Here’s Tory MP Greg Barker just giving up, giving up and passing out the talking points from his financial backers directly, without any further intervention on his part. npower response to Labour energy policy announcement http://t.co/hf1lbbZZj3 — Greg Barker (@GregBarkerMP) September 24, 2013 He may yet delete it, so: Ha ha, Tories doing PR for…
Read More A slight return to Gambetta vs. NpowerSo, I’ve been having a war with my exciting privatised energy vendor. Again. We had a chat about this in this post on think-of-a-number prices, but another opportunity came around. The day before the monthly direct debit payment went out, a letter lands saying that they’ve just doubled, yes doubled, the amount. Thanks. Anyway, of…
Read More Reading Gambetta and Clausewitz in an emerging low-trust societyHere is the first ad in the government campaign for the deployment of so-called smart energy meters, a giant Internet of Things project that’s not going so well. So here we have the charming little tykes Gaz and Leccy, a pair of mischievous pseudo-adolescents bouncing around causing trouble for the tired-olds (check out that astonishingly…
Read More Taking back control: Gaz, Leccy, and Frank FieldPeter Pomerantsev goes to Mongolia and meets the president, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur turned politician. Specifically, an all-purpose post-Soviet entrepreneur and martial arts champ who named his company after The Godfather. This isn’t just eccentric; in Codes of the Underworld, Diego Gambetta has a fascinating chapter on the role movies played in the making of…
Read More The Godfather, Trump, and PutinThis piece about UX research on smart meters could be retitled “How I Quit Smoking The Data”, to say nothing of this one. I really dislike a lot of the funky energy/M2M/Internet of Things concepts because they basically shame you for boiling the kettle, and either work because you do daft middle class lifestyle bollocks…
Read More how I quit smoking energy dataThe Ed has got everyone’s attention by promising to freeze consumer energy prices. It’s one of those moments, as with hackgate and Syria, when he succeeds in making the prime minister look irrelevant and bypassed. Having whined a bit, at least some of the energy companies moved to accept the policy voluntarily. The most interesting…
Read More Rolling back the frontiers of privatisationOn a similar theme to the last post, this Twitter discussion led me to something interesting: https://twitter.com/relume1/status/265117766896476160 The linked Harvard Business School paper, which is good and worth reading, concludes that the craze for delayering in business since the 1980s, which was sold as a way of devolving decision-making authority to lower levels in organisations,…
Read More On the theory of the pathological firmUpdate: I originally didn’t want to publish this because I didn’t think it was good enough, but I hit the wrong button. Anyway, Alistair Morgan read it and thinks one of the premises of the whole thing is wrong. Namely, the weapons were going in the same direction as the drugs, not the other way…
Read More Protection….Update: I originally didn’t want to publish this because I didn’t think it was good enough, but I hit the wrong button. Anyway, Alistair Morgan read it and thinks one of the premises of the whole thing is wrong. Namely, the weapons were going in the same direction as the drugs, not the other way…
Read More Protection….Extremists. I can’t help but think this is a contribution to the ongoing debate about hero-of-the-blog Diego Gambetta’s work on engineers and terrorism. If stuff is upside down before you start the riot, fire, explosion, etc., your extremist cell could probably do with more engineers. Meanwhile, the SELF THOUGHT SPIRITUAL SCIENTIST guy next to him…
Read More mildly amusing roundup