Freesteel Blog » Whipping

Friday, December 13th, 2019 at 11:28 am - - Whipping

It was like an election between the nineteenth century novelist Jane Austen and Marie Antoinette who was running on the slogan: “Get Brexit Done, then we can have Cake!”

There will be no cake since the whole point of Brexit is to stop the imports of sugar and flour. Maybe this will unleash our revolution.

Now I’ve been on a lot of anti-Brexit marches in London. They don’t work; the politicians go on holiday and don’t hear a sound. Extinction Rebellion with all their road blocking hardly makes a dent on the normal traffic congestion. And labour strikes require a huge majority of a set of people who are all doing the same job to quit at the same time, which is very difficult to organize even when here are the right circumstances.

When any of these three actions are undertaken and don’t gain any result, it is demoralizing and self-weakening. It cannot be repeated again and again.

But there was one action that happened during this election that so many people got involved in, which was canvassing. In the last three weeks I’ve been door knocking and board running in Barrow, Lancaster, Bolton, Runcorn, Crewe, Clwyd and Aberconwy (all but Lancaster were lost).

Everyone I went out with, mostly just random people concerned about the political direction of this country and felt they had to do something, seemed pretty reasonable, thoughtful and politically informed.

The voters in their houses watching telly, however, were astonishing.

Now, you’re not supposed to say that all these people who want their Brexit done are stupid, but let me put it this way: People were promised various things in order to persuade them to vote for Brexit in 2016. (It’s not important what these things are, or what each of these persuaded voters personally believed, but it included things like: more money to the NHS, stop immigration, take back control of some unspecified laws from Brussels legislation, and so on.)

But get this: To a man and woman who said to me that they wanted their Brexit done, they have literally forgotten what it was they were hoping to get from it. I have combed through every ad from the Conservative Party and the Brexit Party, and not a single one says what Brexit is going to do for us either. (Although, to be fair, some say it’s going to “unleash our potential”.)

It is very much like you going out the door and down to the shops, and forgetting what it was you’re supposed to be buying. And I say: “What the hell are we continuing going towards the shops for when we don’t know what we want to buy? Why don’t we turn round and go home?”

After doing this a few times, people generally discover how to use a shopping list.

As Mark Lander of the New York Times said in The Daily podcast about the fix we are now in, this country is going to experience two major hang-overs as a consequence of this. The first hangover is that Brexit won’t be done on the 31st January 2020; that’s just the beginning. And the second hangover will be when we discover just what kind of US-vassal state, Singapore-on-Thames style Brexit the Tories in charge have signed us up for.

Congratulations. You went down to the shop to buy some oats, and you came back with a bag of Polonium. Now everyone in the house is sick and going to die. Be careful what you vote for.

Here’s a political action that could be organized.

On the anniversary of this election campaign next year, we ought to do some mass canvassing of the kind we were doing during this election. Pick some new Tory constituency with its hospitals and schools in crisis, round up 5000 or so people from around the country who have an interest because they have to live under this Tory administration, and organize board runners, door knocking, questions, surveys, and visits every house in the district on a single day, and get all the data from the ground about how people are feeling. Perhaps there is a candidate who can put their name on the leaflets, but it should mostly be about providing some PublicWhip type news-sheet about some of the most egregious things their MP has voted on recently in Parliament in their name that they have no idea about.

For this to work, we need some better software. I did get to spend an afternoon entering data from the board running sheets into the diabolical Contact Creator software, which some old duffers in Labour Party have contracted from Experian and probably thinks is ace. They spent half a million quid on it in the last few years. Here’s one of the invoices.

It seems to be a some kind of crappy customer-tracking [touchpoint] software, except it doesn’t track any customers because there’s no evidence they’re matching up voting data when people move. Here’s an even more crappy youtube promotional video from when it was launched in 2008.

There was also a web-app called Labour Doorstep, which did its best to interface to some API in Contact Creator software to make it portable, but there is only so much it could do when the underlying system is so awful. Most of the time it didn’t work.

Now, what you really ought to do is start with the web-app and base it on mapping from OpenStreetMaps. In some parts of the country (eg in parts of Runcorn) every house number assigned to a building outline, which means you can find your way around through all the addresses. This is particularly essential in places where there are stupid house names instead of numbers, like you get everywhere in Llanfairfechan. It would not take long to code up, and the OSM editor could be embedded into the app.

A phone-app could also be sharing live positioning with all the other door knockers in your team, so you’d get little dots of where people are and you won’t keep losing them. This tech is really easy to do through the internet.

How about this: you click on each building that is in green, and residents and their information pops up with some checkboxes for you to fill in when you are conversing with them at the door. Then, when you save the data the building polygon goes blue on the map, so no one else visits it. With 5000 people spread out through a whole constituency using their phones like this, they could do about ten houses each, have decent conversations and find out what’s going on out there, and maybe have time to move on to the next constituency in the afternoon.

You know, this would be rather edgy. It would get something done. You don’t need an insane number of people to participate, and then get ignored. It would be cumulative, and empowering. The Conservative Party would get annoyed and try to ban it, which is when it would get interesting.

We are expecting them to bring in Parliamentary gerrymandering and unnecessary voter-ID laws to suppress the turnout during this term. But when they try to ban citizens talking to other citizens about who they should vote for, that’s something that can be directly fought for.

