Ah yes, St. Valentine’s Day. 
The shop windows are filled with endless tacky heart-shaped corporate eye-catchers and the air is filled with cupid’s arrows… and other rather faster moving objects.
Have fun.
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February 14th, 2004 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In Euractiv, it is reported that the next Justice and Home Affairs Council on the 19th-20th February will pass a draft directive authorising the collection of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data from non-EU nationals by airlines flying to a Member State. The data will be transferred to agencies in charge of the EU’s external borders in order to aid the management of immigration.
The original Spanish proposal was watered down after the House of Lords, amongst other bodies, pointed out that this placed a huge burden upon air and sea carriers. The draft directive will fail if it has not passed by April 30th under the auspices of the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Irish Presidency has crafted a compromise whereby biometric data is excluded and the burden is limited to air carriers. Statewatch had already raised the flag on this proposal to transform air and sea carriers into data collection and surveillance agencies for external border control agencies. February 14th, 2004 | Comments are closed
In addition to loving skyscrapers I also have a thing about bridges, and I periodically feature a picture of a bridge at my Culture Blog. Sometimes the pictures are taken by me, of one or other of the many bridges of London. Sometimes they are acquired from the infinity of information that is the Internet. Some while ago I featured the Coronado Bridge, which is next to San Diego. In that connection someone else drew my attention to another splendid bridge in Macao. Commenting on that posting, Phil Cohen has this to say about the Coronado Bridge:
How about that for an unintended consequence of taxpayer funding. They help you if yours is a long bridge, so San Diego builds a long bridge instead of a short bridge! If you want to see even more clearly what Phil Cohen is talking about, just take a look at this map! It is very rare that government spending has such conspicuously visible results. Normally, when governments waste money – which is what they mostly do with money, after all – the waste all happens tucked away in offices and in the form of a few thousand quietly invisible salaries for suburbanites. For every Concorde or Space Shuttle or daft piece of architecture there are a hundred bits of wastage that are no more exciting to look at than evaporating water. But this Coronado Bridge story really makes the point. Personally I prefer the highly visible kind of government wastage. First, it is often, as with this bridge, and as with Concorde, very pretty to look at. Second, it very prettily dramatises how wasteful government spending can be, and I like that even more. February 14th, 2004 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Of course I have sensitivity, you know… I just refuse to use it with my friends February 14th, 2004 | Comments are closed
Compared to other people (or rather, other people of my acquaintance) I joined the internet revolution rather late. While most people I meet are able to boast that they have had an e-mail address since the late (or even mid) 1980’s, I was not similarly endowed until 1998. But what I lacked in early adoption techniques I made up for in subsequent enthusiasm. This was a whole new frontier and I revelled and rejoiced in the exhilirating liberation it provided. I am sure that plenty of our readers have experienced that same feeling. And it was while I was on this big journey of discovery and emancipation that I stumbled across a forum (there were no blogs in those olden times) run by LM Magazine. LM stands (or stood) for ‘Living Marxism’ and it was run by the same people who, today, run Spiked-Online. As with most internet fora, there was a regular contingent of posters and, in the case of the LM Forum, this consisted of a whole gaggle of Marxists, Communists and Trotskyites. Into this lion’s den barged (or perhaps blundered) two libertarians; one of them was me and the other was an American called Ed Collins. → Continue reading: My friend Ed February 14th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? February 13th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
The daft furor over the outsourcing of job to India (and other places) is just another example of how amazingly primitive the understanding of economics is which prevails amongst the media and political elites in the USA (though no worse than elsewhere I might add). The same troglodyte notions that lead people to think that cheaper foreign steel being imported into the USA is a bad thing (which is just another way of saying that manufacturing cheaper cars, homes and ships in the USA are a bad thing), lead the same people to in effect say that allowing Americans to purchase cheaper computer programs and requiring them to pay more for call center services is also a bad thing.
Sure, if your IT or helpdesk job as just been outsourced to Bombay, it might seem like A Bad Thing for you personally… but then that is just as true if your job in New Jersey has just been taken by someone in Biloxi, Mississippi because your company has just relocated to where costs (and taxes) are cheaper… the overall effect is that companies, and outsourcable functions of companies, will go wherever it makes sense for them to go… and so they should! However notion that India has such a comparative advantage just because they have produced a reasonable pool of IT and call centre people who will work for far less than their counterparts in California does rather miss the obvious fact that India is far from suitable for all or even most IT or call centre jobs. Troubleshooting a network in Texas is rather hard to do from New Delhi and to think people in Asia will have such a deep understanding of American (or British or European) cultural mores that all help desks and call centres will end up there is rather bizarre. Companies who out-source unsuitable jobs will end up being punished by the market if their quality falls below the point which lower costs can offset such a fall, and some jobs are very quality sensitive indeed. It should be screamingly obvious that stopping people in India (and elsewhere) from exploiting their competitive advantages does not only hurt them, it hurts everyone who is a customer for those products. Rather than engaging in unbecoming grovelling, George ‘Steel & Lumber Tariff’ Bush should redeem himself by responding to the Troglodyte faction by pugnaciously asking them “So, what exactly did the American consumer do to you to make you hate them so much, guys?” If a company is not free to run their business and the location of the people who make it work, to best suit the company’s interests, who pays in the end? The company’s customers do, of course. And that means you. February 13th, 2004 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
David is too easily impressed. Over here in Ireland, we were doing public sector cannibalism when public sector cannibalism wasn’t cool. In 1992, the Irish Labour party broke with tradition by entering into a coalition government with Fianna Fail. The Labour party had increased its share of the vote after a campaign of vigorous opposition to Fianna Fail. To placate its voters, most of whom had expected that they were kicking FF out of government, and because they were feeling cocky, Labour demanded a whole raft of rhetorical leftiness in the government program. One of these was to rename the crusty old “right wing” Department of Justice as the brand new, “compassionate” Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. A consequence of this was the establishment of Citizen Traveller, charged with:
This translates as: a Traveller-advocacy group working out of a government department, their motto: “Promoting travellers as an ethnic minority”. So when one government department – the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform – enacted legislation to enable the police to evict caravans which were trespassing on private property, a branch of the same government department – Citizen Traveller – took out expensive billboard and newspaper advertisements to protest this “racist and unworkable law”. We are unfortunate in that, despite his classical liberal background, our current Justice minister Michael McDowell has developed a Blunkett-like authoritarianism but he is to be congratulated for phasing “Equality” out of his department and ultimately shutting down Citizen Traveller. February 13th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The General Accounting Office warned today that the Transportation Security Administration’s high-tech system to screen airline passengers for terrorist connections faces significant testing and deployment delays, which could affect the program’s ultimate success.
