China and Russia drop the dollar for bilateral trade; Brazil and India may be next [via MetaFilter]. Southern Europe may well riot in response to fiscal austerity [via BigThink], and here in the UK it’s only taken six months of having the Tories back in power before the police started to club children with batons.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Following on rather neatly from yesterday’s suggestion that the “developed” economies may in fact be overdeveloped to the point of being detrimental to the overall good of society, here’s a lengthy piece at the New Yorker about Wall Street, investment banking and social good, which seems to reiterate a similar point: investment banking and securities trading isn’t actually beneficial to anyone other than the bloated financial sector itself [via MetaFilter].
It’s good to see people from within that sector starting to say so; whether we get things fixed before the next blow-out is another question entirely. A long article, but well worth the read.
Via Global Dashboard, speculation that a pretty fundamental shift in global economics may be under way*:
… could the emerging world now be a destination for those looking for security? That is what the credit markets say. Either they are wrong and emerging market credit is in an incipient bubble, or we need to turn received wisdom on its head.
[…]
What is fascinating is the market’s comparative judgment of the risk in emerging markets. Insuring against a default in China is exactly as expensive as in the UK – 0.6 per cent. The list of countries deemed safer than Italy (1.82 per cent) includes Mexico, Brazil and Chile, Russia, and even Indonesia (1.39 per cent).
This relative judgment on the emerging world has completely reversed in the two years since the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy seemed likely to tip over into an emerging market debt crisis. Then, insuring against an Indonesian default cost 12.47 per cent.
Back then, emerging markets were victims of a “risk off” trade. Investors got out as quickly as they could. This time, in spite of no shortage of true panic about sovereign debt in the eurozone, investors are not responding by selling emerging market debt.
The obvious explanation is “it’s a bubble!”, but the article goes on to suggest that it’s the very lack of financial sophistication in developing economies that may make them safer – a lower likelihood of speculative trader voodoo taking down entire countries, for example.
… this is not just about avoiding the west; emerging markets have advantages. They do not have expensive welfare states, so it is easier to keep their fiscal houses in order. They have less heavily developed financial sectors and banks that for the most part did not go overboard in the way that they did in western Europe and the US. Ireland’s banking sector grew far too big for its government to be able to rescue it without pain. If you want to avoid such risks, put your money in places such as Indonesia and Brazil.
I’m no economist, of course, so I’m not going to call it either way, but I think it’s interesting to consider the possibility that the “developed” economies are actually overdeveloped, a dead-end branch of excessive complexity on the tree of economic evolution.
[ * That link will probably smoosh you straight into the FT’s paywall, but if you Google one of the paragraphs above and click the correct link from the search results, you’ll be able to read the article in full. ]
The metaverse doesn’t make the news as often as it did a few years back, but don’t assume that means the glow is off for real profits from virtual worlds: Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs just made a cool half-million bucks on selling an asteroid-cum-nightclub in the Entropia Universe MMO.
Until recently, Neverdie was the owner of one of the hottest virtual properties in Entropia, Club Neverdie, situated on a virtual asteroid around Entropia’s first planet, Planet Calypso. Jacobs bought the virtual asteroid back in 2005 for $100,000, after taking out a mortgage on his real-life house.
[…]
Taking out a hundred grand to buy virtual property may have seemed like poor business sense, but Jacobs had a plan. He turned Club Neverdie into a must-visit destination, one that includes more than a dozen bio-domes, a night club, stadium and a mall, where other players flocked to spend real cash on virtual goods and services. Jacobs was making around $200,000 in annual revenue, enough to comfortably support him and his family. Some might wonder why Jacobs didn’t instead start a real-life business like most others. Jacobs’ answer, “games made sense.” Club Neverdie was a “turnkey business” for him — besides dropping in from time to time to check on the property, the business largely ran itself and had no other employees besides himself.
Flipping property has long been an appealingly easy business model for those with enough capital to spare… but not so much in meatspace these days. I think we’ve yet to see the first full-scale metaverse property gold-rush, but once we have, the first metaverse bubble-burst won’t be far behind; in the meantime, a smart chancer can still make their mark on that particular and limitless frontier.
