Davos discuss the meltdown

There's a few more interesting topics in the Davos snow today.

With global stock markets going into meltdown yesterday, the comments in Davos about global growth in 2016 being 'disappointing and uneven' might be an understatement.


The supposition of these economists is that growth is being held back by (wait for it!) low productivity, aging populations, and the legacies of the global financial crisis.

That'd be high debt, low investment, and weak banks burdening advanced economies - although all that new money being created by the Central Bank in the Eurozone must surely be for a reason?

I can't help thinking that there's other structural forces at play. The new ways of doing business mean that huge pieces of traditional infrastructure are being impacted. Virtual shopping, Printed cars like the early one below. Public/Private domain distinctions.

No wonder companies sit on $7 trillion of cash - they don't know where to invest/what to develop next. Mergers & acquisitions maybe but capital expenditure less likely, all implying low growth. It does raise a few leadership questions - beyond the bluffers and duffers.

Later today, Cameron will present on UK matters which will certainly include the Brexit debate, and there's already been a session on finance.

For finance the buzzphrase seems to be about fintech a.k.a. financial technology. By comparison 'Regulation' seems to have dropped down the list somewhat, or maybe that's a feature of this type of meeting.

A Davos re-spin of the 2008 financial crash implies it was caused by fragmentation in the regulatory world - huh? - anything but the bankers themselves. Not the highly target-driven twenty-somethings given full access to global markets to trade using other peoples' money. Oh no. And I'm not sure that it has really changed that much?

And here's the thing...Fintech inevitably gets linked to disruptive technologies which, by their nature, are the ones less likely to be regulated. Anyone spot the place to drive the coach and six horse string? (gratuitous Tarantino reference)

A quick example of a digital disrupters is the algorithms used for energy trading and risk management. Might these robot calculations be having a part to play in the current oil pricing? Just because these systems don't look like Cybermen doesn't mean they aren't software driven. And now we should start adding virtual money into the mix - has anyone an inkling of how to regulate that?

get rich quick in Davos?

The once a year occupation of Davos is underway again, with the mega-rich taking over the Swiss town to talk about the world economy.

Personally, I've found Davos to be a slightly creepy place, for reasons I can't quite pin down.

Strip away the fancy marquees and street branding and there's a sleepy looking ribbon development underneath, with a few tell-tale trappings of Swiss affluence. Then, towards the centre there is a curious wooden sculpture comprising a procession of people walking into a lake carrying umbrellas.

Nonetheless, I can understand why a premium Swiss ski resort in the middle of a country famous for quiet banking and taxation regimes gets selected. Placing the conference 2.5 hours by road or train from a main airport also limits access, although the staff can still get in to run things and helicopter is still available for those that need to get there quickly.

Alongside the rich folk, there's a good smattering of advisors, with some well-known banking and tax specialists in the mix, as well as a few more -er- specialised organisations. They help maintain the 62 folk who apparently equate to half the world's total wealth. Of course, the WEF conference is larger than that, with some 2,500 delegates.

I'm interested to see if there is can be something for everyman at this world event. It would be so easy to run wallpaper presentations that gently summarise without really bringing new enlightenment and to keep the good stuff off stage in the one to ones.

If the real 1% are even present, they'll all have huge run-rates of software licences, confectionery, ball bearings, beer and fashion items to keep themselves in cash. The very top of the wealth list is characterised by these type of people. I can't help thinking of Weeds or Breaking Bad though. That need to have a car wash or a cake shop to help run the funds through.

Further down we start to get the properly 'diversified','investments' and 'hedge funds' people who'd rather not say what the main secret of the success comprises. And of course there's a few 'casinos' in the mix too.

So let's have a peek at today's world and then today's WEF topics:

First, the world.

