Dan McCrum

@mccrum

Do investigations for the FT, into dubious accounting and dodgy characters mainly. Wrote a book called Money Men about a spectacular fraud

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Dan McCrum@mccrum· 8d

‘You’re not lonely when you’re a Freemason’

A moustachioed young freemason stands staring into the middle distance while inside the ornate lobby of building decorated with marble floors, stained glass windows and glowing lantern-like lamps. He wears a grey suit, the jacket slightly too tight and the trousers slightly too large, over which is tied a masonic apron. Medals and white gloves complete the look.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jun 10

For all would-be SpaceX investors, reading "A City on Mars" is a strong recommend. Very funny on the many ways space is terrible, uneconomic, and the decades/centuries of (boring, non-phallic rocket related) research needed to make settlement even a vaguely realistic proposition.

A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space and have we really thought this through?

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Apr 10

In its defence, the FT had pleaded the accounts of 15 women willing to come to testify in court on its behalf. That included three women whose allegations had not previously been reported.

One of those said that in 2018, when she was aged 20, she had been invited to a shooting party at Odey’s home in Gloucestershire. She said she and her boyfriend became aware that Odey had entered their bedroom in the guesthouse uninvited and was watching them while they were having sex.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Mar 20

Seems useful (Spotted in the latest Phoenix)

frame from a comic. Asked what's their favourite strip in The Phoenix, one of the Dunnos says "Dunno. I only read the Financial Times"

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Mar 12

Still from Equilibrium: Christian Bale surrounded by gun-kata'd corpses

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Mar 10

Little nugget at the end for the lawyer watchers

And finally, last week lawyers Carter-Ruck claimed Asif Aziz had reported London Centric editor Jim Waterson to the police for unspecified offences. This was after Waterson visited the billionaire’s office and home to ask if he was pushing ahead with the evictions. The Met police press office said they have no record of such incidents being reported to the authorities.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Mar 3

We still do this! £199 a year to get the Weekend FT delivered every Saturday. Read it as early as you like on Sunday morning. subs.ft.com/spa3_uk3m?se...

Weekend Print
£199 per year
FT Weekend newspaper delivered every weekend, plus FT Digital Edition delivered to your device Monday-Saturday.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Feb 26

Checks out

Allister Heath
The sinister, anti-democratic forces behind focaccia must be exposed at all costs

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Feb 24

Great chart from @pkrugman.bsky.social today on how the revenues from Trump's illegal tariffs stack up against his other policies - big tax cuts for the rich and even bigger increases in military spending.

Bar Chart: budget items % of GDP
Budget deficit 5.8%
Increased military spending 1.5%
Tax cuts in OBBBA 1.4%
tariff revenue 1%

Source:CBO, committee for a responsible federal budget

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Feb 3

TIL: In 1966, London experimented with £20 fines for jaywalkers but the police dropped the scheme after three months, complaining that it was "absolutely unworkable".

London is different from US cities. Much of its road layout predates the arrival of the car. Our roads are more chaotic, with the balance of power tipped a little less towards vehicles. Jaywalking is permitted in London. In 1966, the police tried to crack down on it, but gave up after three months. Our zebra crossings are far from machine-readable; they are designed for micro-conversations between drivers and pedestrians. In some parts of London, such as Exhibition Road in South Kensington, there are experiments in “shared space”, tearing up the old infrastructures that used to force buses, bikes and cars to stay in their lanes. This introduces uncertainty that slows down drivers but makes navigation harder for artificial intelligence.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Feb 2

Mandelson knows a thing or two about that, with contacts at the reputation defence squad Schillings

Sunday March 6, 2011 mail exchange between Peter Mandelson and Epstein

Can we get shilling lawyers number asap, writes the pedophile.

Let me know when Schillings contacted, replies Mandelson

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jan 24

Mother: “I can’t print from my iPad anymore”. Me: “You must be able to, let me try.” Minutes of fruitless experimentation and swearing later, I have to google it. A backward pointing arrow on an email is the symbol to find a hidden menu of options!

Print an email
1. Go to the mail app on your iPad
2. In the message tap [a fucking curved backward pointing email symbol designed by morons] in the bottom right corner, then tap print.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Nov 14

Reminded of this anecdote from that Guardian story about the many people involved in Look of the Year who faced sexual assault allegations www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020...

George Houraney, a businessman whose American Dream Calendar Girls beauty contest had been running in Las Vegas casinos since 1978, recalls encountering Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in January 1993. Houraney says that Trump asked him to organise a party that month with some of his pageant’s finalists, promising to invite heads of modelling agencies and prospective sponsors for his competition. “He had me fly in all these girls, and gave me a $30,000 budget for airfares and limos to pick them up at the airport,” he says. “The girls were all decked out, expecting to meet all these VIPs.” But after an hour at the party, Houraney says, there seemed to be only one other guest: Epstein. “I was like, ‘Donald, where are the guys? What’s going on here?’ And he said, ‘Well, this is it.’” Houraney says he realised “this is a Jeff Epstein party, basically”.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Nov 13

1 million to make a difference? There’s only 3 million privately held homes in London.

Presentation slide: in 2023 London had almost 3.8mn homes
Private sector 3mn
Social housing 426k
Local Authority 390k

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Nov 10

I had a stab back in 2014

In the US the middle class has a blue-collar connotation, whereas in the UK it seems to refer to the rich but not quite richest section of society.

