Cryptocurrency Under Fire: What took so long?
Financial pages filled with threats that central banks and security regulators in the rich world want to reign in the likes of Bitcoin. Even ban it. It is used for money laundering and speculation, with even Warren Buffet’s number two wondering how cryptocurrencies lasted this long.
“It’s totally absolutely crazy, stupid gambling,” says Charlie Munger, the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. “People who oppose my position are idiots.”
Crypto man watches Super Bowl: It could put him in Jail
New York Magazine, not to be confused with the more cerebral New Yorker, says Sam Bankman-Fried (aka SBF) could be in doo-doo for watching last week’s Super Bowl.
SBF, charged with running a $16-billion crypto currency Ponzi scheme, is out on bail but has been staying in his parent’s house in California. His parents are both law professors, and are the type of academic snobs who don’t own a television set. So tech-savvy SBF hopped on a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and watched the rich game online. But VPN’s can be used to get around government surveillance and maybe even trade a Bitcoin or two.
SBF had to fly back to New York to face a judge in Manhattan. The judge said you don’t need a VPN to watch the Super Bowl. He ordered SBF to not use VPNs. His bail conditions are being worked out. Bankman-Fried may be a free man for now but New York Magazine sure wants him in the slammer.
Where the Super Rich live.
Is Don Lemon for the High Jump?
Last week on CNN’s morning show 56-year old Don Lemon said that 51-year old Nikki Haley, the presidential candidate, wasn’t in her prime. It is hard to think that anyone in the TV business could be stupid enough to say this on air:
“A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”
His two co-hosts, Kaitlin Collins and Poppy Harlow were in shock. “Are you talking about ‘prime’ for child bearing?” asked Ms. Harlow, on live TV.
The chairman of CNN, Chris Licht, criticized Lemon on Friday morning. Lemon was not on the CNN morning show on Friday. No reason given. Licht is trying to move CNN to the centre, rather than its recent role of being the left wing counter balance of Fox News. Maybe getting rid of the outspoken liberal (in the American sense) Don Lemon might be a way of doing that. On top of that he is paid $4-million a year and the ratings on the morning show stink.
Ocean Plastic: Surprising Culprits
There are no rich Western countries on this list, which might surprise people who don’t particularly like rich Western countries. The Philippines is the worst offender by far.
The article that accompanied this chart also pointed out that while China appears on the list, it in fact cleans up a lot of its plastic waste before it gets to the ocean. The Philippines has 7,000 islands and sloppy governance. Plastic is washed into rivers, blown from beaches and dumped in from storm drains.
“Some might think that the countries producing or consuming the most plastic are the ones that pollute the oceans the most. But that’s not true,” said the article.
“According to the study, countries with a smaller geographical area, longer coastlines, high rainfall, and poor waste management systems are more likely to wash plastics into the sea. For example, China generates 10 times the plastic waste that Malaysia does. However, 9% of Malaysia’s total plastic waste is estimated to reach the ocean, in comparison to China’s 0.6%”.
Here is a link to the report in ScienceAdvances
The Stuff the Average American Uses
These are averages per person. You don’t imagine the average person has three and half tons of sand and gravel dumped on their doorstep, but that is what is used for construction of buildings, including housing and roads. The stone mystifies me, but it must be the same. I would imagine Canadians use pretty much the same.
Inflation: Will Central Banks keep Raising Rates?
Ever wonder why Cats are so Independent?
Because they came to us rather than we domesticating them. And domestic cats are quite recent, originating in Meospatania, or maybe Egypt and spreading as the map shows, helped by the Roman Empire. Cats came as late as 900 AD to Ireland.
An article in the journal Antiquity says cats were attracted by the mice in early farming sites in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago. There was a separate domestication of cats in Egypt 3,500 years ago. The authors say those cats were tamer.
Dogs were domesticated more than 20,000 years ago.
A Record Warm February Day in Toronto
The indoor/outdoor thermometer in my apartment showing it is 15.2 C, which is a little over 59 F. The average is around -8 C. The coldest February 15 was -25 C.
