The French Burqa Ban

From The Independent:-

The French internal security services estimate that only 1,900 women in France wear the full-face veil – roughly 0.1 per cent of the adult, female, Muslim population. Supporters of the ban, on both the left and the right, say the burka is an affront to the principle of Liberté enshrined in the French constitution. Opponents – and the "sages" of the Conseil Constitutionnel – say the ban is itself an assault on individual liberty.

I tend to side with the latter group. Liberty, to my mind, includes the right to choose not to be free. If you ban the burqa, then you should also ban people from participating in sado-masochistic activities.

(incidentally, it includes a ban on covering your face in public, which presumably also means brides.

School Rebuilding

We are, by nature, taken in by appearances. For most of us, it's only experience that teaches us to look at the data instead.

When they built a new hospital in my town, we were told that it would be the answer to all our ills. It wasn't. It barely made any difference.

In my experience,schools are even less compelling. The best 2 schools in the town I was raised in were a boys' comprehensive and a private (but not especially posh) girls school. Both were mostly made up of buildings that were 50 years old. I'd go further - all the schools which had been built within the past few decades were the ones that people tried not to send their children to.

Now, it's possible for me to get data on league tables, but anyone know where to get tables on the ages of schools?

School Rebuilding

We are, by nature, taken in by appearances. For most of us, it's only experience that teaches us to look at the data instead.

When they built a new hospital in my town, we were told that it would be the answer to all our ills. It wasn't. It barely made any difference.

In my experience,schools are even less compelling. The best 2 schools in the town I was raised in were a boys' comprehensive and a private (but not especially posh) girls school. Both were mostly made up of buildings that were 50 years old. I'd go further - all the schools which had been built within the past few decades were the ones that people tried not to send their children to.

Now, it's possible for me to get data on league tables, but anyone know where to get tables on the ages of schools?

Film Review: The Counterfeiters

One of the things that the BBC's iPlayer has which is quite nice (and well worth enabling for your Wii if you have one), is the occassional movie. I'm not sure what the deal is as it's not all movies, but one that I decided to try is an Austrian film called The Counterfeiters.

The story is a fictionalised version of Operation Bernhard which was a WW2 German operation to produce forged Pounds and Dollars using known Jewish counterfeiters at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Anyway, it's a pretty damn good film and well worth a viewing if you don't mind subtitles. As you might imagine, there's a some violence, but not that much.

Jobsworth of the Year (so far)

We should have an award for things like this

Workmen painting white lines on a road left a gap for a dead badger because they said it was not their responsibility to move it.

The animal had been killed about a week before on the A338 near Downton, on the Hampshire-Wiltshire border.

Hampshire County Council said the workers did what they thought "was best" because it is the district council's job to remove carcasses.

and...

Hampshire County Council is responsible for the line painting but New Forest District Council is responsible for clearing road kill.

The two failed to arrange the clearance before line painting began.

Gahhhhh!!!!!

"Did what was best"? In the time it took you to make the call to "arrange the clearance", you could have just fired a hose in it's general direction, or picked it up with a shovel, or stuck a pair of plastic gloves on and moved it.

It's funny when socialists talk about how socialism makes people more co-operative . The reality is that they actually do far more job demarcation than the free market. In the world of the free market, people just get on with things where there's a bump in the road. Companies actually don't work like jobsworths to contracts - they aim to please, because people then want to work with them again.

If a client sends me a spec with what seems to be an error, I don't just implement it. I give them a call to clarify, or in their absence, I rectify it and clarify it with them later. I do what I consider to be delivering a good service. The reason? Professional pride and the desire to get more of their business.

Graduate Tax

According to Cable:-

It surely can't be right that a teacher or care worker or research scientist is expected to pay the same graduate contribution as a top commercial lawyer or surgeon or City analyst whose graduate premium is so much bigger.

But they're already making a greater contribution - they pay a huge amount more in tax. This reflects the fact that we actually want people doing degrees in law, medicine and for a city analyst, I'd guess math (if we're talking quants). These people are not a problem, and we want more people doing those sort of degrees precisely because we actually want those sorts of skills.

So, the result of Cable's idea is that we don't deter people from doing degrees where there is little demand for the resulting education (Philosophy, Sociology). We still incur the costs of worthless degrees. On the other hand, we're going to encourage people with the sort of skills/abilities who earn lots of money and pay lots of tax to go and work elsewhere.

Here's a better idea: lower targets about higher education and drop the amount of spending to an expectation of less than 10% of people going to university. The best of the best will go to university. We just don't need 40 or 50% of people with degrees. Take computing... the likes of Google, Microsoft and Pixar need people with comp sci degrees and PhDs, but most corporate programming doesn't. A degree has only become a requirement because of the number of people with degrees.

Dropping the spending would focus universities on the courses that they really need to provide rather than the slurry degrees they do now.

Cameron - my thoughts so far

I didn't like the look of this government in opposition, but I'm starting to warm to it. I'd generally assumed Cameron to be a bit of a wet lettuce, but I had in the back of my mind that possibly he was just playing a smart, tactical game. I now believe that this is what is happening.

Firstly, Cam/Osborne had to get elected. BBC and Labour propaganda has been for years that the Conservatives would cut and there would be disastrous consequences. A lot of the public actually fell for this. So, the Cameron strategy was to basically say "we don't want to cut anything". Then, you get into power, dig through the accounts, find things are pretty awful, and what you start doing is cutting the really, really useless parts of government.

Now, Labour's part comes into play - they start protesting about how disastrous all these cuts are. Of course, cutting the arts is not disastrous in the least. Other than a few Guardian readers and the people involved in producting kabuki theatre, or plays about paraplegic lesbians in Iran, no-one else is affected. Certainly not the people who spend their money going to see Toy Story 3.

The effect of this is that people start to see that actually, cutting parts of government aren't too scary.

At the same time, the Conservatives have cleverly left the NHS alone. The NHS is totemic for Labour, the NHS is also something that a lot of people don't use that much (unless they're old). But a lot of people know about good and bad schools, and how terrible many of them are, and many parents in good schools would opt for private schools, if they could afford it. Parent-run schools are going to take off like a rocket. People are going to meet people whose kids are at parent-run schools who will have great stories about how much better their schools are than under the old LEA. This then sets up the government to go after health afterwards.