If you are not regularly reading Michael Yon, you are really missing out on something interesting.
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There’s a new social trend in Belfast whereby women are dropping their children off to school still in their pajamas. This has got the local worthies of Belfast worried, and a little peeved.
Bloggers, who of course are famous for working in their pajamas, should rally around the millies, and defend their right to drop off their offspring at school, no matter how unsightly it may appear. First they came for the millies…. June 9th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am not particularly in favour of sucking up to the Saudis, or of political subsidy for the British arms industry; but can someone please explain why this is vicious nasty corriuption that ought to be internaltionally banned even if it is the custom where the deal is done, and this is a UK local government policy raising a mere £2,500 million a year, in June 8th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 8th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I will be travelling (with another esteemed Samizdata editor) to Addis Ababa this weekend and stay in Ethiopia for about a week. I have read many fascinating things about the country but I have no idea what to expect. So tips and suggestions are welcome. I plan to travel outside the capital – it was a toss up between Axum and Lalibela. In the end the latter won as the rock-hewn churches are amazing. Also it is a shorter flight, which given time constraints is preferable. Thanks to Graham of Noodlepie I have learnt about the vibrant Ethiopian political blogosphere. Any Ethiopian bloggers worthy of note? June 7th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have no idea what it tastes like, but what a name. I am in the village where they make the stuff. June 7th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a great French historian has pointed out, the vineyards of France are perhaps the single greatest cultural legacy of the Roman empire, and it is now more than two millennia since people in Britain first became aware of the intoxicating powers of wine. In all that time, no government in history has yet thought the people so moronic that they needed to be told, on the bottle, that wine could go to your head – Boris Johnson, discussing plans to put warning labels on wine. June 7th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the ‘goods’ with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing. The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices. Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:
So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath. 🙂 cross-posted from Media Influencer June 7th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Home Office [Bureau of State Security for overseas readers] would be ludicrous in its crudity, if it did not present such a threat to liberty. Bids for more arbitrary power are always, but always, acompanied by a scare story. Today’s example: Reid proposes register for terror offenders
Is juxtaposed with: Security checks on petrol tankers in London
The first story is filed by the Times’ home affairs editor. The second by an interesting chap called Sean O’Neill, co-author of The Suicide Factory a highly sensational account of Abu Hamza’s career at Finsbury Park mosque. According to his agent’s website:
Mr O’Neill has something of a speciality in reporting the suspicions of the authorities. He clearly has very good police and intelligence contacts, and can make a livid story out of a change in a police checklist. But the inclination of such unofficial official contacts will be to feed such tidbits to the press to suit themselves, knowing an energetic journalist will make much of them. June 7th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alice Thomson has writen an interesting article called Be a ‘bad’ parent and let your children out in which she decries the enervating risk-averse trends in which parents, with the encouragement of our political masters, try to supervise and regulate every aspect of their children’s lives. The comments are also quite interesting. One of them , calling herself ‘Mum’, bristles at the suggestion Thomson makes:
Well ‘Mum’, I do not have any children either but I am very happy you were not my ‘Mum. Moreover I, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child. I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision. June 6th, 2007 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the early 1980s, American telecommunications company AT&T commissioned management consultancy McKinsey to conduct some research into the newly invented mobile phone. How large was the market for these new devices likely to be? In a report that now makes hilariously funny reading, McKinsey predicted that there would be a world market for about 900,000 of these devices*. This led to AT&T initially not investing in the new technology. In 1994 they entered the business by buying the mobile phone business created by Craig McCaw, and after an assortment of forwards, reverse, and sideways takeovers this business lives on as AT&T Mobility today. It is possible to compare this number with the actual size of the world market for mobile phones – there are now around three billion active mobile phones in the world. That is straight and to the point. However, other kinds of comparison perhaps better illustrate just how wrong the prediction was. For instance the number of phones that McKinsey predicted would make up the world market is almost exactly the same number of phones that Britons accidentally dropped in the toilet in 2006 (* For the sake of honesty, I do have to point out that McKinsey actually did make that prediction of 900,000 as the size of the market “for the year 2000”. Yes, they did pretty much choose a year randomly and they were predicting 900,000 on a “that’s pretty much everyone who will want one” basis, but it must none the less be mentioned. In any event, there were about half a billion mobile phones in the world by 2000, so they were still out by a touch) June 6th, 2007 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favour of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office. – H. L. Mencken June 5th, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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