Ill windmills

In case either of my readers (hi, Mum) were wondering the lack of posts this week isn't a sign of anything more than that I've been a bit busy. I certainly haven't suddenly started believing that all is right with the world after all because clearly it isn't. I just haven't had the time to seethe about it at length in the blogosphere and have had to settle for occasional quiet seethe-lets in the car instead.

And I can't offer much this evening either for the same reason, but I just wanted to point out this from The Daily Mash the other day:

Chairman Lord Turner said: "The only problem we can possibly foresee is if it's not as windy as we think it's going to be.

[...]

The report was welcomed by the large energy providers who said that if they were going to pick a figure of out of thin air for how much more they felt like charging people then they would probably have chosen £110 as well.

Lord Turner added: "It's not that green technology is, in itself, massively expensive, it's that if it doesn't actually work then you have to get the energy from somewhere else. Usually from people who aren't very nice.

"So you end up with an expensive thing that doesn't work all the time plus expensive energy from horrid people. And that is massively expensive.

"But it's fine, because it's going to be windy."

Yes, and just the other week we saw that they're just as good when it's a bit too windy, didn't we?

Free energy from the wind

Well, I suppose if it fell on your house like that it'd warm the place up.

Click for link

Yes, this is indeed a different one

Let's be honest, if it wasn't for the warble gloaming catastrophism and the way so many governments, not least the UK's, have indulged various associated rent seekers these bloody things would be used in those rare locations where it's not economic to connect to the grid. Instead Britain is expected to rely increasingly on a form of generation which, if it's a bit too windy, can turn the generator into a £2 million sparkler. Or just knock it down. In fact the only positive thing I can think of right now is that they're not as useless as they could be.

Give it a few years and and someone will scale this up

Sloppy filter

I haven't blogged on the proposed webnanny/internet filter/Great Firewall of Australia plans down here for a while because things have gone a bit quiet. There have been enough colours nailed to masts, reputations staked and interests vested that I'm not all that hopeful that sense has been seen, particularly when it needs to be seen by a Communications Minister whose paternalist streak might be coming from both religious beliefs and leftie-ness, but it may be that it's been realised that a filter that promised much and failed to deliver would be worse than none at all. And I'm quite confident it would fail. Much of the illegal stuff is being shared by P2P anyway, and the filters proponents were forced to admit almost from the start that it couldn't do a thing about that. And then there's TORs and VPNs - basically it'll affect people who don't google for a way around the filter before the thing goes up, which is more or less everybody that doesn't need a filter because they won't be searching the web for baboon porn or whatever in the first place.

More interesting if you're a baboon, I imagine

But it's not just that because ISP level filters will be under attack from the other side too, as TalkTalk in the UK and some of its customers have found out.

Britain’s third-largest broadband provider has been promoting its new “HomeSafe” security product to its 4.1 million subscribers as a way of blocking pornography, viruses and other potentially harmful content.
Unlike the child safety products offered by other providers, it operates at the network level so parents do not need to install or maintain any software. The approach has attracted praise from MPs and campaigners seeking to restrict the availability of pornography on the web.
But for more than a week the system has failed to restrict access to Pornhub, which offers thousands of free explicit videos and is ranked as the third largest pornography provider on the web.
The failure was discovered by Cherith Hately, an IT expert and mother of three teenagers in south London, who tested the service last week. She found that on the Pornhub website the HomeSafe blocking page had been relegated to a small box normally reserved for advertising, leaving its adult content fully accessible.
“The ‘you have been blocked’ page has been diverted to an advertising slot within the Pornhub homepage thus opening access to it,” she said.
“The HomeSafe barrier has been knocked down, technically and literally. TalkTalk should inform all their HomeSafe customers that their children are still able to see pornography so that parents can supervise more.”

Far be it from me to tell me how to bring up your children, Cherith, and I'm sure you've already had the awkward conversation with your teens about which one had visited that site, but I'd say that parents should take this as an indication that the best filter system is the parents themselves.

A spokesman for TalkTalk acknowledged the failure and said technicians were working on a fix. He was unable to say whether the HomeSafe system had been deliberately circumvented by pornographers.

Perhaps not, but it occurs to me that if it had been to circumvent another filter that worked the same way it could affect TalkTalk too. In the Aussie context since what the nannies want is effectively ISP level filtering under government supervision all ISPs would have the same filter, and when a website manages something similar to what Pornhub's done to TalkTalk's HomeSafe this single point of failure would mean it won't affect just Telstra or iiNet or Optus customers - it'll be everyone. Hardly the end of the world because we'll be about where we are right now, but it does make the whole exercise seem a bit pointless.

“As the only network-level filter, TalkTalk’s HomeSafe is the most effective way of protecting children from content parents consider harmful,” the spokesman said.

No, I repeat: parents are the most effective way of protecting children from harmful content. The filter can't unplug the computer, withhold their pocket money or threaten to stop paying the broadband bill so there's no service whatsoever. But it can create a false sense of security.

“While no technical solution alone is able to solve the issue of child internet safety or be a substitute for parental supervision, we firmly believe that HomeSafe is a step in the right direction.”

Providing that false sense of security doesn't take over leading parents to assume that the filter is doing its job and little or no supervision is necessary, because when you concede that there's no substitute for parental supervision that would be a step in the wrong direction. Not that Britain's nannies are any more clued up about that than Australia's.

