America's attitudes towards guns, and America's attitudes towards drugs.
Especially when guns are scary things which usually harm someone other than the person pulling the trigger, and drugs are scary things which usually harm the person who takes them...
It does not make sense. Why would a wookiee, an eight foot tall wookiee...
Monday, 18 April 2011
Thoughts on AV
It certainly seems more complicated than FPTP to me. Imagine the first choices cast as follows: Tory candidate on 49%, Labour on 40%, Lib Dem on 9%, and BNP on 2%. Two possible contrived scenarios:
If you want to vote tactically, what should your strategy be? I'm not sure if this is clear. In the case one really doesn't want a particular candidate to win, is it clear one should not rank them instead of ranking them last? But then that would only matter if the first choice is likely to get eliminated.
I'm not sure a complex system is a great idea. We want transparency because otherwise people can dress up stupid arguments using the complexity as a justification. For instance, if the BNP does decide any results under AV, does this raise their profile and increase the likelihood of legislation to deal with legal but highly distasteful parties? Or if people are confused by an outcome, will this turn them off politics?
At the end of the day, it only changes the way votes in a constituency are counted. It's not going to make your vote count if you don't live in a marginal constituency. I don't know if it makes it harder for a politician to win, and I find it unconvincing rhetoric that the winner needs 50% - well yes, because of the way the votes are counted.
I'm not sure how it will affect small parties either. With FPTP people are reluctant to vote for a small party because they don't want to waste their vote. I suppose this is understandable. With AV, they can vote for the parties of their hearts, heads, and wallets in whichever order they like. This might be a good thing, but if one of those choices is a small party, they're almost certainly still not going to win, and their vote transfers to one of the big parties, who might then not need to worry about little parties costing them the election. Small parties hope to influence the bigger parties policies rather than to win elections, and I have no idea how AV will affect this.
I'd like to vote for whatever's going to make people freer and politicians less important. Is that AV or FPTP?
P.S. What's happened to the right to recall? That would surely keep politicians on their toes a bit more?
- All BNP voters put Tory as their 2nd choice. Their first choice is deleted, so Tories now get bumped up to their first preference. Tories are now on 51% and win.
- All BNP voters put Labour as their 2nd choice. The result after the first round is now: 49% Tory, 42% Labour, Lib Dem 9%. The Lib Dems are now last, and get eliminated. All Lib Dems put Labour as their second choice. Now we have Tories on 49%, Labour on 51%. Labour win.
If you want to vote tactically, what should your strategy be? I'm not sure if this is clear. In the case one really doesn't want a particular candidate to win, is it clear one should not rank them instead of ranking them last? But then that would only matter if the first choice is likely to get eliminated.
I'm not sure a complex system is a great idea. We want transparency because otherwise people can dress up stupid arguments using the complexity as a justification. For instance, if the BNP does decide any results under AV, does this raise their profile and increase the likelihood of legislation to deal with legal but highly distasteful parties? Or if people are confused by an outcome, will this turn them off politics?
At the end of the day, it only changes the way votes in a constituency are counted. It's not going to make your vote count if you don't live in a marginal constituency. I don't know if it makes it harder for a politician to win, and I find it unconvincing rhetoric that the winner needs 50% - well yes, because of the way the votes are counted.
I'm not sure how it will affect small parties either. With FPTP people are reluctant to vote for a small party because they don't want to waste their vote. I suppose this is understandable. With AV, they can vote for the parties of their hearts, heads, and wallets in whichever order they like. This might be a good thing, but if one of those choices is a small party, they're almost certainly still not going to win, and their vote transfers to one of the big parties, who might then not need to worry about little parties costing them the election. Small parties hope to influence the bigger parties policies rather than to win elections, and I have no idea how AV will affect this.
I'd like to vote for whatever's going to make people freer and politicians less important. Is that AV or FPTP?
P.S. What's happened to the right to recall? That would surely keep politicians on their toes a bit more?
Thursday, 14 April 2011
More drugs
After I'd written this post, I wrote to my MP along those lines, and got a stock response detailing the government's drugs policy, without engaging with my points. I'm not surprised and didn't think I'd get anything else. I assume that MPs who simply delegate their views to the government either don't have enough time to research the matter themselves, more or less agree with the government's position, or more or less disagree but don't want to say anything because it's not worth their ministerial career or the disunity.
