Well, that was grim, wasn't it? I refer, of course, to the new government. Having read through the coalition agreement, I'm almost convinced by Charlie and Jamie's argument that it's really not that bad. Almost. I'm not particularly worried by the supposed 55% thing either, for reasons well explained here - it's fairly obviously an attempt to self-bind, a costly signal of commitment to cement the deal, and it's probably content-free.
On the other hand, there's the NAMELESS DREAD. It's pre-rational, emotional, Lovecraftesque...political. And look at some of the gargoyles and Queen's bad bargains in the government. Also, Vince Cable at the Mandelsonministerium is a reasonably good idea, but couldn't we have got at least one real job? Obviously, the Tories couldn't have worn a Liberal foreign secretary for ideological reasons.
What went wrong with this post? I think the key unexamined assumption was that the Labour Party could be treated as a united actor for negotiating purposes; I didn't take into account that significant numbers of backbench MPs wouldn't support a coalition or wouldn't support an electoral reform bill. I still believe that significant numbers of Tory backbenchers will rebel, but the coalition whips have more leverage over them with the Liberals as a reserve pool. Obviously, it's telling that the Labour whipping operation would pick this moment, rather than - say - March 2003, to break down.
It's also telling just who was lobbying the Labour backbenches; David Blunkett, John Reid, and Charles Clarke! The three monkeys of Blairite authoritarianism, a sort of negative triumvirate of failed home secretaries. Because, after all, as I said about identity cards back in 2004, we are going to win. That is, in fact, the only good thing here; the achievement of NO2ID and Phil Booth is that all political parties except one went into the 2010 general election pledged to abolish the National Identity Scheme. And, crucially, the civil service gets it - I hear that IPS is actively looking at contingency plans as to what to do with its officials when the NIS shuts down, how to cancel the contracts, disposing of office space and kit, that kind of stuff.
Hilariously, my dad spent quite a lot of time trying to get the IPS to give him an identity card, in order to demonstrate various flaws in the process - he was eventually issued one after the intervention of the chief of identity cards. He's now trying to decide whether to sell it on EBay or frame it. Does anyone have suggestions as to what to do with an British National Identity Card?
So, no ID cards, no NIR, no ContactPoint. Home Office junior ministers have swung from people like Phil Woolas to Lynne Featherstone. I should be delighted. But then, yes, nameless dread. I agree that it wasn't so long ago that it looked like we'd get Dave from PR with a majority of 100, so I should be pleased that the damage control exercise has been a success. But, no. Perhaps I should concentrate on MySociety stuff; perhaps I should concentrate on London politics. I have no idea if I'm going to stay a Liberal member.
One thing that will be happening is a new blog patterned on Boriswatch that will be covering our Stable and Principled new government, especially the unstable and unprincipled bits.Check out our statistical model of coalition survival, which is currently showing them sticking it out for the full five years...yup, nameless dread all right.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Sunday, May 09, 2010
a politics lesson
Back to the politics, although of a different kind. Here's the Guardian's piece on Alfie McKenzie, the 14-year old socialist who succeeded in voting on Thursday. What strikes me as politically interesting here isn't that Alfie's a socialist, or that he pulled it off, or even that he refused to speak to the Daily Hell on principle, but this bit from the news story:
What a wonderful human being that teacher must be. There's a political lesson for you - if you tell them anything in confidence, they'll rat on you. Alternatively, the behaviour of responsible adults is to snoop and betray confidences. Obviously, which lesson is learned will depend on the pupil.
He went home, changed into his uniform, and got the bus to St Aidan's school, where he made the fatal mistake of confiding in a few friends, and telling a teacher in strict confidence. "The teacher went straight to the head, and the head called the council – but I don't think the council had a clue what to do about it in the beginning."
What a wonderful human being that teacher must be. There's a political lesson for you - if you tell them anything in confidence, they'll rat on you. Alternatively, the behaviour of responsible adults is to snoop and betray confidences. Obviously, which lesson is learned will depend on the pupil.
the tape recorder, for special music
OK, something other than a relentless focus on politics for a moment. I mentioned on my facebook profile - which is showing worrying signs of developing into a permanent fixture, at least for elections-related stuff - that my boss's band was supporting the former singer of this lot at what turned out to be her new band's first gig. Turns out there's a blog. And there's video.
what hits?
My favourite election moments, in no particular order: Posters go viral. Donal Blaney gets disavowed. David Vance decides to test the ripcord on his suicide vest before going on the mission. Tory candidate quotes TheyWorkForYou on his leaflet; DemocracyClub volunteer gets tasked to document local campaign; uploads leaflet to TheStraightChoice; rejoicing and LotsOfInterCapping on MySociety DevelopersPublicMailingList.
how criminals communicate
A quick lesson in political plane-spotting: we observe, about 2.25pm today, a small business jet type, with minimal wing sweep and a tail about half-way up the fin, in an approach profile heading northwest over North London. Conclusions? It's an RAF Hawker 125 heading into Northolt, and Gordon Brown is probably back in London.
This article, meanwhile, is one of the most factual I've read so far.
Something I think is worth pointing out: Labour plus the Liberals, plus the sister parties who take the whip automatically, only need three seats to reach the 322 mark (don't forget the Sinn Feiners). Plaid Cymru would do. And it's not a question of forming a three- or four-party coalition. You can have a coalition with the Liberals and a toleration agreement with Plaid (or the SNP, or whoever). Arguably there are constitutional issues with Scottish, Welsh, or NI parties having ministerial posts with UK-wide responsibility - I'm on record as saying that no-one has ever been killed as a result of the West Lothian question, but it's a point.
Also, Labour has leverage on the Scots and Welsh parties; Labour did well in Scotland, and could only do better campaigning against an SNP that put Tories in national office. The Tories did unexpectedly well in Wales, and a similar effect might be expected for Plaid Cymru.
Another point is that the bargaining payoffs are quite interesting (I finally get to use my International Relations MSc!) - the Tories must get Liberal support to get Labour out, so they have an incentive to bid high. Labour can stay in office to the wire, and then dare the Liberals to vote in a Tory government - because of the King-Byng Thing and the Senex letter, there is no requirement for a second election in the event that the government is voted out on the Queen's Speech, so this would make Nick Clegg into a suicide bomber. Therefore, they have an interest in starting the bidding low (although not so low as to risk insulting the Liberals).
On the other hand, the Tories probably think they are still winning, so they have an incentive to cheat, making a high offer to the Liberals without any intention of carrying it out, rather than calling an election at the first opportunity. As significant numbers of Tories are potential rebels against electoral reform, the Tories' bid incentives are high offer but low credibility. Labour's are lower offer but higher credibility.
In classical IR theory, we'd be looking at this point for a costly signal, as described so well in Diego Gambetta's classic book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. The reason why the Tories and Labour can try to obfuscate their credibility is that talk is cheap. For a signal to be credible, it has to cost the signaller something. This could be either general or specific; whatever the cost is, the fact it exists lends greater credibility to the signal, but signals can also be "cost-discriminating", when it costs someone who is telling the truth less than it would a liar.
Labour has apparently already hoisted a costly signal - offering the Liberals a referendum on strong proportional representation and several cabinet seats. The cost here is that Labour might lose out from PR, and that offering cabinet seats to Liberals means sacking existing cabinet ministers.
But the Tories' offer is startlingly puny. Offering a Speaker's conference real-soon-now pretty much defines the concept of a cost-free and therefore worthless signal. Perhaps they are trying to signal that they don't think they need the Liberals, so as to bargain us down? If so, they're very close to the point of making an insultingly pathetic offer. Of course, there's no reason to assume the Tories are competent, or that they have an accurate assessment of their own capabilities - the Dunning-Kruger effect will be playing a major role here, especially as no Tories have ever operated in coalition since the time of Winston Churchill. The "Tory coup" strategy, which is the Tories' bargaining threat, seems to be going the way of the Schlieffen plan - once it starts losing time, it's doomed.
And von Schlieffen famously wanted to keep the right wing strong; Tory unity is far from given.
What's the Liberal position in signalling terms? Obviously, the more Labour thinks it can count on Liberal votes, the less it's going to offer - if they are certain we won't vote with the Tories, their optimal strategy is to sign up Plaid or the SNP, form a minority government, and take it to the Queen's Speech. The Tory position is similar, but marginally less so - they don't have the option of simply digging in on the high ground.
So, we need to signal Labour that they have to make us a real offer. We also have to make an opposite signal to the Tories that a centre-left coalition is a serious prospect. And the signalling has to be costly to be credible, although obviously the least costly signal is to be preferred. The simplest way of doing the first of these is to let the Tories keep talking. It keeps the press hanging on, but it doesn't involve any actual policy commitment. And, if they act rationally, the longer they wait, the higher they'll go. It pisses off most of the party, which would appear to be the cost of the signal.
So I suppose I agree with Nick. That leaves a question; what should the corresponding signal to Labour be?
This article, meanwhile, is one of the most factual I've read so far.
Something I think is worth pointing out: Labour plus the Liberals, plus the sister parties who take the whip automatically, only need three seats to reach the 322 mark (don't forget the Sinn Feiners). Plaid Cymru would do. And it's not a question of forming a three- or four-party coalition. You can have a coalition with the Liberals and a toleration agreement with Plaid (or the SNP, or whoever). Arguably there are constitutional issues with Scottish, Welsh, or NI parties having ministerial posts with UK-wide responsibility - I'm on record as saying that no-one has ever been killed as a result of the West Lothian question, but it's a point.
Also, Labour has leverage on the Scots and Welsh parties; Labour did well in Scotland, and could only do better campaigning against an SNP that put Tories in national office. The Tories did unexpectedly well in Wales, and a similar effect might be expected for Plaid Cymru.
Another point is that the bargaining payoffs are quite interesting (I finally get to use my International Relations MSc!) - the Tories must get Liberal support to get Labour out, so they have an incentive to bid high. Labour can stay in office to the wire, and then dare the Liberals to vote in a Tory government - because of the King-Byng Thing and the Senex letter, there is no requirement for a second election in the event that the government is voted out on the Queen's Speech, so this would make Nick Clegg into a suicide bomber. Therefore, they have an interest in starting the bidding low (although not so low as to risk insulting the Liberals).
On the other hand, the Tories probably think they are still winning, so they have an incentive to cheat, making a high offer to the Liberals without any intention of carrying it out, rather than calling an election at the first opportunity. As significant numbers of Tories are potential rebels against electoral reform, the Tories' bid incentives are high offer but low credibility. Labour's are lower offer but higher credibility.
In classical IR theory, we'd be looking at this point for a costly signal, as described so well in Diego Gambetta's classic book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. The reason why the Tories and Labour can try to obfuscate their credibility is that talk is cheap. For a signal to be credible, it has to cost the signaller something. This could be either general or specific; whatever the cost is, the fact it exists lends greater credibility to the signal, but signals can also be "cost-discriminating", when it costs someone who is telling the truth less than it would a liar.
Labour has apparently already hoisted a costly signal - offering the Liberals a referendum on strong proportional representation and several cabinet seats. The cost here is that Labour might lose out from PR, and that offering cabinet seats to Liberals means sacking existing cabinet ministers.
But the Tories' offer is startlingly puny. Offering a Speaker's conference real-soon-now pretty much defines the concept of a cost-free and therefore worthless signal. Perhaps they are trying to signal that they don't think they need the Liberals, so as to bargain us down? If so, they're very close to the point of making an insultingly pathetic offer. Of course, there's no reason to assume the Tories are competent, or that they have an accurate assessment of their own capabilities - the Dunning-Kruger effect will be playing a major role here, especially as no Tories have ever operated in coalition since the time of Winston Churchill. The "Tory coup" strategy, which is the Tories' bargaining threat, seems to be going the way of the Schlieffen plan - once it starts losing time, it's doomed.
And von Schlieffen famously wanted to keep the right wing strong; Tory unity is far from given.
What's the Liberal position in signalling terms? Obviously, the more Labour thinks it can count on Liberal votes, the less it's going to offer - if they are certain we won't vote with the Tories, their optimal strategy is to sign up Plaid or the SNP, form a minority government, and take it to the Queen's Speech. The Tory position is similar, but marginally less so - they don't have the option of simply digging in on the high ground.
So, we need to signal Labour that they have to make us a real offer. We also have to make an opposite signal to the Tories that a centre-left coalition is a serious prospect. And the signalling has to be costly to be credible, although obviously the least costly signal is to be preferred. The simplest way of doing the first of these is to let the Tories keep talking. It keeps the press hanging on, but it doesn't involve any actual policy commitment. And, if they act rationally, the longer they wait, the higher they'll go. It pisses off most of the party, which would appear to be the cost of the signal.
So I suppose I agree with Nick. That leaves a question; what should the corresponding signal to Labour be?
a centre-left nation needs what kind of government?
One outcome of all the MySociety work for this election was the survey administered by DemocracyClub volunteers to all candidates. The results by party are graphed here, with standard deviations and error bars.
Some immediate conclusions: Surprising egalitarianism. Look at question 1, which asks if the budget deficit should be reduced by taxing the rich. Only the very edge of the error bar for the Conservatives touches the 50% mark; the only parties who have any candidates who don't agree are the BNP and UKIP. Also, question 4 ("It would be a big problem if Britain became more economically unequal over the next 5 years" - agree/disagree) shows that there is a remarkable degree of consensus here. The three main parties of the Left - the Greens, Lib Dems, and Labour - overlap perfectly, and even the lower bound on the Tory percentage is over 50%. Only the 'kippers and the fash even skim the 50% mark at the bottom end of their distributions. This may actually not be a statement about far-right thinking, because of...
Extremist internal chaos. On every question except the one about immigration for the BNP and the one about the EU for UKIP, these two parties have huge error bars for every question. As soon as they get off that particular topic, the error bars gap out like the bid-offer spread in a crashing market. Clearly, they agree about very little other than their own particular hate-kink. So the result in my first point could just be because they always have the widest standard error and deviation.
Immigration, or a field guide to identifying British politics. If you're a Liberal, Labour, or a Green, you've got no problem with immigrants. Even the upper bounds only just stroke the 50% line. All the parties of the Right, however, overlap around the 80% line. Need to identify someone's partisan affiliation quickly? Wave an immigrant at them. The other culture-wars question about marriage is similar, although the gap is smaller and the error bars bigger.
