'More Money Than God' provides a comprehensive history of the hedge fund

📚 Finished listening to More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby,

This feels like a veritable encyclopedia of the history and evolution of hedge funds or, as they were originally called, back when they were invented in the middle of the 20th century, hedged funds. It’s not overly dry though; much of it is the stories of the ups and downs of various people heading these at-one-point-innovative funds.

What is a hedge fund? Well, roughly it is a private investment fund that…hedges. The idea being that unlike, say, more conventional stock funds that tend to pick stocks and hope they go up, they’re free to employ innumerable different investment strategies in all directions with the idea that no matter what happens you will have a lower risk of making a catastrophic loss whilst still capturing much of any gains in the market.

A basic example, although this is from my head rather than the book, so caveat emptor. Imagine you are convinced that a specific airline company stock is undervalued and hence going to skyrocket soon. You buy it. Then some disaster happens (e.g. a pandemic, to pick a non-random example) and every part of the airline industry shoots down in value. Sure, maybe your chosen stock was a good buy in other circumstances. But these are not those circumstances, so you lose a ton of your money, unlucky.

How could you hedge? Well, perhaps you identified another airline stock that you think might be overvalued, or even just fairly valued. Or perhaps you feel like placing a bet on a basket of all airline stocks out there. Either way, you short this stock - meaning in effect betting that it will go down. Then, if there is no pandemic then you might or might not lose money on the short but you’ll win big if you were right about the original airline stock you favoured. If there is a pandemic that temporarily destroys the whole industry then you’ll lose on your original stock pick but given you bet against another part of the same industry you will mitigate your losses with the profits you make from that trade.

Some also try to use a combination of psychology, math and economic strategies to take advantage of predictable inefficiencies in the market that are complicated enough to be unavailable to your average stock picker (and perhaps unbelievable to someone schooled in the strangely mainstream ideas of capitalism and its super efficient invisible hand, which, to my reading, is not quite what Adam Smith really had in mind, at least not in the uber-libertarian sense)

These funds tend to have certain characteristics that make them different to the average fund a retail investor might have gotten into. They’re generally accessible to only people who are provably wealthy or sophisticated investors. A random member of the public isn’t going to get direct access to them. They often require a minimum investment that will seem massive to the average retail investor. They’re generally considered risky (although this book provides some arguments in the other direction). The fees are relatively huge - typically 2% of the value of your investment plus 20% of any returns. You may be limited in how much and when you can withdraw your investment. And the fund managers tend to have their own wealth tied up into them.

Nonetheless, their freedom and flexibility has allowed some investors to make vast sums of money (and others, not so much) despite their original concept surrounding the idea of reducing market risk rather than chasing the highest returns. After all if you were right about your favoured airline stock then the hedge will reduce your profits. It’s a kind of insurance, and we all pay for insurance.

Since the 1950s they’ve become a large part in our financial system. You might be familiar with the names of some of the pioneers or managers - A. W. Jones and George Soros being perhaps the most known.

Whilst the book details some abject failures and ethical concerns with specific funds - not least how some played a substantial role in the partial destruction of various vulnerable economies and the ensuing misery that would cause the relevant country’s population - the author comes across as having a general favourable opinion of the idea. Even in its arguably distorted modern incarnations. Not least because these funds are rarely “too big to fail”. Unlike conventional banks, they didn’t need (or at least get) a tax-payer funded bailout in the 2008-era financial crisis. However, they, like most of the financial investment system, remain in my mind a totally unnecessary invention that in a perfect world probably shouldn’t exist. However, I was pleased to learn all about them from a seemingly very comprehensive history of the industry.

📚 Finished reading Dracula by Bram Stoker.

After watching Dracula: A Love Tale I realised I didn’t know and/or had forgotten the actual original Bram Stoker story of Dracula. Sure, The Count is enough of a blanket cultural artefact these days that I know what he looks like and his distinguishing behaviours. But the plot of the original story this spooky phenomenon was hugely popularised from? Not so much.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out the book is pretty great, self-evidently a classic i(f one can overlook some rather jarring sexism in places - product of its times I’m sure, etc. etc.) . The recent film turns out to have several similarities to it, although the story is deliberately entirely different. The book is very readable, highly gothic-atmospheric and truly scary in places. It’s very clear how it influenced so much of what came later in the genre.

The novel written as a series of diary entries from the various protagonists, and the occasional letter between them or newspaper article. This style I almost invariably love - in book or computer game form - and I did here. I also learned that the phrase for this is “epistolary novel” so that’ll be good for a few book searches later.

Reading the original also satiated my curiosity as to whether the more random behaviours we associate with vampires in general these days - turning into bats, not appearing in mirrors, not enjoying garlic - featured in the 1897 original Dracula vs were a more modern invention. Turns out yes, it’s a faithful representation of Count D.

