That’s the title of an article on the New York Review of Books blog by Tim Parks.

My laconic friend Luigi’s answer was “No”. Parks comes to much the same conclusion, but in support he adds a great deal of insight and historical learning, which I am sure Luigi shares, internally.

I’ve yet to read a dull word by Tim Parks, and when he says that Italy is a country for initiates, I know exactly what he means. Good piece, overall, and I wonder what my Italian friends think of it.

But here’s something very strange. I was going to quote a line from the article, but when I went to copy it from the source article, it had changed. What’s there now, is:

“Every Italian,” Giacomo Leopardi dryly remarked in 1826 “is more or less equally honored and dishonored.”

In the version I downloaded yesterday, it is:

“No Italian,” Giacomo Leopardi drily remarked in 1826 “is ever universally revered or despised.”

What gives? No explanation at the page. Did Tim Parks the translator take issue with Tim Parks the writer? And who changed the popular “dryly” to the less-favoured “drily”? The public demands to know.

Nature recently carried a Comment setting out A market approach to saving the whales. It got a fair bit of traction, which is nice.

The authors, Christopher Costello, Leah R. Gerber and Steven Gaines, admit that their proposal is complex and could be hard to administer. Rendered down, it is simple. Allocate quotas on whales and allow them to be traded. Whalers could choose to kill “their” whales, trade them with other whaling nations, or save them for another season. Non-whalers — conservationist societies, for example, or whale-friendly governments — could buy quota and save those whales forever.

Predictably, Greenpeace finds the idea “abhorrent”. If the whales are saved, what happens to their income stream? And other economists are not impressed either. Science quotes Martin Smith, an environmental economist. “The trading system could have unintended negative consequences. If fewer whales are killed but the demand for whale meat stays the same, he says, then prices will rise — and that could stimulate illegal whaling.” Frankly, that would be the least of my worries.

I’m not impressed for a bunch of other reasons, some of which are purely peevish. The authors admit that the idea is not new. Indeed, it is not, having been put forward by Colin Clark and Roland Lamberson in 1982. Nature’s authors say it failed to take off “because the concept was ahead of its time”. They also give the distinct impression that Clark and Lamberson’s work has remained buried until they unearthed it. That’s almost true. The paper has been pretty well cited in the academic literature, and the quota idea was explored by, er, me in my 1988 book The hunting of the whale.

I confess I couldn’t put numbers on the potential price of a whale, back then, because the moratorium had only just been agreed, and the costs of saving whales weren’t as well known either, so my exploration wasn’t nearly as thorough as that of Costello et al., and of course I don’t expect them to have read my book. What annoys me more about both the proposal and the response to it is that both ignore the one big fundamental truth about whaling, which we’ll get to in a minute.

Objections from anti-whalers have mostly been of the “they’re sentient beings too” variety, which doesn’t seem to acknowledge that these fine sentiments have so far failed to put a permanent end to commercial or subsistence whaling. Others have pointed out that there’s more to whaling than costs or profits; whaling continues because it is subsidised by governments and is directed at that government’s standing among its people and internationally. Having to buy a quota wouldn’t materially affect that.

So what’s the real problem? “Sustainable,” that’s what. Costello et al. refer repeatedly to the idea that for each population there is some “sustainable” number of whales that could be taken. Biologically, of course, they are correct, and it depends on the reproduction rate of the whales, among other things. I used to think that the big problem was agreeing on the correct quota, until Sidney Holt, a great fisheries scientist, set me straight by pointing out that “economics is against it”. How so? Holt referred me originally to Colin Clark’s papers, which in addition to floating the idea of a quota also point out that money multiplies faster than whales. In the real world, the reproduction rate of the whales runs smack into the reproduction rate of money, and money wins.

Oversimplifying, a whaler has to decide whether to milk or mine the stocks; to kill a whale, or leave it in the ocean to breed, for some future year. By not killing it, he is effectively investing in its future reproduction. Because whales reproduce relatively slowly, he actually loses money that way. He makes more profit by killing all the whales he can and investing the proceeds in some other venture, like razing tropical forests. As I wrote at the time:

This is a pretty pessimistic conclusion for anyone with a non-financial interest in whales. It means, in effect, that we cannot expect whaling nations to regulate their activities “rationally,” because in fact the rational approach is to exploit the stock as quickly as possible until it is exhausted. That may be disappointing, but it is true. All the so-called disasters of the history of whaling — the system of Blue whale units, the depletion of the most valuable resources first, the excessive fishing capacity of the early heady days — are in fact entirely rational responses to the motive of maximising profits.

