FORTRESS FREEDOM

Schooling #1

2011-10-11T15:55:00.001-07:00

/me blows the dust off this blog

BLEG: any interesting links you have to share on education theory?

Prompted in part by a talk at Cambridge Geek Night #13 about the poor quality of ICT in schools, I am mentally exploring the possibilities of unschooling and am interested in what's already been attempted in this area.

Essentially, school to me seems like an only moderately successful way to keep kids quiet during the day so that adults can work, and I strongly suspect that the current system does very little for those who aren't so smart or who have crap parents and so on.

So I'm questioning everything. Some initial thoughts:
- most teachers are not amazing. But there are some really amazing ones out there. Can we leverage the amazing ones better to eg. deliver video tutorials or course materials on a massive scale?
- are "teachers" even the best people to enforce classroom discipline?
- is the notion of "classrooms" and "classes" even that helpful? 45-60min lessons seem mostly a way for schools to box up packages of information in a way that's easy for them while not necessarily being that great for kids.
- what's with homework? Almost no adults do homework related to their jobs.

I suppose I idyllically dream of an education utopia in which kids are excited to be at school and get taught important things that help shape their articulations. I don't know about you but my <18 education covered none of the following:
- critical thinking (don't believe what you read in the papers)
- logic
- personal finance
- how to learn more effectively
- the sociology and psychology of bullying, and of the school experience in general
- any sort of encouragement to introspection

These things are not "history", "science" or "English" but they all seem to me to be vital pieces of what we expect adults to be, and yet we seem to largely require children to work these things out for themselves.

Alice Thompson: moron

2011-03-30T04:58:00.000-07:00

Oh, why do I read the Times? It only makes me angry. Today Alice Thompson is claiming that a 1% mansion tax is unfair and unaffordable. Her own numbers in her column suggest that there are 250,000 houses liable, and at 1% of at least £1m. a go that's £2.5 BILLION per year. Consiering that estate agents will value your home for nothing (or perrhaps under this scheme a fee of up to... £100) how on earth can that be unaffordable?? It's ludicrous. Who reads this column and agrees with it??

I'd write more but I'm on my phone.

2010-06-29T02:47:00.000-07:00

Goal-line tech is immaterial. What's needed is good-quality refereeing. Technology would be useful for the edge-cases, when it is uncertain whether the call has crossed the line, or if the attacking player was within a foot of being on-side. Neither of these cases, nor Thierry Henry's blatant hand-ball in the qualifiers, should be a matter for the beeping machines.

I don't know much about football, particularly not the org structures of referees, but that appears to be what needs improving. Seems to me that a 3-challenge video-replay system would help deal with the most egregious cases with technology that's available to all the major leagues already.

Budget

2010-06-24T03:27:00.000-07:00

The budget was, of course, an appalling raid on the poor. And that is entirely to expected, being largely a Tory budget. I imagine there's a bit of politics going on here in that they want to get the bad news out of the way as quickly as possible - they are going to have 4 more budgets before the next general election so it is better to be bad now and good later.

Despite that, that 20% VAT rate is going to scar the Lib Dems for a long time, and will probably still be potent enough to bite them in 2015. Expect a return of those VAT bombshells, this time probably exploded ones.

I am lucky enough to have been born into a society in which my particular set of skills happen to be quite valuable, meaning that I am in the top 10% of income earners in the country (the decile statring at approx £40k - it's lower than you think). Okay, so I don't have any children yet, but I literally have money to burn.

If I didn't believe the government was wasting large slabs of tax on things like "defence" (or "attack" as I like to call it) then I would be inclined to overpay my tax bill because I really believe that people like me should be paying more.

Who is it at the top of the Tory party who honestly thinks that screwing the poor is a good and sensible thing to do? Who says "I know, instead of raising the top rate of income tax, CGT, council tax on large homes, instead of introducing green taxes or local income taxes or land value taxes, what this country really needs is for poor people to pay more for their phone credit, dog food, Sky subscription, kitchen utensils, beer, clothes, Coke and petrol!"?

It's a good job I'm only supporting the Lib Dems because of their position on electoral reform. They'd better get that right. I mean, I know that this is a Tory budget with a bit of Lib Dem restraint, but if this is the best the Lib Dems can deliver, it's pretty pathetic.

I DIDN'T BREAK THE LAW - I AM THE LAW

2010-05-29T03:54:00.000-07:00

George Osborne, theoretically at least, is David Laws’ boss. What he should be doing, provided there are no further facts to scrutinise, is stepping outside the door of Number 11 and calling down the thunder. He should tell the press that his faith in Laws’ ability is undimmed. He should say that forcing Laws out of the closet was to the press’ shame. He should say that he believes that Laws has made and will make sound and prudent judgements about the economy and looks forward to continuing to work with him through a very difficult period. In other words, he should be willing to step into the line of fire for his colleague. Showing this amount of courage could turn the Coalition into a team; the spectacle of a Conservative defending a Liberal Democrat would do nothing but cement trust. It would also be an eloquent statement to the Alistair Campbells of this world that their form of political discourse no longer works.

Too right.

2010-05-25T03:37:00.001-07:00

Stuart White is distressed by the abolition of the Child Trust Fund, claiming it as "one of the great liberal achievements of New Labour".

I am a great believer in the Ackerman/Alstott idea of a "stakeholder grant"*, particularly as a cover for university tuition fees, and it is sad to see the basis of such a grant strangled in its infancy by the very liberals who should be 'pro' such a scheme.

Is there anything that can be done before the fund is abolished, in order to save it?

I'll be writing to my Lib Dem MP, who might actually have the power to do something about it for once.

* Incidentally, why has Alstott been dropped from Stuart's list of stakeholder grant progenitors? She literally (co)wrote the book on the subject.

NO COALITION WITHOUT PR, NICK

2010-05-07T12:05:00.000-07:00

Keep the pressure on. Email him here, and tweet at @nick_clegg.

Mention STV. AV and AV+ are not really good enough, and he knows this is true. Let's deliver a fair voting system for ever. Email. Tweet. Pass it on.

NO COALITION WITHOUT PR, NICK email cleggn@parliament.uk tweet at @nick_clegg #letsactuallyfixthevotingsystem please RT

Edit: added hashtag. Also, you can email the Lib Dem Federal Executive here. Please be brief, polite and unsubtle.

Techno techno techno

2010-03-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

Alix Mortimer rightly bemoans the quantity of idiots in parliament, but it should be obvious why there are so many of them: the political skills required to get selected then elected are nothing like the skills required to be a top-class legislator.

Ideally, legislators should have a sharp eye for detail, excellent reading comprehension skills, an excellent grasp of statistics, an understanding of history and political philosophy and a set of novel personal background experiences to bring to the table.

In contrast, parliamentary electees must convince 35,000 skeptics to give them a job, through awareness-raising campaigning, doorstepping, local problem solving, successful media interviews and appearances, and being able to recall and reframe the main planks of their party's brand identity at will.

These two skill groups are so different it should really be a surprise that there are any smart people at all in parliament. And while the media insist that everyone's special and everyone's opinion is important, and while political parties are built on strong brand identities, and while the electoral process only allows one candidate of each political stripe to stand in each constituency, this will continue to be a problem.

What can be done to change things? STV would help a little, I think, because only the "best" tranche of each existing party's candidates would get elected, and would potentially allow smaller parties with more focussed branding to pick up 1st preference votes ("Smart Labour", anyone?).

I would really, really like to see all PPCs take an apolitical statistics and reading comprehension test, with their scores marked on the ballot paper next to their name. That way, voters can actually decide in a meaningful way whether they do want smarter politicians.

Battery

2010-03-23T04:07:00.000-07:00

I like to write something here when I am positively surprised by an online transaction, to reward the seller beyond just the purchase price. So:

I ordered a replacement battery for my Asus laptop on Sunday night on eBay and it arrived this morning, despite it being listed as 3-4 days shipping time. It was also pretty much the cheapest option going. So if you're looking for a laptop battery, give Battery Pro a look on eBay.

Satire: the death of politics?

2010-03-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Tucker appears to be writing a series of columns in the Guardian, which considering he is fictional is an impressive feat.

It's well known that Tucker is viewed as something of an inspiration to many spin doctors in the Westminster Bubble - Armando Iannucci tells a story that when filming In The Loop it was a senior Whitehall spinner that suggested that Peter Capaldi be filmed leaving the actual 10 Downing Street front door and organized it. On the day of filming, the press pit opposite was full of "special advisers" all cheering for Capaldi.

So one has to wonder just how much influence a fake blog - presumably written by Iannucci (though you would have thought that Capaldi would at least get an "ok" on the text since it's effectively his face slapped on the column) - has in the run-up to the actual election. Satire has shaped politics before, of course - Thatcher was a big fan of Yes, Minister and again Iannucci relates that it was because of the portrayal of senior civil servants on TV that caused Thatcher to begin the reign of the "special advisers" - but has satire ever set out its stall at an election campaign so brazenly?

I supposed we can but look on and see whether Labour really do press the Tories on Ashcroft, Ulster Unionists and young conservative organizations...

Birthplace

2010-03-07T07:52:00.000-08:00

So I've had the joy of flying abroad and back recently, and on the return it really hit me just how much time, energy and money we waste on trying to keep people born in different geographic locales from entering and staying in our geographic locale. How pointless is it, that we in the West consider ourselves so much better than everyone else that the dirty foreigners must be boxed in, tagged, queued up and questioned?

It's entirely depressing. Along with the new e-passport cages at Bristol airport: "Come in to our country! But you'd better be the right sort, else we'll lock you in a box!"

I look forward to a world in which geopolitical boundaries finally become meaningless.

Two tribes

2010-02-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

So I've gone and read the report that 54% of people are talking about! Sorry, I mean 0.54%. In short, it is uninformative rubbish. Yes, there are lots of number about how much worse the worst areas in the country are compared to the best areas in the country, but, well, so what? Sure, life is going to suck in the worst places and be awesome in the best places. Here are some examples from page 7:

• Children are six times more likely to grow up in a household dependent on out-of-work benefits.
• Young people are almost twice as likely to be expelled from school.• Pupils are half as likely to get three ‘A’ grades at A-level as their peers in the least deprived local authorities.
• Teenage girls under 18 are almost three times more likely to become pregnant.
• Young people aged 18-24 are twice as likely to suffer from youth unemployment.
• People are twice as likely to be on a waiting list for social housing.• Households are four times more likely to be homeless.
• People are almost three times as likely to be a victim of violent crime.
• People are twice as likely to be a victim of common assault.
• People are thirteen times more likely to be a victim of robbery.
• People are twice as likely to have no qualifications at all.

Of course, this tells us absolutely nothing about what life is like for the vast majority of people in the country. It tells only us about outliers, which are definitionally rare and at the end of the spectrum. This is pure availability bias: tell us about the best and the worst because that's what sticks out. This is why people are frightened of terrorists, too: terrorist events (in the Western world at least) are so vanishingly rare that each one gets so much news coverage we feel they are far more likely than they are.

If the Tories had identified a line at, say, 40% median "area depravity" (they love the word "deprived"!) and shown that things were on average significantly worse below that one line than above it, perhaps their thesis would have some merit.

Here's another little vignette of the deception this report tries to pull, from page 2:

Since 1997 the Government has spent £473 billion on welfare payments alone – that’s as big as our whole economy in 1988.

