This https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexit-witness-archive/philip-hammond/ shows up how much the British government were winging their way through Brexit. Theresa May was mainly concerned about immigration rather than economics:

she will have seen this through the prism of immigration and security. For her, the economy would have been very much a secondary thing. She didn’t really have a deep interest in how the economy worked. Of course, she wanted a successful economy, because she understood that GDP growth underpinned everything else. But, as to the mechanics of it and what the implications were, that wouldn’t have been her primary focus at all at that time.

And when she announced her support for a hard Brexit, it was without consulting the Chancellor or having any idea of the economic implications:

I was completely stunned by the speech that she made at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2016. I hadn’t seen the relevant part of it in advance. I’d had no input to the speech. Nick Timothy kept me completely away from it. I did see some text on the economy the day before, but I had no idea that she was going to describe Brexit in th\e hardest possible terms.

I was absolutely horrified by what I was hearing. All I remember thinking was, ‘There will be a television camera that will be on your face. If you move a muscle, it will be the story on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow.’

[via https://davidallengreen.com/2021/02/how-theresa-may-casually-decided-that-brexit-meant-the-united-kingdom-would-leave-the-single-market-and-customs-union-the-fascinating-and-revealing-interview-with-philip-hammond/]

In discussions about Trump’s sanity, I’ve felt the need to bring up the immortal words of Harold Wilson, speaking to a pair of journalists shortly after he stepped down as Prime Minister:

I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man. That blind man may tell you something.

In other words: power attracts strange people and makes them even stranger.

You probably don’t want to read this, unless you got here by googling the error message. Just a bug workaround, which I’ve backdated into the archives so it gets to exist somewhere online.

The problem: Most websites which use localstorage stop working. You look in the console, and find many errors NS_ERROR_FILE_NO_DEVICE_SPACE. But there is plenty of space on your hard drive

The solution: delete storage.sqlite in the firefox profile directory

What’s going on: the sqlite database that manages localstorage got corrupted (perhaps because the disk was full at some point). Delete the database and firefox will happily recreate it.

…At least, that’s what worked for me. No guarantees!

You probably don’t want to read this, unless you got here by googling the error message. Just a bug workaround, which I’ve backdated into the archives so it gets to exist somewhere online.

The problem: Most websites which use localstorage stop working. You look in the console, and find many errors NS_ERROR_FILE_NO_DEVICE_SPACE. But there is plenty of space on your hard drive

The solution: delete storage.sqlite in the firefox profile directory

What’s going on: the sqlite database that manages localstorage got corrupted (perhaps because the disk was full at some point). Delete the database and firefox will happily recreate it.

…At least, that’s what worked for me. No guarantees!

It’s a comforting New Year ritual for me to read along with Bruce Sterling’s* annual State of the World discussion at the WELL.

This year is slightly more predictable than most because the obvious topics are so hard to avoid:

I had it figured that a failed coup would surely be followed by some kind of purge, but I didn’t get it that it would come from a united front of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Youtube, Reddit, Twitch, Discord and Shopify….
Somebody – who?– got all these tech players on the same page and launched a simultaneous attack without a single rumor leaking beforehand.

But there is at least some of his usual attention to the rest of the world:

Prime Minister Modi, head honcho of India, has become the most attentive pupil of Xi Jinping of China. Modi is much impressed by Xi’s autocratic success, so Modi has become an adept China mimic: he numbers all the citizenry in the Aadhaar databank, he turns Kashmir into Xinjiang with all kinds of surveillance heavy-manners and Internet controls, he turns his BJP Party into Chinese-style party cadres, he cultivates his own Chinese-style cult-of-personality – step by step, Modi is constructing a Modi-centric Indian government that is “Chinese technocracy with Indian characteristics.”

(*) and other people, but Sterling is the main reason I keep coming back.

The problem with historians is that they know too much.

In particular, they know how things turned out. When you have the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to avoid simply assembling a narrative leading up to that result.

So I wish somebody would try doing blinded historical research.

Here’s how it would work. You want a historian to analyze the events and the forces at play in some historical context without knowing what comes next.

