Categories
Investing

Beyond Meat, post-barbarianism

A whalebone (or baleen) corset was de rigueur for the fashionable young things of yesteryear.

I’m mulling over an investment in a vegan food delivery subscription service, allplants*, which is raising money on Seedrs*.

My analysis is about to get tastier. I’ve ordered a sample of its frozen meals!

It sure beats building a discounted cashflow model in Excel.

Follow my link to allplants* and you’ll get £20 off your first order.

Let me know what you make of the meals on Twitter.

Deliver who?

Of course there are already a banquet of meal delivery services competing to lose money in the pursuit of ours.

I’ve invested in another, SimplyCook*. The jury is out on that one.

And to be honest, I’m not yet convinced about allplants. The meals seem expensive, though as my friend H. pointed out, if you’re not confident about your cooking but you want to wean yourself off meat, they may look a bargain.

But there’s no special proprietary technology here – nothing like the lab-grown frankenburgers of Beyond Meat – so it’s really a bet on branding, execution, and what seems like a strong team.

Not nothing, but not ideal.

If it wasn’t for the tailwind I believe such businesses have from the shift away from eating meat, I probably wouldn’t look at it.

Green shoots

You see, in the past few years the move towards more plant-based diets has become a stampede.

From the BBC:

According to the latest research by the Vegan Society, conducted in 2018, there are around 600,000 vegans in Great Britain.

It’s estimated that this is up from 150,000 in 2006, and that there are twice as many women than men who are vegan.

Around 360,000 people also describe themselves as lifestyle vegans, who commit to only using or buying cosmetics and clothes free from animal products, for example.

As someone who tried and failed to stay a vegetarian in the ’90s – I managed a few years on bean sprouts and nut roasts – I rather sheepishly welcome this trend.

And I think it’s only just begun.

Eating animals – and drinking the infant milk of ruminants, and hard boiling the embryos of chickens – guarantees a fine old time on a Friday night in Chinatown, but it sounds odd when you think about it.

I often like to annoy self-righteously woke friends by pointing out the things they do today that history will consider terrible.

Just driving a petrol-fuelled car past a playground might seem callous in 30 years’ time.

And eating ‘real’ meat will probably go the same way:

Bones brigade

We underestimate how much times and tastes change – especially as technology adapts to enable us to become more sensitive souls.

Your great great great grandfather lit his rooms with blubber and the oil drained from the head cavity of sperm whales.

His wife wore corsets and hooped skirts fashioned from the skeletons of these intelligent and now endangered animals.

For many years the perfume trade coveted a substance called ambergris – basically whale vomit. Ambergris was used to fix fragrances. It was also occasionally eaten with eggs.

During the 18th Century millions upon millions of whales were hunted and sliced to ribbons for our ancestors to wine and dine in London under lights lit by whale oil, wearing the bones of whales for clothing, and smelling of whale puke.

And the Victorians called native people barbarians!

It’s all a matter of perspective.

At the turn of the last century, rural British schoolgirls would go out shooting rooks, crows, and much else that flapped with what were called rook rifles.

Communities even held rook shoots. The aim was to destroy the juvenile birds before they could fly.

It was quite the social event. Later they’d eat their kills.

I’m not judging our ancestors – that’s the point. Rookeries can grow to become a nuisance, especially in an environment denuded of predators, and people have to eat.

And Beyond Rook wasn’t on the menu in 1892.

But one can only imagine what the Instagram generation would make of a rook shoot today.

There’s a fun scene in the Amazon Prime* series Mrs Maisel where some well-to-do 1950s housewives are lectured on the virtues of a racoon fur coat versus mink.

Only 70 years ago – and the fur-clad models looks like something out of Vikings.

Tastes change, and technology enables them to change.

Why wear racoon when you can wear environmentally conscious high-tech waterproof clothing from Finisterre?

Blame the size of a planet

Technology is pushing into meat substitutes partly because of this growing squeamishness, but also because we can’t feed 11 billion people a Western-style meat diet without finally finishing off the planet.

Besides the sheer amount of land needed for everyone to enjoy a beef burger, there’s the carbon impact:

Unless you want to see a much smaller population of water-borne humans dine exclusively on fish, tapering our eating of meat looks like a matter of urgency.

So how to profit from avoiding the End of the World?

There are surprisingly few ways to play this trend via stock market-listed equities.

