Climate treaties suffer from a problem that is pervasive in our society. It is the same problem that is destroying British state schools, makes public sector out-sourcing fail, and cripples businesses. Once you set a numerical target, the metric becomes more important that what it measures. Continue reading
Not just a CO2 shortage – the economy is broken
Shortages happen. A shortage of a gas that is vital to the manufacture of everything from beer to pain killers may look like just another unfortunate occurrence, but it is really a product of the way a “neo-liberal” economy works: globalisation and centralisation. Continue reading
Django signals are evil
I was trying to figure out what a Django app was doing today. It turned out that the original developer had decided to monkey patch a third party app. I hardly need say that monkey patching is evil (i.e. a last resort), but one of the things I needed to check along the way was that there was no code being triggered by a (Django) signal, and the problems it causes are very similar to monkey patching. Continue reading
Trump’s immigration policy compared to the UK’s
There has been near universal condemnation of Trump’s immigration policies, but it seems to be that they simply do in one stroke what most European countries have done incrementally. The UK is a fairly typical European country in this respect so lets see how it compares. Continue reading
AirBNB hosts can block bad reviews – and my AirBNB horror story
If an AirBNB “host” needs to give a refund because the accommodation was terrible, they can block the bad review by cancelling instead of refunding. It does mean a 100% refund, but that is clearly preferable to bad reviews and AirBNB have confirmed that this is deliberate. Continue reading
A disturbing post-imperial flaw in the British psyche
I could almost subtitle this “why the Brexit debate turned nasty”, although the problem is far older and deeper than anything it directly deals with. It is something I never realised, possibly because I am not British by birth, until I realised that people who vehemently disagreed with each other shared a common, mistaken, assumption.
What has the EU ever done for us?
What has the EU ever done for us? Mostly, a lot of harm.
Consistently favoured corporate interests over public interests
The EU is far more insulated from public pressure than national governments but even more prone to listening to corporate lobbyists. It is not transparent enough about lobbying for us to even know what the real expenditure is, but we know it a lot.
The greatest single case of this is in the supposedly free trade, but really corporate welfare, TTIP treaty which the EU is pushing hard, despite widespread public opposition. Who wants the treaty? Corporate lobbyists. It also binds countries permanently to particular policies, undermining democracy.
Taylor Swift on Apple Music – translated
As Taylor Swift seems to have difficult saying what she means, so I thought I would provide a plain English translation of what she has to say about Apple Music. Continue reading
Beating Node.js with TCL
This is partly a reaction to people who talk as if Node.js is unique, and partly to test my code against something that has seen production use. There are all sorts of problems with doing this sort of comparison, and while I would have liked to compare more servers, used a better environment, performance tuned everything, done more measurements etc. but I think what I have done is enough to prove my point. Continue reading
Python IDEs part 4: Liclipse and PyCharm
I have never liked the user interfaces of either Eclipse or Pycharm, so it is hard to be impartial. Liclipse, for those unfamiliar with it, is an Eclispe based IDE, that is a successor to Pydev. Both are proprietary, but prices are reasonable. After trying them again I still do not like Eclipse or Liclipse, but I do see the appeal of Pycharm. Continue reading