David Timoney

fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.comPHP stands for Put your Hands uPFrom arse to elbow. A blog about politics, economics, football, films, music and various other stuff that catches my fancy. Dave Timoney.

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the PHP vulnerabilities are simply the latest opportunistic episode in a long campaign to convince us that we must go all in on AI lest AI goes in hard on us." More ... fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/10/php-...

The Financial Times is becoming as monomaniacal as The Economist.

theguardian.comHealey is expected to shield low-income pensioners from income tax – but how will it work?Retirees will get a personal allowance aligned with the new state pension, but experts say it could get complicated

This is obviously a very stupid idea that will create all sorts of anomalies and new cliff-edges. The root problem is the conflicting aims to improve the historically low level of the state pension (the triple lock) while restraining the cost of welfare. www.theguardian.com/money/2026/o...

That can only be done by increasing taxes on private pensions and other forms of passive income, such as dividends and capital gains. But that would obviously inconvenience a lot of well-off non-pensioners too, including many MPs. fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-ca...

Introducing differential allowances for pensioners based on their total income is, by definition, means-testing. And giving a more generous tax-free allowance to pensioners than to the low-paid (and often young) is naked discrimination.

18h

Dunno, mate. I've never walked down a street.

19h

New blogpost: PHP stand for Put your hands uP - The ridiculous over-reaction to the news of a couple of security vulnerabilities in PHP is less about that suddenly discovered critical technology than our old friend AI. fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/10/php-...

theguardian.comAs a young man, magazines were my window to the world. That wonder will be lost when all the shops have gone | John HarrisThe closure of former WH Smith stores around the UK is sobering on many levels. The publications they sold were there to be perused, to broaden horizons, says Guardian columnist John Harris

You might have thought that Modella Capital's asset-stripping, together with the UK's indulgent company law, was the story here. But no, this is simply an excuse for John's magazine nostalgia. Look and Learn never did a special issue on predatory capital. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The early indications are that in both Serbia and Brazil it was the turnout "wot won it", which emphasises once more that soi disant progressives who pursue a strategy of alienating their own voters are not really serious about power, let alone progressive.

observer.co.ukBill Gates: humanity will no longer be the highest form o...On a walk around the Royal Society, the Microsoft founder talks about AI’s threat to jobs, Jeffrey Epstein, the Amish lifestyle and why AI has made his coding abilities obsolete

Always remember, when one of these tech titans uses the word "humanity" they are referring to you, not to themselves. observer.co.uk/news/observe...

observer.co.ukAI is threatening a world beyond our control – but tackli...Artificial intelligence puts jobs, safety and society at risk. The UK government has the chance to bring the world together

The belief that the UK could be a world-leader in AI safety and regulation is premised not on the talent of our scientists but on the idea that British politicians and the wider media class understand technology (any tech, for that matter, not just AI). observer.co.uk/opinion-and-...

This runs into the obvious problem that they are absolutely clueless. Examples range from the collected works of the Tony Blair Institute to the PHP hysteria of the last week. No doubt the Chancellor will shortly assure us that the UK has a bright future as an AI powerhouse.

Ultimately, AI is just la terreur de nos jours, hence the regularity with which we're told it could be used to manufacture WMD in the form of bioweapons (no lessons to be learnt from history there). The reality will be underwhelming and increasingly squalid.

observer.co.ukIf I were chancellor: a fantasy, radical, reforming budge...From removing care services from councils, ending stamp duty and reforming PIP, tying reforms together could bring real progress

You will not be surprised to discover that these proposals are neither radical nor reforming, and are fantastic only in the sense that they are zombie ideas, e.g. "The UK ... needs to spend more on defence" is simple presented as a given. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

The fiscal argument boils down to a higher basic rate of tax (the idea that we should "whack" the rich harder is dismissed) and more generosity to higher-earners facing the childcare "cliff-edge" (I wonder how many journalists would benefit from that).

But the most ridiculous zombie idea is the claim that inflation (and thus higher borrowing costs) is being driven by red tape and other impositions on business, as if greedflation weren't a thing that even the BoE has (reluctantly) acknowledged. We need a better economics press.

Likewise we are told that too many young people "receive health-related benefits that come with few strings attached and actively discourage participation." This despite the recent Fonagy review concluding that the problem isn't laziness or over-diagnosis. The zombie lurches on.

coreyrobin.comFatherlandFatherland, the new Paweł Pawlikowski film about Thomas Mann’s 1949 trip to Germany, may be the most powerful film about the current moment—really, the last ten years—that I’ve seen. In part because…

Corey Robin on the contemporary resonance of Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland. coreyrobin.com/2026/10/24/f...

The desire to "be your own boss", while seeking the approval of others, is a well-known factor in hacking culture. What's interesting about vibe-coding is that the former is an even bigger driver while the latter appears to be negligible.

garth marenghi's chart place@tef.bsky.social

the thing about modern software engineering is that it is so solipsist by nature, "working together" is so against the grain that we have special terminology for it, "pairing" so i guess i shouldn't be surprised when we rediscover the hard way that team work is about communication

Basically, the normative culture of software engineering (precision, cooperation, standardisation) has failed, despite the demonstrably superior practises (pairing, test-driven development etc). And the reason (which I might have mentioned before) is that software development is too cheap.

When resources are costly, you need to standardise to avoid waste. When resources are cheap, or approaching zero cost (AI), standardisation is a luxury, like ethics. Pairing is symptomatic of both low costs (double your overhead to improve quality by 50%) and the desire to impose greater rigour.

bbc.co.ukStreeting: Prepare for supply chain disruption from cyber or climate emergenciesThe defence secretary says the UK needs to be ready for scenarios including impact to essential supply chains.

