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

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.

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