Steve's Journal

12:38pm: Typographical error?
Tories suggest that tax changes should be announced 6 months before the budget:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7486751.stm

Treasury minister Kitty Ussher said the proposals were "absurd", adding: "They would prevent your ability to make emergency changes in a Budget - for example, if you discovered a tax-avoidance scam"

Tax-avoidance scam? I think she meant to say "by-election".

12:01am: BBC, you are unutterably shite
Result of a search on the iPlayer site:
http://www.eschatonic.org/gfx/iplayer1.png

iPlayer home page:
http://www.eschatonic.org/gfx/iplayer2.jpg

ETA: Jay-Z sent out a resounding "shut up, you muppet" to Noel Gallagher by opening his set with a cover of "Wonderwall". Sweet.

5:51pm: Good old British public
David Davis has been accused of wasting a lot of public money with his by-election.

Well, 25 kind souls have pledged to reduce the taxpayer burden, by contributing 500 quid each to the running costs of the election. Well done all of them.

12:15pm: FFS
UK bishop 'will boycott Lambeth'. Good. Boycott the BBC while you're at it, if you're not prepared to participate in a forum with those who value equality.

11:43am: Means of control
Suppose that Mugabe had a legal right to detain people for 42 days without charge, provided only that he could convince parliament (which he controls, or rather he did before it was dissolved prior to the election) to agree that there is a special threat (which there is - Tsvangirai might win the vote), and a judge that the police are investigating suspicions of terrorism-related crimes.

Then would he need to murder MDC campaigners? Couldn't he just lock them up until after the election, and then let them go once he'd won?

I mean, if you're going to have a dictator, you'd probably prefer to have one who leaves you alive. And if you're going to be a dictator, you'd probably prefer everything to be legally watertight: no risk of embarrassing leaks from malcontent policemen, soldiers, or veterans with information about the killings.

So I think Britain might still have a few things to teach Zimbabwe, if only Mugabe were prepared to listen to the old colonial power.

10:06pm: BBC, Secretary of State, Lib Dem, in "clueless" shock.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7463525.stm

1) "... Helen Maughan, a 24-year-old mother-of-two. Known to be fond of a drink, on that Friday night she took it too far, and it cost her her life."

Technically, being drowned in a river by two strangers cost her her life. But to get to that assessment, you have to ignore the psychological need to blame the victim. If bad things only happen to people because they make stupid mistakes, then some idiot BBC journalist doesn't have to feel that he's at risk too, and society doesn't have to shoulder a tiresome and difficult responsibility to defend drunk people from crime.

Jacqui Smith joins in the fun with, "Binge drinking is not only damaging to health but it makes individuals vulnerable to harm".

Note the vocabulary. People no longer "are drunk", they "binge drink". Binge drinking is generally known to be bad, so if you do it you're basically signing up to be murdered. As if people who don't binge drink aren't "vulnerable to harm".

Note that if a Home Secretary were murdered after a bottle of wine, "leaving behind two young children", she would not be described as "vulnerable to harm" through "binge drinking" which "cost her her life". The blame would be placed fairly firmly on the killer, I feel.

Don't give Smith the benefit of the doubt by suggesting she meant that it was only the killers' drinking that created the risk. "Individuals" doesn't mean "the randomly-selected and wholly blameless victims of psychos".

Obviously it's true that, all else being equal, drunk people tend to be less able to make sensible decisions and look after themselves than sober people. I don't know the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if drunk people are disproportionately the victims of violent crime. But conspicuously mentioning these facts when someone is murdered is at best an attempt to exploit that murder to scare people off drinking, and at worst an attempt to hold the victim responsible for the crime.

2)

The Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester, Bob Russell, said Miss Maughan had been "brutally murdered" and described the case as a indictment of Britain's culture of binge drinking.

"...Binge drinking has become a way of life especially in the last decade and it has been brought about by an attitude which the government has allowed."

Mr Russell said the government's encouragement of 24-hour drinking was largely responsible but he also blamed supermarkets which sold cheap alcohol and pubs which encouraged excessive drinking

Very slightly better - he blames the government.

Still: the reason this woman was killed is binge drinking, and the reason for binge drinking is 24-hour licensing? If only it were true that people didn't get drunk prior to the recent round of extended licensing, there might be something in this line of reasoning. But "especially in the last decade" doesn't exactly support a theory of causation primarily by the Licensing Act 2003 (brought into effect in 2005).

