Yearly Archive: 2017

Scaling back my Facebook presence

After watching recent developments on Facebook, partly involving an influx of people who spend a lot of their time behaving like trolls in discussions, and then having to see Jim Wright suspended from the platform temporarily due to a co-ordinated set of complaints of abuse by people he upset with one of his postings, I have been considering how I might scale back my presence on that platform. Jim has already taken one of his groups Private, and he is considering his future on Facebook.
Facebook has no idea how to cope with UseNet syndrome (the tendency of any social media platform, over time, to move towards a zone of spam and junk) and it will not effectively moderate threatening content or give persistent trolls the heave-ho.
Now, after writing a strong note about my lack of patience with absolutists and name-callers on the subject of abortion, I find myself reading comments from people on my Friends list that I need to be careful what I say and how I say it on this topic, unless they end up (as one of them said) “reading about me on the news”.
This is both disquieting and dispiriting.
If we have reached a point on social media where honestly expressed (albeit blunt) opinions are regarded as potentially dangerous to a person’s physical well-being, then this is telling me something rather worrying about not only the state of the nation, but also about the level of discourse on social media.
It is also telling me that it really is time for me to modify and re-scale my Facebook presence.
So…I will be thinking over the weekend about what actions to take.
Most likely that will take the form of my abandoning Facebook for any day-to-day interactions, retaining Facebook Messenger for private interactions with trusted friends, and using only my related pages such as White Cat Publishing and Aerial Savant for posting information on my writing and UAS activities respectively. I will retain memberships to closed groups of interest such as my aviation group memberships. I may post there as time allows on topics of interest.
All new content on topics that I find interesting will only be published here on this blog.
I will also delete most of my prior postings on Facebook on serious subjects. Most of that content, if not overtaken by events, will be transferred to the blog if it did not already exist there in some form. I have no intention of allowing Facebook to capture the IPR for that content more or less in perpetuity, when their current behaviors show that they are not prepared to be wise stewards of the platform.
Short Summary – be prepared to see a lot less of me on Facebook.

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Elections, party ideology and other stuff

1. Political ideology – obsolete and misleading classification schemes
Those people who have read more than a small number of my prattlings online (including the people who have had to listen to me actually saying this in person) will know that I am not interested in discussions about the political spectrum that fixate on left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative. I regard those classification schemes as a combination of obsolete, irrelevant and dangerously misleading. (the right vs. left classification originated in the French Revolution, which didn’t exactly occur a few years ago…). The political positions of the major US political parties have actually swapped over in the last 120 years. In the 1860s the Republican and Democratic parties held general positions that are the opposite of where they are today. This is a historical change that is routinely ignored by partisans.
This Tweet storm, converted to Storify, explains many of the slow changes in the positions of the major US political parties in a way that tries to avoid the simplistic liberal vs. conservative dichotomy.

2. What happens if a US election can be shown to be fraudulent? (answer: nobody knows)
One of the big issues that the US faces as a representative democracy at most levels, is what should and can happen if compelling evidence emerges after that the fact that an election was incorrectly or illegally influenced to the point where the result cannot be trusted.
There are no clear rules for what to do in that scenario, at any level in the legal system, including in the Constitution. The courts, understandably, are reluctant to become involved in issues of electoral malfeasance, unless clear violations of narrowly drawn statutes exist (such as rules governing campaign finance). However, the scenario being postulated by many people, where external actors are trying to distort election results, does not fall neatly into any category of legislation. When the Supreme Court was asked to become involved in the recount dispute that broke out in Florida following the 2000 Presidential election, they basically punted, preferring to stay out of what they (probably correctly) saw as a partisan dispute where the law had little of any clarity to say to direct them, and where they would be in a no-win situation no matter which way they ruled.
There is no law that can cleanly and unambiguously be applied to actors who attempt to subvert the electoral process. If, for example, a PAC throws $10bn at a Senate race, that is arguably a gross distortion of the political process; however, due to the conflation of speech with money used to disseminate speech, as laid down by SCOTUS in the infamous Citizens United ruling, spending large sums of money to influence the political process is currently totally legal provided certain funding and expenditure rules are obeyed, and even if the rules are not obeyed, the penalties are irrelevant and trifling when compared with the prize that can be won by the illegal behavior.
The US legal system is not currently organized to punish bad behavior by election actors in any useful or punitive way. If violating electoral law led to winning candidates being immediately disqualified, you can be sure that electoral laws would be respected a lot more, but none of the existing participants in the process wants that to be a possible outcome (remember the old parable of the fox in charge of the henhouse).