The consensus on civil liberties. Everyone, but everyone, thinks there are far too many CCTV cameras about. All parties overlap at between 68-78%...except for Labour. Labour is the only party that supports CCTV and it supports it strongly. There is just the faintest touch of overlap between the top (i.e. least supportive) end of the Labour error range and the bottom (i.e. most supportive) of the Tories'.
Trust and honesty. Liberals, Labour, and Conservatives all think politicians are honest. No doubt this is because the respondents are themselves politicians. Interestingly, the exceptions are the BNP and UKIP. Very interestingly, the BNP is united in cynicism, whereas the UKIP error range gaps-out dramatically on this question. The Greens' error range converges dramatically on exactly 46% agreement - they are almost perfectly in agreement that they don't agree.
Art and culture; only 'kippers, BNPers, and a very few extreme Tories don't support state funding of the arts.
Britain is a European country and is committed to the European Union. You can't argue with the data; the Tories and Greens average between 20-30% support for withdrawal, zero for the Liberals and Labour, and even the upper bound for the Tories is well under the 50% line. Obviously, the BNP and UKIP want out, which is obvious and after the election result, arguably trivial.
Pacifist fascists; bellicose conservatives; divided lefties and 'kippers. OK, so which parties are least keen on military action against Iran, even if they are caught red-handed building a nuke? The Greens are unsurprisingly 86% against with minimal error - perhaps the only occasion they would turn up a chance to oppose nuclear power! The other is the BNP - 82% against. Who knew we would find a scenario in which the BNP would turn up a chance to kill brown people? Labour, the Liberals, and UKIP would split down the middle - they overlap perfectly around the 50% mark. The Tories, however, are the war party - 39% against, with the lower bound well clear of the other parties. The UKIP result is strange - you'd expect them to be basically like Tories or like the BNP, but they are most like Labour on this issue, although they have a tail of happy warriors. The BNP is also the party most opposed to continuing British involvement in Afghanistan - even more than the Greens. Labour, the Liberals, the Tories, and UKIP overlap heavily around being narrowly in favour, although UKIP as usual gaps out when it's not discussing how much it hates the EU.
Even the Toriest Tories say they support UK Aid. This one's fairly clear - even the upper bound for the Tories is well below 50% and everyone else serious is much lower. UKIP and the BNP are strongly against, but their error bars are quite wide - clearly, they're not sure whether they hate foreigners enough that paying them not to be immigrants is a good idea.
Summary: We're a broadly social democratic European nation, with a few nutters for comic relief. And Chris Lightfoot's Political Survey results (the primary axis in British politics is liberty-vs-authority, strongly correlated with internationalism-vs-isolationism, and the secondary axis is egalitarianism-vs-libertarianism, but there is surprisingly little variance along it) from 2005 appear to be confirmed.
Some immediate conclusions: Surprising egalitarianism. Look at question 1, which asks if the budget deficit should be reduced by taxing the rich. Only the very edge of the error bar for the Conservatives touches the 50% mark; the only parties who have any candidates who don't agree are the BNP and UKIP. Also, question 4 ("It would be a big problem if Britain became more economically unequal over the next 5 years" - agree/disagree) shows that there is a remarkable degree of consensus here. The three main parties of the Left - the Greens, Lib Dems, and Labour - overlap perfectly, and even the lower bound on the Tory percentage is over 50%. Only the 'kippers and the fash even skim the 50% mark at the bottom end of their distributions. This may actually not be a statement about far-right thinking, because of...
Extremist internal chaos. On every question except the one about immigration for the BNP and the one about the EU for UKIP, these two parties have huge error bars for every question. As soon as they get off that particular topic, the error bars gap out like the bid-offer spread in a crashing market. Clearly, they agree about very little other than their own particular hate-kink. So the result in my first point could just be because they always have the widest standard error and deviation.
Immigration, or a field guide to identifying British politics. If you're a Liberal, Labour, or a Green, you've got no problem with immigrants. Even the upper bounds only just stroke the 50% line. All the parties of the Right, however, overlap around the 80% line. Need to identify someone's partisan affiliation quickly? Wave an immigrant at them. The other culture-wars question about marriage is similar, although the gap is smaller and the error bars bigger.
The consensus on civil liberties. Everyone, but everyone, thinks there are far too many CCTV cameras about. All parties overlap at between 68-78%...except for Labour. Labour is the only party that supports CCTV and it supports it strongly. There is just the faintest touch of overlap between the top (i.e. least supportive) end of the Labour error range and the bottom (i.e. most supportive) of the Tories'.
Trust and honesty. Liberals, Labour, and Conservatives all think politicians are honest. No doubt this is because the respondents are themselves politicians. Interestingly, the exceptions are the BNP and UKIP. Very interestingly, the BNP is united in cynicism, whereas the UKIP error range gaps-out dramatically on this question. The Greens' error range converges dramatically on exactly 46% agreement - they are almost perfectly in agreement that they don't agree.
Art and culture; only 'kippers, BNPers, and a very few extreme Tories don't support state funding of the arts.
Britain is a European country and is committed to the European Union. You can't argue with the data; the Tories and Greens average between 20-30% support for withdrawal, zero for the Liberals and Labour, and even the upper bound for the Tories is well under the 50% line. Obviously, the BNP and UKIP want out, which is obvious and after the election result, arguably trivial.
Pacifist fascists; bellicose conservatives; divided lefties and 'kippers. OK, so which parties are least keen on military action against Iran, even if they are caught red-handed building a nuke? The Greens are unsurprisingly 86% against with minimal error - perhaps the only occasion they would turn up a chance to oppose nuclear power! The other is the BNP - 82% against. Who knew we would find a scenario in which the BNP would turn up a chance to kill brown people? Labour, the Liberals, and UKIP would split down the middle - they overlap perfectly around the 50% mark. The Tories, however, are the war party - 39% against, with the lower bound well clear of the other parties. The UKIP result is strange - you'd expect them to be basically like Tories or like the BNP, but they are most like Labour on this issue, although they have a tail of happy warriors. The BNP is also the party most opposed to continuing British involvement in Afghanistan - even more than the Greens. Labour, the Liberals, the Tories, and UKIP overlap heavily around being narrowly in favour, although UKIP as usual gaps out when it's not discussing how much it hates the EU.
Even the Toriest Tories say they support UK Aid. This one's fairly clear - even the upper bound for the Tories is well below 50% and everyone else serious is much lower. UKIP and the BNP are strongly against, but their error bars are quite wide - clearly, they're not sure whether they hate foreigners enough that paying them not to be immigrants is a good idea.
Summary: We're a broadly social democratic European nation, with a few nutters for comic relief. And Chris Lightfoot's Political Survey results (the primary axis in British politics is liberty-vs-authority, strongly correlated with internationalism-vs-isolationism, and the secondary axis is egalitarianism-vs-libertarianism, but there is surprisingly little variance along it) from 2005 appear to be confirmed.
I don't know what they mean by that...
I'm actually quite pleased with our little demo. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic when we assembled in Trafalgar Square, where various speeches were made of which not one word was audible (note to the various orgs involved: I'd happily spring for some batteries for the loud hailer. I mean, my student union would have got that right, to say nothing of the SWP...). And Morrismen kept invading our space.
I originally thought this was some regrettable, Lucky Jim example of sandal-socks liberalism. Actually no; I'm informed by Tom from Boriswatch that this is actually our mayor's idea of culture, and actual taxpayers' money is being paid out to them. Perhaps it's a sort of defensible-space gambit to make it harder to protest there.
Eventually, Billy Bragg - for it is he! - suggested from the platform that we march to Smith Square and picket the Local Government Association building, where the Lib Dem MPs were meeting. This basically turned the demo around, and at least it stopped him singing; off we went down Whitehall, snarling up the traffic, calling on the recently expanded camp around Brian Haw's pad, hurling abuse at the Sky News media-slum in College Green, flanked by policemen radioing each other to work out where we were heading.
Smith Square is not roomy; this is why those TV pictures of Tories celebrating outside Central Office always looked like more of a party than they probably were. So the crowd looked bigger and the shouting was louder. And, well, we stuck around yelling until Nick Clegg came out to speak. Again, I couldn't hear a word, and we actually found out what he said via Twitter on Tom's BlackBerry. Which made sense, as a major aim of the demo was to get onto the TV streams and RSS feeds the MPs would no doubt be obsessively monitoring.
It wasn't a big demo, but it was targeted - the LGA building was already staked out by a huge media presence, with the steps of the church opposite festooned with camera crews, reporters buzzing around like flies round shit, and a big ambush of photographers and more TV cams on the LGA's steps.
This was crucial - as we were arriving during the meeting, there would be nothing for them to report on or film other than the outside of a decentish Queen Anne block, which is better architecture than it is telly. All it took was for the camera gang on the steps to swivel through 180 degrees to get a perfect angry-mob shot, while the ones on the church had a reverse angle view of a crowd apparently besieging the building. Cropping in to emphasise the speakers would tend to compress the scene, giving the impression of a more dramatic confrontation.
The results? Well, we got far more news than I expected; and we seem to have traumatised Kay Burley.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KExTelt3MkE&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
The expression on her face at the beginning is priceless. How dare they! This wasn't on the autocue! There's more here; later in the day, I was with Boriswatch and his charming son, Alfie, who seems to be training as a Dickensian pickpocket (he relieved his father of a £10 note with positively Sicilian panache), in the Westminster Arms, which offers its customers two TV screens, one locked on Sky News and the other to BBC News-24. With a bit of neck-craning, you could just about watch both simultaneously in a sort of split brain media experiment - what was telling was that there was more Shannon-information in the BBC feed, far less repetition, the BBC didn't deliberately misquote Nick Clegg in all its on-screen graphics, and the BBC didn't insist on informing me every three minutes that Mohamed Al-Fayed had sold a rather unfashionable department store.
Seriously - yesterday of all days, Al-Fayed's sale of Harrods was in the top three stories on Sky News for at least two hours. And, as a hint, Nick Clegg didn't say the Tories had a "right to govern", which they repeatedly asserted as a direct quote; he said that the largest party had the right to be consulted about a coalition first, which is far from the same thing.
I originally thought this was some regrettable, Lucky Jim example of sandal-socks liberalism. Actually no; I'm informed by Tom from Boriswatch that this is actually our mayor's idea of culture, and actual taxpayers' money is being paid out to them. Perhaps it's a sort of defensible-space gambit to make it harder to protest there.
Eventually, Billy Bragg - for it is he! - suggested from the platform that we march to Smith Square and picket the Local Government Association building, where the Lib Dem MPs were meeting. This basically turned the demo around, and at least it stopped him singing; off we went down Whitehall, snarling up the traffic, calling on the recently expanded camp around Brian Haw's pad, hurling abuse at the Sky News media-slum in College Green, flanked by policemen radioing each other to work out where we were heading.
Smith Square is not roomy; this is why those TV pictures of Tories celebrating outside Central Office always looked like more of a party than they probably were. So the crowd looked bigger and the shouting was louder. And, well, we stuck around yelling until Nick Clegg came out to speak. Again, I couldn't hear a word, and we actually found out what he said via Twitter on Tom's BlackBerry. Which made sense, as a major aim of the demo was to get onto the TV streams and RSS feeds the MPs would no doubt be obsessively monitoring.
It wasn't a big demo, but it was targeted - the LGA building was already staked out by a huge media presence, with the steps of the church opposite festooned with camera crews, reporters buzzing around like flies round shit, and a big ambush of photographers and more TV cams on the LGA's steps.
This was crucial - as we were arriving during the meeting, there would be nothing for them to report on or film other than the outside of a decentish Queen Anne block, which is better architecture than it is telly. All it took was for the camera gang on the steps to swivel through 180 degrees to get a perfect angry-mob shot, while the ones on the church had a reverse angle view of a crowd apparently besieging the building. Cropping in to emphasise the speakers would tend to compress the scene, giving the impression of a more dramatic confrontation.
The results? Well, we got far more news than I expected; and we seem to have traumatised Kay Burley.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KExTelt3MkE&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
The expression on her face at the beginning is priceless. How dare they! This wasn't on the autocue! There's more here; later in the day, I was with Boriswatch and his charming son, Alfie, who seems to be training as a Dickensian pickpocket (he relieved his father of a £10 note with positively Sicilian panache), in the Westminster Arms, which offers its customers two TV screens, one locked on Sky News and the other to BBC News-24. With a bit of neck-craning, you could just about watch both simultaneously in a sort of split brain media experiment - what was telling was that there was more Shannon-information in the BBC feed, far less repetition, the BBC didn't deliberately misquote Nick Clegg in all its on-screen graphics, and the BBC didn't insist on informing me every three minutes that Mohamed Al-Fayed had sold a rather unfashionable department store.
Seriously - yesterday of all days, Al-Fayed's sale of Harrods was in the top three stories on Sky News for at least two hours. And, as a hint, Nick Clegg didn't say the Tories had a "right to govern", which they repeatedly asserted as a direct quote; he said that the largest party had the right to be consulted about a coalition first, which is far from the same thing.
Friday, May 07, 2010
Resisting the stitch-up
Does anyone know what time the Liberal parliamentary party and federal executive committee meetings happen? I presume the first will be at the House and the second at party HQ...
a great time to be a crazy backbencher
So how did I spend the election night? As it happens, I decided to go to bed about 1am, noting that I was beginning to get as drunk as most of the people on the BBC visibly were and there was still a while to go before any really substantive data came through. Did anyone else notice this, by the way? I've never seen so many important people visibly pissed before. The ruling class drinks in psychic defence, as Mr. Pop would say. And the inhabitants of the best election night thread ever.
And I am amazed that my wave of doom from yesterday has passed. I'm also delighted by the virality. Horrified by our fantastic electoral system - 800,000 more LD votes than last time, and a smaller parliamentary party? Guilty for not going to campaign for Susan Kramer. Informed that actually, "the markets" don't care about us and there is plenty of other stuff happening in the world. Delighted by BNPFAIL and Charles Clarke and David Heathcote-Amory and Nancy Mogg and Jacqui Smith and Peter Robinson joining us all in obscurity.
I do have a serious point in this post, which is credibility. Tories on the Today programme this morning were talking about offering electoral reform for the Lords and local elections; this is not a meaningful offer, as a proportional Lords wouldn't be much different from the current one (which has been fixed to be roughly even). For the Tories, it's cost-free, and therefore meaningless in terms of signalling theory.
More seriously, what credibility does David Cameron have to offer anything?
