going with it

Sometimes you just know when the train has already left the station.

speaking easily

Across Chelsea and downstairs through the caged entrance into the private party.

"Reminds me of a speakeasy," said one accomplice.
"Is there a hidden door behind a row of books?" queried another.

There was certainly no photography.

winter tyres day

Tyre swap over day today.

An hour spent in the dealership reading real newspapers stuffed with yesterday's US election coverage whilst the wheels were swapped over.

My summer tyres are back on holiday again.

What can you do, hmmm?

I was in the USA for the two political conventions earlier this year, when the remaining two candidates set out their stalls. Even then, the personality over content was evident and alongside post truth assertions continued throughout the following months.

For Tuesday's election night, I half-heartedly started watching the results, but there was so much filler that I surrendered.

By this point I'd flicked through CNN, Fox, BBC, ITV, Sky, Russia Today, AlJazeera and NewsIndia. There was every form of graphic and waves of enthusiastic pundits mainly talking about the same stuff, with varying degrees of polarisation. Everyone was trying really hard, but I found the cutaways to street scenes more interesting than all the fancy graphics analysing footfall.

By morning, trumps won over other suits and today we see America and the world working out what it all means.

It's bizarre to think of a short-fused blustering tax-evading billionaire property tycoon of dubious morals as the next US President. It's also bizarre to think he won it on a 'love of the common people' ticket. More predictable were the early morning news bulletins about the state of the markets in Asia and then London. Just what the common people want to hear about.

Maybe, like Mitchell Siporin's 1937 woodcut 'Workers Family', we will all need a dream to cling to now.

opportunity to raise a few brexit plan points?

Teresa May is having to deal with a few in-house politicians who are more about the politics than the practicalities of a Brexit plan.

The lack of the plan is already apparent. A plan would have a heading about legal and constitutional matters.

A plan would recognise the communication strategy to handle both the necessary outward communication as well as the secret stuff that really forms part of the negotiation fallback.

Most plans would also show a critical path through the series of events that are to take place.

We don’t even get the long and short of it. Instead we get Brexit means Brexit. Hard and soft. Per-lease.

Meanwhile the frog-man and others are stirring street fighting whilst Jeremy Corbyn, in his interview with the Sunday Mirror, said Labour could vote against triggering article 50 if the Prime Minister does not agree to Labour’s “Brexit bottom lines”.

Now we are hearing about the one liner motion to get Brexit through Parliament.

It’s a bit of a mess, really, which I’m sure other countries are watching with some quiet glee. Michael Moore references it in his Trumpland documentary as an example of unintended consequences, just before he shows the USA January 2017 with Trump video.

The actual Exit is also two separate things. There’s the exit itself, scheduled over two years. In effect UK gets back its legislation and does this initially by a quick Word ‘change all’ of all the headers and footers on the European stuff to make it UK-specific. Maybe delete the bit about cucumbers. Those changes will no doubt become an industry in their own right.

Whilst the busy-ness of that exit process takes place, there’s the other business of restructuring all of the relationships.

Canada took seven years to agree something with Europe and even then it was held up by a small bloc of Walloons who dug their heels in.

The UK has far more complications because of all the history and aspirations of the various countries in play. In particular, the French and the Germans have deep interests. For example, they both want part of the finance sector. Paris and Frankfurt are already bidding. Same with the cars. Brussels has already asked for the innards of the recent Nissan UK arrangement to be explained.

Benelux will continue to look for an angle. They house the Commission in Brussels. Luxembourg still does - ahem - specialised things with finance making its inhabitants one of the top 3 richest GDP per head in the world.

Netherlands is a trading nation also inside the top 15 GDP, with its strong ties to Germany and increasingly, for imports, to China.

The list can go on, but there, Mrs May’s politicians, at least I’ve started the Force Field Analysis for you. That’s another part of the Plan.

Mrs May also has to get the UK outside of the EU before the next election run-up due in mid-2020.

The EU’s quiet agenda will be to make sure that the UK cannot be seen to have gained any advantage from leaving the EU. It must appear to be worse off as a result. Otherwise the EU itself is threatened, particularly because of the currently restless members such as Netherlands, the currently fragile Italy and even France after their 2017 election which could feature Sarkozy vs. Le Pen.

Throughout this the EU of 27 members and 500 million inhabitants have the easier end of the negotiation. At its simplest they can just run down the clock. Complex international bureaucracies won’t baulk at the thought of a two year countdown.

Even with the UK vote last 23 June, it could be 30 March 2017 before the Article 50 button is pressed. That’s just over 9 months. And only one system in the process.

Then we get the negotiated transition. Mrs. May might be thinking five years. If Canada took seven years, then that probably becomes the new table stakes, despite there being a template already available from the Canadians.

