Interesting Links for 14-03-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Work to begin immediately on £55m music centre vision for Edinburgh landmark (the old Royal High School on Calton Hill)

(tags:music school edinburgh )

2. Gary Lineker row: All the people employed or used in BBC programming who are outspoken on social media

(tags:bbc twitter socialnetworking )

3. The care worker recruitment crisis is even bigger than the NHS

(tags:jobs Doom care )

4. Why did 250,000 Britons die sooner than expected? (Austerity)

(tags:uk austerity death )

5. Silicon Valley Bank seem to have managed risk unusually badly

(tags:risk banking Technology epicfail )

6. Nabokov was not a fan of many people's interpretation of Lolita

(tags:abuse children rape writing )

7. Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Thing'

(tags:scifi funny music musicals )

8. The Pithiest Critique of Modern Conservatism Keeps Getting Credited to the Wrong Man

(tags:Conservatives politics mistakes )

9. Trams! Invade Leith!

(tags:Edinburgh trams video transport )

10. What's Going On With Red Dwarf?

(tags:RedDwarf TV scifi )

Comments

[nancylebov]

8. I've started listening to Wilholt's music. It seems promising and he's got a premiere coming up not to far from me.

That's a remarkably weird coincidence of names.

[andrewducker]

It is very unlikely. Probably. I'd need a decent statistician to tell me how many weird names there are out there, to see how often we'd expect that kind of coincidence to occur!

Glad you like his music too. It's good that he's getting something nice out of this.

[danieldwilliam]

I think it will be like the chances of two people sharing a birthday. More common than you might at first think. Butless common than sharing a birthday because there are more names than days in the year.

Chances of two random people sharing a birthday are 1 in 365.

If you assume there are a thousand different family names and a thousand different given names then there are million combinations of Given Name Family Name. So the chance of two people sharing a name are 1 in a million.

It's clearly more complicated than that for names as there are more than 1,000 Given or Family Names, people have different numbers of Given Names and some cultures and languages have quite different naming conventions and structures from other cultures.

Your chances of finding two people in the United States called John Smith who share an amusing name related coincidence is probaby higher than finding two people with the same name in Pitjantjatjara (number of estimated speakers circa 3,000).

[nancylebov]

It's more of a coincidence because the wrong guy is the more plausible source of the quote.

[danieldwilliam]

Aye - you'd need to factor in some additional category of amusingness or strikingness of coincidence.

[foms]

This sort of thing comes up, once in a while. Every time one does, I think about collecting them as a category. That this one attributes a famous quotation to one of them adds interest.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-theft-racial-justice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216733
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3004653/a-tale-of-two-women-same-birthday-same-social-security-number-same-big-data-mess.html
I think that I remember that Bruce Schneier posted about something similar, in India, fairly recently, but I'm not finding it.

[hairyears]

I have an unusual (in England) surname that is fairly common in Ireland, and a stereotypically-English given name that makes the combination very unusual indeed.

To the best of my knowledge, the only other person with my forename and surname is the former editor of the propaganda organ of an Irish political faction who were considered to be terrorists.


The majority of UK HR departments consider everyone with my surname to be the same person, and pointing out that our forenames differ doesn't always solve the problem.

[andrewducker]

That is spectacularly rubbish.

Nabokov was not a fan of many people's interpretation of Lolita

[jack]

I've not read the book, but from hearing people describe it it sounds like if you actually consider the question, there's not much room for doubt that it's about how HH abused L and lied to himself about it, but it's about him so if you only look at what HH says, it doesn't explicitly say "and he was lying".

I remember another quote from N saying, the book should have an abstract cover showing a stylised self-absorbed HH, not (god forbid) a cover focusing on L. (And that all sounds plausible, but I haven't checked the evidence that he thought that from the beginning)

But of course, the film de-emphasised "this is wrong" in various ways, and the conception of L seducing HH rather than HH abusing L entered the popular consciousness :( :( :(

Sometimes, things are pretty much what they seem to be.

[hairyears]

The Financial Times has quite a bit to say about the SVB collapse, and they were saying it a month ago.

The short version is that things were exactly as they seemed to be, to anyone with access to a good analyst's reports on the banking sector, and to any competent banking regulator; and this has been known for months.

I'll expand on that: other banks were passing analysts' notes to their clients about SVB's bond portfolio and term risk exposures; and the regulators - both State and Federal - chose to ignore the fact that SVB had been routinely using short-term loans (called advances) from the San Francisco Federal Home Loan Bank as emergency liquidity facility throughout Q3 and Q4 of 2022.

This is supposed to be a red flag for the regulatory authorities, in much the same way that repeated use of the Discount Window would alert the Bank of England (specifically, the Prudential Regulatory Authority).

Best short read: The FT's summary on March 9th

Read this article for it's background information on why rate risk exposure is well-understood and well-run banks manage it by hedging and diversification.

Regulatory context: European officials are seething about their counterparts’ “incompetence”.

Apologies if you're unable to get at paywalled FT articles at work.


The Moody's downgrade note on SVB is particularly damning, but you definitely won't have access to that unless you're a subscriber, or they make it public.

Two key points:

1 Moodys are very critical of SVB management:

The significant change in SVB’s funding and profitability profile over a short time suggests higher tolerance for risk in its financial strategy and risk management than Moody’s had previously incorporated . . . these financial profile changes followed by a significant balance sheet restructure indicate that SVB’s risk governance, risk limits, and balance of shareholder and creditor interests posed higher than average governance challenges.

2 This collapse was precipitated by higher-than-expected draw-downs of tech startups' cash piles:

Rising interest rates and increased macroeconomic uncertainty coupled with declining venture capital investment activity and high cash burn among SVB’s clients have created challenging conditions for the firm. This led to a significant increase in wholesale funding in the second half of 2022

...In other words, it's not 'a run on the bank' at all: increased burn-rates in the companies that formed SVC's deposit base forced the bank to start liquidating it's badly-managed long-term funding base at a loss; and that forced them to reveal their true position and call for extra cash with a rights issue.

Re: Sometimes, things are pretty much what they seem to be.

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that's fascinating.

Re: Sometimes, things are pretty much what they seem to be.

[hairyears]

Cory Doctorow (and Wired) make an interesting point about SVB's corporate customers: if those uninsured company accounts were emptied by the SVB bankruptcy, *all* the rented servers for Internet-of-Things companies would go offline, and your IoT front door lock would be bricked:


https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/

Likewise, the payment systems for anything and everything that was a cool startup in the last two decades would be switched off: the payment-processing servers and the bank transfers go through SVB account-holders' systems. Which would've failed shortly after those companies missed payroll and stopped paying the bills for their servers.

Best not to ask what happens for the patients using medical devices or halfway through treatment on drugs manufactured by an SVB account-holder.

So the Bailout mattered in ways that aren't understood by all those who say that companies reliant on a failing bank should take their losses and learn their lessons...

And now you know why the Bank of England was willing to accept a £1 bid from HSBC in order to maintain continuity of banking services from SVB's UK subsidiary.