Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- I've enjoyed attending this fiesta. To a degree.
- Upwardly mobile 'topmantas', the curse of Gran Via in Madrid.
- The great provider. But possibly not evenly spread.
- Excessive leniency?
- Six taxi drivers in Vigo have taken to wearing skirts in protest at a ban on shorts. Are the drivers of Uber and the like similarly constrained? I suspect not.
- The piles of granite slabs are still sitting patiently on O Burgos bridge. And will be until at least Monday, I'm sure.
The UK
- You can’t always put a price on what matters, says Ed Conway in the interesting first article below.
- It takes young people in the UK less than a minute to get annoyed while waiting for their phone content to download. Young phone users are 5 times more likely to lose their temper because of slow download speeds than older people, a survey has shown. The annoyance caused by slow internet connectivity and download speeds, labelled "load rage", is the biggest frustration cited in the lives of young people. Two-fifths of them claim they feel symptoms of burnout - including fatigue, insomnia and anxiety - because of the digital-heavy nature of their lives.
- Meanwhile, teenagers are increasingly concerned that their parents are becoming addicted to technology, with an 11% rise in those claiming that their parents spend too much time on their smartphones.
- Is your smart speaker spying on you? Here’s how to find out what it knows - and how to delete it. See the second article below. Never used any of the things myself.
- Fart tells his base that he will tax the the hell out of China with tariffs. Given that the latter are actually paid by American importers and then by customers via higher prices, he must think his voters are even more stupid than he is. The problem is, he's right for once.
- But it might not matter:-
Spanish
- Word of the Day: Muchedumbre. One of my long-standing favourites
- As my first wife was a feminist and gave me 2 daughters, it's hardly surprising that I too have been one for many years. Possibly even one of the 'first wave'. Or maybe the second. We're now on at least the 5th wave and some developments/proposals leave one speechless. Like the suggestion that hurricanes should be called something like himicanes, because males cause far more damage than females. Of course, like everything else these days, this could well be fake news. Or, a la Fart, Fake News!!
- I put out some sticky paper to catch rats in my garden. Given that it's designed only for mice, I wasn't too surprised not to get any large rodents. Or even small ones. But the bait did attract around 10 wasps. So, not a complete waste of time and money.
1. You can’t always put a price on what matters: Ed Conway, The Times.
This week’s fall in the value of sterling shouldn’t blind us to the strong fundamentals of UK plc
We are all poorer.
That might seem like the obvious consequence of the sharp falls in sterling against other major currencies this past week. Your salary, your home, your sterling-based assets are worth about 3 per cent less today than last week. This country’s GDP is now smaller for that matter — meaning one of the early consequences of Boris Johnson’s premiership is that France is probably once again a bigger economy than the UK.
But in another sense none of this makes much difference. Britain is no less productive than last week. We are no less inventive or intelligent; our stock of human capital is no less capable of generating growth than 15 months ago when the pound was worth a heady $1.45 (it was $1.21 yesterday).
This underlines a big problem with economics. All too often the market price doesn’t reflect real, underlying value. The classic example is the diamond and water paradox. We would all die without water while diamonds are simply sparkling lumps of carbon, so why is water much cheaper? The answer is that diamonds are scarce and people seem to like them a lot; water, on the other hand, is relatively abundant. Then again, for someone lost in the middle of the Sahara water might well be worth more than a diamond, which underlines another important lesson: price is in the eye of the beholder. The idea that prices are subjective rather than absolute is at the heart of modern economics but it wasn’t always so. Adam Smith and Karl Marx both believed it was possible to work out an objective value for everything from a diamond to a pin manufactured in a factory.
That idea went out of fashion about 150 years ago when neoclassical economists decided that what really mattered were the choices we made and the prices we were willing to pay. If prices go up it is often because people have more money in their pockets and want to spend, or vice versa. It’s no coincidence that most central banks have inflation — a measure of prices — as their main policy target and that the Bank of England’s key update, the latest of which was published yesterday, is the Inflation Report.
Except that prices don’t always reflect what most of us regard as reality. Once upon a time you could look at the Bank’s inflation projection and glean what that meant for interest rates. Not any more: yesterday’s report left most analysts flummoxed. Nor is inflation the only unreliable measure: house prices are these days less reflective of our ability to afford them than of a global market for assets. Government bond prices are now so expensive that in many advanced economies their yields are negative. For example, if you want to lend money to the Swiss government you have to pay them for the privilege. Does that mean everyone thinks Swiss bonds are a brilliant bet? Not entirely: it’s because for years there has been too much money chasing too few safe assets.
