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

Brexit

I think the country's just done something terribly stupid. You can sum up the remain case with "lots of risks and no clear benefits". Boring and unsexy, but boring and unsexy are mostly good in politics. I've been trying to find some comfort from some thoughtful Brexiters, but can't find any - the leave arguments are unconvincing. I very much agree with what British Dude and Niall Ferguson have written.

I can't even share the optimism of many in my neck of the woods on the political spectrum, that it's going to herald a new age of confronting our self-made problems. I think this is wishful thinking. Plans rarely survive the first engagement with the enemy. Leaving the EU could just as likely shift the political landscape to Corbyn or the Kippers.

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.