Interesting Links for 14-05-2017

[andrewducker]

Myth-busting the “Tory election fraud” – A 10-point guide

(tags: Conservatives fraud elections law )

How to Accidentally Stop a Global Cyber Attack

(tags: security )

How the whale evolved

(tags: evolution viaSwampers animation )

Cary Grant: how 100 acid trips in Tinseltown 'changed my life'

(tags: lsd mentalhealth movies history )

Belt and Road Initiative - how China is connecting itself to the world

(tags: china globalization )

Really nice visualisation of how vote transfers worked in the recent Edinburgh council elections

(tags: voting edinburgh scotland visualisation viaDanielDWilliam )

Australian Wild Pig Drinks 18 Beers, Gets in Fight with Cow

(tags: animals funny alcohol )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

Two weeks to London I think is important for industries like clothing. I did my CIMA casestudy on the schmutter trade. Lots of firms in Eastern Europe and Turkey picking up work for fast-changing season clothing with physical transport times of days or weeks. China, being 6-12 weeks away by boat couldn't compete with the necessary delivery times.

The Chinese sure are aiming on spending a lot of money doing up their part of the world.

But also Railway Mania...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania

[andrewducker]

Is there anything that we can't boom/bust over?

But yeah, an intermediate between flying in expensive goods, and waiting two months for a ship to arrive is definitely going to be useful.

[danieldwilliam]

Probably not. I noticed that the price of chicken wings has spiked in recent months.

I'm torn about the Belt and Road thing. On the one hand I can see that getting goods from China to London in two weeks has some value and that building infrastructure along the Stans and in to Pakistan and so on might connect those countries to the rest of the world and allow them to trade goods and services and arbitrage labour and become richer. All good. On the other hand, that's a lot of money to spend on a railway through a bunch of poor countries and I'm not convinced that not having ready access to London and Beijing is the only thing that is retarding the economic growth of these countries. Institutions matter. I'm not predicting a white elephant but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being one.