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The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)
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Grant



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FIFA has always adopted the commonsensical position that no one should wear any political signs when playing football, even poppies. So they’re quite right telling Kane to leave off with the gay armband.
I hope when we play Iran one of their players wears a “death to sodomites” armband, although the humour would be lost on most journalists.
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Mick Harper
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Every country sends out refs and assistant refs to officiate (other countries') matches. I hope we send out Sian Massey-Phillips to run the line at Iran vs USA. Then the Iranian government will have a choice to make. Show the match, and the revolution is over. Don't show the match and the revolution is over.
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Mick Harper
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Business News

Not satisfied with the 0.1% return you're getting from your Special Opportunities Unit Trust? Why not try investing in someone who spends forty-four billion dollars buying a company and a few weeks later says it is in serious danger of going bankrupt? We call it due diligence in the trade.
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Mick Harper
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However we must examine Musk's behaviour, Twitter-wise, with some care. He is behaving in the classic way of vulture funds rescuing an already bankrupt firm i.e. by firing half the workforce and resetting the company strategy. And the commentators have reacted in the classic way, "The man must be stark staring mad. Twitter wasn't going bankrupt, but it might be now."

Except, as Musk pointed out, Twitter has been putting on customers rather than shedding them since his takeover. Yes, but shedding advertisers wholesale, the commentators were quick to point out. Who weren't contributing much to Twitter's bottom line, he probably thought to himself. And that is the point. All these massive electronic communicators have a sky-high share price based on the sky-high reach not on current profit. Many of them (eg Uber last time I looked) have never made a profit despite being worth billions.

So let us reflect that Musk got where he is today by doing the opposite of what commentators say he ought to be doing. Mind you, on balance, I'm with the commentators on this one. Sometimes I just can't help myself. Probably why one of us is a billionaire and one of us is on housing benefit. Go on... have a guess.
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Mick Harper
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Now I hear, Twitter has always lost money. This is something else I can't get my head round. Musk sacks half the staff which pre-Musk amounted to some seven thousand people. Twitter has been going for yonks so all the technical stuff has been created yonks ago. It's only a question of monitoring everything as you go along. So here's my question

How can the world's most stupendously successful electronic communications platform, awash with ads and other money-making devices, and operated by a piddling few thousand people sitting at desks, not make money?

And once I get a satisfactory answer to that, my next question would be

When is Twitter supposed to start making money? When it starts signing up the inhabitants of Arcturus V?
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Grant



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But they don’t seem to be able to sell many ads, and the ads they sell seem to be very unfocused from what I remember (I was banned last year).

I wonder if the whole internet advertising business is a massive scam. On the internet I only ever see ads for stuff I’ve already bought, ie hotels I’ve stayed at and holidays I’ve just come back from.
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Mick Harper
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It makes no difference to Twitter if the ads work or not. Nor is the testimony of one person out of eight billion (it reached that figure the other day) of any great value. But it's good to hear they're slimming down the operation by banning people who already have anything advertised on the portal. It's as if they knew.
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Grant



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There is very little scientific evidence about the effectiveness of conventional advertising. What evidence there is shows that only a small fraction actually works, and no-one knows what is truly effective. And that’s for conventional advertising.

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/tv-advertising-is-usually-not-worth-it

The problem for companies is what else can they do? Maybe internet advertising is much more effective, but they would say that
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Wile E. Coyote


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I don't know but it seems the same old story of a popular platform becoming so large that it was ripe to be taken over by a visionary dictator. If I was Elon, I wouldn't be concerned about the profits for now (the odd billion is nothing to him), it is really about what he chooses to do with the communication it offers, and he has already worked out that freer speech and controversy, not wokism, means much more Elon reach. It is about verification. Long term, genuine verification, with genuine targeted members benefits, which will encourage loyalty to the brand. You might have noticed Elon has plenty to sell, he has the resources to buy much more then to sell via the brand. He will do this via a digital currency (he is a fan). Whether the Twitter bit is profitable is pretty irrelevant.
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Mick Harper
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This is all no doubt true and will probably happen but there are lots of examples of popular platforms disappearing in a puff of smoke. I myself signed up with AOL on my principle of 'always go with the Number One, they're the least likely to go belly up'. I know Musk got a whole string of other megamegas to go in with him buying Twitter but even he cannot afford to drop forty-four billion in cash and credibility.

Let's not forget it only takes an unexpected technical development in battery technology for his car empire to go down the pan as well. No, all in all, my sources of income are more secure than his are. Albeit smaller.
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Mick Harper
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When a civil servant complains about ministerial bullying, I am inclined to believe him or her. It's not after all a good career move. When two of them do so independently, it's cut and dried. When it's dozens of civil servants from several different departments, I am inclined to ask why we are being ruled by people who seem to think being bullied is part of the natural order of things and not anything you can do about. Unless they were all fags at public schools turning out people destined to rule us.
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Mick Harper
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Oh dear, Dominic Raab has made the rookie mistake of explicitly lying. He has denied getting advice about not using his personal phone for government business. You may be sure he was, you may be sure it was minuted, you may be sure he is not long for this world.

The correct response of course is, "Communications between civil servants and ministers are always confidential so I cannot comment specifically. We must await the official enquiry, which I immediately requested be held to investigate all such matters."
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Mick Harper
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Football in Numbers
Qatar has invested 250 billion dollars in hosting the world cup Al-Jazeera

I wonder whether Qatar will get its money back over time -- in terms of clout and everything else. I know two hundred and fifty bill is chickenfeed to them but it's still a fair amount of chickenfeed. All it had to do to guarantee that the investment would at least start to pay off was to devote, say, half a billion to some decent shacks and a welfare agency for the migrant labour force. Actually, thinking about it, probably more like a tenth of a billion. Maybe even a tenth of a tenth. So why didn't Qatar?

For an AE reason. If you're going to build the biggest project in your entire history you're certainly going to apply the best methods you've developed over the years for building big projects.
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Mick Harper
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Could somebody in the FCO arrange for an emergency tranche of aid be sent to Senegal ASAP? Usual strings apply.
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Mick Harper
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Channel 4 News ran a routine piece about slave labour being used in the manufacture of surgical gloves, required by the containerful during the Covid pandemic. While enthusiastically detailing the scandalous behaviour of the Malay factories -- deplorable living conditions, unaccustomed food, workers too frightened to speak up and so forth -- one unfortunate addition to the list of complaints was included. Excessive recruitment fees.

Consulting my lists, these would be the first recorded slaves in human history that had paid for their enslavement. I wasn't able to contact any of the principals directly but I'm pretty sure if western pressure was applied to the Malaysian glove manufacturers and they did indeed improve their workers' lot, the recruitment fees would be even more excessive.

If only we would try to understand that the British way is not necessarily the best way. Even though it often is if you're British.
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