Quotulatiousness

October 13, 2011

BBC’s Top Gear GPS deal violates BBC’s own rules

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Due to editorial rules, a Top Gear-branded GPS using Jeremy Clarkson’s voice will be withdrawn:

The BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, will now will now donate all proceeds from the sales to Children In Need to bypass rules that prevent the show’s presenters endorsing motoring products.

The Top Gear satnav features Clarkson giving instructions in typically sardonic style — amusing for Top Gear fans, no doubt, but it may begin to grate on the 100th journey.

“Keep left — if you’re not sure which side left is you really shouldn’t be on the road,” he tells drivers.

“After 700 yards, assuming this car can make it that far, you have reached your destination, with the aid of 32 satellites and me — well done.”

The corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, said no more of the Top Gear satnavs, made by TomTom, would be produced.

A plan to allow existing TomTom owners to download Clarkson’s voice to update their models has now been dropped.

Given how many people have complained about the default voices provided with their GPS units, I can see why adding Jeremy Clarkson’s dulcet tones to the mix could hardly have made the situation any worse.

The war on photography continues: Glasgow shopping mall front

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Nick Thorne recounts the over-reaction of mall security (and the local police) to an alleged incident of photography at the Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow:

It took a high-profile internet campaign to get a shopping-centre chain to reconsider its irrational photography policy. After security guards at Glasgow’s Braehead Shopping Centre stopped Chris White from taking a picture of his own four-year-old daughter, White set up a Facebook page called ‘Boycott Braehead’. In just three days it was ‘liked’ by over 20,000 people. Capital Shopping Centres has now announced that 11 of its malls will from now on allow family and friends to take pictures of each other.

So, parents can now take snaps of their kids eating ice cream, like White did, without worrying about security guards telling them they’re committing an offence, as White was told, or being taken away for questioning by cops who threaten to use anti-terror powers to take snappers’ cameras away, like an officer warned White. That’s splendid.

White’s Facebook campaign went viral and Braehead Shopping Centre was forced to apologise for its overreaction. Common sense won the day. But why was the photography policy implemented in the first place? And why was an innocent, everyday occurrence interpreted as a potentially dodgy, abusive incident?

A statement from the shopping centre explained that staff had become suspicious ‘after they saw a male shopper taking photographs of a child sitting at their counter’. The security guard who went over to investigate said that he had at no point been informed that the girl was White’s daughter. The automatic assumption, it seems, was that a man taking a picture of a child must be some sleazy scumbag.

October 8, 2011

WIPO head: the Web would be better if it was patented and users had to pay license fees

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

Cory Doctorow reports on remarks by the head of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization:

Last June, the Swiss Press Club held a launch for the Global Innovation Index at which various speakers were invited to talk about innovation. After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Society spoke about how important it was that the Web’s underlying technology hadn’t been patented, Francis Gurry, the Director General of the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), took the mic to object.

In Gurry’s view, the Web would have been better off if it had been locked away in patents, and if every user of the Web had needed to pay a license fee to use it (and though Gurry doesn’t say so, this would also have meant that the patent holder would have been able to choose which new Web sites and technologies were allowed, and would have been able to block anything he didn’t like, or that he feared would cost him money).

This is a remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence. The argument that there wasn’t enough investment in the Web is belied by the fact that a) the Web attracted more investment than any of the network service technologies that preceded it (by orders of magnitude), and; b) that the total investment in the Web is almost incalculably large. The only possible basis for believing that the Web really would have benefited from patents is a blind adherence to the ideology that holds that patents are always good, no matter what.

Just imagine: instead of our current anarchic, idiosyncratic-but-still-amazingly-useful Web, we’d have a bureaucratically regulated superset of the old walled garden models like Compuserve, where innovation was stifled long before it got into the users’ hands.

October 7, 2011

Tyler Cowen’s simple theory of regulations

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:42

He appears to have grasped the essence of the problem from both the pro-deregulation and the pro-regulation viewpoints:

The number of laws grows rapidly, yet the number of regulators grows relatively slowly. There are always more laws than there are regulators to enforce them, and thus the number of regulators is the binding constraint.

The regulators face pressure to enforce the most recently issued directives, if only to avoid being fired or to limit bad publicity. On any given day, it is what they are told to do. Issuing new regulations therefore displaces the enforcement of old ones.

If the best or most fundamental regulations are the ones issued first, over time the average quality of regulation will decline.

October 6, 2011

Why the LCBO isn’t like Foodland Ontario

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Government, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Michael Pinkus tries to decide who to vote for in today’s Ontario election on the basis of who’d be the most likely to put Ontario’s wineries on an equal footing with foreign wineries in their own province:

It’s election day, and I don’t want to take up a lot of your time on a day when you should be concentrating on who to vote for. Over the past few months I have given you food for thought from Tim Hudak’s vision of the wine industry in Ontario to Andrea Horwath’s working with the LCBO option, and I heard or received nothing about the reigning Liberal party’s platform on the subject of the wine industry, I guess for them it will remain status quo. So I guess it’s up to you to decided where your loyalties lie and who you chose to believe as to what difference they’ll make, if any.

[. . .]

Part of an email I received about election promises …
“David Peterson campaigned on putting wine in corner stores in 1985 and he won — twice!
Mike Harris campaigned on putting wine in corner stores in 1995 and he won — twice!
Where are those promises in this campaign [I need to know who to vote for].”
– John

[. . .]

