Month: October 2020

At least they seem willing to end Lockdown

From this tweet, concerning a piece behind the Telegrap paywall (thankyou Adriana Lucas) …:

It’s rather reminiscent of Medieval physicians, attributing any sign of recovery to the effectiveness of bloodletting; any deterioration to insufficient application of leeches.

… I found my way to this thread, which summarises the case against the Plague policies of most governments around the world, the case that I have been passing on here, and the case which I hope will become the orthodoxy concerning this ghastly episode. The Plague was not that bad. The overreaction to it has been one of the great public policy blunders of all time.

However, if Johnson, Hancock and their equivalents elsewhere are thinking that they can now end Lockdown, because Lockdown has worked, I’ll take it, for now. The right thing getting done for the wrong reason, is surely better than the wrong thing continuing to be done for some other wrong reason. The argument to the effect that Johnson and Hancock and their ilk are off their chumps and should be dustbinned as major politicians can then proceed in a more relaxed fashion.

LATER: It seems that I may have underestimated their willingness to end Lockdown. Hancock is still threatening more Lockdown. But the government is rapidly losing its own backbenchers, who may soon compel a return to normality, because of all the reasons I’ve been going on about here. At which point, the government may then be allowed to declare their failed policy to have succeeded, just so long as they stop doing it any more. The backbenchers will maybe then go along with this charade, to avoid humiliating their own government more than is absolutely necessary and in order to get something resembling normal life back again, even though lots of them already think that Lockdown was a total failure rather than a good policy. Like I say, I’ll take that.

Giant mouse

Well, no, not really. Actually a miniature carpet:

I did my best with some rotating and cropping, but it still looks like a regular sized mouse and a tiny carpet. Which of course it is. It’s number 22 of these silly things.

Number 19 is a sign saying: “Don’t kill your wife with work! Let electricity do it.” Which is entertaining to see, but you probably wouldn’t want to own it.

But I did like number 31, socks with sandals.

Number 46, a mobile phone that looks like a gun, might get you, as they point out, into trouble, but it might also get you out of trouble. Also, a gun that looked like a mobile phone might come in very handy in certain situations. They wouldn’t know what hit them until it hit them. But presumably Q has already done this.

Big Jim’s Trims behind its windows

This afternoon in Wilton Road:

It was the Walken faces that got my attention, as was surely the idea. Big Jim, or maybe just one of his hirelings, was behind the glass, doing a trim, and I was with someone. So this was all done in haste. But despite all the reflections and the confusions, I like them, and partly because of all the reflections and the confusions. What with windows being such a big deal in architecture these days. They create a lot of the particular look and feel of our times, the look being reflections, and the feel being the resulting confusions.

It’s late. All I’m really doing is showing you some half decent photos that I did today, rather than photos from my previous life.

Here’s the Big Jim’s Trims website. It’s a franchise. So, that won’t be Big Jim himself, just a guy with tattoos on his arms.

And here’s what that Barbicide sign is about. I can make no sense of it myself, but if you want to try, click on that, and I wish you luck. “Barbicide” ought to mean killing barbers, or maybe killing barbie dolls. Is that a clue?

How London is protecting itself against the threatened Second Wave of The Plague

A friend (the one whom I refer to here as GD2S) iPhone-photoed this photo two nights ago, in Soho, London:

The Plague is now over. The only thing London is now scared of is the damn “Temporary restrictions”. Who the hell knows how long those are going to last?

Elon Musk on the difficulty of getting from prototype to mass production

Elon Musk:

The extreme difficulty of scaling production of new technology is not well understood. It’s 1000% to 10,000% harder than making a few prototypes. The machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself.

Musk said this in connection with the battle he is now having to mass produce batteries.

This is a point that Matt Ridley, in his recently published book about innovation, also makes very forcibly.

Another illustration of this that I am a little bit familiar with (in the sense of having read about it) is that getting from a prototype to the mass production of the famed World War 2 bomber, the Avro Lancaster, took more than a year. This at a time when pressure to get the Lancaster flying and bombing in numbers could not have been more intense or more nationally prioritised. A prototype Lancaster first flew in January 1941, with great success, so there was not, on the face of it, a lot of trouble that needed shooting, so to speak. Yet it was over a year after that before the first RAF bomber squadron was able to switch to flying Lancasters in anger.

LATER: As I should have mentioned earlier, I got to the above quote by being told that Starlink (mentioned in this Michael Jennings comment here), which is intended to supply cheap and speedy internet connection in unpromising places, like disaster areas and very poor countries, is now being rolled out, despite whatever difficulties they had to overcome before they could start mass producing (and mass launching into space) all the kit for that.