A pretty good piece comparing the MMR scare with the Reinhart-Rogoff paper. I think there are a couple of interesting points that don’t make the cut, though. First of all, there’s the power of plot and story, tragedy and comedy. Anyone, after all, can have an Excel fart, and I doubt you’ll find many people…
Read More Attack of the monetarist vaccine clownsVoIP engineer, Linux developer ( Asterisk, 2+ years, Perl, MySQL) ESSEX BASED – Small but growing hosted VoIP provider requiring experienced engineer to join our team. Looking for a team player who is keen to be involved in new ideas. The successful candidate is required to have: -2+ years of VoIP (Asterisk, SER/Kamailio), incl. experience…
Read More From the economy (and asterisk-biz)Amazingly detailed discussion of how to label legal dope, at Mark Kleiman’s. He’s binned the Torah discussion group posts, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. The Social Market Foundation graphs the economic debate or rather the respectable and therefore uninteresting bits of it. You can save your effort by putting your hand over the entire…
Read More InterestingWell, ha ha. Godfrey Bloom, ‘kipper (and subject of a TYR profile back in 2004) is concerned that his party is full of obsessives, weirdos, and people with terrible amateur schemes. Bloom’s rant is worth quoting: My experience thus far is that as soon as more than 2 people get in a room progress completely…
Read More “Buying policy off the shelf”: the last political partyA case of China exporting its internal chaos, as Jamie Kenny would say; I was recently talking to someone who had installed a wireless broadband network in China, and they mentioned that they’d had an exciting experience with a Huawei router. Politicians whose constituents include Huawei’s competitors are endlessly insinuating that their equipment is always…
Read More internal chaos, exportedOK, so who spent a significant part of their evening reading about pigs and pork thanks to a Twitter row about CRESC? Yeah, me. I think that paper is rather good, and you can see the applications to something like this. That said, I wonder how euro-compliant some of it is. I’d really like something…
Read More PigsSo what’s up with this? Tuesday’s Sun front page – “Maggie dead in bed at Ritz” #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers #Thatcher twitter.com/suttonnick/sta… — Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) April 8, 2013 The Sun was always her biggest media pal. This is presumably a broadcast from Murdoch Central – the supposedly retired elder-statesman Trevor “I thought I scooped Hutton fair…
Read More Tab noteOh, do you like maps? Do you like data visualisation? Roll in Richard Edes Harrison’s 1940s work for Fortune. Being me, I especially love The World of ITT – beautiful colour, network visualisation, weird globe projections, and it’s horribly clear why supporting dictators in Madrid and Rio was so important to them. You can’t see…
Read More InterestingMy initial response to today’s Labour policy rollout was as follows: @labour_partisan also, another way of hating the young. — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 7, 2013 Thinking about it, though, this isn’t necessarily so. Presumably the idea is that people build up additional entitlement by paying their class III National Insurance contributions over the years…
Read More Labour market efficiencies from the Roses to the X factorSo, speaking of Clausewitz, here are some reflections from reading him. (If you think the blogs are a bit eclectic today, yes, I’m working through a queue of things I drafted in a notebook..) Zweck vs. Ziel – one of the things everyone sort-of knows about him is “the maintenance of the aim”, but I…
Read More A bit of Clausewitz