Semi-Ambivalent

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The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.

Daniel Webster

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A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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A ship in a harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are for.

 John A. Shedd

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The Case for Coding

Update: See what I've built since writing this post: http://www.openadtools.com/

            As I have mentioned before, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to start learning how to code. Before the start of the year I had a vague idea of why coding was valuable, but I always assumed that I could always count on someone else, who’s brain didn’t bleed upon clicking ‘view source’, could handle it. A whirlwind of reading on the topic since then has made me realise how wrong I was - coding is essential.

            Computers are pervasive in our everyday society. It is becoming virtually impossible to work in a job or exist in the world without coming into contact with a computer of some kind. Computers wake me up, remind me of appointments and store my memories. They help me manage my to-do list, let me keep in contact with everyone who matters and entertain me when I am bored. I found my job, which depends on computers, through using a computer - and the list of jobs that could only exist in a world dominated by computers is rising, fast. When I see someone failing to understand a basic computer-based task I give them the same look my father (a mechanic) gives me when I turn a screwdriver the wrong way or struggle to change a tire. Ironically the majority of problems he grew up fixing on cars can now only be fixed with the aid of a computer. With computers so prevalent, the ability to manipulate software is invaluable. People who can code can actually change the way the world works around them. Being able to code today is like knowing how to build a house was in the days of the Wild Wild West – vast acres of cheap land have opened up, brimming with opportunity, and all it takes is someone to take a risk and apply their skills to make a fortune.

            Most of us are perhaps unlikely to consider a career change to programmer, but when you hear that Facebook pays new hires (straight from a computer science degree) a signing bonus of $50k, a salary of $100k per year, $5k to relocate to California (as if anyone needed to be paid to relocate there!?) and over $120k in stock… you surely freak out a little bit. Those astronomical wages aren’t being paid because Facebook is overly generous – they are in the middle of a hiring war with the other tech titans of Silicon Valley (and the world) because the ability to program is severely in demand. Google, LinkedIn and Twitter are offering similar wage packages. In January 2011 Google offered all employees a 10% raise across the board, coupled with a tax-free $1000 dollar bonus, in part because as many as 20% of Facebook’s employees have been recruited from Google. I like to think that even if I become a fraction as good at coding as that computer science grad in my spare time, I could learn to automate a few recurring tasks in my current job and maybe earn myself a healthy bonus.

            If you want to start your own business, the returns are even greater. The majority of startups are now tech startups. Even Groupon, with a simple non-technical business model, is hiring a large tech team to help it automate processes and sift through buying data to optimise its products. Sure it is possible to be a non-technical founder of a startup, but I would argue that you can only manage what you know – would you volunteer to coach a football team if you had never kicked a ball? If you don’t speak the same language as a programmer, or understand how they think, then how will you manage them? Would they even respect you enough to work hard for your cause? Wouldn’t they rather work for a manager at another tech startup that isn’t just a ‘suit’, that actually understands the technical challenges they are facing?

            At this point you would be right to ask whether all of this is a temporary blip in the market – an imbalance caused by too little Math / IT emphasis in schools that will eventually be ironed out as people see the value and move towards those roles. Although I do believe that addressing this imbalance will be attempted, I doubt that the market will correct itself anytime soon. All of the evidence is pointing to us being on a cusp of a new industrial revolution.

            Three hundred years ago the wealthiest people owned the land. Agriculture and shelter were the source of all wealth and those who had the most land by default had the most power and wealth. Wars were fought and atrocities committed to expand territories. Then suddenly 120 years ago the industrial revolution turned everything on its head. Machines started automating jobs normally done by people and whole new industries were born. Agriculture now only makes up 2% of the economy in the UK but in those days before the industrial revolution it was the leading employer by miles. With the upheaval came social struggles but ultimately the revolution generated unprecedented sums of wealth. Titans of industry such as Dale Carnegie and Henry Ford and their contemporaries became wealthier than land-barons, kings and even many countries. The factories and processes that made this possible became worth more than the land they were built on. Since the 1990’s the same shift is occurring – the information economy is destroying manufacturing jobs and further automating tasks. Computer programs are making machines more efficient whilst making old style machines obsolete. Now the computer programs are worth more than the machines they run on, moving manual workers with no ability to code even further down the pecking order. With the advent of 3D printing, nano-technology and advances in Artificial Intelligence, the list of jobs that can only be done by a human is shrinking.

            The World’s biggest companies are now tech companies – Apple is worth $600 billion: this makes it the most valuable company in the world with only 60,000 employees. To put that in perspective, Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple products, largest exporter from China and employer of 1.2 million employees, is worth less than 1% of Apple. Apple is worth more than the entire economies of Greece, Portugal and Spain in part because the clever programming in their products helps automate and make inexpensive, tasks that were costly or time-consuming previously. I know people will laugh when they hear me equate Apple and inexpensive, but just owning an iPhone gives you a GPS, communication device, a virtual secretary and more access to information than Bill Clinton had when he was president. Apple isn’t the only pioneer of the information age - Google’s entire mission is to “organise the World’s information” and has built a $200 billion business on using that information to serve Ads. Facebook is set to be worth $100 billion on its knowledge of consumer behaviour.

            Rather than my starting point, convincing myself it would be nice to know how to code, my reading around the subject has made me feel like it is a biological imperative for survival. It is possible to squeeze in a career around the cracks created by these titans of tech and there will always be manual work in some areas, but anyone who is ambitious should seriously be considering some heavy study time. Luckily, learning is easier than ever (and free!). Resources like OpenCourseWare give you access to world-class lectures on the subject and I have really enjoyed letting Codecademy hold my hand through the baby steps I have taken so far, but there are thousands of other sites like this available. Hell, if 12-year-old kids are building apps by now then surely a grown adult can manage. In fact, it means that I had less time than I thought – what am I doing still writing this blog post?

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"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."

- Woody Allen

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"When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion"

- Abraham Lincoln

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The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or of a lack of verbal interest is just fucking lunatic.

- Stephen Fry

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Of Fish, Trees and Lemons

“Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Einstein

            A great feel-good quote, particularly welcome in these times of hardship. Unfortunately, in these times of hardship, the pond has all but dried up and a generation of fish is being forced to climb trees for a living. In the 3 months between handing in my dissertation and my graduation in 2009, I applied to over 120 jobs before getting my first offer – a low paid telesales job ill-suited to a recent Economics MSc grad. I have since worked my way into a great job (albeit through an unusual route), but I still look back on this depressing time and rue the colossal waste of effort that went into researching, preparing, applying and interviewing for these positions. I was one of the lucky ones – it turns out that half of all new graduates are unemployed or underemployed. Think of the incredible waste of human ingenuity that represents – millions of the countries best and brightest doing no productive work; spending all their energy simply trying to convince employers of their worth. Worse is the loss of self-worth that comes with eventually barely getting a job that (excuse the elitism) is beneath the level you have invested so much time and money in achieving. How many people take this to heart and give up entirely on the original intellectual curiosity that drove them to study? I don’t know a single employed person with too small a workload, and there are millions of intelligent, unemployed people out there with value to add: why are they not being employed?

            The market for jobs is there exists a high degree of asymmetric information. This means that in a transaction, one party has information that another can’t possibly know, that affects the value of that transaction. The classic example is lemons (as in a faulty used-car, not the fruit). Because there is a chance that the car you buy used will turn out to be faulty, you factor in the perceived risk and offer less than the market rate would normally be. This price only appeals to sellers of lemons, as those with the best quality cars refuse to sell at that price (better to keep it). Over time the market will eventually break down as lemons become a bigger proportion of the market, rational people stop buying used and buy only brand new cars - used cars are left to rust on the lot. When there is economic uncertainty, it only hastens the decline because the cost of a mistake is that much higher. In the market for jobs, even the definition of a ‘lemon’ is changing – a person considered a catch five years ago might not have even the basic credentials required now, as employer’s standards are shifting upwards – the Oxbridge types (the sparkling new cars of this world) are on temporary discount while the banking sector recovers, and the cost of hiring a lemon is potentially losing your own job.