Under government pressure the rest of the big four internet providers – BT, Virgin Media and Sky – recently agreed to offer all new customers software to restrict which websites children are able to access, but stopped short of implementing network-level filters.
TalkTalk’s approach is meanwhile supported by the campaigners, and MPs including Claire Perry, a Conservative backbencher who is leading a parliamentary inquiry into online child protection. As well as network-level filters she wants broadband providers to switch them on by default.
“When I started campaigning to make access to internet pornography an 'opt-in', many industry experts said it was technologically impossible to provide a network-level filter,” Mrs Perry said.

You idiot. Of course it's impossible, we've just bloody seen that. This looks like it was circumvented at the other end without any effort on the part of the person sitting at home, and it's not like the person sitting at home doesn't have ways and means anyway. Look, I can't put it any better than an Australian blogger, Stilgherrian, put it nearly four years ago (my bold):

Real-world experience in everything from spam filters to the record industry’s futile attempts to stop copyright violations always shows that filters only block casual users. Professionals, the desperate or the persistent will always get through.

However if a politician demands a filter, pretty soon a shiny-suited salesman will appear, ready to sell him a box with “filter” written on the front. It’ll work — well enough for the demo, anyway.

“Look, Minister! Nice Minister. Watch the screen. See? Filter off, bad website is visible. Filter on, bad website gone. Filter off. Child in danger. Filter on. Child happy and safe. Filter off. Voter afraid and angry. Filter on. Voter relaxed and comfortable. Cheque now please.”

When elected nannies like Stephen Conroy here and Claire Perry in the UK wrap their heads around this and stop spunking taxpayers' money at things which at best will work until someone defeats them and at worst will never work at all they might start giving out useful advice. Advice along the lines of: the government can't stop your kids from seeing tits and arses and rooting baboons online...

... but if you get off your arse and look at what they're doing you can.

They just can't stop, can they?

Click images for links.

In his long-awaited Autumn Statement, the Chancellor will outline a £650 million scheme to provide free “early education” for about 40 per cent of two year-olds.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will today announce a £1 billion scheme to pay firms more than £2,000 for each young unemployed person they hire.

And all this at a time when some think the UK is already back in recession and may need a decade of austerity to really recover. So what's the Cobbleition's response? Copy the policies of the deranged madmen who fucked the country into this hole in the first place, that's what.

I can't carry on with this, I really can't. I've said umpteen times that they're as bad as the last lot and that there's no appreciable difference between the the main parties anymore with the possible exception of how quickly they're going to fuck the country into a hole. The issue of how deeply they're going to fuck it into a hole has long had cross party support. If I blog this again anytime soon something is going to get fucking broken. Instead I'll just point out that Douglas Carswell, the Tory party's favourite for MP Least Likely To Be Given A Front Bench Job, has been wondering what the government would be doing right now if it was still a Labour government with Gordon Brown leading it. His list looks depressingly like the actual policies of the Cobbleition.

The attitude alone should be worth an extra couple of years - UPDATED

Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence. You are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard, presumably accepting imprisonment in the same casual manner. We therefore feel constrained to commit you to the maximum term allowed for these offences: you will go to prison for five years.

From the titles of Porridge

Of course that was from both fiction and another time. These days an habitual criminal can look forward to having to write a letter, and even though that's likely to be a tortuous exercise with many products of the British educamakayshun system at least one burglar has treated it with the contempt it deserves and not even taken the trouble to disguise his equal contempt for his victims.

Now on one or two levels he's actually doing everyone a favour. You can't argue with the advice of a professional thieving little bastard as far as things like curtains and open windows go, and since we can expect his attitude towards this so called punishment - apparently described as the most rigorous form of non-custodial sentence for young criminals, which I guess means there's no help with the spelling and punctuation - to be shared by many who do take the trouble to hide it and go away smirking to themselves this guy's open display of contempt tells us what a pointless waste of fucking time it is for someone like him. It's probably not intentional but in effect his twisted form of honesty is a kind of public service, so he probably deserves some kind of thank you.

I'd suggest a few years bed, board and possible buggery in HMP Slade.

UPDATE - Same with more serious crimes if the Ambush Predator's latest post is any indication.

"Mr Hussini was punched by two of them, who then held him back while the defendant leant forward and stabbed him in the stomach."

Yes, you heard that right – they held him while this little savage stabbed him in the stomach.Is that not attempted murder?

The boy handed himself in to police the following day and pleaded guilty in court to wounding with intent and possessing an offensive weapon.

Sentencing the youngster to a two-year detention and training order, Judge Hamilton said: "But for the fact that there was a surgeon living nearby, the man you stabbed would have died."

A two-year detention and training order. For stabbing someone in the stomach…

This country is doomed.

This Private Frasier-itis I've come down with seems to be catching, but perhaps we're being unfair. I suppose it's not attempted murder if someone is only slightly stabbed. /sarc

A modern parable

Spotted by Fausty.

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of nowhere. Parliament said, "Someone may steal from it at night." So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.

Then Parliament said, "How does the night watchman do his job without instruction?" So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.

Then Parliament asked, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?" So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write the reports.

Then Parliament said, "How are these people going to get paid and administered?" So they created the following positions, two time keepers and three payroll officers, and then hired four human resources consultants and five health and safety executives.

Then Parliament said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?" So they created an administrative section and hired fifty people including administrative officers, assistant administrative officers, legal secretaries and a chief executive on £250,000 per annum.

Then Parliament said, "We have had this in operation for over one year and we are £25,000,000 over budget, we must cutback the overall cost."

So they laid off the night watchman.

True, that.

