Banditry: The idle musings of John B

In general, the New South Wales drivers theory test is a Bumper Book of Common Sense. However, I’m disappointed by question FD035:

FD035 – Fatigue and Defensive Driving RUH
You are driving an older relative for an appointment and are running late. They ask you to go faster to get there on time. You should –
a) Choose a safe speed and say you will not go any faster
b) Take the advice of a more experience driver and go faster where you can.
c) Drop them off at the train station.

According to the Bumper Book of Common Sense, a) is the only permissible answer.

This is bad and wrong. When some silly old sod is hassling a kid (since 95%+ of Australians learn to drive in their teens) to drive dangerously, “here’s the train station, now piss off” is clearly the most appropriate response…

From Ars Technica, enlightening the ‘net neutrality’ debate, a piece on the corrupt institutions and robber barons who hijacked the Victorian equivalent of the Internet.

This digression was interesting:

The result was the infamous Credit Mobilier scandal of the 1870s… Rather than license the construction of the Union Pacific railroad to an independent contractor, its Board of Directors farmed the work out to Credit Mobilier, a company that was, essentially, themselves. In turn, Credit billed the UP vastly more than the actual cost of the project. To keep Congress quiet about the affair, the firm offered stock in itself to Representatives and Senators of any political persuasion at bargain basement prices.

The piece compared the scandal to Enron. But for some reason (and I’m struggling to work out why the thought hit me at this point), I started to wonder whether any Treasury politicians or officials in place in the early 2000s were granted generous share options or shares in Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Bombardier, EDF or Thames Water…

From CiF:

We managed to add a 5th terminal to Heathrow without too many problems – apart from some lost baggage in the immediate aftermath; which, while tiresome, was hardly a showstopper. Trouble is, with our infinite capacity to see the negative, this was seen as some kind of apocalyptic proof of how useless we are at infrastructure.

The French built a new terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport a couple of years before Heathrow terminal 5. It fell down.

In the last couple of weeks, Boris Johnson has done three good things that I can remember:

* Allegedly had a row with David Cameron about Crossrail, taking London’s side
* Endorsed cycling home after a couple of beers
* Supported restarting tours of London’s disused Tube stations

Meanwhile, I can’t think of anything bad he’s suggested over the same time. And yes, I know the whole point about the probably-manufactured Crossrail row is to do a ‘moderate’ act, and I know the latter two points are irrelevant identity statements with no serious policy implications, and this kind of thing still isn’t going to make me vote for him.

And yet… and yet the latter two are identity statements that I approve of. The public admission that having a few drinks isn’t a problem, and doesn’t impair your functionality to the extent that you can’t ride a bleedin’ bike [*], is both entirely true and against the mood of these curmudgeonly times. And tours of disused Tube stations will make existing geeks happy and help recruit new ones – and were done without any problems until 2000, so clearly could be restarted without causing any major harm. Indeed, both are the kinds of things that humourless pseudo-experts rail against, whilst not causing any major harm. They’re the opposite of the showcasing, ‘let’s ban stuff that doesn’t do any major harm but that we don’t like to send a message’ side that makes the current government so loathsome [**].

And yes, I know that Boris’s tube-booze ban is the ultimate example of a spurious ban, second only to the Tory plans to turn back the licensing laws to the absurd WWI-dictated situation that prevailed previously [***].

So, can we have someone on the left who’s prepared to stick up for Fun Stuff over Spurious Bans? Hell, someone on any official side would do. Then again, since the target audience at this election apparently consists of middle-aged nurses who’re afraid of everything, probably not.

[*] Car comparisons are spurious. We allow kids to ride bikes, fercrissakes.

[**] I might, through extremely gritted teeth, vote for them this time round as discussed. But my God, they are.

[***] The licensing laws are an excellent example of lobbying from big business creating an unalloyed improvement that neither party dared to or wanted to bring about in their own right. Since the public mood at the moment still seems rather puritan, I’m thanking all deities for the fact that the booze industry has deep pockets and political influence.

Following this research into GE-made Airbus engines cutting out in ice, he say:

So far as the GE-powered AF 447 is concerned, the potential woes go on mounting:

* Dodgy AF training for weather
* Failure to change course for weather
* Sensors buggered by extreme temperature and/or turbulence
* Avionics gave up – handed control to pilots
* Who were probably asleep when the woes started
* And probably were only two junior officers (captain on rest break)
* Engines vulnerable to flame-out
* Plane previously damaged
* etc., etc.,

I’m continuing to avoid AF.

I also note that the French authorities leading the search failed – despite having a nuclear submarine easily capable of deep-water searches – to find the black boxes that would have shown whether the crash was the fault of the French national airline, the French national aircraft manufacturer, or something mysterious and improbably neither-of-the-above. This is my ‘shocked’ face.

Update: Air France has great deals in international flights right now. See also: hotels in Xinjiang, greased-pig-racing weekends, Labour prospective candidatures, etc.

I think pretty much everything in my RMT piece from last summer still applies today.

