David 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 labradorI recently sent off another report through FixMyStreet, pointing at the horrible state of the roads round here. (I am more than a little disappointed with the Android client app, by the way.) Within a week, some of the worse potholes had been tar’n’gravelled. Meanwhile, even more seem to have appeared or worsened. What it…
Read More ticket punchingThis is depressing; they couldn’t find enough volunteers to count the votes in the Norwich North by-election on the night. What’s especially worrying is that it’s one of those assumptions that you never think about – a sort of minimum of commitment to the special importance of voting. And it’s being eroded, just as the…
Read More democracySomething else that came up at OpenTech; is there any way of getting continuing information out of the government? This is especially interesting in the light of things like Who’s Lobbying? and Richard Pope and Rob McKinnon’s work in the same direction; it seems to me that the key element in this is getting information…
Read More why is there no enduring FOIA request?So what do we need to know about a parliamentary bill? First of all, as soon as a piece of legislation is published, it has certain meta-data. Date originated; originating department; originating MP; originating house; type – primary legislation, order in council, statutory instrument; current status (pre-legislative/Green/White Paper, first reading, committee, report, second, third, Royal…
Read More free our bills: hardcore wonk/geek outBrilliant post from Dan Lockton on the design problems of making smart meters usable and useful. In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA’s Social Brain about “the dark side of “nudge””; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people’s decision processes into ones that are more rational,…
Read More tattyResistance – The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such…
Read More Review: Alistair Crooke, “Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution”Jason Scott tells a sad tale of how AOL eliminated a whole mass of little Web sites and then erased all traces of their content. (Readers with long memories will recall the shutdown of Dave Winer’s blog farm.) What follows showed the best and worst of Internet culture – Scott called for volunteers to start…
Read More a small object lesson on the past decadeAnd then I was fool enough to look at another newspaper. So, with Labour you can at least hope they’ll look after us in the recession, right? No, they want to give bailiffs the right to restrain people, and to charge interest on social fund loans. And they’re blowing hot and cold on the Jaguar-Land…
Read More anger is an energyPakistan Policy Blog speaks sense: Zardari’s attempt to present himself as a savior belies the reality and the way most in Pakistan and even the United States see him. Billionaire Zardari is part of Pakistan’s feuding oligarchy, not a revolutionary against it. The sad fact is that most Pakistanis have been hostage to this sadistic…
Read More stuck, stuck, stuck