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Recently located scroll providing additional insight into life in the time of Jesus

These words were recently found on a parchment in a cave near Palestine (next to US Highway 84, down the road from Smith Ranch):

As the Summer did reach its searing peak, which the people didst fear and despise (for Factor 30 had not yet been invented), the people did become restless, as if desirous of frivolity.
And lo, Jesus looked upon the land, and he saw that the land was good, except for the brown parched areas where nothing except tares did grow. Then Jesus did look upon the people and sayeth unto himself “verily the people are a good people, however they have a fatal weakness that obliges them to wave flags and demand aerial tribute once a year in the Summer”.
So Jesus came across a tree, and laid his hands upon the tree, then raised his hands to the heavens and sayeth “oh Heavenly Father, wilt thou appease the masses with your great powers?”.
And as the Sun did set in the West (for it would look bloody silly if it set in the East, and would confuse the hell out of the sundial vendors, who would be forced to ask for yet more subsidies), the tree did transform into a large grove of strange devices resting in earthen tubes. And yeah verily, as darkness fell, the tubes did suddenly erupt into the air a collection of stars that filled the heavens with a multitude of lights and colors, which did greatly please the restless masses, who shouted and clapped their approval, although the shepherds were vexed, since their flocks did piss themselves with fear and stampede and trample all over arable land.

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Disciplinary processes in professional sports

Ensuring that professional sportsmen play within the defined and accepted rules of the sport is always a challenge.
Top-flight sports athletes, no matter what their sport, are at the top of their sport for reasons that have a lot to do with talent, but also to do with a burning desire to not only compete, but also to win.
As a result, competitive athletes often end up believing that the means do justify the ends, if the end is an individual or team victory. They would certainly regard any argument that their actions were against “the spirit of the sport” or “the spirit of the rules” as naive talk coming from uncompetitive wimps.
The teams for which the athletes compete usually have the same level of competitive desire, so they are unlikely to ever tell the athlete to “tone it down” or do anything that they think would put the athlete or the team at a competitive disadvantage. So it is no use anybody looking in that direction as a way of ensuring that competitors always obey the rules. (The team may choose to intervene in situations where the athlete has become a pain in the ass to deal with for any number of reasons, but plenty of assholes stayed in teams and competed. Winning gets you a lot of indulgence for bad behavior).
As a result, managing compliance with the rules has to be down to the governing bodies of a sport. They are the only interested party that can and should take on that role.
Unfortunately, many sports governing bodies consistently and persistently fail to discharge that role. They do so for a number of reasons:

1 Pressure from teams and broadcast partners to not penalize bad behavior with suspensions, in order to allow offenders (who are often the high-priced stars) to continue to play
2 A conviction that any publicity is good publicity. If an athlete does or says something outrageous, that generates column inches and web hits a.k.a. controversy
3 Fear that penalizing over-aggressive behavior will cause conservative fans and traditionalists to moan about the sport being “dumbed down” or “pussified”

The result of all of those conflicting pressures is that many sporting bodies, instead of suspending performers for bad behavior, instead subject them to fines, penalty points, probationary periods and other penalties that stop short of outright suspension.
For driven competitors, none of those punishments really matter. As long they can still compete, they won’t care about being fined or told off by email. For a top star earning millions of dollars in a year, even a fine of $500,000 is merely a cost of doing business.
For some lesser-paid players, fines do hurt their pocket-book. However, many players, particularly in team sports, are not going to change their approach, since they risk being written off as insufficiently competitive.

The conclusion that I reached years ago is that in some sports, the disciplinary process is merely window-dressing, a fig-leaf to enable the sport’s owners to say things like “we care about player conduct”, while doing next to nothing to effectively regulate it.
Sometimes that laissez-faire approach backfires badly on a sport, especially contact and collision sports. Professional hockey and rugby have both found themselves squarely in the cross-hairs of bad publicity after player in both sports engaged in unprovoked assaults during games. What many practitioners of contact sports often fail to notice is that the laws governing assault are still in force during a sports event. Sports often use tools that are potentially lethal if misused. A hockey stick is every bit as dangerous a weapon when wielded by an NH player in a red mist as a baseball bat is when wielded by a street thug. Ditto a racing car when being used as a weapon in a race.
So, when somebody says “well, Graham, how would YOU regulate competitor behavior?”, here is my short summary.