To make any realistic offer from the Conservatives to the Liberals credible, they have to prove that they're willing to pass PR for the Commons with Liberal votes against their own backbenchers.
One thing we do know about this parliament is that it's going to super-empower everyone's backbenches and the odds-and-sods - this is what happened in the Major years, and he had a (bare) majority. And the last-ditch Tories hate PR - hell, some of them probably aren't fully reconciled to the Reform Act of 1832. They have nothing to lose but their safe seats; they would have every incentive to hold the government hostage at every opportunity, and they'd be roared on by the extra-parliamentary Tory right.
We simply can't accept promises from Cameron, because there is no credible assurance he can deliver on them. And it is simply unacceptable for the outcome of an election in which 51% of the public voted for either Labour or the Liberals, and no overall majority emerged, to be that a party with 36% of the vote forms a minority government. Demonstrate tomorrow. 2pm Trafalgar Square. If you're not in London, why not put the show on right here?
(I just noticed that the BBC results page now puts Lib-Lab ahead of Tories-DUP-Lady Sylvia if they somehow manage to bribe her round. And you've got to count in the 4 NI MPs who take the Labour whip.)
According to the boy Band, "London lost it for Cameron". So meanwhile, here is some music.
And I am amazed that my wave of doom from yesterday has passed. I'm also delighted by the virality. Horrified by our fantastic electoral system - 800,000 more LD votes than last time, and a smaller parliamentary party? Guilty for not going to campaign for Susan Kramer. Informed that actually, "the markets" don't care about us and there is plenty of other stuff happening in the world. Delighted by BNPFAIL and Charles Clarke and David Heathcote-Amory and Nancy Mogg and Jacqui Smith and Peter Robinson joining us all in obscurity.
I do have a serious point in this post, which is credibility. Tories on the Today programme this morning were talking about offering electoral reform for the Lords and local elections; this is not a meaningful offer, as a proportional Lords wouldn't be much different from the current one (which has been fixed to be roughly even). For the Tories, it's cost-free, and therefore meaningless in terms of signalling theory.
More seriously, what credibility does David Cameron have to offer anything?
To make any realistic offer from the Conservatives to the Liberals credible, they have to prove that they're willing to pass PR for the Commons with Liberal votes against their own backbenchers.
One thing we do know about this parliament is that it's going to super-empower everyone's backbenches and the odds-and-sods - this is what happened in the Major years, and he had a (bare) majority. And the last-ditch Tories hate PR - hell, some of them probably aren't fully reconciled to the Reform Act of 1832. They have nothing to lose but their safe seats; they would have every incentive to hold the government hostage at every opportunity, and they'd be roared on by the extra-parliamentary Tory right.
We simply can't accept promises from Cameron, because there is no credible assurance he can deliver on them. And it is simply unacceptable for the outcome of an election in which 51% of the public voted for either Labour or the Liberals, and no overall majority emerged, to be that a party with 36% of the vote forms a minority government. Demonstrate tomorrow. 2pm Trafalgar Square. If you're not in London, why not put the show on right here?
(I just noticed that the BBC results page now puts Lib-Lab ahead of Tories-DUP-Lady Sylvia if they somehow manage to bribe her round. And you've got to count in the 4 NI MPs who take the Labour whip.)
According to the boy Band, "London lost it for Cameron". So meanwhile, here is some music.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
you know what to say
Michael "The Arabs Are Comeeeenk" Gove on t'telly. Not convincing as a master manipulator. Even he doesn't dare claim victory. Says we need "humility".
Loads of guff about uniform national swing projections based on the exit polls. UNS probably doesn't work on this data. Everyone agrees with that. But everyone's being Tebbly Serious about the poll. Except for Flipper Gove. I wonder why that is?
Dave from PR: I think I can govern. I don't have a majority, even on the projections we know don't work, but I THINK I CAN GOVERN.
Jesus wept - Sheffield polling stations have been turning queues of voters away.
Loads of guff about uniform national swing projections based on the exit polls. UNS probably doesn't work on this data. Everyone agrees with that. But everyone's being Tebbly Serious about the poll. Except for Flipper Gove. I wonder why that is?
Dave from PR: I think I can govern. I don't have a majority, even on the projections we know don't work, but I THINK I CAN GOVERN.
Jesus wept - Sheffield polling stations have been turning queues of voters away.
resist the stitch up
So here's the plan; it looks like Bush vs Gore 2.0. Bullshit, bluster, and fake it 'til you make it. This is actually incredibly outrageous - we're in the middle of a contested election and one party doesn't feel itself bound by what is, effectively, the constitution. And the original version of the Grauniad story in the print edition was considerably worse; it included quotes from a "Tory frontbencher" being actionable about the Cabinet Secretary on the grounds that he worked in the Treasury, was in fact Treasury Permanent Secretary, at the same time as Gordon Brown. Among other things, it is terrifying that the "frontbencher" is so ignorant about the Civil Service that they didn't know that it's entirely normal - even expected - for the top man to be a Treasury civil servant.
This seems relevant, not to mention this; I've been slipping into a deep sense of fear and loathing all week, rather as you might slip into a silk nightgown.
So I'm going to launch my own counter-narrative now. The answer to "we won we won we won" is "resist the stitch up". And, as soon as the polls close, I want to get this out as much as possible. As soon as you read this, kindly go and use the phrase.
Update: Sunder Katwala; there's already a Twitter hashtag and a provisional date for a demo - 2pm Saturday, Trafalgar Square.
This seems relevant, not to mention this; I've been slipping into a deep sense of fear and loathing all week, rather as you might slip into a silk nightgown.
So I'm going to launch my own counter-narrative now. The answer to "we won we won we won" is "resist the stitch up". And, as soon as the polls close, I want to get this out as much as possible. As soon as you read this, kindly go and use the phrase.
Update: Sunder Katwala; there's already a Twitter hashtag and a provisional date for a demo - 2pm Saturday, Trafalgar Square.
Monday, May 03, 2010
Pyramid schemes in Darfur
I briefly touched on South Sudan's new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there's been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud? In the wilds of western Sudan?
Seriously. It seems that someone in El Fasher ran a classic Ponzi burn on a large number of people. They paid in money or goods and received "certificates"; to begin with some of them actually received payouts; then, as always, the curve went exponential, the inevitable crash arrived, and they lost it all. And then they went looking for the guy who burned them, with a view to burning him.
The weirdest bit of this is that you can actually promote a Ponzi fraud there; Charles Ponzi invented his eponymous scam in the hyperurban world of Italian Boston in the 1920s. How many people would you expect to be even vaguely familiar with the concept of investing money in securities in a Darfuri refugee camp? A few years ago, there would have been no chance.
The Sudanese government's own peculiarly vicious take on counter-insurgency, which bears a similarity to the Soviet strategy in mid-80s Afghanistan, was to bomb and raid them until they flee to the big city (in relative terms), where they are thought to be easier to keep an eye on. Samuel Huntington - for it is he! - thought something similar was happening in South Vietnam in the 1960s. In an odd symmetry, the logistics of international humanitarian aid reinforced this - aid is delivered to the refugee camp, because it's where refugees are, and it's near an airfield.
The result has been a form of instant urbanisation; interestingly, however, there is little evidence that the strategy was successful in its own terms. The population has become an urban one, but that doesn't mean its opinions are any different, and the problems of policing an instant city are hardly any easier than those of patrolling a vast wilderness; the guerrilla base area still exists, but rather than being the desert, now it's the urban wall of silence - a fortification in software.
In other news, you may consider this a contribution to Daniel Davies' ongoing international symposium on "The Geneva Conventions - Actually Pretty Good When You Really Think About It".
Seriously. It seems that someone in El Fasher ran a classic Ponzi burn on a large number of people. They paid in money or goods and received "certificates"; to begin with some of them actually received payouts; then, as always, the curve went exponential, the inevitable crash arrived, and they lost it all. And then they went looking for the guy who burned them, with a view to burning him.
The weirdest bit of this is that you can actually promote a Ponzi fraud there; Charles Ponzi invented his eponymous scam in the hyperurban world of Italian Boston in the 1920s. How many people would you expect to be even vaguely familiar with the concept of investing money in securities in a Darfuri refugee camp? A few years ago, there would have been no chance.
The Sudanese government's own peculiarly vicious take on counter-insurgency, which bears a similarity to the Soviet strategy in mid-80s Afghanistan, was to bomb and raid them until they flee to the big city (in relative terms), where they are thought to be easier to keep an eye on. Samuel Huntington - for it is he! - thought something similar was happening in South Vietnam in the 1960s. In an odd symmetry, the logistics of international humanitarian aid reinforced this - aid is delivered to the refugee camp, because it's where refugees are, and it's near an airfield.
The result has been a form of instant urbanisation; interestingly, however, there is little evidence that the strategy was successful in its own terms. The population has become an urban one, but that doesn't mean its opinions are any different, and the problems of policing an instant city are hardly any easier than those of patrolling a vast wilderness; the guerrilla base area still exists, but rather than being the desert, now it's the urban wall of silence - a fortification in software.
In other news, you may consider this a contribution to Daniel Davies' ongoing international symposium on "The Geneva Conventions - Actually Pretty Good When You Really Think About It".
Sunday, May 02, 2010
notes on denial culture
Just a couple of disorganised thoughts on this. There's a sort of integrated cultural package of denialism out there; rather like Michael Berube's Wingnut Software Package.
Key components: Computer hate. I encountered people complaining that the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud was being forecast with "the same computer models that forecast global warming". No doubt we'll soon see the reverse argument. In general, anything involving a computer is wrong.
Bending it like Ulrich Beck-ham. There's a sort of bastardised version of the thesis of Beck's The Risk Society, which is that "politicians" or "bureaucrats" are uniquely risk-averse. This isn't content-specific; any and all decisions get the same response. It also doesn't preclude you from attacking them for being incautious if the decision is later reversed. Essentially, the notion of taking precautions that you might then reverse in the light of better information is unacceptable.
Hating women. Intelligent men in positions of responsibility were willing to blame Harriet Harman for a volcanic eruption. This is literally a witch-hunt.
Key components: Computer hate. I encountered people complaining that the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud was being forecast with "the same computer models that forecast global warming". No doubt we'll soon see the reverse argument. In general, anything involving a computer is wrong.
Bending it like Ulrich Beck-ham. There's a sort of bastardised version of the thesis of Beck's The Risk Society, which is that "politicians" or "bureaucrats" are uniquely risk-averse. This isn't content-specific; any and all decisions get the same response. It also doesn't preclude you from attacking them for being incautious if the decision is later reversed. Essentially, the notion of taking precautions that you might then reverse in the light of better information is unacceptable.
Hating women. Intelligent men in positions of responsibility were willing to blame Harriet Harman for a volcanic eruption. This is literally a witch-hunt.
self-refuting dave is self-refuting
Meanwhile, Dave from PR reckons his own spending cuts aren't tough enough. All election campaigns go into the surreal phase eventually.
fail
Quietly, as the election campaign goes on, the NHS IT programme has gone from "heading for the rocks" to "sailing into the cliff". Has NPfIT put us back 10 years? asks the NHS chief in Rotherham, who's taken the recently announced option to bail out of the project and deploy something of his own choice. He's also chosen to do a soft-launch rather than a monster all-or-nothing go-live - so he's probably worth listening to.
A key problem, apparently, is a lack of the right skills - people have simply drifted away from the project as the reek of zombiedom has become ever more intense. It's somehow awe-inspiring that it was possible to spend £12bn without attracting hordes of the talented and the merely opportunistic.
The guy who got out earlier - the Paul Allen figure - speaks, and says that the project was doomed because the clinicians didn't support it. Where have we heard that before?
A safety critical bug emerges.
Some areas have suspended uploading patient data to the Big DB; weirdly, it turns out that the official business case for the summary care records was never approved.
Even weirder, many of the trusts that sent out letters to millions of people, red-alerting NO2ID into action, weren't actually planning to upload - they just did it because some budget became available for publicity, and hey! budget! Thus accidentally throwing a giant NO2ID demo at the taxpayers' expense.
A key problem, apparently, is a lack of the right skills - people have simply drifted away from the project as the reek of zombiedom has become ever more intense. It's somehow awe-inspiring that it was possible to spend £12bn without attracting hordes of the talented and the merely opportunistic.
The guy who got out earlier - the Paul Allen figure - speaks, and says that the project was doomed because the clinicians didn't support it. Where have we heard that before?
A safety critical bug emerges.
Some areas have suspended uploading patient data to the Big DB; weirdly, it turns out that the official business case for the summary care records was never approved.
Even weirder, many of the trusts that sent out letters to millions of people, red-alerting NO2ID into action, weren't actually planning to upload - they just did it because some budget became available for publicity, and hey! budget! Thus accidentally throwing a giant NO2ID demo at the taxpayers' expense.
killer meme watch
Apple's internal security team may be scary - and especially the name (Worldwide Loyalty Team). But they are as nothing, in terms of creepiness, to this Microsoft web page, which provides the criteria against which MS employees are assessed for their use of humour and the targets they are given to improve. You will not be able to unread this.
In fact, it's the kind of thing for which the only valid response is to pretend to take it seriously. Why not print out a copy and carry it around? Score your friends against this fine 4x4 matrix chart!
Via this comment, it turns out that the program is based on the ideas of a 70s cult leader who fell out with the Scientologists in a dispute about intellectual property - how very Microsoft of him - and who reconverted his organisation into the management consulting industry. (I've often thought a terrorist group should try that one some day.)
The Wikipedia article on the dispute is very funny - two blind men fighting over a comb doesn't really do justice to the full absurdity of it, as two cult/hucksters duel over the rights to the kind of ideas that shouldn't be treated so much as property as like toxic waste, or one of those weird codicils that occasionally force some poor swing-voter to fork out for a new church roof. If they were sane, they'd be fighting to get rid of this stuff; but then they wouldn't be there.
But the really interesting thing is that Werner Erhard's ideas have already killed one of the great computer-development groups, Doug Engelbart's Augment Lab at SRI, which dissolved into a stew of project failure and ego wars under their influence. Here's the money quote, from What the Dormouse Said:
There's a key cultural inflection point right there. And I bet Linus Torvalds doesn't make sure to check that
In fact, it's the kind of thing for which the only valid response is to pretend to take it seriously. Why not print out a copy and carry it around? Score your friends against this fine 4x4 matrix chart!