There is a lot of anger out there, which is being mis-directed and then amplified by the billionaire press we have around. Door knocking is not usually like this, but here is an example of a bad one, which the individual was evidently proud of:

This can’t be healed if we leave people in their boxes, self-medicating on manufactured outrage and anger.

Wednesday, October 30th, 2019 at 6:44 pm - - Whipping

The BBC completed its China: A New World Order series with an exercise in political propaganda so ham-fisted that it rivaled the Chinese State TV on a bad day.

Remarkably, it asked the audience to be sympathetic to the greed of multi-billion dollar gene patenting US agri-corporations, and against the availability of cheap and plentiful solar panels.


So, after ten minutes of Chinese dictator footage, we get served the appetizer.

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Thursday, September 12th, 2019 at 1:52 pm - - Whipping

One of the primary advantages told to us of Brexit is that it permits the UK to instruct its own civil servants to negotiate new international trade deals, and not have the work done by the EU civil servants.

How’s that getting along?

Let’s go on the Gov.UK website to “Find out which new trade agreements will be in place if there’s a no-deal Brexit”.

We’ve got listed, in approximate order of importance, South Korea, Switzerland, Israel, Iceland and Norway, Chile, the Andean countries, Carribean, Central America (does not include Mexico), Eastern and Southern Africa, the Pacific states, the Palestinian Authority, the Faroe Islands, Liechtenstein.

There are 26 other countries or trading blocks listed as “engagement ongoing” where we’ve got nothing.

Let’s take a look at what’s actually been done in the last three years.

Here’s a bit from the UK/Chile Agreement of 6 February 2019:

Basically this says:

At moment of Brexit the provisions of the EU-Chile Agreement (including the instruments referred to in Article 206) are incorporated here, but modified so it is as if it had been signed between the UK and Chile in the first place, except for what’s written here.

One of these exceptions (Article 5) is that references to the Euro are not going to be changed to UK Pounds, even though an Agreement between the UK and Chile would have obviously used UK Pounds.

Here’s that aforementioned Article 206 of the EU-Chile Agreement:

Pretty boring. Most of these treaties are 95% Annexes listing every kind of product and material.

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Saturday, June 22nd, 2019 at 12:45 pm - - Whipping 1 Comment »

I just had a petition to the UK Parliament rejected on 20 June that I submitted on the 23 of May.

Now you could say that it was delayed because they were busy, but I went back through the list of rejected petitions, and found that they had turned down 320 other petitions in the meantime.

This tells you that they had a hard time finding a problem with it, and in the end just made something up.

Here is the text of the petition:

Legalise party political placards on street furniture during an election

The laws in the UK against fly-posting are so restrictive that, unlike in most other countries, elections are totally invisible to people on the street. Yet during the Christmas season the councils find time to put up decorations on every lamp-post to remind us that we need to keep shopping.
More details

In most countries (throughout Europe and especially Ireland) you can really tell when an election is on because the lamp-posts, bridges and traffic railings are festooned with coloured placards and banners, often with photos of the smiling candidates.

I used to be against it, but now I can really see the point in letting people feel there is something is happening. We have gone way too far in banning these notices. Trials should be run in selected parts of the country at the next election.

And the rejection notice:

Why was this petition rejected?

It’s about something that the UK Government or Parliament is not responsible for.

We can’t accept your petition because this would be a decision for local councils and not the UK Government or Parliament.

The law doesn’t explicitly prevent political advertising in this way. It does allow local authorities to remove any “picture, letter, sign or other mark painted, ascribed or affixed on the surface of the highway, or any structure or works on or in the highway.” It is up to local authorities how they use that power.

Obviously they are wrong, because Parliament makes the laws that tell local authorities what they can and can’t do, or indeed what the heck these institutions are.

If they’re claims were right, I would not be able to find in Section 5 of The Planning (Control of Advertisements) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2015:

The Deemed consent for the display of advertisements

… deemed consent is hereby granted for the display of an advertisement falling within any class specified in Part 1 of Schedule 3, subject… to the standard conditions, except that paragraph 4 of Schedule 1 does not apply in the case of any Class 13 advertisement.

What’s that mean?

The way to read UK legislation is to know it for the tangled mess that it is. There ought to be an inquiry into why it gets so bad.

Schedule 3, Part 1, Classes of advertisements which may be displayed with deemed consent says:

CLASS 13 – Advertisements relating to an election

Description: An advertisement relating specifically to a pending Parliamentary, European Parliamentary, Northern Ireland Assembly or district council election.
Conditions: The advertisement is removed within 14 days after the close of the poll in the election to which it relates.

And then Schedule 1, Standard contions says:

Paragraph 4 No advertisement may be displayed without the permission of the owner of the site or any other person with an interest in the site entitled to grant permission.

To me, that looks like election posters can be put up without the persmission of the property owner. For “property owner”, you should think of local government property (eg lamp posts), not someone’s leafy garden lawn.

Sometimes posters do get cut down, but according to the reporting it’s seen as wrong because election posters are an important part of the democratic process.

The same is true in southern Ireland, where everyone knows election posters are important and simply considers them a necessary evil.

The law passed by the Irish Parliament is in Section 19 of the the Litter Pollution Act 1997:

A prosecution shall not be brought in a case in which an offence under this section is alleged to have been committed in relation to an advertisement if… [it] relates to a presidential election, a general election or a bye-election, a referendum, or an election of representatives to the Assembly of the European Communities, unless the advertisement has been in position for 7 days or longer after the day specified in the advertisement for the meeting or the latest day upon which the poll was taken for the election, bye-election or referendum concerned.

