In 1995, only a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was working at a community centre in Nyanga, a shanty-town alongside Cape Town’s international airport. The centre had started a project which aimed to give HIV-positive single mothers a safe place to live and work.

My self-appointed task was to assist with setting up income generation projects. I had a “real” job during the week and would arrive early on Saturday mornings to a queue of toddlers and tiny children waiting to be picked up and swung. Little happy, snotty faces with upstretched arms taking their turns and then running to the back of the line to have another go.

And every one of them HIV-positive.

One day a child, late to be swung, came running too quickly and slipped. She fell hard on the concrete and scraped her arm and leg. Blood flowed and she began to howl. I stooped to pick her up and a nurse grabbed me, pulling me back.

“No,” she said, her face sad, “let her mother pick her up,” indicating the blood and cuts on my hands from where I’d injured myself working on my car.

That was the moment that the death sentence implied by AIDS hit home. None of these children would live more than another few years. Full story »

There are still nights when the nightmares take me. I am in the shop I made, standing behind the till. My wares are on the shelves and I wait for customers who never come.

I see them passing by the windows, looking in. Their faces, a mixture of curiosity and contempt I dare not interpret. My heart-beat is erratic. I am 10 kilos down. I sleep maybe two hours a night. I am exhausted.

These are the days and nights of the zombie business; too weak to live, too strong to die. Full story »

“Prices are set on the margin,” goes a general statement in economics and finance.  It sounds a bit glib as an explanation for the current abject state of the global economy.  How for the “want of a nail” could the battle be lost?

Think of an airplane consisting of 100 seats which only breaks even on the cost for a single journey once there are 65 paying customers on board.  The blue seats in the image below are the 64 patiently waiting to start their travels.  The red chair waits for the 65th customer.

The 65th passenger

Full story »

It was Sun Tzu who said, “Always leave an escape route for a surrounded enemy, for a soldier with no prospect of escape will fight with the strength of ten men.”  A person with no escape has nothing to lose, they have lost everything already, and so they will take many with them.

When I was very young I read a collection of horror short-stories.  They were mostly childish waffle except for one which has left a life-long impression on me.

In the story, a successful author begins to receive a series of letters from all across Europe.  The message is the same, “You made me and I am coming to meet you.” Signed with the name of the principal villain in the author’s long-running series of books, the author assumes a prank but calls in the police.  Despite protection, one night the character arrives. Full story »

Speaking in urgent tones from the Rose Garden at the White House, Obama rejected Republican arguments that his proposals amount to “class warfare,” saying it comes down to “math.” “It is wrong that in the United States of America a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million,” he said, adding that anyone who opposes that principle “should be called out.” – LA Times

I’ve said this before, but while the wealthy may be paying less than you want them to pay they are still paying higher tax rates.  The loophole Warren Buffet is exploiting is Section 1256 and probably benefits a very small number of people who get their income primarily through non-equity options – hardly the bulk of high earners, who get them through salaries.

Year 2011 income brackets and tax rates Full story »

Samuel Maynard Hicks is a skinny and shy-looking youngster, yet his eyes burn with fervour in a face mottled with ash and dust.  His fingers are blackened; soot and grime mark out his fingernails as his hands twist a dog-eared copy of “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” by John Maynard Keynes.

“It is essential that we stimulate the economy,” he says earnestly. “Keynes believed that, no matter how unproductive an action may appear, if it results in increased aggregate market activity we must do it.  We’ve let the government have a go with macroprudential stimulus and quantitative easing, but people just won’t spend.  So we’re giving them a reason to start building again by destroying their businesses, burning down their homes and stealing their stuff.” Full story »

In the final moments of Children of Earth, Captain Jack Harkness – sometime immortal, but really a “fixed point in time and space” – must make a terrible decision: sacrifice his grandson, Steven, in order to channel a transmission and destroy alien invaders.

In so doing he will save 10% of the world’s children whom the invaders, the 456, wish to use as living factories to produce recreational drugs.

