2013/05/12 21:44
I made a wee video starring Rosie yesterday: (The music is of course Drink, Drink Yer Zider Up by The Wurzels.)
2013/05/02 17:40
I'm really excited by the upcoming release of Google Glass. Until now, there's been an inherent conflict in smartphone design between creating a huge screen and making the device small enough that you can be bothered carrying it around at all times. (It's interesting how mobile phones were getting smaller and smaller until the advent of smartphones meant a larger...
2013/05/12 22:37
I must have overlooked
this very interesting blog post by The Telegraph’s Thomas Pascoe (probably because the Scottish holidays had already started at the time).
He’s arguing that Gordon Brown wasn’t an innumerate idiot when he sold most of the UK’s gold reserves at a ridiculously low price, as most people had assumed.
What he really did was trying to salvage the banking system:
It seemed almost as if the Treasury was trying to achieve the lowest price possible for the public’s gold. It was.
[...]
Faced with the prospect of a global collapse in the banking system, the Chancellor took the decision to bail out the banks by dumping Britain’s gold, forcing the price down and allowing the banks to buy back gold at a profit, thus meeting their borrowing obligations.
If true, this puts the gold sale in a completely different light. It was perhaps after all the right thing to do at the time (although I wonder whether bailing out a few banks would actually have cost more than the value of all that gold today), but why didn’t Gordon Brown afterwards try to strengthen the banking system instead of letting them continue their merry games until the system finally crashed in 2007?
2013/05/11 11:09
It's completely clear that David Cameron's plans to renegotiate the EU membership terms is just a plot to halt the progress of UKIP. He thought that promising a referendum in five years' time would make UKIP's voters come back to the Conservatives in time for the next general election. However, it's now increasingly clear that voters are drifting towards UKIP for many different reasons (immigration being one of the major ones), which means that the referendum promise now looks utterly...
2013/05/10 20:18
I'm pleased to be able to introduce the newest member of our family: Rosie Hamster. We bought her on a farm in the Coatbridge area today. She was born on 12th April 2013 (so she'll be one month old on Sunday), and she seems to be really lively and not shy at all. So far she's just exploring her cage,...
2013/04/28 10:43
After the introduction of the euro, the German politicians got worried that Germany wasn't the best place to run a business any more (the "Standort Deutschland" discussion). As a result of this, salaries and other labour costs were lowered. This...
2013/04/26 22:42
The first beer I ever tried to brew in Scotland was a German Weißbier, α₁. Although I was pleased at the time, I later came to view it as a bit of a failure -- it wasn't really pleasant enough...
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