We need to be more aware that our security is fragile and only the good guys in govt stand between us and chaos. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

According to the New Statesman, the Greens are now subject to entryism, though they seem coy about identifying exactly who is doing the entrying (is that even a word?). To make up for this gap in their analysis, they have a big picture of Trotsky. archive.ph/mLeXk

They also provide a potted (and not entirely accurate) history of the Militant Tendency. You may spotted that this has nothing to do with the Greens. There is also the tendentious claim that Corbyn won the Labour leadership due to entryism rather than by enthusing da yoof.

The attempt to foist a frame specific to Labour onto the Greens, and indeed make the latter subordinate to the former's history, is patronising in the extreme. It also highlights that the Greens are very much outside the cartel, which may prove their chief attraction for voters.

The idea that Israeli society turned sharply right after Oct 7 is ridiculous, but so is the claim, repeated here, that the slide towards intolerance began after the failure of Oslo (a claim usually made without attributing blame for that failure). observer.co.uk/news/interna...

Israel has been tending towards the ethno-nationalist right since its foundation in 1948. Its supposed socialist roots (the kibbutzim making the desert bloom etc) were always overstated and consciously used to mask a neocolonial reality.

Begin, Shamir, Sharon were all rightwing and they were there from the beginning (as was the settler terrorism). Netanyahu isn't an aberration and Ben-Gvir and Smotrich aren't even the most extreme voices on the right.

There's plenty to agree with here, but I feel Kenan is missing the point in framing the Sally Rooney case as a matter of free speech. Nobody is banning her books (Faber are just cowards) and her pro-Palestine Action comments have been widely reported. observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Faber would be unlikely to face prosecution for selling Ordinary People, not least because they can point out that their contract with Rooney doesn't stipulate what she can spend her royalties on. Will all authors now be asked to indemnify publishers? I doubt it.

This is not an assault on free speech but an example of thought-policing. The infamous Voltaire quote (actually made up 130 years after his death) isn't about defending a right but defining what is agreeable and what is disagreeable. Anti-Zionism remains beyond the pale.

The 1,553% increase in “terrorism-related activity” is not an absurdity, unless you think the govt didn't anticipate this outcome. The point isn't to limit expressions of Palestinian support but to place them beyond the boundary of acceptable politics, like "Zionism is racism".

You'd expect a professor of cybersecurity to suggest that we spend more on cybersecurity, but this mistakes the problem: "software occupies a curious category in which flaws affecting millions are treated as unfortunate but inevitable". observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

At root, the problem is that software development is dirt cheap. The high price of enterprise systems has little to do with the cost of production. It's about establishing a level that the customer is willing to pay both for the utility and the boardroom cover of the brand.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" is an axiom that, mutatis mutandis, still applies today.

Software is buggy by design because we have grown used to the idea that users should be the ones who invest in testing. The other major problem - poor maintenance - is due to users themselves not caring enough about system integrity, let alone structured testing.

A classic of the "Parents not understanding teenage jokes" genre. Next up: "My kids keep making L signs at me. Does this mean they're Brazilian Communists? Should I be worried?"

G. Willow Wilson@gwillow.me

My teenage children, who have never set foot in NYC, go around saying "Help me, Mamdani!" whenever anything goes wrong and/or they can't figure out their homework, just to give everybody a sense of the scale of this man's presence in the culture lol

The revealed preference of every British political party since 2008 has been to be in office but not in power, and on the one occasion when one of them (or at least the leadership) broke ranks, there was a collective nervous breakdown.

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fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.comA Capital IdeaFrom arse to elbow. A blog about politics, economics, football, films, music and various other stuff that catches my fancy. Dave Timoney.

The people who benefit from lower tax on capital gains "are middle managers with share options, people who inherited unencumbered property, and people who started and sold a small business. The overlap with MPs is considerable." More ... fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-ca...

It's official. John "magnificent backside" McGinn.

This claims that sentiment on Brexit is changing as older voters die off. But the point about the age gradient is that the tendency to become more conservative with time doesn't stop. So why haven't 2016 middle-aged people become more pro-Brexit? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

We know that Brexit was a proxy for mulitple resentments, notably around immigration and race, so why on this one topic have people (apparently) become more pragmatic and open to evidence when bigotry and irrationality is so prevalent elsewhere?

Might it be because the press have now linked those resentments to a different source? If we have substituted the conspiracy between the woke elite and the malign invader for those killjoy bureaucrats in Brussels, have we truly evolved and will freedom of movement really return?

You might think this is because Brexit has failed and people have come to their senses, or that the middle-aged were already sensible. But those ideas must somehow co-exist with the growth of far right parties, which is clearly being fuelled by the 40-65 age group.

New blogpost: A Capital Idea - Equalising capital gains tax rates with income tax rates would seem a no-brainer for the Chancellor, but there is no shortage of reasons why John Healey will likely demur, not the least of which is that it would affect MPs. fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-ca...

This can be reliably interpreted as a sign that it will be a damp squib budget. When in doubt, Labour will always dun the banks, but it's a carefully choregraphed minuet with the Banking sector in which the BoE beats time, not a "raid" on bank profits. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

The target is "profiteering", though the growth in the bank spread (between lending and saving) is trivial in comparison to utility and food profit margins under inflation. But targeting the latter would be "interfering in the market", which oddly never applies to the bank levy.