Typical political trick: is your scary number not big enough? Then add it up over lots of years, then compare it to a number from a single year!

£473bn is approx £40bn per year, which, according to the Tories at least, is only 8.3% of government spending in 1988. But why did they choose 1988? £40bn is only 4.6% of 1997's GDP, and a measly 2.3% of 2008's GDP. Do we really resent paying 2-4% of GDP on welfare payments? Really?

We are not "two nations". We are one nation. And we're getting pretty sick of transparent political bullshit.

2010-02-05T04:11:00.001-08:00

Brilliantly, the UK Statistics Agency has pwned Chris Grayling for, basically, lying about crime figures. Mark Easton's report here.

I'm surprised (well, perhaps just disheartened) that this isn't getting more play in the national media: here is what could be the future Home Secretary lying through his teeth about crime figures that he full-well knows are incomparable for political advantage.

Sure, this thing is probably all too common, but I still think it warrants flagging up when it happens.

Trial

2010-02-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a thought: everyone is arguing about which is better: AV, AV+, FPTP or STV. Or at least, lefties are - clearly STV is best! - but instead of gambling five years of potentially ruinous governance on a proposition with no local evidence, why don't we run some trials, eh? Take ten random constituencies and have them vote AV, another ten, AV+, another ten STV. See what happens. Take some time, get some evidence.

Is that really such a crazy idea?

XNARTSWTFBBQ

2010-02-02T12:22:00.000-08:00

So I am investigating building a 3d game in XNA. So far, my main conclusion is that all of the available "engines" are rubbish. Either poorly-documented, feature-lacking, or both. I am used to the relative elegance and acres of documentation of Java3d's Scenegraph, and despite the fact that J3d is lacking a ton of modern features (like, er, shaders), I have actually managed to get something approximately like what I want up and running in it.

This is quite frustrating. In the unlikely event that you have any tips, please contribute.

Sugadaddy

2009-11-24T04:35:00.000-08:00

A marketing genius at Microsoft has hired the only UK girl-group everyone thinks was better in a previous iteration to promote Windows 7. Well thought-out, that man.

(Also, I pity the fool whose job it is to read the submissions to the competition: "Win a private gig with the Sugababes! Enter your perfect gig ideas now..." - didn't someone just get sued for that sort of thing by Girls Aloud?)

Stephen Fry vs Catholics

2009-11-09T02:27:00.001-08:00

From the recent Intelligence Squared debate, here's Stephen Fry on the Catholic Church:

(skip to 2m30 to avoid Ann Widdecombe)

He starts out in such a measured and nice way that when he begins to round on the church for all its ills it really is magnificent to watch and considerably better than Christopher Hitchens' blustery attempt. Fry really is an excellent lecturer.

2009-11-09T01:49:00.000-08:00

According to PoliticsHome, Evan Harris has written to Alan Johnson accusing him of a litany of errors.

Bless him (in an entirely rationalist manner) for this.

I think it's pretty shameful that the Home Secretary is allowed to wander into Parliament and basically lie about everything in order to get his way. Harris's comprehensive demolition of Johnson's comments probably won't change anything at all, but it does demonstrate how morally bankrupt the arse-end of Nu Labour's ministerial picks have become.

This is one of those days on which I find politics deeply depressing rather than exciting.

2009-11-04T02:23:00.001-08:00

Hurray! The Lib Dems website has finally got an accent colour! Now everything is not just varying shades of piss-yellow.

This is a massive improvement.

On the ACMD

2009-11-03T03:29:00.000-08:00

According to this Times leader and elsewhere:

The classification of drugs involves many issues besides its harmfulness — the social context is important.

But the ACMD's job is explicitly to consider social implications of drug use. That's why of the 28 members listed here:
- 6 are police or probation officers or judges
- 8 lead drug charities or work in social work
- 7 are medical doctors or vetinarians (one vet and one dentist!)
- 6 are what we might normally call "scientists" (3 psych and 3 chemists)
- 1 is a school inspector

(The 3 resignees are 2 pharmacologists and 1 medical doctor iirc).

As you can see, the council is already made up of several members whose job is to investigate the social effects of substance (ab/mis)use. To claim otherwise is to either not do your homework or be deliberately misleading.

Dispiritingly, I presume that the media simply can't be bothered to check their facts properly.

2009-11-02T08:35:00.000-08:00

If you're as angry about Alan Johnson's sacking of Prof David Nutt from the ACMD as I am, you could do a lot worse than signing this petition and passing it on.

You might think that these petitions rarely go places, but there's a chance to catch the popular zeitgeist here if thousands and thousands of people pile on.

It's really important that scientists are able to express their reasoned scientific opinion in public even if they do work for the government, and attempting to gag them in this way is unacceptable. Stand up for rational debate in this country! Sign the petition!

2009-10-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

Nice to see Daniel Davies sticking to his principles.

2009-10-26T04:10:00.000-07:00

Apropos of JB's comments on the QT thing, I have to say that the continued disingenuousness of the entire political class on immigration makes me very angry.

Specifically this whole nonsense about a "points based" immigration system that everyone wants to make tougher than everyone else. 95% of immigrants to the UK don't have to qualify on points because they live in the EU and one of the things we have decided in the EU is that all citizens can work in all countries in the EU. You might not like that, you might disagree with that as a policy, but that the source of the vast majority of immigration into the UK and a points system simply won't make any difference whatsoever to it.

Grrrrr.

Baking Fridays - Thursday Edition

2009-10-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

First in an occasional series. Probably very occasional!

Today I tried out this recipe for baking no-knead bread. I have to say, I was very skeptical, partly because it's an American recipe, and the last time I went to the States, the shops there seemed to have no clue even what grain to make bread out of. Rice bread? Potato bread? Maize bread? What?

I was also skeptical because it seemed altogether too easy. Make a bunch of dough, put it in the fridge, cut bits off when you need to? Seems a lot easier than mixing, kneading, proving, kneading, proving again...

Also, since my breadmaker died I've been struggling to get my breads to rise properly, despite giving the allotted time to repeated kneading and proving.

So, I gave it a go.

Always unorthodox, I couldn't be bothered with just doing the plain master recipe, so I used wholemeal flour and added about 1/6th cup of maple syrup. I was wary, actually, that the recipe given in the link above doesn't include any sugar, so wanted to make sure that there was some in there even if there wasn't supposed to be. Finally, I did half the regular recipe, since this was a trial.

Finding 1 - I needed to add more water than the recipe gives in order to get a wet, 'shaggy' dough. About 1/4 extra cup.

You're supposed to give it at least 2 hours to prove at room temperature - I gave it exactly 2 hours in the airing cupboard, since winter is drawing in. The dough about trebled in size over this time, I'd say.

Finding 2 - it's difficult to get out of the bowl when so slimy. I covered one palm in flour and deposited the dough into that hand then covered the other before proceeding. I tried to take a grapefruit-sized portion but it was really too squishy to hold such a size. I made two smaller 'balls' that sagged quite flat in my hand.

It was hard to shape the dough as the instructions said - I couldn't really get any purchase on the dough to pull the top down, but once I got it right, I knew I'd got it.

I forgot to cut the tops, and only left it 20 minutes on the side (my partner was getting hungry!).

Finding 3 - 15 minutes in the oven at 230C was plenty - any more and there would have been serious burning. I generally find this true for all recipes in my oven, that I need to knock 20-30% off cooking times to get a non-black result. Yours may vary.

Finding 4 - it really works. The bread had a good open texture to it and a good crust, although it did not rise very much at all from the pre-oven size; maybe 50%. I ended up with two roundels about 6 inches across and 2 inches high at the tallest.

Tune in next week when I'll tell you how the dough in the fridge worked out. Maybe.

2009-10-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

I've started watching Bones* recently, which is quite good fun (give it a few episodes). In one episode, Bones's publishers give her a Mercedes SLK as a present, to which I thought "she must be doing them really very well to earn a $100,000 car".

Lo and behold, though, you can get an SLK with a not-unreasonable number of miles on Autotrader for £12000 or less - I was seriously considering if I sell my current car (a lovely little 206CC, thanks) and get another good contract before Christmas, that I could get one, at a bit of a stretch.

Then I saw that Gordon Brown is being forced to repay more than £12000 in expenses. So it appears he's fiddled the public out of more than the price of a (2nd-hand!) luxury sportscar!

I can't really quite justify it... can I...?

(* affiliate link - season 1)

2009-10-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

Fafblog on the Taliban:

Q: Is the Taliban a threat?
A: Of course. The Taliban is an ongoing threat to our ongoing mission to eliminate the Taliban.
Q: And if we fail to eliminate the Taliban?
A: We cannot fail to eliminate the Taliban, as long as the Taliban continues to provide safe havens and training grounds for the Taliban.
Q: And the Taliban, of course, offers aid and comfort to the ever-dangerous Taliban.
A: Such is the deadly circle of terror.

Fafblog on Afghanistan:

Q: Is Afghanistan a threat?
A: Of course not! We are not at war with the proud and freedom-loving people of Afghanistan. We simply happen to be killing the proud and freedom-loving people of Afghanistan on a regular basis.
Q: But we deeply regret killing them, each and every time we kill them.
A: And each and every time we plan to kill them, and each and every time we're in the middle of killing them, and each and every time we plan to kill them again.
Q: And every time we go to kill them, we of course take every possible precaution we can possibly take to avoid killing them, except of course for not actually killing them.

Read the rest. Fafblog is awesome.

2009-10-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

You may have read in the Daily Mail about the girl who died not long after being given the HPV vaccine. The usual scaremongering ensued. However, it is now clear that Natalie Morton did NOT die due to the HPV vaccine.

Even if she had, she would be the less-than-one-complication-in-a-million that the vaccine is estimated to cause; no medical intervention is perfectly safe and a complete immunization campaign in the UK will inevitably lead to some girls dying due to an adverse reaction against the vaccine. However, the risk of not being vaccinated is considerably larger.

Here are some numbers:

Number of girls vaccinated in 10 years: 3.5 million (approx)
Deaths due to vaccination: 1 in 10 years
Lives estimated saved: 4000 in 10 years

Risk of dying due to vaccination: 0.00028 in 1000
Chance of vaccination saving your life: 1.15 in 1000

Take the vaccine, if you're the age for it. If you have kids of the right age, make sure they're vaccinated.

(Fight the scaremongering. Pass this on.)

2009-10-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

Mark Reckons asks for Lib Dems' opinions on inheritance tax. Here are mine.

Firstly, as numerous people have pointed out, it seems to be riddled with exemptions and thus quite easy to avoid. The rate is so high at 40% that for people with a lot of wealth to pass on, there's a huge incentive for gaming the system. Indeed, my own parents have given me some money to invest for a house deposit so that it won't be caught up in inheritance tax later (though it's very doubtful that their assets will total enough to even hit the IHT threshold).

A really great argument I read for an inheritance tax was in Redesigning Distribution* - in order to fund a 'stakeholder grant' of the equivalent of a university education for every adult as they turn 18.

However, I think that the boat has sailed on linking IHT to a new good outcome, so it seems to me that the same effect - taxing wealth which is doing little - could be accomplished with a land value tax, which could be rolled up over several years past age 65, say, to be paid on transferral. Of course, that wouldn't tax non-land assets, but the problem with 'wealth', it seems to me, is that it's pretty easy to hide or move to evade taxation.

