UCL researchers have developed an algorithm that can reproduce anyone’s handwriting — yes, even Rory Cellan-Jones’s.
Review of Katherine Gelber’s new book on how freedom of speech has fared in the ‘war on terror’. (Answer: poorly.)
Why Theresa May won’t call an early election. Thoughtful, informed and convincing piece by Martin Kettle.
Warren Buffett is not a model for America’s economy. Thoughtful Economist critique of an American folk hero. “He is far from a model for how capitalism should be transformed. He is a careful, largely ethical accumulator of capital invested in traditional businesses, preferably with oligopolistic qualities, whereas what America needs right now is more risk-taking, lower prices, higher investment and much more competition. You won’t find much at all about these ideas in Mr Buffett’s shareholder letters.”
“I’m deleting Snapchat, and you should too”. Why? Lack of ethnic diversity in its team leads to gaffes like a new filter which implements a racist stereotype of oriental people.
Barack Obama’s Summer playlist
London bookshops strike a blow for freedom: no Wi-Fi. Good idea.
“How to Hack and Election in 7 Minutes”. No – not another Trump conspiracy theory but a great Politico piece about how vulnerable to hacking America’s voting machines continue to be.
Yesterday, at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump said:
“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
This is nudge, nudge, wink, wink assassination talk.
Tom Friedman spotted it immediately, and remembered the historical parallel:
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin got assassinated.
His right-wing opponents just kept delegitimizing him as a “traitor” and “a Nazi” for wanting to make peace with the Palestinians and give back part of the Land of Israel. Of course, all is fair in politics, right? And they had God on their side, right? They weren’t actually telling anyone to assassinate Rabin. That would be horrible.
But there are always people down the line who don’t hear the caveats. They just hear the big message: The man is illegitimate, the man is a threat to the nation, the man is the equivalent of a Nazi war criminal. Well, you know what we do with people like that, don’t you? We kill them.
And that’s what the Jewish extremist Yigal Amir did to Rabin. Why not? He thought he had permission from a whole segment of Israel’s political class.
In September, I wrote a column warning that Donald Trump’s language toward immigrants could end up inciting just this kind of violence. I never in my wildest dreams, though, thought he’d actually — in his usual coy, twisted way — suggest that Hillary Clinton was so intent on taking away the Second Amendment right to bear arms that maybe Second Amendment enthusiasts could do something to stop her. Exactly what? Oh, Trump left that hanging.
The historian Mark Mazower, in his FT review of Gareth Stedman Jones’s new book on Karl Marx, asks:
“The question this book raises is what [Marx’s] value is for us today. The answer is not hard to find: Marx remains an outstanding model of how to stand outside capitalism and subject it to critique on the basis of something larger — the ability of an economic system to serve human needs. Communism may have failed. But it can scarcely be said that contemporary capitalism — with its intensifying tendency to inequality, its propensity to crisis, its hollowing-out of political institutions and its casualisation of the labour force — has succeeded. So long as we persist in our tendency to have off the study of economics from politics, philosophy and journalism, Marx will remain the outstanding example of how to overcome the fragmentation of modern social thought and think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment. “
FT 6/7 August 2016
This morning’s Observer column:
The big news last week was that Uber, the California-based ride-hailing company, threw in the towel in China. It announced that its Chinese rival, Didi Chuxing, would acquire all of the assets of UberChina – including its brand, business operations and data. In return, Uber gets a stake in Didi Chuxing worth £5.3bn.
Why is this significant? How long have you got?
This from a lovely essay on Trump by Martin Amis:
“Trump can sense when an entity is no longer strong enough or lithe enough to evade predation. He did it with that white elephant, the Grand Old Party, whose salaried employers never saw him coming, even when he was there, and whose ruins he now bestrides. The question is, Can he do it with American democracy?”
Looking at David Cameron’s ‘resignation honours’ list of people given peerages, knighthoods and other gongs either for doing their (often well-paid) jobs or for giving money to the Tories reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend who is a Life Peer. He is an eminent, decent, intelligent and thoroughly honourable person. I asked him how it felt being a Lord. He thought for a moment and then replied: “It’s a privilege but it’s no longer an honour, given some of the other people who now get peerages.”
Sums it up, really. Also, recall that we recently had a vote to leave the EU because we didn’t want to be governed by ‘unelected’ bureaucrats in Brussels. We are apparently still content to be governed by unelected political donors in London, though.
“Last Friday, for a brief period of time, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon were the five most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, relegating ExxonMobile, the long-time leader in this category to a sixth place. And even though the oil company has since clawed its way back into the Top 5, the composition of the list clearly illustrates how important the digital economy has become over the past few years.
Ten years ago, the list of most valuable companies was dominated by big oil and multinational conglomerates. These days, it’s companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon dominating the headlines.”
Sometimes I love the Financial Times. The other day the Brexiteering MP Bernard Jenkin had a piece in the paper arguing that leaving the EU was actually a simple matter. Under the headline “There is no such thing as hard or soft Brexit Britain should look to leave the EU as swiftly and simply as possible” he wrote:
“Leaving the EU is in principle straightforward; much easier, in fact, than joining since it is not necessary to change domestic laws and regulations. All the laws and regulations that apply by virtue of Britain’s membership can remain perfectly aligned with those of the rest of the EU until they may be changed at a later date. This is how the UK gave independence to the countries of the British empire.
There are two crucial legal components of Brexit. The first is Article 50, the procedure laid down by the EU treaties by which we disapply these treaties to the UK in international law. This is implemented by an act of Parliament, which is the second component. This need be no more than a few clauses, including one to repeal the European Communities Act of 1972, which currently implements EU law into our domestic law, and another to incorporate all the EU laws that apply directly in UK law into UK statute. That is what Brexit is; there is no “hard” or “soft” option.”
There then followed a fascinating comment thread, which, as you might expect include commenters who knew a thing or two about the subject, and certainly more than the unfortunate Jenkin.
For example, this from ‘goldbug’:
“I have many, many questions for Mr Jenkin, but I will focus only on one. You suggest that repatriating the 17,000+ laws and regulations provided under the 1972 European Communities Act will be a straightforward exercise, a stroke of the Parliamentary pen. Bravo. But as I’m sure the learned gentlemen is aware, law consists not just of written law, but also of the case law developed by the courts over many years to clarify what has been written. This is a crucial element of the legal system, and these judgements are relied upon by all legal advisors and practitioners.
So might I simply enquire as to what case law will apply when the court that made these judgements – the European Court of Justice – is no longer a part of our legal system? Anyone operating under these laws or regulations will need to know. Will English courts continue to rely on decisions made by the ECJ? Until what point? And how will anyone trying to operate a business be sure whether they are protected by those decisions or not? Which court will hear any challenges to those decisions, and under what authority?
Sorry, that’s turned into five questions. Funny how these simple questions have a tendency to do that.”
Lovely stuff!
This morning’s Observer column on the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computer networks:
Needless to say, it’s been dubbed Watergate 2.0, in memory of the burglary of the DNC HQ in June 1972 by people working for Richard Nixon’s campaign team. And now, just as in 1972, the key questions are: who were the burglars? And what were their motives? A number of cybersecurity firms investigated the DNC hacks and concluded that the culprits were two agencies of the Russian government, one the FSB (successor to the KGB), the other Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. A clinching piece of evidence linking the hack to the Russians was the existence of an internet address in the DNC malware that had also been found in a piece of malware used in a Russian attack on the German parliament’s servers.
So it seems pretty clear that Putin’s lot were the burglars. But what were their motives? Here the conspiracy theories begin…