Memex 1.1

On the doorstep, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Walking through town early one morning I saw these on a doorstep and wondered about the story that lay behind them.

Mick Fealty’s Live Blog of the count in the Donegal South West by-election is absolutely riveting.

In a preposterous interview on Radio 4′s Today programme, Labour’s new child prodigy, Edward Miliband, declared that he wanted to be the “champion” of the “squeezed middle”. Well then, asks my friend Andrew, “who will champion the squeezed bottom?”

Precisely. Step forward Lord Prescott.

Borderland, originally uploaded by jjn1.

On a cold November day, a reminder of high Summer.

Talk about swallowing one’s pride. Or having a gut feeling about a certain track.

Gives an indication of the scale of user-generated content on the Web.

Just another cat picture, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Larger version here.

So the Irish government has published its €15 billion ‘austerity programme’ — 10 billion in public spending cuts and 5 billion in extra taxes. Since the Irish economy is a tenth of the size of the UK’s, multiply those numbers by ten to put them into a British perspective. The standard media narrative is that the cuts are the price to be paid for being ‘rescued’ by the EU and the IMF. But you could read it another way: that Ireland is rescuing the Eurozone by stopping the bond markets going for Portugal and, after that, Spain. The strange thing is that this is, almost by definition, a doomed enterprise. There is no rational way of appeasing markets when they are in irrational moods. As Keynes observed, markets can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.

The more sinister possibility, of course, is that there is a semi-rational element in the nervous instability of the bond markets. Could it be that the reason they believe the bailouts won’t work is because the currency markets have decided that there’s a sporting chance of bringing down the Euro, and that significant players have begun to bet on that, in much the same way that George Soros started betting against sterling in 1987?

Terrific interview which provides a really good explanation of neutrality and how it should apply in the wireless world — and how Google is beginning to think like a Telco. Suddenly made me wonder if Google was more badly burnt by its failure to run a phone shop than we had believed. I’m currently reading Wu’s new book, which is likewise very sobering. Wonderful quote: “The only time that governments do the right thing is when the people are paying attention”.

The Open Rights Group is 5 today!