RIPA

Good article by Carswell on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The problem isn't that we're using it to fight terrorism, but that the number of public bodies that can request snooping powers for a whole host of reasons is stupid and depressing. Really not nice to think about, in fact.

Sad the government hasn't done anything about this.

Data Loggers for Cheaper Insurance

A follow-up to the last post. Recalling the incident with the National Grid van reminds me that I need to buy a video camera for my bike so if bad stuff happens then I have some evidence. I did contact the National Grid to report the incident, but they said it would be impossible to track the driver down, and they don't use GPS trackers / data loggers in their fleet.

They should. Those devices are great. I assume, because people can opt to have them for cheaper insurance, that they really do make people drive better. But what about liberty, big brother, etc? Don't see what the issue is. Have privacy concerns, don't like it, or want to drive like an idiot? Don't bother with a tracker then, but be prepared to pay extra. Why should you have to pay? Because your risk changes. You pay according to the risk you represent.

Ah, so why is it a problem if the government made them compulsory? General reasons against governments increasing their meddling portfolio:

• Low hanging fruit. If something is important and requires some legislation it would probably already be in legislation by now. Since we don't already have it, it's worth noting that society hasn't fallen apart without it (we've survived a civil war, an industrial revolution, two world wars, etc). The possible new things governments can mandate are probably increasingly hard to implement, have unintended consequences, are controversial, etc. 
• People can be trusted respond to incentives far more than people whose job it is to govern tend to give them credit for. When all you know how to do is hammer, every problem looks like a nail. People tend to overestimate their own competence. This is all important to note, given a political solution can be a heavy-handed approach to something as complex as human affairs.
• The proposed solution may not attack the root cause, or may not be well thought out. The people who write legislation tend to be career politicians with legal backgrounds. They're probably not engineers or scientists, who might care about keeping things simple and managing complexity.
• Politics. The proposed solution might be more about grabbing headlines, gamesmanship with the other side, etc. Like New Labour trying to outflank the Tories on law and order, terrorism, etc.
• Lobbying. The proposed solution might be a result of powerful interests who want some of the 45% ish of GDP controlled by the state directed their way, or want to make it harder for the little guys by making compliance with various new laws arduous.
• Eggs in one basket. If it's wrong, there's no diversity which might be helpful. For example, if government plans food production and gets it badly wrong, then we're really shafted.
• Whatever it is, it will probably generate more work for lawyers and accountants. That's a drag on the economy.
• If it's expanding the role of government, it's diluting democracy. That one single vote each person has then has to encompass more issues. It distracts from the important stuff, while people demand action and politicians jerk knees over this new stuff.
• Once government gets involved in something, it's damn hard to get rid of it. Imagine repealing the extreme porn law. There would be howls that doing so would be to send a signal that extreme porn is OK, etc.
• The medicine might be worse than the disease, e.g. with the war on drugs.
• Loads of reasons in the Road to Serfdom.

Cycling

Twitter's 140 characters let me down again. Saw this on Twitter, about cycling and motorists, from a motorists' union. I wonder if they're a member of a wider umbrella union, representing unions for interests that already have society set up to suit them?

Millions of times a day drivers are safely and considerately negotiating their way past cyclists but to believe in an imaginary war, implies that drivers are deliberately going out to be rude, inconsiderate and dangerous to cyclists.

Don't really give a toss about what's being implied, or whether a driver is going out of their way to be rude or not, only the end result that I witness when I'm on my bike. The most common one is not giving enough room when overtaking. Either out of impatience, someone feeling pressured by motorists behind, or because (the scary one) a car moves out, passes properly, but they're being tailgated by someone who hasn't left themselves enough time to react to things that materialise in their field of vision.

Next most common are acts of driving where the motorist has seen me and does something that turns out to be safe, but I don't know whether I've been seen, and it starts the same way as something far more dangerous, so I have to take evasive action. A driver pulling out of an opposite side road in my direction, but not coming all the way over to my side is a good example. Initially they're accelerating their car right at where I'm going to be, so I hit the brakes and the adrenaline gets flowing.

Then we have left hooks, when someone overtakes then immediately slows down and turns left. In one bad instance of that, I nearly ended up under a car. About as common as left hooks are cars pulling out of junctions who either haven't seen me or underestimate my speed. Once that happened when someone reversed into the road!

I say I couldn't give a toss about what drivers might be thinking, only the end result, however I haven't really been subject to being yelled at by a driver that I "don't pay road tax" or I "shouldn't be on the road", which many other cyclists have experienced. It's an alarming thought that someone in a car, a potentially lethal weapon, might give you less respect because they feel righteous, and one I try not to entertain.