There’s also an Election Posters FAQ.

I’ve not looked up the Statute Law on the Isle of Man, but the Department of Infrastructure does “recognise that the campaign process for elect/on candidates may include the siting of posters and banners, and will allow for these providing they do not adversely affect the safety of the Island’s residents and visitors and those putting up the election material.[link]

Oh, but it’s different in the United Kingdom, you say — even though the first regulation I quoted there was laid before the UK Parliament and applied to Northern Ireland (which is still part of the UK at the moment).

Let’s look at that Regulation in more detail. According to its explanatory memorandum:

Parity or Replicatory Measure

Equivalent Regulations have been made in England [Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007], Wales [Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) Regulations 1992] and Scotland [Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (Scotland) Regulations 1992]

So, Regulation 6 of Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007 says:

Deemed consent for the display of advertisements

… consent is granted for the display of an advertisement of any class specified in Part 1 of Schedule 3, subject to

(a) the standard conditions; and
(b) in the case of any class other than Class 12, the conditions and limitations specified in that Part in relation to that class.

So far so good.

Hit me with Class 12 from Schedule 3, Classes of advertisement for which deemed consent is granted:

Class 12 Advertisements inside buildings

Description:

12. An advertisement displayed inside a building, other than an advertisement falling within Class I in Schedule 1.

Humph.

There are no special cases for election posters listed anywhere here, or in any of the other versions of this legislation in the rest of the UK.

So, what are the consequences?

Posters on the street are the best thing for telling people of an event. Individual fliers delivered to houses take to much time, get thrown away and do not work. Online engagement is expensive and difficult and can only be undertaken successfully by experts.

There is nothing better for telling people that there is an event on or an election ballot within walking distance of their house than a sign on a lamp-post that they will walk past twenty times in a week.

I think people have to start putting up simple plain posters that there is an election on a particular date coming up at crossings and road junctions that do not state a party or candidate, but just reminds people of the date. As I said in the petition, it’s an important event, like Christmas. And just as the Council puts up gross plastic Santas that remind us to buy crap, but don’t say from which shop, they ought to have an equivalent set of decoration on every lamp-post to remind us to go vote, if they’re not going to let parties put up their own.

Update

Anti-politician posters seen in Belfast this March:

Probably quite illegal as they didn’t say what [real] party they were from.

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019 at 1:35 pm - - Whipping

Someone who works on the railways told me that his Union, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) was one of the big unions in the UK that supported Brexit.

I wanted the check why, having recalled doing some research about railway policy and the EU (reported in a blog entry from May 2016) following some crappy speech from Boris Johnson about the nasty EU using an ECJ ruling to run their freight trains on our national tracks in preference to our patriotic privatized passenger trains.

The problem is that if a factory in Hungary wants to send 5000 tonnes of cheap sausage meat to the UK, they can put this into 200 lorries and drive them all the way to their destination on our roads, causing lots of pollution, and traffic jams getting in the way, and Boris doesn’t complain. But lord help us that they might possibly put this load onto a more efficient train and expect it to get through to its destination unspoilt.

You’d think that railway unions would be in favour of legally binding international agreements to increase the guarenteed capacity of the railway. But it turns out that Brexit stupidity is not all on the Conservative Party side.

In a Press release on 21 April 2016 the RMT wrote:

The European Parliament’s decision this week to back the opening up of all rail routes across the EU to more competition for private operators was just one more reason to vote Leave on June 23, transport union RMT said today.

Under the proposals in the EU’s so-called Fourth Railway Package, train operators would have complete access to the networks of member states to operate domestic passenger services.

The European Council had already agreed that mandatory competitive tendering should be the main way of awarding public service contracts.

RMT general secretary Mick Cash said that the failed Tory privatisation of rail over twenty years ago using EU directive 91/440 was now being imposed on 500 million people by EU diktat without a mandate.

“This rail package is designed to privatise railways across Europe and its proposals are remarkably similar to the McNulty report on the future of GB railways, imposing further fragmentation and attacks on workers.

“McNulty, the Tory government and the EU share the business-led mania for privatisation and agree on the need to jack up fares and attack jobs, pay and pensions to pay for it, no-one has voted for that.

“It is impossible to make changes to this privatisation juggernaut inside the undemocratic EU so the only solution is to get out by voting Leave on June 23,” he said.

None of this makes sense.

How can we believe that the EU — every other country of which runs a nationalized rail service — is going to impose privatization on the UK whose railways are already privatized?

Also, I do recall that we had a Labour Government for thirteen years post-privatization, who carried on with the private railways policy at vast expense of money and political capital, only nationalizing the trackways themselves after a series of lethal accidents and a bankruptcy when it had no alternative. Now there were serious issues as to the democracy within the Labour Party during that time, which resulted in the RMT breaking from the party in 2004. This history needs to be remembered, because it indicates that the EU is not the source of our problems.

Later that year, after the referendum, the RMT wrote in November 2016:

MEPs have a critical vote on the future of our railways taking place on 12-15 December 2016. Privatisation of rail passenger services could be imposed on all member states if new EU regulations are passed into legislation. Even though the UK is leaving the EU, regulations in the Fourth Railway Package could still apply to the UK for years to come…

The Fourth Railway Package must be stopped. Please email your MEP before 12 December to let them know that you want them to vote against the Fourth Railway Package.

Oh yeah, what was that bit about the undemocratic EU?

It’s so bad and incoherent.

