written by Martin on Feb 17, 2011
Anglo Irish - a bunch of stupid bankers
Vanity Fair’s Michael Lewis writes about economic disasters, and spells out exactly why countries like Ireland and Iceland should never be left in charge of their own economies.
It’s also a shrewd warning to people in Scotland over the dangers of pushing for independence from the strong economic reslience of the United Kingdom.
“Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. But while Icelandic males used foreign money to conquer foreign places — trophy companies in Britain, chunks of Scandinavia — the Irish male used foreign money to conquer Ireland. Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From one another.”
written by Martin on Feb 12, 2011
Mr Cameron is selling you lies
Ben Goldacre, again, in today’s Guardian, methodically demonstrates how the Tories are deliberately misleading people on the reasons for cuts in health care spending, by cherry-picking the research that supports their policies, while ignoring the overwhelming evidence that refutes them.
“Here is what politicians apparently cannot understand: it’s absolutely fine to make policy based on ideology, whim, faith, principles, and all the other things we are used to. It’s also fine for evidence to be mixed. And it’s absolutely fine if your reforms aren’t supported by existing evidence: you just shouldn’t claim that they are.”
written by Martin on Feb 10, 2011
Ben Goldacre has taken steps to preserve 172 websites that the BBC has arbitrarily decided to delete as part of a cost-cutting exercise.
He purchased a $3.99 ‘low end box’ type VPS server and began the crawl of the BBC servers, capturing the content of the doomed websites and making them available in a torrent file for people to download and distribute, thereby ensuring that the publicly-funded content is still available, somewhere.
In actual fact, it would have cost very little to retain the websites – other than the miniscule traffic bandwidth the sites might incur. It’s claimed the deletions of the sites is part of a rationalisation process of trimming down the overall scale of bbc.co.uk.
