Speed survey
This morning I noticed a pair of temporary speed survey tubes on the Lancaster Circus flyover in Birmingham, which had a 40mph limit for years and years which was recently cut to 30. I wonder what will happen when they (the council) get the survey results and find that the good people of Brum generally aren't keen on doing less than 40mph for no good reason, and the 85th percentile speed is more like 50mph?
Option 1: Increase the speed limit to the 85th percentile speed (85th percentile meaning 85% of people are slower than, and 15% faster) as is good historical speed limit practice, or:
Option 2: Say "bloody hell, everybody is speeding by a massive amount" and install some speed cameras.
Answers on a postcard please. I already feel I have an inkling as to what will happen 
“Leading doctors call for ban on smoking in cars”
From here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article7073299.ece
"Twenty of Britain’s most senior doctors call today for a ban on smoking in cars as part of a sweeping expansion of laws to protect children against the effects of inhaling smoke."
"The doctors say that the national strategy must include tobacco price rises, media campaigns, more effective health warnings and better provision of smoking cessation services."
And here's another thing:
"Leading internet radio presenters call for doctors to go fuck themselves"
Whenever such "Doctor's" pronouncements are in the press, they cause me to become quite annoyed and as such my blood pressure rises dangerously. Of course this is rather bad for my health and wellbeing. As such I call for a ban on 'doctors' sticking their frigging noses into affairs that don't and shouldn't concern them.
More and more the attitude of the state appears to be that our bodies are somehow owned by them, much like a mortgaged house is actually owned by the bank, and that action should be taken against anyone who has that audacity to 'abuse' 'their' property.
When did we become the property of the state? Was it when the NHS was founded, or did it come later? Was there a defined event, or was it a slow and creeping process? Answers on a postcard please...
Hi-vis jobsworth patrol
To cut a long story short, it's St Patrick's day today [edit: no it wasn't] , and much of Digbeth is closed off to allow the parade and related festivities to take place, as they have done every year in Birmingham.
Normally we residents of the surrounding area receive information about road closures etc, so we know what is happening and can make plans to accomodate. This year I received precisely fuck all.
Anyway, I had to visit my mother this morning, and returned home about 2:15. Every road in the vicinity of my flat is utterly clogged up with buses, taxis and cars; not helped by the many minicab drivers who attempt to cut the queues and end up blocking what little clear road remains when they try to get back in to the queue.
My flat (and the car park entrance) are within 50 yards of the somewhat generous road closures.
Last year I seem to remember residents being allowed through. Not this year.
A certian hi-vis vest wearing tosser seems to be taking great pleasure in his 'duties' of causing maximum inconvenience to everyone and wielding what little 'power' he has, or at least thinks he has; backed up with lots of authoritative sounding words like 'council' and 'police'. Apparently we're supposed to drive round hideously congested streets for hours, hoping to find a parking space somewhere nearby (clue: there's a festival on; there aren't any) and walk a mile or two home, then back again later to collect the car because he, THE ALL POWERFUL ROAD CLOSURE MAN OF JUSTICE, allows NO-ONE TO PASS!! I should "take it up with the council if I don't like it" (his words).
What I will say is this- fuck you, you utter waste of skin, oxygen and everyting else; you fuckpigs in yellow bibs (inspectors of various types, 'compliance officers' etc etc etc) are the one thing above all wrong with Britain today, and I know it's a terrible cliche but your backs will be first against then wall when the revolution comes. Fuck off and die.
N.b: I'm home now, thanks to a barricade nearby being unmanned and having blown down in the wind. The roads inside the cordon are of course deserted.
Conservatives’ bad tax idea
Accoding to The Daily Telegraph today and also covered by Guido Fawkes' blog; The Conservatives are working on a plan where employees pay will automatically have any income taxes etc automatically deducted by their bank, rather than the responsibilty falling on their employer as it does now under the PAYE system. The 'selling point' is that "The administrative burden on businesses, especially small businesses, should be significantly reduced".
