Government wants to control you, business just wants to flog you stuff. I know which I prefer.

 Rich people running large companies don't want you to be poor. Really they don't. Those people want you to be rich because when you're rich you're going to buy more stuff. And when you buy more stuff, these folk can buy yachts, footballs clubs and space programmes helping make the world still more spiffy than it was before we started.

Some of those rich people run technology companies - the dark evil of Facebook, Google and so forth. We're told (mostly by politicians or by people who know there's more book sales in imaginary demons than in truth) that these big technology companies are bad because of algorithms, machine learning, profiling, psychographics and other scary things we don't really understand. The message of these politicians (and the people with books to sell) is that without some controls these tech companies will become the 21st century's robber barons impoverishing us so they can have more power and money. For the answer I refer you to the first paragraph above - rich businessmen and big businesses are really not interested in you being poor.

So, if the motives of businesses are clear ("we want to make money") how is it that we now have an escalating moral panic about tech? This sort of thing from one futurist person on Twitter - "...and if we don't start now, we will be nothing but pawns of large tech companies."

The thing for me with all of this is that the alternative to us being pawns of large tech companies (who essentially want to flog us goods and services) is to be what exactly? It does seem that those riding the moral panic of techno-fear - a sort of 21st century luddism - are proposing that the power is shifted from those terrible people selling us stuff and folded into the caring, sharing arms of government.

This is the government that wants to tax, ban and regulate you into changing your lifestyle to their official prescription (for your health, to protect, for the children). This is the government that demands identification from you for the most mundane of ordinary activities, from voting or opening a bank account to buying some glue to fix the shelf in the den, This is the government that, without democratic authority, is testing face recognition systems and enhanced surveillance. The government that installs cameras to track your every move and introduces Public Space Orders to give them power to arrest and punish you for things that aren't a crime. And this is the government that's introduced new blasphemy laws - supposedly to combat hate crime - allowing them to police our words and punish us for 'wrongthink'.

You should be a lot more scared of government and its agents than of businesses that just want to sell you stuff. Government exists only for the purpose of power and control - some of that is necessary but most of it suits the tidy organised minds of the bureaucrats (who, of course, know so much better what's good for you that you do). And all wrapped up in the hollow reassurance of "if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear".

As with all actions of government - and so much of it is beyond the scope of democratic accountability as to be essentially beyond control - you have to imagine these tools of  surveillance and restriction in the hands of a more authoritarian government. And we have a little glimpse of it with places like Singapore (how it makes me mad to see supposedly freedom-loving Tories telling us that South East Asia's pseudo-democratic and authoritarian city state is marvellous) and, of course, the ex-communist autocracy of China which is introducing a Social Credit system straight out of Brian Aldiss's "Primal Urge".

You've a choice folks - live in a free consumer society or else run from the imaginary demons conjured up by the great and good to scare you back under their control. For me this is a simple decision - if the price of freedom is me getting ads with my online searches directing me to things I might like to buy then it's a really cheap deal. And the motive of government, in so far as it is clear at all, has always been to control and direct what you do, the very antithesis of freedom.

“Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

Choose freedom.



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Citizen juries - another daft idea dreamed up in Whitehall

What, I hear you shout! How can the idea of "giving communities a more direct role in decision-making" be a bad idea? Surely this glowing world of empowered and engaged citizens is precisely the point of democracy - harnessing modern technology to transform the way we govern, what could go wrong?

The ideas around citizen participation in the government's new "Civil Society Strategy" sound good:

The Government will also launch an ‘Innovation in Democracy’ pilot scheme in six regions across the country, which could include Citizens’ Juries or mass participation in decision-making on community issues via an online poll or app.

Brilliant stuff! The problem is, of course, that this decision-making would be determined by those who turn up (or in modern terms, download the app, set it for notifications and respond when those notifications pop up). And most people don't turn up leaving the field to activists and the wronged - imagine making planning decisions in a world where angry NIMBYs with an app can flood the system?

Even for less contested decisions the app would be biased. When one US city trialed a clever app people could download that measured road impact (and therefore things like potholes and surface quality) they discovered that all their worst roads were in the wealthy quarters of town. The thing is that, using the only "engineer goes and looks" approach they knew this wasn't true, the big data from the app was wrong because people in poor neighbourhoods didn't use the clever app.

It's already the case that political decisions are disproportionately affected by representation - "he who shouts loudest wins" is an old local political adage. As a councillor, I constantly remind myself that my "full inbox" does not really reflect opinion but rather the opinion of a few people motivated enough to write. Nothing wrong with this until these minority opinions become the basis for policy decisions - "we must do something about X because I've had so many people raise it with me". Here, of course, "so many people" might mean a couple of dozen.

What happens with participatory systems is that, because of the bias, we don't actually decide on the basis of what the citizen panel says but rather treat it as a 'consultation'. The problem here is that, having consulted, it can get tricky to ignore the consultation without undermining the whole point of your whizzo participatory systems.

So let's not do this. We already have a tried and tested system for making political decisions in communities (called 'electing local councillors'). Perhaps we should look at ways in which this can work better - more community councils, a return to the committee system, scrapping party whips - rather than introducing systems that ignore local democracy in favour of app-based participation. Especially when, even the most intensive of participatory approaches gets low levels of engagement - in Porto Allegre where participatory budgeting is something of a religion they still only get 3% of citizens involved (and perhaps unsurprisingly these tend to be the older, home owning, wealthier citizens).

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There's been plenty of economic progress since 2008 - you're just not measuring it

The problem with economics, I find, is that too often it becomes trapped inside the limits of what it measures. If we haven't attached a specific monetary value to something then the economist's assumption all too often is that this something therefore has no value. Take childcare for example - government recognises that looking after young children has a cost but only when that looking after is done by an agency external to the family. We therefore provide subsidy to people using that external agency but not to the people who choose to provide the childcare themselves. I may be wrong but it does seem that the driver here - glossed over by debates about getting women back to work (as if looking after children isn't work) - is that the only measure that counts is GDP. And there's a double win by the parent returning to work by using a childcare agency - not only does her return raise GDP because she's in the part of society we measure but the purchase of childcare raises that GDP too. It's taking in eachothers washing on a grand scale but it make the figures look good. Better stills we can throw chaff about women's equality into the mix to make it look like a social good.

