a blog from a Citizen of Woking

School reform

2012-01-28T19:15:00.001Z

While at state school parents' evening recently, I happened to be chatting to a friend who is a teacher at a nearby private school. At the state school parent evening, you get a five minute slot to chat to each teacher. This stops it from being boring, but it does make things chaotic because some of the parents run over and the timetable doesn't last more than the first few minutes. Then it turns into a weird survival of the fittest, whereby the parents with the most tattoos and piercings, get to jack the queues and you end up having to wait for ages. Anyway, he told me that he has to prepare for every child at his school and all of the parents show up (of course, because they are paying something like £18,000 per year for each child) and they have 20 minute slots, during which the parents grill him about why the children aren't achieving A* in everything because a mere A isn't worth the money. (I once met an advisor to a hedge fund, someone considerably richer than me -- he has four kids at private school -- who told me, entirely seriously, that if his kids didn't get in to Oxford or Cambridge then he would get them in to a foreign university and help them to emigrate because they would have no future in the UK.)

Anyway, my point is that my friend who is a teacher was bemoaning the fact that he couldn't afford to send his daughter to the private school he wanted her to go to, and said that she was now going to get worse GCSEs. I didn't ask why, but maybe the discipline, rather than the teaching or the facilities is the key. I remember one of my sons complaining to me about the poor discipline at the state school I had condemned him too. I tried to comfort him by explaining that it made perfect sense to let the less academically-minded smoke pot on the far playing field instead of bringing them in to disrupt lessons, but he wasn't persuaded. This is why I've decided to lend my support to the Archbishop of Canterbury's campaign to bring Sharia Law to Britain after reading about the 13-year old Saudi Arabian girl who was sentenced to 90 lashes and two months in jail after she was caught using a mobile phone at school. This is the sort of clear and direct policy that would have a very positive impact on most state schools.

This is not the only improvement that might be imported. Apparently under Sharia Law schoolchildren can get between 300 and 500 lashes for assaulting a teacher. Not only "can", in fact, but "do".

Three years ago 16 schoolchildren, aged between 12 and 18, were each sentenced to between 300 and 500 lashes for being aggressive to a teacher.
[From Saudi girl, 13, sentenced to 90 lashes after she took a mobile phone to school | Mail Online]

I can see why the Archbishop said (a year after his initial call for this much-needed reformation of our legal system on religious lines) that, despite all of the whinging from the Liberal media, public opinion is coming round to his view.

"So I think there is a drift of understanding of what I was trying to say, perhaps I like to think so."
[From Archbishop of Canterbury: Society is coming round to my views on sharia - Telegraph]

The obvious next step, in my opinion, is for the Archbishop to introduce Sharia Law into Church of England schools. This farsighted move would simultaneously drive up parental demand for places at those schools and deliver significantly better exam results for the community. Using the new structures set up by Michael Gove, it ought to be straightforward to begin setting up the first Sharia-based Academy Schools and put this country back on its feet again.

Incidentally, if you're curious as to why I was reading a two year old newspaper article about girls being lashed at a Saudi Arabian school, there is an innocent explanation! When I was pottering about in London last week, I found myself on a tube station platform. On the opposite platform was a party of schoolgirls with a couple of teachers. The girls looked to be about 11 or 12. I suppose about half of them were wearing Muslim headscarves, but there were a small number (three or four) who were actually wearing full burkhas. I couldn't stop myself from wondering… how does anyone know that they are schoolgirls and not agents of a foreign power about the kidnap the daughter of some British PSP (politically-significant person, a phrase drawn from anti-money laundering legislation), perverts who had sneaked into the classroom or illegal immigrants who were operating incognito until such time as they could get a pet cat and use this in order to obtain the right to say in the UK.

This gave me a great idea for a book, and so I googled to find out whether girls where burkhas to school under Sharia Law.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Honourable mention

2012-01-01T22:23:00.001Z

As the only person in Britain, apparently, who genuinely doesn't care whether Russell Brand gets divorced or not, I ended up buying the Sunday Times at the petrol station on the way home. It is full of depressing stories -- HBOS bad debts approaching £60 billion while the guy in charge of racking them up has retired on a £344,000 per annum pension, and that sort of thing -- but the one I settled on was the one about the New Year's Honours.

David Cameron faced an honours row today after it emerged at least four Conservative Party donors were given awards in the New Years list.
[From Cameron faces New Year honours row as four Conservative donors are given awards | Mail Online]

I'm using the Daily Mail link because the Sunday Times link is behind a paywall. But the point is that it's time we had a more open and transparent Honours system instead of the current system of handing out honours to speculators who correctly guessed "heads" and then split the loot with the governing party, near-randomly selected "ordinary people", some deserving cases of people who've done a lot for charity and celebrities who are friends of the elite. So I propose setting honours tariffs. A tariff of X means that you have to either have paid X in income tax or donated X to registered charities to qualify. But where to set the thresholds?

I think it was P.J. O'Rourke who said that the biggest contribution that the average person can make to society is to get a job, and he is surely correct. So therefore, the honour tariff should be set so that the first step on the ladder of honours should be above this basic threshold. Fifty years at work on the average salary means about a million quid of income, so let's say £300,000 in tax and national insurance (i.e., tax). So set the first rung on the ladder, the CBE, at £500K. Once you've paid £500K in tax or donated £500K to charity, then you get a CBE. Say a million for an OBE.

Obviously, at higher levels, the number of honours should be smaller and the club more exclusive, so it should take £100 million to get into the House of Lords.

The merit of my system is that everyone can see exactly where they are in the great scheme of things and that if property developers or currency speculators or famous actresses want to get honours then they will have to pay the tax or make the donations in the UK and then we call all applaud them for their contributions. I'm not sure why someone should get an honour for being a dinner lady or whatever for 50 years, because having a job for most of your working life should be the minimum we expect from people, right?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Flight control

2011-12-24T11:32:00.001Z

It's bad enough that I'm not allowed to use my iPad to read instead of a book when the plane is taking off or landing (even though the pilots are now being issued with iPads instead of paper manuals) but the phones thing is getting further out of control.

According to the F.A.A., 712 million passengers flew within the United States in 2010. Let’s assume that just 1 percent of those passengers — about two people per Boeing 737, a conservative number — left a cellphone, e-reader or laptop turned on during takeoff or landing. That would mean seven million people on 11 million flights endangered the lives of their fellow passengers.

Yet, in 2010, no crashes were attributed to people using technology on a plane. None were in 2009. Or 2008, 2007 and so on. You get the point.
[From Fliers Still Must Turn Off Devices, but It's Not Clear Why - NYTimes.com]

When I landed at a major US international airport a few days ago, we were informed by an announcement of board the plane, whole taxiing to our arrival stand, that we were required by the airport authorities to keep our phones switched off until we left the terminal building for "security reasons". An awful lot of passengers were pissed off about this, because they wanted to let relatives know that they had landed, check their messages and so on. There was a lot of grumbling as we stood in the 55 minutes line for immigration. Fortunately I had the latest "Economist" with me so I had something read while the people around me, some of them families with small children, had absolutely nothing to do. They weren't even allowed to listen to music or play handheld games.

I began to wonder what "security reasons" there might be for the prohibition. If I were a terrorist dedicated to the overthrow of the United States, then I would simply ignore it. So it can't be aimed at terrorists or criminals or other people who disobey the law. And if the "authorities" really don't want anyone to make phone calls inside their airport, then all they have to do is turn off the cells.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Stock arguments

2011-12-14T19:05:00.001Z

Listening to the wireless whilst pottering around the house, I heard noted pop music impresario Pete Waterman bemoaning the laziness and stupidity of British youth. Now, I normally pay no attention at all to the drug-fuelled ramblings of music industry persons, but in this particular case he caught my attention, because he runs a business in the real world. Or, at least, in Crewe. He has an engineering works and has been trying to hire (I think he said) 20 apprentices but they won't do it because they start at 7.45am and he won't let them use mobile phones while using equipment. He said that he had had to look "further afield" to find the people he needs - he didn't specify but I assume he meant Poland or Latvia.

Meanwhile, my wife was in hospital recently and was being served lunch by a Latvian woman. She was a university graduate but was serving food in a hotel to earn some money in the UK while she bettered her English and went to college in the evening. I know that anecdote aren't statistics, but you see this sam pattern time and time again. Under New Labour insane plans to create an underclass that would form a permanent socialist voting bloc while using uncontrolled mass immigration to keep the lights on we have come close to rendering an entire generation unemployable.

By coincidence, I happened to have been at an employers gathering the day before. I don't want to say why, because it would be inappropriate to identify any of the particular organisations. but it was interesting here some of the CEOs talk about the problems of expanding their businesses in the UK. Some had made a very deliberate decision to expand overseas and it wasn't, as I would have imagined, all about wage levels. More than one of them said that it was simply not possible to find young people in the UK who were prepared to work all day. Someone I know tolerably well has moved his software development company from the south east of England to Romania. You don't just lose the jobs of the software developers, you lose the jobs of the receptionists, janitors, accountants, solicitors and so forth too.

One of the guys at the meeting I was at was talking about the new government apprentice scheme. They have ten places available for (paid) apprentices. Only two people even showed up for interview (in a country with over a million unemployed yoofs). One of the other guys was trying to to hire engineering graduates and couldn't find any. The chap from one of the universities present said that many engineering graduates go into banking and finance because it offers the potential for big bonuses.

What has gone wrong? The New Labour edukashun drive must have had even more disastrous effects on our young people than even I had imagined, and my kids go to state schools so I see the catastrophic reality every day. This leaves me with very little hope for the UK - naturally I am advising my own children to flee as soon as is practical - but someone please tell me that there is a ray of sunshine out there somewhere.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Derek and Clive

2011-12-05T22:50:00.000Z

I was waiting for a bus in San Francisco. At the bus stop with me were two men, late teens or early twenties. One was African-American, one was Latino-American. They were both dressed in the standard uniform of very baggy jeans with the crotch below their knees, underpants showing so that they looked like escaping mental patients, strangely thick padded jackets (it was a very hot day) and hats. They were talking about potential career options. Their conversation was so ridiculous I dubbed them Derek and Clive. For younger readers, this is an allusion to an infamous series of albums made by Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. One of them actually said, and I swear to Roberto Mancini that I'm not making this up, that he'd considered being a judge, because he thought he would quite good at it (if I understood his vernacular), but had decided against it after discovering that you had to go to law school first.

I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.
[From Peter Cook - Wikiquote]

The other youth said that he hadn't come to any firm conclusions yet but thought that he might like to work in the music industry.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Next right please, minister

2011-11-14T17:55:00.001Z

If my taxi driver is a reliable barometer for the economic outlook, which I believe him to be, things are about to get better irrespective of what the CBI, or the berks running the "Treasury model" might think. He told me that business has been picking up lately and he attributes it to three things, each of which I think might serve as more practical guide for business than any number of MBA theories.

He spent money on advertising and, in particular, expensive advertising on roundabouts.
He bought another taxi company (for several tens of thousands of pounds) in order to consolidate but specifically because they had a better (i.e., simpler and more memorable) phone number than he did.
He started to follow the weather more closely, making sure there were more taxis on the rank when it was cold and raining.

Should Vince Cable become involved in some sort of scandal and be forced to resign, I believe I can point to a ready-made replacement. The person who runs the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills should, in my opinion, be drawn from the ranks of those of create by far the great majority of jobs in these British Isles: SMEs. In fact, I'd go further and say that you shouldn't be allowed any senior position in BIS at all unless you had run an SME for some qualifying period. A few years working for a bank or an oil company doesn't put you in touch with the beating heart of UK plc. I would formally like to nominate my taxi driver as the next Minister for whatever it is that noted tax-evader Vince Cable is Minister of.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Ministry of morons

2011-10-30T18:18:00.001Z

Much as we changed the name of the "Ministry of War" to the "Ministry of Defence" in 1964, I think we should change the name of the "Department for Education" the "Department for Stupidity" to reflect the new reality. The increase in stupidity is inexorable. There was an article in New Scientist a few weeks ago that said that we are losing, on average, about 0.8 IQ points per generation because stupid people are having more children than clever people. The burgeoning underclass in the UK is testament to this and there's no solution in sight: the welfare state incentivises the production of children while uncontrolled mass immigration further adds to the population. Fortunately, some of the immigrants can read and write, thus providing a basic workforce, but the long-term trend is not encouraging. If you don't believe me, watch the Jeremy Kyle show or read a national tabloid newspaper.

One way to measure the decline in national intelligence might be to find a benchmark. Here's an interesting suggestion: use television quiz shows.

“Who is the head of the Ismaili community?” was one question, to which the correct reply was the Aga Khan. Another asked which British politician had bought shares in the Suez canal. Disraeli, it turned out.
[From Think Britain hasn't dumbed down? Just watch Bullseye - Telegraph]

This gives me an idea for an independent measure of national stupidity, free from political interference or distortion by the vested interests at the Ministry of Edukashun. Perhaps some academics could construct an index that simultaneously measures how much easier the questions are on the top-rated prime time quiz show, University Challenge.

Brain of Britain, on Radio 4, seems mercifully unaffected by the collapsing national intelligence so that could serve as a reference point. Then all we have to do is persuade the government to announce the national stupidity level each year and hopefully they will then try to manage it down. If national stupidity goes up, then I will expect the Minister to write a suitably apologetic letter to the Prime MInister and then resign. Although I suppose making the Bank of England write a letter apologising for the inflation figures doesn't seem to have improved them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Taking a stand

2011-10-17T09:49:00.001+01:00

A friend of a friend, a chap I've know for a few years, is a bankster: that is, he works at a bank that is "too big to fail". To be precise, he works on the fixed income desk for one of the big banks in the UK. His job, for many years, has been arranging syndicate loans for, primarily, PIGS. Basically, the governments run out of money, come to a bank for a few billion euros, that bank arranges a syndicate who each put up a few hundred million. The lead bank gets a few extra points for arranging the syndicate. This adds up. The bank makes a ton of money, my friend makes a ton of money -- enough to buy a very big house in the country near Woking and to send both of his kids to one of the most expensive private schools in the country -- and UK plc gets tax revenue.

Germany is pushing behind the scenes for a "hard" default in Greece with losses of up to 60pc for banks and pension funds
[From German push for Greek default risks EMU-wide 'snowball' - Telegraph]

So here's my question. Since the loans that my bankster friend arranged are about to go tits up, will he have to pay back 60% of the cash he earned? No, of course, not. And if his bank is going to go tits up because it was stupid enough to loan the money itself instead of palming the dodgy deals off on to syndicate partners, then the bank will go bankrupt, but my friend will still keep his cash. And of course, since the government won't let the bank to go down, the taxpayer (i.e., me) will end up paying.

Now, as a capitalist, I used to think that my friend deserved his bank balance because he was smarter than me or worked harder than me. But now I understand the actual dynamic --- which is that he was simply a lottery winner, having almost randomly chosen that line of work -- I'm outraged and my faith in "the system" is undermined. I've a good mind to go an join the Occupy Wall Street chaps, but unlike them, I know what I want. My demands will be for some actual capitalism in the city instead of the debased corporatism that has allowed the few to loot from the many.

And as I have previously noted, radical concentration of wealth actually destroys capitalism, turning it instead into socialism for the rich.
[From Guest Post: Extreme Inequality Helped Cause Both the Great Depression and the Current Economic Crisis « naked capitalism]

We need to stand firm against all forms of socialism, whether National (as in Germany), International (as in the Soviet Union), Bonkers (as in North Korea) or Tailored (as in Wall Street).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Audio boo

2011-10-09T11:21:00.001+01:00

Here's a +1 to Starbucks: the wifi is now free in the UK (finally) so you don't have to remember your loyalty card username and password any more. Great stuff. Personally, I prefer the coffee at Costa, but they don't have wifi so Starbucks will be getting my business again for the time being.

Here's a -1 to Starbucks: the music is too loud. I have my iPhone with me, so if I want to listen to music while I work, then I'll sort that out for myself thanks. Right now, I'm listening to Paul Jones BBC2 Rhythm & Blues Hour from a couple of weeks ago, and really enjoying, but I have to turn it up quite loud to block out what sounds like Jazz Odyssey in the background. So, Starbucks: if I want to listen to the two girls sitting next to me discussing who got with who at the party last night I can't hear them because of your music and if I don't then I can't hear my music because of your music. Loud music in coffee shops is so last century. Please turn it down.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

A comment on tax

2011-09-29T20:27:00.001+01:00

Suppose you earn £40,000 per annum. You decide that you want to improve your quality of life, so you decide to work four days per week instead of five and make do with £32,000 per annum. With a marginal rate of tax at 51% (40% income tax plus 11% national insurance), you take a salary cut of £8,000 but are only £4,000 per annum worse off. If you've paid off your mortgage and the kids are all college, you might well prefer a four day week with time to pursue your hobbies over the extra £80 per week.

This isn't idle speculation, because I know people who have already done this. Therefore, the net gain to Exchequer from the 50p tax rate is negative. If an employer has a couple of people who do this, and hires a part-timer to fill in for them, then the overall tax take is substantially less, although I suppose you could argue that having three people employed part-time (provided that's what they all want) is better for society than having two people full time and one on benefit.

