned to complete loss of control over my computer for 30 seconds while poor little Windows tries to decide what to do next.

There's no reason for this. Give me a 'Play' button, and let me decide when (or whether) to click it. If you can configure Firefox - or allow me to configure it - so that it will never on any site, ever, no not even then or there, play a video without waiting for me to click on a button clearly labelled with a right-pointing arrow head of some sort... that would be a victory. I realise this is technically not as simple as I'm describing it, but that's why you employ clever people.

(In this context I would draw your attention to this well-reported study, which showed (indirectly) that people are much less likely to click on video ads than on regular, static ads.)

Another scourge you could control? Sites that insist on refreshing themselves at stupid intervals, where "stupid" is defined as "anything less than a minimum that I, the user should be able to configure in my browser from a simple menu setting". They eat my bandwidth and slow down my machine, all so that some media wankers with an inflated sense of their own importance can avoid the terrible stigma of their site appearing to be three minutes out of date.

And auto-redirecting. I know there are many good reasons for this, but there are also many bad ones. It would be nice to have a browser option to disable it, so that when I type in or click on a URL, I would have the option to see the content hosted at that URL and no other.

Remember pop-up and pop-under ads? For a brief time in the early 2000s they seemed to be the unstoppable scourge. Now? They haven't bothered me for years, in part thanks to you. You can do it again.

Envy is the same colour as money

The New Zealand Herald, the other day, published a story about how much John Key was spending on a hotel room.

Well, not really. Mostly they cribbed the story from the UK's Daily Mail, which was more interested (and it shows) in what David Cameron was spending to attend the G20 summit. Turns out, Cameron is the third-biggest spender after Presidents Obama and Xi. While the leaders of such also-ran countries as Germany, Italy and Japan, and even the king of Saudi Arabia, are slumming it at $400-600 a night hotels, our Mr Cameron is splashing out A$1250 a night for his bed in Brisbane.

(Actually, we don't know that - not from this story, at least. He might be accepting a bribe from the hotel so it can advertise that he stayed there. Or he might be accepting bribes from other hotels to keep him away. Who knows? So long as he declares them, it's all good.)

But the Mail, I guess, is more concerned with the look of the thing. Is it Right, for Mr Cameron to be spending like this abroad after four years of preaching austerity at home?

Which just goes to show what a tediously snobbish little rag the Mail really is. Because as Cameron surely knows, if you want to make money, it's essential to spend it as if it meant nothing to you.

I have no idea where I first heard that bit of wisdom, beyond "somewhere in my youth". I don't think the person who told me had any idea why it worked, but I've given it a couple of decades' thought now, and I've worked it out. See, the most important thing about money - as every economist from Micawber to Friedman agrees - isn't how much you have, it's how fast you spend it. "Velocity of circulation", it's called. And in the interests of the economy, it's better for everyone that it should be spent as quickly as possible. Money changing hands is a good thing.

And therefore, when people make decisions that affect who gets to be rich - all other things being equal, they'll tend to favour the big spender. This is the real reason why political campaign ads work. It's not the content, it's the demonstration value: "See, this is how I splash money about! Vote to give me more money, and some of it might splash on you!"

So, David, congratulations on doing your country proud. Now I trust you'll take the next logical step and strike the word "austerity" forever from your political vocabulary, and that of your party.

The only leader who deserves higher marks (Obama spends more, but let's face it, the US genuinely is richer and bigger) - is the president of Burma, who is staying in a $1300 hotel despite Burma not even being in the G20. Now that's ballsy.

The end of the world as I knew it

This post is based on the speech I delivered at a funeral last Friday. Some attendants have requested a written version; this is for them. I'm sorry for redacting the name of the deceased, but it's always been my policy to keep this blog anonymous.

Mumsie would sometimes talk about funerals.

Nothing significant in that. She talked about everything, all the time, with complete disregard for her audience. But sometimes the endless carousel of topics in her head would throw up "funerals", and those of us trapped at the dinner table with her would smile and nod politely and wait for the subject to change. All I remember from those moments, now, is that she liked the idea of a funeral as a celebration of the deceased's life, rather than an orgy of grief.

Well, I'm sorry Mumsie, but I'm grieving.

I remember when she first told me about death. I have no idea, now, whose death she was talking about, beyond that it must have been someone I knew. She explained it as a form of going away that meant we could never see them again - they couldn't visit us, we couldn't visit them or phone or write or anything.