Note in particular: 1) Low turnout and non-spectacular majority indicating this is a Crow effort not grassroots; 2) Tories using the RMT’s intransigence to lobby for (even) more draconian public sector anti-strike rules; 3) DLR, Thameslink, Overground are all working (as would be ELL, extended Thameslink and Crossrail, if they were built yet); 4) absolutely no support from Aslef and TSSA, leaving many Tube lines running too; 5) reports of RMT drivers blacklegging.

Inspired specifically by this piece, but more generally by the dozens of such pieces, left and right, which perpetuate ludicrous myths about the cost of travelling on the trains.

The fact is, in Great Britain, train fares rise at a couple of percentage points above inflation every year. This isn’t surprising – most of the cost of running a railway is that of paying people, and (at least when the economy’s growing, as it was for the last 10 years) people like to be given pay rises above inflation every year too.

So every year, trains get slightly more affordable to the average person (because the average person’s income rises by 2-3% above inflation), but slightly more expensive in cash terms, than they were the year before. Like sandwiches, or pies, or haircuts, or pretty much any other consumer service that can’t be imported from China.

(since such stories are rarely complete without a questionably chosen anecdote about outrageous prices – I went from London to Birmingham and back at the weekend, heading out in the Friday rush hour, with a £30 return ticket bought on the day. That works for me…)

Quoth our illustrious mayor (via):

I am informed that, thankfully, there have been no fatal accidents arising from collisions between cyclists and articulated buses in London since the introduction of articulated vehicles.

Serious incidents are defined by TfL as those where a cyclist may have required treatment, including in hospital. There was one serious incident involving a cyclist in each of the years 2005/06 and 2006/07, and two in 2007/08.

In other words, the data collated by TfL and accepted by the mayor clearly shows that bendy buses are not dangerous for cyclists.

As Tom from Blairwatch says,

At this point you checkmate him by pointing to the reams of documentation on gyratory systems and perceived cycling safety, particularly referring to Parliament Square, Elephant and Castle, Aldgate etc.

Indeed. The mayor isn’t pro-cycling; if he were, then he wouldn’t be adjusting the traffic flow to make cars faster and more dangerous, or pretending that something completely harmless to cyclists is a threat to them. He’s a traditional Tory ideologue, who hates public transport, urbanites and the poor, and loves cars, suburbanites and the wealthy, wearing an extremely skimpy green veil.

The implications for the next Westminster elections are pretty obvious. I can understand wanting to get the current lot out, and I can understand the argument that a Tory government might be less bad than the plausible alternatives. But if you’re voting Tory, don’t delude yourself they’re some kind of NuLabLite and that all you’re opting for is a change of leader – they’re still the party of Michael Howard and Mrs Thatcher, and a vote for them is an endorsement of the whole Thatcherite project.

(I might be being unfair – it’s just about possible that the mayor has no understanding of evidence-based policymaking, and genuinely doesn’t realise that the statistics are a bloody good reason to cancel his hare-brained scheme. I’m not sure that hoping the future PM is merely an idiot rather than a dishonest ideologue is a wonderfully optimistic position to be in, though…)

[phone rings]
BJ: Wot ho, Bozza here.
BC: Hello. I’m Bob Crow, and I’m evil. I’m going to lead the Tube maintenance workers out on strike (a 5% pay rise just isn’t enough, you see) and paralyse the city.
BC: [evil laugh]
BJ: Oh. That’s dashed inconvenient. Is there, erm, anything we can do to appease you?
BC: Hmmm.
BC: [evil laugh]
BC: Well, there is one thing…
BJ: Jolly good, I always say that reasonable chaps can work things out reasonably.
BC: The guy you hired to run TfL – you know, the one with the record in taking over badly run, overmanned companies, cutting costs, improving services, breaking union strangleholds, that kind of thing?
BJ: Oh yes, Timmy. A bit of an oik – his daddy was a squaddie, what, but the only chap on my team who isn’t a completely useless buffoon.
BC: Hmmm.
BC: He goes.
BC: [evil laugh]
BJ: And that way your chaps will take the 5%?
BC: Oh yes…
BJ: Spiffing fun. Timmy goes, strike’s off, let’s all have tea and cakes.
BC: …until next time.
BC: [evil laugh]

Chris Dillow makes sense:

“If people are prepared to lend to government at less than 1% real interest, let’s bleed them dry, because cheap money won’t last forever; infrastructure spending should be undertaken now, whilst it’s cheap.”

The construction collapse will have the same effect on labour costs, which we can offset by removing the impact of crowding-out from multiple public-sector projects. So let’s go for 200,000 new council houses (£20bn); a TGV line from London to Leeds via Birmingham and Manchester (£20bn); and nuclear power stations covering 30% of UK energy requirements (£40bn); while also going ahead with Crossrail (£10bn).

These would raise the national debt by 7% of GDP to levels that are still historically fairly low, while adding £900m per year of real interest to be met by taxpayers (approximately a 0.1% increase in government spending).

If I was in a political party that looked almost certain to lose the next election, then borrowing an enormous amount of money to spend on infrastructure projects that won’t be completed for about 10 years (by which point the next government will be so tired and jaded that nobody will credit them with the achievement), would be top of my list of priorities at the best of times. The fact that it currently makes economic sense to do it is a happy coincidence, and hopefully one that’ll work in all our favour…