Now, speaking as someone in small business, payroll isn't any particular headache; for our 7-or so staff we spend about 0.5 man-hours per week processing pay; of which very little is actually involved in calculating tax (our payroll software does that automatically. We spend an hour here and there (up to say 8 man-hours in a year) sorting out any problems that arise with HMRC, inputting new tax codes etc. It generally wouldn't be any quicker or easier to do without deducting tax.
The other implications of the government having direct access to one's bank accounts are rather worrying*. I forsee situation where tax disputes are 'resolved' by the disputed monies being drawn directly and instantly, leaving the person in question skint while trying to prove their tax case to an uncaring HMRC who already hold the money anyway! No doubt this is where mch of the '£1bn' of increased government revenues under the scheme would come from.
Personally I'd rather have a little bit of extra bureacracy than the ever-creeping increasingly powerful state having a direct line to my bank, and thats even speaking as a proposed 'beneficiary' of this scheme.
*This already happens; people have had their bank accounts frozen or drained by the government pendng tax or criminal investigations, leaving them with no funds to pay for legal representation in the cases in question. Institutionalising government access to bank accounts can only make this situation worse.
High Speed Line to -somewhere or other-
According to The Times today, plans for a 'high-speed' rail network in the UK are currently on hold because of disagreement about the precise routing into London.
The so-called 'Labour plan' being promoted by the incumbent government involves the line (from the north) having a major 'hub' station at Old Oak Common (west London) before terminating at Euston Station in central London. An 'ordinary' rail loop from Old Oak Common would feed Heathrow Airport.
The so-called 'Conservative plan' promoted by the probable next government favours the line instead serving a major hub at Heathrow Airport (extreme west London), with a spur terminating at Euston and the main line passing through Stratford International (east London, where the Olympics will be) as the existing 'HS1' high-speed line to the Channel Tunnel.
Diagrams of the respective plans here
Now in my opinion, there are 2 major objectives for any high-speed line; from the point of view of someone such as myself residing north of London. For any 'high-speed' line to be any use there would need to be:
1) Direct trains to central London (read 'Euston')
2) Direct trains to mainland Europe (read 'Channel Tunnel')
Each of the proposed plans at present allow one and not the other of these objectives.
There are similar problems in siting any high-speed station in Birmingham too; there are proposals for HS lines going through the existing New Street Station, plans for the major terminal to be placed at Birmingham Int'l Airport instead, and plans for the line(s) to bypass the city entirely.
Previously a new 'Birmingham Grand Central Station' was proposed, on the site of the former Curzon Street Station immediately east of the city centre; on land now allocated by the council to parks, government offices and the like. This proposal would have bypassed the continued capacity problems at New St while providing HS links (almost) right into the city centre. Alas; this plan was rejected and now New St Station is going to have an entirely cosmetic makeover.
All of these disputes reveal a lack of direction about what these HS lines are actually for. Are they intended for domestic intercity rail travel? As massvely overengineered airport links? Are they intended as direct links to Europe? Seemingly nobody knows, and until that somewhat important point is decided any further 'planning' is pointless. Trains, especially high-speed trains need to have their routes set in stone at a very early stage. A 200mph train is utterly pointless if it needs to stop at various stations along the route because nobody could decide where best to place the major terminals. They need to travel long distances in one shot to be worthwhile, and the UK is already 'small' in relation to the distances covered by other countries' high speed trains.
I personally like the idea of sleek trains bombing around at 200+mph, but the fact that nobody knows what the point of them would be makes me wonder if there is a point to them at all.
Bullshit of the week: “Oil shortages by 2020 due to Western ‘profligacy’”
As seen in The Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/oilprices/7206410/Oil-shortages-by-2020-due-to-Western-profligacy-says-energy-boss.html
"Drivers need to start treating oil as a scarce commodity and switch to green transport to avoid shortages by 2020, according to the chief executive of Scottish & Southern."
So; we need to stop using oil now, to prevent us from having to stop using oil in the future..
""It's GCSE economics that if production is constrained and demand increases from emerging countries, the price will go up and up and up," Mr Marchant said."
It's also GCSE economics that the price rise itself will curb the rise in demand
"One car in China adds far more value than a second car sitting in the driveway of some house in the UK."
