A bit more on the Independent Group’s accounts. Here’s a chart breaking down their expenses by supplier, which really does show how much of a creation of the advertising/marketing/public relations industry they were: Here’s the daily spending on Facebook advertising: And here’s the history of their spending with The & Partnership, by category: You can…
Read More TIG in chartsI put this on twitter but it ought to be a blog post too, just without the GIFs, even though every GIF takes two years off your subjective age. (I’m following the science.) The Independent Group, aka Change UK, aka The Independent Group for Change, is winding up the private company it created as its…
Read More The Independent Group: envoiIf you read this I promised you a review of Adam Tooze’s Crashed. I didn’t write the review, but a major theme of the book seems enormously important now. Here’s the FT‘s Edward Luce, with a magisterial piece on Trump responding to a real crisis in the way it was obvious he would. It was…
Read More The world of Crashed, crashedThis is fantastic and it reminded me of a book: Every single #BorisJohnson speech – so you never have to listen to him again. #extendlockdown pic.twitter.com/UiJ2EIu7df — James (@seebsouq) May 7, 2020 Heinrich Böll’s 1955 novella Doktor Murkes Gesammelte Schweigen/The Collected Silences of Dr. Murke, a classic of postwar German literature, was written and is…
Read More ErmSo, @cinemashoebox on the twitter says: a Soviet Bus Stops/Yugoslav Memorials-style coffee table book of shitty Millennium municipal features in British towns and villages — Ben (@cinemashoebox) May 2, 2020 Well, I’m sure we all know the feeling. Staines decided to replicate Saddam Hussein’s Victory Arch, not once but twice. The other one is at…
Read More The millennium crap book would be funny but that’s allThere is a lot of discussion about using mobile technology to partially automate tracing COVID-19 patients’ close contacts. I thought I’d provide a quick overview of the various ways you can locate mobile phones. Cell-site location This is the one everyone thinks of first. In order to route incoming voice calls and Internet packets back…
Read More Positioning mobile devicesThere have been a hell of a lot of opinions put forward about modern China – from the Blairite vision of a superpower of economic liberalism with lots of CCTV, integrated fully in the system, to cold-warrior visions of a monolithic neo-USSR, anarchist hopes of a convergence of mass-group incidents into revolution, tankie fantasies of…
Read More 10 years of the Jamie Doctrine: not a symposium of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham HouseThe jarring combination of absolutely pristine spring weather and a national emergency reminded me of something the other day. Viridian foliage, crystalline skies, working from the back steps in glorious sunshine, a massive financial crisis, no aeroplanes – of course, I’d been here before. It’s eerily like the weeks following the Eyjafjallajokull eruption back in…
Read More Still under that volcano.What to do while you’re living under two nations, in isolation? What about….blogging? We’re about at the time in the media life-cycle when you should expect takes arguing that panic-buying is actually good to appear, and indeed I see someone’s trying to rebrand it as “resilience buying”. Never mind. A lot of people think it’s…
Read More Keynes and the Case of the Disappearing Bogrolls