Month: January 2017

It’d be hilarious if the Tories’ European Union Act 2011, which mandates a referendum in circumstances where the UK relationship with the EU is amended still applies and thus a second referendum is in fact Law. It was written because they feared a tightening of the relationship, but looks like it applies even if we’re loosening the ties. 😆 …

For the idiots, we are not getting our blue passports back, there’s another international treaty which governs the look, feel and format of passports and it would seem that the old blue passports are also the result of an international treaty. …

I was experimenting with deepart.io and was looking for style sheets which reminded me André Derain & Dufy. Here’s some pictures of theirs, from the ‘net, curiously both of the river bisecting the Capitals of the old Entente Cordiale.

Derain’s “Pool of London”, I think

and one from Jean Dufy;

I have one of his, or is it his brother’s bucolic pictures on my wall, but I liked this. …

Is Capitalism transforming, must we have a citizen’s income because it can’t offer enough people jobs?. Thinking about this leads me to the theories about the declining rate of profit. I decided that Wikipedia would be the most intellectually accessible.

Amongst other things, it says,

The central idea that Marx had, was that overall technological progress has a long-term “labor saving bias”, and that the overall long-term effect of saving labor time in producing commodities with the aid of more and more machinery had to be a falling rate of profit on production capital,

This depends on the assumption that only Labour can produce surplus value and in a software managed world, I am not sure its true. It may also depend upon the idea that capital is and has been homogeneous over time; I am of the view that Capital Productivity has been reset and rebooted by the five technological revolutions. I also question if Labour is as it was and how the increasing value of information, knowledge and human capital impacts these theories. Marx also stated that nature is a source of wealth and production; it’s not exclusively about Labour. I think I need to read the fragment of the machines, and write a review of the second machine age. …

In my mind, I have seen three ideas coming together.

1. The Nation State cannot defend both universal human rights and citizenship,
2. Asylum is a universal right and immigration controls cannot legally nor morally contravene these rights.
3. Parliamentary Sovereignty is an on-ramp to dictatorship; it must be constrained  by a  basic law and thus require judges. (We need the ECHR!)

  …

It’s been a busy week on the Brexit front, first, the Prime Minister lays out her stall and vision on how the Article 50 negotiations might take place and on the UK’s goals, I originally created a story on Storify which is now posted here, and then the Supreme Court rules that the Government needs an Act of Parliament to authorise the Article 50 notice. This has created much excitement in all the political parties; let’s hope the result is that Parliament or the electorate get the opportunity to authorise or reject the final agreement although much will depend on whether the Article 50 notice is revocable since I want the rejection of the Article 50 negotiations to be that we remain members. There’s much to play for. Let’s hope to opposition play their cards well in the next month. I am still of the view that there’s no exit terms as good as staying in and I am in direct disagreement with the Tories, we want and need the European Court because it’s a counter to Parliamentary Sovereignty; it’s the only way to guarantee workers and citizens rights against a backwoodsman Tory Parliament. …

Jon Lansman and his allies in Momentum have through extraordinary means overturned the decisions of the last Momentum national committee i.e. to hold a delegate based Conference to set rules and determine policy. They have also determined that expelled Labour Party members cannot be members of Momentum, it’s claimed that this is in order to prepare for affiliation as a Socialist Society. At least some of the Socialist Societies have non members as do the Trade Unions, it’s part of their design goals. As Jill Mountford points out in her blog, in the ’80s, the Left opposed expulsions despite stronger provocation. This is a power play by the same people that have been losing to Labour’s right since 1980, the goal should be to energise new joiners and those that have rebooted themselves; playing the same old games lets them down and will lead to Labour’s destruction.

  …

Over the last couple of years, a number of economists and politicians have been exploring the threat to professional and middle class jobs posed by algorithms and robots,, for instance, here at the Harvard Business Review and here at the Economist.

Interestingly Article 22.1 of the GDPR offers a freedom from automatic processing, stating that,

The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

Obviously this can be finessed via consent as are the working hours restrictions in the UK, but this is a big problem for the robot lawyers (& doctors). When I originally found this clause I thought it might be new but it is in fact part of the previous Directive (Article 15.1) and implemented in UK Law as Para 12 of the Data Protection Act 1998 …