Jonn Elledge

Right, well, I managed it. For those keeping track, that is 29 chapters down, six, plus intro and conclusion, to go.

Doesn't bother me! Not my normal genre but oddly motivating.

the human world. all the things we built to reshape the environment to our needs. lot of transport stuff but also sewers, skyscrapers, and so forth

about half a mile east

it is not, but I am wary of naming it for fear they'll take my short term membership away, it's quite a nice place to work

no, I am not there twice, that is thankfully just a typo

I did a talk in a private member's club, and they gave me a short term membership to say thanks, and book deadline is looming so I am there now. And I just looked up, and realised there is literally nobody here, except me, a bored looking barman, a live DJ, and me, with laptop, writing about canals

ah, not got there yet

Noted

Ah excellent! Guy I was talking to said something similar about his family. And yeah, the Habsburgs come up in the book a *lot*

...unnervingly, I was listening to them. Last week I sent @tom-phillips.com a picture of them with "actually it's about ethics in games journalism" and he got upset because they're one of his favourite bands and demanded I listen to a playlist

yeah I'm using "random" in a colloquial, not technical, sense, and for reasons I'm sure you understand was more considered with my wording in the actual article

admittedly the three words were "history dutch canals" but

has taken me two hours to fill in a three word section of my chapter plan, christ

this morning I did an interview with a Slovakian newspaper about the history of borders, and I would say that not for the first time I find myself thinking that talking about a book you've already written is more fun than actually writing one you haven't

I feel like (correct me if I'm wrong) this is arguing with the glib wording of the post, rather than the more considered one in the article? And yeah, there are obviously ways of beating it, but you have to know you need to, and often people don't.

Hearing that masked state agents are marauding around American cities, forcing anyone they can find into unmarked vehicles, driving them to cinemas and ordering them at gunpoint to go and watch MELANIA.

This is such a facile argument. Sure, let's have a conversation about how universities should be funded. But let's also talk interest rates, debt that functions like an extra tax, repayment thresholds, and what that's actually doing to millions of young people who did everything they were told to do

yeah the British version is weirdly cuddly - it's clearly set up to be a bonding experience where people have to kill their friends, rather than one where they delight in destroying their enemies

That sounds right - but the law wouldn't apply to such datasets anyway as they're manmade not natural, they'd be much closer to an even split I think

but yes, as with the British version, there are early signs of "in the absence of other information we will go after anyone who seems too far from some sense of the media Irish person or, failing that, someone who could plausibly have spent the 17th century being denounced as a witch"

oh SPOILERS (only done the first two)

no because that isn't how numbers work, I think

Someone got one of these in my name, praising their book and offering to introduce them to someone who could boost its profile. A thrilling new form of identity theft

The Gordian Knot This week: why is the British state broken? Also: fraudsters hate this one weird trick for spotting man-made numbers! And a map of what’s left of the Roman limes.

Nearly half the first digits in a randomly occuring set of numbers should be 1 or 2; less than a tenth should be 8 or 9.

On Benford's Law - or, fraudsters hate this one weird trick to check numbers aren’t random!

When a computer stops responding to your instructions, you start mashing the buttons instead. For the last few years, the British electorate has repeatedly voted for change – yet change has consistently failed to come. Little wonder a fair chunk of them now seem ready to kick everything over in frustration. When I used that metaphor before, it was in a quick think piece about the effects of government stasis, not an in-depth investigation into what had caused it in the first place. For that, you need to turn Power Failure: a deeply researched report written by Phil Tinline and published by the Future Governance Forum. Here’s the opening line: To restore voters’ trust in mainstream liberal democracy, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration has to deliver the change it promised in opposition. To do that, the government needs a new approach to power. That approach can be summed up as “use it”. The report identifies a couple of ways in which the British government has disempowered itself. One is the way an ostensibly neutral reliance on fixed rules and objective numbers instead of political judgement has worked to bolster the status quo. The big one, though, is it’s no longer clear where power actually is. Over half a century or more, it’s been pulled out of local government and other autonomous institutions to the centre, only to be dispersed again to agencies, quangos, outsourcing firms – partly because of ideological motives concerning private sector efficiency, partly due to political ones about reducing the chance a minister would have to take the blame. The result is that, today, “responsibility sits in so many places, it sits nowhere”.

The result is that, today, “responsibility sits in so many places, it sits nowhere”.

Yeah there are a lot of charlatans out there and some of the changes on offer (Brexit!) have been bad. Nonetheless, "What do you want?" "Not this" is a fairly consistent theme of recent British election results. Even 2019 was built on victory in the Red Wall which were changing from Labour.

I don't think whether or not they listen to me will make any different either way. I *do* think reading Phil's report about state capacity could prevent catastrophe, and so ironically this was one of my *more* helpful comments.

On almost everything – fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation – evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers.

But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.