Via this comment, it turns out that the program is based on the ideas of a 70s cult leader who fell out with the Scientologists in a dispute about intellectual property - how very Microsoft of him - and who reconverted his organisation into the management consulting industry. (I've often thought a terrorist group should try that one some day.)
The Wikipedia article on the dispute is very funny - two blind men fighting over a comb doesn't really do justice to the full absurdity of it, as two cult/hucksters duel over the rights to the kind of ideas that shouldn't be treated so much as property as like toxic waste, or one of those weird codicils that occasionally force some poor swing-voter to fork out for a new church roof. If they were sane, they'd be fighting to get rid of this stuff; but then they wouldn't be there.
But the really interesting thing is that Werner Erhard's ideas have already killed one of the great computer-development groups, Doug Engelbart's Augment Lab at SRI, which dissolved into a stew of project failure and ego wars under their influence. Here's the money quote, from What the Dormouse Said:
A woman who Bob Albrecht, the People's Computer Company guru, had been involved with went through the training and came back transformed into a very un-Zen-like creature. She no longer believed that everything was interconnected, but rather had decided that she wanted it all for herself and would do anything to get it.
There's a key cultural inflection point right there. And I bet Linus Torvalds doesn't make sure to check that
Do I ever encourage a near party atmosphere because of my comfort with using humor?always returns False, or worry about finding his personal brand.
IPPR: I agree with...
The Institute for Public Policy Research has issued a report on the correlates of BNP membership and support (pdf).
Fascinatingly, they reckon that there is very little or no correlation between BNP support and key socio-economic indicators like GVA per capita, growth, unemployment, immigration, etc. It's as if a typical BNP supporter was, well, a case of free-floating extremism. (A dedicated swallower of fascism; an accident waiting to happen.)
Oddly enough, this replicates an earlier result.
The Nottingham University Politics blog has a more nuanced response, but I'm quite impressed by the fact that two analyses based on two different metrics of BNP support - votes in the IPPR study, membership in mine - converged on the same result.
Fascinatingly, they reckon that there is very little or no correlation between BNP support and key socio-economic indicators like GVA per capita, growth, unemployment, immigration, etc. It's as if a typical BNP supporter was, well, a case of free-floating extremism. (A dedicated swallower of fascism; an accident waiting to happen.)
Oddly enough, this replicates an earlier result.
The Nottingham University Politics blog has a more nuanced response, but I'm quite impressed by the fact that two analyses based on two different metrics of BNP support - votes in the IPPR study, membership in mine - converged on the same result.
it's called "power" for a reason
This story from Rajiv Chandrasekharan about two rival approaches to sorting out Kandahar's electricity supply is informative, but not just about its apparent topic. Basically, the US Army wants to go for a quick fix, installing a lot of mobile generators and trucking in the diesel fuel, in order to get the lights on as soon as possible. The US civilians in Afghanistan disagree, on the grounds that it's a temporary hack that will be far too expensive for the Afghans to support in the longer run.
Incredibly, it turns out, the US/NATO base at Kandahar air field produces and consumes about 100 megawatts of electricity; the estimate for the gap between current levels and requirements is 42 megawatts. Obviously, the military has a point in that if it's possible to produce that much electricity in the field, it may be foolish to keep playing around with grandiose projects when a call to Aggreko could cut it.
On the other hand, as in Iraq, electricity is deeply political. We speak of generating power for a reason.
Deploying 42MW of mobile diesel gensets to Kandahar is one kind of solution; it defines the issue as a discrete project, which can be solved by standard logistics methods, drawing on a private contracting firm that specialises in delivering surprisingly large electricity projects in containerised form. It also commits whoever rules in Kandahar to import large quantities of diesel through the shaky logistics pipeline from Pakistan, which means that somebody has to find the foreign exchange to back the most expensive way possible of generating power, and keep the roads reasonably open, which has its own military and political consequences.
You could argue that it's not actually a solution - in fact, it's a substitute for a solution, a temporary, containerised fix delivered as part of a standard tool-kit for counterinsurgency. A lot of people would argue that there is no such thing. Certainly, though, this option implies that donors continue to pay the bills, somebody continues to patrol the roads, and someone continues to pay off the Taliban between there and Quetta. I can't help thinking, looking at a lot of the growing technology of instant urbanism (suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres...) that a lot of this stuff might actually be a sort of negative toolkit of local optimisations. I'm trying to be optimistic, though; a less depressing example is here, in which South Sudan gets its own brewery. (I never realised producing beer was so bulk-increasing that it was worth importing all the inputs except for labour.)
On the other hand, the US civilians' alternative is to press on with the Kajaki Dam project; the British Army brought off an incredibly complex tour de force in finally getting its new turbines delivered, involving a major operational-level deception plan, the building of a new road, and 4,000 men, but it's still not making much progress. Adam Curtis would probably have something interesting to say about the fact that it's been the major development plan for southern Afghanistan since the 1950s. The reason is, of course, that it embodied a particular political vision.
In terms of what might be called conflict urbanism (see this post) the Kajaki dam would seem to be a really bad idea; the plan is to generate power out in Taliban territory and have Kandahar depend on that. We know how well long-distance transmission lines survive in an environment of insurgency and counterinsurgency from Iraq; not at all. Of course, given that something like 40% of the power goes missing in transit, this is itself a sort of suboptimal political solution on the part of the people who live near the wires.
By comparison, generating power in town and having it radiate out to the villages is obviously a very different kind of politics - the conceptual fit with the counterinsurgents' intellectual legacy is quite clear. However, I can't help but doubt that anyone's going to be importing all this diesel into Kandahar in two years' time, nor that Aggreko or whoever's expat staff will be entirely cool with a stint there. Of course, the problem is deeper than that; the contractors' war-risk insurance policies come to mind.
The bill is apparently a cool $200 million; at $4/watt, a 42MW concentrating solar power plant would come in at $168m and produce power independently.
But I suspect this is as likely to happen as the other way of getting enough foreign exchange for Kandahar to buy its own fuel is to be accepted. Another notable fact is that the US Army is looking at getting the GCC countries to pay for the diesel bill - entrenching, in other words, southern Afghanistan in the Saudi sphere of influence.
Incredibly, it turns out, the US/NATO base at Kandahar air field produces and consumes about 100 megawatts of electricity; the estimate for the gap between current levels and requirements is 42 megawatts. Obviously, the military has a point in that if it's possible to produce that much electricity in the field, it may be foolish to keep playing around with grandiose projects when a call to Aggreko could cut it.
On the other hand, as in Iraq, electricity is deeply political. We speak of generating power for a reason.
Deploying 42MW of mobile diesel gensets to Kandahar is one kind of solution; it defines the issue as a discrete project, which can be solved by standard logistics methods, drawing on a private contracting firm that specialises in delivering surprisingly large electricity projects in containerised form. It also commits whoever rules in Kandahar to import large quantities of diesel through the shaky logistics pipeline from Pakistan, which means that somebody has to find the foreign exchange to back the most expensive way possible of generating power, and keep the roads reasonably open, which has its own military and political consequences.
You could argue that it's not actually a solution - in fact, it's a substitute for a solution, a temporary, containerised fix delivered as part of a standard tool-kit for counterinsurgency. A lot of people would argue that there is no such thing. Certainly, though, this option implies that donors continue to pay the bills, somebody continues to patrol the roads, and someone continues to pay off the Taliban between there and Quetta. I can't help thinking, looking at a lot of the growing technology of instant urbanism (suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres...) that a lot of this stuff might actually be a sort of negative toolkit of local optimisations. I'm trying to be optimistic, though; a less depressing example is here, in which South Sudan gets its own brewery. (I never realised producing beer was so bulk-increasing that it was worth importing all the inputs except for labour.)
On the other hand, the US civilians' alternative is to press on with the Kajaki Dam project; the British Army brought off an incredibly complex tour de force in finally getting its new turbines delivered, involving a major operational-level deception plan, the building of a new road, and 4,000 men, but it's still not making much progress. Adam Curtis would probably have something interesting to say about the fact that it's been the major development plan for southern Afghanistan since the 1950s. The reason is, of course, that it embodied a particular political vision.
In terms of what might be called conflict urbanism (see this post) the Kajaki dam would seem to be a really bad idea; the plan is to generate power out in Taliban territory and have Kandahar depend on that. We know how well long-distance transmission lines survive in an environment of insurgency and counterinsurgency from Iraq; not at all. Of course, given that something like 40% of the power goes missing in transit, this is itself a sort of suboptimal political solution on the part of the people who live near the wires.
By comparison, generating power in town and having it radiate out to the villages is obviously a very different kind of politics - the conceptual fit with the counterinsurgents' intellectual legacy is quite clear. However, I can't help but doubt that anyone's going to be importing all this diesel into Kandahar in two years' time, nor that Aggreko or whoever's expat staff will be entirely cool with a stint there. Of course, the problem is deeper than that; the contractors' war-risk insurance policies come to mind.
The bill is apparently a cool $200 million; at $4/watt, a 42MW concentrating solar power plant would come in at $168m and produce power independently.
But I suspect this is as likely to happen as the other way of getting enough foreign exchange for Kandahar to buy its own fuel is to be accepted. Another notable fact is that the US Army is looking at getting the GCC countries to pay for the diesel bill - entrenching, in other words, southern Afghanistan in the Saudi sphere of influence.
they're protecting us, but we don't know who they are
Jamie Kenny mentions Thailand's "black clads". Who they?
Reuters has an excellent article that gets into this question.
They're protecting us...but we don't know who they are. This strikes me as being very much of the times, a sort of inverted version of the Iraq war's icon, the fake policeman.
The Reuters piece also digs into the back story some distance. A possible explanation is that the men in black - surely a better translation - are former members of an army unit created in the 1970s to fight insurgents, as part of the broader cold war counter-insurgency strategy. The force in question is the Rangers - the name is important, as US advisors created the same force in several countries, apparently unaware that the term's cultural associations aren't particularly resonant outside the US. How do you even translate it?
They were eventually disbanded 10 years ago, which suggests that there may well be people plying for hire or else just on the political market generally who served in them. Interestingly, quintessential modern thinker Thaksin Shinawatra was politically close to the army officer responsible for their creation.
Also, meet the community-radio hackers of Thaksinite rebellion.
Reuters has an excellent article that gets into this question.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE MEN IN BLACK?
Witnesses and grainy video footage revealed armed men with assault rifles and M-79 grenade launchers appeared under cover of darkness on April 10 during a heated standoff between red shirts and troops trying to break up a protest in Bangkok's old quarter.
The government says the rebels, who wore black and covered their faces with hoods and balaclavas, appeared in the crowds of protesters and opened fire on troops, triggering chaos and prompting panicked soldiers to fire back in self-defence.
Government officials and the army believe the men in black are politically aligned with the red shirt movement and sought to cause bloodshed severe enough to force Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to call a new election.
Red shirt leaders say the "black clads" are protecting them, but they don't know who they are.
They're protecting us...but we don't know who they are. This strikes me as being very much of the times, a sort of inverted version of the Iraq war's icon, the fake policeman.
The Reuters piece also digs into the back story some distance. A possible explanation is that the men in black - surely a better translation - are former members of an army unit created in the 1970s to fight insurgents, as part of the broader cold war counter-insurgency strategy. The force in question is the Rangers - the name is important, as US advisors created the same force in several countries, apparently unaware that the term's cultural associations aren't particularly resonant outside the US. How do you even translate it?
They were eventually disbanded 10 years ago, which suggests that there may well be people plying for hire or else just on the political market generally who served in them. Interestingly, quintessential modern thinker Thaksin Shinawatra was politically close to the army officer responsible for their creation.
Also, meet the community-radio hackers of Thaksinite rebellion.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
French bloggers, Scud missiles, etc
There's a new strategy blog about, this time a French one. They have an interesting discussion about the suggestion/rumour/story that Hezbollah might be trying to acquire Scud missiles. They're dubious about it, although open to the suggestion that the organisation might be developing its own inter-service politics, with the big rocket people perhaps constituting the "air force". Relatedly, this pair of Tom Ricks posts is stuffed with interesting links about the 2006 war. In the light of those, you might almost think that any effort to acquire something like a Scud, with its huge transporter-erector-launcher truck, would be more of a deception or disinformation tactic than anything else.
project failure
I've been reading Bruno Latour's Aramis, or the Love of Technology, a postmodernist account of the failure of a massive French project to develop a Personal Rapid Transit system. Latour's book contains chunks of fiction, interviews, historical documents, and authorial comment, broken out by the typography - the experience is more like reading a long blog post containing blockquotes from different sources and snarky comments on them than anything else.
It's a fascinating exploration of the politics of the project, the nature of projects themselves, and the sources of project failure; running from 1969 to 1987, the scheme went from conceptual paper studies to a major prototype by 1973, and eventually built a large-scale test implementation in the mid-80s, before being suddenly cancelled while an intensive test campaign intended to qualify it for deployment was under way. Latour is primarily interested in how the overall concept and much of the technology stayed the same, although its objectives, planned deployment, and resources changed constantly throughout the project.
He argues that, eventually, the crucial issue was that a project is a fundamentally political concept - it has to recruit the support of people and of interest groups in order to progress, and Aramis was a side-project for nearly everyone involved except for two groups - the engineers working on it, and the French Communist Party. Unfortunately for the first group, the contract for large-scale tests was signed as the last act in office of the Communist transport minister before the party pulled out of the Mitterrand government.
This is of course true; a project needs to create its own tribe and its own culture. However, I'm quite ambivalent about the whole concept; not really about its technical or economic aspects, but rather about the idea of urbanness that was built into its core assumptions. PRT emerged in the 1960s as a technological fix to what its American proponents thought was the steady decline of cities - the big idea was a form of high-capacity public transport that would provide point-to-point service without intermediate stops, in a private environment, rather like a car, but without traffic jams or exhaust fumes or road accidents.
The flip side of this comes up again and again in Latour's interviews with Matra and RATP executives, regarding their assumptions about the passengers and the user-experience studies that were carried out later in the project. Passengers, apparently, wanted more than anything else to be transported from point to point, "without transfers, without thinking", without other people. Not that any passengers had actually been asked what they thought at this point. Clearly, the political assumptions built into Aramis from the beginning were that moving around a city was basically unpleasant, and specifically because of the presence of other people. Huge amounts of effort were expended on the contradictory task of building a vehicle and a broader networked system that was both user-controlled and designed to keep the user from engaging with it in any way.