            There is a phrase that used to be used in the computer industry – “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. In those days IBM was the standard, and although you could potentially risk it and go for a less well know provider that may turn out cheaper and better, you knew by buying IBM your job would be safe, regardless of how it worked out. This situation follows the same sentiment – even if that Oxbridge grad screws up spectacularly, your boss won’t blame you – the boss will blame the grad (“despite being the best candidate on paper, he just didn’t work out…”). Take a risk with a promising and likeable candidate with a less prestigious education and the blame will fall squarely on your shoulders (“what where you thinking, I knew hiring that guy was a bad idea from the start…”). If your goal were to make the best possible choice in hiring, you would adopt a ‘Moneyball’-esque strategy of finding diamonds in the rough. In reality people are busy, tired, incompetent and afraid of losing their jobs – in this situation the goal is to just make an acceptable choice with the minimal risk.

            This is assuming that your underlying assumptions about cost/benefit and risk are all correct - that additional person may be projected to bring you three times their wage in cost savings or new revenue, but what if the economic situation worsens? What if a big supplier leaves or you are forced to shift in priority? People are expensive to hire and more so to fire; so you have to be damn certain they are essential before you start the application process. Even then why sift through thousands of applications when you can ask your employees to put the word out? Going back to our car metaphor: this is akin to buying a car from a friend-of-a-friend that can vouch for the seller’s integrity. What if the risk or benefit can’t even be quantified in the first place? Facebook came from a Harvard dorm room and not a corporate board room because nobody would have been able to produce a realistic spreadsheet to calculate to prove that would be worth 100 billion one day – Zuckerberg had nothing to lose and everything to prove so he tossed aside the spreadsheets and made something great on a hunch.

            Given this new reality, what can you do to overcome it? I would argue the answer is: more Zuckerbergs. Big businesses are great at crunching the numbers to find new opportunities and throwing money at them until they see a return. However in this environment they can’t trust their numbers and will be conservative because they have everything to lose, opening up a gap in the market. What does an unemployed graduate have to lose? Aren’t all numbers above zero an improvement? What big businesses achieve by throwing money at a problem, a sufficiently organized and motivated person or team can achieve by through time, persistence and a bit of creativity. The cost of starting a web-based business has become almost negligible: just a few quid a month in web hosting. With incredible websites like Codecademy, OpenCourseWare and Khan Academy, you can teach yourself all of the necessary skills for free! Funding for startups is more prevalent than ever with every city vying to become the next silicon valley, every investor looking to have the next big thing in his portfolio and hundreds of newly-minted millionaires coming from the IPOs of big names like Groupon, LinkedIn and soon to be Facebook. The best part of starting your own business is that hiring yourself eliminates the problem of asymmetrical information – you don’t need to prove to yourself how awesome you are!

            Now I know not everyone can be the next Internet billionaire, but I can’t imagine looking back on learning a skill like how to build a webpage or writing a blog and thinking “I wish I hadn’t wasted my time…”. For that matter, I can’t imagine an employer that wouldn’t be impressed that you had built your own website, or that wouldn’t be interested in reading your blog or hearing about the skills you have learned during your time between jobs. Activities like these separate you from the pack and prove to the employer that you aren’t likely to be a lemon – lemons aren’t self-starters like you.

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The Earth is NOT full

            My New Year’s resolution this year was to do as much as possible of the following things: write blog posts, learn code and watch TED talks (if you haven’t heard of TED check it out immediately!). Recently however, I watched the first TED talk that I didn’t like: “The Earth is full”, by Paul Gilding. To save you from watching, the summary of Paul’s talk is “there are too many of us, we are all gonna die!” What annoyed me enough to write a blog post was the lack of evidence used to support his premise, in what is normally an arena for smart, reasoned arguments based on fact. He instead employs vague threats and Daily Mail-style fear mongering. This is an actual quote from his talk: “I could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this, but I won't because, if you want to see it, that evidence is all around you. I want to talk to you about fear.” … I hear enough about fear on the nightly news Paul; I’m here for the numbers.

            The central argument, that the Earth is getting too full with people to support further growth, is a logical and intuitive one – a finite planet can’t support an infinite amount of people. By Paul’s back-of-a-napkin estimation we need about 1.5 Earths to support us at our current population – never mind the 9 billion people we forecast by 2050 (where it actually levels off, because richer, more educated people have less babies on average). Call me an optimist, but I disagree.

            We are always more receptive to bad news, and because of this, doomsday predictions can be found throughout history – as far back as 200AD in Roman times Tertullian (a prolific early Christian author) said “We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.” With the benefit of hindsight we can see that his claim was ridiculous – the human race has exploded in population since his time, whilst also increasing in prosperity. In Economics we label this doomsday pessimism ‘Malthusian’ after a 19th century Economist called Thomas Malthus, who predicted that because food production increases linearly (1 bushel, 2 bushels, 3 bushels), and population increases exponentially (2 people, 4 people, 8 people) we will inevitably hit a population ceiling, leading to widespread famine and war.

            You will agree this is fairly logical and makes sense intuitively; eventually we will reach a productive limit to what we can grow – however what Malthus got wrong was how long we had to hit that limit. He however did not (and arguably could not) predict something called the ‘green revolution’. Centred mostly in India, it involved the modernisation of farming techniques combined with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, causing food production efficiency to drastically shoot up. The green revolution made it suddenly possible to grow vastly more food from the same land and is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. This improvement has continued, as we are nowhere near done improving agriculture - calories produced per day per person globally went up 23% between 1960 and 2000, despite the world population doubling during that period.

            Whether it is improved farming techniques, the steam engine or the Internet, improvements in technology are the driving force behind the prosperity people like Tertullian and Malthus could never imagine. It took less than 100 years between the first flight by the Wright Brothers and the first landing on the moon. A Masai warrior on a mobile phone in the middle of Kenya has a better phone connection than President Reagan had 25 years ago. If Mr Masai is on a smartphone using Google, he has access to more knowledge and information than President Clinton had 15 years ago. Since the first computer we have been benefiting from Moore’s law, that predicts price vs performance for computers doubles over 12-24 months – that’s why the mobile phone he is carrying is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the 70’s. Better still, things that he would normally have to pay for are becoming available for free – Google Maps, Wikipedia and Skype give him access to more information and connectivity than at any point in history. Spotify, Youtube and free game apps give him more hours of free entertainment than he could know what to do with. More importantly, online how-to and educational videos are making it possible for Mr Masai, or any sufficiently motivated person to master a subject without even signing up for a library card; never mind attending university.

            Despite all the talk of recession, in the west today the majority of people under the ‘poverty line’ still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, television, mobile phones, KFC, air conditioning and cars. A century ago the kings of this planet could have never dreamed of this luxury. If all you did was read the news for the last 100 years you would no doubt be pessimistic, but consider the following: worldwide child mortality has fallen 10x, per capita income has increased 3x and the human lifespan has doubled. The cost of food is down 10x, cost of electricity is down 20x, transportation prices are down 100x and the cost of communication is down 1000x! The price of solar power dropped 50% last year and is now cheaper than diesel in rural India. Remarkably, Global literacy has gone from 25% to 80% in the last 130 years. Steve Pinker has shown that, despite what the news says, we are actually living during the most peaceful time in human history. What’s more, the rate of innovation is actually getting increasingly faster - as new technologies fuel faster growth in other innovative areas, these improvements are feeding off each other, pushing us forwards at an exponential rate.

            This is all without the unpredictable effect of 3D printing, robotics, A.I. (Watson winning at Jeopardy), nano-materials or other unforeseen innovations will have on our prosperity. These technologies, combined with the democratisation of knowledge on the Internet are already leading people to do great things we didn’t think possible. An organisation called DIY drones, recently designed (working for free in their spare time) an unmanned aerial vehicle with 90% of the functionality of the U.S. military’s 35,000 dollar Raven, for under 300 dollars. Are the Steve Jobs or Bill Gates of our generation tinkering around in his garage with a 3D printer today, on course to change the world? At present we have just over 2 billion people connected to the internet – over the next ten years over 3 billion people are predicted to join us – who can possibly predict what they have to say, what they will want to consume and what innovations they will drive? All I know is that we are sure to think of a way to accommodate them.

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Macedonopoly - travel with no agenda

            Those of you that I have pestered enough to read this blog on a regular basis (thanks mum) will know that after a recent trip to Krakow I swore off drinking in London – asserting that my money was better spent on holidays in poor Eastern European countries. Soon after making this pledge I booked a trip to Macedonia. It may seem an unusual choice for a holiday, but the beer averages at £0.73p a pint and I decided on a whim that it would be more interesting than Serbia, my close second choice. A small country in the middle of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania can’t not be interesting:  being in the firing line of the Ottoman empire and even founding it’s own under Alexander the Great, it must have something going on.