More than 2,000 tax inspectors will be recruited to crack down on tax evasion among the wealthiest people in the UK… Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the Lib Dem conference that this would ensure 350,000 top earners paid their "fair share" of tax.
[From BBC News - Lib Dem conference: Minister signals tax crackdown]

Since really, really rich people don't pay tax anyway, all this suggests to me that the days of income tax are numbered and the sooner it is scrapped, the better. We should have introduced a land value tax back in Victorian times, it's time to bite the bullet. Now, people who live in big houses around Woking might whine about it, but it's a much fairer way of funding the state (and it can't be dodged).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

That's with a "z"

2011-08-26T17:02:00.001+01:00

I enjoy reading Spiked Online of a Friday afternoon with my winding-down cuppa. I'd just got off the phone to Canada and put my feet up with some Yorkshire Gold when I read

Nobby’s disdain for south London – ‘It’s a karzi’, he says, ‘I wouldn’t go there in a tank’
[From Burnt Oak: it ain’t all doom and gloom | Brendan O’Neill | spiked]

Oh dear. Brendan O'Neill has confused khazi (British slang for toilet) with karzi (a misspelling of the name of the Prime Minister of Afghanistan), a mistake I often mentally trip over.

If I hear on the news about Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, in my head I picture noted English actor Kenneth Williams. That’s because he starred as the Khazi of Khalibar, the head of the Pashtun (I assume) opponents of the British Raj in the greatest film of the Carry On series (in fact one of the greatest English films of all time) Carry On up the Khyber.
[From a blog from a Citizen of Woking: One up the Khyber]

I shall e-mail him immediately.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

There's a riot goin' on

2011-08-20T18:43:00.001+01:00

Unfortunately, with the continuous low-level background of crime to which we British have been conditioned, there's not much hope of improvement in the quality of life in the foreseeable future.

You have to WANT to be caught to be prosecuted for any half-serious crime nowadays, whereas the police are pretty good at the trivial stuff.
[From PC Bloggs - a Twenty-first Century Police Officer: Will the real blogger please stand up?]

Indeed. And the latest Channel 4 figures prove it. You're much more likely to be a victim of serious crime in London than in New York, presumably because the police are busy giving out speeding tickets and arresting people for over-filling their recycling bins. There's been a lot of serious crime recently. I woke up on a Sunday morning recently to the news channels reporting a night of criminal violence and looting in north London. Apparently the police abandoned the streets to gangs who were able to empty retail premises at a leisurely pace, burning down shops, setting fire to cars, that sort of thing.

On Saturday night, shops and homes were raided and cash machines ripped out in Tottenham. There were also thefts from shops in nearby Wood Green.
[From BBC News - London riots: Met Police launch Operation Withern]

Where were the rubber bullets? I have a conspiracy theory. The government has asked the police to cut their spending back to 2008 levels, so the police responded by letting London burn, thus making it politically impossible for the government to impose cuts. It's been a win-win for them: lots of easy people to arrest and a great PR win over the evil Tories at the same time.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Feeling a little blue (helmet)

2011-08-11T18:31:00.001+01:00

I see that Iran is ready to contribute to a UN Peacekeeping force to help Britain control its rampaging underclass. Now, normally, the opportunity to have other countries' taxpayers fork out help us would be welcome, but I fear this is one specific idea that I will not support.

Iranian military commanders say that if the United Nations decides to send peacekeepers to the U.K., Iranian troops are ready to go now.
[From Britain Burning: Iran ready to send troops, calls U.K. leaders autocratic oppressors | Blind Bat News]

But in her excellent book Emergency Sex, Heidi Postlewait recounts her time with UN in various places in Europe, Asia and Africa and concludes with a very stark and specific piece of advice (I paraphrase, since I don't have the book to hand) that if some UN chaps with blue helmets arrive at your village and tell you that they are there to protect, grab what you can and run, don't walk, in the opposite direction as fast as you can. So I think we should turn down Iran's kind offer.

However, I can see one area where Iran might be able to provide practical support. Our Prime Minister, David Cameron (Eton, Oxford -- a man well-versed in modern technology and with a Digital Champion to hand in the form of Martha Lane Fox (Westminster, Oxford) who understands modern youth and their use of that technology -- has his finger on the pulse and intends to "crack down" on social media to prevent looting in the future. Now, I understand that in Iran, the revolutionary guards have been forcing suspected troublemakers to log in to their Facebook accounts in front of them so that they can see if the miscreants have been posting counterrevolutionary or blasphemous messages, or if their friends had. Perhaps some Revolutionary Guards could be dispatched to the streets of Hackney, where they could support the Prime Minister's strategy by asking passing youths to log in to Facebook, Twitter and BBM. If they see a message saying something like "Meet at Currys at 3am" then they could execute a citizen's arrest. Job done.

Facebook has been banned in Pakistan for a year or so, and I imagine civil disorder must have fallen substantially in that time.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Deranged debit

2011-07-17T11:06:00.001+01:00

I got a letter from the tax persons today, pointing out that after paying tens of thousands of pounds in tax over the later year, I still owed them about fifty quid. I put it in my bils pile, because I generally do the bills on Sunday morning when I log into to my internet banking and pay things. I was surprised to see a flyer tucked in to my tax bill, though, inviting me fill out a direct debit form for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs so that they could, in future, remove the money directly from my bank account.

Are they nuts? Who is responsible for this potty pamphlet? Anyone with even a passing knowledge of public sector IT would sooner fill out a direct debit to the widow of former Nigerian strongman General Sani Abacha, who only this morning e-mailed me with news of a financially-rewarding scheme, than give the Revenue this access.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

By, of, and for... the consultants

2011-07-09T10:56:00.001+01:00

There were several Twitter conversations going on last week about UK public sector IT. Generally speaking, it's been pretty disastrous and billions of pounds have been completely wasted. Why? There are lots of theories, but mine is that the nature of the British establishment means that all technology-related policy is disastrous.

When the words "former management consultants" are invoked, watch out. There is very little idealism in these types, mainly on a gravy train and with a tendency to just re-formulate and re-play back what the people working for their customers tell them.
[From Charles Moore warns that the Downing Street machine isn't working | The Spectator]

As someone once said - but I can't find on Google - New Labour created a government by, of and for management consultants. It was inevitably going to wreck both the economy and society. How different things are in a successful operation.

Agarwal tells us that Apple is completely run by its engineers. "They don’t have a lot of product management," he says. "Most of the project teams are really small, and they’re all driven by the engineers." On top of that, Agarwal says that most managers are all engineers as well, "not product people or MBAs." That means that the people overseeing projects understand the technology, what's necessary for a project, and can really relate to their team.
[From 8 Management Lessons I Learned Working At Apple]

This so very different a culture to public sector organisations in the UK, where being an engineer, or having any understanding of a technical topic at all, is see as a positive disadvantage. This is all rooted in Britain's pernicious class structure. When you go into a meeting with senior civil servant about some important and expensive IT project, he or she will almost certainly begin the conversation by telling you that, of course, they don't understand the technology. Which is true, they don't. But that's not what they are really telling you, which is that you are "trade" - you are a member of the grubby commercial class, and scarcely fit to be in their presence. From then on, your comments about the feasibility or otherwise of the proposed scheme/system/standard can be simply discounted before the project is handed over to one of the large management consultancies to run for a few years before it gets cancelled. And the civil servant you are talking to doesn't care in the slightest.

MP Richard Bacon suggested yesterday that the only accountability for the failure of the project was Sir Robert Kerslake's having an uncomfortable two hours before the Public Accounts Committee. As for his officials, the only accountability for the waste of £469m was to sit in seats behind him, periodically passing him notes.
[From £469m waste on Firecontrol vindicates setting up of Cabinet Office's Major Projects Authority - The Tony Collins Blog]

Half-a-billion quid down the train, and no-one so much as struck off of the Departmental Winter Festival card list.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

It's always economics in the end

2011-06-30T17:34:00.001+01:00

The War on (some) Drugs doesn't seem to have been going to particularly well recently,

I should have listened to the Drug Enforcement Administration official who told me that wholesale heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were sufficiently cheap and easy to smuggle that synthetics had no real marketplace advantage. He was right, and I've been reluctant to commit acts of prophesy ever since.
[From Synthetic pot: Bloomberg BusinessWeek files a dandy drug-capitalism story. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine]

That's amazing, isn't it: There's no market for synthetic drugs because the natural drugs are cheaper, even with the billions of dollars spent on law enforcement, interdiction, education, prison and everything else. Perhaps the solution is make the synthetic drugs not cheaper than the natural ones but better. There are plenty of people working on "nutriceuticals" so a breakthrough can only be around the corner. Who's going to buy Afghan opium when the man-made opium will work better, make you smarter and improve your sex life (or whatever).

What with the ageing population, that I was reading about yet again today because of the strike by communist fifth-columnists in government empty, the business opportunities are obvious. Someone is bound to invent something that's a bit like MDMA but that improves your memory. They'll make a fortune.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Hitchhikers guide

2011-06-05T12:03:00.001+01:00

You know those horror stories you used to hear when you were a kid, where a friend of a friend picks up a hitchhiker only to later discover that the hitchhiker had died years before, or was the the spirit or serial killer, or whatever? Well how much scary would it be to pick up a hitchhiker only to discover it was noted celtic caterwauler Bono, leader of the famous Dutch beat combo U2.

Edmonton Oilers center Gilbert Brule found something very unusual on the side of the road while taking a drive in West Vancouver -- U2 frontman Bono, the Edmonton Journal reported Thursday... After hopping in, Bono, by now sitting in the back beside the couple's dog, told them they had gone for a walk only for it to start raining.
[From Professional Hockey Player Picks Up Hitchhiking U2 Frontman Bono - FoxNews.com]

A nightmare from which you might never recover. But if it does happen to you, there may be therapy available at this year's Glastonbury Festival, a traditional English fayre at which the privileged gather to listen to members of the artistic establishment bemoan capitalism (except for record companies). This year, however, anti-tax avoidance protesters finally going to make it a happening and relevant place, as it used to three decades ago...

Members of activist group Art Uncut will hoist a massive inflatable sign with the message 'Bono Pay Up' spelt out in lights during the Irish band's headline performance.
[From 'Saint Bono' facing huge Glastonbury protest ¿ for avoiding tax | Mail Online]

This is because the communist ingrates are upset about U2's perfectly natural tax avoidance strategy. They are just doing what anyone else in their right mind would do, and adopting perfectly legal tax avoidance methods in order to minimise their payments to governments, thus leaving as much money as possible in their own hands for their own good works.

Ireland changed its tax laws in 2006 so that the earnings of artists fell within the tax net if they exceeded Euros 250,000 a year. Extraordinarily, they had been exempt whatever the amount until then. For 99% of all artists this did not, of course, have any impact on their tax affairs. For Bono and his U2 colleagues it did... and despite the fact that they could have kept them in an Irish company and have paid no more than 12.5% tax... They did instead shift the place in which they recorded their royalties as being earned to the Netherlands. As a result they cut the potential tax they might pay to no more 5%, because that’s what the Netherlands allows.
[From Netherlands » Tax Research UK]

These good works, naturally, include investments intended to boost the amount of money available charitable donations, third-world debt relief and so forth downstream.

Bono, the Irish rock star, is being hailed as "the worst investor in America" as his five person investment team Elevation Partners reels from a series of unprofitable investments. It's believed that the rocker has lost millions by investing with Elevation... which investment trade papers are calling arguably the worst run institutional fund of any size in the United States.
[From U2's Bono called the worst investor in America | Irish Business | IrishCentral]

Hhhhmmm. Perhaps Bono had the wrong investment advisor.

I wonder if he sold his gold records as well.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

What a night!

2011-05-30T20:10:00.001+01:00

Great night out at the O2. We went to see Roger Water perform "The Wall" (out of total nostalgia) and guess what...

David Gilmour joined old band mate Roger Waters on stage tonight at London’s O2 Arena to perform in Roger Waters’ epic tour of The Wall! David played lead guitar on Comfortably Numb using his black Fender Stratocaster guitar and also brought his mandolin out at the end of the show... also attended by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason.
[From David Gilmour Joins Roger Waters On Stage at London O2]

Amazing. I'm sure I wasn't the only person in the London audience who had been to see "The Wall" when it was originally performed 30 years ago.

The concept album was originally toured by Pink Floyd in 1980 and 1981 in only 4 cities due to the colossal size of the production! The show made the band a financial loss due to the expense of staging it.
[From David Gilmour Joins Roger Waters On Stage at London O2]

And I saw it then too - in both years, in London. It's something to do with the cycle of life, but I've been reflecting on how I enjoyed the concerts in different ways. When I saw it in 1980 and 1981, I was just there to enjoy some great music (I always loved "The Wall" -- I can remember listening to it over and over in the living room of the house I shared with mates at Uni) with some great mates. Listening to it as a "grown up" (and not off your face) was a very different experience, because you were following the story, and understanding more about emotional content. The evening went by in a flash - wonderful.

It was, naturally, made even better by the tidal wave of envy I unleashed after twittering all about Dave Gilmour's appearance!

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

We don't need no... um... ahh..

2011-05-07T22:59:00.001+01:00

Oh no, I was forced to start thinking about education again, and this during the school holidays, because I sat next to two women talking on a train back from London yesterday. One of them was a teacher, and although I didn't hear all of the conversation, I did hear her say that she had taught in both state schools and in private schools and that when she had children (she looked around 30 I guess) she hoped that she would be able to afford to send them to private school. All this while her union, presumably, campaigns to force the children of the masses into state edukashun camps under their control.

I sat in a lesson in a top public school the other day in which the children were learning about the Treaty of Versailles. I swear I'm not exaggerating: in that one lesson they learnt more than they would learn in an entire term in some of our state schools.
[From Katharine Birbalsingh: 'The middle class is disguising the failings of state schools in the inner cities' | Education | The Observer]

The only way out of this is to make all schools private.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Arty-farty

2011-04-22T10:29:00.001+01:00

Nothing winds me up more at the moment than hearing rich film stars complaining about government arts funding in the UK. I have no objection to people funding arts projects. Let's be clear about that. Let me be the first go on a record to say that I have absolutely no objection to multi-millionaires Kenneth Branagh or Helen Mirren (who was paid £500K for two days work by Nintendo) funding any or all arts projects that they see fit anywhere in the UK.

I suggest that instead of writing letters to The Observer they write letters to old Etonian Hugh Laurie, who earns more than $400,000 per episode for the American medical soap "House". Each episode could pay for one regional theatre company for a year, or something like that. I think the general public would be moved to see the artistic community banding together in this way.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Waiting, waiting

2011-04-12T03:24:00.000+01:00

Oh man, I watched something horrifying on my last plane journey. I was flicking through the movies looking for something to watch after spending four solid hours typing on my laptop. I couldn't see anything that looked appealing that I hadn't seen, and I certainly wasn't going to watch Harry Potter, but then I spotted a title I didn't recognise. I chose it. The strapline was that it was documentary about the American public school system. Yawn. Still sounded better than Harry Potter. So I started watching it.

It was compelling, interesting, well-made, fascinating and above all, horrifying. Every day I am tortured by middle-class guilt because I didn't send my kids to private school and this didn't make me feel any better (even thought it was about the US). Public schools are failing us.

England's primary trainee teachers came second to last out of eight countries with a score of 32.2 out of 60.
[From BBC News - England's teacher trainees 'do worse' in maths tests]

The filmmaker began by noting that he drove past three public schools every day while he was taking his own children to private school. I liked this: I can't stand liberal posturing about education from people at (for example) newspapers who went to private schools and Oxbridge and send their own children to private school in turn.

In essence, the point of the documentary was that the biggest problem in American schools is the teacher's unions, which I'm sure applies equally in the UK.

One of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life was the footage from the "rubber room" in New York where teachers who are suspended awaiting a hearing for a variety of disciplinary problems (up to and including sexual abuse). They do absolutely nothing all day here. In the US, 1 in 57 doctors will lose his medical licence. Around 1 in 100 lawyers will be struck off. And, of course, people don't chose bad doctors or lawyers, so the bad ones do less damage. Only 1 in 2500 teachers will be fired, and they basically have to kill someone to do that.

Despite years of reform, capital investment, targets, increased assessments and testing, a great deal of comprehensive education languishes far behind that offered by the independent sector and, indeed, other European nations. The manner in which private-school students dominate the elites of politics, law, business and media, not to mention Oxbridge colleges, is sobering enough for middle-class parents who have the resources and ability to add value to state education, but it leaves the vast majority of working-class children, especially those with minimal parental back-up, with little to no chance of bridging an ever-widening divide.
[From Katharine Birbalsingh: 'The middle class is disguising the failings of state schools in the inner cities' | Education | The Observer]

Anyway, the documentary was about the US charter school movement. It featured an incredible guy called Geoffrey Canada, who started a charter school in the worst-performing school district in New York, in Harlem. I won't spoil the movie by telling you any more, but it's well worth your time. Watch "Waiting for Superman" when you have a chance.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Maximum

2011-03-25T15:34:00.001Z

Never mind having a minimum age for voting -- which really should be much higher than it is now, say maybe 21 at the very least -- pretty soon we're going to have to introduce a maximum age for voting. I can't see any other way of avoiding the coming age riots of 2025 (when the youth of the western world will commemorate the Watts race riots of 1965 by going on the rampage to demand equality) than by stopping the old from voting. Otherwise the inevitable, inexorable steamroller of the dismal science will guarantee intergenerational conflict. The problem is simply that neither politicians nor journalists nor voters can understand the basic facts.

Politics is not about economics tutorials. Political journalists can’t or won’t understand anything more than a soundbite, so giving them a lengthy lecture about economics makes as much sense as reciting poetry to a pig.
[From Stumbling and Mumbling: Expertise in politics]

Now that may be a little unfair to all journalists. For example: hereditary celebrity and Oxford graduate Stephanie Flanders, the millionaire BBC Economics Editor and former girlfriend of new Labour leader Miliband, E., went to one of the most expensive private schools in the country (St. Paul's) and so can clearly understand economics tutorials. And she noted recently that

Here's the stark reality: employment in the UK has risen by 296,000 since the start of 2010, and 75% of those jobs - or 222,000 - have gone to people over 50. Just under 44% of the jobs have gone to the 3% of workers over 65. For comparison, the number of 16-17 year olds in work has fallen by nearly 8% over the same period
[From BBC - Stephanomics: Jobs for the boys - and the over 65s]

But not all journalists have this excellent grounding and a great many of them know perfectly well that even if they did understand the economics, it wouldn't make any difference to what they might report.