(* affiliate link -- but this is a really good book if you're interested in basic income and it introduced me to the notion of stakeholder grants)

Electric Day Motions

2009-07-08T01:54:00.000-07:00

Many are suggesting that EDMs need to be reformed rather than scrapped.

I have nothing to say on the cost or efficacy of EDMs as they stand beyond James Graham's view. However I do worry that, if badly done, electronicizing (?) EDMs would effectively neuter them. Part of the point of digitizing (that's better) things is that they become cheaper, easier to use and easier to maintain. If setting up an EDM became easier than it already is, then it is inevitable that there would be more of them, and more of them would be signed by more MPs.

Therefore, in order to be seen as worthwhile, an EDM would have to attract a considerably larger number of signatures than they do at the moment, which means that more MPs would spend more of their time ticking boxes and signing them.

Eventually, I envisage a situation in which there are 10x more EDMs, each with 10x more signatures, with MPs spending exactly the same amount of their time signing them, and the Commons spending the same amount of money maintaining the new, larger database.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but I hope you see my point.

Torture

2009-03-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

None of us want the UK government to use intelligence gained by torture, do we?

Support Craig Murray's quest to have his evidence heard by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/your_help_neede.html

It'll take you two minutes to write one email, and another two minutes to forward the link to all your friends.

spag

2009-02-23T06:14:00.000-08:00

Got an email from the lib dems suggesting that I go digg something. What does anyone think about this? It seems like going and voting things up on aggregators is going to be a new form of spam (spag, anyone?) because loads of special-interest groups are going to try it on - and special-interest bodies are going to have a lot of mindless clickers, whereas the rest of everyone has less of a stake in ruthlessly voting things down. This could lead to the ruin of aggregators by diluting their usefulness. At the very least it seems that the aggregator sites will have to fight back against spag, provoking another arms race.

Your thoughts?

Smoke

2009-02-19T09:21:00.000-08:00

GOVERNMENT LYING ABOUT DRUGS SCANDAL. Except that it's not a scandal, is it, because bleating tabloid journos would rather a) be able to write ARMY BUSTS HUGE DRUG RING rather than ARMY ACTION COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME or b) report on the agonizingly slow death of Jade Goody. Girls Aloud are playing her wedding, don't you know?

free xbox controller as mouse software

2009-02-17T14:51:00.000-08:00

If you are looking for some free software so that you can use your xbox controller as a mouse in windows, you could do worse than ControlMK. It is a bit fiddly, but it's free and it does the job. Saved me from the agony of the dodgy trackball on my cheapo wireless keyboard.

I'm mostly writing this post to give the guy a better search ranking, because when I was looking myself I came across a bunch of apps that wanted to charge money for the privilege of doing this fairly simple task - in fact, I was pretty gobsmacked that the Microsoft driver didn't allow you to use the xbox controller as a mouse in the first place.

Horse Bang

2009-02-11T06:46:00.000-08:00

Compare and contrast. Oh, wait - artist with mental vision and no clear idea how to fix the engineering problems given heaps of money. They're both the same.

Watch this space for the first person to be killed in the UK by a giant steel horse cock, coming (so to speak) in 2012. At the earliest.

2009-02-10T02:48:00.000-08:00

George Monbiot is often a smug tool. Today he is a king.

Shorter

2008-12-12T08:47:00.000-08:00

Wah wah companies are evil because you have to write them a letter to complain why can't they take emails letters are so hard to write the bastards. Supermarkets sell things too cheap!

We need change! Change so that supermarkets can't sell stuff so cheap! Change so that internet retailers have to receive endless, mindless email complaints! No! Come back! This stuff is, like, important!

Oh, wait.

It's not that I don't agree with this stuff, but c'mon, there's surely a better platform to stand on than "evil businesses are evil"?

Value

2008-12-05T03:44:00.000-08:00

Question: how much did the Audit Commission spend on this, do you think?

Breakdown

2008-11-11T04:01:00.000-08:00

It's trivially obvious that the major Western car manufacturers are crippled by unions, overproducing and horrendously inefficient. Isn't it time they were allowed to fail, instead of propping them up like the banks?

Toyota isn't asking for any government handouts, I notice...

No friends

2008-10-21T04:39:00.000-07:00

Not making any friends here, but, hello: you're the problem. No-one, presented with the information about the dangers of smoking and taking a rational decision would say "uh, yeah, give me some of that emphysema, I really want a mild buzz and a desperate craving for an expensive habit that doesn't only kill me in a variety of creatively painful ways, it at best makes me smell awful and at worst kills the people around me too. Yes, let me sign right on that dotted line". No-one.

If you're a smoker, it's probably because you started as a kid because you thought it was cool (or at least grown-up) and you weren't really adult enough to make the decision, or if not, then at least because someone else you know smokes and you got peer-pressured into it, or got a bit drunk and decided to have a couple of fags since they were going. And then y'all got addicted. For life.

Honestly, if you want to sling a bunch of money into HMG's coffers and then die early before you need 30 years of respite care, go ahead, I don't give a toss, but it's purely because YOU smoke that other people start. If no-one smoked in the UK, and knowing what we know about it now, no-one would start because it's so retarded. That's why I'm angry, and that's why I'm happy that smoking is stigmatized as a filthy habit.

Kill yourself, I don't give a fuck. But don't take anyone else with you.

No smoke

2008-10-21T02:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Smokers,

You're a bunch of fucking idiots. By banning smoking we're trying to help you break your addiction to a drug that kills 30-50% of people who use it. Stop whining.

------

Or, in a longer form:

OMG SMOKERS NOW STAY AT HOME AND DON'T CREATE JOBS IN PUBS - well, jobs aren't intrinsically valuable, are they? I mean, no-one actually wants a job, right? That's why it's called "work". If people wanted to do it, it would be called "fun" and they wouldn't pay you to do it.

No-one complains now about how we're not all subsistence farmers doing 12-hour days of backbreaking labour to put food on the table, instead we rejoice that automation has saved people from a life of drudgery.

OMG SMOKERS BUY CHEAP BEER FROM THE SUPERMARKETS - how terrible. You mean they're getting a substitute product for substantially less money? Well, that's good. Efficient. It means that they can spend the fucking money they saved on something else, like a Sky subscription or a flatscreen TV. Guess what? That's keeping people in jobs, innit?

OMG BANNING SMOKING STOPS ME DOING WHAT I WANT - what you want is idiotic. Stop it. Look, if you must be physiologically addicted to a drug, at least try something that's a bit less crap than nicotine. At least coke gives you a rush!

OMG BAR STAFF SIGN UP FOR PASSIVE SMOKING - fuck off. Who checks the box that says "yes please, I'd like an early death due to other people who can't stop themselves being disgusting"? It might come as news to you but bar staff make minimum wage. How many of them actually have a real choice, between "taking this job and feeding my kids" and "not", hmm?

Smarts

2008-10-14T07:46:00.001-07:00

Chandila's first email to the party is knacker-kickingly awful. I sympathize with the guy, who is clearly trying to shake things up, but someone who is leading on rebranding the party who can't even get his headings the same colour is clearly not the person for the job.

The text itself is not very high quality, the sentence structure and punctuation is odd at the best of times. Basically Chandila comes off as an Apprentice runner-up, and I don't mean that in a nice way. Sorry mate, I think you raise some valid points and hopefully these will be taken up by the membership, but you don't strike me as smart enough to actually do the job of president.

Memewatch

2008-10-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

First in an occasional series (knowing me, *very* occasional) tracking once-good phrases as they are abused in modern language.

Today Nick Clegg said that "We are in the eye of an economic storm".

The eye of a storm features mostly calm weather, as any fool knows. I don't think the Dow sliding 5% and the FTSE circling 4800 really counts as "calm", more like "terrifying". Even if you don't believe in the "financial crisis" it must still be at least "a bit worrying".

See also "more heat than light", desperately overused by Lib Dem bloggers this year. Anyone have any other nominations?

Reversal

2008-08-29T03:27:00.000-07:00

If the Americans vote in the young black guy then they will quickly have an old white guy in the Oval Office anyway, after he gets assassinated - and if they vote in the old white guy they're gonna get his VP in short order after he has a heart attack or cancer or whatever... so I really hope that McCain picks Rice or Powell as VP to complete the circle!

UPDATE: McCain has picked a woman, at least, so vote McCain if you want someone from a large disenfranchised section of society to get into power!

Hard choices

2008-08-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

I'm glad that the BBC have an editors' blog - it makes it possible to ridicule cretins who believe that the Olympic opening ceremony is more important than Russia invading Georgia. Comment #2 is spot on.

Opening

2008-08-08T07:03:00.001-07:00

I bet Gordon Brown is kicking himself for not going to the opening of the Olympics. They looked fucking awesome on the telly!

Escape

2008-08-03T02:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Gordon Brown,

You have two ways of escape:

(1a. Call leadership election. Stand. Squash opponents.
(1b. Sack all detractors in cabinet.
(1c. Solve 10p rate mess by jacking up personal allowance by £2k.
(1d. Start proposing more actually sensible laws that benefit lots of people instead of obsessing over terrorism and knife crime.

OR

(2. Run away.

kthxbye

Form

2008-08-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

New name, new look. Taken from the Justin Currie song "no surrender", which I urge you to hunt down.

Actual content will come later. Maybe :P

(Attribution: background picture from flickr, by Abduraman)

Gas

2008-07-31T08:35:00.001-07:00

It appears that British Gas are making a 4.3% operating profit. Oh noes!

Sense

2008-07-31T03:38:00.001-07:00

Government agency sees sense on drugs: enforcement isn't working. It infuriates me that the only reason - the ONLY reason - why we are not taking a far more effective stance on drugs both nationally and globally is that it is politically dangerous to do so, simply because the average person's kneejerk reaction is "drugs are bad". It's pathetic, and people should grow up and stop reading tabloids. Grrrr.

(float) ((int) egalitarianism)

2008-07-27T02:49:00.000-07:00

So I've been reading Recasting Egalitarianism, one of the Real Utopias Project books, over the last few days. It's pretty interesting, although I buy the central premise - redestribution of assets rather than income as an egalitarian exercise that can be done without compromising economic efficiency - rather less than the premise of Redesigning Distribution, though the premise of that is the notion of a basic income scheme being A Good Thing.

Anyway, in a nutshell the authors are effectively proposing proper incentive alignment under the cover of egalitarianism. For example: tenants have no stake in the value of the properties they rent, and thus they will depreciate that asset faster than if they were the owners themselves. Another example: workers who work for the man have no incentive to maximise their own productivity because they will ultimately not be the big winners. In both of these cases, realigning incentives (by creating housing cooperatives and worker cooperatives) is not only redistributive but also has the power to actually increase productivity.

So, my question to you, dear lone reader, is how does one get from our current position to a position where housing cooperatives replace landlords? Is this viable? Is it even desirable? I feel another post coming on... later!

Enough

2008-06-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

As of May 3, 139 soldiers, 25 Marines and seven sailors have killed themselves in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, according to Pentagon data.

Can we leave now?

2008-05-21T02:05:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Parliament for doing the right thing on HFE. NB. Cameron voted for a cut in the abortion limit, despite no evidence showing that 22-24 week foetuses were more viable now than before. Cretin.