Very significantly, when user studies were actually carried out, the public was notably cool on the idea and found the cabins (patterned, on the inside, on the Renault Espace) unnerving and uncanny - rather than being protected from a sinister and menacing urban jungle, they felt isolated in sealed capsules controlled by automated systems, in which they could still be confronted with strangers. The paranoia and declinism that originally motivated the PRT concept was accurately preserved in its architecture and communicated to its potential passengers.
Of course, if you were to ask me about this on the Northern Line or the 271 bus tomorrow evening, I'd probably be significantly more sympathetic to the idea; it's much easier to enjoy public transport when it isn't operating at overload-plus. This was also a criticism of Aramis - the RATP managers found it hard to imagine a system working that didn't use standing passengers as a buffer for peak demand, which is telling in itself. And the PCF's interest was presumably in the idea of a communal and high-modernist rival to the car that would also be a major technical boost for French industry.
Another interesting but under-discussed angle is that of failed consilience.
While the most active phase of Aramis development was on, other groups of engineers were solving the problems of routing discrete packets around a dense scalefree network, preventing them from colliding, and providing congestion control, load-balancing, and controllable routing metrics. They were, of course, the IEEE-802 and IETF work groups building the Internet. The engineers down the road at Alcatel working on GSM could probably have told them a thing or two, as well. The analogies between the longest prefix match/shortest path wins logic of BGP and the problems of routing Aramis cars are very close, although one problem that doesn't come up in internetworking is how to return the empties and make sure there is a sufficient free float of vehicles to maintain the service. (You regularly see small vans redistributing the Velib bikes around Paris in order to deal with just this problem.)
Part of the explanation, and another interesting angle, is that there was clearly a massive culture clash between the Matra defence-electronics managers, the RATP railwaymen, and the software developers subcontracted in to eventually write the routing and speed-control systems. Matra representatives repeatedly mention that there was a need for a revolution in microprocessors, although that is precisely what happened every 18 months throughout the project.
Apparently, a related system is under test around Heathrow Terminal 5, due to go live in "spring 2010". Anyone taking bets?
It's a fascinating exploration of the politics of the project, the nature of projects themselves, and the sources of project failure; running from 1969 to 1987, the scheme went from conceptual paper studies to a major prototype by 1973, and eventually built a large-scale test implementation in the mid-80s, before being suddenly cancelled while an intensive test campaign intended to qualify it for deployment was under way. Latour is primarily interested in how the overall concept and much of the technology stayed the same, although its objectives, planned deployment, and resources changed constantly throughout the project.
He argues that, eventually, the crucial issue was that a project is a fundamentally political concept - it has to recruit the support of people and of interest groups in order to progress, and Aramis was a side-project for nearly everyone involved except for two groups - the engineers working on it, and the French Communist Party. Unfortunately for the first group, the contract for large-scale tests was signed as the last act in office of the Communist transport minister before the party pulled out of the Mitterrand government.
This is of course true; a project needs to create its own tribe and its own culture. However, I'm quite ambivalent about the whole concept; not really about its technical or economic aspects, but rather about the idea of urbanness that was built into its core assumptions. PRT emerged in the 1960s as a technological fix to what its American proponents thought was the steady decline of cities - the big idea was a form of high-capacity public transport that would provide point-to-point service without intermediate stops, in a private environment, rather like a car, but without traffic jams or exhaust fumes or road accidents.
The flip side of this comes up again and again in Latour's interviews with Matra and RATP executives, regarding their assumptions about the passengers and the user-experience studies that were carried out later in the project. Passengers, apparently, wanted more than anything else to be transported from point to point, "without transfers, without thinking", without other people. Not that any passengers had actually been asked what they thought at this point. Clearly, the political assumptions built into Aramis from the beginning were that moving around a city was basically unpleasant, and specifically because of the presence of other people. Huge amounts of effort were expended on the contradictory task of building a vehicle and a broader networked system that was both user-controlled and designed to keep the user from engaging with it in any way.
Very significantly, when user studies were actually carried out, the public was notably cool on the idea and found the cabins (patterned, on the inside, on the Renault Espace) unnerving and uncanny - rather than being protected from a sinister and menacing urban jungle, they felt isolated in sealed capsules controlled by automated systems, in which they could still be confronted with strangers. The paranoia and declinism that originally motivated the PRT concept was accurately preserved in its architecture and communicated to its potential passengers.
Of course, if you were to ask me about this on the Northern Line or the 271 bus tomorrow evening, I'd probably be significantly more sympathetic to the idea; it's much easier to enjoy public transport when it isn't operating at overload-plus. This was also a criticism of Aramis - the RATP managers found it hard to imagine a system working that didn't use standing passengers as a buffer for peak demand, which is telling in itself. And the PCF's interest was presumably in the idea of a communal and high-modernist rival to the car that would also be a major technical boost for French industry.
Another interesting but under-discussed angle is that of failed consilience.
While the most active phase of Aramis development was on, other groups of engineers were solving the problems of routing discrete packets around a dense scalefree network, preventing them from colliding, and providing congestion control, load-balancing, and controllable routing metrics. They were, of course, the IEEE-802 and IETF work groups building the Internet. The engineers down the road at Alcatel working on GSM could probably have told them a thing or two, as well. The analogies between the longest prefix match/shortest path wins logic of BGP and the problems of routing Aramis cars are very close, although one problem that doesn't come up in internetworking is how to return the empties and make sure there is a sufficient free float of vehicles to maintain the service. (You regularly see small vans redistributing the Velib bikes around Paris in order to deal with just this problem.)
Part of the explanation, and another interesting angle, is that there was clearly a massive culture clash between the Matra defence-electronics managers, the RATP railwaymen, and the software developers subcontracted in to eventually write the routing and speed-control systems. Matra representatives repeatedly mention that there was a need for a revolution in microprocessors, although that is precisely what happened every 18 months throughout the project.
Apparently, a related system is under test around Heathrow Terminal 5, due to go live in "spring 2010". Anyone taking bets?
self-compulsion notice: diplomats
I have been scraping things with Scraperwiki this weekend. Which made me wonder about this post on Spyblog about that Israeli diplomat who one of the Milibands told to pack his bags. Mark quotes from the official London Diplomatic List, which turns out to be issued every month as a PDF by the Foreign Office protocol bureau, and which lists all embassies in London and their members. You can see where this is going, and it's going to involve pdf2xml...
Further adventures in globalisation
So you might remember that Thai demonstrators invaded the brand-new airport there a while ago, establishing a huge Ballardian protest-camp among the glass walls and retail space and soft-xray terrorist detectors. Their movement went on to spray the prime minister's house with their own blood, collected in buckets by their medical wing. Clearly, they have a certain style.
Which made me think when I saw this BBC story; how much science-fiction would you need to get from being stuck at the same airport due to northern Europe getting a fine dusting of Iceland, while the Redshirts and the cops and the No Colour Movement - colour revolutions have clearly reached some sort of logical end point - duke it out downtown, to actually getting the queues involved in the revolution? (The other way round is much easier, and amounts almost to a cliche.)
Which made me think when I saw this BBC story; how much science-fiction would you need to get from being stuck at the same airport due to northern Europe getting a fine dusting of Iceland, while the Redshirts and the cops and the No Colour Movement - colour revolutions have clearly reached some sort of logical end point - duke it out downtown, to actually getting the queues involved in the revolution? (The other way round is much easier, and amounts almost to a cliche.)
thuds and screams in Wapping
So, that election. I should be out delivering leaflets; but my leaflets haven't turned up. Such is life in the sinister Lib-Dem election machine.
More interestingly, it's been a week of truth. We kicked off with David Yelland's and Michael Wolff's pieces about the likely panic in the Murdoch world about the Lib Dem surge and, more broadly, the possibility of their pet candidate, complete with Andy Coulson as personal representative, failing to win. That was interesting, but you could have been forgiven for a certain scepticism.
Then, however, the Murdoch world decided to throw a live demonstration (in more ways than one, thinking about their visit to the Indy). Kicking off, the Tories announced "a new Get Clegg strategy". Rather, it might have been truer to say that they "announced" it; at the time, the news reporting was merely that it had been announced. What was really meant by this became obvious on the morning of the second debate, with the synchronised wave of abuse from the right-wing press.
By lunchtime on the next day, however, they had been called on the issue, by name:
The direct quote is from the Liberal election coordinator, Danny Alexander; the rest is the Guardian's. You have to love the impressively yellow bit about "there is no evidence that Conservative HQ..." after the direct statement that, yes, Gideon personally made the rounds and handed out the talking points.
Because, of course, the Lib Dem surge has at least achieved one thing - it's provided an opportunity to observe the media-political complex working in real time. We can't tell what transpired between Osborne and the pet editors, but we do know that an unexpected third-party surge happened at the beginning of the week, the Tories promised smears, and that certain newspapers all delivered them on the due day. Input-output analysis.
At least we now know, for a fact, that there are newspapers in the UK that accept direct orders from politicians, and we also know which ones. Not that the list is a surprise. It's also interesting that the Murdochs still think the Times has to observe slightly different standards; it sat out the story. Clearly, self-delusion does actually act as a real check on some people's behaviour. The Times kids itself it's still a newspaper, and therefore is somewhat more like one.
Another thing; since Osborne got caught, the Tories have adjusted the fire somewhat. Ken Clarke told the Telegraph that they might consider going into coalition with the Liberals; the Observer, in its Obscurer mode, headlined the same thing over an interview with David Cameron, in which he didn't really say that - but presumably his PR team must have accepted it. The whole thing has had a strangely communist feel; a Power Struggle in the Inner Party, which the people follow through odd snippets of certainly misleading news-like data.
The good news: ignorance is no longer excusable. The even better news is: there's an app for that, or rather a Greasemonkey script.
(More here, and here, among others.
In an environment characterised by uncertainty, the best predictions are often the ones based on humour and caricature; they get past the shared illusions and get right to the irrational core.
More interestingly, it's been a week of truth. We kicked off with David Yelland's and Michael Wolff's pieces about the likely panic in the Murdoch world about the Lib Dem surge and, more broadly, the possibility of their pet candidate, complete with Andy Coulson as personal representative, failing to win. That was interesting, but you could have been forgiven for a certain scepticism.
Then, however, the Murdoch world decided to throw a live demonstration (in more ways than one, thinking about their visit to the Indy). Kicking off, the Tories announced "a new Get Clegg strategy". Rather, it might have been truer to say that they "announced" it; at the time, the news reporting was merely that it had been announced. What was really meant by this became obvious on the morning of the second debate, with the synchronised wave of abuse from the right-wing press.
By lunchtime on the next day, however, they had been called on the issue, by name:
"George Osborne needs to come clean as to whether he himself was personally responsible for this negative media smear campaign, which is now backfiring spectacularly with voters."....
Osborne met some political editors on Monday and discussed the party's response to the Lib Dem surge.
In one paper, a strategist was reported as expressing the hope that the media would do the Tory party's dirty work. There is no evidence that Osborne made this remark or that Conservative headquarters fed any story to any paper.
The direct quote is from the Liberal election coordinator, Danny Alexander; the rest is the Guardian's. You have to love the impressively yellow bit about "there is no evidence that Conservative HQ..." after the direct statement that, yes, Gideon personally made the rounds and handed out the talking points.
Because, of course, the Lib Dem surge has at least achieved one thing - it's provided an opportunity to observe the media-political complex working in real time. We can't tell what transpired between Osborne and the pet editors, but we do know that an unexpected third-party surge happened at the beginning of the week, the Tories promised smears, and that certain newspapers all delivered them on the due day. Input-output analysis.
At least we now know, for a fact, that there are newspapers in the UK that accept direct orders from politicians, and we also know which ones. Not that the list is a surprise. It's also interesting that the Murdochs still think the Times has to observe slightly different standards; it sat out the story. Clearly, self-delusion does actually act as a real check on some people's behaviour. The Times kids itself it's still a newspaper, and therefore is somewhat more like one.
Another thing; since Osborne got caught, the Tories have adjusted the fire somewhat. Ken Clarke told the Telegraph that they might consider going into coalition with the Liberals; the Observer, in its Obscurer mode, headlined the same thing over an interview with David Cameron, in which he didn't really say that - but presumably his PR team must have accepted it. The whole thing has had a strangely communist feel; a Power Struggle in the Inner Party, which the people follow through odd snippets of certainly misleading news-like data.
The good news: ignorance is no longer excusable. The even better news is: there's an app for that, or rather a Greasemonkey script.
(More here, and here, among others.In an environment characterised by uncertainty, the best predictions are often the ones based on humour and caricature; they get past the shared illusions and get right to the irrational core.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
oh dear
The Tories' iPhone app ('cos they're modern and stuff) works by sending a plaintext e-mail to callafriend@myconservatives.com, it turns out.
bubbles
Everyone's reviewing Dean Baker's False Profits. I contribute.
I strongly recommend the book, agreeing with D^2 that it's important that he names the guilty men, reminds you that they're guilty, and keeps on naming them. (In fact, if anything, he drowns the fish - if you weren't sure if there had been a housing bubble, you'll be sick of hearing about it.)
But I think there's an important point here; so long as there is capitalism, entrepreneurs will every so often become over-extended, chase the price of something up a mountain, and then panic and crash. In fact, perhaps even outside capitalism; aren't the investment disasters of the Soviet Union something similar? Usually, however, it's possible to look at this process philosophically; as J. K. Galbraith said, nothing but money is being lost, and the people who are losing it usually have plenty. Residential property, though, is special - it alone brings the full destructive power of a leverage-fuelled financial crisis within reach of the common man.
As the Despair poster has it, none of us is as stupid as all of us together. A housing bubble's effects are therefore very widespread, and individually catastrophic to a degree that isn't true of financial crises restricted to bankers, investors, and entrepreneurs. They also have a special feature, which is that they interact with the tools of macro policy closely. Once the bubble passes a certain point, a significant chunk of the buyers are no longer able to cope with the normal range of fluctuation in the interest rate, and disaster is certain. This is essentially Minsky stage 2 - when capital gains become a necessity in order to service debt.
Once this stage is reached, for many of the people involved, it doesn't matter whether the final crash comes sooner or later - they're going to be ruined. For society as a whole, it would probably be better if it came sooner, but there are obvious reasons why this is unlikely to happen.
Keynes once said, in Economic Perspectives for our Grandchildren, that he hoped economists would become "humble competent people like dentists". Daniel Davies said not so long ago that economics might, if it was lucky, eventually become a branch of control systems engineering. An important concept in both is stability, but stability is often misunderstood. It doesn't mean the absence of change, but rather, the ability to recover to a normal state. James Lovelock's insight about ecosystems was arguably that they are stable - they eventually recover - but that there was no guarantee that recovery would be a good thing.
