Category: Main

OK, so the death toll from the Great North Run matched that of the Hatfield rail crash.

I wonder how long the court case will last?

Dr Andrew Vallance-Owen of BUPA said, “At BUPA we encourage everyone to take an active interest in their health and running is a great way to keep fit. This year BUPA is sponsoring six runs including the BUPA Great North and BUPA Great South Runs.”

Oops, wrong page. That was last year. Actually, he said that fun-runners who failed to prepare properly for such gruelling events could suffer heart attacks. (Metro, Monday 19 Sep).

Not that there is any evidence that the victims did fail to prepare properly. The brother of 28-year-old Reuben Wilson said that Wilson had trained for the race. The immediate assertion that “if it didn’t work, you weren’t doing it properly” is one of those things that I generally find very annoying. Facts first, please, then conclusions.

Seriously, I don’t think that the organisers of the race should be considered liable for the deaths that occurred. But there is at least is much justification as in many other cases of accidental death, including Hatfield.

There are two views of politeness. One is that it’s a kind of magical fairy-dust that you can add to whatever you do by using meaningless words like “please”.

That might be OK for teaching toddlers, but it’s rubbish.

Real politeness is caring about other people. “please” isn’t meaningless, it’s a contraction of “if you please”, and it means that you’re recognising that the person you’re talking to might not want to do what you’re asking, and that you’re accepting that they might choose not do it.

Giving an order including the word “please” isn’t polite, it’s gibberish. Saying “please” isn’t polite, unless you mean it.

Now the message you get if you go to http://www.legos.com/

“… We would sincerely like your help … Please always refer to our products as LEGO bricks …”

Is, as far as I can see, genuinely polite. They’re not giving orders or making threats. They’re pointing out what they call the stuff they make, and saying that they’d prefer it if their customers called it the same. There’s nothing to suggest that they are unaware that Cory Doctorow or anybody else can call it whatever they like, but like other global companies these days, they prefer to call their product by the same name everywhere (Snickers, anyone?). Unlike Mars, they can’t rename their product from “Legos” to “LEGO”, because it was never Legos in the first place, it’s just that Americans seem to be a bit confused. So they’ve made this polite request. Complaining about seems ridiculously touchy.

The problem here is not BoingBoing, it is the people who never got beyond toddler level, who don’t know the difference between speaking politely and being polite, who say “please do not smoke here” when they mean “if you smoke here we’ll send security guards to throw you out”, who say “please do not copy this CD” when they mean “if you copy this CD we’ll sue you for $100,000”. They leave us in the position where we’re not quite sure whether the Lego message is insufferable bossiness or a mild request.

On reflection, the motive might not even be marketing. It might just make their skin crawl to hear the word “legos”. Mine does, a little, and I’m nothing to do with the company at all.

“Hard as it is to believe, it would appear that promoting marijuana as a medicine for cancer and AIDS patients did not make it seem cooler to teenagers.”

Jacob Sullum

I don’t like hardback books.

They’re too bulky, too heavy, and the dustjackets rip easily. I want a book I can shove in the already-crammed pocket of my laptop bag and read on the train. Paperbacks meet the need, and they’re cheaper too!

The only thing the hardbacks have going for them is that they’re available first, when the publicity hits. So what I want is some kind of application that I can notify when I hear about an interesting book, and which will let me know when the paperback comes out.

This one that Tim Worstall has picked up a review of would be a first choice: “Why Most Things Fail” by Paul Ormerod.

On a related note, “Freakonomics” is just out in paperback.

In the news today: some utter, utter drivel from the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

If it had happened all at once, there would have been a huge outcry; determined, concerted action. But it didn’t; it happened over several decades – gradually, incrementally, without anyone really knowing who was responsible, or whether it was anything to do with them. And so those who can remember how things used to be look back uneasily. They find it hard to believe that it happened. But it did. It’s 2035, and the countryside is all but over.