1. Make the rules of the sport governing competitor behavior on and off the field of play during the time of an event simple, clear, and not subject to on-the-spot interpretation by officials.
Complex and subjective rules end up placing the burden of ruling into the event officials, which creates all sorts of potential for inconsistency

2. Fines should be levied as a percentage of the competitor’s earnings for an event or for a series of events, not a fixed monetary amount.
The stars and the middle-tier competitors should all feel the pain equally for financial punishment

3. Suspensions should be used for any competitor that engages in reckless, dangerous play or who commmits assault.
Forget fines, letters of contrition, probation etc. They are competitors. The right way to punish them is to deny them the opportunity to compete.

4. The appeal process should follow these principles:
– Appeals should be timely, heard by a small number of independent arbiters, and competitors should not be permitted to bring lawyers and other professional advocates.
Competitors need to be directly accountable for their behavior in front of the disciplinary body. Having professional advocates gives them the ability to hide behind those advocates.
– If the appeal fails, any punishment is applied immediately, and cannot be deferred
– If the appeal is deemed to be frivolous or evasive, the governing body reserves the right to increase the punishment, up to three times the original punishment, and to refuse to allow any further appeal on the matter at any level
Every sports body has competitors to try to game the system, by appealing every punishment, sometimes not even to get the punishment modified, but simply to avoid serving the punishment until after some important event. The only effective way to deter frivolous appeals is to punish competitors for attempting them.

If all governing bodies implemented those principles, a lot of sports would start to have a lot less of a problem with competitor misbehavior.

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Miscellany

1. The slow descent towards bankruptcy for Oklahoma and Kansas
both Oklahoma and Kansas have been electing Republicans to office in record numbers over the last 10 years. However, the GOP message of fiscal discipline does not seem to be doing either state much good. They have steadily increasing levels of debt. In the case of Oklahoma, the state’s credit rating has been downgraded recently, as its debt hit the #900m mark. The failures in OK seem to be that revenues have fallen significantly below predictions. This is an analysis of the stare’s finances. Kansas has also seen its debt rise, as the policies of Governor Sam Brownback of heavy cuts in taxation have failed to generate enough economic activity.

2. When you lie and get caught, people start digging
Mark Chelgren, the GOP state senator from Ottumwa who was caught falsely claiming to have received a business degree from a Sizzler steakhouse franchisee, also founded a gun manufacturing company despite a 2006 disorderly conduct conviction.
When you are found guilty of lying to the public, and people start digging, all of your deceits can be exposed. I am seeing a pattern here.

3. The opioid resurgence in the USA
Perceptive commentators such as Chris Arnade and J.D. Vance have written about the explosion of drug addiction in rural American communities.
This is not a new phenomenon. In a previous married life, I had in-laws living in Gladewater TX, and the Fire Department there was regularly called to the scene of meth lab explosions. It was always the same story – massive damage to the kitchen, a strange gray-white deposit all over the place, and a complete inability of the house occupants to remember exactly what it was that they were cooking when the explosion occurred.
Meth addiction is common throughout rural Texas, but especially so in East Texas, where the predominance of forest provides plenty of below-canopy hiding space for drug manufacture and distribution.
This article puts the whole addiction phenomenon into context. Effectively, as per Chris Arnade’s back row/front row analogy, the front row folks get addicted to Oxycontin, while the back row folks end up addicted to heroin, Fentanyl, and meth.
I have some issues with the article, especially it’s implied endorsement of 12 Step programs, which, despite their pervasiveness and popularity, have next to no scientific evidence to back up their claims of efficacy.

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Cabinet Meeting after round 1 of Brexit negotiations

Chair: OK Item 1 on the Agenda – EU negotiations. Prime Minister, please report

PM: …we had a good meeting. Everybody was very nice. However, they want money.
Minister 1: How much money?
PM: Here is the breakdown
(admin. passes document looking like an invoice to other ministers)
Minister 2: What the Dickens? Minister 3: What’s this line down the bottom…”Surcharge – Nigel Farage being an arsehole in Brussels…100 million euros”?
Minister 4: They’re a bunch of highwaymen!
Minister 5: Did the subject of “soft Brexit” not come up
PM: Er… when I mentioned that they all looked at each other and then Guy said “so you want to pull out without really pulling out?”. Then they all laughed. I don’t know how to put this…they want rid of us. Macron has them all-a-giggle with his “France on the Move” stuff, and he and Angela couldn’t keep their eyes off each other. They also kept asking me how my “orange friends” were doing, and smiling all the time.
Minister 6: So, Prime Minister…we’re fucked aren’t we?
PM: Er..um…(shifts in seat)…have we written any position papers on what a very very soft Brexit look like?

