The Jolly Contrarian Life

We have hit the crazy summer season where JC will be bouncing around a bit more randomly than normal, and newsletters might become somewhat intermittent. Rest assured, much is going on behind the scenes at the Jolly Contrarian. Including the rollout of a new consulting arm! This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Wit...

So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure—How amazingly unlikely is your birth. And pray that there’s intelligent lifeSomewhere up in space, becauseThere’s bugger all down here on Earth. — Galaxy Song, Monty Python’s Meaning of Life , 1983 This piece started out as a book review, of Professor Brian Klaas’ recent book Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters . It quickly...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com “I once got all the way from Glasgow to Edinburgh without a ticket. I walked.” — Sid Snot, The Kenny Everett Video Show . “There are more network use-cases in heav’n and earth, Horatio, than are dream’t of in your philosophy.” — Shakespeare, Spamlet I, vi An iron-fisted Romanian “The Bickerings,” ancestral h...

Reality TV competitions like the BBC’s Traitors offer valuable insights into group dynamics and decision making under situations of uncertainty. Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. For those bewitched by the unravelling convictions of postmasters, LIBOR rate setters and antenatal nurses Traitors is a superb, but unsettling model. It shows how easily we — be we contest...

Welcome to a new experiment in gratuitous discursion about music, culture and modernity. Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a little different that the usual JC fare, and in lieu of any strengths plays to my weaknesses, which is the ability to get utterly sidetracked by the simplest questions. On a train up to see my daughter Antagonista I happened across U2’...

Sightseeing trips to the ice In the 1970s New Zealand’s national carrier Air New Zealand began operating “sightseeing” flights to Antarctica. The flights would depart from Auckland, fly south over the remote Balleny Islands and onto the ice continent, passing over Capes Hallett and Adare and from there, down McMurdo Sound to the ice continent. There they would circle for an hour or so, to give pas...

Sorry for the lack of news recently — I’ve been tinkering around with a spanner in the underbelly of the great steampunk machine which is the JC. The website’s performance — how quickly it serves pages — had fallen off a cliff. It had even started refusing to serve pages at all. The more I looked into it the more I realised I had to do something. The problem turned out to be twofold: Bots Firstly,...

Normal accidents In 1999, organisational sociologist Charles Perrow wrote the masterly book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies . In it, Perrow proposed that certain complex human systems — the Three Mile Island nuclear power station was his prime example, but there were others — are so complex and the interaction of components so tightly coupled that certain modes of operation ca...

Radio: live transmission You may have noticed in recent months that a few JC newsletters have been breaking out into audio format. I’m on Spotify. I won’t deny this has been a personal ambition for a while now. With Substack, it is surprisingly easy to go nationwide. My personal preference for “discretionary content” these days — how I read for pleasure, that is — is audio: like everyone I spend a...

Recently, as thanks for a minor accommodation, I received a Vue cinema gift card. Though it was a generous and thoughtful gesture for a trifling matter on my part, I did what most people do when given gift tokens: I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Having recently come...

Hello everyone Following a sequence of minorly unfortunate but quite improbable incidents — at one point JC wondered whether he was in an episode of Game For A Laugh — there won’t be a fully thought-out newsletter this week. But I offer a couple of thoughts about Bitcoin, seeing as I have been updating the JC’s prime brokerage section and Bitcoin has finally crossed that magical US$100,000 thresho...

is an audio version of last week’s newsletter. Original article on the JC is here . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jollycontrarian.substack.com/subscribe

This article started as a review of Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers’ remarkable Bitcoin is Venice , but I got carried away and began ruminating about the philosophy of not just cryptocurrency but money, capital and social organisations generally. Bitcoin is Venice raises important, deep questions about the financial system. It asks us to consider fundamentals: What is money ? What is debt ? What...

The desktop In 1973, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center released the “Alto”. This was the first personal computer equipped with a “graphical user interface” (GUI) — computing with pictures — instead of the traditional “character user interface”. If potential users — bowler-hatted bureaucrats who didn’t use computers at all — were to be persuaded to give up their card catalogue systems, typing pools...

The report of my death was an exaggeration. —Mark Twain In 2017, then-CEO of Deutsche Bank John Cryan thought his employees’ days were numbered. Machines would do for them. Not just back office grunts: everyone . Even, presumably, Cryan himself. [1] “Today,” he warned, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have robots behaving like people ”. … This recording will be linked to t...

The report of my death was an exaggeration. —Mark Twain In 2017, then-CEO of Deutsche Bank John Cryan thought his employees’ days were numbered. Machines would do for them. Not just back office grunts: everyone . Even, presumably, Cryan himself. [1] “Today,” he warned, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have robots behaving like people ”. … This recording will be linked to t...

The debate chuntered on, recently coagulating around an unlikely, tearful graduate whom we got to know as “TikTok Girl”, confiding to her followers the exhausting experience of having to commute, work a whole eight-hour day and then commute home again. “I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and I am in person, and I am commuting in the city,...

In its abrupt dislocation, lockdown was a sort of miniature Burgess Shale — a sudden, dissonant punctuation in a long, flowing, paragraph of commercial consensus. A rare chance to “beta-test” alternative ways of conducting commercial activity. It would be a shame to waste it, or pay no heed to the lessons it offers…. This recording will be linked to the premium article here . Here it is on substac...

Der Teufel mag im Detail stecken, aber Gott steckt in den Lücken. “The Devil may be in the detail, but God is in the gaps.” — Büchstein , Die Schweizer Heulsuse Org chart/ɔːg ʧɑːt/ ( n .) A formal portrait. A still life. A glib schematic that tells you everything you don’t need to know about an organisation, but which it treats as its most utmost secret. The org chart purports to order the organis...