We’ve lost the ‘Watch, also known as BorisWatch, also known as Tom Barry. That would be the guy who brought you the link between neo-conservatism and the war on bendy buses, who counted the number of the Dangleway and found that basically no-one ever used it, who measured the heat in the Borisbuses (as well…
Read More Wait ‘Til I Tell BoriswatchThe beta version of Companies House’s website looks like a godsend for Webcheck addicts. Here’s their file on Matthew “BadSpellers Alliance” Elliott, who has apparently been in favour of social mobility, arguably against it, in favour of British membership of the European Union, against it, opposed to identity cards but only after they were already…
Read More The new Companies House website is unstoppable!Here’s the crash report Amazon Web Services issued after the massive outage to their US-EAST region, the first and biggest of the regions, back in 2012. Here’s the one Heroku issued about their outage, caused by the Amazon outage. On Saturday night, Barclays Bank had a major outage which took out online authorisation for credit…
Read More Barclays should publish its internal report on the outage this weekendAndrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command is pretty special. In essence, this is a deep history of a mentalité, a way of thinking and seeing, and it’s a history that spirals outwards from a very specific time and place and a very specific artefact. The time, the place: Windy…
Read More The place, the time, the artefact, the cultureThinking about this, does anyone know what or who the patient zero for the idea that “mayors” solve something in British politics might be? I remember it as an early Blairite thing, but thinking about it, the Treasury seems to love it even more than DCLG. That said, it seems to have become part of…
Read More What is the source for all this mayor stuff?I say bubble? I say bubble. Good piece, but the most interesting paragraph is the following, provided as a health warning on a NYT feature quoted: (The article’s author, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, is the wife of Silicon Valley venture investor Marc Andreessen, though Theranos isn’t listed as a portfolio company of Andreessen Horowitz, his venture firm.)
Read More WhoseKidIsTheranosWhat are national security numbers? Why would you think TalkTalk would have some? Why would you believe anyone who claims to have them is the real deal, when: The UK doesn’t have a thing called a Social Security Number Nor does it have a thing called a National Security Number It does have a National…
Read More There is no such thing as a “UK national security number”In case you wonder, there’s not been much activity around here due to a project over at the Pol. Think Project Lobster, but Eurocratic. Expect an uptick on the blog from now on. First of all, something that has struck me at work and by following Maciej Ceglowski‘s talks. We all remember the crack from…
Read More The menace of correlated hype cyclesThe remarkable thing about this is just what Nigel Seed QC was willing to consider normal. “On the day of her trial there was a large number of reporters at the court,” he said. “I was informed by the police that this was because the defendant, who had been on bail, had let it be…
Read More Nothing to see here.What do we make of this, rantosphere? ICYMI – Since '05 rents in Eng (exc London) rose slower than earnings but in London they decoupled in 2011 #ukhousing pic.twitter.com/BoBZHCZwgy — Joe Sarling (@joesarling) August 3, 2015
Read More Rent