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Vettel vs. Hamilton incident at Baku – what it tells us about rule enforcement in Formula 1 and sports

A lot of light heat and sound is being created over the incident during a Safety Car period in the European Grand Prix at Baku where Sebastian Vettel, angry at what he thought was an incident of Lewis Hamilton brake-testing him at the exit to a corner, drove alongside Hamilton and then deliberately bumped him.
Vettel was penalized for the incident by being given a stop-go penalty. Predictably, opinion is split between people who believe that Vettel was not punished severely enough, and should have been disqualified, run out of town on a rail etc. etc. and people who believe that the incident was a storm in a teacup between two competitors, and that the media is against Vettel (in the case of the UK media, it must be because Vettel is German and “Don’t Forget Ze Var!”).
Lost in a lot of the discussion is that Vettel has a track record of behaving petulantly on-track. There was the infamous “Multi 21” incident in a race in 2013, where Vettel essentially refused to obey team orders to let Mark Webber pass him on-track, and then lawyered up to weasel out of punishment from the team. More recently, last season Vettel unleashed a string of expletives at Charlie Whiting in a race after another incident. So his behavior in Baku was not exactly new, nor was it totally unpredictable.
There is a simple reality at work here. Competitors in any sport will do what they think they can get away with. They will read the rules, watch how other successful past and current competitors and their role models in the sport behave, and then go out and push the rules to their limits. Talk about “the spirit of the rules” would be regarded by hard-core sports competitors as so much naive fluff. In the case of Sebastian Vettel, he has made no secret of the fact that Michael Schumacher was his hero growing up, and Lewis Hamilton has made no secret of his reverence for the late Ayrton Senna. Both men, as drivers, were bristlingly and uncompromisingly competitive, and both pushed the rules and norms of the sport up to (and in some cases, beyond) previously accepted limits.
It is up to the rule enforcement bodies in a sport to determine what the competitive limits are, and what to do about incidents where competitors go over those limits.
Unfortunately, most competitive sports governing bodies merely fine competitors or put them on probation. Partly this is because many sports leagues are essentially run by team owners, and team owners, as a general rule, do not like to see their highly-paid star performers sitting disconsolately off to one side while the game or event takes place without them. The same applies to Formula 1, where teams like Ferrari would be publicly indignant if one of their drivers was suspended. However, as Joe Saward explains in this commentary, the FIA may be about to come down hard on Vettel for several reasons, and Ferrari, who have been behaving like a bunch of horse’s asses towards the media for months, are likely to find that there is no reservoir of sympathy for them.
However, trying to regulate competitor behavior with fines and probationary warnings never works. Most fines are chump change to athletes earning millions (and some cases, tens of millions) or dollars annually. They will regard a fine as merely part of the cost of doing business.
Competitors will only change their behavior if their actions cause them to be denied the opportunity to compete. Competing is what they live for.
So…any discussion around consequences for Sebastian Vettel’s actions in Baku involving monetary fines, penalty points or minor losses of grid position is total fluff. If he is guilty of dangerous driving, the FIA should have suspended him for 1 race, or disqualified him from the race in Baku and then made him start the next race from the pit lane with a 10 second penalty on the rest of the field.
It is my belief that if the FIA had suspended Ayrton Senna for 5 races and docked him 25 championship points for running into Alain Prost back in 1990 at Suzuka, we wouldn’t have to had to watch this incident, or the Schumacher-Hill and Schumacher-Villeneuve incidents in 1994 and 1997. The message would have been sent along time ago to formula 1 competitors “if you collide with another driver deliberately, it WILL cost you a championship”. The current behavior patterns by drivers are the direct consequence of 20+ years of pussyfooting and inaction by the FIA.
UPDATE – Whenever I read articles talking about “making an example” of a competitor to “send a message”, I know I am dealing with a scenario where a sport has failed to correctly regulate competitor behavior in the past. If Sebastian Vettel, for example, knew in advance that running into Lewis Hamilton would have resulted in an immediate black flag, preferably supported by past incidents where drivers were black-flagged, he would most probably not have run into Hamilton.

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The awakening of the UK farming Industry..Part 3

Another AHA! moment as the UK farming industry suddenly appears to engage its brain about the practical consequences of Brexit. The soft fruit industry now realizes that without boots on the ground to pick the produce, the industry is likely to contract and possibly disappear.
As is now becoming usual, their public begging and pleading statement is a hoot.

