Posted in Flatulent tosspottery

Something does not compute here

By Comments:55 Comments

Twitter Engineering Manager Leslie Miley, the only black engineer in a leadership position at Twitter, just publicly announced that he has left the company. In his post, he says his reasons for leaving have everything to do with the way Twitter is addressing diversity and inclusion.

OK.

Twitter’s workforce consists of 1% African-Americans, 3% Hispanics and 13% women, according to its latest diversity report. Miley argues that Twitter’s issues with growth and engagement are related to the company’s issues with diversity.

“For some at Twitter, diversity is an obstruction to avoid,” Miley wrote. “With my departure, Twitter no longer has any managers, directors, or VP’s of color in engineering or product management. From this position, Twitter may find it difficult to make the changes to culture and product.”

Entirely possible: not enough people within the company understanding the various cultures outside it. OK, let’s test that:

Pew said blacks also tend to use Twitter more often, noting that 22 percent of black Internet users access Twitter at high levels compared with 16 percent of whites. Overall, 73 percent of black Internet users and 72 percent of white Internet users use Twitter.

Oh, maybe that’s why he was fired (and he was). Because an engineer who is empirically wrong isn’t of much use to anyone, are they?

Posted in Your Tax Money At Work

Hang them all

By Comments:47 Comments

Devon County Council has road repair backlog that would cost £750m to fix
Council signed up more than 55 residents to help fill potholes in local areas
But a year on, the team has been unable to fix a single one due to red tape

That multi-person gallows is taking a long time, isn’t it?

Posted in Flatulent tosspottery

Pecunia non olet

By Comments:8 Comments

Fuck off wankers:

Oxford University has been urged to review its decision to accept £75m from Len Blavatnik, Britain’s richest man, to build the Blavatnik school of government.

In a letter to the Guardian, the signatories accuse the university of failing to investigate whether Blavatnik and other “oligarchs” played any role in what they describe as a state-sponsored campaign of harassment against BP in Russia. Oxford “should stop selling its reputation and prestige to Putin’s associates,” it says.

In 2008 and 2009 dozens of British and western managers were “forced out of Russia”, the letter adds, in a bitter dispute between BP and a group of powerful Russian billionaires. The billionaires, including Blavatnik, were joint partners with BP in TNK-BP, Russia’s third-biggest oil company.

The university says it did not look into the dispute, which the AAR consortium won. In 2013 the oligarchs sold their stake to the Russian state oil giant Rosneft in what the letter describes as “a highly controversial deal”.

It adds: “Oxford University apparently failed to investigate these facts, AAR’s track record from the beginning, and its close ties with the Kremlin … We insist that the university should stop selling its reputation and prestige to Putin’s associates. It should and carry out a new and independent due diligence investigation with clearly defined ethical norms.”

Go make your own £75 million and donate it as you wish.

Posted in Flatulent tosspottery

Today’s idiot stupidity

By Comments:30 Comments

Like CB Radio, Twitter isn’t an end product. It’s infrastructure that plays too socially and politically useful a role to be left in the hands of investors and stockbrokers. Whether it’s through state nationalisation, some sort of global governance framework or a user maintained co-operative, it’s time to take Twitter out of the world of finance and put it firmly in the hands of the public – before it goes broke, or wrecks its user experience entirely, or both.

Sigh.

Posted in European Union

Who in buggery cares?

By Comments:25 Comments

Eurocrats have been hoodwinked into eating cheap fish, an undercover investigation into Brussels restaurants has established.
EU officials are being ripped-off and their health put in danger by a “systemic” fraud in the Belgian dining scene that sees one in three fish dishes mislabelled.
An investigation by campaigners using undercover diners and DNA sample analysis found that even the restaurants of the European Commission and Parliament are, wittingly or unwittingly, passing off low-grade fillets as delicacies.
Investigators working with the University of Leuven sought to buy five kinds of fish – Atlantic cod, common sole, bluefin tuna, swordfish and ray – from restaurants surrounding EU offices and in Brussels’ tourist quarter.
In fact, they were served 36 kinds of fish – including four that could not be identified by laboratory analysis.

If the dullards who become bureaucrats cannot tell the difference then why should anyone else give a shit?

Except, of course, that because 10,000 dullards are being ripped off the 500 million people of Europe will be subjected to yet another layer of expensive and intrusive legislation. Hurrah etc. Because if one of the fuckers stubbed their toe they’d be waving around plans for a Common European Stair, wouldn’t they?

Posted in Feminism

And the gender gap in the tech world is explained

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For people baffled as to how scientists and mathematicians come up with such novel ideas, a new study suggests they are higher on the autism spectrum making them far better at logical thinking and seeing the bigger picture.
New research which tested nearly 500,000 people for autism traits and compared it to their jobs found those in involved in STEM professions (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) have more autistic traits.
Autistic traits are not the same as having a diagnosis of autism; instead, these are characteristics of personality and behaviour that are found throughout the general population and are linked to what is seen in the clinical condition of autism.