This was followed by regular cold weather by Friday, including snow and ice.
Doctor, was it something I ate?
Essay of the Week
I don’t know most of the people I write obits about. But I did know this man. He taught me a lot about television and writing and he was great at lunch.
Desmond Smith was a television producer and writer who worked on the first CBC television programs in 1952 and went off to produce documentaries and news programs in Vietnam, Russia and across the United States for American TV networks. He later returned to Canada, eventually becoming a guru to top TV executives, including the man who ran CBC News and Current Affairs for more than a decade.
"He was my futurist," said Tony Burman, who was in charge of CBC Newsworld in the 1990s and then all of News and Current Affairs from 2000 to 2007. "He understood the whole revolution in American television. He had worked in it but was no longer there, so he was able to see it with detachment."
What first impressed Mr. Burman and others were the long magazine features Mr. Smith wrote about television and the information age in the 1970s and 80s. Some appeared in The New York Times Magazine, but his best work was in New York magazine. He would travel to New York regularly, always staying at the Algonquin Hotel because of its romantic association with the writer Dorothy Parker and her literary salon there.
In the early 1980s, many people in Canadian television were predicting the rapid demise of CNN. The man who started CNN, Ted Turner, was seen as a brash upstart who knew nothing about news, a kind of Donald Trump of the media world at the time. Desmond Smith wrote a piece in New York magazine saying CNN was the future.
He saw that computers, television and telecommunications would all come together, and wrote about the information age. He was an early adopter and always worked with an Apple computer, though he had a CBC staffer help him set it up. Theory was his forte.
"In 1969, computers were big, expensive, and for the vast majority of people, out of reach. In 1980, computers are small, relatively inexpensive and in radio stores. The computing power that was in an IBM machine that cost $1.2-million in 1968 is today available in the Apple home computer, priced around $2,000," he wrote in a story proposal to the editor of New York magazine in 1980.
That observation may seem obvious now, but it wasn't then, which is why editors in New York bought so many articles from him. Mr. Smith also drew on his extensive connections, developed while working at ABC News and CBS News, to write knowledgeably about American TV news. He could pick up the phone and get straight through to Don Hewitt, the CBS producer who invented 60 Minutes, or media mogul Roone Arledge, who built ABC News into a powerhouse.
In February, 1980, he published a profile in The New York Times Magazine titled "The Wide World of Roone Arledge." No one else could have written it, since Mr. Arledge avoided media interviews.
"Roone Arledge was notorious for never returning phone calls. But he would pick up and talk to Des because of their friendship and the work Des did in Vietnam and the Soviet Union," said Peter Rehak, a former executive producer of W5 who was working at the CBC when he met Mr. Smith, who had just been transferred from Montreal.
"I remember someone on the assignment desk who knew him from Montreal complained about Des, saying, 'All he wants to do is go to lunch.' So I asked him to lunch," Mr. Rehak said.
Desmond Smith was not Mr. Smith's real name. When he was born in Manchester, England, on Sept. 7, 1927, his Canadian-born parents, Lily and Arthur Desmond-Smith, named him Eric. But when he came to Canada he dropped the hyphen and just called himself Desmond Smith. He had a brother, Godfrey Desmond-Smith, who also went by the name Desmond Smith. Mr. Smith's daughter, Charly, says both did it because they didn't care for their tyrant of a father.
Like many British boys, he yearned for the romance of the Royal Air Force, but he was only 12 years old when the war began. He did join the RAF in the final months of the war, flying as a navigator in a twin-engine Mosquito. He specialized in aerial photography, mapping Germany from the air in the fast, high-altitude Mosquito.
After the war, his squadron was based in Germany and he joined some of the older airmen in a business of trading coffee from Britain for German cameras, which they would bring back back in the empty bomb bay of the Mosquito. His Majesty's Customs and Excise saw it not as a business but smuggling, and Mr. Smith and others were given a stern reprimand.