In a housing bubble scenario, eventually the berserk run-up in prices does indeed go into reverse - but it does so through widespread bankruptcy, unemployment, and systemic bank failure. This is the same whether the bubble bursts on its own, or the bubble is deliberately burst. The recovery mode of the system is indistinguishable from the worst-case scenario. As the purpose of a system is what it does, the fact we get into these scrapes is telling in itself.
Here, Felix Salmon excerpts a range of fascinating charts from the US National Housing Survey. A critical detail; even people who are currently behind on their mortgages or even in the process of repossession believe, by large majorities, that property is a good investment and that it is less risky than Treasury bills. Clearly, it will need more than just the biggest bubble in economic history, leading to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, to convince anyone that there is a problem. (There's also an excellent chart making the point that the market is still dear historically by about 20%.)
An interesting counter-example is here; it seems that specific regulation against some of the worst bubble-generating practices can help a lot. And I think that changing the failure modes is probably a good way of changing the system. Dean Baker answers reviewers here; he also points out that although Spain's banks didn't blow up, the housing bubble there was sufficient in itself to flatten the economy.
I strongly recommend the book, agreeing with D^2 that it's important that he names the guilty men, reminds you that they're guilty, and keeps on naming them. (In fact, if anything, he drowns the fish - if you weren't sure if there had been a housing bubble, you'll be sick of hearing about it.)
But I think there's an important point here; so long as there is capitalism, entrepreneurs will every so often become over-extended, chase the price of something up a mountain, and then panic and crash. In fact, perhaps even outside capitalism; aren't the investment disasters of the Soviet Union something similar? Usually, however, it's possible to look at this process philosophically; as J. K. Galbraith said, nothing but money is being lost, and the people who are losing it usually have plenty. Residential property, though, is special - it alone brings the full destructive power of a leverage-fuelled financial crisis within reach of the common man.
As the Despair poster has it, none of us is as stupid as all of us together. A housing bubble's effects are therefore very widespread, and individually catastrophic to a degree that isn't true of financial crises restricted to bankers, investors, and entrepreneurs. They also have a special feature, which is that they interact with the tools of macro policy closely. Once the bubble passes a certain point, a significant chunk of the buyers are no longer able to cope with the normal range of fluctuation in the interest rate, and disaster is certain. This is essentially Minsky stage 2 - when capital gains become a necessity in order to service debt.
Once this stage is reached, for many of the people involved, it doesn't matter whether the final crash comes sooner or later - they're going to be ruined. For society as a whole, it would probably be better if it came sooner, but there are obvious reasons why this is unlikely to happen.
Keynes once said, in Economic Perspectives for our Grandchildren, that he hoped economists would become "humble competent people like dentists". Daniel Davies said not so long ago that economics might, if it was lucky, eventually become a branch of control systems engineering. An important concept in both is stability, but stability is often misunderstood. It doesn't mean the absence of change, but rather, the ability to recover to a normal state. James Lovelock's insight about ecosystems was arguably that they are stable - they eventually recover - but that there was no guarantee that recovery would be a good thing.
In a housing bubble scenario, eventually the berserk run-up in prices does indeed go into reverse - but it does so through widespread bankruptcy, unemployment, and systemic bank failure. This is the same whether the bubble bursts on its own, or the bubble is deliberately burst. The recovery mode of the system is indistinguishable from the worst-case scenario. As the purpose of a system is what it does, the fact we get into these scrapes is telling in itself.
Here, Felix Salmon excerpts a range of fascinating charts from the US National Housing Survey. A critical detail; even people who are currently behind on their mortgages or even in the process of repossession believe, by large majorities, that property is a good investment and that it is less risky than Treasury bills. Clearly, it will need more than just the biggest bubble in economic history, leading to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, to convince anyone that there is a problem. (There's also an excellent chart making the point that the market is still dear historically by about 20%.)
An interesting counter-example is here; it seems that specific regulation against some of the worst bubble-generating practices can help a lot. And I think that changing the failure modes is probably a good way of changing the system. Dean Baker answers reviewers here; he also points out that although Spain's banks didn't blow up, the housing bubble there was sufficient in itself to flatten the economy.
Kursk
Kursk was a bit of a disappointment. A submarine control room as the setting of a play isn't a bad idea - the movies worked that out many years ago - and putting it on as promenade theatre through the simulated sub is a cracking one. But, not quite.
It did remind me to check the (excellent) Wikipedia article on the loss of the Kursk, which answered my question. The problem is that the story doesn't really provide for a good drama from the viewpoint of a British submarine; even if you accept they were present, had they decided to surface at once and steam up to the Pyotr Veliky, the best thing that could have happened would have been to launch the ineffectual Russian rescue attempt a few hours earlier, which would have changed nothing. Most of the dead were dead within seconds; the survivors survived for days, almost long enough for the eventual British and Norwegian rescue effort to save them.
This leaves the story as a pure sea-piece; the isolation of the submarine, the role of the captain, the character conflicts, navy culture, the details of control-room procedure. In fact, the set's two-level structure, laid out around the central search periscope, isn't all that far off the Navy's original submarine simulator in design. In the original, the mockup control room was on the lower level, with the periscope rising through the ceiling into a room where the images required for the training scenarios were projected onto the walls.
You could make a case for secrecy being the main theme, but again, it doesn't quite work. A minor note is that there's a fair bit of Americo-scepticism about; the presence of two Los Angeles-class boats in the area is pointedly briefed as the American "threat".
Seen as science-fiction, though, it holds up better. An SF writer, whose name I forget, once said that there weren't any wars in his books because the universe was enemy enough.
It did remind me to check the (excellent) Wikipedia article on the loss of the Kursk, which answered my question. The problem is that the story doesn't really provide for a good drama from the viewpoint of a British submarine; even if you accept they were present, had they decided to surface at once and steam up to the Pyotr Veliky, the best thing that could have happened would have been to launch the ineffectual Russian rescue attempt a few hours earlier, which would have changed nothing. Most of the dead were dead within seconds; the survivors survived for days, almost long enough for the eventual British and Norwegian rescue effort to save them.
This leaves the story as a pure sea-piece; the isolation of the submarine, the role of the captain, the character conflicts, navy culture, the details of control-room procedure. In fact, the set's two-level structure, laid out around the central search periscope, isn't all that far off the Navy's original submarine simulator in design. In the original, the mockup control room was on the lower level, with the periscope rising through the ceiling into a room where the images required for the training scenarios were projected onto the walls.
You could make a case for secrecy being the main theme, but again, it doesn't quite work. A minor note is that there's a fair bit of Americo-scepticism about; the presence of two Los Angeles-class boats in the area is pointedly briefed as the American "threat".
Seen as science-fiction, though, it holds up better. An SF writer, whose name I forget, once said that there weren't any wars in his books because the universe was enemy enough.
better than it is
An interesting isotope is detected in the CRU report fall-out plume. Apart from the very high concentrations of concern-troll, tone-troll, and pure drivel, there is something worth learning from.
There are hardly any scientists today who don't do some programming of some sort; there's not much science that doesn't involve churning through really big data sets. As a result, there's a lot of it about. Which reminds me of this Eric Sink post from 2006, about the distinctions between "me-ware, us-ware, and them-ware". Me-ware is software that you write and only you use; us-ware is software that is used by the same organisation that produces it; them-ware is software that is produced by a software company or open-source project for the general public.
There's a gradient of difficulty; the further from you the end-user is, the less you know about their needs. On the other hand, if you're just trying to twiddle the chunks to fit through the ChunkCo Chunkstrainer without needing to buy a ChunkCo Hyperchunk, well, although you know just how big they are, you're unlikely to spend time building a pretty user interface or doing code reviews. Which only matters up to a point; nobody else would bother solving your problem.
But this can bite you on the arse, which is what happened to the climate researchers. It's fair to say that if you're processing a scientific data set, what actually matters is the data, or the mathematical operation you want to do to it. You won't get the paper into Nature because you hacked up a really elegant list comp or whatever; they won't refuse it because the code is ugly. Anyone who wants to replicate your results will probably roll their own.
This is OK, but the failure mode is when the political equivalent of Brian Coat comes snooping around your #comments or lack of them. Perhaps I should tidy up the Vfeed scripts while I'm at it.
For this reason, many software professionals encountering science software for the first time may be horrified. How, they ask, can we rely on this crude software, developed in primitive conditions - by amateurs, working with such poor tools and such poor understanding of the field? This is a common reaction to GISTEMP, and is exactly the reaction which many critics have had, some very publicly, to the software published with the CRU emails. Such critics do have a point. Science software should be better than it is. Scientists should be provided with more training, and more support. But consider the uses to which science software is put. Most
software written by scientists:
* consists of tiny programs;
* which will only ever be run a small number of times;
* over the course of a few weeks as it is being developed;
* by the scientist who wrote it;
* on data gathered by that scientist's team;
* concerning a scientific field in which that scientist is expert;
* to perform data processing on which that scientist is expert; and will be discarded, never to be used again, as soon as the paper containing the results is accepted for publication.
There are hardly any scientists today who don't do some programming of some sort; there's not much science that doesn't involve churning through really big data sets. As a result, there's a lot of it about. Which reminds me of this Eric Sink post from 2006, about the distinctions between "me-ware, us-ware, and them-ware". Me-ware is software that you write and only you use; us-ware is software that is used by the same organisation that produces it; them-ware is software that is produced by a software company or open-source project for the general public.
There's a gradient of difficulty; the further from you the end-user is, the less you know about their needs. On the other hand, if you're just trying to twiddle the chunks to fit through the ChunkCo Chunkstrainer without needing to buy a ChunkCo Hyperchunk, well, although you know just how big they are, you're unlikely to spend time building a pretty user interface or doing code reviews. Which only matters up to a point; nobody else would bother solving your problem.
But this can bite you on the arse, which is what happened to the climate researchers. It's fair to say that if you're processing a scientific data set, what actually matters is the data, or the mathematical operation you want to do to it. You won't get the paper into Nature because you hacked up a really elegant list comp or whatever; they won't refuse it because the code is ugly. Anyone who wants to replicate your results will probably roll their own.
This is OK, but the failure mode is when the political equivalent of Brian Coat comes snooping around your #comments or lack of them. Perhaps I should tidy up the Vfeed scripts while I'm at it.
actual Iranian music news
I was needling Spencer Ackerman about this but didn't get a rise. It's applicable to Noel Maurer too.
No-One Knows About Persian Cats is a cracking little film; it's a pseudo-documentary about Iran's music underground, by the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi and a small who's who of Iranian music. As a result, it could almost have been designed for Spackerman in the way Jeremy Clarkson said Vulcan 607 could have been designed for him.
One thing that comes through are the permanently-operating factors in the human terrain. For example, there's always a fixer - the guy who doesn't actually contribute any music themselves, but does know people who know people who have access to studio time and hall bookings and dodgy government permits. It's the Tony Wilson ethic. Hamed Behdad plays him as someone of permanent charm and near perfect unreliability, never clear whether he's totally committed to success or on the point of making off with the funds - one reading of the grim ending is that he's the grass.
The metal band's guitarist works - like Tony Iommi - in a metalworking factory, and the band rehearse in a shed full of cowshit on the edge of town, although paradoxically their lyrics are all about positive thinking. The rappers are slightly thuggish and given to lyrics like "the class struggle oppresses us!" which may have worked better in the original. The indie band are a bit painfully sensitive and notably more middle-class, the sort of people these guys are thinking of.
So far, so good; anything that reminds us that Iran is not actually Nazi Germany or the far side of the moon is politically welcome. So much of this is immediately recognisable if you've ever sat in a Mini with rust holes and a 1x12 Valvestate box on your lap, with a curry balanced on the top.
Of course, making music in an authoritarian society has its special problems. Everyone except the rappers is desperate to leave and the plot revolves around rounding up passports, visas, and means of payment, as the East Germans used to say. And getting the Ministry of Virtue permit to actually put on a gig. In the meantime, there's a constant round of rehearsals in cellars and in breezeblock sheds on rooftops; incredibly complex informal building seems to be a bit of a feature of Tehran.
And there's a sticky end at the hands of the militia, or not quite at their hands enough to prove it. In that way the police tend to have.
The BBC has the soundtrack as streams here.
No-One Knows About Persian Cats is a cracking little film; it's a pseudo-documentary about Iran's music underground, by the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi and a small who's who of Iranian music. As a result, it could almost have been designed for Spackerman in the way Jeremy Clarkson said Vulcan 607 could have been designed for him.
One thing that comes through are the permanently-operating factors in the human terrain. For example, there's always a fixer - the guy who doesn't actually contribute any music themselves, but does know people who know people who have access to studio time and hall bookings and dodgy government permits. It's the Tony Wilson ethic. Hamed Behdad plays him as someone of permanent charm and near perfect unreliability, never clear whether he's totally committed to success or on the point of making off with the funds - one reading of the grim ending is that he's the grass.
The metal band's guitarist works - like Tony Iommi - in a metalworking factory, and the band rehearse in a shed full of cowshit on the edge of town, although paradoxically their lyrics are all about positive thinking. The rappers are slightly thuggish and given to lyrics like "the class struggle oppresses us!" which may have worked better in the original. The indie band are a bit painfully sensitive and notably more middle-class, the sort of people these guys are thinking of.
So far, so good; anything that reminds us that Iran is not actually Nazi Germany or the far side of the moon is politically welcome. So much of this is immediately recognisable if you've ever sat in a Mini with rust holes and a 1x12 Valvestate box on your lap, with a curry balanced on the top.
Of course, making music in an authoritarian society has its special problems. Everyone except the rappers is desperate to leave and the plot revolves around rounding up passports, visas, and means of payment, as the East Germans used to say. And getting the Ministry of Virtue permit to actually put on a gig. In the meantime, there's a constant round of rehearsals in cellars and in breezeblock sheds on rooftops; incredibly complex informal building seems to be a bit of a feature of Tehran.
And there's a sticky end at the hands of the militia, or not quite at their hands enough to prove it. In that way the police tend to have.
The BBC has the soundtrack as streams here.