You could consider US stocks like Beyond Meat, Ingredion, and Hain Celestial, or you could buy say Unilever and hope it pivots in time.

Otherwise you’re looking at risky startups like allplants.

Enjoy your £20 off if you do decide to do your due diligence on its vegetable moussaka or its BBQ jackfruit burrito bowl.

You’re getting a taste of things to come!

*Affiliate links

Categories
Society Technology

Why you’re doomed to techno-befuddlement by the time you’re 70

A friend aspires to be as adept at using consumer technology in 30 years – when he’ll be in his late 70s – as he is today.

This will be me and my friend in 30 years’ time. Children will smirk at us before being re-submerged in their entertainment vats.

He believes many older people have been lazy about keeping up with the underlying advances of the past 50 years.

And he argues that because he works in software engineering and makes an effort to understand the principles behind new technology, he will be in a good position to achieve his goal of being able to program his semi-bio-engineered cyborg gardener using mind control as easily as his grandchildren in the year 2054.

I believe he’s missing the point, and we’ve had many debates.

Silver surfer wipeout

We first got onto this topic after my friend expressed frustration with his septuagenarian mother, who was struggling to read her online banking webpage.

She’d had the Internet for years! Why couldn’t she just fill in the boxes and click the right buttons?

Because, I argued, she didn’t grow up with it. It’s not in her bones, or her muscle memory, or the appropriate synaptic connections.

While most older people I know have basically got the hang of parsing webpages by now, it was fascinating watching them try in their early encounters with the Internet.

Very often they’d start reading from the top left. They’d scan right, then return to the left hand side, drop their eyes down a bit, and continue the process.

They were reading the webpage like a book!

Ever wondered why anyone clicked on banner adverts or got confused about content versus text ads in the sidebar?

Now you know.

Reading a webpage like a book is bonkers to my generation.

Most of us grew up with – or at least encountered – video games.

We were taught very young to treat the screen like a plate of tapas to pick and choose from, rather than as a sacred text.

Perhaps even those who missed games (many young girls, in the early days, for instance) were still trained to have a roving eye by the frenetic activity of Saturday morning cartoons, or by the visually didactic offerings of Play School and Sesame Street.

Older people grew up on books, and watched movies at the cinema that were first staged like theatre productions. Their hands were held by the film’s creators through the viewing. Though they couldn’t articulate it, they mostly knew what to expect next (what shot, what reaction shot, what panning shot, and so on).

Whereas we were taught to take what we needed from a screen. Webpages, when they came, were no big leap.

Of course we were also young, inquisitive, and took pleasure in being adaptable – qualities that do seem to wane.

In any event, reading webpages has diddly-squat to do with understanding hypertext or TCP/IP.

Similarly, many of our parents well understood what a video tape was capable of doing.

The reason they struggled to program their VCRs was because they grew up in a world of wooden horses and plastic cars and just one fancy piece of electronics in the corner of the living room that at first they weren’t allowed to touch.

Are you already a luddite?

If you’re in your mid-to-late 40s and you believe your grandkids won’t be helping you with your household appliances in 30 years, ponder the following:

  • Do you spend fewer than 10 hours a day consuming content via a handheld digital device?
  • Do you still own a CD or DVD collection, or even an iTunes library?
  • Do you take a photo of every meal you have in a restaurant and then distribute it on social media?
  • Do you ever answer your front doorbell?
  • Do you take 546 portraits of yourself in front of every cultural landmark you pass, and know which is your good side, the right angle for your chin, and what’s your best filter?
  • Are you innately au fait with the rule of three?
  • When was the last time one of your memes went viral?
  • Do you answer your phone and/or leave voice messages?
  • (You actually have a landline?!)
  • Did you meet your last three partners on dating apps?
  • Has your Facebook account been dormant since 2016?
  • How often do you Snapchat something you’re ashamed of?
  • Do you fall asleep with your iPhone?
  • Can you even imagine sitting in front of adverts on the TV?

Sometimes you should be answering yes, and sometimes no.

Hopefully the questions speak for themselves. Most of us my age are already past it.

And this is just 2010-2020 technology. If you’re under 30 and you’re thinking “sure”, wait until you see what’s coming next…

The future is child’s play

My point is that what defines technological advances, eras, generations – and alienation – is not how the technology works.

It’s what people do with it.

