Hope you all had a nice Christmas/festive period and got some good reading and exercise in to set-off (close-out net?) all the mince pies.
Just a quick note to update you on the goings-on on the two wikis.
Engineering work
The JC has been busy doing some mainly invisible engineering under the hood with the idea of making the “user manual” coverage of the main agreements a bit more seamless and slightly less flighty. You should start to notice it on the ISDA Master Agreement user manuals: our American friends might be pleased to know the 1992 in particular has a lot more on fulsome than it used to — largely by way of comparative study against the 2002 edition, but it all should help.
Also, I have figured out how to do multilevel numbering on a website! All I need is some content now!
My goal for this year is to do a series of deeper newsletters about various aspects of the ISDA master agreement — not just the text and commercial points, but the history, underlying theory, and some of the myths and legends behind ISDA, some of which I concede the JC has made up out of whole cloth.
While this is (dammit!) interesting enough just as an exercise in mass psychology and collective delusion, non-legal eagles might find these letters a bit tedious. Still, the idea is to make them at least passably digestible to laypeople — those of you with hypertension, having trouble sleeping, or who just need quickly to calm down for some reason, may find them helpful.
(That reminds me: I once pitched the idea of doing a “boring talk” for the BBC podcast series about the history of the ISDA Master Agreement. They turned it down because — I kid you not — it was too dull! Even with the bits I made up! My other idea, about musical foghorns, they quite liked!)
Reading recommendations
A propos nothing really, over Christmas I read Allen Farrington’s Bitcoin is Venice and Iain McGilchrist’s multi-potentialite The Master And His Emissary.
McGilchrist’s book is stunning. Hard, really, to put into words (it took him over 600 pages of them, and he’s just written a two-volume follow-up that is 1,500 so, you know): it is a colossal essay that starts with the traditional misapprehension about how the two hemispheres of the brain interact with each other and goes from there, taking in linguistics, literary criticism, art theory, modernism, scientific realism and by the end has canvassed pretty much the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
I don’t quite get there with Farrington’s conclusion (that “Bitcoin fixes everything”) — and he spends no time at all dwelling on all the things for which Bitcoin has been a disaster — but it is still a terrific journey with quite the civilisational sweep, taking in JC favourites like Jane Jacobs, James C Scott, Ole Peters and Gerd Gigerenzer, who have nothing to do with cryptocurrency. A contrarian read that it is well worth your time.
Both are monster books — fantastic in different ways, but both end up being wide-ranging deconstructions of the high-modernist techno-dystopia we seem to be galloping towards.
Seems to me that figuring out how to steer away from the apparent inevitability of techno-dystopia is something we should all be spending more time thinking about, books like these are a great start. Both, in any case, are well recommended.
Staying off the beaten track
Remember, it is ski-season, so a timely reminder to: stay off piste.
The JC loves skiing. Say what you like about his privileged, stale, pale, male, out-of-touch ass. He has mixed feelings about the “off-piste” metaphor.
Real off piste
Literally, it means to ski away from commercial ski-fields — typically, miles away from them and their lifts, cafés and so on — ski-touring, with skins, avalanche gear, a rucksack and a day’s worth of food, spending more time walking up than skiing down. This is fabulous, of course, but it’s quite a mission, and it has its dangers. The JC knows good men who went out ski-touring and never came back.
On-piste off-piste
More narrowly, being “off-piste” means skiing on commercial ski-fields, using normal lifts, but just keeping off the groomed runs, skiing in between them.
For dilettantes and lazybones like the JC, it is a lot less dangerous and a whole lot less of a hassle than back-country ski-touring, and it is so much better than skiing on the pistes. For every acre of lovingly-gardened snow for les gens to swish down on their way to that midmorning genepis, there are at least three are au naturale. Sure, they’ll feature trees, ditches, rocks, skanky, crusty snow but, on a good day, plenty of unspoiled powder.
To be sure, you have to have your wits about you. You have to have a decent game. You have to work it. You need enough technique to deal with powder, crud, moguls, avoid trees and whatnot. Ninety percent of skiers don’t have this, so guess what: they stick to the pistes.
So, some maths: if only a quarter of the skiable area is pisted then three times as much is not. If 90% of skiers are on piste at any one time — I dunno, but I reckon both these are conservative — then by my feeble calculation, there are twenty-seven times as many skiers per hundred square yards on the piste as there are off it.
That is reason enough to learn to ski crud. Plus, pistes tend to be icy in the mornings and get rucked up, mogulled, sludgy and icy when everyone has been drilling them all day.
So, pistes: not particularly challenging, until you hit flat ice or some useless lump hits you, whereupon they become hideous. There are a ton of people taking the best lines — and usually not taking them, but traversing shittily across them, meaning you can’t take them. Bogus.
The moral of the story
Life, work and business is a bit like skiing.
Sticking to the piste is like chasing the same margin, job opportunities and business everyone else is chasing. It’s like, dude, look to the side. There’s plenty of good stuff there, if you only engage with it, and you’ll get a lot more out of it if you do.
Olly