Data, words, code
He had the sense, at the moment, of groping for intellectual support, of casting about and dimly receiving a hint here, a hint there. Like a radio technician delicately picking signals out of background static, he’d learned to recognise voices worth listening to, voices that meant something distinct even when they ued hte same compulsory words as everyone else.
Here and there, people were speaking with secret passion
— Francis Spufford, Red Plenty p.65
Tatu are secretly Wobblies, aren’t they?
All About Us
hinges on a personalization of the great IWW slogan
An injury to one is an injury to all
,
transmuted into obsessive romance
:
If. They. Hurt. You. They. Hurt. Me. Too
So we’ll rise up won’t stop
And it’s all about
It’s all about
It’s all about
us
It’s not just me feeling the solidarity. This group review returns to the theme time and time again, albeit with a point-missing tendency to link it to the USSR:
You can imagine those pounding war drums soundtracking the Bolshevik revolution – there’s certainly a similar sense of collective running through the lyrics, drawing strength from standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow revolutionaries. “If. They. Hurt. You. They. Hurt. ME. TOO.”: spine-tinglingly magnificent pop moment of the year.
And more generally, you can make a case that the value of TATU is fitting their various high-pitched emotional states into a grand narrative of love and rebellion:
If you listen across their ‘Best Of’ album, you can see it unfold: forbidden love and ensuing confusion as the girls, through their transgression, are thrust beyond the bounds of the normative (“All The Things She Said”‘); the forging of a new revolutionary ethics (“All About Us”, “They’re Not Gonna Get Us”); yet more confusion as one of the girls falls for a boy (“Loves Me Not”); a Thermidorian inquest into the motives and consequences of the betrayal (“Friend Or Foe”); then finally, the realisation that the only place this utopian society can exist is in space (“Cosmos”)
Does the cost of policing affect what laws are enforced?
I’d (naïvely?) imagined that there would be some kind of institutional firewall in place, analogous to the division between advertising and content in a newspaper, or the various Chinese Walls inside financial firms. That is, that decisions on which types of crime to pursue would be separate from decisions about how to pay for it.
Is that not the case? Brooke Magnanti (belle de jour) writes:
Another way in which opposing sex work brings financial benefit is through the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Police know, for instance, that if a brothel owner is prosecuted, since running a brothel is illegal, any money and property retrieved from the ‘crime scene’ becomes theirs. When police resources are limited, does the temptation of profit possibly influence victimless crimes being prosecuted more vigourously than they otherwise would?
…
It’s impossible to know for certain, but one can imagine plenty of situations in which police – with restricted time and money – must make choices: unknown violent criminals who may be difficult and expensive to catch, or women technically breaking the law standing right in front of you, with cash assets?
Similarly, there’s a debate about the cost of evicting travellers from Dale Farm:
The cost of evicting travellers from Europe’s largest illegal camp could spiral to £18million, councillors have revealed.
The occupants of Dale Farm in Crays Hill, Essex, have threatened violence if bailiffs move in, pushing up the bill to remove them from £3.5million just 18 months ago.
Basildon Council has set aside £8million for the operation – almost a third of its annual budget – while Essex Police has a £10million ‘worst-case scenario’ fund.
…
Despite the huge cost, Tony Ball, leader of the council is determined to press ahead if the families choose not leave by their own accord.
Mr Ball said: ‘No one wants a forced clearance of this site and we have spent ten years asking the travellers to work with us to seek a peaceful resolution.
‘However, it is important the law is applied equally and fairly to all people and if we do not take action in this case, we would have little moral right as a planning authority to take action against future unauthorised developments.
So it sounds like the cost of enforcement is taken into account in policing decisions, whether at the level of the police themselves or their political masters. Is that the case? If I break the law in some way that’s expensive to identify, can I expect to get away with it?
Cory Doctorow on the joys of writing for teenagers:
That’s one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences — it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There’s a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying. You see it when you run into them in person and find out that there are kids who read your book, googled every aspect of it, figured out how to replicate the best bits, and have turned your story into a hobby.
…
young people live in a world characterized by intense drama, by choices wise and foolish and always brave. This is a book-plotter’s dream. Once you realize that your characters are living in this state of heightened consequence, every plot-point acquires moment and import that keeps the pages turning.
Next in the continuing saga of Rolling Stone printing surprisingly good long-format journalism: The Stoner Arms Dealers.
Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. “It was surreal,” he recalls. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war… It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn’t know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.”
The author, Guy Lawson, seems to have written a string of in-depth articles on international crime in Rolling Stone.
Although you suspect Rolling Stone is also dropping serious money on lawyers, to let them say things like:
The Albanians cut him out of the deal, informing AEY that the repackaging job would be completed instead by a friend of the prime minister’s son. What Trebicka had failed to grasp was that Thomet was paying a kickback to the Albanians from the large margin he was making on the deal. Getting rid of Thomet was impossible, because that was how the Albanians were being paid off the books.
I suspect part of the reason Rolling Stone can support this kind of journalism is that they force their writers to be
entertaining
. Not only does this mean people read and appreciate the long-form articles (and thus build demand for more of them), but it forces the writers to properly get to grips with their subject.
Adrian Mogos describes the use of forced labour in Central European. They were producing food for Tesco, among other outlets:
Corina says they worked in the fields under Ukrainians carrying shotguns who hit anyone that dared ask about the wages they’d been promised or protested over the conditions and hours.
Around 400 hundred men and women were kept working around the clock, sleeping in a dormitory, and they were not allowed to leave the fields unless their Ukrainian bosses transferred them to constructions sites or slaughterhouses.
…
After two months of working for free under these armed guards, Corina knew she’d never get any money. When she and her husband protested, they threatened to sell her off to a pimp to work as a prostitute in Prague. Finally, she, her husband and one brother-in-law fled the camp by night in the summer of 2008.
To open in vim all files matching a regex:
$ grep -l foo ./* | xargs vim -p
Vim has a plugin for outlines, clearly described here. Create a file with the extension
otl
, and you’ll get some visual help in managing an outline.
Whitespace denotes indentation level, colons mark text content. It builds on the vim folding commands:
There are also some commands specific to vimoutliner. these are introduced with a double comma, and listed in the documentation
Finally, it’s possibe to get ascii checkbox functionality, a little like emacs org-mode. This requires installing a plugin-for-the-plugin, and I’ve not yet tried it. Details in
:help vimoutliner
The real
get out of my head
command is this perfect incarnation of my own notation for marking tasks as done:
,,T normal Pre-pend timestamp (HH:MM:SS) to heading
I’ve lately been poking around in the UN Comtrade database. This records international trade in detail that is mind-boggling, and I suspect not entirely reliable. So today I learned that:
Whenever I try to put code snippets up here, I end up frustrated that they turn up deprived of any highlighting. So I’ve tried following these instructions to fix things. With luck, this post should be an example
So this goes in <head>:
And for the highlighted text you have 2 options.
First is with <pre> tags:
or a slightly more longwinded version, which provides for escaping of html tags:
<script type="syntaxhighlighter" class="brush:html"><![CDATA[ <a href="http://exampe.com/blah">blah</a>]]</script>
This, alas, interacts badly with blogger’s pre-posting HTML validation. It’s easier to handle the escaping from the command-line beforehand:
$ xclip -o | perl -MHTML::Entities -ne 'print encode_entities($_)' | xclip