It’s not that Google has become the US’s second biggest spender lobbying – the US telcos, a notoriously ferocious lobby, are the biggest and their behaviour imposes it. It’s this: In May 2012, the law school at George Mason University hosted a forum billed as a “vibrant discussion” about Internet search competition. Many of the…
Read More Oh, Google.My old student mate Julian Hofmann, half-German and I don’t know what, has given up on Private Eye and pharma industry trade journalism in favour of raising beef cattle in Devon. The blog is here. I find this a little bit funny. Julian is one of the most comprehensively bookish people I’ve ever met. At…
Read More department of mates’ ratesOK, just to clear the schedule a bit, here’s a general books post. Fly By Wire: The Geese, The Glide, The ‘Miracle’ on the Hudson. Various readers recommended this one; being about aviation and by William Langewiesche it wasn’t a hard sell. The book is (obviously) about the US Airways A320 that ditched successfully in…
Read More Booooks.This post is a response to readers’ input to the open newslist Daniel Davies mocked this guy, as having placed his bets on Camden staying deeply cool and missed out on the migration east. But he has a point. Our startup moved to Shoreditch in 2008, making us a relatively early one although not first-generation.…
Read More Shoreditch twats: not quite as bad as property developersI fucking told you. Eric Pickles has signed up for the deeply dodgy Create Streets agenda, on the basis of a report drawn up by a bunch of estate agents. On which planet isn’t this an outrageous conflict of interest? Also, he wants to get rid of terribad concrete towers through….system building. But Mr Pickles…
Read More DEMOLISH ALL THE THINGS.I have recently been reading a lot of books. Ironically, this was in part because I left a Kindle on a plane and had to get the app instead – having the books so temptingly close caused very rapid consumption. Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai by Robert Bickers, is the personal history…
Read More The personal history of a Lancashire fascistMySociety has produced a map of Viking placenames in the UK. Eoin Clarke has produced a map of cuts on a ward by ward basis: And the Tories wonder why the North of England is a No-Go area for the Nasty Party. pic.twitter.com/l498nrqyNR — Eoin Clarke (@DrEoinCl) April 7, 2014 Is there something we should…
Read More The real Tory agendaSo I said you could hide a million-strong dole queue with enough bogus hairdressing and then it totally like happened. Shift in jobs market in 6 months incredible: on experimental ONS monthly figs 8% Aug (stuck for 4 yrs) to 6.6% in Feb pic.twitter.com/SFdhaLq0bn — Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) April 16, 2014 Discussion follows. Fortunately it’s…
Read More sidewalk social scientist don’t get no satisfaction..So, it’s well known that I’m an obsessive about Create Streets, the flaky Tory wanktank that wants a whole succession of gimmes for developers who are in no sense their mates, except when they are. Single Aspect notes that the Urban Design Group is having a thing on Wednesday the 23rd of April, i.e next…
Read More Your chance to meet Create Streets.So last week I asked readers to take a view on what I might blog, swinging off an idea of Andrew Gelman‘s. The post was here. The lucky winners got a piece on Ukraine, the proliferation of SIGINT technology, and Ed Snowden, and a joint review of two books about Russia, plus a lot of…
Read More TYR open newslist, the second