            And that was all I had to go on when I convinced six of my friends to come with me. The exchange rate making the currency akin to Monopoly money was a big enough draw for most. However at one point I had to whip out Wikipedia and quick-fire some random Macedonian facts at one friend who wasn’t convinced: birthplace of Mother Theresa, same GDP as Jamaica, first province of the Roman Empire, and so on, ad nauseum, until he gave in. Before we left I read a couple of bits and pieces online, and asked someone I had met travelling in Croatia what bars/clubs were good (he had done an internship in Macedonia), but I didn’t bother with the guidebook. I like to travel under the assumption that the majority of what you read in the guidebook is irrelevant or better learned in a hostel or from a local. Too many times I have wasted hours staring into a guidebook and using it as a crutch; now I prefer just to wing it (much like my packing strategy).

            Ditching the guidebook forces you to interact a bit more with the locals or fellow hostel guests, but it also brings another important benefit: freedom. What I mean by this is freedom from ticking every box, seeing every statue, every obscure museum and following every out of date restaurant tip. Ignorance really is bliss, and if I don’t know that this was the bench that Alexander the Great once sat on to tie his shoe, I doubt it makes my trip any less special. When I reach this point in a discussion, people usually ask me “aren’t you worried you are going to miss something?”.  Yes, that is entirely possible, but it is also likely that stubbornly collecting landmarks like Pokémon will mean I miss a chance encounter, or that I am too exhausted to make conversation and learn something new the natural way. The truth is the vast majority of what you see isn’t going to be the highlight of your holiday anyway. If you hadn’t heard of it before you left, chances are it isn’t that important – and if it is, and you don’t walk into it by accident, people will guide you in the right direction. In my experience hostel staff are painfully friendly and will exhaustively list everything you should see in the city (given unlimited time) – fellow hostel guests are great for narrowing down that list and locals can lead you to the odd gem that isn’t even in the guidebook.

            Now I have held these views for a while but hadn’t properly tested them – either myself or a friend would research what to do or see long in advance of the trip, and take a guidebook along ‘just in case’. Question: so how did this no guidebook tour work out? Answer: surprisingly well. On the first night we managed to find the main square through pure serendipity, and wandered down a street to a bar. Upon sitting down, we saw what we eventually figured out to be Mother Theresa’s house! The next day, after wandering aimlessly through the Turksh bazaar, we randomly found a big Fortress, and after walking round the corner of it, happened upon an amazing view of the city. Back in the Turkish quarter, we chose somewhere that looked decent enough to sit and have a shisha. It was only when 3 days later we asked where a good shisha place was, that we were told that the best one in the city was (you guessed it) the one we had wandered into. We did the same thing with a nearby winery and the wine that we tried ended up being the nicest one in the duty-free as we were leaving.

This sort of thing happened the whole trip, and while it seems like blind luck, I think that it is actually bound to happen. Cities were designed by people, to make sense to other people: the culture may be different, but not that different. Now there are exceptions (London), but most cities can be navigated (minus the odd wrong turn) by wandering in the direction that ‘feels’ right. It sounds terrifying, especially in the age of smartphones, but I recommend you try it to liven up your brain cells a bit. You may start wandering into a dodgy area of town, but you can tell it’s dodgy and self-correct. I would argue that it is a way better method for exploring a new city than staring at a map – you stand out less as a tourist, you are forced to take in your surroundings and nothing is more rewarding than finding something based on a combination of intuition and chance. At worst you can just take a taxi – we never paid more than a quid or two.

At this point you may be thinking – “ok, but even if the beer is cheap, why go to a country that you know nothing about, that isn’t famous for anything and has no landmarks?” Good question: I had no convincing answer before I left, but I do now. It all ties back to freedom, in this case from two sources:

The favourable exchange rate was one source of freedom - the feeling of being able to afford anything we wanted really energised the entire trip. We got to feel how I imagine rich London bankers must feel, without having to be wankers (although we did find that power corrupts). Ordering two meals each, two Jaeger bombs at a time and buying endless rounds of drinks without even worrying about the bill was a brilliant experience everyone should experience. In Krakow it was just as cheap, but I hadn’t quite let go of the ‘tab anxiety’ living in London had drilled into me – this time I just let go and went nuts. All it took was a cheap flight to a neglected Eastern European country to get a sense of how lucky we actually are having grown up in a stable Western economy. One of the running themes of the holiday was saying “first world problems” any time someone complained about something – whilst a funny meme (ousting “that’s what she said” as the easiest way to raise a laugh in our group), it also does point out how full of shit we all are when we complain about flies in the ointment of our privileged lives.

The other source of freedom was the relative lack of must-see landmarks: we were free from ticking off all the must-see places you would get elsewhere in Europe. This, catalysed by the cheap booze, shifted the focus of the holiday from where we were, to the people we were there with. An intelligent bunch consisting of Mathematicians, Economists and even a Theoretical Physicist (geek alert!), my friends are also colossal idiots – in the way that only really smart people can be. We would talk our way through a wide range of topics, solving all the big questions both philosophical and sordid. The juxtaposition of brains and heavy drinking reminds me of an Economist article I read on the history of drinking societies amongst the educated in England; particularly the following quote sums up the nature of our conversations nicely:

“One story unearthed by Mr Withington involves a cleric and two lawyers in Yorkshire. Sitting in an alehouse, the trio “began to be merry” in a manner that started with a faux-Latin competition and ended with the cleric’s penis hanging out of his trousers while one of the lawyers burned it with his pipe.”

Much like the Cleric and Lawyers quoted above, our conversation often quickly degraded from civilized to debauched – at one point I remember arriving at a conclusion in a heated discussion about the economic rise of China, only to turn to my right and hear one of my friends conclude his conversation with “...and that’s how masturbation starts” – leaving us all in tears. Much of what was discussed can’t possibly repeated in this blog post (or remembered clearly), but judge the success of the trip by this: by the time we left Macedonia, my face was hurting from laughing too hard…

#firstworldproblems

[semiambivalent-blog]

Pack late and pack less

            Tomorrow, I go to Macedonia for 5 nights. I haven’t packed yet – and nor do I feel like I need to. This is the sort of thing that drives my well-organised mother mad, but maybe by explaining my thought process will bring a few more of you over to my side. So instead of packing (or sleeping) I will sit here and write this blog post.

            My first gripe with packing started when I was younger – I would pack everything in my suitcase all excited, weeks in advance, only to repeatedly raid the suitcase for my toothbrush, that t-shirt I liked, etc. So being a natural procrastinator, I started leaving packing to the last minute. Anyone who has had to pack in a rush knows that it quickly devolves into the equivalent of a black Friday shopping spree – everything is on sale and it won’t be there quick: stick everything that isn’t nailed down in your bag ‘just in case’. One day I managed to do this hung over, with very little sleep and in a rush, on my way to Reading Festival. In my child-like state I grossly overestimated the amount I could carry. Long story short, I arrived at a point, emotionally and physically exhausted, left behind struggling by the more sensible people I camped with, where I could go no further.  Shamefully I was reduced to just sitting on my bag and waiting for help until a friend came back to see where I got to. After that I knew something had to change.

            The morning of my next festival a year later I found myself, predictably hung over, tired and in a rush after waking up the wrong side of London. This time instead of shoving everything I thought I needed in a bag, I just walked into my house and grabbed five items – my toothbrush, a hoodie, a spare t-shirt and two pairs of spare underwear. Notice there was no tent or sleeping back on that list. We stopped at Tescos on the way and I managed to pick up everything I needed for 45 quid. The tent was so cheap I actually donated it afterward rather than take it back home – everything worked out surprisingly well and I realised that I didn’t actually need anything I normally would take.

            Taking this concept further I started purposefully limiting myself to just essentials as a kind of challenge to see what I could get away with. My highlight was touring Thailand for 18 days with only a gym bag full of shorts and vests. The woman at the check-in desk actually laughed in my face after I replied to her that ‘no, I didn’t have any bags to check in, just this rucksack’. I didn’t run into any issues in Thailand: I simply wandered around shops and bought the items I needed as I needed them. In fact, my trip was markedly better because of my limited wardrobe – for example I realised when I got there that I forgot to buy flip flops – everyone had a good laugh at my expense (I looked pretty out of place in jeans) so I wandered around Bangkok marketplaces on my first day with a mission. This was a better immersive experience than just wandering around looking at tourist tat and knock-off DVDs. As well as buying flip-flops (I actually ended up buying 4 pairs of these over my trip but that’s a different story), I got to frequent shops that actual Thai’s shopped in for their basic necessities – which again enriched my experience.