A clue my friend is going to be metaphorically reaching into the befuddled darkness in his old age with the rest of us is he thinks none of the stuff in that list is new, and that it’s mostly stupid.

He doesn’t use Snapchat, he says, because he hasn’t got time, but anyway it’s just text messaging with pictures.

Posting photos of every dinner to Instagram is pointless, narcissistic, and distracting.

And so on.

Yes, perhaps I agree with him – but I would because I’m his age.

Our parents thought Manic Miner was a waste of time, too.

My father – who worked in Information Technology all his life – said I was in too much of a hurry to encourage him to get a home email address. Who was ever going to email him at home?

Whereas young people play with the new technology around them.

It’s not even new technology when you’re young. It’s just the world.

Their play may seem silly at first. But often they’re learning how to navigate the future.

Photographing your dinner seems ridiculous to those of us who made it to 46 without a daily visual record of what we ate.

But we weren’t cultivating multi-faceted media personalities from our pre-teen years with as large a footprint online as off.

I sent my friend a video this morning. It shows kids having fun using their AirPods as covert walkie-talkies in class:

My friend replied as follows:

A typically convoluted and wasteful solution. I’m sure they have great fun doing it, though.

(To get his tone, read his second sentence in the sarcastic voice of Basil Fawlty, rather than with the camaraderie of a Blue Peter presenter.)

His response illustrates why my friend will surely have to call out the droid training man six times before it’s finally packing away the grocery deliveries the way he wants it to.

Or why he’ll be one of the last to order an autonomous car that has a hot tub instead of a driver’s seat.

Or why he’ll never meet a partner on Tinder who will only make love after micro-dosing LSD.

Or why he’ll insist on sending text messages, rather than sharing head-vibes via an embedded emote transmitter-receiver.

Or why he’ll die of a heart attack because he hadn’t tracked his blood via a wearable monitor disguised as a signet ring.

Or whatever actually does come down the road; the challenges of tomorrow’s technology won’t look like those of today.

I don’t mean to make fun of my friend. I applaud his aspiration.

But he has got a solution for a totally different problem.

Categories
Society

The four horseman of the Apocalypse for the after dark High Street

Cardiff, 2010: Those were the days (BBC)

Economists and pundits are befuddled by the decline of the UK High Street, and all the pubs and restaurant chains that have shrunk or gone bust.

Most blame high rates but I find that unconvincing. It’s hardly new.

Others point to Brexit uncertainty. While it’s true this act of gross national self-harm hasn’t helped anyone bar a few politicians, it’s surely not what’s ailing Britain’s purveyors of boozy revelry.

No, I believe it’s all about sex.

Carbon dating

Most people over 40 have no idea just how ‘dating’ – or ‘hooking up’ – has changed since we were young.

I put both terms in quotes, because these are American imports that weren’t even really a thing in the UK 20 years ago.

Like good investing, getting horizontal in Blighty used to be simple but not easy.

Boy had a few drinks. Girl had a few drinks. Semi-drunk boys and girls met somewhere social, got off, thought “you’ll do”, and hung about until they realised they wouldn’t or they got married.

Sadly, imports have destroyed this traditional British way of life.

First there was the TV show Friends, and latterly Tinder.

Nobody is putting themselves out there

I’ll illustrate via the experiences of a friend of mine.

Let’s call him Frank.

Frank has gamed the algorithms of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge.

Looking at his profile is a glimpse into what life must be like as an Instagram model with a winning way with a bikini, or as Barack Obama on Twitter.

Frank’s profile is a long stream of Likes, Matches, and interactions. He browses them at his leisure, and engages a few in chat.

When Frank has decided he’d like to meet one, he sends them exactly the same 12-word semi-witty suggestion that he has found gets the highest positive response rate.

I know… romantic.

Needless to say all his photos have been A/B tested, too.

Furthering his odds, Frank is in the demographic sweet spot for men – early 30s, works out, decent earner, still has all his own hair.

Okay, he is probably in the foothills of the spectrum, but that doesn’t matter in the era of apps. If anything it’s a boon.

He’s interesting enough to talk to in real-life, if a bit insensitive.

Frank gets lots of traction from dating apps, that’s my point.

But it is a truth universally acknowledged since Austen that when it comes to the sexual marketplace, the grass is always greener.

We don’t serve your kind in here

Frank wants to be a real-life player, like the men he read about on dodgy Internet forums when he was a teenager.

