Brent Bans Fracking
This story about how Brent Council is going to ban fracking, must be the most silly of the weekend. It’s a bit like me saying, I won’t allow someone like Kate Moss to come round to my house for a cup of tea and some scones. Fracking needing to take place in Brent, is probably just as likely! Or should that be unlikely?
Dull-As-Ditchwater Television
The BBC has just started broadcasting proceedings in the Court of Appeal.
Judging by the excepts I’ve seen, I shall not be watching. It must surely rank for exciting content with BBC Parliament.
Why is the BBC wasting our licence fees on this dross?
The test card and Cambidge University’s first webcam, were much more interesting.
I did here a rumour that the Security Services wanted this coverage, as it is ideal to show to reluctant suspects. After a few hours of programmes such as this, they usually decide to tell everything.
Hollande Shows How To Ru(i)n Football
The top French football clubs, are showing what they think of President Hollande’s high earner tax, by going on strike, as is reported here on the BBC. Here’s the first paragraph.
French President Francois Hollande has rebuffed protests against a 75% tax on high earners, prompting football clubs to press on with a planned “strike”.
Mr Hollande stood firm by his plan to levy the tax on incomes above 1m euros (£850,000; $1.36m) at a meeting with club presidents.
Ed Milliband admitted in this interview to being a lapsed Leeds United supporter and now follows Doncaster, so expect him to raise taxes like Hollande if he gets elected, as it won’t effect any of his teams. It might even raise Doncaster into the Premier League!
Switching Energy Suppliers In Twenty Four Hours
I was trained as a Control Engineer, and know that the quicker you can make adjustments to a system, the faster it will stabilise. So the aim of being able to switch energy suppliers in 24 hours, would have the effect of stabilising prices, at a level acceptable to both suppliers and customers. It is unlikely that prices would rise because of this, as why would a customer switch to a more expensive supplier?
So hopefully prices will fall.
I can also see, why the Big Six do not want 24-hour switching. It’s curtains for a CEO, who brings it in, as there would be tremendous resistance and instant flight on the part of customers to the raising of prices.
Intel Raises The White Flag
This article about Intel and its fight with ARM could be the most significant story about the rise of the Cambridge upstart for the next few months. This is the opening paragraph.
Unable to break through with its own mobile Atom chipset, it seems that Intel finally raised the white flag and has decided to begin manufacturing 64-bit ARM chips of its own.
The article, then goes on to speculate about future relationships between ARM, Intel and Apple. It finishes with this statement.
Intel’s potential ability to make high quality 64-bit ARM CPU’s may be enough to entice Apple into taking the plunge, and perhaps even get an exclusivity agreement in the meantime.
That would be an alliance!
That Was A Storm That Wasn’t
Yesterday’s storm wasn’t exactly one in a teacup, but compared to that of October 16th, 1987, it wasn’t the biggest. The BBC have a comparison here.
Personally, I was unaffected this time, especially as that of 1987 could have killed me. I went to a celebration last night near Berkeley Square and except for getting rather wet, I didn’t have any problems. But several of those present had come down from Liverpool and had tales of taxis from Rugby or roundabout routes via Reading.
Sadly four people died in the storm, but the level of damage was a lot less than 1987, where it took two weeks for Suffolk to get back to normal.
There was a bit of damage near where I live.
Damage In Southgate Road
But it was all reasonably back to normal by mid-morning, when this picture was taken.
Are Scots More Dangerous Pedestrians?
When I was in Scotland, I saw an article in The Scotsman entitled Scotland is ‘deadliest place to go for a walk’
Here’s the first paragraph.
Scotland has Europe’s worst record for pedestrian deaths in towns and cities, campaigners claimed yesterday, as new official figures showed the total soared by one-third last year.
I don’t know but as a careful pedestrian, who always waits for the green, I found that in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I’d wait and found when it went green, everybody else had long gone.
So perhaps Scots do walk more dangerously!
Does The Devil Look After Her Own?
Admittedly, I don’t live in a place, which is likely to suffer much from today’s storms, which seem mainly to be a gloomfest for the media.
But I’ve already had my very lucky escape from a big storm, as I said here.
I have a feeling though that this storm, won’t be anything like that one in October 1987.
Who’d Have Thought It?
I have a Google Alert on my name and sometimes it picks up an interesting story like this one from NBC, entitled Curing Mississippi’s blues with Iranian care? Here’s the introduction.
An American doctor from Mississippi searched far and wide for solutions to his state’s endemic health problems.
Now, after years of practicing what he calls “health diplomacy,” Dr. James Miller, director of Oxford International Development Group in Mississippi, thinks he may have found some solutions in what may seem like an unlikely place: Iran.
Whether he’s right or not I don’t know, but you have to agree it’s not a story, you’d expect to read on an American news feed from NBC.
Good luck to the doctor.
We Need More Openness Everywhere
This story from the BBC is a big dose of common sense from MPs. Here’s the jist.
Councils in England should publish annual parking-charge accounts if they want to prove they are not being used as a “cash cow”, MPs have said.
I think we need much better access to all government data.
Here’s a few ideas.
If you run a company, as I’ve done several times, you have to publish a set of simple accounts, including things like cash flows and a profit and loss statement.
Why shouldn’t the government publish such a brief set of accounts, which the man on the Dalston Omnibus could understand?
But of course they don’t!
Some years ago, I tried to find the data to do create some simple accounts for UK plc. The data is there, but it is in several different places and despite help from a BBC financial journalist, I thought I had better things to do, than dig holes in treacle.
I would also like to see an anonymised database of those who are in prison. A man like me would be described as male, 60-70 in reasonable health, who was a non-smoker living in North London.
It would allow those, who make wild statements about prisons to be challenged and hopefully, it would lead to better justice and penal policies.
I must admit, that it has got a lot better in recent years with the growth of the Internet, but too often, data that would help us to have better lives is hidden from view.
The NHS is one of the worst for hiding data. There has been a lot of discussion about A & E units in recent years. Surely, a database should be available on the Internet, of all visits to this department. Again, it would be anonymised.
It would then be easy to find out for instance, how many drunks turned up at various hospitals demanding treatment.
The trouble is, that a national database in this area of the NHS, would show how A & E departments should change to get fit for the twenty-first century. Some would be obvious candidates for closure, whereas others would need to be expanded with special units.
As Charles Babbage said
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
Give everybody the data, so that we can all finish the job!
You don’t make a good omelette without breaking a few eggs.
y
The Anonymous Widower 