Links

Really superb study of the Iraqi post-Ba’athist insurgent movement led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri. Yes, that’s the guy who was a deputy of Saddam’s and about number three in the pack of cards, still out there to this day.

Similarly, how the Americans were still trying to make Iyad Allawi boss of Iraq, even backing up the airstair with derringer in hand.

Nate Silver on why economists should be more like weather forecasters. He has a point – among other things, weathermen don’t try to forecast the behaviour of a representative water molecule, precisely because its behaviour would be nondeterministic. And they care when they are wrong.

The sinking labour share: at the TUC. I recently read an economic paper purporting to account for the decoupling between productivity growth and wages growth which concluded that the decoupling was mostly accounted for by inequality (i.e. all the wage growth was concentrated at the top), and therefore…it wasn’t a problem. Which tells you more about economists-as-in-Trotskyists-rather-than-scientists than anything else.

Liu Jinxiang, former deputy mayor of Guangzhou in charge of finance:

“If, by socialism, you mean more equality, then Sweden is more socialist than China. Many aspects of the old Chinese society have survived. People don’t really know they are aiming for any more. We have no criteria, no model to follow. How should we define our system — market economy, socialism, state capitalism? None of these concepts really fit. That’s why there is such confusion over which direction we should go in. We have a lot of theoretical work to do. You could say that we are in the phase of state capitalism as a means of building a socialist society where there is more room for individuality.”

(Before us there is nothing but a black square on a white background, as Kasimir Malevich said and, uh, Ed Hugh used to use as his e-mail sig block.)

Oh dear.

Oh yes.

Is the US actually having a post-Soviet experience? Terrifying article is terrifying.

So, do you hate workers more than you hate flesh-eating bugs? This point is made:

Yet when the problem is bacteria on surfaces, eliminating them depends on the building-services crews. “This is the level in the hospital hierarchy where you have the least investment, the least status and the least respect,” says Jan Patterson, president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. Traditionally, medical centers regard janitors as disposable workers—hard to train because their first language may not be English and not worth training because they may not stay long in their jobs.

At N.Y.U. Langone in 2010, Phillips and his co-workers launched a pilot project that redefined those formerly disposable workers as critical partners in patient protection. Janitors, they realized, know better than anyone else which rails are touched most frequently and which handles are hardest to clean.

It’s as if…social democracy was a good idea.

Cash machine PRNGs aren’t very random or even very pseudo-random, and you guessed it, there’s a live exploit. Not having tied a national ID card to this system, like Charles Clarke wanted, is almost worth not having a Labour government…almost. But see above.

Somehow takes the fun out of it, although the thought of Michael Gove and Simon Jenkins trying to discuss Victorian values through it puts the fun right back in.

Max Hastings’ memoirs say that in Da Nang in 1975, during the evacuation, he encountered a western civilian in the street, carrying two submachine guns, festooned with Air America jewellery. “Are you CIA?” he asked. “I’m with the Save the Children Fund”, he said. See also.

How on earth did the boss of High Speed Trains end up saying that the project had “benefits, too”? Don’t these people have PRs?