Alex Massie has long served as “that guy on the Spectator it’s OK to like”, but this post of his serves as an excellent demonstration of a point made here. When this magazine endorsed Brexit, it did so in typically trenchant and elegant fashion. ‘Out and into the world’ we said. The central thesis of…
Read More a hurricane, after all, is a lot of hot air moving in the same directionIt’s fairly well known that a lot of the productivity gap between the UK and other industrial countries is accounted for by a long tail of unusually unproductive small businesses (see ONS data here). This fascinating piece in the FT covers a project to do something about that by getting them management advice. An interesting…
Read More Where do UK SMEs get technology advice?This is a fascinating insight – the best-performing NHS trusts are the ones with more managers. That will annoy both the Tory types for whom the only people who exist in the NHS are doctors, and the Chris Dillow caucus left-libertarians who hate managers. But wait one. The researchers defined a manager as someone with…
Read More a couple of links about NHS managementSo I read Tim “Not the Doctor” Shipman’s All Out War instabook on the referendum campaign and after. Shipman argues strongly for the continued importance of the old 90s Tory Eurosceptics in the whole thing – this is partly a consequence of his method, writing down stuff MPs tell him, but I think also a…
Read More #AllOutWar: One, We’re Agin ItEton College has been hit by further controversy after it emerged that boys studying there were sharing details of our most important national institutions. A major inquiry suggests that cheating may be widespread at the ancient school, with students going to extreme lengths to achieve an unfair advantage in public examinations, their future careers, and…
Read More Eton pupils exposed “cheating at life in general”This BBC Scotland story about a swimming pool in Helensburgh should probably have got much more play than it did. Perhaps it was something about the framing? It’s a pity, because the central thrust of it is really important to the future of the polity. Back in the autumn of 2015, when journalists rejoiced in…
Read More The barbarians were here all along: a post about technical details of local government financeThe former MI5 Director-General, Jonathan Evans, has thoughts. Acknowledging that use of encryption had hampered security agencies’ efforts to access the content of communications between extremists, Evans added: “I’m not personally one of those who thinks we should weaken encryption because I think there is a parallel issue, which is cybersecurity more broadly. This is…
Read More Evans is right.It’s time for another 2007 Revival! carrier watch post. It looks like the forward-based carrier, Reagan, is fully ready. Nimitz is committed to the Middle East. Bush is eight thousand miles away, in UK home waters. Truman, Lincoln, and Vinson are in early phases of training. Eisenhower, Washington, and Stennis are in bits in the…
Read More Worry a little bit more about Korea but not that muchThis depressing thread of Marie Le Conte’s, and the associated Press Gazette story, are familiar. This is bleak but I'm absolutely not surprised: https://t.co/H0FHd5RMeH pic.twitter.com/rBPrGgOBw9 — Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian) August 3, 2017 In early 2005 I was hired as a staff writer at Mobile Communications International magazine, having impressed at the interview by being…
Read More The answer probably isn’t more NIBsHijacking the blog for work purposes. I know quite a few readers here develop software or design things in a freelance, startup, or small business context. What is it that telecoms operators/ISPs, both fixed and mobile, aren’t offering you at the moment? What are they selling you that you don’t want? Leave your thoughts in…
Read More Work post.