The Daily Telegraph is suddenly worried about the future of the aviation industry post-Brexit. As well it might be. But I remember distinctly that the source, the Engineering Employers’ Federation, spoke out in this sense during the referendum campaign. So did the individual companies involved, and the trade unions. And the Telegraph thought this was…
Read More the Airbus supply chain, the press, and leopardsHere’s a good rant against bloat and ad-tracking and everything else Maciej Cieglowski has been warning you about for years. Now, somewhere on Twitter I saw @annehelen asking why it didn’t say anything about the look and feel of the nutter right’s websites. And I also saw this project, where a classic Cranky Old Engineer…
Read More Design values are values, againThinking about Michael Howard’s interview fart over the weekend, I done a twitter and they liked it: Remember when politics was all about minutely planned grids, media training, and message discipline, and everyone said it was terrible? — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 2, 2017 And then I remembered the sheer weirdness of standing in Parliament…
Read More Are you thinking what I’m thinking?So Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on t’telly and continued trying to jawbone some sort of privileged access to WhatsApp messages. In the process she also: called on “people who understand the technology” and know “the necessary hashtags” to stop extremist material being uploaded to the internet. Anyway. This was all in aid of Friday’s…
Read More Exactly how those media reports about WhatsApp terrorists happenedOne thing I’ve recently noticed knocking about the industry is what I’m beginning to call the “post-Internet” or maybe the “Afternet”. This is the conjunction of maybe three trends. The first of these is the way 5G is panning out over in mobile. To start with, pretty much everything in consumer and most things in…
Read More Preview: TYR @ OpenTech 2017Reading the Institute for Government’s report on Universal Credit, I was struck by two related things. First of all, the project was powered forward by people who didn’t bear any responsibility for its implementation. Whenever it ran into people who needed to care about how it would work, it hit opposition. Lord Freud’s original skunkworks…
Read More Universal Credit: the history of an IT project failureThat populism post has been delivered!
Read More Future populism post, deliveredSo I went to the Royal Academy’s Russia exhibition yesterday, which led to me looking up oligarch/collector Petr Aven on Wikipedia. He’s Mikhail Fridman’s business partner in Alfa Group, which means ironically enough I was looking at paintings belonging to the guy whose employees built a whole fake website to confuse me about their ownership…
Read More WikipediaSo I read the Indivisible Guide, which was drafted by a group of ex-Obama staffers as a HOWTO for people interested in protesting Donald Trump. The core idea is that the ‘baggers were very successful as a protest movement and their strategy can be replicated. Basically, don’t bother with shopping lists of nice stuff, do…
Read More The design values of todayNow if you read this blog, you probably know I was briefly known for proposing that councils borrow against the stream of Local Housing Allowance payments and use this to buy up a lot of rental property. I called it the Simple Plan; it would simultaneously do something for the housing crisis, let the buy-to-let…
Read More A simple, terrible plan