To be clear though, Dracula was a populariser, not an inventor of the vampire or their famous associations. The general concept is far, far older. As far as we know the term “vampyre” first appeared in published English in 1732 in actual news reports, and, depending on one’s definition, the general concept of ‘vampirism’ may be thousands of years old.

🎥 Watched Dracula: A Love Tale.

This is a French re-imagining of the classic Dracula story. Including, unlike the original, an origin story.

He we see him convinced that his one true love, murdered in front of him in some past century, must have been reincarnated. Naturally he’ll stop at nothing to find her - even if it means hunting her through means unholy over many centuries.

The performance of Maria stood out to me, but we’ll leave it at that in case of spoilers.

📺 Watched: Curfew Season 1.

Set in a world very similar to ours, plagued by male violence against women, the government of the day comes up with an obvious, if 50% unpopular, solution. Under the ‘The Women’s Safety Act’, they instigate a legal curfew where men are not allowed to leave their house between the hours of 7pm and 7am each night, at least unless they have special permission. They’re ankle-tagged wherever they go to make sure they follow the policy.

This proves to be a rather more impactful policy than the efforts so far of real Labour’s violence against women and girls “priority”, even if it clearly hasn’t got rid of the disgusting Andrew Tate-a-likes spreading their hate on the internet. Violent crime plummets.

Nonetheless it’s not entirely eliminated. This show tells the story of what happens next after a women’s murdered body is found one morning outside of the Women’s Safety Centre, as well as frequently touching on other aspects of the social effects of such a (fictional) policy.

🎶 Listened to RADICAL by Gavin Prophet.

This is Prophet’s first full album. Packed with shortish pop-punk style songs replete with accurate and necessary punches critiquing of the political system many of us are subject to.

An example from “H8 U (4 U)” about how we’re all manipulated into hating each other rather than those who have real control over our lives:

Cause it’s problems they like to have Make sure I hate you for you It doesn’t matter if you’re red, blue, gay straight, religious, or identify as a fill in the blank The rich want us at war Cause I’ve been raised on a lie You’ve been raised on a lie We’ve been raised on a lie Cause I’ve been raised on a lie In nations Paid to divide To make sure I hate you for you

Probably the one I’ve seen shared the most is I’m not Lazy. Can’t fault the lyric “Trickle down deez nuts with your economy”:

An unexpected side-effect of the seemingly intractable conflict between the US and Iran: Japan’s largest maker of snacks has found itself needing to change its colourful packets of crisps into monochrome versions.

What’s the connection? Naphtha - an ‘an ink ingredient derived from petroleum’.

Based on the graphic below it seems like they’ve also lowered how many crisps you get by 5g. I suspect shrinkflation.

The Open Rights Group's very comprehensive report on the importance of Digital Sovereignty

The Open Rights Group has produced an extremely comprehensive report on the need for Britain to make progress towards digital sovereignty, rather than have the whole function of our country’s governance and public sector dependent on a handful of private for-profit tech companies, sometimes with a history of moral crimes, that are are essentially under some level the control of foreign leaders (Trump , Xi).

Notably, the report provides a definition of this somewhat non-obvious concept.

…the right and ability of political entities to autonomously (independently and/or self-determinedly) use and control tangible and intangible assets and digital services that significantly impact democracy, the economy and society.

That is to suggest that we should want our government to have some control over how our country works. Makes sense, right?

It is absolutely absurd that folk ever would argue against this, and yet, in effect, they do.

Here’s some snippets from their handy summary, as I slowly work my way through the main report’s 132 pages.

• Digital Sovereignty is critical for the UK’s economic and national security.
  It is defined as the ability of a country to have control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technology.

• The UK is currently facing a crisis of digital dependency.
  The country is overly reliant on a small number of tech giants for its critical digital infrastructure, which poses significant economic, security, legal, and policy risks, including to democracy and public debate.

• A strategic shift to using and growing the Digital Commons — that is, open technologies — provides the most effective path to Digital Sovereignty.
  This includes shared Open Source software, open standards, and open hardware, which can foster a more competitive and innovative domestic tech sector, reduce costs, and enhance security.

What are the costs of our digital dependency? There are many: Economic risks, security risks, surveillance risks and policy risks.

And the UK’s current position?

• The UK lacks a coherent Digital Sovereignty strategy.

• The Government’s analysis of the ‘chronic’ risks is classified, precluding public debate of its approach.

• Government IT procurement is dysfunctional.

• Competition and data protection enforcement have been weakened.

Prioritising digital sovereignty in the ways they suggest could help with both “building the economy” and “international collaboration”

What should be done?

• Embrace the Digital Commons of Open Source
• Strengthen competition and regulation
• Build digital leadership in Government
• Foster international collaboration

And so the government should:

• Reset UK digital policy to make Digital Sovereignty a central strategic goal.

• Drive competition and effective regulation to create a more level playing field for UK businesses.

• Deliver ‘Public Code for Public Money’ to build a commons of publicly-owned software.

