So I picked a fight with Tom Lee of Sunlight Labs about why a rather good piece on whether the big spenders in US politics actually achieved anything with their money didn’t have any charts. Sunlight reckons campaign money was surprisingly ineffective, and Republicans had the most of it, in a post that surely does…
Read More The smart money and the dumb money in the US elections“There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”
Read More Quote of noteYou may remember my brief involvement with AR standardisation (the annotated whiteboards are here). As a result I’m on the mailing list for various things, and the Open Geospatial RFC for the ARML 2.0 spec just dropped. Being on a plane, I got around to reading it. I have comments. Back in Barca, in order…
Read More Commenting on ARML 2.0I have just realised I’ve also written notes expandable to about 800 words of final blog on what to do about the pathological firm, ranging over Occupy, MPs’ expenses, Corey Robin, conservative arguments for radical goals. Whew. And I have drafts on other subjects. But I think I’ll let the first one get home and…
Read More Closing the books on the weekOn a similar theme to the last post, this Twitter discussion led me to something interesting: https://twitter.com/relume1/status/265117766896476160 The linked Harvard Business School paper, which is good and worth reading, concludes that the craze for delayering in business since the 1980s, which was sold as a way of devolving decision-making authority to lower levels in organisations,…
Read More On the theory of the pathological firmInspired by this weekend’s story that you now pay a transaction fee to fly Ryanair even if you use a Ryanair credit card, which is apparently a thing that exists even if it sounds like it shouldn’t, I have been thinking about their business model. It is not what you may think it is. This…
Read More A brief inquiry into the nature and consequences of think-of-a-number pricingSo, are we going to get the name of the Tory paedophile (or paedophiles) or the confirmation of just how far Becky Asbo and Dave from PR’s relationship went first? I just ask because I want to prepare for the inevitable storm-surge of everything that is creepy in advance. Sandbags. Back-up generators. Areas of wetland…
Read More The year everything went impossibly creepyMike Smithson tweets this poll, showing that even Tories hate and fear the possibility of another Republican presidency: https://twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/status/264720136831901696/ Stian Westlake remarks that this isn’t true of Tory pundits: Funny that 8 out of 9 UK conservatives want Romney to lose, but most UK conservative pundits want him to win. pic.twitter.com/MuI30sm8 — Stian Westlake (@stianwestlake)…
Read More The difference between pundits and votersI was recently pointed to NESTA’s report on innovation in the British economy and our recovery, or otherwise, from the Great Recession. This is a pretty good example of the first two functions in the post on thinktanks – it’s assessment and comparison first, with ideas arising from them – but that’s not really my…
Read More More radical consensus – the innovation strikeI sometimes wonder how I got away with being a 1980s kid. Between the Ro-Ro ships sailing with their bow doors open, the football grounds burning down, the police-enabled disasters at them, the state-backed kiddy fiddlers, the beef that ate your brain, the Soviet nuclear rain, aircraft full of smoke on the runway at Manchester…
Read More scanner appeal!