2011 ISA investment review – rough waters but maintained speed and heading OK
Most people do their new year review in January, and it’s still January, even if I’m nearly a month late. Last year I was looking for income, and this year I can look back, and conclude that I got it, to the tune of about 4% on the cost of what I put in. That’s possibly a minor fail as I target 5%, but I only have two-and-a-half year’s worth in my ISA and I buy throughout the year. So it’s possible that the ramp up across the year has something to do with that.
Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012…
So we bid goodbye to 2011, a difficult year for many people, ermines included. A certain degree of mayhem on the stock market, but also a degree of mayhem for the lives of many Britons. Unemployment is rising and inflation is taking a toll on many people’s household incomes. Often already precarious in the good times, lubricated with the torrent of cheap debt, the going has been tough for a lot of people as the friction of everyday financial existence increases. Hopefully not too many gorged on the Christmas sales and our guardianistas and impecunious Daily Mail journalists learned to say no to their materialistic children from last year.
What did we learn in 2011 – well, the drumbeat of bad news continued, we learned the Euro was pretty much shot to bits and heading in the wrong directions. We learned we are poorer than we thought we were, we learned in August that shares could go down as well as go up, as if we’d forgotten from 2008… We observed some creative solutions to the problems of inflation in the summer, unfortunately somewhat at odds with the law.
We learned an awful lot of people in Arab states were mightily pissed off with their lot, we learned that we could bump off dictators like Gaddafi but as usual we weren’t so good at putting something better in its place (cf Afghanistan, Iraq). The trouble is the West is too economically and imperially weak to invade and hold and transform a situation, some of us (well, the US of A to be honest) can project force, but we hate the messy part that comes afterwards. Iran seems to be the next place for an oil war, and those North Korean dudes seem to be genuinely barmy despite no doubt being useful to their northern sponsors, but at least they haven’t discovered the elixir of eternal youth yet.
So what of next year? We seem to be coming up against a bifurcation. Established economics would have it that 2012 will be a pretty rough year but that it should be a turning point. On the other hand it could also be a different kind of turning point, where we discover that capitalism is beginning to eat itself as Karl Marx foretold all those years ago, as it continues to destroy the jobs and livelihoods of the people that it needs as consumers. Like so many things, some is good, more is not always better. Or it could be time to consider surrendering to the forces of peak oil and perhaps engineer an economic system that doesn’t demand we consume more and more consumer tat and make up for the empty feeling inside with Prozac, there has to be a better way.
This is becoming apparent as the shocking youth unemployment and rising joblessness. It is hard to say where that is going, it is a bad combination with an education system that has been debased and which seems to take as its most important job bolstering its customers’ self esteem. Sometimes it is better to know that you are stuffed than to just feel good about yourself, as knowledge leads to effective action. We have been here before, it was pretty rotten to look for a job in Thatcher’s first recession, and the 1990s one was no fun for jobseekers either.
For me, 2012 is the year that, after three years of frugality wins me the second goal of financial independence, assuming, of course, that there is still a financial system to be independent in 
The first was reached nine months ago, when I could survive on the stored capital. This New year feels like the last leg of the journey started in February 2008, when I listened to a twerp of a line manager try to pressure me, and I decided that I needed options in future, in particular the option to call punks like that out and tell him that while he may be desperate for the money, not all of us buy our middle class lifestyle on a tower of debt, and I think my own way and dream my own dreams.
So now I am on the final approach, and it does feel like I am gradually surrendering the potential energy of a dynamically unstable job for the lower energy but more stable position of my final aim, to be independent of working for a living.
My hopes for 2012 are personally, to be able to stay the course until the third quarter of the year. Two and a half years ago I took a chance, to carry on and risk crashing and burning, and so far it has worked out, and a lot of luck has favoured my journey. The road is getting harder all round, however. One of the pieces of luck was to get on a London 2012 project, which will be a great swansong for my engineering career.
More generally it is that we find out whether this financial crisis is a financial crisis or something more serious, in that the assumptions behind an industrial economy are starting to break down.
Finally, what we desperately need is for enlightened leadership to rise to the surface. Not ‘strong l’eaders, but a political leadership that can see the wider picture and is not so craven as to endlessly tell the people what they want to hear. There are some serious challenges coming in the years and decades to come. We would all like things to carry on as they were, but sometimes we need to recognise that isn’t possible, and then to take decisive and effective action to adapt and select one of the better alternatives.
I did this in 2008, realising that working for another 12 years until retirement would come at a significant cost to my well-being. I had the advantage of being just one person. As nations, there are a lot of areas where effective leadership is needed, In Europe, the people of the Eurozone need to decide whether they have sufficient common cause politically to make a political union that reflects the economic union. It would be good if the politicians, particularly Merkel and Sarkozy, were slapped around the face with a wet fish often enough that they got to understand that it would be really good if they asked people first, before implementing it. I am not sure that this process was done in the creation of the Euro, and repeating the undemocratic exercise makes me uneasy.
If the people aren’t up for it, then it is time to back away and unravel the Euro, carefully. Because it seems pretty clear that without political union monetary union with always fail Europe in times of financial stress.
Closer to home, we need to decide how we want to earn our living in the UK. We can probably rebuild the banking edifice, though we could do well to diversify. I am not sure that the time is right for us to go down the line of making things again – time and time again it disturbs me how many of the principles of logical thought and basic engineering seem to have been lost from professional life in the UK.