A fact checking organization looked at the case in June 2016, three days before the referendum, and concluded:

The pending changes to EU rail regulation, known as the fourth railway package, don’t require member states to privatise any aspect of their rail networks. Neither do they require any member to break up its national operator.

There was an initial proposal for rail infrastructure and services to be split into separate organisations, which would have meant breaking up national operators, but the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, directly intervened and it was dropped…

The new EU regulations promote competition for the market between rail operators irrespective of ownership structure, but not privatisation. As far as renationalisation is concerned the reality is that, unless the rules are interpreted in an extreme way, they do not make it any easier or more difficult than the structure in place at the moment.

The RMT did support a No2EU party that ran in the 2009 and 2014 EU elections garnering about 0.3% of the vote in the second poll, so was quite a waste of time.

What we’re seeing is an unreasoned, illogical, incoherent, counterproductive hatred of the EU from a large union who has a lot of sway with the current Labour Party. I can’t see where it comes from, because from the point of view of railways and transport, the EU and its structures are beneficial. They bring in a semblance of order, integration, interoperability, purpose and reliability that is essential for any transport infrastructure to serve society’s needs.

Wednesday, February 13th, 2019 at 12:56 pm - - Whipping

I received a complaint about a blogpost via an intermediary from folks who have chosen not to contact me directly, even though they have my email address.

My view is that figures that are wholly undeserving of respect should be accorded maximum disrespect on the basis of maximum research and background knowledge.

However, rather than check me out on that matter, I have been accused of breaching the confidentiality of certain documents.

Due to my respect for the intermediary, I have taken the post down. However, I would like to leave in its place a clarification.

The following documents are public, by virtue of the fact that they are published on a public website by those who are authorized to publish them.

On the website entitled: Liverpool John Lennon Airport Strategic Vision to 2030 and Master Plan to 2050 the public are invited to download the following documents:

In addition, should you need them, here are links to the conflicting documents on the www.gov.uk website:

Fans of my style of blogging may enjoy a previous post from October 2014 entitled Take this job and shove it up Carl’s Bass published on the day I quit my job at a company whose millionaire CEO was at the time Mr. C. Bass.

All documents referenced in that post were public, including those sourced from court documents, although I had to know what I was looking for.

One of the chapters in that blogpost was a story about Socialcam, which Bass’s company had bought for $60million dollars.

I had gotten into a lot of trouble while I was an employee of his company for posting to an internal corporate site that the business plans I had found for it were completely ridiculous.

What made it even funnier was that the internal site I posted to was based on software by company called Qontext, which they had just acquired for $24million (see a pattern?), that was so lacking in features there was no capability for managers to flag and moderate an embarrassing post. (I was uncontactable for twenty-four hours as all hell broke loose.)

As like now, the displeasure was communicated to me via intermediaries (line managers) rather from those who felt aggrieved and who were evidently cowards.

By the time I quit the job 18 months later, the Socialcam website was riddled with uploaded porn videos, because no one was watching it any more. I had proved just too irritating to managers who preferred to wallow in their flagrant incompetence, by posting benign suggestions like:

“With all these companies you’re taking over, maybe you ought to institute an independent two-year review after any acquisition to get the best from the lessons learned, so you don’t keep doing the same embarrassing mistakes over and over again?”

Interestingly, there is a bit more to this story. Six months later I happened to strike up an email conversation with Mr Bass on a different matter following the Develop3D conference in Coventry in March 2015, during which time he found me out, and wrote:

A couple of months ago, someone showed me your post after you quit saying I did all kinds of shit to you. Struck me as odd since we’ve only met once (I think) and I can’t reconcile any of the stuff you claimed I’m responsible for with what I’ve done.

Among the stuff I wrote back, was:

I can forgive you for not getting past the title. However, nobody must have read very far into the post — given that the following page still has a lot of porn: https://socialcam.com/public

The next day the page was still up.

I couldn’t believe it.

This led me to the surreal experience of having to email hard-core porn to the CEO of a ten billion dollar American company. (The image is truncated and blurred as it’s too gross to post in full):

You just can’t get the staff!

Finally, they worked out how to take down that $60million website. No apologies or thanks given for pointing it out. No admission that maybe they should have listened to me earlier. Even if they had acknowledged me, they’d have blamed me for the tone. They don’t like my tone. I have to moderate my tone if I am to get heard.

Yeah, right. I have tried hard and found no evidence for that. The message is the problem. There is no tone that will get the message through. As I quoted the business consultant Tom Peters at the end of my rant: The situation is hopeless. Might as well go and do something interesting.

And if there is one thing that would make the world a better place, it would be for Billionaires to just get a life and go and do something interesting, instead of always trying to make more money out of causing damage to a lot of little people. Isn’t that right John?

Tuesday, February 5th, 2019 at 3:40 pm - - Whipping 1 Comment »

This is just awful. It makes things worse. We need someone to speak truth to these elites, like Rutger Bregman just did at Davos where he said: “Enough with the philanthropy bullshit, just pay your taxes, and then we can improve society.”

Cambridge University provides an intellectually stunted education. Why else would one of their graduates, who made a lot of money on financial speculation, donate a stupendous sum of money for:

  • £79m toward funding PhD scholarships
  • £21m will help fund undergraduate study
  • £1m will go towards funding access efforts for applicants from underrepresented backgrounds.

The most basic due diligence would have revealed that Cambridge (and Oxford) were put into special measures last July 2018 for not fulfilling their obligations of their Access and Participation Plan, which they are required to do in order to charge inflated fees.