            The point is, in 96.72% of cases, the place you are going on holiday is populated with people very much like you – it stands to reason that they buy similar sorts of products to you, and therefore there will be shops selling what you need. It may be difficult to find what you want, and the brands may be unfamiliar, but that is all part of the reason we travel in the first place – to experience a different way of doing things. Funnily enough you can actually save yourself some money buying things there – the UK (and London in particular) is one of the most expensive places to live in the world, so it stands to logic that in many cases the outfits, toiletries and paraphernalia you are buying for your holiday will be cheaper once you get there (particularly if you learn how to bargain). The same goes for currency – on a recent trip to Poland the rate I was quoted at the post office was over 20% worse than what I was charged for withdrawing from an atm.

            I really applaud efforts to take this philosophy to its logical extremes – for example the “No Baggage Challenge” by Rolf Potts was pretty well done – he just kept what he needed in his coat pockets. I sometimes daydream about what I would do if plonked in the middle of Trafalgar square naked with nothing on me (I saw it in an episode of “Hustle”) – where would I run to hide, how would I convince/con my way back to safety? I like to think that the less you pack, the more you need to rely on your wits and problem-solving skills (the naked test being the biggest test I could think of), ultimately making your holiday less comfy, a bit harder to accomplish, but ultimately more intrinsically rewarding. Packing minimum is really a process to help us rethink that is really important on a holiday and it helps us unchain ourselves from the cycle of mindless consumerism we all fall into from time to time. So off to bed now: in the morning I may try sleepily spend a few minutes trying to stuff spare undies into my coat pocket before giving up and opting for a gym bag.

[semiambivalent-blog]

In Defence of Advertising

                  I work in marketing – when I tell people that I occasionally get this reaction: “oh so you try to trick people into buying crap they don’t need?”. I find criticism in this vein annoying and ignorant, but it isn’t just misguided pinkos that hold this view – the belief that advertising has no inherent value (and is even detrimental) is held by a huge swathe of society, including people I know to be intelligent and thoughtful. It is those people I am most hoping to convince with this article, as I attempt to defend advertising’s role in society.

                  In classical economics, it is believed that in a perfectly efficient market, advertising would cease to exist. This is because participants in such a model hold perfect information – the knowledge of all products, features and prices, as well as the ability to measure accurately their own wants and desires. In this scenario, the choice of what to consume essentially boils down to a maths equation. Although this helps predict a surprisingly large array of behaviours, any idiot on the street can see that this view is inherently flawed: we don’t have access to all the information, and we frequently make decisions that are less than desirable.

                  So at it’s most basic level, advertising exists to fill that information gap – you don’t know what you want, until you are made aware of its existence. Now if you are a business, there are two basic ways that you can spread the word about your product – directly through an advert, or indirectly through word of mouth. Word of mouth is an incredibly effective way to spread the word about a product, and I suppose was the first form of marketing – I invent the wheel, and I show my friend Ugh, who then tells his friend Jeffrey, and so on. The problem with this form of advertising is its speed – news travelled only as fast as a man could run, ride a horse, and later send a telegram. Even then it only spreads to people in the same social circle – for example there exist remote tribes that never adopted the wheel. Weak/non-existent property rights meant that nobody stood to benefit in promoting these products, so word of mouth remained the only method of dissemination available for the bulk of history. With the industrial revolution came the solidification of property rights and widespread use of the printing press – simultaneously increasing the profit of businesses selling products, widening the reach of advertising and decreasing its cost. The resulting economic boom catapulted the west into an unprecedented standard of living that the former economic world leader, China, is yet to catch up to.

                  Sure, you may say, but most advertising isn’t informative – it is deceptive and sometimes downright combative… and I would have to agree with you. Trust me, I hate the pop-ups, the infomercials, political ads, direct mail and spam just as much (and likely more) than you do. The truth is, in any human system that offers rewards; there will be malcontents that game the system. These ads work because they run their operations as a numbers game – if they send an email to 1000 people, they may just catch one sucker who will buy their product: scale this up to a million people, and you have made thousands in profit. Real marketing avoids this type of unscrupulous activity as a rule, because a real business trying to build a brand depends on repeat purchases to turn a profit. Compare this to the world of dating – the guy that reads ‘the game’ and chats up 10 or more girls in a club usually ends up going home with one. One-night-stands exist because talk is cheap and self-indulgence is fun. Spam adverts (in all forms) exist for the same reason – advertising space is cheap and given you reach enough people, a proportion of them will be caught in a moment of weakness. Those looking for a long-term relationship approach the scenario differently. They invest in romantic dates and learning more about their prospective partner, and aren’t likely to disappear as soon as they get their way. In the same way, it is a good rule of thumb, that because a brand is an expensive investment (in terms of money or brainpower) companies that invest heavily in quality advertising are more likely to produce higher quality products (why spend all that money building brand awareness if you then release a shitty product that undermines it?). In fact, the marketing department is often instrumental in the research into new products, sourcing feedback and ultimately fine-tuning the product to match what customers actually want, which benefits us all.

In a world where the most effective ads are usually run by the highest quality brands, can it actually be a good thing that they are manipulating our decisions? We naturally assume that in all decisions we weight the costs, tally the benefits and choose the best option. In reality this is rarely the case. The majority of purchases we make are of little consequence to our well being, and we make a lot of those decisions day-to-day. If you spent even 15 minutes deciding what brand of chewing gum to buy people would think you are crazy – what you actually do is look for a name your recognize, perhaps the one you had last time, and try to avoid peppermint because you know you hate it. The goal of a purchase is not to pick the very best option, it is to pick an acceptable option without spending too much time or effort on it. The actual brand you pick is purely emotional and based on several factors outside of your control – where it is placed on the shelf, what colour the package is, the jingle on the advert. People with brain damage to their emotional centers actually find a trip to the supermarket impossible – they stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision and find themselves unable to make a choice. Isn’t that advert lodged in the deep recesses in your brain actually making your life easier by making an inconsequential decision quicker? Even the big decisions in life, what house to buy, what car to drive, who to marry, all benefit from these emotional shortcuts because we are simply unable to calculate the complex possibilities of every outcome. We do more research (and therefore are less affected by ads that wither under scrutiny), but in the end it comes down to a gut decision. Like it or not, advertising has, in part, influenced that decision in return for helping you make it at all.

                  Despite my sunny disposition towards advertising, I still sick up a bit in my mouth when I hear about the size of some companies’ advertising budgets. The internet, and more recently social media is doing a lot to decrease this cost, but it still doesn’t seem right somehow – shouldn’t they just spend the money making better products? It seems logical until you factor in the economies of scale advertising can bring. A small local business, operating on word of mouth, can never produce in high enough quantities to lower cost significantly. Furthermore, they can’t accept a thinner profit margin because to do so would be to risk going out of business even in temporary slow periods. Unless they are extraordinarily good, they will find it difficult to grow larger than they are without advertising. Large multinationals advertise to the point of saturation, and therefore can benefit from economies of scale. They can also operate on a thinner margin because they are less at risk – it would take a hell of a disaster to put Pizza Express out of business (no matter how many offers they run), but a local family-run restaurant could be closed down by something as simple as a highway route change or a bad batch of anchovies. Consider also the side-effect of this massive outlay: all of the services we currently get for free and take for granted. Google and Facebook depend on advertising to offer their services, and the New York Times would be prohibitively expensive without the ads it runs. Isn’t this worth a little coercion, considering it is only really effective on decisions you care little about?

                  We should also question the assumption that advertising is just a cost, that it brings no benefit to the product. Was an Apple computer worth as much before the think different campaign? Would people pay so much for a Porsche if it didn’t make a statement about their net worth? People dismiss this argument by describing intangible or perceived value as frivolous, as somehow worth less than function. Steve Jobs knew that they are inseparable – by making a product beautiful and easy to use, you can make it more valuable to its user – in some cases it can be even more important than added functionality. For example, if I told you that you could be 10% more intelligent, but it would mean being 20% uglier, would you take the deal? I suspect most wouldn’t, but that is exactly the tradeoff that a mobile phone manufacturer makes when it stuffs in extra memory, making the phone case misshapen – a tradeoff that never happened at Apple. A great example of tangible vs intangible benefit comes from the famous Coke and Pepsi taste tests. With a blind taste test, in what was called the Pepsi challenge, it was discovered that people actually preferred the taste of Pepsi to Coke. Infuriated, Coke did their own test and found that people preferred Coke to Pepsi… who was right? Well they both were – Coke’s taste tests were not blind, so users could see that they were drinking Coke. After further research involving brain scans, they found that people actually liked the taste of Coke better when they could see the can: Coke’s advertising actually physically improved the taste! The same result occurred when doing blind taste tests of wine – only around 5-10% of people can actually taste the difference between cheap and expensive wine. So for the uninitiated, wine actually physically tastes better when you can see the posh packaging, hear about the region it is grown or are told how expensive it is! You may still treat this ‘perceived’ benefit as inferior than ‘real’ benefit, but you can’t deny its power.