Alongside it will be the payments that UK is expected to make to the EU. My guess is that they will expect something akin to the current net amount paid inside the EU to now be paid when outside the EU. The cost of exit becomes an ongoing fee equivalent to membership. As it is, Osborne mis-judged a projected budget surplus which has turned into prolonged deficit, with around a £25 billon hole expected by 2020. That is before any Brexit costs get added. Right now, Hammond must be working out how to spin this for the autumn statement.

It's also where the negotiating strategy needs more than one level. It should be possible for the negotiators to show something of the process to appease the critics without giving away secrets.

At a simple level there’s the structure of the negotiation itself. Alignment of goals is one interesting area. Remembering negotiation basics, there’s the useful grid to illustrate the tensions and the potential for gains and losses.

Then there’s the tiered approach to the actual negotiations, which may often include a fact-finding round before the real negotiations get under way.

Unpacking this stuff is hardly a secret, but can be a lot better than the ‘nothing contributed’ mentality of many commentators.

So here’s my example of a tiering, although I’m not going to introduce a starting point.

1. No concessions
2. No further concessions
3. Making only deadlock-breaking concessions
4. High realistic expectations with systematic concessions
5. Concede first
6. Problem solving
7. Goals other than to reach agreement
8. Moving for closure
9. Combining strategies

I can start to see a toolkit emerging.

• A timetable.
• A list of major exit topics
• A list of major ‘new world’ topics
• A UK political Force Field Analysis
• An EU political Force Field Analysis
• A Rest of World Force Field Analysis
• Factfinding requirements
• A preferred negotiation stance
• A desired outcome
• A series of options
• Targeted outcome scenarios
• An approach to creating agreements

A defined set of phases for the process with durations and names like:

Stage 1 : Factfinding and strategy definition 6 months
Stage 2 : Initial exchanges 6 months

Stage 3: First Wave preliminary negotiation 3 months
Stage 3.1 : First Wave Options : 3 months
Stage 3.2 : Negotiation First Wave Options : 3 months
Stage 3.3 : Agreement First Wave 3 months

(Two Year Marker)

Stage 4: Second Wave preliminary negotiation 3 months
Stage 4.1 : Second Wave Options : 3 months
Stage 4.2 : Negotiation Second Wave Options : 3 months
Stage 4.3 : Agreement Second Wave 3 months

Stage 5: Third Wave preliminary negotiation 3 months
Stage 5.1 : Third Wave Options : 3 months
Stage 5.2 : Negotiation Third Wave Options : 3 months
Stage 5.3 : Agreement Third Wave 3 months

(Four Year Marker)
Stage 6 : Statement of degree of completion of Main Topics 3 months

Stage 7-9: Ongoing second tier topics preliminary negotiation 3 months
Stage 7-9.1 : Ongoing second tier topics : 3 months
Stage 7-9.2 : Negotiation Ongoing second tier topics : 3 months
Stage 7-9.4 : Agreement Ongoing second tier topics 3 months

(Seven Year Marker)

There’s a whole lot more to this, but the difference is, that it is about defining a structure and making a pragmatic start.

Oops. That’s probably not ‘politically’ correct

my bike is still quietly blogging its daily stats

A consequence of the recent unexpected Windows updates was that I fiddled around with my phone whilst waiting around for the lengthy update to complete.

I fixed one of those things that I'd been meaning to do for ages. It now means my bike simply logs its activity from the Garmin direct to the phone instead of via the PC or Mac and Wifi.

No biggie, but now when I press "Stop" on the Garmin, my bicycle immediately updates its statistics logged to Strava, Connect, Training Peaks and elsewhere, without me needing to do anything else.

103 mince pies miles to go

I'm approaching my cycling target for the year now. I decided it would be prudent to blast a few extra miles in October, because there is often a tapering off in November and December. It would be good to be able to say that the weather and conditions don't have any effect, but a combination of colder days, leading to slipperiness and then the mince pie and festive factor can mean that the two months of November and December become less than a single normal month for distance.

So far I've only had about four mince pies. That's two from a box and two mini ones when visiting friends in Cheltenham last weekend.

I'm sure they will already have had a negative effect on my aerodynamics.

loopy windows moment

My Windows computers run on Windows 10, which generally provides a good environment.

The challenge is around the revised update protocol it uses. Whereas the older Windows used to ask about updates, some versions of Windows 10 force system updates.

It can be annoying. It just happened to me in the middle of using the garage computer. It stopped in mid-flight and proceeded to update itself. Despite those 100% complete messages, it decided to reboot itself about three times and altogether took 15 minutes to go through all the machinations.

Given that the same machine had been switched on overnight the prior evening, it would have made more sense to do this kind of thing when the machine is clearly unattended.

A different rashbre related remote PC has attempted a similar update but stopped partway through.

It keeps rebooting and getting lost in the middle. Microsoft also removed the old "boot with F8" safe mode option, so the machine is effectively unusable now until I can physically get to it to work out how to rescue it.

