No doubt there are more pressing problems in the world, but the other night some friends and I were grappling with what a hedge-fund manager of mutual acquaintance should call his new yacht, currently on order from Princess.
I suggested various epithets, from the funny to the lame (Bailout, Liquidity, Too Big to Sail, Floating Charge) but the winner was a banking friend, with the inspired Quantative Ease.
My media consumption keeps me fully up to speed of everything that interests and entertains me. The quality of much of this media is exceptional. Today, Marketplace, Marginal Revolution and Last.fm stand out especially.
Why do I mention all of this? Well, because I find it amazing that, aside from the TV Licence, I pay nothing for any of this media.
I sold out of Tesco in October at 407, having bought them at 321 exactly a year previously and enjoyed two dividends in addition to the 26% rise in share value. It was my first investment. Of course, commissions took their toll from my profit: although I try to keep these as low as possible, I’m playing with hundreds rather than thousands, so it’s hard not to lose a few points to the brokers. However, perhaps that’s a good thing as it discourages frequent trading, a sure fire way of making brokers rich at your expense. The asymmetric brokerage costs that I now have arranged (£1.50 flat to buy, £10 flat to sell) are a good incentive to stay in the game too. Despite this, not staying in the game is my first investment mistake. Tesco passed 420 today, making 321 seem even more of a steal.
Ben Casnocha blogs about the need for building thinking time into the daily routine. He suggests ensuring that you schedule in time for reading, driving and similarl activities where thinking can happen unprompted. I agree and it is for this reason that I lengthened my morning commute. I now take a less quick but less packed train to work. I have just the right amount of time to sit, read and think about the day ahead, and I still arrive on time. I lose only some fairly unproductive time between 08:20 and 08:50, when previously I would do a sift on the overnight emails to warm me up for the day.
I have just finished this book, by Dambisa Moyo. It’s a very simple argument. So simple that the preface by Niall Ferguson means you can skip the majority of the book. After an hour, you’ll have the idea. As Niall points out, it’s slightly annoying that these arguments are taken more seriously when they come from Dambisa, an intelligent, attractive Ghanaian, rather than from older, whiter (but equally intelligent) critics of aid, such as Bill Easterly. But that’s not to the discredit of Ms Moyo or the arguments. Somebody needs to get the fact that aid is not the answer on the radar. Moyo does a good job as the ‘anti-Bono’.
I have just finished reading Philip Delves Broughton’s book on the topic (called Ahead of the Curve in the US). I loved the book: it’s one of the best reads of my year. It has also made me want to go to HBS. I think that the school comes across as a place that teaches well and broadly, that strives for a balance of the academic and the social, and which, fundamentally, tries hard. It’s a shame that in his subsequent work, Broughton appears to blame MBAs for the failures of the world economic system. Taking such a position turns him from an interesting outsider with a fresh perspective to a caricature of a bitter critic peddling exposé. It’s not clever.
You know that you have been studying too hard when one of your policy case studies comes from The Wire.
In this season, a maverick Baltimore cop, Major Colvin, in despair, stops enforcing drug laws in certain areas of the city. The local drug dealers love the policy, and refer to it as ‘Hamsterdam’ – citing a direct transfer of Amsterdam’s liberal cannabis policies. In reality, Colvin’s plan wasn’t very much like the law in Amsterdam at all. But the dealers obviously had their state-centric hats on that day – had they spent more time reading, they’d be thinking ‘maybe this is an example of the slow process of international, cross-jurisdictional policy learning’!
I think that films are a powerful way to develop case studies. The Mist is a paradigm of testing moral absolutism and Kant’s categorical imperative for a start.
Mike Simpson, a developer of the Total War computer game series, has come out fighting after the latest game in the series, Empire, continues to take flack. The post (reproduced below in its entirety) is a good glimpse into the realities of game development.
Our guiding principle with design is that we make the game we want to play, and trust that other people will like it. That inevitably means we make the TW games for the hardcore fans rather than for the more casual gamers that are possibly the majority of our customers. We believe that if we succeed in making a game that the fans like it will by definition be a great game, and the because of its quality casual players will like it too, so long as we make it accessible. We need both groups (casual and hardcore) to get enough money in to allow us to keep making the games, so one of the tightropes we walk is the balance between accessibility and depth. Great design manages both, and that’s what we strive for (occasionally successfully!).
We do however also have another customer who we make the game for, and in one particular way they are the most important of all. It’s our publisher, who is driven by the grim necessity of commercial reality. Those necessities tend to be short term compared with the dev time of a game or the lifetime of a series. They are also necessities that we cannot ignore – if we do it’s Game Over. Empire: Total War happened the only way it could – it had to be in a box in Feb 09. Damned stressful for all concerned, but it’s so much a fact of life it’s almost not worth talking about.
I think some people think that when “commercial reality” wins, they lose. If the car parks at Sega or CA were full of Ferraris, I might agree. But they are not. When “commercial reality” wins, we live to make another game.
I have mixed feelings on this. Yes, commercial goals and gamer goals can (and should) be compatible. Yes, there will be some trade offs. But the quality of the product should be the last thing a value-add, creative company lets slip. They should lose features before releasing broader, buggier games. There is no excuse for selling buggy software. This approach (shall we call it the ‘Microsoft approach’?) can only work long-term if you have the commercial advantage and customer lock-in to support it. Even then, it will vanish as soon as higher-quality alternatives appear.
I love the Total War series and own three games (of which Rome is my favourite). But I haven’t bought Empire, and probably won’t. When the next installment, Napoleon, arrives, I won’t be rushing out to buy it either. I’ll hang on until the bugs are fixed and the price drops. I don’t want to be paying top dollar for whatever work in progress “has to be in a box by date X”.