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June 2016

Oh so true this, so true

More Than Half Links Shared on Twitter Are Never Clicked: Study

Over at Forbes I get to see where traffic is coming from. There’ve been a couple of times that something goes viral on Facebook. Takes days and days as the link spreads through the network. Peaks and troughs in time zones as it spreads around the world and so on…..and hundreds of thousands of clicks, a million if something really travels.

On Twitter, not so much. A link and a retweet from say Marc Andreessen (500 k followers) might mean a few hundred click throughs to the original article. sure, that’s not going viral but it’s an indication of how many do click through to a link…..

There’s something rather scary about this idea from Mason

What can is a left-led Labour party, combined with the progressive nationalist parties and the Greens, which will institute real change.

“Progressive nationalist party” has echoes that I really don’t like. For here progressive means edging towards socialism. And nationalist socialist parties really didn’t have a good 20th century track record.

Britain has had one such quite recently, the BNP, and people like Mason tended not to like that very much. What is it about Celtic progressive nationalism that is therefore to like?

Difficult to work out why

A gunman opened fire inside Venezuela’s central bank on Monday, wounding two guards before he was shot dead by security officers, according to two sources, in the latest violent episode to shake the country.
…
“He wounded two guards, fortunately they are stable and are currently in a clinic,” Merentes told journalists, adding that the shooter’s motives were unclear and an investigation was under way.

Obviously not an attempt at robbery as in Venezuela the central bank is the one place that doesn’t have any money.

Could someone who speaks American better than I do help me out here?

Something I’m getting increasingly puzzled about, the difference between principle and principal.

In English, a school has a principal, a capital repayment is the payment of principal on a mortgage or bond etc.

Principle is sure, I have principles and if you don’t like said morals then I have some others as well.

I keep seeing Americans using these differently. For example, this from Moody’s via email:

PDVSA’s hefty payment calendar through 2017 includes almost $4 billion in
debt service in Q4 2016 when $3 billion in principle payments come due:
$1 billion in October and another $2 billion in November. By contrast,
the sovereign has only interest payments due on its global bonds from now
through the end of 2017.

That’s not the only example which I recall.

Now, is that just a spelling mistake? Or does American use the spellings differently than English?

Well, no, not really

Byrne, who was a uniformed officer, says the president personally directed officers to provide Lewinsky access to the White House for a booty call around the beginning of 1996. The president even provided Monica with a top-secret phone number to reach him directly in the Oval Office.

“We wondered how he got any work done and joked that he would have been better at running a brothel in a red-light district than the White House,” Byrne writes.

Not sampling the goods is a good start to managing a brothel.

About that institutional racism of post war Britain

Bloke on the Windrush, serving in the RAF:

King rejoined the RAF, but found civilian accommodation was the biggest challenge. At the first place he visited he was greeted with a sign that would become depressingly familiar: “Room to let. No Irish, No Coloureds, No Dogs.”

When he found a place there was no bath. Like many fellow Jamaicans, he relied on the public baths of Camberwell and Brixton, queueing for half an hour on Friday evenings.

He was determined to buy his own house and became only the second West Indian in London to do so when he took the deeds to a property in Sears Road, Camberwell. The manager at his local bank had refused to give him a mortgage even though he had a job and saved up for a deposit. The rejection letter advised him to “go back to the colonies”. The RAF lent him the money to be repaid in ten years. King paid it back in five.

Most certainly racism, yes, but it’s a little difficult to call that institutional, isn’t it?

Not an argument I buy to be honest

Abortion is simply another form of birth control and should be as freely available as contraception, the head of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service has claimed.
Ann Furedi, chief executive of the country’s biggest abortion clinic chain, also argued that there is no moral difference between decisions on a termination and whether to get married or divorced.
And there is nothing morally wrong with destroying a foetus because ‘it kills a being that has no sense of life or death’, she said.
The call for abortion on demand, without time limits, comes amid a rise in the number of terminations in England and Wales, especially among older and cohabiting women.
Mrs Furedi’s charity carries out more than one in three abortions in England and Wales, and around one in 14 pregnancies in 2014 ended in one of its clinics. It collected more than £27million from the NHS that year, funding almost all of its 66,000 terminations.
Her call for abortion to be made as easily available as condoms comes in a book to be published next month, arguing that it is ‘a travesty of our freedom’ for terminations to be regulated by criminal law.

As we all know my views on this are rather out of step with modern society’s. But no moral difference? A travesty of freedom that we don’t do partial birth abortions at 35 weeks?

That might be a little too far in the other direction perhaps?