• Invest in the UK’s Open Source ecosystem through procurement, tax incentives and skills development.

• Build digital leadership within government to drive the transition to open technologies.

• Protect democracy by promoting a more diverse and open social media landscape.

I deeply hope that our elected representatives pay some attention to this call to action rather than get further reliant on the foreign companies apparently favoured by their current strategy, not least Palantir.

Our country will be much stronger, much more resilient, if we actively pursue a strategy that doesn’t depend on the good will of random Twitter-pilled billionaires and the political leaders of countries that can’t even really be considered reliable allies at present. Other countries seem to be heading that way. So must we.

As a side note, the Open Rights Group appears to be the nearest equivalent to the famous Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US. For anyone concerned about the digital sovereignty topic or mitigating the myriad of other ways that the government and other powerful actors seek to impose potentially dangerous or misguided technology and associated legislation upon us, they would be well worth supporting.

We fight for your human rights in the digital age, campaigning for a fair digital environment where technology supports equality, justice and freedom.

Their 6 suggested manifesto pledges for the most recent British general election give a taste of some of their priorities:

• Protect our right to send private messages.
• Provide migrants with digital sanctuary.
• Ban the use of pre-crime AI by the police.
• Defend our right to freedom of expression online.
• Strengthen our data protection rights.
• End intrusive tracking by online advertisers.

Britain's dependence on US technology makes us vulnerable

Last week the FT had an article that I’d particularly recommend anyone who is unfamiliar with such awkwardly-named concepts such as “digital sovereignty” to read.

In a world where our ability to operate effectively is governed in so many ways by the nature of our existence in the digital realm, and where, once again, so many of the online services involved are in fact the exclusive fiefdoms of some weird uber-rich American billionaires who increasingly appear to act under the cringe-worthy control of the more vindicative Trumpist arms of their government - what would it look like for us here in the UK to live a “Life without US tech”?

The experience of ICC judge Nicolas Guillou after Trump decided to impose sanctions upon him simply because he didn’t like some of his rulings provides a clue.

Within days, he was cut off from all the services that rely on US companies. He could not have an American credit card and instead had to rely on cash and national payment systems such as iDEAL in the Netherlands for online transactions.

Wire transfers bounced back. His hotel reservations on Booking.com and Expedia were cancelled. He could not rent a bike from the City of Paris’s public Vélib’ Métropole scheme, which requires a credit card guarantee. Packages delivered by UPS were returned to the sender. His health insurer tried to cut him off.

This is distinct from the occasion where the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, reportedly had access to his Microsoft email account cut off overnight for similarly petulant reasons.

For those of us who are not ICC judges, whilst Trump et al may not have any particular unhinged reason to pick on us personally, it’s not like it’s impossible that our whole country could come under some kind of foreign-government-mandated exclusionary policy in retaliation for some real-or-imagined perceived national slight that one of our citzens made against the big-baby-snowflake president or whatever.

Trump has already threatened to (continue to?) wage a damaging economic war on us if we don’t change our tax laws to suit his preferences. And elsewhere, well, as Jordana Timerman writes: “Reward countries that toe the line, punish those that don’t: that’s how Trump is exerting control in Latin America”.

And that’s all before we discuss all the myriad of other, far more prevalent, ways these services can further turn against our interests well short of an absolute ban, independent of their country’s presidential preferences.

The FT’s “day in a life” flow chart shows how something like that could render us unable to access our email, payment systems, cash, messaging apps, documents, social media, AI tools, online shopping, delivery services, maps or streaming services.

And that in some cases there really aren’t all that many great alternatives we could switch to should the US (or these companies) decide we are not to be served. Or at least not great ones that the average person-in-the-street knows about. The article goes a bit deeper into some of the efforts of Europe in general to extract itself from this obvious trap. I hope they - I hope we - succeed.

Whilst the real solutions to almost all of today’s massive societal threats are of course actually to be found at the societal level, in the mean time I think this is actually one of those problems we can also usefully take the time to think about ourselves at a personal level. There’s a lot we can do to make ourselves and our loved ones less personally vulnerable to this particular strain of threat.

Starmer's government is following the path of the recent Conservative administrations in terms of ministerial resignations

Kier Starmer frequently gets accused of acting like a Tory. And here’s one more way in which that’s true!

Chart courtesy of the Institute for Government.

I’m very curious whether this is a general property of modern-day politics also seen in other countries, or whether we’ve had a particularly incompetent set of either Prime or other Ministers in recent years. I have my suspicions.

The Dirty Business documentary provides yet more evidence in favour of nationalising water provision in the UK.

📺 Watched Dirty Business.

The was another exemplary documentary about the life-ruining spread of various inappropriate capitalistic and corrupt activities throughout the UK. This time by the monopolistic companies that have somehow been entrusted to provide us the life’s essential that is clean water.

The show follows the true story of a retired detective and a professor who noticed a continual decline in quality of the natural waterways around where they live, and later, the several reports of people allegedly becoming ill through exposure to contaminated water.

They used a combination of IRL investigation and data analysis to expose the criminal negligence of the water company involved and the absolute failure of the Environment Agency to hold them to account, and be involved in building something of a people’s movement along the way.

There are several stomach churning scenes - real-world footage is sometimes included - and tragic occurrences, including the death of a child who caught E coli after playing on a supposedly top-of-the-league-for-cleanliness beach.

It’s absolutely infuriating, oftentimes heart-rending stuff. And hence as essential viewing if one wants to discover the true state of such an important industry as “water” as the famous Mr Bates vs the Post Office documentary was for another sphere of British greed-over-people tragedy. And, data inclined as I am, I’m never upset to see portrayals of folk committing acts of dedicated heroism via spreadsheets.

Corrupt companies maliciously abusing our natural waterways to the determinant of the rest of humanity and the natural world is not a solved problem for us here in the UK. Far from it. Thames Water is probably the company that is currently the most infamous in contemporary Britain for routinely illegally outputting an incredible amount of dangerous sewage into our waterways whilst siphoning off what should be money used to invest in its creaking infrastructure into its shareholders' pockets.

But it’s not unique. As is often the case, it’s an incentive-driven behaviour. As The Conversation notes - “profit drives pollution”.

Since privatisation began, water companies in England have paid out an estimated £76 billion in dividends to shareholders while accruing approximately £56 billion in debts. Dirty Business highlights not only what went wrong with the water industry, but the tactics used to deny, deflect and distract from its poor environmental performance.

📺 Watched Death in Paradise season 15.

I mean, I watched the first 14, so what’s 1 more?

Previously.

There's no party that hates the working class more than Reform

…which is saying a lot I know.

For all the talk of “workers” and “ordinary people”, do Reform UK’s policies serve the working class?

No.

In slightly more detail:

Together, these findings suggest that Reform’s self-presentation operates at the level of identity politics and rhetorical appeal, rather than any kind of coherent class-based policy agenda. By presenting themselves as the defenders of “ordinary people”, candidates cultivate an image of class affinity even when their economic priorities and personal backgrounds do not materially reflect working-class interests.

Full study here.

Not too surprising when their leader has pocketed more than £2 million of gifts and extra-curricular income since supposedly becoming an MP.

Nigel Farage is a multi-millionaire who is out for himself and working for the interests of his super-rich friends

And that’s ignoring his slightly-before-that-point secretive and undeclared gift/bribe of £5 million from one of his billionaire pals we all learned about this week.

📺 Watched Beyond Paradise Season 4.

The next season of the Britain-based spinoff of the original Death in Paradise. Nothing too unpredictable here, it’s comfort crime. It must be said that the cases hold a little more variety than the main series did last time wherein every crime was a murder and every investigation had effectively the same solution.

Previously…

It's election day in the UK once again

It’s elections day today in the UK. A variety of local government , Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru and mayoral elections are taking place. The outcome is likely to be rather dramatic, and potentially devastating for the traditional main parties of the UK - in particular Labour is destined to lose a huge number of seats.

I beg and implore anyone out there minded to issue some kind of protest vote to go with the Green party over Reform. There are so many reasons why.

Not least those to be found on Hope Not Hate’s gigantic “60 Reasons (and Counting) to Not Vote Reform on May 7th”. The 60 point list is simply a list of 60 Reform candidates and some of the more outrageous things they’ve said or done. Most of them are the tedious racism, paranoia and conspiracy theorism of the modern populist right. The occasional one sticks out as something novel though.

On Steven Lewis, a candidate in Wakefield.

Lewis is waging one-man campaign against the celebration of Christmas, Easter and New Year’s Eve, all of which he appears to believe are “demonic” and/or pagan. Referring to himself as the Lion of Judah, Lewis I will bring holy fire down on anyone who gets in my way […] I AM AN ANGEL OF THE MOST HIGH AND HE SPEAKS THROUGH ME LET GLORY BE TO GOD AND THE HOLY SPIRIT AMEN

Very normal.

If you haven’t got time to read 60 horror stories, there’s always the New World’s “The 40 worst Reform candidates on May 7”

Some of these reasons must already be hitting home, with several previous Reform voters considering the Greens, as unintuitive as that is at first sight.

Reform’s record in councils so far is…not good. Tons of resignations, expulsions, lies and broken promises aplenty, incompetence, incoherent chaos and the general inability to make any kind of real change other than increase the number of flags flown at taxpayers expense a bit, the jobs destroyed, the closures of essential services. The list goes on.

They tried. They failed. They didn’t do what they promised. They made life in our country worse. They failed their constituents. So even even if you feel some affinity with some of their polices, let’s not see their constant harmful failures repeated in a ton more places. After all, Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results.

📚 Finished reading Witch Trial by Harriet Tyce.