                  I suspect intangible benefit gets a bad rap because it often fills a want, rather than a need. A house that is nicely decorated is more valuable, but we would gladly take a poorly decorated one if the alternative were life on the streets. It is true that tangible benefit is more likely to address the problems we need solving, but above a certain income level (enough to cover the basics), we don’t really need anything: taking care of what you want takes precedence. We live in world today with billions all arriving at this basic level of income at the same time, inevitably reaching for the same prosperity as the west. In such a world, with rising incomes and limited materials, the only way to satisfy our wants and avoid conflict is by increasing the size of the pie by creating more wealth. If effective advertising combined with clever product design can increase our perceived wealth, by increasing the proportion of value we derive from intangible goods, then maybe advertising can save us all. The writer G.K. Chesterton hit the nail on the head when he said “we are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders”.

[semiambivalent-blog]

Unintelligent Design

All hail the flying spaghetti monster! Worship Him! Obey Him! Be Touched by His Noodley Appendage for He is THE ONE! WWFSMD?

             That last part stands for “What Would the Flying Spaghetti Monster Do?” and no I haven’t gone crazy. Pastafarianism is a parody religion invented by a man called Bobby Henderson in response to the introduction of teaching Intelligent Design in Kansas State schools. Intelligent Design is a criticism of Darwin’s theory of evolution and a thinly veiled attempt to get religion back into science class. Now don’t get me wrong, I like to think I am a pretty spiritual guy. But organized religion, by its very nature, is not science, and it should never pretend to be.

            The flying spaghetti monster deity is a modern day ‘Russell’s Teapot’; philosopher Bertrand Russell coined this analogy to describe why the sceptic should not have to prove unfalsifiable claims. He describes that if he were to claim there was a teapot orbiting the Earth, that was too small for our most powerful telescopes to see, he would be described as a madman because he is unable to prove his assertion. However you would not be able to prove that there wasn’t such a teapot. Obviously the right thing to do would be to ignore him until he produced evidence (or started getting aggressive). However, in the case of religion, claims of the existence of a super-natural being, which science cannot prove, are based on the same principle as the teapot: you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist.

            So, in steps (or flies) the Spaghetti monster. Despite the fact that this is a made up religion, it uses all of the same logical and (often) illogical arguments that Religious-types use to defend their religions. You can’t prove there isn’t a Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the entire universe “after drinking heavily”, just like you can’t prove that God didn’t create the World in seven days. What about carbon dating you ask? Where did Dinosaurs come from if the world was only made a few thousand years ago? Well some Christians claim that God has put the bones of Dinosaurs there to test our faith, and that God changes the results of carbon dating to… make it a harder test? Pastafarianism, in a direct parody, believe that the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster) is there changing the results of carbon dating and planting evidence of Global warming “with his noodley appendage” to test the faith of Pastafarians.

            Followers of Pastafarianism (finally) acknowledge Pirates as ‘absolute divine beings’. Did you know Pirates stop Global Warming? They have provided evidence in the form of a chart showing correlation between the number of Pirates and World Temperature. Surely it is no coincidence that the home of modern piracy, Somalia, also has some of the lowest carbon emissions in the World! Pirates are so important to Pastafarians that they are required to wear full Pirate regalia as part of their religion. In fact, a student in America, who is a practicing Pastafarian by the name of Bryan Killian, was suspended from school for wearing full Pirate gear. Bryan argued that this violated his freedom of Religion: which the school dismissed as ridiculous. But is it? His school obviously didn’t believe in the FSM and claimed Bryan was being disruptive. Is it any less disruptive to wear a replica of a crucifixion, paint a dot on your head or wear a full burqa? Is it less offensive to wish someone a Merry Christmas when they don’t believe in Jesus?

            What makes Pastafarianism so awesome (apart from how much they love Pirates) is its ability to ridicule. The religion is obviously fictional and probably quite offensive to Religious-types. But because Pastafarianism uses all of the same arguments and thought processes as the typical religion, they cannot attack it without attacking themselves. I acknowledge that religion has been (on balance) a positive force in the world. I know there are topics that Science has yet to explain. I do kind things for other people even if it doesn’t benefit me, not because of logic, but because deep down it feels like the right thing to do. But Pastafarianism shows how ridiculous it is to subscribe blindly to rules made thousands of years ago: we have come a long way since then. It fosters the critic in all of us and reminds us that the Bible is not a documentary. It also lightens what can be a contentious issue with a bit of frivolity, which is important, according to my last blog post, and also Dr. Seuss:

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities." - Dr. Seuss

I think we can all agree that religion is at its most valuable when it helps fosters charity and community, and it is at its worst when it breeds tribalism and pig-headedness. Pastafarianism attacks the notion that you can defend an inherently emotional and subjective belief with logic, making it harder to maintain a stubborn position and leaving us with the option to believe what we want in the gaps that Science can’t fill. Most importantly of all, their Heaven has a beer volcano and a Stripper factory. I think I’m converting…

RAmen

Anyone wanting more information on the CotFSM (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) please click here: http://www.venganza.org/

[semiambivalent-blog]

All Work and No Play (gives Jack generalised anxiety disorder)

             How much fun should you allow yourself? It’s a question I often ask myself as I try and strike the right balance between progress in my career and the temptations of a social life. ‘Just one more game of FIFA’, ‘another episode of Mad Men’ or staying out drinking past midnight – these are all pleas my right brain makes to my left brain a few times a week (and good old lefty usually concedes). This internal struggle isn’t unique to me – I can see it in people’s eyes when they decide to stay for another pint instead of getting a good night’s sleep, or when they pick up a trashy mag instead of the Economist. We enjoy these indiscretions, but know they are bad for us - we feel better about ourselves when we finish a boring but educational book, or if we make it home on a Friday with our livers still intact.

            As a result, we play games and strike bargains between the devils and angels on our shoulders – “I went for a run today so it’s fine to eat that cookie”, or “when I finish my essay I will celebrate with a big night out”. For example, at the moment I am reading a book called ‘Drive’ by the economist Dan Pink, as part of upholding a bargain between my right and left brain – it’s written by an economist, so it’s educational, but it’s written in the popular pseudo-scientific way that many books are nowadays; making it easy to digest for my right hemisphere. I got 45% through (according to my Kindle) and read a paragraph that inspired me to put down the book and write this article. The paragraph talks about a study by a psychologist called “Csikszentmihalyi” (pronounced ‘chick-sent-me-high’) around the importance of play with regards to productivity. Csikszentmihalyi wanted to test what would happen if you purposely scrubbed fun from your life. His instructions were as follows: “Beginning [morning of target date], when you wake up and until 9:00 PM, we would like you to act in a normal way, doing all the things you have to do, but not doing anything that is “play” or “noninstrumental”.

            At first glance these instructions don’t sound too hard – I mean who has much fun at work anyway... all the ‘play’ comes after 9pm. How long do you think you could last? I estimated I could survive an entire week like this (and I thought I was being conservative). The result: they lasted two days before the experiment had to be prematurely stopped! So what went wrong? The participants started exhibiting signs of “generalised anxiety disorder” – the symptoms of which may be frighteningly familiar to you (they certainly were to me):

Restlessness or feeling on edge

Being easily fatigued

Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank

Irritability

Muscle tension

 Sleep disturbance

These symptoms became bad enough that after 48 hours the experiment had to be abandoned: the experiment suggests that denying yourself simple, playful behaviour actually starves your brain of the ability to work effectively. Without the rejuvenation you get from doing activities that you find fun but may serve no clear purpose, you lose the ability to even do simple tasks. Remember that next time you feel guilty at work for checking Facebook.

