I mentioned that the Economics Fairy gives those people who prove themselves worthy of her their greatest wish: a chance to fail. That is, of course, as nothing to the opportunities for failure and disaster offered to people with good ideas about agriculture. (You ask Nikita Khrushchev, come to think of it.) Joel Hafvenstein reports…
Read More this land is…Am I right in understanding the legal comments in the NYT piece to mean that the only way to get the police to disgorge whether or not your phone was monitored is to sue the Screws and serve a notice on the Yard for disclosure of relevant documents? It seems that the primary barrier to…
Read More there’s a catch…This is interesting; Brazil is currently carrying out a national census. How? With 150,000 LG 750GM smartphones, and a canny bit of software. Photos are here. Things that struck me – the Americans decided to build a dedicated device and it cost like hell. The operating system on the 750GM, however, is MS Windows Mobile…
Read More windowsElsewhere: we resume blogging at Stable & Principled. Via Jamie Kenny, the Conspiracy’s roundup. Here’s the first comment: so this is the biggest news me the day? Not the fact that the Guardian has endorsed David Miliband?
Read More not stable, not principledThe Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyThe Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyCreepy google searches of the week: “who writes the blog for yorkshire ranter” and “identity of yorkshire ranter”. Someone in a BT dynamic-IP pool.
Read More dsrA4E and Miss £5 Million will get you a job….pretending to get other people jobs. I love it when a plan comes together.
Read More big societyAn unusual case. (Horrible right-wing) Blogger convicted of threatening to kill three judges. One judge is himself a (not all that horrible) right-wing blogger, and another is a horrible right-wing blogger and journalist’s brother. The prosecutor in the case is the former idol of Firedoglake, Patrick Fitzgerald.
Read More libertarian blogging fratricideHere’s something interesting. We must also consider the alternative that many of the most prominent and powerful Afghans are in fact motivated by greed and opportunism. [harrowell: ya think?] It is therefore in their interest to maintain the status quo of massive US and international spending that fuels the Afghan “rentier state” economy. This isn’t…
Read More cutting down on your mercenary miles