Quotulatiousness

May 26, 2013

Bangladesh needs legal reform and free markets

Filed under: Asia, Bureaucracy, Economics, Law — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

Sheldon Richman discusses the plight of workers — especially poor women workers — in Bangladesh:

According to a report written for the Netherlands ministry of foreign affairs, most Bangladeshis, unsurprisingly, are victimized by a land system that has long benefited the rural and urban elites. “Land-grabbing of both rural and urban land by domestic actors is a problem in Bangladesh,” the report states.

    Wealthy and influential people have encroached on public lands…, often with help of officials in land-administration and management departments. Among other examples, hundreds of housing companies in urban areas have started to demarcate their project area using pillars and signboard before receiving titles. They use local musclemen with guns and occupy local administrations, including the police. Most of the time, land owners feel obliged to sell their productive resources to the companies at a price inferior to market value. Civil servants within the government support these companies and receive some plot of land in exchange.

Women suffer most because of the patriarchy supported by the political system. “Women in Bangladesh rarely have equal property rights and rarely hold title to land,” the report notes. “Social and customary practices effectively exclude women from direct access to land.” As a result,

    Many of the rural poor in Bangladesh are landless, have only small plots of land, are depending on tenancy, or sharecropping. Moreover, tenure insecurity is high due to outdated and unfair laws and policies…. These growing rural inequalities and instability also generate migration to towns, increasing the rates of urban poverty.

Much as in Britain after the Enclosures, urban migration swells the ranks of workers, allowing employers to take advantage of them. Since Bangladesh does not have a free-market economy, starting a business is mired in regulatory red tape — and worse, such as “intellectual property” law — that benefit the elite while stifling the chance for poor individuals to find alternatives to factory work. (The owner of the Savar factory, Mohammed Sohel Rana, got rich in a system where, the Guardian writes, “politics and business are closely connected, corruption is rife, and the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”) Moreover, until the factory collapse, garment workers could not organize without employer permission.

Crony capitalism deprives Bangladeshis of property rights, freedom of exchange, and therefore work options. The people need neither the corporatist status quo nor Western condescension. They need radical land reform and freed markets.

May 21, 2013

Conflating rules for “sexual harassment” with “sexual assault”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

Wendy Kaminer on the issues of sexual harassment rules on campus:

What’s the difference between an unwelcome request for a date and rape? Pursuant to the Obama administration’s definition of sexual harassment, this is not an easy question to answer.

You have to read the administration’s latest diktat to colleges and universities to believe it. In a joint letter to the University of Montana (intended as ‘a blueprint’ for campus administrators nationwide), the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) define sexual harassment as ‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’, verbal or non-verbal, including ‘unwelcome sexual advances or acts of sexual assault’. Conduct (verbal or non-verbal) need not be ‘objectively offensive’ to constitute harassment, the letter warns, ignoring federal court rulings on harassment, as well as common sense. If a student feels harassed, she may be harassed, regardless of the reasonableness of her feelings, and school administrators may be legally required to discipline her ‘harasser’.

They are also required to promulgate detailed policies parroting the DoJ/OCR definition of harassment, as well as procedures for reporting and prosecuting alleged offences: ‘Federal government mandates unconstitutional speech codes at college and universities nationwide’, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) accurately declares:

‘Among the forms of expression now punishable on America’s campuses by order of the federal government are:

  • Any expression related to sexual topics that offends any person. This leaves a wide range of expressive activity — a campus performance of The Vagina Monologues, a presentation on safe-sex practices, a debate about sexual morality, a discussion of gay marriage, or a classroom lecture on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — subject to discipline.
  • Any sexually themed joke overheard by any person who finds that joke offensive for any reason.
  • Any request for dates or any flirtation that is not welcomed by the recipient of such a request or flirtation.

There is likely no student on any campus anywhere who is not guilty of at least one of these “offences”. Any attempt to enforce this rule evenhandedly and comprehensively will be impossible.’

