So I need to write some more stuff for the Pol. Progress so far is here. My self-imposed terms of reference require something that uses data or public documents and that results in a testable prediction. Also, I’m chary of doing something about Greece for fear both that the situation changes dramatically during the editing…
Read More Open newslist 9It wasn’t that long ago it struck me, watching the Twitter-war of the nanosecond: the social media killer app is just really fast ethnogenesis, the process by which a nation is created. Or was it: thank God these people haven’t got a finance ministry and can’t collect tax, or else there’d be a no kidding…
Read More The Affinities. Facebook that doesn’t suck, and the consequencesSo I was having a long talk with Declan Gaffney on Twitter about incapacity benefit and the Department for Work and Pensions. The Gaffer mentioned that when he’d been working for the Greater London Authority with John Hutton’s DWP in 2006, nobody seemed to have been aware that the IB caseload was rapidly ageing-out, and…
Read More IDS and the Great Skip of InitiativesSo I got an answer to my FOI request! On the 12th of June, National Savings and Investments disclosed some e-mail regarding the Tories’ fake government mailshot. You can get the dump at the link, and read the related meta here. My original blog posts are here and here. The upshot, as usual with these…
Read More These 9 Government E-Mails I Just Got Disclosed Show Just What a Dick George Osborne Really IsI 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 Update