Well, that went south quickly, didn't it?
I last posted to this blog two weeks ago, when the Bay Area and the state of California hadn't yet locked down to slow the spread of the virus. Since then, in fairly rapid succession, my company made us all start working from home, the Bay Area counties enacted a shelter in place order and then the whole state followed suit.
In that last post I was already talking about avoiding crowded places, and that hasn't changed - in fact, even if I wanted to go somewhere crowded I'd have trouble, unless I end up at the supermarket on a particularly busy day. But in the meantime I'm just trying to avoid going stir crazy while I sit out the lockdowns and virus and all that.
It's probably no surprise that work days are the easiest to cope with (and it helps that I'm one of those lucky people who are able to work from home). I'm expected to be on call for the stuff we're doing, at specific times on Monday through Friday, and that makes it easy to not spin my wheels wondering what to do next.
The main thing I've had to keep in mind is exercise - not just getting up from my desk to oil my joints, but also getting out of the house for a walk once or twice a day. The fresh air and sunlight (when we have it - it's been oddly cold and rainy, even for here) are necessary, as is the time to let my brain unspool without external stimulation from music or podcasts or work meetings.
What's a little more difficult is keeping busy on the weekends. Or, rather than "keeping busy", the question is how do I avoid feeling like I've wasted my time? A thing I noticed very soon after I moved here in late 2013 is that weekends passed more quickly than they did in London, but with notably less payoff. There, I would hop out to the center of town and find some lunch, hang out in the museums and peruse the bookstores.
Here those options were a little less available, because most of the good museums are up in San Francisco, which requires an hour's drive to get to. I made do, but of course for the moment the museums I'm a member of are all closed, and I don't want to go up there to risk getting sick anyway. So my range is circumscribed to a radius of a couple of miles, which takes in the stores I shop at to stock up on essentials and my normal walking or running routes.
Apart from that, I've been trying to make sure that I get errands done around the house, while also balancing goof-around time. Yesterday I reserved an hour for writing - and got through correcting a manuscript that's been on my desk for a while; then I reserved an hour for cleaning - and after unloading the dishwasher and taking out the trash I finally tackled the snowdrifts of mail that have been building up for (literally) years at this point. And I reserved a guilt-free hour each for reading, watching TV and playing video games, because I have a fair backlog of all of those to get through.
Of course, I'd trade some of that productivity for having my girlfriend here, as I told her on our FaceTime call last night. Which brings me to the other thing that I've been doing a bit more of: getting in touch with friends and family and checking in.
My sweetie and I have our daily check-in, whether on text or on FaceTime, but I've been calling my parents more (my dad's in Italy, but ironically I feel he's the safest of us all) and trying to stay in touch with my sisters more too. I've also tried to text some friends a bit more often, though that's more bittersweet as I can't actually go and see them.
The other question I'm dancing around is how long this will all last, and whether it's all sustainable. When I was unemployed and freelancing two years ago, there were a few days when it all got to me and I couldn't muster much interest to either look for permanent jobs or drum up more freelance work. Luckily I haven't descended to those depths during this time, in part because I only have the weekends to wallow, but I don't think I'm saying anything too controversial by hoping that things resolve themselves soon - ideally without too much undue chaos or loss of life.
The hope is that we start to see cases dropping off soon, and start to see the restrictions relax. Because, frankly, while I have a fair stash of toilet paper (thanks to my wonderful, prepared girlfriend), it's not infinite and I can't beat the panicky assholes who are hoarding it for no reason.
But apart from that, as I say, I'm trying to be productive, and I figure that's the best any of us can do at the moment.
Stay safe out there!
Sunday 22 March 2020
Sunday 8 March 2020
Europe's Centrifugal Force Threatens to Make it Irrelevant
Even though I don't live in a place that's been locked down by the coronavirus, I've been taking precautions like avoiding crowded places, and this has meant a lot of long walks have replaced my gym sessions this weekend. Naturally when I go for these walks I think a lot of deep thoughts, and so today I chewed over a question that's been bothering me for about 15 years: Is Europe setting itself up for irrelevancy?
