Friday, April 27, 2012

Skills-biased technological change?

Here's an example. Time was when it simply wasn't possible to make a career out of being an expert on what sizes of bags it was possible to zip yourself up in. But these days, a demand has been created for all sorts of niche skills.

The dead guy came from down the road from me, and his family are getting increasingly pissed off at the British defence/intelligence establishment's absurd denial of the obvious. I doubt this will calm them down much - the guy apparently tried and failed a hundred times to zip himself up in a holdall, but testified that "it isn't necessarily impossible".

Well, dream big, little sparrow but surely there has to come a point at which you have to face up to reality and admit that it can't be done? I am picturing a Hill Street Blues style boss-cop pounding the table and saying "I'm taking you off the case, Pulowski!". While the yoga expert waves with his one hand still sticking out of the bag, and you hear a muffled cry of "just give me twenty four hours boss!".

Bottom line - if there is a guy in a bag, then either he zipped himself up in it, or someone else zipped him up in it.  If it's a dead spy in the bag and a weirdly clean DNA-free environment, then one of the top candidates for the zipping role is "another spy". If anyone tries to tell me that the Occam's Razor solution is that he did it himself, I am seriously going to question their judgement.

Update: thanks, oh New Google Template, for getting rid of my line breaks and half the text.  Perhaps for your next task you could fuck up the search engine?  That seems to have got off lightly from the treatment meted out to Reader, Blogger, Mail and now Groups.  So far.

11 comments:

  1. This is a classic example of the Kahneman probability-weighting curve - the first and last few per cent are hugely overweighted (i.e. "but there is a chance, isn't there?" and "well, let's pay extra to be absolutely sure, not just 99%").

    Also, the spoooks do seem to have doubled down on "please, disturbing information, please just go away"...

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  2. All this case needs now is Taleb as an expert witness, no doubt wittering about black swans zipping themselves in holdalls, to make the absurdity complete.

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  3. Apparently there were 2 expert witnesses. One tried 300 times and concluded it was impossible, one 100 but thought it couldn't be ruled out.

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  4. It's a industrial cluster! Bayswater is the Saudi Arabia of trying to zip yourself into a bag.

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  5. This story is beginning to slowburn into a decent-sized scandal. SIS half-inched a bunch of evidence. Investigation generally mangled.

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  6. But if he was bumped off by another spy in a way that could be passed off as suicide, why the hell didn't they make it a way that could be plausibly passed off as suicide? Either there's some kind of weird quadruple-bluff being played here or the spooks don't have a clue either & are just trying to shut it down.

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  7. looking at the twitter coming from the inquest, it sounds like they successfully shat up the inquiry, with the result that they have no idea who offed their key cryptanalyst in the middle of London.

    compare and contrast the Met's successful investigation of the Alexander Litvinenko killing. And then...vote Labour?

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  8. No, the _public_ has no idea who killed this guy. It's just about possible that it's a coverup sufficient to hide that detail while being blatently a coverup.

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  9. I've posted in the past that "Secret" has a meaning of "Unaccountable" in the context of "secret" police and "secret" intelligence services. Whoever did this didn't just want to bump off a spy; they wanted to demonstrate to the world exactly what they could do and get away with it.

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  10. Yeah, Litvinenko was a failed attempt at that, if it wasn't intended to be deliberately shocking.

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  11. Something my son was reading (yes, it's come to this) said that the FSB-or-whoever-niks who offed Litvinenko got just the wrong dosage: a bit more would have induced almost immediate organ failure, killing him quickly but without arousing the suspicion of radiation, while a bit less would have induced multiple cancers, killing him weeks or months later - and again, without arousing the suspicion of radiation.

    BB - that suggests that the atmosphere inside SIS at the moment is one of either dull resentment (as in the aftermath of somebody pulling the most outrageous piece of office politics and getting away with it) or headless-chicken panic (as in, they know somebody's fucking with them...). I wonder which it is & how it would show?

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