You may recognise the name of the author as having played a short-lived starring role on Celebrity Traitors last year.

This is one of the former criminal barrister’s novels - a courtroom drama, featuring a cut-throat trial involving two teenagers who, it is alleged, have murdered a third member of their contemporary self-proclaimed coven. Yes, they are or at least claim to believe that they are, witches who can do nothing but serve the needs of the devil. As you might expect, the vast majority of the court is a little sceptical.

The story follows the life and times of one of the serving jury members, whose goes from seeing the case as a nice distraction from his somewhat troubled past and present into, well, something rather more inexplicable and disturbing.

I enjoy a good courtroom drama. I like witches and/or people who claim to be witches. I am a fan of initially unsolvable mysteries, as long as they are resolved by the end, which it mostly is. There’s a touch of messaging around prejudice and the incumbent risk of an actual hunt for witches turning into a metaphorical witch hunt. So it was a winner for me.

A courtroom thriller to be sure, albeit with a bit more substance than others I’ve read. I’ll be queuing up for any sequel.

📺 Watched Matlock Season 2.

The hardened investigator disguised as a harmless little old lady is back on the tail of the corrupt lawyers whose illegal actions led at least in part to the opioid crisis and subsequent death of her daughter.

It’s somehow a lot more fun than it sounds. Unlike the real life version.

Previously.

Reform's latest unhinged and hopefully illegal policy: 'if you vote Green we'll put a massive immigrant prison near you'

It’s impossible for a mere part-time blogger to cover each one of Reform’s increasingly abhorrent and unhinged policy announcements, but this one seemed like it deserved special attention.

From Zia Yusuf, one of the more powerful of Reform UK’s millionaire elites:

In order to deport all illegal migrants in Britain, Reform will need to detain tens of thousands at a time.

Migrants will not be able to leave these detention centres, and each will be held there a couple of weeks before being deported.

So here’s our promise:

A Reform government will not put any migrant detention facilities in any constituency with a Reform MP.

Nor will we put them where Reform controls the council.

And of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green controlled councils to locate the detention centres.

The only positive thing here is that the comment smacks of abject populist desperation, rather than strength to me. Of weakness and cowardice of a type that leads to some kind of weird bribery. Scared little men.

They’re probably worried due to their thankfully decreasing polling numbers as more and more people become aware of their prejudiced incompetence - still far too high for our country to be safe though- and total humiliation in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election.

Let’s hope such a clearly unethical policy it would also be subject to both public condemnation and legal challenge.

I am the furthest thing from a legal scholar, so this is probably extremely ill-informed, but couple of avenues immediately come to mind:

Irrationality, aka the Wednesbury Unreasonableness test:

The irrationality test requires demonstrating that a decision is:

• So outrageous in its defiance of logic or accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question could have arrived at it
• Beyond the range of reasonable responses available to the decision-maker
• Not merely wrong, unwise, or different from what the court would have decided
• Irrational in the sense that it lacks any logical connection to the evidence and purpose

Or the Porter v Magill decision:

The House of Lords accepted that councillorsare elected. However, their powers can only be used for the purposes for which they are conferred, and not for the electoral advantage of a political party. Also the new (and final) test of bias was introduced:

Would the fair-minded and informed observer conclude that there was a real possibility of bias?

This decision was made in response to the infamous ‘homes for votes’ scandal, which seems like an equally corrupt and desperate act as Reform’s fantasy here.

The Conservative majority of Westminster Council adopted a policy to sell council housesin parts of the City where it was believed that home owners were more likely to vote Conservative.

It became known as “the homes for votes scandal”, involving Shirley Porter. As the leader of Westminster City Council, she helped formulate a policy which appeared to be designed to sell off the council housing at a lower price for the purpose of electoral advantage in marginal wards.

📺 Watched Pluribus.

You might know the word “pluribus” from the Latin saying “E pluribus unum”, or “out of many, one”.

Famously, the phrase appears on the US Great Seal, with its original choice reflecting the union of the original 13 colonies into a single nation. It might be hard to say that the same vibe applies to the modern day (dis) United States.

Anyway, the show is not about US history. Rather, one day almost all of humanity wakes up to find they’ve been subject to a “joining”. Everyone’s consciousness has been merged into one, with the result of universal happiness, kindness and coordination. A hive mind, if you will, but a very positive, loving and generous one, committed to such noble sentiments as non-violence.

What’s not to like? Especially when one compares the outcome to real life humanity and its eternal hatred and conflicts.

Well, Carol is one of the tiny number of people who actually failed to be joined. She’s her own independently-minded human still, driven by pain, misery, and inner and outer conflict, same as the rest of us today.

The collective are looking for ways to allow her to join the euphoric mass, to increase the happiness of the world. They’re desperate to make her as happy as they are. In the mean time they facilitate her to do whatever she wants, to try and please her, to meet her every need.