As someone once said, in politics, if you have to explain you’ve lost the debate.
[From Stumbling and Mumbling: Expertise in politics]

Well, that's just a sad, but true, signpost on the road to disaster that we seem unable to turn off. Why does this matter?

At the last election, over 55s accounted for more than 10 million votes cast - 40% of the total. In 24 constituencies, they accounted for more than half the votes cast (and there will be more constituencies like them when we next go to the polls).
[From Nick Cohen: Loth as I am to give Joan Bakewell a kicking... | Comment is free | The Observer]

You won't see an article in the Daily Mail arguing that old people should start paying back some of the largesse that the Joan Bakewell generation acquired through political capture, but the truth is that as they come to dominate the political environment so it will become impossible take even the slightest steps to redress the balance. Meanwhile doctors are thinking of going on strike because they want to continue to retire at 60 while the rest of us work until we drop.

the true cost of these pensions ranges from 34.7 per cent of salary for a male teacher, up to 71.8 per cent for a policewoman. No wonder the Government Actuary’s Department calculates that taxpayers will have to find a total of £770bn in future to deliver unfunded pensions already promised to public sector workers.
[From Arresting cost of police pensions – and five steps to boost yours – Telegraph Blogs]

This is why I am telling my kids to leave the country before the civil war between the unemployed or highly-taxed young and the retired old begins.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Classy

2011-03-23T22:47:00.001Z

I think I prefer British Airways business class to American Airlines. I like the ergonomic "cocoon" seats on BA and I find them more comfortable for working. But there were three things that struck me about AA that BA ought to adopt immediately. First of all, they had much nicer coffee than BA. Whether it's the coffee itself, or the way it is brewed I don't know, but it was definitely better. Secondly, instead of the crappy headsets you get on BA, they give you Bose noise-cancelling headsets and these are so much better and so much more comfortable than normal airplane headsets. Watching TV shows, movies and listening to Eric Clapton's greatest hits were all made considerably more pleasurable through the simple expedient of better headsets. At, what, $100 per seat to buy these would be an excellent investment for our flag carrier. And finally, the toilets are much bigger and much more comfortable than even the first class toilets on BA. I guess AA have the plane configured with less galley space? I couldn't quite figure it out, but they were definitely way bigger.

Now, I do realise that when the burning issue of the day that I am moved to blog on is the comparison of business class seats on transatlantic flights it can reasonably be said that I do not reflect the median, but it's budget day back home and by the time I post this I will be considerably poorer.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Confused by the news

2011-03-19T10:56:00.001Z

Internet safety has been back in the news again. Reminds of something I saw a few weeks ago.

The IWF circulates a list to ISPs of sites found to be hosting illegal images of child sexual abuse
[From BBC News - Internet porn block 'not possible' say ISPs]

Is there another list of the sites found to be hosting legal images of child sexual abuse?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Chicks dig jerks

2011-03-09T19:20:00.001Z

I don't get it. I really don't. I just watched a movie where a woman who works at a bank falls in love with one of the bank robbers. He is a thief and part of an armed gang that murder people. Now, I know it's a tradition in movies to see bank robbers as heroes (oddly, in my opinion, since none of them have ever robbed anything like as much from banks and their own management - Barclays paid £150m in bonuses to top management last year and I doubt that they've suffered £150m in robberies in their entire existence) but the film left me really puzzled. Why would the attractive and sexy (and apparently smart) woman fall for the criminal? He was, of course, very handsome, but surely in real life this wouldn't happen.

Wrong. That is real life. A sad lesson that was brought home to me in early puberty. Chicks dig jerks, as the old saying goes (doesn't it?). You don't get the girl by doing your homework, passing your British Constitution 'O' Level and helping with the lighting deck for the school play. Rudimentary evolutionary biology would surely indicate that fertile females would value these secondary signals of long-term ability to support offspring through to reproductive maturity, but no-one had told the girls at the Richard Jeffries Secondary School in Swindon.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Fruit and cakes

2011-03-08T14:17:00.000Z

Another bonkers New Labour doomed experiment in social control hits the buffers. I should explain to foreign readers that the British welfare state has been optimised to ensure that middle-class people face severe penalties should they decide to reproduce, part of a post-war Marxist drive to eradicate the bourgoisie, and find themselves taxed to penury. Meanwhile, the people least able to support and nurture the next generation are encourage to reproduce without limit. Anyway, hilariously, under the Brown junta, is was decided to give 600,000 women on benefit shopping vouchers for £322 per year while they are pregnant or have babies. Now, the results of this mental programme were entirely predictable to anyone with even the most rudimentary acquaintance with the British underclass (eg, people like me who have to live near them, but not Cherie Blair or Harriet Harman). And guess what?

Now a Government survey of more than 2,000 retailers, health professionals and recipients has found that more than one in five knew of occasions when shops had swapped the tokens for products outside the scheme. Critics said the findings showed that the nanny state had encouraged “shameless behaviour” by those keen to exploit the system. As well as trading vouchers for alcohol and cigarettes, supermarkets and small convenience stores had allowed them to be used to pay for nappies, baby products, general groceries, bread, eggs and meat, the report found.
[From New mothers swap fruit vouchers for booze and cigarettes - Telegraph]

Who would have thought?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Hacked off

2011-01-30T20:08:00.000Z

There was more on TV about the News of the World phone "hacking" scandal today. I've sort of lost interest in it, so I can't say I've been following every twist and turn. I assumed it was a battle in the BBC/Guardian vs. New International war, so I was unclear as to what was at the root of it (which, I think, was something to do with slebs being too thick to change the default passcode on their voicemail services). Anyway, I saw this thing about it on the news, and once again the newsreader used the example of Sienna Miller. They refer to her as an actress, but I've no idea who she is, and can't be bothered to go and look her up on IMDB. I didn't recognise her from any films, as far as I could tell. So why is she the "poster child" of the scandal? I assume she already has more money than I will ever have in my entire life and that she will never have to work again, so it's not like I'm going to feel sorry for her, and I'm pretty sure her voicemail messages weren't at the wikileaks level, so no-one cared about those either.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Comfortably dumb

2011-01-14T07:13:00.001Z

I haven't yet got over the shock of nodding in agreement to Julie Burchill's December outburst in The Independent, lambasting the new aristocracy (founded on celebrity rather than land ownership) and its devastating impact on our society. She mentioned in passing the case of Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour (who has an £84m fortune). Naturally, his son went to an expensive private school and Oxbridge and, more recently, went off to stick it to the man.

Gilmour - who studies history at Cambridge University - issued a grovelling apology, but incredibly claimed he did not realise he was insulting the memory of Britain's war dead.
[From Student riots | Cenotaph yob is son of Pink Floyd star Dave Gilmour | The Sun |News]

A testament to New Labour's legacy, where only the privately-educated can expect a decent education and a place at Oxbridge (private school pupils, according to the latest figures, are 22 times more likely to get into a "top" university), yet they are as dumb as the sea of chavs they float above.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

What's special about porn?

2010-12-19T16:51:00.001Z

Today's news contains an exciting announcement about the internet in the UK.

The UK government plans to legislate to make households "opt in" to be able to access porn on the internet. ISPs are expected to put some kind of registration, age-related classification and/or filtering mechanisms in place.
[From Racingsnake - Robin Wilton's Esoterica: UK Govt plans to "turn off" internet porn]

Well, this is excellent news: someone has discovered how to read and interpret the contents of internet traffic so that ISP can filer out porn. But I'm curious as to why porn is the only category for blocking: what about Islamist hate sites and anything to do with the X-Factor? Surely the government's commitment to protecting the children should extend to bomb-making instructions, Facebook pages connected to gang crime in South London and political parties espousing demonstrably harmful philosophies, such as socialism.

Sounds like a joke? Of course: no such filter exists, the ISPs will just have list of IP addresses to block. Will we get to vote which IP addresses go on this list? Will the police compile it? Or Mumsnet? And another thing. I'm not being facetious, but what's special about porn? I already have my own filter at home, which blocks porn and a variety of other categories of sites (eg, gambling). I'm far more upset about the Daily Star being on open sale in the local newsagents (typical front page: paparazzi shot of the knickers of some soap actress falling drunk out of a cab), because I have no control over that.

You can understand the government's desire to have some control over the material reaching the ill-educated masses, but I guarantee it will only be a matter of time, once this magical filter is in place, before you'll have MPs calling for Wikileaks and Frankie Boyle's blog to be banned as well.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Traditional value

2010-12-17T10:11:00.001Z

A few days ago, my son found some money in the road outside our house. A few tens of pounds. It was a little soggy, which suggested to me with my CSI:Woking hat on, that one of the local drunken louts had dropped it on the way back from the pub on Friday night. He came back in with the money and asked what to do. I told him that we would hold it for a couple of days to see if anyone came round or put a note through the door asking about money lost in the street, and then we would give it to charity, and he could choose the charity. All fair enough.

After he left though, I got a lump in my throat: we raised a good kid. I'll bet a lot of broke teenagers who desperately want every penny they can get to funnel to Phillip Green's wife via the local branch of Top Man would have just put the money in the their pocket and said no more about it.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The whole "law" thing is very confusing

2010-12-05T15:43:00.001Z

I am not a lawyer, hence I don't understand the English legal system in the slightest, since the system is constructed by and for them.

There was a fuss among the twitterati, led by Stephen Fry, because a chap twittered that he was going to blow up Nottingham airport. The police, who presumably monitor twitter diligently, arrested him and he was found guilty.

A man who posted a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport is facing a £3,000 bill after losing an appeal against his conviction.
[From BBC News - Man in Twitter bomb threat against airport loses appeal]

A few days later there was another case, involving the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, following on from some of her typically deranged ranting on the BBC.

A Conservative Birmingham City councillor has been arrested over allegations he called on Twitter for a female writer to be stoned to death.
[From BBC News - Tory councillor arrested over Twitter stoning post]

Now, in both of these cases, the person arrested was clearly joking, although the "joke" was pretty poor. Contrast this with the treatment of some people who don't appear to be joking at all.

On November 12, he wrote: ‘Burn your apartment with your family tied to the couch. And slit your throat, so when you scream, only blood comes out.’
[From Facebook death threats: 5 Muslim boys and white girl excluded from school | Mail Online]

Facebook "is the problem"? Oh please. I couldn't find any reference to this story on the BBC, so I've posted the Daily Mail link instead. But I'm curious: why weren't these people arrested? Could a lawyer please help me to understand the difference between the cases? I really don't want to fall foul of the law, but there is a possibility that I may call for someone to murdered in the future, and i want to make sure that I do it the right way. So am I on safe ground if I tweet that I'm going to cut your throat, but not if I tweet that I'm going to blow you up or stone you?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Blitzed

2010-12-02T20:04:00.001Z

Well I have to say that the blitz spirit was very much in evidence at Woking during the whiteout. It's not surprising, since commuters used to dealing with South West Train during clement weather are already used to standing up in overcrowded, cold trains. Therefore people were friendly, helpful and understanding. Since I had work to do, and suspected that the trains might be intermittent, I opted for a 1st class ticket. What a waste of money. The first train that arrived was full and standing even in 1st class so I couldn't get on it at all, the second train that arrived had space in 1st class so I got on but there was no heating. Oh well. On the way back, the 1st class carriages were completely jammed full, since the proletariat had (correctly) determined that there was not the slightest chance of a ticket inspection. I was crushed into the middle of an economy-class cattle truck in conditions that would be illegal if employed to move cows around.

Coming back from Waterloo was an eye-opener. First of all, it was total chaos. But second of all, it was most un-British chaos. This must be something to do with New Labour's policy on uncontrolled mass immigration over the last decade. But people were - literally - fighting to get on to trains (to the point where the police were called to try and keep order) and as people were jamming themselves on to any train they could find heading in the right direction there was considerable unpleasantness. There were voices raised, abuse and jostling. It was very disappointing. I don't understand why people don't understand that an orderly queue is that natural state of affairs.

What turned it into a natural disaster, though, was that because it took so long to get home - I was on a slow relief train that stopped at every station - my iPhone battery ran out. I was instantly cut off from Mott the Hoople Live in Los Angeles (Welcome to the Club) and forced to listen to the people around me. Aaargh. I woman behind spent at least twenty minutes yelling into a mobile phone in a language I couldn't identify (it sounded South Asian) while the guy that I was crushed up next to was talking to a loved in an unfamiliar slavic tongue, perhaps Bulgarian. I couldn't read my book with one hand standing up so i ended spending an our vowing to never, ever get on a train again with a fully charged backup battery for my iPhone. Never, ever, again.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

This is where I live

2010-11-27T08:26:00.000Z

What's the big news in my neck of the woods? World War III? Couldn't care less, North Korean ballistic missiles can't reach Surrey. The collapse of the euro? Serves them right, that's why we never joined. Tory peer moaning about the poor breeding? What do you expect, it's basic economics. What will get us out on the streets? Well, nothing really. But some of us will be outraged on twitter for a while.

Simultaneously outraged, ripped-off and illiterate. This is where I live.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Left or right?

2010-11-22T09:17:00.001Z

In the October 2010 edition of Prospect magazine, there is a fascinating article about a simple experiment to explore moral perspectives. I won't go into all the details, except to note that the thought experiment rests on notions of railways, tracks and switches: essentially, people are asked to make choices about life and death. In one experiment, you can set the switch to send an out-of-control train down one branch, where it will kill five people, or down another branch, where it will kill one person. That sort of thing. Quite the most surprising result of the experiments concerns the difference between liberals and conservatives.

In an experiment where subjects could save a Philharmonic orchestra by pushing an African American on to the tracks or could save the Harlem Jazz Orchestra by pushing a WASP on to the tracks, the liberals showed a marked propensity to make different choices, whereas conservatives did not. The lesson that I took from this is that conservatives make decisions according to a set of moral principles and are "colour blind" in the sense that they do not modify their position according to the race, gender, age, nationality or sexual orientation of the actors. A true commitment to equality. I think I fall into that category: things are right or wrong and it doesn't depend on who is doing them. Does this condemn me as a reactionary, permanently out of phase with the world from now on?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Connections

2010-11-02T22:56:00.001Z

There are two stories next to each other in the local paper this week. I wonder if there might be some connection between them? The first was a story about an elderly gentleman who has been burgled repeatedly over the last three years. He was commenting on the most recent theft (of a motorbike) and said that he had given the police detailed descriptions of the thieves, but so far the police had not found either the thieves or the bike. The second story was about a day-long police crackdown on drivers on a particular road. They gave out a couple of speeding tickets, a ticket for using a mobile phone, found someone driving uninsured (and fined him £200 -- much less than the cost of insurance) and a few other minor offences. Quite how many policepersons and time this all took isn't mentioned.

Someone has to make choices about what the police do. I have no idea whether they should spend time looking for motorists without insurance or reducing burglaries -- but I know that I wasn't asked.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Streets and shame

2010-10-19T22:34:00.001+01:00

So the public sector are going to "take to the streets" we're told, over efforts to keep their pension bill from bankrupting the nation. Well screw them. We should be taking to the streets to complain about the public sector.

A council which paid out more than £500,000 making 12 human resources staff redundant hired 11 new employees to replace them
[From £500,000 pay-off to staff then council hires 11 new people | News]

I happened to go to a meeting today near Parliament and there was some sort of demonstration going, with a lot of Unison banners going on about education.

The average gap in achievement in science, mathematics and reading between those attending state and independent schools is indeed larger in Britain than in any of its allies in the OECD.
[From Article | Full Fact - FullFact.org]

I didn't have the time, but I would have enjoyed making my own banner calling for all schools to be privatised immediately as the only way to stop us from sliding into a new dark age.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

And the emma goes to...

2010-10-11T22:17:00.000+01:00

Hereditary celebrity and Cambridge footlight millionairess Emma Thompson is upset by the way the young people speak.

She says people who speak improperly make her feel "insane"
[From BBC News - Teen slang: What's, like, so wrong with like?]

This is down to our education system I imagine. Emma, as a prominent supporter of the Labour Party all her life, has contributed in no small way to the current state of Britain's schools after more than a decade of Edukashun Edukashun Edukashun. Don't believe me? I would have thought that the poor level of education in the UK was evident from the success of Emma's "Nanny McPhee" films. Having seen the trailer at the cinema, and immediately having resolved to never even accidentally watch one second of it, I was astonished to discover that people had paid good money to go and see it. You can't have it both ways Emma: either people are uneducated enough to go to your movie or they're educated enough to talk properly.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Rescan

2010-10-04T19:57:00.000+01:00

Our local Waitrose has a self-scanning system (in fact, has done for years), so you have your own barcode reader and as you go around the shop you pick up the things you want, scan them yourself and then put them in your shopping bag. It's a good system, and it save time and queues because when you have finished shopping you just put your chip and PIN card in to pay and then go. Since your shopping is already in shopping bags, you're off.

Occasionally, the computer will ask an assistant to take a couple of random things out of your shopping bag and scan them to check that you're scanned them in properly. This doesn't happen that often, maybe once a year or something, so it's no inconvenience. Today, though, when I went to check out, the computer called for a "rescan". This was tedious, because it meant that I had to take everything out of my shopping bags and have the assistant re-scan all of them, It's presumably a random anti-fraud check.

