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  • 14/02/2025

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    The marvels of the English language

    David Allen, the Irish comedian, who hosted his own comedy show in the UK, featuring straight talking to the camera, armed with a G+T in one hand (or so we believed) and a fag in the other, interspersed with silly sketches, was required viewing in my childhood household. The best jokes were the ones at the expense of both the Irish (my mother and her descendants ), and Catholics in general (the family). WikiP says of him: “He was best known for his observational comedy. Allen regularly provoked indignation by highlighting political hypocrisy and showing disdain for religious authority.” Amen.

    I got this one via John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 today.

    Quote of the Day:

    ”If it’s sent by ship, it’s cargo. If sent by road, it’s shipment.”

    As they say in the US: we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.

  • 13/02/2025

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    Scam Inc

    Wonderful article (and Editorial) about the industrialisation of online scamming and digital lies. Totally scary. But what a line:

    The digital fracking of human frailty is highly scalable.

    It is worse that you imagine. Makes the drug trade look like a corner shop stealing pennies.

    The vast and sophisticated global enterprise that is Scam Inc.

  • 12/02/2025

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    The case for persisting with foreign aid

    The case for persisting with foreign aid

    It is disgusting to read the boast of the world’s richest man that “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper”. That this raises constitutional and legal issues for the US republic is quite clear. Indeed, it is evident that those now in charge would be quite happy to dispose of such tiresome constraints altogether. But there are also moral issues. Should the US effort to succour the world’s poorest have been fed into a “woodchipper” at all? The answer is “no”.

    Martin Wolf in the FT

  • 10/02/2025

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    The Magic of Words Strung Together

    Katherine Rundell · Why children’s books?

    I first came across her writing (KR) when I bought her book, The Girl Savage for my better half (Africa, boarding school etc). Then there was Super-Infinite on John Donne. Given the topic, I would never have once imagined that I could be so gripped. Below is some more of her magic from an article in the LRB.

    It is the work of a writer for children to do the same for the world itself. Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible. [emphasis added]

    Her final sentence is as good a definition of real education as you will find anywhere.

  • 08/02/2025

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    Listen for the creaking of timbers.

    Adam Tooze · Trouble Transitioning: What energy transition?

    On the Welsh side, I am the descendent of multiple generations of miners. I do not have a high opinion of the mine owners.

    As Fressoz points out, anyone who claims that the dawning of the coal age in the 19th century freed us from our reliance on organic materials has never been down a mine. Miners traditionally preferred timber pit props to hold up mineshafts not only because they are cheap and flexible, but because their creaking gives early warning of a failure. Survival as a coalminer depended on being a competent carpenter.[emphasis added]

    Wood, no more. My brother once had a summer job at British Steel in Cardiff where a more modern but more silent fabrication product held the ceiling up. No more.

  • 07/02/2025

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    Health Care Fraud: has much changed since 2012?

    Punishing Health Care Fraud — Is the GSK Settlement Sufficient? | New England Journal of Medicine

    I found this note lurking in one of my electronic filing systems. Hiding from the light, perhaps. The quotes below are from a 2012 NEJM article written by Kevin Outterson, J.D., LL.M. I wonder if much has changed since then. If you want to know more about how pharma works I would recommend Graham Dutfield’s book: That High Design of Purest Gold: A Critical History of the Pharmaceutical Industry, 1880-2020. His voice is reasoned and pitched perfectly (IMHO), but judging from the price of the book the publishers want their share of the gold too.

    The Department of Justice has announced the largest settlement ever in a health care fraud case: GlaxoSmithKline will plead guilty to three criminal counts and settle civil charges, paying $3 billion to the federal and state governments. But is that sufficient?

    One partial solution would be to impose penalties on corporate executives rather than just the company as a whole. Boston whistleblower attorney Robert M. Thomas, Jr., embraces this approach: “GSK is a recidivist. How can a company commit a $1 billion crime and no individual is held responsible?”

    You only have to look at the new obesity therapies or the distribution of skin altering agents to know that it is just down to money. The costs of doing business, coupled with — in the UK at least — incompetent regulators who readily accept the money lenders in Medicine’s temple.

  • 06/02/2025

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    Metaphors are cheap

    Civil servants will need to work efficiently or face redundancy under new rules | Civil service | The Guardian

    In a speech in December, McFadden (The Cabinet Office MIinister) said ministers wanted to rewire the state to function “more like a startup”. He announced plans to simplify Whitehall’s recruitment process for external candidates and to offer tech workers year-long secondments in Whitehall to tackle some of the public sector’s biggest challenges. [emphasis added]

    Would he want Airbus or a startup to build planes? Crashing the country is a N of 1 experiment.

  • 06/02/2025

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    Sex, drugs or chastity

    Usual witty language from the Economist’s review of the Pontifex maximus’s autobiography, Hope. We are told that “He is very nice, very kind and very, very boring”.

    The very best autobiographies … take the humdrum daily detail of life, fillet, shape it and so, says Mr Douglas-Fairhurst, “redeem all that chaos”. The pope’s biography does not do this. It gives the reader a mass of detail: trousers, pizza, his parents’ first address. But it does nothing with this. As a result, this biography of a pope offers, ironically, no redemption—and precious little sense of the man himself. The devil, as always, is in the details. The pope, alas, is not.

    No doubt will be a big seller, but not as big as that other book.

  • 05/02/2025

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    Yelling into a vacuum

    Washington DC plane crash. The Guardian

    “This was a disaster waiting to happen,” Ross Aimer, a retired United Airlines captain and chief executive officer of Aero Consulting Experts, told the Associated Press…

    “Those of us who have been around a long time have been yelling into a vacuum that something like this would happen because our systems are stretched to extremes.”

    Yelling into a vacuum: I could say the same about safety in the NHS

  • 05/02/2025

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    A  metaphor that finds another home

    Via John Naughton | Memex 1.1

    “We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Marshall McLuhan

    This is how medical diagnosis works.