Banditry

Happy St Cyril’s Day, everybody. And bah, humbug to all other saints (yes, even you, Methodius…)

Update: this is excellent stuff…

Fine 18th century invective from Captain Christopher Middleton, directed against a random idiot who was talking rubbish on the Pamphletnet - a snip at £2,000.

A REJOINDER TO MR. DOBB’S REPLY TO CAPTAIN MIDDLETON; IN WHICH IS EXPOS’D, BOTH HIS WILFUL AND REAL IGNORANCE OF TIDES; &C. HIS JESUITICAL PREVARICATIONS, EVASIONS, FALSITIES, AND FALSE REASONING; HIS AVOIDING TAKING NOTICE OF FACTS, FORMERLY DETECTED AND CHARGED UPON HIM AS INVENTIONS OF HIS OR HIS WITNESSES; THE CHARACTER OF THE LATTER, AND THE PRESENT VIEWS OF THE FORMER, WHICH GAVE RISE TO THE PRESENT DISPUTE. IN A WORD, AN UNPARALELLED DISINGENUITY, AND (TO MAKE USE OF A VERODOBBSICAL FLOWER OF RHETORIC) A GLARING IMPUDENCE, ARE SET IN A FAIR LIGHT. LONDON

Regular readers will doubtless be unsurprised to hear that Captain Middleton turned out to be right in the end.

If someone had told my 15-year-old self that in the year 2008, I’d be a high-powered professional, up at twenty to one on a Tuesday night in the heart of the big city, eating fried chicken and exploring the innermost parts of models, then I’d've been quite pleased about the way my life was going to turn out.

I don’t think I’d heard of financial models when I was 15. And I liked fried chicken quite a bit more than I currently do…

A very long time ago, I had a blog whose software platform I wrote myself. It was pretty ropey by the standards of Wordpress and Moveable Type, although it beat Blogger’s offer in those days (for really dull reasons, the only server I had access to ran Windows and Access; no existing blog software supported this setup, so I had to write some).

I learnt a lot about Access, IIS, and databases and scripting in general. And for ages I was relatively immune to spam, because automatic spambots were configured to deliver the right form data to work with Blogger, MT and WP. But after a year or so, blog comment spamming was sufficiently big business (and my old blog sufficiently popular, he said self-aggrandisingly) that - presumably manually - the droves of spam started coming.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a patriotic Brit, I’d find it hard to deny that Samuel Adams was a terrorist. However, it’s slightly surprising that the US Department of Transportation agrees with me…

[off to the States in two weeks… wish me luck]

This, basically. Blech.

Update, Tuesday evening: well, those were a rubbish couple of days. I’m now more or less confident in my ability to go more than 10 seconds away from a toilet, although I’m not quite up for vindaloo night just yet.

In the meantime I was sufficiently bored that I followed my own advice and read all of Dan’s archives starting from the beginning, which has left me jaded, cynical, statistical, argumentative and mildly jealous.

(yes, this also explains my original link, rather than merely having a disturbingly good memory of bloggers’ illness records from five years ago.)

Update, Wednesday: yes, I confused “noro” and “novo” in the headline. I was a bit distracted at the time, in my defence.

Very sad to hear that Marxist economist Andrew Glyn, who had the dubious honour of teaching both me and Chris Dillow, has died.

As a not-very-socalist, I’d second Chris’s view that:

He never gave those of us who shared his views an easy ride, and was never less than generous to those who didn’t share his views; his conservative and liberal students held him in as high regard as I did.

…which isn’t a bad (professonal) epitaph for an academic.

It’s possible that house prices will fall a little in 2008. It’s just about possible they may even fall by a lot (although I’d happily stake my life that they’ll fall by less than 20%).

However, it’s absolutely certain that house prices by the end of 2012 will be higher in real terms than they are now. And it’s highly likely that the return on house prices between now and the end of 2012 will exceed the base interest rate.

“So, why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?” - well, because I’m quite happy in my current rented set-up, I’m not sure about where I’m going to be living for the next two years (during which time I accept I could lose money), and I don’t want to be a landlord right now.

Still, anyone who thinks that an investor with more than five years’ liquidity/time before they’d like to sell will lose money (say, the government on Northern Rock’s house estate…) is an idiot.

Apparently it’s Daniel Davies Day today (even if the TV schedulers and sellers of greetings cards have failed to notice).

In tribute, I’m linking to his two best ever pieces: It was a wonderful headbutt and (allegedly, pseudonymously) Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics.

If you don’t follow Dan’s writing, a) you should; b) you’re an idiot. Go here, here and here, and keep reading for the rest of the day…

Small earthquake in Chile; not many dead