At its best, science fiction confronts us with human choices against the stark contrast of an alien background.

Children of Earth asks us: would you sacrifice someone you treasure and love in order to save millions of others who you have no connection to and who may never know of your sacrifice?

Full story »

Any morality play has its set-piece characters. The villain, the outraged public, the crusading representatives of order.

Democracy in the UK is very tactile. Parliament is the voice and instrument of the people. Anyone, no matter how powerful, can be summoned to answer questions before the people. These performances can destroy careers and reputations but are an adjunct to the more dull and complex process of police investigations, judicial review and eventual judgement. They permit the public to see their anger expressed.

Rupert Murdoch’s role before his questioning was clear: he is the villain of this set-piece. He was there to be a subject of the collective outrage of British society and to hold himself to account.

Yet you don’t get to be an 80-year-old media tycoon without understanding that a story is made in the telling. Full story »

A goodly number of Murdoch’s newspapers run at a loss.  This isn’t because he’s a bad businessman, it’s because of the industry.  His competitors are doing worse.

However, Murdoch loves newspapers and news.  Whatever else his failings, it’s rare to have a newspaper owner who actually loves the medium.  So even though these companies lose money for him (and, in revenue terms, are a tiny proportion of an empire that is mainly about entertainment and media) he keeps them alive and well financed.

Say that the clusterfuck over the infractions of a small number of his newspapers (assuming this goes beyond just News of the World) results in him divesting of news entirely.  Firstly, who’d buy them?  Secondly, what happens if this leads to the final destruction of actual daily newspapers?  Full story »

Jeff Jarvis, scion of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, took issue with my Twitter response expressing the belief that newspaper buyers are complicit in the actions of newspaper producers (wrt to News of the World, for our American readers).  He took it further in a blog post, “Readers are our Regulators.”

I disagree. If the public are good regulators then I assume you would accept that the public would have Casey Anthony found guilty even though a court of her peers found differently? The “court of public opinion” isn’t always wise or informed.

Making difficult and appropriate, but socially unpopular, decisions is part of the idea of justice. Full story »

Commenting on Thomas Lowenthal’s original article at ArsTechnica on Bitcoin and the dangers involved in introducing a new currency.

The closest parallel to a pure digital currency play is the travails of paper money. Coinage is at least based on the value of the coin making up the face value. Paper money has no such associations which is why the gold bugs still want to return to the standard.

Money is only valuable when backed by a government that can use sufficient force to ensure that it will be used for all trade, debts and promissory notes. When a person asks, “You and what army?” a government can easily respond. Full story »

The Iranian government arrested all the opposition leaders and moved them to a military jail over the weekend. Bear in mind none of these guys is an actual liberal, merely calling for less oppression from the state. Still, it appears to have acted as some weird trigger. That and the protests elsewhere.

Anyhow, #10esfand is the hash-tag and the protests are happening right now. Unbelievable stuff. Traffic is ground to a halt in major cities. Thousands of people are standing on their roofs screaming, “Down with the dictators”. Plenty of YouTube stuff showing the crowds and chants. Absolute chaos. I still don’t believe the Iranian regime will fall but it is weakening daily. Who knows, though.

A lot of governments are considering that the choice is definitely as extreme as Egypt or Libya and have to be asking themselves which world they want to live in…

However, try for a moment to imagine a world in which most of the Middle East is run by representative governments. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Islamist. Imagine a shade of Turkey, for example. It could be the largest shift in human development … ever…

“I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as ­precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.”

The words are Pratchett’s coming at the end of his Richard Dimbleby lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, and spoken, with tremendous compassion and composure, by his good friend Tony Robinson.

We arrive and leave life on our own. Full story »

In 1994 I was in my final year in university in Cape Town. The transition to majority rule was messy, violent and filled with atrocities by all parties to the conflict.

A bomb by the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress destroyed a pub that I, and other students, frequented. Members of the Afrikaaner Weerstands Beweeging, a Nazi-like white-supremacist movement, had attempted a bombing campaign of their own.

