The economics of P.G. Wodehouse

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Nice Guardian column by Aditya Chakrabortty about the Tories’s political confusion. I particularly like this passage:

The problem with this cabinet is not that they lack ideas for Brexit Britain: not at all. It’s rather that they’ve got too many and most haven’t been baked for long enough. Consider cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom’s demand that Britons take up fruit-picking – while her colleague Jeremy Hunt urges them to train as doctors. Consider the Tories’ various barmy import-substitution plans, such as Liz Truss’s plaintive cry a couple of years ago that Britain imports two-thirds of its cheese and “That. Is. A. Disgrace”. Down one side of the cabinet, free-trade buccaneering; down the other, economic autarky on all dairy products. And on both sides, a preference for factoids over evidence and for blue-sky thinking over anything remotely serious.

Well, well. Fans of P.G. Wodehouse will recognise here some echoes of Roderick Spode, the Amateur Dictator and Leader of the Blackshorts. Spode’s economic policies, for example, included giving each citizen at birth a British–made bicycle and umbrella; banning the import of foreign root-vegetables; compulsory scientific measurement of all male knees; and stipulating that each English county should specialise in its manufacturing industry. Warwickshire, for instance, would specialise in the manufacture of umbrellas. Oh — and the national rail gauge should be widened, so that sheep could stand sideways in railway trucks.

Theresa May’s merrie band are not quite at Spode’s level yet, but they’re getting there.

Trump’s taxes

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The New York Times‘s scoop on Trump’s taxes is interestingly provisional. But Trump hasn’t responded. Here’s why:

All the Times has is three pages of Trump’s records from 1995. Everything else is informed speculation, extrapolation, and the word “could,” which appears again and again through the article.

Think about how dangerous that was for the paper. Trump could have released his tax returns and proven them wrong. Trump could have shown their speculation to be mere speculation, and used it as a cudgel to discredit their reporting on his campaign. The Times was far, far out on a limb.

But the Times bet correctly. Trump still isn’t releasing his returns. And here’s what that means: whatever is in his returns is worse than what the New York Times is telling the world is in his returns. The Trump campaign has decided it prefers the picture the Times is painting — a picture where Trump didn’t pay taxes for 18 years — to the picture Trump’s real records would paint.

Yep.

The Internet of Insecure Things is up and running

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This morning’s Observer column:

Brian Krebs is one of the unsung heroes of tech journalism. He’s a former reporter for the Washington Post who decided to focus on cybercrime after his home network was hijacked by Chinese hackers in 2001. Since then, he has become one of the world’s foremost investigators of online crime. In the process, he has become an expert on the activities of the cybercrime groups that operate in eastern Europe and which have stolen millions of dollars from small- to medium-size businesses through online banking fraud. His reporting has identified the crooks behind specific scams and even led to the arrest of some of them.

Krebs runs a blog – Krebs on Security – which is a must-read for anyone interested in these matters. Sometimes, one fears for his safety, because he must have accumulated so many enemies in the dark underbelly of the net. And last Tuesday one of them struck back.

The attack began at 8pm US eastern time, when his site was suddenly hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack…

Read on

Subduing wishes to possibilities

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An excerpt from Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys, a memorable history of the early British personal computer industry. He’s writing about how two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used ingenious mathematical tricks to get round the limited memory available on the BBC Model B when they were creating their trailblazing computer game, Elite:

Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a process of subduing wishes to possibilities … A real, constructed thing (however dented) beats a wish (however shiny) hands down; so working through the inevitable compromises, losing some of what you first thought of, is still a process of gain … But sometimes the process goes further. Some of the best bridges, programs, novels – not all the best, but some – come about because their makers have immersed themselves in the task with such concentration, such intent openness to what the task may bring, that the effort of making wishes real itself breeds new wishes. From the thick of the task, in the midst of the practical hammering, the makers see further possibilities that wouldn’t have been visible except from there, from that spot, from that degree of engagement with the task … This is what happened when Bell and Braben wrote their game … It became great because they saw the possibility of it being great while they were just trying to make it good.

This is wonderful, insightful writing about the creative process.

So when are you going to let me in?

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let_me_in

One of our cats, who sometimes thinks that using the cat-flap is beneath her dignity and comes onto the kitchen windowsill demanding to be let in. She has clearly been reading PG Wodehouse, who argued that the reason cats have such a superior attitude is that they know that the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods.