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dsquareddigest.bsky.social
Malcolm Sparrow in the streets, Stafford Beer in the sheets. Once I wrote about fraud and its detection; currently writing about the industrialisation of decision making in general
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My column: This Israeli Government Is a Danger to Jews Everywhere www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/o...

It just crossed my mind that Donald Trump could do with a few well meaning but patronizing friends to ask him to consider how things look on television. If a small and peaceful march is being blown up to look like anarchy requiring military response in a large city, that's surely not good for him

The book proposal I'm currently working on is about a general theory of crises. So far my research is pointing toward the conclusion that the most important thing to do is to **understand that you are in a crisis** and that the normal rules which serve well in normal conditions may not apply.

The UK government should long ago have exited X. The platform is not interested in appropriate moderation. It is a hotbed for extremism. This was clear nearly a year ago during the riots.

There are no jay walkers in London

one of the things that I think is sort of undercovered with autonomous vehicles is that teleoperation is REALLY HARD, like full safe teleoperation is an extremely challenging unsolved technical problem. The smarter players like Waymo very rarely use actual teleoperation for intervention (cont.)

So I wrote a thing. Here is the gist. My provocation was a bit of heresy aimed at my own tribe of decent, evidence-driven, apolitical policy wonks who quite sensibly worship at the altar of the arms-length institution, the predictable rule, politics-free decisions and so on ... 1/

I was thinking about all this regulatory arbitrage of shadow (private credit) banking vs banks. Permanent capital sub prime investment vehicles would always bang on about that as well open.substack.com/pub/rupakgho...

LABLDGR 48 / REFCON 46. still looks like "Votez escroc, pas facho" is where we're heading. personally I'd be worried at the extent to which Labour is piling up deal-breaker issues with a bloc that demonstrated its willingness to break with the centre left in 2024, but I'm not an Election Knower

Presumably he knows that Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away, so "travel to the stars by 2030" is close to being literally impossible. So he's speaking metaphorically - what's it a metaphor for? fortune.com/2025/06/06/g...

“Can you imagine someone saying to me in 20 years’ time: ‘You never had children – why?’ And I say: ‘Well, because I didn’t make enough money for the UK government to approve my husband coming to my country with me‘” www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Current status of this bet: not good news I'm afraid chief

Re-upping this thread as it appears that quite a lot of people have finally realised