Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years.
He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is âriggedâ; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle class is necessary for the functioning of a democracy.
We know that the US, for instance, doesnât really do much about monopolies, having redefined them since the 1980s as essentially OK if no one gets charged more. Hence, Wolf, citing Prof Thomas Philipponâs The Great Reversal, notes that the spikes in M&A activity in the US has weakened competition. I should note that this isnât the province of âthe rightââPhilippon also shows that M&A activity reduced under Nixon.
I alluded to the lack of competition driving down innovation, but Wolf adds that it has driven up prices (so much for the USâs stance, since people are being charged more), and resulted in lower investment and lower productivity growth.
In line with some of my recent posts, Wolf says, âIn the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft combined have made over 400 acquisitions globally. Dominant companies should not be given a free hand to buy potential rivals. Such market and political power is unacceptable. A refurbishment of competition policy should start from the assumption that mergers and acquisitions need to be properly justified.â
History shows us that Big Techâs acquisitions have not been healthy to consumers, especially on the privacy front; they colluded to suppress wages before getting busted. In a serious case, according to one company, Google itself commits outright intellectual property theft: âGoogle would solicit a party to share with it highly confidential trade secrets under a non-disclosure agreement, conduct negotiations with the party, then terminate negotiations with the party professing a lack of interest in the partyâs technology, followed by the unlawful use of the partyâs trade secrets in its business.â (The case, Attia v. Google, is ongoing, I believe.) Their own Federal Trade Commission said Google âused anticompetitive tactics and abused its monopoly power in ways that harmed Internet users and rivals,â quoting the Murdoch Press. We see many undesirable patterns with other firms there exercising monopoly powers, some of which Iâve detailed on this blog, and so far, only Europe has had the cohones to slap Google with massive fines (in the milliards, since 2017), though other jurisdictions have begun to investigate.
As New Zealand seeks to reexamine its Commerce Act, we need to ensure that we donât merely parrot the US and UK approach.
Wolf also notes that inequality âundermines social mobility; weakens aggregate demand and slows economic growth.â The central point Iâve made before on Twitter: why would I want people to do poorly when those same people are potentially my customers? It seems to be good capitalism to ensure thereâs a healthy base of consumers.
Those who remember Visual Arts Trends, a publication created and edited by my friend Julia Dudnik-Stern in the late 1990s and early 2000s, might recall that I didnât have kind words about the Rt Hon Tony Blair and his government. In those pre-Iraq war days, one reader was so upset they wrote to Julia, who, to her credit, defended my freedom to express a political view.
It was actually quite rare to attack Blair, Mandy, the Blairites and Labour thenâthe fawning interviews given to Blair by the likes of Sir David Frost, and so many of the British media establishment made their 1997 campaign relatively easy. They shrewdly pitched themselves, light on substance and heavy on rhetoric, and that may have been what I was calling out. For once, I donât recall too clearly, but I can tell you that I do sweat, and did so even when the Falklands were on.
How times have changed. In 2019, an independent study has shown that Labour largely gets negative press coverage in British newspapers, while Conservative gets positive. As covered in The Independent, Loughborough University researchers assigned negative scores to negative articles and positive scores to positive ones, to arrive at an index.
In the period from November 7 to 27, 2019, coverage on Labour scored â71·17 in the first week, â71·96 in the second, and â75·79 in the third.
By contrast, the Tories received +29·98, +17·86 and +15·87.
Tonight, Colin Millarâs thread made for an interesting read, where the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn is damned if he does, and damned if he doesnât.
There is a possibility Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister of the UK by the end of next week. There is no better time to highlight how, no matter what Corbyn does or whatever position he takes, his critics will attack him – even if they totally contradict themselves (thread).
Corbyn's problem? He's both too centrist. He's also too much of a fringe figure. Both are argued in the same piece by Tom Peck: https://t.co/OZH41FavKm
Now, I’m sure I’ve shifted my position on things, but generally not in the same year. And yes, Labour itself hasn’t had the best comms in the world.
