Digital Surveillance Plans

We can't assume the good intentions of future (or current) governments. Lawmakers should consider how a power might be abused, especially when it comes to civil liberties or giving ministers statutory powers (enabling acts). Then if it absolutely must go ahead, it should have a sunset clause, requiring a vote in parliament every five years for its continued existence.

There are immense practical difficulties with these plans. Real-time access to all of this data is an immense technological challenge. There will be monumental data storage, bandwidth, and processing requirements. It will be a huge challenge to keep up-to-date (if people start using a new social network for example, traffic to and from the servers for that site will need to be understood by the snooping system). This is a huge undertaking, and will lead to the intelligence services demanding more and more resources to make the most of their shiny new toy.

It will be hard enough to keep up with normal uses of the Internet. It will not have a chance of dealing with internet traffic which uses networks of proxies (outside the UK), such as "Tor", and/or uses encryption and steganography.

It will be expensive. Either it will have to be paid for out of taxation, or ISPs and telecoms companies will pass the costs on to customers, but one way or another I think it will be misdirecting economic resources, and will be yet another drag on those of us just trying to do productive things to earn money to support our families, despite high taxes, high costs of property, and the myriad other problems we face.

You can always make an argument that new powers will stop nasty things happening, but what we're after is a balance between state power and privacy, and a proper sensible debate about that. So to hear the home secretary suggesting that it will catch paedophiles and terrorists is galling, I hoped such tired arguments and populist simplicity was only a thing of the last Labour government.

Spending cuts

Apparently the coalition isn't even meeting Darling's deficit reduction targets. While this is very bad, it's amusing hearing Labour prattle on about how damaging something is that doesn't even go as far as their own election pledge.

MPs troughing again

So the taxpayer subsidy for catering (including alcohol) on the Parliamentary estate hasn't gone down despite promises it would.

More commentary from Tim Worstall here. In summary, they're doubly taking the piss because those bars should be paying business rates to the council, and the tax payer should benefit from the rent of the premises to a company running the bars.

Meanwhile, they're talking about minimum alcohol pricing for the rest of us...

Mary Bousted

On Question Time, about 24.30 in, she says that private pension funds receive about £40bn a year in subsidy because of tax relief.

Well yes, because otherwise people pay income tax on their pension contributions, and then income tax on the annuity they receive. Which is being taxed twice, isn't fair, and doesn't encourage people to pay into a pension. The way it works is that people pay their pension contributions after tax, but the pension funds receive tax relief at 20% of their contribution.

It's unbelievable that she considers this a subsidy. That not taking money off people costs them. It's unbelievable nobody on the panel took issue with this.

Doctorocracy

A doctorocracy would work like this:

1. Some thing is studied, and it is decided that it is injurious to our health or well-being.
2. The thing is banned, or taxed heavily.
   
3. A new thing is identified, and we return to step 1.

The BMA often provide us with illustrative worked examples, such as wanting to tax unhealthy food, or making wearing a helmet on a bike compulsory.

I can understand doctors wanting us to be educated about issues affecting our health (although they might worry about the stress this might cause us, if we spend too much time worrying about unhealthiness), but I don't know how if they care too much about the result of using their professional voice to call for things to be banned or made compulsory. Such things can only be achieved with the implicit threat of force from the state, which will be certainly be injurious to a freedom loving individual, whether physically, or from the stress of being up against the state's inexhaustible potential to make sure people comply.

Timbersbrook Project

A few days ago police and council officials turned up at a privately owned nature reserve, demolished the sheds, and took the animals away. See the Congleton Chronicle for details, and a blog post here. Here is the Council's press release about it.

The problem was that the owner didn't have the necessary planning permission to use land that he owned as a nature reserve. Therefore the council eventually went and used "direct action" to uphold a planning decision, after a long legal fight.

This green belt development appears to be a collection of animals housed in temporary structures. It was open to the public and without admission charge, one of the few free family attractions in the area.

It certainly seems like very bad PR and very disproportionate for them to use such force to destroy something loved by lots of people. Some accommodation could surely have been made?

Writing for a wider audience

I realise I'm a crap writer (I'm good with sums not words), and also probably a hypocrite for saying what I'm about to say, but reading lots of blog posts about the riots from across the political spectrum has made me think that if someone is writing for a wider audience, rather than just nodding-dog readers, then there are a few rules of thumb:

1. Keep posts short and cogent. Pure Orwell: "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."
2. Don't use emotive language, names, loaded terms, etc. Besides anything else, I'd start to worry about myself if I found using the term "Nu Liebour" gratifying.
   
3. Credit political opponents with intelligence and good motives. If I disagree with the gist of a blog post, I'm going to struggle to read the post when it's sprinkled with the insinuation that I'm stupid and want to eat poor people. I think that if you can conceive of your opponents in a good light, it enriches your understanding of that position, rather than just to think of them as bogeymen.