A couple of teardowns of Russian Orlan-10 UAVs captured by Ukrainian forces have appeared on the Internet lately. This drone is a short-ish range platform for reconnaissance and artillery target acquisition that acquired a fearsome reputation after the 2014 battle of Zelenopillya in the Donbas, where a substantial Ukrainian force was destroyed by Russian artillery…
Read More Drone TeardownThis Time magazine report on the campaign by democratic America (in every sense) to force Trump to respect the election results is well worth your time. This slightly earlier NYT story can be read with it for more colour. The overwhelming, astonishing stand-out here is how close this was to the colour revolution blueprint of…
Read More All that was missing was the colourWhat to do while you’re living under two nations, in isolation? What about….blogging? We’re about at the time in the media life-cycle when you should expect takes arguing that panic-buying is actually good to appear, and indeed I see someone’s trying to rebrand it as “resilience buying”. Never mind. A lot of people think it’s…
Read More Keynes and the Case of the Disappearing BogrollsWhy is the Sun so lame these days? Here’s a case study. Overnight everyone was expecting a deluge of incitement to pour forth on the Supreme Court, but when the mountains had finished travailing we got this: This is a mad choice of lead, and a reference to the catchphrase of a TV comedian who…
Read More How did the Sun get so weak?Boris Johnson’s private behaviour is public again this week, which is almost a pity, as some of the chickens stirred up by his public behaviour as Mayor of London are coming home to roost. For a start there is, or was, Wonga. Last weekend I was on the tube when I noticed something unusual –…
Read More Relics of the Johnson AdministrationWhat have US healthcare, British railways, the shipwreck of Carillion plc, and the F-35 got in common, and why should you care? Well…none of them work terribly well, they all cost vastly more than expected, and nobody can put their finger on why. Cash seems to leak out of them by a thousand cuts, without…
Read More In The Eternal Inferno, Fiends Torment Ronald Coase With The Fate Of His IdeasSo I’m watching the chute, and then the experimenters chuck down this pellet, which turns out to be some sort of libertarian riffing off my Neo-Edwardians post around the idea that perhaps the move away from a simple, Posh vs. Oiks politics is to do with the rise of post-scarcity, idea dear to the hearts…
Read More Scarcity and political complexityTurned down by Politico Europe for being too local The populist threat is on everyone’s mind, whether from Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, or the AfD. In the UK, it’s been argued in a classic twitterstorm that Labour’s Northern heartlands are especially threatened, precisely because they’re “the heartlands” – ultra-safe parliamentary seats and city councils where…
Read More Bradford: Populism And AfterRemember Red Plenty, Francis Spufford’s historical SF novel about the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a real-time planned economy using computers and the ideas of Oskar Lange and Leonid Kantorovich? Sure you do if you’re on this blog. Well, it turns out that it had a dark and twisted 1980s sequel. We already knew about…
Read More That time I was nearly burned alive by a machine-learning model and didn’t even notice for 33 yearsEveryone’s waiting for something to happen about Greece. If you think the suspense is bad, imagine what it’s like if you have a pan-European politics column to fill and you have undertaken a public commitment not to fill it with speculation, gossip, or bullshit that you can’t substantiate with data. At the moment, there is…
Read More All politics is eventually about the whips