The Office For Students, which authorises Cambridge’s fee hike, believes that, while they are spending tens of millions on bursaries for students from low-income households, there is no evidence that the money is actually attracting young people from such backgrounds.

In other words, they already have too much money for this, and they are wasting it.

Exactly the sort of institution a lazy billionaire would look to give his money to — ie not one mile beyond the one place he encountered during his youthful formative years.

Is this evidence he has broadened his horizons during his career? Nope!

Just remember kids, earning a billion dollars does not make you smart.

If it does anything, it makes you stupid.

I mean, if I were surrounded by people telling me I was smart, not needing to concern myself with problematic details where the devil lies, and rarely getting challenged on any of my stupid ideas, my head would be more chock full of dumb stuff than ever. No room for intelligent life.

I don’t blame billionaires for letting their minds go blunt. Staying smart is bloody hard work. What’s the point of being rich if you are going to endure that kind of pain?

No brain can function clearly under the burden of wealth, any more than it can respond to events when it is on alcohol. But unfortunately, while most drunk people now know they are unfit to drive, even when they feel confident, no one has come to terms with the fact that the super-rich are unfit to decide how to allocate wealth. It’s an inevitable a car crash.

I mean, listen to this wooden fence-post of a Vice-Chancellor:

I’m immensely grateful to David and Claudia Harding to for this extraordinary gift to the student support initiative of Cambridge University.

It will transform Cambridge’s ability to attract and retain the very best post-graduate students from across Britain and around the world.

It will also encourage greater philanthropy and support of our undergraduate students…

In October 2018, without blinking, this same Professor Toope announced a £500million target for the Student Support Initiative. So he’s got about another £400million to raise from brainless rich people and then to squander on already ineffective bursaries to fulfill overdue obligations.

At some point I’m going to get phone-banked by these clowns, because they have my address, and this is the university I graduated from. I intend to arrange to meet a representative in person, rather than vent my spleen at the hired call-centre operative they’ll have procured, because this has gone too far.

If the university had one inkling of their problem, they could attempt to convene a panel of randomly selected students from across the country from their target audience and give them the resources to probe the institution about its failings in a way that would make them squirm and then possibly do something.

But that’s not going to happen. This institution, which knows about science, and political corruption, and the future, can’t even wean itself off fossil fuel donations and investments in the face of overwhelming opinion.

Meanwhile, the same rich benefactor, who made his money with algorithmic trading, has also in the past sponsored the Winston Program for the Physics of Sustainability, whose program is notable by the complete absence of anything to do with the very near-future threat to the sustainability of organized human life on this planet.

Just take a look at titles from their Symposium last November 2018:

  • Gravitational wave detectors : precision measurement technologies and their applications
  • Atom Interferometry for Geodesy and Fundamental Physics
  • Taking inspiration from biomechanics to engineering, dragonfly drones and other bio-inspired vehicles
  • Electrical machines: from Microwatts to Gigawatts – the future challenges
  • Implantable Biomedical Microelectromechanical Systems
  • Power at the Nanoscale: Speed, Strength and Efficiency in Biological Motors

Here’s that institute’s inspiring logo, the recycled atom:

According to the institute’s description, “There will be a strong emphasis upon fundamental research that will have importance for the sustainability agenda in the long-term.”

Guess what? After eight years of this crap, the problems we face are now short-term. These guys are from the Island of Laputa without their clappers.

Another thing Mr Harding’s Winton Foundation has donated money for in Cambridge (and presumably found wholly satisfactory) is the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in which he says:

David Harding: Statistics is an immensely powerful subject, but unfortunately it’s counter-intuitive. (Laughs.) So the normal ordinary human brain trying to do statistical analysis will come firmly and to the wrong and often the opposite conclusion to that which is the right conclusion.

And this is dangerous, tragic, and leads to a very strong shortfall in terms of optimal public policy outcomes, and often outcomes for ourselves in our own lives.

Harding, of course, has an extra-ordinary human brain, and he can see through to the really pressing issues of “Risk, Evidence, and Communication”, such as:

  • The risks of alcohol
  • Predict breast cancer tool release
  • Coffee and cancer
  • Can nine lifestyle changes change dementia risk?
  • The dangers of insecticides, poor statistics and over-enthusiastic press offices
  • Does air pollution kill 40,000 people each year in the UK?
  • How dangerous is burnt toast?

We are totally screwed.

For different reasons, the historian Malcolm Gladwell had also had it with this philanthropy universities crap going on in America and tweeted four years ago:

He followed up with a very fine podcast episode about the phenomenon, where he exposed just how utterly insatiable these institutions are, when there are just so many other places you could make a thousand times more of a difference if you thought about it.

In his interview (minute 25:00) with John Hennessy, the President of Standford University, who was just then ushering in a $750million endowment for the hundred most elite graduates chosen by a panel of wealthy professors from a set of high-flying graduate applicants, Gladwell asked:

Gladwell: How much is enough for an institution like Stanford?

Hennessy: How much is enough? Um. I think if our ambitions don’t grow, then I think you do reach a point where you have enough money, and I would hope that our ambitions for what we would want to do as an institution, both in our teaching and our research, grow

Gladwell: Hypothetically, if Bill Gates or Larry Ellison came to you and said, “I’m giving you ten billion dollars. I’m retiring and my will says everything goes to Stanford.” Would you say, “We don’t know, we don’t need it.” Or would you say, “We can put that money to good use.”