Let's get the flock out of here

Or if we're talking about pigs, the herd. And obviously that's a lot easier if the herd has its own fully signed, designated escape route which it knows because there have been escape drills. Yes, we're still talking about pigs, and no I'm not making this up. I've banged my head on the desk once or twice but this bloody article is still there.

Click for linky and loss of will to live

If fire engulfs a piggery in Monto, its residents can rest easy. That fluorescent exit sign above the doors will save their bacon.

And also saves me making that joke. Predictable, I know, but better than the 'hamstrung' one the Courier Mail used in their headline.

In one of the most ridiculous rules stifling small business in Queensland, piggery operators are required to install illuminated exit signs inside pens occupied solely by pigs.

Okay, look, I know pigs are supposed to be relatively intelligent creatures but I can spot two flaws with this. Flaw number one is that I'm pretty confident they're not that intelligent. Flaw number two, and this is important for anyone who believes you can teach a pig what a sign's for, is that's a running fucking MAN on the emergency exit sign.

But it's okay because after that the rules begin to make sense. No, just kidding, they don't.

Regulations also demand an escape door for pigs to use in case of fires...

You might already spot the potential problem here.

... but which farmers fear the animals can use any time.

Which suggests that someone in the Queensland government has failed to recognise that emergency exits aren't used all the time because you can explain to people that this exit, this one over here, is for emergencies only and that one over there is for coming and going as you please. This is simple enough even for a fairly young child to grasp, but I wish you the very best of luck if you're hoping to explain it to farmyard animals. You're going to need every bit of it.

Oh, and then there are the fire drills. Fire drills! That must have been funny enough to sell tickets for.

"Right, we'll try again. Now, Napoleon?"
"Oink?"
"When I blow this whistle you call Pinkeye and Squealer..."
"Squeeeeeeaal!"
"No, listen..."
"Squeeeeeeeeeeaaal!"
"Just listen a minute..."
"Squeeeeeeaaloinkoinkoink."
"Ah, screw it. They'll all be in bits on cold shelves in a few weeks anyway."

"A concrete block shed with steel roof trusses and corrugated iron roof, built to hold 60 pigs in four pens, had to have a fire hose, an illuminated "EXIT" sign above each of the two doors and an evacuation procedure displayed in a prominent position," former pig farmer Darryl Stewart told an industry survey.

A fire hose? But how... ?

"The biggest difficulties were teaching the pigs to read the signs and procedures, conducting fire drills so the building could be evacuated in orderly fashion and training the four most intelligent pigs as fire fighters.

Presumably chosen from among Pugh, Pugh, Barney MacGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Snouter.

And it had to be done all over again every three months because that is when a new batch replaced the old batch.
"Oh, and rounding them up from anywhere within a 5km radius after every fire drill was not much fun either."

Okay, I am actually laughing now because I've got this mental picture of pigs running in every direction apart from back to the piggery, and there is Benny Hill music. Still, this is a former pig farmer and he's probably kidding, right? Right?

Ian Hill, of Bailey Creek Piggeries in Mulgildie, confirmed to The Courier-Mail exit signs were legally required in pens.
"It's one of the council requirements that when you put a building in that they want illuminated exit signs at every piggery building," he said.
[...]
A Biloela piggery owner confirmed signs and particular types of doors that pigs could use in a fire were a legal requirement.
"We had a fire inspector come through here when we put up sheds years ago, and he made us put in fire extinguishers, put up the illuminated signs ... There's no deviation," he said.

And of course the serious side to this is that of costs to business. Someone's got to go out and buy signs which are meaningless to the inhabitants of the buildings they're put up in, plus install and maintain equipment that those inhabitants can't operate with trotters or even comprehend the purpose of - with the exception of the pig operable doors that are supposed to be for emergency use. Not only that but you can't cut corners because there are inspections, and to cap it all your taxes are helping pay not just for the inspectors' wages but also the clown who I'm guessing saw Porky the Fireman while stoned off his dial and thought it was a good idea.

Memo to the Queensland government. Don't attempt to teach a pig Occ. Health and Safety. It wastes your time and annoys the pig, but really infuriates the poor sod who has to pay for it.

A perfect storm of stupid - UPDATED

So we've just had the Greens' carbon tax rammed through with the support of the minority Labor government, and now it's the plain tobacco packaging, which I read...

...will pass the Senate with the support of the Greens.

Is it speculative to wonder if the price for supporting Labor's pointless plain fag packets - pointless not least because it follows recently introduced laws that generally prevent the fucking packets being on display anyway - was the carbon tax and vice versa?

Who knows? But what I am very confident of is that these two pieces of legislation, one extremely divisive and the other egregiously illiberal, will each achieve as near to nothing as makes no odds.

"If this legislation stops one young Australian from picking up a shiny, coloured packet and prevents them becoming addicted to cigarettes then in my view it will have been worthwhile," Labor senator John Faulkner told the upper house today.

It won't. Hell's bells, I'm getting tired of saying this, but just look at the illegal drug trade. Just fucking look at it. Do they have trademarks? Do they have shiny, coloured packets? No. Does the trade have any difficulty in retaining customers? No, but of course the nanny screams of "Addiction!" will be starting any second, so let's ask a different question. Does the drugs trade have any difficulty attracting new business despite the complete lack of trademarks and shiny, coloured packets? Again the answer is no. And the reason is that people want to take the bloody stuff. No, I don't particularly get the attraction either, but there's a very good chance that someone somewhere in this very suburb is getting wasted right now and we all know that whatever s/he's on came in some kind of plain and most likely ad hoc packaging. Hell, even illegal chop-chop tobacco already comes in plain packaging, and I'm sure the suppliers are just delighted that their main competition, the legal and regulated tobacco trade, are taking one in the crotch and losing one more thing that distinguishes the legal from the illegal product. And, er, correct me if I'm wrong but they don't even pay tax, do they? Christ, they must think all their Christmases came at once.