Newsflash: An unused car uses no fuel
"Mr Souter, the transport boss, has proposed more radical solutions than incentives to buy green vehicles. He called for the abolition of the lowest bands of tax that hit those with problems paying their energy bills and the establishment of a tax on carbon emissions. "This would help redistribute wealth and the people using carbon would be paying for it," he added."
So now he wants to increase taxes on energy (increasing the price) to make energy more affordable? Is this the same logic that says we should deal with rising oil prices by artificially inflating the retail price of fuel using fuel duty?
The industry group [the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security] wants the government to explore electrification of the railways and overhaul the transmission and distribution network.
Does it now? Would this be the 'industry group' that consists of Ian Marchant, head of Scottish and Sourthern Energy; Sir Richard Branson, head of amongst other things Virgin Trains; Brian Souter, the chief executive of Stagecoach, and Philip Dilley, chairman of engineering group Arup? Are they trying to say that rail magnates, electricity companies and civil engineers want government investment in civil engineering projects to benefit railways and electricity companies? Whatever next!
As a forklift dealer and part-time radio DJ I think that the government should invest billions of pounds in buying lots of new forklifts and subsidising internet radio stations, paid for with a new "not using forklifts or listening to internet radio" tax. If they don't do that they are condemning the UK to certain economic and environmental doom.
Buying the media
Now as you have no doubt noticed we are approaching the deadline for a general election to be held, and increasingly all political parties are setting out their stalls to try and tempt voters.
What you may also have noticed is the steady drip, drip of increasing government advertising over recent years. The annual budget of the Central Office of Information (COI) now stands at over £500M.
In 2001, the Conservatives accused the government of spending "more than £62m of taxpayers' money advertising itself" over 3 months (£248m/year) in the run-up to the general election that year (note how the advertising budget has more than doubled since then). The theory was that Labour was stimulating lots of advertising to make the government look better- "look at all these fantastic new services/benefits"- with the side effect of making Labour look better, them being the party in power.
If you look at government advertising today however, the tone is quite different to that conveyed back in 2001. The adverts are now usually intended to modify the population's behaviour somehow, much like wartime propaganda. This fact to me suggests that the massively increased advertising of late is not intended to apply any kind of 'electoral halo' to the incumbent party.
If that is the case, is there any electioneering purpose to the advertising, or should it be taken entirely at its paternalistic face value? I believe that something else is going on.
Since the start of the current economic problems in 2008, government advertising has grown to a massive proportion of the advertising market nationally, especially in radio, by virtue of the COI's much larger budget and importantly by the reduction of advertising demand from the private sector due to the recession. The COI is the biggest single advertiser in the country.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, have indicated that if they come to power they wish to slash "Programmes that represent poor value for money, excessive spending on things like advertising".
Now look at the situation from the point of view of a commercial broadcaster, whether an independent or one of the large media empires. One party is providing a huge revenue stream to your operation. The other promises to slash that revenue. It would certainly be tempting to 'nudge' the media output to favour 'the party of plenty', wouldn't it?
Presuming this assertion to be true, what could the Conservatives do to win the 'hearts and minds' and so the output of the commercial media? Like in any industry, money is the language of love, so any sweetener would need to increase their profitability. With budget increases ruled out, and tax cuts highly unlikely in the short to medium term due to a commitment to reduce government debt, there remain only the avenues of reduced competition and reduced regulation.
Funny how they propose cutting competition against the commercial media from the BBC, and reducing regulation to allow larger media groups (also reducing competition), isn't it? Any meshing with core ideology is just the icing on the cake.
£150k to send ‘artists’ to Arctic for ‘inspiration’
Here is something I found on the blog of David Thompson, seemingly £150,000 of Arts Council (read "taxpayer's") money was spent on sending a gaggle of arty types to the polar regions, "to inspire the creative team to respond to climate change".
Highlights include the projection of images onto a glacier, the opening of a CO2 cylinder (profound) and the collection of poppies. It is unknown what the 'carbon footprint' of the carbon-footprint-awareness junket was (seemingly always the case).
£150,000 of your and my money well spent then.
Full details here: http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2009/11/artists-for-gaia.html