However, the UK population, and, for that matter, we here in New Zealand, look at the state of news in the US and think we somehow are above the phenomenon of âfake newsâ. But itâs very clear that we arenât, and I have insisted for years that we arenât. This may be uncomfortable for some, but the truth often is. I can only imagine some are all right with being lied to, just as they are all right with being surveilled by Big Tech.
There seems to be little outrage in a week when an article by the UK PM saying that his countryâs poor are made up of chavs, burglars, drug addicts and losers emerges, and that poverty is caused by low IQ. In a separate story of his, admittedly older than mine for Julia, he says that children of single mothers are âill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimateâ. One wonders what our former PM, Sir John Key, raised by his mother, makes of that.
Just like 1997, one side is being given a free pass by the British media, whether you like them or not. Are ‘we British’ smart enough to see through it? History suggests we are not.
When Douglas Bader recorded in his log book on the aeroplane accident that cost him his legs, he wrote, âBad show’.
It was men like Bader, Audie Murphy, Claire Lee Chennault and Douglas MacArthur that my father spoke of as heroes from his childhood.
There were plenty more from our own culture but Iâm using these ones given my largely occidental audience, and Dad really did cite them as well.
None of these men, by the accounts Iâve read, were braggarts. Most were indeed very humble about their contributions to their countries.
But even my late pacifist veteran grandfather (he served, but desperately hated war) would consider these men heroes, as my father did.
I may have blogged at other times about my first years in New Zealand, but I wonât go into depth about it as it would be too much of a digression from the point I want to make.
Perhaps itâs growing up in an immigrant household that what your father tells you a real man should be trumps what you witness at school from your classmates about what they think masculinity is.
And you see your own father display the qualities of what he considered to be gentlemanly. Children are good mimics.
A gentleman, he would say, has the ability to refrain. A lesser man might act out, or strike someone, but that is not a civilized man. Society runs best when people are civilized.
Those ideas of what we call toxic masculinity today were never displayed in my household and are utterly foreign to meâand as an immigrant, âforeignâ has two meanings in that sentence. I may be the âforeignerâ as far as others (such as certain Australian-owned newspapers) are concerned, even after living here for 43 years, but from your own perspective, you can more easily distance yourself from any undesirable behaviour, saying, âThatâs not who I am.â
In the early years at my first high school, I may have had some cause to doubt the fatherly advice because what I witnessed was an extreme and intellectually stunted form of hero worship that might was right. That the brute force of the rugby player was true masculinity and if you didnât have it, then you were a âpoofterâ or a âfaggotâ. Brag, brag, brag, be it about sports or sexual encounters.
This, as any real rugby player knows, and I have met men who have represented our national side, is a wholly inaccurate perception of who they are.
They will tell you that true men display values of camaraderie, teamwork, quiet achievement, tolerance and decency. No All Black I know talks himself up as anything other than one of the boys who happened to be lucky enough to be chosen.
Indeed, some of the bigger blokes who wound up in the school rugby teams, especially the Polynesian and Māori lads, were generally gentle and protective fellows with strong family values.
Yet that misplaced perception held by immature high school boys, I fear, informs many young men of how they are to conduct themselves in adult life.
They think that being jerks toward women is the norm. ‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen,’ is the familiar refrain.
Iâve had comments over the years of, âWhy didnât you make a move on me?â when I either could not read the signs or felt that forceful âmasculineâ behaviour was not particularly respectful. As a middle-aged man I wonder if the patriarchy, âjust the way things areâ, has warped expectations for heterosexual men and women. (I canât obviously speak for our LGBTQI community.)
However, what I do know is sending intimate pictures of yourself via a dating app or messaging service is disgusting (and, incidentally, has not worked for any man in the history of the planet), and that constant desperation is particularly unappealing.
I remember a female friend showing me the sorts of messages she received from potential suitors on a dating website.
âHoly crap,â I said. âThis is the calibre of men out there?â
And when I talk to my partner today, she tells me that that was par for the course.