If there is one things I’d like us to achieve in the year ahead, it is to find a way for our economy to give decent jobs for most people to do as Obama called out in his state of the Union speech earlier this year. At the moment we are racing headlong into a winner-takes-all world of work, where most people will end up unemployed and a few will reap most of the rewards. Though chaotic and unstructured, there are sounds of dissent as the ’99%’ feel this without understanding. We need to apply understanding. It may be possible that having most people unemployed is the only way an efficient modern economy can work. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – the 1970′s dream of a life of leisure I was sold at school and that Keynes foresaw doesn’t sound that bad, and heck, this is what I have been striving for this last three years. Work just isn’t all that. However, we must then change a lot of the incentives and designs of society – Martin Ford has given this a lot of thought, n particular how we deal with a world where most people are not capable of being employed usefully in his scenario where the majority of jobs have been automated away.
It takes brilliance to see the possibilities when all around seems lost, just as JM Keynes, standing at the depths of the Great Depression when all semed lost in 1930, wrote Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate. But, of course, it will all happen gradually, not as a catastrophe. Indeed, it has already begun. The course of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed. The critical difference will be realised when this condition has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed. For it will remain reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.
The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things-our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.
It’s hard to see how this could transpire, looking back over 8 decades, and decades in which we have very definitely failed to control the human population, or eschew wars. I hope his vison was clearer than mine, and he simply called his solution to the economic problem in a bit early
Happy New Year, and may 2012 be good to you!
reflections: anticapitalist censensus decision making occupy wall street
by ermine
3 comments
Why the Consensus method of decision-making doesn’t work
There’s a time-honoured method of getting a group to make decisions, it’s intuitive and widespread in clubs and societies. Faced with a decision to use collective resources to achieve X or to pass the opportunity, the chairman calls for a show of hands.
The aim is to discover the view of the majority, and then get on and do it.
Now occasionaly an ermine squeezes his sinuous body into some groupings that lean politically in a different way from his general viewpoints. Most notably the transition movement where I was introduced to the Consensus Decision Making process. It’s a bizarre practice, which appears to be popular in left-of-centre circles. Apparently it originated in the feminist and environmental movements, and as for that I am going to STFU because there be dragons of great passion and strongly held views, and that’s just the environmentalists…
Consensus is the method used by the Occupy Wall Street crowd, that spawned the St Paul’s anti-capitalist protest. Hat tip to the Archdruid Report which led me to this discussion of the fundamental ineffectiveness of Consensus as a way of self-governance or even deciding things.
I was introduced to the technique by a chap who I’ve got the utmost respect for, and it all seemed a good way to prevent minority points of view being railroaded out of the process. Although I’m generally a believer in benign dictatorship and effectiveness being inversely proportional to the number of decision makers, I was prepared to give it a go.
I experienced it as a long winded method of getting a group of people to do nothing at all for a while, all the time pretending to be refining their way to a decision. It was like the worst office meeting, in that dissent was bludgeoned out of the way because dissenters held up progress, which eats into drinking time, and let’s face it, you need a drink after a Consensus meeting. In the end I came to the conclusion that if a grouping used Consensus decision making, I would go and do something more useful, like herding neighbourhood cats or bailing out the North Sea with a teacup.
Once I managed to get such a group to take a decision by urging a show of hands, which happened before people realised that they were meant to be using the consensus method. A load of beer helped dull their awareness of such wrong thinking being snuck into the meeting.
Consensus seems to be a classic case of be careful what you wish for. It stops the railroading of the minority by the majority, by simply letting the minority filibuster the majority view into the ground. As the Archdruid opined, perhaps that’s why groupings that use consensus “have accomplished so little in the decades since that model came into fashion.”
Talking of effectiveness, the St Paul’s crowd puzzle the heck out of me. If you want to picket capitalism, it seems curious to pick on God rather than Mammon. If you want banks in London, the go east, young man, to the urban canyons of Canary Wharf. To be effective, you must take the battle to the enemy…
Canary Wharf Tube Station in London's nouveau-riche financial district
Doom and Depression Death Spiral Deliberations
It’s all going down. The Euro is going to explode and Crash Mk2 is on its way. It’s hurricane season on the stock markets.
This is the sort of thing that could really change things for me. I haven’t got enough capital to become particularly rich, but I have cleared all my debts and cut my costs.
I have tried investing in a bull market – the late 1990s. Everybody wants to invest in a bull market like that – until it ends and they lose their shirts. I’ve also tried index investing into the post-dotcom crash over the 2000s. Though the circumstances were unfortunate, I had to liquidate in 2007, before the crash. Like SG, I was lucky and dodged a bullet…
After waiting a year, I am lucky enough to have started again into the teeth of this recession, and I expect it to turn to Depression over then next few years. I believe there is some possibility this is the denouement of Western industrial civilisation, in which case the stock market will never recover, because the assumptions that underpin industrial civilisation are beginning to unravel. In particular the myth of unending growth in a finite world is beginning to fail in the face of natural limits.
The Germans have a fine saying that “The good Lord sees to it that the trees do not grow into the sky”. Tragically, we have built this requirement for continual growth into the foundations of capitalism. Without growth we will see an erosion of jobs and will never be able to pay off debts.