For instance, while both might be seen as middle class signifiers, the BBC’s Radio 4 claims a weekly audience of just under 11m, or about a fifth of the UK population, while a smaller segment of the latter (about 7 or 8 per cent) were educated at fee paying schools.

Taking the official ONS data, we might say that a broad middle section of the UK is the 4th through 7th deciles of households, so excluding the bottom and top 30 per cent. To be in that range is to have a gross household income somewhere between £20,000 and £40,000 – the average of the 4th decile was £21,676 in 2011/12, and for the 7th decile it was £38,763.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Oct 13

For more on the Cascadia Subduction zone, and the advice that everyone in the Northwest should plan to be self-sufficient for two weeks after any disaster, see here survivingcascadia.com/how-often-do...

Overall, 27 of the 41 intervals were less than 300 years in length. So when we tell ourselves the story of how often these earthquakes occur in the Pacific Northwest, it may be more accurate to say: *picture of time frequencies with us on the wrong side of the distribution.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Oct 11

Unsolicited wick pic

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Sep 12

A handy tool to have in your bag or car should you need to quickly and safely cut a line is a hooked box/strapping cutter. Just thought I'd flag it.

Picture of the Hook Knife Film/Tape/Strapping Cutter with keyring JF07631 available for 83 pence from euroffice

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Sep 10

Joel Pashcow, a real-estate executive and Mar-a-Lago Club member, offered a drawing of Epstein giving a lollipop to a group of young girls in 1983, juxtaposed with another drawing of Epstein in 2003 being fellated and massaged by another gaggle of women. The implication is that Epstein has groomed them from an early age. Paschow did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But his most startling contribution is a photo of him holding a novelty check bearing what appears to be a doctored or rendered version of Trump’s signature. The photo appears alongside a handwritten note suggesting Epstein sold him a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500. The New York Times reports that the check was a stunt meant as a joke about a woman in her 20s who dated both Trump and Epstein. But this is remarkable enough that it bears repeating: Inside the 50th-birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein—a man charged with sex trafficking—is a photo of a massive, novelty size check, seeming to reference the sale of a human being from one powerful man to another. The man whose supposed signature is on the check is the current president of the United States.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Sep 4

Regardless of who the dead were in this specific case, he added, history shows that a policy of using force against drug smugglers risks disasters based on faulty intelligence. For example, in a 2001 incident, the C.I.A. told the Peruvian government that a plane was smuggling drugs, and its air force shot it down, only to find out that it had instead killed American missionaries.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Sep 2

Turns out "thanks for watching" is the YouTube version of the Enigma Machine's "Heil Hitler"

There's also a phenomenon called "overfitting" in AI models where information (in this case, text found in audio transcriptions) encountered more frequently in the training data is more likely to be reproduced in an output. In cases where Whisper encounters poor-quality audio in medical notes, the AI model will produce what its neural network predicts is the most likely output, even if it is incorrect. And the most likely output for any given YouTube video, since so many people say it, is "Thanks for watching."

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Aug 29

This is bad

The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Aug 27

Trying, indeed. The Man United zero here makes me laugh every time.

Athletic chart of transfer fees spent and received. Man United's fees received is £0.0, versus £188.5mn at liverpool, £7,m at Arsenal, £227mn Chelsea...

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jul 25

Judged purely by the number of times I've been surprised by people taking trips to Ilfracombe in recent years (which doesn't break the top ten nicest places in North Devon) I would guess there is an AirBnB oversupply www.ft.com/content/7c3f...

$Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/7c3fea66-6525-4a65-84f0-cb6c4249154e Properties on the market in Ilfracombe, North Devon, increased 86 per cent in the first half of this year compared with the first six months of 2021; Hayle, in Cornwall, was up 85 per cent, according to Hamptons.$

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jul 22

There's some assumptions in this report that I'm not sure about. Here it's conflating a permanent change in the value of the asset, with the position of the rich person.

Take someone who owns a £100m company, now subject to a 2% wealth tax. If they expect an 8% return on their holdings, the wealth tax has reduced the value of the company by £25m (i.e. because their return from the £100m company, net of wealth tax, is the same as what their return would have been from a £75m company before the wealth tax).

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jul 22

The appropriate technical term is bullshit

Cohere’s Frosst warned that even the term hallucination was misleading. “It sounds too much like [the model] working the way a human brain works, and it does not,” he said. “It works in a completely different way.”

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jul 22

The intrinsic bullshit problem on.ft.com/4nWq8v3

Hallucinations are a very hard problem to fix because of the probabilistic nature of how these models work,” said Amr Awadallah, a former Google executive and founder of Vectara, a generative AI agent start-up. “You will never get them to not hallucinate.”

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jul 18

Sadly doesn’t include this astonishing Madonna by Dali

Salvador Dali pointillist self portrait of an ear and the Madonna and child with astonishingly rendered notes on it that appear as if they could peel off

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jul 17

Evergreen xkcd

xkcd panel.
Lady holding microphone: They say they've fixed it with something called "blockchain"
Guy 1: AAAAAAA!!!
guy 2: Whatever they sold you, don't touch it.
Guy 1: Bury it in the desert.
Guy 2: wear gloves.

Dan McCrum@mccrum· Jul 17