Incidentally, she was drunk and inadvisedly associating with her eventual killers at 10.30pm, with 30 minutes of decent, non-society-destroying drinking time left to go.

Extended opening hours / 24 hour drinking probably do contribute to societal acceptance of (or perhaps resignation toward) binge drinking. But only because a bunch of Mail-reading fruitcakes spent two years screaming that binge drinking would be the sole and inevitable result of allowing pubs to continue selling booze beyond their own need-to-be-up-in-the-morning-to-defend-society-from-moral-laxity-and-import-lager bedtimes.

What does the "Lib" in "Lib Dem" stand for, can anyone remind me?

I'm also bemused by the constant description of "cheap" alcohol as contributing to the problem. Even the supermarkets have selflessly offered to fix alcohol prices to the detriment of their customers, and this week it looks like they might get their way. Does nobody except me see this as a cynical cash-grab, which will reduce total alcohol sales barely if at all? Cheap alcohol exists because supermarkets fiercely compete to capture the market, not because the low-end products are necessary to stimulate demand. If demand were all that sensitive to price, alcohol duty would have been the death of the industry long ago.

3) Why has no Tory stuck their nose into this? I want to insult everyone. They're against 24 hour drinking too, but only for other people (i.e. they're happy for private clubs to serve alcohol without license and at any time). Wankers. And David Davis can fuck off with his "civil liberties", bring back hanging principles.

12:18pm: Discrimination?
Suppose that your employer had a rule that 36% of employees must have been employed/trained/educated in England (or your employer's country if not England) for a period of 3 years between ages 15 and 21.

Would you think that this is an only-slightly-cryptic discrimination on grounds of nationality (strictly speaking residence, but I suspect the two are correlated), and that the practical effect would be to exclude foreign employees to the advantage of English employees? I would.

Apparently the European Commission thinks not.

So if some racist political party were to propose, to bring out the xenophobic vote, that all companies have quotas of employees educated in England, then the European Commission can hardly say that's discriminatory. Or rather they can and would, but the inconsistency would be clear. Nice one, Brussels. I'm hoping the courts will contradict the Commission.

Football is not more important than EU employment law. It does not need the rules to be sympathetically bent.

1:37pm: Terrorists' rights are your rights, part II
Apparently in British law, if you download this document (and the rest of the manual) from the US Department of Justice website, you can be detained for six days as a terrorist. It is an "illegal document which shouldn't be used for research purposes". So, what, the DoJ has it online as part of a sting operation?

You have nothing to fear. Go back to bed, your government is in control.

12:06pm: Nonsensewatch
Francis Maude was on Question Time last night saying repeatedly (so I assume it's a deliberate theme rather than an off-the-cuff comment) that during the good times of the past decade, the Labour government should have put money "in the bank", "in the cupboard", "aside for a rainy day", etc, to cope with the current difficulty.

This is interesting because it's a total U-turn for the party. A few weeks ago, David Cameron was in the House of Commons saying that during the good times of the past decade, the Labour government should have "mended the roof while the sun shone". Unfortunately for him, Labour pointed out that they actually literally did that: along with at lot of other public spending increases, they threw a lot of cash at school and hospital buildings.

So which is it - during good economic times should you make capital investment, or should you make cash savings? When it starts raining, is it better to have cash in the bank and a leaky roof, or a nice new roof but an empty purse? Or is it just that the government is wrong no matter what it does?

Of course from the luxury of opposition the Tories could presumably say, "they should have done both. And taxed less". And they might do just that, by carefully arranging never to say all three in the same place at the same time. If they did that, surely people might notice that they're taking the piss?

Not only are the Tories a bit confused and lacking on future policy, they're even confused on what it is they disagree with that Labour's done in the past. Aside from not being Tories, that is: I think they're pretty consistent there.