But she hates the whole thing. She is disgusted that the joining happened to everyone else, and has no desire whatsoever to become part of it. So not only is she evading the process she’s looking for ways to totally reverse it and, as she sees it, save humanity.

As the show’s tagline puts it: ‘The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness’. So the shows follows her ups and down trying to figure out what happened, why, and how to undo it.

Intriguing and compelling as both a show and a thought experiment.

When my OneDrive sync started seemingly permanently destroying some of my files I was surprised to learn that you can actually get telephone support from Microsoft. That’s cool. They even call you at a scheduled time.

However hours of discussion later they hadn’t fixed the problem and referred me to specialist support, which is an email thing. After a few failed interactions the specialist support started asking me stuff that made no sense in the context of my issue (along with things I hope my case notes showed I already did), asking me to uninstall software I never had and so on.

Finally I noticed on the support email footer what I imagine is the cause:

This is an AI-generated email, which may have been reviewed by the Support Personnel.

Aargh.

📺 Watched The Apprentice season 20.

Same old, same old, even though they promised that there would be special twists and turns it being the 20th series. It was, let’s say, easy to miss them.

Perhaps the only notable difference to usual was by the end I did actually think one candidate was a better bet than the rest, and what’s more, they won.

Previous season.

📺 Watched The War Between the Land and the Sea.

This is a spin-off from the Doctor Who franchise (which I am still working my way through more than two years later) featuring one of its historic baddies - the Sea Devils, first seen in 1972. Although they’re generally referred to as the more politically correct, and fairer, names of Aquakind or Homo Aqua in this update.

They’ve been living quietly under the sea for time immemorial but are forced to emerge when humankind reached the contemporary point in time where we’ve polluted and otherwise damaged the sea so much that their species can no longer survive in it. Their emergence triggers a global crisis, and seems set to result in the titular war.

Enter unlikely Ambassador Barclay, heretofore an admin in the famous Doctor Who UNIT division. He’s more used to ordering taxis for the upper brass than negotiating with a fundamentally alien species who feel like their lives are threatened by the very existence of humanity but there we go, circumstances force him into it anyway. However, as the story line continues, he’s forced to confront the question that I wish much of present-day humanity should introspect on today: are we the baddies? Whose side should he be on?

Elon Musk discovers that if you're a world-class villain it's hard to find a jury that doesn't already dislike you

Imagine being such a notorious evil-doer that it’s impossible to find jury members that don’t already hate you.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are currently in court battling over who said what in the earlier days of OpenAI. Jury selection apparently didn’t go overly smoothly:

Musk’s lawyers took issue with some of the people who said they already don’t like Musk and tried to get them struck from the pool of possible jurors for cause.

However, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said, “The reality is that people don’t like him… Many people don’t like him, but that doesn’t mean that Americans nevertheless can’t have integrity for the judicial process.”

To be fair, some of the prospective juror questionnaires were quite forthright in expressing their very valid opinions:

Elon Musk is a greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage."

“Elon Musk is a world-class jerk.”

“I very much dislike Tesla. As a woman of color, I am very aware of the damaging statements and actions Elon Musk has enacted and been a part of.

Tim Marshall's 'Prisoners of Geography' may help you understand the world at least a little better

📚 Finished reading Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall.

In my quest to try and understand something about how the chaotic-seeming modern world works, geopolitics edition, I’ve had this one on my list for a while, but delayed it until now when I heard a 10th anniversary edition was coming out that’s been updated for the massive and often bizarre and horrific seeming twists and turns that have happened in the world since the first edition of the book was written. This lets it talk about, for instance, the contemporary Russian invasion of Ukraine.

However it did come out before the US initiated its war-of-choice against Iran. Nonetheless, it contains some rather prescient words that, yet again, put a lie to the Trump administration’s claim that no-one anticipated Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz when the US invaded:

The threat of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a constant presence, but there are restraining factors. In a straight line it is 1,000 miles to Iran, meaning the IDF would have to fly over Jordan and Iraq; the latter would certainly warn Iran that the attack was coming. Refuelling of planes would be challenging, but the 2024 air strikes on Iran suggest that Israel can do it, and its destruction of Syria’s air defences in the same year has potentially opened an alternative route.

However, Iran has a deterrent – the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest the strait is only 21 miles across. The industrialised world fears the effects of Hormuz being closed, possibly for months. Nevertheless, an Iranian bomb is an existential issue for the Israelis.

Anyway, the main premise of the book is that the history, development and contemporary actions and abilities of any given country is shaped, even in today’s technologically advanced world, by its geography; especially its physical features such as mountains, rivers, seas, climate and so on. In fact these even shape the borders of countries; many of the man-made lines one sees on the maps of today run down waterways or butt up against mountains for example. And places where they don’t - for example some of the context-free straight lines that, for instance, various colonial or wannabe-colonial external powers drew over Africa or the Middle East as they relinquished their unjust control or following other global events - are often troubled in many ways.