FIRE is right to note that fair, inclusive enforcement of this mindlessly broad policy is impossible. But I doubt it’s intended to be fairly enforced. I doubt federal officials want or expect it to be used against sex educators, advocates of reproductive choice, anti-porn feminists or gay-rights advocates if their speech of a sexual nature is ‘unwelcome’ by religious conservatives.

May 12, 2013

British emergency wards are overcrowded … so we’ll fine the ambulance service!

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Hard to come up with an explanation for this perverse policy:

Ministers came under fresh criticism for their handling of the NHS last night after it emerged the ambulance service will be hit with £90 million in fines — as punishment for the chaos blighting casualty departments.

Critics said the fines will simply deprive trusts of vital funds that could help tackle the deterioration in patient services.

A new penalty clause that was written into ambulance trust contracts from last month will levy fines of £200 for every patient who has to wait for longer than 30 minutes for admission to A&E, and £1,000 for each patient forced to wait more than an hour.

You can understand the desire to speed the delivery of injured people to the emergency services they need, but how does it make any kind of sense to punish the ambulance service because the emergency wards they need to get their patients into are overcrowded? Unless the ambulance service has some kind of magic ability to shift priorities in the hospitals, fining them for patients’ wait times makes less than zero sense.

But acute overcrowding in A&E departments has led to increasing ambulance ‘jams’ formed as they queue to unload, with waits of four hours recorded at some hospitals at the busiest times.

Damning new figures reveal that during the past year there were more than 265,000 occasions in England when ambulance staff took more than half an hour to deliver patients into the hands of hospital doctors.

And shockingly, more than 37,000 patients had to wait over an hour to move on to the wards.

Official guidelines say ambulances should deliver patients, clean the ambulance and be back out on the road within 15 minutes. A longer wait is seen as ‘unsafe’.

Yet the chaos in A&E departments is so bad that at one, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, doctors were forced to put up a tent to act as a makeshift ward to treat patients alongside the ambulance queue.

April 29, 2013

TSA makes sensible decision, but quickly backtracks after noisy protests

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

In Reason, Steve Chapman explains why bureaucrats rarely go out of their way to ease restrictions:

Once in a while, a government agency adopts a policy that is logical, hardheaded, based on experience and unswayed by cheap sentiment. This may be surprising enough to make you reconsider your view of bureaucrats. But not to worry: It usually doesn’t last.

In March the federal Transportation Security Administration surprised the country by relaxing its ban on knives and other items. Starting April 25, it said, it would allow knives with blades shorter than 2.36 inches, as well as golf clubs, pool cues and hockey sticks.

That was before flight attendants and members of Congress vigorously denounced the idea as a dire threat to life and limb. It was also before two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon.

So it came as no great surprise when last week TSA announced it would retain the existing ban indefinitely so it could hear more from “the aviation community, passenger advocates, law enforcement experts and other stakeholders.”

A more plausible explanation is that TSA officials grasped the old Washington wisdom: Bureaucrats rarely get in trouble for being too careful. But if there were a single incident featuring a passenger and a blade, the agency would be tarred and feathered.

Politicians love seeing their names in the newspaper or being mentioned on TV. Bureaucrats understand that such attention can be a career-limiting move. Therefore, no rational bureaucrat will want to be associated with any policy change that might lead to media attention.

April 22, 2013

India’s submarine program hits (even more) delays

Filed under: Bureaucracy, France, India, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

Strategy Page reports on the latest set of delays to hit the Indian navy’s submarine building program:

India’s effort to build six submarines (French Scorpenes), under license, has been delayed once again. The problem is mainly poor management. An example of this occurred quite recently with the departure of ten Spanish technical advisors for the Scorpenes. Their contract expired at the end of March and, despite the expiration date being well known Indian bureaucrats were unable to get a new contract in place on time. Similar avoidable delays have occurred several times already and the price has gone up with each delay. Last year it was announced that the first Scorpene sub would not be ready until 2015. The new delays push that to 2017.

