Well, ha ha. Godfrey Bloom, ‘kipper (and subject of a TYR profile back in 2004) is concerned that his party is full of obsessives, weirdos, and people with terrible amateur schemes. Bloom’s rant is worth quoting: My experience thus far is that as soon as more than 2 people get in a room progress completely…
Read More “Buying policy off the shelf”: the last political partyA case of China exporting its internal chaos, as Jamie Kenny would say; I was recently talking to someone who had installed a wireless broadband network in China, and they mentioned that they’d had an exciting experience with a Huawei router. Politicians whose constituents include Huawei’s competitors are endlessly insinuating that their equipment is always…
Read More internal chaos, exportedOK, so who spent a significant part of their evening reading about pigs and pork thanks to a Twitter row about CRESC? Yeah, me. I think that paper is rather good, and you can see the applications to something like this. That said, I wonder how euro-compliant some of it is. I’d really like something…
Read More PigsSo what’s up with this? Tuesday’s Sun front page – “Maggie dead in bed at Ritz” #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers #Thatcher twitter.com/suttonnick/sta… — Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) April 8, 2013 The Sun was always her biggest media pal. This is presumably a broadcast from Murdoch Central – the supposedly retired elder-statesman Trevor “I thought I scooped Hutton fair…
Read More Tab noteOh, do you like maps? Do you like data visualisation? Roll in Richard Edes Harrison’s 1940s work for Fortune. Being me, I especially love The World of ITT – beautiful colour, network visualisation, weird globe projections, and it’s horribly clear why supporting dictators in Madrid and Rio was so important to them. You can’t see…
Read More InterestingMy initial response to today’s Labour policy rollout was as follows: @labour_partisan also, another way of hating the young. — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 7, 2013 Thinking about it, though, this isn’t necessarily so. Presumably the idea is that people build up additional entitlement by paying their class III National Insurance contributions over the years…
Read More Labour market efficiencies from the Roses to the X factorSo, speaking of Clausewitz, here are some reflections from reading him. (If you think the blogs are a bit eclectic today, yes, I’m working through a queue of things I drafted in a notebook..) Zweck vs. Ziel – one of the things everyone sort-of knows about him is “the maintenance of the aim”, but I…
Read More A bit of ClausewitzEarlier this year, I had to spend a week or so with a 2004 vintage feature phone. For connoisseurs, it was one of the early 3G models from LG that 3UK launched with. This was an interesting experience. The first thing that comes to mind about it was that simple wasn’t simple. iPhones are simple;…
Read More I want one that just makes calls: no, you don’tSo, I’ve been having a war with my exciting privatised energy vendor. Again. We had a chat about this in this post on think-of-a-number prices, but another opportunity came around. The day before the monthly direct debit payment went out, a letter lands saying that they’ve just doubled, yes doubled, the amount. Thanks. Anyway, of…
Read More Reading Gambetta and Clausewitz in an emerging low-trust societyOK, a bit of Lobster. Two things have happened recently to up my tuit on the project. First, I learned that Drew Conway of the Zero Intelligence Agents blog has given NetworkX the ability to generate a force-directed graph in d3.js, which you can stick right in a web page. Second, I’ve been reading the…
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