Via the Real World Libertarian

And if in return for that utter pointlessness, unless the idea really is to benefit the criminal tobacco trade, Labor brought in the carbon tax for the Greens it doesn't seem to me to be any more likely to achieve anything noticeable. As I mentioned the other day other countries seem quick to praise Australia for the carbon tax but oh so reluctant to follow suit, and with such a small population we could cut emissions to nothing at the cost of utterly destroying the economy and going back to being a pre-industrial society, and the self-sacrifice would have a measurable effect on the climate of zero. And that's making the assumption that the whole warble gloaming catastrophism bandwagon isn't garbage to begin with. The reality is that we're on our own.

Earlier this week Climate Change Minister Greg Combet rejected the idea that there are serious issues with international carbon trading and yesterday spoke rosily about the global carbon market's prospects while the EU carbon price crashed.
To support his argument Combet cited the World Bank's Carbon Finance Unit State and Trends of the Global Carbon Market 2011 report that the market has now grown to $US140 billion ($136bn). But he's clearly only read it to recite convenient anecdotes.
According to the report "after five consecutive years of robust growth, the total value of the global carbon market stalled suffering from the lack of post-2012 regulatory clarity".
Meanwhile the price of some emissions permits "fell by double-digits for the third year in a row" and "shrank as well in 2010".
A carbon market recession should hardly come as a surprise.
[...]
Before its closure in the middle of last year, the price of voluntary Chicago carbon exchange permits plunged from $7.40 a tonne to a mere 5c.
And Europe's carbon price has not been in parity with Australia's $23 a tonne price since June and now sits at about $10 following a downward price trend.
As long as the EU's emissions trading scheme accounts for 97 per cent of the global carbon market, the price will be set in Europe and a price drop there will significantly influence whether emissions cuts will be achieved in Australia.

And as that article also points out, arguments between the industrialised and developing worlds over a replacement treaty for the Kyoto Accord, itself not credited with achieving a measurable temperature change as far as I've heard, are deadlocked on the issue of whether the developing world is included this time.

Worse, like the tobacco legislation, it seems that criminals are going to gain from this too, or at least have a bloody good try.

The Australian Federal Police is preparing to investigate cases of serious fraud that could arise from Labor's carbon pricing scheme, including the possible sale of bogus carbon credits.
The AFP's deputy commissioner of operations Andrew Colvin said a working group had been established with the Department of Climate Change to discuss possible responses to carbon tax breaches.
Appearing before a Senate committee hearing today, Mr Colvin said the AFP's efforts would focus on serious fraud offences, particularly those involving the sale of counterfeit carbon permits or credits.

And of course they're quite right to if experience elsewhere is any guide.

Click for link - H/T to WUWT

So to recap, what we've got here is a couple of bits of legislation that will attract and likely benefit criminals, add to the workloads of the police, and achieve two-fifths of fuck all. But on the upside they're ideologically sound, keep wealthy lobby groups onside, and of course Australia gets to say it's leading the world even if the world isn't all that keen to follow.

Marvellous.

UPDATE - Coincidentally WUWT has a post looking at Kyoto’s effects which concludes that it did nothing in signatory countries that didn’t happen in the US too, and did quite a lot less than the financial crisis. Now, about that carbon tax, Jules and Bob…

On taxing the sixth element

Or rather one of its oxides. Via the Real World Libertarian and quoted en bloc, a post by Viv Forbes of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Back to the Dark Ages

The passage of the carbon tax bills today is no reason for celebration. It is a step back towards the dark ages.

Just a few generations ago, humans lived in a “green” world. There was no coal, oil or gas providing light, heat, transport and traction power.

In this green utopia, wood provided heat for cooking fires and forests were felled for charcoal for primitive metallurgy; farmers used wooden ploughs and harvested grain with sickles and flails; the nights were lit using candles and whale oil; rich people used wind and water power to grind cereals; horses and bullocks moved coaches, wagons and troops; there was no refrigeration and salt was the only preservative for meat.

Towns were tiny as the whole family was needed to work the farm. For most people, the daylight hours were filled with heavy labour to produce, preserve and transport food. There was no surplus to support opera, bureaucracy or academia.

Humanity was relieved from this life of unrelenting toil by carbon energy – steam engines and electricity, machines, tractors, cars, ships and planes.

Today the pagan green religion celebrates the first step in their long campaign to destroy industrial society and reduce population.

They should be careful what they wish for.

For example, just a few more bitter winters in Britain will see their wind powered lights going out.

A British observer once said of the Whitlam government: “Any fool can bugger up Britain, but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia”.

The Gillard-Green Government is showing the sort of genius needed to dim the lights in the lucky country.

I would say that this should serve as a warning to those outside Australia to do their damnedest to prevent their governments joining this madness, but as I mentioned at the weekend it seems that no other governments are all that keen anyway.

Great work, Jules. Really fucking outstanding.

In Masho veritas?

Well, if it applies to wine couldn't it apply to The Daily Mash talking here about the 'Occupy' mob's spread from New York to other cities?

... first-time protestor, Roy Hobbs, insisted: "I'm here because I'm sick and tired of all the greed that stops me from getting what I want.

"That's why I've come up with a plan that will solve everything. It involves dividing all the money in the world equally and then waiting to see what happens next."

You know, I really believer that is the plan. I really, really do.