Following advice to study something that interested him, Mr. Smith received an undergraduate physics degree at the University of Manchester after the war. He then went to Cambridge to study economics, though he was always terrible with money.
He started working at small papers in Britain and eventually received an assignment from the Economist, which delights in hiring clever young oddballs. His task was to write an in-depth article about Canada. One stop on his 1952 trip was Toronto, where the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was preparing to air its first television broadcast. Mr. Smith filed his story to the Economist then joined the CBC. He was working on the set of that first broadcast in September of that year.
Mr. Smith worked on Tabloid, the first daily current affairs TV program in Canada, and a host of other events including the Queen's coronation in 1953. He started as a script assistant and floor director, then graduated to writer and producer.
"In those early days there was no variety, no news, there was just television and you did it," Mr. Smith told The Globe in 2004. It was live television: "There were no re-takes. Just 30 pages of scripts with every shot planned."
In 1955, Mr. Smith moved to New York, established himself with some overseas TV networks and worked in Denmark and Germany for a year. He married Kirsten Rasmussen, a Dane, then returned to New York, where he was a stringer for The Economist and started working in local television at WNBC.
In the mid-1960s, ABC News sent him to Vietnam, where he produced documentaries, including one called This Is Saigon. It featured the charismatic Armed Forces Radio Network announcer Adrian Cronauer, the character played by Robin Williams in the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam.
"I am sure some kid was watching that program in his basement in 1966 and this scene of the disc jockey stuck in his head and it later became the movie," said Gary Gould, a professor of journalism at Ryerson University who worked with Mr. Smith at a media school they ran in Oxford, in England, for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
After his stint in Vietnam, ABC News sent Mr. Smith to Moscow to shoot documentaries. The Soviets suspected anyone working for a U.S. network of being a CIA agent. One of Mr. Smith's documentaries was called Comrade Soldier, a profile of the Soviet army,
"Desmond had this idea he wanted to open with the changing of the guard at Lenin's tomb in Red Square. At first the Russians said no, but Desmond was extremely friendly and very persistent, and in the end they agreed," said George Watson, who was ABC's correspondent in Moscow. "We filmed all night; every hour on the hour the guard changed. One hour Des wanted the boots shot, the next hour a long shot. We had to rent huge lights from the Soviets to light Red Square. It worked."
Back in the U.S., Mr. Smith worked for ABC in Los Angeles and then on The Walter Cronkite Show in New York for CBS News. In 1973, the CBC hired him to run the local television station in Montreal. His flamboyant style soon earned him the nickname "Broadway Des" in Montreal's anglophone community. He changed things, cancelling religious programs and dramas, and pouring money into an extended newscast called The City at Six.
Reporters were sent to Northern Quebec to make documentaries about Cree land claims at James Bay, or to Florida to interview the grandson of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, a U.S. district attorney who had uncovered a fraud involving a Montreal businessman.
In 1979, he moved to Toronto, where he produced the weekend newscast, leaving him lots of time to work on his New York-based magazine articles. In the late 1980s he became the senior producer at the business program Venture, and in 1992, when he turned 65, was forced to retire.
Mr. Smith was addicted to TV news. He could not be disturbed between 5:30 and 7:30, when he channel-surfed, watching Canadian and American newscasts and taking notes. In retirement, Mr. Burman hired him to critique the flagship news program The National. "He was an absolute whiz," Mr. Burman said.
Following the breakup of his first marriage, Mr. Smith met Marjaleena Jappinen, a Finnish flight attendant, on a Pan Am flight from Moscow. They married and had two children together. Marjaleena died of an aneurysm on the tennis court in 1985, when she was just 41.
Mr. Smith was close to his two children, Charly (a daughter, named after a friend) and Nicky, his son. He gave up smoking cigars when his daughter said her friends at school told her she smelled of tobacco.
Mr. Smith leaves his two children, two grandchildren and his sister-in-law, Ulli Jappinen.