Mailman,
Yes, the bureaucrats were on a power kick and didn't care about the money. That's more or less a given for bureaucrats everywhere. It should have been caught and stopped by the justice system, but they just waved the cases through. No entertainment of reasonable doubt.

Australia had a somewhat comparable situation a couple of years ago, now generally known as the Robodebt scandal. The social security bureaucrats (apt to abbreviate them to their initials) had developed an automated "fraud detection" system which worked out expected income and compared it with income declared in social security claims. If declared income was lower they assumed fraud and issued penalty notices. It was all automatic.

A lot of people just paid the fines. Some people killed themselves. Eventually someone let the SS prosecute them and the Federal Court chucked out the case saying that "looks like fraud" isn't good enough, you have to prove the money trail.

Result of that: all penalties issued under Robodebt were reversed. I don't think they managed to bring any of the suicides back from the dead.

Australia's justice system is no great shakes, but it appears the UK's is worse. Might be good for a couple of judges to have their CBEs withdrawn too, and their arses separated from the bench.

With the exploding pagers: I'm hoping it goes further than the Israel Hezbollah hostilities. Are various people with (say) Chinese benefactors now looking at their hi-tech gifts with a little circumspection?

Recent EconTalk interviewing Andrew Fox was listenable enough. Fox is a soldier who has been scrutinising IDF processes and was mostly favourable about how they've been conducting themselves.

He said the level of destruction of "civilian" buildings was horrifying, but what do you do when the military tunnels (etc.) are in amongst them? He raised the question of rebuilding once the war's over, but no answers.

That is a tricky question, but no harder than deciding when exactly the war has ended.

Robbo said "What has puzzled me all along is how fraud was proved, rather than incompetence. Surely proving fraud means showing the money landing in the person's pocket."

If you watched the hearings with the investigators it was rather apparent that they had no interest in finding the money...just in proving the money was missing.

Any REAL investigator would have INVESTIGATED where that money went in the hope of, well two things I guess...firstly recovering what ever was left and secondly, understanding if it actually went missing...and what better proof of money going missing than finding it had been deposited in to a bank account somewhere or the "criminal" was living a lifestyle well above their pay etc.

But the investigators never did follow the money. No one seemed at all interested in finding where the money had gone, especially where there was hundreds of thousands of pounds missing. One would think finding the money trail for something that big would have been rather easy.

The only result the Post Office was after was a guilty conviction. Anything that distracted from that outcome was not desirable.

Does anyone know if any Labour MP's pagers spontaneously detonated yesterday?

tomo,
I agree that the incentives are all there for the big cogs in the machine, not for the national good. It's interesting to read that Vennell's CBE was withdrawn for "bringing the honours system into disrepute". All the bad things she is notorious for were done *and* *known* *about* when the honour was bestowed. The honours system is its own disrepute.

Just to clarify my earlier remark about the system not being any more caring when women are at the helm, this wasn't anything levelled at women — sex has nothing to do with it — the system selects for psychopaths.

Certainly would be good to see the guilty punished, but: 1. the machine will undoubtedly drag its heels, and 2. doing something to help the victims is more urgent. Another thing learnt in ITV's latest was that there was another faulty system before Horizon, MS-DOS-based Capture, with similar bugs and similar victims. I gather that the saving grace was that its use was optional, and not many took it up. Then again, that made for an even lonelier walk of shame for its victims.

As you say, maybe private prosecutions would get things closer to justice. Still be a nice payday for lawyers. What has puzzled me all along is how fraud was proved, rather than incompetence. Surely proving fraud means showing the money landing in the person's pocket. Tricky to do when the money was an invention of dodgy software. Seems the UK justice system deserves a hefty kick in the rear too.

Occurs to me that Musk delivers a rather better flavoured form of Branson's showmanship. Both go in for the splash, but I could imagine Musk making a big contribution to a Post Office fighting fund; can't see Branson doing it.

On Miliband, a mildly amusing spoof.