Tilting at windmills

Click for linky

... soon after being installed [at the Gorran School in Cornwall] the wind turbine became faulty and after a few months seized up - showering the school's playing field with debris.
Since then the school has been locked in a battle with suppliers Proven Energy which has now gone into administration leaving the school with little hope of any money being returned - and a pile of scrap in their field.

Having seen this earlier I was going to blog it later on today, but I see Watts Up With That have already done a thorough job on it, including the fact that the debris with which it showered the playground included two fucking turbine blades lessons have not been learned as well as the local community's apparent inability to treat this as a learning experience - they're now spunking away half a million pounds on two 'community turbines'. Nip over to WUWT and have a read of the whole thing when you can. I can't add anything other than the cynical observation that someone, or several someones, in Big Eco is probably getting wealthy off places like Gorran. Which would be fine if what was provided in return actually worked.

Victory? For whom?

Paul Dacre yesterday

Town halls are to be shamed into bringing back weekly bin collections, it was revealed yesterday.
In a victory for householders and the Daily Mail, ministers unveiled a £250million fund to restore them.
Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles said councils will now have ‘no excuse’ to maintain hugely unpopular fortnightly schemes. ‘My view has always been that people expect a weekly collection,’ he said.

Yes, and the reason people expect a weekly collection, and so the reason why tapping taxpayers for another £250m makes this a pyrrhic victory at best, is because they've already fucking paid for it.* Has anyone anywhere heard of a UK council reducing council tax when switching from weekly to fortnightly collections? Anyone?

So what this means is the taxpayers are going to be shaken down again, either in the form of taxes now or in the form of more national debt now to be paid later, all to pay for what they should have been getting in the first place. Some bloody victory, especially as it turns out Eric Pickles can't even promise that the money won't be spunked away on fact finding missions to somewhere sunny with hot weather and hotter waitresses or yet another bunch of outreach and upchuck services for the vertically challenged, gender non-specific, gay, disabled, travellers of extra-terrestrial ethnicity community.**

He cannot force town halls to go back to weekly collections, but made it clear that voters should throw out councils which do not – a provocative suggestion, given that many of those that have gone fortnightly are Conservative controlled.
Mr Pickles told the Daily Mail: ‘I’ve had council leaders sitting at this very table who claim their public like a fortnightly collection and are very supportive. Well, good luck to them. Come the elections, there can be no excuses.’

Actually I don't exactly disagree with this. If people aren't happy they certainly should kick out their councillors (MPs too) come election time, but of course this isn't as straightforward as it sounds when parties have similar, and sometimes identical policies. Who do you vote for when they're all going to do the same thing? Not voting doesn't help since the people that do vote will still ensure that one of the bastards gets in, and like most (all?) democratic countries the UK still doesn't have ballot slips with an option to reject all candidates? As the article makes clear, it's not like this is something one particular party is prone to do when in control of a council, and it didn't take me long working my way down a list of hung councils to find that no overall control doesn't mean any assurance of weekly collections either.

So as far as I can tell The Daily Mail's self congratulatory circle jerk is based on the government tapping taxpayers for another quarter billion to pay for a service they've already paid for through council tax, with no guarantee that this extra money will result in householders actually getting the service. Oh wow, let's break open the champa... er, the really cheap Asti Spumante that someone brought over New Year before last. Seriously, what do British council taxpayers have to do to get the kind of refuse collection service that we get here in Oz, which having come from a fortnightly collection council area in the UK amazed me enough that I blogged it a couple of years ago.

What is it with rubbish collection here? There's a tip/recycling centre about 20 minutes drive away that is either free or inexpensive depending on what and how much we're dropping off. We have a pair of 120 litre bins that are provided to all local rate payers, and for a couple of bucks a week per bin we could double up to 240 litres (or reduce to 80 and get a small rebate). One bin is for rubbish and the other is for assorted - i.e. unsorted - recyclables. Seriously, we don't do any separating beyond what can be recycled and what can't, so all paper, cardboard, tins and plastics with a recycle logo just get rinsed out if necessary and chucked into the same bin, with everything else going into garbage bags before being put in the other bin. Nobody gets their cock in a knot and insists the bins are put out in the morning rather than the night before, nobody talks about fines if it's a bit full and the lid doesn't quite shut all the way, and nobody insists it's in a particular place as long as the robotic arm on the truck can reach, which is a fair way (vid - not our council but similar machines). And both bins are emptied weekly, and we don't have to do anything other than take 'em out the night before the bin men 'garbos' come round.
[...]
I mean, how backward is that? Apart from the robot arms on the vehicles and recycling some stuff that's like where rubbish collection was in Britain 25 years ago.

It's got to the stage now where I think the best chance of that happening is for the councils to have some competition. That means encouraging people to go private and pay for a collections from one of the firms that have begun appearing to provide that service the councils are no longer interested in but still insist on charging for. I've no idea what the average council charge for it these days, and even if I could remember what we used to pay that was several years ago anyway, but a very brief search turned up one UK company willing to do weekly bin collections for about 500 quid a year (plus either a one off £50 for a bin or £6 a month to rent one because councils won't let anyone else empty theirs). That company also does a fortnightly collection for those who might want it, either because they don't produce much rubbish or because they just want rubbish taken those alternate weeks when the council won't do it (shame that means having yet another bin).