The root of this question is a conversation I had in my very first week at journalism school, when I engaged one of my fellow students on her thoughts on China. I don't know how we got there, but she was very in favor of China's rise, and predicted that Europe would be irrelevant in the coming century. This was kind of blasphemous to me, in part because I was (and still am) an advocate of Western liberal democracy over China's corporatist authoritarianism.
A few months later I attended a talk at school about Latin America, and was struck by one of the journalists there saying that Latin America had made itself irrelevant. I didn't know much about the history of the region, but the idea stuck with me.
In any case I kept both those thoughts in mind for years, so that when I got to that book I've referenced before, The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen, something in my brain dredged them up.
As I've said, I'm keen as any leftie to remake the US in the image of a Nordic social democracy, but something about Partanen's tone struck me as off. It took a while to realize that she was completely leaving out China (and Asia generally) from her analysis. That is to say, yes, it would be great if the US would guarantee healthcare, parental leave, good-quality education and so forth, but the big Asian economies aren't moving in that direction - so is it really a prerequisite for competing in the future?
Probably, but then Europe has other problems beyond this complacency (which is, by the way, very Nordic). That's been brought home to me by the discussion around the role of Huawei in delivering 5G.
Europe is, oddly, probably better placed than the US to deliver 5G network infrastructure, because it's home to two companies that build such equipment: Ericsson and Nokia (also both Nordic, funnily enough). That said, Huawei is enormous, and already in most operators' networks worldwide, giving it a head start of years compared with those two... and an even wider head start over any US competitors.
This hasn't stopped the US from raising concerns about whether Huawei's equipment is trustworthy - concerns that at least a bit valid, even if the administration is acting on them in a pretty ham-handed way. Yet the US's position is weakened by the fact that, as noted, neither Ericsson nor Nokia (nor both in concert) is ready to position themselves as a counter-weight to Huawei. Without getting into the merits of the "race for 5G" (which I think is a stupid talking point), any country that refuses to use any Huawei equipment risks delivering an inferior network experience, at greater expense and over a longer time.
So where does Europe's supposed irrelevancy come in here? The fact is that European companies haven't been able to grow to the scale of US or Chinese companies. This could be because of the regulatory environment (i.e. the fact that a regulatory environment exists in Europe, whereas it doesn't in China or the US), or it could be because both China and the US are more willing to let companies grow monstrously big to "compete on a global level".
The EU on its own is comfortably larger than the US, and if you add in non-EU European countries you'd add a further 100 million inhabitants... and that's without including Russia. But what I believe hamstrings it in this sphere is the still very fragmented state of business - there are a number of pan-European firms, but they tend to be smaller than US counterparts... or owned by them.
And the situation in tech is worse. I don't believe that Europe is a tech wasteland, because there are some notable companies that have come from there. The problem is that Microsoft has bought all of them (a slight exaggeration, but still).
Where the political fragmentation hurts Europe, even despite the presence of the European Union, is that certain things are still done in a certain way in Italy, compared with Germany, compared with France, and so on. Certain countries' labor markets are more flexible and dynamic than those elsewhere, so all the young people leave their home countries and go to the places where they'll find jobs. This creates a high degree of noise to signal for any budding entrepreneurs, while also starving their home countries of the experience needed to build an innovation ecosystem.
And because I'm a whining Remoaner, it's worth pointing out that leaving the EU won't fix this issue, but rather make it worse. It's not pro-EU propaganda to point out that companies want to do business in a harmonized environment, and when multiple countries harmonize their environments it becomes easier to conduct that business.
To summarize, the problem for Europe is creating enough space for innovative companies to flourish without all decamping to the Silicon Valley (this is a two-fer of self-interest for me, because it makes Europe more dynamic and it keeps loads of Europeans from coming here to the Bay Area and putting even more strain on it). Part of the problem is being able to scale a company to a point where it can compete globally, and the other part is simply having room in the market to do things in tech - for example, who needs another search engine when everybody just uses Google?
This assumes that having large companies is the only measure of success, which to be clear I don't believe. Germany's economy is built on an enormous number of small and medium-sized enterprises that act as suppliers to big ones, for example in the car industry. But having enough small companies creating goods that are in demand is an important prerequisite.
I don't believe that European countries are setting themselves up well to do that. Too many of them are still too protectionist (for example France and its insistence on farming subsidies), while attempts to limit movement from outside the EU, or from the EU into Britain, won't help the underlying causes of population movement.
