Several times in this space, I’ve spoken of the recklessness of the 100% mortgage and how it both shouldn’t have been offered to many of the people it was sold to and how those people should have had the sense not to take it.

A mortgage is in fact a very simple instrument, but it is often portrayed as a complex and unique financial proposition (at least as far as everyday finance goes). I think this bank- and media-fueled portrayal is a key reason why many people accepted mortgages they should not have done—they were blinded by the belief a mortgage was “too complicated” for non-financially savvy people such as themselves and so shirked their responsibility to understand and evaluate the risks.

XL Recordings, the record label that’s tearing up the rule book

With music booming out of speakers, posters splashed everywhere and offshoot indie label Young Turks beavering away on laptops, the XL office is a place that serves to remind you how dull your own place of work can be. How can people be having this much fun and make a success of it? No wonder they all seem so devoted to the XL cause. This, after all, is a label that is thriving in an industry that is supposed to be dying.

My broken record at the moment is privacy and the amount of control we have over data we publish about ourselves. My long default has been to publish everything to a public rather than private space—basically so it’s drop-dead simple to reason about who can see my stuff. I’m lazy and, frankly, I don’t think the stuff I write about is important enough to be kept “secret”.

And “secret” in scare-quotes is the right way to think about it. On balance, it’s probably best to think of anything you publish online as being “eventually public”, even if it’s currently restricted to a small group. Given the ease of copying data online, eventually it’s safe to assume that someone will copy data to outside your technological fencing.

To us, it’s an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it’s the heist of the century

George Monbiot on a prospective change to the British corporate tax system.

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don’t get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.

Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub and XML on the Web

Dare Obasanjo nails a primary cause of a failure in the wider world to adopt your pet technology.

When I look at all three of these failures I see a common pattern which I’ll now be on the look out for when analyzing the suitability of technologies for my purposes. In each of these cases, the technology was designed for a specific niche with the assumption that the conditions that applied within that niche were general enough that the same technology could be used to solve a number of similar looking but very different problems.