It’s not that Google has become the US’s second biggest spender lobbying – the US telcos, a notoriously ferocious lobby, are the biggest and their behaviour imposes it. It’s this: In May 2012, the law school at George Mason University hosted a forum billed as a “vibrant discussion” about Internet search competition. Many of the…
Read More Oh, Google.My old student mate Julian Hofmann, half-German and I don’t know what, has given up on Private Eye and pharma industry trade journalism in favour of raising beef cattle in Devon. The blog is here. I find this a little bit funny. Julian is one of the most comprehensively bookish people I’ve ever met. At…
Read More department of mates’ ratesOK, just to clear the schedule a bit, here’s a general books post. Fly By Wire: The Geese, The Glide, The ‘Miracle’ on the Hudson. Various readers recommended this one; being about aviation and by William Langewiesche it wasn’t a hard sell. The book is (obviously) about the US Airways A320 that ditched successfully in…
Read More Booooks.This post is a response to readers’ input to the open newslist Daniel Davies mocked this guy, as having placed his bets on Camden staying deeply cool and missed out on the migration east. But he has a point. Our startup moved to Shoreditch in 2008, making us a relatively early one although not first-generation.…
Read More Shoreditch twats: not quite as bad as property developersI fucking told you. Eric Pickles has signed up for the deeply dodgy Create Streets agenda, on the basis of a report drawn up by a bunch of estate agents. On which planet isn’t this an outrageous conflict of interest? Also, he wants to get rid of terribad concrete towers through….system building. But Mr Pickles…
Read More DEMOLISH ALL THE THINGS.I have recently been reading a lot of books. Ironically, this was in part because I left a Kindle on a plane and had to get the app instead – having the books so temptingly close caused very rapid consumption. Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai by Robert Bickers, is the personal history…
Read More The personal history of a Lancashire fascist