• Oil supply Now it's down at $27 a barrel, even the middle east must be worrying. The UK economic viability point for its own production is around $60. Norway is slightly less and the USA is slightly more. The middle east can run at about $30. Now Iran is also back in the game, the entire world is running production at around the lowest possible breakpoint and with a massive and growing surplus. Cheap fossil fuel implies burning the planet and runs against the climate change agenda.
• Eve of Destruction How does that song go? Barry McGuire may have sung back in 1965, but this time it's Stephen Hawking warning about nuclear war, global warming and genetically engineered viruses posing threats to humanity, alongside scientific progress that will create “new ways things can go wrong”. Yikes
• Re-bordering: As Brussels scraps asylum laws that the first country a refugee enters is responsible for any claim, it is changing completely the way that border structures operate throughout the whole EU bloc.
• Rich money: The little scheme dreamt up in Euro-land to pump €60bn per month into the Euro, starting in March. That's quantitive easing money lobbed in at the bond end which flows through to the more affluent end of the market - whilst trying to stop the Euro from capsizing. Pass the bubbly.
• Cyber attacks, of course: If ever I pick up a technical journal, the front cover has something about cyber attacks. As we drift further into Internet of Things and clever cars, the predictions are about off-shored nation state engineering of cyber attacks.
• Loony tunes: What do I know, but it all seems to be going very wobbly in America, what with the President on his farewell tour and Trump having a love-fest with that Alaskan tea-party Palin woman. Large chunks of America seem to love all this stuff.
• China broken and fatter: After its share price rises, China is now jittery and struggling - which is knocking through to everyone else. There's also that recently rescinded 'one child' gap creating a kind of population time-bomb as it ascends into and beyond the workplace. There's also a new obesity and diabetes healthcare epidemic, as well as the west working out how many ways to sell sticks (cigarettes) to the Chinese.
• Climate Change: Should be in the list, but somehow the 62 people = 50% wealth or .1% people = 80% wealth signpost away from this topic.

There's more, of course, but that'll do: The World Economic Forum presentations are in a different vein:

• Top technology trends - Buying that gold Rolex just got easier: Yes - a last minute Christmas $20k gift, bought via an iPhone app. The related trends are: The age of everywhere (like IoT)/ data to add context/ on-demand inventory/ true global commerce/ virtual reality shopping
  
  And my personal favourite - "sustainable shopping" - that's "buy/use/sell" to you and me and will probably appear in Ebay's tag line anytime soon.
• Greatest users of mobile eCommerce?Why, the Brits! Then the Germans and in third place the Americans. 28% of all eCommerce in Britain is mobile generated. Shop till you drop?
• Healthcare in the home: Use of sensors and home monitoring, which is already underway. Then it talks about delivering medicines from one room in the home to another by drone.
  
  Ok. I guess the presentations don't really want to give away anything that could seriously make money.
• Gender equality: Using the index of 0 to 1 for parity of representation, women score 0.0 on Politics, 0.6 on economics and close to 1.0 on Education and Healthcare. For the conference, they'd score 0.18, which is still a low representation.
• Fourth Industrial Revolution Billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge. Possibilities multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
  
  Let's face it, there's a lot of people in the rich list that made it with software. There'll be plenty more with all this stuff. Assuming that the government/commerce/citizen triangle can be figured out.
• I, and a Robot The storyline that workers will have greater employment opportunites if their occupation undergoes some degree of computer automation. Just watch out if you see anyone designing a Cylon or a Replicant.

So if the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the overall theme of the conference, with 1) Automation, 2) China, 3) Stuttering emerging markets and 4) What Britain decides to do in Europe all in the mix, then perhaps we could expect some interesting viewpoints?

More likely it's a choreographed move away from the ongoing themes of bankers gone wild, new war zones, terrorism, migration and climate?

Then again, the folk at the conference can probably work out that there's money to be made from the fourth industrial revolution, and maybe it's better for them to keep all the really good stuff secret.

The Hateful Eight in Tarantino's Movieverse

Ever since the Vega Brothers turned up split between two Tarantino movies (Vic played by Madsen in Reservoir Dogs and Vincent played by Travolta in Pulp Fiction) I've been aware of the emerging Tarantino Universe.

The most obvious reference would probably be in the $5 milkshake scene in Pulp Fiction when Uma Thurman's character describes Fox Force Five (i.e. Kill Bill) to John Travolta's character. This was long before the Kill Bill movie was made, of course.

Tarantino indicates that The Hateful Eight is his eighth movie and indeed it is emblazoned across the start. In practice, there's a few more out there where he had a significant role such as True Romance or Natural Born Killers. I reckon the real-time chronology of their settings would be something like:

1. Django Unchained
2. The Hateful Eight
3. From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (DVD only)
4. Inglorious Basterds
5. Reservoir Dogs
6. True Romance
7. Natural Born Killers
8. Four Rooms
9. Jackie Brown
10. Death Proof
11. Planet Terror (kind of - e.g. the Missing Reel effect)
12. From Dusk Till Dawn
13. From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (DVD only)
14. Curdled (a play)
15. Pulp Fiction
16. Kill Bill Volume 1
17. Kill Bill Volume 2

Others have drawn complex diagrams showing the interdependencies between these movies in Tarantino's 'Realer than Real' Universe and the 'Movies Movie' Universe, which contains the kind of films his characters from Realer than Real would go to see.

