So, I had a drink with the most popular man in England on Thursday. Something which came up in the conversation was that apparently, some UK and European central institutions’ press offices are handing out “tokens” to lobbyists. Tokens? This meant nothing to me, but apparently what was meant is that they are counting meetings…
Read More a restraining influence on the rate of retrogressionThis is wrong, not just for the methodological reasons given. The problem is more serious. What’s so great about optimal decisions after all? Absolute optimality has costs. Specifically, even if consultation doesn’t help you achieve an optimal decision, it may help avoid a decision that is dramatically pessimal for some particular person or group of…
Read More the worst thing that can happen is actually pretty badOK, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My problem with the whole “Blue Labour” concept, and further, the love-affair between people like James Purnell and American “community organisers” is this: If you’re so smart, why haven’t you got health insurance?” Seriously. Isn’t trying to learn from the American Left a bit like trying…
Read More oh fuck hell, it’s that extensive future-of-the-Labour-party post at last.Term-extraction algorithms have the disturbing property of making things sound more interesting than they really are. These are WordPress’s suggested tags for the last blog post: community organisers, multilateral agreement on investment, plymouth argyle, james purnell, crash investigation Way more fun than just another future of the Labour Party post. This is of course inherent…
Read More tagged!London Banker: Because they now have the role of market maker of last resort, central banks should become much more active in ensuring that any asset permitted to be classed as capital by a bank can be liquidated on demand in a public market. If this is so, then they must needs take a view…
Read More again with the central bank thingOK, I’ve added hundreds more government meetings to the Lobster Project webscraper and run the analytics script. We’re up to 3,825 lobbying events between 2,725 entities, which lobster.py reports processing in 4.63 seconds. Here are two depressing findings. First of all, Francis Maude is still the fourth most lobbied minister, although his gatekeepership has dropped…
Read More the good news is that the No.1 lobby is no longer a bank…What is it with Tories and loan-sharking? We all know about Francis Maude, the toxic pusher and secret ruler of the world, or at least we all should – he was a director of a company offering dodgy “debt consolidation” deals, and also Spanish sub-prime mortgages that were marketed as an inheritance tax avoidance scheme.…
Read More …wi nowt taken outTime for a non-Thursday music post. And again: In other “things that are good” news, I want one of these. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous…
Read More it’s not Thursday, so…Time for a non-Thursday music post. And again: In other “things that are good” news, I want one of these. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous…
Read More it’s not Thursday, so…Yadda yadda China cyberwar. I make the point that the Chinese infosec environment is characterised by chaos, there isn’t a well-defined centre of activity probably enjoying offical tolerance or more like the old Russian Business Network*, and that the great firewall is about censorship and also a sort of trade-barrier protecting the locals from competition.…
Read More Chaos as a deliberate strategy