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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 Teardown

Following up on this post, there’s been a surprisingly good parliamentary debate on the practice of using bogus lawsuits to intimidate journalists and MPs, which touches more than I expected on the impact of kleptocracy in British politics. I have some objections to this – where was Liam Byrne on this when he was a…

Read More A little more

I promised to enlarge on this Twitter thread, so I will. Unfortunately the inciting incident has fallen prey to that terrible depressing habit of bulk-deleting one’s tweets on a schedule, but the point Michael Hobbes was making was about the way all kinds of tiny niche interests have developed a recognisable structure of celebrity-fan relationships,…

Read More a case study of troll-host symbiosis

Jon Lawrence set off with a cracking idea. One of the most important intellectual projects of the last decade has been the so-called replication crisis, the effort to find out if major psychology experiments’ results can be repeated. It turns out they can’t; a combination of stubborn prejudice, poor statistical methods, and academic career incentives…

Read More Me, Me, Me? In Search of Community

Here’s a topic that’s bound to delight everyone. The best way I can think of to understand the social place of the British monarchy is as a very modern influencer content-marketing and celebrity management operation, the influencer house of Windsor. Starting in the late 1960s, there was a deliberate project to reinvent the institution in…

Read More The monarchy as a content-marketing operation

During the first lockdown I got around to watching the General Magic documentary. Having worked in the mobile industry for practically all my career so far, I am not surprisingly fascinated by the history of the technology and the repeated roads not taken. General Magic was a spinoff from Apple in the 1990s that tried…

Read More Three links on failure in Silicon Valley

When I was despairing about the very possibility of accountability and coming up with this post, I was thinking of things like this piece from Josephine Cumbo in this weekend’s Financial Times: Data obtained through a Freedom of Information request showed that since 2018 the Financial Conduct Authority has opened formal investigations into 29 firms…

Read More Rotten

Around the end of August I was despairing of political accountability on the grounds that the effectiveness of what is generally called spin, the practice of tactical political publicity, seemed to have improved significantly since about 2005. What really worried me about it is that if it’s a technology, it can be improved, and as…

Read More Cataloguing spin

So it looks like I’m not the only one thinking about Johnson and acracy: Johnson’s explanation for all these things is that he suffers from the classical vice of akrasia. He knows what the right thing to do is but acts against his better judgement through lack of self-control. He is, in Aristotle’s words, like…

Read More Acracy followup

Following Dan Davies’ tracers here. The guy who the care-home industry pushed out to pick a row with the prime minister this week, hoping it would divert attention from their atrocious labour practices and how they helped their customers catch COVID-19, turns out to be the very same whose £100m-big operation got caught perpetrating £20k…

Read More Alternative, Terrible Models of Ownership