Friday, April 09, 2010
coffee and stupidity
Deeply unprofitable Crooked Timber thread produces an interesting point. Not so much "why do libertarians hate Fairtrade coffee?", but why on earth do they insist on lying? From the link:
The problem here is paragraph two; I've not attempted to estimate the cross-elasticity of demand for Fairtrade and non-Fairtrade coffee, and it's not the kind of thing I'd try unless someone was paying me to do it. But it's perfectly simple to consult the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation International standardisation documents and see if they actually forbid full-time employment or set a maximum limit on the size of farms. Here's the standard on the use of hired labour. Requirement 1.5.1.13:
So - no. Not even close. 180 degrees out, in fact. The point arises downthread that the great majority of work on a coffee farm is seasonal in nature, so Cowan couldn't possibly have been right even if you let him have his own facts. This is marginally unfair to him; it's not his prose, but rather something he's (very) favourably quoting. The original source is here; note the cites back to Cowan and to people at George Mason University, the Koch Industries school.
For some reason, I still followed a link to his blog after this, to this interesting sociological result. Apparently, if you've been to jail, you're more likely to self-identify as black when you leave jail then when you went in. This is interesting, but then numskull racist twit Steve Sailer showed up in the comments. As far as I can make out from his semi-coherent comments, he's very angry about this, which is odd for someone who believes in biological racism (surely it wouldn't matter? your DNA, after all, doesn't care which census box you tick).
Further, Sailer's freakout reminded me of the old joke about the Wee Free minister who hears that a hippie commune has moved into the next island along. He listens icily as the various novel features are described - the long music, the loud hair, the ruthlessly commercial communists, etc. Eventually they tell him the newcomers believe in free love. "Free love?" he explodes. "That could lead to mixed dancing!" Similarly, it's clear from Sailer's comments that he's opposed to rape in prison because he thinks it might lead to multi-culturalism. And does he think about it. All the time, it seems.
Perhaps his mate Anthony Browne from PolEx could offer him counselling as part of the Big Society?
By guaranteeing a minimum price, Fairtrade also encourages market oversupply, which depresses global commodity prices. This locks Fairtrade farmers into greater Fairtrade dependency and further impoverishes farmers outside the Fairtrade umbrella. Economist Tyler Cowen describes this as the “parallel exploitation coffee sector”.
Coffee farms must not be more than 12 acres in size and they are not allowed to employ any full-time workers. This means that during harvest season migrant workers must be employed on short-term contracts. These rural poor are therefore expressly excluded from the stability of long-term employment by Fairtrade rules.
The problem here is paragraph two; I've not attempted to estimate the cross-elasticity of demand for Fairtrade and non-Fairtrade coffee, and it's not the kind of thing I'd try unless someone was paying me to do it. But it's perfectly simple to consult the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation International standardisation documents and see if they actually forbid full-time employment or set a maximum limit on the size of farms. Here's the standard on the use of hired labour. Requirement 1.5.1.13:
All regular work is undertaken by permanent workers...The objective is that as often as possible, work is undertaken by permanent workers. Only work that is added to usual work levels during peak seasons may be undertaken by seasonal workers.
So - no. Not even close. 180 degrees out, in fact. The point arises downthread that the great majority of work on a coffee farm is seasonal in nature, so Cowan couldn't possibly have been right even if you let him have his own facts. This is marginally unfair to him; it's not his prose, but rather something he's (very) favourably quoting. The original source is here; note the cites back to Cowan and to people at George Mason University, the Koch Industries school.
For some reason, I still followed a link to his blog after this, to this interesting sociological result. Apparently, if you've been to jail, you're more likely to self-identify as black when you leave jail then when you went in. This is interesting, but then numskull racist twit Steve Sailer showed up in the comments. As far as I can make out from his semi-coherent comments, he's very angry about this, which is odd for someone who believes in biological racism (surely it wouldn't matter? your DNA, after all, doesn't care which census box you tick).
Further, Sailer's freakout reminded me of the old joke about the Wee Free minister who hears that a hippie commune has moved into the next island along. He listens icily as the various novel features are described - the long music, the loud hair, the ruthlessly commercial communists, etc. Eventually they tell him the newcomers believe in free love. "Free love?" he explodes. "That could lead to mixed dancing!" Similarly, it's clear from Sailer's comments that he's opposed to rape in prison because he thinks it might lead to multi-culturalism. And does he think about it. All the time, it seems.
Perhaps his mate Anthony Browne from PolEx could offer him counselling as part of the Big Society?
trolls of the Ayatollah
Laura Rozen takes us to meet the Iranian government's loyalist bloggers.
You bet they do. It would be offensive to speculate exactly who we all know would end up doing this job in a hypothetical fascist Britain. I'll leave it up to you, although I will point out that at least two bloggers who would be regulars on Newsnight and in the British Gazette's opinion pages in that scenario...already are regulars in the MSM.
I don't know if they're doing anything technical to favour their bloggers and their trolls over the other guys; if the loyalists are more likely to be hosted in Iran, the policy of slashing international bandwidth while leaving the networks up might help. But that's not what interests me right now.
What role, politically, do trolls play? On one hand, it's clearly possible to use the Internet as a mobilisation tool for good, or at the very least, for nihilistic shit-flinging. Examples; this slightly disappointing interview with the Obama campaign's CTO, and this blitz on a bunch of bigots' facetwitspace accounts, respectively. Or this scientific paper; oddly, when a random Internet person actually did some climate science they didn't find that it was all made up.
But on the other hand, there's a great towering mountain of drivel, a spuming, stinking Eyjafjallajökull of bullshit - an Icelandic or Hawaiian eruption, one that keeps burbling on without working up enough pressure to explode, but does keep belching toxic gas.
Personally, I suspect that the use of Internet pond life in politics is that it's a way of tapping the energies of people who otherwise wouldn't get involved, just as lefties tend to hope it might be the same thing. I just differ on which group of people are being mobilised. It's hard to get The Authoritarians to initiate anything; they're obsessed with leaders by definition. And it's also unlikely that you'll get people who are convinced of the futility of collective action to start a movement. Further, this guy wasn't going to take to the streets, was he?
Get them in front of a keyboard, pass them some talking points, though, and they're happy to bombard selected targets with abuse. I further observe that we have about three major examples of this - one is the US, and specifically the Bush re-election campaign, another would be Russia in the early Putin years (Andrew Wilson's classic Virtual Politics (I reviewed it here) is good on the importance of the temnik talking points system), and the latest would be Iran today.
The hardliners have fielded hundreds of pro-regime bloggers, most writing in Persian, emphasizing particularly the importance of supporting the Supreme Leader. The bloggers range from students to clerics, with many claiming to be members of the Basij and children of war veterans or martyrs. Virtually all are hard-line or extremist in their views. Some bloggers appear to be popular and often draw many comments from their posts.
You bet they do. It would be offensive to speculate exactly who we all know would end up doing this job in a hypothetical fascist Britain. I'll leave it up to you, although I will point out that at least two bloggers who would be regulars on Newsnight and in the British Gazette's opinion pages in that scenario...already are regulars in the MSM.
I don't know if they're doing anything technical to favour their bloggers and their trolls over the other guys; if the loyalists are more likely to be hosted in Iran, the policy of slashing international bandwidth while leaving the networks up might help. But that's not what interests me right now.
What role, politically, do trolls play? On one hand, it's clearly possible to use the Internet as a mobilisation tool for good, or at the very least, for nihilistic shit-flinging. Examples; this slightly disappointing interview with the Obama campaign's CTO, and this blitz on a bunch of bigots' facetwitspace accounts, respectively. Or this scientific paper; oddly, when a random Internet person actually did some climate science they didn't find that it was all made up.
But on the other hand, there's a great towering mountain of drivel, a spuming, stinking Eyjafjallajökull of bullshit - an Icelandic or Hawaiian eruption, one that keeps burbling on without working up enough pressure to explode, but does keep belching toxic gas.
Personally, I suspect that the use of Internet pond life in politics is that it's a way of tapping the energies of people who otherwise wouldn't get involved, just as lefties tend to hope it might be the same thing. I just differ on which group of people are being mobilised. It's hard to get The Authoritarians to initiate anything; they're obsessed with leaders by definition. And it's also unlikely that you'll get people who are convinced of the futility of collective action to start a movement. Further, this guy wasn't going to take to the streets, was he?
Get them in front of a keyboard, pass them some talking points, though, and they're happy to bombard selected targets with abuse. I further observe that we have about three major examples of this - one is the US, and specifically the Bush re-election campaign, another would be Russia in the early Putin years (Andrew Wilson's classic Virtual Politics (I reviewed it here) is good on the importance of the temnik talking points system), and the latest would be Iran today.
export any
So we were talking about China exporting its internal chaos, while also importing Indian internal chaos. Then, the good folk at 31 Jin-rong Street, Beijing gave us a practical example. That would be AS4134, CHINANET-BACKBONE, aka China Telecom's long lines/Internetworking division. Starting at 1558 GMT, they leaked a very large number of other people's routes into the global Internet. According to Martin Brown of Renesys, the incident affected some 31,847 routes in 10 minutes, or several times the number normally announced from 4134.
Anyone who accepted one of the leaked routes would have seen their traffic to that network go to China Telecom first, and only then to their destination, presuming that China Telecom's internal routing was valid. Otherwise it would have gone nowhere.
The key thing to remember here is that Internet routers know where to route your traffic because they tell each other which routes they have. Network A - in this case AS4134 - tells its peers that it can route to network B directly and to C via D or E, but preferably D. The peers pass on this information to their peers. Eventually, this means that any router connected to the Internet can have a full copy of the routing table for the entire Internet at any moment, should it need it. The downside of the Border Gateway Protocol which governs this is, however, that it doesn't perform any verification of the routing updates; like a lot of Internet engineering from the 70s and 80s, it relies on trust. More to the point, it relies on trust in others' competence.
Occasionally, bad things happen, as when Pakistan accidentally routed all inbound traffic to YouTube into the censorship proxy at Pakistan Telecom. In this case, somehow, China Telecom issued 31,847 routing updates to the world at large. An important distinction here is that between internal and external BGP; it's possible that a huge national backbone operator might have offered its customers a seriously large number of routes, indeed a full route-view. But they certainly shouldn't have offered them to the wider Internet - hence the idea of a routing "leak".
We've blogged before that the Chinese Internet isn't characterised by "cyberwar" or even by censorship, but rather by chaos. This is a physical, real-time example of internal chaos within China being exported to the rest of the world. As a result, not just because of BGP issues but also of spam, etc, quite a lot of networks filter all or most netblocks inside China; here's a sample access control list.
Anyone who accepted one of the leaked routes would have seen their traffic to that network go to China Telecom first, and only then to their destination, presuming that China Telecom's internal routing was valid. Otherwise it would have gone nowhere.
The key thing to remember here is that Internet routers know where to route your traffic because they tell each other which routes they have. Network A - in this case AS4134 - tells its peers that it can route to network B directly and to C via D or E, but preferably D. The peers pass on this information to their peers. Eventually, this means that any router connected to the Internet can have a full copy of the routing table for the entire Internet at any moment, should it need it. The downside of the Border Gateway Protocol which governs this is, however, that it doesn't perform any verification of the routing updates; like a lot of Internet engineering from the 70s and 80s, it relies on trust. More to the point, it relies on trust in others' competence.
Occasionally, bad things happen, as when Pakistan accidentally routed all inbound traffic to YouTube into the censorship proxy at Pakistan Telecom. In this case, somehow, China Telecom issued 31,847 routing updates to the world at large. An important distinction here is that between internal and external BGP; it's possible that a huge national backbone operator might have offered its customers a seriously large number of routes, indeed a full route-view. But they certainly shouldn't have offered them to the wider Internet - hence the idea of a routing "leak".
We've blogged before that the Chinese Internet isn't characterised by "cyberwar" or even by censorship, but rather by chaos. This is a physical, real-time example of internal chaos within China being exported to the rest of the world. As a result, not just because of BGP issues but also of spam, etc, quite a lot of networks filter all or most netblocks inside China; here's a sample access control list.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
the voices of randomness
My Markov chain blog occasionally brings forth wonders.
It's incredible how the paranoia makes itself felt. A Lovecraft theme here, of course.
Martin "Asian supermen are our rightful masters - submit!" Jacques, meanwhile:
The a speech of David Cameron would be facing in this country who hope that the Jews generally and poisonous Jewish millionaires the Centre for many Americans are long tentacles of the little platoons of the gathering darkness.
It's incredible how the paranoia makes itself felt. A Lovecraft theme here, of course.
Martin "Asian supermen are our rightful masters - submit!" Jacques, meanwhile:
The Chinese believe that a trade war drawing in the country's centre of power relate to a long drawn out process of the Uighurs: duties and equally fine wine a likely possibility.
Indeed a characteristic of government is running scared.
exporting Chinese chaos, importing Indian chaos
The new Shadowserver Foundation report is out; everyone has ooh'd over folk stealing the Dalai Lama's e-mail, etc. Others have pointed to the concentration on the Indian military establishment.
Technically, all that's interesting here is that the attackers used mass market Internet services, like Yahoo! Mail, as transports for their botnet command-and-control messages, and that they made a lot of use of dodgy PDF files as an attack vector, usually personalised to the target. Also, their network visualisations suggest that registering DNS names with minimal consequences is very important to the system as a whole - each name is requested by many, many bots and is used to identify many, many Web servers. Fast-flux would seem to be a crucial node in the system.
Politically, the first major insight is that it's India that's the top priority, and India beyond the Tibetan exile institutions. India, excluding the Tibetan targets, vastly dominates all categories of everything in the report. Indian institutions are the top targets - as well as a wide range of defence organisations, the Indian Railways are in there. There's no word on Bollywood yet. So far, so clear - rather than worrying about much fancied dissidents or Tibetans, the strategic priority is the local peer competitor.
On page 33, however, detailing what was extracted from the Indian National Security Council Secretariat:
Now, it's very possible that this is just the effect of dragging a big scoop through a flock of top Indian Civil Service presentations. On the other hand, why would China prize data on Shokly's lot? Various options are possible. One, they're splittists causing irresponsible destabilisation and obstructing construction - and they want to either know all about them in case of war, or else know all about them because they're both a bunch of modern thinkers very keen on big coal mines.
Another would be that the Chinese side is interested in the Naxalites as a potential model for their own internal chaos, as Jamie Kenny would say. China's forced-draft modernisation - as Samuel Huntington might have said in one of his periodic bouts of moral self-abasement - is constantly reacting with a tough working class that expresses its protests by burning down Communist Party offices. Like India, they have deeply uneven development, and a strange relationship between top-down, authoritarian modernisation and federalism. Perhaps they're wondering what form a super-MGI would take?