States with physically defensive borders, plenty of natural resources, useful coastlines and navigable waterways (useful for transport and trade) have natural advantages. Those that don’t, don’t. Those surrounded by easy-to-invade flat plains, that are deserts or have few water-based transport options find it more of a struggle to develop.

A couple of examples:

• The North European Plain and consequent absence of physical defences to Russia’s west leave it exposed to invasion which to some extent explains its historical desire to acquire buffer zones. Despite its size, it also has very little access to the sort of sea ports that support an extensive navy or trading links - because most of those it does have regularly freeze over, and many would also involve routes through chokepoints vulnerable to the actions of other countries - which is also an incentive for conquering territory that provides access to warm water ports. The author does point out that it’s not the case that this is the only driver of Putin’s violent and illegal actions.
• Why has there not been more military trouble between India and China than there has been (which to be fair, is not a negligible amount)? The assertion here is that the Himalayas that divide them make an invasion hard to pull off.

The book covers a lot more than the simple geographical features of a place - history, culture and politics are part of the whole story, not least because they too can be derived to some extent from the geography according to the author’s premise.

It’s all extremely engaging. The author has written others in the series that are now on my list. I’m sure it’ll have faced some criticism that it’s a bit over-simplified and deterministic, and maybe it is - but I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that it suggests that everything about a country is geographical feature related. There is mention of modern technology overcoming some historical limitations - but just that it’s not yet at the stage of overcoming them all to the extent that the natural surroundings of a country are irrelevant. Far from it. I mean, we can look at what’s going on with the Strait of Hormuz now once again for an all too obvious example.

There were likely similar criticisms of a (slightly drier, as I remember, but still very instructive) book I read ages ago, Guns, Germs, and Steel which situates the major waxing and waning of the world at the civilisational level in terms of the differences in local environment they existed within, a fairly similar theme.

The chapters are arranged one per region of the world it concerns itself with, i.e. the sub-titular 10 maps. These are:

• Russia
• China
• The USA
• Latin America
• The Middle East
• Africa
• India and Pakistan
• Europe
• Japan and Korea
• Greenland and the Arctic

The book does contain maps of each, rather essential to those of us with my sadly lower level of geographical knowledge. They’re very useful but to be honest I think I’d have done even better to get hold of separate maps to look at as I read through the pages rather than having to flick back constantly to the relevant map. There’s a free idea for an add-on for the author! But if you already own an atlas, find it before you begin this very worthy guide to a surprising number of aspects of the world and its development.

Making an external monitor connected via a hub work in Linux Mint

One thing I didn’t particularly expect during my latest transition to Linux is that whilst my laptop would work fine with an external screen if I plugged the laptop directly into the screen, the computer wouldn’t detect or use it if I used my usual setup, which is computer -> usb cable -> hub -> hdmi cable -> screen.

It turns out one may need a “DisplayLink driver for the hub to work. For my Targus hub on Linux Mint, what worked well was:

1. Go to Synaptic’s Ubuntu Driver Download page.
2. Scroll down to find the “Download” button in the section labelled Synaptics APT Repository and download the “synaptics-repository-keyring.deb” file it offers .
3. Then open terminal and run these 3 commands in sequence.

sudo apt install ./Downloads/synaptics-repository-keyring.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt install displaylink-driver

That’s assuming your file downloaded into the Downloads subfolder. Obviously change the path in the first if it did not.

How to (re)move Windows 11's supposedly 'unmovable' files in order to shrink its disk partition

It took a while until annoyance (and ethics?) overcame my laziness, but I finally got to the point of wanting to convert my latest Windows computer into a Linux computer, or rather, given I do have a couple of Windows only programs, into a dual-boot hybrid.

The final straw was when it became apparent that I’ve lost some unspecified number of files from years ago due to some mish-mash destruction that Windows 11s' Onedrive integration seems to have caused. I can see them, but they won’t open. Even after hours with Microsoft support staff. Oh, and why doesn’t my wifi auto connect any more? And why don’t my headphones work when I have a webcam plugged in? Anyway, those are all rants for another day.

Anyway, the first step towards dual-booting is to reduce the size of the partition of hard drive space one uses for Windows and create a new blank one ready for Linux to use. This involves shrinking your Windows partition. Which should be easy now that Windows comes with a “Disk Management” program where you can right-click shrink.

Naturally, it was not easy.

I wanted to free up a partition of at least 100gb on my solitary hard disk, which seemed fair given I had free space of more like 250gb. However Disk Management wouldn’t let me choose to shrink Windows by more than 15gb due to unspecified “immovable files”. Linux, being space-efficient, can usually run in 15gb, sure - but no way do I want to limit myself like that. Plus my computer is my computer and I should be allowed to decide how I want it arranging! Including what files are on it and where.