For me it was the Ultra Panavision 70mm 2.76:1 version of this newest Tarantino movie. This was proper event cinema, an overture before the film, a popcorn intermission.

The outdoor scenes looked stunning on this ultra-wide format and when a large part played out inside Millie's Haberdashery (the stagecoach roadhouse) at times you could every nook and cranny of the room, which became useful for looking out for clues towards other activities.

I can't really talk about plot (which works on different levels) and being a Tarantino, there's some stark and flinch-inducing moments.

At a kind of deconstructed level there's a setup in the snowy wilds of Wyoming, and then an extended play-like format in the roadhouse, based around a series of deliberately archetypal western characters including bounty hunters, sheriffs and a hangman, still raw from the Civil War.

My first impression was of a somewhat slow-burn movie, but progressively the howling winds and snow and burrow into the subconscious.

As I became further immersed in this world I realised I'd got no clue about how things would turn out. Tarantino's pacing was like a Fibonacci spiral, cranking up as the movie progressed.

Sure, I could recognise some leading clues, but there was no way that I could have predicted what actually took place.

vintage downton alien

An intriguing photography-related article appeared across some of the media feeds over the last day or two.

For some time I've been tinkering wth 'old-school' analogue lenses to use with modern digital cameras. In my case they have been inexpensive yet high-quality ones which can be connected to the latest digital still and movie cameras. Good control of depth of field to get that movie-like blurriness, compactness coupled with simple manual control.

It turns out that the professionals are doing it too. The sharpness and extended depth of field of modern kit has created a need for extensive post-processing to get the right 'feel' for the some pieces. Period dramas get singled out for attention, although I'd expect anything with a more arty look to need that blurriness.

Instead of trying to post process it, some of the film and high-end television cameramen are now recommending the use of so called 'vintage' lenses to create the effect naturally as part of the filming.

Downton Abbey gets mentioned in the articles, as does the buying and selling of lenses from well-known movies classic such as Alien.

Although, I'm not sure that Alien was going for a period drams look when it was created?

bicycle targets and silencers

I've loaded my annual targets for my cycling for 2016 and am already on the way (just).

More bizarrely, I noticed the Daily Telegraph encouraging a bicycle target aimed at buying a 'dream bicycle' for Jeremy Corbyn.

It's another dig by the newspaper that encouraged non-Labour supporters to spend £3 to, in the Telegraph's words, 'destroy the Labour party'. This time the campaign appears more whimsical, but still runs the dog-whistle politics of destabilisation.

A leading proponent of these subliminal high frequency influences has been UK-living non-dom Lynton Crosby, who bizarrely secured a knighthood for his extremely well-paid strategising to get Cameron elected. Surely the cash should have been the reward enough, but as he doesn't appear to like Cameron, maybe the 'Sir' was akin to a silencer?

Deutschland '83

With yesterday's passing reference to secret services, I remembered I've been watching some spy films recently. There's the James Bond style fast action ones but then a whole genre of slower paced movies, usually with the Berlin Wall included somewhere.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy which re-appeared on TV in its movie form with Gary Oldman a few day ago. A bunch of the people that moved into later spy television series were in the cast, so last year gave us other beige-world dramas with rain, double decker buses and German borders.

London Spy (shown at the end of last year) was of a similar slow pace - I had a look through the shooting script and there are only about 40 spoken words in the first four pages. Of course, the spy aspect was secondary in that particular story, although it followed the conventions.

Earlier in 2015 we had 'The Game' which was set in the 70s and featured plenty of intra episode plot points to remember. I suppose that's why its easier to get something like 'Death in Paradise' recommissioned, with every episode self-contained comprising 1)a murder 2)some false leads 3)a grand reveal - often with something that only the clever detective could spot 4)a side line jolly jape like buying a rusty boat or learning to water-ski badly.

Anyway, its a long way around to saying I've been watching Deutschland '83 over the last couple of weeks and am thoroughly enjoying it.

There may be some remarkable co-incidences that help the story along, but it seems to be a good way to produce a snappy alternative to the frequently brown-toned spy format. The filming itself is also super saturated and entertainingly framed.

