Auswanderer Quatsch

After reading so much about the current economical crisis in the news and in great posts like this one (in french) from Franck about the original purpose of companies and their relation to the stock market, I finally decided to take this book (Vingt Propositions pour Réformer le Capitalisme) – that was gathering dust on my shelf since 2009 – with us on our trip to the Caribeans and read it cover to cover in a blink.

This book takes a very interesting approach of summarizing the state of the financial world, try to explain why it evolved this way and suggest 20 ideas that could solve as many weak points of the system. Written at the end of the first subprimes crisis in 2008, I found particularly interesting to read it now, 3 years later, as we are still stuggling with the aftermaths of this major crisis.

Beside learning tons about the stock market itself and discovering a world that makes way more sense than I ever thought (don’t misunderstand me, I still think – like Frank – that the stock market is answering the wrong question and endangering the system as a whole in the process but still), it gave me some confirmation on the fact that without ethics, nothing will change. Most of the ideas proposed make sense but would be very hard to put into place.

Some are almost impossible to put in place without a “world governing institution” like for instance the interdiction of trading insurances for products that you don’t own or (and this is one of their methaphores) “create new floors (insurances) on a building in order to make it safer when the base (the products insured) is still completely shaky (subprimes)”.

Another example could be the idea of creating a very stable market enforced with hard rules where the risk and the return on investment would be low to oppose to the wild-wild-rest. This sure sounds very nice, but that would be assuming that the investors would accept to forget about their double digit growth rates and understand the ethics behind such a preventive approach and not try to bend it as soon as the authorities would turn their back.

Another very interesting point of the book was to make parallels between the different bubbles we had and try to make out some patterns of the history. I was astonished to hear that the 1929 and the subprimes crises had very similar triggers: buying actions/houses with only very little (~10%) personal income and relying on the marketgrowth to cover for the rest. And bytheway, I wonder how this was not flagged as a Ponzi-like scheme from the begining…

I also really liked the construction of the book, going from very precise financial points to market dynamics, global organization and finally to ethics. The book has a very good lexicon to which you can refer every other page to get the meaning of those awkward financial terms.

All in all, this was a very interesting reading, so interesting that I noted a few points I need to investigate back home. I also would be very interested in hearing about the impressions of 2011 crisis by the same authors as some of their proposals were already partially implemented and some that they did not dare wish started to move as well (at EU level for instance). And least but not last, I might now be able to understand what my friend Joe is doing :] and what he means when he “computes the VaR of his energy package at maturity based on a risk-gaussian distribution in order to smurf his smurf in the smurf” (I know, this sentence does not make any sense).

Decisive point anyway, this is a french book so… nothing for my non-french-speaking readers :[

I first heard about this book about 6 months ago, while watching a TED video of its author Christopher McDougall (this was the trigger for this post). This was the starting point for me to go into barefoot running. Nevertheless, I did not start with the book right away.

During my vacation (yeah… I’m right back… didn’t want to, believe me), I read my way through the book in a very few reading sessions and simply loved it. I so much loved it, that I had to go for a jog right before I could settle down and start typing this post.

I ran as a kid, I ran as a teenager, I ran as a young adult, and I still (try to) run. I have always liked running even though it did not always seem to like me. I love those “lonely” moments when I am alone in my head (I’ve never really experienced group running yet) and where nothing else matters beside me and the trail I chose. I very much like this feeling of stepping out of the door and being able to run right away, not requirering anything else than a pair of shoes (and a pair of shoes is already almost too much). Finally, I love this felling of duelling against your own self with only mother nature for witness, convincing yourself that another loop or kilometer wouldn’t be that bad and pushing farther. I’ve always dreamt of long distance running, as a fight with myself, with my own will…

In the last 4 years, something changed for me. I noticed I could not run as far as I used to. I ran my last semi-marathon and then my last 10K experiencing this numbness in my feet. I finally registered to a final semi-marathon, rolled out my training, and had to give up as I came down to being only able to run 5 to 7Ks max… that sucked and still sucks.

In this book, Chris McDougall describes a lot those feelings of freedom and self challenge. But he also very well describes those hickups faced by many a runner (up to 80%?) that forces us to stop doing what we like so much due to recurrent pain or injury. Using the Tarahumara, a forgotten Mexican tribe of runners as a red line in his story, he describes the pleasure that running can and should provide, while exposing the theory that the Homo Sapiens is in fact “Born to run”. He describes the common joy of the ultra-runners (participating in 100km races or more) and how come they can go beyond every likely limit and still smile at every step. He also diggs deeper into morphology and suggests that the barefoot approach (or the almost similar minimalistic approach) which is growing out to become more than just trendy now is in fact a very natural, safe and sustainable way of running.

Go grab the book, put your shorts on and go running… barefoot! NOW!

(Img found on Barefoot Ted’s Blog – This is the original cover photo of the book by Luis Escobar…Billy with Caballo seated)

It’s been a while since I reviewed a book in here. Actually it’s been a while since I read a book in the first place. As part of my 2011 will-not-hold-long resolutions, I thought it would be good to start reading again. Since I know myself pretty well by now, I decided to start right-away-while-its-fresh-because-you-never-know-how-long-it-will-last. So I jumped on Rework from David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried and read it cover to cover in two days.