One theme popular right now with some economists is the argument that there has been no "progress" since 2008's great crash. Those economists point to per capita GDP proclaiming 'look no increase in productivity' because those figures seem to have stagnated. The problem here is that it's a one-eyed look at people's lives - measuring only the money income and not what that money income gets us. It's true that average incomes haven't risen but to say there has been no progress ("the final crisis of late capitalism") is hard to argue.

Until recently I was a director of a large social housing organisation and, in preparation for the shift to universal credit and the digital-by-default approach it uses, we looked at how ready our customers were for the change, the degree to which they were digitally-enabled. What we found was nearly 9 in 10 of the tenants had access to the Internet, most commonly using a smart-phone. Bear in mind that we are literally dealing with the poorest in society - three-quarters of our tenants relied on benefits. I realised why when I dropped my (expensive) phone in a car park and it smashed.

My temporary fix was to buy - yes buy - a phone for £20 and stick a sim card in it. And this wasn't the cheapest smart-phone. For £25 I had a phone allowing me access (albeit slightly slow) to the whole of the Internet's wonders. I'd venture to suggest that this wasn't possible in 2008 and those poor and vulnerable people in our flats and houses have had their lives made significantly better by being able to afford the benefits of Internet technology previously only available to the wealthy.

Take a walk round your house, look at the things that have changed - become cheaper and better in equal measures. Televisions, fridges, microwave ovens, dishwashers. Open the apps on your cheap smart phone and see the things you've got for free - music streaming, social media, football scores and updates, bus timetables, maps, radio. I've a super little bluetooth speaker, better sound quality than any transistor radio of my youth - cost me £9.99.

Pop down to the supermarket and walk round. Tens of thousands of lines, produce from across the world and at prices little higher than a decade ago. Add in cheaper taxis from Uber, cheap home delivery takeaway food, online retailing driving down costs and prices. Thousands of small changes each one providing a little more value to us as people often for a little less cost.

So when people say "there's no productivity growth" are they really telling the truth? Perhaps - hallelujah - the productivity growth is coming in people's private lives not in the dull Taylorist world of the workplace. The last ten years have seen massive advances in people's lives, what we get for our money means we're better off even if that money's still the same. Today's TV isn't the same as the telly of ten years ago (it's flat, smart and hung on the wall). Today's mobile phone isn't really a phone, it's a computer more powerful than the PCs and laptops of ten years ago.

All this is hard to measure (how to calculate the benefit I get from wasting so much time on Facebook and Twitter) so mostly we don't bother. And this lets people get away with spouting manifest nonsense like this from Delphine Strauss in the FT:

Absolute social mobility — people’s chances of living better than their parents — has worsened almost everywhere since the financial crisis.

Our children and grandchildren are likely to enjoy a vastly better life than us enjoying things we can only speculate about. For sure there's an outside chance of the Marxist wet dream coming about and capitalism completely collapsing but it's one of those sort of outside chances that brought Ford, Zaphod, Arthur and Tricia together - damned close to infinitely improbable. And so long as capitalism continues it will carry on creating, innovating, initiating - doing the thing it has done for three hundred years: making us all happier, healthier and wealthier. Long may it continue.

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If there's a global technology race, Europe is going to lose.

This is clear from an interview in Der Speigel with Pedro Domingos, author of 'The Master Algorithm' (which, we're told sits on Xi Jinping's bookshelf alongside Marx and Mao):

My literary agent told me: "You are going to sell this book all over the world, but not in France and Germany." And that's what happened. "The Master Algorithm" was sold to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea. There are Polish and Russian translations. But my agent was right when he said: "The Germans and the French don't like these things."

There still isn't a German translation of the book and it's because the Europeans are terrified of technology's implications:

The picture coming out of Silicon Valley is a very optimistic one, informed by libertarian ideas. The very opposite is true for Europe: I just came back from a conference in Berlin where I was struck by the sheer pessimism. Every other session was about: "Oh, we have to fear this. Who knows what may be going on here?"

This technology - Artificial Intelligence - is our future economy, it is our escape (if Silicon Valley's libertarianism wins over Jinping's autocracy) from being what sociologist C. Wright Mills called The Cheerful Robot back in 1959 (if not it's a world more like Taylorism on steroids - Zamyatin's 'We'). Yet European governments are closing the doors to the idea - from proposals for limits on robots to government access to commercial algorithms the EU and other European governments are set against the idea of a liberal, free market artificial intelligence.

Here in Britain it's not much better with the recent Facebook / Cambridge Analytica sessions, the House of Lords' risible report on AI regulation, the febrile 'we're being spied on by evil capitalists' line of national broadcasters and broadsheets, and a government that can't see how giving the state access to encrypted messaging makes that messaging useless.

We need a debate about the risks and benefits rather than about how we can control the technology - what are the downside risks of unregulated commercial AI set against the upside benefits of giving technology innovators free rein? What, as Domingos comments, is the balance between 'explainability' (this is what the algorithm does) and effectiveness?

Right now Europe, for all its brains and corporate clout, is dragging its heels and, worse, has a government in the EU that is actively opposed to both a liberal US-style technology surge and an autocratic Chinese-style approach. Whoever wins this battle, it isn't going to be Europe.

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52 things that are more important than Brexit - including mushrooms

I know it seems that Brexit (or not-Brexit for that matter) is the most significant and momentous thing that has happened anywhere or anywhen. The chattering classes have nothing else to talk about - everything from the cost of coffee to the price of a flat in Mayfair is washed through the "what does this mean for Brexit" mill. Well I'm here to suggest that when other folk look back at 2017 in fifty years time they'll see some other things that were more important to the future of mankind - even of that small bit of mankind living in the UK.

I did a little list of those things that might be more important than Brexit.