We get the East German border guard who is forced to become a double agent in the West and the inevitable culture shock when he sees the supermarkets for the first time (Sweet dreams are made of this) and the humorous hardship of another double agent forced to stay in the wealthy west as well as rafts of other passing characters.

Set in the 80s at the peak of the Reagan missile deployments, we get Nena's 99 Luftballon playing on the radios both sides of the wall, with the original lyrics that the balloons triggered a nuclear alert. In the German song it was a suspected UFO and some suggestions of street riots whilst the English version had a software bug and political escalation. They both scrambled jet fighters with flying knights thinking they were Captain Kirk. Oh well.

And that's just a side line in this fast moving and sometimes deliberately awkward spy piece. I'm finding it a delight to watch and a whole other style for some of the spy genre to consider. It shares some spirit with 'Good Bye, Lenin!' which is a German movie set just after the wall came down.

So here's Nena, mainly in German but on this subversive version with a bit of French added to the chanson.

semper occultus

I've been receiving password renewal reminders for some of my secret squirrel accounts.

I've used the relevant one-shot security token for logging-in.

I know the old password and I know how to create a new rule-compliant one which is at least x characters long, has no words in it, includes numbers blah blah blah.

Yet, after I create the new one, it is only working with some of the systems that are supposed to be supported. I sense I'll be needing to call the help desk about this.

far out in the red sky

Far out in the red-sky
Far out from the sad eyes
Strange, mad celebration
So softly a supergod dies

rise of the refrigerators

I've been looking at some of the new technology from CES this week.

Among the items that seems to have received disproportionately high coverage are the new generation refrigerators, which are now Internet of Things enabled.

The refrigerator is becoming the newest robot to need to be obeyed.

I've been an early adopter of IoT technology around the home and we have various devices like Nest, Hue, music and automated fireplace controls that work from WiFi/Zigbee signalling. Hubs R Us etc.

A key facet for me is that IoT should be quiet technology. By that I mean it does its thing without needing to be obviously present. The technology should be hidden away, yet these newest devices seem to be the opposite.
Their design point reminds me of building surfaces in Shanghai or Tokyo - or on a modest scale Leicester Square.

Brightly lit animated and flashy, like a reverse version of form over function. Limited function dictating the entire form.

I can almost imagine the meetings at Samsung, LG or Philips.

"See if you can figure out how to put a flat panel television screen onto this white surface."

And lo, they have done it. There's a fridge that now has a glass panel in the front that is dark - like those glass fronts on office meeting rooms or showers in Novotels, you know the ones that can go misty at the tap of a button. In this case the glass is dark but goes clear when you tap it.

Yes, you can see inside the fridge without opening the door! And then there's a special foot sensor which, when a foot is put in the right place on the floor will automatically open the fridge door.

The demonstrator here looks thoughtful...

"Manual doors are so 20th Century"/"Does it come in black?"/"That'll attract fingerprints"/"What about the other three doors?"/"It's not completely dark, I can see inside before I've tapped it"/"Now I'll always need Fortnum's fridge goods so nosy neighbours can only see the good stuff"/"My next kitchen will be styled on an aircraft maintenance facility"...and so on.

So are these kitchen hubs totally pointless options? Who am I to say. I suppose if I was staying away from home and had one of these in a temporary apartment then it would make a conversation piece?

But practically - will the food lose that much freshness when the fridge door is opened? And what happens to that handy part of the door where the milk gets stored? As for the foot control - they can sell the feature that it doesn't respond to cats, dogs or small children, I suppose. An example of a solution looking for a problem.

Then there's the 'flat panel TV glued to the door' type fridges. Proper computer hubs, turning one of the simplest and most reliable kitchen appliances into one of the one most likely to go wrong and need rebooting. Internet browser enabled, of course. And capable of monetisation. Add an ordering option to the front so that when the bottled capers or cranberries are getting low they can automatically be re-ordered. Guess what? They've also added a 'fridge housekeeping function' so that you can drag and drop the fridge inventory as well as its 'use by' dates. So many things to go wrong with this one, and an ugly great black mirror to live with in the kitchen too. I suppose if it does crash then it could re-order its entire content automatically.

Much more fun would be to create the (c) rashbre central fridge cam which records fridge accesses and alerts when the last yoghurt/can of beer has been taken. Maybe add an optional "Midnight munchies suppression" feature.