Hennessy: Well, first of all I don’t think either Gates of Ellison is going to give me ten billion dollars, unless I tell them exactly what I’m going to do with it, and how I’m going to make it a good investment. And since I know both of them I can tell you they won’t do it.

Gladwell: Could you make an argument to Ellison that if he gave you ten billion you could put it to good use?

Gladwell (narrating): Ten billion, just to put us in the ball-park, because I worry sometimes that Americans get a little jaded about big numbers. Ten billion is a few billion more than the GDP of Barbados and four billion shy of the GDP of Jamaica. Basically I’m asking what would happen if someone gave you, Stanford, the average economic output of an entire Caribbean country for a year. Tax-free, by the way. The guy who gives the ten billion gets to write it off, and every dollar Stanford earns on that ten billion, they get to keep.

Hennessy: Ten billion. I’d have to do something really dramatic for ten billion dollars. Really dramatic.

Gladwell (narrating): He thinks about it for a moment. Actually I counted. For about two seconds. Then he comes up with something really dramatic.

Hennessy: The one area where I think there is an opportunity for significant incremental funding is in the biomedical sciences. If that were an endowment, for example, so you’re throwing out about a half a billion dollars a year, I could find a way to spend half a billion dollars a year in biomedical research.

Gladwell (narrating): Ten billion! He could totally use another ten billion! At this point, I’m just curious… So I keep posing more and more far-fetched scenarios.

Gladwell: Do ever imagine that a president of Stanford might go to a funder and say, “At this point in our history the best use of your money is to give to the UC System , not Stanford?

Gladwell (narrating): The UC System is the University of California System. Ten schools: Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbra, etc. Maybe the finest group of public universities in the world… In the previous episode I talked about the NYT Access index which is a ranking of the 180 universities in the US according to how good a job they do in finding, educating, and financially supporting low income students. Right now… six of the first seven spots on that list are University of California schools. Stanford has 16,000 students, the UC System has 238,000 students.

So I’m asking John Hennessy, might there ever, ever, be an instance where he might tell a would-be super-philanthropist, “Look, we’ve already got £22billion in the bank, higher than two Caribbean countries combined, and it’s earning us a couple of tax-free billions every year. Your dollar would go further at the public institutions down the street, since they educate 222,000 more students than we do, with a fraction of the endowment.

I’m not holding Hennessy to his answer. I’m not looking for him to make a solemn pledge. I’m just asking.

Hennessy: Well that would be a hard thing to do, obviously, to turn them away. And I think the other question we’d be asked is, “How can I have confidence that they’ll use my money well?” which obviously the president of Stanford is not in a position to vouch for I think.

Gladwell (narrating): Now I realize he has institutional loyalties. He’s the head of Stanford. And I must say, I liked him. But I must say, am I the only the only one who finds his answer ridiculous? Even offensive?

He’s suggesting that he can’t guarantee that the UC System, perhaps the most successful and socially progressive public university system in the world, he can’t guarantee they would use that money well?

As opposed to what? As opposed to spending $800million on a boutique graduate program for a hundred elite students a year: that kind of using money well?

Saturday, December 15th, 2018 at 1:57 pm - - Whipping

In March 2018 Liverpool John Lennon Airport published its Masterplan 2050 to justify their “need for expansion”. It was based on a single extremely cherry-picked datapoint from an out-of-date government forecast.

The plan included this suspiciously simple forecast chart on page 29:

Page 23 of their “Master Plan” states:

Department for Transport UK Aviation Forecasts

[Paragraph 1]: The Department for Transport (DfT) 2013 forecasts for aviation were produced to inform long-term strategic aviation policy at that time, including the Government’s Aviation Policy Framework. The document set out forecasts for air passengers, aircraft movements and CO2 emissions at UK airports. The key findings include the following:

  • demand for air travel was forecast to increase within the range of 1% – 3% a year up to 2050; and
  • the central forecast was for passenger numbers at UK airports to increase from 219 million in 2011 to 315 million in 2030 and 445 million by 2050. This is an increase of 225 million passengers over the next 40 years.

[Paragraph 2]: The DfT central forecast from 2013 projected passenger traffic at LJLA at 5.3-6.7 million ppa by 2030 growing to 6.8-15.4 million ppa by 2050. This Master Plan includes proposals to enhance services and meet the levels of passenger traffic envisaged within these national forecasts. Forecasts are presented as ranges to reflect the inherent uncertainty in forecasting over relatively long periods. LJLA has undertaken its own detailed forecasts based on its knowledge of the market and trends in aviation and utilising the DfTs long term growth rates for the UK. These forecasts have been peer reviewed by York Aviation and form the basis of the Master Plan proposals.

[Paragraph 3]: In October 2017, the DfT issued a revised set of aviation forecasts with the primary purpose of informing longer term strategic policy, rather than providing detailed forecasts at individual airports. These forecasts superseded the 2013 forecasts; however the longer term growth rates for airports outside of London continued to be within the 1% to 3% range as in the 2013 forecasts. Given that there is minimal change in long term growth rate, and the recognition by the DfT that forecasts at individual airports will differ from their own, there is no change to the forecasts utilised within the Master Plan.