However, I feel that this is not that time yet. Which is why I want to invest into this blue funk, because paradoxically it could change things significantly for me. If the market turns, and the assumptions of capitalism still hold, then the 5% or so of my working life earnings will be magnified by buying when stocks are on sale.
In the end it boils down to if I believe in the stock market as a way to get a return on money, then if I’m not prepared to buy into a bear market, then when else? Doing otherwise is illogical and being untrue to my values. I am aware that I may be throwing this last year’s salary into oblivion, but I feel the likelihood is a lot less than 50%.
So bring on that stock market death spiral. If I am right, my 5% of my working life will punch above it’s weight. I want to invest in a bear market, and I want to be still investing while I am still working, through the low-water-mark when all seems lost. And if the assumptions of capitalism hold, there will be a turning point.
If they don’t, well, so what? That year’s worth of income won’t buy me early retirement in the desperate times to follow, but some of the community and alternative non-financial investments may help soften the blow as living standards in the UK decline, and we focus once again on the needs of life rather than the wants.
Money isn’t everything. You need a certain amount of it in an industrial civilisation. Most of the wins are to be had in not being suckered into consumerism, to know when enough is enough, and what is necessary, what is nice to have, and what shouldn’t be bought even if you have the money.
Not buying crap and empty dreams is most of the personal finance battle, along with gaining an appreciation of the economic cycles. It’s one of the benefits of gaining experience as you get older. I was a child in the 1970s crises, though I observed the upside of it when my Dad bought his house outright in his late forties. I thought I would never find a job in Thatcher’s first recession of the early 1980s, but it did happen after six months.
I survived the negative equity and 14% mortgage rates of Thatcher’s second recession in the early 1990s, when it looked like house prices would never recover to the long-term norm of 3-4* salary (I know that sounds like a sick joke now, but reversion to the mean is a strong force, both from the upside and the downside. The problem is it tends to work over the 10 year period, which is a long time to put life on hold). What I lost of the first house I gained on this one.
So in financial crises it always looks like the world is going to end, it goes with the territory. And the bear argument always makes a better story. This crisis is probably different from others, inasmuch as it is the cumulative denouement of several recessions that were put off by inflating asset prices in 2001 and the mid 2000s, so we probably have got three recessions-worth of pain to go through anyway as all the stuff that was put off comes home to roost. Capitalism seems to need recessions to flush out irrational exuberances.
Added to that are the structural changes in the global economy, the barmy shenanigans un Euroland, increasing energy prices and the like. None of this is looking good, but it’s not clear to me that it amounts to a terminal death spiral. In the West we have been living above our means on borrowed money, so not only will living standards fall to something that matches the wealth we create, they will fall below that with the suckout from paying down debt. In the end you don’t borrow money from someone else, you borrow it from your future self. We are now that future self and it’s pay back time.
My aim is to do okay out of the Depression, for in such times what matters is to be truly debt-free, because money will be tight.
This guy needed $100 more than he needed a car in the 1930s. We will see things approaching this, I don’t know if we will see Hoovervilles in the years to come.
The way to tackle a Depression is basically to try and decouple as much as possible from the economic system. That means
- Eliminate debt – of any sort. The reason is that money becomes incredibly hard to come by, so servicing non-negotiable debts like mortgages becomes extremely onerous if your income falls or disappears. Where you can’t do this then prioritise mortgage debt over all else.
- Don’t rely on benefits of any sort. I am not sure that this will fall to 1930s era harshness, but it’s likely to be a lot less liberal than we’ve been used to
- Reduce costs wherever you can, particularly recurring costs (gym memberships, Sky or other pay TV, long mobile phone and internet contracts.
- Insource – do as much as possible for yourself – whether it’s home repair, prepare and grow your own food or bringing up your own kids.
My policy is to avoid debt of any kind unless it’s underwritten by cash assets, and to minimise dependency on others, particularly the government and any benefits. The latter will come as a shock to a lot of people who have built the assumption of continuing benefits into their economic lives. Many of these will probably be scaled down or shed in the coming years because the government doesn’t have the income it used to have. We already see the straws in the wind with the clampdown on incapacity benefits and the steady increases to the state pension age.
There are other things to be done to improve resilience in the harsh times ahead.
One of those is to live healthier – in addition to the usual culprits of eating and drinking less and taking more exercise this is at odds with my financial goals. Financially, it would make sense to work a little bit longer, but I have seen all too often that as people get older their tolerance for the day to day low levels of stress in the modern workplace can break out in physical form. I am lucky enough to enjoy good health at the moment, but I have seen too many colleagues fall by the wayside in the last ten years of their working life.
In the hard times to come health spending will be less. Although we don’t have the health insurance fears in Europe that Americans suffer from, the quality and availability of health care will fall. It is also something that one should do anyway, but the stress of working life mitigates against living healthily in many ways.
Connection with the community is another aspect of life that may pay dividends in future. Rich societies become atomised because everybody can afford to buy in services and every house can have their own washing machine and lawn mower. However, getting to know other people gets you a wider range of skills and a deeper understanding of the way things work in your house, if these are your responsibility. I repaired my central heating system which failed for want of a zone valve with a replacement motor for less than £15, whereas I am sure getting in a heating engineer would probably cost more. Repairing things rather than replacing will probably become more widespread. Knowing other people and helping them out and being helped out by them makes a lot of things that are expensive or are a grunt a lot eaiser. We would have really struggled to raise a polytunnel between two of us, whereas many hands do make this easier and a lot more fun.
