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ajs_dy

Listed below are comments made by ajs_dy between Wednesday, 22nd July 2009 and Thursday, 29th October 2009.

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Scientists v Politicians: Round 3 1:47pm on 29 Oct 2009 @CountingChickens, #63:
You can not produce the amount of cannabis used in this country in people's greenhouses. There is not a day goes past without our local police discovering a cannabis farm where criminals rent a house,connect illegally to the electricity supply and use tens of thousands of Pounds of stolen electricity to produce cannabis.
And this behaviour is happening precisely because it is illegal.

Factories producing legal goods have to pay for their electricity, and are subject to annual inspections to ensure they are not likely to catch on fire or give anybody an electric shock. If anything, you seem to be arguing in favour of legalisation and regulation.
Do you speak Race? 1:22pm on 23 Oct 2009 Whatever word you use to describe something, someone somewhere will take offence at it. And whatever word you replace it with to avoid causing offence, eventually someone else somewhere else will take offence at it.

The end result is a Sisyphean struggle of coining new euphemisms to replace the old ones.

It's compounded by certain sectors apparently taking offence by proxy.
Will we miss the targets? 6:51pm on 22 Oct 2009 JadedJean is a computer program and I claim my £5 prize.
The picket and the postage stamp 5:24pm on 22 Oct 2009 Everyone, please remember the Royal Mail.

And one day in future, when the postal service has been privatised; when you have to refer to a book of confusing tables (which you have to pay for a new one of, when the prices change) to find out how much it is going to cost you, to send what size and weight of letter, to where in the world (starting at £1 for a small envelope just to the next street); when you can be charged for receiving items of mail; and when there is a steady supply of advertising junk mail through your letter box from which you cannot opt-out because "it helps to pay for the service",

Remember that this is exactly what you gave your approval to, if you did not support the striking postal workers in 2009.
Will we miss the targets? 3:02pm on 22 Oct 2009 The box-ticking culture in public services is born from the same ideas as the testing-obsessed culture in education already mentioned elsewhere on this blog (and which, arguably, is merely a subset of the same condition).

Instead of measuring performance properly (which would be very difficult), a facile method is employed based on something that would ordinarily be a rough indicator of performance.

However, once those under scrutiny are aware of how their performance is being measured, they learn to take advantage of the measurement methods. So, for instance, we get doctors treating the least-serious patients first. Although this shortens average waiting times, it means that the most serious cases (which will take longer to process) get seen last. But this is not a measured statistic, so everyone is happy -- except the patients whose care was neglected for the sake of making the doctor's figures look better! Meanwhile, those who retain some integrity and treat patients in order of need end up with longer average waiting times and get told to work harder, and no, there's no more money available.
Map of the Week: Addressing educational underachievement 2:26pm on 20 Oct 2009 The problem really comes back to the simple fact that it's very easy to count people with formal qualifications; it's much harder to count people who are good at their jobs (unless the measurement of how good they are at their job is simply the rate at which they accumulate money). It's also very much easier to inflate formal qualifications artificially, than it is to make people look better at their jobs than they really are (unless they can make themselves appear better just by awarding themselves more money).

So we have got universities awarding mickey-mouse degrees and privatised matriculation boards making GCSEs and A-levels easier year-on-year, to make it look as though the population are better educated. Meanwhile, real jobs aren't getting easier at the same rate. Precision plastic mouldings have replaced complex assemblies of many separate machined parts, printed circuits have replaced spaghetti-wiring, more jobs are being done with the aid of machines and best practices are improving as people find slightly better ways to do jobs that they have always done, but these "real" advances are coming at a much slower rate than the "fake" academic advances. Which is to be expected. After all, current will always equal voltage divided by resistance; it will always take 70 watt-minutes of heat energy to make a litre of water one degree hotter; extinguishing a fire will always require the removal of one of fuel, heat or oxygen; you will always need a rooster to get baby chicks; a sharp tool will always do a better job than a blunt tool; and the human body will always work the same way. No amount of pieces of paper will ever change these things. Reality is not malleable.

Some people are good at the jobs they do, some people aren't, qualifications aren't a good indication and it's no good pretending otherwise. As long as people who can't do their jobs but have pieces of paper to say they are try to tell people who are good at their jobs but don't have pieces of paper how to do them, we are in serious danger of becoming a nation of middlemen. And middlemen can be missed out .....
A big match for Broadband Britain 10:56am on 07 Oct 2009 Never mind any of that. Does it work with Linux?
Benefit cuts consensus? 2:23pm on 05 Oct 2009 What is really needed is to create some real jobs.

The EU as a whole need to come together and restrict the import of goods that have been produced under conditions that would not be acceptable in the EU (fair wages, workers' rights, safe working conditions, pollution controls &c). There's simply no way we can compete fairly with bosses who pay their workers a pittance to work in unsanitary conditions without union representation, while guaranteeing local workers all the protections denied to their overseas counterparts.

This does mean that prices will rise at first -- although the creation of jobs means that more people will eventually be able to afford to buy locally-made goods. A greater initial investment will be necessary to offset this.

Or let me put it this way: The poor are never going to get any richer unless the rich get a little poorer.
Broadband Britain - how far down the league? 2:29pm on 01 Oct 2009 I think something needs to be done, but I am not at all certain that that "something" is simply to increase Internet connectivity. Rather, we need to take a step back and question whether everything should be moving online in the first place? Would it not be better to ensure that even people without an Internet connection can receive access to goods and services?

There is a lot of proprietary technology around, and proprietary technology is toxic. Manufacturers use it to limit what you can and cannot do with it.

For instance, artificial obsolescence is engineered into Microsoft Office by changing the file formats every few years. Newer computers come with a newer version of Office which saves files in a format that older versions cannot understand, thereby forcing users of older versions to upgrade. Yet, the only thing that is wrong with the older software -- which has worked perfectly well up to now -- is that it cannot read the newer files; Microsoft have deliberately done this, in order to ensure people are forced to upgrade

This dependency on proprietary technology ultimately means that money that people probably really ought to be spending on something important gets diverted instead into a revenue stream for Microsoft and the like.

We desperately need a new law to be passed which would make it an offence to require anyone to use any kind of proprietary technology in order to obtain goods or services; or to discriminate in favour of users of proprietary technology, for example by differential pricing.

Anything else is tantamount to privatisation of the law.
Sharpening elbows 11:41am on 22 Jul 2009 The tripartite system of education at least ensured that the brightest pupils could receive a Grammar School education, which in the end was as good as a Public School education. Mixed-ability teaching has lowered standards for everyone. As uncomfortable as it may be to admit this, one less-able (or less-willing) pupil can ruin a whole class.

Parental choice has made things even worse. A bright child from a poor family may well end up trapped in a school from which all the better-off parents have withdrawn their little darlings, leaving mainly ineducable chavs whose parents cannot be bothered about them. Only a minority will survive that experience to emerge with good examination grades.

Then there is the problem of grade distortion by the privatised matriculation boards. Schools want to be able to show high pass rates, encouraging boards to set easy examinations.

We need to take a hard line and re-introduce segregation by ability; as opposed to the present situation which, to all intents and purposes, is segregation by ability to pay. Yes, some children are not as smart as others. We ignore that at the peril of the smartest.

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