April 25, 2018
The many numbers with which we are bombarded every day can be misleading for two main reasons. First, they can simply be wrong. The most egregious example is the £350 million per week we were told by the Brexiteers during the referendum campaign that we would save on our annual payments to the EU. It… » read more
Posted by pbye
February 12, 2018
The past two years or so have seen an alarming departure from the political centre ground in many democracies. Brexit has polarised the UK, where the major parties and indeed the whole population are split into Remainers and Leavers. Even those wanting to leave the EU are divided between so-called hard and soft approaches, such… » read more
Posted by pbye
November 28, 2017
In many years of experience of IT-intensive projects, I have found that there are four conditions that must be met to maximise the chances of success. Putting it another way, if some or all of the conditions are not met, the likelihood of failure is raised. The first condition is that there must be a… » read more
Posted by pbye
October 16, 2017
Alice X is a philosopher and historian of ideas with a global reputation. She holds a chair at a leading university in the UK, has visiting professorships in Paris, New York and Boston, and has received honorary doctorates at more than twenty universities. She specialises in contemporary European, especially French, thought and is regarded as… » read more
Posted by pbye
September 5, 2017
I was recently looking around for a word to describe government by the incompetent, rather as, for example, kleptocracy is government by thieves. I googled ‘government by the incompetent’ and was rewarded with the magnificent word in the title of this piece. Kakistocracy means government by the worst[1], from the Greek kakistos meaning worst and… » read more
Posted by pbye
July 19, 2017
It’s now more than one year since the UK referendum on EU membership, and the vote to leave. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, invoked Article 50 of the Treaty of Rome at the end of March this year and then, out of the blue, called a general election. Her intention was to get a bigger… » read more
Posted by pbye
May 16, 2017
In my working life in IT, I have encountered a number of organisations that wanted to move from a working IT system to a different one, in the belief that it would be better and cheaper. I’ll be describing a recent example in this piece. Although there is not on the surface any obvious connection… » read more
Posted by pbye
April 3, 2017
I was thinking of calling this piece ‘In defence of internationalism’ but I decided that praise is the best form of defence. And we need to speak up in favour of internationalism. After decades of increasing openness, nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise in the West. We hear politicians coming out with statements such… » read more
Posted by pbye
February 17, 2017
The title of this piece is a quotation from the great physicist Richard Feynman. Late in his life, he was asked to join the commission investigating the causes of the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 28th January, 1986: the shuttle disintegrated 73 seconds after lift-off. There were no survivors in the crew, which included a… » read more
Posted by pbye
January 16, 2017
In my previous piece, posted on 22nd November 2016, I argued that direct democracy, where the electorate is asked to decide or approve policy, is dangerous. I suggested that representative democracy is a better alternative. One of the reasons I advanced is that a majority of people in an electorate are remarkably ill-informed, making rational… » read more
Posted by pbye
