A lot of people seem to think the Windrush scandal is an argument for national ID cards, and as a result, the Financial Times ran this collection of four short articles on four different experiences. This includes two European ones that are kind of OK, the disastrous Indian Aadhaar project, and one that hasn’t happened…
Read More What’s worse than ID cards? The ID card register without the cardsSomebody knows what they’re doing. The fossil contribution to the UK national grid – the red line – has gone from just shy of 30GW in 2013 to 14.6GW now. Imports are up a bit, but the heavy lift is from renewables, which have doubled, and efficiency, which kicked in about 5GW. Created with Highcharts…
Read More Actually good newsHere’s something nice, from architect Peter Barber: Council housing which we just finished for London Borough of Enfield… YIPEEE pic.twitter.com/jIWHO5yQn9 — Peter barber (@PpeterPeter) April 19, 2018 Barber’s practice designed the Ordnance Road project for Enfield. Like all architectural practices its website is completely incomprehensible, but I found information at the builders’. Neilcott Group say…
Read More Simple planningSo I saw a biography of Bob Crow in a bookshop in Windsor of all places and did some #crowtweets. As readers will know, he was a long-standing interest of this blog (see how to get the look) and in any case he was surely the only modern British trade unionist to have a revolutionary…
Read More Looking back on Bob Crow: 1, StrategyThis is the third post in a series. The others are here and here. A really important lesson to take away from the book is about Crow’s relationship with the media. There are several points to remember here. The first one is the importance of realistic expectations. Crow never imagined that the commentariat or the…
Read More Looking back on Bob Crow, 3: Media, and a final thoughtThis is the second post in a series. The others are here and here The Crow strategy in post 1 was wildly successful. The effort to flip the RMT’s success in its economic goals into wider political ones, however, saw mixed results. Gall argues that Crow may not have realised how much easier it was…
Read More Looking back at Bob Crow, 2: PoliticsI think I might make this a regular feature just to get rid of the things. Here are some documents from my downloads folder: Between 24% and 30% of US electors, with 95% confidence, were exposed to fake news during the 2016 election campaign. Nearly all of this was pro-Trump, and it accounted for 2.6%…
Read More London Review of PDFsWell, here’s some of the stickiest, nastiest grease dripping out of the bottom of the Internet: Around 2009, Gryn moved to Prague to intern at a company called Elephant Orchestra, which specialized in selling ads on misspelled domain names such as facebok.com. Elephant Orchestra was so profitable that its founder, then about 26, produced a…
Read More Looking back down the S-curveSo, some stuff I’ve been reading lately. A Mind at Play, Jimmy Sori and Rob Goodman. This is a sound biography of Claude Shannon. It’s heavily researched and does a decent job of explaining the science, which is after all the point, although on that score it’s oddly better on Hawtrey and Nyquist than on…
Read More BoooksEr…whoops? Tfw a $3m surface-to-air missile malfunctions and falls in your back yard đŹ #Saudi pic.twitter.com/TZQKLFG8qE — Haidar Sumeri (@IraqiSecurity) March 25, 2018 Intercepting ballistic missiles is hard! Especially if for some reason, like your first shot missing or not detecting the target until late in the day or the fire-control centre not being able…
Read More finally, a post with rockets