The next few years are going to be a rough ride. I could get slaughtered financially in it, and I’m aware of the risk. However, I also believe fortune favours those who are prepared to take a calculated risk, and this is mine. I’m not one of the pussies that when asked what is your attitude to losing money is “No, never, under no circumstances” and shovels all their money into cash. I’m prepared to take the hit if I screw up, on the grounds that the UK economy is going to be so shattered if I am wiped out that there’s precious little that would preserve wealth. Sometimes you have to do the best you can with whatever you have to hand.
End of recession for companies, Depression for the people?
It struck me once again as I was in Canary Wharf for a meeting, just how different the City of London is from anywhere else I’ve been in the UK.
Canary Wharf Tube Station in London's nouveau-riche financial district
Where the rest of the UK is mired in recession and the jobs outlook is going from dire to desperate, the animal spirits in the financial district seem to be even more on the up than they were last time. Which is pretty remarkable given the near death experience of last week on the stock markets. I even got out at London Bridge and walked through the original City of London where the old money lives just to make use that this wasn’t a Docklands thing.
Tower Bridge. A gratuitous quick blast of the tourist thang, just for the heck of it
Well, I couldn’t resist the tourist shot, though I should know better as an ex-Londoner. However, looking back south from London Bridge I spotted The Shard
The Shard going up south of the river
and as I entered Bank and St Mary’s Axe, home of the Gherkin’s monument to the essential masculinity of finance I get to see a shedload more cranes.
How you get to clean the windows of the Gherkin - looks like it's the hard way
It isn’t quite like watching the skyline of Berlin from the Intercontinental Hotel looking over what used to be East Berlin in the early to mid 1990s, but construction is doing very well in London, and that’s not counting the Olympics work.
Construction galore in front of the Nat West tower
and of course the serious looking guys on their mobiles
guys on mobiles - 1
guys on mobiles - 2
and a quick proprietorial hello to one of my new purchases, with that wonderful juxtaposition of the olde worlde and the new reflected in the glass.
Aviva HQ in the City of London
Ok, so it’s not like I’m Warren Buffett and my vast shareholding in AV. probably bought a stack of pens but there we go 
The overall feeling I got in the City of London is that things are going well. This is a small bubble – even on the train as I was leaving it’s easy to see that other parts of London have boarded up shops which can’t all be due to the recent rioting, and as I returned to Ipswich I saw the signs of severe economic distress all around – boarded up shops, abruptly stopped construction works from 2007 and the like.
There’s a split happening, where FTSE 100 companies seem to be doing okay just as the Great British Public is losing their jobs, and being exposed to serious inflation, rising fuel and travel costs to which there seems little end. Hence the title – firms seem to be doing okay despite the consumer heading towards ever-increasing straitened times, I’d go as far as saying running towards Depression times of multi-year decreasing economic experiences.
The contrast between all that construction in the City, the sharp suits and pencil skirts, the purposeful mobile-phone working on the one hand and the slack-jawed chavs hanging around listlessly in the High Street in Ipswich was striking. I don’t normally see the town centre on a workday, and Ipswich isn’t particularly disadvantaged as a town. It doesn’t feel like the prognosis is good for many UK citizens on the economic and the jobs front…
The Market’s been like the Grand old Duke of York’s men this week
What a rough old week it’s been on the markets. Share prices just like the Duke’s men, when they were up they were up, when they were down they were down. Barmy. You couldn’t make head or tail of it, other than that people were having the bejeesus scared out of them as the mood swayed from total panic to near euphoria.
There have been days where nearly everything has been a sea of red on my screen, and today everything is on the up. I took the opportunity to hop in and buy TSCO, AV. and BA., which diversify me into two sectors I haven’t been in before. I’ve now only got about £3k space left in my ISA. Going forwards I’ve got space for about five more shares and then I have to follow SG in buying more of what I have got already.
Now obviously there are a lot of people that are nervous. What are their fears? And what makes me so different to them…
I share many of the fears. The slowdown in the West will probably turn to depression – we have used all our ammunition up fighting the banking crisis and there’s not much more left. All the tightening of government, corporate and household budgets will result in too much money chasing too little economic activity. We’re guaranteed a big hunk of inflation to craftily lose some of the wealth, and I expect in real terms the net worth represented in my shareholdings to fall, even if the nominal value stays the same. There’s a precedent for this – the FTSE100 in the last ten years hasn’t been a barnstorming success like it had been the previous decade.
I’m not sure I am looking for the same as other investors. This isn’t about winning or getting ahead to me. It is about attempting to lose less. The value of the currency is being destroyed, in an attempt to devalue existing commitments, and also to cover up the fact that in Britain and the West in general we have become decadent and lazy. In itself that wouldn’t be a problem. However, it means that we can’t afford the standard of living we are used to and have expectations of, because we can’t be arsed to put in the work, as a nation.
That’s shown analytically by Tullet Prebon’s Project Armageddon report (hat tip to Monevator for this gem). The strapline ‘thinking the unthinkable; might there be no way out for Britain’ sums the prognosis up pretty well. A larger and larger section of British citizens are content to live off the wealth created by fewer people. Author Tim Morgan is rabidly right-wing (to the extent he makes me look like a bleeding-heart liberal!) but it’s hard to disagree with his stark summary of the issues Britain faces, and the issue is one of attitude and habits, which are hard to change, possibly taking generations.
the gravest problem – the concept of entitlement
Despite the appalling mismanagement of the New Labour years, Britain remains the world’s eighth largest economy (though it has now fallen to 37th in terms of per-capita income).