The authors are pretty well known in the IT world. David Heinemeier Hansson is the father of the excellent web development framework Ruby on Rails. He is also the co-founder of the web-company 37Signals… with Jason Fried. This small company has been profitable for years now and producing very interesting software dedicated to small businesses.

The best way I can describe this book is by giving it the nickname “the little black book of common sense 2.0″ because if it will sometime sound like common sense to the youngest generation (the web2.0 generation)… it will not always be easy to grasp for our elders. And “little black book”… well… because it is not so big, it is black… and it’s a book :]

The book is not really structured but more like a repository of ideas and interrogations like: Can a company succeed by revealing all its secrets? Can a company succeed by doing less than the concurrence? Can a company succeed when its x members are spread up in (close to) x locations? … and of course the book answers “yes” three times and tries to push its reader into questioning his/her current job in this regard.

Far from being a wonder in itself, this book is very interesting and will definitely leaves a mark in your mind. Nevertheless it sometimes sounded like “common sense” to me ; which was pretty disappointing. I think I will have to read it again in a while in order to grasp some more of it. But already it has made its way into my mind and I am working on implementing some of its suggestions.

This book I really recommend! Now I think I will have to get myself a copy of Getting Real, their other book… but not before I get at least half way through the stack of books lying beside my bed!

Hey, I just realized I did not talk to you about Halting State and Accelerando two science fiction books written by Charles Stross (and suggested by Greg – again) that I read before getting along with the Zombies in World War Z.

Halting State

The story takes place in a very near future, where online gaming becomes an institution as well as a marketplace in itself. “Hayek Associates”, one of the multiple companies taking care of balancing the economy of a virtual world is robbed… or should I say its ingame virtual bank is raided by a group of orcs virtually stealing millions in goods and epic items. But due to the interconnection of the virtual worlds and the importance of a stable economy there, it is the stock exchange rate of the company “in real life” that is at stake here ; the investigation can begin.

The pitch is actually pretty good, the characters are interesting, the mix between real and virtual is puzzling at first but soon very enjoyable. There are a couple very cool concepts in there like an online game used by the “government” to perform spying tasks and training spies etc. Unfortunately, the plot looses itself pretty soon in some crazy international terrorist crap with big guns which removes all taste to this – at first – wonderful setup.

Well, you got it, even if there are some funny concepts in there, I don’t recommand it.

Accelerando

This book is almost as strange as it is complex and exciting. The story starts just before the singularity (mum: that’s the time when machine’s complexity will start to grow too fast for us humans to follow ;] ), following the life of Manfred Macx, a genius VentureAltruist (I love the concept, a guy giving away his ideas for the sake of increasing his online reputation and living from what the people he helped earn billions will kindly give him in return), and his “dysfunctional family”. With the singularity, comes the virtualization of the mind and the unlimited lifespan that goes with it… I let you imagine what it does to a 3 generation family that now have to coexist virtually forever although they just cannot stand each other >_<

If the story itself is not that fresh, the concepts explosed are plain fantastic. The virtualisation, upload of the mind and “virtual worlds” to run them, the economical concepts pushed to their extreme… it is really plain fantastic.

The story was first published as a serie of novels in the “Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine” and later reunited in a whole book. That’s why the jumps between the chapters are sometime a bit hard to follow but that’s also why the chapters themselves are often small self-sufficient stories, which is really appreciable.

What can I say? I really had a lot of fun reading this book and I really recommand it to any crazy mind like mine (but if you are not sure of your english, go for a translation as it ic COMPLICATED!).

After trying (and failing) to read “Gardens of the Moon” from Steven Erikson (too much magic for me there, I like my medieval-fantastic more medieval and less fantastic), I decided to invest my fast decreasing reading time into Sci-Fi again.

Zombie_Woman by WVS

This time I went for a zombie story – “an oral history of the zombie war” to be precise – that was recommended by a former colleague of mine and read it cover-to-cover in the train and plane during my trip to Slovakia this week : World War Z from Max Brooks.

Zombies are always fun, probably because they are pretty unrealistic, they defy all the laws of physics and ironically give us a sure alternative to death… what we actually fear most! But writing about zombies is not an easy task for it is way too easy to produce a cheesy story full of crap and seen a million times already ; but this one isn’t.

What really interested me at first – and what is in my opinion one of the strongest faces of the book – is the construction of the novel as a journalist interview of the survivors. Since it is supposed to be recorded after the war, all the persons talking survived it somehow… and what they are explaining will somehow end “well”… at least for them. This simple construction trick removes a whole suspense part of the book, focusing the story on the succession of events on the global scale and less on the survival – which is the usual zombie subject.

Of course you get a lot of run-aways, of trapped people, fighting scenes, bloody massacres, dismembering and flesh-orgy scenes… but the central point of the book is to show how the plague started, how it gained the whole Earth, how it was fought and how humanity managed to survive it, not to make you like a character and make you fear for his life as he runs away from the living dead trying to save his dumb-trapped-princess at the same time.

Talking about the characters, each chapter is actually the narration of a different person. From a secret Israeli agent, a GI and high ranked military officer to a Japanese nerd, a gardener and “simple” parents you get a really interesting picture of the global situation.

Yes, I really enjoyed this book and I warmly recommend it, specially if you need a break after a medieval fantastic streak that was too strong on the fantastic

(Picture – splendid – by WVS whose DailyDoseOfImagery I strongly recommend as well)