Rav Casley Gera

“As a concerned Israeli citizen who lives in the state of Israel with his family and all of his children and grandchildren, I love very much the courage of those who live 10,000 miles away from the state of Israel and are ready that we will make every possible mistake that will cost lives of Israelis.”

The Guardian reports on Britain’s ghastly economic outlook:

Official figures showed the economy contracted in the first three months of the year after a poor performance before Christmas. This meant it registered two consecutive quarters of negative growth, the standard definition of a recession. The economy is now in its longest depression for 100 years, with little sign of regaining its previous record output before 2014.

A silver lining was provided by a CBI survey of the manufacturing sector that pointed to a recovery in sales and confidence, albeit from one of its worst slumps on record in January. And a survey by the British Retail Consortium found an increasing willingness by shop owners to hire workers. More than 3,000 jobs were created, mainly by large supermarkets opening new stores.

But HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, offset this news when it announced plans to shed 2,000 staff in its UK retail division over the next year as part of a worldwide redundancy programme. Banks have cut thousands of jobs in the past few years to reduce costs and cope with a sharp slowdown in business caused by the financial crisis and subsequent drop in lending.

The good news: that long-awaited rebalancing is happening. The bad news: manufacturing is growing far slower than finance is shrinking.

And yes, you read that right: the longest depression for 100 years. We’re doing worse than during the Great Depression.

Joe Weisenthal of BusinessInsider has done a wonderful thing by charting UK GDP against the Eurozone and the US. As before, you can see the exact moment Britain changed government and - in that ‘emergency’ budget just a month later - embarked on George Osborne’s breakneck spending-reduction plan. But now you can see how growth in the US and Eurozone - both of which have hardly been without their structural problems (the Eurozone, for Christ’s sake!) but have prioritised growth in their deficit-reduction plans.

As Weisenthal writes: “Basically we have a life test of a country that wants to do what conservatives in the US want to do: reduce national debt. Doing so is a growth disaster.”

Atlantic editor Robert Wright and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg have had an interesting conversation about procrastination. Duhigg’s theory is that when you click onto Twitter when you’re stuck on a sentence when you’re writing, that’s actually an entirely appropriate response - distracting your conscious brain while your subconscious works on the knotty problem. (This, presumably, is why it’s so socially acceptable for executives to play endless golf.)

The problem, though, as Wright points out, is that it’s never a two-minute Twitter break, is it? It’s a twenty-minute, or hour-long Twitter break, or BBC News break, or Daily Mail break, or The Verge break, or whatever it is you’re into.

Duhigg goes on in another clip to suggest some tools for rewarding yourself for stopping these breaks after an allotted amount of time. But I think that’s missing the point. The thing that makes the internet such a pernicious driver of procrastination - apart from the fact that it exists on the same screen which we’re trying to work on, so is terrifyingly easy to stray into - is that it is essentially infinite, but appears finite.

When I’ve read five minutes of Twitter, I’m not thinking about the five minute’s worth of Tweets I’ve read, or the seven articles I’ve added to my already-overflowing Instapaper queue - I’m thinking about all the Tweets I’ve yet to read. I want to keep scrolling, keep reading. But not in the way that, when my alarm goes off in the morning, I want to stay in bed. It’s not that I want another five minutes of the experience of being in Twitter. It’s that I’ve only gone back through the last three hours of my news stream, and there are so many other tweets from before that time that I feel I ought to read. In my head, there is a manageable amount of information there which I can - and perhaps even should, in order to be an interesting and enlightened person - consume.

In this way, media-based procrastination is different to experiential procrastination. If I take a break by playing solitaire, I may finish a game and immediately want to play another one. But I know that after that second game, I’ll only want to play a third; it’s inherently infinite and thus carrying on is inherently pointless. But with the internet, while there’s always something new out there to read, we usually feel like it’s possible to read ‘all there is to read.’ To scroll through all the new tweets until you get to the ones you read last night in bed. To read through all the new articles on your favourite news site until you get to the ones you read on the bus home last evening. There seems to be a finite amount of new stuff to consume, so you allow yourself to aim to consume it all. You turn what was supposed to be a break from your allotted task into a task.

The solution? Somehow, to visualise the internet not as an in-tray of information to be scanned, triaged, and either addressed or discarded; but as a river of information to be dipped into and out of at will. The irony is that, the sillier the aspects of the internet you look at for procrastination purposes, the less likely you’ll be to convince yourself that you ‘need’ or ‘should’ keep on with them past the two- or five- or seven-minute mark. It’s easy to convince yourself you ‘should’ keep up with what your Twitter contacts were saying 12 hours ago, in case you miss something interesting. It’s hard to say that about watching the latest video of an anaesthetised child saying the darnedest things.

Reading news might seem more worthwhile but, if it means you take longer away from the actual task your’e supposed to be doing, it’s a cost, not a benefit. Of course, the same could be said, for most of us, for writing blog posts. But that’s another post. One I really should write later, before I finish this article I’m supposed to be writing.