Cue much web-searching, and a little AIing. There is no way I can consolidate the whole experience or all my notes here, but for the sake of posterity/future me, what ended up working best was to:

1. Load up the built-in Windows Disk Management app, right click the C: drive (my hard disk) and choose “Shrink volume”. It would spin for a while and then tell me I could shrink some paltry amount of space far lower than I wanted to. Then:

2. Load up the built in Windows Event Viewer and click on Windows Logs. Double-click the Application category you’ll see a massive list of events including some recent ones with a source labelled “defrag”. Clicking on one of the more recent ones of them will tell you the file that’s immovable, or at least one of them. For example:

   A volume shrink analysis was initiated on volume Acer (C:). This event log entry details information about the last unmovable file that could limit the maximum number of reclaimable bytes. Diagnostic details:

• The last unmovable file appears to be: $Extend$Deleted\00000000000000::$DATA

Next, websearch / AI search to decode what that unmovable file actually is and how to remove it and get rid of it.

Here’s what Event Viewer looks like when you do the above:

Then go back and repeat 1 and 2 as often as necessary until disk management reports at least as much space as you want, at which point “Shrink volume” should work fine. This is quite boring but it took me a mere five iterations to get there.

One alternative to all this would be to use a third party program of which there are several probably very nice ones - but I didn’t feel like learning / risking that given the temperamentality of Windows I was working with an encrypted drive and so on.

Below are the “last unmovable files” I encountered and how to solve. Note that much of this involves deleting files I had rather little clue about what exactly were. I managed to re-assure myself that I didn’t need them, for for the sake of all things holy, please be confident you don’t need them and it won’t break your computer before doing likewise.

File: \System Volume Information{…}::$DATA

These are shadow copies of your data that Windows and other backup tools create for various reasons including to support the “system protection” feature that allows you to roll back to earlier versions of files or system restore points. Note that what I am going to decsribe will remove all of those so you won’t be able to revert to earlier points in time. Make sure this isn’t going to cause a problem for you! This in itself might be a deal-killer for you. But otherwise:

First Disable System Protection - which you can get to via Start -> Create a restore point -> select your hard drive -> Configure -> Disable

Remember to turn this back on once you are done!

To delete old shadow volumes, in terminal you can type e.g.

vssadmin delete shadows /all /quiet

For me this wasn’t enough. That’s because I was running third party backup software that creates shadow volumes and the above wouldn’t touch them. To get those to be deleted was surprisingly hard.

In the end the workaround for that was to tell Windows that all Shadow Files must be restricted to no more than a relatively small amount of data, e.g.

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /MaxSize=320MB

Anyway, reducing it to 320MB caused even my third-party big backup shadows to be deleted. Again, you want to undo this command when you’re doing, setting it to a big number or UNBOUNDED.

If you’re not sure what to reset it to then BEFORE you do the above you can run the below, which will also list any shadow volumes you have. You want to have none on your relevant hard drive by the time you’re done.

vssadmin list shadowstorage

to see what it is pre-changes.

File: $Extend$Deleted...::$DATA

These represented a deleted file. To solve I first emptied my Recycle Bin, and then in terminal ran:

chkdsk C: /f

and rebooted at least once in order to ensure everything was flushed out and any disk errors detected. I’m not sure if this step was truly necessary though.

File: \Windows\Logs\NetSetup\service.0.etl::$DATA

This is some log file or other that Windows network service had locked open. To dispose of this I stopped the relevant service:

net stop NetSetupSvc

and force-deleted the log file.

del /f /q C:\Windows\Logs\NetSetup\service.0.etl

Of course this means you lose the historic log data.

File: \pagefile.sys::$DATA

This is your virtual memory which your computer uses once it’s runs out of RAM.

Firstly I disabled virtual memory entirely by turning off the paging file which you can find under Start -> View Advanced System Settings ->Advanced tab -> Settings button under the Performance section -> Advanced tab -> Change button under Virtual Memory section -> Unlick automatically manage and choose “No paging file” and ignore all the scary warnings.

Then you have to reboot and that file should be gone. This is another setting you should absolutely remember to undo all the changes once you’re done shrinking your partition otherwise stuff might get very flaky and crashy.

File $Extend$UsnJrnl:$J:$DATA

This is Windows log of any changes to files on your system. It’s used by services like Windows search I think. In any case, I deleted it with fsutil like this

fsutil usn deletejournal /D C:

Doing all the above finally meant when I ran disk management it let me shrink the Windows partition enough to create a nice big blank space for Linux. I did that, and then re-went through the above undoing the change 1 and 4.

Note that if you reboot some of the journals etc. will automatically start to be re-created, so don’t do that before sorting out your partition except where noted above. And also you might need to be in administration mode when you type in many of the above commands (Start -> Terminal -> right click the icon -> Run as administrator)

And once again - be absolutely sure you don’t care about the manifold side effects of all these changes and deletions before doing them! They might be dangerous! Sure, they worked for me and I didn’t mind the side effects, but who knows what kind of state anyone else’s Windows computer is in.