I generally like Fintan O’Toole, but his most recent article A strange definition of ’systemic importance’ goes fairly wide of the mark. In it, he argues that the government are behaving hypocritically by allowing PostBank to “fail” while pumping incredible amounts into Anglo to keep it from failing. He fairly cattily argues that PostBank wasn’t saved because in order…

…to achieve that enviable status and become immortal, Postbank would have had to do certain things. It would have needed a chief executive who was on first-name terms with the taoiseach and who delivered regular lectures to the nation on the evils of social welfare and regulation.

It would have had to plead with every gambler and hustler to please, please take a few hundred million more in loans for another fantasy project. It would have had to bamboozle its investors by cooking the books and lending chosen customers the money to buy its own shares. If it had concentrated on these goals instead of getting stuck in the pathetically old-fashioned rut of helping ordinary people manage money, it would have been systemically important.

This idea of there being a) elite, snobby banks with connections and b) honest-to-god, salt of the Earth banks is fairly rubbish. First off, PostBank is a project of BNP Paribas, the largest eurozone bank, and one of the largest banks in the world. Irish banking leaders are small fry compared to these guys. The CEO of BNP Paribas mightn’t be on first name terms with Irish politicians, but that’s more because they’re well above their paygrade.

Secondly, and much more importantly, PostBank wasn’t “failing”. What happened to PostBank was that BNP Paribas decided to shut it down and leave Ireland. That doesn’t mean, as in Anglo’s case, that it would leave behind a plethora of inter-bank loans, thousands of depositors without cash, and a government left standing having to guarantee those depositors’ accounts. Put simply, Anglo’s failing, PostBank is just shutting down.

PostBank might post losses, but it can still – thanks to being a subsidiary of BNP Paribas – cover the accounts of its depositors. It can still cover inter-bank loans (if it has any). It doesn’t depend on the government to cover its accounts. Anglo simply doesn’t have the money to do those things. PostBank’s closure won’t make life harder for other banks (arguably, it’ll make things easier), won’t massively threaten the reputation of Irish banking, and won’t make it more difficult for Ireland/Irish banks to borrow or raise capital.

Say what you like about pumping money into Anglo (and you can say plenty), but it’s not at all comparable to what’s happening at PostBank. Not one bit. One is closing by choice, the other is imploding by stupidity.

Fintan’s article tries to conflate “shutting down” with “failing”, to try and make some point about society. Usually he’s somewhat on the ball, but this article is reaching more than a bit.

In 1981, Christopher Fettes wrote a letter to the Irish Times, announcing that he was convening the “Ecology Party of Ireland”, which you can read below. The title’s a little unkind, but these were early days, I suppose. The “Ecology Party of Ireland” became “The Green Alliance/An Comhaontas Glas” in 1983, and “Green Party/Comhaontas Glas” in 1987.

You can see a copy of the poster for the first meeting on the great Irish Election Literature blog here.

Update: I sent on the letter to their blog, and they’ve kindly included it.

A few people have mentioned how irritating Google Buzz is, and that they don’t want to use it. I’m not a fan of it (yet!), so I’ll be turning it off for the time being. If you want to turn it off, it’s surprisingly simple, but tricky to spot.

Just go to your inbox, scroll to the bottom of the page, and the second last line contains the option “turn off buzz”.

Just click it and you’re done.

(I know this is a little obvious, but one or two people have mentioned how annoying it is not being able to turn it off.)

Brilliant.

[via epicponyz]

Back in the good ol’ days of MSN, you used to be able to block any contact you had. You could go online, chat with whomever you want, and – unless a friend who could see you ratted you out – they had no idea that you were online. This was handy for dealing with those people who you really didn’t like, or even for people who you did like, but didn’t want to get dragged into a conversation with.

Now that most people (in my group of imaginary friends, at least) have migrated over to Facebook Chat, some are annoyed that – while they don’t want to be rude enough to “defriend” someone – they miss the old block function. In some cases that’s due to hatred or disdain of the relevant person, and in other cases it’s just that they only want to speak to one person, and not get interrupted by others. After several unsuccessful attempts to explain this in the pub (note subtle reference to drinking – this clearly indicates that I’m socially active and that I’m down with the youth), I thought I’d pop up a simple guide on how to do it. It’s very easy.

Step 1: Create a friend list
When on a page in Facebook, click the “Friends” button on the top of the screen. Hit “Create new list” and call it something easy to remember. For me, it’s called “No chat”. Fill it with people who don’t want to talk to (this can even be one person, if you want). You can always change this list name and its members later.

Step 2: Edit Chat settings
Open up chat on the bottom right of the screen, and when it loads up, click the option called “Friend lists” at the top of the chat box. This will give you the option to divide your list of friends in chat into the relevant group of friends you’ve put them in. Click whatever you called that group of friends you don’t want to chat to (the one I called “No chat”), and that group will now appear as a separate section on your chat. If the list doesn’t appear, that’s because none of the people in that group are online.

Step 3: Go “offline”
Now that the friend list appears in Facebook chat, you’ll see a green dot to the right of the name (as in the image below).

Click the green dot (it’ll say “Go offline”) and to the various friends in that group, you’ll appear offline. To everyone else, you’ll be online. You can drag and drop names into and out of the groups, so you can mess around with whoever you want to talk to fairly easily. If there’s only one person you want to chat to, you can simply put them into a group, set it to online, and then turn off all friends listed as “Other Friends”.

In doing all this, you may still be a bad person, but at least the little shits won’t be irritating you anymore.

The ever-interesting BoingBoing blog has an article on Wikibumps, the “jump in traffic to an article which is in the news”. They’ve got various examples of relevance, such as when Michael Jackson died, he went from a few thousand hits per day to nearly six million hits in one day. Over the course of the entire month, his page got around thirteen and a half million hits.

One thing I thought I’d take a look at was the Wikipedia article for Paul Gogarty, the Green TD who infamously shouted “Fuck you, Deputy Stagg, fuck you” to a heckling Labour deputy. (If you’ve been living in a cave, and haven’t seen it, here’s the video.) The incident happened on the eleventh of December, 2009. Prior to it, Gogarty’s page had registered anywhere between zero and eleven hits a day, getting a total of one hundred and forty-three hits in the entire month of November. This pattern continued for the start of December, but quickly shot up, as you can see in the graph below.

The page went from single-digit hits to over two and a half thousand in one day. Since then, it’s tailed off to being close enough to one hundred per day, and has stayed there. Interesting to see the value of a simple “fuck you” for publicity. It’s also an handy way to gauge the interest internet users have in news stories. You can play around with the stats yourself by visiting the Wiki stats page, here.