All Simon Baron Cohen all over again. Men are more likely to be on that autistic spectrum (about 10:1) and being in STEM correlates with being on the spectrum (a bit: that is, with being a bit on the spectrum, not correlates a bit).

And thus is our gender imbalance among techies explained. Nerds and geeks tend to be male. Thus those employed as nerds and geeks tend to be male.

QED.

Posted in Your Tax Money At Work

Save the local authority staff!

By Comments:9 Comments

Town hall officials will face up to two years in prison if they abuse snooping powers under a crackdown on council surveillance to be unveiled on Wednesday.
A new offence is to be created to target public authorities who inappropriately access phone and email records.

Why not just protect them by temptation by removing their powers to do so in the first place?

Posted in The Blogger Himself

Great fun with the 1939 register

By Comments:15 Comments

For a given value of fun of course. The register of all the people in the country in 1939, the pre-war census thingammiebob.

So, looking up my name (Worstall, obviously, because it’s rare and easier to look up than mother’s maiden name) I see Great Aunt, Uncle, no idea who the bloke in Pewsey is, Grandmother and that’s it.

Father and Grandfather don’t seem to be on it. Which is a bit odd, as father’s address at the time was the same as Grandmother’s and Uncle’s (he wouldn’t have been away at school at that time, too young) and Grandfather was career RAF so they should have known where he was (at the same address I think….some airbase in the Cotswolds, Calne maybe? Although that’s Wiltshire I think. Summat like that anyway).

The other grandfather, mother etc don’t seem to be in there at all.

So, not hugely accurate I would say.

Posted in Newspaper Watch

Oh do fuck off you tosspot

By Comments:39 Comments

But then, after about five seconds, I realised what Sonny Bill Williams had actually done. He’s ruined competitive sport for ever. Nice work, Sonny Bill, you magnanimous berk.

You see, everything has a shadow. Every smile eventually fades and becomes a frown. Every kind act, somewhere down the line, has a victim. Thanks to his kindhearted efforts, the victims of Sonny Bill’s action are literally every single person who has ever won – or will ever win – anything. This isn’t an exaggeration.

Christ, it’s not that damn difficult to find a reasonable subject for a column you know. OK, Jessica Valenti and Charlotte Proudwomyn never quite manage it but the rest of us can usually find one without this sort of guff.

Posted in Flatulent tosspottery

Claims I don’t believe

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Via email:

Bitcoin set to be 6th largest global reserve currency in 15 years

Hmm, No 5 or 6 is either the C$ or A$ at present. And C$ M0 money supply (not quite the right comparator but what the heck) is some $77 billion, M4.

There’s only ever going to be 23 million (?) bitcoins, which would have to have about that value in order for the reserve currency bit to be true. C$3,350 per bitcoin?

Naaah.

Posted in Civil Liberty

Have a feeling this won’t work

By Comments:48 Comments

Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday.
Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

As was pointed out in the comments yesterday, who think Apple is going to produce a version of the iPhone, or iOS, just for the UK?

Because that’s what they’d have to do in order to obey this: they cannot, even in a clean room, on the bench, access customer encrypted data without the customer’s password.

Posted in Obituaries

Wages really have gone down

By Comments:6 Comments

His first novel, The Man Who Rode By Night, written when he was a teenager, was a 40,000-word Western for which he was paid the princely sum of a guinea per thousand words.

That’s £5,000 these days. And a no name teenager writing a penny Western really isn’t going to get that sort of sum as a fee.

Heck, if that was the fee then you’d be seeing edition 504 of my westerns by now….

Not that it was all loadsamoney being a writer:

When Sharples submitted his first television script, shortly before ITV went on air in 1955, he was told that he would receive no fee as, after all the payments to actors, there would be no money left. When he asked why the actors were being paid and he was not, he was told: “Because the bastards have a union.”

Posted in climate change

I thought we knew this already?

By Comments:11 Comments

NASA scientists have shattered the conventional wisdom that Antarctica’s ice surface is shrinking and revealed that the amount of ice is in fact growing.
Though accepting that glaciers are still shrinking because of man-made global warming, the new study published in the Journal of Glaciology suggests that recent gains more than offset losses elsewhere.

Roughly speaking, that East Antarctica was gaining more ice than everywhere else was losing?

Posted in Johnny Foreigner

How very Russian

By Comments:11 Comments

Meanwhile, it emerged that Metrojet owes its staff two months in unpaid wages and has suffered at least two serious accidents in the past five years.
Kogalymavia, the legal entity that owns the Metrojet brand name, owes its employees up to 70million rubles (about £70,000) in arrears, Alexander Snagovsky, the company’s general director, said.
The family of Sergei Trykhachyov, the co-pilot on 7K9268, said the last monthly wage he received was for July.

