Heads Down, not Elbows Up
In the last couple years the phrase “elbows up” has made rounds as a defiant cry against the American imperialist infiltration of Canadian culture and economics. While it is,…
My Time in Sally McManus’s Labor Movement
Towards the end of a long conversation, it becomes increasingly obvious that Emma Kingdon is frustrated.
AIM, Leonard Peltier, Terminal Phase Apartheid and PW Botha: Context You Need To Understand the Eby Government’s Land Giveaways
Apartheid in Global ContextI was a proud campaigner against South African Apartheid when I was a kid. Down at the Unitarian Church I attended, we raised funds for the South […]
X's Reply-spam it's limited, you deserve to know why.
"Open Source" Transparency: A Regulatory Analysis (#OnyxAudit) Prepared 14 August 2026. Evidentiary tiers: Tier A = verified against a primary source (regulation text, official regulator document,…
The Adventures of Alice and Bob in The Corporate Borderlands
The Adventures of Alice and Bob in The Corporate Borderlands A working space. There are screens, and at least one cool keyboard. One of the screens is showing the C.E.O. Tags: art tech-industry…
Week note - ii
I flew to Minneapolis for a wedding this weekend and only got back home to Portland last night, so this post is a bit delayed. This was my first time experiencing Minneapolis and we stayed just a few…
Ranked Choice Voting
In most elections in the United States, we have "first past the post voting" in which whoever gets the most votes wins.
Can We Get A Number? – A Look at Wildly Varying Estimates of Austin’s Homeless Population
There are a lot of different opinions and philosophies on how to approach Austin’s homelessness problem. One thing it seems we should be able to agree on though is the need for a solid estimate of…
Work as punishment
Richard Murphy (The repugnance of Robert Jenrick) and Simon Pearson (When Work Becomes a Moral Test) skewer Reform’s proposals to cut benefit payments, Pearson identifying an interesting academic…
The rise of the political right-wing: Part 2, The challenge to patriotism
FOR the first time in two or more years, according to British political opinion polls, Nigel Farage and his right-wing […]
My Democracy Now! interview
Democracy Now! interviews Gil Duran about The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.
We Are an LLM
the president is prompt engineer in chief pulling the Overton window this way or that speech for effect open source prompt injection or is it free programming we the people
OPINION: A Compass Reading on the Direction of the Nuclear Renaissance
In the range of sizes of nuclear reactors that are needed for a true nuclear renaissance they will come in three sizes. To use visual metaphors, size one, the microreactors at 1-15 MW, are no bigger…
The Missing Washington Millionaires Tax Deductions
Washington state taxpayers paying the new Millionaires Tax may assume the itemized deductions they use on their federal income tax return also somehow work for the state income tax. That assumption…
Conservatives just hate America
It’s time to face facts. Conservatives hate America. They’re in love with their dream of what they want America to be, and they claim to love America, but it’s an America that…
American Oligarchs or the Chinese Communist Party
In China, the pecking order is clearer. A founder who flies too high is grounded; a platform that forces monopolizing behavior and mistreats its workers gets punished; when the government rolls out…
U.S. Anti-China Tech Protectionism Is Sloppy, Corrupt, And Stupid
U.S. efforts to ban Chinese tech are driven by corruption, crafted by incompetent zealots, and normalized by a shitty corporate press.
Iran's Schrödinger's pilots in Qatar
Tehran is alleging Doha is illegaly holding four pilots who aircrafts were shot down over Qatar in early March. Qatar is disputing the accusations, saying it tried contacting Iran from the start. The…
Apple’s statements about its developer program in the Epic trial
I was reading Apple’s August 13 court filing in the Epic trial, helpfully hosted by 9to5Mac , and I was surprised by a statement Apple made about its developer program: Unlike cost-only based…
Where’s the Platform?
As a college student over 20 years ago, it was fashionable to identify as a person who voted ‘based on issues’ rather than based on party. You probably know the idea. You didn’t…
BIP-110 Post Mortem
A comprehensive review of the spam debates and BIP-110 fork movement.
