The Jolly Contrarian Life

Dec 15 2024 11 ep. 30 mins 1
The Jolly Contrarian Life Podcast artwork

JC and his hobby horses, bonnet bees, bêtes noire and miscellaneous passing fixations. This is a sister podcast to the Jolly Contrarian on ISDA, which you can access here: https://open.spotify.com/show/5TRKFSdwBy3LsV8OYi3kxq

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Cryptonomicoin

Dec 15 2024 16 mins  
Hello everyoneFollowing 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 mag

Trolley Problem

Dec 06 2024 21 mins  
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

Bitcoin is Venice

Oct 18 2024 74 mins  
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

Desktops, metadata and filing

Sep 30 2024 23 mins  
The desktopIn 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 thei

Lucy Letby

Sep 21 2024 52 mins  
Serial murderers of any kind are vanishingly rare in Britain. Wikipedia lists fifty-five, since 1600. But so are miscarriages of justice. Wikipedia lists fifty-four, since 1255.Both narratives are highly improbable. Of all the explanations we might offer for the unusual spike of incidents in 2015 and 2016, as a matter of “prior probabilities” they are the least plausible: all e

Prosecutor’s tunnel vision

Sep 16 2024 53 mins  
The collection of biases and cognitive gin-traps that can lead prosecutors — those who “prosecute” a particular theory of the world — to stick with it, however starkly it may vary from available evidence and common sense.So named because it is often literal prosecutors, of crimes, who suffer from it. This kind of tunnel vision has led to notorious miscarriages of justice wh

Reports of our death are an exaggeration, Pt 2

Nov 24 2023 28 mins  
The report of my death was an exaggeration.—Mark TwainIn 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 record

Reports of our death are an exaggeration Pt 1

Nov 18 2023 16 mins  
The report of my death was an exaggeration.—Mark TwainIn 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 record

The future of work part 2

Nov 12 2023 18 mins  
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

The Future of Work, Part 1

Nov 12 2023 16 mins  
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.H