Building the subs in India will leave India with thousands of workers and specialists experienced in building modern submarines. All that will be wasted because the defense procurement bureaucrats seem to have learned nothing. These officials already caused numerous delays and cost overruns during negotiations to build these diesel-electric submarines. The bureaucrats mismanaged this deal to the extent that it is now five years behind schedule. But it is even more behind schedule if you count the several years the Indian bureaucrats delayed it even getting started. The delays and mismanagement have so far increased the cost of the $4 billion project by 25 percent (to $834 million per sub).

[. . .]

All this ineffective urgency is in play because India’s submarine fleet is dying of old age and new boats are not going to arrive in time. It’s not like this was a surprise, but the Indian defense procurement bureaucracy has long been noted as slow, sloppy, and stubborn, especially in the face of demands that it speed up. The twisted tale of the tardy submarines is particularly painful.

The plan was to have a dozen new subs in service by the end of the decade. At present, there will be (with a bit of luck) three or four of them in service by then. The procurement bureaucracy is still seeking a supplier for the second batch of six diesel-electric subs. This second six probably won’t even begin arriving by the end of the decade. It’s hard to say, although the defense procurement nabobs speak of “fast tracking” this project, but long-time observers not expecting speed.

There’s some urgency to all this because this year five of India’s 16 diesel-electric subs (10 Kilo and two Foxtrot class Russian built boats and four German Type 209s) were to be retired (some are already semi-retired because of age and infirmity). Because of the Scorpene delays, the Type 209s are being kept in service (but not allowed out to sea much) for several more years. That leaves India with 14 subs. But in the next year or so several of the older Kilos will reach retirement age. Thus, by the time the first Scorpene arrives in 2017, India will only have five or six working subs. India believes it needs at least 18 non-nuclear subs in service to deal with Pakistan and China.

April 21, 2013

EU banking governance as situational comedy

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

In the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner pokes a bit of fun at the EU’s self-inflicted media pratfalls over the Cypriot banking “bailout”:

For the last time, I never used the word “template”. Thus said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Eurogroup, at his IMF press conference on Saturday. This is about whether the troika’s disastrous mishandling of the Cypriot bailout should be used as a model for future banking insolvencies in the eurozone. The row shows no sign of abating. OK, so Mr Dijsselbloem never did use the word “template” in originally welcoming the Cypriot defenestration, but that’s what he meant, forcing him quickly to backtrack when it was pointed out to him that his remarks might prompt a run on banks elsewhere in the eurozone.

But hold on a moment. Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, said on Friday that Cyprus did provide a model in terms of bailing in depositors, so who’s right? Well it is sort of a model, Mr Dijsselbloem said at his IMF press conference, in the sense that common principles would in future be applied to banking resolution, but each case would no doubt be different and have its own defining characteristics. All clear now?

April 11, 2013

Ontario’s LCBO workers vote in favour of a strike

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Michael Pinkus is looking forward to a potential LCBO strike:

Call me an anarchist but I want the LCBO to go on a nice, big, long strike. And by the time you read this newsletter I am 100% sure that the sheeple of the LCBO will have given their bargaining team the go ahead for strike action. Now the LCBO’s contract was up on March 31, 2013 — which means currently the guys and gals roaming, stocking and generally keeping track of the aisles are without a legal contract with the provincial liquor board. I’m not about to get into the nitty-gritty of the contract negotiations, but when I read in the Liquor Board Employees Division (LBED) Bargaining Bulletin: “The offer we received from management can only be described in one word: Outrageous!” — well I just felt that I had to look a little deeper to see how the LCBO was screwing their own people (which is a nice change from the people of Ontario they screw daily).

What outrage would I find on the pages of the LCBO’s proposal? Are they locking the doors and throwing employees out on their ears? Are they proposing actual punishment for selling to minors (like the sting David Menzies did in July of 2012)? Will there be repercussions for doing a bad job, breaking the law, real penalties?