Of course, not only would all this be more likely if Eric Pickles stopped putting his hands in the poor bloody taxpayers' wallets and instead told them that they could withhold part or all of the portion of their council tax that pays for kerbside refuse collection if they pay a private contractor to do it instead, but it's an essential move if there's to be any competitive pressure on councils to improve their service. And here's where we run into difficulties, because currently members of the political class or all parties seem congenitally incapable of considering any solution to a problem that doesn't involve them at some level. It's not just the empire building attitude, though that's probably a factor too, but this assumption among politicians and civil servants that people simply won't be able to cope with buying services themselves. In modern infantilised Britain this might even be true to an extent, but it's only a problem if council refuse collection is scrapped altogether. It's not a problem if people can choose freely between continuing to pay the council for whatever it's prepared to provide in the way of bin collection and paying a private company for whatever they actually need in the way of bin collection. The only remaining issue would then be that councils would likely crack the sads at the thought of losing some of their income, and frankly that's just a facet of the empire building thing so too bad.

Still, as I say most current politicians are fiercely statist even if they don't think of themselves as such, so I won't be holding my breath. But if you're walking down a British suburban street on hot summer day there's a fair chance you'll still need to, because I'm sure many bins will still contain nearly two week old rotting food stinking the place up.


* I can't see any mention of whether this is one off or annual. Generally I'd expect politicians doing the 'Have some free money' routine to maximise the sound of their generosity with other people's money by saying if it's an annual thing, but possibly the Cobbleition are getting a bit sensitive to the fact that they promised to tackle the spiralling national debt and they're abjectly failing to do so. Or maybe Britons are starting to realise that governments have no money of their own and asking who's really picking up the bills for their largesse. I'm not wildly optimistic about that but I'd very much hope so.
** This is probably about the last group apart from vanilla WASPs who don't have outreach services yet.

Wallets out, everybody

Little time for blogging this weekend, so my comments on this will be brief.

British taxpayers risk being caught up in a £1.75trillion deal aimed at saving the euro by allowing Greece to default on its massive debts.
[...]
The eurozone deal, being brokered by the G20 group of nations, would seek to "ring fence" the crisis around Greece, Portugal and Ireland - preventing it from spreading to major EU economies such as Italy and Spain.
It would involve the bailing out those European banks - mostly French - most at risk from their massive lendings to tottering economies.
Greece, crucially, would be able to default on at least some of its more than £300billion debts but remain inside the eurozone. The Greek government's private creditors would bear most of the increased costs.
At this stage, a new bail-out programme would be devised for Greece - with cash coming at least in part from the International Monetary Fund, in which Britain holds a 4.5 per cent stake.

And so...

This could mean British taxpayers paying out more than the £1billion they are already slated to have to contribute under the terms of the first Greek bailout fund.

I suspect 'could' in this context means 'will'. How can Britain avoid it when the IMF is involved? And so I'll make my usual comment in this kind of situation:

It's not your fucking money!

And add only that actually allowing a default isn't a bad thought but this idea is still, to use Douglas Carswell's phrase, bailing water into a sinking boat. The idea that a bail out involves adding more of the problem is just gold standard professional window licking.

Intervals at the security theatre

If we have to have security theatre it'd be a nice idea to have intervals, wouldn't it? Not only could you have a break, stretch your legs a bit, browse the programmes and maybe get a glass of wine or something, but you could also look forward to the second act not being exactly the fucking same as the first. And that's where the analogy falls apart because with security theatre you actually have to have the first act all over again even if it's just because someone fluffed a couple of lines.

Flights from Sydney Airport's domestic terminal have been delayed after a security breach.
Two people reportedly entered a secure area of the Qantas-managed T3 domestic terminal without being properly screened this morning.
Passengers report that planes have been grounded and the terminal closed, with thousands having to be re-screened.
"Two passengers enter secure area in Sydney Airport (domestic) causing all passengers to be rescreened. Will be mass delays," one passenger tweeted.
Another passenger said on Twitter: "Entire Sydney Airport terminal has been evacuated due to a security breach. Looks like I'm not getting home today."

And people ask me why I avoid flying if at all possible. You have to queue up to be questioned, then x-rayed and finally scanned and fondled, all of which means passengers are sometimes being told to arrive three hours before departure (I was the last time I flew out of London Heathrow), and then you have to do it all over again if the daft sods lose track and accidentally let someone in without having first questioned, x-rayed, scanned and fondled them.

If the person who wasn't scanned doesn't own up then the whole terminal - and I do
mean the whole terminal - will have to do it all over again. I can wait all day.

Not only has this now happened four times that I know of in Aussie airports - once here in Melbourne, once in Brisbane and twice in Sydney - and caused big delays and inconvenience each time, but the media have failed to ask what seems to me to be the big questions. If people have slipped through security and got airside four times that we know of, but were eventually checked along with everyone else's recheck, then how do we know it hasn't happened a few more times without it being noticed and there being rechecks? And if so, what the hell's the point in all the security theatre anyway? Because it doesn't sound like it's actually keeping the place all that secure. It's not like it's just Aussie airports either, because as I noted a couple of weeks ago undercover journalists managed to smuggle a dismantled gun onto flights from two French airports (and just to prove the point they then took it into the toilet and mantled it) while in the US an undercover federal agent got through security on multiple occasions with her gun in her knickers. So I repeat, what is the point in security theatre that's intrusive, costly, inconvenient and can't even guarantee our security anyway? Can't we just go and see a different play?

If security be the food of air travel, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Well, it's worked for me, which is why my appetite for flying is roughly zero. At the risk of repeating myself, when I get treated like a paying customer again I'll happily fly, but as long as I'm treated like a suspect by security that we can see doesn't bloody work I won't unless I really have to.