1. Driverless cars and autonomous transport technology
2. Neo-Luddite campaigns opposed to digital disaggregation, AI and robots
3. Better drones enable African development without roads or rail
4. Electricity supply systems (power supply, microgeneration, disagregation, off-grid)
5. Fracking, renewables lead to declining reliance on oil (impact on economy, on geopolitics)
6. Private space travel
7. Colonising Mars
8. Non-national living, seastedding, artificial islands, cruise living
9. Declining fertility rates in rich countries
10. Continuing population pressures in poor countries
11. Migration from poor places to rich places
12. International migration, people trafficking, refugees
13. Integration and community cohesion in a world with more migration
14. Food production and distribution - feeding the world: GMO, animal welfare
15. Changing diets as poor nations become richer
16. Big killers - malaria, AIDS, and so forth
17. Antibiotics
18. Medical technology
19. Continuing urbanisation with associated health and societal problems
20. The future of care and health provision in an ageing society
21. Loneliness
22. Declining rates of functional literacy as technology reduces need to read and write
23. Ideological bias in education - especially higher education
24. Decline in religious worship leading to more extremism from faith groups
25. Intellectual property, copyright and piracy
26. Scientifical and technical literacy
27. Cyberterrorism, cybercrime and cyberwar
28. Pornography and sexual exploitation
29. Women's rights
30. Rogue states, civil war and terrorism
31. Break up of established nations - Spain, Italy, UK, USA?
32. Climate change - resilience, technological response, economic impact
33. Environmental degradation, desertification
34. Reforestation, rewilding
35. Flooding and flood mitigation
36. Water supply and water quality
37. Pollution of the oceans
38. Digital disruption of elite white collar business (law, accountancy, banking)
39. FinTech and its challenge to central banking system of financial management
40. 3D Printing and associated technologies
41. Impact of Internet of Things on human productivity
42. The 'gig' economy, self-employment - rights and protections
43. Chinese monopoly of African resources
44. China becoming a net importer of goods
45. Remote warfare - drones, military robots
46. Nuclear proliferation
47. Mushrooms (or rather fungi in building, medicine and environmental management)
48. Nanotechnology
49. Biotechnology including 'bionics'
50. Break up of blue collar/white collar political order
51. Impact of digital technology on democratic institutions
52. England winning the World Cup (well we can dream!)

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Now, about those robots...

From Deirdre McCloskey:

If the nightmare of technological unemployment were true, it would already have happened, repeatedly and massively. In 1800, four out of five Americans worked on farms. Now one in 50 do, but the advent of mechanical harvesting and hybrid corn did not disemploy the other 78 percent.

In 1910, one out of 20 of the American workforce was on the railways. In the late 1940s, 350,000 manual telephone operators worked for AT&T alone. In the 1950s, elevator operators by the hundreds of thousands lost their jobs to passengers pushing buttons. Typists have vanished from offices. But if blacksmiths unemployed by cars or TV repairmen unemployed by printed circuits never got another job, unemployment would not be 5 percent, or 10 percent in a bad year. It would be 50 percent and climbing.

Maybe there is a limit. Maybe. But aren't we better off, regardless of that financial investment warning, planning for tomorrow's changes to result in similar outcomes from today's?



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An Evil Marketer comments on data analytics in political campaigning

Back in the 1970s a man called Richard Webber was working at the UK government's centre for Environmental Studies. This, more or less, was what he was doing:

I created Acorn, the first neighbourhood classification system, while working at the government's Centre for Environmental Studies in the 1970s.

People ask how it came to be a commercial application. I had organised a seminar for local authorities to show how neighbourhood data could identify areas of deprivation. Quite by chance, it attracted Ken Baker, a sampling specialist from BMRB. He was a lateral thinker and he came up with the idea that the Acorn tool would be useful for market research sampling.

I meanwhile had realised that Acorn could help predict the households most likely to respond to direct mail and door drops.

Without wanting to come over all geeky, Webber had used census data combined with the electoral register to create a classification of small neighbourhoods (based on census enumeration districts, the base geography for the national census). The principle of Webber's classification is essentially that 'birds of a feather flock together' - people in Manchester who have the same census characteristics as people in Bristol will tend to have other similar behavioural characteristics including, of course, purchasing preferences.

I know you're asking what all this has to do with Brexit (or indeed voting in general). The thing is that, as well as Webber's classification of residential neighbourhoods capturing similarities in terms of how people might respond to different marketing offers, the system also applies to the matter of how we vote. If the 'birds of a feather' principle is correct then similar areas will have similar voting behaviour.

By the end of the 1980s, we were using geodemographics (as Webber's system became known) to combine with proprietary data on customers to refine the targeting of direct marketing campaign, to improve the selection of retail sites and to manage advertising better. Without wanting to overcomplicate, customer address data was given an ACORN code and then profiled using initially a simple index (where 100 = National Average). The indices were reported at the level of postal sector (i.e. BD11 2 or ME2 7) as these were large enough to give the index validity but small enough to facilitate fine grain targeting.

For a targeted doordrop we might then take the top 300 postal sectors and, through the Royal Mail, purchase a delivery of unaddressed mail. Typically, results showed an uplift in response of 2x or 3x depending on the client. Results were less good for targeted direct mail using the electoral register - mostly because a key behavioural characteristic, responsiveness, was not captured in census data. We played other games using expert systems and the early days of data-mining too - it was just a lot slower back then!


The generation of geodemographic systems that followed the original census-based ACORN system (e.g. SuperProfiles, MOSAIC) began to add in other large data sources such as credit data and 'psychographic' survey data - some may recall the retailed questionnaires incentivised with free prize draws that collected this information. Targeting extended beyond shared residential characteristics to details about financial services, indebtedness and preferences around holidays, cars, fmcg products and lifestyle choices (smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.).

Unsurprisingly, political parties began to make use of these systems to improve the targeting of election campaigning especially in areas where they lacked good quality 'voting intention' (VI) data. The same essential methodology was used as that I was using for mail order and financial services companies - a database of VI details was profiles against MOSAIC to provide improved campaign targeting in places with no canvass. This might be used on a national basis to decide which local council by-elections to target or at the constituency level to improve the effectiveness of limited resources thereby allowing the broadening of target seat campaigns.

