Month: January 2025

DeepSunk Costs

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision. – From an IBM staff presentation, circa 1979

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.

I don’t know how closely you’ve been following the developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) lately but it’s been The Next Big Thing in the tech sector for the past few years. Even if you’ve gone out of your way to try to avoid it, it’s being crammed down your apps just as soon as the companies behind them can update them. You’ll have noticed your internet search engines adding “AI summaries” instead of giving you links to the website you want. The call centres you’re trying to navigate through have replaced overworked and underpaid scut-workers with AI chat bots that on a good day eventually pass you through to one of the remaining scut-workers and on a bad day it’ll break in ways that would be hilarious if not for the fact that these bots are being pushed into mission-critical roles too. You might even have noticed the news that Meta wanted to introduce GAI bots that would set up fake profile pages, post fake posts and then be responded to by fake comments from other bots – all in the name of harvesting ad revenue. That plan lasted less than a week, but will be back as soon as we’re distracted by something else.

Continue reading →

The Scottish and UK Governments are both wrong on DRS

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“This book was written using 100% recycled words.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this blog, you can here.

a green traffic light sitting next to a store

Both the Scottish and UK Governments are wrong on Deposit Return Schemes.
The DRS is back in the news now that Keir Starmer – in yet another show of policy innovation – has decided to copy/paste the previous Conservative Government’s plan for a deposit return scheme – the proposal where you pay a small deposit when you buy things like drinks and receive the money back when you return the packaging to a deposit return machine (sometimes known as a “reverse vending machine”). His plan includes the previous plan to exclude glass from the scheme and he has refused to allow an exemption to the Internal Markets Act that would allow Scotland to both include glass and to introduce the scheme at all without having to wait for the UK to do it.

It really is impressive to me how the UK can be so backwards that it is utterly unable to bring in a circular economy scheme that is already near-ubiquitous across central Europe (and used to be common in Scotland if you’re old enough to remember Barr’s ‘gless cheques’ before they ended their scheme in 2015) and utterly baffling how vulnerable we are to lobbying by companies who want to keep dumping the costs of their pollution onto consumers and the environment. I’ve told this story many times but I remember being in an informal roundtable in Holyrood in the early days of the planning for the Scottish scheme and a representative from a major supermarket and a representative from a major multinational drinks company both argued against the concept of DRS. Both went a bit more silent when I mentioned that in my previous holiday to Prague I had personally deposited a drinks bottle made by the latter into the DRS machine hosted by the former. If they can do it in one country, why not another? As I say – it was never about “could”, but about “why should we, when we profit more by not doing it?”

Continue reading →

The Dragons Ate Your Lunch

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.” – George Monbiot

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.

Dragon

One of the arguments in favour of billionaires is that while they are wealthy beyond any possible realistic need, they in turn generate even more wealth by creating and supporting jobs. They might take a share of the production generated by you, their workers, but you wouldn’t be able to generate that production without the risk they took in employing you and providing you with the tools, the capital, that you need to do that job.

What if it wasn’t true?

Continue reading →

To Build Houses, First Buy The Land

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” – Margaret Thatcher

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.

image_2025-01-29_150318951

Why are houses so expensive?

There are many reasons. To take just a few, Developers only build private housing at a rate just high enough to keep prices up and subsidies flowing, certain areas are being particularly pressured by those rich enough to own multiple homes at the expense of the local community, and – as we pointed out in our book All of Our Futures – the UK’s decision to push the burden of pensions away from the state and onto individuals has created a culture of “climbing the housing ladder” with “victory” meaning extracting the wealth you’ve accumulated through ever increasing house prices so that you can pay for retirement or, increasingly, so that you can give it to a private care firm owned by a tax-dodging hedge fund. That is, if you’re allowed to buy a house at all and aren’t destined to be one of the increasing number of private renting pensioners who face destitution due to rents and the lack of means to pay for care (something we warned about in All of our Futures but only recently being picked up as a problem by places like the FT).

Continue reading →

Tool Libraries Are Overdue

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donate page here.

image_2025-01-09_143839802

In December 2021, the Scottish Government made a promise to the Scottish Climate Assembly. In December 2024, their deadline passed with the promise now overdue.

Continue reading →