Now I have met, had dealings with, and actually, once upon a time, worked alongside some very good LCBO employees, most of them casual part-timers — but I can tell you that for every one good one there’s two that are lazy, surly and just generally people you don’t want to deal with in a retail situation — and sadly, those are the one’s you are likely to remember. So from the LBED Bargain Bulletin dated March 1, 2013 here are 2 of the 9 crazy demands the LCBO is making of their employees and the Union’s response to those “outrageous” proposals (I highlight my favs, but you can read the full bulletin here):

[. . .]

But who really suffers from an LCBO strike? California, Spain, Italy, France, Australia, Chile, in other words import wines and liquor producers, who can ONLY sell through the Province run monopoly, and they’ll be demanding the LCBO settle so their products get into the hands of Ontarians instead of sitting idly in warehouses collecting dust. Meanwhile local producers could see a boon as Ontarians thirst for wine is not met by the LCBO but instead by in-province wineries. Tourism to wine producing areas should also see an uptick; instead of visiting Grandma on a Saturday afternoon the family would pile into the car (with Grandma) to tour the highways and bi-ways of Ontario wine country. A long LCBO walk could mean that Ontarians finally get the taste for their homegrown wines en masse and will then demand greater access — one weekend away is quaint, but having to make the trek each and every weekend may prove too much. And with that kind of demand we could see movement in this province towards a freer market system with independent and corner wine stores. Maybe the government will get tired of having to pay all those wages, negotiating with an inflexible union and decide to sell off the LCBO — preferring instead to reap the rewards from taxes instead of paying the price of labour unrest … sigh, wouldn’t that be nice?!? As for the employees, the good ones will have no trouble finding a job in the public sector [I think Michael means private sector here], many in the same kind of newly created positions. The others? Well they’ll just go back to ditch digging where they belonged in the first place.

April 10, 2013

Despite government denials, the iPod duty is alive and well

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

Expect to pay more for your iPods and similar devices, says Mike Moffatt in the Globe and Mail:

Last week, I wrote that the federal government’s changes to tariffs in Budget 2013 would result in new import duties on models of MP3 players and three of four models of Apple iPods. The tariff changes involve changing the tariff status of 72 countries, so music devices manufactured in China, Indonesia and Malaysia will pay a 5 to 6 per cent tariff rather than their “preferential” rate of zero, starting in 2015.

The article caused quite a stir, and the government denied it was true. A spokeswoman for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the article was wrong. “Music devices like iPods are imported into Canada duty-free under a long-standing special tariff classification from 1987,” she wrote. That classification, which was unaltered by the recent budget, is known by its number: 9948.00.00. (We’ll call it 9948 for short.)

However, a close reading of the relevant document, Tariff Item 9948.00.00 (9948 for short), shows that to qualify for the special classification, the importer must meet strict criteria.

My position that importers cannot meet the requirements of 9948 rests on three straight-forward premises:

1. It appears that sellers of iPods and MP3s are required to collect “end use certificates” from the final consumer on each sale, and be able to present these to the CBSA if audited.

2. The 9948 requirement for “end use certificates” appears to be actively enforced by the CBSA.

3. Retailers cannot reasonably collect these certificates from consumers when they buy an iPod.

These three, put together, make retail sales of iPods and MP3 players ineligible for 9948 and therefore subject to an iPod tariff. What follows is my evidence.

The importer must maintain a database (what Moffatt calls “an iPod registry”) of personal information on the final purchasers of the devices, but there is no matching legal requirement on the consumer to provide this personal information (which would probably violate privacy laws in any other context).

The CBSA’s Memorandum D10-14-51 requires that consumers attest that they will use the iPod in a manner in which it is “physically connected” to a computer (though not necessarily permanently so, according to the memo) and will “enhance the function” of that computer. The consumers must attest that their devices will be “solely used for the purpose for which they were imported.”

If a consumer uses a device in a manner not covered by 9948 during the first four years of ownership, the importer is required to “make a correction to the declaration of tariff classification and pay any applicable duties and taxes.”

