Boredom = Torture
According to The Telegraph, a school’s isolation unit has been likened to Guantanamo Bay.
The room is painted totally black. The walls, the partitions, the window blinds – everything was black.
The partitions down one side created four cells where school kids are expected to sit at a desk all day.
I would rather take my son out of school than see him spend time in that dungeon.
Gosh. I recall on one occasion I was required to stand alone in the lobby of the school for one hour as a punishment for something or other. At the time it just annoyed me, but now I realize that it was in fact a shockingly medieval form of punishment. Boredom plus public humiliation. Perhaps I should sue the school under human rights laws.
Get real. Boredom + public humiliation are just about the only punishments that you can legitimately apply in UK schools. Next they’ll be asking that teachers refrain from using sarcasm to humiliate kids in their classes.
Libertarian Ebooks
The Mises Institute has an enormous selection of over 2,500 libertarian ebooks available for download from Mises Literature. I’m starting with The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn (1949) and The Regulated Consumer by Mary Bennett Peterson (1971). Let me know if you have any recommendations.
Olympic Logo Firm Nails It
The London Games Organizing Committee asked Wolff Olins for a logo that was:
- dynamic … check
- different to previous Olympic logos … check
- flexible … check
- instantly recognizable … check
I think Wolff Olins delivered.
Sadly the Committee forgot to ask for number 5:
5. Attractive.
Duh!
MTAS: Inadvertantly Hilarious
I once wrote a simple to-do list web application. It took me a few hours, and it was for my own amusement and understanding. No one but me ever used it or even knew it existed. It was online for all of a few days.
Yet still, that to-do list application was better secured than the MTAS system.
Tim Worstall has a good explanation of how security works in web applications. It might seem complicated to a lay person, but let me assure you that it is not. Tim is not joking when he says it is Day 2 of a script-kiddy cracker course. It is Day 1 of a web application design course.
Gross incompetence is putting it mildly.
4874 Spam Comments
I just deleted 4874 spam comments from the database. Wordpress crawled under the table and whimpered when I tried to use the normal interface, so I had to use PhpMyAdmin and figure out the database layout. Fortunately it wasn’t hard.
DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘0′
did the trick. I have now activated Akismet.
It’s an abuse of language to call this profit.
According to the BBC:
Network Rail, which runs Britain’s railway tracks and signals, is expected to announce it has made a profit for the first time in its history.
There is no sense in which we can call the excess subsidy that has been showered on this body a ‘profit’. Profit refers to your value added, to the amount by which you have made your customers’ lives better. Profit is not: compare your costs to the made up number which is what the government thinks it can get away with giving you, and if costs are smaller you win!
The very fact that subsidies are given to Network Rail means that it is NOT in profit. It would be in profit if it could fund itself by voluntary payments for services rendered to its customers. It CANT, so I have no idea where they get the cheek to say they are profitable.
Slight Error
Civitas has released a new set of ‘balanced’ student worksheets on the EU. Great idea, but what about this line in worksheet 4, paragraph 1:
The EU represents one of the greatest experiments in political history.For the first time nations have chosen to surrender aspects of their national sovereignty to a central body that has a responsibility to ensure that they act for the good not only of themselves but of other nations as well.
Aside from the tranzi sentiments (this is the pro-EU worksheet), is the EU really the first time that independent nations have pooled sovereignty to a central body? Seems like it might have happened before.
UPDATE: In a similar vein, Tim Worstall has problems with the same worksheet.
It’s Arrived!
It’s beautiful.
Oh To Have Your Problems
The Americans are getting worked up because of a new law, McCain-Feingold, that makes it a crime to screen certain political ads before elections. As a Brit, I’d love to have their problems. Here in Britain it’s basically illegal to screen any political ads at any time by any one.
Parties can’t screen ads for their candidates (they get a few `official’ broadcasts that each last 5 minutes in the run up to elections, you can imagine how much they get watched). But also, independent groups can’t screen ads that in any way touch on politics. In Britain, you can’t run an ad that supports or opposes a bill, just as you can’t run issue ads that say, call for lower taxes. Nope, all against the law.
We also have speech codes, produced by the regulator Ofcom, that require `impartiality’ and no `undue prominence of views and opinions’ from broadcasters. Note that this is ridiculous since in Britain, the media are without question left-wing to varying degrees. In practice, `impartiality’ means adhering to the dominant centre-left line of the BBC. This makes things like partisan talk radio a punishable offence. No Howard Stern or Hugh Hewitt over here. Both illegal. Certainly no FOX.
I’ll reiterate that this isn’t just during election season, this is ever.
To American conservatives, think how much more dominant the left-wing MSM would be now if your parties and organisations had been banned from ever screening ads, if talk radio was banned, and if FOX news could never have been founded. Here in Britain, all those things can never happen, by law.
So by all means criticize the new bill, because for God’s sake don’t let your country end up like this one, but at the same time, you guys are lucky. And free.
Stupidity of Ethnic Quotas
The recent news that employers may face ethnic quotas is even stupider than you think.
I created a simulation of the hiring process for firms to estimate the chance of falling foul of these quotas even if you are perfectly non-discriminatory.
Assumptions: the population is completely homogenous in terms of skills, and ethnic minorities form 10% of the population.
Let’s suppose that your application for government work will be considered unfavourably if ethnic minorities make up less than half the percentage of your workforce as in the population.
Results:
- If you have 100 employees, and are absolutely completely non-prejudiced against minority applicants, there is a 2.3% chance of breaking the rules anyway.
- If you have 50 employees, there is an 11.3% chance.
Youch! Not the kind of risks a business should be taking. What to do, what to do?
I know, discriminate in favour of minority applicants! What are the statistics for that?
Result:
- If you have 100 employees, you’d better start giving around a 55% greater weight to job applications from ethnic minorities if you want your chance of totally innocently being denied contracts to fall below 1%.
Well at least its clear what you have to do. If you have ten applicants for a position, nine white, one black, you should pick the black guy about 15% of the time.
Of course, this is just what firms should be doing in the long run, obviously if you are below the line right now you need to work a bit harder at being diverse, and give a really much bigger weight to minority applications.
Do I sense a business opportunity here? Do you think firms would pay money for statistical analyses of this type? After all, it’s only good risk management. It could work out the exact ‘affirmative action’ quotient your business needs at any given time.
Of course, since racism certainly exists, for many it won’t be an ‘affirmative action’ quotient, so much as a counterbalance for prejudice that actually exists.
Needless to say, it hardly seems as though policies of this sort are going to end racism as we know it.
(If you want the code for my simulation, ask in the comments. It’s in Ruby)