I just got the statements from the various people who want to be the Labour candidate for mayor of London. The good news is that candidates Christian Wolmar, Diane Abbott, and David Lammy all seem to be supporting some version of the simple plan. Wolmar wants to set up a London Housing Development Agency. Abbott…
Read More MAYOR!Something completely different. There’s been a lot of Rugby League lately and a lot of it was good. Who thought Fiji would beat Papua New Guinea? 22-10, and it sounds like a terrific match, especially going by this. More boringly, who could imagine both that this is the first time the Kumuls and Fiji have…
Read More Rugby League links.While we’re rejecting stuff, here’s something else to reject. The notion of a progressive alliance or progressive majority involving the Lib Dems wants rejecting, badly. You might think 2010 killed it, but it stumbles on. (Before you all write at once, yes, I believed in it, but I got over it and there’s no reason…
Read More The coalition had a majority of 76.Something I left out of this piece, because it doesn’t really fit my self-imposed terms of reference for the Pol, is my own two cents on what the Labour party should do. (Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?) The problem, according to me, was defining a political statement that addressed about four…
Read More I am the party of no.A new piece is up at the Pol, with maps made in CartoDB. The Stamen Design basemap is lovely, and PostgreSQL is…quirky, but it’s nice to be able to do things like reduce a webmercator shape to its centroid with one function in a SELECT.
Read More Admin notice.National Savings has information about the codgerbond mailshots, but wants until the 29th of May to look for an excuse.
Read More UpdateSo I got round to reading the original paper about automatically predicting who’s likely to be a troll. This was always likely to be fun: Defining trolls as those who get banned for trolling, a pragmatic solution if nothing else, they obtained a large corpus of comments from three high-volume sources, CNN, a gamer news…
Read More if you can’t spell this you might be a trollWhy won’t Ed Miliband commit to a deal with the SNP in advance? The explanation is incredibly simple. Here are the last three Scottish polls – Survation for the Daily Record, TNS Global, and Ipsos MORI. As expected they both show a monster LAB>SNP swing. But the interesting bit is this: there are a lot…
Read More why Ed Miliband won’t commit in advance to the SNPThis talk about distributed systems architecture may be the most yorksrantery thing ever. By Mary Poppendieck, who appears to be awesome. Contains 1960s-era telecoms switching, the Saab Gripen, shipping containers, several good books, mission command, containers in the virtualisation sense, Amazon.com infrastructure, much more. No music though. Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
Read More most yorksranter thing everSo I was all sarcastic about Iain Martin pretending Peter Lilley foresaw the great financial crisis back in 1997. And then I found out from a comment on Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog that Lilley actually claims this himself. ” …..I was shadow Chancellor when the Bill that became the Bank of England Act 1998 was introduced.…
Read More that was meant to be satire