If it's that they don't have the time, I hope they could be persuaded to have a more involved opinion. There are many high-profile people who have called for a rethink about drugs policy. Vicente Fox called for legalisation after he left office, and his incumbent successor is in favour of a debate. Not satisfied with prohibition are a quite a few ex-police chief superintendents, and then there are ex-heads of medical bodies, and government drugs councils. Recently an ex-home secretary and a current chairman of the bar council advocated legalisation, and amazingly in 2005 David Cameron advocated legalisation, not just decriminalisation. These are illustrious opinions, and what forms them and why they change is definitely worth careful consideration. I think it is the remarks made freely and frankly that have more value, but people are often reluctant to make such remarks while in office. I think MPs need to be more circumspect about supporting a policy that might be shaped by pressures which lead to such reluctance.
I don't think it's purely academic what MPs think in the face of alarmist headlines and public opinion. It certainly isn't in the case of the death penalty, the EU, and other matters. Once MPs have found safety in numbers, they can help provide a drip of momentum that will eventually convince the public that we need a radical rethink on drugs.
If it's that they don't have the time, I hope they could be persuaded to have a more involved opinion. There are many high-profile people who have called for a rethink about drugs policy. Vicente Fox called for legalisation after he left office, and his incumbent successor is in favour of a debate. Not satisfied with prohibition are a quite a few ex-police chief superintendents, and then there are ex-heads of medical bodies, and government drugs councils. Recently an ex-home secretary and a current chairman of the bar council advocated legalisation, and amazingly in 2005 David Cameron advocated legalisation, not just decriminalisation. These are illustrious opinions, and what forms them and why they change is definitely worth careful consideration. I think it is the remarks made freely and frankly that have more value, but people are often reluctant to make such remarks while in office. I think MPs need to be more circumspect about supporting a policy that might be shaped by pressures which lead to such reluctance.
I don't think it's purely academic what MPs think in the face of alarmist headlines and public opinion. It certainly isn't in the case of the death penalty, the EU, and other matters. Once MPs have found safety in numbers, they can help provide a drip of momentum that will eventually convince the public that we need a radical rethink on drugs.
Monday, 14 March 2011
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Labour's VAT figures
According to an article on the BBC, Labour says the increase in VAT will cost the average family £7.50 a week.
So the average family spends x/1.175*1.2 - x = £7.50 => x = £7.50/(1.2/1.175 - 1) = £352.50 per week on VATable goods? That's £1410pcm. Is this plausible?
AFAIK, the list of exempt or reduced rate goods hasn't changed. At least I recall no mention of this happening and haven't found anything by Googling.
Monday, 3 January 2011
Housing
“Over the long term it would be desirable if house prices did not do very much as all as it would allow earnings to catch up and for housing to become more of an affordable commodity as so many white goods have become over the years,” he said.Says Grant Shapps, the Housing Minister.
Let's federalise the UK. Regions in the North could use their autonomy to lower taxes to tempt businesses to set up there, make it easy to get planning permission to build houses on former industrial wasteland, etc.
Far better than building an expensive railway so more people can spend exactly the same amount of time commuting to London, just from further away.
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Is Murdoch More Evil than the BBC?
Presumably anyone against the News Corp buyout, because they're worried about it being anti-competitive or harming media plurality, is in favour of doing something about the BBC's privileged position?
This isn't a point made in favour of Murdoch; I'm hoping that his power over UK elections will decline, that the Times paywall will fail miserably, etc, etc. I just hope people might start to think more about the BBC's unsavoury aspects.
The licence fee is crude, anachronistic and unjust. It's a tax, no two ways about it. If I want to watch live TV, there is no way for me to avoid paying money to the BBC, and this is backed up by the implied threat of violence. I can't shop around or make a protest by denying an organisation my custom. I pay the same no matter how much or how little I consume, rendering it 'regressive'. I'm not sure how it will evolve to react to streaming TV over the Internet, but it will surely get more ugly and unjust unless it's abolished.
AFAIK, if you don't watch live TV, or don't watch content streamed over the Internet at the same time as it is being broadcast, then you don't need a TV licence. If this is the case, then you'll probably get a threatening stream of letters from 'TV Licensing', which fail to clearly explain when you need a TV licence and what their powers exactly are. Interestingly, this is all handled by Capita, and the BBC refused to disclose the details of this arrangement in an FoI request, in case Capita's competitors found it useful - presumably to outbid Capita and provide the BBC with a cheaper service.
