London’s killer app

In the comments at Blood & Treasure, Dsquared explains why banks threatening to leave London don’t have to be taken too seriously:

In actual fact, the thing that keeps everyone bolted down to the UK with little hope of escape, is that amazingly important national intangible asset called “the commercial common law of England & Wales”. Any time anything goes wrong, or when you’re drawing up documentation to make sure it doesn’t, it’s amazingly useful to be able to make use of all those hundreds of years of precedent. It’s the difference between a well-designed high level programming language, and having to write all your own functions from scratch.

A lot of the reason for not shifting out to the suburbs (for trading at least) is simply telecoms infrastructure. A hell of a lot of the IT talent that’s gone into the City over the last twenty years has gone into the building of what amounts to a very fast, very very reliable specialised telecom system (to replace SWIFT, the previously existing very fast, very very reliable specialised telegram and telex system).

Yo, is this racist?

Finally a site that tells you if you’re racist or not. Of course, if you have to ask, you probably are. The guy behind it got a wicked sense of humour and I especially like his answer to the white supremacists who just found the site:

Now, I just wanted to say that, by and large, I will be ignoring your shit and not giving you a platform and definitely not a dialog on your ideas. Mainly this is because, at the end of the day, you’ve already lost. However flawed the world is now, you’re never going to achieve whatever open, racist, white supremacist world you so desperately want, and it’s not going to be particularly fun or useful to swear at you racist fucks.

Think of it this way, at some point in the future, when your kids, or your grandkids, or your great-grandkids speak of you, the nicest way they’ll be able to do it is to ignore the central thing that defines you, your racism. That’s at best. Obviously most likely you’ll be the scary, embarrassing, racist piece of trash that the family wishes never existed.

For more on Andrew Ti, the guy who runs the site, read this interview at Colorlines.

Lazy Friday picture post

Three funny tumblr picture blogs found this week:

cat in fridge
get out of there cat. you are not a head of lettuce. i cannot use you to make salad and you certainly will not taste good covered in ranch dressing.

blonde female students getting their A-Level results
It’s that time again… Time for UK students to get their A-Levels results and the newspapers to run sexy A-Levels pictures.

Finally, LOL Dutch people — which is not funny!

Comedy Double: Splitting Image — surprisingly relevant again

Our House … In the Middle of a Slump.



Made for Italia ’90, but it works for every football tournament.


You just don’t see this sort of visceral hatred on tv any more and it’s the worser for it. Have I Got News for You or Mock the Week just don’t cut it.



And of course: