Everyone is talking about the Tory election spending thing. Apparently, there are MPs who fear they might go to jail. The latest break involves letters sent out over David Cameron’s signature, which may count against the local spending limit because they addressed the reader as living in the constituency in question. But that wasn’t the…
Read More Tory election spending and the #codgerbonds. Can you help?So it looks like the local elections didn’t go so badly. While we’re in the intermediate phase between Corbyn’s Labour doing something reasonably well, and them throwing it all away through some sort of terrible cake-and-arse juggle, I’d like to take note of something. John Curtice reckoned we should expect a net-loss of about 170…
Read More One good thing: a better electoral forecasting modelIt looks like everyone’s favourite Tory thinktank has a plan to solve the housing crisis, and it’s pretty simple! It said acquisition of the land would be financed by a private-public joint venture, with the government contributing 49 per cent – about £3.1bn a year – alongside institutional investors. It would represent the largest government…
Read More Policy Exchange plagiarised me…and I loved itThis Peter Hitchens post is fascinating. First of all, there’s the massive degree of psychological projection on show. He spends hundreds of words berating literally the whole of the nation for lacking the courage to leap out of the European Union in favour of….whatever it is the Outs are in favour of. And then he…
Read More The Hitchens has spoken, and he said “You go first”Two exhibitions on Saturday: Calder at the Tate and Big Bang Data at Somerset House. There was something I didn’t like about both. Calder’s curators are apparently convinced that none of the motorised works can be allowed to run in case something terrible happens. Weirdly, they don’t draw the matching conclusion and weld the mobiles…
Read More Software is not a painting.Has anyone else noticed all the signs of change? Of course, it’s terrible. None of us is getting any younger. That isn’t quite what I mean, though. I mean signs, signage, graphic design in the public realm. There are a hell of a lot around that say something like X – it could be benefits,…
Read More #ischanging: the KEEP CALM of the future 2010s revivalThis BBC interview between Jeremy Paxman and David Bowie has gone viral, and with good reason. Partly this is because Bowie’s remarks about the Internet were prophetic and funny. But it is also fascinating for what it shows us about Paxman. It is only too obvious that Paxman knew nothing, literally nothing, of what he…
Read More Paxman is Ziggy Stardust.This economic paper is strange: Over the past thirty years, a great deal of business cycle research has been based on purely real models that abstract from the presence of nominal rigidities, and so (at least implicitly) assume that the Phillips curve is vertical. In this paper, I show that such models are fragile, in…
Read More when the facts change…Back in 2011 the government had been proposing to spend £190 million on a flood defence scheme for Leeds. Instead, they cancelled the scheme and only did £50m worth of the work. The scheme was based on a hypothetical worst-case flooding scenario. In 2011, the economic losses from such a flood were estimated at £500…
Read More Sound financeIf this Yorkshire Evening Post piece is at all accurate, Leeds RLFC is in the stone age and deeply irresponsible. The former Gold Coast Titans rake was knocked out twice in Rhinos’ Boxing Day defeat by Wakefield Trinity Wildcats and did not feature after the 35th minute. But the hooker insisted there is no long-lasting…
Read More Really, Leeds?