2013 – Page 2 – The Yorkshire Ranter

December 5, 2013 by yorksranter 0 comments

Voting may affect your interests. Think carefully before voting

This exchange, and chart, illuminate the biggest challenge and biggest opportunity for Ed Miliband. . @jamestplunkett But not feed through into consumer confidence on own finances yet. Big challenge. pic.twitter.com/rKOVK2NnyK — Matthew Oakley (@MJ_Oakley) December 5, 2013 So, people expect the UK economy to be doing a bit better. They see an inflection point in…

December 5, 2013 by yorksranter 1 comment

This one weird trick will improve your productivity and deliver social justice

Shorter me: economists should study business more, and in an ideal world, industrial sociology, before they try to do cognitive psychology Peter Dorman at Econospeak takes issue with a Robert Frank piece about workplace safety, which has all the whoopee doo Econ-101 problems you’d expect. I think, though, that there is a really big issue…

November 26, 2013 by yorksranter 4 comments

A blog you should read if you don’t already

Borderland Beat needs no introduction, as a great and indeed heroic blog. This week, it has excelled itself. Here is an interview with an American lawyer, a member of an elite Mexican-American family that straddled the border and the law with minimal concern, who became a defence brief to the cocaine traffickers, and eventually one…

November 26, 2013 by yorksranter 2 comments

awww.

I’m getting referrals from inside OKCupid to this post. I really hope this means two of my readers are falling in love. “Hey! I read Yorkshire Ranter too!”

November 25, 2013 by yorksranter 0 comments

A bit more Ralph Miliband blogging

I did some Ralph Miliband blogging a couple of weeks ago. Here’s some more, from my back-cover notes. The chapter on “The Politics of Survival” is quite possibly more use as a playbook for the opposition than anything else and I even suspect that US and French rightwingers might have done so. Delay everything, get…

November 22, 2013 by yorksranter 0 comments

Links in space

Here’s something cool. According to the Zarya Blog, a Russian Dnepr rocket just orbited no fewer than 32 satellites, including one package that deploys no fewer than nine subsatellites. They’re a huge variety of scientific and engineering experiments. At the same time, a NASA Minotaur rocket was launched from the Wallops Island range, with some…

November 20, 2013 by yorksranter 4 comments

The threat of preference modification

So YPlan. It’s a neat enough proposition. Basically, it’s a way of getting rid of spare tickets, or if it gets big enough, guaranteeing a minimum sale. It buys up what’s left. It asks new users some questions and runs a weighted Bayesian classifier to guess what they might accept and pushes recommendations to them.…

November 17, 2013 by yorksranter 2 comments

Redesigning Britain on a rational basis, again

Here’s a map of the UK creating regions the size of London. Compare the emergent regions in the BT CDR graph.

November 17, 2013 by yorksranter 3 comments

Evicted

This blog has to move, apparently. Bytemark, Beasts, Squid, Linode, or somewhere else? Jesus what an autumn. First e2fsprogs ate my HDD. I still have to go back and hack on that. Then we migrated the work e-mail, with the result thanks to Microsoft that although a load of archive e-mail has the right headers…