Pot

2008-05-07T05:20:00.001-07:00

I've submitted a couple of FoI requests to the home office for their data on the public consultation run before Christmas, but I suspect that my emails are being handily blocked by their mail server. Anyone else feel like dropping an email to public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk asking for both the raw data and any statistical or summary information compiled relating to Question 39a and b on the consultation? Here's the email I wrote:

Hi,

I note that the IPSOS/Mori report on the Home Office drugs consultation of late last year has now been issued, minus the section on cannabis reclassification, which is due to be published later. I would like to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act for the full anonymized survey answers to Questions 39(a) and 39(b) of the "Our Community, Your Say" consultation along with any summary information that IPSOS/Mori or the Home Office has compiled based on these survey answers.

Thank you.

If you write in and get a reply, even a read receipt, I'd love to know.

Blush

2008-04-26T01:40:00.001-07:00

Soooooo, let's say you're a right-of-centre political party currently without any MPs, but a fair number of council- and Euro-level representatives. You are offered the services of a science-hating, racist, money-grubbing, gay-hating, Iraq-war-supporting defector who had previously been elected under both old Labour and new Tory banners to be your one and only MP, garnering a large amount of publicity for your organization, probably showing it in a rather poor light, and almost certainly convincing several people of your party's essential barminess.

What would you do?

(a. accept the services of the slimy spineless toad, compromising any principles you ever had in order to get a single, useless seat in the legislature...
(b. refuse politely and suggest he might prefer to switch to the BNP...
(c. beat him repeatedly around the face and neck into unconsciousness with his own shoes?

We report! You decide!

Shot

2008-04-26T01:39:00.002-07:00

Spotted on CiF:

if you can still bring yourself to vote Labour after they've stolen from the poorest workers, lost your children's personal data, assaulted habeas corpus and the right to walk the streets without carrying a card like a criminal, left a million schoolchildren without even a single one of the devalued GCSEs to their name, wasted billions on the Olympics, borrowed in the good times with no thought for the coming downturn - then, frankly, you should be shot.

Great stuff.

Face

2008-04-26T01:39:00.001-07:00

Labour backbenchers last night convinced the government not to go out and just start punching poor people in the face.

Green

2008-04-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

This is probably the slickest party political video I've seen this side of the pond:

I might not agree with everything they say, but it is very, very well produced.

(ps. can you see my google ads? I can't, but I think they do that on purpose)

Four ideas for better democracy

2008-04-13T13:41:00.001-07:00

For every parliamentary candidate:

1. Criminal records indicated on the ballot paper.

2. Full CV and two references posted online for all to see.

3. Set your required salary (inc expenses) on the ballot paper.

4. Politics 101 test score also on the ballot paper (testing eg. stats, political history & philosophy, comprehension)

And that's just with the current system. Don't even get me started on electoral reform...

War On Progress

2008-04-13T13:40:00.001-07:00

What annoys me most about the term "progressive" is that it only every seems to be used by lefties who think that the left has a monopoly on "progress", whatever that is. A lot of people think that Thatcher made a lot of "progress" by crushing the trade unions in the 80's, but does she get the "progressive" mantle? Of course not - progressivism is only for elitist left-wingers who think that their vision is the one and only true one. Just fuck off, m'kay? If you want to say that you are an environmentalist feminist multiculturalist left-leaning liberal, then don't try and appropriate a word that connotes "good". It's like the whole mess of the "decent left" all over again.

What progressivism really reminds me of is the wanky non-speak of the Transition Towns movement that seems to use an awful lot of words to mean not very much at all.

ps. no post on progress can go without mention of Daniel Davies superb "Don't Just Do Something, Stand There": the great thing about the status quo is that it is no worse than the status quo.

Chips

2008-04-13T13:09:00.001-07:00

My local Sainsburys (and if you know Bath, you know it's not a big one by any means) devotes an entire frozen aisle to selling chips. It sells 26 varieties of frozen chips. TWENTY SIX! Twenty six products that are, at base, potatoes sliced into a particular shape. Furthermore, of those 26, many are simply duplicates by a different brand - so there is McCain's straight-cut oven chips and own brand straight-cut oven chips, which are different in price by pennies.

What I find most frustrating about this explosion of choice in the supermarket is that they still never manage to have exactly what you wanted in the first place. I wouldn't mind approaching-infinite choice if it meant that I could have the huge fat fluffy chips that the pub down the road from my old job did, but you don't get that - you always get a sub-par substitute. What's the point? If you're not going to get exactly what you want, they might as well pile it high and sell it cheap.

I like Marks & Spencer, because it knows that it is catering to a very specific market, and so doesn't need to offer ten different kinds of each product in order to target the wallet size of every customer shopping, and can just get on with selling one kind of each thing. Thus it manages to offer 75%+ of the products of Sainsburys in less than 25% of the floorspace. Of course, I realize that I'm paying for the privilege of less choice, which is barmy in its own special way.

Inequality kills...

2008-04-12T04:03:00.000-07:00

National pay scales kill - FACT.

Fafblog

2008-04-11T00:56:00.000-07:00

If you don't read Fafblog, then you should.

So for the last five years all the liberals and the hippies and the nattering nabobs of normalcy have been coming up to Giblets and going "Was the war a mistake Giblets?" and "Are we losing the war Giblets?" and "Oh look at all the dead people Giblets, maybe we should stop the war." And the correct answers to these questions have been "Shut up," "Shut up you traitor," and "We'd be winning already if you'd just shut up."

It's great. Scroll down to Now They Hate Us With Our Freedom, too.

Indy

2008-04-10T11:20:00.000-07:00

The Independent today announced the 80p Euro on its front cover with a huge splash story. However, the paper itself was priced in the top-right corner "80p / E1.10". Doh.

Gordon Brown thinks smoking pot is worse than raping someone

2008-04-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

The maximum penalty for possession of cannabis is five years. Considering that dealing is a separate offence (and, I think, you get automatically upgraded to dealing if you're holding a certain amount - anyone know if this is true?), that means you can do five years in jail for carrying a single person's supply of cannabis. What's that - a half?

The maximum sentence for rape is life imprisonment - however, the average sentence seems to be about four years.

That means that, according to one person at least, holding a few spliffs' worth of pot is worse than the typical rape.

Great moral compass, eh?

Tom Watson MP: Liar

2008-02-06T12:59:00.000-08:00

I don't normally link to Guido, but Tom Watson's return to government when he previously promised not to make one is worth pointing out.

Tom Watson MP: Liar.

2008-02-04T00:55:00.000-08:00

Good to see that the government is holding all public servants to below-inflation pay rises this year...

Story Writes Itself

2008-01-23T15:00:00.001-08:00

Whose figures should we believe for the march this time? The police's figure of 22500 protesters or, er...

Organlegging

2008-01-15T13:56:00.000-08:00

Blogging in support of Justin, here.

Ideology aside, if most people want to have their organs donated after they die, then we should have an opt-out system out of simplicity. Even with some very strong protections (ie. all it takes is a word from next-of-kin to prevent donation) the number of donations would increase substantially.

And if you opt out of allowing your organs to be donated, I think that it's only fair that you opt out of receiving organ donations from others.

Another Mystery

2008-01-15T05:26:00.000-08:00

A single Milky Way costs 20p in the local corner store.

A twin pack costs 47p.

This seems to have been the case since records began. Why?

National Debates

2008-01-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

Is anyone else sick of politicians saying they want a "national debate" on a topic? This is not the most egregious by any means, but it's a stock phrase that is really starting to get to me. We employ politicians to have those national debates. The only other place we get them is the ill-informed and ready-biased mainstream media, which does not represent true public opinion at all. If politicians are so enamoured of the notion of a national debate, then they should put forward a framework for having national debates, culminating in a referendum so that the public can decide on the true outcome of the debate.

Second, to anyone accusing anyone of "generating more heat than light": oh, fuck off. Get a new phrase.

Rise of the Robots

2008-01-10T12:20:00.003-08:00

A friend pointed me at a short story a while ago describing the rise of AI and robotization in two countries, the USA and Australia. In the USA, the robots forced everyone to work in shittier and shittier jobs, finally replacing the automaton-like humans at the bottom with robots, and tossing all of the poor people into, effectively, a prison.

In Australia, the robots were harnessed for good - every person was freed from having to work, because each person was awarded enough energy credits to buy enough food, shelter and warmth to live comfortably. Thus, people devoted their time to arts, philosophy, games, etc.

Now, I don't believe that either country would exactly end up like that, but it did prompt me to think, in the wake of people demanding that layabouts get jobs, that surely we already have the technical ability now to 99%+ automate the production of all food, clothes, houses and so on. We could live in such a society as the neo-Australian one, in which everyone gets enough to survive on, and spends their excess energy credits on fun things, or on entreprenurial activities that people would pay them energy credits for, aside from a small group of people engaged in the machinery of keeping everyone alive, of course.

Of course, it's probably not politically feasible. But I always think of this, now, when people suggest that the non-workers should get off their arses and get jobs - because the jobs that they can get are probably crappy minimum wage jobs that no-one wants to spend their life doing, and I think that it's pretty inhuman that the only reason that they are doing them is because it hasn't yet become cheap enough to replace them with robots.

Tricketing

2008-01-10T12:20:00.001-08:00

People are moaning about ticket resellers again, to which I have to say: naff off, it's the sodding market at work. If artists wanted to make more money from their tickets then guess what? They should charge more in the first place. The problem is that most ticketing systems charge a flat rate to everyone on a first-come first-served basis, whereas there are some people who would be happy to pay more for those tickets, but don't win the time-based lottery, and thus will pay more than the face value of the ticket.

This incentivizes people to buy up what they view as underpriced tickets from the vendors and resell them at the price that the punters are willing to pay.

Clearly, the solution is for vendors to adopt a smarter approach to ticket prices, perhaps in the style of EasyJet, in which tickets bought early go for cheap, and the price increases as demand increases, and offer almost-at-cost buybacks if cancelled far enough in advance.

Workfair

2008-01-09T10:53:00.001-08:00

I've seen yet another person proposing that people be forced to work in order to collect benefits. Oh, and this chap too, more worryingly.

Question - is the work that benefits-seekers are to be drafted into going to pay them the minimum wage? It doesn't seem so, since net benefits (for a single adult) don't add up to the same as the minimum wage. If that's the case, surely by forced labour one is essentially supplying a huge pool of labour who can (unwillingly) give their labour for less than the cost of a regular worker. If that's the case, won't that destroy minimum-wage jobs, as companies queue around the block to get their hands on the cheap slaves? And then they start shedding their existing minimum-wage staff back into the unemployment pool, and "rehiring" them as forced-workers, until there are no minimum-wage jobs left?

Another question - would you really want someone working for you who had effectively been forced into the job? I mean, I realize that a lot of people work in jobs that they don't like, and often it will be because they have little alternative, but isn't there a quantifiable difference between taking a job because it's the only one going that will pay the bills, and taking a job because if you don't, the government will force you onto the streets as a homeless person?

Third question - what would a government do with the heap of discarded people from this ludicrous policy who were homeless and wandering the streets? Existing charities would be stretched to breaking point.

So yeah - forced labour: it may sound seductive on the surface, but seriously, it's a stupid idea.

Licenceiousness

2008-01-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty proud of that one. Thanks.

Before Christmas (topical blog, this) we had Harriet Harman claiming that we need to make prostitution illegal in order to protect trafficked sex slaves. This week, Fiona McTaggart attempts to make a feminist case for making buying sex illegal (and is thoroughly thrashed in the comments for doing so).

