Life Inc.

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Graham in Aviation and the Environment

Graham's Interview starts on Page 23.

Aviation and the Environment - Issue 03

Encourage bees to make our economy buzz again

Found Boris Johnson on bee's and the economy quite amusing...

Long before the alarm clock goes, the buzzing begins, and I am afraid my irritation sometimes gets the better of me. As soon as the sunlight hits the window panes, the dunderheaded insects conceive their lust to be outdoors, sticking their noses into the sexual organs of the flowers, and bonk bonk bonk they start to bash their furry bonces against the glass and buzz buzz buzz they go in frustration until I can take it no more.

I bound naked from the bed, brandishing the 580-page biography (unread) of Marcus Aurelius; and just as I am about to give the brutes a drubbing they will not forget, I pause, and hold my hand, as an Inuit holds his club poised above the head of a baby seal when a Greenpeace activist shouts to him across the floes. I hear the voice of conscience, and Marcus Aurelius trembles in my grip.

Whoa there, says the voice of conscience. You cannot flatten the most popular insect in world history. You can't just squash a creature that was once beloved of Apollo and which mankind has associated, since the beginning, with poetry and rhetoric and the gift of speech itself. You shouldn't murder a poor defenceless critter to which we have traditionally ascribed every human virtue from patriotism to thriftiness; and above all, says the voice of conscience, you cannot slaughter a member of a species now thought to be as threatened as the panda. No, friend, says conscience, savouring a rare moment of victory as I lower Marcus Aurelius, you cannot kill a bee.

"Sorry, guv," say the pest control people when I mention the underfloor infestation. "We don't touch bees. They're protected." When I consult the Rentokil website, I find all sorts of advice about how to massacre wasps and ants, but not bees. If you are lucky enough to have bees in your house, says Rentokil, you must treat them as honoured guests. If you value the future of the planet, you will not touch a bristle of their buzzing little backs.

As all bee experts will testify, there are good grounds for such restraint. The global bee population has recently entered a catastrophic decline, in a syndrome despairingly but vaguely known as "Colony Collapse Disorder". Thriving bee farms are being turned overnight into ghost towns as workers mysteriously desert their queens; beeswax candles are in short supply; the stocks of honey are running low; and with too few bees to pollinate the plants that make up the very basis of our agriculture, everyone is quoting Albert Einstein to the effect that if the bees go, the human race will perish four years later.

In the great bee crisis, it is impossible not to see the metaphor. Since Homer compared the Greek troops to columns of bees issuing from a hollow rock, bees have stood for mankind's organisational ability. As Shakespeare puts it, they are creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom. Hive of industry; busy as a bee – for centuries these have been the clichés of human economic success.

Well, look at the poor bees now, and look at the world economy. No one knows exactly what has gone wrong with the bees. Some blame the Varroa mite; some blame pesticides; some say they have been put off by all the genetically-modified crops; some say the bees are getting fed up of being carted around to fertilise the Californian fruit and nuts, and have gone on a kind of strike; and some say that their navigational technology is being jammed by humanity's increasing use of mobile phones.

No one can say why they go off to die on their own, and no one knows exactly where they go – except me, that is. I can tell you that a small but noisy minority has junked the hive and come to live in our house, at least until first light, when they like to rise early and make love to the spring flowers. I have one on my desk in front of me. I am afraid that he has knocked his little bee brains out trying to fly through the window, but you can tell by the fat yellow pollen sacs on his legs that his last day was highly enjoyable. He has been out there pollinating and fertilising in a thoroughly promiscuous way, and later this year, I expect, there will be some apple or cherry that ripens entirely thanks to his efforts.

And that is the point, my friends. The economic recovery is like the bee population, in that you never know exactly where it will turn up. Samson saw the bees swarm in the belly of the lion. Virgil described how you could restore a bee colony by beating a bullock to death and sticking it in a brick kiln. Unlikely though these may sound as places for bee generation, they are nothing like as inhospitable to nature as our house. If I were trying to breed bees myself, they would certainly go the way of our belly-up goldfish, or our hamsters, who all had shamelessly incestuous relationships before expiring of hamster Aids. Here is the most polluted, bee-hostile urban environment you could imagine, the air thick with hairspray and nit cream and the microwaves of umpteen mobiles and other electronic devices – and yet I am proud to say that it is also a refuge for some of the most vulnerable and vital animals in the ecosystem.

I don't want to make too much of this. I will not claim that I have seen a bee revival, any more than I will claim to have seen the bottom of the market. But when I read the wrist-slitters and the gloomadon-poppers in the Financial Times, and their snooty refusal to see any hope in the recent rallies in stocks or in house prices, then I cannot help thinking of the people who are buying houses, and opening shops, with a determination and confidence that will eventually lead us out of recession; and I think of the amazing animal optimism that urges the bees to try living in my bedroom, and I put Marcus Aurelius back on the shelf where he belongs.

