2012

by 1 comment on "How to control the newspapers (aka. Explicit is better than implicit)"

Ho hum, a spun day at the Guardian with this piece covering a double page spread on 8-9. Amelia Hill interviews a panel of prominent feminists about the Prime Minister’s new “women’s advisor”. You may have already guessed that they aren’t particularly impressed (an accurate headline might have been Thinking Individuals Find Sop Unsatisfying, Faintly…

Read More How to control the newspapers (aka. Explicit is better than implicit)
by 0 comments on "we know where your dog goes to school"

A while ago I noticed that a detailed story in Le Monde about their telecoms-interception-scandal-of-the-week had bizarrely vanished from their archives. It is baaack and I can share it with you! So if you read French and want to know what happens, in operational detail, when a prosecutor orders an illegal trawl of call-detail records…

Read More we know where your dog goes to school
by 0 comments on "Churchill was wrong for most of his career, you know…"

This Ha’aretz piece is interesting for the insight it gives into Israeli policy and especially into process, but also for a couple of other things. Notably, it’s remarkably frank about the Obama administration deliberately trying to stop Netanyahu going to war, and the role of dodgy casino guy Sheldon Adelson in both US and Israeli…

Read More Churchill was wrong for most of his career, you know…
by 0 comments on "This is not a mafia business. This relies on credit!"

Via Jamie Kenny, a must-read translation of a Chinese investigative report into the case of Wu Ying, a Chinese businesswoman who is in deep trouble with the law. What’s interesting here is that the report provides a deep view into some of the most important interfaces in the political economy of China – between the…

Read More This is not a mafia business. This relies on credit!
by 3 comments on "Politics of call centres, part three (really part three this time)"

So we’ve looked at how they’re dreadful and why. The stakes are important; a huge chunk of the economy is made up of services, and some of the places where they are located are becoming almost as much one-industry towns as they were before their one industry shut down. What if this sector was as…

Read More Politics of call centres, part three (really part three this time)
by 0 comments on "The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure"

So, why did we get here? Back in the mists of time, in the US Bell System, there used to be something called a Business Office, by contrast to a Central Office (i.e. what we call a BT Local Exchange in the UK), whose features and functions were set down in numerous Bell System Practice…

Read More The politics of call centres, part two: sources of failure
by 8 comments on "The politics of call centres, part one"

What is it that makes call centres so uniquely awful as social institutions? This is something I’ve often touched on at Telco 2.0, and also something that’s been unusually salient in my life recently – I moved house, and therefore had to interact with getting on for a dozen of the things, several repeatedly. (Vodafone…

Read More The politics of call centres, part one