What stress! As far as I knew I'd scanned everything properly. But as I stood there waiting for the assistant to finish, I began to panic. What if there was something in the bad that I hadn't scanned. What if I'd forgotten something? What if my impending senility had led me to completely forget to scan something? I would be forever branded a criminal by the John Lewis supercomputer and I would never be able to hold my head up in middle-class Britain again.

Why does this happen? What is it in our brains that triggers the sensations of guilt in these circumstances?

Everything in the bag had been scanned correctly, of course, since it's second nature now. But when I left, I definitely had an increased heart rate and sweaty palms.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

If there's a gene for stupdity, the UK is carrying it

2010-10-01T13:29:00.001+01:00

I was listening to the Radio 5 Live phone-in programme while I was working the other day. There had been a news report in the morning about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), otherwise known by its proper name of "bad parent syndrome". Some researchers at Cardiff had discovered a statistically-significant variation.

They found that 15% of the ADHD group had large and rare variations in their DNA - compared with 7% in the control group.
[From BBC News - New study claims ADHD 'has a genetic link']

Who knows what this actually means. But the BBC had a phone-in on the topic, always risky in our innumerate and semi-literate society. A female member of the underclass called in, to support the Cardiff research.

Her reasoning was impeccable.

She said, essentially...

1. I have eight children by three different fathers (at least one of whom is currently in jail, as are some of the children).

2. Seven of the eight children have been diagnosed with ADHD, so that suggests a genetic factor.

3. Because they have different fathers, I must be carrying the gene for ADHD.

4. Since it is a genetic problem, just like cystic fibrosis or whatever, it's not my fault.

Brilliant, just brilliant, and a shining example of what New Labour's Edukashun Edukashun Edukashun policy has done for the country: that is, having failed to impart any scientific or mathematical knowledge, it has filled the void with a culture of irresponsibility. Instead of this woman apologising to citizens and taxpayers for having eight children that neither she or nor any of the fathers could look after properly and then throwing herself on the mercy of the public, she was able to lay the entire problem at the door of her unfortunate genes and therefore shake off the last vestigial, submerged feelings of responsibility. I think they call this "socialism: I wonder if that has a genetic cause as well? I will scour the BBC's web site to find out.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The man for the job

2010-09-24T14:30:00.001+01:00

One of the reasons for the impending age wars is the size of Britain's public sector. It's not just that it is enormous and will bankrupt us because of its pension obligations, but also that it's not very good value for money.

The public services are riddled with ‘bone idle people’ who have damaged the productivity of the state sector, a leading fire chief has claimed.
[From Fire chief Tony McGuirk 's devastating verdict on bone idle public sector | Mail Online]

This is hardly a maverick perspective, and it is echoed in other areas of public life.

David Forster reportedly said the NHS employed "too many who are lazy, unproductive, obstinate, militant, aggressive at every turn".
[From BBC News - NHS director disciplined over 'lazy staff' comments]

I'm afraid this is inevitable with nationalised industries that can't go bankrupt, whether French air-traffic control, Greek post offices or British health care. But what to do? Clearly we need a substantial reduction in the size of the public sector, but who has the backbone to take on the public sector unions? Well, I think I've found the man for the job. I'd always assumed that the ruling family in Cuba were deranged, and genuinely believed the socialism would work. But it turns out that they were merely deranged, and know that it can't.

As Raúl said: “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world in which people can live without working.”
[From FT.com / Comment / Analysis - Man in the News: Raúl Castro]

Raul, who has clearly never been to the UK, is about to sack half a million public sector workers. I'd love to see him and Bob Crow go head to head, but in the meantime, perhaps we could ask for a correct international socialist position on Wayne and Waynetta's claim for increased public support.

A jobless couple today demanded a bigger council house for their family of six children... Unemployed Wayne and Jenna Sandercock say it is 'outrageous' that their local authority won’t give them a bigger home for their brood.
[From Jobless couple demand bigger home for family of eight (and all their children are named after celebs) | Mail Online]

I say we have whip round and get them moved to a four bedroom house in Cuba.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

You said you wanted a revolution

2010-09-22T21:01:00.001+01:00

When the age riots start, media commentators will say that no-one could have foreseen the inter-generational strife, but it seems to me to be inevitable. Now that companies cannot fire people for being old, youth unemployment will climb further and the mass of people with no real stake in society will increase. Eventually they will just think to themselves that they may as well riot, why not? It will make the race riots of earlier generations look like a picnic in the park, because of the numbers involved. Western governments, not just ours, appear powerless to cut back on the future commitments that they are making on behalf on our children.

I read in the newspapers recently that council staff spend less than a third of their time doing any actual work and that policepersons spend only a seventh of their time fighting crime and that a woman entering the teaching profession now will earn more from her pension than will earn from working. I simply cannot see how the kids will meet the liabilities we have set for them. A generation from now, Europe will be older and poorer -- it's quite depressing -- and intergenerational strife will lead to the breakdown of law and order. Let's hope that the Archbishop of Canterbury is right and the firm hand of Sharia Law isn't far away.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Car wars

2010-09-20T12:49:00.001+01:00

In the UK, where somewhere around a couple of million drivers have no insurance, uninsured drivers kill 160 people and injure 23,000 every year. When I was on the M4 last week, the guy in the car behind me (both doing 70mph) was talking on a non-hands free mobile phone for miles, and I see this all the time. Outside the school that my kids used to go to (where there are no speed cameras) my wife stopped to let a woman and her children cross at a zebra crossing, only to be overtaken by a woman driving a chelsea tractor. This sort of thing also goes on all the time, so it's no wonder people like me get outraged getting done in a camera trap at 10am on a Sunday morning on an almost empty dual carriageway leading to a motorway. Increasingly, this is our only nexus with the police.

Many years ago, I got nicked by a police car when I was doing 60mph heading toward the A3 out of Epsom: I was caught "bang to rights" as they say. I didn't feel outraged. I shouldn't have been going that fast on that stretch of road, and the guy was right to do me. Fair enough. But getting done by a camera on a nearly empty road doesn't feel the same.

Almost 25% of under 21-year olds confessed to having driven without a license, an MOT-checked vehicle or a valid driving license.
[From Uninsured drivers cost motorists £1.25 million a year - Telegraph]

Cameras don't catch people driving badly, even dangerously, and they don't take account of the traffic or the conditions. And there's always the suspicion that they are there to tax (that's why they're on the A40 and not outside my kids school). So are middle class whiners like me simply hypocrites who want the police to get tough on crime and on the causes for crime, except for speeding. Maybe. But now that the country is conducting a live experiment on the worth of speed cameras, the evidence points in another direction.

In the first nine months after the cameras were switched off in Swindon on July 31 last year, there were 315 road traffic casualties in the area as a whole, down from 327 in the comparable period the previous year, a reduction of around 4%. There were two fatalities compared to four, while the number of people seriously injured fell from 48 to 44.
[From Speed camera opponents hail success of Swindon switch-off - but do figures back that up? | road.cc | The website for pedal powered people: Road cycling, commuting, leisure cycling and racing]

So there. Time to re-examine rational incentives. Talking of which...

Motorists who drive without insurance face a £200 fine
[From Number of uninsured drivers falls - Motoring, Life & Style - Belfasttelegraph.co.uk]

Well, that seems like quite a bargain, given the cost of insurance, so I think I'll act rationally given the incentives presented and cancel my insurance to use the money to pay for speeding tickets, and then I'll get a new car with some Belgian plates and drive with impunity, since the chances of getting stopped are negligible.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Strike!

2010-09-06T19:42:00.001+01:00

Well, I've been thinking about law and order again after listening to a podcast about the reign of King Athelstan, the first king of England as we know it now, and the law codes that he promulgated. He was particularly strict on theft, because he regarded all theft as a breach of the king's peace and a personal affront. England is rather different now.

Campaigners have called for an end to short prison sentences after an habitual thief was jailed for the 73rd time at the age of just 37... David Fairbairn has appeared in court on 96 occasions since he was a teenager and been sent to prison every year of his adult life.
[From Criminal jailed for 73rd time at age of 37 - Telegraph]

Isn't it time for some kind of "three strikes" policy? Everyone gets a second chance, but no-one should go to jail for the third time. We really ought to look at an automatic death penalty instead. The person referred to above will never contribute enough to society to make up for the damage caused to date, so what's the point? I think I might be able to get the Archbishop of Canterbury to support my campaign for a three strikes death penalty if I tell him that it is part of Sharia law. That's not true -- it isn't. But Sharia Law certainly does have some more creative punishments than are available under the boring English law in the land that Blair (Cherie, that is) built.

A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals to paralyse a man by damaging his spinal cord as punishment after he was convicted of attacking another man
[From Saudi judge 'asks hospital to paralyse man as punishment' - Telegraph]

I'm not suggesting anything like this, obviously. The advantage of my "three strikes" death penalty, compared to old-fashioned 1960s-style capital punishment, is that it will actually reduce crime but actively reducing the number of criminals.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Age before booty

2010-08-25T18:41:00.001+01:00

There's hardly any aspect of coalition government policy at the moment that isn't creating the conditions for the next wave of mass protest, violence in the streets and civil disobedience. The reason for this, as I read in this month's Prospect, is that health and pension commitments to the baby boomer generation are currently running at 355 per cent of GDP. Basically, we were going to go bankrupt anyway, but the crunch brought it forward a decade.

Thanks to the enormous loss of tax revenues caused by the recession—the cost of all the bank bailouts were a drop in the ocean by comparison—the spending commitments made by governments all over the world have become unsustainable.
[From How to save capitalism – Prospect Magazine « Prospect Magazine]

The boomers have, essentially, been looting national resources and, if anything, the extent of their bare-faced intergenerational theft will increase, because the old tend to vote more than the young. Thus, despite all rational advice to the contrary, the electorate will continue to vote itself completely unaffordable entitlements. Now that the boomers have decided that they don't even have to retire any more, it can surely only be a matter of time before there are "age riots" on par with the race riots of the 1960s. days). But where will they break out? Where will the first roaming gangs of jobless twenty-somethings begin to vent their anger on the aged? I wonder if it might be at the BBC, where they thought that middle-aged Jonathan Ross appealed to the yoof market. Al least he's gone, but now that Dame Joan Bakewell cannot be forced to retire, the next generation of cultural commentators are out in the cold, and it's only a matter of time before they realise that the entire national cultural booty is being denied them and turn nasty.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Local journalism

2010-08-15T18:02:00.001+01:00

The local newspaper reports on the visit of some children from the Ukraine as part of a programme that goes back to the famous Chernobyl incident. The newspaper reports that "thousands" of children in the area develop bone cancer, leukemia and thyroid cancer every year. So I thought to myself "that sounds terrible, why isn't more being done to help these people", after all, if thousands of children are developing these terrible cancers a quarter of a century after the event, that should be on the front page, not BP and a bit of an oil leak. Nevertheless, I also had a terrible suspicion that the figure simply can't be true. Thousands? So I thought I'd try and find some figures. I went off to the UN and began to rummage around.

By 2002 [16 years after the disaster], more than 4,000 thyroid cancer cases had been diagnosed in this group, and it is most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers is attributable to radioiodine intake.
[From UNSCEAR assessments of the Chernobyl accident]

That's far from "thousands" every year, but still terrible.

In a letter published yesterday in Nature, a British science journal, Dr. Vasily S. Kazakov of the Belarus Ministry of Health in Minsk and his colleagues say that the thyroid cancer rates in the regions most heavily irradiated began to soar in 1990. In Gomel, the most contaminated region studied, there used to be just one or two cases of thyroid children a year. But Kazakov and his colleagues found that there were 38 cases in 1991. In six regions of Belarus and the city of Minsk, the investigators found 131 cases of thyroid cancer in young children, some of whom were still in the womb when the Chernobyl accident occurred.
[From 9/92 "Nature" magazine: Thyroid Cancer 7.5 yrs after Chernobyl soaring]

So in the most heavily contaminated area, there were an additional hundred cases of thyroid cancer (for comparison, about 2,000 people per annum get thyroid cancer in the UK) in the years immediately after the event. What about the other cancers mentioned. The British Journal of Cancer (1996) 73, 1006-1012, reports on leukemia.

There was a slight increase in the incidence of childhood leukaemia in Europe during this period,but the overall geographical pattern of change bears no relation to estimated exposure to radiation resulting from the accident. We conclude that at this stage of follow-up any changes in incidence consequent upon the Chernobyl accident remain undetectable against the usual background rates. Our results are consistent with current estimates of the leukaemogenic risk of radiation exposure, which, outside the immediate vicinity of the accident, was small.

What do the UN say? Do they agree? Well, yes they do.

there is no clearly demonstrated increase in the incidence of solid cancers or leukaemia due to radiation in the most affected populations. Neither is there any proof of other non-malignant disorders that are related to ionizing radiation.
[From UNSCEAR assessments of the Chernobyl accident]

So with the exception of thyroid cancer in people who were babies and lived closed to the event, no-one appears to be getting cancer because of Chernobyl. Not what I was expecting to find. By far the most interesting result of my trawl around, though, was this:

There were widespread psychological reactions to the accident, which were due to fear of the radiation, not to the actual radiation doses.

There is a tendency to attribute increases in the rates of all cancers over time to the Chernobyl accident, but it should be noted that increases were also observed before the accident in the affected areas. Moreover, a general increase in mortality has been reported in recent years in most areas of the former Soviet Union, and this must be taken into account when interpreting the results of Chernobyl-related studies.
[From UNSCEAR assessments of the Chernobyl accident]

Those kids still deserve our help, but it's important to have the proper perspective. Generally speaking, I think the UN's assessment holds true for nuclear power in the UK as much as in Russia. The problem is the fear of nuclear power, not nuclear power itself (especially since as far as I am aware, all research seems to show that our bodies are far more tolerant of low-level ionising radiation than we thought back it the early days).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Scandinavian model

2010-08-09T22:18:00.001+01:00

This was probably the most unbelievable story in the newspaper today, and that was up against some pretty stiff competition let me tell you.

Traffic wardens in Denmark’s capital have refused to tell parking offenders what rules they broke. Following numerous complaints from motorists the Danish Broadcasting Corporation requested and received a 110 page document spelling out how traffic wardens should behave and how and when they should issue tickets. But key sections of the guidance, including the pages concerning the rules setting out the circumstances for issuing tickets, had been blanked out by the Copenhagen parking authority. Traffic wardens claimed that if drivers became aware of the information they would lose respect for traffic law and probably try to work around the rules.
[From Danish drivers stumped by secret rules - Telegraph]

This fantastic. The verb Kafkaesque is the only one that can be applied in these circumstances. So much for the notion of the Scandinavian model. I mentioned this story to someone today and he told me it sounded the same as dealing with the congestion charging people, so we shouldn't feel superior.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Live!

2010-08-07T20:54:00.001+01:00

I was flicking round the movie channels the other day and I started watching Live! with Eva Mendes. It was quite fun: it's a mockumentary about new network TV show in America where people play Russian Roulette live on TV. It was all horribly plausible. What I thought was particularly funny is that at the start of the movie people are pitching terrible TV show ideas to network executives and at least one of them -- a makeover show with women having boob jobs that are filmed -- I have already seen on TV here. In modern Britain, nothing is beyond satire.

But I don't think the probabilities were worked out right. Each of the five winners got a million dollars while the loser got dead, obviously. But surely it takes more guts (or insanity) to pull the trigger as the game goes on. The first person to get picked has a 5 in 6 chance of surviving, whereas if you are the fifth player, it's 50-50. So the players should get more as the game goes on. Also, I don't quite see how it could really work as show: after all, if the first person to go shoots themselves in the head then the rest of the hour slot is going to be as boring as Big Brother. I do think Davina McCall "the cackling high priestess of shit television" would be a good choice for it though.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Shirty

2010-08-02T19:59:00.001+01:00

The news that Manchester United shorts are to be banned in parts of Malaysia because they lead people down a path to sin...

Muslims have been told by religious leaders in Malaysia to stop wearing the famous Manchester United red jersey because of the "devil" emblem on their team crest... United and the rest of the Premier League clubs are massively popular in the Muslim-majority country, but conservative religious scholars said the jersey is forbidden in Islam... .
[From Muslims in Malaysia ban 'devilish' Manchester United shirts | inside World Soccer]

...once again demonstrates the wisdom of the Archbishop of Canterbury in recognising the inevitability of Sharia Law in the UK.

When the question was put to him that: "the application of sharia in certain circumstances - if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples' religion - seems unavoidable?", he indicated his assent.
[From The Archbishop of Canterbury - 'Sharia law' - What did the Archbishop actually say?]

Not only as a Manchester City fan -- although possibly not for much longer, because of my growing revulsion at the money-driven perversion of the Premier League -- but also as a football fan, the sight of people wandering about in Manchester United shirts is nauseating. Roy Keane may well be a sociopathic nutter (by his own admission) but he was surely on the ball (yuk yuk) when he was ranting on about the "prawn sandwich" brigade.

But at home they have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, and they don't realise what's going on out on the pitch. I don't think some of the people who come to Old Trafford can spell 'football', never mind understand it
[From 10 classic Roy Keane rants | Football | guardian.co.uk]

As noted, it isn't only Manchester United shirts that have fallen foul of the Mufts of Johar and Perak. They've also banned the shirts of teams including Brazil, Portugal, Barcelona, Serbia and Norway, all of which carry images of the cross on their team emblems. I think the Archbishop should pop in for a chat about cohesion and taking people's religion seriously.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Brand values

2010-07-26T19:59:00.001+01:00

Now, although I don't care about Russell Brand in the slightest, I do know who he is. I've never listened to his radio show, but I've seen him on things on TV from time to time (although I can't think of any specifically). Like most people in Britain, I only associate his name with one thing, which was being rude to Andrew Sachs, a national treasure. I know that he is in films as well, but haven't seen them. Judging by the reviews of his new film, I doubt I'll even watch it for free on TV.