            So how do we find the right balance? Sure I would love to spend my entire day playing and doing things I love, but what about when the boring tasks come up? What about our chores and responsibilities? What about things that I don’t enjoy doing, but I know will make me smarter/healthier/more attractive to the ladies? Well to be honest, I don’t have an answer – I am still trying to define those boundaries myself. But I would use this as a guideline: if you get to the point where you start noticing these symptoms, take a break: you are pushing yourself too hard. If you can’t do something you enjoy at your desk, then get up, walk around, make a coffee or develop an addiction to nicotine (lung cancer seems way less unhealthy than lack of fun).

So what if you work in one of those offices where long hours are the norm, and everyone pretends to be working, even if they aren’t? Ask yourself what you want to be good at – doing your job or acting? (Ignore this question if you are an actor). Besides, it is entirely possible that you are only imagining those judgmental eyes you see when taking a break. Quick experiment: go ahead and think of a song everyone knows, and tap it out on the table with your fingers for a partner to guess. Did they get it right? Chances are they didn’t – only about 3% of the time people do. However on average people estimate that their partner will guess correctly 50% of the time. There is obviously a disconnect between what we think people notice, and what they actually do – this is called the illusion of transparency. So relax a little bit – your boss is busy and isn’t likely keeping a log of every break you take or noting down every time they see you chatting by the water cooler. You know what they do notice? Mistakez. And you are far more likely to make them when you have your head buried in your work all day. If you were a boss, who would you rather manage? – someone who stays late, makes mistakes and always looks burned out? Or the happy-go-lucky guy that you suspect takes a bit too long for lunch, but never burns out or fucks up, and gets on well with everyone in the office? I know personally I would rather have someone be honest with me, who tells me “no” when it can’t be done, and is dependable when they give me a “yes”, because even if it means less getting done, what gets done will be high quality, and there is less risk of delay or nasty surprises the night before a big deadline.

I understand this message will be dismissed by anyone currently putting in those long hours, because your personal case always seems different somehow. Just be aware that you are trapped in a loop – by denying yourself fun to keep on top of your workload, you are actually decreasing your effectiveness and doing less work per hour spent. You have put in more effort, but the value of that work is decreasing, erasing the gains you think you are earning. What’s more, over time you are less likely to find creative, novel ways to reduce your workload. Now I know there are times when you need to commit to an all-night slog to get something done (my specialty), and that sometimes you do just have too much work, but as I think this through, I am wondering if my poor working tactics are what lead to that all-night slog being necessary? If I was working more effectively and being more productive, I could perhaps get ahead of my work and recharge my brain ready for a last minute sprint when that inevitable task falls on my lap at 4pm on a Friday.

The truth is that counter-intuitively, it is actually harder to leave work on time – if you stay longer you don’t have to stand up for yourself or make tough decisions because you can always just stay an extra half an hour or more to finish. Leaving on time means saying “No” – a word most of us try to avoid telling our clients and bosses. We hate to let people down; it’s human nature to try to meet the expectations other people set for us. However, if you are having one of those days where nothing is going in, and you can’t seem to think straight, just know – it doesn’t mean you are stupid: it’s your brain telling you to take a break. From now on, try to work smart, not hard, and give in to your fun side every now and again – as honest Abe says himself:

“It has been my experience, that folks who have no vices, have very few virtues.”

- Abraham Lincoln

[semiambivalent-blog]

Mirror Mirror on the the Wall Street

           The stock market is the pinnacle of our modern market-based economy; the world’s sharpest minds and highest fliers moving dizzying amounts of money in a testosterone-laden, coke-fuelled frenzy of mathematical gymnastics. Situated in the wealthiest cities in the richest countries of the modern world, stock markets have incredible power. They can turn two students working out of their garage into multimillionaires, or bankrupt giant multinational corporations, all in an afternoon. Despite all of this power and importance, the average person on the street knows and cares little about what goes on in these institutions. This is an incredible shame, because if utilized correctly, the stock market is one of the best ways to make an impact on how our world is run. So what makes the stock market so important?

            A stock market’s basic role is to allow companies to raise money for investment. They do this by issuing ‘shares’. This is a legal right to claim a slice of the profit of the firm, paid out in the form of dividends. The price of a share is subject to the same rules of supply and demand that any other price is determined by. More people want the share; the price rises. The company issues more shares (increasing supply); the price falls. In the same way that the price of a car is a reflection of how much future enjoyment you will receive driving it, the price of a share is a reflection of what the future profits of the firm are expected to be. Sure, a bank can fulfill this role, but it’s difficult; banks find it hard to guess at the future profits of a business (even the business doesn’t know), so there is always a danger of bankruptcy, or there is a missed opportunity to charge higher interest if the business turns out to be wildly profitable. One banker’s opinion of the future profits is always likely to be way off the mark. The average of thousands of Trader’s opinions tends to get much closer to the truth. And what’s more the traders have to put their money where their mouths are; they are risking their money on the belief that their opinion is the right one.

            This makes the stock market surprisingly democratic (for those with money to invest). Simply by selling or buying shares in a company Investors make their opinion known. If enough people sell shares in the company, it runs low on the credit it needs to keep going. This acts as an incredible motivator because it hits the corporation where it hurts; its profits. The corporation, seemingly all-powerful, is actually subject to the whims and considerations of investors. If investors suddenly (for whatever reason) collectively decided that wearing suits to work was a mark of a bad business, you would instantly be hit by a deluge of casually dressed CEOs swearing they never liked suits anyways, and explaining their five-point-plan aimed at eliminating suit-wearing by employees.

In this way the stock market acts like a mirror to our opinions on what constitutes a successful company. Anything investors don’t like will be avoided; anything in vogue will be pursued piously. Corporations are often portrayed as lacking morals, in fact they are amoral: they will pursue the highest profit strategy, regardless of right or wrong. It is unprofitable for corporations to act in any way that we do not want them to, because it means a lower share price and therefore less money to pursue its strategies. The reason they sometimes commit immoral acts is because the risk and punishment of getting caught was calculated to be worth it, for the higher profits earned. By getting involved in the stock market, and learning about how finance works, you can help define the strategies of these companies. Through higher scrutiny we can increase the risk of mischievous companies being caught. And by choosing carefully what we buy and where we invest, we can help punish any behavior we disagree with, aligning the incentives of corporations with our own.

[semiambivalent-blog]

Cracking on in Krakow

             Just over a week ago 7 of us set sail for Krakow, Poland for what resembled a stag party with no stag. Not all of our time was spent drinking – we actually covered a lot of cultural ground. The juxtaposition of intense fun at night with the overwhelming sadness we felt at Schindler’s factory and Auschwitz made the whole trip seem very surreal. Rather than give you a chronological account of what happened on the trip (something I am not confident I could pin down if I tried), I will give you just 7 highlights in rough order that stand out from my blurry memory.

             The first highlight was of a cultural nature and occurred on the first day, when we visited Schindler’s factory. At the start, it looks as you would expect any factory from that era to look, but as you delve deeper the exhibitions build in intensity as they tell the story of the oppression, segregation and eventual forced extermination of the Jewish people of Krakow. The rooms were disorganised in such a way that you had to check several to figure out the right way to go to complete the exhibit. Not sure I was going the right way I peered into a darkened room behind a cloth and instantly felt a chill over my whole body. In front of me, the only thing illuminated in the back of the darkened room was the first piece of Nazi memorabilia I had seen – an officer’s hat perched on a podium. It sounds mundane to describe it now, and I quickly snapped to my senses, but for a moment my whole body froze and I could really feel the evil of the place. Moving through the factory the stories and pictures got progressively worse, and by the end I couldn’t help but think that this was only a warm-up for Auschwitz.

            The first night out, though a lot of fun, was fairly quiet and mostly a blur as the tiredness, combined with drunkenness, left me out for the count relatively early on. Therefore the second highlight was also cultural (doing well so far!). Come afternoon we had already made the half an hour walk into town, traipsed around most of the city centre and had lunch, so there were murmurings within the group that we should just find a place to drink, or head back to the hotel for a nap. I had other plans. I had read on the Internet of a set of dragon bones chained above a cathedral door, and became increasingly insistent we find them despite not knowing where the cathedral was, and not having a map. Eventually we guessed our way to Wawel Castle. After taking obligatory pictures there were further mutterings that we should turn back. I cajoled the group up the ramp into the castle, promising them the cathedral was inside (something I was in no way sure of) and we weren’t disappointed. The place was really stunning and the views were worth it alone. In the end we did find the dragon bones, but they were the least impressive thing we saw there (just an old rhino horn strung up to a whale bone). The most amazing thing for me was the decoration of the cathedral itself – full of ornate details carved into every crevice. I couldn’t help thing how much it would suck to be the guy that spent his whole life carving tiny patterns into the higher up windows that nobody would ever see.

