Dokumenteerija

Here's a video of a lecture I gave to first-year IT students at the University of Tartu, on the job of a technical writer. It's in Estonian, and it's short; one of a technical writer's core virtues is to talk as little as possible while still getting your point across.

In Re Vu

I've been on Bulgarian TV and in Latvian magazines; now, here's me in a Maltese publication providing an outside perspective to an inside audience.

My Politics

The Estonian Public Broadcasting company released a little questionnaire that maps important political issues ahead of the parliamentary elections in March.

I decided to record myself answering the questions, and explaining why.

Yay, I'm a Pundit! and other €-linkery

Courtesy of Kris Rikken, I've been quoted in the British press. Beyond that, the Economist's Charlemagne has a pretty good write-up of the motivations and implications of Estonia's Euro accession. For those who might not have read it before, here's my distilled Euro analysis. The first-day coverage of the switch in the Estonian press has been humorous to track, though not particularly interesting to read: half a dozen full-page articles about everything pretty much running smoothly and nothing going wrong.

Oh, and Happy N€w Y€ar!

Click-to-summon

Don't you just love "experts" who are not just consistently wrong, but remain wilfully ignorant?

Forgive me for feeding a troll, but I understand that my readers rather enjoy this kind of thing. Was pointed to an article by someone purporting to be an economist.

Well, as I told John at the time, the Estonian case is a complex one, since in a country with only just over a million people a myriad of special case factors can be at work, confounding results.

Well fuck me sideways with a chainsaw, Edward, but wouldn't it just be swell if an analyst publishing long-winded treatises full of graphs actually took the time and effort to investigate these special factors, and contemplate their effect on the model he's trying to apply? All the more so after admitting his previous predictions have been wrong?

Two more Th!nk3 posts. The Internet as a force multiplier, and the art of the possible. The latter is the consequence of a flame war, and being (once again) astounded at how people will not respond to what you are saying, but to what they think you are supposed to be saying.

Tartu floods

The river is 3,26 meters above notional zero.

E-stonia on Th!nk3

Latest post. Comment there.

Th!nk3, and Gadgetry

Over at Th!nk About It, taxes on financial transactions and impressions of corporate governance in Russia. You can see all of my Th!nk3 blog posts here.

Closer to home, my preciousssss:



There's a long post that I've been meaning to write about the comparative merits of this spring's new gadgets, and why I want to buy an iPad, but won't. But my blogging energy is pretty much devoted to Th!nk3 for now, and I'll be doing it until the end of August, so in the meantime I'll just say that my choice of HTC Legend over all the competitors has been very well-considered, and I genuinely believe it is the best device I could buy right now.

A Layman's Take on the Robin Hood Tax

Over at Th!nk About It. Disabling comments here - I'd love to have a discussion with you over on the th!nk3 platform.

*giggle*

Estonians are at their funniest when they take the piss out of themselves. In the words of DJBB, "no other people on this planet quite as proud of all its pain".

Anyway, this is almost as good as Wabariik.

Pleasure in Knowledge

This is worth repeating.

БЛОГЪР

A blogger whom I met at Th!nk About It works for Bulgarian national television, and asked me to comment on the Copenhagen summit. Here's the video. (Yes, I'm growing an evil goatee.)

I Don't Think You Know What "Interesting" Means

Here's a news article linked from one of my forums. The news story itself is a couple of days old now. The gist of it is that a Frenchman paid some Kosovar gangsters to kidnap a German and drop him off near a French courthouse. The German had previously been convicted in absentia in France of the manslaughter of the Frenchman's daughter; the German authorities found the case to be without merit, and so refused to extradite him.

Just to get it out of the way, my personal opinion is that the Frenchman - who appears to be cooperating with the police in the identification of the kidnappers - should be tried, convicted for kidnap, and sentenced to lots of community service. He broke the law, but in the least evil way possible under the circumstances. (For comparison, consider Drasius Kedys, the Lithuanian who murdered two people suspected of molesting his daughter.) The German is now in French custody; the article says that a conviction in absentia means he will now go through another trial, where he will have the opportunity to defend himself.

What bothers me is the cocnluding line of Charles Bremner's article from the Times Correspondents section:

It's interesting that we have only had the French side of this story.

As I commented on the article itself - yes, because it would be ridiculous to expect a staff writer for a major newspaper to actually get the German side of the story!

Even though the article itself appears in the Blogs section, it still carries the Times header; as such, Charles Bremner does represent the institution and ought to be bound by the habits of good journalism. I usually defend the established media in the face of claims that it has outlived its usefulness in the age of Digg and Twitter, but lazy incompetence of the kind exhibited by master Bremner makes it difficult to do so. "It's interesting" can be expected from a blog (though even then it is vulnerable to ridicule), but in a major news source, it ought to be cause for immediate termination. The very least that the Times correspondent must do is contact the German prosecutor's office and ask for a statement, better yet - have a look at the reasoning in Germany's official refusal to extradite or even pursue the case. Even if that information is not public record, certainly the Frenchman and his attorney would have access to it. And if Bremner were to strike out, find nothing of significance, then the line should read "The German authorities declined to comment on the case".