But I have a quality relationship because I did listen to my father and behaved in a way that I thought he would approve of. Whatever he taught me wound up being hard-wired in me and I never aped the boys in my first high school. He was right after all, even if it took longer for me to be in a long-term relationship.
No, I donât have a massive list of âconquestsâ because it honestly isnât about quantity and life is too short for empty encounters. And while my behaviour at uni age, and shortly after, wasnât always exemplary, as I tried to figure out the norms, Iâve also come through this knowing that I didnât have to lie to any woman, and not a single woman out there will be able to say I did anything physical without her consent.
While I obviously told my other half of my career when we met (âSo what do you do?â), I never mentioned my mayoral bids till our fourth date, a month in to our courtship (she lived out of the country when I ran), and I admitted I didnât always have an easy time in business during a period of my life, including the recession. I am human, after all. And if one canât accept me for the bad as well as the good, then is the relationship founded on reality? Or simply fantasy?
Weâve recently had a murder trial here in New Zealand with the accused a young man who is described as a serial liar, and accounts from women he had met were tragic: he would lie about his occupation, bigging himself and his family up, or pretend he had terminal cancer. Enough has been written on this creep.
I had the misfortune to meet another young man who has since been exposed by the Fairfax Press as a con man, who also told constant lies about his life, thinking that talk of personal wealth would impress me and a co-director of one business we have.
Mercifully, the latter case didnât wind up with anyone physically hurt, and I know plenty of young people who would never behave like this. But it got me wondering whether the core of these cases tells us something about how certain young men feel inadequate, because of a misplaced hero worship of a warped form of masculinity that leaves them as outsiders.
Iâm by no means excusing the murderer because he frankly committed a heinous crime, in a premeditated fashion. I remain appalled at the victim-shaming that I saw reported as though the deceased, the one person who couldnât answer, were on trial. Iâm also not excusing the failed con-man who any viewer of Hustle would be able to spot a mile away: his actions, too, were his own. But I am pointing at society and how we men have shaped expectations.
For I look at some male behaviour and they are entirely at odds with what a man should be.
While examples like Douglas Bader might not resonate with young men today, because his example is too far back in history for them (the biopic is in black and white), surely we can find ones of humble men who accomplish great deeds and donât have to go on social media to talk themselves up.
Just tonight I was at a dinner for Merrill Fernando, the 89-year-old founder of Dilmah Tea, who was earlier today conferred an honorary doctorate by Massey University.
When I asked if he was now Dr Fernando, he replied that he would still be Merrill Fernando, and that all the honours he had receivedâand they are plentifulâwould never change who he was. His humility and his faith continue to inspire me.
This is the mark of a decent and admirable man.
And surely we can find examples where men arenât being disrespectful to women and show us that that is the norm.
Surely we donât need to berate anyone who doesnât fit the trogoldyte mould and use homophobic slurs against them.
Because, chaps, I donât believe what defines a man, a real man, a fair dinkum bloke, has actually changed, at its core, from what my Dad told me.
There is room for the jocks, the geeks, the musos, the artists, the romantics, the extroverts and introverts, because we all have our strengths.
One female friend of mine tells me that itâs safer for her to presume all men are jerks as her default position till proved otherwise, and I know fully why she would take that position. On social media she points to the âbrosâ, men whoâll gang up on women because they donât like them for calling it as it is, or having a different viewpoint. In real life she has had unwanted attention, even after she tells them sheâs queer.
These men, the bros, the braggarts, the dick-pic senders, the liars, the bullies, the slanderers, are actually trying to change the definition of what a real man isâand that, to me, seems to be non-masculine, insecure and inadequate. We can do betterâand history shows that we had done once.
Iâve discovered that the newer the Instagram, the buggier it is. Weâve already seen that it canât cope with video if you use Android 7 (a great way to reduce video bandwidth), and, earlier this year, filters do not work.