Prices, once the best way of measuring value, are now often simply reflections of the weirdness of the global economy. You don’t have to live your life in financial markets to realise this. The cost of healthcare and education are spiralling while measures of what value we get for that — life expectancy and educational attainment — are barely creeping higher.
Part of the explanation is that those prices reflect government intervention as much as underlying value. In most developing countries the reason water is so much cheaper than diamonds is not merely its abundance but because the state subsidises it. Indeed, the IMF reckons that households across much of the world (not this country, it should be said) are being charged about half a trillion dollars less than they should be for water. Add on agriculture and the shortfall is even greater, and this mispricing goes some way towards explaining why drought is on the rise. Water, it turns out, is more valuable than the official price — something economists call a market failure.
Sometimes the problem is not too much government intervention but too little. Since the Industrial Revolution we have neglected to put a price on the waste products of capitalism, greenhouse gas emissions and plastic rubbish among them. We are now learning the consequences.
Research has shown that the more children are neglected in early life, the more likely they are to live unhappy lives, be drawn into crime and suffer from poor health. Given there is a long-term cost to unhappy childhood you might have assumed we would attach a high value to childcare. Yet those who look after young children and, for that matter, those who look after the very old, are among the lowest paid in society. Child poverty is on the rise but despite the fact that it could be a catastrophe for future generations today’s policymakers seem to have little interest in doing anything meaningful about it.
There are other oddities: in some areas of life we prefer not to impose a price at all. In this country we keep surrogacy, adoption, blood supplies and organ donation outside the market, banning anyone who attempts to charge for a kidney or to bear your child.
All of which is to say that while economists like to think prices tell you everything about the economy, all too often they tell you surprisingly little. Not that that is much consolation when we’re exchanging money for the summer holidays.
2. Is your smart speaker spying on you? Here’s how to find out what it knows - and how to delete it: James Cook
We’ve become used to installing microphones in our homes thanks to the smart speakers released by the likes of Amazon, Google and Apple. The speakers make it easier than ever before to do things like play music and check the weather forecast, but there are increasing privacy concerns about how much audio is collected by the devices, and where those recordings go.
Apple has suspended a program which used human moderators to review some conversations with its virtual assistant Siri after a reviewer said they heard sexual encounters and drug deals which had been mistakenly recorded. And Google has also paused a similar program in Europe after recordings of people’s conversations were leaked to a news website.
Here’s how to find out what your smart speakers know about you, and how to delete it:
Amazon Echo
Amazon’s line of Echo smart speakers are some of the world’s most popular gadgets, and people can get the attention of its virtual assistant Alexa simply by saying its name. However, sometimes Echo devices mistakenly record snippets of audio when they think they hear their so-called “wake word.”
To check the recordings stored by Alexa, open the Alexa app on your smartphone. In the settings menu, select “Alexa Privacy,” and tap on “Review Voice History.” This will open a page where you can see all of the recordings that Alexa has made. Choose the date range “All History” to see everything it has recorded since you started using Alexa.
To delete the recordings, you can manually select individual snippets to delete, or get rid of them all at once by choosing “Delete All Recordings for All History.”
Google Home
Google Home smart speakers let people interact with its Assistant software. It works in the same way that Alexa does - recording audio when it thinks it hears you say its wake phrase. In this case, the devices are activated by saying “Hey Google.”
You can view all the saved snippets of audio that Google has through your Google account dashboard, which can be found in its app or through its desktop website. In your Google account, select “Data & personalisation.” Scroll down, and you’ll see “Voice & Audio Activity.” This is where Google stores your recordings, and also where you can stop it making new recordings.
Select “Manage Activity” and you can see all saved recordings, and can also delete them.
Apple HomePod
Apple has also entered the smart speaker market with its HomePod speaker that works using its virtual assistant Siri. Unlike Google and Amazon, Apple doesn’t allow you to view the recordings that Siri has made, or to individually delete them.
There are ways to disable the always-listening Siri mode on the HomePod, however. You can say “Hey Siri, stop listening” and then say “Yes” when it asks you to confirm your choice.
Or, head to Apple’s Home app and select the Room which contains your HomePod. Long press on the HomePod option and select “Details.” Inside this menu you can turn off “Listen for ‘Hey Siri’”.
No comments:
Post a Comment