Snippets 11: US deep state, how Apple is managed, laughable HS2 'evidence' to No10 in 2020, why do OneWeb

... and why Silicon Valley benefits from being so far from Washington

[UPDATED AT BOTTOM, 18/10: fake news & war]

Sorry for delays.

I’ve been stuck going through my statement for the official covid Inquiry with the Inquiry lawyers. It has been painful.

I finally sent it in on Thursday. I give evidence on 31/10.

I will put the statement on my blog, but have been asked not to for the moment (and some is being redacted for ‘national security’ reasons). I’ll comment on some of the statements of others when I’ve read them, and do a post-evidence AMA on it all and record some of the most important things that emerge.

Singapore has already done its inquiry, figured out how to improve, and implemented the lessons. This is itself a pointer to how dire Westminster is. In one short news report there are more sensible sentences from Singapore than you find in entire debates in Parliament. Also interesting that Singapore, like the Vote Leave No10, did better than the EU on procuring vaccines — the German government described the EU approach as a ‘shitshow’. Westminster now has little interest in it all other than the ‘which famous people get blamed for what’ stories. Little will change except, probably, Whitehall will create hundreds of new ‘processes’, more non-jobs, and friction will be even higher when the next crisis hits. Such is life in a country that increasingly resembles the trajectory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — ever more tragicomic baroque bureaucracy plus ‘the system is running the people’.

I will finish going through TSP comments and reply ASAP with thoughts.

I’ve written a few things over the past 8 weeks or so.

I’ll post some below for subscribers in coming days/weeks…

Below a few things including a graph I found on HS2 while going through documents for the covid inquiry, which sums up a lot…

• A new book on the US deep state

• How Apple is managed — in contrast to Whitehall’s systematic war on expertise and long-term building

• What I predicted on HS2 in Jan 2020 & why — and one of the absurd Jan 2020 ‘evidence for demand’ graphs given to No10 purporting to show that *the entire country* would be either on HS2 or building HS3, HS4 etc

• Bill Gurley’s excellent talk on regulatory capture: Silicon Valley has been so successful ‘because it’s so fucking far away from Washington’ (particularly relevant to those working on the UK AI Taskforce)

• OneWeb and LEO satellites, Starlink, war — why did I push through OneWeb in 2020?

And two twitter lists, one for SW1-pundits and one for builders/creators so you can watch them side by side and judge for yourself whether you should continue watching political news.

More coming soon…

And I’m proofreading the Bismarck chronology which I must post before 25/11…