And perhaps because I’m more than a decade older, Frank decided I’d be the perfect ‘wingman’, in the parlance of such tribes, to go out with him for non-screen mediated interactions in social venues – or, as we used to call it, “on the pull”.

Our missions are a perpetual disappointment.

Of course the truth is going on the pull was almost always hugely disappointing. So Frank is getting some authentic reality right there.

Throw in a first-generation PlayStation, Blur on a CD player, and a couple of bottles of Hooch, and Frank could be living the ’90s dream.

But as one who did live that dream, I had to inform Frank after several doomed Saturday nights that this was even worse.

Because – in short, rounding down – nobody is doing it anymore.

They’ve just stopped.

Okay, I’m sure students on campus are still getting off at the college disco or whatnot, but in everyday life, women have stopped going to pubs to meet men, and men have stopped going to look for them.

If women are in pubs now, it’s to meet and socialise, and who can blame them.

Browsing long streams of “hey!”s and/or propositions on a dating app with a hot chocolate must be a ten-fold improvement for the average woman compared to being drooled on by the least shy, most cocksure, or most drunk male on a Saturday night.

As for men, I think dating apps are a cruel place for most of us in terms of garnering the attention of women, but really it was the same back in the old days. We just didn’t have apps telling us to expect anything different.

Anyway, back to my point – most people have realised the only thing they’re likely to attract in today’s near-empty pubs is a cold.

There’s probably a broader trend here, too, informed by movements in identity politics and #metoo, perhaps.

People no longer seem to signal their status like they used to, and they have less fun with / less tolerance for it all.

In other words, they don’t flirt in most social spaces.

In the long run this is probably for the good, especially for women who can do without low-level harassment in the workplace, but still it’s easy to forget how much has changed.

Twenty years ago I worked in an office where the newest recruit – male or female – was hazed by having a bunch of framed porn photos on their desk until someone newer was hired.

I didn’t work for Hustler. It was just an office of normal media people. I don’t remember anyone thinking it was especially off.

Yikes. We’ve changed.

Goodbye to all: apps

Which brings me back to my four horseman. (Can you hear their mounts stamping at the door and braying to be heard?)

I believe the epochal shift in sexual and social dynamics – mostly due to dating apps, but with a strong supporting cast – has changed nightlife forever. (It’s probably doing much else besides.)

As I mused to Frank at the end of one of our uneventful evenings, I see four apps in particular as the riders of the Apocalypse that have spelled doom for traditional nightlife:

  • Tinder – And Hinge, Bumble, Plenty of Fish, Grindr, and all the others. People no longer need to go out, spend money, and get drunk to meet to people. So they don’t.
  • Netflix – …and chill. Clues in the vernacular. Even if you’re not chilling with that special someone who made it through your Tinder funnel, you’re probably bingeing on a box set rather than trying to ring fun out of a provincial nightclub.
  • Deliveroo – Why get a sweaty kebab when you can have your favourite chain meal whisked from dark kitchen to your door in 30 minutes?
  • WhatsApp – You don’t even need to go to the pub to drown your sorrows. Cheap beer and a group of your fellow unlucky lovers will get you through those long nights of the soul.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

There’s that pub near you that’s always busy, or you were out on Friday night in Shoreditch in London and it was rammed.

Yes, yes. There will always be a few successful pubs that are hubs for the local community, presuming we don’t transition to living in vats wearing VR headsets.

I suppose too that there will always be the very trendiest parts of town, the most Instagrammable new restaurants, and the odd capital letter Event that stokes your target demographic’s FOMO.

I’m talking about the continental landmass, not those exotic islands.

The waters are rising, and the end times are upon that old world.

Categories
Technology

Would you rather be killed by a robot?

Few of us want to die, but we have a greater aversion to going one way than another.

A classic example is air travel. Despite being statistically far safer than driving, many more people are afraid of flying and it is air plane crashes that make the nightly news.

Of course the safety of air travel is what makes a rare calamity headline-worthy. Just another car crash caused by a sleepy, drunk, or texting driver will be lucky to make the local papers.

But there’s also something else going on.

Drivers – and perhaps even passengers – seem to accept their agency in a highway accident in a way that many airplane travellers do not. We feel helpless at 35,000 feet, but we suspend our disbelief. We’re equally helpless at 80mph on the motorway should a lorry jack-knife in front of us, but a few seconds before we felt like we were the kings of the road.