The BBC reports on stupid plans for stick-on contactless payment cards:

The British Retail Consortium BRC estimates that accepting cash payments costs shops on average 1.7p per transaction, but a bank charges the shop on average about 9.2p per transaction for debit card transactions and 37.1p for credit card transactions.

I’m a little surprised that the Daily Telegraph agreed to let Save the Children CEO Justin Forsyth ‘report’ the findings of his own organisation’s research into aid effectiveness - isn’t this inherently better billed as an opinion piece? - but the facts speak for themselves, and are cheering:

Four million fewer children aged under five died in 2010 than in 1990. Over 50 million more children were enrolled in school in the last decade. 131 countries now have over 90 per cent immunisation coverage for diphtheria, tetanus and major preventable childhood diseases such as measles, compared to just 63 in 1990…

In Botswana, for example, an aid-funded programme to provide free HIV tests for expectant mothers, medicine to those testing positive, and infant formula to their babies led to a 15 per cent fall over five years in the number of newborn children contracting HIV from their mothers. Importantly, the programme was conceived and overseen by the government and local NGOs, but paid for by aid.

Similarly, in Bangladesh, a 62 per cent drop over a 17-year period in the number of deaths of under-fives was built on a booming economy and a sustained commitment from successive governments. These foundations were crucial. But so was the aid that bought the vaccines and trained the midwives, so that the government could deliver on its strategies.

The report shows that using aid to drive child-focused development pushes economies forward, countering criticisms that it fosters dependency in recipient countries. Targeting aid to children saves lives in the short term, is a catalyst for development, and fills a critical gap when other conditions are lacking.

The Guardian’s Larry Elliott analyses the decline in aid from OECD countries last year:

The golden era for aid is now over, for the time being at least. Pledges made at Gleneagles in 2005, when the economic outlook was benign and western countries were flush - have not been met. The financial climate is now a lot more hostile, and politicians in rich countries are finding it hard to justify spending more on poor people in poor countries when they are cutting spending on poor people at home.

Representatives of Harvey Weinstein:

We appreciate that Bret Easton Ellis took the time to go see ‘Bully’ and tweet a review. We look forward to reviewing his next project as well.

From Escapist Magazine, a Bio of Nintendo legend Gunpei Yokoi:

Since the late ’70s, Nintendo had been experimenting with the home videogame market, and by 1983, the company was ready to release its first gaming console, the Famicom (NES). But that was the same year the infant videogame industry, wracked with price wars and a glut of crappy titles, crashed spectacularly. Faced with indifferent customers and bargain bins brimming with videogames, retailers refused to stock more consoles. Nintendo realized it needed a clever marketing ploy to trick store owners into supplying the Famicom.

Again, Yokoi saved the day, this time by devising the Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B. (the Famicom Robot in Japan). Released in 1985, the R.O.B. was a one-foot tall toy automaton that didn’t do much of anything, except consume AA batteries at an alarming rate. But the R.O.B. was bundled in the NES Deluxe Set, which also included a console, a Zapper gun, two controllers and two games (Duck Hunt and Gyromite). This clever packaging convinced retailers that the NES was not a videogame console but a robotic toy, and stores hesitant to stock other videogame products ordered the Deluxe Set instead. The trick worked: In its first year, the NES sold more than 1 million units, and having served its purpose, Yokoi’s R.O.B. was quickly dropped from the line-up the next year.

Former Senior Airman Brian Kolfage, a security forces airman, holds his wife, Ashley, on his lap as the couple looks out over the water on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii. Kolfage was one of the first Airmen deployed to Iraq in 2003 at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. During a trip to the chow hall, a mortar flew over the walls of his camp and landed less than 10 feet from him. Kolfage barely escaped with his life and is the most injured surviving Airman from any war. Sept. 9, 2011.

The Verge:

“After more than 250,000 votes, Consumerist readers ultimately decided that the type of greed exhibited by EA, which is supposed to be making the world a more fun place, is worse than Bank of America’s avarice, which some would argue is the entire point of operating a bank.”

Revealed: The Artwork of Kurt Cobain

This is a lot better than I was expecting.

Freshers’ week is completely different to the rest of university life. Ask any student and they will tell you that freshers’ is the only time when everybody talks to everybody, without any social hang-ups or pretensions. There is definitely something that changes once it is over. Cliques begin to form. The very large rugby boys all end up together endlessly discussing the complexities of protein powder. Girls studying English flock together in a sea of berets and roll-up cigarettes. The Pippa Middleton RAH set battle it out to see who has the most horses and the most surnames. Everybody from London keeps on being friends with everybody they previously knew from London. And, in Bristol at least, a handful of bewildered Northerners form a Rugby League scrum and take refuge in nostalgic memories of pies and coal.

Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.