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At 5am this morning, 90 years ago, the armistice that ended WWI was signed. This will be the last major anniversary commemorated by veterans, since there are only 10 surviving and the youngest is 107. Ironically, I owe my life to the conflict itself, because my great-grandfather’s brother was killed, and his fiance ended up marrying my great-grandfather.

Although the truce was agreed in the early morning, it did not come into effect, officially, until 11am. This technicality resulted in a horrifying fact. In the 6 hours between 5 and 11, three times as many people were killed as America has lost during the entire Iraq War or 911. More people were killed than in the D-Day landing, and more Americans were killed than any other nation. This was because most generals decided to stop fighting, but America’s commander, Pershing, specifically ordered attacks right up until the last minute.

In Pershing’s defense, he believed that the enemy needed to be forced into unconditional surrender, or there would be another war, and that every last second should be used to smash them to a pulp. The consensus view, however, points to the opposite, that it wasn’t the softness of the allies that eventually caused the Second World War, but the harshness of war reparations, German economic collapse and subsequent climate of political unrest and extremism. After seeing millions of people being slaughtered, you would have thought that Pershing might have had enough. If I’m wrong, Pershing’s posthumous reputation has been imperceptibly dented by an obscure blogger. If I’m right, Pershing is responsible for thousands of people’s deaths due to his arrogance, incompetence and blood lust.

Despite these losses on the last day of WWI, America has never had its equivalent of the battle of the Somme (although the Civil War comes close), the resulting patriotic capitulation and distaste for: war; national debt and people like Pershing. And people still take pictures of families sitting on bombs, smiling.

Om took me to see Al Gore in San Francisco.

I bought a house in London in 94 for 30% of what the previous owners had paid for it (people who thought house prices only ever went up). I sold it in 2001 for 600% of what I paid. Seven years later, after selling a company for $30M, I could not afford to buy it back from my share of the proceeds. In theory, I would have made more money had I stayed at home for the last seven years watching television.

In short, if you bought into the British dream then you implicitly believed that it was a better idea, financially, to buy a house, become a crack addict and do nothing for more than half a decade. If you believe this, as the statistics imply, then crack is what you are smoking.

So here is my Crack-o-meter guide to lingering UK house price delusion:

This ridiculous orgy of money-for-nothing greed spawned a dozen of TV shows which replaced architecture for window dressing in order to make a quick buck. This should have been the early warning sign. 50% of British TV (even here on BBC America) seemed to be one giant infomercial for the economic potential of your own living room, if you bought an IKEA lamp and painted it orange.
Conclusion: early experimentation with crack

After house prices started to level, plot lines were running a bit thin on ‘half hearted house makeover: paint your front door and make half a million quid’. The leather panted ponce who presented one show I watched took a new tack – falling house prices were a good thing, you could make money because the rungs on the housing ladder would get closer together and you could move up more easily. Unbelievable.
Conclusion: social crack smoker, says he/she can give up.

As house prices started to drop the mantra was that ‘house prices never really drop, they just stagnate’. However, a graph of UK and US house prices compared to Japan showed that this was patently false. See here.
Conclusion: habitual crack smoker.

Since I posted the graph comparing UK/US in August 07, the US has experienced dramatic falls in house prices. The median house price in Detroit has dropped 57% in one year to less than $10,000 (this is not a misprint). This is less than the price of a breeze block garage in a deprived area of England. But the sub prime market in the US was believed to be an isolated problem that would not affect the UK.
Conclusion: mental impairment from crack smoking.

The catalyst that created the UK house price boom in both the 80s and now, financial industry bonuses, has vaporized. The subsequent layoffs and contagion of the broader economy have only just begun, while 97.3% of UK houses have already declined in value by an aggregate 13%, before the crash.

And yet: 32% of UK home owners believe their house is not worth less and 38% believe it will not be worth less in future and 30% believe their house price is about to go up. Irrational denial is revealed by the fact that statistically, people think their own house will hold value but not the next door neighbors’. But the irrational denial does not stop there, real estate companies predict another 15% maximum price drop (and this is the gloomy prognosis), starting to correct next year. I we look at Japan things could be a lot worse.
Conclusion: crack dealers.

He is my prediction. In two years time, I will be able to buy a house in England, and I will pay less than 50% of what it was valued at the peak. The aggregate will not decline by as much, but the decline will nevertheless be catastrophic. At that rate I will still be getting a worse deal than my last house, so this is hardly without precedent. Am I smoking crack? We’ll see.

“Russian excess is feeding discontent among poorer people. Pierrette, a housekeeper for one Russian, said: ‘I attended a party where the guests had fun throwing burning €500 notes into the air while everyone split their sides laughing. The domestic staff were later told to collect the ashes. It was sickening.'”
Link

In case anyone else has had this problem, that was driving me nuts: seems that Macbook Airs have a serious overheating issue that causes the CPU to max out and disable.

The problem happens with CPU intensive applications like Video or Flash. In other words, ordinary web browsing can be difficult. Not all MacBook Airs seem to have the flaw, but a large number do (it may be to do with excessive thermal grease being factory applied to some, which messes up the airflow).

The solution is to throttle the maximum temperature at which your Air will run at 1600 MHz and to run the chip at a lower voltage (which reduces stability). This requires a $10 app called coolbook: downloadable here and using settings here.

Perhaps this causes warranty problems, and you may be asking yourself 1. why can’t Apple sort this out and 2. why do I have to do something like this anyhow, isn’t this a major design problem.

As regards 1, it looks like Apple don’t have a solution yet, so you will just end up wasting hours and hours dealing with them.

2. The Air is clearly a new and innovative machine. First generation, innovative design has a much higher chance of problems. This is why the Hubble runs a 386 Chip. When I was an architect, I worked for what is arguably the worlds most famous practice and at that time almost every building they had designed resulted in a law suit because the roof leaked. You would think that being able to design a building with a non-leaking roof would be a minimum level of competence required of an architect, but that misses the point. The architect was fully capable of designing an ordinary building with a non-leaky roof, but a truly innovative building increased the chances of problems.

Apple is capable of designing a computer that doesn’t overheat, but a laptop that fits in an envelope has increased the chance of problems. Of course, its a bit galling to be throttling your MacBook Air at a time when overclocking a MacBook Pro is making headlines.

No idea of the source of this. Perhaps its some kind of Apple ad making fun of the PC guy, more likely a Stephen Colbert spoof Someone from an ad agency or production company was on the phone, in our lobby, talking about an Air ad and it sounded pretty amusing:

“…so we were going to run the ad, Stephen wanted us to run the ad where he takes a MacBook air out of a manila envelope, writes an email on it, puts it back in the envelope and mails the Air to the email recipient – because thats how he thinks email works on the Air.”