I was told yesterday that business people don’t cheat or cut corners because if they did, investors would punish them and that if I had studied finance I would understand that. It was all I could do to avoid just responding with maniacal laughter. Last year I had an economics professor tell me that Google and Amazon are not profit maximizing companies because they do not operate the way that microeconomic theory says that they will.

Bitcoin is another example of the gig economy - outsourcing business costs to someone else who may or may not recover their costs. In addition, there is the question of its impact on the environment. Let’s spend a minute thinking about what bitcoin really is. Bitcoin is a let’s pretend commodity, limited by contract to 21 million bitcoins. Simplifying greatly, bitcoins are supposed to be a way to exchange value and anonymously with the transaction guaranteed by cryptoanalysis.

Sometimes (some people would say often) I feel the need to flag some study in an area I am completely unqualified to comment on the substance. I am, however, really good at pulling apart logic, generalizations and over-broad journalistic pronouncements, however, so I feel completely at ease in doing that. What else is the internet for? WARNING: Long read. Cambridge University researchers just came out with a study entitled The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach with a rather astounding claim in the abstract: “[W]e uncovered the specific psychological signatures of political, nationalistic, religious and dogmatic beliefs.

Shirley pointed me towards an interesting article entitled Why You Can’t Understand Conservative Rhetoric. I’ll change the terminology slightly to “Definition Oriented People” and “Culture Oriented People”. Think of the word “red” as in the color. A physicist or a graphic designer may have an exact definition of what that word means. I can point to something and say it is red and something else is not red (examples), but I wouldn’t be able to actually define “red”.

Britain has taken the lead in shellfish conservation and restoration! By accident. EU health and safety rules have long required shellfish to be purified and processed and any shellfish brought into the EU must have been purified and processed before entry. While Britain has a shellfish industry, all the purification and processing has been done on the continent. Can you see where this is going? Yeah. Until Britain builds a shellfish purification and processing plant, the entire British shellfish industry is practically shutdown because almost all their sales were to the continent.

As far as I can tell, Ghana is getting hammered by Brexit. Huh? What? Yes, 40% of Ghana’s banana crop is sold to the UK. Now that the UK is no longer part of the EU and therefore the trade agreement which would have applied no longer exists, Ghana’s bananas are subject to tariffs on import. One UK importer indicated it was 20k pounds a week in increased tariffs, not counting the additional red tape.

I thought I would just put Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem “The Hill We Climb” here. I have no idea where line breaks should be. Note to self - there are poetry readings on Youtube, but check out the ones by the poet, not by actors reading the poetry. Do poets do poetry readings on Zoom? “Mr President, Dr Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr Emhoff, Americans and the world: when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

Someone on Reddit made a comment about fear driving the extreme ends of the political spectrum and that the media drives that fear because it creates addiction and keeps their viewers/listeners and enables their market. That leads me to the question of whether the media (at least at the extremes) could be viewed as emotionally abusing their viewers or listeners. Thoughts? As usual, feel free to disagree using this contact link.

I spent my career finding ways to thread through conflicting laws and priorities in multiple countries. Once you found a way to thread through the conflicts, you could pull it together in a way that made sense and reduce the conflicts. The most difficult situations were when governments were intentionally writing rules that favored their national interests and penalized other countries' businesses. Sometimes the public and private rhetoric was different. This generally happened only when you had achieved a respectful relationship with the government officials - they still wouldn’t change their positions, but they would admit to the politics involved rather than the logic.

While lots of social media focused on videos of individual Capitol Police being “friendly” to the rioters I want to focus on Capitol Police leadership. If you might recall, I mentioned “Hanlon’s Razor” in an earlier post. Hanlon’s razor says that you should never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or stupidity. I also mentioned that malice is often assumed to be someone being out to get you, but more often the person is just out for themselves and you are collateral damage (roadkill).

President Trump told attendees at the political rally earlier in the day to “take back our country”. Rudy Giuliani told the same crowd at the rally “If we are wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat.trial by combat” and is now condemning the assault on the Capitol as shameful. I’ve been watching interviews of reporters who talked to the mob that rushed the Capitol yesterday.

Ok. My December 20 post Case Nightmare Orange was wrong. It considered whether President Trump might try to use Homeland Security forces to disrupt the Congressional certification of the Electoral College results. There was, however, a distinct lack of police manpower to deal with protests that everyone saw coming. Looking at this video, there was no way those four police officers could deal with that mob. It didn’t look like much more manpower than normal around the Capitol building.

So today the initial transition period for the UK leaving the EU is over and the next stage of transition periods begin. Since the UK government did sod all to actually prepare, at 11PM on Dec 31 the government issued notices saying, among other things, that shipments from Great Britain to Northern Ireland don’t need export paperwork for another 12 months (because no one knows what the paperwork should look like).