I downgraded to version 59 till, last week, Instagram began deleting direct messages as its way to force me to upgrade. Neither versions 119 or 120 are stable, and are about as reliable as one of Boris Johnsonâs marriages, although they have fixed the filter problem.
Neither version has an alignment grid to aid you to adjust an image so itâs square, even though Instagramâs own documentation says it remains present. Presently, only Tyler Henry and other psychics can see the grid:
I imagine this is Googleâs way of saving on bandwidth and it is utterly successful for them as nothing is ever transmitted.
The ZIPping process took probably 15â20 minutes a go.
A comparable service like Wetransfer or Smash just, well, transfers, in less than the time Google Drive takes to archive a bunch of files.
I also notice that Google Drive frequently only sends me a single image when the sender intends to send a whole bunch. Thereâs no age discrimination here: both an older friend and colleague and a young interviewee both had this happen in October when trying to send to me. It is, I suspect, all to do with an interface that hasnât been tested, or is buggy.
Basically: Google Drive does not work for either the sender or the recipient.
This morning a friend and colleague tried to send me more files using this godawful service, and this time, Google Drive at least gave me a sign-on prompt. Even though I was already signed on. Not that that does anything: you never, ever log in. However, for once, the files he tried to send me actually did come down in the background.
I should note that for these Google Drive exercises, I use a fresh browser (Opera) with no plug-ins or blocked cookies: this is the browser I use where I allow tracking and all the invasiveness Google likes to do to people. Now that it has begun grabbing Americansâ medical records in 21 states without patient consent in something called ‘Project Nightingale’ (thank you, Murdoch Press, for consistently having the guts to report on Google), weâre in a new era of intrusiveness. (Iâm waiting for the time when most Americans wonât care that Google, a monopoly, has their medical records, after the initial outcry. No one seems to care about the surveillance US Big Tech does on us, which puts the KGB and Stasi to shame.)
Looking at Googleâs own help forums, it doesnât matter what browser you use: even Chrome doesnât work with Drive downloads in some cases.
The lesson is: stop using Google Drive for file transfers, as Smash does a better job.
Or, better yet, stop using Google. Get a Google-free phone, maybe even one from Huawei.
Meanwhile, I see WordPress’s Jetpack plug-in did this to my blog today without any intervention from me. I imagine it did an automatic update, which it was not set to do.
Thereâs untested software all over the place, ignoring your settings because it thinks it knows better. News flash, folks, your programs donât know better.
A great way for one tech company to get rid of criticisms of another tech company for a few hours, I guess, harming its ranking in the process. Google itself has done it before.
Farewell, Jetpack. Other than the stats and the phone-friendly skin, I never needed you. I’m sure there are alternatives that don’t wipe out my entire blog.
My thanks to Sydney-based photographer Robert Catto for linking me to this one, especially near the festive season.
It is funnier than the one I took in Sweden many years ago, which in pun-land could be racist:
The sad thing is, at some point, the majority will not get the top joke.
I have a ringtone on my phone for SMSs, namely Derek Flint’s ringtone from In Like Flint.
If I mention In Like Flint, in my circles there’d be about one person every two years who’ll get what I mean.
Twenty years ago, everyone would have said, ‘Who’s Derek Flint? That’s Austin Powers’ ringtone!’
Today, some of my younger readers will ask, ‘Who’s Austin Powers?’
So far, only a tiny handful of people get my reference when I say, ‘Dear guards, Jeffrey can be taken off suicide watch. Signed, Epstein’s mother.’
No, what Epstein did to his victimsâchildrenâis no laughing matter.
However, I don’t think I’m alone in needing humour as an anchor for my sanity when the news is abhorrent.
Facebookâs advertising preferences are getting more useless by the day. Even a company as dodgy as Google has managed to keep its preference page working.
Over the years Iâve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if theyâre uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you have opted out of targeted ads. Now, you canât. If youâre on the desktop, Facebook just wonât show them to you. You can have this window open for hours for nothing to appear (and yes, I have tried regularly).
