Comments on: Jumping on someone else’s gravy train

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 21:22:52 +0000

In Australia, the conservative party gives out “maverick” status for free. At least that’s how I was described by one Liberal Senator (for opposing privatisation).

By: burritoboy

burritoboy — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 21:13:34 +0000

Actually, my firm is (partially) invested with an investment manager who specializes in investing in just such enterprises (not just in the UK though) and they’re doing quite well. Apparently, not surprisingly they’re doing quite well!

By: dipnut

dipnut — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 17:23:31 +0000

You can’t get rid of Dan. If you get rid of Dan, there won’t be anyone to threaten me with bodily harm.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 16:54:43 +0000

Fair enough, D-squared. Let my punishment be that I was accused of having an obsessive pathology by somebody capable of searching out a seven-month old comments thread.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 16:21:32 +0000

because he often makes good points in between picking fights, and because we’re quite a tolerant bunch here. Crooked Timber’s comments section is rather like a good pub; it has a big sign up saying “No Squaddies Welcome” …err….no, I, mean, we try to deal with troublemakers on the spot rather than by barring them.

By: Jakes

Jakes — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 14:33:06 +0000

I think Dan Hardie’s remarks relate to a post of Chris’s back in Feb – a full seven months ago! The URL is here http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001253.html In that comment thread, where DH misrepresents what Chris said anyway, Chris refers to DH’s “habit of getting overexcited about my posts”, suggesting that DH’s condition—some form of serial obsessive blogroach pathology—predates even that exchange. Jeez, why don’t you folks at CT just ban this idiot!

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 14:04:57 +0000

It would have something to do with his amusing inability to cope with criticism, and something to do with a grotesque remark he made criticising the media attention paid to the trivial matter of a woman objecting to the way her husband had been issued and then un-issued with body armour, and then shot in the chest. But, as Noel Coward would have said, Let’s Not Be Beastly to The Bertram. For now.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 13:49:17 +0000

dan: I didn’t understand why you were making these jibes at Chris when you started doing it and I certainly don’t understand why you’re carrying on at it.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 13:41:55 +0000

digamma: Tony Soprano makes a pretty good living, but I’m not sure I’d call what he does “risk free”. If he were in the UK he’d have a much better time of things; all he would need to do would be to pop down to Hackney Council every six months to explain that the reason the rubbish hadn’t been picked up was due to the wrong kind of sunshine, and that they would need to pay him an extra couple of million to maintain his “commercial viability”.

By: Matthew2

Matthew2 — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 12:35:03 +0000

a long-dated contract with easy performance criteria and plenty of scope for us to renegotiate the contract once all the other bidders have dropped out and we suddenly discover it?s going to cost five times as much as we tendered. Excellent Daniel, and you’re in luck because Blair just announced that there will be plenty more of these vibrant PFI “collaborations” in the future.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 12:14:27 +0000

In which case I shall fall back upon Plan B- stuffing flak jackets into large cardboard boxes and phoning for a UPS courier, which will get me the MoD contract for supplying crucial equipment to war zones. There’ll be a sub-contract available for a PR to deal with any tearful war widows who object to this practice, if Chris Bertram is interested.

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 11:36:18 +0000

Unfortunately for all of us with access to university libraries, they don’t even need that anymore in the US. I’ve seen one ‘Iranian threat’ article which looked like a search-and-replace job on an old Iraqi threat article. They actually used some human labor though, because they did replace ‘Saddam’ with ‘mullahs’. Who says that the right isn’t into recycling?

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 11:03:57 +0000

This is the kind of baseless cynicism from unaccountable persons in the media which, as Onora O’Neill and John Lloyd have noted, is poisoning the political process in this country. Having said that, I am more or less capable of staggering down to a library and scanning, or at a pinch even copytyping, chunks of someone else’s PhD thesis, so I am thinking of bidding for MI6’s work on researching the threats posed by countries with which we may be about to go to war.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 05:44:39 +0000

I used to work at an oil refinery…

By: Ian Whitchurch

Ian Whitchurch — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 03:31:00 +0000

Reserves reporting requirements for the UK oil industry. Lots of opportunities for junkets, highly technical issues, the fact that current standards are a joke, and oh yeah lots of opportunities for insider trading once we get a look at BP’s etc data.