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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.