             After ticking off most of the sights of Krakow, it was time to get some serious partying in. However, I was wary that our Auschwitz trip was the next day - I didn’t want to tackle that place hung over, so I initially planned to pace myself. That went straight out of the window when I encountered the third highlight of the trip. Walking back from the cathedral we saw a sign saying “big beer – 3.5 zloty”  - after doing a quick calculation, realising that meant 70p, then repeating said calculate to be sure, we decided we had to check this out. Walking down an alleyway we came to a doorway lit by a neon red light, leading down into a basement. There were looks of hesitation, but being a big group nobody wanted to be the first to cry wolf, so we descended the stairs… and it was awesome. What greeted us underground was an awesome bunker-like bar with good beer as cheap as advertised and a cute barmaid to top it off. The cheapness of the beer hadn’t really hit us on that first night, but now we felt like we were spending Monopoly money. From that point on we stopped keeping track of rounds and just bought whatever drinks we fancied, for as many of us that could still handle them. At one point in a club I bought an entire bottle of vodka and ten red bulls for 30 quid. In England a round like that would bankrupt me, but in Poland I couldn’t help but feel like a pretty big deal.

             The club we decided to go to the second night had been recommended to us by a couple of patient girls we kept pestering the night before. It was called club “Cien” and had a reputation for being fairly upmarket. After sampling several apple vodkas and feeling good about how far our sterling was stretching, we decided the best thing to do would be a dance competition. Carving out a circle on the dance floor, we took turns in the centre to do the most ridiculous dancing we could manage. Pull the Rope, the Shopping Trolley, the Lawnmower – all the classics were employed to good effect. This brought upon us a great deal of attention. It seems in Poland the guys actually try not to make asses of themselves (such a different culture), so we stood out - allowing us to coerce a good proportion of the club into entering our competition. The highlight for me was that I won! More accustomed to being called a loser when I danced, it was one of the proudest moments of my life.

             Auschwitz was a place I knew I had to see, despite knowing that it was inevitably going to be an uncomfortable experience. When booking the trip I had told myself to arrange it so that I wasn’t visiting the camp hung-over, but had broken this rule and felt a bit like I was underwater. The seven of us had a minivan to ourselves and the good mood from the night before hadn’t been broken. We bantered back and forward for most of the trip and were generally in good spirits, unprepared for what was in store for us. The mood quickly settled to quiet reverence once we walked under the famous “arbeit macht frei” sign (work makes you free). The first camp looked no different to a standard military barracks, and in fact did house Polish soldiers before the war. The initial exhibits were bad, but at that point no worse than I had seen in the British war museum. Then our guide warned us that in the next room, no pictures were allowed. I had been warned what would come next – what I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer scale of it: an entire glass cage filled with human hair. The tour guide explained that the inmates’ hair was shaved and used as material for making various products – one of many examples of the pure efficiency with which the Nazis committed their evil deeds. We moved through several other exhibits like this, including an entire, long, room filled with shoes from the victims. At the end of the tour of the first camp, we were all simply shaking our heads in disbelief, speechless. It seemed like months had passed since the good humour of the morning. After a short break to regroup and acquire some caffeine, we moved on to Auschwitz II, Birkenau camp. This camp is the one everyone sees in films, with the railway leading in, the barbed-wire fences, the guard towers, the primitive wooden huts where the prisoners slept. After the visual onslaught of the morning, we just walked around in a daze. It was a foggy day, and being in that evil place was hard for my tired brain to process. I didn’t say much, just wandered around at the back of the tour, concentrating on keeping my balance in the mud. No matter how prepared you feel, the sheer scale is what catches you off guard – the base extends in all directions, and was meticulously designed to de-humanise and destroy an entire race. I have never felt so fortunate in my life to have not lived in those times. Every time I have complained about something since, I think back to the conditions the prisoners of Auschwitz were living in, and mentally kick myself for being so spoiled.

             We were in a sombre mood when we left the camp, and I can definitely see why many people recommend not planning anything for the night after going. If we had gone straight back to the hotel I doubt we would have gone out that night. However, we had booked a two-for-one deal, and were on the way to, of all things, a salt mine. After another hour journey, we pulled up at a restaurant outside the mine. None of us ate much, so we soon were heading down the seemingly endless steps with our tour guide. The air in the mine was clean and clear and immediately started doing wonders for my hangover. According to the guide the air is completely bacteria-free due to the salt, and many asthma suffers spend time in the mine to alleviate their condition. Down in the mine we entered the first room, and saw a chapel made completely out of salt. It was fairly worn down (being near the entrance so exposed to moisture) but was still pretty impressive. As our guide took us from room to room, deeper into the mine, we started noticing a few quirks. One of which was her stellar repertoire of salt-based puns. Still a bit emotionally drained from Auschwitz, we started to soften up when she told us to take the story she just finished relating “with a pinch of salt”. She told us to lick the walls if we didn’t believe everything was made of salt (yes I licked the wall: it tasted salty). As well as the salt-based humour we started laughing at the fact that she would systematically point at everything in each room, one-by-one, that was made of salt - “this is made of salt… and this picture, it is made of salt… this table, it is also made of salt… the very tiles you walk on, they are made of salt… if you were to fall in this lake, you would float, because it is very salty like dead sea... this chandelier is not made of salt, but it is decorated with the salt crystals…”. There is only so many times you can hear someone say that before cracking up. It reminded me of this deleted scene in Borat where he walks down an entire isle of cheese in an American supermarket, picking up every pack and asking the manager “is this cheese?”. Whilst it was bloody impressive that the workers in this mine had carved several churches and a massive cathedral out of salt, the pure oddness of our guide made the entire tour ridiculous. By the end we were in a completely different frame of mind to when we had left Auschwitz – the fact that someone can be so enamored with something so mundane and unassuming as salt, strangely restored our faith in humanity, and left us ready to enjoy our last night in the country. 

             After trying a famous “Mad Dog” shot whilst our taxis were waiting (the aftertaste saves you from the fact that you can’t shoot the whole thing without gulping), and a near run-in with a drugged-up American expat in an Irish bar, our night got of to a good start. We got to about the right level of drunk in Shakers club (a cool place with a foosball table we had been to every night), and headed downstairs to Frantic. First impressions were pretty overwhelming. The dance floor was 80% filled with some of the most attractive girls I had ever seen. Somebody even uttered this Inbetweeners-worthy line: “we should go somewhere else, the girls in here are too attractive to ever talk to”. We sensibly ignored our doubts and made a beeline for the bar. After a few rounds of Jaegerbombs we started to feel a bit less self-aware and started dancing. Remembering the hilarious dance off we had the night before, I was looking for the first signs that one of us was going to start dancing outrageously. Cue Scott, centre stage. My mate Scott is normally more ninja than pirate, so I didn’t immediately clock what he was doing. A few seconds later, I noticed a few people stopping to look at him.. what was he doing? Is that… yes, he is definitely warming up for something. More people danced strategically to get a better view of Scott as he worked his way through several common stretches. The crowd opened up as we got nearer to the chorus to form an entire circle around him, but his gaze was set dead ahead and he looked eerily focused. After 30 seconds of warm-ups, the chorus kicks in: he starts doing the sprinkler. The crowd watching him erupts with laughter, but he remains dedicated and doesn’t even smirk. Every time I think back to it I can’t help but actually laugh out loud. A perfect way to break the ice with all those unobtainable girls, and I respect the fact that he had the balls to do such a ridiculous dance move when the rest of us had just mustered up enough Dutch courage to do that non-committal sidelines dance thing that guys do. It really set up the rest of the night, and the rest was, as they say, history.

             So hopefully these seven highlights give a bit of an insight into what made this trip special. Ideally it convinced you to make your next holiday a Polish one. I left feeling like we had achieved the perfect balance of pursuits cultural and hedonistic, and like all good trips, I came back feeling like something had changed. I complain less, I have stopped drinking so much (hard to stomach a London pint when you can buy a round for less in Poland) and I have started to revaluate how I spend my time and money. Why live for the weekend and drop over a hundred in overpriced London clubs when you could fly to Poland and have the holiday of a lifetime for the same price? I had more fun in those three days than I would have in a month of weekends in London combined. In fact, I have already started to live this new mantra – this weekend was my first completely sober weekend since I moved to London (giving me time to write this article), and I have already booked a holiday over the April bank holiday weekend: next stop Macedonia!

