2018

This War on the Rocks post is excellent, making the case that Hamas has succeeded in denying the Israelis escalation-dominance and this is why a cold peace is holding-ish. These TYR Flashbacks! refer (one, two, three, four.)

Read More SSP

So here’s the Parliamentary Select Committee on DCMS’s fake news report. Rather, its report on fake news. This bit has been doing the rounds: ‘Free Basics’ is a Facebook service that provides people in developing countries with mobile phone access to various services without data charges. This content includes news, employment, health, information and local…

Read More Now that’s what I call viral

While we’re talking fraud, this NYT piece on people who sell YouTube views is fascinating and enlightening. YouTube counts how many people watch videos, puts the number next to them, and uses this to account for advertising money and decide which videos to promote. It’s therefore worthwhile to program a computer to click on your…

Read More The Inversion: or why everything sucks.

We’ve not done one of these for a while so here goes. Dan Davies’ Lying for Money is an economic history of fraud which emphasises its relationship with the social trust necessary for civilisation. Practices like accounting, auditing, and record-keeping are in some sense technologies that permit us to manufacture artificial trust, and of course…

Read More Boooks

This Left Outside post is getting attention, and it’s good: That brings us to the least obvious, but most damaging effect of rating your waitress. Good management is good. Better management can drive big improvements in productivity. And everyone knows how bad it is to have a bad manager, it can be utterly hellish. In…

Read More Star ratings can’t leave you to improve