It would have been nice if Costello et al. had explored not only Colin Clark’s idea for a quota-selling World Whaling Authority, but also his explanation of why, in the case of slowly reproducing natural resources, conservation doesn’t pay. My own prediction, for what it is worth, is that it will probably never be worth investing in new whaling ships, and that most commercial whaling, especially far from shore, will stop when the last rust-bucket is beyond repair. I haven’t kept up with the state of the main fleets for some years now, so I don’t know how far gone they are, but I honestly think it is just a matter of time before commercial whaling does indeed grind to a halt. Quotas will only delay that day.

This has been a public service announcement, for all my friends and colleagues looking for funding.

The pressure has been building. At the last count, I was doing stuff online (i.e. sharing content) at 10 different places. And they all seem to require feeding. That’s fine; after all, an online social relationship is no different from one in wetspace. They all need regular grooming. What I find hard to understand, as these various networks have proliferated, is what each of them is for; automatic duplication — so that everything is everywhere — has made that even harder to resolve.

It isn’t as simple as fun versus work, though at one point I did think Facebook would be more for fun and LinkedIn more for work. Truth is, LinkedIn has done absolutely nothing for me. One or two people found me there, because they could, but I’m pretty sure they would have found me somewhere else had they looked. And beyond the initial thrill of “Golly, you’re here, after all these years” there hasn’t been a huge regrowth of the relationship. I don’t actually do anything active on LinkedIn, although I do litter it from elsewhere. Would I lose anything by leaving? No. Well, maybe one or two contacts unique to that space; perhaps a week before I leave I’ll send out a change of address notice and leave it up to them to follow me if they choose. Of course, to do that I need to know where I’m going to end up.

OK, then; Facebook or Google plus? Tricky. Both can be fun, and both are reasonably easy to leave for a while and then come back. Do I need both? Maybe I do, but I also need to be a lot more ruthless and make quicker decisions on what to pursue, and that seems kind of disrespectful to the people who are sharing. Do unto others, and all that. I’ll keep both for now, but only because I really cannot decide which I prefer. Would anyone miss me in either place? Would I miss either of them?

Photos and videos are kind of easy. I like Flickr and Vimeo, and I can’t see going anywhere else just yet. But not everyone knows about them. So I sometimes advertise new stuff on FB. (But not G+; why not?) And I do put occasional photos directly onto FB if they are probably of no wider interest.

The short-form stuff is no problem. I have a Twitter account, but I don’t really use it much. I do find things on Twitter that aren’t elsewhere and it is very easy to skim, so that stays.

Then there are the blogs, three at the last count. Sharing automatically to FB seemed like a good idea at first, because it exposed things to an audience that wasn’t reading directly, sometimes eliciting good and useful comments. Which then stayed where they were, making for at least two separate discussions. Sure, there are ways of bringing FB comments to the blog, and maybe vice versa, but that’s yet another layer of complexity and meaningless duplication for at least some people. Maybe tweeting blogposts is the best way to broadcast their availability. Problem with that is that the half-life of a shared link is of the order of a couple of hours. How valuable a broadcast signal is that, in a 24-hour world? And retweeting every three hours, which some places seem to do, makes me gag.

More recently I’ve been playing with a site that makes content curation easier, and while it offers good content to select and results in a reasonably attractive page, it is very proprietorial about the links I selected and to which I added value, making it harder for me to share them in those other spaces I inhabit. Sure, I found ways round that, but I don’t feel I should have to.

All of which leads to the big questions. Why do I bother? What do I really want?

I bother because I like finding things myself and it pleases me to think someone else might get some pleasure out of the things I find. I could (and do) email single links to a couple of people. But I also regard sharing my finds as a form of potlatch, given that I benefit from the stuff that other people find and share. So I’m going to continue looking, and sharing, somehow.

What I want is a single place where I gather my finds together and where others can see if there’s anything there they like. I also want it to be simpler and less time-consuming than at present. And I think I know where to go with that. It is easy enough to display the contents of an RSS feed on a blog. Where to source the feeds? I already use Pinboard to store the links I find and many of the ones I share. I’m leaning towards building specific Pinboard feeds — there’s already one on the right, to replace one that Google discontinued — and creating my own version of the walled garden, a series of raised beds, each (perhaps) dedicated to a specific kind of stuff.

Either that or an entirely new micro-blog dedicated to stuff from elsewhere.

Indeed, I am a pedant. Wanna make something of it?