Reflecting this, British citizens enjoy high quality health, education and welfare systems, combined with strong provision of other basic services.
The problem which has emerged over the last decade, and can in large part be traced to Labour’s doctrine of moral absolutism, is the widespread assumption that individuals and, by extension, Britain as a whole, have an entitlement to these advantages, when the reality, of course, is that they have to be earned on an ongoing basis.
It’s why we have to hire non-Britons to pick the fruit and veg in the fields of our green and pleasant land, and a little bit of this attitude is why we have had rioting in London’s streets for the right to have the right sort of footwear and a flat-screen TV, while elsewhere in the world people have been rioting to get rid of autocratic leaders. People sense the austerity to come, and try and hold on to what they have by any means possible. For the rich that means the numbered Swiss bank account and tax evasion on a grand scale, for the middle classes that means the skewing of government policy to try and keep house prices up and to hang on to their child benefit, for the working classes it means the cash in hand jobs, and for the kids it means a chance to nab a free TV and get some excitement at the same time. As the man from Tullet Prebon summed up, we got here via
Worse still, the legacy of moral absolutism and entitlement has created a political landscape of warring interest groups which gravely compromises Britain’s ability to find unified solutions to its problems.
The debasement of the currency will gradually make imports dearer and Britons poorer, to accommodate our reduced productivity, and governments will hope the change is gradual enough that people won’t pin it on them. Some of this malaise applies to the rest of the developed world, which of course hammers our chances of exporting our way out of this.
I am well into the last third of my working life. I have earned most of the money I will have, so the focus for me is to lose as little of it as possible. These macroeconomic problems will destroy some or perhaps much of my wealth, and is why I have diversified into non-financial assets and tried to screw down my cost base as much as I could.
The problems I fear are the large scale macro issues – peak oil and the like. The Tullet Prebon report was interesting, because I had not seen the scale of the nearer term malaise in Britain. My social circle is from a narrow section of society. I don’t personally know anybody who is unemployed. I know people who to me look underemployed, but they do this as an elective lifestyle choice to have more time, which is different. They are doing this at the early part of their careers in a similar way to my search for a way to be able to retire early at the end of my working life.
I will probably never be able to use the benefit system, because as long as the stock market doesn’t fall to 20% of its value my net worth will be over the capital assets threshold for getting JSA. I am happy enough with this, I don’t particularly expect other people to fund my lifestyle. However, it does somewhat hack me off that the general indolence will trash money as a store of value.
Equities are diversification for me – my non-financial assets are to hedge the downside, but equities are there to hedge this sort of world-view. I don’t share the view, but I can’t say it’s impossible that we might find leadership that will stiffen the British spine, and as a nation we pull the nose up before the ‘whatever’ crowd puts the economy in a tailspin.
So I share the fears that made the stock market dive. But since this part of my assets is there to hedge the rosy world-view then it is only logical to get in there and buy. So I did. I’m getting close to my ISA limit and will soon have to consider either converting my cash ISA or possibly venturing outside ISA territory with more growth-oriented stocks. Either way it would be rude to ignore the opportunity to pay less for more, which acknowledging that Mr Market may well be feeling in a much sicker mood and the harbingers of Depression start to become clearer. Which is why I haven’t loosed all my firepower at the market yet. I don’t know whether the Grand old Duke of York’s men are up at the top or down at the bottom of the hill at the moment
reflections: bizarre death ettinger immortality Kurzweil weird
by ermine
2 comments
Founder of Immortalist Society Dies
I guess Robert Ettinger, founder of the Immortalist Society went seriously off-message. Every so often, you get fiendishly clever guys like this chap and Ray Kurzweil, who seem to have overdosed on 1950′s science fiction. Either I am bizarrely dumb or these guys are, in the specific area of consciousness. In other areas they’re probably a lot smarter than me
It’s not that I fundamentally believe that humans mightn’t be able to transcend death. However, what I do fundamentally believe is that if you’re gonna do that, then you need to avoid dying in the first place. We might be able to arrest the ageing process, or as a second best compensate for it, or replace elements on the worn out flesh with bionic bits. I don’t think it’s happening any time real soon now.
However, one thing that seems self-evident to me is that once you’d died, however, the organism that was you has lost state. The information content of your mind dissipates, the sequences of nerve firings and elemental signals that make your consciousness fades to black, since the power supply is lost and this is dynamic storage, not static storage, the electrical charges will leak away swiftly without maintenance in milliseconds, not years.
And in that process of losing state you’ve lost life. The wanton materialism of whacking your carcass into deep-frozen nitrogen is fair enough. These are clever guys, and bright enough to engineer the process so the natural process of recycling that carcass doesn’t happen, and the decay of the cells is arrested. There are two versions of this, one is the full-body freezing, and the other is “just the Head, Ma’am” where they cut off your head and freeze just that. Presumably some über-mensch in the future splices on another body from someone who couldn’t afford to avoid dying
Either way, so what, where’s the state that has been lost, where is the boot CD? Even if you had the darned thing, you need the bootstrap reloader that the original designer, if any, seems to have been remiss enough to leave out. So even if you had the data you couldn’t reload it and set it off running at that far distant future.