Maybe you donât have any, Jack? You just said you deleted them. Fact: I do have them, except they are only visible on the cellphoneâand as usual theyâre not that accurate. However, on the cellphone, these cannot be deleted or edited in any way.
I also have a set of different ones if I export my Facebook data, but that’s another story.
And remember when I said I opted out of alcohol ads, yet I still see plenty, especially from Heineken, which has even uploaded my email and private information to Facebook without my permission, and refuses to respond? (I may have to get the Privacy Commissioner to intervene again.) Facebook does say that opting out doesnât necessarily work. In which case, you have to wonder why on earth the feature is thereâregardless of what you toggle, Facebook does what it wants. Even Google doesnât get this bad.
Remember: Facebook offers you features, but they donât necessarily work.
And advertisers: Facebookâs audience estimates, by their own admission, have no bearing on the real population, and there is no third-party auditing. Even if you tailor your promotions, thereâs no guarantee theyâre even reaching the people you want. My interests are certainly incorrectânot that I can do anything about it so you donât waste your money. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of users.
People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isnât what itâs cracked up to be.
Last month, Bob Hoffmanâs excellent The Ad Contrariannewsletter noted, âI believe the marketing industry has pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars on digital fairy tales and ad fraud over the past 10 years (in fact, Iâm writing a book about it.) If I am right, and if the article in question is correct, we are in the midst of a business delusion unmatched in all of history.â He linked to an article by Jesse Frederik and Mauritz Martin (also sent to me by another colleague), entitled âThe new dot com bubble is here: itâs called online advertisingâ in The Correspondent. In it, they cast doubt over the effectiveness of online ads, hidden behind buzzwords and the selection effect. If I understand the latter correctly, it means that people who are already predisposed to your offering are more likely to click on your ads, so the ads arenât actually netting you new audiences.
Hereâs the example Frederik and Martin give:
Picture this. Luigiâs Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two canât make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: âI stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria.â
The summary is that despite these companies claiming thereâs a correlation between advertising with them and some result, the truth is that no one actually knows.
And the con is being perpetuated by the biggest names in the business.
As Hoffman noted at the end of October:
A few decades ago the advertising industry decided they couldn’t trust the numbers they were being given by media. The result was the rise of third-party research, ratings, and auditing organizations.
But there are still a few companies that refuse to allow independent, third-party auditing of their numbers.
No surprises there. Iâve already talked about Facebookâs audience estimates having no relationship with the actual population, so we know they’re bogus.
And, I imagine, they partly get away with it because of their scale. One result of the American economic orthodoxy these days is that monopolies are welcomeâitâs the neoliberal school of thinking. Now, I went through law school being taught the Commerce Act 1986 and the Trade Practices Act 1974 over in Australia, and some US antitrust legislation. I was given all the economic arguments on why monopolies are bad, including the starvation of innovation in their sector.
Roger McNamee put me right there in Zucked, essentially informing me that what I learned isnât current practice in the US. And that is worrisome at the least.
It does mean, in places like Europe which havenât bought into this model, and who still have balls (as well as evidence), theyâre happy to go after Google over their monopoly. And since our anti-monopoly legislation is still intact, and one hopes that we donât suddenly change tack (since I know the Commerce Act is under review), we should fight those monopoly effects that Big Tech has in our country.
What happens to monopolies? Well, if past behaviour is any indication, they can get broken up. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is simply recounting American history when she suggests that thatâs what Facebook, Google and Amazon should endure. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats would have been united on this prospect, given the trusts that gave rise to their Sherman Act in 1890, protecting the public from market failures like these. Even a generation ago, theyâd never have allowed companies to get this influential.
Also a generation ago, we wouldnât swallow the BS an advertising platform gave us without something to back it up. Right now, it seems we donât have anythingâand the industry is beginning to cry foul.