In fact, if we take a look at the history of Latin America, there was a time when countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile were much more active internationally. However, they fell into a period of economic nationalism, political populism and military rule, which caused them to fall behind the countries of Europe. Folks in the global north may know of Eva Peron from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Evita, but in truth her husband's regime made Argentina ungovernable, and ripe for the military takeover that blighted the country for decades.
As Europe splits off into different populist or nationalist camps, whether in Hungary, Poland or the UK, they should look at the history of Latin http://frad-lab.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-scandinavian-design-and-social.htmlAmerica and avoid the pitfalls those companies hit, to avoid the same fate.
The root of this question is a conversation I had in my very first week at journalism school, when I engaged one of my fellow students on her thoughts on China. I don't know how we got there, but she was very in favor of China's rise, and predicted that Europe would be irrelevant in the coming century. This was kind of blasphemous to me, in part because I was (and still am) an advocate of Western liberal democracy over China's corporatist authoritarianism.
A few months later I attended a talk at school about Latin America, and was struck by one of the journalists there saying that Latin America had made itself irrelevant. I didn't know much about the history of the region, but the idea stuck with me.
In any case I kept both those thoughts in mind for years, so that when I got to that book I've referenced before, The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen, something in my brain dredged them up.
As I've said, I'm keen as any leftie to remake the US in the image of a Nordic social democracy, but something about Partanen's tone struck me as off. It took a while to realize that she was completely leaving out China (and Asia generally) from her analysis. That is to say, yes, it would be great if the US would guarantee healthcare, parental leave, good-quality education and so forth, but the big Asian economies aren't moving in that direction - so is it really a prerequisite for competing in the future?
Probably, but then Europe has other problems beyond this complacency (which is, by the way, very Nordic). That's been brought home to me by the discussion around the role of Huawei in delivering 5G.
Europe is, oddly, probably better placed than the US to deliver 5G network infrastructure, because it's home to two companies that build such equipment: Ericsson and Nokia (also both Nordic, funnily enough). That said, Huawei is enormous, and already in most operators' networks worldwide, giving it a head start of years compared with those two... and an even wider head start over any US competitors.
This hasn't stopped the US from raising concerns about whether Huawei's equipment is trustworthy - concerns that at least a bit valid, even if the administration is acting on them in a pretty ham-handed way. Yet the US's position is weakened by the fact that, as noted, neither Ericsson nor Nokia (nor both in concert) is ready to position themselves as a counter-weight to Huawei. Without getting into the merits of the "race for 5G" (which I think is a stupid talking point), any country that refuses to use any Huawei equipment risks delivering an inferior network experience, at greater expense and over a longer time.
So where does Europe's supposed irrelevancy come in here? The fact is that European companies haven't been able to grow to the scale of US or Chinese companies. This could be because of the regulatory environment (i.e. the fact that a regulatory environment exists in Europe, whereas it doesn't in China or the US), or it could be because both China and the US are more willing to let companies grow monstrously big to "compete on a global level".
The EU on its own is comfortably larger than the US, and if you add in non-EU European countries you'd add a further 100 million inhabitants... and that's without including Russia. But what I believe hamstrings it in this sphere is the still very fragmented state of business - there are a number of pan-European firms, but they tend to be smaller than US counterparts... or owned by them.
And the situation in tech is worse. I don't believe that Europe is a tech wasteland, because there are some notable companies that have come from there. The problem is that Microsoft has bought all of them (a slight exaggeration, but still).
Where the political fragmentation hurts Europe, even despite the presence of the European Union, is that certain things are still done in a certain way in Italy, compared with Germany, compared with France, and so on. Certain countries' labor markets are more flexible and dynamic than those elsewhere, so all the young people leave their home countries and go to the places where they'll find jobs. This creates a high degree of noise to signal for any budding entrepreneurs, while also starving their home countries of the experience needed to build an innovation ecosystem.
And because I'm a whining Remoaner, it's worth pointing out that leaving the EU won't fix this issue, but rather make it worse. It's not pro-EU propaganda to point out that companies want to do business in a harmonized environment, and when multiple countries harmonize their environments it becomes easier to conduct that business.