So Robert, I reckon it’s Game Over, no place to put in another coin in the slot and hit the replay button. All that money going into freezing your carcass might have been better spent on finding out how to avoid dying in the first place. Though I absolutely respect your right to spend your money on creating the most expensive piece of deep-frozen meat on Earth. Bet the UPS on the Cryonics Institute is something to behold!
Avoiding death is a classic preoccupation of the old, and they ain’t getting any better at it. It raises all sorts of interesting conundrums. Let’s say it were possible to avoid death. We’d better do something about stopping birth PDQ as well, otherwise we’d have to recreate death to thin out the burgeoning ranks of humans. And what sort of society would it be?
Doesn’t humanity need some young Turks who know they’re invincible to take chances, try new things out? On the other hand we might do something about pollution and other sorts of environmental degradation if we figured we’d be around to deal with the consequences. Maybe governments would have to start paying down their debts. We don’t seem to mind borrowing from our children, but making our future selves poorer may seem a worse deal.
Now I could see how humanity could get to immortality by avoiding death, but let’s just say the Cryogenics Institute were right, and state is irrelevant for human minds, as a curious exception to all other sequential state devices. Why would anybody reactivate these frozen heads? Let’s say we are some über beings in 2100. Let’s say we avoid the macro economic hazards. Sure, some inquisitive über-human might reawaken the dogs they’ve also frozen to see if it could be done. Then perhaps we may want some simple-minded proto-human pets, and break out the frozen heads. There’s just so much that could be wrong with this. And what would the head make of it all?
All this worrying about death obviously did something for Ettinger, he got to the ripe old age of 92 when his brain was last illuminated by the light of consciousness. That’s not a bad innings, even if shit did happen in the end. Good luck to him, and if he gets his head reheated I hope the stateless mind feels chipper, rather than having to learn everything new like a baby, but with a 92-year old brain. I could see that could take the edge off your life…
Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading with a Kindle
Over the past month or so I’ve acquired a bunch of PDFs of books on finance and investment, and stared with the first one, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre, a fictionalised biography of the legendary trader Jesse Livermore, who was notable for shorting the market in the Great Depression.
However, reading it on laptop is the damnedest way to read anything that was designed as a book or other long-form document. I learned to read before I went to school, so I have a higher reading speed than most people. However, probably because I didn’t learn to read from a computer screen, my reading speed drops dramatically on the laptop, and it costs me 20 W of power just to hold the page on my screen. I can’t read it in anything other than a sitting position, the whole thing is a pain. Paying for Stock Operator in book form almost starts to look attractive, but I have another 20 or so books to read like this. The reading experience needs to get better, and a Kindle could do it.
I’ve come across the Kindle before, though I hadn’t seen one, and my first reaction was along the lines of
this is like a games console or similar consumer thneed designed to create a locked down consumer space to part the simple-minded from their money.
If used as intended, that’s exactly what you get. You can get a Kindle version of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator for £9, and off you go. That’s not bad for this book if you compare the dead-tree versions, though the secondhand market will come up with the goods in real form for £6.42 at the time of writing. My copy is a PDF, and was the result of a Google search. The book was from 1923.
Monevator’s Kindle books on investing article made me think about this again, particularly as I have now collected even more PDFs from the fascinating period between 1900 and 1930 when the Haber-Bosch process of creating artificial fertiliser from natural gas hadn’t been refined, and all sorts of bizarre methods were tried in agriculture using electrical discharges.
At the same time Martin Lewis’s moneysaving expert website warmed me up to how to get a WiFi Kindle for £75-ish so I figured it was time to revisit this, so I bought one, and loaded it with PDFs. You get a 30-day trial during which you can return and get your money back less delivery if you don’t get on with it, so I figured I could take a flyer.
the total Kindle area is similar to the book, but the screen is a lot smaller
As the picture shows, a Kindle isn’t the same as a paperback, because the screen is smaller than the page of a typical paperback. And though I am middle-aged I can see easily enough that the resolution of the screen isn’t the same as a paperback, but it is far, far, closer to it than my laptop.
It’s good enough. I’ve got my normal reading speed back, it’s a lot more convenient and I can read anywhere. I’ve only read PDFs on the Kindle apart from the instruction manual, and the image quality of the result with PDFs isn’t as good as with a true Kindle book. To get a whole A4 page onto the Kindle screen results in a small and ill-defined font. However, you can spin the Kindle through 90 degress and read in landscape mode. It doesn’t reformat automatically, I would have thought an orientation switch would have been an easy win, but it can be done manually. The result is much sharper than reading the same PDF on my laptop, even though the screen is physically much larger on the laptop.
Landscape mode is easier to read on this PDF and matches the book font size more closely
So I’m a convert – but I won’t be buying from Monevator’s list yet. I don’t like paying for what I can’t touch in terms of media, and there’s no used market for Kindle books, because they’ve presumably stitched things up so you buy a license and not a product. Embodying your media in Real Stuff has the advantage of giving such monoplistic control freaks the shaft, they surrender control of the secondhand market as soon as they let go of the physical embodiment. Hoever, if I don’t buy ebooks I don’t get to eat that crow. The Kindle works well for PDFs, and Google can turn up all sorts of good stuff.
