Twitter and 140 characters

Technology is supposed to be liberating. Often people use a tweet to link to an image containing lots of text. That's an image (often JPG with lovely compression artefacts) rather than something better suited to representing text, like, er, text.

Using an image to represent text is dumb. It means you can't do much with the text except read it. Many people are lucky to even read it, as it's not going to be compatible with browser settings which make text bigger, higher contrast, or synthesise it as speech. Nobody can use copy and paste, or save it somewhere. Search engines can't index it. In short, this is turning information back into restrictive data. Which is particularly crap as it started out as information (someone typed it). All that was required was preservation of that information!!

Again, technology is supposed to be liberating.

Apparently they're now experimenting with doubling the character limit to 280 characters.

How about keeping the 140 character tweets (so you can rifle through the chaff easily enough, and it's still all realtime and light), but tweets should support longer text attachments, which you can get to by clicking on the tweet.

Tory manifesto

Me: "Have you read the manifesto? They don't believe in untramelled free markets!"
Partner: "Who, Labour?"

Sarcastic email to MP about energy price controls

Dear Mr MP,

I know parliament is dissolved and you only want to hear about important matters but I can’t contain my enthusiasm about the following matter!

Regarding implementing a similar policy to Ed Miliband’s freeze on energy prices (one of the things which prompted the Daily Mail’s misguided 2015 election headline “A Return to the Bad Old Days"), since this can’t have any drawbacks, I look forward to the government banning holiday companies charging more during school holidays, McLaren being made to price their cars within reach of normal folk, and many other things. I’m glad that the market is being sent a signal that rather than responding to the caprices of supply and demand, it should instead consider what Mrs May would want it to do. This common sense move will surely convince foreign investors that Britain is a strong and stable place to come and do business, especially in the wake of Brexit. Furthermore the policy will benefit the people of Venezuela, whose government will finally be able to learn the correct implementation of price controls, so that toilet paper shortages can become a thing of the past.

Yours sincerely,

Higher education

Cheap, accessible, high quality. Pick any two.

Cheap - either to students or to the wider tax paying public.

Accessible - in that it's open to a large percentage of the population.

High quality - in that the spending of 3/4 years at uni results in lots of contact hours with good teachers and researchers, lots of feedback, suitable resources etc.

Furthermore, build more houses

 

When a resource gets too scarce because supply isn't meeting demand, it can have many knock-on consequences.

Reasons to build more houses:

1. Putting a roof over your head is an outgoing, and as such should be as cheap as possible. If you want an investment, invest in the stock market.
2. It would reduce the state's housing benefit bill, and possibly reduce the pressure to increase public sector wages.
3. It would give people choices. They might wish to reduce their need for job security, or take a job that is more interesting but pays less well.
4. Unlike HS2, it would help alleviate London centrism.
5. Equality of opportunity - the most imporant one. Children shouldn't need an inheritance from their parents to get anywhere in life. Perhaps that could be stressed to NIMBYs who want to protect the size of that inheritance.
6. Buy-to-let landlords are growing fat and lazy. They need help for their own good. 
7. Tax or student loans wouldn't seem so expensive.

It would be great if we had an MP that ended every speech with "furthermore, build more houses".

TV licence and iPlayer

I wrote to my old MP a while ago:

I write referring to the government’s intention to close the "iPlayer loophole”, by widening the requirements for a TV licence.

According to the culture secretary John Whittingdale, "When the licence fee was invented, video on demand did not exist. And while the definition of television in the legislation covers live streaming, it does not require viewers to have a licence if they watch BBC programmes through the iPlayer even if it is just a few minutes after transmission.”

When the licence fee was invented, it was impossible to prevent freeloading, so the obvious solution was a compulsory telly licence. However, now it is certainly possible to prevent people consuming streaming media unless they’ve paid for it or can otherwise prove they’re entitled. There are technical solutions that the BBC could readily deploy.

Increasing the amount of legislation should always be the last resort. I would have hoped that a Conservative government instinctively understood that sort of thing!

And received some platitude about the technical solution not being deemed the best option (obviously).

Now when I open the Android iPlayer it tells me "you will soon need an account to watch iPlayer".

If they're introducing an account system, it nearly completely undermines the need for legislation. So is it going to be repealed?

