UBS and LIBOR: Horribly rotten, comically stupid
Though it’s left the headlines, the LIBOR scandal keeps growing and growing. More and more banks are found to have been diddling the system.
The interchanges published by the FSA also reveal a comical stupidity among people who, if judged by their above-average pay, ought to have been expected to display above-average insight and intelligence. Sadly, they showed neither.
I find the apparent abject stupidity of many of those involved to be breath-taking.
Anil Dash talks about how the rise of closed social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on — has caused many of the strengths of the web to be hidden away from many new users of the web.
Anil first talks about how some of the functions of the web that were taken for granted five or ten years ago are no longer exposed in an obvious manner and moves on to thinking about what effect that has on assumptions made about what is possible:
Subcompact round up and The Daily
It’s been just over a week since Craig Mod wrote Subcompact publishing. And my, what a coincidence of a week it’s been.
Even the death of The Daily — though easy to label ‘failure’ — is anything, in my opinion, but a failure. What it’s done is shown us you can’t build a print island in the middle of our digital ocean. Yes: many of us knew that. But, still, to see an old-school structured publishing institution thrust upon this new space, have it willfully ignore many of the rules-of-engagement obvious to us, and then fail means we are, indeed, somewhere new. It’s nice to be able to say that with reinforced confidence.
AN EMINENT Prussian bachelor once argued that rational creatures are bound, by the very nature of reason, to act only according to rules of conduct one would affirm, when at one’s rational best, to equally guide everyone’s choices. This is not, it turns out, very useful as a day-to-day rule of thumb. It is, however, an excellent test for government policy in a multi-party democracy. If a policy seems advisable when one party is in power, but inadvisable when the other party is in power, then it is inadvisable, full stop. This is how we know that the Obama administration’s drone policy is, to put it mildly, inadvisable.
In Hidebound books, I spoke about the publishers locked into a business model based on out-moded data containers: books. That they are trying to keep an old model, based on the scarcity of physical books, and not embracing the challenges and opportunities offered by digital distribution.
It strikes me that one of the things I’ve said in the past is hypocritical when viewed against this argument. I’ve said one should be able to lend digital books. In retrospect this is precisely what I’ve criticised: taking an action predicated on a physical manifestation of a book and applying it to a digital one. But it leads us down some interesting paths.