I’ve no idea as to the truth of this

One of Sir Cliff Richard’s child sex accusers was arrested over an alleged blackmail plot, it emerged yesterday.
The man, said to have ‘serious mental health problems’, contacted an aide of the pop legend demanding money not to spread false allegations about him.
But police were alerted to the scheme and detained the man for questioning.
According to reports the man, in his 40s, was then bailed with conditions banning him from contacting the singer or his PR team.
But the alleged blackmailer then spoke to South Yorkshire Police, the force in charge of the bungled investigation into Sir Cliff, 75.
Detectives fell for his lies and included his allegations in the file sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. The other force later dropped the blackmail case, it was reported.

But apparently it is now safe to take the grandkids past that vineyard he has just down the road this summer.

Interesting tax claim

Microsoft Ireland’s accounts show the computer giant made £2.3bn from hardware and software in the year to June 2015, but its UK arm paid a poultry £16,9million in corporate tax.

From the Mail’s front page.

Just paying chicken feed, aren’t they?

Most fun about the independent lifeboats

“We do exactly the same job as the RNLI,” Birch tells me, “but we’re less known.” But if the job expected of them is the same, the challenges of being an independent lifeboat station can be much greater. Birch and his crew of 22 are responsible not only for saving lives, but also for the upkeep of their boat, their equipment, training and raising enough funds to meet their annual running costs. These are about £20,000 a year, excluding renewing equipment, boats and property. They are currently fundraising £160,000 for a new boathouse. As operations manager of Sandown and Shanklin Independent Lifeboat, Birch’s situation requires a range of skills not normally associated with lifesavers, including a constant sales mentality.

The underlying economic point being made is that these independents get crowded out by the RNLI. Fundraising and so on, “We already gave to the RNLI” etc.

Shrug, it’s what happens when there’s a dominant organisation, especially one that’s well funded.

However, the fun in this is that the article is a really impressive example of crowding out. that thing which The Guardian stoutly insists never does happen when government moves into an area.

Ho hum.

Yes but, yes but

Ten of the world’s leading economists have issued a warning about the consequences of the UK leaving the EU as the City prepares for the pound to plunge and shares to fall in the event of a Brexit vote in Thursday’s referendum.

They look purely at the next few years. They are not actually doing economics in fact, they need to be looking for the unseen.

Which is, of course, that we don’t face a choice between the EU today and not-the EU today. We face a choice between the EU of the future and the not-the EU of the future.

One way to think of it is this – so, we’ve people who were told the euro would be an economic disaster of major proportions. They went ahead and did it. When it turns out to be an economic disaster of major proportions they double down and insist that it must continue, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Who, on economic grounds, would want to join such a bunch of idiots in a system of such lunacy? And that is what they’re promising ever more of, more integration, more Europe, ever closer union with Brussels handling ever more of the cash. They are already, and will keep doing so, pushing for fiscal union. Who wants to be tethered to such stupidity?

Given that our Nobel Laureates don’t actually consider the true alternatives on offer our Nobel Laureates, however distinguished, simply are not doing economics.

Misogyny and violence

Those progressives at Vox:

Every high-profile shooting has unique circumstances, and every killer has different motivations. But extreme misogyny is such a common thread in so many of them that we can no longer ignore its role in public violence.

Hmm.

To study the potential differences that distinguish homicides involving women as victims or offenders from those involving men, we analyzed Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports data on homicides that occurred in the United States between 1976 and 1987. Only cases that involved victims aged 15 years or older were included. Persons killed during law enforcement activity and cases in which the victim’s gender was not recorded were excluded. A total of 215,273 homicides were studied, 77% of which involved male victims and 23% female victims.

I’d say there’s a fair amount of misandry out there myself.

If Brexit happens

Ritchie:

it is my hope that by then the EU may also have realised reform us essential and that changes in the free movement of people and capital and the use of People!s QE to fund infrastructure would have all been possible. I. Have to lube in. Hope, but the circumstances for change could have been created by Brexit.

So what Ritchie hopes for is an autarkic economy fueled by money printing. How much more fascist can we get?

Still, gotta love “I have to lube in hope”. Economics and politics to be done as one might visit a gay bath-house.

Not me saying this

Everett, 57, now starring in The Musketeers on BBC1, is dismissive of Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete now described as the most famous openly transgender woman in the world.

“I don’t think she’s a woman. She’s a cross-dressing man,” he says.

Yes Will, great, but why do we have to have the fuckers in Brussels?

Europe is an idea. It’s better than that – it’s a noble idea. The many countries of a small continent club together, sharing common values and common interests, to solve problems, break down barriers and live better than they would and could otherwise.

Lovely jubbly, and why not?

But why does it have to be run as an anti-democratic precursor to a superstate directed by the bureaucracy? Why, in short, do we have to have some fat German socialist as a President of it?

Snigger

I bumped into him at The Open at Sandwich a few years ago and noticed he was limping. He’d fallen in a ditch, he said. “Drink taken?” I asked. “Don’t be daft, man,” he said in that lovely Welsh lilt, “who falls in a ditch sober?”