Quote of the Day

Via the Pistonheads forum, Sky's Kay Burley turning a tragedy into an embarrassment:

KB: What's this colliery used for?

Interviewee: It's a coal mine.

Subtext: Coal, woman, fucking coal. Do you not know what the word colliery means? Are you asking for the benefit of an audience with a room temperature IQ? Get a dictionary, for Christ's sake. Sheesh!

Australia's Carbon Taxed National Anthem

SING!



Australians all let us revolt,

For we are carbon free;

We’ve iron ore and coal and more,

But live in poverty.
Our land abounds in Nature’s gifts,

To use we do not dare;

In history’s page, we’re now stone age

What chance Australia fair?

In worried strains then let us ask,

What chance Australia fair?


H/T to the Real World Libertarian.

Remembering those important dates

Tomorrow marks a date we'll all be expected to remember. The papers will be full of it, it'll be mentioned on every news and current affairs show, the blogosphere will no doubt add its contribution (and in a way this post is a part of that) and the never-mind-liberty-give-me-security-or-at-least-the-illusion-of-it paranoia brigade will spend the whole day shitting themselves in case the alky-aida bogeyman blows something up. And on that point, look, if the alky-aida bogeyman can blow something up tomorrow I don't doubt that he will, but I doubt he'll be hung up on anniversaries and special dates like most of the west seems to be. He'll be just as happy to blow something up a fortnight next Tuesday or this time next month. Or a fortnight last Tuesday or this time last month. Whatever suits him, really.

'Courageous', but not in the way that they mean

The plain fag packets law has crept a little closer.

Australia's parliament has passed two bills moving the nation closer to becoming the first to introduce plain cigarette packaging in a move Health Minister Nicola Roxon Thursday called "courageous".

Well, Nics, if by 'courageous' you're referring to the benefit the illegal tobacco trade will reap because those who counterfeit packaging will have an easier time while those who've always supplied their baccy in plain packaging, all of whom will be hoping to increase their profits and none of whom will pay a cent in tax, then yes, it's very brave indeed. You might go so far as to say it shows enormous balls.

But somehow I don't think she does mean that at all, which makes it less about having balls and more about talking balls.

The plans, which are being closely watched by other countries considering similar policies, have enraged the tobacco giants, who say there is no evidence plain packaging will reduce smoking rates.
They are also concerned it would reduce their profits and see counterfeit products flood the market.
But Roxon said they would have to live with it.

As will you, Nics, as will you. And not only Nicola Roxon but all the rest of us non-smokers too. You see, the tobacco industry currently puts several billion dollars into the Treasury in tobacco taxes. Now I know that the anti-smoking lobbyist drones claim that smoking kills 15,000 a year and cost $31 billion - one was wheeled out to do so for the linked article - but this is a claim that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If tobacco costs really were greater than tax revenue by a factor of five or more it's simply inconceivable that the government are not banning smoking outright, and if they believe it then the decision to piss about with plain packaging is financially moronic. I very much doubt they're quite that stupid, so I suspect it's far more likely they're trying to have their cake and eat it because they don't actually believe the $31 billion figure themselves. And they shouldn't, as Christopher Snowdon of Velvet Glove, Iron Fist explains (my emphasis).

Let's first consider that there are believed to be 15,000 smoking related deaths in Australia every year. If the "medical burden" is $31 billion a year, this means that each person receives over $2,000,000 of treatment. This sounds just a little bit implausible and should have seemed so to the journalist as she typed it out.

And of course it turns out that is not the medical burden. The study that came up that figure accepted—totally contrary to what the hapless hack said—that tobacco taxes exceed the cost to the taxpayerof treating smoking-related diseases:

"Tobacco tax revenue in 2004/05 exceeded tobacco-attributable costs borne by the public sector by over $3.5 billion. Of this surplus $2.7 billion accrued to the Commonwealth and around $800 million to state governments." (p. 72)

This same study did indeed come up with a figure of $31 billion, but it did so by including 'costs' that no reasonable person would consider to be costs. Lost productivity both at work and at home gave them an extra $8 billion (p. 64). Aside from the obvious problem of coming up with a suitable cash equivalent for domestic work, all lost productivity figures are questionable because they rely on an assumption that an individual is capable of a set amount of work in a lifetime and that he/she has a duty to fulfill that quota, otherwise they are somehow costing other people money. It's as if someone dies and you have to go round and clean their house for the next ten years. It's a nonsense.

Still more dubious is the remaining $19.5 billion which is made up of 'intangible' costs (p. 65). This relies on the entirely arbitrary valuation of a life at $2 million, or a loss of one year's living of $53,267. This kind of psychological evaluation is practically meaningless and has no place in economics. You might as well say that the value of life is priceless and, therefore, the costs of smoking (or alcohol, or drugs) is infinite.

So the aim of this policy, like most so-called anti-smoking policies the world over, is to keep the Strength Through Joy mob happy by bullying the smokers while at the same time not doing anything that risks too much of the government's tax revenue take. Let's not kid ourselves here, if a $4 billion fall in tax revenue is newsworthy and had the finance minister in front of the cameras to talk about it, losing the baccy tax surplus, which is on the order, would give the government headaches.

Worse, the whole $7 bn or so per year would be lost while the costs wouldn't go actually away. They wouldn't go away immediately because if what they claim about the health effects is true even if everyone stopped there'd be people getting smoke related illnesses for years later, and in reality they wouldn't go away at all for precisely the same reason we still have to pay for the health effects of pot, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, crystal meth, etc. - because people who really want to smoke will be doing it off the grid with tobacco they either buy illegally or produce themselves. Look, cannabis is banned and Aussies are supposedly among the highest users of pot in the world (no pun intended, that's really how it was put) so the health system has all of the costs while the trade provides not a single cent of tax revenue.