If you jump through their hoop and tell them that you don't need a TV licence, they say they might want to send one of their salespeople around to search your home to check you're not lying. If the salesperson (who is paid on commission for TV licences sold and successful prosecutions) has a snoop around your house, and is satisfied he can't catch you out, then TV Licensing will stop harassing you for some period of time, and then the letters will start again.
If you don't comply with their salesperson's desire to search your home, they can apply to a court for a search warrant. It's not clear what might convince a magistrate that there are reasonable grounds to believe an offence is being committed on the premises. Simply refusing a voluntary search might be a good enough reason. I can't find any information about this, and I suspect it varies from court to court and magistrate to magistrate. They must think it helps to send courts their glossy annual newsletters, which has got to be quite an unusual thing for a plaintiff to do.
If a warrant is served, it's not unusual for police to be present, who are only officially there to keep the peace. However, as we have seen many times with bailiffs, rather than uphold the law, police often make unlawful demands, such as for the name of the occupier, or other information TV Licensing don't need.
While they maintain that people who don't buy TV Licences are guilty until proven innocent, it's worth remembering that about 25% of those people investigated require them. While this percentage would go up without their draconian approach, I don't think guilty-until-proven-innocent is a justifiable way to keep it down, furthermore it makes the letters seem all the more unreasonable when they don't even have the balance of probabilities on their side, and it makes the whole concept of a TV licence seem all the more ridiculous.
It would surely be better to let the BBC fend for itself rather than let the state bully on its behalf for its money, and abolish the licence fee?
This isn't a point made in favour of Murdoch; I'm hoping that his power over UK elections will decline, that the Times paywall will fail miserably, etc, etc. I just hope people might start to think more about the BBC's unsavoury aspects.
The licence fee is crude, anachronistic and unjust. It's a tax, no two ways about it. If I want to watch live TV, there is no way for me to avoid paying money to the BBC, and this is backed up by the implied threat of violence. I can't shop around or make a protest by denying an organisation my custom. I pay the same no matter how much or how little I consume, rendering it 'regressive'. I'm not sure how it will evolve to react to streaming TV over the Internet, but it will surely get more ugly and unjust unless it's abolished.
AFAIK, if you don't watch live TV, or don't watch content streamed over the Internet at the same time as it is being broadcast, then you don't need a TV licence. If this is the case, then you'll probably get a threatening stream of letters from 'TV Licensing', which fail to clearly explain when you need a TV licence and what their powers exactly are. Interestingly, this is all handled by Capita, and the BBC refused to disclose the details of this arrangement in an FoI request, in case Capita's competitors found it useful - presumably to outbid Capita and provide the BBC with a cheaper service.
If you jump through their hoop and tell them that you don't need a TV licence, they say they might want to send one of their salespeople around to search your home to check you're not lying. If the salesperson (who is paid on commission for TV licences sold and successful prosecutions) has a snoop around your house, and is satisfied he can't catch you out, then TV Licensing will stop harassing you for some period of time, and then the letters will start again.
If you don't comply with their salesperson's desire to search your home, they can apply to a court for a search warrant. It's not clear what might convince a magistrate that there are reasonable grounds to believe an offence is being committed on the premises. Simply refusing a voluntary search might be a good enough reason. I can't find any information about this, and I suspect it varies from court to court and magistrate to magistrate. They must think it helps to send courts their glossy annual newsletters, which has got to be quite an unusual thing for a plaintiff to do.
If a warrant is served, it's not unusual for police to be present, who are only officially there to keep the peace. However, as we have seen many times with bailiffs, rather than uphold the law, police often make unlawful demands, such as for the name of the occupier, or other information TV Licensing don't need.
While they maintain that people who don't buy TV Licences are guilty until proven innocent, it's worth remembering that about 25% of those people investigated require them. While this percentage would go up without their draconian approach, I don't think guilty-until-proven-innocent is a justifiable way to keep it down, furthermore it makes the letters seem all the more unreasonable when they don't even have the balance of probabilities on their side, and it makes the whole concept of a TV licence seem all the more ridiculous.
It would surely be better to let the BBC fend for itself rather than let the state bully on its behalf for its money, and abolish the licence fee?
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