I pick on the Tories more than Labour (excepting that I always pick on the Home Office), so for the sake of balance: Gordon Brown is chuffing useless. He made 5 million poor people poorer with one tax change, and then "compensated" for it by making 22 million people richer, of whom only 4 million were from the original group. Net result: 18 million better off for a year, 4 million poor people break even for a year, and 1 million poor people are still poorer. And he's doled out 2.7 billion quid. Shortly after withholding part of the police's independently-arbitrated payrise. He did that on grounds that them having more money would be inflationary - the sum in question was a few tens of million pounds. So how inflationary will 2.7 billion be? Or maybe it's more that giving them their full payrise would set a precedent for other public sector workers: except that teachers were given a payrise greater than the police full payrise would have been. So now we get inflation *and* the police are demanding the right to strike, since the government has broken the no-strike agreement. Smoothly does it.

In short, Brown has lost the plot and any big principle or strategy of government. He is doomed now to do nothing but fight fires until either there are no fires left or the general election, whichever comes first. If it's the election, he loses. If it's not the election, he still has a huge amount of work to do to persuade the electorate that he isn't even worse than the Tories.

At least he's unlikely to invade anyone before 2010. He can't afford it, for starters.

11:13am: The triumph of scientific analysis in policy-making: just look at the evidence
Hybrid embryos will be permitted for medical research.
IVF is to be permitted without considering the need for a "father figure".
No change to the current limit on abortion.
Saviour siblings will not be banned.
Steven Moffat will replace Russell T. Davies as lead scriptwriter of Doctor Who.

2:49pm: Fact crunching
You know how the BBC sometimes change articles on their website as further news comes in?

Well, maybe you don't, but because I read the site via its RSS feed, the headline displayed in my reader is the headline at the time it first got that article from the feed, whereas what I see when I view the article is the headline as it is now.

So, when I saw the headline earlier, "Henin 'set to retire from tennis'", I thought that I'd come back to it later, once it contained actual news rather than the expected content of an announcement later today.

The headline is now "Henin announces shock retirement".

BBC, you are too modest. Either that or your journalism is now so utterly dominated by feeling over fact that having told us earlier to expect something, you now think the best story is to pretend it's a surprise...

5:17pm: Number crunching
Darling has just said that at a cost of 2.7 billion he will give 120 quid each to (some people, detail in a second).

That means there are 22.5 million people involved, right?

The people in question are those between the current personal income tax allowance (5435 quid) and the current higher rate tax threshold (40835 quid). There's a bit of fiddliness to do with the people within 600 quid above the current allowance, who get less than 120 quid. Darling says that's 600,000 people, so maybe there are as many as 23 million involved.

The question is: does that number sound about right, for the number of people in the UK whose marginal income tax rate is the basic 20%?

Your working might include: the number of people with any income (including pensioners), the number of people exempt from income tax (most children and quite a lot of students, since grants for education are exempt), the number of people subject to income tax but who don't pay it and therefore don't get the 120 quid (cash-in-hand economy), or the proportion of workers paying higher rate tax.

Point for trainspotters - because the basic rate is conveniently half the higher rate, Darling can elegantly prevent higher rate taxpayers from getting the 120 quid, by reducing the higher rate tax threshold by the same amount he increases the personal allowance. Nifty, huh?

10:46am: For those who aren't convinced whenever I whinge about laws which "could" be abused:

The experience of a man named Richard Seymour whom the police found taking photos of London landmarks.

He compares it with:

The experience of a man named Salam Abdulrahman whom the police found taking photos of London landmarks. You don't even need to click the link to know what happened, do you?

Seymour modestly doesn't say so, but the stated accusations against Abdulrahman pretty much apply to him. I don't know whether he has a press pass (I'd guess not), and he certainly isn't an Iraqi (he's from Northern Ireland), but I know just from his blog that he otherwise fits the Met's profile of someone worth charging with terrorist offences. And they let him go. Scott free.

On the plus side, Abdulrahman's account is a year old and Google hasn't heard anything about prosecution, so it looks as though the CPS might have limited the harm done by the Met's exercise in stupidity.

Of course this is only anecdotal evidence. It's early days yet in terms of proving that current anti-terrorism laws are enforced in an overtly racist way. But they are, aren't they? And that was always the intention of those who supported them. If you're white, the police will assume you aren't a terrorist and send you on your way. White people simply do not get arrested in London for behaving in suspiciously terrorist ways, although they occasionally have their cameras taken off them, etc.

