Month: January 2015

A compound Spanish neologism meaning “child-buyers,” which was coined by Victor Hugo in his novel The Man Who Laughs.

Adopted as a pejorative term used for individuals and entities who manipulate the minds and attitudes of children in a way that will permanently distort their beliefs or worldview.

And we have a new word for those who are opponents of integrated education in Northern Ireland. People who wilfully distort the minds and attitudes of children, installing bitterness and fear where there is innocence and acceptance.

Clearly we’re seeing some of the supply-and-demand statistics play out and we’re seeing low fuel prices, we may see that for a certain amount of time but our medium and long term view is that they will go up.
Ford CEO Mark Fields (link)

Of course they’re going to go up. That’s what they do. They’re only down at the moment to strengthen the Saudi grip on the oil markets because they’re the only oil producers with the reserves to weather out a price war. That major oil producers are playing a game of chicken – oil is currently plentiful (as US oil production has reached a new high not experienced since 1983).

Enjoy the reduced prices for a while because they’re going up again soon.

David Cameron just asked:

in our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?

By “we”, he means the security professionals around the world. In effect, he would be demanding keys to banking transactions, online shopping carts, email, WhatsApp, iMessage, movie DRM, WiFi passwords and every other secured transaction on the market. It’s already illegal to refuse to give your password to the security forces but the response from the vendors of these products would not necessarily to be to hand over the keys; it’s more likely to cause them to withdraw their products and services from the islands. Just to use one example, iMessage would simply not be able to operate on these shores and it would therefore be illegal to use it. It would be illegal to use your own VPN, without having some sort of governmental back door in there.

We’ve seen how effective banning guns has been. Yes, we have very few guns deaths but criminals still have them and I think Camerons special advisors are underestimating the ease of criminals in creating their own bespoke networks on the Internet and via wireless.

The fact that criminals are on the public Internet is a boon to law enforcement. It actually gives the government a chance to intercept. The alternatives are worse: criminal networks will run their own messaging networks on the Internet with non-backdoored communication channels or they’ll create their own closed darknets.

The problem with being to see every conversation is that they’ll look at every conversation. Surveillance will become an inexhaustible drain on technology resource; an ever-rising cost as they trawl through data a mile wide but only an inch deep.

While they’re inspecting your To-Do lists for secret words and deciphering your pattern of movements and check-ins on Swarm, they’re going to miss the deliberate attempts.

It’s not whether we want to be able to ready everything, David. It’s whether it’s appropriate, whether it’s necessary and whether it would be effective. It would cripple our digital industries and for all of these reasons, it’s important to see it for what it is. An undeliverable. It’s designed to create fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of voters.

I’ve always tried my best. When I was setting up QCON, I ignored the advice of naysayers. Similarly when I was writing RPGs for Crucible Design; some said it couldn’t be done. It was the same when I brought the Star Trek Megagame to QCON; it’s not possible. But it was.

I sacrificed a lot to achieve things – lost things along the way. It was the same when I set up MACSys – I remember being advised by a (now) director of InvestNI not to start because his company was going to crush us. They didn’t. Not by a long shot.

There are things that didn’t work. A sustainable accelerator/incubator for instance; mostly because I was unwilling to mortgage the startups of NI for pennies to a peppery developer who didn’t value startups at all. But I guess it was also my fault; maybe I just wasn’t the right guy to run it. Too grumpy, too suspicious, too pessimistic and definitely not naive enough.

But what about tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.

Malachi O’Doherty isn’t a believer. He’s written a lengthy and repetitive note complaining about the lack of a real economy in Northern Ireland. And if he is reflective of the philosophers in the province then he’s right.

“There’s no such thing as the NI economy and we’ll never be self-sufficient financially, such is our reliance on the Exchequer, but attracting more visitors can at least help us to pay our way”

This patronising opener relegates our region to knitting jumpers and mass-producing cultural knickknacks, or as he puts it “little ceramic orangemen”. We’ll all end up driving minivans around the Belfast murals and stopping at a street corner to comment sadly about what might have been without seats packed full of ghoulish tourists.

But smaller nations have prospered. Estonia endured years under the boot of the Soviet Regime and yet now boasts an economy that is not only an economic marvel but a socially and culturally progressive wonder.

The “Northern Ireland doesn’t have an economy” refrain is something I hear from the Nationalists in our midst. It’s part of the whole “Failed State” rhetoric and they do their damnedest to ensure that it remains true. That we maintain a massive welfare bill, that our people are spending their cognitive surplus in identity feuds and not in being productive members of society. And while they are happy to maintain Northern Ireland as an open sore on the British economy, the leads parties of Unionism are equally keen to maintain the status quo – citing that our dependence on the British economy is exactly the reason to stay in it.

Malachi is right that we will not progress while our leadership is wasting its time on identity disputes. We maintain segregated schools, much to the horror of thinking people everywhere who always point to that as the root of the identity issues in Northern Ireland. It’s so obvious and yet why don’t our leaders do something about it?

The Corporation Tax bill was presented yesterday and I have to believe that it will not pass through Parliament (mostly because Labour hates it and there’s not enough time before the election). So I believe the UK government sold us a sop in return for our compliance. But, in this complex negotiation it has to be said that our politicians were also hiding their true card under the table. As if a hasty deadline and economic hardship could force change in Northern Ireland. I don’t believe the Conservatives will deliver on Corporation Tax but then I also don’t believe that our leaders will delivery on peace, reconciliation, the economy, restoration of education, maintenance of health and everything else they may have committed to. We just have another holding pattern while everyone outside of Northern Ireland waits for the “bitter generation” to just grow old and die. Civilisation, as represented by almost everywhere else, can wait for us to grow up.

I deliberately used Malachi’s desert analogy in the title because of something that people forget about a mirage. A mirage is an image of a far-off place, transported into view via optical refraction of light in the atmosphere. In this case, we can see a mirage of a prosperous economy, we can even see the mirage of a society that is finally happy with their own identity. But we will never reach that mirage by repeating the mistakes of the last seventeen years.