What I don't really understand is the mindset that prostitution is bad per se and thus should be criminalized. Of course there is a lot of danger and misery surrounding prostitution in this country and most (if not all) others, but it is not the act of exchanging money for sexual favours which is at the root of the problem. The illegality of doing so is what has led to a lot of the problems associated with prostitution.

Harriet Harman is being utterly cretinous when she asks "can we really stop [the sex slavery] trade when we've still got a lawful sex trade going on?". Can you imagine how hard it would be for government outreach workers to even find native prostitutes if all prostitution became illegal?

Legalizing prostitution and licensing (aha, the penny drops!) brothels would allow us to solve many of the problems that prostitutes face, including slave trafficking. Prostitutes could have a shagging licence (sorry) that would require regular STD checks, and punters would be able to look up the licence number by text message, receiving a photo of the prostitute and STD safety report by return MMS. This also ensures that unlicenced sex workers were not working (hence eliminating trafficked sex slaves), providing that engaging the services of an unlicenced sex worker became illegal. Brothels themselves could be regulated by a similar system, featuring a licence number that could be checked up by punters that would give the address of the licenced premises and perhaps a picture of the outside of the building, too.

This way, everyone has an incentive to play things straight - sex workers get the security of legal premises and can report abuse to the police with no fear of legal action to themselves. They are also easier targets for eg. drug rehabilitation programs since their working locations would be known, and punters would know that they had less chance of contracting an STD. Of course, I expect that the average price of sex services would increase, since the increase in regulation would impose significant operating costs on a sex business, but I can't imagine many punters choosing to use an illegal, unlicenced sex worker when the legal option was available.

Finally, and something I hadn't even considered, Mark Wadsworth points out very astutely that once a prostitute has an offence relating to prostitution on hir criminal record, it becomes very difficult indeed to get other work.

Peering

2007-12-19T14:45:00.001-08:00

The Public Administration Committee has said that appointments to the House of Lords should not be made by party leaders and that an independent body should do it instead. They also suggest that it should be possible to boot Lords out of the House, presumably if they fail to follow their Commons' masters' orders, and that the number of Lords should be proportional to the vote-share at the previous general election.

So, they want to allow our Lords to be appointed by people who are unaccountable to the public, removed from office by their political masters when expedient, and composed in rough proportion to the contents of the House of Commons?

Good idea? You decide.

Dumberer

2007-12-13T15:49:00.001-08:00

The ever-superb Ministry of Truth is onto the story of that physics teacher who a while ago wrote an open letter to the authorities, demanding his subject back.

After the privatization of the exam boards, it should be thoroughly unsurprising that the exams have gotten easier - the boards are competing against each other. And since the GCSE is a fixed standard (or rather, they aren't allowed to call theirs "GCSE++"), there are two ways to compete to attract submissions: firstly by streamlining business processs and becoming more efficient, which is what the market was introduced to encourage but is, in practice, difficult and subject to diminishing returns, and secondly by making their exams easier so that schools that want to boost their kids' grades will pick them over the competition.

This may appear to be a bug in the system, but it might perhaps be a feature - the people in charge of the privatization might have thought at the time that gradually rising grades would make the government look good. It has, of course, just led to complaints of dumbing down. And ruined the secondary education of millions of children.

This is exactly why politicians shouldn't be able to control anything to do with education except for the budget. I'd rather have a separate executive making decisions on how to spend its budget to best benefit the children under its control than the current highly-politicized mess.

The preferred option around these parts is vouchers or equivalent. In that circumstance, though, we also need to make sure that there is either a well-understood market for qualifications, or that there is some kind of (government-run?) qualifications rating bureau that will rate qualifications against each other so that parents know what they are choosing for their children, and crucially so that employers and universities can differentiate between the poor, mediocre, good, great, and geniuses.

Can't Stop The Pot

2007-12-13T15:48:00.001-08:00

The government has responded to the petition to legalize cannabis on the No. 10 website. Here is their response in full, followed by why I think that it's a pile of shite. I have numbered the paragraphs for reference, the rest of the text is as produced on the No. 10 site.

(1) The Government has no intention of legalising cannabis and regulating its control. In response to the Home Affairs Committee report on The Government's Drugs Policy: Is It Working? in 2002, it stated that "We do not accept that legalisation and regulation is now, or will be in the future, an acceptable response to the presence of drugs" and that includes cannabis. Supply and possession of the drug are and will remain illegal.

(2) The Government considers that cannabis is a controlled, illicit drug for good reasons. It has a number of acute and chronic health effects and prolonged use can induce dependence. Most cannabis is smoked and smoking, in any form, is dangerous. Even the occasional use of cannabis can pose significant dangers for people with mental health problems, such as schizophrenia, and particular efforts need to be made to encourage abstinence in such individuals.

(3) Legalising cannabis would run counter to this country's international obligations as a signatory to the relevant United Nations Conventions on drugs and there is no prospect of unilateral action.

(4) Legalisation would also run counter to the Government's health and education messages. The message to all - and to young people in particular - is that all controlled drugs, including cannabis, are harmful and no one should take them. To legalise the possession of cannabis for personal consumption would send the wrong message to the majority of young people who do not take drugs on a regular basis, if at all, with the potential risk of increased drug use and abuse.

(5) The Government's objective is to reduce the use of all illegal drugs - including cannabis - substantially, not to encourage increased consumption due to more ready access to increased supply. While our drugs laws cannot be expected to eliminate drug use, there is no doubt that they do help to limit use and deter experimentation.

(6) The Prime Minister announced on 18 July that, as part of the consultation to review its drug strategy, the Government will also consider whether it is now right that cannabis should be moved from Class C back to Class B under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.

(7) There is real public concern about the potential mental health effects of cannabis use and, in particular, the use and availability of increased strengths of the drug, commonly known as skunk. In these circumstances, the Government is considering whether it is necessary to toughen the penalties relating to cannabis possession to complement its education and treatment programmes.

(8) The Home Secretary has therefore asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which advises the Government on drug issues, to again assess the medical and social scientific basis of the classification of cannabis. This review will take into account the fact that there are stronger forms of cannabis that may cause more harm.

(9) The Government will consider carefully the Advisory Council's findings, expected next spring, before making a final decision that will be consistent with its aim of reducing the harm caused by drugs and ensuring that people - and especially young people - are well aware of all the risks.

(Incidentally, if you want more ammunition to fire at the government, I recommend that first link)

So let's summarize:
(a) Cannabis has acute and chronic health effects eg. addiction, lung problems, schizophrenia.
(b) Legalization runs counter to international obligations.
(c) Legalization would send the wrong message.
(d) Government objective is to reduce use.
(e) No doubt that drugs laws limit use and deter experimentation.
(f) Skunk is more available now.
(g) Government aim is to reduce harm and raise awareness of risks.

Tackling those one at a time:
(a) Health effects: while there is no doubt that cannabis can have negative effects on health, this is true of a whole host of perfectly legal activities such as drinking, driving, diving, skydiving, surfing, motorcycle riding (deadly, that, both my grandads died in bike accidents), yachting, mountaineering... the list goes on. Why is it that it's okay when it's an "extreme" sport, or a day-to-day activity to get to work that it's legal, but when it's a mind-altering recreational drug, that suddenly becomes a problem? I never saw a notice anywhere that said SURFING KILLS.

(b) International obligations: I believe that the Netherlands manages to avoid this by making cannabis illegal but not actually enforcing the law, and explicitly stating that it won't. Anyway, I suspect that invading Iraq ran counter to a few international obligations. If HMG can do it to kill a million Iraqis, they can do it for cannabis.

(c) Laws should not be made to "send a message", they should be made to accomplish stated outcomes. If it could be shown that legalization would reduce use (like it did in the Netherlands), would the government still be ideologically opposed to legalization? If so, why? That would run counter to their practical aims to reduce use and therefore harm. Anyway, lawmaking based on "sending messages" is really code for "we don't want the tabloids disapproving".

(d) I simply don't believe that. If the government's objective was to reduce use, then they would have seriously investigated, and possibly trialled, legalization. Evidence from the Netherlands shows that after a short spike, usage falls to levels below pre-legalization levels.

(e) Bollocks. Cannabis has always been considered counter-culture and edgy precisely because of its illegality.

(f) It is not at all obvious that cannabis is vastly stronger now than it ever was, nor that most users are actually smoking the strong stuff. Furthermore, there is good reason to believe that the rise of skunk is due to the illegality of the drug, and the requirement to make more money per plant on the part of producers due to the criminal risks involved in production. If cannabis were to be legalized, firstly, the strength could be controlled, preventing legal skunk from being sold, and second, the demand-for-supply of skunk (if that makes sense) should actually go down since production would no longer be illegal, and cultivation would not need to be done in secret.

(g) What better way to raise awareness of the risks of cannabis than to emblazon "CANNABIS CAUSES SCHIZOPHRENIA" on every packet in every newsagent? The harms associated with drinking and smoking are well-understood and often discussed, because they are legal.

Intellectual Poverty

2007-12-11T10:36:00.002-08:00

(Is it a wonder that most blog posts are fatuous? Bloggers must surely expend most of their mental energies thinking up suitably punnishing titles - I know I do!)

I find the current discussions on child poverty infuriating. The notion of 60% of median as a floating scale for child poverty is, frankly, bonkers. We should be looking at how much it costs to actually house, feed, clothe, etc a child today. If a parent doesn't have that much money to spend on their children, then those children should be definitionally "in poverty". Otherwise not. Okay, it may be that right now, 60% of today's median income corresponds to enough income to feed oneself and one's children, but in five, ten years?

Second, I don't really believe that 1 in 3 children in the UK live in poverty by any sensible definition of the word. Hardship? Sure. But starving? Or living without heating or electricity? I find that very unlikely. Is this figure being calculated *before* benefits are paid? If so, then no suprise that the figure is going up.

Fortunately, there's a very easy way to end child poverty: it's called a "Citizen's Income". Pay everyone a CI, and pay <16-year-olds a half-share. A 2-parent, 2-child family then receives £18k at a CI of £6k. Oh, hey, that's way bigger than the £12k that is currently 60% of median income.

And you free parents from the benefits trap that keeps them at home, hopefully increasing economic activity all round (particularly if the minimum wage is abolished and the restrictions on childcare reduced).

Finally, if the kids' half-shares are actually full shares, but with 50% going into a trust, then every child will have ~£45k (in today's money) available at age 18 to give them a real start in life. Okay, so 18-year-olds can be irresponsible, so we might limit the uses of the trust to educational (etc) purposes until age 30. This frees children from the fear of getting into huge debt through a university education, whilst also making them think sensibly about what to spend the money on.

I know Mark's going to pop up and disagree with me here, on the basis that we should be keeping things simple, but I think that sometimes a compromise is worthwhile if it provides good outcomes. I think that a stakeholder grant of this form would disproportionately benefit the poor whilst solving the funding problem for universities, amongst other things, and so I believe that it would be really worthwhile.

---

A separate thought on child poverty and attainment: children who are born to richer, older parents do better than those born to younger, poorer ones. One might naturally think, therefore, that one should incentivize parents to have children later and richer by making the monetary rewards for bearing children later and richer be greater. However, it seems awfully unfair to thus disadvantage children born to poorer, younger parents, through no fault of the child themselves. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that it's pretty hard to distinguish between money going to the children and money going to the parents from an institutional point of view.