British Summer Fruits chairman Laurence Olins said: “It is inconceivable that people who voted to leave the European Union wanted to destroy an iconic and incredibly competitive British horticulture industry, and see the end of buying British produce.
“But if we cannot ensure access to the seasonal workers needed to produce soft fruit in Britain, that will be an unintended consequence of Brexit, along with soaring prices and increased reliance on imports.”

Laurence, me old pal me old beauty, could I just perform some translation on that for you? here goes…

When our members voted by a majority to leave the EU last Summer in a fit of juvenile nihilistic pique, we didn’t stop to think that it it might destroy much of the British horticulture industry, and see the end of buying British produce.
Now we are crapping in our trousers.If we cannot rely on cheap labor from those countries with weird character sets and odd place names, what the f**k do we do? HELP!

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The failure of Jon Ossoff to win in GA-06

The failure of Jon Ossoff to win the special election in GA-06 is a damning indictment of the organizational and campaigning weaknesses of the Democratic Party.
From leading the race by 6 percentage points to losing today in 2 weeks? That takes a serious amount of organizational and messaging incompetence.
Ossoff played the last 10 days like an ultra-careful centrist, trying not to lose. Karen Handel went-all out with ad blitzes and mud-slinging. This was the 2000 Presidential Election all over again.
The Democratic Party has to understand and act on a fundamental reality. If you run down the middle of the road, you will get run over. Every time. Why would people vote for GOP lite when they can get the genuine article?
Here’s the underlying issue that the Democratic Party refuses to address. If you want to get out the vote, you have to run candidates that excite your natural supporters. The collection of milquetoast candidates that the Democratic Party often ends up with in elections do not excite the party base, nor do they impress young people, who will be a key voting group to be energized. Leaving aside ideology, the Republican Party currently does a far better job than the Democratic Party at running candidates that excite their core supporters. They seldom interfere in primary processes, unlike the Democratic Party, which never seems to be able to shake of the machine politics pathology of trying to fix the process to get the result that they think they need. Fixing primary processes may please centrists and establishment figures, but it sends a terrible and de-motivating message to party loyalists and young people, whose tolerance for cynical bullshit is still low, unlike the tolerance levels of the older and more cynical.
In addition the Democratic Party persistently falls prey to the “freezing in sight of the finish line” pathology, and I have seen it happen dozens of times.
1. New candidate is trumpeted by party at start of campaign, jumps out to big lead, looks to have race comfortably in hand.
2. Then suddenly, starting 3 weeks from polling day, candidate suddenly starts to act like they have to capture middle-of-the-road voters. They start talking all manner of conciliatory centrist guff.
3. Opponent goes all out on ad blitzes, FUD and all manner of mud-slinging.
4. Leading candidate determines that “say nothing and take the high road” is the right approach because it makes him or her seem to be statesmanlike and mature. Opposing candidate meanwhile is saying “***k that I’m going to damn well win”.
5. Candidate’s lead shrinks as fear of making a mistake adds to the “don’t piss anybody off” message being whispered in their ear by worried party grandees.
6. Would-be-supporters who were going to vote for candidate decide to not bother because candidate is a wimp. Uncommitted voters look at candidate and opponent and vote for opponent because damm it, they look like a winner.
7. Come election day, our former field-leading hero finishes second.

The inquest usually concludes that candidate was not “moderate” enough, ignoring the reality that at one point the candidate had a large lead, so was a good match most of the way.
The “not moderate enough” verdict is the best one to avoid further unpleasant scrutiny, since it places the blame on the primary electors, not the campaigning or messaging, which usually falls prey to risk-aversion dictated by the party establishment, whose attitude is “we write the checks, you do as we say”.
A new variation on this explanation that I am already hearing is that Jon Ossoff could never have won the seat, since he is not a Republican. The implication being that the seat was always unwinnable by a Democrat. If that was the case, how the hell did tracking polls consistently show Ossoff with a significant lead? A hopeless cause is when you are always behind in the polls, not when you lead by a significant margin until the last few days (see Dais, Wendy). This race was winnable. Ossoff, for reasons that look all too familiar, was unable to hold on to his lead.
If the message is that the Republicans managed to energize their supporters to get out at the last minute and vote, well, time for the Democratic Party to learn how to energize their supporters. (HINT – They won’t do that by telling the candidate to shut up and start trying to not piss off middle-of-the-road voters. You have to get your natural supporters to come out on polling day).