You can bet that the directors aren’t skimping on their champagne and mistresses, but the staff? Hey, they’re just labour, right?

Posted in Timmy Elsewhere

Timmy elsewhere

By Comments:2 Comments

A selection of bits in other places:

So, what’s the difference between Modern Monetary Theory and tax and spend then?

So, in order to reduce the inflation brought about by government spending the newly printed money with gay abandon all you’ve got to do is raise taxes.

At which point it’s very difficult to see what’s so new about the idea really. We can raise government spending by raising the tax level without the magic money tree. And if we do use the magic money tree then we’re going to have to raise taxes once the politicians apply MMT (of either kind) to their pet projects. So, what’s the difference? An expansion of government spending is accompanied by an increase in the tax level.

So, what’s new about this?

Aye, well, there’s the rub, isn’t it?

Run For The Hills: Sub-Prime Mortgages Are Back

There’s a rather breathless report from my native UK that we should all be preparing those emergency bunkers, polishing the shotguns and be ready to take off for the hills as sub-prime mortgages are making a comeback. This, it is thought and implied, is inevitably going to mean another collapse of the banking system, so we’d all better be prepared. However, given that it wasn’t sub-prime mortgages which collapsed either the US or UK banking systems last time around there’s not quite as much to worry about as people seem to think. This isn’t to say that the collapse was nothing to do with sub-prime: rather, to point out that the problems came from other aspects of the system, not that one.

Why The EPI Is Wrong About The Labour Share And Corporate Profits

Just to repeat again, there’s nothing wrong with the numbers here. It’s the interpretation that contains the error.

They are assuming that this change in that apportionment of the corporate income shows that American workers are getting the shaft. And that’s not obviously true, to say the least. For think about what we also know about American corporate profits since 2000. That’s right: more and more of them are coming from the overseas activities of American corporations. All those hundreds of billions a year that the likes of Apple AAPL -0.84%, Microsoft MSFT -1.36% and so on are piling up in those Caribbean accounts where the money can get a nice rum punch and a tan.

Dear Archbishop Sentamu, I’m Afraid You Still Don’t Understand The Living Wage

At which point we might want to remind the Good Churchman of someone that Jesus himself pointed out, that bit about to Caesar what is his, to God what is his. We economist types (and I am a “type” not an economist, Krugman is of course both) promise not to lecture on the differences between trans- and con- substantiation, something that a Protestant cleric is well versed in, on the proviso that Protestant clerics refrain from preaching on what they are less than fully informed about, perhaps the economic effects of a higher minimum or living wage level.

6 Million Earn Less Than The Entirely Bizarre Living Wage

Well, yes, that’s quite obvious too. There’s been very little real wage growth in the UK in recent years (you have heard about the recession?). And yet the Living Wage has been rising each year because it is linked to living standards, not other wage incomes. So, the campaigners keep raising the Living Wage, real incomes aren’t rising much, so obviously more people are falling below that Living Wage. There really is no great mystery here.

The Excellent Part Of Ted Cruz’s Tax Plan Is Why We Need Dynamic Scoring

Senator Ted Cruz gave us his tax plan yesterday and the excellent part of it is the reason that we need to use dynamic scoring to judge tax plans. That is we need to look at the effect of tax laws, tax rules, after all of the various effects have worked their way through the economy, not just look at the static effects of changing rates. And this is not just because of the dynamic effects of different tax rates, as is sometime alleged. This is hugely important when we look at a different structure of taxation, which is what Cruz is suggesting. Essentially Cruz is suggesting an abolition of corporate taxation, a huge reduction in capital taxation and an increase in consumption taxation. That’s the right way for the economy to move and we would expect it to have significant dynamic effects, over and above what we might find from the mere change in rates.

Posted in Ragging on Ritchie

He’s still not got QE has he?

By Comments:2 Comments

Of that purchase package at least €10 billion is German government debt, and the simple fact is that there’s not enough of it around to make that an easy task.

This though is potentially just the start of the problem of a shortage of high quality government debt. As I noted a while ago, the same debt that governments are buying using largely misguided QE policies that have little sign of now working are exactly the same assets that much of the world’s capital is looking for as a safe haven. QE is then spiting the market that wants more debt by going out and cancelling it.

The answer is, of course, obvious. First, we need more quality debt. That means government must create more.

So, the point of QE is to raise the value of government debt in order to lower the yield on it. This lowers long term interest rates by restricting the amount of zero risk assets (OK, low risk, but that’s the jargon term) and thus forces investors to move out along the risk curve in search of yield. This is the point and purpose of QE: to stop people buying government debt and force them to buy riskier assets.

Ritchie’s solution to this is to insist that governments should issue more government, ie zero risk, debt in order to force down the price and up the yield so that people will come in along the risk curve and thus long term interest rates will rise.

Umm, yeah.

You’d think none of this should be rocket science. Apparently it is to those spending billions. Which is probably the most worrying thing.