I didn't understand. Why would they do that? She said that sometimes you have no choice, and everyone has to die.

I still didn't understand. Who could force a grownup to do such a thing? And when she said "everyone", obviously she couldn't mean everyone, because that would include her. The idea of a world in which I couldn't see her - was far beyond my comprehension.

As I grew more and more distressed, I begged her - pleaded as only a child can plead - to promise that she, at least, wouldn't die. But she was adamant that she would. When that line of attack failed, I begged her to promise that at least she wouldn't die for a very, very long time. She said she'd try.

She kept the second part of that promise for 40 years, and now she's followed through on the first part.

And that was typical of her. What she said she would do, she did.

We remember the endless home-improvement projects, each of which began with her saying something like "I've been thinking I'd like a jacuzzi". From most people I know, that sort of remark is just casual conversation; but when Mumsie said it, it was a serious threat, a solemn declaration of war on the state of Things As They Were. And the self-improvement projects - the degree that she took ten years to earn, the entry into the workforce at an age when most people are thinking of retirement, the repeated attempts to quit smoking.

But most of all, what I will try to take from her memory is the courage. The courage of a woman who, in her 20s, left behind everything she knew to settle in a new country. In her 70s, and in frail health, she undertook the 30-hour journey to the far side of the world to help us look after her newborn grandson. The unfailing love that never stopped giving, until it had nothing more to give.

I hope your Viking ancestors were watching all that from Valhalla, Mumsie. They would have been proud of you.

Failing the Turing test

Just when we thought politicians couldn't get any less principled, they go and pull a move like this. Alan Turing receives a royal pardon.

Well, that's very nice. But the question is: why?

Is it because the law he was convicted under is now seen as unjust? Then what of the thousands of others, some no doubt still living, who were convicted under the same law?

Or is it because he was a national hero, who contributed significantly to winning the Second World War, as well as making some significant contributions to early computing?

I hate to say it, but Gordon Brown, of all people, was better than this. His government said that the conviction was correct, even if the law wasn't. Brown's apology to Turing was both appropriate and just: it recognised Turing's contributions, but without closing its eyes to the others affected by the same law.

That's a strong argument, and four years ago it was decisive. It hasn't been forgotten, and it hasn't been answered. It's just been - ignored.

This pardon is just about how special Turing himself was. It's shameless pandering to the gay lobby. And it entrenches the power of "one law for the great, another for the rest of us". It is, I think, slightly more shameful than the original conviction. The people who passed the law under which Turing was convicted - they may have been wrong, but at least they believed in something (in fact, they were most concerned with preventing sexual slavery).

Today's politicians? Don't even pretend to believe. They're just trying to buy votes.

Artificial work

Remember the financial crisis? How many millions of people whose only real crime was "believing what they were told by the politicians they elected to lie to them" were faced with losing their homes, or worse? Yes, the fallout is still going on - but the main thwump of the collapse is, let's hope, behind us now.

And it's left in its wake stories like this. On the face of it, it's a tawdry and depressing tale of political incompetence, corporate corruption and human fallibility. But I think there's another angle here, which no media outlet is likely to spot, because they're all deeply embedded in the same demented economic system that gives rise to it.

Just in case you didn't click on the link just now: it's a story of how Bank of America outsourced some of its complaint-handling functions to a variety of private companies, and those companies proceeded to systematically screw customers by making a series of procedural "mistakes" that were, to all intents and purposes, embedded in the procedure itself. For example, they'd demand paperwork, but had no procedure in place to check whether the customer had already supplied it; so the poor sods were sending in copy after copy of the same paycheck, and all these copies would just pile up unopened somewhere. Then the customer's "failure to meet requirements" would trigger some other process, which basically meant they were booted out of their homes.

"People went through years of sending documents in," said Daniel Ellersdorfer, 37, a customer advocate who left Urban Lending after 13 months in September 2012 and is now a scuba-diving instructor. "There were people who did everything right and they would still get screwed over and have to start the modification process all over."

Like I said, it's not an edifying story. It hints - in a way that could get it into big trouble, if the publisher and targets were in the UK - at large-scale malpractice at BoA and its contractors, but it also provides plenty of ammunition for those who want to criticise President Obama and other politicians. Looking at the measures they put in place to "protect vulnerable borrowers", the phrase "half-arsed" springs irrepressibly to mind.