The report itself is 48 pages. It will take me a while to give it the fisking it deserves, though I hope to get round to it. My first pass was to look through it for any evidence at all that would seem to contradict the key relevant fact, that Britain is mostly empty.

The report does state that the developed area of Britain is increasing (by 21 square miles per year, apparently), but nowhere does it put this in context of the area which is undeveloped. The nearest it gets to such a claim is the last bullet point on page 15:

“the total area of ‘tranquil countryside’ declined by 20% between 1960s and 1994, and continues to do so”.

The source for this claim is a 10-year-old publication by the same organisation.

They do make some accurate points: Farming is declining (good!). Light pollution is an aesthetic problem (can be fixed, by, er, pointing the lights downwards, and should be.) Some bird species are in dangerous decline (but how much of that is caused by changing farming methods rather than encroaching development?). But the central claim is that we are running out of countryside, and that claim is utterly false, and indeed is made dishonestly, since they surely must have noticed that there was no evidence to support it, when they looked for some to put in their report and couldn’t find any.

Related posts:
Crowded Island
The War on Housing

I don’t much like this government. I don’t like Blair, and I don’t like Brown. Their centralising, high-spending, high-taxing, interventionist policies are damaging the economy and the nation.

But set against the whole context of nasty statist politicians, they’re not exceptionally bad. They get some stuff right – like this from Gordon Brown.

Somehow I can’t see Ken Clarke making that speech. And that’s his problem. For all his cuddly image and centrist appeal, if it comes down to an election between Gordon Brown and Ken Clarke, I think I’d prefer Brown. It’s kind of a “hanging or electrocution” type question, but there it is.

The trouble with ambiguity is that people suspect the worst. If the Tory party campaigns on a platform of “we want to cut spending but we’re not going to”, voters who don’t want cuts will expect to get them, and voters who do, won’t. Everybody will be put off.

Some points from the argument between Tim Worstall and Jesse Taylor over “price-gouging”.
To recap: John Stossel made an argument, with a hypothetical example, to the effect that if you pay a high price for some essential, you should be glad that the price was set high, because had it been set low the vendor would have already sold out and you wouldn’t have it at all.

Jesse Taylor attacked this argument as “odious”.

Tim Worstall then nominated Jesse Taylor as an “Economic Idiot”

After that, things started to get unfriendly.

The sides are so far apart in their unstated assumptions that they appear quite unable to comprehend each other. After much pondering, however, I think I understand Taylor’s claim that the seller is “artificially encouraging scarcity”.

Read on…

Just as it’s too early to say with confidence what caused the death of de Menezes – though I sure as hell want to know – it’s too early to say what, if anything, really went wrong in New Orleans.

I don’t think it’s too soon to draw some general lessons, however.

This article in the NRO alleges the following (my emphasis):

… a working group decided that the workable solution to the problem of thousands of stranded citizens was to ask churches to set up a giant car-pool system. The plan further called for a DVD to get the word out, which was still in production when Katrina struck. A cynic might say that such a plan was drafted so city officials could say they had a real evacuation plan, written down on official letterhead and signed and announced and all of the other things that make bureaucrats swoon, but was in point of fact yet another exercise in passing the buck to the next schmuck to occupy the conference-table chair.

Again, at this point I would treat this as an unconfirmed allegation, but anyone who has had the “disaster recovery” duty dumped on them in a business is likely to see it as at least plausible. The general lesson is that, if you might someday be dependent on an organisation’s disaster plan, it would be a good idea to find out in advance what it is, and whether it makes any sense. That’s the only way to be sure it isn’t an exercise in pointless box-ticking.

Everyone should do this, everywhere. Make a list of, say, the three most likely disasters to hit your area. Find out what the contingency plans are. If they’re stupid, make a fuss. In any case, make your own plans.

And, of course, get risks in perspective. It’s silly to be planning for the likes of a nuclear strike, if you haven’t planned for a house fire. House fires kill 700 people a year in the UK. That’s a 7th of July death-toll every month.