If you're not white, then you're fair game for further investigation at great personal cost and inconvenience, and if that investigation throws up anything else 'suspicious' then you're in serious trouble. Of course in law everyone is fair game in this way. We're all "sacrificing our liberties for security". But in reality, those of use whose race is not correlated with Islam needn't worry so much. We're immune from the worst of it. So we're all "sacrificing" (for which read denying) other people's liberties for our security. Nice.

When thinking of human rights, I try to apply the principle that my rights (or anyone else's) are only as good as the worst case. So, the rights of terrorist suspects are *your* rights, because you personally could be suspected of terrorism through no fault of your own. If they can be detained for 42 days, then you can be detained. If they can be rendered to torture in Syria, then so can I. And so on. But that does rather assume that everyone is equal under the law, which is not the case when race in itself contributes to "legitimate" grounds for suspicion.

OK, so nationality does affect rights, and we can't get away from that short of one world government. Laws which disadvantage foreigners don't even pretend to be "fair", so it is at least honest discrimination. But they're still bad news if I think I'm ever likely to go abroad, since Britain can hardly acquire and defend for me rights in foreign countries which it does not itself offer to foreigners.

And this is the new, post-Lawrence, not-as-racist-as-they-used-to-be, Met. Why do I have a scary feeling that when Boris says he will "work tirelessly for all Londoners", he means, "instead of concentrating my work on those who need it since they are currently the victims of injustice"?

2:33pm: Constitution?
What's all this about?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7379610.stm

Summary: the high court will review whether we should have a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

wtf? The House of Commons has approved a bill on the issue, which is currently in the Lords. What does it have to do with the courts? Why is the case even being heard?

"Mr Wheeler said a vote was promised on the EU constitution and says the Lisbon treaty is virtually identical". So what? The government has promised us 42 day detention without charge: if it U-turns, or if it doesn't and the House of Commons votes against, should the High Court "review" that too while the bill is in the Lords?

Does anyone have any idea which part of our allegedly-existent constitution says that if the government promises something, perhaps in a manifesto, then the courts can order that it be delivered even though Parliament says otherwise?

11:56am: More on those Tories
They say they are coming back: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/7379092.stm

"In two years time you'll find us taking seats, I promise you."

I guess that depending how you look at it, either he reduced a 243 Lib Dem majority to 91 (in which case his claim is plausible), or else by defecting he flipped a 243 majority into a 91 loss, personally losing nearly 200 votes in the process (in which case not so much).

Heh. Oxford doesn't want Tories, even if its Lib Dem councillors did think it ought to have a couple for the look of the thing...

1:08am: Get orff moi land
Tories might have done well nationally, but the two we had in Oxford have been run out of the city on a rail. And don't come back.

Not sure who's going to be running the place tomorrow, though. Could be Labour as far as I can tell.

5:49pm: Computer management tip
Maybe this is already obvious to everyone else, but if you're using Vista, or possibly any other OS setup which distinguishes between ordinary and privileged/admin users:

Create a second administrator account. Right now.

I booted my PC 45 minutes or so ago, and on attempting to log on was presented with a message and then sent back to the logon screen:

The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.

A bit of web surfing (using my guest account) turned up that Microsoft don't appear to understand the problem, and their best suggestion is to delete the faulty profile: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947215/en-us

This strikes me as being a really bad idea if it's your only admin logon. Which it was. Another site suggested some ways of undoing the most likely causes of the problem, but they required admin privilege. Which isn't much use when your admin user doesn't work, because I couldn't use the password to boost privileges on the guest account.

Fortunately in my case a system restore appears to have fixed it (for the time being). And equally fortunately, I use my admin account for everything, which means when it broke I noticed right away, which with luck means it has restored to a very recent point, although that remains to be seen.

If that hadn't worked, though, I would be all out of options, and I'd be reinstalling windows about now and posting from the laptop.

So. Create (at least) two admin accounts. It will give you options if one of them breaks.

11:50am: BBC, why do you keep doing this?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7316891.stm

"Poor white boys and girls do worse compared with other ethnic groups, even when factors like single parent status and parental attainment are considered." (emphasis mine)

But then later in the article it transpires:

"at GCSE level, pupils from Caribbean backgrounds did significantly worse on average than white pupils, while Pakistani pupils did a little worse."

...

