Yesterday Rishi Sunak announced the next stage of support for the economy to see us through a coronavirus winter and mitigate some of the job destruction inherent within Brexit. It seems to be a short term working subsidy. It is described in the Guardian in an article entitled, “Covid scheme: UK government to cover 22% of worker pay for six months”. It requires employers to pay workers 55% wages for 33% hours. Below/overleaf, I also look at Richard Seymour and Rebecca Long Bailey's comments. ... ...
Where’s Labour on the future deal with the EU.
While most attention is on the Govt’s response to the pandemic, and while expecting a reimposition of the lockdown, the second part of the the triple whammy is the looming end of the Brexit Transition agreement. What are Labour doing? Certainly not making so much noise. Here’s the FT on Kier Starmer’s response, which it headlines as “Getting Brexit Done!” on the basis of his speech to the TUC. Labour’s front bench spokesperson on Brexit is Rachel Reeves, who now it seems doesn’t really want to speak about it. While Starmer seems keen to ensure a visibly effective performance in Parliament, which seems to be paying off in the polls, as Labour draws even at 40%, it requires the acquiescence of the press to break through and both Reeves and Starmer were outshone by Ed Miliband in opposing the 2nd reading of the Internal Market Bill. Too much of Labour’s parliamentary attack position is based on competence, the failure of the Tories to meet their own goals without even addressing the issues of cronyism and accountability or more importantly of a vision of how things could be better.
But then the Remain campaign has disappeared, (or the Guardian’s view if you prefer), giving some on Labour’s Left, the evidence they always wanted that the Remain campaign was an anti-corbyn trojan horse. Not for me! But Parliament has voted to allow the Govt. to negotiate the trade deals without asking Parliament to agree, and the Govt. refused to ask for a transition extension despite the CV19 pandemic. These are both opportunities missed.
If we get a deal, it’s going to be pretty shit. …
10 Point Plans for Labour
In running for election as Leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer published a 10 point plan, which I have noted & mirrored on this web site. A couple of months later, Richard Burgon, writing in Tribune produced his own 10 point plan as a focus for left unity within the Labour Party. I produce them below/overleaf in a table of titles. Provided we 'don't try and read the tea leaves in the order, there's not a lot of difference! For those of us who didn't vote for him, this should give us hope that Labour's opposition and manifesto will be worthwhile, but those that voted for him because of his 10 pledges need to be articulate in reminding him of them. ... ...
ARM in play again
I was interested to learn that ARM is in play again, although curious to learn that Nvidia might be its suitor, and even more interested to learn that Nvidia has overtaken Intel as the world’s largest chip fab. How did that happen? Nvidia sell on consoles as well as PC/laptops and games platforms are it seems another good whose demand has been boosted by CV19 and that the global demand for cycles has been driven by HPC and AI recently where the Nvidia are competing architecturally with Intel, although they need a CPU to complete their portfolio. It may be a better fit than I’d thought.
I have to laugh a bit, as Intel drove the final RISC players out of the market by leveraging the volume of the consumer product design, and it would seem, have been bitten in the arse by the same thing. These products require volume, and production will coalesce towards the low price duopoly.
ARM was bought by Softbank, for £24bn cash, just under 4 years ago; they are a Japanese venture/hedge fund which has famously had it its own problems. I wonder what they did with the money as some of their principals are now bleating for state protection as Nvidia is a allegedly an inappropriate owner of the chip designers. The Verge heralded it as another proof that intellectual property has value. The Register reports that the big stake holders have been insuring themselves against losing access to the intellectual property.
In this article on the BBC, they returned to Herman Hauser, one of ARM’s founders, who voted against the deal in 2016 who shares his fears for access to the technology of bought by another market participant, and possibly the decommitment to the Cambridge campus, which is a security of supply issue, but this Govt. is unlikely to do much and it should be safer owned by someone who wants the ideas rather than an organisation which just considers it a red-ink line in the P&L. …
A collective voice
Things to be considered about Labour Party Policy making. Many people join because they have good ideas, and certainly have unique experiences and it’s not enough to just take their money and ask them to knock on doors. In “Ideas, alliances and promises”, I examined the long term failure of the Labour Party to develop long term effective and democratic policy making processes and the electoral consequences of this.
It’s possible that the most important reforms contemporary to the democracy review was the dropping of the need for motions to Conference to be “contemporary”, increasing the number of motions to be discussed from eight to twenty, which had the effect of ensuring that important topics with lower levels of support got to conference floor and the introduction of “reference back” on the NPF report. Let’s see how long these last. …
There’s no divorce in Bitcoin
I attended a presentation hosted by the BCS, and given by Ron Ballard, based on his article in IT Now, “Blockchain: the facts and the fiction”. What he said inspired some thoughts and reminded me of others, some of which I have previously published on my blog. I wrote an article, called Learnings of Bitcoin, which was meant to be a spoof on the Borat film title and posted it on my linkedin blog, The article looks at the tight coupling of Bitcoin, and its consensus mechanism, the proof of work, together with its costs and vulnerabilities. It examines the goal of eliminating trust authorities and its questionable ability to meet the necessary roles of money as a means of exchange and a store of wealth. In the comment pushing it, I say, “This might be a bit basic for some, but you can’t have a coinless immutable blockchain, at least not one based on ‘proof of work’.”, at which point you need to consider if there are better data storage platforms for your use case.
