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From Marwood Lennox’s post: Someone reading a draft has pointed out that this proposal is to make the whole of the UK into Northern Ireland. Just as well then the DUP are now close to the government, they are the experts in building up a bureaucracy to its advantage using other people’s money You know,…

I’ve had various feedback about the Two Cultures 2017: Merit vs. Brilliance post – ranging from “Yes…yes…now I see it” to “How dare you call these people brilliant?!” However, over Christmas, events gave us something better than another wall of text. They gave us a visceral object lesson, like so: Langan was kidnapped by the…

This story is fascinating. So there’s this e-commerce company that basically asks second- or third-tier Chinese manufacturers to do their worst, and advertises it to you. If you’re willing to wait 14 days for delivery, it’s dead cheap. This suggests they may even be manufacturing on demand and air freighting, eliminating inventory as far as…

David Davis’ sensational confession that he hadn’t done the Brexit impact assessments and in fact hadn’t bothered to read the halfbaked document pulled together after it became clear he couldn’t get away without releasing something gave me an insight. There is a huge cultural divide in the country between two forces we could call the…

I was reading this post about White House CoS John Kelly trying to control Trump’s consumption of #snackable #edgy #content and failing when it reminded me of something. Trump Twitter is like Cyberfolk but shit. To unpack a bit, while cybernetics pioneer and blog icon Stafford Beer was working on Cybersyn, Chile’s experimental real-time planned…

I have just been re-reading Dr Mike Martin’s An Intimate War, his anthropological study of the conflict in Helmand the British army was inserted into. Something that struck me this time round: Martin’s account of the role of rumours and conspiracy theories, what we might now call fake news. Martin reports encountering many people who…

Following up on the previous post, here’s something fascinating. The developers of an AI project that is meant to provide a vast base of conceptual associations to help computers process text in English are trying to purge it of racism. As I understand it, ConceptNet is meant to help your application parse incoming natural language…

Will Davies writes about immigration, politics, and what he calls the “collapse of statistical reason”: The macro-economic case for immigration – that it is a net positive for both public finances and economic growth – was integral to New Labour’s tacit, occasionally explicit, support for high levels of immigration. This was a broadly neoliberal type…

It’s time for another 2007 Revival! carrier watch post. It looks like the forward-based carrier, Reagan, is fully ready. Nimitz is committed to the Middle East. Bush is eight thousand miles away, in UK home waters. Truman, Lincoln, and Vinson are in early phases of training. Eisenhower, Washington, and Stennis are in bits in the…