Which I guess brings us to this conclusion from an article about a marketing analytics business who may or may not have been active during the recent EU Referendum:

Is it the case that our elections will increasingly be decided by the whims of billionaires, operating in the shadows, behind the scenes, using their fortunes to decide our fate?

To appreciate why this is unlikely, we need to go back to how marketing analytics work, which is at the aggregate level. I appreciate, as a marketing professional, how we all want to believe advertising has become like the opening scenes in Minority Report but the reality is that aggregate data really doesn't provide the means to manipulate what we think. Rather, geodemographics, psychographics and marketing analytics enable us marketers to better target those people who are already predisposed to buy our product (or vote for our cause).

The big change from the stuff we were doing with mag tapes and mainframe computers in 1989 is the availability of information from social media (most usually Facebook). Again this is aggregate data - Facebook doesn't sell your details to marketing analytics businesses - but the sophistication of the data makes the targeting of messages all the more precise as does the ability to analyse public profiles without Facebook's permission. But even with this level of analysis, we still haven't 'manipulated' your opinion merely targeted our message more precisely to people more likely to respond positively to that message.

We are right to express concerns about whether the use of analytics has crossed over into misuse of personal data and it appears the UK's Information Commissioner is doing just that. But the likely truth (given it is not in Facebook's interest to share personal data and this is illegal in the EU) is that analytics companies are simply doing just what we were doing as direct marketers 30 years ago - using information to target our messages a little better. Back then it was all seen as a bit sinister ('where did you get my name from...') and nothing has changed except that there's more information, faster computers and social media. You can always find a computing academic (note, not a marketer) do do the full on evil empire stuff:

A rapid convergence in the data mining, algorithmic and granular analytics capabilities of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is creating powerful, unregulated and opaque ‘intelligence platforms’. In turn, these can have enormous influence to affect what we learn, how we feel, and how we vote. The algorithms they may produce are frequently hidden from scrutiny and we see only the results of any insights they might choose to publish.”

The truth is a deal more prosaic. Marketers ask customers about their lives, social media use and so forth then profile this against aggregate data from various sources to produce targeting information - where geographically or behaviourally we can go looking for folk like those customers we've surveyed. I so want us marketers and ad men to be master manipulators, able to switch your mind at the push of an analytical button or the twitch of an algorhithm. But we're not like that at all, we're not even that good at using big data.

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Things are seldom as simple as they seem...

I'm discussing Council budgets and we get to the matter of shared services and specifically sharing back office functions (things like receipts and payments, payroll, tax collection and so forth). Now these are things that every local council does with the same intention and the same outcome. So, on the face of it, sharing such things ought to be a doddle.

The problem is (and it's not insurmountable since quite a few councils have merged back office with other councils) that, for all the apparent obviousness, things aren't that simple. Even if I allow for a certain amount of bureaucratic sucking of teeth - "ooh, Councillor, I don't think that's possible" - there remains the matter of systems. And unless you merge the systems you really don't realise, other than a bit of saving in senior management, much benefit from sharing.

The problem is that merging large and complicated systems is not straightforward. By way of illustration, our former Spanish bank (Banesto) was taken over by another bank (Santander) but the actual back office systems for the two banks remain - or did in October 2015 - separate to the extent that Santander operators were unable to sort out problems, these had to be done by the former Banesto people who "understood the systems".

Integrating two complicated back office systems - say those of Leeds and Bradford Councils - is only possible given time, money and a plan. To make such a merger worthwhile, we need also to know that the net savings exceed, in a reasonable time frame, the money invested in the merger. It is, while not impossible, pretty challenging to make this calculation with a high degree of confidence. Such a lack of confidence isn't really a problem if the costs are low and the savings are high. But this really doesn't seem to be the case for such back office mergers (or so I'm told).

This problem with complex systems, how they stay in place because changing them is uncertain and expensive, is repeated time and time again. Here's Jon Worth on European railways (quite literally):

After having been stuck again this morning due to lack of collaboration between EU rail firms, I started to wonder: can liberalisation of EU rail actually ever work? And, were it to ever work, what are the prerequisites to making it work?

Jon goes on to set out seven factors about the system (information, accountability, ownership, cohesion, customer rights, maintenance and ticketing) that need resolution through system design if a liberalised railway is to be delivered. Jon concludes, unsurprisingly, that:

So then, that’s the little list of issues to solve. Will the EU, and its Member States, be ready to go that far to make a liberalised railway work? And to foot the costs of doing so? I rather doubt it…

The problem for us is that, given the significance of our legacy systems (in government, transport and finance especially) and the rate of innovation in these areas, we run the risk of economic sclerosis unless we begin to grapple with the challenge of replacing those systems with new ones. There are technical solutions to all of Jon's questions but the current infrastructure (physical and social) is largely unable to carry those technical solutions. The result of this is that people find 'get-arounds' - those railways, instead of sleek transport systems of the future become anachronistic and inefficient systems superceded by driverless vehicles, drones and communications technology.

Too often this is an argument against doing anything or for merely doing things that don't impact the established order - an interactive screen here, an app there rather than having some idea how the system will look when everything is done. For all my liberal instincts, I can't help but think things are seldom as simple as we like to think they are whatever William of Ockham might have said!

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Great technology but lousy business - the urban farming revolution that isn't

There's an article in the New Yorker about 'vertical farming' - this is the use of redundant urban spaces to create farms:

No. 212 Rome Street, in Newark, New Jersey, used to be the address of Grammer, Dempsey & Hudson, a steel-supply company. It was like a lumberyard for steel, which it bought in bulk from distant mills and distributed in smaller amounts, mostly to customers within a hundred-mile radius of Newark. It sold off its assets in 2008 and later shut down. In 2015, a new indoor-agriculture company called AeroFarms leased the property. It had the rusting corrugated-steel exterior torn down and a new building erected on the old frame. Then it filled nearly seventy thousand square feet of floor space with what is called a vertical farm. The building’s ceiling allowed for grow tables to be stacked twelve layers tall, to a height of thirty-six feet, in rows eighty feet long. The vertical farm grows kale, bok choi, watercress, arugula, red-leaf lettuce, mizuna, and other baby salad greens.