In spite of a lack of clear references, we can identify the source as the UK Aviation Forecasts 2013 [withdrawn on 24 October 2017] from the Department for Transport, because Paragraph 1 lifts two sentences from it:

Then Paragraph 2 provides the numbers:

  • 5.3-6.7 million ppa by 2030
  • 6.8-15.4 million ppa by 2050

These four numbers come from the table (subject to a typo) on page 159:

Note that because the National Air Passenger Allocation Model (NAPALM) is a bit unstable, the values for the high end simulation possibly blew up and gave passenger projections greater than the actual population of the UK, which the DfT decided not to publish.

There’s a chance that the central range projection is also subject to this problem, with numbers that have a tendency to spike up when they hit a certain date. Experts at economic modelling are supposed be able to recognize this phenomenon and refrain from publishing garbage.

Those four data points are not much to base a graph on.

Luckily, pages 154 and 158 of the same document fill in the values for 2020 and 2040 to get a fuller picture of the curves:


We can take this complete set of numbers and graph them against the Liverpool Airport projection:

Clearly, all they did was pick a halfway number at 2050 — which they liked — and drew a straight line to it, ignoring the fact that this line went far out of bounds until at least 2043.

But what of the claim in Paragraph 3, where they write:

“In October 2017, the DfT issued a revised set of aviation forecasts with the primary purpose of informing longer term strategic policy… Given that there is minimal change… there is no change to the forecasts utilised within the Master Plan.”

The Department for Transport must be pretty disappointed, because Liverpool Airport is not at all interested in informing its long term strategic policy.

Evidently, they decided they didn’t need to download the spreadsheet provided with the
UK aviation forecasts 2017 or plot its complete table of projections. If they had done, it would have looked like this:

Thus we have conclusively established the sources of all the passenger projection numbers used by Liverpool Airport in their so-called Masterplan, and proven how they have cherry-picked a single out-of-context number from a DfT forecast from 6 years ago, drawn a straight line to it, and then lied about the relevance of the most recent DfT forecast numbers.

This level of mendacity ought to discredit everything they say about the matter, and should mean their plans for expansion into the surrounding green belt land is rejected by the Authorities, as there is no basis to believe their claim that it will create more jobs or have any other benefits.

People should print out and take copies of the graph above to show to politicians at meetings claim to be able to read graphs.

Update: For bonus points, here is the diagram from page 20 of the Discussion paper on aviation demand forecasting from the Airports Commission in 2013 showing the points in time when they predict the various airports would reach their capacity, where they put Liverpool joint last on the list:

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018 at 9:51 am - - Whipping

This comes from three pages at the start of Chapter 21 “What Is Money For?” from the 1926 book Today and Tomorrow by Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther.

I have photographed and transcribed it, and have nothing better to add to what he said, except to observe that not one thing has changed in a hundred years, and that you don’t find business experts talking like this in modern times — probably due to the long-term re-education process by the finance industry and their deep conflicts of interest combined with a total lack of intellect.

The most common error of confusing money and business comes about through the operations of the stock market. And especially through regarding the prices on the exchange as the “barometer of business.” People are led to conclude that business is good if there is a lively gambling upward in stocks, and bad if the gamblers happen to be forcing stock prices down.

The stock market as such has nothing to do with business. It has nothing to do with quality of the article which is manufactured, nothing to do with the output, nothing to do with the marketing, it does not even increase or decrease the amount of capital used in the business. It is just a little show on the side.

It has very little to do with dividends. A large part of trading in stocks is without reference to dividends. Except with the sober investing class, the dividend is of little consequence; at least, it is not the main objective. Some of the most “active” stocks do not pay dividends. The profits sought from stock trading have no relation to the earnings of industry by the production of goods. The price of a stock often depends wholly on how many people want to buy the shares that are for sale.

The state of the stock market may make a deal of difference to the officers and directors of a company if they are dabbling in the stocks and trying to make money out of the securities of the company instead of out of its service. These stock-market companies are of little consequence: they flicker and die out. But they do serve to convince people that the stock market has something to do with business, whereas, if not a single share of stock changed hands, it would make no difference to American business. And if every share of stock changed hands tomorrow, industry would not have a cent more or a cent less capital to work with.

The whole stock activity, therefore, is on par with organized baseball, so far as the fundamental interests of business are concerned: it is a side show, unrelated to the basic principles of business and supplying none of the necessities of business. It has only a spasmodic and accidental relation to values. If the extreme speculative element were removed, the natural buying and selling of stocks would be but a mere side line of banking.

We further hold, however, that strings on a business held by those not engaged in it are hindrances, because often it compels the business to become a money-maker instead of a commodity-maker. When the chief function of any industry is to produce dividends rather than goods for use, the emphasis is fundamentally wrong. The face of the business is bowed toward the stockholder and not toward the consumer, and this means the denial of the primary purpose of industry.

The absentee stockholder is one of the principal, though concealed, items in the unnecessary and preventable costs of living.

All this is defended, of course, by the statement that stock represents a contribution to enable industry to function. The story, however, is not so simply told. When preferred stock, for example, becomes a burden on production, the benefits of industry become private instead of public, and this cannot be defended on any terms. There comes to mind an instance where a charge of fifty dollars was added to the cost of an article to meet the demands of stockholders. In another case one hundred and twenty-five dollars per article was added for the same reason.

Industry is not money — it is made up of ideas, labour, and management, and the natural expression of these is not dividends, but utility, quality, and availability. Money is not the source of any of these qualities, though these qualities are the most frequent sources of money. Any business is better off when its money comes from the buyers of its product. Such money is not a charge on the business or on the public. Money that enters in any other way becomes a charge on the business. Its main interest is its own increase, and the public never gets through paying on the original investment.

