So here’s the Parliamentary Select Committee on DCMS’s fake news report. Rather, its report on fake news. This bit has been doing the rounds: ‘Free Basics’ is a Facebook service that provides people in developing countries with mobile phone access to various services without data charges. This content includes news, employment, health, information and local…
Read More Now that’s what I call viralBoris Johnson’s private behaviour is public again this week, which is almost a pity, as some of the chickens stirred up by his public behaviour as Mayor of London are coming home to roost. For a start there is, or was, Wonga. Last weekend I was on the tube when I noticed something unusual –…
Read More Relics of the Johnson AdministrationReading this New Statesman piece about the deselection of MPs Graham Stringer, Frank Field, and Kate Hoey, it struck me that there is a much better way to understand most things about the Labour Party than you are usually offered. Here goes. The most important thing Labour people are disagreeing about is which of two…
Read More Why Field & Co. must be deselected.While we’re talking fraud, this NYT piece on people who sell YouTube views is fascinating and enlightening. YouTube counts how many people watch videos, puts the number next to them, and uses this to account for advertising money and decide which videos to promote. It’s therefore worthwhile to program a computer to click on your…
Read More The Inversion: or why everything sucks.We’ve not done one of these for a while so here goes. Dan Davies’ Lying for Money is an economic history of fraud which emphasises its relationship with the social trust necessary for civilisation. Practices like accounting, auditing, and record-keeping are in some sense technologies that permit us to manufacture artificial trust, and of course…
Read More BoooksSo, about a year ago, I was writing about how the last thing Eurosceptics agreed on was what they were against. Now, it’s a commonplace to argue about whether Jeremy Corbyn – or some other politician, but usually him – is “really a Eurosceptic”. I think this question is no longer meaningful in the terms…
Read More What are Eurosceptics?This Left Outside post is getting attention, and it’s good: That brings us to the least obvious, but most damaging effect of rating your waitress. Good management is good. Better management can drive big improvements in productivity. And everyone knows how bad it is to have a bad manager, it can be utterly hellish. In…
Read More Star ratings can’t leave you to improveSo I was talking about Coasian hell the other day. Here’s a great example. The franchisee of the Great Northern, Thameslink, and Southern railway routes decided to pay its penalty clauses in advance of taking over the franchise. Until September 2018, however bad the trains get, it won’t cost them any more than the £10m…
Read More Coasian Hell: ThameslinkI am beginning to worry that the government, and specifically the Home Office, thinks 80% accuracy is nearly 99%. At the same time as the FT was arguing for a national biometric identity database, it also dropped this scoop. The Home Office seems to have used some sort of voice identification test in an effort…
Read More 80% accuracy is not nearly 99%A lot of people seem to think the Windrush scandal is an argument for national ID cards, and as a result, the Financial Times ran this collection of four short articles on four different experiences. This includes two European ones that are kind of OK, the disastrous Indian Aadhaar project, and one that hasn’t happened…
Read More What’s worse than ID cards? The ID card register without the cards