Pretty interesting stuff especially when you look at the technology involved where the production system uses a tiny proportion of the water typically used to grow those baby salad greens. Indeed this sort of technology holds out considerable opportunity for the further intensification of high added value salad vegetable production - anyone driving through the Fens will see the polytunnels and greenhouses that might form the basis for this technology, especially in a world where water is more expensive, to really make a difference.

The problem is that urban spaces really aren't the best places - even with multistorey production - to do such a business. Here's a clue:

The AeroFarms clamshell package (clear plastic, No. 1 recyclable) appears to be the same size as its competition’s but it holds slightly less—4.5 ounces instead of five. It is priced at the highest end, at $3.99. The company plans to have its greens on the shelves soon at Whole Foods stores and Kings, also in the local area. Greens that come from California ride in trucks for days.

So we've a product that is significantly more expensive that the more traditionally produced product. Even were a tighter ship to be run it is unlikely that AeroFarms will be able to compete with the mass production in California leaving it with a niche market of people who want to buy 'local' production.

This vertical farming requires the acquisition of expensive urban real estate and a significant capital investment just to grow stuff for a niche part of a niche market for salad vegetables. The idea that this sort of production will somehow release current agricultural land for rewilding is pretty much nonsense. The plant in New Jersey featured in the article will have cost some $39 million (including nearly $9 million in government grants) to create a little more than an acre of vertical farmland - right now agricultural land in New Jersey sells for about $10,000 an acre.

The technology here is genuinely exciting but, even in run down urban areas, there is no way that vertical farming on expensive real estate is the solution. And this is before we recognise that businesses like AeroFarms focus on agricultural products with pretty much the highest margins - salad leaves for yuppies - rather than on the sort of production that dominates arable farming in the USA: corn, wheat, potatoes, barley and so forth. Lovely technology but lousy business.

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2017: Another year of human progress beckons. Let's celebrate!

Another year crawls coughing and spluttering from the ashes of its predecessor. Blinking in the watery light of a January morning, 2017, like many of its inhabitants, groans with the hangover from supervising the final death throes of the "Year of Horrors" that was 2016. Everywhere the perkier of those denizens, perhaps those most inured to hard drinking, started the annual task of churning out comments and predictions about the year ahead.

I've never been one for making predictions - I'm usually wrong - so instead I'll celebrate things we already have that are wonderful. We are, ignore all the doom and gloom, truly a blessed generation and we don't remind ourselves of this fact often enough. It's not just that there are fewer poor people in the world that ever in human history but that the things those no longer poor folk can have include stuff that were the stuff of science fiction just a decade or two ago.

I lost my phone in Lisbon during 2016 (on 23 June as it happens) and for various reasons had to get a cheap smart phone as a stop gap before my new and shiny Samsung was available. For less than £20 I had the sort of computing power that, as a student, had occupied a whole floor of a building in Hull. And with that bargain computing I could make phone calls, send letters, research the information I need for work plus things undreamed of back in the 1980s like social media and text messaging.

We've also found that the electricity these things need to run - much less as it happens that in times past - is now increasingly coming from renewal sources. And the fossil fuel sources we still use - fracked natural gas especially - are also far less contributory to climate change. If the EU would stop being dumb about importing cheaper solar panels from the Far East (more protectionist nonsense I'm afraid) maybe we'd move even faster towards a sustainable energy market without having to do so by making poorer people's fuel more expensive.

There was a time when brand ownership was what matters to food businesses because brands allowed a premium price to the consumer. Today - if the coffee business is anything to go by - the brand is no longer the thing, it's capacity and production efficiency that matters more. Food businesses are now delivering their margins more by reducing production costs rather than through the costly malarkey of brand marketing. This renews the wonderful thing that is cheap food, something brought to you by great farmers, fantastic manufacturers and brilliant supermarketers. It is a cause for celebration that we spend just 11% of our household incomes on food and drink (13% if you include booze and fags) and the trends - especially if Brexit opens up international food markets - will carry on downwards to the benefit of everyone.

Because we no longer spend all that cash on food, we've been able to buy stuff we otherwise wouldn't have had the money for - such as over 20% of our income on leisure, pleasure, recreation, culture, hotels and restaurants. Not only do we have more leisure time but we've also got the cash to enjoy that time better. And to top it all we're living longer and healthier lives than ever before - a trend that's set to continue. Whereas a previous generation retired at 60 or 65 and died ten or twelve years later, today's retirees can expect - even with a raised retirement age - to live passed 80 in an active independent life (and some can look to living a great deal longer).

For sure this longevity presents a challenge - not least to our creaking and badly run health service - but it shows why the cult of the young that dominated media and politics for so long is no longer such a deal. Those 55 year old baby boomers (like me) can look forward to an average of 30 years more life so don't tell us that we've nothing invested in that Brexit decision. And with reducing rates of dementia and heart disease joining rapidly rising cancer survival rates whose to say thirty years doesn't become 35 or even forty!

Meanwhile, society is getting better. Crime rates have shown a recent rise but the really bad ones like murder are as low as they've been since the '70s. Other supposed crises seem less so - child obesity rates at five and eleven are at the lowest they've been since 2000 and this might represent a switch in what was a seemingly intractable problem. Vaping has resulted in an acceleration in smoking's decline - would be even faster in public health folk would get with the programme and accept that the markets and a consumer product has achieved what they couldn't.

Elsewhere the frantic panic about 'hate crime' seems misplaced too. If our primary schools are any guide, the UK is a really tolerant and non-racist place - out of 4.5 million children aged five to eleven there were just 420 racist 'incidents' in 2014-15 which is about one incident for each 10,000 children. And this came after a long campaign to make schools report incidents rather than just using their own discipline and correction. In Bradford - as multi-ethnic a place as you get - the Council and police had to put on extra resources to encourage the reporting of 'hate crime' And in a couple of months they managed just eight reports of such crimes from a population of half-a-million. We really aren't a racist nation - nor indeed are we especially sexist, homophobic or disablist either - at least if reports of hate crime are anything to go by.