The update appears to be linked to Windows 10 Version 1607 - the so called Anniversary Edition. Since release it has not taken long for forums and newsfeeds to show systems unable to complete updates, but also not able to boot because of the unfinished update, leaving them stuck.

This is where 'it all works perfectly in PowerPoint' springs to mind. Less so in the analogue.

whose vote is it anyway?

Alongside the luminosity of the bright orange arm waving candidate, we see the sometimes subtler machinations of the apparatchik alternative.

There's a currently building media narrative about what could happen if a few less expected states swing (in this case Georgia, Utah, Alaska).

The conspiracy theorists say that this is part of an electorate softening exercise. Less surprise if weird things happen.

Coverage includes Huffington Post, Bloomberg, Washington Post and -er- The Salt Lake Tribune, to name just a few. The Daily Telegraph, amongst others, has regurgitated versions of these stories here in the UK too.

Now a fun thing as a Brit when travelling very long straight roads in the US, is to tune into one of the shock jockey shows to pass a half hour. We don't really get anything as extreme in the UK. Someone like the colourful and highly Republican biased Alex Jones, who fronts Infowars and has been talking with analytics investigator Bev Harris about the potential for US election rigging.

There's two schools of thought on this. One involves the often old machines used as the basis for the vote. These are not used everywhere and are many designs.

There's plenty of stories, such as in the 2015 Brennan Report of having to buy spare parts for them on eBay (such as Zoom modems and Zip disks) and that many, including those in parts of high tech California, still use Windows XP or Windows 2000.

People imply they are insecure, have inaccurate touch screens and are difficult to audit end-to-end.

The second school of thought is the one for the recent shock-jock allegations. They don't really talk about the actual voting machines instead jumping to the other end of the system, where the big counting takes place.

The two features of a conspiracy suggested by Bev Harris involve (a) access to the centralised black box counting software and (b) a programming trick involving the conversion of integers to double precision floating point numbers onto which a gentle 'allocation' weighting can be applied.

Put simply, someone hacks into the central system and adjusts the voting skew using rounding from computerised fractional arithmetic.

The slightly nerdy story doesn't seem to get picked up by the mainstream US media, presumably because they filter shock jocks of whatever type.

It is still interesting to examine and may well get played after the results are in.

"Trust, but verify" as they used to say, or was it "Doveryai, no proveryai"?

reflections on piloting the future

I've now enjoyed watching all of the Charlie Brooker Black Mirror series. When I say all, I really mean all, because after series 3, Netflix drops back to the start of series 2 and then even back into the start of series 1.

I won't detail plots or characterisations here, more to say that there is a consistency to the near future incremental nature of much of the Brooker world. Each idea seems to fit alongside other ones in a way that meshes, a thought that isn't lost on the production team who provide little overlaps from one storyline to another. Not plot points, just hat-tip moments.

The ideas vary from that Series 1 story about a prime minister and a pig (long before the Hameron news bursts) the one about an X factor type show with accompanying meaningless work style processes then through virtual realities, nano robotics and many a reference to distortions of the social media experience.

Some ideas are ones that many of us may have thought about, (pay per not view, killer robotic insects, inside the machine, what happens when the x-system is down?) but Black Mirror stamps the pedal down to drive through impacts and conclusions for all of its scenarios.

I already mentioned hat-tips too. The new episodes have mainly gathered creative production sheens appropriate to their genre. There's the colour palette of Edward Scissorhands meets Desparate Housewives in one new episode. Various Hitchcock moments in another. Staccato 90 degree camera shuttering of a modern combat movie, coupled with the green/brown muted saturation of a shoot-em-up game in one about reality distortion.

The world view appears seamless, sounds right and kind of how we'd expect it to work, with sharp ideas alongside other throwaway moments almost worthy of whole episodes.

I'll have to give it a week and then watch them all again. And maybe take a few notes.

Meantime, here's a Tesla driving itself around a few road systems. Let's not forget how amazingly consistent American road junctions are, compared with the ones here in the UK.

San Junipero cops in the donut shop say...Way Oh. Of course.

That San Junipero 80s extended soundtrack, from Charlie Brooker, on Spotify. Waaa-Oh Way-Oh, plus a few of those synths that look like guitars.

cashless vanguard

The new £1 coin is being minted, ready for introduction in a couple of months. Like the old thrup'ny bit, it has 12 sides and the new coin is supposed to non viable to forge, compared with the ease with which current dud £1 coins are in circulation.

The old coin was 3/240ths of a £1, or worth just over 1p in today's currency. Its buying power by 1971 decimalisation was somewhat higher though, at about today's equivalent of 15p or three bob in old money.

So in buying power, that's 15/100th of a £1, a 12 times reduction in value over 45 years, or nearly 15 times reduction with recent currency fluctuations.

Maybe cashless society already has another meaning?