Just a quick hit, in comments at Steve Randy Waldman’s: Economists who think finance is merely a veil over real production also think real production is basically just like the easy bits of finance, for example, British government bonds – negligible transaction costs, huge liquidity, instant and frictionless trading, authoritative pricing and well-defined pricing models,…
Read More 37.2 homogenous capital units and one for the barmanSo I was talking about Iraqi GSM networks. Now, d’you know what they’re dancing to up in Kidal, or at least they were before music was illegal, or before the French shot the piano player? No. But somebody did that as recently as 2011, asking people for tracks they had on their mobiles’ SD cards,…
Read More the tape recorder, for special musicWhen I started hearing about a blogger called Brown Moses, who collated Syrian rebel videos and identified unexploded ordnance, and regularly posted remarkably sharp depth pieces on the Leveson inquiry, I assumed this person was some retired six-letter agency type with their SAS badge on the mantelpiece, in the formaldehyde jar, stuck through Jimmy Savile’s…
Read More So you think you’re a bloggerGood NYT piece is good – working through the effort to arm Syrian rebels, with Saudi and Qatari money, Croatian surplus warstocks, and Jordanian airlift. Inevitably, the kit is moving aboard Il-76s. This time out, though, the aircraft are Jordanian (and occasionally other) military aircraft that sometimes operate as “Jordan International Air Cargo”, a nationalised…
Read More Don’t read this, read them!Via Trombly x Exum, an interesting paper on mobile telephony and the Iraq war is here. I was impressed by the fact the authors know there are multiple antenna sectors per cell-site, and that they bothered to find out roughly what an emerging market GSM operator’s roll-out process is like. In fact, if you wonder,…
Read More GSM Warlord, with actual statisticsGrim, gripping reportage from northern Mexico. A giant, 1980s West German wheel-dragline excavator abandoned in a swamp in southern Sudan the size of France, crippled by rebel ATGWs, as part of a very unwise geoengineering scheme. At last you can have a full-motion David Cameron mask projected on your backside. I am struggling to work…
Read More InterestingI’m using the big megaphone this blogkend, but here are a couple of Simple Plan things. The London Labour Housing Group’s Red Brick discusses why the distinction between general government gross debt and public sector net debt is important. GGGD is internationally comparable, and excludes public corporations, which hardly exist any more but do include…
Read More Simple Plan linksTony Harrison, reviewed by Nicholas Lezard: he says “When dole-wallahs fuck off to the void / what’ll t’mason carve up for their jobs? / The cunts who lieth ‘ere wor unemployed?” That hasn’t changed, not really: and “call-centre worker” isn’t something you’d want on your gravestone either, as my own experience has taught me Here’s…
Read More Some Yorkshire linksSo I’ve been reading Clausewitz. In the original German. It took me months – *humblebrag*. Anyway, if the government were to fall next week, what should Ed Miliband do right now? It seems to me that quite a lot of thought is going into the long term. There’s a complex of ideas around changing the…
Read More A quick hits agenda, with ClausewitzRemember BuyThisSatellite? So your man heard about Terrestar going bankrupt and one of their comsats going begging, and had the brilliant idea of crowdsourcing the money to buy the thing and redeploy it over Africa or perhaps Iran and, uh, provide Internet access to people who really needed it. So what happened? Well, someone with…
Read More Rewind on a project