This LA Times story about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (so called because it’s still a dream – let’s get the last drop from that joke before it goes into service) and the role of outsourcing is fascinating. It is partly built on a paper by a senior Boeing engineer which makes among other things, this…
Read More 787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expectThis LA Times story about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (so called because it’s still a dream – let’s get the last drop from that joke before it goes into service) and the role of outsourcing is fascinating. It is partly built on a paper by a senior Boeing engineer which makes among other things, this…
Read More 787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expectBack in September, 2006, we were talking illegal immigrants and artisanal shipbuilding in West Africa, over at the Fistful. one of the curious economic details you could notice was how the process was in fact exhibiting an increasing returns type feature, in that the increased demand for boats increasingly meant that a number of would-be…
Read More a questionWhat’s wrong with PROFIT?! Death to all Marxists! Hey, I usually try to remain calm, but this is getting unnerving. Everyone with any sense knew there would be an epic wingnut freakout after the US elections – the structural forces made it inevitable, after all the time spent denying plate tectonics – but who imagined…
Read More …from the seaOK, so I got no takers for this prediction. My money’s on the Latvian or the Hungarian to out himself as a buffoon or neo-nazi. Not surprising, really. But what I didn’t expect was that even though the Latvian turned out to be the neo-nazi, the buffoon would turn out to be Timothy Kirkhope MEP,…
Read More too many right-wing meetingsAndrew Brons apparently likes the voluntary repatriation grant clause in the 1971 Immigration Act, a sop thrown in for Enoch. Well. A feature of this legislation, if I remember correctly, was that accepting it was without prejudice to one’s immigration status. You could go back. So the only people who accepted it took holidays back…
Read More my country needs me…It is come to this. Here is our Secretary of State for Culture: The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material. He plans to approach US…
Read More Burn, Hollywood, Burnham!Meanwhile, this is good news. As more and more ships from various parts of the world – like China and Iran – arrive in pirate country, somebody’s made vaguely sensible arrangements to put them on trial in Kenya, which is what has been done with the ones captured by Northumberland. This is a much better…
Read More business in great watersSo, if World President Brown was to ask me what to do about the headless Viktor Bout empire, and the operators like it, what would I say? Here’s what I’d do: Let’s draw up a big list of dodgy airlines. Better, let’s use rules; ex-Soviet aircraft, or old 737s, based in the UAE, registration in…
Read More Operation Firedump – the great rampcheckOoh, more Iran-war nonsense, this time from none other than mouthpieceful Russia Today, via this thread. There seems to be a meme floating around that there was a war between Russia and Georgia because the Russians intervened to prevent the Americans using Georgian airbases to attack Iran (obviously, a war with Iran is the universal…
Read More Not Just Armies, But Antonovs