I read a lot of history and thus know a fair bit about how weather impact has been perceived by humans over time. It is a fact that the 20th century was an abnormally lucky hundred years, meteorologically speaking. The facts I managed to jam into tweets included (a) the superstorm that flooded 300 square miles of the Central Valley in California in the 1860s, (b) rainfall levels we’d consider drought conditions were normal in the U.S. Midwest before about 1905, and (c) storms of a violence we’d find hard to believe were commonly reported in the 1800s. I had specifically in mind something I learned from the book Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, which relays eyewitness accounts of thunderstorms so intense that travelers had to steeple their hands over their noses in order to breathe air instead of water; but a sense that storms of really theatrical violence were once common comes through in many other histories.
We had a quiet century geophysically as well — no earthquakes even nearly as bad as the New Madrid event of 1812, which broke windows as far north as Montreal. And no solar storms to compare with the Carrington Event of 1859, which seriously damaged the then-nascent telegraph infrastructure and if it recurred today would knock out power and telecomms so badly that we’d be years recovering and casualties would number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly the millions.
(I’m concentrating on 19th-century reports because those tended to be well-documented, but earlier records tell us it was the 20th century calm that was unusual, not the 19th-century violence.)
The awkward truth is that there are very large forces in play in the biosphere, and when they wander out of the ranges we’re adapted to, we suffer and die a lot and there really isn’t a great deal we can do about it; we don’t operate at the required energy scales. For that matter, I can think of several astronomical catastrophes that could be lurking just outside our light-cone only to wipe out all multicellular life on Earth next week. Reality is like that.
Eric S. Raymond, “Heavy weather and bad juju”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-03
February 9, 2011
QotD: (Historical) weather and climate
Real usage-based billing might work, but not the current form
Tim Wu contrasts the way the UBB issue is being presented and how it might actually be successful:
The issue of usage-based billing is a little tricky because such systems are not inherently evil. When you think about it, we usually pay for things on a usage basis. Gasoline, electricity and even doughnuts are generally billed based on how much you use. And the fact that usage-based billing sounds reasonable in theory is surely why the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission approved the new rules.
But take a closer look and something far more insidious is going on. If bandwidth were actually billed like electricity or water, that might be fine. But what the CRTC approved is something different. Claiming that its profit and consumer welfare are exactly the same thing, Bell wants to remake Internet billing. It wants to make use of the most lucrative tricks from the mobile and credit-card industries by preying on consumer error to make money. And this ought not be tolerated.
Any rule that asks the consumer to guess at usage, and punishes you if you’re wrong, is abusive. Imagine being asked to guess how much electric power you need every month, with a penalty for mistakes. Yes, that’s what cellphone companies do — or get away with — but that hardly makes it a model. It’s a system of profit premised on human error, and this begins to explain Bell’s deeper interest in usage-based billing. Bell wants to make the horrors of mobile billing part of the life of Internet users. And that’s a problem.
H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke for the link.
Nokia: the company on the burning platform
Nokia has a problem. The ordinary cellphone market which mere years ago they bestrode like a Colossus has been overshadowed by the smartphone market, and they’re just an ordinary company in that market.
In the memo, Mr. Elop shares his vision of the current state of the mobile landscape, where Apple controls the high-end of the wireless market with its iPhone, where Google’s Android not only is making its mark in the smartphone arena but now conquering the mid-range market with Android and how Nokia is even losing the fight to control the low end of the cellphone market — an arena in which the company has traditionally dominated — as it struggles to compete with China’s MediaTek for market share and mind share in emerging markets.
“The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience,” he writes.
“Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable … And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.”
Update: Eric S. Raymond thinks the memo shows that Nokia’s new CEO has the courage to grasp the nettle:
If this memo does nothing else, it proves that Elop is not afraid to look facts in the eye and propose drastic remedies for a near-terminal situation. I cannot recall ever hearing in my lifetime a CEO’s assessment of his own corporation that is so shockingly blunt about the trouble it is in. The degree of candor here is really quite admirable, and does more than any other evidence I’ve seen to suggest Elop has the leadership ability to navigate Nokia out of its slump.
It’s clear from the memo that Elop is preparing his company to change their flagship smartphone OS. You can’t get more obvious than ‘We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.’
The available alternatives are Android or WP7. Apple’s iOS is right out because Nokia needs to be able to sell cheap on a huge range of handsets. RIM and WebOS are tied to one company each. MeeGo’s been tried and failed. There are no other realistic contenders.
