A bit of Simple Plan news. I was out on the March for Homes at the weekend, and I’m afraid nobody had a SIMPLE PLAN NOW banner, mainly because I didn’t make one, although some Germans did ask me if I was an “expert on the housing crisis”. That said, it was a pretty decent…
Read More #simpleplan: two news itemsSo we blogged about the abject failure of privatisers Circle and Hinchingbrooke hospital, the one where they boasted of using tills like the ones in Argos: And whilst waiting in A&E, an unusually high number of patients (double the national average) left before being seen, fed up of waiting – and presumably unimpressed by the…
Read More Errr…Tesco. Yes. That must be it. Do I get a biscuit?Did you think Boris Johnson sucked? Try Ivan Massow, doyen of hipster Toryism (he was the nice version of Michael Portillo before Michael Portillo was the nice version of Michael Portillo) and prospective candidate for mayor of London. Somehow, the mayoralty has become a strange attractor for people who combine vacuous celebrity and a particular…
Read More You thought London mayoral candidates couldn’t get worseSo yer #defenduss. The UCU delegation came back with a new offer, the same stuff but with a slightly higher accrual rate, some more money from the other side, a higher cap, and promises to use any improvement in the scheme finances to put back the cuts and also to review the valuation methodology. And…
Read More #defenduss arrives at an unsatisfactory compromiseHere’s a brutal sickburn on the journos, wanktankers, and pols who were taken in by the privatisers of Hinchingbrooke Hospital, who have now done a bunk ahead of the inspectors after the place turned out to be a sinister deathtrap run by Nurse Ratchet: We heard the staff member say to the patient ‘don’t misbehave,…
Read More #iwaswrong – public sector co-op editionDavid Cameron’s trip to Washington reminded me of something @thejimsmith on Twitter said. Cameron, he said, reminded him of a dog that doesn’t realise you know he’s trying to steal food. Anyone who’s ever had a dog will recognise this. Ours wasn’t allowed to beg at the dinner table, and he would sit and wait…
Read More the prime minister considered as a golden labradorAre still very much with us. Here’s a chart showing the average staff turnover in British call centres (from here). Turnover marches up in the boom, crashes in the recession, and you can even make out the doubledip. All clear so far?
Read More The political aspects of full employmentThis piece about UX research on smart meters could be retitled “How I Quit Smoking The Data”, to say nothing of this one. I really dislike a lot of the funky energy/M2M/Internet of Things concepts because they basically shame you for boiling the kettle, and either work because you do daft middle class lifestyle bollocks…
Read More how I quit smoking energy dataSo it seems to be a day for heavy politics like candidate selection. UKIP is tearing itself apart over this issue, which is surely interesting – if you can’t select candidates you’re not a functioning political party. For example, here’s a piece from the Indy‘s Paul Gallagher, describing a wave of resignations, sometimes en masse,…
Read More Would you buy a used Conservative from this man?Hey look, someone’s writing a Python library to analyse US electoral spending from a network theoretic viewpoint. A good introduction to the problems and also why it’s so intractable in terms of nice charts.
Read More someone else has a #lobster