Shuffle up, wheel and deal

[peterbirks]

Presumably as intended by Mr Blair, other matters conspired to push the cabinet reshuffle out of the Birks headlines. Those of us with any sense of history will recall Macmillan's famous "night of the long knives", when he sacked a third of his cabinet and promptly went on to stop being prime minister within a couple of years. His successor was a disaster and the result was the Labour Party being in power for 12 of the following 15 years.

Interesting things about the reshuffle:

1) "The first woman foreign secretary" might have made headlines in the past, but with the increasingly presidential style of government, the role of foreign secretary isn't so important any more. We already have a foreign secretary; it's Tony Blair. However, one can imagine Condoleeza Rice being less than enamoured. "You mean I spent all that time in Black Bourne with a guy and now he's not even foreign secretary any more? What kind of a country are they running over there?" Indeed.

2) Charles Clarke gave away his entire agenda at the end. "I have been loyal to you ..." he wrote to Blair, presumably with the unsaid but pointed accompaniment "but you haven't to me". What this reveals about Clarke is his belief that loyalty is all. In fact, there is the occasional requirement of competence. A major problem in mature companies and in politics is that loyalty is rewarded rather than ability. Clarke is so useless that he can't even see that sometimes something more is needed than saying the right thing to the boss. Being able to do your job comes in useful as well.

3) The appointment of John Reid as Home Secretary is a warning shot to Brown. Once again, drawing parallels with the Macmillan regime, where Brown can be seen as our Rab Butler figure, it would appear that Blair will do anything to stop Brown succeeding him, for reasons that will have to remain locked inside Blair's psyche. Macmillan did the same to his old colleague Butler. It looks as if Reid is being groomed to be ready to stand against Brown when Blair decides to step down. If we push the Macmillan comparison a bit further, what chances do you reckon that Blair's resignation, when it comes, will be attributed to "ill health" (although Macmillan tottered on well into his 90s)?


+++++

I've been attempting to follow Bluff's strategy of reading a bit of a poker book every day, just to keep ideas flowing. I had a quick reread of some of Malmuth's work on bankroll requirements and I noticed that he was talking about a win rate of $30 an hour at a $30-$60 stud game, with, get this, a standard deviation of $910 an hour. Well, I nearly went white, I can tell you.

I'm not sure if this could be called a sign of success or, well, of what, but this year I am knocking up $10 an hour average with a standard deviation of $60 an hour. I really don't think that I could cope with an SD approaching a thousand dollars an hour (well, not for an average win rate of $30 I couldn't).

I suppose that this is an indicator of the fact that, while I have succeeded in pushing up my hourly rate, I have ben more successful in pushing down my volatility (in relative terms). In practice this means that my bankroll requirement is (theoretically) very low (no more than $400 for each site on which I play, actually). In practice, I keep more than that in the sites so that I an (eventually), move up to a higher limit and accept the strains that this entails.

I think that part of the problem in moving up in limits is not just that your win rate can either go nowhere, or actually fall (in the short term, until you get used to the level), but also that your volatility shoots up more than proportionally. So, at $5-$10, I might find myself averaging $8 an hour with a volatility of $200 an hour. And it's the combination of these two factors that pushes you out of your comfort zone, rather than the pure monetary value. If I increase my stake in a forex bet, my volatility in relative terms does not increase at all. It remains my stake/expected return times x. If I step up in levels at poker, my volatility is likely to increase by more than both. It becomes my stake times x times 1.2 (or whatever) and my profit times x times 1.5 (or whatever).


+++++++++

I see that the Gutshot 5,000 euro tournament attracted the grand total of 23 entries. OK, maybe it was a step too far, but this gives us a lot of information. The main part of it is that, for all the talk of people wandering around with wodges of cash in their pocket from poker, the number of players who are willing to pony up for a large buy-in tournament in the UK is relatively small. There are a large number of £500 tourney players, but a very small number of £3,000 tourney players.

This in turn perhaps gives an indication of how much money is actually being made by a lot of the "faces". There are quite a few online players out there for whom a £1,000 tourney wouldn't really dent the petty cash. But in the bricks and mortar world it looks to me as if 50% of the entrants to such a tournament would come from £20 or £50 satellites.