The world's not perfect and mankind isn't perfect but let's get ourselves some perspective in 2017. Not everything's going to go well - some people will suffer personal loss or tragedy, celebrities who played a big part in our lives will die and the wrong side might win an election. But on the fundamentals and the direction of travel for technology, leisure, health and security the world's getting better year by year. There's no reason not to think this will continue on 2017. So look up, smile and enjoy the bounty that human genius has brought you.

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Uberising home cooking...

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I guess this works in a place where you've a lot of women at home with a kitchen:

Million Kitchen is an aggregator and delivery service by Delhi-based non profit Swechha that allows women to prepare and sell home cooked food to customers within a 5-7 km radius. The app-based service gives young working people the access to fresh and simple homestyle meals as well as empowers women to earn extra money by using their cooking skills. “Every dormant kitchen is a resource lying underutilized,” says Vimlendu Jha, Founder and CEO of Million Kitchen.

I'm sure there'll be the usual guffle about exploitation and workers rights but, hey, this is excellent!

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Stuff to read (including a brief Friday Fungus)

We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for mushrooms:

A fossil dating from 440 million years ago is not only the oldest example of a fossilised fungus, but is also the oldest fossil of any land-dwelling organism yet found. The organism, and others like it, played a key role in laying the groundwork for more complex plants, and later animals, to exist on land by kick-starting the process of rot and soil formation, which is vital to all life on land

Driverless boats...oh yes!!

The world’s first flying water taxis will soon be floating passengers down the Seine river in Paris. The electric, zero-emission vehicle, called the Sea Bubble, will float 70 centimeters above water, touching only along its four “marine wings.” It is set to begin testing in Paris this summer with possible commercialization coming as early as 2017.

The Sea Bubble was invented by Alain Thébault, who holds several sailing speed world records. He is best known as one of the designers of the l’Hydroptère, a ship that was able to break 50 knots thanks to its innovative hydrofoil.

The ancient origins of the North-South divide:

To find a more convincing connection between modern politics and medieval monarchs, we need to go beyond mere borders and explore cultural, political and genetic links. For instance, the advocates of Yorkshire devolution trace their heritage back to medieval times – and even earlier. There’s certainly some evidence to support their longstanding connection with the region.

Mind mapping cities:

It’s the same in mapmaking, says Archie Archambault, a designer who’s making an ongoing series called “Map From the Mind.” Archambault’s maps are based solely on his own explorations and time spent with locals in a given city. “It seems kind of dishonest to make a map completely based on secondhand data,” he says. “The tradition of mapmaking is surveying and being within the parameters of the space.”

The maps he’s made won’t give you turn-by-turn directions from from point A to point B, but they will give you the gist of various cities through the eyes of locals.

Your city isn't the next silicon valley:

Still, if everywhere is the next Silicon Valley, then nowhere is the next Silicon Valley. That’s the reality, and it’s important for cities to grasp it so they can plan their economic futures properly.

“When it comes to tech, nobody can simply create the next Silicon Valley,” explains Aaron Renn, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“Just because a place has a number of startups doesn't mean it's destined to be a Silicon Valley,” Renn continued. “By all means celebrate a growing tech industry, but don't get carried away.”

People or places?

Given their fundamental territoriality, however, cities can never really be people-based entities in that sense. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, an advocate for policies that are first about people, is realistic about the choices facing local policymakers. As he put it in an article for City Journal, “No mayor ever got re-elected by making it easy for his citizens to move to Atlanta, of course, even when that might be a pretty good outcome for the movers themselves.”

The very best article on London's pillaging of Bradford's National Media Museum:

I never imagined, thirty years on, that dream would be comprehensively shattered as the status of Bradford's collection, already diminished by cuts and neglect, would be relegated to that of a retro-themed amusement arcade with the notional remit of helping kids through their science and technology GCSEs.

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A fossil dating from 440 million years ago is not only the oldest example of a fossilised fungus, but is also the oldest fossil of any land-dwelling organism yet found. The organism, and others like it, played a key role in laying the groundwork for more complex plants, and later animals, to exist on land by kick-starting the process of rot and soil formation, which is vital to all life on land. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-load-of-old-rot-fossil-of-oldest-known-land-dweller-identified#sthash.5nhL1A3A.dpuf

How to save the high street - don't employ anybody

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So it seems:

Customers simply use their cellphones to unlock the door with a swipe of the finger and scan their purchases. All they need to do is to register for the service and download an app. They get charged for their purchases in a monthly invoice.

The shop has basics like milk, bread, sugar, canned food, diapers and other products that you expect to find in a small convenience store. It doesn't have tobacco or medical drugs because of the risk of theft. Alcohol cannot be sold in convenience stores in Sweden.

"My ambition is to spread this idea to other villages and small towns," said Ilijason. "It is incredible that no one has thought of his before."

He hopes the savings of having no staff will help bring back small stores to the countryside. In recent decades, such stores have been replaced by bigger supermarkets often many miles (kilometers) away.

Of course nothing is quite as simple as this - the shelves still have to be stocked and someone has to manage that stock, deliver that stock and handle customers. But the principle - that the simple process of buying a loaf of bread and some cheese can be entirely dehumanised - still stands and means that the advantage supermarkets have over local stores is diminished.

However, it does seem to me that the big losers in this battle (perhaps not in Sweden though) aren't the big hypermarkets with 100,000 lines and sophisticated delivery systems but rather the expanding market of small convenience stores run by those same stores. I suspect that, while this system will challenge 24-hour opening, the market for crisps and baby food at three in the morning is pretty limited.

Interesting stuff though.

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Don't laugh, really...don't laugh

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The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) thinks planning is needed for technology development:

‘City planners are uniquely placed to mediate and bring together the conditions that are attractive to technology and AM firms, such as highly skilled employees who prefer a more social lifestyle and proximity to workplace, broadband connectivity, good transport, physical compactness.’

Given the planners' record on housing might I suggest we keep them as far away from all this economic development stuff as we possibly can.

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Will the gig economy kill planning?