All of this is unnecessary. People need to share the road. And prepare to give up the odd 5 or 10 seconds of time here and there so we can all do it safely. People should drive at speeds where they can react to anything that might happen in their window of vision. That means: not tailgating, slowing down when sun is in eyes, not piling into blind bends, etc. Obvious stuff.

The fact is that after 300 billion driver miles year, there's less death on the road from all causes than from accidents in the home and five times less than from NHS failure. So UK's drivers seem to be much better than the keen cyclists of The AA will credit.

Crude apples and oranges comparisons there. That'll be comforting to the families, that there's some context.

They forget to mention that our society, yes even The Thunderer, would collapse without our 35 million drivers but not without cyclists. There are only two types of road user that society must have; walkers and drivers.

Good god. The choice isn't between a functioning society with a few deaths and the collapse of our economy. The choice is whether people can sacrifice the odd 5 seconds here and there to allow everyone to use the road safely. Classic false dichotomy.

The fact is that cycling isn't that crucial at all. Only a minority do it keenly and they are only in a tiny minority of London commuters too. This shows that The AA's 'Two tribes' claim is fallacious in every respect.

What does it matter whether it's crucial? Drivers are responsible for not hitting things they can avoid hitting by driving responsibly. If drivers are responsible, then we don't have a problem, do we? Besides, what's crucial? Is a car journey crucial when it could be taken on foot? Is a car journey crucial when it's just for social reasons? We're dealing with different standards of crucial here, which is kind of a bullet-meets-foot moment when the author is (otherwise rightfully I think) arguing against a two-tribes mentality.

I find such thinking alarming because it might give a motorist less concern than they should have that their car is a lethal weapon when used incorrectly. I know it's being used to try and rubbish the AA's campaign, but it belies a mentality. Another reason to be alarmed is the idea that by getting my bike out of the garage, I'm writing a disclaimer about what might happen to me.

Why do some drivers feel so threatened by all of this? Is it such a problem that they might have to do what's in the highway code?

If there are massive safety issues about road cycling, then it is the duty of politicians, and your paper to preface any discussion with the question: 'Does our society need it?' 'Why must we have road cycling?'. A fair logical question isn't it? 

No, those questions are retarded, for reasons given above.

Why do we also ignore that road cycling is placing one's unprotected body, on two slender wheels, among and competing with large essential relatively fast moving machines, operated by complete strangers of varying ability and mental capacity? That is road cycling in a nutshell.

Now we have an if-by-whiskey fallacy. No that's not cycling, although you might want to use it as a reason why the potentially-lethal-car-weapon should be used responsibly (see above about driving in a way to give you time to react to things).

And again, a cyclist is not implicitly entering into some kind of disclaimer by entering the domain of the car. We can all share. Cyclists should not be subjected to careless, pointless, impatient behaviour. Maybe the author might want to think of a better way of stopping that instead of rubbishing the AA's campaign and belittling the problem?

Would humans normally behave like that unless it were cycling? If the concept were only just being suggested and proposed now, we would send for the men in white coats. How can politicians and the media ignore the reality and encourage more to do it?

What if we were a nation of walkers, horse-riders, and cyclists and someone just invented the motorcar? It wouldn't be the men in white coats, it would be an armed police squad. The author should try using his own arguments on his own arguments, it might help uncover turds-on-own-doorsteps he wasn't aware of.

They ignore reality because it's your own personal reality which isn't the one other people inhabit. Cycling has net-positive health benefits. That's why it's encouraged.

So why not support drivers more? None of us, including keen cyclists, can exist without them.

I bet if there isn't already an online shop full of bumper stickers along the lines of "another motorist, saving the economy" then he's working on it.

My most terrifying experience was when I was narrowly missed by an oncoming National Grid van which was on my side of the road because it was overtaking something. Either didn't see me or didn't care. But hey I'm the one taking the risks, with my skinny tyres, and it's down to these people that we have an economy at all! What I was doing was unnecessary, but that driver saving a few seconds by overtaking something was crucial, and, besides, the NHS kills more people.

And breathe.

Lengthening School Days

Don't like the sound of lengthening school days and shortening holidays. The government wants to make it easier for parents to work. Households with one worker might turn into two-worker households, and single non-working parents might be able to work. This will cause growth, more tax, and less welfare payments.

However, this is going to cost money to implement (i.e. people without kids are going to be subsidising people who do have kids some more), there's got to be a utility cost to children who are deprived of time to climb trees (think there's probably some kind of Laffer curve effect going on with education, the optimum is somewhere between zero hours and every waking hour). Single-earner households will be competing in the housing market with more dual-earners who can kick themselves in the balls that little bit harder when it comes to what they're prepared to pay.