Welcome Home Dad

Hi Dad, it's great to have you back! I hope you had a wonderful time!

I'll look forward to seeing some of those (many - I'm sure) photos from Burma up here on the Bettany Blog!

Two items of interest on a sunny March morning:

1. From the BBC: Community penalties 'laughed at'.

The credibility of community sentences is at stake because offenders who breach the orders are not dealt with firmly enough, a study says.

Experts from King's College London examined Community Orders and Suspended Sentence Orders, which were introduced in England and Wales four years ago.

They require offenders to do unpaid work or undergo rehabilitation.

But a probation officer interviewed for the study said those under the orders left court "laughing their heads off".

2. And from the World Famous inflight magazine of VLM Airlines, Velocity Magazine. A rare piece of original writing from yours truly.

WHEN, IN 2003, THE NOBEL PRIZE winning economist Myron Scholes told academic journal Quantitative Finance that “the world is our laboratory”, he was comparing the work of scientists with that of financial academics and practitioners. Like the physical world, the financial world consists of a bewilderingly complex system of interrelated parts and processes that lends itself to the tools and analysis of mathematics and science. It should come as no surprise, then, that the quantitative professionals who now dominate the financial markets with their models and products, and who have lately come under so much criticism, should associate themselves with the scientific method.

On 29 March 1900, a French student, Louis Bachelier, successfully defended his doctoral thesis, Théorie de la Spéculation, at the Sorbonne. Bachelier’s achievement was to offer a mathematical description of randomness and to introduce many of the concepts in the field that has come to be known as stochastic analysis. Crucially he applied his insights to the problem of pricing financial options and, in doing so, is considered by many as a pioneer in the early study of mathematical – or quantitative – finance...

Brilliant: The National Money Hole

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Dollars and dominance

BBC Radio 4's Analysis: Dollars and dominance is broadcast on Thursday 23rd October at 20:30 BST and repeated on Sunday 26th October at 21.30 BST

Listened to this as a podcast last week and thought in very interesting. Even got the transcript as its very relevent to an assignment I'm doing in Globalization. You can listen as a podcast or listen on BBC iplayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/analysis

I think that today's financial crisis is going to hasten the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Avinash Persaud

But as this programme discovers, the dollar may no longer remain such a pillar of US power.

Before the crisis its value had been steadily declining. That suited many Americans and their political leaders - a weaker dollar boosted US exports and manufacturing jobs.

But no longer can the powers that be in Washington tell the rest of the world, as a 1970s Treasury Secretary once did, that the dollar is "our currency, but your problem". And the crisis has raised new questions about how far the US can afford its foreign policy commitments and its need to keep the domestic economy afloat.

Rising powers such as China and the Gulf states now have huge reserves in dollars. That makes them, very keen on a strong dollar now.

But if they decided to switch allegiance they could suddenly destabilise the US currency. It's been called a "balance of financial terror" that the US must now live with.

If the dollar is in decline as a global currency, what of the alternatives? The euro has a global role, but no political leadership to match that of the US. Many expect the Chinese currency to rival or overtake the dollar as the global balance of economic power changes, but that will take time.

It's like the idea of mutually assured deterrence. We hope that everybody becomes respectful of the financial power of the other side, but that such destructive power won't be deployed.

Barry Eichengreen

So in the meantime, we are left with a world in which the dollar plays a more and more controversial and uncertain role - still a key pillar of American power, but a currency over which the rest of the world has more and more control.

Contributors:

Avinash Persaud, Chairman of Intelligence Capital Limited

Barry Eichengreen, Professor of political economy, University of California, Berkeley

Harold James, Professor of History, Princeton University

David Marsh, author "The Euro: The Emerging Global Currency"

Dr Albert Park, Reader in Economics, Oxford University

Jim O'Neill, Head of Global Economic Research at Goldman Sachs

Presenter: Ngaire Woods
Producer: Chris Bowlby
Editor: Hugh Levinson

Atheism and the Stock Market

Not many people combine these 2 subjects.

Nassim Taleb is a controversial but influential and entertaining intellectual whose views on probability and 'decision-making under uncertainty' are outlined in his best-selling book 'The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable'.

In this short clip he derides those skeptics who criticise religion on rational grounds while putting their faith in the stockmarket.

A full version of the lecture which was presented as part of a Long Now Foundation series is available here - but you might want to hunker down for it, it's an hour and half long.

Debt