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From California Planning and Development Report:

But how can you possibly plan for and control land uses when every bedroom is a hotel room, and every dining room is a restaurant, and every coffee shop is an office, and conversely every office is a potential living room or dining room or bedroom?

Well exactly. That is if your planning system depends on rigorous and strongly enforced zoning of land use (which is the case in California). And we're not just talking here about planning for housing, employment or physical infrastructure but a whole load of other things where we use control of land use as the starting point - health, education, recreation and waste management for example.

Even the need for road improvements – maybe the biggest driver of planning in California – is based on assumptions about different land uses. Road improvements are based on traffic estimates, which in turn are based on formulas about how much traffic is created by different land uses – single-family homes, apartments, office buildings, restaurants, and so on.

The basis on which much of local government is founded has been undermined by the way in which technology is disrupting service businesses, work patterns and social activity. We really have no idea whether our carefully defined models for estimating employment land demand, housing need or the need for public transport will actually meet the needs for those things. When people commute by Skype and conduct business from the pub on the corner, the assumptions about needs change in a way that the planning system - dependent on spatial determinism - simply can't accommodate.

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If we're not planning for 'robocars', we are planning wrongly.

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OK we're talking about America here but the point remains a strong one:

The rise of robocars may accelerate metro area decentralization. Congestion will be reduced, and the greater safety of driverless cars may permit higher speeds on metro area beltways and cross-town freeways. Once taxi drivers are replaced by robot taxis, the cost of taxis will plummet and the greater convenience of point-to-point personal travel anywhere in a sprawling metro area will make rail-based mass transit obsolete except in places like airports and tourist-haven downtowns. As in the past, most working-class families with children will probably prefer a combination of a longer commute with a bigger single-family house and yard to a shorter commute and life in a cramped apartment or condo.

We need to understand that this will happen and it will make all our debate about the negatives of personal transport obsolete. This also - with the need to travel also reduced by technology - rather undermines the idea that we will cram ourselves into enormous, dense core cities while the wilderness is recreated as that technology reduces farmland acreage.

Our debate about housing, transport and much else is stale and limited so long as our long-term planning is predicated on urban densification to reduce the impact of the private car. Driverless vehicles as a mass transit solution may be 30 years ago but this is not a massive planning horizon and the places that design themselves to meet this world will be the winners.

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The World's Most Important Thinkers...discussed (and they aren't economists)

Over at a magazine called Prospect (which badges itself rather self-importantly as "The Leading Magazine of Ideas") they're having a fun little poll asking who the world's most important thinkers might be - just follow this link to vote. I would recommend opting for Russell Brand - mostly for the laughs.

However, the list of great thinkers from which we must choose - carefully chosen by Prospect's team of contributors "whether they agree with them or not" (very big of them that) - set me to thinking about what constitutes an 'important thinker'. But first the make up of Propsect's list as this contains an important truth about what the punditry consider important.

The dominant category is 'economist' with thirteen entries in the list of 50 followed by the general term 'activist' with eight entries (ten if you include a lone feminist and someone listed as 'activist and tech theorist') and writers - journalists, novelists, authors -  also with eight entries. The rest of social science and historians musters twelve entries and there's one each of diplomat, surgeon and lawyer. The remaining four entries are scientists - two physicists and two biologists.

What we see here is the increasing hegemony of economics alongside a continuing hero-worship of sexy and attractive activists. The list doesn't contain a single engineer, entrepreneur, chemist or - and this is striking given the importance of the debate - climatologist. There are no artists, designers or architects, no urbanists, no geographers. Given the importance of business and the management of business it is shocking that the only thinker on business issues (as opposed to economics) is Naomi Klein who promotes an anti-market, anti-business message.

I suppose that all this reflects the current bias in how we seek to understand the world and the continuing botheration about the world's economy. So the preference for economists - and the list isn't especially biased to left or right in its choices - reflects the belief (a misfounded belief) that their musings can help us understand what needs to be done to put things that are wrong with the economy right. But settle back for a moment and ask yourself what message Prospect's 'team' are sending by selecting so few scientists?

Economics, and especially 'grand unified theories of everything' (© M. Piketty) economics, has become something of a fetish with the punditry. The discipline has indulged this - partly with the twee (think Freakonomics) and partly with creating a parallel universe where people continue to kid themselves that national economy models will actually explain the real world rather than simply play games with ever more sophisticated arithmetic.

The most important thinkers aren't those trying to square the circle by pretending there's a way to have a store of value without creating the value in the first place. Rather the important thinking is being done by those working out how to colonise Mars, how to extract more efficiency from the machines that capture energy, and how to feed the world's population as it continues to grow. The important thinking isn't about money or wealth but about technology, creativity and art - yet Prospect have chosen a list utterly dominated by the immediate botheration of national budgets, international relations and, in the case of Russell Brand and Naomi Klein, baying at the moon.

Look ahead at the things that will transform the world - like driverless cars, 3D printing, nanotechnology, hybrid engines, photovoltaic technologies, intelligent surfaces and bio-engineered fungi - none of these things are the stuff of economists, activists and writers. Rather they are the stuff of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs - I may be none of these things but I'm sure that the most important thinking being done right now is being done in laboratories, test sites and boardrooms not in newspaper offices or wherever it is that economists gather to peddle their myths.

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Coding is either an everyday basic skill or an elite profession - it can't be both

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Let's start by mentioning that I can't write code - indeed I would know where to start. But I know it is important and that the ability to construct computer programmes will be central to the future of civilisation. So I am sympathetic to those who believe that more people - perhaps everybody - should be given the basics of coding:

We at the Year of Code are going to help change that. The new computing curriculum starts this September, and it puts coding at the heart of IT education. Coding is the art of telling a computer how to perform complex tasks. Once you know how to code, you can create virtual worlds within the computer where the only limit on what is possible is your imagination. We want to put this power into the hands and hearts of every child in Britain.

I applaud this initiative - it liberates coding from being the domain of specially trained folk and results in a broader understanding of how we can make the computing tools around us work for us.  However there's a dilemma - the code being written is giving instructions to important things like vehicles, heating systems and the delivery of medication. We want it to work.