To summarize, the problem for Europe is creating enough space for innovative companies to flourish without all decamping to the Silicon Valley (this is a two-fer of self-interest for me, because it makes Europe more dynamic and it keeps loads of Europeans from coming here to the Bay Area and putting even more strain on it). Part of the problem is being able to scale a company to a point where it can compete globally, and the other part is simply having room in the market to do things in tech - for example, who needs another search engine when everybody just uses Google?
This assumes that having large companies is the only measure of success, which to be clear I don't believe. Germany's economy is built on an enormous number of small and medium-sized enterprises that act as suppliers to big ones, for example in the car industry. But having enough small companies creating goods that are in demand is an important prerequisite.
I don't believe that European countries are setting themselves up well to do that. Too many of them are still too protectionist (for example France and its insistence on farming subsidies), while attempts to limit movement from outside the EU, or from the EU into Britain, won't help the underlying causes of population movement.
In fact, if we take a look at the history of Latin America, there was a time when countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile were much more active internationally. However, they fell into a period of economic nationalism, political populism and military rule, which caused them to fall behind the countries of Europe. Folks in the global north may know of Eva Peron from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Evita, but in truth her husband's regime made Argentina ungovernable, and ripe for the military takeover that blighted the country for decades.
As Europe splits off into different populist or nationalist camps, whether in Hungary, Poland or the UK, they should look at the history of Latin http://frad-lab.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-scandinavian-design-and-social.htmlAmerica and avoid the pitfalls those companies hit, to avoid the same fate.
Sunday 1 March 2020
How Scandinavian Design and Social Democracy are Linked
I found myself thinking about Scandinavia again on my walk today. Specifically, I thought about the architecture, and the design more generally, and the way we've fetishized it here in the US for several decades. And then I wondered whether that interest in Scandinavian design and architecture is connected to the progressive love for Scandinavian social democratic politics.
A google search for the furniture chain here in the Bay Area also turns up a showroom in New York that closed in 2014, but effectively they date back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Americans were apparently crazy for stuff from Europe, as it smacked of sophistication (per Bill Bryson and his book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid). My memory of the retail chain here in the Bay Area is of my parents shopping for furniture there (and it being super expensive).
Somewhere along the line clean, functional lines and blond wood became catnip for people who vote progressive. My theory is that this love for Scandinavian design is what came first, but that as the right wing here in the US became more nativist and xenophobic the left held up its love of Scandinavia as the perfect photo-negative to stand in opposition.
This isn't at all scientific, of course, or a ground-breaking idea. But I think the fact that the love for Scandinavian design came first might be. And moreover, the eye-rolling that it prompts among people on the right or even among the more bien-pensant types is clearly a reaction to generations of lefties telling us how everything would be great if we were just more like Sweden, Norway and Denmark. And let's throw in Finland, even though as a Finno-Ugric speaking country we have to expand our designation to "Nordic" to include it.
I have my own love-hate relationship with this type of thinking. On the one hand I can't get enough of books where some foreigner moves to the Nordics and gets all dewy-eyed at the social democracy and supposed happiness. On the other, I get a little frustrated how I and my fellow lefties just invoke Danish or Finnish family leave policies without understanding how they work or what kind of infrastructure is involved with delivering them. Both are likely the reasons why I devour the type of book referenced above: I want to live in that kind of (seemingly) effortless simplicity and I want to understand how they've actually implemented it.
It also doesn't help when the books explaining that implementation are so self-satisfied. A book that's affected my thinking quite heavily in the last year or so is The Nordic Theory of Everything, by Finnish journalist Anu Partanen, in which she explains her culture shock at moving to the US to be with her new husband, and how backward we are in things like delivering healthcare and providing education.
I'm on-board with arguments like that, but given how frustrated I was with her didactic tone, I find myself having to dole out arguments based on her book very carefully, lest I turn off the people I'm trying to persuade.
But what does this have to do with my original thesis, about Scandinavian design? The point that probably a lot of my fellow lefties miss (or forget) is that the best examples of this design are intended to be democratic and available to everyone. A womb chair from Saarinen designs may run you to over a thousand dollars online, but the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designed housing for veterans returning from the Winter War in the 1940s and for workers at various companies and factories throughout Finland.