So you give them access to archives, newspapers, records – but only up to a certain date. They write their analysis of what is going on, and describe what they expect to happen next. Then you reveal what did happen, and compare it to the predictions.

The result? The historian can apply whatever methodology they like – and see how good it is at making predictions. Then you could apply the same methods in situations where you don’t know what will happen (e.g. the present), and have a ballpark idea of how much trust to put in it.

It’s a comforting New Year ritual for me to read along with Bruce Sterling’s* annual State of the World discussion at the WELL.

This year is slightly more predictable than most because the obvious topics are so hard to avoid:

I had it figured that a failed coup would surely be followed by some kind of purge, but I didn’t get it that it would come from a united front of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Youtube, Reddit, Twitch, Discord and Shopify….
Somebody – who?– got all these tech players on the same page and launched a simultaneous attack without a single rumor leaking beforehand.

But there is at least some of his usual attention to the rest of the world:

Prime Minister Modi, head honcho of India, has become the most attentive pupil of Xi Jinping of China. Modi is much impressed by Xi’s autocratic success, so Modi has become an adept China mimic: he numbers all the citizenry in the Aadhaar databank, he turns Kashmir into Xinjiang with all kinds of surveillance heavy-manners and Internet controls, he turns his BJP Party into Chinese-style party cadres, he cultivates his own Chinese-style cult-of-personality – step by step, Modi is constructing a Modi-centric Indian government that is “Chinese technocracy with Indian characteristics.”

(*) and other people, but Sterling is the main reason I keep coming back.

The problem with historians is that they know too much.

In particular, they know how things turned out. When you have the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to avoid simply assembling a narrative leading up to that result.

So I wish somebody would try doing blinded historical research.

Here’s how it would work. You want a historian to analyze the events and the forces at play in some historical context without knowing what comes next.

So you give them access to archives, newspapers, records – but only up to a certain date. They write their analysis of what is going on, and describe what they expect to happen next. Then you reveal what did happen, and compare it to the predictions.

The result? The historian can apply whatever methodology they like – and see how good it is at making predictions. Then you could apply the same methods in situations where you don’t know what will happen (e.g. the present), and have a ballpark idea of how much trust to put in it.

One of my lockdown activities has been remotely watching short movies with a friend. Here are a few of them, from best to worst.

Emilie Muller. A young woman attends an audition, where the director requires her to talk him through the contents of her handbag. As their conversation veers into more personal territory, we become very aware of the power dynamics and the patterns of self-dramatization. Along the way, though, there is some lovely slice-of-life discussion sparked by the objects.

House Party. A Romanian woman comes home, to find her teenage son has thrown a house party in her absence. This short is much subtler than you might expect from the set-up. Its heart is the relationship between the women living in the same apartment block. I suspect much of the nuance has been lost in translation, but still worth watching.

The Jigsaw. A dusty, little-frequented shop. You try to buy a jigsaw. The shopkeeper tries to discourage you with mysterious warnings, before finally relenting and selling you the puzzle.
Yes, you are in a horror film. Yes, every trope is going to be played absolutely straight. No, this one doesn’t have much to recommend it

One of my lockdown activities has been remotely watching short movies with a friend. Here are a few of them, from best to worst.

Emilie Muller. A young woman attends an audition, where the director requires her to talk him through the contents of her handbag. As their conversation veers into more personal territory, we become very aware of the power dynamics and the patterns of self-dramatization. Along the way, though, there is some lovely slice-of-life discussion sparked by the objects.

House Party. A Romanian woman comes home, to find her teenage son has thrown a house party in her absence. This short is much subtler than you might expect from the set-up. Its heart is the relationship between the women living in the same apartment block. I suspect much of the nuance has been lost in translation, but still worth watching.

The Jigsaw. A dusty, little-frequented shop. You try to buy a jigsaw. The shopkeeper tries to discourage you with mysterious warnings, before finally relenting and selling you the puzzle.
Yes, you are in a horror film. Yes, every trope is going to be played absolutely straight. No, this one doesn’t have much to recommend it