NHS jabs

Was told by letter to arrive at a health centre at a particular time for junior's inoculations. Queued at GP's reception desk, was told it's in the clinic which was in a different part of the building. Queued at reception there, was told that junior wasn't on their computer, so we'd have to go back to the GP's reception and get that sorted. Queue again at the GP's, to be given two forms. One was the standard NHS form, and the other was the standard GP questionnaire. The second included questions like how much junior smokes and drinks, whether junior has a full time carer, and lots of questions about medical history when there is no medical history. Ten minutes to fill all that out. Queue again to hand it back, to be told they're very busy but they'll enter it into the computer as soon as they can. This took ages because the receptionist kept having to deal with other patients and answer the phone. Back to the clinic, queue again. 1hr40min after arriving, junior got the jabs.

That's nearly two hours (spent milling around ill possibly contagious people) I'll never get back.

How did they generate the appointment letter without junior being on their database?

Surely so many resources must be squandered because of processes like the above that nobody takes ownership of and improves. Smaller queues, less demand on receptionists, more of my time for earning money, an emptier car park, less time around sick people, which in turn leads to fewer sick people, etc.

HS2 briefly

From HS2.org.uk, "HS2 will create around 25,000 jobs and fuel economic benefits worth over £103 billion to the UK.” The claimed cost is £55billion, and this implies a benefit cost ratio of 1.87.

If it’s a good idea, but sadly doesn’t involve enough direct recoupable benefits for entirely private funding, then external benefits should still be extremely easy to find. A BCR of 1.87 that is also flimsy doesn’t look good. I assume the BCR doesn’t account for the fact that raising the tax to pay for it will do damage - the tax wedge. I think a fair BCR which takes into account the tax wedge would show that the project will make us poorer.

Regarding the jobs created, at 55 billion / 25,000 = £2.2M per job, I’d make a pure guess that that £2.2M of tax is at least one private sector job prevented or destroyed, again due to the cost of the tax. Furthermore, regarding the north/south divide, which half suffers more when there's extra tax? My money would be on the north.

The only convincing reason for HS2 seems to be that it would inevitably release greenbelt land for housing. But I can’t bring myself to think spending fifty billion plus for a side effect is sensible. The boring answer for the north/south divide seems to be decentralisation with tax-cutting powers, and building many many more houses. Evidence from around the world seems to suggest that high speed rail links are not the answer to regional imbalances.

With all three main parties in favour at the last election, you could say the electorate never had much of a choice.

I can see why governments pursue bad popular ideas (votes), and unpopular good ones (lack of choice usually, dressed up as good leadership), but I can't fathom why an unpopular bad idea has progressed so far.

Jeremy Corbyn

Old post in drafts folder...

Clearly this isn't just about Labour's lacklustre remain campaign. The PLP never thought Corbyn could win an election, and they were hoping he'd go before the next one. The next election is probably going to happen sooner rather than later, so they need to force matters.

Labour already properly tried the unions' choice, Ed Miliband, and he soundly lost the 2015 election. So it's not very likely that someone even more anoraky and student-socialist is going to do any better. More socialist narrative and denial about the overspending of the New Labour years isn't going to win elections.

What won elections was New Labour not Old Labour, economic credibility, keeping the movement's crazies in the attic: Blair. The country needs a credible alternative to the Tories to keep them honest. Without a strong Labour, the working class will turn to UKIP, who are opportunist populist plonkers. Blair and people in his mould can also be blamed for turning people off mainstream politics but that's something to worry about when other more important problems are solved.

One very stupid thing Miliband did was selling Labour leadership votes for £3. This is why Corbyn won by such a landslide. Everyone who left Labour because it wasn't lefty enough, or any narrow-minded Tory, could pay £3 and vote for Corbyn. Who is going to pay £3 to vote for someone more mainstream like Burnham? His supporters are very likely to be full members. This was only ever going to move the party to the left.

I think the Tories really want Corbyn in charge for an election. A team will pour over every commons vote, every article he's ever written, and speech given. There will be never ending questions along the lines of asking him to distance himself from past unfashionable views, which he won't do. Some of the characters involved in Momentum should be an embarrassment to a credible future PM but will be a goldmine to the Tories.

The membership need to ask themselves if they want a party that's electable or whether they just want someone to preach to the converted and to pat the membership on the back. If they re-elect Corbyn then there's going to be more revolt in the PLP, and things will get nastier. De-selections, etc.

P.S. This was an interesting read: http://www.newstatesman.com/2016/08/explaining-love-jeremy-corbyn