The go anywhere appeal is the best part of the Kindle, in all sorts of surprising areas. At the electronics bench, once upon a time you could have databooks with device pinouts and application data. Since the 1990s you had to print out the PDFs, and datasheets aren’t concise. With a Kindle, all the datasheets are to hand at the bench. That go anywhere feature is what makes this transformational. For other people it will be having recipes in the kitchen to hand, or workshop manuals in the shed – all places where taking a laptop is doable, but a right pain.
Oh an if you haven’t got a PDF creator, Google docs creates PDFs if you want to print something, as the cloud hasn’t got access to your print drivers. The Kindle can take these too, so you don’t have to pay the Adobe corporation for the privilege of using your Kindle. Two proprietary closed shops designed to part the punter from their money circumvented at a stroke
The Kindle works for me. I have my reading speed back, I don’t have to put up with the intermittent noise of a fan and I can focus on what I’m reading as I used to be able to with paper. There are things wrong with the Kindle, colour would be nice, the screen could be 1.5 times bigger, the sturm und drang on the screen associated with a page turn isn’t so great, though it is over quicker than a page turn. It would be nice if it would slowly scroll the page itself as you can do in Word. But I’m carping here – the overall experience delivers.
reflections: alternative vote nick clegg proportional representation
by ermine
4 comments
AV or not to AV – proportional representation and stuff
Yesterday there was a referendum on changing the UK voting system to something I struggled to understand. The mechanics are easy enough to understand for the alternative vote, but what it would mean aren’t clear to me at all.
For what I guess must be historical reasons Britain groups its voters into relatively small clusters called constituencies, and currently the ~ 70000 voters in a constituency vote for one of the candidates. The candidate with the most votes wins that ‘seat’.
I can see the case to be made for proportional representation, possibly with a 5% minimum vote cutoff, and perhaps we may move to that one day. However, to make PR work, to my eyes we would have to eliminate the small constituency groupings.
The reason for this is that all electoral systems are a map of the voters’ views, and they come with their own distortions. Let’s take a 5% accuracy as good enough – we would then need up to 20 MPs for an area, so each can represent 1/20th of the popular opinion. In a constituency with 40% Lab, 40%Con and 15%Lib and 5% Monster Raving Loony Party, we’d have a chamber with 8Lab, 8Con, 3 Lib and 1 MRL members.
Suffolk, the region I live in, currently has 7 MPs each serving about 70,000 voters so unless the cost of politicians’ salaries is going to rocket up, we’d have to upscale the size of the constituency, to 70,000 * 20 = 1.4 million voters. We could do that – indeed we do when we elect members of the European parliament, where there are 72MEPs representing the UK. The actual process whereby they allocate MEPs strikes me as overly complicated, but doable.
IMO we either have to do this job properly or not at all. Either we get rid of our small constituencies (along with the link to the local people and MPs surgeries etc) and accept the large faceless constituencies that go along with getting a more accurate representation of the vote, or we retain the small constituencies and accept the distortions, but at least we can hold politicians to account for their manifestos, something that is lost with coalitions.
In practice the distorting issues of first-past-the-post voting seem to integrate out over time. I have voted for all the big three parties, depending on the issues of the day, and overall I feel my views were acceptably represented. In some ways the UK stumbles along veering from left to right as the inconsistencies inherent in any excessive duration of one extreme or the other start to upset enough people that they switch allegiance.
In this way a rough path is trod, in a similar way to how your central heating maintains an acceptable temperature, despite the fact the boiler can usually either be either running flat out or not at all. A set-point is established, and if things are too cold the boiler is run, until the temperature gets too hot, and then it is turned off. The temperature is never exactly what you set, but it’s near enough most of the time.
We’ve had a run of tax and spend for a while, and it was nice for some Britons while it lasted, but now enough voters sort of came to the conclusion we need to stop paying so many people to do nothing. That tends to go too far as well, as anybody who remembers the early 1980s can recall.
So I voted no, either fix this right or leave us with the imperfection we are used to. If we want PR then let’s have it. Perhaps we can have this debate again with the elected House of Lords if it ever happens.
Of course, there’s the other issue of it being one in the eye for Nick Clegg. On the occasions where I have voted LD I was after something reasonably left wing. If I want Tories I’ll vote for them, thanks all the same Nick, I don’t need a proxy. It would have really pi**ed me off if I had voted LD last May and ended up being part of making a a Tory led Coalition happen. Whereas had I voted LD and ended up with a LibLab coalition I would not be too surprised, as I view them as two similar flavours with different emphases.
The trouble with getting a hold of a tiger by the tail. Nick, is that you end up going where the tiger wants to go… Something gives me the feeling that’s not the same direction as where most of your voters wanted to go hence the hammering you got last night. As he said
“Clearly what happened last night – especially in those parts of the country, Scotland, Wales, the great cities of the north, where there are real anxieties about the deficit reduction plans we are having to put in place … we are clearly getting the brunt of the blame,” he told reporters.
“To the many families, in those parts of the country especially, there are some very strong memories of what life was like under the Thatcherism of the 1980s, and that’s what they fear they are returning to. We need to get up, dust ourselves down and move on.”
I’m not sure how you do “move on” from that, what part of “Why are you enabling the Tories to do this to us” do you not understand, Nick?
