Bigbale: scaling up the Winter Palace to family size
The Winter Palace was built for less than £5,500, because that was all I had. But that figure included the stove and its chimney, the plumbing, and quarter of a mile of water pipe in a trench over a metre deep. The front glass cost another £1,400, and the roof lining cost an unbudgetted extra £200; so I always quote a figure of £7,000 for the whole building. It's a building of 30 square metres floor area, so its cost is about £233 per square metre. And those figures are inclusive of VAT, because while someone self-building a legal house can reclaim their VAT, someone building an illegal house cannot.
However, a dwelling with twice the usable volume does not need to consume twice the materials. 'Bigbale' was a design exercise to see how one would build family sized house using what I've learned from the Winter Palace.
How have the mighty fallen
This is not an anti-Labour blog. I am not anti-Labour. I don't support them, but I don't hate them. I'm about to say some very harsh things about them. I hope they're harsh but helpful; however, even if they're seen as harsh and unhelpful I'd like to point out that I have in the past said equally harsh things about the SNP. This is not partisan or tribal harshness, I'm not seeking to advance the cause of any other particular party. I'm trying to explore why the Labour Party have fallen so far from the ideals on which it was founded.
And I want to start with this absolutely shocking image. How does it shock me? Let me count the ways:
Scottish Devolution, and Socialism in One Nation
[This is a submission to the Smith Commission, written mainly by me but on behalf of Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway. It's separate from (and deals with different issues to) my own submission, which is here. My instructions from Comrade Lucy were 'Just scrawl "full communism now" on rahbackuvvah silver rizla'. I may have written slightly more. Thanks to everyone who contributed.]
Dear Commissioners
Post Scarcity Hardware
Eight years ago, I wrote an essay which I called Post Scarcity Software. It's a good essay; there's a little I'd change about it now — I'd talk more about the benefits of immutability — but on the whole it's the nearest thing to a technical manifesto I have. I've been thinking about it a lot the last few weeks. The axiom on which that essay stands is that modern computers — modern hardware — are tremendously more advanced than modern software systems, and would support much better software systems than we yet seem to have the ambition to create.
That's still true, of course. In fact it's more true now than it was then, because although the pace of hardware change is slowing, the pace of software change is still glacial. So nothing I'm thinking of in terms of post-scarcity computing actually needs new hardware.
Submission to the Smith Commission
Dear Commissioners
First let me say I wish you well in your immensely difficult task. While separating Scotland out of the Union might have been hard, keeping Scotland in the Union under present circumstances looks a great deal harder. Your commission was set up in the immediate aftermath of the recent referendum. Germane to the establishment of your commission were
- 'The Vow', signed by all the leaders of the major UK parties, whose terms as written are so woolly as to be virtually meaningless, but which was represented to the Scottish electorate as being a promise of DevoMax
- A series of extraordinary interventions by Gordon Brown MP, in which he promised — on the basis of what authority it is not clear — a solution '...as close to federalism as we can go in a country where one nation accounts for 80% of the population.'1