profits for some (and mere wages for most)

from jacken elswyth (betwixt and between)  some favourites from their end of the year list. 

mass digital education on platforms designed by the big tech firms is pretty much how education is being delivered right now. and the longer the crisis goes on the more it is likely to become the way in which education is delivered. is this not creeping privatisation? doesn't this give the big tech companies the same power to farm people's preferences and aptitudes (big data) that it does in business and social media? 

this is the kind of question that when it comes back we know we have exited the crisis. 

the government will then try and design a mass digital education platform (er. and fail probably). 

horsemouth is not some libertarian idiot, he doesn't think that there is a one simple overdetermining reason a why a hierarchical organisation organised in the name of government can't do the thing that a hierarchical organisation organised in the name of profit (profit for some and mere wages for most) can't, he just thinks the current crew have lost the knack. 

but we have not exited the crisis yet.  

the death toll seems to be falling (and the number of people sick and the number going into hospital in the UK at least) for this wave of it at least. this is good news, we may be moving past peak. the monday figures are normally unreliable but tuesday, wednesday we should be able to tell.  

sad news. over on 6070ies folk group a row has broken out about posting bernies. now horsemouth likes bernie. some people are having a sense of humour failure (horsemouth opines) but OK, horsemouth accepts that if we want to play together then we have to play nice. he accepts that it is not the primary purpose of the group. horsemouth would not be best pleased if loads of people were posting trumpies.  

last night horsemouth watched la femme aux bottes rouges by bunuel (fils) et jean-claude carriere (with fernando rey and 3D chess). fernando rey plays the villain, forever a lecherous old bourgeois, forever destroying art, forever mocked. but, gentle readers, art wins in the end. horsemouth can't tell which european city it is based in (madrid?) but it makes him nostalgic for european cities (as does spirals which he watched earlier). 

will the days of global travel return? when we are jetting off everywhere. horsemouth thinks not for a while (but then people he knows have been off to portugal and even further afield during the crisis). we are moving into the era of differentiated national strains (some of which are worse than others allegedly). 

after the end of the cold war (about 1990 or so when horsemouth was working for an anti-nuclear group) he remembers going to a conference at a US university on the new security environment. instead of a dazzling peace dividend  a world was sketched out of increased terrorism, migration, immigration controls, and infection diseases spread rapidly by means of increased international travel. horsemouth found this depressing (this was the darkside of the end of history). 

today snow (at least half an inch his dad reckons). yesterday horsemouth helped his dad tidy up after chopping down a tree (this substituted for a walk on the common). at the moment it is all beautiful (but at some point he will have to go out into it and discover that it is merely muddy and cold). 

in a bit breakfast.