Flicking round the channels bored after the World Cup, I accidentally turned on Channel 4, which had him doing a sort of stand up act. It wasn't funny, but that's fair enough. What was odd about it was that it was boring. That, I hadn't expected.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Opposition

2010-07-24T08:39:00.001+01:00

Well, since we've had a coalition government, we don't seem to have had much of a loyal opposition, which is bad for democracy. I think the media need to realign themselves so that they give a more realistic view of the political landscape. This means treating the Monster Raving Looney Party as the official opposition from now on, while treating the Actual Raving Looney Party (formerly known as New Labour) as a wacko fringe. After all, the last two things I read from Actual Raving Looney Party MPs were Michael Meacher (who thinks 9/11 was a plot by the US government) talking about how humanity is a virus that will be wiped out in 200-300 years and Geraint Davies talking how Visa and MasterCard should be fined if people use their cards to buy child pornography. Compared to this, the Monster Raving Looney Party's manifesto promise to ban envelopes and make people write everything on postcards -- to stop criminals, pedo, terrorists, drug dealers etc from using the post to go about their despicable businesses -- looks positively sensible.

Now, I have to say that there is something a tad depressing about living in a country where the pronouncements of MPs from Her Majesties Loyal Opposition are indistinguishable from deliberate satire, but perhaps my plan will bring things to a head and help us to move on. If the Today programme, for example, were to get into the habit of asking for comment on government policies from Alan "Howlin Laud" Hope, head of the Monster Raving Loonies, instead of, say, Dedward. Remember, when the Loonies first stood for Parliament in 1963, two of their main manifesto pledges were votes for 18 year olds and all-day drinking in pubs, both policies that were eventually brought to the statute book by the Actual Raving Looney Party some time later.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Poachers and gamekeepers

2010-07-18T14:51:00.001+01:00

The was a very sad story in the newspapers today. The last rhinoceros in a South African game reserve was found dead. She had been drugged by poachers who cut off her horn for sale to Asian (predominantly Vietnamese) buyers and left her to bleed to death. Her cub was found wandering, starving, near her dead body. In the newspaper report, various people said that there was nothing that could be done to stop the poachers.

The plight of a baby rhino whose mother was left to die after poachers drugged it and sawed off its horn has highlighted a resurgent threat in South Africa from criminal poaching gangs.
[From Rhino poaching on the rise in South Africa - Telegraph]

But they haven't heard my idea. I notice that there are tourists who will pay considerable sums of money to be allowed to shoot a lion or an elephant. I think many of them are Russian. How much more would they pay to shoot a poacher? Surely this would be the most eco-friendly form of tourism that there is, even more so than the very eco-friendly hunting of big game.

Big game hunting has an important role in preserving large areas of land from agriculture and settlement in Tanzania and elsewhere. The Government has set aside large areas of land as Game Reserves, over 100,000 km2 in total, which allow for limited tourist hunting. The money generated from this type of hunting through licenses and fees is used as a justification for keeping people out of these areas since the money can be used by the Government to build roads or hospitals etc. My research group at the University of California at Davis has shown that Game Reserves are beneficial for both mammals and vegetation.
[From Hunting Benefits Biodiversity - African Conservation Forums]

There are not many rhinos but plenty of poachers, so this should provide a significant source of long-term revenue for African nations. The tourists could hide in armed redoubts in areas where rhinos live, or they could perhaps denote hidden mines when poachers walk by or similar. The newspaper claims that the poachers use helicopters, so providing the eco-tourists with shoulder-launched heatseeking missiles is an obvious step. I can Vladimir Putin in Hello! magazine, stripped to the waist next to a burned out helicopter with rhinos (safe and sound) grazing peacefully in the background. It's the ideal green holiday for oligarchs from around the world, much more exciting than the typical carbon offset programme. I don't think there would be much local opposition to my plan. Surely if we could persuade the South Africans to replace "Kill a tourist" days -- yes, that's right --

“It was Kill a Tourist Day,” she explains. “And we were in the way.” ... Yet when they called South African police to report the incident, the officer just said “yes, thank you,” and hung up. It was only when a member of the family later met someone who had police connections that the investigation went further, although Smurfit has not found out who was responsible for the attack.
[From Irish actress shot on ‘kill a tourist day’ in South Africa | Irish Entertainment Around the World | IrishCentral]

with "Kill a poacher" days, we could be well on the way to a thoroughly green solution. I will send my idea to Britain's only Green MP (Caroline Lucas, who rather unfortunately mistook noted private school supporter and Labour leadership contender Diane Abbott MP for a man), and expect a favourable response.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Mobile phones, they are a curse really

2010-07-12T15:49:00.001+01:00

I was on a flight to somewhere or other, and I had an aisle seat. Across the aisle from me was a woman who talked on her mobile phone from the moment she got on the plane and was still talking as we went down the runway and only hung up after the plane had left the ground. The stewardess asked her to turn it off a couple of times and she completely ignored her.

What's worse is that because I was obeying the rules and had turned off my iPhone, I couldn't carry on listening to what I was listening to, which was the Paul Jones Blues hour that I'd downloaded from BBC Radio 2, and so I had to listen to her drone on and on. I wish it was possible to report that she was a top futures trader and I made a fortune by overhearing her conversation, or that she was a top heart surgeon discussing a critical case. She wasn't: she was discussion tedious administrative details at what sounded like a tedious public-sector body.

It's soon going to get to the point where they have mobile and no-mobile sections of the plane, just like they used to have smoking and no-smoking areas.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Village idiots

2010-07-03T22:35:00.000+01:00

I rather like having some protestors opposite Parliament. For many years, the pavement of Parliament Square opposite the House of Commons has seen continuous protest, as shown below. Now, I have to say that every time I come round the corner and see a banner calling for the arrest of the Foreign Secretary (or whatever) it gladdens my heart. I think there is something very British, and very special, about allowing people to demonstrate right outside the Mother of Parliaments. It's about a commitment to free speech and the right to protest.

It's not a big area and it tends to get monopolised, which is wrong. It really should be like the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square, so that different groups of protestors get to use it for a week at a time, because otherwise you end up seeing the same protesters over and over again. Despite the picture above, they're not all nutters, obviously. Some of them have very sound points of view:

But in recent times the whole of the square has been taken over by a collection of tents and banners that calls itself (hilariously) "Democracy Village". Parliament Square belongs to all of us and is a major tourist attraction. I really object to it being turned into a revolting camp site and was really upset that the Mayor failed to evict them today.

Democracy Village has housed an array of protesters, vagrants and helpers voicing concerns over Afghanistan, climate change, the Middle East and anti capitalism. They have called today's eviction an affront to democracy.
[From www.thelondondailynews.net]

Frankly, I object to them even calling it "Democracy Village" since virtually none of the "protestors" care less about democracy here, in Afghanistan or anywhere else and none of them were elected to represent anyone anyway. When I walked past it last week, there were banners supporting a wide variety of bonkers causes -- everything from "9/11 truth" to "boycott Israel" to "stop the Freemasons from secretly controlling the Home Secretary" -- as well as one or two causes (such as "dad's rights" and so forth) that are not really to do with democracy.

Real democracy, pure, radical democracy is (according to [people supporting the protestors]) about being elected by no-one, representing no-one. What arrogance must motivate you to believe that you have the right to monopolise an area to which other citizens should have free access; to protest, yes, but to enjoy also, to take a stroll in, to have a quiet sit down.
[From ‘Democracy Village’ my a**e! | And another thing...]

But let's suppose that we support their right to free assembly (as I do) and their right to hold transparently ludicrous opinions (as I do). I suggest that we set aside a brownfield site somewhere in, let's say, Middlesborough (where i imagine there are quite a few of them) and make it a Democracy Village that we can be proud of. All we need to do is bulldoze whatever is there and they take all of the "Peace" Camp up there. They can protect in peace, without disrupting the capital, and if they are inventive and creative, they can turn it into a major media attraction (and perhaps even a tourist attraction). I think this could be just the compromise that's needed to move along.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Am I taking crazy pills?

2010-06-28T14:26:00.001+01:00

I thought we were all in this together and that Mr. Osborne's austerity budget was sharing the pain equally between independent wealthy baronets (eg, George Osborne), parents with school fees to pay (Diane Abbott) and unemployed single mothers (Fergie). In particular, I thought that we in the private sector would at last see some trimming of the fat in the public sector.

some of Whitehall’s finest are “bewildered” and “appalled” by the appointment of TV presenter and management guru Kris Murrin as head of the PM’s implementation unit. Formerly of the ?What If! consultancy, she co-wrote a book of the same name. It talks about creative behaviours including “freshness, greenhousing and realness”. She also goes in for role playing, where people are asked to pretend they are beansprouts and oil in a wok. Well, you can see why Whitehall is concerned, can’t you?

Taxpayers might be concerned too. Ms Murrin is now a civil servant paid between £82,900 and £150,000 – Number 10 will not be more specific... her pay is probably nearer £150,000 than £82,900 (who says austerity begins at home).
[From FT.com / Columnists / Sue Cameron's Notebook - Oil spill threat to Whitehall plans]

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss tra la la la la...

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Stand!

2010-06-24T09:05:00.001+01:00

Standpoint magazine opens with a robust editorial this month, discussing the spongiform amorality of an exclusively liberal elite sustained by the public purse, an intellectual class that has atrophied into a caste.

Indeed, and the ramifications are genuinely terrible, because the behaviour of that elite has been encouraged across society in order to normalise it. If you're a millionaire rock star, television celebrity or politician then having affairs, divorces, children with different partners and so forth really doesn't matter: you can afford to pay and to send the kids to good schools and support them. But for the rest of society it is devastating and it's the taxpayer who foots the bill. I really don't care how many children Mick Jagger has and by how many women -- good luck to him, since command over female fertility has been a goal of the "big man" since we came down from the trees -- but I do care about the countless near-feral children cast into these circumstances up and down the country.

I was thinking about this because of the case of Shannon Matthews. As you will remember, this is a truly terrible case that involved a woman with seven different children by five different fathers who social workers said was unable to prioritise the needs of her children above her own sexual needs. And yet they let her keep the children -- despite the risk of abuse of many kinds -- and didn't provide advice about contraception until she'd had her sixth child. The truly shaming aspect of the case is that...

"We see the kind of parenting Karen provided fairly commonly. We are looking at a fairly common problem."
[From Shannon Matthews inquiry clears social workers | UK news | The Guardian]

How come the liberal elite are enthusiastic supporters of three strikes and you're out for people who download pop songs but not for people who carry out sustained and deliberate child abuse? Surely people who can't provide their kids with a certain basic level of care have no right to keep them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Bleakley house

2010-06-21T19:22:00.001+01:00

According to the newspapers, Christine Bleakley is being tempted to move from BBC to ITV by an offer of a million pound salary. For those of you unfamiliar with dreary early-evening television, Christine Bleakley is one of the hosts of The One Show, a dull BBC1 "magazine" programme. Ms. Bleakley is better known as the girlfriend of the noted association footballer Mr. Frank Lampard (otherwise known as the "Where's Wally" of the England World Cup team).

Now, when I read about this proposed transfer, I thought it was a good news story. The BBC would save her salary -- I couldn't care less if ITV want to pay her ten million pounds per year -- and could go out an find another young woman from the regions to take her place (there cannot possibly be a shortage). I was a little disappointed at the end of the story to discover it was mere speculation -- presumably put about by her agents or negotiators -- and that her salary continues to be paid by hard-pressed licence fee payers such as me. Surely it is time to introduce a salary cap at the BBC: if presenters were capped at, let's say, the same salary as the Prime Minister (they'd not starve, as they can make plenty of money writing books, being in Hello magazine, running production companies and that sort of thing) then everyone would know where they stood and there would be a splendid stability to the TV world. Young and cheap presenters would compete to work for the BBC and then once they've become established but want more cash then they can sod off to ITV, thus keeping the BBC fresh and (importantly) performing a socially useful function. Everyone's happy.

[UPDATE] I went back to check something and it turns out the story is true! Well done BBC. The search is now for an attractive young woman with -- I would guess -- a Scottish or Welsh accent and the ability to read an autocue for £100K per annum.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Blackbushe

2010-06-19T14:12:00.001+01:00

I was listening to Johnnie Walker's "Sounds of the 70s" on the plane earlier and he said something like "does anyone remember Dylan at Blackbushe in 1978?" Do I!! I can say without a shadow of a doubt that not only can I remember it, I remember it as one of the happiest days of my entire life! It wan't just Dylan, but Dylan and Clapton, a perfect day that finished with us running out of petrol on the M3 at 4am. On the show, when people emailed in their memories, the sttendance was reported as a quarter of a million! Could this be right? They also said Joan Armatrading and Graham Parker were there, which I didn't remember at all so I went and googled it and sure enough they were there, although I genuinely have no memory of them at all. There's a Blackbushe Festival site that has a few pictures and I looked them and began to wonder about how our kids will look back on things like that: not with warm, fuzzy, hazy memories of a great time but through the prism of the interweb, with detailed text, pictures, video on Flickr and Facebook. Isn't it better to -- sometimes -- not be able to remember things properly?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Acquaintances reunited

2010-06-08T21:23:00.001+01:00

Well, I signed up for my 30 year university reunion and I'll be going along in September. It's going to be fun to catch up with people, of course, but I have a slight worry that it's going to be a little sad too, because all of the great memories I have of most of these particular people are of them when they were young (that includes me, too!) and I wonder if seeing them all in their fifties will plunge me into mid-life crisis. It's definitely a risk. Perhaps there's some kind of insurance policy?.

Anyway, having agreed to it, I've realised that I've now only three months to lose weight and get a better job. Oh, the pressure.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Campaigner

2010-05-29T11:13:00.001+01:00

Excellent news for eco-warriors everywhere. The noted actor Mr. Jeremy Irons has become a green campaigner, and will be tirelessly raising awareness on sustainability. He starred in one of my all time favourite films, Dead Ringers (which included one of most disturbing movie lines ever uttered: "they're gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women"), and was the voice of the baddie (of course, because he's English) in the Lion King, which I must have seen a thousand times when the boys were little.

Launching himself as a green campaigner, Irons has revealed plans to make a documentary about sustainability and waste disposal, likening himself to Michael Moore, the controversial film maker, although “not as silly”.
[From Earth will bite us back, warns Irons - Times Online]

It transpires that Mr. Irons has seven homes, one of them a castle, which I think is an excellent benchmark for sustainability, so I hereby commit myself to the cause of sustainability and I before my peers, with hand on heart, I promise to never have more than seven homes.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Handicapped

2010-05-20T14:05:00.001+01:00

I went shopping at Waitrose the other day and as I was walking across the car park a red BMV -- a fancy one -- drove in and parked in one of the handicapped parking spaces. As I walked closer, I could see that the vehicle did, indeed, have a blue badge. Note for foreign readers: "blue badges" are the much-abused scheme for allowing disabled people to park near to the shops.

The only occupant, a very large gentleman got out and strolled off to go shopping. A poser. What do you do? I could have said, "I say, old chap, it's damnably thoughtless to park there when a genuinely handicapped person might need to park there shortly!". I didn't, of course, because querying anyone about anything will get you stabbed in modern Britain so I just walked on, fuming.

Why are we conditioned to put up with this sort of mindless anti-social behaviour? They take this kind of thing seriously in Texas.

Clark admits that she parked in a yellow-striped space next to a handicap space for a few minutes March 8 but said she never saw a "no parking" sign until after an officer pointed it out to her while writing the ticket.

"It's outrageous," Clark said. "I wasn't driving drunk. I wasn't speeding in a school zone."

If Clark had been speeding 35 mph over the limit in a school zone, her fine would have been $324, about half of the parking ticket cost, according to the court's website.
[From Everything's bigger in Texas, like a $640 parking ticket | McClatchy]

I think a £400 parking fine for abusing the spaces at Waitrose is quite reasonable.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

A8

2010-05-08T18:28:00.001+01:00

"This paper assesses the fiscal consequences of migration to the UK from the Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU in May 2004 (A8 countries). We show that A8 immigrants who arrived after EU enlargement in 2004, and who have at least one year of residence – and are therefore legally eligible to claim benefits - are 60% less likely than natives to receive state benefits or tax credits, and 58% less likely to live in social housing": this comes from "Assessing the Fiscal Costs and Benefits of A8 Migration to the UK"

Thus, from an empirical position, the immigration problem might be restated as:

How can we get more productive immigrants to come here (ie, Poles) while stopping less productive immigrants from making it across the channel and,
How can we persuade the feckless and stupid (whether immigrants or not) to leave?

The second point is particularly difficult. Clearly, if you are feckless and stupid, you will have no incentive to do anything other than stay here and live on welfare. But suppose you were offered the chance to go and live somewhere sunny like Sierra Leone for 2/3 of your benefits? After all, 2/3 of UK benefits is a tidy income by Sierra Leone standards and it would be a way for us to save a third on the welfare budget right away.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Headcaselines

2010-05-04T22:39:00.001+01:00

Looking at today's paper reminded me of last month when I was in the office on April Fool's Day being teased by my fellow workers because I couldn't figure out which of the news stories in the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian were the traditional April 1st spoof stories and which were real. At the time this was most amusing, but since then I've begun to worry: isn't there something rather unsettling about living in a country where you can no longer distinguish between reality and clumsy satire? In the news over the last few days there have been stories of a female soldier who has won a payout for sexual discrimination from the Army because she couldn't go on parade because she couldn't sort out child care for her daughter, a major high street store selling padded bras for 7 year-old girls, a complaint that wildlife film makers such as David Attenborough don't pay attention to animals right to privacy and school that has suspended a teacher for saying "blackboard" instead of the politically-correct "chalkboard". OK, so I made one of them up, but you'll never guess which one. Does that disturb you as much as it disturbs me?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

NHS Indirect

2010-04-22T22:00:00.001+01:00

If I was sick, I certainly wouldn't take any advice from the staff of NHS Direct who, it transpires, take an average of 23 sick days per year each. I'm not saying that if I had to listening to members of the public calling me about their nauseating ailments I wouldn't fancy a couple of days a month on the club, but this is more than twice the already too high day a month sick average for all NHS staff. Actually, if I was sick, the NHS would be the absolutely last place I would call. I'd call a taxi instead of calling them.