How Copy-Paste Credit Washers Wrecked The CFPB Database
On February 29th, 2024, a consumer from Texas posted a complaint on the CFPB portal against Experian that read like the start of a novel “In the quiet humdrum of everyday life, a sudden jolt…
The Elephant In The Room
Introduction William O'Reilly, Nicola Morrison, Rachel Reeves, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Neri Oxman, John Hattie, Susannah Dickinson, Claudine Gay, Jason Arday. All 9 of these people were accused of…
The Prediction Market Debate (CFTC vs States) Is Likely to be Settled Sooner Rather than Later
On one side, there’s Kalshi, Polymarket, and all other companies offering prediction market sports wagers–err, sports predictions–allied with the Commodities Futures Trading…
America's Pivot To Asia Ends On The Wrong Side Of Asia
It was supposed to be East Asia, not West Asia
Weekly #33 (2026)
Lots of Blue Tokai coffee We travelled to Bangalore this week, with a cousin who stopped over in Delhi in-transit. I made 3 airport trips on the same day, which is quite crazy! And over the week also…
The 9pm Clacton and On and On with David F Porteous
Odd things have been happening in the UK, so it’s time once more to chat with Scottish author and social researcher David F Porteous. In this episode we discuss Barnaby Joyce’s claim that…
Review: Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time
I found a copy of Clavell’s Tai Pan and decided to read it, to learn more about the history of Hong Kong. (“Tai Pan” is a term for a master trader.) Then I started to read it, and was disappointed by…
The National Week of Action against ALPRs -- in Washington and across the country
Just as with the fight against data centers, the energy is really coming from the grassroots.
All the concerns that make me a boring civil servant
When you’ve learnt your craft, you become much more boring at your job. At least that’s Dave Rupert’s theory in his blog post explaining all the concerns that make him a boring developer. I reckon…
AI Watermarking, Nazi Enigmas, and Sherlock Holmes
Anthropic announced Claude.ai will watermark every AI-generated text from now on. And online communities are having a complete meltdown over it. Freelance writers fear clients mistake human-written…
Nobody knocked
Nobody knocked My history of cybercrime is typical: the usual shithead tour of carding, account takeover, game cheats, denial of service. All of it more than fifteen years removed. In early August I…
Why Flock Is A Fourth Amendment Nightmare
TranscriptRecording a car on a public road generally isn’t a Fourth Amendment search. But turning sightings from an entire camera network into a searchable history of where people travel may…
US cloud act, sovereignty, and why you might need to care
Airbus’s move to European cloud hosting is a reminder that data residency is not the same as digital sovereignty. Where your cloud provider is headquartered, and which laws it answers to, can matter…
Money Worship
There is no god but money, and Peter Thiel is his prophet.
Some people are really upset about LLM watermarking and I don’t get it
This week Anthropic announced that to comply with an EU AI Act they would watermark text generated by Claude models. A few tech bloggers I respect had strong negative reactions to this, and I wanted…
Mumbai’s Great Railway Rebuild: MUTP Status Report, August 15, 2026
Two decades of rebuilding Mumbai’s suburban railway Rajendra B. Aklekar Mumbai’s suburban railway has been rebuilt in stages for more than two decades under the something called the Mumbai Urban…
Jason Arday’s Enablers and Encouragers Cast the First Stone
I had two immediate reactions to the news of Jason Arday’s apparent suicide. The first was sadness, especially for his two children, wife, and parents. The second was to start a countdown to…
The state I’m in
A few further thoughts in this post on the matter of the state – what it is, what its past and future involves, and what does it mean to live within the jurisdiction of a singular state (‘the state…
The Vibe of the ECHR
A thought experiment: suppose I wanted to transform the European Convention on Human Rights into a vehicle for state regulation of speech, how would I go about it? At first sight it should not be…
The Beginner's Guide to AI Governance
I recently finished the London School of Economics' programme on AI Law, Policy, and Governance. What follows is a series built from the notes I took along the way. This has been written for people…
The compounding criticality of cadence: the widening tech gap between the US, China, and Europe
681 SpaceX missions and $725B in AI capex show how cadence compounds, and why Europe's gap with the US and China may be widening past recovery.
The Defender's Window
The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident was a watershed moment for cybersecurity because it gave a peek into how the capabilities of a typical threat actor will evolve in upcoming months. I’ve spoken with…
Access to telemetry data: Automotive industry criticizes intelligence reform
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It’s time for movements to rethink social media
Going viral was never the goal. The organising has to happen somewhere else.
Make the Safe Harbour Compile: Regulate the Predicate, Not the Prose
Vague regulation is not light touch. It is a tax collected in delay, and it buys no safety, because a rule too imprecise to check is also too imprecise to enforce at scale. But formalising the law is…
US Invites China to Invade Taiwan
Donald Trump has pulled the last U.S. aircraft carrier out of Asia to help prosecute the war in the Middle East.
Alaska’s mafia
Has a new don wannabe What a way to end the week. No sooner had I finished a commentary on the ‘Big Lie’ propaganda suggesting that the 49 sockeye killed as trawl […]
How to Make Social Housing Work: Common Problems and How to Fix Them
Income-dependent rent increases create a disincentive to take up employment and reduces overall labour mobility, especially when rent increases are tied to hard thresholds.. Social housing estates…
Problems Associated with Social Housing - Evidence to Date
No matter what you call it, new social housing is back on the policy to-do list in many countries, especially those with a dearth of affordable housing. Social housing has been around for long time…