What if the entire political response to the Great Financial Crisis could be summed up as “Punch the incumbent”? Americans threw out George Bush. Obviously this was overdetermined, but still, they did it in the winter of 2008. If you look around the democratic world, what seems to make the most difference is timing –…
Read More Throwing out the bumsEven more trivial than the last one! Some mobiles I loved. Samsung ??? This was the first of them all in 2000-2001. A weird reverse-clamshell design that very rapidly developed dodgy contacts in the joint. But eh, I had a real, lasting relationship and I could send her texts from the union! Siemens c55i Neat…
Read More my love affair with GSM hardwareSo there was this thread with music. It went like this, and then like this, and this, then this, this, this, and finally this. Also a fair amount of stuff about shwi-vet Erik Lund and the most popular man in Britain. But mostly music. Meanwhile, someone defined a last.fm tag for “oh yeah this is…
Read More it wasn’t Thursday, and still isn’t, so…Having fixed the Viktorfeed, I notice with some pleasure that the activity levels continue to decline. It looks like the last gang in town is “Reliable Unique Services”, ICAO:RLB, an alias for Rus Aviation, operating five Il-76, a couple of which served with various version of Click Airways.
Read More …like it’s 2008!A good post on the notion of “hard Keynesianism” raises some important questions about the recent past of the Labour Party. Hard Keynesianism is the doctrine that, if the government should run a deficit when there’s a negative output-gap and therefore unemployment, it should run a surplus when there’s a positive output-gap and therefore inflation.…
Read More Sometimes history is written by the losersA couple of News of the World things. Just before the Met dropped their effort to bully the Grauniad with the Official Secrets Act, they ran this story about the disastrous attempt to use a supergrass in the Daniel Morgan case. Is this a coincidence? And this quote reads like a Ballardised version of Le…
Read More is there a Corby trouser press, miniature kettle, and teabags in Room 101?Did anyone else read this and this and get the horrible feeling that Maurice Glasman is over-promoted, and likely to crash in some really embarrassing way, even more than he has done already? It reminds me a bit of Tony Blair at his elevenarife worst or one of those people who are caught pretending to…
Read More he’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boyIt seems that the Islington Gazette‘s usually very funny problem page isn’t coming back from their recent re-design. Perhaps I should write and tell them I have a problem.
Read More is this normal?So, I had a drink with the most popular man in England on Thursday. Something which came up in the conversation was that apparently, some UK and European central institutions’ press offices are handing out “tokens” to lobbyists. Tokens? This meant nothing to me, but apparently what was meant is that they are counting meetings…
Read More a restraining influence on the rate of retrogressionThis is wrong, not just for the methodological reasons given. The problem is more serious. What’s so great about optimal decisions after all? Absolute optimality has costs. Specifically, even if consultation doesn’t help you achieve an optimal decision, it may help avoid a decision that is dramatically pessimal for some particular person or group of…
Read More the worst thing that can happen is actually pretty bad