How about a one-off bonus paid to every couple, of £250 per year past age 20 (capped at £3000) of the mother's age at the birth of her first child (age 21 = finished uni!). Not enough to materially affect the child's development, but perhaps enough to encourage everyone to wait for as long as possible? (£2.5bn a year, tops. Peanuts in terms of government spending!)

Cutting

2007-12-11T10:36:00.001-08:00

There are two issues that I want to talk about relating to censorship. I've been muddling my responses to them together, so this is really a post to clarify my own thinking.

1. Torture porn
Basically, I think that films like Sin City are pretty gross. I usually avoid them, and only saw Sin City on the basis of faulty advice (and left the cinema when Clive Owen started chopping dead bodies up). Honestly, I don't think that Sin City is really the worst offender, because most of the films I put in the "torture porn" category involve a lot more women screaming as horrible things are done to them or are about to be done to them. I always find the threat of sexualized violence in the narrative context of a 'mainstream' movie quite stomach-churning. I have a sense, though, that there have been a rash of recent films in which "this sort of thing" is being done purely in order to titillate the audience rather than because the scene is strictly necessary in the movie. That's what I find detestable, that the filmmakers seem to be speaking to the audience and saying "we've got what you like", rather than actually making films with a reasonable story.

On the other hand, I find the gleefully gratuitous fight scenes of Shoot 'Em Up and its ilk highly entertaining, and casualizing violence is arguably worse. I guess what really gets me about the "torture porn" genre is that people actually want to watch that stuff. But I guess that I can't claim any moral superiority since I'd list The Matrix and a couple of John Woo films in my top 20 favourites. And I can't even watch an episode of House without looking away at least five times.

NOTE: I don't really include S&M movies in the "torture porn" category, since they are pretty clearly harmless. Not that I've seen any. No, really. What?

2. Hate Speech
(You're thinking, how does he get these two confused?? Thinking about censoring things that people find offensive, that's how.)

On the one hand, I am pretty firmly anti-censorship in all its forms - I think that people should be able to say what they like, and if other people find that offensive then tough. I think that I'm even "pro" hate speech and incitement, at least in theory, because the people being spoken to surely have their own minds.

On the other hand, I find Chris Bertram's argument compelling.

So I'm in a quandary. The notion of a blanket freedom of speech seems "instinctively liberal", but sometimes our instincts are wrong. Should we give up a part of our freedom of speech in order to foster equality and tolerance? So that "the strong should not harm the weak"?

Jack Straw's vast conspiracy

2007-12-03T12:40:00.001-08:00

Mr Straw also said " 99.9%" of people in the Labour Party had not been involved

Maths quiz: how many party members are there, and how many are therefore implicated?

Fiscal engineering

2007-12-03T12:39:00.000-08:00

Buying peerages or policies via donations to political parties is, in security terms, an "exploit". Unfortunately, it's not an easy one to fix, even aside from the fact that the people who would be attempting to fix the exploit are the same people who are benefitting from it, and thus have to reason to get the fix right - you wouldn't hire the guy who hacked your bank's software to write the fix to his own exploit (not without some serious review mechanisms).

Jock outlines a neat solution in this post. The reason it works is because it purports to vastly reduce the demand for cash by political parties by reducing all campaigns to face-to-face discussions. I'm not sure I totally buy this, incidentally - presuming that the party system were to stay intact in such a system (and I'm not at all sure that it would), I can see that parties could win more by spending money in a different way - instead of national advertising, training candidates on public speaking, debate, and so on, and providing high-quality campaigning materials such as powerpoint presentations (you just know that cellular democracy will result in campaigning-by-powerpoint), flyers, websites and so on. But anyway, I think it's a neat idea on other grounds anyway, so I share it with you. My three readers, one of whom is Jock anyway :P

I'd like to propose a different solution: eliminate the demand for donating to political parties. Many (not all) donors give large sums on the presumption if not outright agreement, that they will benefit somehow themselves. There are three obvious ways in which rich donors could benefit from donating either to the party in power, or the party who is about to come into power. Incidentally, this is why the Lib Dems have, I suspect, significantly fewer large donors - because they are unlikely in the short-to-medium term to gain power and be able to pay back favours.

1. A peerage or other honour: since the scandal, I suspect that the likelihood of rich donors being nominated for peerages will have dropped significantly. However, leave it a few years, and the parties will start to peddle them once more.

Solution: a sortitioned Lords. If the Lords is drawn at random from the public, there's no way to buy one's way in. For other honours, well, who cares? Knights don't get to rule anyone.

2. Favourable policy decisions: Lord Ashcroft seems to be bankrolling the Tories on the basis that they will bring in policies more to his liking.

Solution: a sortitioned Lords would help here, along with a written constitution and a transparent and well-managed lawmaking process that rejects spurious or bad laws. Giving MPs cash bonuses for sponsoring "good" laws would incentivize them to not just follow the party whip. Finally, a system of election that is more representative of the people's views would make parliamentary votes closer, meaning that governments would be less able to steamroller bad legislation through parliament, particularly if their own MPs stood to lose money on the proposition.

3. Favourable executive decisions: Local councillors seem to be being bribed all the time to make favourable property planning decisions.

Solution: separate the executive from the legislature. Ministers should not be responsible for policymaking, running their department, and representing their constituencies all at the same time. Instead, the heads of departments should be appointed by Commons committee and ratified by the Lords. An ombudsman with real power to investigate complaints and abuses in the departments, and to recall the head of department, could be appointed by the judiciary and ratified by a jury (because parliament should not be appointing both head and ombudsman - perhaps the Lords could appoint an ombudsman instead?).

Finally, the rules on donations at the moment need to go. They are just too easy to circumvent. There are only two sets of rules that I think would be easy to enforce and difficult to game: either no donations from 3rd parties at all, or no restrictions on donations at all. The former can still be gamed by gifts in kind (need somewhere to hold your conference? Use my hotel. Need someone to make your party political broadcast? Use my TV company!) so I'd tend towards the latter, presuming that my solutions were implemented.

2007-11-28T14:06:00.001-08:00

I've been having an entertaining debate -> argument -> flamewar with Laurence Boyce on LDV on the notion of a national universal DNA database. Finally had a comment "moderated" (I think they mean "deleted") when I told Larry to "STFI noob" and er, something a bit more complicated to explain but was about as offensive.

Remember, kids:

Anyway, this thread is partly so Laurence can come here and comment in an environment which won't be "moderated" (promise), and partly so I can outline my concerns on the notion of a national universal DNA database (I'll refer to this as a "NUDNAD" from now on, because it sounds childish and rude):

My first objection is that the idea that any large bureaucracy can build, maintain and run a system as vast as a NUDNAD without data compromise would frankly be hilarious if it weren't so terrifying.

My second is that any government with access to a NUDNAD would be sorely tempted to scope creep it into The War Against Terror, the "war" on drugs, or just to sell the data in it to interested 3rd parties. The consequences of this could be devastating.

That's without even getting to the argument about whether it would be liberal or not to do it.

To be fair, there are a few possible benefits: it would become a lot easier to figure out all of the people who had been at the scene of a crime. That could be handy if the crime scene was visited by relatively few people, and if the identity of any of the people was in question.

However, the idea that a NUDNAD would facilitate personalized treatments on the NHS is a joke - sure, having your DNA sequenced might help, but there's no need to then put your DNA sequence onto a NUDNAD - the GP's computer system would be fine.

Anyway, what do you think?

V is for, uh... Truth

2007-11-21T11:33:00.001-08:00

I commend to you the Ministry Of Truth's lengthy and brilliant vivisection of David Cameron's speech on rape. I keep forgetting about MoT, for some reason, despite the fact that it is one of the, if not the, best-written political blogs going.

If I were Vincent Cable, I'd say something like this

2007-11-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

HMRC has today displayed exactly why entrusting this government with an identity card database would be a terrible idea. Can Mr. Darling categorically state that such a cock-up could never happen with the National Identity Register? He cannot.

And yet, he will blab that this latest incident is not his fault. Well, he's right. It's not. He can't have been in the Treasury long enough to set the policy and the senior staff that presided over this incredible blunder.

That honour lies with Gordon Brown. Another nail in the coffin for his alleged brilliance. Since his time in office begun, Mr. Brown and his government have displayed gross incompetence, appalling judgement and disgusting atavism across a whole spectrum of issues.

Simply, LABOUR ISN'T WORKING. Mr. Brown bottled an election because he was afraid to lose it. Now it's clear why. Mr. Speaker, we will put forward a motion of no confidence in this farcical administration at the earliest opportunity, and put an end to a decade of incompetence, waste and corruption.

2007-11-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

I don't often just post links, but this one has been nominated as "one of the best blog posts ever", and I have to agree: The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101

Addressing Voucher Deficiencies

2007-11-01T16:20:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I outlined my two qualms with education vouchers:

1. The flight of the middle classes to better schools, due to reduced deadweight costs.
2. That poorer children require more expensive education, and yet are least likely to get it.

I would like to examine a different idea: reverse-auctioning children to the bidder who offered to teach them for the least amount of money.

You'd need to collect a bit of information about each child and hir parents - household income, geographical location, disabilities and so on, not more than about four variables. Then the children can be collected up into tranches of similar kids for consumption by schools.

The advantages of such a system would be:
1. The most difficult children to teach would get extra money to pay for their education.
2. Schools could specialize in teaching particular kinds of children without fear of collecting 100% difficult children - even if they did, the financial rewards would make it worthwhile.
3. That every child would get an "equal" education.

The disadvantages being:
1. Parents don't get a say in the matter.
2. Presuming there is an open market, new "schools" could easily buy tranches of children and then teach them really badly, skimming the money off for a profit.
3. It's impossible to capture the additional cash that some parents are willing to pay to get a better education for their child, leading to there potentially being less cash in the system as a whole. Simultaneously, parents would still be able to buy home tutoring, etc, for their children, partially defeating advantage(3).

Adding a performance bonus for successfully getting children to target educational milestones would help negate disadvantage(2).

Adding some sort of parental "veto" (which puts the child back into the pool for a second round of auctions) would help with both disavantage(1) and disadvantage(2). Since all schools should become equal over time, there should be little reason to veto a bid eventually. Repeated vetoing could lead to problems.

Anyway, I put the notion out there in the hope of some constructive comments.

---

ps. it occurs to me that a lot of the problems of vouchers would go away by awarding vouchers to a value inversely proportional to parental income - since poor kids are likely to do less well - however, I further suspect that schools would pick "the best of the worst", further clustering the worst pupils in the worst schools.

pps. a possible alternative to a bid-down auction could be a bid-up auction played in several stages - each child starts out with a ~£3000 fund. Schools make offers for children they think that they can teach for £3000. Any kids not taken up (all of them?) would have £1000 added to their fund. Schools bid again for the kids they want to teach at that price point, and so on up. Parents can either pick a school offer, or they can reject all offers, and accumulate half the £1000 for the next round. Parents can perhaps make 5 refusals. There are probably weaknesses in this approach, it's just something that occurred to me right now.

Clegg, but with a heavy heart

2007-10-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

I'm going with the general consensus (not often you'll hear me say that!). I'll be voting for Nick Clegg, barring any unforeseen circumstances. Clegg is the better presenter, and that's what counts. I am far from convinced that Chris Huhne, whilst holding policy positions closer to my heart all round, will be the best person to raise the public profile and standing of the party.

