Freesteel

Team HSM on the rainy walk from Ibis to the Euromold hall

It’s not the same without Peter. And it’s no fun being stuck in a soulless Ibis hotel on the highway out of Frankfurt. I got deeply, deeply depressed on the second day of Euromold. There were a number of reasons.

Part of it had to do with seeing Myron Ebell hard at work swiftboating the Copenhagen climate talks. As most of the exhibitors unselfconsciously flew in to the annual routine trade show through Frankfurt airport, there’s obviously not a lot of sympathy for the extra-ordinary threat to the survival of the species following the pursuit of Business As Usual.

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Horrors! This happened in our shiny CAM system when demoed in front of a customer. Everything was performing swimmingly slick and faster than anyone had seen, until this buggered-up boundary appeared, and the customer decided he liked his old CAM system better because it gave smoother, more consistent results.

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Too much ranting in the blog. Here are some still pics from last three weekends caving.

Sunday 18 October

What a mean thing to put on a horse. This was during our Wheeler ride around St Helens.

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Just before the summer Liverpool University staff got this brochure about their new Pensions Plus salary sacrifice scam. You could tell it was a scam by the number of stock photos of smiling models holding money out to the staff in question.

In essence, they have found a way of legally lying to the taxman about employees’ pay in order to reduce tax receipts to the treasury. The deal is made very complex by the need to readjust a host of other entitlements that are pegged to the official salary rate. But here is how it’s explained.

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As anyone following the news at the moment would know, there is a sh*tstorm about the sacking of Professor Nutt, formerly head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. He is now learning about the Misuse ofDrugs in Politics, since he has made the unadvised decision not to go quietly.

Let’s check the political record:

On 29 October 2003 MPs voted — in line with informed advice — to downgrade the classification of cannabis from a Class B to a Class C drug. That means it would be a lower priority in relation to actual harmful drugs (to which more resources could be diverted), as well as reducing the aggravation to a lot of non-criminal ordinary people who were showing no signs of changing their habits.

All Tories voted against downgrading it. Most Labour and Libdem MPs voted for it.

I don’t have records of the 2005 election campaign, but it’s likely it showed up in the literature.

On 12 November 2008 MPs voted — as instructed by the government — to reclassify cannabis back to a class B drug. We were very lucky to get a vote on this issue, because the decision was scheduled to be waved through. Once again, all Tories voted for higher criminal penalties, and Labour MPs voted for the same, while Libdems continued to vote with the evidence.

There was a debate in the House of Lords on their version of the vote, which explains that the move pre-empted an impending review by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

Indeed, from the Lords debate, we have this comment from Lord Mancroft:

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Vero reported the conclusion of its 2 November 2009 General Meeting thus:

The The[sic] Board of Vero Software plc (AIM: VERO) announces that following a General Meeting of the Company held today at 10:00 a.m. at the Company’s offices, the Resolution set out in the Circular sent to Shareholders on 15 October 2009, has been duly passed.

What? They don’t even say how many people showed up? Did they have a debate? Was the vote unanimous? How about the minutes of the previous meeting? Were they read and agreed to?

What was their last General Meeting?
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More entertaining financial farting going on at Vero which, in my opinion, is socially and productively useless — as is practically everything that is currently part of our godforsaken corporate financial structure.

Let’s start with some tedious biased history gleaned from 5 years of company annual reports…

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Not that I actually have the time for this, myself, but anyway. That’s my whole Friday blown when I should have been doing some machine tool debugging.

The picture is that TheyWorkForYou.com has the speeches, and PublicWhip has the votes.

I think the speeches are generally all hot air, and it’s only the votes which matter — that is why there are 40 MPs known as party whips making sure their flock votes the right way, but they don’t care what anyone says.

But anyway, the speeches are what politically unsophisticated people supposedly understand, while large charts of votes are kind of scary for everyone — supposedly. Common wisdom is that ordinary citizens don’t really get it with votes.

Except when they do: 10:10 call defeated in Commons (The Guardian):

MPs voted by a margin of 71, 297 votes to 226, to reject a call by the Liberal Democrats to commit to the cut. Yesterday, in the run-up to the afternoon vote, the Lib Dems’ challenge to the government built up a head of steam with 63 MPs from all parties supporting their motion.

According to 10:10’s organisers, nearly 10,000 people had written to their MPs about the debate in the preceding 48 hours, and made more than 600 phone calls. In all, 96% of MPs were contacted by members of the public before the debate. A government amendment welcoming the 10:10 campaign was carried without a vote.

It turns out that if you actually read the newspapers, Parliamentary votes are quite regularly reported. It’s the goal score, so to speak. Maybe it’s time someone helped people out by showing which net their MP got kicked into the back of. You know, it’s kind of an obvious thing to show the next day.

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Today the new UK Crime Mapper is having a big launch.

It’s been put together by a small ad company in Leicester called Rock Kitchen Harris with 22 people on their about page, all but 4 of whom are not programmers. They must be happy with this balance because they’ve got a recruitment ad for another graphics designer.

The technology appears to be Bing maps — which is some Microsoft product. I don’t know what goes on internally inside Rock Kitchen, but it’s likely to be Microsoft as well. UK government has a history of loving Microsoft no matter what the case. They refrain from giving money to anyone who actually knows what they are doing.

Here’s the criminal quality of the crime overlays:

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Last Monday I got out for a dive on The Marlin, a boat owned by the retired physics professor who has written the book on wrecks in Liverpool Bay. Dives were on The Dublin and the Lightship Alarm. Someone needs to get into adding the relevant pages to this list, citing his book.

Here’s my edited vid of the day out, using the very fine (and free with the operating system) Windows Movie Maker.

To quote Rummy, you make the movie out of the clips you have, not the footage you might have wanted.

I need to get a much bigger torch. The water is green due to the chlorophyll in the plankton, that also blocks out most of the light at depth. It’s a very different ecosystem to what you normally see filmed in the tropics with all the light and the pretty colours and no floating algae.