Twitteretter

Pile wrote, in the late XIX Century, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, highly recommended bedside reading for any young teenager. Orwell wrote the outstanding Animal Farm, which I have quoted previously, highly recommended bedside reading for older teenagers. In it, Napoleon enunciates the darkly meaningful All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others . This week, in Wall Street, Robin Hood Trading suspended GameStop shares to control volatility, as private investors teamed up to drive up the price, in a move which has cost shorting hedge funds a fortune, and, for once, transferred wealth from funds to small investors. Robin Hood’s action seems to protect the rich from the poor, hardly the modus operandi of the Middle Ages folklore hero the trading platform takes its name from. This makes for a great, Orwellian conspiracy theory, but I fear the true explanation is more prosaic, related to Robin Hood’s lack of financial resources to cover exposures, as it must do in la...

Interesting, and concerning, to realise, when reading on geopolitics and business, two fields with a huge bearing on our quality of life and prospects, that the main references practitioners of these disciplines seem to have are, respectively, Thucydides, the V Century BC Greek general, and Sun Tzu, the VI Century BC Chinese general. The rivalry between the current superpower, the US, and the new upstart, China, is understood by geopolitical planners, in both countries, in the light of Thucydides’ work. According to it, as China’s economic might and political influence grows, the ultimate, inevitable consequence will be a hegemony war. Of course, as a planner, if you prepare for this, you’ll most likely bring it about, a perverse self-fulfilling prophecy. The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, is compulsory bedside reading for many businessmen. No wonder humanity’s future appears fraught with insurmountable problems, if our go to references ignore all we might have learnt in the last 2,500 years ...

I have started producing a video channel, on YouTube, with Twitteretter posts, read by myself in English and subtitled in Spanish. This is a bit of an experiment. I am interested in whether this initiative will drive any views and following. My expectation is not many. I know that I would get many more should I start a channel on start up and running business, an area where I have significant expertise and where I have built a reputation over the years, but which I regard as much less interesting than Twitteretter. We seem to be more and more focused on consuming information for its practical usefulness, rather than its intrinsic interest. And in our utilitarian and consumeristic universe, usefulness is defined exclusively in economic terms. Alas, Twitteretter does not aspire to teach you how to make a living, but to get you to think about how to live a life. And for this, I fear, the audience is much smaller. Still, let’s not pre-empt the experiment, only running it will tell Length: ...

There are two types of money. Money made by working, performing tasks demanded by your occupation, and money made by other means, such as investing or gambling (these two activities can be very different or almost identical depending on each individual’s approach to the former). We seem to derive more pleasure from money made the second way. I have observed that, presented with a speculation opportunity which promises the possibility of large, easy financial returns, most of us, even those typically uninterested in wealth, excitedly jump at it. This is interesting, as one would think that money earnt by effort and toil and by performing duties well should provide more satisfaction. But it does not. I think the reason is that anyone, or almost anyone, can earn money by working, but earning money by investing or gambling makes us feel clever, different to others, special. It feels like a prize to our ingenuity, boldness and courage, earnt by our talent, rather than a salary for our toil ...

Noun, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a time in the past. Interesting how valuable nostalgia is to disciplines such as literature or cinema. How effectively the bringing back to life of the past can elicit strong sentiment in their audiences, giving them license to transport themselves to a time past, remembering the good and forgetting the bad, as one can choose to do in fiction. Interesting also how it can be catastrophic in politics, how when the citizenship takes license to try to bring about a time past, which they remember as being better than the present, they invariably succeed at rescuing what was bad, and little of what was good. Politics is about building the World of tomorrow, accepting that the past is gone but learning from it. It’s about recovering, maybe, something that worked well, but realistically adapting it to future circumstance, accepting that circumstance, environment, cannot be wound back. Politics calls for aspiration and ambition, not nostalgia...

This post stems from a combination of experiences I have had of late with the courts and my observation of how people like Donald Trump go about their business, or life (not sure they see a difference between these two concepts). These days, justice is not only blind (as it should, in the sense that it does not see status, class, education, faith or any other grounds on which to treat those it judges unequally) but also very slow. To the point that, quite often, when it rules, it may be too late for justice. Mr. Trump relies on this, throwing money at delaying court rulings, appealing continuously, pretending to seek all avenues for justice to be done, in reality looking for justice to not be done, not because of an unjust ruling but the lack of one. Many deserving plaintiffs find that, by the time the ruling comes, it is too late to matter. This is fundamentally unjust. As a society, we must ensure we resource and protect justice enough so that it is not only blind, but also timely Le...

I’m reading Noam Chomsky’s ‘Who rules the World’. Chomsky is one of the great political thinkers of our age. His work is well researched, quoting over 600 references, and full of public but not commonly known facts. It is very critical of US and Israeli policies, mostly but not only in Palestine in the latter case, globally in the former. Chomsky presents them as engaged in a global fight against democracy, convincingly and with plenty of the evidence lacking from the conspiracy theories others are pushing. It strikes me that the one feature they both have in common, possibly the reason they disregard humanity’s interest to pursue political power and influence, is they both consider themselves special. Israel for religious reasons, their Doctrine assuring they are God’s Chosen People. The US for more mundane reasons, their XX century economic and political success. Isn’t the World far too small today to regard humans one side of an arbitrary line as better than those the other side? Le...