This post responds to a request in the TYR open newslist J.W. Mason’s essay Disgorge the Cash! is a genuinely fascinating exploration of the way the whole apparatus of “shareholder value” functions to force management to, eh, disgorge the cash, and therefore to actually prevent improvement in favour of maximising the extraction of rent. The…
Read More Disgorge the cash.You want a World Cup record. Here’s a World Cup record. “I live in a land of class hypocrisy/we’re gonna win the National Lottery/ee-i-addio-I don’t think so.” In a digitised west Lancashire accent. This reminds me that the 1990s could be quite a lot of fun, and in some ways very radical. A lot of…
Read More Not Thursday, so a music postYou know, if someone like Erik Lund or Jakob Whitfield were to start a post-blogging project based on the OMG COMPLETE ARCHIVE OF THE BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL, that would be kind of awesome. I’m just saying. Saying, and trying to fight off the impulse to volunteer to blog 400-odd 120 or so page slabs…
Read More So the complete Bell Journal is online and I am not going to blog itEli Rabett has a collection of links to John Fleck’s blogs on the incredible project to send an artificial spring flood down the Colorado River’s delta. Go, read. But the really fascinating thing is the political and diplomatic process that brought it about. I’ve occasionally said that people don’t fight wars over water anywhere near…
Read More Bringing water to the tableSo #BeatPhil. This came up on twitter last night, but it’s been annoying me for a while. Alternatively, #BeatPhil by rejecting the implied link between income and human worth pic.twitter.com/8bV7GNuKK3 — Nathan Midgley (@nathanmesq) May 9, 2014 “Phil” is a character the London School of Business & Finance’s ad agency has come up. We are…
Read More Don’t beat Phil.Someone tweeted Ernest Shackleton’s legendary ad for Antarctic explorers. Manliest thing in the history of manly manliness. Also the Britishest. pic.twitter.com/dtyrEEWCAN — Lucy Wainwright (@Whoozley) May 4, 2014 Cool. Not to say chilly. But it immediately made me want to post the same text to a variety of different job sites. Monster. Taskrabbit. Craigslist. You…
Read More An experimentW1A has been a bit of a disappointment for me. It’s not so much the BBC self-regard, a notorious turnoff, but rather the lack of a plot driver. Twenty Twelve worked because it spoke to the steadily rising national dread before Operation Big Sportsday, something which nobody remembers now. This was wired into the show’s…
Read More Siobhan Sharpe rides againI find it both reassuring, and intensely funny, that after all the effort to get rid of the Secretary of State for Health’s duty to provide an NHS, top NHS officials are now moaning that Jeremy Hunt is micromanaging them. Sir Bruce Keogh can probably handle being micromanaged by someone like Hunt, and in general,…
Read More The system has won, and damn right tooThe UsVsTh3m crowd really gave me the horrors with this app, at least when it was returning UK No.1s. Mine has a fast start – Odyssey, in July 1980 – but then plunges into two Spice Girls tracks and, Christ!, Wet Wet Wet. And Frankie Knuckles has left the building. This of course was an…
Read More Music.I’ve just been to the Tate’s Richard Hamilton monster exhibition. A thought: here’s Hamilton’s 1984 installation Treatment Room. The Treatment Room has been re-installed at the Tate and you can walk around it, which is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, photos usually centre on the TV with the Thatcher loop, putting…
Read More Pop-Up Treatment Room 2014