After sleeping on it, I'm still quite enthused by my suggestion for a ruthlessly scoopish news feed that I commented over at Scripting News yesterday. In answer to the question "how will we get our news if journalism dies" : Maybe a site *only* for "scoops", ie. breaking news stories which haven't b...

Something kind of hilarious just struck me. About the blinkered thinking that economics can encourage. The main claim for the virtue of markets is that they co-ordinate supply and demand. But the big political problem we face now in a recession is jobs and unemployment. In other words, supply and de...

People seem to be concerned that Lloyds, despite making a massive loss and being on the verge of nationalization, wants to pay bonuses to lower-paid staff. Immediately this raises the question of why fairly ordinary staff are being paid bonuses for merely "hitting their targets". After all, if bonus...

In response to the last post Oli commented : I'm not convinced that an economy with a growing numerical size (as measured by some currency) necessarily has to have a growing ecological footprint. Agreed in principle. But probably hard to find counter-examples in practice. Basically, if the *numbers*...

This "takedown" of Barbera Ehrenreich is total bullshit. Condensed (read the comments) : Charles Platt : I worked at Walmart and it wasn't too bad. Commentators : But you didn't try to live off your salary; which was kind of the point of the Ehrenreich book. Platt : Ah, but she was stupid / selfish ...

I just suddenly feel like commenting on a discussion about Momus's recent albums. Some people think they're not as good as his old stuff. Some people disagree. However, what strikes me more than whether the noughties are "better" or "worse" than earlier decades, is that the new albums recapitulate e...

Incredibly, enterprise RSS is dead! My first, flippant thought : Enterprises just take forever to adopt stuff ... give it another 10 years or so. But that's not really true. I'd suspect that the real issue is this. Enterprises are a life-form with a certain kind of structure, held together by specif...

One thing that infuriates my wife is that whenever she gives an opinion about something, I almost always start to disagree. Not so much because I disagree, but because seeing three sides of an argument is *interesting* to me. And hearing one side immediately triggers my attempt to find counters. Aft...

Being unemployed / post-Christmas holidays are great! :-) Here's roughly what I'm up-to at the moment. jQuery / Javascript / Titanium I've pretty much got jQuery under my belt. (Not hard, really) and am playing a lot with Javascript, now in Chrome. (Which is nice and fast and hasn't caused me any pr...

K-Punk on Oliver Postgate : This was the voice of an adult speaking to children; an obvious point, no doubt, but where in children's TV now would you find such a mode of address? There are no children, there are no adults, there is no wonder: only adolescents in waiting, being spoken to by screaming...