The press was filled with stories of “black on black” violence as the Inkhata Freedom Party fought the African National Congress. Hidden somewhere within this, illusory, bogey-like, was the brutal state security apparatus still attempting to hold back the tide. Full story »

You’ll recall how, when George W Bush stood for re-election as US president back in 2004, outraged Europeans organised petitions and marches to demand that Americans vote for someone else.

And then, in 2009, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was trying to steal the Iranian presidential elections, millions of people around the world turned their web pages green and fired off thousands of Twitter posts to call for free elections.

Or how about when, in 2007, George Clooney went to Sudan to demand that the international community do something to stop the genocide taking place in Darfur.

As you’ll also remember, Bush lost to John Kerry, Ahmadinejad went into exile and Darfur is now peaceful and prosperous.

Oh, wait, no, none of that happened. Full story »

The Bankside Power Station was closed in 1981 leaving a handsome, and increasingly derelict, face-brick building in a prestigious spot by the side of the river Thames in the heart of the city of London.

After an expensive conversion the building reopened as the Tate Modern. “Modern” in that it features art produced since 1900. Here you will find works by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. However, the Tate also commissions new work.

On 12 October they opened a major new installation in the vast – completely insanely gargantuan – Turbine Hall. Ai Weiwei is a 53-year-old Chinese ceramicist and his Sunflower Seeds is nothing less than 100 million individually crafted and painted porcelain sunflower seeds poured onto the floor. These were produced by 1,900 skilled artisans from the city of Jingdezhen, famed for its production of Imperial porcelain, over a two-year period.

Until Thursday you could happily walk and play in the seeds. Kids lay on their backs to make sunflower seed angels, businessmen shrugged off their patent-leather shoes and strolled back and forth in their suits, young couples picnicked. It was delightful.

Since Thursday it is a health hazard. Full story »

The Pope, titular head of an organisation that spans the globe and claims over 1 billion followers, has just visited the UK. He has apologised profusely for the sexual abuse of children by priests, warned against the rise of secularism, and promised greater transparency and openness.

Plainly something is up. This is worlds away from the Catholic Church which the Fern’s Report of 2005 described as having: “A culture of secrecy and fear of scandal that led bishops to place the interests of the Catholic Church ahead of the safety of children”.

The world has changed. The Catholic Church is now an unwilling participant in a competition of ideas which also includes the choice not to have any beliefs at all. Such competition can make even the most stodgy and autocratic of institutions liven up a little. Full story »

“… We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. In the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…”

George Orwell, 1984

Probability is very clever. Finding sense, logic and predictable behaviours out of seeming chaos. But there is a difference between seeing a pattern and prompting an expected pattern into place. Google Instant is very clever. But, in guiding our hand as we type, it reduces our thoughts and steers them into fixed ruts. Google can claim, over time, to be becoming more accurate when, in fact, they’re simply evaporating the variety of human thought.

More importantly they have reduced the pattern of 26 ordinary letters into the most valuable and sought-after real-estate on the planet. The words that appear in response to your first letter choice are now a biddable property.

Join me now as we sing Google’s new Alphabet Song and you can be introduced to your new masters. Full story »

The phone call came early in the afternoon.  My wife’s mom calling from 10,000 kilometres away. An article in the paper.  “I thought you should know.” And her cry, of grief and pain and anguish and horror and infinite sadness, as I rushed downstairs to catch her. Full story »

In 2007 I wrote about the asymmetry of “caring”; of how the Indonesian tsunami of that year had unleashed the biggest charity response in history while the Pakistani floods had left people unmoved. Three years later Pakistan has flooded again and The Huffingonton Post makes an impassioned plea as to why we should care, but it is plain we don’t. It isn’t because they’re Muslims, as Radio Netherlands seems to believe. In 2007 Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, was also the beneficiary of an astonishing amount of charity after the tsunami. I’ll restate my original article: Full story »