Dented Shield

Both Bruce Schneier and The Register cover Trump’s issuing of a “Executive Order”, known in the English language as a Decree called “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” in which he instructs Federal agencies (nudge nudge, wink wink) to ensure that their privacy policies apply only to US citizens or lawful permanent residents and that Privacy Act protections are not to be applied to, well, the rest of the world. The Register, doesn’t quite call this a “Fuck You, EU” and Schneier is more balanced offering counter opinions, but it does question the US commitment to the Privacy Shield which as the Register points out is itself questioned by many EU law makers. …

3rd Reading

Is it true that Labour’s amendments to the Article 50 Bill are Committee stage amendments and will only be debated now that the Bill has passed its 2nd Reading? So let’s see what happens to the amendments. What will Corbyn and the PLP do if none of them pass? Despite all the calls that the referendum result is the final democratic voice of the people, Labour’s Conference position is clear; we should only leave if the deal is acceptable and Parliament should demand the last word when we know what the deal is. …

Brexit goes to Parliament

Brexit goes to Parliament

On returning from LP conference in September last year, I predicted that the left/right split had been added to by arguments over Brexit and Immigration. The last couple of days has shown this clearly. It starts from May’s declaration that the UK will be seeking to leave the single market and the customs union, the so-called “Hard Brexit”. This is because they wrongly think that this is the only way to implement more restrictive border controls and for reasons I can’t really understand hate the European Court of Justice. The UK Supreme Court has since ruled that only Parliament can agree to leave the EU and implement Article 50’s intention to quit. This article looks at the politics of the situation, especially as it applies to the Parliamentary Labour Party and argues that Labour’s policy of defining red-lines, and asking for a second mandate if the terms of exit are unacceptable are fair, democratic and desirable. …

Old Blue

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. …

Fine Art

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. …

Profit

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. …