This rule is not trivial. CITT Appeal No. AP-2008-023 discusses the need for sellers claiming the tariff reduction (here Code 2101, the predecessor to 9948.00.00) to show that the end consumer is using the goods in the manner described on the certificate.

But there is no practical way an importer could possibly verify and ensure that that the retailer’s customers have not changed how they are using iPods and MP3 players.

April 9, 2013

Britain’s wartime rationing was the actual start of the modern welfare state

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Food, Government, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:31

In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan shows that the wartime coalition government led by Winston Churchill actually laid the groundwork for the post-war “creation” of the welfare state:

British WW2 Fuel ration book cover

It wasn’t the 1945 Labour Government that created the welfare state, that Saturn which now devours its children. The real power-grab came in 1940.

With Britain’s manpower and economy commandeered for the war effort, it seemed only natural that ministers should extend their control over healthcare, education and social security. Hayek chronicled the process at first hand: his Road to Serfdom was published when Winston Churchill was still in Downing Street.

Churchill had become prime minister because he was the Conservative politician most acceptable to Labour. In essence, the wartime coalition involved a grand bargain. Churchill was allowed to prosecute the war with all the nation’s resources while Labour was given a free hand to run domestic policy.

The social-democratic dispensation which was to last, ruinously, for the next four decades — and chunks of which are rusting away even today — was created in an era of ration-books, conscription, expropriations and unprecedented spending. The state education system, the NHS, the Beveridge settlement — all were conceived at a time when it was thought unpatriotic to question an official, and when almost any complaint against the state bureaucracy could be answered with “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

All quite true, and all quite necessary at the time. Without significant amounts of imported food, Britain could not feed its people. Even with imports, the amount of available food was subject to unpredictable fluctuations as losses at sea interrupted supply and left empty shelves in grocery stores. Although losses were relatively low early in the war (early U boats were unable to stay at sea for long periods, and German bases were a long way from most British trade routes), the writing was on the wall if the war continued for years.

To fight a totalitarian regime, Britain had to emulate some of its methods (ironically, full rationing wasn’t introduced in Germany until much later in the war). For the middle classes, this was an unwelcome intrusion of the state into private affairs, but generally accepted due to the war. For the working classes, in many cases it was actively welcomed. While the rations were small, there was the promise — and generally a fulfilled promise — that some would be made available even in the poorest areas of the country. My mother was nine when the war began, and she remembers seeing more food in the stores of Middlesbrough after rationing was introduced. After the deprivations of the Great Depression, many people in the north and in Scotland were better fed and clothed during the rationing period than they had been for nearly a decade.

Given that information, it should not be surprising that so many people voted for Labour in the 1945 elections: they’d had what they believed to be a live demonstration of the benefits of socialism for six years of war, and didn’t want to go back to the pre-1940 status quo.

April 6, 2013

The old class system and the modern welfare state

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

A majority of Britons who are on state assistance now believe that the system is too generous and discourages recipients from seeking jobs:

In 2003, 40 per cent of benefits recipients agreed that ‘unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work’; in 2011, 59 per cent agreed. So a majority of actual benefits recipients now think the welfare state is too generous and fosters worklessness. Surely those well-off welfare cheerleaders, when shown these figures, would accept that perhaps they don’t know what they’re talking about. But no, they have simply come up with a theory for why the poor are anti-welfare: because they’re stupid.

Even more resented than those who abuse the system are those who run it:

Working-class mothers hated the way that signing up for welfare meant having to throw one’s home and life open to inspection by snooty officials, community health workers and even family budget advisers.

They didn’t want ‘middle-class strangers’, as they called welfare providers, ‘questioning them about their children’. They felt such intrusions ‘broke a cultural taboo’.

And the use of welfare as a way of allowing society’s ‘betters’ to govern the lives of the poor continues now. Indeed, today’s welfare state is even more annoyingly nannyish than it was 80 years ago.

