The crazy thing about neoliberals is that they love markets right up to the point that someone tries to create a market in their ideas. Biden has been forced to confront neoliberal madness head on
2023
Highbrow media are setting up Sunak v Starmer as a battle of the centrist dads. Never was a frame so improbable. Sunak is a “state capacity libertarian” and Starmer a “reforming” Christian democrat. A right-wing battle far from the failing systems of country crashing into penury.
Some tools in the can. Looks pretty secure.
On changing the brushes on the motors when the battery is flat
Monday, February 27, 2023
Leave politics aside a sec and ask yourself, who is being feather-bedded when businesses are uncompetitive, have low productivity and live of rents? The owners of capital and the executives who see their returns and remuneration rise “to the moon”? Or the workers whose wages are stagnating? In Britain, the Tories have decided the problem is that the workers enjoy a feather-bed of the right to strike and employment protections.Okay. So, thanks to Geofency and Pipedream, I can annoy you all with my arrivals at and departures from selected locations.
Sense of Wonder
Saturday, February 25, 2023
There’s this sci-fi trope where our time-travelling hero in the past lets the future know when she is by taking out a classified ad for something that couldn’t exist at the time. When I was studying physics at school, mechanics was just classical mechanics, and I kind of got this because I was studying physics just as the “standard model” was being named. Being a kid, I thought quantum mechanics, all the extra-curricular stuff I was reading about, was pretty new.Are Tories blind to structural problems? Does their privilege lead them to really, truly believe the world is a Disney movie?
one of the best ways for people to boost their income is not only to get into work if they are not in work already, but to work more hours or get upskilled to get a higher income.
I like Yubico YubiKeys - sound idea for improving online personal security, I think. I own a couple. But their marcomms is utter kack.
Bought some nice-looking russets from the local M&S, but they’re rubbish: flavourless and squishy. So making apple pie with what I can find about the flat - “Classic Christmas spice”, ginger, Muscovado sugar, sweet-potato flour, and frozen vegan ready-made shortcrust pastry.
I generally avoid vegetables with trademarks, but Kalettes(TM) are seriously tasty. I braise them with shallots, dried chilli flakes, panch phoran, garlic and a splash of rice wine. Good enough to be probably illegal.
Alexa seems to like chicken.
Putting ANPRs on pelican crossings and fining every driver who runs a red light would seem to be an easy money spinner for London.
Is it that graffiti is not art, or that all that art is is pissing on lampposts?
Road racer’s engine is louder than the sirens of the police chasing after down the A13
I’m leaving Stratford International on the DLR from platform 2. Have literally never seen a DLR leave from platform 2 before. Let alone be on it.
What are the Americans shooting down? De-orbiting Teslas?
A brief musing on political centrism
Sunday, February 12, 2023
I’ve struggled with the concept of political centrism. I’ve found its positioning as “moderate” or “in the middle” of a left/right continuum at odds with its political incoherence and its totalising tendencies. I think centrism is better understood as a form of populism - bourgeois populism - if you like. It bundles up the shibboleths of the “metropolitain elite” (incoherence) and decries opposition as uncredentialed ignorance, and therefore illigitimate (totalising). As such it is little different from national populism, except that it centres “the people” on the better-credentialled professional classes, and demonises opponents not like them.Uttering sound bites while wearing a high viz jacket is not an industrial strategy.
Reading Liz Truss’s piece in the Sunday Telegraph, I can only conclude that the UK political right has spent far too long, with way too much cocaine, talking to itself in darkened rooms. The only solution is sunlight and a lengthy period of cold turkey. Alas for us, we’re stuck the the Tories for another two years.
Elon Cohaagen cutting off the oxygen in Venusville is fiction, right?
Reading about power outages and trees exploding from the cold, and the best we’ve got is the wrong kind of snow every decade or so.
Dockhunt: closer to that journalistic slip of the tongue than the UK chancellor of the exchequer.
Not sure how public sector workers contribute to the “wage/price spiral” given their labour isn’t sold for profit on the open market.
The workers being lowered into the sewer are all Irish. This is England! We expect foreigners to clean up our shit.
What is your worst walk? Mine is Canning Town to the Greenway via Manor Road. Nasty in all weathers.
The BBC’s review into its taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt output is interesting and worth a look, as is this commentary from Richard Murphy.
Newham Council would like people to drive less and walk more. It’s a laudable aim even if, as we heard at the “budget summit” they favour the stick over the carrot. Today, it’s an icy morning and the walking routes to local schools are ungritted.
I have some thoughts and comments about reforming NHS bureaucracy. I tried referring myself to Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, but they wouldn’t see me. I have to follow appropriate channels.
The UK may avoid a recession for now but it won’t feel like it for many
Britain avoids recession because population permanently drunk.
Hedge funds holding up vital debt relief for crisis-hit Sri Lanka, warn economists
Bastards will bastard.