As I said earlier, the government may be stupid but it isn't quite that stupid, and so I'm sure it has no desire at all for the same thing to happen with tobacco. However, I think the current Aussie government is in danger of inadvertently pushing things that way anyway by policies that blur the difference between regulated and quality controlled tobacco and the illegal, untaxed, unregulated competition. Ironically I think that might not be bad news for Australia's smokers since I believe more will be encouraged to smoke the much cheaper illegal products - I emphasise that I'm not advocating it, just predicting that it will happen.

That's not courageous but stupid, handing over more control of yet another desirable product to criminals, just as was once done with alcohol in the US and as is the case with all the illegal recreational drugs that people still want to use today and which have never had any trouble keeping existing customers or finding new ones. Not the intent, to be sure, but the fact that Nicola Roxon didn't refute this but instead said the tobacco companies will have to live with it means they are aware of the possibility. And yes, I do believe that governments can be that stupid.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

It's a funny one, the Law of Unintended Consequences. It's one of those laws that is beyond any possibility of repeal, but it's one that most governments, if they ever stop their furious production of arse gravy for long enough to think about things for a few minutes, must wish they could do away with quietly because they keep falling foul of it. These days the poor, stupid things seem to be particularly prone to unintended consequences when trying to give themselves a veneer of greenishness, and so it is with the latest example from this part of the world.

A couple of years ago, in a move reminiscent of the current drive for Australia to lead the world by introducing mandatory plain tobacco packaging to make it easier for counterfeiters and chop-chop dealers to compete with the legal tobacco industry, South Australia led the nation in banning plastic carrier bags. This would, it was claimed, reduce waste sent to landfill - though quite why that's a problem in a state of more than a million square kilometres and only 1.6 million people, three-quarters of whom live in Adelaide, I'm not quite sure. Nobody likes to see plastic bags littering the place, but SA is not short of room to bury shit is what I'm saying here. Now I know that you can probably emit some carbon dioxide down any street of any city in the developed world and be sure of warming at least half a dozen green zealots by a fraction of a degree, all of whom will tell you that plastic bags in landfill won't decompose for about eleventy squillion years, and hyperbole aside they're probably right. So far better to ban the nasty things and force everyone to buy those reusable ones, right?

Wrong, as any member of any household that used to reuse their carrier bags could have told them. We do use the reusable bags but we tend to make sure we get a few carriers on shopping trips for use in small pedal bins and for clearing up after pets, and since many SA pet stores will surely sell bags for that it's not like the bags are completely banned in SA. It's just that the supermarkets aren't allowed to give them out, or even sell them, for you to take your groceries home in. And since South Australians also used them for more than that the ban has had an effect that you probably needed to be in government to have been unable to foresee.

BIN liner sales in SA have doubled since free plastic shopping bags were banned more than two years ago.
And most bin bags are made of thicker plastic than traditional bags, which means they take longer to break down in the environment.

But... but... surely there must be some mistake because, as the article mentions, none other than the head of Zero Waste SA (a state government quango by the looks of it) said at the time that there wouldn't be a significant increase in bin bag sales. Exactly what he thought South Australians would be lining their bins with I don't know, but clearly it wasn't expected to be bin liners. So this must be coming as a bit of a shock.

Woolworths (one of Australia's big two supermarket chains - AE) says SA sales of plastic kitchen-tidy bags of a similar size, capacity and shape to single-use plastic shopping bags, are now double the national average.
At Coles (the other big supermarket chain - AE), sales of kitchen tidy bags increased 40 per cent in the year following the ban in May 2009.
Bin bag manufacturer Glad reported a 52.5 per cent jump in kitchen-tidy bag sales in the first year of the ban, compared with a 5.5 per cent increase nationally.
In SA, 48 million Glad bin bags were bought in 2008, rising to more than 73 million in 2009 and 84 million last year.
The figures have raised concerns about whether the plastic bag ban has been effective in reducing waste sent to landfill.

And it gets worse, since both paper and reusable bags are heavier, meaning emissions if you believe in warble gloaming, and costs if you don't, are higher per bag you transport since you'll get far fewer of them on the lorry. This is going to be at least partly cancelled out if a lot if people do reuse them but it turns out that there's more bad news on that score - they have to be reused a hell of a lot before they make up for the extra energy used in their production.*

HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton hold-alls favoured by environmentalists, and have less than one third of the Co2 emissions than paper bags which are given out by retailers such as Primark.
The findings suggest that, in order to balance out the tiny impact of each lightweight plastic bag, consumers would have to use the same cotton bag every working day for a year, or use paper bags at least thrice rather than sticking them in the bin or recycling.
Most paper bags are used only once and one study assumed cotton bags were used only 51 times before being discarded, making them – according to this new report – worse than single-use plastic bags.

And ironically this means that I, as a warble gloaming sceptic, can use the allegedly eco-friendly bags with a clear conscience, while the eco-sustainability types should be marching on the South Australian parliament house to demand the evil polythene ones back. Clearly then, the policy makes no sense at all, and it's really a bit of luck that the South Australians have found out about these unintended, though not unforeseeable, consequences in time for other states and territories to avoid the same trap.

The Northern Territory and ACT are now introducing their own bans.

/facepalm


* Tip of the Akubra to Cracked.com.

Another lesson on government from Non Sequitur

From a few days ago.

Enjoy your weekends.