As the writer Ferdinand Mount says, the post-war welfare state is like a form of ‘domestic imperialism’, through which the state treats the poor as ‘natives’ who must be fed and kept on the moral straight-and-narrow by their superiors.

Mount describes modern welfarism as ‘benign managerialism’, which ‘pacifies’ the lower orders.

Working-class communities feel this patronising welfarist control very acutely. They recognise that signing up for a lifetime of state charity means sacrificing your pride and your independence; it means being unproductive and also unfree.

April 4, 2013

Canadian public sector workers earn between 9% and 12% more than private sector workers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Once upon a time, back in the far-distant past, public sector workers got lower wages but better job security, benefits, and pensions than their private sector counterparts. Over the last few decades, the public sector wages caught up and surpassed the private sector, and if anything the benefits and pensions got better. The Fraser Institute calculates that currently there is between a 9% and a 12% premium paid to public sector workers for similar jobs (and that understates the overall differential):

Comparing Public and Private Sector Compensation in Canada examines wage and non-wage benefits for government employees (federal, provincial, and local) and private-sector workers nationwide. It calculates the wage premium for public-sector workers using Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey from April 2011, after adjusting for personal characteristics such as gender, age, marital status, education, tenure, size of establishment, type of job, and industry. When unionization is included in the analysis, the national public-sector “wage premium” (i.e., the degree to which public-sector wages exceed private-sector wages) declines to 9.0 per cent from 12.0 per cent.

Aside from higher wages, the study also found strong indications that Canada’s government workers enjoy more generous non-wage benefits than those in the private sector, including:

  • Pensions: 88.2 per cent of Canadian government workers were covered by a registered pension plan in 2011 compared to 26.4 per cent of private-sector employees.
  • Early retirement: Government employees retired 2.5 years earlier, on average, than private-sector workers between 2007 and 2011.
  • Job security: In 2011, 0.6 per cent of government employees lost their jobs — less than one sixth the job-loss rate in the private sector (3.8 per cent).

To ensure public-sector compensation is fair to both taxpayers and government workers, the report argues that better data collection is needed and suggests that Statistics Canada should gather data on wages and non-wage benefits more regularly and systemically than it does now. In addition, comparisons between the public and private sectors should focus on total compensation, not just wages or specific benefits such as pensions.

About one in five Canadian workers is in the federal, provincial, or local government civil service or related organizations, and only 15% of Canadians are self-employed. The vast majority of government workers are unionized, while the reverse is true in the private sector.

April 1, 2013

US Army forced by sequester cuts to eliminate several medals

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

The Duffel Blog is your source for all breaking US military news:

Lt. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, the Army G-1, explained, “the amount of money spent on ribbons and medals has increased exponentially over the decades.” As proof, Bromberg pointed to a picture of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general, who was bedecked with only three ribbons.

“Today, we’d look at a private with only three ribbons as if he were some sort of dirtbag,” said Bromberg.

Although no final list had been decided upon, one Army spokesperson said that several ribbons were all but certain to be canned.

“The Army Service Ribbon? What the hell?,” asked the spokesman. “The fact that you’re in an Army uniform is proof of your army service. Why should I give you a damn ribbon?”

Army officials would neither confirm nor deny the fate of the National Defense Medal. One simply said, “So you were drinking beer in Germany, while the entire U.S. military was fighting Desert Storm? Remind us, again, why you deserve a medal?”

The Army indicated they would be cutting medals incrementally, starting with “I have a pulse”-tier awards, followed by “Thanks for showing up” awards, and finally, “I did an okay job” awards. Altogether, the program is expected to save $37 billion over the next decade.

March 29, 2013

Cyprus has become the EU’s “lab rat”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

In sp!ked, Bruno Waterfield talks about the EU’s most recent involuntary experimental subject, Cyprus:

Every negative European political trend has deepened in the latest round of the Eurozone crisis, as Cyprus has been treated by the EU with a disdain for self-determination worthy of the high age of imperialism. It is this which is really troubling, not the haircuts for depositors or the bank closures. In effect, an entire island nation has been made a laboratory rat for a new Eurozone experiment in rebalancing economies in the EU single currency — whether the Cypriots like it or not.