Dr Tracey Leigh, the out-of-hours GP who was on call, diagnosed the boy with swine flu after following a flowchart to help identify his symptoms... However, Louis was actually suffering from a rare form of diabetes which had not been diagnosed, and was experiencing symptoms of kidney failure related to that disease. When his mother found him in bed the next day he was cold and had stopped breathing.
[From Boy died after NHS staff wrongly diagnosed swine flu | Society | The Guardian]

Basically, if you get really ill, don't call anyone. Go to hospital and get some real attention.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Eruption of memory

2010-04-18T11:11:00.001+01:00

What with all of the news about the volcano, the newspapers and TV have repeated many times the story of the British Airways jumbo jet that lost all power when it flew into an ash cloud created by the eruption of Mount Galunggung in Indonesia in 1982. You'll remember the story of the heroics of the pilots who, having lost all four engines, decided to glide the plane into the sea but (after it had fallen from 36,000 feet to 24,000 feet) managed to restart the engines and land the plane safely. The point is that you can't see volcanic dust clouds on radar and that's why they've grounded all of the flights in Europe, because if the jets flew into the clouds then their engines would clog.

The events around one British Airways flight in 1982 reveal the potential dangers of this sort of dust... The passenger jet effectively turned into a glider... When all four engines on the Boeing 747 being flown by Captain Eric Moody shut down at 37,000ft, he hadn't a clue why.
[From BBC News - When volcanic ash stopped a Jumbo at 37,000ft]

This story always reminds me of my experiences on the ground. I was living in Bandung in central Java when that volcano went off. And when the ash cloud reached us, it was honestly one of the most unusual days of my entire life. We'd been told that the ash cloud might come but I don't remember that having any connotations. I don't remember thinking anything about it, other than that I'd never seen a volcanic ash cloud. When we woke up in the morning it was pitch black. I mean absolutely black, not like dark at night when there's still a little moonlight or starlight to see by. I mean it was absolutely pitch black, the ash blocked out the sun completely. Visibility out in the streets was maybe 50 feet maximum. You couldn't see the dust in the air right in front of your face but you couldn't see 50 feet. It was like being in fog where you can't see the fog right in front of your face.

Since we didn't know what else to do, we got into the car and slowly navigated our way to the office. Everyone was driving very slowly with their headlights on. I can't remember ash on the ground. It wasn't like snow where it was piling up on the side of the road, I don't remember that at all. I just remember a coating of dust on everything. When we got to the office, we were issued with face masks. They just covered your nose and mouth with a sort of cotton pad which was held in place with an aluminium frame and some elastic. I actually hadn't found it difficult to breathe but it was really shocking after you put the masks on because after no more than a few minutes you could see a red film building up on the face mask where the volcanic dust was building up on the cotton instead of, presumably, going into your lungs.

It was a really strange day to spend a day, a whole day, in the pitch dark. And I can still remember how it felt sort of other-worldly to be walking round in total darkness in the middle of the day. The volcano didn't seem to affect anything in the sense that it didn't seem to stop cars from running or computers from operating. We were running some DEC mini and some early PCs (XT?) with Microsoft's now long-forgotten version of Unix called Xenix. Perhaps equipment was just more robust in those days, jet-engines excepted.

While in a reminiscing about volcanoes mood, I've also upload three pictures of my visit to Anak Krakatoa ("child of Krakatoa") in 1983. It had erupted a couple of years earlier but was quiet when we got there so we just made our way up it! It was hot, but not intolerable, and it was quite exciting to stand on the top.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Copycat

2010-04-17T16:13:00.001+01:00

That was fun -- we went over to see Rory Bremner at the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford. It was part of Rory's Election Battlebus Tour 2010. The first part of the show was him doing "stand up" commentary on the election, the second part involved the Lb Dem candidate for Guildford (a marginal), a wonk from the Lib Dems (the Tories were invited by didn't come) and Edwina Currie. It was actually jolly enjoyable: he's a good MC, being a) clever and b) quick, but there could have been a few more questions from the crowd. I wanted to ask a question (about immigration) but didn't get picked, so I'll ask it here: "You don't have to be a member of the BNP to be concerned about uncontrolled mass immigration to the UK, so could the panel bypass their metropolitan, liberal and faintly patronising statements about immigration from the first half of the show and give us their honest opinions on the topic? Specifically, given the revelation that uncontrolled mass immigration was a deliberate New Labour policy, how they would answer the concerns of the good burghers of Peterborough about the collapse of their civic infrastructure under the strain of it?"

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Copywrong

2010-04-07T12:45:00.001+01:00

I was reading a blog post by Great She Elephant and it mentioned in passing something called "Copyscape", in a context that implied it was some kind of anti-plagiarism tool. I'd never heard of it, so I was curious to take a look because I wondered how it might work. It invited me to see if any of my work had been plagiarised (by someone other than me, since I "repurpose" material all the time. I put in a random blog page, and was shocked to see that the system threw up four cases of plagiarism, on sites that I didn't recognise. The system then suggested that if I clicked on the page link, Copyscape would highlight the words that had been copied from blog. Outrage rising up my gullet second-by-second, I clicked.

The copied words?

View an alternate. Post a comment If you have a TypeKey or TypePad account, please Sign In You are currently signed in as (nobody) . Sign Out (URLs automatically linked.)

How dumb is Copyscape? There must be millions of pages with these words on them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Dashed board

2010-03-24T18:39:00.000Z

In an averagely bonkers speech this week, Gordon Brown said that at some unspecified time in the future some unspecified proportion of the population would in some unspecified way be able to log on to a government web site to see some unspecified information and then apply for a passport. I presume he means in some other way than you do now, because I when I tried to apply for a passport at the Passport Agency website I couldn't figure out what on Earth to do.

A MyGov dashboard that allows every citizen to personalise the explosive growth of government services on the web was proposed today by Gordon Brown... In a wide-ranging speech on the impact of the web on the government, he said the MyGov dashboard will make citizen interaction with government as easy as internet banking or online shopping.
[From Gordon Brown proposes personalised MyGov web services | Technology | guardian.co.uk]

Since corporate dashboards are all the rage, I thought I'd experiment and have a guess at what the government dashboard might look like...

What do you think? Am I being too pessimistic -- will dogs be slightly less dangerous in the year 2025, or whenever the management consultants, systems integrators, outsourcers and business process re-engineers will have brought this cabinet office vision into existence?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The miles are the goal

2010-03-22T16:48:00.001Z

I just watched the new movie "Up in the Air", so I'm wondering -- in a purely hypothetical thought experiment, I should add -- if there are women out there who are sexually excited by a BA Gold Card even if the holder doesn't look like George Clooney. I hope so, because it's not worth having just for the nicer lounge at T5!

It was an OK film, but there was something about the movie I really enjoyed: George's "road warrior" tips to his colleague in the security line were just the same as my own mental checklist. And I have a Hilton Honours gold card too.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Inflation

2010-03-16T16:16:00.000Z

In the excellent, excellent movie "The Damned United", Brian Clough has a run in with his chairman in 1969 because he signs Sunderland midfielder Colin Todd for £175,000 which the chairman thinks is outrageous, but not as outrageous as his £300 per week wages! Just for comparison, the equivalent player today (someone who can hold the ball and not waste it) would cost around £5-10 million with wages of £75,000 per week. In fact there are players in the Premier League whose wages are already approaching Colin Todd's transfer fee EVERY WEEK.

By the way, I wasn't that bothered about watching Dammed United, but I was bored on a plane so I just started watching it out curiosity and within two minutes was completely hooked. It's brilliant, and Michael Sheen's performance as Brian Clough is awesome: he doesn't try to imitate Clough like an impressionist but instead captures an essence that I found totally absorbing. Brilliant film, in a week of brilliant films.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Haile likely

2010-03-05T21:13:00.001Z

Famine in Ethiopia, which has occurred roughly once every decade since the dawn of recorded history, is back in the news but for an unexpectedly interesting reason.

Fresh controversy over aid to Ethiopia erupted today after an investigation concluded that millions intended for victims of the 1984 famine was diverted to anti-government rebel leaders
[From Live Aid donations 'were diverted to arm Ethiopian rebels' - Times Online]

I remember someone telling me before that something like 100,000 people died directly because of Live Aid, because the food supplies meant that the government could fight on for longer, but it's really interesting to hear that this may be an underestimate. I made myself very unpopular at the time of Live Aid by telling my co-workers (I was living in the SF at the time) that if they really wanted to help starving people in Ethiopia then they should be sending them AK47s, not sacks of rice, since they were starving because Ethiopia's government wanted them to. It hasn't rained in Australia for god knows how long and no-one is starving there (to the best of my knowledge). That's not to say there aren't serious problems, as the BBC tell us

Steve Evans reports from Melbourne, a city that has suffered ten years of drought. He talks to oyster farmer Graham Taylor, who says that the lack of rain means less food for the oysters.
[From BBC World Service - Business - Living with drought in Australia]

Drought so serious that oyster farmers are concerned. Wow: that's how bad things can get in a democracy. When the famine in Ethiopia began killing large numbers of people in 1984, the Ethiopian government was spending half of GDP on weapons. Australian defence spending is 2.6% of GDP. Go figure.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Freer enterprise

2010-02-07T16:30:00.001Z

Suppose you wanted to do an experiment to see what the natural set of economic arrangements in society might be, perhaps curious to see if free enterprise is a self-emergent property of economic systems that lack central co-ordination (as it is in World of Warcraft, for example).

The thing to do would be to go somewhere where there is no government and see. Well, the experiment is underway even as we speak. There is a place where the writ of government does not run and people are free to pursue their dreams. Not in some dreary Welsh commune full of welfare warriors, but in everyone's favourite seaside tropical paradise, Somalia.

In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate.
[From Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair | Reuters]

"Criminal" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but this is exactly what my sons and their friends get up to in World of Warcraft: pool effort and go off and kill people and steal their stuff. Anyway, these enterprising heirs to Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, absent Spanish treasure fleets from South America have been raiding treasure fleets from the new Eldorado, the Gulf. And a pretty profitable business it is too.

"I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."
[From Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair | Reuters]

Yes, it's the Indian Ocean Bubble!

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Security matters

2010-02-01T21:21:00.001Z

There was a report on the news tonight about the new strip scanners at British airports. I had a brilliant idea about this that I mentioned on twitter a while back: let's crowdsource airport security. Take the output from the scanners and send it up to Flickr, partly to increase the sum total of gaiety in the nation (there's no privacy issues since you won't know who any of the pictures actually are) and then people at home with nothing to do can look through the pictures and see if there are any suspicious-looking images. Then they can e-mail to some central government security centre. The government security centre will pretty soon learn which public-spirited websters are good at spotting the terrorists and so a ranking system will quickly develop to direct the attention of the security services (a bit like eBay stars) and at the end of the year we can award OBE's to the top 10. Tell me: how is my idea any more stupid than reality (remember that these scanner won't detect rectum bombs etc)...

A Manchester airport spokesman said their trial had started in December, but only with passengers over 18 until the legal situation with children was clarified. So far 500 people have taken part on a voluntary basis with positive feedback from nearly all those involved.
[From New scanners break child porn laws | Politics |The Guardian ]

So 17-year old jihadis can get through with detonating underpants intact -- let's hope that Osama bin Laden doesn't cotton on to this. But this led me on to wonder if there is any point in any of this? Hugo Rifkind is surely right when he points out that the whole colossal enterprise of homeland security is an almost total waste of money.

Before the World Trade Center came down, flying was a breeze, and there was a tiny chance you might get blown up. Now it’s a nightmare, and there’s still a tiny chance you might get blown up. In what way is this progress? Our attitude towards getting onto aeroplanes is starting to look weird. It’s like a disorder. It’s like they’ve won.
[From Airport security is a giant exercise in arse-covering — and it doesn’t work (obviously) | The Spectator]

If the 9/11 guys tried that same stunt again today, they would fail. Not because of airport security but because the passengers wouldn't let them. I'm an overweight, unfit middle-aged man, but if the guy in front of gets up and holds a knife to a stewardesses' throat, then I'll go for him. Ah, you might say, but what if he has explosives in his underpants? That's why we need the new stripscanners. Well, if you scan his underpants, then he'll stuff the TNT up his arse. Or buy a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile, or go an blow up a Eurostar instead. There comes a point where we have to see that we are into a zone of diminishing returns, so if there's a need to spend extra money on airport security, then spend it the Israeli way: on profiling, on interviewing, on intelligence and not on pointless scanners that can't detect underpants bombs or rectum bombs anyway.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Citizens Dave

2010-01-25T21:24:00.001Z

We're having some work done on our house at the moment. I had to pop in to see the builder's estimator at the house this morning. He is called Dave. The painter is called Dave. The chippie is Dave and he has an assistant called Dave. When he wasn't available, they sent another chippie for a couple of days: yes, he was called Dave. The plumber is called Brian.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Looney bins

2010-01-23T21:21:00.001Z

Here in Gordon Brown's Looking Glass Britain, the Land of Perverse Incentives, there has been a steady shift of focus in law enforcement. While the underclass continue to beat their children to death, while honest citizens are stabbed in the street and gangs of feral youths are allowed to roam free,

Leicester City Council recently began fining residents £100 if their wheelie bins were put out on the wrong day.
[From The laughing policemen: 'Inaccurate' data boosts arrest rate - Crime, UK - The Independent]

The idea that law enforcement is about revenues and targets rather than right and wrong is hateful, but you can't blame the police. The government's plan is clear: criminalise things that middle class homeowners might do (eg, overfill the recycling bin) and then target them to push up the revenues, since they are easy to catch and will always pay up

Householders who fail to nominate a neighbour to turn off their alarm while they are away from home can be breaking the law.
[From Blair's 'frenzied law making' : a new offence for every day spent in office - UK Politics, UK - The Independent]

I notice, by the way, that under the torrent of new laws introduced by the Labour government since 1997, such as the crackdown on the wheelie menaces, it is now an offence to set off nuclear explosion in the United Kingdom.

It is now illegal to sell grey squirrels, impersonate a traffic warden or offer Air Traffic Control services without a licence. Creating a nuclear explosion was outlawed in 1998.
[From Blair's 'frenzied law making' : a new offence for every day spent in office - UK Politics, UK - The Independent]

Presumably, had the Iranians managed to float a fission bomb up the Thames and set it off outside Parliament before 1998, we would have only been able to charge them under some noise abatement regulations or perhaps press a more serious case under environmental protection laws. We can all sleep more safely now, knowing that it is a criminal offence.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

It's not really democracy, is it?

2010-01-15T21:13:00.001Z

The government doesn't do what the majority want, by a long way. Since the general public are pretty thick (according to official government statistics, not just my opinion), that's probably a good thing. But we ought to change our mental model and stop thinking of ourselves as a democracy anyway.

It is a sad fact of British elections that the event is decided by about 100,000 swing voters in swing seats. The election campaign which ‘started’ this week showed the same safety-first formula: all parties battling for the 1 per cent which their computers tell them hold the key to power.
[From A golden age for fascism | The Spectator]

This really bothers me. It means that I know deep down that it doesn't really matter what I think about the great issues of the day, because my vote is almost worthless. Woking is a safe Tory seat, with a majority of several thousand, so my vote is irrelevant here. But it's also true that it doesn't matter what most other people think either. Those 100,000 swing voters are sick of Marxist clown Gordon Brown so will vote for Eton Dave, and none of them will really care what manifesto promises either side makes or what policies they will adopt. It's a sick society.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

May contain nuts

2010-01-11T21:14:00.000Z

With all of the stories in the news about airport security, together with traveller's tales of three hour delays at Heathrow security, I'm really not enthusiastic about getting on a plane again. But I saw a story today that gave me some hope.

Air Canada (AC.B-T1.29-0.03-2.27%) has been told to create a special “buffer zone” on flights for people who are allergic to nuts.
[From Air Canada told to provide nut-free zone - The Globe and Mail]

Brilliant! I don't want to sit next to someone who thinks that shampoo causes autism, Gordon Brown or whoever. But sadly, this isn't what they mean.

The Canadian Transportation Agency has ruled that passengers who have nut allergies should be considered disabled and accommodated by the airline. The CTA has advised Air Canada to come up with an appropriate section of seats where passengers with nut allergies would be seated... Air Canada stopped serving peanuts years ago, but the airline still serves cashews and other snacks that contain nuts.
[From Air Canada told to provide nut-free zone - The Globe and Mail]

Someone one with a "nut allergy" apparently sued the airline after having to lock herself in a bathroom for 40 minutes while the food services was underway, in case a molecule from someone else's cashew nut reached her. Ridiculous? Probably: will Air Canada be liable if one of the other passengers starts eating a Snickers in the nut free zone? As always, it will be lawyers who obtain maximum benefit from this attempt to alleviate the potential suffering of others. Anaphylactic shock does actually exist though, although it's not clear to me why it is so prevalent.

unless you're a character on "Heroes," genes don't mutate fast enough to have caused an 18% increase in childhood food allergies between 1997 and 2007. And genes certainly don't cause 25% of parents to believe that their kids have food allergies, when 4% do. Yuppiedom does.
[From Nut allergies -- a Yuppie invention - latimes.com]

I notice that disability legislation has also been in the news in the US as well as Canada.