Yet a further option would be that the Ghostnet team are interested in the Naxalites because they're rebels themselves. They may be working for the Party, but it's very clear from the report that the line between the commercial spammer/botherd business and the spooks is blurred. The same techniques and the same people and the same places appear in both. In one way, this suggests that the crimeware world is a significant resource for the Party and the government; in another way, it suggests that they're beholden for this to an unruly and uncontrollable gang of botnet masters who'd frame their grandmothers as paedophiles for money, and do worse for bragging rights.
Technically, all that's interesting here is that the attackers used mass market Internet services, like Yahoo! Mail, as transports for their botnet command-and-control messages, and that they made a lot of use of dodgy PDF files as an attack vector, usually personalised to the target. Also, their network visualisations suggest that registering DNS names with minimal consequences is very important to the system as a whole - each name is requested by many, many bots and is used to identify many, many Web servers. Fast-flux would seem to be a crucial node in the system.
Politically, the first major insight is that it's India that's the top priority, and India beyond the Tibetan exile institutions. India, excluding the Tibetan targets, vastly dominates all categories of everything in the report. Indian institutions are the top targets - as well as a wide range of defence organisations, the Indian Railways are in there. There's no word on Bollywood yet. So far, so clear - rather than worrying about much fancied dissidents or Tibetans, the strategic priority is the local peer competitor.
On page 33, however, detailing what was extracted from the Indian National Security Council Secretariat:
In addition to documents containing the personal and financial information of what appears to be the compromised individual, the exfiltrated documents focus on India's security situation in the states of Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, and Tripura, as well as the Naxalites, Maoists, and what is referred to as "left-wing extremism".
Now, it's very possible that this is just the effect of dragging a big scoop through a flock of top Indian Civil Service presentations. On the other hand, why would China prize data on Shokly's lot? Various options are possible. One, they're splittists causing irresponsible destabilisation and obstructing construction - and they want to either know all about them in case of war, or else know all about them because they're both a bunch of modern thinkers very keen on big coal mines.
Another would be that the Chinese side is interested in the Naxalites as a potential model for their own internal chaos, as Jamie Kenny would say. China's forced-draft modernisation - as Samuel Huntington might have said in one of his periodic bouts of moral self-abasement - is constantly reacting with a tough working class that expresses its protests by burning down Communist Party offices. Like India, they have deeply uneven development, and a strange relationship between top-down, authoritarian modernisation and federalism. Perhaps they're wondering what form a super-MGI would take?
Yet a further option would be that the Ghostnet team are interested in the Naxalites because they're rebels themselves. They may be working for the Party, but it's very clear from the report that the line between the commercial spammer/botherd business and the spooks is blurred. The same techniques and the same people and the same places appear in both. In one way, this suggests that the crimeware world is a significant resource for the Party and the government; in another way, it suggests that they're beholden for this to an unruly and uncontrollable gang of botnet masters who'd frame their grandmothers as paedophiles for money, and do worse for bragging rights.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yak
Progress update on fixing the Vfeed.
Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like "data-row2", now, exactly half the flights are like that, they've been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so movements each, and the rows that aren't "data-row2" don't have any class attributes but random HTML colours.
And the airline names have disappeared, replaced by their logos as GIFs. Unhelpful, but then, why should they want to help me?
Anyway, I've solved the parsing issue with following horrible hack.
As it happened, I later realised I didn't need to bother grabbing the logo filenames in order to extract airline identifiers from them, so the td.img["src"] bit can be dropped.
But it looks like I'm going to need to do the lookup from ICAO or IATA identifiers to airline names, which is necessary to avoid having to remake the whitelist and the database and the stats script, myself. Fortunately, there's a list on wikipedia. The good news is that I've come up with a way of differentiating the ICAO and the IATA names in the flight numbers. ICAOs are always three alphabetical characters; IATAs are two alphanumeric characters, which aren't necessarily globally unique. In a flight number, they can be followed by a number of variable length.
But if the third character in the flight number is a digit, the first two must be an IATA identifier; if a string, it must be an ICAO identifier.
Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like "data-row2", now, exactly half the flights are like that, they've been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so movements each, and the rows that aren't "data-row2" don't have any class attributes but random HTML colours.
And the airline names have disappeared, replaced by their logos as GIFs. Unhelpful, but then, why should they want to help me?
Anyway, I've solved the parsing issue with following horrible hack.
output = [[td.string or td.img["src"] for td in tr.findAll(True) if td.string or td.img] for tr in soup.findAll('tr', bgcolor=lambda(value): value == 'White' or value == '#F7F7DE')] As it happened, I later realised I didn't need to bother grabbing the logo filenames in order to extract airline identifiers from them, so the td.img["src"] bit can be dropped.
But it looks like I'm going to need to do the lookup from ICAO or IATA identifiers to airline names, which is necessary to avoid having to remake the whitelist and the database and the stats script, myself. Fortunately, there's a list on wikipedia. The good news is that I've come up with a way of differentiating the ICAO and the IATA names in the flight numbers. ICAOs are always three alphabetical characters; IATAs are two alphanumeric characters, which aren't necessarily globally unique. In a flight number, they can be followed by a number of variable length.
But if the third character in the flight number is a digit, the first two must be an IATA identifier; if a string, it must be an ICAO identifier.
manufactured controversy
A question, inspired by this ruckus in Jamie Kenny's comments. Is the notion of a manufactured controversy analytically useful?
I can see that the ideas of fake consensus, or fear-uncertainty-and-doubt, are useful. But manufactured controversy presumes that someone is manufacturing the controversy. Presumably they are doing this to make a point of some sort, unless they are simply trolling. They want their side of the manufactured controversy to win. Isn't that, in fact, controversy? The climate-change deniers are full of crap and funded by the coal industry, but they exist.
Arguably, manufactured controversy is a bit of an unspeak concept; if there is no real controversy, therefore there is no real opposition, and my views embody the broad consensus. In some ways, it's a delegitimiser; in others, a tranquiliser. I don't need to worry about the opposition - it's all froth.
I can see that the ideas of fake consensus, or fear-uncertainty-and-doubt, are useful. But manufactured controversy presumes that someone is manufacturing the controversy. Presumably they are doing this to make a point of some sort, unless they are simply trolling. They want their side of the manufactured controversy to win. Isn't that, in fact, controversy? The climate-change deniers are full of crap and funded by the coal industry, but they exist.
Arguably, manufactured controversy is a bit of an unspeak concept; if there is no real controversy, therefore there is no real opposition, and my views embody the broad consensus. In some ways, it's a delegitimiser; in others, a tranquiliser. I don't need to worry about the opposition - it's all froth.
science!
Here's something interesting. I grabbed the last 6 months' worth of national opinion polls from Wellsy's and graphed the Tory lead in percentage points. On the tiny chart below, you'll observe that the mean is 10 points; the hatched area shows one standard deviation each side of the mean, and I've plotted a linear trend through it. (You can see a full-size version of it here.)
The interesting bit; there are 21 polls, out of 158, that showed a Conservative lead of more than one standard deviation greater than the mean. All of them occurred before the 29th of January. There are 24 that showed a lead more than one standard deviation less than the mean. 20 out of 24 occurred since the 19th of February. What on earth could have happened between these dates?
The posters broke in a big way around the 19th of January and the second wave hit in early February. Clifford Singer deserves a knighthood for this.
(link)
The interesting bit; there are 21 polls, out of 158, that showed a Conservative lead of more than one standard deviation greater than the mean. All of them occurred before the 29th of January. There are 24 that showed a lead more than one standard deviation less than the mean. 20 out of 24 occurred since the 19th of February. What on earth could have happened between these dates?
The posters broke in a big way around the 19th of January and the second wave hit in early February. Clifford Singer deserves a knighthood for this.
(link)
Friday, March 26, 2010
FAIL
Yes, the Viktorfeed is indeed down. Dubai Airport has redesigned its Web site, and the parser is now not parsing, and the error handling has failed to handle an error where the target page loads but contains unexpected HTML. I've stopped the cron job to save filling up the system logs. There will now be a short break.
Note the faintly mischievous expression.
Note the faintly mischievous expression.
Monday, March 22, 2010
neither Hoon nor Gove, and probably not Opik either
Has there been anyone in British politics quite as depraved as Geoff Hoon? Can my readers help?
Probably the worst defence secretary ever. (You have to realise that he was probably one of the Prime Minister's two designated deputies for nuclear retaliation - Byers, not so much, and at least he got us the railways back.) Iraqi mothers will thank me. Editors should apologise. And on and on it goes. He signed the letter in an effort to sack Brown but didn't send it because he wanted a job in Europe. Now, the bungling backstabbing fucko and neocon extras girl is yours for £3000 per 86,400 seconds. It's almost worth taking a Senlis Council view and deciding that it's worth paying over the money, collecting his lobbying services in a sealed warehouse patrolled by the army, and destroying them just to get them off the streets.
But. But. Come to think of it, the Blaney precedent governs this case - whatever is worthless cannot be the object of corruption.
Meanwhile, Michael Gove reckons that accepting money from a non-taxpaying non-voter who made the money by squeezing the wages of cleaners and charging Belizeans for phone calls at monopoly rates, before joining the legislature under false pretences, and letting him define your party's strategy, without any of its members being so much as asked, is OK. Accepting money from the taxable income of millions of citizens who donated it by their free choice and elected representatives to decide what to do with it is beyond the pale. However, if some sort of national network of political activists was to offer Michael Gove donations and organisational support, that's OK so long as they start with a C.
Of course, Gove personally didn't need any organisation or money, because he got given a one-party seat and was allowed to keep writing national newspaper editorials in his own cause during his "campaign". The only conclusion is that Hoon and Gove are equally repellent; you have to make allowances for the opportunities Gove has missed out on, as part of a generation of Tories deprived of power.
Meanwhile, I called my local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing man in the Commons and 472nd out of 646 for responsiveness about the Digital Economy Bill. Radio silence, of course. I left a comment on Lynne Featherstone's blog, and you know what? She actually responded to it, saying that it going into the washup was good because all parties had to agree to pass it. True. If anyone remembers to object.
Probably the worst defence secretary ever. (You have to realise that he was probably one of the Prime Minister's two designated deputies for nuclear retaliation - Byers, not so much, and at least he got us the railways back.) Iraqi mothers will thank me. Editors should apologise. And on and on it goes. He signed the letter in an effort to sack Brown but didn't send it because he wanted a job in Europe. Now, the bungling backstabbing fucko and neocon extras girl is yours for £3000 per 86,400 seconds. It's almost worth taking a Senlis Council view and deciding that it's worth paying over the money, collecting his lobbying services in a sealed warehouse patrolled by the army, and destroying them just to get them off the streets.
But. But. Come to think of it, the Blaney precedent governs this case - whatever is worthless cannot be the object of corruption.
Meanwhile, Michael Gove reckons that accepting money from a non-taxpaying non-voter who made the money by squeezing the wages of cleaners and charging Belizeans for phone calls at monopoly rates, before joining the legislature under false pretences, and letting him define your party's strategy, without any of its members being so much as asked, is OK. Accepting money from the taxable income of millions of citizens who donated it by their free choice and elected representatives to decide what to do with it is beyond the pale. However, if some sort of national network of political activists was to offer Michael Gove donations and organisational support, that's OK so long as they start with a C.
Of course, Gove personally didn't need any organisation or money, because he got given a one-party seat and was allowed to keep writing national newspaper editorials in his own cause during his "campaign". The only conclusion is that Hoon and Gove are equally repellent; you have to make allowances for the opportunities Gove has missed out on, as part of a generation of Tories deprived of power.
Meanwhile, I called my local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing man in the Commons and 472nd out of 646 for responsiveness about the Digital Economy Bill. Radio silence, of course. I left a comment on Lynne Featherstone's blog, and you know what? She actually responded to it, saying that it going into the washup was good because all parties had to agree to pass it. True. If anyone remembers to object.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Sunday SDR, Chapter 6 - Key Strategic Questions
And we're there! Chapter 6 - Key Questions for the future SDR - attempts to sum up the Green Paper and set some deliverable goals for the full SDR process.
There are six key questions, which also get their own comments threads here; again, one of the salient features is how little there is about the relationship with the US and also that none of the comments seem to find this at all surprising. Not so long ago, suggesting any cooperation with Europe except for the strictest possible interpretation of NATO would reliably get you an avalanche of Tories accusing you of undermining the special relationship. Now, not so much.
The six strategic questions are as follows:
There's also this one:
The rest is basically a summary, but it's interesting that a couple of specific policies make it through to the final cut:
More for reference than anything else, here are the official military planning assumptions, and a list of operations since the 1998 SDR.
There are six key questions, which also get their own comments threads here; again, one of the salient features is how little there is about the relationship with the US and also that none of the comments seem to find this at all surprising. Not so long ago, suggesting any cooperation with Europe except for the strictest possible interpretation of NATO would reliably get you an avalanche of Tories accusing you of undermining the special relationship. Now, not so much.
It is likely that the American commitment to the NATO Alliance will wane in the next 10 – 20 years...The prospect here, indeed possibly the only prospect, is of closer ties with our European partners through development of the Common Security and Defence Policy....It is obvious that the continual paring down of national capability will end in a Euroforce. Whether this is perchance or by design is a moot point. I think the time has come to stop resisting this and start positively embracing it
The six strategic questions are as follows:
* Given that domestic security cannot be separated from international security, where should we set the balance between focusing on our territory and region and engaging threats at a distance?
* What approach should we take if we employ the Armed Forces to address threats at distance?
* What contribution should the Armed Forces make in ensuring security and contributing to resilience within the UK?
* How could we more effectively employ the Armed Forces in support of wider efforts to prevent conflict and strengthen international stability?
* Do our current international defence and security relationships require rebalancing in the longer term?
* Should we further integrate our forces with those of key allies and partners?
There's also this one:
* To what extent and in what areas should we continue to refocus our current efforts on Afghanistan?
The rest is basically a summary, but it's interesting that a couple of specific policies make it through to the final cut:
Options for enhancing our cyber capabilities and structures to ensure we can defend, and take steps, against adversaries when necessary; and where we might increase our contribution to allied space capabilities or invest in our own national capabilities.
More for reference than anything else, here are the official military planning assumptions, and a list of operations since the 1998 SDR.
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