It has ever been thus. No matter where you go in the poker-playing world, there will be more people pretending to be making fortunes, and more people looking to nip, than there will be people who are genuinely shovelling the cake into the bank account. If you are playing online and you feel guilty at making "only" $50 a month this year, console yourself with the fact that you are probably doing better than 50% of the names who are mentioned on the various forums week in, week out.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

What seems to have happened in the post-election year has been the arrival of the twins from 1990. The Anyone But Blair vote is rampant amongst Labour and a That Bloody Man feeling amongst everyone. You do start to look for a point when he has to go but whereas Thatcher had to put up with the Tory rules on leaders which encourage contests and putsches, Blair is blessed with less of that sort of thing from Labour rules.

The equation for the Labour party has to be very much based on Major's experience 1990-92. If Brown is in power for too long before the next election then he would start to suffer from events (dear boy) and an inability to do the right thing in foreign policy. If Brown were to be in power 2006-09 it might well be too long. Politically he'd be best off by Blair hanging on for at least another year or so. If he goes to an election early, he'd be seen as cutting and running.

What grates on me is that since reaching 18 I've had Wilson into Callaghan (poor), then Thatcher (appalling) and Blair (uplifting for a few months and then terrible). Am I going to be a pensioner before I get a decent PM?

Sorry - that was me

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

with the rhetorical question

Waiting for the Leader

[(Anonymous)]

You can avoid disappointment by expecting nothing of politicians.

I'm waiting for the day when people finally realize they can get along better without politicians. I have faith that the day will come, though I don't expect I'll live to see it either.

If you're waiting for a Great Leader, your wait could be even longer than mine.

-- Jonathan

and waiting...

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

I know if I were waiting for a Great Leader, I'd be waiting a long time, but there are regular bursts of OK leadership, looking back. I actually admire Wilson who was honestly devious, Macmillan had his moments and Attlee was admirable. Churchill would have been dreadful at any other moment in British history apart from 1940.

I see above I overlooked Major completely but that's understandable, even is he is the best out of the 4 who I've had in my adult life.

And it would be lovely to think that we'll all achieve some politician-free zone in the future but for that I think you'll need to acquire the immortality you were craving the other day Jonathan.

Re: and waiting...

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

The problem with the line that "people can get along better without politicians" is that, if this were the case, politics would not have developed, since the socieites without politicians would have prospered and those with politicians would have shrivelled and died.

Perhaps reasonable people could get along better without politicians, or people all of whom had a similar (nay, identical) outlook on life.

I expect nothing of politicians. I studied politics because I find politicians interesting. That doesn't mean I have to like or admire them.

PJ

Re: and waiting...

[(Anonymous)]

The only thing governments have proved effective at over the centuries is organizing armies. The first political leaders were surely warlords.

These days, the only thing we really need governments for is to protect us from other governments. Politics is a protection racket.

Medieval Iceland got along for several centuries without a government. It had well-functioning laws and courts, but it didn't need an army because no-one fancied invading the place; so it didn't need a government. Until eventually it was taken over by Norway.

In order to get rid of politicians, what we need above all is a way for a country to defend itself against hostile foreign governments without having a government itself. I think no-one has solved that problem so far; but the one thing we know about the future is that it will be surprising.

It's somewhat interesting that governments seem to have more difficulty these days in taking over foreign countries -- even when there's no government-organized opposition. Perhaps simply because they're not as ruthless as they used to be?

-- Jonathan

Laws and courts

[(Anonymous)]

It's been around for a long time, but here for reference is David Friedman's chapter on law without government. What the Icelanders could do centuries ago, we could do too, and better.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freedom/MofF_Chapter_29.html

-- Jonathan

Re: Laws and courts

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

This is all very well, Jonathan, but a country without government is not a country without politicians. Government is optional. Politics is not.

Your statement was "I'm waiting for the day when people finally realize they can get along better without politicians", not >"I'm waiting for the day when people finally realize they can get along better without government". You will note that in my response I made no mention of government, so you are refuting an argument which I did not make.

Now, you can eliminate "paid" politicians, and you can eliminate the formal structures in which politics takes place. In this sense, government consists of the formalized rules of politics. Not having a government is a form of a political system, but it remains a political system, one where the actions undertaken by governments in most countries are undertaken either by other formal institutions (such as the courts, a gathering of elders, whatever) or by informal groupings.

A more recent example of a country without government than medieval Iceland (although somewhat less romantic and Tolkienesque) is Afghanistan, where the "government" imposed by the Soviet Union in the early 1980s ruled nowhere but in Kabul. The rest of the country was in the hands of no government, but that did not mean that there were no politics. Indeed the warlords and Taliban were as political as the rest of us and manipulated the USA quite shrewdly.