Melanie Phillips: part 2

2007-10-27T03:53:00.001-07:00

One of the (few) specific claims Melanie Phillips made about drugs on the Moral Maze was that "75% of parents who kill their children are cocaine users". Now, apart from what I call the "Ribena effect" (their advertising claims that 98% of British blackberries are used to make Ribena in a way that implies that Ribena is 98% blackberries. It's not), there are so many qualifiers that you'd need to add to this statement to make it meaningful:

1. Just how many parents have killed their children in the UK in the last, ooh, 50 years? If it's less than about 1000, then I'd say that you'd need to put some pretty big confidence intervals around your 75% claim.
2. What proportion of cocaine users who are parents kill their children? If it's <0.1%, I imagine that it's starting to look comparable to rock climbing, road accidents, etc in terms of risk.
3. Does the number of parents killing their children over the last fifty years correlate with cocaine usage over the last fifty years?
4. Is it a particular kind of cocaine? Crack?
5. Is it a particular kind of user? An addict taking *much per week?

I realize that I shouldn't get so angry over someone who is so obviously an idiot. But she seems to embody everything that's wrong with the popular press that it's hard not to be angry that she gets to express her views in print to hundreds of thousands (millions?) of readers and attempt to sway them. Bah.

Vouchers for Education - a first thought

2007-10-27T03:52:00.000-07:00

The notion that the government should get out of the business of providing education and instead grant vouchers to parents to spend on schooling their children where they like is a notion that I instinctively agree with, but on further reflection, I think that there are some important caveats that need to be made on such a position in order for such a proposal to actually work.

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine that we have vouchers and that therefore parents can spend their vouchers and contribute their own funds on top of the vouchers. I presume that this is traditionally possible under voucher schemes.

Now, at the moment, if the parents of a child want to take hir out of state schooling and put hir into private education, they must meet the full additional cost. However, with vouchers, those who can afford even a small amount of money beyond the vouchers can send their child to a better school.

What I imagine that would lead to would be a greater flight of the middle classes from what are currently comprehensive schools to what are currently grammar / independent / grant-maintained schools. To higher-quality schools, anyway. Leaving those without the ability to pay with a mediocre school and, far more importantly in my view, surrounded by all those others who cannot pay for a better school either. Poor families are disproportionately dysfunctional, and so the poorer schools would be disproportionately stocked with dysfunctional pupils, who not only fail to attain themselves, but can hold back the attainment of others. That's what I consider to be deeply unfair about vouchers.

If one stopped parents being able to pay on top of vouchers, you'd basically criminalize home tutoring and so on, which would be madness. And it probably wouldn't work anyway - the best schools would be oversubscribed and thus able to pick all of the least-likely-to-be-disruptive pupils, because they are cheaper to teach and are less likely to negatively affect other pupils' outcomes, maintaining their reputation as a good school.

My qualms are therefore twofold:

1. That by reducing the direct cost of improved education to parents, that more of the richer parents will take their better-quality pupils to better quality schools, thereby giving their children an advantage over others that is solely due to ability to pay. This does not sit well with my egalitarian beliefs that everyone should get the same life chances, as far as we are able to give them.

2. That by allowing schools the power to select their intake, coupled with a requirement to teach each child for £x000, will naturally encourage all schools to select the pupils that are cheap to teach, which are largely the bright and hard-working.

I would therefore like to propose a different market-based solution to the problem of privatizing education, to be discussed in a later post.

Redundancy

2007-10-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

Do you know why Ariane-5 exploded 39 seconds after take-off? It was because the inertial guidance system failed. And then the backup inertial guidance system failed. Then the rocket made a course correction it didn't need to, put the rocket in an aerodynamically dangerous position, and then the auto-destruct sequence was called, as designed in the case of significant malfunction, and worked perfectly.

Amongst the many lessons one could take away from the explosion is that having a backup system that works exactly the same way as the primary system means that if the primary system fails due to an inherent flaw (rather than failing due to an individual component malfunction), then the backup system will fail in exactly the same way. Indeed, that's exactly what happened in Ariane-5.

So, why the hell would we want to elect the Lords? We already have one elected chamber, and the people in it are, as previously mentioned, not necessarily the best people for making laws.

The Lords as is has its problems, but imagine if it had roughly the same composition as the Commons. Every law introduced by the Commons would get passed through the Lords on the nod, and vice versa. The Lords currently provides an important balance to the excesses of government because it is composed of members appointed by previous governments many years past. That is to say, the backup system uses a different algorithm to obtain its members.

I'm not claiming that the Lords as-is is a perfect or even near-optimal solution, but I'm damn sure that electing the Lords would make things worse, not better.

Melanie Phillips: crackpot?

2007-10-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

This week's "Moral Maze" on Radio 4 was awful. It was about the legalization of drugs. The quality of argument was so poor. Unsurprisingly Melanie Phillips was the main culprit.

Tax Simplification

2007-10-18T13:27:00.001-07:00

Income / Wealth Tax Simplification
---

I once wrote a mod for Quake that allowed fiends to run along walls and ceilings in the manner of aliens in the Alien Versus Predator game. The code worked pretty well, apart from one part: how to decide which angle to draw the fiend facing.

That bit of code was a nightmare. I threw everything at it - I hacked and hacked and hacked, adding tweaks here, taking away angles there, guestimating everywhere. It was a total mess, an utter botch job, with lines cancelling each other out, doing the same thing twice, with arbitrary decisions taken as to where and when which angles should be set how. It worked, after a fashion, but not very well, and really not very efficiently.

Is this reminding you of anything yet?

You probably know already that there is more tax law in the Commons library than one person could read in a lifetime. This strikes me as a little bit silly. Combined with the vast number of different means-tested (or not) benefits available, it seems that the current tax and benefits system is much like that fiend drawing routine.

Here's an idea: let's tax everybody at two simple rates - one on income, and one on wealth. Since the basic rate of income tax is 20%, and NI is ~10%, let's have a flat rate of income tax of 30% on all income between £5k and £500k. To pull a second number out of my arse, let's have a wealth tax of 1% on all assets between £50k and £5m.

Combine that with a Citizen's Income of £5k, paid as per my earlier post about children and stakeholder grants, and then abolish:

- National insurance
- Inheritance tax
- Capital gains tax
- Council tax

- Jobseekers' allowance
- Housing benefit
- Council tax benefit (obviously)
- Incapacity benefits (and make lots of services for the disabled available free on the NHS, such as care and transportation services)
- Child benefit
- Public funding for universities (perhaps excluding the Open University)
- Student loans
- There are surely more...?

If I were standing for Lib Dem leader, I'd say something like this:

2007-10-18T13:20:00.001-07:00

Liberal egalitarianism is the future. The 20th century was a century of war, physical and philosophical, between the authoritarian socialists of the left, and the authoritarian free marketeers of the right. The battle between left and right has been resolved, the result a draw, the conclusion that each needs the other.

"'New' Labour" and the "'Modern' Conservatives" - what a contradiction, modern, Conservative - are out of date. Watch them stealing policy clothes from each other as each stand on the centre ground between left and right. They are not parties of conviction or of ideology any more. They have no story to tell. Their time has passed.

The battle of the 21st century is between the musty old authoritarians struggling to remain relevant and the liberals who are speaking sense on so many issues today. Who is to defend the cause of liberty in this century? And not just defend it, but take it to the people, show them why liberalism is better than authoritarianism, for everybody.

That task falls to us.

Authoritarianism has provided the basic services that people now take for granted - schools, hospitals, policing and so on. But on the substantive issues of the 21st century, authoritarianism has failed to deliver. Failed on poverty, failed on inequality, failed on education, housing and the environment. Failed on freedom.

Now it is time for liberalism to shine. We should be making the case for traditional libertarian policies - small, simple government, local power, land value taxation, the legalization of drugs - and showing people how and why these policies work. Challenge the received wisdom that is so often misguided. Hand in hand with this liberalism goes the egalitarian policies of citizen's incomes and stakeholder grants.

As leader of this party, I would campaign tirelessly to bring these issues into the public eye. To make the case for liberal egalitarianism as the solution to the problems caused by a century of authoritarianism.

...

Problems of poverty - 2(?) million people in poverty in this country.

Problems of inequality - in which the richest ten percent control 35%(?) percent of the money.

Problems of societal breakdown, ASBOs, single parents, slums, a spiralling prison population of 80,000(?).

Problems due to pollution through inefficiencies, overconsumption and poor regulation by past governments.

Problems of poor service and quality in the police, the health service, education.

Problems of corruption and rent seeking in a vast government looking to justify its own flabby, shabby existence, spending 45%(?) of the UK's GDP last year.

Make no mistake, the authoritarianism of the last century has provided basic systems to provide shelter, food and clothing, and fair health. But it has done this barely, at great cost, and with varying success. Liberal egalitarianism can fix these failing systems.

...

A citizen's income, a breadline income for every person in this state should be a core plank of liberal party policy. An income that would guarantee basic freedoms to all, equally, with dignity, instead of the degrading and stigmatizing means-tested, inspected, examined and regulated indignity of the mess that is the current benefits system.

Coupled with the egalitarian policy of a stakeholder grant - a grant for every person as they reach the age of majority, to spend how they wish, and recouped via a capital tax, we could bring unprecedented equality of opportunity for generations to come. These two measures alone would vastly increase the quality of life for every citizen in this country.

But we can go further.

By putting administration of schools, hospitals and police forces into the hands of local people, and letting them decide how money is spent, we can further guarantee the equal freedoms due to good health, a good education and good policing, and ensure that those freedoms are delivered at a reasonable cost to all. It's time to end the culture of targets and misreporting upwards.

By shrinking the central bureaucracy by these measures and by the elimination of QUANGOs, the Department for Trade & Industry, the failed Child support Agency, and many, many benefits agencies besides and replacing them with small, simple government with good oversight and good governance, we can provide everyone the freedoms guaranteed in the bill of rights at a reasonable price. It's time for an end to rent-seeking bureaucrats.

By legalizing narcotics and prostitution, we can reduce crime due to their domination by hardened criminals. We can free police to solve more violent crimes, the sort of crimes that do the most damage to our society. We can reduce harm done to addicts and streetwalkers and reach out to help these damaged people take their place in our society. It's time to end the stigmatization of those in need.

By giving every citizen in Britain the right to a clean and healthy planet, we can ensure that we limit our impacts on the environment, so that the freedom and equality of our children, and our children's children can be guaranteed.

...

Six radical policies for a liberal Britain - on income, wealth, localism, small government, crime and the environment, form the cornerstone of my offering to the party, and to this country.

I'll be honest, many of them sound like "vote losers", unpopular with mainstream voters. Many of you are sitting out there thinking "this man is a mentalist, and will drive this party into the ground. Can you say '0%' already?".

But every policy is sellable on a practical level. What parent would refuse a forty-five thousand pound grant for their child? Which worker would forsake the security of a breadline income, giving them the freedom to change jobs or to demand better conditions? Which hospital nurse would refuse more local control? Which teacher would not want to be freed from the millstone of our curriculum? Which taxpayer would argue for a larger, more bloated state in exchange for less money in their pocket? Which police officer would rather spend time arresting youths smoking cannabis than chasing real criminals? Which citizen wants a dirtier planet, a shorter lifespan?

None of them want any of them. It is up to us to show people that liberal egalitarianism provides the answers to these problems, not more, bigger government with more centralized control, more targets, more spin, more corruption and more lies.