The difficulty in making an all-terrain level 5 autonomous car that’s fit for purpose has curbed the enthusiasm of those of who thought (/hoped!) we were on the edge of a self-driving revolution.

But the squishy calculus that we apply to fatal accidents could hold back a rollout even if sufficiently viable technology comes along.

Do Androids dream of L-plates?

What’s sufficient?

In the US, the National Highway Traffic Administration estimated that 36,750 people were killed in US traffic crashes in 2018.

If the entire fleet had switched over to autonomous vehicles on January 1 2019 and the number of deaths had subsequently dropped by one to 36,749 would it be celebrated as a success?

Unlikely – although the one extra person who lived to read that statistic at the end of the year might disagree.

Even leaving aside the many complicating factors absent from this illustration (noise in the statistical data, unintended effects such as greater alcoholism as everyone could now drink and ‘drive’, an increase in drug use or suicide among newly-unemployed truck drivers) we intuitively know the US public isn’t going to accept 36,749 robot-mediated driving deaths a year.

I don’t think the American public would accept 749 annual fatalities from buggy robot driving.

Perhaps not even 49.

Obviously this makes no logical sense, but there it is.

These questions will only amplify as AI migrates further off the desktop and the cloud and visibly into our daily lives.

  • Would you be happy if a robot lifeguard saved three elderly swimmers in difficulty over your six-year old child?
  • Would you chalk it up to statistically predictable bad luck if an AI screen for breast cancer gave you a false negative, even if you’d stood a lower chance of such an erroneous result than had a friendly-faced radiologist seen the same slide?
  • Should a robot driver head towards a fatal collision with an oncoming out-of-control vehicle, killing several, or instead swerve to crush a baby in a pram?

That last example is regularly trotted out in the insurance industry, where such issues aren’t just interesting after-dinner talking points.

Someone will have to be responsible if someone is going to pay.

But for most of us, the questions are mushier. We recoil at their asking, but the machines need to know what to do.

One option is to avoid AI, even if doing so leads to worse outcomes and perhaps tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

Another is to live in a world where we come to accept the odd random destruction or death from poor or faulty or simply inexplicable AI decisions in the same way ancient people sighed and chalked up heart attacks or plagues as evidence of the whims of capricious gods.

That sounds defeatist. But it’s arguably better than 36,750 Americans dying every year at the hands of human drivers because nobody wants to be killed by a bug.

Categories
Technology

Instagram: On the node

A candid photo exposes the reality behind so many aspirational Instagram photographs set in impossibly beautiful locations:

Norway’s Trolltunga: The Instagram myth
Trolltunga: The reality

CNBC notes:

A decade ago, fewer than 800 people a year traveled to Trolltunga. Next year, that figure’s expected to hit 100,000.

People queue with dozens of others, babbling and checking their phones, to be photographed standing at Trolltunga in meditation.

What’s going on?

The 1990’s interpretation: Cheap air travel and a generation that puts more of a premium on experiences than stuff are seeking out the world’s greatest places.

The 2000’s interpretation: The explosion of information on the Internet and the ubiquity of smartphones has made people more aware of where they can visit and what sort of experiences they should pursue.

The 2019 reality: Instagram has made every place a de facto node on a real-world physical network. Social media influencers and network effects drive superlinear traffic to the most popular nodes, which only increases their subsequent popularity.

Instagram will eat the world

Twenty years ago, the National Geographic could publish a photo of Trolltunga to the fleeting interest of a magazine browser. One or two might add Norway to their holiday lists.

Today’s aspirational Instagram user identifies Trolltunga as a resource. In consuming that resource – by visiting, photographing, and posting – they make a honey trap that attracts 100 more.

Hence the most popular spots are noded and overrun, and this kind of mathematics implies they’ll be impossible within an iteration or two.

Solutions?

  • Restricted access to the most popular nodes (quotas, dollars)
  • A counter-cultural trend towards more obscure nodes (at best a delaying tactic)
  • Simulcra nodes. A fake Grand Canyon. A 3D printed Taj Mahal. Machu Picchu remade for middle-class China to visit by train.
  • The Instagram craze dies down (unlikely)
  • Eventually we all live in the matrix, anyway

Many of these solutions sound phoney.

Are they phonier than the myth of Trolltunga today?