I believe one of the Democrat-leaning newspapers in the US compiles a list of lies by Donald Trump. I really think we should be doing one for Facebook, as it would make for impressive reading, though it would also take some time to compile.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed he talked to media from âacross the spectrumâ, but as The Interceptâs Jon Schwarz and Sam Biddle discovered, this is another lie: Zuckerberg cultivates relationships with US conservatives, not their liberals, based on the duoâs checks.
This adds fuel to the fire that Zuckerberg dreads US senator Elizabeth Warren getting into the White House, and has said so, and we know the buck really stops with him when it comes to Facebookâs activities. Facebook even pulled Sen. Warren’s ads from their platform briefly: so much for impersonal algorithms, ‘We’re just a platform,’ and free speech. We also know from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezâs questioning of the Facebook founder that he claims he passes the buck on what media are considered legit to a conservative group, something heâll have sanctioned, so be prepared to see Facebook reflect his (and Trump-supporting, Facebook board member Peter Thielâs) right-wing political views.
As Schwarz and Biddle also note, Facebookâs VP for US public policy is a George W. Bush aide and a board member for the former presidentâs museum.
Jack Morse at Mashable, meanwhile, reported that Zuckerberg is attempting historical revisionism on why he started Facebook. Retconning might work with comic books but less so in real life. Apparently, instead of the truthâa website which scraped photos of students and asked people to rate who was hotterâFacebook is now something created to give people a voice after the Iraq war in 2003.
Sorry, Mark, we know you didnât have such noble intentions, regardless of what they eventually became.
Itâs an insult to all those entrepreneurs who actually did start businesses or ventures with noble intent or socially responsible purposes.
Frankly, sticking to the truth, and saying you discovered the power of connecting people, is a far more compelling story.
Except, of course, Facebook no longer connects people. It divides people by validating their own biases, including less savoury viewpoints. It stokes outrage because that’s worth more clicks and time spent on its site. At worst, itâs a tool used for genocide. It’s a shame Facebook refuses to acknowledge the Pandora’s box it has opened, because its top management has no desire to do a thing about it. And as such it loses my respect even further. Don’t want the likes of Warren calling for breaking your company up? The solution is actually quite simple, but you all have become too rich and too establishment to want to break things.
I actually had to write this in my opâed for Lucireâs 22nd anniversary last week: âIn this respect, we see our mission as the opposite of social media: we want to bring people together, not usher them into silos and echo chambers.â The narrative Facebook wishes to spin, like so many in its past, is an easily seen-through joke.
I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffsâa group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social networkâsettled.
Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, âThe suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. âThe average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,â stated an amended complaint.â
Facebook denies this and settled for US$40 million, which is really pocket change for the multi-milliard-dollar company. Just the price of doing business.
Remember, Facebook has been shown to have lied about the number of people it can reach (it now admits that its population estimates have no basis in, well, the population), so Iâm not surprised it lies about the number of people who watch their videos. And remember their platform has a lot of botsâI still have several thousand reported on Instagram that have yet to be touchedâand Facebook itself isnât exactly clean.
Every time they get called out, there are a few noises, but nothing ever really happens.
This exchange between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mark Zuckerberg is a further indication that nothing will ever happen at Facebook to make things rightâthere’s no will from top management for that to happen. Thereâs too much to be lost with monetization opportunities for questionable services to be shut down, while Facebook is all too happy to close ones that donât make money (e.g. the old âView asâ feature). The divisions and “fake news” will continue, the tools used by all the wrong people.
It’s your choice whether you want to be part of this.
"So, you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think that's just a pretty simple yes or no."
Complete exchange between @RepAOC@AOC and Mark Zuckerberg at today's House Financial Services Cmte hearing.
That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, donât you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!
Strictly speaking, I realize it was Book Antiqua, though as we all know, that’s a Palatino clone.
Since even English types like Baskerville were influenced by what was happening on the Continent, for official use, the UK really needs to go back to Old English. And yes, I realize that suggestion has unpleasant parallels to what was going on in Germany in the 1930s âŠ
There was a great follow-up to my Tweet, incidentally:
I need a "Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!" tee shirt, and I do not even wear clothes with writing on them.