"once pupils' low parental incomes were taken into account the minority groups began to catch up. And when a wide variety of factors seen as markers of deprivation were also factored in - such as living in deprived neighbourhoods, single parent homes or having mothers with no educational qualifications - white working class pupils came out worst."

So when the BBC says "even", it actually means "only", and with a caveat about relying on the applicability of the statistical methods used to eliminate the various disadvantageous factors. Since the factors excluded disproportionately affect non-white children, I also have to question what known disadvantageous factors were left in, that disproportionately affect white children: the article mentions "academic hopes", "amount of homework done", and "attitude to school", but does not state whether or not those factors were excluded along with income, location, single-parenthood and unqualified mothers.

I think the parliamentary term is that the BBC has "unintentionally mislead" the public. Which is pretty unacceptable in the context of their "White" season, which is intended to cover issues which potentially are very inflammatory. Such a project necessitates rather more care.

1:06pm: Free printer, anyone?
Somewhat elderly Kyocera FS-600 (ETA: b/w) laser printer. PDF User Manual (USA). No idea how much toner is left it it, but it worked last time I used it. Power lead and 2m parallel cable included. 0 pounds ono.

NB: I said parallel cable. My new PC doesn't have a parallel port, which is why I'm ditching the printer. I'm told that USB-parallel adaptors exist, but I grabbed a second-hand printer going almost-free from someone else instead.

11:06am: Children's Society calls for more Descartes, Hegel; less Hobbes, Marx.
BBC reports "Children 'damaged' by materialism".

Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the society, said: "A crucial question raised by the inquiry is whether childhood should be a space where developing minds are free from reductionist philosophical techniques.... Unless we question our own behaviour as a society we risk creating a generation who are left unfulfilled through chasing unattainable Marxist dialectics."

Or something like that. I never realised the primary syllabus had become so sophisticated.

2:00pm: Antidisestablishmentarianism?
"An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger" - Rowan Williams. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7232661.stm)

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? His church has a privileged place in the law and constitution of the country. He can't let "dangerous" ideas like equality before the law get about, or they might be applied to him.

Obviously most law is not founded in human rights, but I humbly submit that the UN might just have been on to something here:

"Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."

- Article II of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Perhaps Williams could have said that anyone (Muslim or otherwise) should be entitled in a civil dispute to mutually-agreed binding arbitration in preference to the courts. But he prefers to say "Sharia law in the UK seems unavoidable". You have to wonder what agenda would result in that preference.

10:31am: Freudian slip?
Quoted by the BBC:

"If people take law into their [own] hands, obviously, they have to be dealt with," - Tariq Azim, Pakistani Information Minister.

If dismissing the courts and suspending the constitution isn't "taking the law into your own hands", I'm not sure what is. So I guess that Musharraf, by the standards of his own lackeys, has to be dealt with. Will Bhutto be the one to lead a revolt? Will it be an Islamist? Or will military rule continue?

Clue: we and the Americans would prefer that military rule continues, just as China prefers that in Burma.

Funny that this should kick off just when our good friends the Saudi dictators are visiting...

10:59am: WotD
Word of the day at dictionary.com is "triskaidekaphobia".

And I thought it was just an automated system.

Shockingly, triskaidekaphobia is not in Firefox's spell-checker. But then, neither is "Firefox". Or "spellchecker".

10:14am: Solution to today's XKCD
Problem here: http://xkcd.com/c287.html

Solution: "here's two sampler plates and some hot wings: we'll only charge you $15.05".

An NP-complete problem is nature's way of hinting that you're probably missing something.

3:56pm: Grr. And, indeed Aargh.
BBC again

The deputy contest used a complicated system where the last place candidate was eliminated in a series of rounds, and their second preferences reallocated until one contender got more than 50% of the vote.

No wonder there were tens of thousands of spoiled ballots in Scotland, if the BBC is telling people "Don't try to bother your pretty heads understanding instant-runoff, it's 'a complicated system'".

"Complicated" would be if they applied Condorcet, or were electing multiple candidates and transferring fractional second votes from those exceeding the threshold.

I suspect that the media can, if they choose, prevent any kind of electoral reform from ever happening, simply by presenting anything other than FPP as "complicated", egg-head stuff that readers don't really need to think about.

That said, FPP in this instance would have elected Cruddas, and New Labour can't be having that.