Ballard is an anti-bitcoin polemicist and his anti-slide is comprehensive, although it misses the asynchronicity; I am less clear about his assertion that relational databases are good enough. Stonebraker in his paper, “The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite) § 6.[12]” identifies five use cases where relational databases are sub-optimal including stream/feed processing and also states that SQL is not suitable for all data retrieval problems. I would add that an SQL database is not immutable, and most implementations do not come with a “four-eyes” super-user implementation; much effort needs to be invested in controlling the activities of these super-users, especially to implement the “developers can’t run code, and operators can’t change code” rule.
If the only use of Bitcoin, is paying for the electricity to keep it secure, exchanges become necessary. There’s something on how is Bitcoin valued by the market, but I haven’t found it yet also marginal utility theory requires two commodities; I wonder what the alternative to the crypto-currencies is and how liquid the exchange mechanisms are? Also are we trusting the exchanges? If so, the solution is not trustless! (I mean the alternative is cash since it’s the only way we measure energy and like cycles, electricity can’t be stored.
Some have suggested that the language used such as mining, is designed to suggest that the Bitcoin is similar and as safe as Gold, which isn’t! The use of the word ‘nonce’ which in IT security field means ‘number used once’, and is part of the chain design to my mind disguises the role of this field. It is only used once, but it is the output of the proof of work.
Ballard challenged his audience to find a good use case, and to my mind the proof of work and its costs make it hard, but I wonder if either trade confirmations or P2P name resolution are potential use cases, certainly bitcoin have had to solve the later and has inspired the namecoin project. There may be better ways to do both, but doesn’t look like anyone else is working on it.
The presentation was published on youtube here … …
Schadenfreude
I should have more sympathy, but Unite’s United Left,, have just conducted an e-ballot, to determine who should be the UL’s candidate for General Secretary when Len McClusky stands down, which will have to be in the next two years. McClusky and his close supporters prefer Howard Beckett, currently Director of Legal and Politics, and he is being opposed by Steve Turner, the Union’s most senior industrial organiser, and currently Assistant General Secretary. E-Ballots are hard to run, particularly over the internet. Beckett lost be three votes and is claiming that the ballot should be re-run; I, of course, am laughing my arse off, as so many of Beckett’s supporters and he himself, felt that over Brexit, the I and the rest of the British people should be denied a ‘final say’ by having a re-run of the referendum, 🤣 …
delicious bookmarks recovered
I found my delicious bookmarks, and decided to remove the easily identified as gone away and expose the tags, on the way, I removed those without descriptions. The links came from from ~3525 to ~1800. I was fascinated by del.icio.us when I first discovered it, and used it as a micro blog. This is how it now looks in wordpress, but I need to put the anchor text, descriptions & tags through an ascii to html converter. The code is on github, in repo called delicious tools. The next stage is to allow them to be queried using the tags (or not, if I think it's worth it). The wordpress plugin on broken links continues to identify those that are broken, and I usually unlink them. If interested, 'read more' …
On Record Management
As part of my series on devising systems to create logs to protect an organisation and its staff against charges of criminality, I posted an article on my linkedin blog called “Doing Record Management well”. It doesn’t surprise me that there is an ISO Standard (ISO 15489) on the subject, but it does surprise me that I hadn’t heard of it until I started to research some of the articles in this series.
I have a research note on my wiki, which links to the Bank of England policy and also quotes Deutsche Bank’s policy, which is available because they post it on internet. I quote it here,
Deutsche Bank’s code of conduct, see page 25, says, among other things,
…“Maintaining accurate books and records is fundamental to meeting our legal, regulatory and business requirements. You are responsible for maintaining accurate and complete records and for complying with all the controls and policies our bank has in place. You should never falsify any book, record or account that relates to the business of our bank, its customers, employees (including your own activities within our bank) or suppliers. You must never dispose of records or information that may be relevant to pending or threatened litigation or a regulatory proceeding unless you are authorised to do so by the Legal Department. You must also comply with applicable record retention policies.”
DB Code of Conduct
Labour and the 4 Day Week
This is the text of the Working Hours resolution at #Lab19, calling for a 4 day week with no loss of pay.
Composite 8 -Working Hours
Working time is a major industrial and political issue in the UK. This conference is seriously concerned that compared to other countries in Europe, we have some of the worst public and statutory holiday entitlements; full-time workers have amongst the longest hours of any country; UK workers work unpaid overtime worth billions of pounds; and with the forthcoming increase in the state pension age, we will have the longest working lives.
But this has not delivered benefits to workers: average pay is lower than before the financial crash; productivity lags significantly behind other countries; and in-work stress is at record levels. The recent report from Autonomy and the 4 Day Week Campaign outlines the health and wellbeing costs of overwork. Work-related anxiety, stress or depression accounts for half of all working days lost to ill health.
Instead of building a country that works for everyone the Tories are building a country in which you work until you drop –and with the current imbalance of power in the economy, new technology and automation risk exacerbating this by continuing to intensify work, polarise terms and conditions and replace jobs entirely.
Conference believes there is a growing consensus around reductions in working time, including support from the TUC, STUC, Labour Party frontbenchers, individual unions and 63% of the population and that reducing the standard working week, with no loss of pay, must be a central pledge in the manifesto and a key aim of a Labour government.
In particular, Conference believes this should be part of the strategy to address under-employment, build a more sustainable economy, boost productivity and ensure workers benefit from the 4th industrial revolution and leads to opportunities for parents and a decrease in gender inequality.
Conference believes Labour should support the aims of Labour for a 4 day week campaign, go beyond the pledge to introduce four new public holidays and commit in the next manifesto to set out a plan to achieve a standard four day or 32 hour gross week with no loss of pay within a decade through sectoral collective bargaining and a new ‘UK Shorter Working Time Directive.’
Mover: CWU
Seconder: Perth and Kinross CLP …