...

It will be difficult. The print media seethes against this party. We have to show the newspapers that we will be good for them too. They may ridicule these policies at first, but as businesses they stand to benefit from the freedom and equalities granted by liberal egalitarianism, through a better quality workforce that is better motivated and paying less tax and so on. Every business is made up of people. One would have thought that newspaper owners would be very much "for" the party of small government, elimination of red tape, and so on. We are that party. The Tories are no longer. One would have thought that the traditionally Labour papers would see that our principles of egalitarianism are better for their readers than the broken promises of Tony and Gordon. If given time. If we go out there and engage with them, if we make the case for a free and equal Britain.

As party leader, I will take it upon myself to begin that engagement and to drive it ever on, with the media and with the people, in every way and on every level. Through old media, new media, through lecture tours like Al Gore has so effectively done, through meeting people, through blogs and adverts, radio and television, books and magazines.

We will have spokesmen for our core policies speaking on them and shaping their details together with the party, in public, so that we can show people that we are not only enthusiastic, but intelligent and inclusive too.

We will raise our profile in the national eye through advertisments, articles and debates on our ideology and our core policy.

We will court endorsements by respected public figures, from scientists to singers, firefighters to film stars.

We will show ourselves to have human faces, cares and worries like everyone else with TV appearances, magazine articles and so on. People love people, so these are a great way to engage with people. Show them that we are kind, honest, thoughtful, interested people who really want to make a difference. And who are not stuffy and humourless, too!

Through these means we can bring the battle for the 21st century to the fore, and show that we are the people with the right answers, not the vacuous, vacillating politicians in purple.

...

So, on a clear ideology, radical and right policies, and an unprecedented level of public engagement, I put myself forward as leader of this party. Except I don't, because I'm not an MP. Damn.

Citizen's Income versus Child Benefits versus Stakeholder Grants

2007-10-16T14:53:00.001-07:00

I'm a big fan of citizen's income schemes. Having read this, though, I also really like the concept of stakeholder grants. So I'd like to see a fusion of the two schemes, thus:

Most CI schemes seem to only apply to those over 18. Well, I'd like to see a CI that's paid from birth. Part could go to the parents in order to help with childcare, food, clothing, etc. The remainder would be invested in a trust fund that would become accessible to the child once they became an adult.

At today's suggested CI rate of £5-6k, one might consider it reasonable to pay a child's CI at half rate. Presuming that the child retained roughly 50% of the CI in a trust fund, at age 18 they would receive a windfall of ~£45k in today's money (presuming a 5% interest rate).

Alstott and Ackermann are explicit about their $70k stake being possibly used for a "college" education. So in the UK, one could abolish the state funding of universities (at least for undergraduates), taking the state out of another sector of industry. Off the top of my head, here are the things that the government would no longer need to provide:

- Child Support Agency (or whatever it's called this week)
- Child Benefits
- Management & funding of universities
- Student loans

Furthermore, the percentage awarded to parents can be fine-tuned to ensure that baby production is not an activity that is preferential to work: at the moment, it seems that in a lot of poorer areas, there is a choice between working a shitty job for long hours and low pay, or having a baby and living on benefits. If I was an unskilled, working-class teenage girl, I know which option I'd choose.

(It should be noted that one of the alleged benefits of a CI is to remove such a poverty trap by awarding a flat rate of benefits to all, so perhaps this problem would sort itself out anyway.)

Further, second and additional babies could be paid a greater proportion of their CIs - perhaps 75% for the second baby, and 100% for successive babieS), in order to discourage population growth, if one believes, as I think I do, that there are really too many people in the world already, and we would be individually a lot better off if there were less of us.

On top of that, it may be that having a large family becomes the mark of a rich couple, rather than as it currently is, the mark of the poor. This is a good thing if you believe that children born in wealthy families have a better quality of life and are more likely to be more successful adults.

Your thoughts?

2007-10-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

I've just finished watching season 3 of The Wire. There's an interesting political thread running through it to do with how society treats drugs, and it reminded me of something that I should have blogged about on here a while ago: the UK government's ongoing drugs consultation.

The government are asking for your views (there's an online questionnaire to complete, only 7 questions). The deadline is the 18th of October. Here are my thoughts:

Firstly, I'm coming at this from a moral point of view - I strongly believe that people should be able to do what they like in private (and maybe in public), so long as it's not harming anyone else. UK law mostly respects this principle these days - you can screw any number of people of any combination of genders in your own home. Super. You can write pretty much what you like on blogs like this one, say what you like to your friends, and so on. We live in a pretty free and tolerant society, all told, certainly in comparison to the rest of the world, and certainly when it comes to doing things in private. The one major exception seems to be ingestion of narcotics.

Now, I can totally see why hard or intensely addictive drugs like heroin and crack should be controlled substances - the amount of harm they can do to one's family and friends through their use is, I imagine, serious.

On the other hand, there appears to be a class of fairly harmless recreational drugs such as magic mushrooms, cannabis, ecstasy and so on that have relatively minor effects with relatively small risks, when used properly, whose use and sale is illegal. Why?

As far as I can tell, there is no good "moral" reason.

Turning to the practicalities of the matter, access to narcotics is, by their nature, controlled by criminals. Now, the student cannabis grower, while technically a criminal, is not really a threat to anyone, but I suspect that there is a class of drug dealer dealing in recreational drugs, for whom the margins are sufficiently large that serious criminal activity such as extortion and violence becomes worthwhile. Further, there are probably some dealers who sell both "soft" and "hard" drugs, who would rather their clientele be hooked on something fantastically addictive rather than pot or ecstasy.

Legalization of soft drugs for sale in eg. pharmacies would deprive dealers of revenues and of the gateway mechanism. This would result in a contraction of the number of dealers and (hopefully) therefore a reduction in the non-drugs crimes that dealers are involved in. Hell, some dealers could become registered pharmacists!

There's the obvious public health benefits, too, in that health information would be available to users, and grade and purity would be guaranteed.

The final worry is that with legalization comes an increase in demand. I would ask where that demand would come from - and I suspect that the answer is the kind of people who already drink alcohol would maybe try something different. I can't imagine many teetotallers would decide that alcohol is evil but ecstasy - well, that's awesome. So there would be an increase in competition in the legal mind-altering drugs market, but the market itself would not necessarily get much bigger. Considering the effects that alcohol has on people, in terms of health effects, public disorder and so on, I am all for encouraging some of them to switch to drugs whose responses vary from "wanting to hug everyone" to "wanting to sit eating cookies all night" instead of alcohol, which seems to make a lot of young males do stupid and nasty things to each other and the people around them.

Here's that link again. Please go and give your views.

Andy Burnham: twat?

2007-10-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

Another cabinet minister has identified himself as a moron - this is unsurprising, and has been mentioned around the blogosphere a bit already, but I'll throw my two bits in.

Leave aside any party-political clothes-stealing for a minute and instead think about the content of Andy Burnham's comments on marriage. He claims that "there is a 'moral case' for promoting the traditional family through the tax system".

Unfortunately, he doesn't actually make this case, because, well, heaven forbid that any serving ministers would have anything approaching an actual ideology or political philosophy. His other comments seem to be hinting back to that good old chestnut "kids that are raised by two married parents are more likely to do better than kids raised in other circumstances". This is another one of those indicator problems: married couples are far more likely to be committed to each other because - duh - they chose to get married. Marriage is the signal. Increasing tax incentives for married couples will probably raise the number of people getting married, sure. But it's the people who are less committed and less in love than the ones that already got married (broadly speaking). So in time, the child-outcome stats for married couples would get worse as those that would previously have been registered in the "cohabiting and beating our kids" bracket move into the "married and beating our kids" bracket.

Also, today getting married is expensive. I bet that the average married couple (of a given age) is hella lot better off than the average unmarried couple of the same age. Wealth correlates well with child success, because the wealthy can provide for their children better in terms of toys, education and so on, and are likely to be brighter and marry later, both of which themselves correlate well with child success.

But no-one wants to talk about this shit in the mainstream media. Where are the journalists hanging politicians out to dry for stuff like this? It's not rocket science. Hell, it's not even "dual award" science, and that's saying something.

ps: "There’s sometimes a metropolitan myth that Labour people are all a bit liberal" oh fuck off, Andy. No-one in their right mind thinks Labour are liberal. Hello? ID cards? Detention without trial? Not ringing any bells yet? Tosser.

2007-10-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not very good at this blogging business, am I? Trouble is, I'm not so interested in publishing daiy shout outs to places that you see on the right, who are pretty much all of the blogs I read frequently. However, I did discover openDemocracy the other day, and recommend it for commentary on meta-political issues like what I am trying to do here.

The other trouble is that I find that my writing is not up to the standards of the blogs I read myself, which is quite dispiriting.

2007-10-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Can't get enough o them left/right flamewars.

And on the topic at hand, I do recommend kateshomeblog on the matter.

MP selection algorithms

2007-10-03T12:15:00.001-07:00

One of the parts of a safety case for a safety-critical system is a list of the engineers who developed the system, and a reasoning for why they were selected. For a safety-critical system, you want smart, well-trained and diligent people who "do their utmost" to make sure that the system turns out well.

Lawmaking is a safety-critical system: bad laws can result in harm to millions. So why do we select our lawmakers in such a poor way? We must be, because the people who get elected are frequently cunts.

One of the problems is that the average voter probably doesn't know what makes up a high-quality lawmaker, and probably doesn't care to find out.

So, how about an exam for potential MPs? We have exams for doctors, lawyers, teachers, and, of course, engineers. Why is law-making exempt?

The exam would cover questions of political history, use of statistics, logic, policy analysis and development and so on. It would be set by a board of academics drawn from leading universities, appointed by a crossparty committee from the House of Lords.

Candidates' exam results would then be shown on the ballot paper next to their names. In fact, the ballot paper could show a "star rating" for each candidate which would be influenced by their exam score, length of previous experience (in local or national government), any criminal convictions, and so on. The ballot paper could show the salient details in successively smaller fonts, so that the party affiliation can be used for those who care not at all, the star rating for those who care somewhat, and the details for those who care a lot.

Some might say that anyone should be able to represent the people, education or not. Some might say that the exam excludes the working class, that the "experience" part of the star rating excludes the mavericks and includes the party apparatchiks. They may indeed be right.

But would you really want an uneducated person making your laws? Look at George W. Bush.

Would you want an inexperienced person making your laws? You probably wouldn't want an inexperienced engineer designing your car or your holiday jumbo jet.

Michael Gove Is A Muppet

2007-10-01T12:33:00.001-07:00

So Tory education secretary Michael Gove wants all children to wear a blazer (scroll down), on the basis that 48 out of 50 of the best state comprehensives enforce the wearing of a blazer.

Here's a similar idea: being in Who's Who is probably a fair indicator of success. So why don't we simply list everyone in Who's Who, and then everyone will be successful?

Or how about: the presence of condoms in the home indicates a low(er) rate of STI infection. So why don't we mail all those pesky Catholics a free box of Durex?

Something in the inverse: imagine you are in charge of safety at a nuclear power station. Your sole job is to watch a "DANGER OF MELTDOWN IMMINENT" indicator light and act on it. If the light ever lights up, do you:
a) investigate the problem using all the other monitoring equipment, determine that there is a serious fault, evacuate the building, press the "emergency shutdown" button, and later begin an investigation into the problem or,
b) disconnect the light.