Cyprus is the perfect fall guy for the EU and IMF experts who, despite the mess in Greece and elsewhere in southern Europe, still believe they know best how to run a nation’s affairs. That’s because, as well as being too small to count, especially for the markets, Cyprus is easily painted as a bad guy, a swarthy, even Levantine crook which launders dirty Russian money (nearly a third of Cypriot bank deposits) for ‘dodgy’ oligarchs. This whiff of corruption (nothing new to Cyprus, or other European banks for that matter) provides the perfect pretext for treating Cyprus as a case apart. This is meant to soothe the fears of senior northern European debt holders — it is corrupt Cyprus, and not failed private risk in general, that has been targeted.

So, because it is small, and in the eyes of the Eurozone social engineers, easily contained, Cyprus has been selected to be an experiment, potentially a model for Portugal or Spain. And if it all goes horribly wrong… well, Cyprus is small and a dodgy special case, so who cares? The EU doesn’t.

March 26, 2013

Irish municipal workers fear for their jobs after fixing a pothole … without getting Health & Safety approval first

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:05

There are some stories which are just too silly for words:

THREE county council workers have been suspended from duty for attempting to fill in a pothole outside Carrigaline.

There has been outrage at the suspensions, which were imposed by the local authority after a health and safety inspector came across the workers carrying out unscheduled repairs to a road.

The outdoor crew were suspended on full pay pending an inquiry, and are now fearing for their jobs.
Council workers must pre-plan road works, fill in reports detailing the repairs to be carried out, and use the appropriate signage to alert the public.

It’s understood workers were on their way back to a council depot in Carrigaline when they spotted a large pothole on the road surface.

They decided to stop their vehicle to repair the pothole, even though it was not on their official list of jobs. They had earlier been carrying out scheduled repairs on the Carrigaline to Crosshaven road.

A health and safety inspector came across the workers carrying out the unofficial repairs and reported them to the local authority for a breach of health and safety guidelines.

March 14, 2013

The scare stories about increasing antibiotic resistance

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

In sp!ked, Robin Walsh debunks some of the scare factor from recent reports about antibiotic resistant diseases and the looming pandemic:

The UK’s chief medical officer (CMO), Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a splash in the media this week with her warning that antibiotic resistance is the new climate change. There is a ‘catastrophic threat’ of ‘untreatable’ diseases, she said, which promise to return us to a ‘nineteenth century’ state of affairs. The CMO has form: she warned the House of Commons health select committee about the same problem in similarly stringent terms back in January — a case not so much of apocalypse now, as apocalypse again.

As with all such stories, reading the actual CMO’s report leavens some of the hysterical excesses of the press, which were stoked up by the CMO’s excitable media appearances. Setting out the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the UK, the report highlights that while some drug-resistant infections, such as the well-known Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, are becoming less widespread, there is an increasing occurence of harder to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, which, although still only in the hundreds of cases per year, are on the rise. The report states that only five antibiotics to fight such infections are currently in phase II or III trials, so the cupboard seems worryingly bare of new, necessary drugs.

So if we’re running short on drugs, how can we make more? A sensible article in the British Medical Journal from 2010 clearly set out the challenges facing the development of new antibiotics. Firstly, there are many regulatory hurdles that make running clinical trials in this area difficult. More importantly, there is a major financial disincentive for drug companies to develop antibiotics. Currently, drugs which are profitable are those for chronic conditions that are prescribed lifelong: painkillers for arthritis, diabetes drugs, and the like. A drug that you take once to cure you is unprofitable; doubly so if it is likely to be husbanded to prevent resistance developing until the patent runs out. A change in government payments to incentivise new antibiotics, like that which already applies to so-called ‘orphan’ drugs for rare diseases, would be an easy and rational step towards producing more drugs that meet our needs.

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