A group of Santa Fe residents recently attempted to get all public Wi-Fi hotspots in the city banned [because of] "electromagnetic allergies." More curious perhaps was how the group tried to use the Americans With Disabilities Act to force the city's hand
[From Santa Fe Wi-Fi Fears Keep Getting Weirder - Man sues neighbor for refusing to turn off wireless - dslreports.com]

Whether you can use disability legislation with respect to a disability that doesn't actually exist is an interesting point. Bear in mind that there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone is allergic to wifi. I imagine that it is only a matter of time before a judge in this United Kingdom rules that if people consider themselves to be disabled, then they are disabled and therefore covered by the appropriate equality legislation. This will happen. And then we'll all have to provide wifi free zones in our offices and streets.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Capital

2010-01-08T19:30:00.001Z

No.2 son had to write something about capital punishment for a school essay. He said that he was against it, because you might execute the wrong person and then you couldn't bring them back. This is indeed the central argument against it, I would have thought. He also said that even in the US, it would be better to sentence murderers to life imprisonment (as we don't do in the UK). Again, a sophisticated case against the death penalty, especially given the enormous cost of appeals and lawyers in the US system. All very good.

No. 2 might have also pointed out that there is no correlation between the murder rate and which States have the death penalty, so it's not even a deterrent.

Tricky.

So when he asked me what I thought, I said that I was in favour of the death penalty, but not for murderers, since it clearly doesn't deter them and you might get the wrong person. Surely it makes more sense to use the death penalty in places where it might deter behaviour and where you are certain have the right perpetrator. In this case, for example:

A woman made an emergency 999 call to Greater Manchester Police (GMP) to say her cat was "doing her head in" because it was playing with string.
[From BBC News - Woman's 999 call over playful cat]

Of course, to be really beneficial to society, the death penalty would need to be carried out before she could reproduce, but you have to start somewhere. I expect that my new green campaign (I think the death penalty should be remarketed as an environmentally-friendly alternative to both prison and keeping people alive in general) is certain to attract high-level celebrity support, so it may well become government policy before not too long.

Think about it. David Cameron needs a populist big idea that is simple enough for our moronic public to understand: what better one to choose than green capital punishment. This helps us to kill two birds with one stone (although that needn't necessarily be the only executive method) because it tackles the twin evils of stupidity and population growth. If we can execute enough stupid people, we can make a real impact on global warming without having to turn down the central heating.

Leading scientists, like Martin Rees, head of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of science, also assert that population growth must be constrained in order to successfully confront global warming.
[From Population Growth and Global Warming - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com]

I see persons such as eco do-gooder Jonathan Porrit and British actress Susan Hampshire support something called the "Optimum Population Trust". I'm sure they will be right behind me, I must get in touch.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

We are all Icelanders now

2010-01-05T21:52:00.001Z

Well, I've go to say I'm with Iceland on this one. The plucky Norse are going to have a referendum over whether to force their citizens to pay billions to the British and Dutch governments to compensate for failed banks.

Half of me wants to congratulate plucky little Iceland for its decision not to sign into law a bill to repay more than $5bn lost by savers in Britain and the Netherlands when the island’s banks collapsed. I’m an admirer of those who give the old two fingers to oppressive international pressure, and in this case in particular, Britain’s attempt to invoke anti-terrorist laws to get the money back was an absolute disgrace
[From Iceland's disgraceful decision not to pay up over stricken banks – Telegraph Blogs]

I agree. Remember how this all started?

The October 2008 collapse of one bank, Landsbanki Islands, triggered the trouble. Hundreds of thousands of British and Dutch depositors, wooed by high interest rates, had placed money with Landsbanki through an Internet arm operating in those countries called Icesave.
[From Iceland President Vetoes Icesave Compensation - WSJ.com]

But surely this must have come out the blue, and you can't blame people for leaving their money in these collapsing banks, since in October 2009 no-one could have foreseen their imminent default. Really? Then read this article from February 2008

That said, Kaupthing is fully covered by the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Under this, all your savings are guaranteed up to £35,000. If you have more than this with the bank, perhaps now is the time to pare your savings down and redistribute them among its high-interest paying rivals such as ICICI or Bradford & Bingley.

Of course, one of Kaupthing's main rivals is its Icelandic colleague Landsbanki, the origins of the popular Icesave account. You may also have concerns over Icesave at the moment, given the amount of print expressing concern over Iceland's banking system since the Moody's report three weeks ago
[From Could Kaupthing Edge be the next Northern Rock? | This is Money ]

Can you see the problem with compensating the people who put their money in these high interest accounts? It means that people like me who left their money in the Nationwide at 5% instead of moving it to the First Bank of the Vikings at 6% are being officially called dicks by the ruling elite. Everyone may as well take all of their money out of (for example) Barclays at 1% and put it in the Savings Bank of Upper Wazooristan at 2% and not give a shit about it because when it goes down the Swanee, poorer taxpayers will bail them out. This is madness and it was clear at the time that bailing the banksters out was wrong.

A full-scale bailout would undermine any sense of personal or corporate culpability for the risks that were taken that did not pay off. Doing so would almost guarantee repeat fiascos in the future.
[From Matthew Elliott: Taxpayers should not have to bail out banks | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk ]

Indeed. By all means go after the investment bankers, lawyers, financial advisers and executives involved with the failed institutions, but why should taxpayers have to fork out, whether Icelandic or British. The British government (ie, the British taxpayer) has just lost another TWENTY SIX BILLION POUNDS on LBG and RBS and there's plenty more to come. The people who made stupid decisions about how to run these banks have got off (in many cases literally) scot free.

Britain and the Netherlands stepped in to cover their own citizens, and then demanded the money back
[From Iceland President Vetoes Icesave Compensation - WSJ.com]

It was the British government that decided to exceed the deposit insurance, so I can't see what that has to do with the population of Iceland. Iceland has already agreed to honour the EU Deposit Guarantee which covers almost all retail depositors. If the British government wants to take legal action against the banks involved, it should go ahead and sue the banksters, not penalise the Icelandic public. If the Icelandic government is liable for regulating a bank that was run appallingly badly, then so is the British government, so why don't the Icelanders sue the FSA for allowing Kaupting to set up a retail operation in the UK a few months before it collapsed.

We can't send a gunboat because we haven't got any, they beat us in the last Cod War and if we send our aircraft carrier the Icelanders will just climb on board and claim asylum. One day, the saga of how they defeated Marxist lecturer Gordon Brown and Trotskyite solicitor Alastair Darling will be sung round the camp fires alongside the story of Hen-Thorir and others.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Catty

2010-01-03T21:06:00.001Z

Here's a heartwarming story. Noted television presenter Cat Deeley, who earns $5 million per annum working Fridays and Saturdays in the UK and the rest of the week in Hollywood (ths burning up the carbon allowance of about a million Brazilians) was pestering hapless travellers to give cash to the BA "change for good" on a flight from Sao Paolo.

Charming the Club World cabin (‘Come on, guys, the flat beds can wait’) before making her way to the back of the plane where one man has found a £50 note (‘Oh we love you, sir’). By the time Cat has finished her walkabout, flight 246 has coughed up £404, which Cat pledges to match. Mission accomplished.
[From Cat Deeley in Brazil: the TV presenter swaps the Hollywood Hills for the slums of Sao Paulo | Mail Online]

If I was sitting at the back of that plane, I wouldn't have been charmed but I would have told her to thank her tax accountant for the donation 0.0005% of her after-tax salary and that I would be happy to match that percentage. That's how generous I am (actually, I'm being ungenerous: I have actually given foreign coins to the Change for Good programme). But what was she doing in Sao Paolo? She was there as an ambassador for UNICEF, which says on its web site that

Urgent action now to reduce carbon emissions and invest in climate change solutions will move the world to be cleaner, healthier and more equitable.
[From UNICEF UK Blog ]

Perhaps they could take immediate action and stop Cat Deeley from flying across the Atlantic twice every week? No, of course not. When celebs call for action, they mean from peasants like us who annoy them by clogging up the the airports and heating our homes: Emma Thompson, to choose one example, probably goes to Hollywood by some form of yacht or other wind-powered transport. Anyway, back to Cat.

Aside from her TV work, Cat admits that her biggest passion is fashion
[From Showbiz - News - Ten Things You Never Knew About Cat Deeley - Digital Spy]

I don't share her passion and I certainly don't have an important job like looking good in front of a TV camera, but I agree with her diagnosis of the nation's ills.

“In Britain, it’s almost as if we’re ashamed of having ambition and drive.”
[From Television star Cat Deeley hits out at unambitious Britons - Telegraph]

How ungrateful. In what other country could you become one of the super-rich and ensure that neither you nor any of your dependents will ever have to work again simply by being attractive enough to be a model on Kilroy?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Genetic engineering

2009-12-27T16:02:00.001Z

I was reading New Scientist this week and found an article about why women have sex with men who have Porsches. Or at least that was my interpretation. It turns out that a series of psychology experiments have determined that quite a wide range of ladies from young to old will drop them for a man who shows off wealth rather than a man who may have more money but does not show it off. If a dreary, balding, grey-haired, overweight, middle-aged man (eg, me) turns up in a Volvo having invested the balance of his disposable income in a variety of savings instruments directed at long term security, the knickers stay on. On the other hand, if I were to ditch the Volvo and the Schroeders Capital Growth fund and use the proceeds to buy even the dullest of Porsches, they would literally fly off. But why? Are women generally stupid and unable to make calculations as to the long-term best investments to support offspring (as I had thought that natural selection would have demanded)?

Well, it transpires that women of childbearing age will do the Porsche guy not because they think he is a rich and can therefore provide for them and their offspring in the future, but because their hormones mistakenly assume that the Porsche signals good genes (experiments show that the long-term cashflow is heavily discounted). This is clearly a throwback to our pre-civilised past, when the possession of (say) a dead wildebeast probably did signal that the owner was stronger, faster, smarter and therefore had a better genetic makeup. Possession of a Porsche signals no such thing, and yet the ovaries still throb at the display.

Some women will be reassured to know that the experiments demonstrate that men display no such behaviour, because they will have sex with absolutely anyone under any absolutely any circumstances and, even better, will spend their every last penny to do so:

In short, men who saw attractive women became much more motivated to get whatever money they could in the short term, presumably so they could spend it on conspicuous consumption to attract mates
[From Sex and shopping – it's a guy thing - life - 01 January 2010 - New Scientist]

Nature or nurture?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Deserve got nuttin' to do wiv it

2009-12-15T13:20:00.001Z

Having replaced the merciless dance marathons of the great depression with the merciless karaoke-to-the-death X-Factor of this one, Simon Cowell is well on course to be the richest person in TV (if I heard the Today programme correctly). This is surely the final incontrovertible piece of evidence for atheism that Richard Dawkins has been lokking for. In a universe designed by an intelligent creator, this could not possibly happen. My hatred for the X-Factor may be the only opinion I have about anything that is shared with Elton John, but who are we against so many. Anyway, envy aside, good luck to Cowell and the money he wrings from a credulous public. He deserves it, doesn't he?

As Felicia "Snoop" Pearson notes in the greatest-ever television drama, The Wire, the universe is an uncaring arbiter. People don't get what they deserve. But what do they deserve?

Take me, for example. I’m smart and hard-working. I don’t know if it’s because of my genes, or because my parents brought me up right. But whatever the cause, I didn’t do anything to become smart or hard-working.
[From Do Smart, Hard-Working People Deserve to Make More Money? « The Baseline Scenario]

That's a really good point. This why when people on radio phone-ins talk about nurses "deserving" more than bankers or policemen "deserving" more than TV presenters, they are barking up the wrong tree. By starting off with a category error, then you find yourself in a system that cannot resolve even the most basic questions. Why should David Beckham get paid more than me just because of his parents (they were the ones who gave him the genes for being good at football)? Why should Zac Goldsmith have more capital than me because of this parents (who were very rich)? Why should Marcus Brigstocke get on Question Time just because of his parents (who sent him to a 25 grand per year public school) when I am right about most political and economic issues and he is wrong?

Perhaps no-one gets what they deserve, and Simon Cowell is no different. By the way, Simon Cowell got his break because of his parents. His father, who was an EMI executive, got him a job in the A&R department there. Snoop was right.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Anthropology, Woking-style

2009-12-13T18:55:00.001Z

I happened to be wandering through Woking town centre when I came across a group of welfare heffers grazing peacefully at a food court. No men were visible. There were a number of infants strapped into various kinds of pushchairs distributed through the herd, and a number of hatchet-faced crones (who I took to be mothers and grandmothers of herd members) circling the group. I was shocked at my own revulsion, but it was nevertheless real. I'm decidedly overweight, but couldn't help but reflect that many of these girls -- still teenagers -- were absolutely huge.

How does this happen? Eleven years of compulsory edukashun has left most of them pretty thick, for sure, but they must be at least vaguely aware of the connection between food and obesity (even if they don't seem aware of the connection between sex and pregnancy). I wonder if the Green Party should make more of an effort to target this group: they are consuming far more than their share of the world's resources and they are causing problems for the overcrowded world of the future by continually having children that they rely on the rest of the world to support.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Titled

2009-12-03T18:15:00.001Z

It's competition time (just for fun, don't phone in). One of these is a real person and the other is made up.

Poo Bah, First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buckhounds, Groom of the Back Stairs, Archbishop of Titipu, Lord Mayor, both acting and elect, and Lord High Everything Else.

Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council and Church Commissioner.

Difficult isn't it? Especially when I tell you that one of them is planning sacrifice economic growth to a few content oligarchs via a draconian and expensive scheme that will never actually work.

Well, as was covered on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, Poo Bah is a made-up character from Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado, whereas Lord Mandelson is, sadly, real.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The doormen of perception

2009-12-01T18:26:00.001Z

In a sane society, you don't have the right to show "fire" in a crowded theatre and nor do you have the right to force (for example) airlines to respect your view that the world is flat. Developed countries live with a post-renaissance notion of scientific progress that rests on evidence and argument, not emotion and belief. However, here in Gordon Brown's Looking Glass Britain (the Land of Perverse Incentives), the institutionalising of stupidity of all forms has substituted for more traditional notions of progress.

A police worker who was sacked because he believed psychics can help solve criminal investigations is to go to court today to defend his right to legal protection from religious discrimination.
[From Man sacked for belief in psychics backed by judge (but, of course, he knew that would happen) - Home News, UK - The Independent]

You can see his thinking -- even without extra-sensory powers -- with absolute clarity. Nowhere does the inviolable law of unintended consequences exert such vengance as in the strange world of equality legislation, where hard cases make very bad law indeed. It's difficult to fault his logic, though: since you're not allowed to sack me for stupidity, because stupidity is my religion, I deserve recompense. It's only a matter of time before a burglar is able to demonstrate that his attraction to your property is a sacrament and therefore obtain similar legal protection.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Age and beauty

2009-11-26T09:33:00.000Z

I was listening to the radio the other day, and the government's age commissar Joan Bakewell was making some point about impending legislation to end age discrimination. At first, I thought this might be a good idea, as I could use a free bus pass and I've often been tempted to order the pensioners' half-price lunchtime special at the fish and chip shop round the corner. I shall do this, and when they say no, I'll sue the for the mental distress they cause me because of their blatant age discrimination. That goodness for the new approach.

You should check that your recruitment process is non-discriminatory, eg aim to place advertisements in publications read by a range of age groups, and avoid using terms which imply a particular age group, such as 'mature', 'enthusiastic', 'highly experienced' or 'recent graduate'. See our guide on employing older workers.
[From Age discrimination | Business Link]

Enthusiastic? Oh well, I'm sure businesses will get used to advertising for people who are disinterested, I must mention that to our HR people. But there's something else that started to bother me about the automatic assumption that getting older persons to stay at work is a good thing. Isn't it better for society if they move over to provide more jobs for young people? Unemployed young persons are quite likely to beat me to death in the street (this happens about once a week in the UK as far as I can see) whereas unemployed old people will go and join a bridge four (which is one of things I look forward to about being old, frankly).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Healthty scepticism

2009-11-25T22:10:00.001Z

I see things are going well over at the NHS Supercomputer (for £20 billion, it better be pretty bloody super) and having spent god knows what on new software for the NHS' million staff, virtually none of them are using it.

here are only 174 clinicians using Lorenzo patient software across the five early adopter trusts, according to Mike O'Brien, minister for the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
[From Only 175 people using flagship NHS software, says minister - 30 Oct 2009 - Computing]

The acumen of those in charge continues to stagger.

the recently signed contracts with BT to deploy Cerner Millennium at hospitals in the south require BT to be paid even if the hospitals refuse the systems – a possibility if they think they will not work... Junior Treasury minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry defended The NPfIT in the debate.
[From Only 175 people using flagship NHS software, says minister - 30 Oct 2009 - Computing]

I have a memory of the head of Westminster council (was it the Tesco woman, Porter?) being prosecuted for wasting public money on stupid schemes for party political reasons, and that was only a few million. Shouldn't some of the NHS IT people be in jail by now?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The other tsunami

2009-11-12T18:01:00.001Z

How do you get to be an MP? And where are all of the prostitutes? I started wondering about this because I read that

On Monday, Labour MP Fiona McTaggart asked Tessa Jowell, Minister for the Olympics whether she had commissioned any research on the effect of increased visitor numbers for the London 2012 Olympics on demand for the sex industry.
[From MPs prepare to beat off phantom Olympic hooker invasion • The Register]

I was wondering when this tidal wave of prostitutes would arrive. When I was last in Woking town centre after 10pm (last week) I did notice a number of very scantily glad young woman (all wearing mini skirts and shoulderless dresses despite a wind chill of -12) simultaneously shivering and smoking. But they were hardly of normal build, let alone size zero, and too badly-dressed to be Eastern European prostitutes. But then the name, and topic, rang a bell. I had a vague memory of reading a newspaper report that all of this stuff about sporting event-related tart tsunamis had been completely made up, and sure enough, it had been. When even The Guardian says that it's a "moral panic", you know they must be on shaky ground. In fact that august body came up with a rather nice phrase for ill-informed, evidence-free government lunatics egging each other on in order to waste public money:

The cacophony of voices has created the illusion of confirmation.
[From Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic | UK news | The Guardian]

That's rather a good way to put it, and I will certainly use it again! But it led me to think: how do you get to be an MP? Surely, you'd think, you must have a certain amount of intelligence. Surely you would know when you are parroting made-up rubbish? So much for evidence-based policy.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Chip the lot of them

2009-11-02T19:40:00.001Z

Isn't it typical of us British that we love our pets so much that we will hapily go along with a law to help us manage them better. If we've lost our dog, or it's been injured in accident, or whatever, then we want the vet to be able to contact us and get hold of their records. And, of course, we want to be able to track miscreants.

