March 10, 2010
Some things never change
I was looking though some old postings and found this little gem, which is as true as ever:
It is a sad real-world fact that most legislators, when presented with something they do not understand, almost always attempt to ban it. This probably started with the first neolithic fire-tamer . . . who was probably beaten to death with sticks when the tribal shaman saw it. Senator Hatch is showing all the finely nuanced reactions of Ug the caveman here.
This was in reaction to Senator Orrin Hatch introducing a bill to make peer-to-peer file sharing illegal back in 2004.
George Monbiot: “There goes my life’s work”
As I mentioned when the Climategate scandal started to break, I fear that the misdeeds of climate scientist-activists would rebound against all scientists. George Monbiot seems to be coming around to sharing that concern:
The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as “white-coated prima donnas and narcissists . . . pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks . . . The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more.”
A small clique of activists managed to temporarily hijack the global agenda, with the potential to destroy untold trillions of dollars of economic development and reduce the freedom of billions of human beings. If the CRU data leak hadn’t taken place, we’d now be looking at massive government intervention in all areas of human existance, far beyond the dreams of power-mad dreamers.
If the threats to human existance were as bad as the CRU and IPCC declared, the actions our governments would have to take would be catastrophic for much of the world. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the level the global warming activists deemed appropriate, we’d have to pretty much give up fossil fuels altogether. We’d be condemning billions of people to starvation . . . without modern farming and modern transportation and storage facilities, we couldn’t feed the current population of the world.
To say that this is a setback to science is an understatement, for the actions of those few scientists will make all scientists that much more suspect. Given the alternative of forced curtailment or even abandonment of industrial civilization (and a death toll of unimaginable size) or scientists being given less credence by the public, the latter is by far the lesser evil.
Despite my iconoclastic, anti-corporate instincts, I now spend much of my time defending the scientific establishment from attacks by the kind of rabble-rousers with whom I usually associate. My heart rebels against this project: I would rather be pelting scientists with eggs than trying to understand their datasets. But my beliefs oblige me to try to make sense of the science and to explain its implications. This turns out to be the most divisive project I’ve ever engaged in. The more I stick to the facts, the more virulent the abuse becomes.
This doesn’t bother me — I have a hide like a glyptodon — but it reinforces the disturbing possibility that nothing works. The research discussed in the Nature paper shows that when scientists dress soberly, shave off their beards and give their papers conservative titles, they can reach across to the other side. But in doing so they will surely alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to trust them. As the MMR saga shows, people who mistrust authority are just as likely to kick against science as those who respect it.
Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.
H/T to Elizabeth who wrote “Is Monbiot on the road to Damascus? He hasn’t got there yet but he certainly is starting to question a lot of the greenery.”
There goes another slice of office productivity
Matt Peckham looks at a new “office productivity suite” which is sure to be popular in certain work-averse environments:
Pilot a spaceship, paddle a ball, even play horizontal Tetris, all while crafting reports, cutting costs, and scanning monthly performance charts…or at least appearing to. It’s the latest way to avoid work while looking like you’re furiously engaged in it.
The brainchild of four developers from the Netherlands, CantYouSeeImBusy.com teases a collection of free Flash-based mini games that let you slack off, chameleon-like, by adopting the form of an office productivity suite. Each one opens like a full-screen pop-up and offers a panic button that’s smarter than the average escape hatch: Tap the space bar and the “game” elements vanish, leaving just the “productivity” features in place.
“Let’s face it, we all want to relax every now and then, but still want to appear professional or busy!” reads the site intro. “That’s why all the games at CantYouSeeImBusy.com are designed in a way that nobody can see that you’re gaming. In fact, your boss and colleagues will think that you’re working harder than ever before.”
Police funding: Toronto increases budget, reduces staffing
Toronto’s police force is going to have to cut back on the number of officers on the beat, in spite of a $33 million budget increase since last year:
At an emergency meeting at police headquarters, the board voted to find temporary savings, which would bring spending down to the $888.1-million approved by the city in February, avoiding a clash over a $5.9-million disparity.
Police Chief Bill Blair said even temporary budget reductions would mean fewer officers on staff, and concerns about a reduction in the force’s effectiveness.
“At the end of the day, this is what you need to fund these service levels. The city doesn’t want to come back and say, ‘cut police officers,’ because politically, that is a difficult thing to suggest,” Chief Blair said. “But what they instead say is, ‘We won’t give you enough money to pay their salaries.’ So inevitably we have to cut the number of police officers.”
Last year’s budget was $854.8 million. So an increase to “only” $888.1 million means automatic cutbacks to staffing levels. That must make sense to someone, but it seems like only in the public sector can an increase in funding go hand-in-hand with a decrease in provided services.
California launches yet another attempt to tax out-of-state corporations
California is getting desperate to scrape up every penny it can, so a renewed proposal for a tax grab vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last year is back in play:
The online retail giant [Amazon.com] has enjoyed an edge over many competitors in the state because it is not required to collect sales tax from residents who buy books, top-of-the-line plasma televisions, cases of diapers and thousands of other products from its website. The Seattle corporation has no store, warehouse, office building or other physical presence in California, and the state cannot tax such businesses under a 1992 Supreme Court decision.
Consumers here are required to pay sales tax on the goods they purchase at Amazon but almost never do, because the state has no mechanism for tracking Amazon purchases and collecting the money.
No story is complete without a nasty accusation:
The Democrats who control California’s Legislature plan to put their own bid on the governor’s desk this month in hopes of reaping up to $150 million annually for state and local coffers. The revenue would make only a tiny dent in the state’s $20-billion deficit, but supporters say every dollar counts in tight times, and there’s a principle at stake.
Amazon has “built an entire business model based on tax avoidance,” said Assembly tax committee Chairman Charles Calderon (D-Montebello).
Of course, tax avoidance is perfectly legal . . . he’s trying to smear Amazon (and every other business selling to customers in California) as being tax evaders. Avoidance is not only legal, it’s a sensible strategy to minimize costs and gain a competitive advantage. Tax evasion, on the other hand, is illegal.
So who is going to get hurt if the measure passes — other than Californians who have been remiss in declaring and remitting their sales taxes?
The California proposal seizes on the thousands of online sales affiliates that Amazon contracts with to get customers to its site. Those companies advertise Amazon products, provide links to the company’s website and get a percentage of the resulting sales.
Many of the affiliates are in California. Supporters of the Democrats’ bill, ABX8 8, say that the connections amount to a presence for Amazon as well and that California should be able to force the firm to collect sales tax.
H/T to Clive, who became aware of this through a website he visits regularly which may have to close down due to the proposed law.
Slight stylesheet change
A comment by “sm” let me know that not everyone was seeing the same formatting on the blog that I was seeing (the term he used was “spidery” to describe the text). As I’m not an expert at stylesheets, I consulted Jon, my former virtual landlord. He quickly diagnosed the problem as a stray lettering specification which affected most paragraphs, but which didn’t show up for visitors using ClearType. Each of the machines I’d been using to post on the blog had ClearType turned on, so I wasn’t seeing any issues.
So I’ve changed the stylesheet to remove the negative letter spacing, which should provide a better viewing experience for anyone not using Windows XP/Vista.