I understand that the marketeers want to take punt on some of this stuff, but I'm not sure how many people will want a row of LCD screens distracting their kitchens.

"Open the fridge bay door, Hal"

should I get a 45 million to 1 lotto ticket ? - oh, go on then...

I must stop my weekly UK lotto gambling.

It's only been funded by sales of my novel, the funds from which seeded my tiny lottery fund out of which I bet on a ticket every week. Despite the old odds of 14 million to 1, I managed a few wins that kept the fund topped up (reinvestment - none of the wins were that spectacular).

At some stage along the way they doubled the entry cost, with the entry stake moving from £1 to £2. Maybe it was an attempt to hide the falling size of the main prizes as less people were entering the bet.

More recently, with the size of the jackpot still falling, Camelot/Lotto decided to change/rig the odds by adding another ten balls to the system, moving the odds to 45 million to 1. Maybe they took advice from their sole shareholder/owner, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan?

Unsurprisingly, the revised odds have created more weeks without a jackpot winner at all (like we all notice?), and so eventually, after some 13 weeks, they are invoking a payout based upon a different rule.

More surprisingly, in those blank payout weeks I have managed to win couple of small prizes! Guess what? Another con. In the old days a small win might be £10 or £25 which would keep a small-time gambler like me running for plenty of weeks. This time my small win was - a free entry to the next Lotto game. I remember the old negotiating tactic (from the eminently practical Karrass probably) - It runs along the lines of "If you have to give something away give something that is cheap to you but of perceived good value to the recipient".

So they give me a free entry - which would cost me £2 but they know is essentially useless because the odd of it winning are so low.

I get it that the new odds will create a headline grabbing piece of free publicity every 10 weeks or so, when the non-wins accumulate enough to give a big payout.

So yes, I will enter this weeks lottery, but unless I win something then this may also be the perfect time to cancel my recurring random bet.

Dickensian text messaging

I've been enjoying that BBC series 'Dickensian' which is now on around episode 6 of 20. Take a bundle of Dickens characters and put them together in a closed world and see how they interact. The stories are all from a time before the main Dicken's novels but have a similar episodic feel to them.

Set in east London, with a daily cliffhanger ending, murders, a pub frequented by many of the players and even a wedding that could go a bit wrong...Why it sounds like another show on the BBC, except the cor blimey Cockney is less pronounced in this than in modern day Eastenders.

If Eastenders is like an 'X-Factor' soap, mainly brash and sensationalism, then Dickensian reminds me more of a 'Strictly' version, still with scenes of anguish and mayhem, but somehow with more of a heart. It even tickles me to see Stephen Rea playing Bucket from the Yard with a smile in his eye.

The extensive and well detailed set reminds me of something from a Punchdrunk production and is being well used, although I suppose the roaming camera will eventually run out of novel angles.

I'm enjoying the simple pleasure of the series. Some of the plots are a little contrived, but the spirit of the production has a warmth that seems just right for this time of year. It may often be snowing in the streets of this particular part of East London, and there may be a permanent mist hanging in the alleyways and by the dockyard, but I'm still interested to see how Bucket is influenced by Venus the Taxidermist, or whether Arthur Havisham's disinheritance was for *ahem* another reason fleetingly alluded to in the shared digs with Compeyson.

Really there's so many rich resources to deploy across the realm of Market Street, with its Curiosity Shop, Mantalini's, Scrooge and Marley's offices, The Cratchits, Bumble's Workhouse and Fagin's Lair. Somehow the twenty 30 minute episodes are not enough to do full justice to these 'Greatest character hits' from Dickens.

And just when I think Eastenders relies upon telephone-based drama too much, with text messages, missed calls and all, I see that Dickensian has a similar device. Except they shout "Boy", and pass their handwritten note and a penny to the nearest Short Message Service. Properly voice activated and long before Siri.

new Apple - sorry Swiss Alp watch handles scarce commodity and allows reconnection

I was always wary of square faced watches unless they bore the inscription 'Casio' or similar. Although, come to think of it, I suppose I'd not really class that Apple device as a watch.

I see that H. Moser & Cie. have produced this interesting revision to the category, with a limited edition that has a 100 hour power source and no need for text, phone calls or even sketches or heart-beats.

It is slightly more expensive than the Apple watch though, at around $25,000, although I'm wondering if I'd change the strap to something with an orange rather than apple green backing?

To be honest though, I must admit to a sneaking preference to one of their round designs, rather than the square one, even if it is a little more expensive.