This is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that if we want to valorize these ideas from Scandinavia, we need to emphasize how they benefit everyone, without taking for granted that normal voters will just automatically see the benefits of single-payer healthcare or generous family leave. Americans have been abused (for instance) by the corporate and Byzantine healthcare system for so long that they're mistrustful of any change that potentially makes it more difficult for them to get healthcare.
Add to that the constant drumbeat of "socialism = evil" and "Europe = socialist", and it's easy to see why even supposed progressives like Pete Buttigieg evince a sort of Stockholm syndrome for our existing system (btw, do you see what I did there?).
If we agree with Le Corbusier's argument that a house is a machine for living, then you could say that Scandinavian architecture and design are machines that just work, no fuss and no muss. If we want to take it a step further and import their healthcare systems and general organization of society, we need to emphasize that simplicity first and foremost. Then maybe we'll have a chance to sell more Americans on the concept.
A google search for the furniture chain here in the Bay Area also turns up a showroom in New York that closed in 2014, but effectively they date back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Americans were apparently crazy for stuff from Europe, as it smacked of sophistication (per Bill Bryson and his book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid). My memory of the retail chain here in the Bay Area is of my parents shopping for furniture there (and it being super expensive).
Somewhere along the line clean, functional lines and blond wood became catnip for people who vote progressive. My theory is that this love for Scandinavian design is what came first, but that as the right wing here in the US became more nativist and xenophobic the left held up its love of Scandinavia as the perfect photo-negative to stand in opposition.
This isn't at all scientific, of course, or a ground-breaking idea. But I think the fact that the love for Scandinavian design came first might be. And moreover, the eye-rolling that it prompts among people on the right or even among the more bien-pensant types is clearly a reaction to generations of lefties telling us how everything would be great if we were just more like Sweden, Norway and Denmark. And let's throw in Finland, even though as a Finno-Ugric speaking country we have to expand our designation to "Nordic" to include it.
I have my own love-hate relationship with this type of thinking. On the one hand I can't get enough of books where some foreigner moves to the Nordics and gets all dewy-eyed at the social democracy and supposed happiness. On the other, I get a little frustrated how I and my fellow lefties just invoke Danish or Finnish family leave policies without understanding how they work or what kind of infrastructure is involved with delivering them. Both are likely the reasons why I devour the type of book referenced above: I want to live in that kind of (seemingly) effortless simplicity and I want to understand how they've actually implemented it.
It also doesn't help when the books explaining that implementation are so self-satisfied. A book that's affected my thinking quite heavily in the last year or so is The Nordic Theory of Everything, by Finnish journalist Anu Partanen, in which she explains her culture shock at moving to the US to be with her new husband, and how backward we are in things like delivering healthcare and providing education.
I'm on-board with arguments like that, but given how frustrated I was with her didactic tone, I find myself having to dole out arguments based on her book very carefully, lest I turn off the people I'm trying to persuade.
But what does this have to do with my original thesis, about Scandinavian design? The point that probably a lot of my fellow lefties miss (or forget) is that the best examples of this design are intended to be democratic and available to everyone. A womb chair from Saarinen designs may run you to over a thousand dollars online, but the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designed housing for veterans returning from the Winter War in the 1940s and for workers at various companies and factories throughout Finland.
This is perhaps a roundabout way of saying that if we want to valorize these ideas from Scandinavia, we need to emphasize how they benefit everyone, without taking for granted that normal voters will just automatically see the benefits of single-payer healthcare or generous family leave. Americans have been abused (for instance) by the corporate and Byzantine healthcare system for so long that they're mistrustful of any change that potentially makes it more difficult for them to get healthcare.
Add to that the constant drumbeat of "socialism = evil" and "Europe = socialist", and it's easy to see why even supposed progressives like Pete Buttigieg evince a sort of Stockholm syndrome for our existing system (btw, do you see what I did there?).
If we agree with Le Corbusier's argument that a house is a machine for living, then you could say that Scandinavian architecture and design are machines that just work, no fuss and no muss. If we want to take it a step further and import their healthcare systems and general organization of society, we need to emphasize that simplicity first and foremost. Then maybe we'll have a chance to sell more Americans on the concept.
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