I think we’re being given some subtle clues that it will be Android.
Update, 12 February: Andrew Orlowski has some post-tragedy analysis of Nokia’s collapse into the arms of WP7:
There are times when you don’t want to intrude on public grief, but Nokia has spent 15 years (or more) trying to avoid this day.
New CEO Stephen Elop would argue otherwise, but giving up control of your platforms means giving up control over your destiny – and Elop has given Nokians not one twig of consolation around which a bit of dignity could be wrapped.
He’s also signalled the end of Nokia as a high R&D spend technology company. “We expect to substantially reduce R&D expenditures”, said Elop bluntly in this morning’s webcast. The new Nokia will be a global brand and a contract manufacturer whose primary customer is itself.
“Disaster” and “stitch-up” are two of the texts I received this morning from Nokians. Finnish press reports 1,000 staff in Tampere walking out. A surprise? Not really. For 15 years Nokia has defined itself, to its partners and customers, as the Not-Microsoft. Now it’s utterly dependent on them. There’s no Plan B.
[. . .]
How does Nokia recreate the product-centric, almost skunkworks development culture of the 1990s, while retaining its global logistical strengths, such as its ability to customise for local markets? How does Nokia prevent Microsoft from stealing its ideas? How does it create services that don’t brass off its biggest customers, the operators? Some of these are very old questions, and the Microsoft tie up does nothing to resolve them — it might even complicate them.
The impact on morale is probably the most immediate thing Elop has to address — it’s a huge blow to Finnish national pride. Elop’s brutal assessment in his “Burning Platforms” intranet post is that Nokia was hopeless at strategy, rubbish at marketing, and couldn’t write software. He all but told Nokians that they should have stayed in the rubber boot business.
What a motivator!
LSE to buy TSX
It’s a crafty move, but it’s not clear whether it’s the buyer or the seller being the craftier:
London Stock Exchange Group Plc, the 210-year-old bourse operator, agreed to buy Toronto Stock Exchange owner TMX Group Inc. for about C$3.2 billion ($3.2 billion) in stock as the companies cut costs to counter lost market share. LSE surged to a two-year high.
LSE shareholders will own 55 percent of the company, while TMX investors will hold the rest, the exchanges said today in a statement. TMX shareholders will receive 2.9963 LSE shares for each they own, valuing the Toronto-based company at about C$42.68 a share, 6 percent more than yesterday’s closing price.
Xavier Rolet, LSE’s chief executive officer, will reduce 35 million pounds ($56 million) a year in costs and expand into new businesses such as derivatives as competition from alternative trading platforms increases as do mergers among rivals. His predecessor Clara Furse fought off five takeover offers in two years and bought the operator of the Milan stock exchange. The LSE’s share of U.K. equity trading was 63.8 percent last quarter, compared with 75 percent in 2009, data from the London- based company show.
It could be a way for London to diminish the impact of European rules on their business (by having a non-EU place to land if necessary) or it could be a way for the EU to extend their rule-making to the Canadian market. Or, and this is the least believable scenario, it might just be an ordinary acquisition by a company that happens to run stock markets.
Update: What is presented as a take over in other markets is being positioned (spun?) as a “merger” for domestic consumption:
TMX Group, which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange announced Wednesday they are merging to create one of the world’s largest stock exchanges.
The merger, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is unanimously being recommended by the boards of both exchanges.
The merger, if approved, would give the new firm a value of just over $6 billion (Cdn.) and give LSE shareholders just over 50 per cent of the combined company.
TMX Group is valued at $2.99 billion, while the London Stock Exchange Group’s value is slightly higher, around $3.25 billion.
The new company will have the world’s largest number of listing, more than 6,700 companies with an aggregate value of $5.8 trillion, the partners said in a statement early Wednesday.
[. . .]
The company will be co-headquartered in Toronto and London with Xavier Rolet, the CEO of the London Exchange, retaining that position with the new company. The president will be Thomas Kloet, the CEO of TMX. The FO will be Michael Ptasznik, who currently holds the same post with TMX, and the company director will be Raffaele Jerusalmi, the Milan-based CEO of Borsa Italiana.
Expect this deal, even if it eventually gets regulatory approval, to drag on for most of this year.
I guess we’re all going to Hell
“Name Something You Pass Around” – Watch more Funny Videos
H/T to Jason “I’m still laughing” Ciastko for the link.
Fifteen years ago
John Perry Barlow wrote the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in
bit-bearing media.Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