Owners will be forced to install the microchip containing a barcode that can store their pet's name, breed, age and health along with their own address and phone number.
[From All dogs to be microchipped with owner's details to 'help track pets' - Telegraph]

Surely it would make more sense to insist that these chips are installed in the feral children of the underclass that roam freely along our highways and byways. We could put detectors in all public places and then we could easily solve crimes like this. I doubt we would go so far as to actually punish the offenders, but at least we would know who they are.

This is important because one of the government's newest mental schemes is to set up public league tables of yobs. Their idiotic notion is that the underclass would somehow be shamed by having their names published.

Every yob handed an Asbo will be named and shamed online under radical plans outlined last night. All local councils will be told to publish names and photographs of louts.
[From People.co.uk - Asbo yobs shamed in web move]

They won't, of course, since in our new responsibility-free Britain they will only be interested in getting themselves to the top of the league. I bet they'll link their Facebook pages to the councils' online hall of shame, and firmly predict an immediate rise in anti-social behaviour once the system goes live.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Being digital

2009-10-26T21:50:00.000Z

I always loved Ian Hunter's first solo album, the one that he made immediately after leaving Mott the Hoople back in 1974 (I was shocked to find out, earlier this year, that Ian is now 70). So when I was working earlier today, I suddenly thought to myself that I hadn't heard it for a while. I know that I have the CD in a box somewhere, but am far to lazy (and busy) to go and try and find it. In the circumstances, I did what any normal person would to, which was to use screen sharing to log on to the Mac in my study and remotely run iTunes then go to the iTunes Store to buy it. When I searched on iTunes I discovered that there was a remastered 30th anniversary edition. I bought it, it's fabulous.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Saved my bacon

2009-10-22T22:20:00.001+01:00

I had to go to Copenhagen for something, and when I was at Heathrow, I read about a splendid new green initiative from All Nippon Airways.

All Nippon Airways (ANA) claims that empty bladders mean lighter passengers, a lighter aircraft and thus lower fuel use.
[From Airline goes green by asking passengers to use the toilet before boarding | Mail Online]

Apparently, the gate staff there are reminding travellers to go to the toilet before they get on the plane. The idea of this is to reduce weight on the flights, thereby saving on jet fuel, thereby helping the environment. What a brilliant idea! It struck me as just the sort of vacuous, irrelevant gesture that is perfect for Looking Glass Britain. I'm surprised that Bono didn't mention this in his address to the Tory Party conference. Usually, you just get celebrities flying around in private jets while telling the rest of us to use low-energy light bulbs, but this is so much better. A "take-a-dump for Gaia" campaign will get the public on board and certainly raise awareness of climate change issues. It will make people feel like they are doing something about climate, without really inconveniencing anyone (conveniencing, them in fact). I enthusiastically joined the campaign, and then boarded the flight.

When I got to the airport in Copenhagen, I thought I would continue with my heartfelt commitment to saving the planet and decided to take a bus to the hotel, as it looked as if it was directly on the 5A bus route from the airport. So I wandered out and hurrah! There was a 5A bus waiting. I jumped on, and then ran into a problem, since it hadn't occurred to me that I would have to pay, and I hadn't bothered to get any Danish Kroner and the bus didn't take cards. So I asked the driver if I could pay in euros, and he said it would be five euro. But oh no, I only had a 10 euro note and the driver didn't have any chance. I was just about to get off, when a youngish (I'd say mid-20s) man came forward and paid the fare for me. I asked him if he had a card or could write his address, and he told me in near-perfect English that the driver was trying to rip me off because the fare should have been half that, and please don't worry about the money. What a gentleman! The historic relationship between England and Denmark continues (I still consider the the crowns to be united, as I do not recognise the claim of King William I to the English throne).

In true pay-it-forward fashion, I swear the next time I see someone get on the bus and then get stuck because they have no change, I will cheerfully pay for them.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

You don't need to make this stuff up

2009-10-17T15:20:00.000+01:00

The government is on the verge of denying me one of my few remaining simple pleasures, because it's becoming increasingly more difficult to pluck up the courage to open a newspaper in the bizarre looking-glass world that is Brown's Britain. I fought the phobia this morning and managed to get all the way to page 3 (of the Telegraph, I hasten to ad) before I find a story about a criminal case being dropped because the Crown Prosecution Service, the bastard offspring of the Keystone Cops and the Criminal Justice Act of 2003, had (after six months) not managed to photocopy some document that was required for the case. Why hadn't they photocopied it? Well, it was because the "person responsible for photocopying had been off work for an operation".

It reminded of an old joke -- which I think may have been on Spitting Image, but I can't really remember -- about Prince Charles and Lady Diana at the breakfast table. Prince Charles is staring blankly at an envelope and then says to her "where's the letter opener", Lady Diana replies "it's his day off".

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Hope this doesn't seem sexist

2009-10-15T17:51:00.000+01:00

I sat down in an aisle seat on the train. An extremely attractive young woman got on the train, walked down and sat in the aisle seat opposite me. She had long blonde hair and was wearing a white blouse, a bright scarlet jacket and a short black skirt, with black tights and black stiletto heels. As she walked down the carriage, the heads of a large number of overweight, balding, grey-haired elderly gentlemen (eg, me) turned to follow, which I imagine was the desired effect.

After a few minutes, I noticed she was writing in a notepad and I glanced over to see what she might be doodling. She was doing integral calculus. Really, really, hard integral calculus.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

New playlist

2009-10-12T19:59:00.001+01:00

I tried out my new playlist going into London today.

As the SWT Animal Transport approached, I kicked off with Blondie's pacy "Call Me", by far and away my favourite Blondie song. I wasn't much of a Blondie fan back in the day, but this one grew on me as the years passed, and now I appreciate the construction as well as the delivery.

Settling down on the train -- I managed to get one of the few remaining seats even though it meant getting jammed in the middle between two other commuters, who were both clearly devasted that I'd decided to go for it instead of politely leaving the middle seat empty -- I eased into the Joe Perry Project's version of the old Aerosmith number "Let the music do the talking". I've always preferred Joe's solo version. I couldn't find it to download, so I had to buy a whole CD to get it, which was really annoying, but I thought it would fit nicely in the playlist, and I was right.

Buzz Buzz. A simple bit of uptempo guitar-based rock from the Joe Perry Project eases the train through the sunny Surrey countryside.

I've Got to Rock (To Say Alive) by Saxon with Lemmy got me pumped up as we entered the London suburbs.

I Got a Line on You, the first rate Jeff Healey rework of the old Spirit classic which carried me along nicely through towards Clapham Junction.

On the final approach to Waterloo, the absolutely fantastic live version of Messin' with the Kid by legendary Irish blues guitarist Rory Gallagher.

I Wanna Be Your Dog from Iggy & The Stooges carries me out of the train, shuffling down into the underworld and across the Styx (the Waterloo & City line).

I was never really crazy about ELP (Emerson, Lake and Powell in this case), but I loved Greg Lake's sound with King Crimson (I can still remember buying the first album with money I made from working in a factory on Saturdays). "Touch And Go" is one of those tracks I don't get bored with.

I finished the journey with Jo Jo Gunne's timeless "Run Run Run" so that I was in a upbeat mood at just the right tempo coming out of the tube and starting the walk to the first meeting. Something of a success I feel.

Another Jeff Healey track, his own I Think I Love You Too Much, helps me along the road to the Royal Exchange. The combination of first rate guitar playing and sunshine helps me to recover from the travails of the tube.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The world's favourite...

2009-10-06T11:55:00.001+01:00

There's no doubt about it. I've been singing the praises of Terminal 5 which, after the initial stutter, is now quite pleasant as airports go. The key metric -- how long does it take from getting off the plane to getting into your card -- holds up well, except on the odd occasion when the border police forget that planes are arriving. I sympathise with John Redwood. He had a conversation with them about this.

The issue was how they handled the peaks. Surely it was one of flexible hours, the balance between full time and part time, and the use of intelligent rosters... He countered by saying the peaks were unpredictable. I argued that on the whole they were entirely predictable, as there are timetables telling them when all the large jets are expected in.
[From John Redwood MP]

Indeed. I've often wondered the same. Anyway, despite its great leaps forward, I have to say that Terminal 5 still doesn't reach the benchmark: Singapore Changi. This is the most efficient place on Earth. I came in tonight on a BA flight that had a technical fault and was nearly an hour late. No big deal, these things happen. I thought I would miss my connection, but wasn't too bothered since I figured there must be plenty of flights to KL and I'd get on one of them. Nevertheless, when the jetway opened I rushed up as fast as I could in order to see if there was a chance of making the Singapore Airlines flight or to head to a help desk if not. What was I thinking? This isn't Heathrow.

At the top of the jetway a super-efficient Singapore Airlines lady was holding a sign with my name on it. They thought it would be stressful for me to run and try and catch the flight, and I probably wouldn't make it anyway, so that had rebooked me on a JAL flight an hour later. She took me to the transfer area where I took a ticket and waited in an orderly manner. My number was called in five minutes and five minutes later I had my new boarding pass and pottered off to Starbucks to relax (and use the free wifi - Heathrow should take a leaf out of their book). If you have to change planes anywhere, make it Changi.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Primary colour

2009-10-01T21:55:00.001+01:00

Along with a couple of friends, I went along to the Woking open primary for the Conservative Party. It's an interesting new fad to have open primaries, so that anyone can come along and vote to see who will become the Tory candidate, in this case to succeed Humphrey Malins in Woking. They held in the H.G. Wells suite, which was completely full. I was genuinely surprised at the size (and, frankly, the average age) of the audience.

There were four candidates: a barrister, a couple of lady doctors and a marketing wallah. They were brought in one at a time -- in a random order, determined by lottery -- and asked the same questions, some of which had been selected from the floor ("has multiculturalism failed?") and some that had been set by, I suppose, the selection committee. They all did reasonably well: I'd sort of assumed that one of them would have really stood out to make the voting easy, but it wasn't like that at all. They handily gave out score sheets for you to fill in as you went along, and all of the candidates scored within a couple of points by my tallying.

I was sure the marketing guy would lose -- I didn't like his speaking style, which seems stilted and slightly unreal -- and although I was inclined towards both of the doctors -- my reasoning being that unlike barristers or marketing wallahs, doctors are forced to meet "real people" on a daily basis, and therefore experience the devastation that the New Labour plague has visited on our land at first hand -- but somehow just wasn't convinced by them as MPs. So I voted for the barrister, who had actually lived in Goldsworth Park in Woking. My friends each chose one of the doctors. On being told that the count would take half an hour, we went off for a beer and then came back.

We were totally shocked when the marketing wallah won, although to give him his due he did give a victory speech that wasn't bad (it was better than his "choose me" speech), so good luck to him.

Incidentally, I didn't understand why all of the candidates felt obliged to say that they support a return to grammars schools, unless it was because the audience was so old. The solution isn't to go back to the 1950 but to go forward: the candidates should have been calling for school vouchers.

None of them put forward any radical policies at all. I wanted one of them to call for the abolition of income tax, the legalisation of drugs and a few other things, but they were all quite moderate.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

They will always be the world's favourite to me

2009-09-24T18:50:00.001+01:00

Twice in the last couple of weeks I've forgotten my iPhone at airport security and twice the fine people from BA have got it back for me. The first time was at Heathrow. I wandered into the lounge, got a paper and a coffee and sat down. As I did so, I realised that the comforting bulge of my iPhone was missing from my pocket. I searched my person in panic, and then realised that the last time I could remember having the phone was before security. I explained my predicament to the BA lady at the desk and one of her colleagues went back through the Concorde lounge short cut to T5 security, got the iPhone for me and brought it back. Phew. The second time was at Charles de Gaulle. I bumped into a friend as I entered the lounge and we were chatting all the way down the stairs and on to the bus, across the tarmac and into the plane. As I sat down, I realised I didn't have my phone. I got my bag down to search it, but no luck. The stewardess asked me if I'd lost something so I explained the problem to her. We were still on the ground waiting for the last few passengers. The captain radioed back to the gate and a gate person went to security. Sure enough, my iPhone was there. The stewardess ushered me down the steps and into an airport car which whizzed me back to gate. I ran (seriously) up the stairs and back to security to retrieve the iPhone. Hurrah. Then back out the gate, and back into the car which whizzed me back across the airport and to the plane again. The last couple of passengers were climbing the steps so I followed them in and sat down. Phew.

Excellent service, thanks chaps.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The exams get easier, but are they learning any more?

2009-09-11T15:05:00.001+01:00

Our criminals are pretty rubbish, which is why the jails are stuffed full. The ones who are any good go and work for banks, whereas the ones who are hopeless are left to terrorise the citizenry with little reward. I notice that Japan, always a go-ahead sort of place, has introduced a sort of 11-plus for criminals. This makes obvious sense: the ones who pass can be sent on the fast track to business school or to some politician's office, whereas the ones who fail can be schooled in practical, day-to-day thuggery.

Japan's largest and most notorious organized crime group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is forcing members to take a "gangster exam" in order to reduce costly damages suits, police have discovered.
[From Yakuza group forcing members to take 'gangster exam' - The Mainichi Daily News]

I'm sure that their mechanism for avoiding grade inflation might be seen as a little harsh, but I bet they'll work to keep the standards up.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Madame Mental

2009-09-07T20:55:00.001+01:00

Fantastic news from the Land of the Rising Fun. It turns out that new Japanese Prime Minister's wife is a mentalist, and not in the dreary Cherie Blair bonkers crystal healing kind of way, but in the full on "I was taken to Venus by aliens" kind of way.

Miyuki, 66, described the extraterrestrial experience, which she said took place some 20 years ago, in a book entitled "Very Strange Things I've Encountered."
[From Japan's new first lady says rode UFO to Venus | U.S. | Reuters]

The adds greatly to the gaiety of nations. This is why I feel quite strongly that the Conservatives should consider inviting former BBC man David Icke to be the new head of the Beeb following the next election. Sanity does not seem to be winning strategy any more, so encouraging the population to take refuge in madness could be a better alternative.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Working on a chain letter

2009-08-22T15:46:00.001+01:00

Cycling along a couple of days ago, I was enjoying a traditional English rural scene. Picking my way round broken glass on the canal towpath, admiring the group of drunken tramps who inhabit the green behind the magistrate's court, I was watching an eclectic collection of rubbish floating by: plastic bags, empty lager cans and a couple of discarded soft drink bottles as normal, but also some bits of wood that looked like a part assembled piece of Ikea furniture and something unidentifiable thing with string trailing behind it. I suddenly wondered why in all the time I have been taking this route (more than a year) I had never seen chain-gangs of young offenders cleaning the mess up, which I thought I had been promised by get-tough no-nonsense pinnacle of probity Hazel Blears when she was a Home Office minister. It turns out that she'd just made it up, there was no such policy, disappointingly.

The move towards US-style chain gangs was suggested by a Home Office minister, Hazel Blears, who said it would improve confidence in the criminal justice system.
[From Community chain-gang plan 'a cheap gimmick' - Crime, UK - The Independent]

This may well have been the only sensible policy that she has ever proposed, but anyway it never happened. It turns out that our tough-on-crime Commissariat opted for more drastic action, requiring young offenders to carry out between 10 and 42 minutes of community service PER WEEK. No wonder our streets are safe again.

Under joint guidance from the Ministry of Justice, Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Youth Justice Board, young criminals may only have to do limited community work.
[From Teenage offenders could do just ten minutes community work a week - Telegraph]

Well, "limited" is one way to put it I suppose.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Green policy in tatters

2009-08-18T20:20:00.001+01:00

Here at the beating heart of Digital Britain, testament to the Virtual Jerusalem under construction by New Labour's visionaries, privately-educated millionairesses and Peer-to-Peer networkers, I've been trying to be green and take the bus instead of driving to the station. Unfortunately, our 21st-century Woking buses don't take cards (contactless or otherwise) and so I have to chase around the house looking for cash in the morning. Today I couldn't find any cash anywhere until, by good fortune, I found two fivers and some loose coins at the bottom of a briefcase. When I got on the bus, the bus driver refused my fiver because it was "too tatty". They have high standards in Woking. Fortunately, he decided that my other tatty fiver met the new minimum standards and I was able to continue my journey. They've already put the fare up to £3.70, so pretty soon a fiver won't be enough anyway. It's not easy being green.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]