Recent Brendan O'Neill interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a bit depressing. She sees political Islam gradually taking power in the west. Had me reconsidering my thoughts on the relevance of elected members in our bureaucratic states. Would be just my luck to see the unelected bureaucratic state finally overthrown by an elected Islamic state.

Should have tried the experiment first, then commented here.

The template-expanding package is r-cran-rmarkdown. You prepare a file (fred.rmd) like the following:

# Hello, World!
This is some plain text.
```{r}
x<-c(3.14159,2.71828)
```

The value:
`r x`.

Then go into R, issue commands:

library(rmarkdown)
render("fred.rmd", html_document())


And it creates fred.html which you can review in your browser. Package also has word_document() and pdf_document() outputs which I haven't tried yet.

Have to admit though, that having to learn R, markdown and rmarkdown is sounding a bit like the three sides of a rectangle I mentioned earlier...

tomo,
Hope the R caper goes well. One frustration I used to have with R was that "R", as a word, wasn't all that helpful in online searching. Seems better than it used to be — probably some special exception that Google used to have for "C" has been extended to "R".

I confess I have typically just used R to generate numbers and/or graphs and manually incorporated them into documents if needed. Scanning around, R Markdown appears to be the popular way to get formatted output from R. Looks like you build a template containing embedded instructions which R will expand to form the publishable document (typically HTML). Seems a sensible approach. I've grabbed the r-cran-markdown package myself for a bit of a try-out.

My video recorder can record by keyword and occasionally catches things I want. Last night I saw it had caught a new instalment in Mr Bates Vs the Post Office. It was ITV's follow-up showing the effect the programs have had. My synopsis: not enough; better summed up by one of the victims: Paula Vennels has cried for a day, I've been crying for fifteen years.

Outrageous that many still have seen no compensation. They should have shown good faith and made ex gratia payments of (say) £10k to everyone accused by the Post Office and *then* started on itemised compensation claims.

Anyhow, the show does at least serve to quantify the oft-repeated claim about how much kinder and more caring the world would be if only there were more women running corporations and government. Not kinder at all. Not a bit.

DaveS,
You're right to be sceptical. Monbiot strikes me as unique amongst the alarmist movers and shakers. He has these emotional outbursts when he feels let down by his side, the side of the Cause, as the Climategaters put it. What he doesn't realise is that his view of "the Cause" has little in common with with other team members' views. He wants to see CO2 come down; the others all have variants of "more for me and less for thee".

Nice that he's less of a hypocrite, a pity that marks him as more of a fool.

tomo,
Mechanical tree seems to be another case of cynics getting their meal tickets paid for by fools. If you really want to capture CO2, grab it where it's concentrated.

That Miliband video plays to a theme that I've been forming over the years. Here's the logic, such as it is:
1. Political parties want to stay "in power". To do that they need to maximise their vote.
2. It's much easier to lose votes by bad decisions than to win them by good ones, therefore, outsource the tricky decisions to "independent" bureaucrats who can be blamed when the decisions are unpopular (hence central banks, pricing regulators, etc.).
3. The natural endpoint of this process is that *all* decisions which actually matter to voters end up in the hands of such bureaucrats, and the politicians, far from having *power* (the whole objective in the first place), are relegated to (as you put it) a purely performative role. They hold office, not power.

I think that's roughly where we are.

Those Houthis are mighty resourceful, aren't they!

Sympathies on your spreadsheet travails. I'm afraid I have little to offer, since you're way ahead of me in spreadsheet expertise. I don't really like them; they often seem to make a trip from A to B follow three sides of a rectangle. In recent years I've found R often gets me there pretty directly. Something like:

x<-read.csv("bank.csv")
x

would load your .csv file and then display what had loaded. There are umpteen things you can do to manipulate the fields and, while it's ok for interactive use, it's built for scripting. The first fiddly part for your problem would be getting it to recognise the dates as dates rather than text (not very hard, e.g. x$date<-as.Date(x$date,"%d/%m/%Y") would convert dates like 16/9/2024).

All FWIW. R has its own frustrating aspects. Short-term easiest is probably to persevere with LibreOffice. Happy to help with R if you want to try it.