But stock speculation is not without value — some really good men lose at it and in consequence are compelled to go to work. The stock habit takes too many men’s minds off their legitimate business. Anything that drives them back to their proper sphere is a benefit. Wealth is not increased by stock activity; at best, it only changes hands. Wealth is not created; it is but a score in a game. I was once quoted as saying that the stock market was a good thing for business. The reporter omitted my reason — “because it drives so many men back to legitimate business by breaking them.”

Friday, July 20th, 2018 at 10:54 am - - Whipping

To me, your justification for Brexit seems incoherent and illogical.

Your basic premise — in common with a lot of superficially thoughtful criticism — was that the EEC began as a treaty to regulate trade and harmonize regulations, and has then metamorphised into a superstate taking on powers and imposing new laws far beyond this remit. The people are not ready for this.

You gave as an example of super-state over-reaching powers, something from Intellectual Property law — your area of interest. The example was Copyright Extension, which you claimed — correctly — was not about harmonizing some regulation across Europe, but of extending it far beyond what anyone had before.

Really? This is your example?

But we’ll go with it.

Regulations have to change and move forwards with the times, and the point of European system is to make these changes in harmony across the whole of Europe at the same time.

Otherwise, your definition of “Regulatory Harmonization” implies that EU can only impose regulations onto the UK that had existed elsewhere in the EU prior to 1973.

Put into that context, it’s easy to see why the early years of the EEC would be mostly about harmonization of regulations, while the later years became more about drafting new regulations when those pre-1973 regulations grew out of date through processes we can call time passing. To expect otherwise is illogical, Captain.

But, on the subject of Intellectual Property, let’s look at the pragmatic situation. We all know where the policies of successive UK Governments on this issue lie. For sure, if we had not been part of the EU we would have experienced Copyright Extension and Software Patents good and hard since 1998, via a trade treaty with the US.

And good luck with lobbying our supposedly more democratic UK MPs to vote against Software Patents, as we did with European MEPs. They will either not understand it, or agree that it’s harmful but consider it something well worth selling out in order to get a better trade deal with the US. It’s give and take in the negotiations, you see, and we are a small country who don’t get to impose our will on an international super-power. Anyway, Software Developers already do well enough to make a living on the job market; we can trade them to protect our sheep farmers.

Ah, but there’s Taking Back Control.

My turn for an example.

After Brexit, the French police can Take Back Control over who is allowed to drive on the French highways. So if I cross the Channel by car, the French police can arrest me for not having a valid MoT on my car, the lack of which means it’s officially unsafe to drive and could kill someone. Bad idea.

Fortunately, there’s an international court called the ECJ to enforce the treaty/contract between the French and UK Governments that says my MoT certificate for my car issued by the UK Government is as good as the French paperwork.

Now, the French Government can only sign such an agreement to respect our MoT certificates if they have the assurance that our safety and inspection standards are up to scratch — both in terms of the quality of the regulations and in their enforcement.

We have to allow the French Government to potentially take the UK Government to court if they think the UK Government is not doing a good enough job of prosecuting cowboy garage operators who are issuing MoTs to unsafe cars that could then kill people on French motorways.

Otherwise, without the ability to seek redress in court, the French would just have to ban all cars with UK MoTs until the UK cleaned up its act.

However, in such a dispute, it is possible that the French are simply wrong and are being too picky about their standards, and are deliberately making safety requirements that just so happen disadvantage UK cars. So we’d like this matter to be considered in a Competent Court that values its reputation for impartiality — not just some ad-hoc tribunal made up of three dudes deep into conflicts of interest appointed by both sides that has to come up with an answer in 30 days or else.

And we’d like the decision to be worked out and enforced justly, without threats, organized disinformation in the Press, counter-measures and political grand-standing hanging over it — which is what happens when you don’t have a framework of functioning law that punishes such disruptive activities.

This story about the MoTs and car safety across borders generalizes to every other field of regulatory cooperation. Basically, if you plumb your toilet into the main sewerage system instead of to a hole in your back garden, you give up control over how many tampons you can flush down it. What was so important about having Control again?

And finally, you suggested a time-frame of five years. It could be bad and painful during the transition period, but we need to hold our nerves while we take back control, until it all works out.

This time-frame, quite frankly, is pulled out of someone’s arse. No basis on anything. Here’s one way to make a number. Trade treaties take about ten years to negotiate, so why not say ten years, plus another five to account for the fact that no one in the UK Government has negotiated one in 45 years. Does 15 years of chaos and closed borders feel worth it?

I mean, I’ve got an estimate for the time horizon for how long this takes to work out. But it’s not expressed in years; it’s the length of time it takes for enough of the Brexiteers to come to terms with the fact that their slogans of Sovereignty, Control and so-called Democracy (with an electoral system that does worse than if you picked 650 citizens for Parliament completely at random) are totally vacuous.

Maybe it takes one month. Maybe it’s fifty years. Nobody knows yet. How long can this society carry on with an unbroken layer of denial and mendacity at the top when the shit gets real?

I’ll check back with you in about year after it hits the fan. The gradient of the learning curve will suggest a more numerical estimate. By then there will be four-and-a-half out of the quoted five years remaining for things to get sane. My theory is that because it’ll actually be happening to us, and isn’t some foreign game like a war, the Friedman Unit trick of always quoting five years in the future from now won’t work.

The main consequence of taking Control is that we must take the Blame.