The Monkey Cage has an interesting post on how British political parties spent their money in the 2015 general election. Specifically, they plotted spending as a percentage of the short campaign limit against how marginal each seat was. The more marginal a seat is, the greater chance you have of picking it up – or…
Read More How to win a general electionHere is a really superb paper on the 50 cent party, the Chinese Communist Party’s army of loyalist Internet trolls. The researchers scraped literally millions of below-the-line comments and Weibo posts, hired Chinese students to identify the 50-centers in random samples and classify the posts by subject, checked that the students, who worked independently, agreed…
Read More This is what the mandate of heaven looks likeIt’s pretty depressing that British politicians are shallow enough all to glom onto the same risible fad at the same time: It’s a thing. It’s definitely a thing. Someone is telling them to stand like this. pic.twitter.com/RcvelFujVa — SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) June 2, 2016 It’s even more depressing that the risible fad in question is also…
Read More This one weird trick will completely fail to replicate the previous experimenter’s resultsOut funder Peter Hargreaves thinks leaving the European Union would be “like Dunkirk” and would turn us “into Singapore”. That he mentions two of the most catastrophic disasters in our history is surely Freudian. Dunkirk saw the British Army booted off the continent of Europe, forced to sabotage every bit of its equipment heavier than…
Read More #Brexit: strategic incompetence for fun and profitEveryone is talking about the Tory election spending thing. Apparently, there are MPs who fear they might go to jail. The latest break involves letters sent out over David Cameron’s signature, which may count against the local spending limit because they addressed the reader as living in the constituency in question. But that wasn’t the…
Read More Tory election spending and the #codgerbonds. Can you help?So it looks like the local elections didn’t go so badly. While we’re in the intermediate phase between Corbyn’s Labour doing something reasonably well, and them throwing it all away through some sort of terrible cake-and-arse juggle, I’d like to take note of something. John Curtice reckoned we should expect a net-loss of about 170…
Read More One good thing: a better electoral forecasting modelIt looks like everyone’s favourite Tory thinktank has a plan to solve the housing crisis, and it’s pretty simple! It said acquisition of the land would be financed by a private-public joint venture, with the government contributing 49 per cent – about £3.1bn a year – alongside institutional investors. It would represent the largest government…
Read More Policy Exchange plagiarised me…and I loved itThis Peter Hitchens post is fascinating. First of all, there’s the massive degree of psychological projection on show. He spends hundreds of words berating literally the whole of the nation for lacking the courage to leap out of the European Union in favour of….whatever it is the Outs are in favour of. And then he…
Read More The Hitchens has spoken, and he said “You go first”Two exhibitions on Saturday: Calder at the Tate and Big Bang Data at Somerset House. There was something I didn’t like about both. Calder’s curators are apparently convinced that none of the motorised works can be allowed to run in case something terrible happens. Weirdly, they don’t draw the matching conclusion and weld the mobiles…
Read More Software is not a painting.Has anyone else noticed all the signs of change? Of course, it’s terrible. None of us is getting any younger. That isn’t quite what I mean, though. I mean signs, signage, graphic design in the public realm. There are a hell of a lot around that say something like X – it could be benefits,…
Read More #ischanging: the KEEP CALM of the future 2010s revival