PJ

Re: Politics

[(Anonymous)]

True, I wrote rather hastily and imprecisely. The context was a discussion of politicians, so I sometimes wrote 'politicians' or 'politics' where I would normally write 'government'.

However, when I consult my dictionaries, I find that 'politics' is strongly linked to government. In the OED, for instance, the primary meaning of the word is "The science and art of government; the science dealing with the form, organization, and administration of a state or part of one, and with the regulation of its relations with other states".

Much further down the page, I find it can be used figuratively to mean "Conduct of private affairs; politic management, scheming, planning". But I don't think this is what you had in mind.

'Politician' is defined in a related way: "One versed in the theory or science of government and the art of governing; one skilled in politics; one practically engaged in conducting the business of the state; a statesman."

By this definition, an Afghan warlord would seem to be a politician only if you consider his followers to comprise a nation; or if you reckon he has the skill to govern a nation even though he's not doing so.

I think your personal definitions of these words must be somewhat different from the OED's.

-- Jonathan

Re: Politics

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I would hope that my personal definition of politics would be different from a dictionary definition. Wikipedia is quite good on this (in that it's all I really have time to head for at the moment).

"Politics is a process by which decisions are made within groups. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within governments, politics is observed in all human (and many non-human) group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. Political science (also political studies) is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power.

I think that I would run with that. Wikipedia then goes on to refer to dictionary definitions, textbook definitions and the definitions provided by theorists and practioners. Since I studied "Politics and Government" I guess you are right, my interpretation might go beyond that found in the OED. As I said, Government implies politics, but politics does not imply government. In this sense the OED, which is, as you know, intended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, is simply saying that most people tend to use the words politics and government interchangeably. That does not make that use linguistically correct.

The word politics comes from the Greek word "polis", meaning the state or community as a whole. Thus we have games called "Office Politics" (John Harrington, creator). People well-versed in getting on in organisations are called "good politicians" and someone who knows what to say and when in bureaucracies is called "a political animal". None of these definitions relates to government.

I am very careful to differentiate between the two words because they mean different things. What the OED refers to is not "the primary meaning of the word", but "the primary use of the word". This is also an important distinction to make, although some empiricists would argue that one effectively implies the other. However, by this line of reasoning, "Windows" no longer means a collection of things that you look through, but means instead a computer operating system. I don't follow that line.

I mean, the fact that you confused the two words led you to think that I was defending the inevitability of government, when I was not. There was nothing wrong with your libertarian line that the world could function quite well without government, but it didn't follow from that that the world could function without politicians. I hesitate to question the intelligence of OED lexicographers, but I suspect that in this case they are making the mistake of taking what normally happens in the world (that politics and government are strongly correlated, which they are) with a theoretical inevitability in both directions (that government implies politics, which it does, and that politics implies government, which it does not).

PJ

When I use a word...

[(Anonymous)]

Hm. I didn't mean to criticize your use of words. However, if I use words in the sense given by the dictionary, I think that's a valid defence of my own writing. Not only the OED but also Chambers and the American Heritage Dictionary give very similar definitions, although the American Heritage definition is a bit broader: "The art or science of government or governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation..."

I can understand that one sometimes disagrees with a dictionary definition. For instance, if I look up 'anarchy' in Chambers, the first thing it says is "a complete absence of law or government". Wrong! It's a complete absence of government -- not necessarily any absence of law.

Admittedly, Chambers goes on to add as an alternative "a harmonious condition of society in which government is abolished as unnecessary".

The trouble with disagreeing with dictionary definitions is that you'll find yourself misunderstood whenever you use the word in question, and you'll have to keep explaining what you mean by it. I often avoid using the word 'anarchy' these days because it's so widely misunderstood.

Interesting that Wikipedia gives such a wide definition of 'politics'. I agree with you that its definition has a certain coherence. I guess this is a modern sense of the word that dictionary writers haven't caught up with. It would be interesting to see what the online OED has to say about it, but I don't think I can justify the annual subscription. My OED is the 2nd edition on CD, which I bought more than ten years ago, though I upgraded the software relatively recently.

It's normally not difficult to distinguish between windows (small w) that you look through, and Windows (big W) the operating system from Microsoft.

According to the OED, 'politics' comes only indirectly from the Greek polis, more directly from the Greek politis (citizen) and politicos (pertaining to citizens). The OED gives these words in Greek letters so I've transcribed roughly.

-- Jonathan

[pb9617.livejournal.com]

I've been attempting to follow Bluff's strategy of reading a bit of a poker book every day, just to keep ideas flowing.

Books on CD make this so much easier!