There are probably easier gains to be made first. Like building lots of houses. Spent some time thinking about this today. How about relaxing planning laws for super-eco-low-impact-houses, maybe even on greenbelts? If the house isn't going to contribute to flooding, can pretty much generate its own electricity (so what if you've got to actually plan when to use the washing machine), composting toilet, etc? What about access roads? Well if that's a scarce resource, how about rationing it with a local congestion charge? This will encourage walking the kids to school, getting stuff delivered from the supermarket, working from home, etc. Also wonder whether modern manufacturing could make houses cheaper, it seems fairly strange that all new-builds look very similar, yet each requires a huge amount of labour to construct. Perhaps there's some red tape that ensures that has to happen?

Cinderella Law

You're a monster if you disagree with anything to do with the Cinderella law, right?

The problem is how you define cruelty, and how the law works in practice.

"You can look at a range of behaviours, from ignoring a child's presence, failing to stimulate a child, right through to acts of in fact terrorising a child where the child is frightened to disclose what is happening to them," Mr Buckland told BBC Radio 5 live.

What's a legal definition of any of that? 

He said the new law would not criminalise parents for being nasty, but for their criminal behaviour.

What's the legal definition of 'nasty'?

"This proposal is not about widening the net, it's about making the net stronger so that we catch those parents and carers who are quite clearly inflicting significant harm on their children, whereas they should be nurturing them and loving them," Mr Buckland said.

Can't imagine how this wouldn't widen the net, from a logical point of view. If it provides new powers, then more people will come under attention, and if it doesn't provide new powers, what's the point? What new powers are given that aren't in, say, the Children's Act of 1989? This from Wiki:

Each local authority has a duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of children who are assessed as being in ‘need’. A child is deemed as ‘in need’ if they are disabled or unlikely to achieve a reasonable standard of health or development unless services are provided.
...
A care or supervision order may be granted by the court if a child is or is likely to suffer significant harm if they are not placed into local authority care.

Fairly sure significant harm is already considered to include emotional harm. Set all this against a background of secret family courts, gagging orders, forced adoptions, etc, and is it really a good idea to give new powers before any of that's addressed? Back to the BBC article, and the likely implementation of the aims:

The Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 provides for the punishment of a person who treats a child "in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health (including injury to or loss of sight, or hearing, or limb, or organ of the body, and any mental derangement)".


Mr Williams's bill would add a further category of harm for which the perpetrator could be punished: impairment of "physical, intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development".

That's going to give a massive opportunity for lots of test cases (probably heard in secret) to figure out what all of that means. Wonder if he's got 'use cases' where social workers know what goes on in Family X, have the evidence, but can't do anything about it? Will parents voting UKIP or BNP constitute intellectual or social harm? Perhaps it should actually be teachers and social workers worried about a law that gives a sweeping definition of harming a child?

I worry the government is just pursuing ideas which superficially sound good to the electorate but which don't actually result in sensible laws.

40% tax rate

Glad to see this is becoming an issue.

Suppose someone just nudges into the 40% tax rate with a family to support on one income, and is paying their student loan off. If they earn £1 extra, they see just 48p of that*. That's ignoring employer's NI, the burden of which largely falls on the employee, and ignores council tax. The total probably leaves them about 40p in the pound. Our hypothetical wage slave is renting and trying to save for a deposit for a house, can barely think about contributing to a pension, and probably can't think about holidays or luxuries. No wonder they might be thinking about emigrating somewhere more sympathetic to the idea of getting established first and paying shitloads of tax second. Plus then they could aspire to live somewhere less cramped and expensive.

The stats are interesting. When the 40p rate was introduced, 1 in 20 paid it, now it's 1 in 6, because of the usual fiscal drag - thresholds not keeping up with inflation. Another interesting one is that a household with a single top fifth earner (as in 80% of individuals earn less), results in a household income that is in the bottom half! Households are reliant on multiple earners and the state is geared up to taxing on that basis.

* From listentotaxman.com, student loan deduction ticked, no pension. A figure of £42,500 used, then added £20 to work out marginal change.

Ministry of Justice Cuts

Think the government are getting it wrong on this one. People found innocent should be entitled to full legal costs back. If this costs the government too much money, then this risk should be considered in the CPS's calculus on whether to prosecute the case in the first place.

Yes this increases the risk a guilty person will escape the justice they deserve (and this might harm innocent people indirectly) but a fundamental hard constraint of our justice system should be that its direct actions do not harm innocent people.

If successfully proving your innocence can put you in serious financial difficulty, then the authorities can punish people by simply bringing the case, rather than having to actually prove anything.