October 2013

This is a fascinating and shocking story. The main problem with the auto-enrolment pensions system seems to be that the middleware that links Company X’s payroll solution to the pension fund is stupidly expensive. And I mean stupidly expensive, like £50 a signup plus £50 a year per-head recurring. As a result, the financial advisers…

Read More Digital disruption disrupts, except when it doesn’t

So, back in March we were transitioning towards a low-trust society via the phenomenon of the bogus hairdresser. I identified a maximum at the chilly limit of 1.16 million people who might be kept off the official unemployment number via Work Programme wipe-your-own-arse classes, zero wage placements, or bogus hairdressing. I didn’t believe it was…

Read More The missing millions, found hairdressing

I’ll be having more to say about the latest Snowdonian revelations as they apply to macro-politics, probably at the Fistful. In the meantime, the document at Le Monde is interesting from a technical point of view. They mention attacking a PBX – quite a common issue, because a lot of them are proprietary and not…

Read More The problem: the US can’t promise information security to anyone

The Royal African Society’s African Arguments blog is superb. Being Burundi’s chief inspector of taxation. Why are there riots in Sudan, and what’s likely to happen? Nigerian jihadis attack schools. Rwanda doesn’t like the ICC very much but did recently help it arrest Bosco Ntaganda. Why? “That something will try to discuss the nuclear dimension…

Read More Links, globally

Frances Coppola’s fine blog points out that Will Hutton is wrong, and so is George Osborne. Letting Chinese banks trade in the UK as branches of the parent company (like: Bank of Ireland), not subsidiaries (like: Bank of Ireland (UK) Ltd), may perhaps get the UK taxpayer off the hook should they go bust but…

Read More We don’t need two kinds of bank, “bank” and “bank(if you dare)”

This here is quality from Agata Pyzik. The minor detail that there is no evidence any central bank actually uses the famous Taylor rule, and the somewhat less minor one that using it requires making a priori decisions about two of its parameters as well as the inflation target itself. I occasionally wondered precisely what…

Read More Links

OK, a book. British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Military Strategy and Operational Art), available from the book company. Recommendation from Tom Ricks. I’ve not finished the book yet, but the big stand-out issue here is: Why is nobody responsible? Hardly anyone sees Iraq as anything other than a disaster. Meanwhile, the British armed forces have…

Read More It’s nobody’s fault and nobody is sorry.