But more disturbing than all of this, to me, is the evidence it provides of two things that I've suspected for a while.

First is that the feudal system is alive and well in modern America. It's clear that everyone concerned takes it for granted that the only way for a pleb to have any chance at all in a difficult situation is for them to seek patronage from their betters (e.g. congresscritters); people didn't even get referred to the process unless there was a letter from Someone Important. Letters from people not of the noble class, apparently, don't even get opened.

Second is that - one faction of the Tea Party is 100% on the money. As far as the government was concerned, the plan to rescue people from the financial crash wasn't so much about "helping the helpless borrowers" as "using government patronage to create jobs". Thousands of jobs were created in these private companies that BoA hired to screw up its paperwork, and the fact that these jobs created no value and did no good for anyone except the job holders themselves (who got a paycheck out of it) doesn't seem to bother anyone.

Now, I'm all for the government giving people paychecks. Where I part company from this scheme is that these job-holders were required to turn up in an office every day and put in eight hours of grind at a task that they knew to be futile. They knew their jobs were worthless. What's worse, they knew there was valuable, useful work right under their noses that needed to be done, but they were powerless to do it - because if they did, they wouldn't be doing their paid jobs, then they'd be fired and stop getting their paychecks.

"Everyone knew that we weren't helping people," said Erik Schnackenberg, a customer-service manager who left Urban Lending in 2011 and now runs a yoga studio in Longmont, Colorado. "They were giving us all the pressure and none of the power to change anything. It was this absurd, self-contained ecosystem of worthlessness."

That's a broken system.

I've come to the conclusion that every government benefit (or tax break, which is the same thing) that's contingent on the recipient actually having to do something - look for work, turn up at a location, go through an interview process, have babies, earn money, get married - is a misguided attempt at social engineering. Much better if the government just gives everyone a paycheck for breathing, then lets them decide for themselves what to do with their time. Then people wouldn't have to take soul-destroying, dead-end jobs like these; they'd be happier, more free, and ultimately more productive work would get done, because thousands - probably millions - of people would be free to do something useful, instead of pointless make-work.

What are we all waiting for?

The boy stood on the burning platform

When I read that Stephen Elop is to be paid $25 million for his three years architecting the downfall of Nokia, the outrage across the internet was palpable. And I must confess, I fell for it. As I considered how this once-proud brand had been brought so low, and now the architect of its downfall is to be so rewarded, I felt almost physically sick at the sheer injustice.

But, I wondered, where was the political angle? How could the government of Finland just stand by and watch this - pillaging of their national flagship? Where was the doomsaying, the demagoguery, the raging anti-Americanism that should have heralded the announcement of Microsoft's takeover?

Which led me to think that, just maybe, people who paid attention may know more about this story than random internet blowhards. Which prompted me to do a little - just a little, mind you - further research.

And looking at the record, I notice that when Elop became CEO of Nokia in September 2010, the firm was already in grim shape. Share price, market share and profitability were all dropping rapidly. True, the company still had its own distinctive platform, it still had an unrivalled reputation for quality, particularly in the low end of the market, and it still shipped more phones than anyone else on the planet. But all those positions were under strong attack, and it was rapidly running out of resources with which to defend them.

And while Elop's performance was, by the numbers, gruesome, it wasn't as bad as it's now routinely depicted on partisan blogs. The oft-quoted "87% share price decline", for instance, is based on measuring from peak (just after his arrival) to trough (July 2012), but it fails to consider that if you bought stock in July 2012, you'd be looking at a 250% return by now - the end-to-end drop is a mere 40%. Of course that's still not good - unless, that is, you compare it with the 3-year period before Elop's arrival, when that same stock dropped by an eyewatering 75%.

If Elop's job was to arrest the decline, then he failed. But if his job was to prepare Nokia for its only viable future, as part of a hideous multinational empire, then he's done it well. Rather than a "trojan horse" - the popular image right now - perhaps we should be seeing him as a port pilot - the guy who comes on board just before the ship enters a harbour, to steer her past the hidden shoals into a safe dock.

Viewed in that light, Elop's initial appointment makes a lot more sense.

Has he earned $25 million? I have conceptual problems with the thought that anyone can "earn" that sort of money in three years; but I can imagine it wasn't a fun three years. And so long as it's not my money, who am I to judge?