There are other significant issues facing U.S. airport security, according to a former top Israeli airport security official and the director of security at Virgin Atlantic Airlines. According to these officials, who spoke Tuesday during an online Terror and Technology conference sponsored by IDPartners LLC, the U.S. runs a major risk by focusing too much on information technology and other high-tech solutions to uncover terrorist plots against airports and airlines. Rafi Ron, president of New Age Security Solutions and the former head of security at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv explains that the terrorist threat against airlines is a relatively new experience in the U.S.
Rather than rely on IT systems for the bulk of security monitoring, Ron said airport authorities should use personnel training programs in behavior pattern recognition, which has been highly successful in Israel.
February 13th, 2004 | Comments are closed
Wired reports that privacy groups, business travelers and members of Congress asked the federal government this week to reconsider its plans to implement a passenger-profiling system because agencies have not adequately addressed privacy concerns or shown effectiveness in detecting potential terrorists. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California), joined by 25 other Democrats, sent President Bush a letter Wednesday asking his administration to protect passenger privacy. The group also proposed that airlines should tell passengers exactly what information they pass along as travelers make reservations.
CAPPS II will require passengers to give more personal information when buying airline tickets, information that will then be checked against mammoth commercial databases, watch lists and warrants to screen for suspected terrorists and people wanted for violent crimes. An ideologically diverse group of public-interest groups – including Common Cause, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation -joined the letter-writing campaign, asking Congress for hearings. February 13th, 2004 | Comments are closed
I believe I detect some tantalising signs that the Many-Headed Hydra of the British State is, at last, beginning to eat itself:
This ‘institutional racism’ thingy has turned out to be a very useful multi-purpose weapon. Perhaps they should drop one into Iraq to help quell the insurgents. In any event, considering the disproportionately high number of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who work in the NHS, I find this accusation very hard to believe. In fact, I will go as far as saying that it is bunkum. Bunkum on stilts. Bunkum with knobs on. About as plausible as an EU anti-corruption drive.
We have to respect the fact that some people choose to be stark, raving bonkers and that that choice is just as valid as people who happen to be in full control of their mental faculties. All states of mind are the same and doing things like eating spiders and lurking around public parks flashing the old one-eyed trouser snake at little old ladies are merely alternative lifestyle choices that we should celebrate. In fact, these people are not barmy at all, they are just….differently conscious. But, truly, this is a puzzlement. The NHS is the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the public sector and the only thing still holding that wheezing, cankered Leviathan together is the commitment and morale of the staff working within. What better way to dissolve all that goodwill than by subjecting them to the kind of Inquisitional ordeal that ‘cultural awareness training’ entails? Do these accusers not appreciate or realise that the possible consequences of their campaign might be to cattle-prod this most sacred of sacred cows straight into the merciless metal teeth of the abbatoir? Or perhaps they do realise but they simply do not care? Perhaps the years of unimpaired success have so sharpened the appetites of these professional race warriors that they have become like ravenous wolves, turning on their class confreres and ripping out great gobs of flesh in a feeding frenzy? Well, either way, I say it is best to let nature take its course. February 13th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, lovers out there, St. Valentine’s Day is rapidly approaching. For those in the mood I heartily recommend the new CD by that wonderful young diva, Norah Jones, who’s debut album has already sold a reported 17 million copies worldwide. Ms Jones’s success and background got me thinking on an important cultural point. We are led to believe, for example, that globalisation will lead to the extinction of local, unique cultures and the replacement of a sort of mushy global soup. And yet as the writer Tyler Cowen showed in a recent excellent book on the cultural riches possible via globalisation, the growing mix of different cultures possible on today’s world is making possible new directions in areas like music and art. Norah Jones, with her mixed ethnic background and her fusion of country and western, blues and soul music styles, is a living embodiment of what Cowen means. And she is certainly rather easy on the eye, in case you wondered.  Update: The new album, “Feels Like Home”, which has a more overtly country feel, is excellent, in my view. February 12th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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