Charles Bremner uses the word "interesting". I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Estonian Girl

Tragically true, though there are exceptions. Found via Colm of Corcaighist. Anyone know the author?

Tim Minchin - Storm

Outstanding. Simply outstanding.

The Telegraph Folly

My sister (who lives in Brussels and does something with international labour law) asked me to comment on a link she was sent. I started writing a response, but it grew enough that I might as well post it here, for general consumption.

It's claptrap. The author mentions no economic theory to explain how the impending doom will actually come about. He begins with forced misdirection, using private debt figures in a context designed for public debt. He then mentions that the state "could" spend more, and that we have a remarkably low public debt figure. He assembles random scary soundbites, such as our economy falling twice as much as Iceland (Iceland's economy is fishing and geothermal-powered aluminium smelting, it has nothing to do with the financial crisis that killed the country). Essentially, it is a piece written to order. His editor asked for a thousand words on how the Estonian economy is fucked, and he assembled the best bits of trollbait and posturing that Google could provide.

As a rule of thumb, do not trust an Englishman with a double-barreled last name to be actually competent or knowledgeable about anything.

The rebuttal is the same it's been since 2007: the private debt is held by foreign banks, and is Sweden's headache, not Estonia's. Estonia has a reasonable personal bankruptcy law, and devaluation would simply result in massive foreclosures that would leave Swedish-owned banks with swathes of property they could never sell for anything approaching the value of the loans. Estonia's Euro accession is in the absolute, unequivocal interest of the parties holding the private debt, which is why the Swedish central bank has recently declared that they made billions of SEK available to the Estonian central bank, in order to maintain the EEK's stability.

The impressively tragic numbers describing the fall in real estate prices in Tallinn belie a virtual lack of transactions. As I've said a long time ago, the biggest realty discounts come from new-build projects, where developers are slashing initially astronomical margins on units that were built to the lowest cost. Lack of consumer confidence and prohibitive interest rates have destroyed demand, and the relatively small amount of desperate supply is available at fire-sale prices to those lucky few who can pay cash. There are damn lies, there are statistics, and there are percentages: you'll get a scary picture if you compare a buyer's market against the apex of an insane price boom.

In any case, it is almost unbearably ironic to be accused of high personal debt and unrealistic house prices by the British!

The motivations behind Estonia's behaviour in the current economic climate are quite difficult for outside observers to comprehend. Part of it is politics, yes: we are willing to sacrifice much in order to integrate ourselves with Europe's infrastructure to the extent that it will be cheaper to defend us than to throw us to the bear. But there is more to it. While the entire Western world is battling a recession with massive government spending, we are doing something that simply does not occur to Telegraph readers (or writers): living within our means.

It was Stockholm and Frankfurt's folly to pump cheap loans into Estonia, and we'd have been fools to ignore the opportunity - personally I am giddy with satisfaction at my mortgage payments, consisting of a contractually fixed tiny margin over a freshly bottomed-out EURIBOR. My apartment's worth less now than what I paid in the fall of 2006, but not less than I owe on it (because the local banks always demanded significant down payments, which the British, with their multi-generation home loans of 110% of the value of the purchased property, should really give a try). And if we really were that bothered by the size of the private foreign debt - which master Evans-Pritchard emphasizes is the second highest in Eastern Europe, though even in percentage terms it pales in comparison to that of the UK - then we would indeed devalue the kroon. Let SEB and Swedbank repossess all those Soviet tower blocks, while we once again become cheap labour, drawing off the last of Western Europe's skilled jobs; and five years from now, when the defaulted debts of a third of the country are wiped clean, we will simply buy all the property back from the banks at a fraction of the loan amounts. I wonder how surprised Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and other devaluation advocates would be if they saw the employment contracts of Estonia's competitive middle class, particularly the clause that guarantees a recalculation of salaries in Euros if the peg is lost!

Instead, we are being responsible, reliable allies of Western Europe, maintaining our obligations and dealing with the real world. Which is not something I would expect an Eton twit to understand.

The Lazy Person's Vote

New article on Th!nk About It - this time, with video!

Not particularly bothered if you vote or not, but I would appreciate it if you commented. Oh, and this is a video post. Be gentle - it's more or less my first experience in editing video.

New TAI post. Not my best work, but should count as an EP-themed entry for the month.

I hereby suggest that the below extract from this XKCD strip be adopted as the autoironic mark of technical writers everywhere.