So there's a bunch of people who want to control who can (and cannot) be allowed to write code:

Frailey suggests that software engineers should be required to demonstrate a certain level of expertise before offering their services to the public, just like professionals in disciplines like medicine and law.

Indeed some 30 states in the USA now require software engineers to take (and pass) a licencing examination before they can work on projects that "affect public safety". It's pretty simple to see that such a definition has the capacity to cover almost everything that involves programming computers and especially the programming of tools in the so-called "internet of things".

We have two different pressures - one the support among professional code-writers for licencing and the other a movement to democratize coding by giving the skills to everyone. It is difficult to encompass both things - coding is either a basic skill that everyone can use or it's a highly sophisticated activity akin to heart surgery requiring specially licenced individuals. In the latter case, it is in the interests of the licence issuer and the person licenced to extend the requirement beyond high risk areas (programming the computer that will aid in the heart surgery, for example) to encompass a much wider range of activities. Programming computers, rather than being a craft skill, becomes a licenced 'engineering' function, the very opposite of the world envisaged by the people at Year of Code.

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Some thoughts on a £364m question.

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The front page of Bradford's Telegraph & Argus was splashed with the terrible truth about health spending - a £364m 'spending gap':

Bradford’s health and social care services face a funding shortfall of a staggering £364 million over the next five years, health bosses have warned.

And one health board member has said the district faces some “really hard” decisions, including possible hospital restructures, as it tries to balance the books. 

Now that 'one health board member' was me - pointing out that something should be done now to address the problem. Indeed the longer we leave the hard decisions the more painful those decisions and the greater the prospect (as neighbouring Calderdale is discovering) of those decisions being imposed rather than agreed locally.

The instinct of observers is to start talking about 'austerity' or 'cuts' and to calling down opprobrium on the evil government for not protecting health services. And this instinct is wrong - however much Labour may pretend with their jobs tax to fund the NHS. The problem isn't maintaining levels of funding but increasing demand for health services. An increasing demand driven by two factors - the wonderful truth that we're all living longer (around three-quarters of NHS spending is on the over-65s) and the equally wonderful fact that clever scientists, doctors and surgeons are discovering ever more creative ways to improve medicine.

In the article where I'm quoted the issues raised are whether we need to review hospital provision in the District (we have three general hospitals) and whether there is the need for reform in primary care (there are still a lot of single-handed GP practices especially in the inner-city). But there are some other issues to explore including the application of technology to reduce the cost of healthcare - this could be telemedicine such as that pioneered at Airedale Hospital in partnership with the Prison Service. In the emerging model remote consultation removes the cost of transporting patients to hospitals for consultation and can be extended to supporting nursing homes and even the management of treatment for people in remote locations (Airedale's catchment includes the Yorkshire Dales).

We also need to consider that the funding gap in question is not a cut but rather an estimation of the shortfall in cash resource if nothing changes - there is no prospect of the roughly £1.2bn spent currently on health in Bradford getting smaller. Indeed the £364m estimated shortfall assumes that this figure will rise. This means that we need to find ways to increase productivity - getting more treatments than we currently get from a given budget, for example. This again makes for tough choices - for routine elective surgery do you commission private sector provision? And do you continue to improve the speed at which patients are released from very expensive hospital beds?

The other aspect of this productivity lies with self-care - or rather people being healthy enough not to need expensive medical support. Most of the population do not place much burden on health services (and, despite what the nannying fussbuckets say, this includes most smokers, drinkers and consumers of hamburgers). It is only as we age that this burden increases. If the age at which we become regulars at the doctor's surgery rose then this would represent a significant improvement (even though the long-term cost is unchanged as we will live longer).

We also need to direct investment towards things that really will reduce the health bill - chiefly by reducing or eliminating things that result in expensive hospital treatment. At present the public health budget is dominated by two things - treating people with drug and alcohol problems and running public health campaigns such as smoking cessation, weight management and alcohol awareness. We perhaps need to rethink some of this focus and to switch attention to environmental factors that contribute to those long hospital stays (typically by the elderly).

These factors where a sensible public health approach would concentrate would include:

• Reducing trips and falls especially in the home
• Programmes to reduce damp and cold conditions for the elderly
• Initiatives aimed at improving air quality in urban environments
• Actions to improve road safety

Alongside new technology, greater productivity and further private sector involvement, these sort of actions will help close the terrible spending gap - there may still be some tough decisions but we will have bought ourselves some time to make those decisions and implement them with care. I fear, however, that the producer interests dominating the health economy (most notably the medical profession itself) will act as a brake on many initiatives meaning we could end up closing hospitals, clinics and services rather than facing up to the challenges of improving the system's productivity.

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We have IVF technology why shouldn't women use it?

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The Chief Medical Officer has put on her official frown and wagged her finger at women:

Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England, said she was concerned about the “steady shift” towards women choosing to postpone starting a family until their late 30s and early 40s, reducing their chance of conception, and increasing their medical risks. 

To be fair to Dame Sally, this was just a warning that fertility declines with age and IVF doesn't always work (I suspect most women sort of know this). However, the result is some weapons grade fussbucketry from Lara Prendergast in the Spectator:

Like it or not, women must stop seeing fertility treatment as a lifestyle choice. It is wonderful that such treatment exists, but to see it as a ‘quick fix’ is wrong. Selling people fertility on the tube suggests we have taken a step in the wrong direction.

Why on earth not? Women live, on average, into their eighties providing more than adequate time to successfully raise a child to adulthood. And I don't think that fertility treatment represents any sort of 'quick fix' - it's intrusive, risky and the results are uncertain.

Presumably Ms Prendergast hasn't hit the point of panic - perhaps if she does she'll understand that, for most who use it, IVF treatment isn't some sort of cosy lifestyle choice but the consequence of careful discussion, stress and the failure to conceive.

So if there is technology that can help women in their 40s conceive, why on earth should judgemental fussbuckets like Ms Prendergast think it OK - without the first thought about women using these services - to suggest that somehow these women shouldn't think about having a baby. And worse to suggest they should have got pregnant when they were younger?

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