In the final moments of Children of Earth, Captain Jack Harkness – sometime immortal, but really a “fixed point in time and space” – must make a terrible decision: sacrifice his grandson, […]
Gavin Chait
Economist, data scientist, entrepreneur, author. Fascinated by the frontiers of human progress: innovation vs ignorance; wealth vs poverty. Oh, and coffee. @GavinChait and https://gavinchait.com
A morality play: When Rupert Murdoch entered Parliament
Any morality play has its set-piece characters. The villain, the outraged public, the crusading representatives of order. Democracy in the UK is very tactile. Parliament is the voice and instrument of the […]
Hold Rupert Murdoch to account. But go no further.
A goodly number of Murdoch’s newspapers run at a loss. This isn’t because he’s a bad businessman, it’s because of the industry. His competitors are doing worse. However, Murdoch loves newspapers and […]
Readers are as good at being regulators as viewers are at judging talent shows
Jeff Jarvis, scion of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, took issue with my Twitter response expressing the belief that newspaper buyers are complicit in the actions of newspaper producers (wrt to […]
Bitcoin – and digital currencies – retrace the troubled history of banknotes
Commenting on Thomas Lowenthal’s original article at ArsTechnica on Bitcoin and the dangers involved in introducing a new currency. The closest parallel to a pure digital currency play is the travails of […]
OK, now it's Iran
The Iranian government arrested all the opposition leaders and moved them to a military jail over the weekend. Bear in mind none of these guys is an actual liberal, merely calling for […]
The grace, courage and humanity of Terry Pratchett
“I would like to die peacefully with Thomas Tallis on my iPod before the disease takes me over and I hope that will not be for quite some time to come, because if I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds. If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice…”
The Bang Bang catches up with Joao Silva
In 1994 I was in my final year in university in Cape Town. The transition to majority rule was messy, violent and filled with atrocities by all parties to the conflict. A […]
PhilanthroCapitalism – Why giving won't save the world
You’ll recall how, when George W Bush stood for re-election as US president back in 2004, outraged Europeans organised petitions and marches to demand that Americans vote for someone else. And then, […]
Health 'n Safety vs Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern
The Bankside Power Station was closed in 1981 leaving a handsome, and increasingly derelict, face-brick building in a prestigious spot by the side of the river Thames in the heart of the […]
Progressive Culture | Scholars & Rogues 