I’ve just been reading the Resolution Foundation Growth without Gain report like every other left-wing blogger. Here’s something interesting. About economics and the success or failure of New Labour’s administrative devolution. Don’t all rush at once. You read that right – between 2003 and 2008, disposable income in the UK fell on average by 1.1%…
Read More got DULL if you want itVia yet another really excellent Arms Control Wonk piece on Indian and Pakistani nukes, it turns out that A.Q. Khan, formerly of Khan Research Laboratories, the man who sold the world the unofficial open-source community version of the Urenco enrichment cascade, and now of luxurious house arrest right up until the Navy SEALs climb over…
Read More Dr A.Q. Khan: Has a BlogI went with the ThinkPad option in the end – the wily denizens of the computer souk managed to upsell me from the ThinkPad Edge 11 to a fully fledged X200S that looks like you have to wear a tie to start it up. Next step, clear up my data enough to look at moving…
Read More consumerSo we did the Stag & Dagger festival. This translated into the following facts on the ground, which I propose to review briefly. Toro y Moi, at XOYO This lot could be interesting – if they stopped, ugh, jamming. EDIT. Ended up back in the bar with the house’s DJ. Venue is pretty great, too…
Read More your guide for this evening…I need to be more damn effective and better organised. If it helps at all, I just bought the O’Reilly books on Android development and on JavaScript, as it’s getting increasingly ridiculous to not know it.
Read More Another OpenTech resultSo it was OpenTech weekend. I wasn’t presenting anything (although I’m kicking myself for not having done a talk on Tropo and Phono) but of course I was there. This year’s was, I think, a bit better than last year’s – the schedule filled up late on, and there were a couple of really good…
Read More OpenTech washup, and an amended resultThe National Rail website has borrowed the sensible URIs from traintimes.org.uk. Although it does seem a bit of a miss that there’s no shortener like – say – tra.in, as those are by definition quite long strings. The website that identifies the satellite a dish is pointing at, or tells you where to point the…
Read More LinksSo that Michael Lewis – you know, the one who writes articles about how stupid Icelanders were. Via The Oil and the Glory, here’s what he was saying in January, 2007, just as the last bulls in the US housing market’s dizziest bubbles finally cracked and the big plummet began. Here it is. But the…
Read More Don’t read Michael Lewis articles, do check if he’s still writingThis is incredibly great, and will instantly catapult you into the top 3% of the information distribution on top-level Chinese politics. One for the RSS queue, even if his views on economics are very much what you might expect.
Read More no matter who the government votes for…the people still get in(Alt. title: Look, it’s like a society but smaller!) OK, so you may remember the case of Startupbritain.org, a well-publicised eye-catching initiative that turned out to be little better than spam paid for with a government grant to some whose-kid-are-you types. It seems that the whole pointless wankabout was kicked off when one of the…
Read More Acid Helvetica titles do not make you a decent person