Incidentally, a little further down this piece there’s an interesting and (to me) unexpected junction to another story, namely the J K Rowling plagiarism lawsuit, which gets weirder and weirder the deeper you look into it:
Jacobs wasn’t always a virtual celebrity, but even his past plays out like something out of a movie. His was born to a Miss United Kingdom and Adrian Jacobs, a prototypical Bond villain of sorts. An infamous ’60s British financier nicknamed “Mr. X,” the senior Jacobs was banned from the London Stock Market in the ’80s after a string of shady deals, and has been reportedly quoted as saying, “I’ll be back again, richer than ever!” You can almost hear the super-villain laughter. Adrian Jacobs died in 1997, but in 2009, his estate filed a lawsuit against J.K. Rowling, claiming the author of the Harry Potter series had copied substantial parts of Jacobs’ 1987 children’s book, Willy the Wizard.
Call me cynical, but I’m now even more convinced that the Willy The Wizard suit is an opportunist scam…
[This story via MetaFilter, to whom I’d point out that while I’ve blatantly stolen their headline pun, I did so in the belief that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. That, and the knowledge that I couldn’t think up a better one at short notice. ]
1) Marx wouldn’t approve! And anyway, we can learn about our relationship to the wider cosmos just as effectively from the surface of the Earth:
So outer space technology can be used for tackling a number of immediate social and political issues. But these strategies do not add up to a philosophy toward outer space and the form humanization should take. Here again, the focus should be on the development of humanity as a whole, rather than sectional interests. First, outer space, its exploration and colonization, should be in the service of some general public good. Toward this end, the original intentions of the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty should be restored. Outer space should not be owned or controlled by any economic, social, and political vested interest. The cosmos should not, in other words, be treated as an extension of the global environment, one to be owned and exploited. We have seen enough of this attitude and its outcomes to know what the result would be. Spreading private ownership to outer space would only reproduce social and environmental crises on a cosmic scale.
I’d agree that space shouldn’t be owned or controlled by vested interests, but I rather suspect that it won’t be very amenable to such any control, by dint of its, well, space; territorial disputes are a function of limited room for expansion, and it’ll take us a long while to run out of lebensraum at the top of the gravity well. Why fight for territory when it’s less effort to strike out for an unclaimed patch? Indeed, I suspect conflicts in space are more likely to retain the ideological character of those currently popular on Earth’s surface… viz. Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series, Sterling’s Schismatrix. Is that a reason to avoid going there? I’m not so sure; I don’t think we’re any more likely to solve those problems by simply staying put.
Frankly, I’m right behind George Dvorsky on this one, who says “… I couldn’t help but think that Marxist analyses are growing increasingly irrelevant and anachronistic […] Economic determinism ain’t what it used to be.” Marxism is a useful critical framework when used alongside others (especially in literature), but on its own it seems hopelessly idealistic, ignorant of (or uncaring for) post-modern networked global culture, and soundly lodged in the craw of Victorian industrialisation. Cue brickbats from my more radical left-wing readers… but the world has changed a lot since Marx, while Marxism hasn’t changed at all. YMMV. 🙂
2) We can’t survive out there! We’re designed to be planet-dwellers!
What is of greatest concern here is that, unlike muscle loss which levels off with time, bone loss seems to continue at a steady rate of 1 to 2 per cent for every month of weightlessness. During a three-year mission to Mars, space travellers could lose around 50 per cent of their bone material, which would make it extremely difficult to return to Earth and its gravitational forces. Bone loss during space travel certainly brings home the maxim “use it or lose it”.
[…]
The impossibility of an escape to space is just one of many examples of how our bodies, and those of our fellow organisms, are inseparable from the environments in which we live. In our futuristic ambitions we should not forget that our minds and bodies are connected to Earth as by an umbilical cord.
Well, yes, but umbilical cords can be cut and tied off; indeed, to extend the metaphor, cutting the cord is an essential step toward independence from one’s mother. And if our bodies are inseparable from our environments, we can hack one or both of them; if Human1.0 with default settings can’t live in space, we can upgrade her and her environmental surroundings. The biological status quo is not a cage, it’s a room with a door whose lock requires dexterous but doable picking.
There are concepts in development for spacecraft with artificial gravity, but nobody even knows what gravitational force is needed to avoid the problems.
Oh, I’d have guessed something approaching 10m/s² would do it… call it intuition. Anyway, Karl Schroeder’s done a better job than I can of deflating the long-standing “it’s too dangerous!” hand-wringing about space travel; of course there are challenges, but they’re far from insurmountable. Where there’s a will, and all that.
And as a wee bonus, here’s a new twist on an old fandom favourite:
So far, boneless creatures such as jellyfish are much more likely than people to be able to return safely to Earth after multi-year space trips.
Intelligent jellyfish in spaaaaaaaace… why should squid get all the glory, eh? 🙂