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Thoughts on the UK general election results

The results are now complete, with the Conservative Party losing its overall majority (the infamous “hung parliament” scenario). At time of writing, the Conservatives seem to have decided that they can form a government with the help of the Democratic Unionist Party’s 10 members of parliament.
The two biggest unanswered questions that the election result has thrown up are (1) what happens to the UK exit from the EU (aka Brexit) and (2) will a Conservative-DUP coalition be able to survive for any length of time? Thoughts on both topics below.

1. Brexit
I do not understand all of the earnest back-and-forth over “hard” or “soft Brexit (except that it does rather remind me of the discussions over pornography in the 1970’s…but i digress).
The UK has already given notice under Article 50 of its intent to leave the EU. That triggered a 2 year negotiation period. That clock started running a while ago.
The idea that the UK electorate has voted against Brexit, or has somehow voted against “hard” Brexit, makes no sense to me. The electorate could have sent a clear signal that they disapproved of Brexit by voting for candidates from other parties who supported the UK staying in the UE. They did not do so. I therefore have to assume that the UK electorate is either in favor of Brexit, or is resigned to it happening. The electorate voted in a way that weakened both of the pro-EU parties. That is not a “stop Brexit” message.
All of the signs are that the EU is definitely resigned to the UK leaving, and wants it to happen as expeditiously as possible.
As for the hard vs. soft concept…well, the UK has limited leverage in negotiations. When you are trying to leave a club, you don’t have many cards to play. If the UK wants to have an orderly Brexit, it will have to make concessions, A LOT of concessions. Anybody banging on about how the UK can be tough on EU negotiations was clearly asleep when Greece tried to re-negotiate its debt burden, or they came down from the hillside with the last rainstorm.
The UK, in truly petulant fashion, told the EU “We’re leaving” last Summer. The only credible way that the UK would be able to reverse that would have been to elect a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and the SNP dictating the terms. This did not happen.
Brexit is happening, whether the UK likes it or not. The UK election results changed a lot of UK political dynamics, but they will not change Brexit.
However, nobody in the UK who supported Brexit seems to be able to explain how the UK will create 750+ trading agreements to replace the existing agreements that the EU has with other countries. I call this the Clegg Question. Nick Clegg, who actually knows a lot about the EU, having studied it and worked within it, asked this question last year after the original referendum result, and the question was greeted with The Sound Of Silence, followed by soothing bullshit along the lines of “well of course the rest of the world wants to trade with us!”
In summary, many Brexit supporters seem to be confidently assuming a stampede by other countries to trade with us after the UK leaves the EU, an assumption that has next to no evidence to support it. Many countries that trade with the EU will want to continue that arrangement, the UK being a smaller trading partner than the rest of the EU. I am forced to conclude that a lot of the driver for the assumptions around Brexit is an outdated view not only of how world trade operates, but also of how important the UK is when compared to established trading blocs like the EU, NAFTA etc.

2. The fate of the Conservative-DUP coalition
It is unlikely that any coalition government between the Conservative Party and the DUP will survive more than a few months. The coalition will have only a tiny majority, and unless a working “nod and wink” back-channel arrangement is made with one of the other parties to bolster the majority, It will only take one disagreement between the coalition parties to end the tenure of the government. In this kind of situation, the coalition partner has disproportionate power, and the DUP is not a forward-looking party committed to equal rights for all orientations and groupings, which may lead to problems sooner rather than later.

Summary
The UK is a rudderless ship. Markets dislike uncertainty, hence the decline in the value of the Pound during and after the election result declarations.
The reason the ship is rudderless is that the UK electorate has been making bad decisions for the last 10 years. They first turned down the Alternative Vote proposal in a referendum, which would have made the entire electoral system a lot more representative of the voting patterns of the electorate (needless to say, the two existing major parties, beneficiaries of the “first past the post” system, campaigned against AV, successfully).
Then they decided to vote in favour of the UK leaving the EU, in a referendum marked by inept messaging by the Remain groups, and nativist, nationalistic and (in some cases) outright racist messaging by the Leave groups.
Now it is not entirely clear what they have decided. They almost took the car keys away from the Conservatives, but somebody picked them up off the floor and gave them back, with conditions. There are claims that the vote was against Brexit, but that seems illogical. My cynical take is that, overall, the electorate decided it didn’t much care for the Conservative Party’s governance, but is clueless about what to do instead.
The only good aspect of the election is that young people seem to have turned up to vote in large numbers.

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