mrmikardo

This is another good case for security-by-minimisation. I struggle to see why NI numbers were required on the electoral register — particularly when democracy in the UK had been functioning for over a century without them.

The best way to ensure valuable data doesn’t leak into the public realm is to minimise the amount of unnecessary data collection.

And indeed, there's an important caveat in the Django 4.1 docs;

Note that, at this stage, the underlying database operations remain synchronous, with contributions ongoing to push asynchronous support down into the SQL compiler, and integrate asynchronous database drivers....

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/releases/4.1/#asynchro...

Craig is a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who served in the Foreign Office for many years. He's since dedicated a lot of his time to following and reporting on the Assange case in the UK.

He doesn't hide his opinions, some of which are quite strongly worded, but I don't think that makes him less worthwhile as an observer. I'd say he is less of a fact-finder/whistleblower and more of an analyser/commenter.

I personally find his articles insightful and nuanced.

By taking everything literal ("no, Bill Gates is not literally inserting microchips"), their enemies can avoid dealing with the issues a more charitable interpretation would be getting at.

This is so on the mark - too often we forget to focus on what someone is _really_ trying to communicate, and take their words at "face value" - which is not communication at all.

Thank you for remdinding me of this fantastic book! One of my favourites.

I've been practicing kriya yoga and hatha yoga every day for the past half year. I usually do it as soon as I wake up, and it takes about an hour.

It's quite intense work, but I'm glad I've kept it up, as the benefits have been immense. I've some drama in my life, some of that is now starting to ease off, and life is becoming more intelligent and filled with ease.

For anyone interested to learn more: https://youtu.be/XLk5yks9c_Q

Many thanks for posting this. It's a very well-written and timely piece.

Thanks for reminding me of this. A very pertinent and insightful observation and, as you suggest, one that is missing from the linked article.

I agree.

And the more centralised the banking system is, the weirder the incentives become / banks are somewhat decoupled from the incentive to lend to credit-worthy / promising businesses (like here in the UK).

I think this article misses a valuable point: because they lend more than they keep in reserve, banks create money or credit, and thus expand the available money supply.

Removing banks, and giving all this power to the central government, amounts (in my view, at least) to a form of central planning.

There's a good talk about this, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzE038REw2k

The author of this article seems to espouse the "financial intermediation" view of banking. But, as Werner notes, this theory has been rejected (on empirical evidence; although, I haven't read the paper he cites in his talk).