I don’t know what the results of the AV vote are, but either way it will have served to open the debate. This was rushed and the wider issues of changing the constituency system were not aired well. We may be happy to rattle along using first-past-the-post and accept that over time we get something approximating to what we want, or we may reflect that we would prefer something more accurate in the 21st century. It’s no bad thing to think about that.
reflections: christianity niall ferguson Protestant work ethic
by ermine
11 comments
Civilisation – The West and the Rest, Protestant Work Ethic Redux
Earlier this year here at the Ermine’s Nest we pondered whether there was a case to be made for saving £140 odd by outing the TV. That may seem obscure to non-UK viewers, but in the UK there is a thing called a TV licence that you are meant to have if you watch TV as it is broadcast. This largely pays for the BBC, whose programmes don’t have commercial advertising.
Anyway, we decided that we would see if we could find something that pleased us enough to justify the £140, so I occasionally look for stuff that may interest me. The recent Panorama Finished at Fifty was one of these, and I had recorded Niall Ferguson’s Civilization -The West and the Rest. This was presumably a TV series of the book
Watching this was rewarding and I learned a few bits and pieces I hadn’t known before. Niall comes across as a dapper and personable enough chap, and according to this review in the Grauniad he targeted this series at teenagers. Which explained why he had this infuriating catchline where he comes across as “Dad trying to be down with the yoof-speak and with it”, by endlessly referring to the six “killer apps” of Western Civilisation. I know he titled his book civilization but I just can’t bring myself to spell it that way, I have enough unwitting typos without adding deliberate ones
Anyhow, that killer apps yoof-speak got on my nerves, because nothing made by the Apple corporation has darkened my door because I don’t have money to burn, and I am a crabby old git who has nothing to do with media and so I don’t refer to apps and folders on a computer but directories and programs. When I see job ads for appers rather than programmers I’ll rethink that.
Despite the killer app-speak, Niall was informative and reasonably to the point, though his perspective is a lot more upbeat about the advantages of the European empires than I am used to. Some people will hate it for that alone. He did at least tip his hat to Mahatma Gandhi’s delightful one-liner on what he thought about Western Civilisation, something to the effect of “yes, that would be a good thing”.
One takeaway I got from the series, particularly in the last program, was the effect of the Protestant work ethic on the success of the West in economic terms. I’ve spent my fair share on here slagging off the Protestant work ethic, but Niall did make me think that perhaps I should be more nuanced about it.
When I was in America, it did strike me that there were an awful lot of churches about, both in New England and in California (I haven’t been anywhere else in the US, other than NJ, NV, MI, CO and AZ so it may be very different elsewhere). The sheer density of churches was remarkable. Niall made the case that this has something to do with the dynamism of the US economy compared to those of Western Europe, a part of the West he considers in relative decline vis a vis the US, as it became largely secular after the Second World War.
It puzzled me because the presentation of Christianity in the US came across to me as extremely in-your-face, of a type which I believe is called evangelical. The last time I had significant dealings with Christianity was in the 1970s, and this sort of thing wasn’t around then.
In Niall’s program they showed some clips of what went on in US churches, and what strikes me is that the entire message seems to be mediated through the emotional centres, with rah-rah sessions of ‘Can you FEEL the power of the Lord’ together with the raising of arms and clapping. The sort of thinking and reflection that I had observed in Christians in the Old World, albeit three decades ago just wasn’t there.
That sort of thing makes me uneasy – somewhere at the back of my mind I feel that if the Good Lord is worth believing in, He wouldn’t demand that His adherents check their brains in at the door. Each to their own, but I could see how this might lead to people being persuaded to defer gratification for other goals. And a lot of economic success seems to be about deferred gratification, so Niall makes the case that Protestant Christianity was a large part of the economic success of the West. In his final program he makes the case that as this fades, so the power of the West will also fade, particularly as it appears that Christianity is on the rise in China.
Now this is a TV program, and though Niall is bright he isn’t infallible. For instance he perpetrated a howler in saying Edison was associated with AC power in the US – he opposed it intensely in the war of the currents due to patent considerations.
I have no way of verifying a lot of what he claimed. I would agree with him that there is a decadence and a lack of people taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions in the West nowadays. There is a general infantilisation of public discourse, where we all too often resort to “the Government should” or “They should” fix one of the current malaises, often the result of earlier aberrant behaviour. For instance the years 2000-2007 where we all believed house prices would go up forever so it was worth lending NINJA‘s money in the knowledge the rising house price would enable them to pay off the loan?
It is also possible that the increasing secularisation means that one common source of a moral compass is lost, and this is why we are regressing and becoming decadent. It isn’t the only explanation, and humanists among others would object to the concept that only religion can provide a moral frame of reference. An alternative explanation would be that life has got materially easier, so we can get away with more lax behaviour. Or I might just be getting older and it’s all really okay as it is, despite the financial crises and the disappearing jobs that the POTUS noted a while back
So all in all I can probably get my £140 worth, over the year. This programme was not on the BBC, so it was infested with ads. However, my Humax Foxsat PVR seems to be programmed well inasmuch as two taps of the >> button skips the whole ad break, so I am not troubled by companies trying to push consumerism on me. I win much of the simple living/frugality battle by busting as much advertising and junk out of my sight as I can .
This also helps me in the fight against my power bill as it has a standby power usage of < 1W. Obviously that’s still more than if I got rid of the whole TV receiving system, however it is very low, so I can live with the £2 it costs me in power a year, as it spends most of its time in standby.