Racist Microsoft?

msoftPolishThe BBC has a story running about a Microsoft ad on their Polish web-site which has been Photoshopped to change one aspect of the original from the US site. Apart from the translation of the words to Polish, of the three people in the original photo (Asian man, black man, white woman – very PC – and no, I don’t mean personal computer) the black man has now become white – a different head has been used.

As an aside, the article points out that the Photoshopping has not even been done very well – the original man’s hands remain. But that’s just an amusing side issue. The much more interesting aspect is the apparent reaction to it. We have this:

Microsoft said it had pulled the image and would be investigating who made the changes. It apologised for the gaffe.

The “gaffe”. What gaffe would that be then? The gaffe of having done a poor job with Photoshop? Of course not. The gaffe is that a black man was replaced by a white man.

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Spark of madness

sparkOfInventionThis week’s Economist has an article about the possible emergence of a market in house-price hedging derivatives. It’s at Housing Derivatives: Spark of Invention and appalls me. Appalls not least because the writer seems to genuinely believe that it’s a great idea. Still hungover and bleary eyed from the last economic piss-up, we’re already planning the next one.

The article starts off by comparing house fire insurance with the idea of house-price hedging. That’s very unreasonable. The business model behind insurance is not a zero-sum game. The execution of that model by many insurance companies in recent times (AIG to mention just the best known offender) may be ridiculous, but the basic model is sound: based upon actuarial risk, a large group pool resources to pay out to the few when something happens. If the actuaries are good at their job everyone is happy: the many who required no payout, the few who did and the insurance company who retain a profit. Maybe difficult to achieve, but sound in principle.

What is being describe in this article, however, is a different beast altogether.

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