[semiambivalent-blog]

Kony Cacophony

            “Who or what is Kony?” – the question that approximately 99% of people in the Western world were asking themselves today when they started seeing their Facebook newsfeeds dominated by links to this video. If you haven’t seen the video, I really urge you to watch it – not only is it a powerful message, but as a lesson on how to speak to the Facebook generation it is astoundingly good. For those too lazy to watch a 30-minute video (I mean, come on, this is the internet FFS!), or for those who have now seen it, I will use my hastily thrown together knowledge on the subject to talk about what makes this video good, during which the various criticisms that I have of it will surface.

 DISCLAIMER: I wholeheartedly agree that Joseph Kony is an evil man who should be stopped. However, I am also aware that the majority of people who watch this video will be unaware of the techniques being used to manipulate them, and will have little sense of the true complexity of the situation. I sure wasn’t until today, and in no way have I become an expert on the subject in the 5 hours since I got home from work. Here is a great link for those wanting to find out more.

             The video starts with various images of people being empowered by social media and new communication technologies. This sets the scene in the familiar and gives you that instant warm, fuzzy association straight away – your subconscious mind thinks: “hey I like these things and if this guys does too, he must be alright.” The video continues on to the birth of the narrator’s son, as well as a few outrageously cute videos of him generally just being the kind of kid that every self-respecting dad would want. Your subconscious chimes in again: “he raised a cool kid, so he must be a nice guy, and whatever he says must be correct”. By the time you get to the point of the video, the narrator already has you in the palm of his hands.

             Now we get to the purpose of the video: to spread awareness of the crimes of a man called Joseph Kony – the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda and neighbouring countries. Kony is a nasty piece of work; his crimes against humanity involves the mass abduction of tens of thousands of children to fight in his army, and the displacement of close to 2 million people. His misdeeds have earned him the top spot on the International Criminal Court’s list of bad people to arrest (which seriously takes some doing). I won’t go into more detail on the crimes because you will have heard about them in the video, and frankly they are pretty upsetting.

            One of the comments I have seen a lot of today is “if he has been committing these crimes for over 25 years, then why am I hearing so much about it now?”. Good question, nameless Facebook friend. I wondered the same thing, so I did a bit of digging. The current flurry of activity started on Monday the 27th Feb – when the video was uploaded. The video is perfectly timed to create buzz before a major milestone in the campaign – on the 20th of April, dubbed “cover the night”, supporters are to blanket the walls of their towns with posters of Joseph Kony to raise awareness for the campaign. This is another sign that the makers of the video are well aware of how to run a good promotional campaign – one of the things they teach you in advertising 101 is that deadlines inspire action. It’s the same reason retail sales last for a limited time, or why Groupons have an expiry date – the majority of people who would potentially buy a product will tend to just wander off and forget about it if there is no incentive to commit right now. This entire campaign has an expiry date of the end of 2012 which creates a sense of urgency: people deal with immediate problems over ones that can be put off, regardless of how important they are (that’s why you obsessively check your inbox but haven’t started that big project due next week).

            So what else about the video is lifted from the advertiser’s handbook? KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. This video really does dumb it down. In fact the genius of the video is that it does so in a way that isn’t patronising through the use of the narrators insufferably cute kid. Through explaining the situation to a child, the narrator is actually getting away with explaining the story to the audience in black and white (good guys and bad guys), repeating the core message an uncomfortable amount of times (so you remember) and reducing the capacity for critical thinking by regressing the audience back to their inner child. This technique allows him to paper over several facts, which if you read deeper into the subject, do not sit well with the narrative.

             For example (and bear with me here), if I described Josephy Kony as a freedom fighter, fighting for the right to adhere to the 10 commandments with a small group of loyal supporters against a force many times the LRA’s size, doesn’t he begin to sound a bit less like Darth Vader and (only slightly) more like the Rebel Alliance (who incidentally also used child soliders)? What if I told you that the Ugandan army, the heavily financed and superior force, were accused of committing the same crimes that Kony is wanted for? Now what if you find out that of the $8.9m budget the charity behind this film had in 2011, they spent $1.2m making and promoting the film, $1m in travel expenses and $1.7m on salaries. In fact only 31% (low by industry standards) actually went to direct aid, and much of this diminished sum will go to the Ugandan Army and the People’s Liberation Army in Sudan (a particularly nasty group that the makers of this video have been caught posing with)?

             These snippets of information do not change the horror of what Joseph Kony has done, but they have certainly given me an uneasy feeling in my stomach and made me feel a bit less fuzzy and warm about donating to the cause. These shades of grey were cleverly shifted from focus for the majority of viewers by the use of the little kid (I mean, who would argue against such a cute kid?).

            Similar to the way the narrator delivers the story through the eyes of his child, he also employs Jacob, like it or not, as a technique to deliver his story. Marilyn Manson once sang “the death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic”. Marilyn was right – our brains just can’t imagine what large numbers mean. So if the video showed you a graph of deaths over time you would switch off (unless you love charts like I do); but instead they tell you the story of just one boy with conveniently articulate English to really bring the point home and tug at the heart strings. The whole “we are going to stop these people and rescue you” scene smacked more of ego than genuine heroism. I am not trying to devalue the mission, but these people are by no means the first to stand up and take notice of the situation in Uganda. In fact, as well as the various other charities that provide aid to the region, the U.S. has tried several times to capture or kill Kony over the years, each failure provoking terrible retribution. The thing about a man who uses children for bodyguards, is that any attempt to kill or capture him will inevitably lead to inexcusable collateral damage – the main reason, I suspect, the U.S. is reluctant to get involved.

            Validation by President Obama is another great boon to this campaign – Obama was the first president elected through social media using techniques very similar to this video (can’t get much simpler than “yes we can”). The video portrays Obama's dedication of 100 special forces to train the Ugandan Army as the first true foreign intervention where the U.S. became involved not for its own benefit, but because it was the right thing to do – this instinctively made me proud for a little while, before I actually thought of the dubiousness of that claim (uh, the two World Wars, anyone?). I hate to burst the bubble, but the video fails to mention that the Ugandan army is a major U.S. ally in the region, helping in the fight against piracy in Somalia, and that oil was recently discovered in and around Lake Albert… It also fails to mention that the U.S. has had a presence training the Ugandan army for years, and that one of the core problems with that on-going mission was that the Ugandan army was not listening to the advice of its U.S. special forces advisors.

            The final pillar of what makes this video work, is that the whole campaign is designed for social media. Its core message is contained in an easily shared video. There are various calls to action to spread the word, and at least one big flashmob event (“cover the night”) planned. When you buy an action kit, they give you a free wristband to give to a friend. They target celebrities and policy makers on Twitter and LinkedIn – essentially shaming them into endorsement by begging for their help in a public arena. Their logo (which is really quite smart), is an upside down triangle – a claim that the balance of power has now turned on its head and all the ‘little people’ at the bottom of the triangle are now in charge. This is not dissimilar to Apple’s ‘1984’ campaign – the disenfranchised taking control against a bleak Orwellian future. Similar to other successful social media campaigns, it leaves the door wide open for user-generated content. For example, it has already been turned into a meme, and even Hitler is having his say! At the end of the video, the very last prompt is to share it – and you will do this effortlessly before your brain even kicks in to start thinking critically; spreading the message before you have a chance to consider your view on it… because now you are on Facebook and you have pictures of cats and witty status updated to "like", dammit!

             Despite my misgivings about the tactics used in this video, these are the same techniques that all brands use to sell their products – it’s just in this case, the product is of a charitable nature. What I found jarring about the video was that it was a charity that had executed these techniques so shamelessly well! I would not be surprised if Procter and Gamble and Coca-Cola weren’t sending this to their junior ad execs as homework. Now I am aware of the context of the video, I am still making the informed decision to support their cause. I truly believe the Ugandan army are more legitimate than Kony’s cronies, and are probably the lesser of two evils. At the end of the day they have raised awareness for a cause in desperate need, turned a mass-murderer into a household name and put international aid back on the top of politicians' agenda, which in my books can only be a good thing. I would only like to ask: what do they plan to do on 1st January, 2013?

UPDATE 17/03/2012: I did NOT expect Jason Russell to react like this to my criticisms...