The LCBO affects all wineries in Ontario, but truthfully it is not the sole fault of the liquor board, they are just following their mandate to make money for the government. Two days before the election, the Grape Growers of Ontario released this plea:

“Consumer access to the wines made from Ontario grapes is a keystone issue for the future success of the industry, and unless Queen’s Park is willing to make substantive changes to the way it promotes and sells Ontario wines, the industry will continue to tread water … The domestic market share of Ontario wines is stagnant at around 39% while other winemaking regions are flourishing in their own backyard, some with market shares in excess of 90% … By making changes in the way the LCBO presents Ontario VQA wines on its shelves, how many Ontario VQA labels are available and how those wines get onto the LCBO list, accompanied by an increased, year-round promotional effort within the LCBO, the sales of Ontario’s wines will grow.”

They’re not telling you who to vote for, but they are asking you to be mindful of your vote. But I think it’s more to do with what happens after the election that counts, not the foreplay leading up to it. After the euphoria of victory has subsided we have to hold elected officials to what they promise, or pressure them to give us better and help our wineries, who are after all, tax payers themselves, yet work in a very restricted and restrictive environment. As a lover of Ontario wine you have to demand more. As the Grape Growers point out in that same plea: “We want to see provincial politicians who understand that marketing foreign wines in an agency owned by the province is like Foodland Ontario launching a promotion of Georgia peaches. It’s just not right. We can no longer afford to just sit back and watch.” Now that would be a nice change.

October 4, 2011

European Union’s biggest fear isn’t the financial crisis: it’s the voters

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Mick Hume points out that the EU is undemocratic, and well on the way to being even less so if the Eurocrats get their way:

When even the Europe editor of the Europhile BBC suggests that ‘it is quite possible that an early casualty in the Eurozone crisis will be democracy’, it is surely time to ask some serious questions about the way that the handling of Europe’s financial and economic problems is intensifying the crisis of democratic politics.

If there is one thing that worries the Euro-elites even more than their out-of-control finances these days, it is their uncontrollable electorates. Governments, EU bureaucrats and Euro-bankers do not trust the ignorant European masses, many of whom have stubbornly refused to accept (on the rare occasions they have been asked) that the authorities know what’s best for them. We have followed on spiked in recent years the elites’ sustained efforts to impose a new centralised constitution on the EU and then, when those nations offered a vote rejected their imperious plans, to sneak it in through the backdoor anyway. They will not take ‘no’ for an answer, no matter how often and how loudly we tell them.

[. . .]

Every discussion of the possible outcome of the crisis only seems to suggest two options: either a ‘disastrous’ break-up of the Eurozone or its ‘restructuring’ – that is, a mega-bailout coupled with further moves towards fiscal as well as economic union. The first of these is not really considered an option at all by the Euro-elites. It would be an act of political suicide on their part. So the second option is their only one. But they also fear what the reaction of their peoples will be to that, especially in Germany and France.

Their answer has been effectively to suspend democratic debate of these matters and keep the public out of the loop, conducting the real deals in smoke-free rooms and secret correspondence behind a curtain of media obfuscation.

[. . .]

Democracy is a meaningless charade without choices and competing visions for the future of society. And the bankrupting of democracy is surely too high a price to pay for any financial package. There is no ready-made alternative economic solution to hand. But the very least we should demand is that the true depth of the crisis be made public, and that every aspect of the counter-crisis measures must be openly debated. The first step in that direction should be to challenge the way that European democracy is being bankrupted and asset-stripped in the name of saving the continent. Fighting for the future of Europe is not the same thing as the survival of the Euro-elites.

As things stand, we in Europe look set to end up with the worst of both worlds. We are supposed to swallow the abrogation of democracy and imposition of the dictatorship of experts and bureaucrats in the name of economic necessity. And then their elitist schemes won’t work anyway either to bring about an integrated Europe or to revitalise the Euro economy.

September 29, 2011

Greek tax evasion: not a new problem at all

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

In a New York Times article from last year, Suzanne Daley reported the rather amazing statistic from Athens:

In the wealthy, northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures often hit the high 90s, just 324 residents checked the box on their tax returns admitting that they owned pools.

So tax investigators studied satellite photos of the area — a sprawling collection of expensive villas tucked behind tall gates — and came back with a decidedly different number: 16,974 pools.

That kind of wholesale lying about assets, and other eye-popping cases that are surfacing in the news media here, points to the staggering breadth of tax dodging that has long been a way of life here.

H/T to Araminta Wordsworth for the link.

“The euro isn’t just a failed currency, but a language unto itself”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Jonathan Weil provides a sampling of Euro terms and their real-world meanings:

It’s bad enough for average Americans that most European leaders speak English with heavy accents. What’s worse, even when we can make out the words they utter, it’s almost always impossible to figure out what these officials are really saying. That’s because they’re speaking in Euro-ese.

Fortunately, there is an answer to their endless riddles: a Euro-to-English dictionary, excerpts of which I have included below. To truly see the meaning of the seismic events rapidly reshaping Europe, you must know what the following 10 Euro terms of art mean in plain American English:

1. Finance ministry: A house of worship where government leaders go to pray for bailouts, economic miracles, panaceas and other forms of divine intervention.

How to use in a sentence: Officials at the Greek Finance Ministry said they remain hopeful the country will receive its next batch of rescue loans in time to avoid a cataclysmic default.

2. Coordinated: Chaotic, unfocused, brain-dead, paralyzed to the point of nonexistence; even in its best moments resembling a hopeless klutz.

Example: Finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations last week said they were “committed to a strong and coordinated international response to address the renewed challenges facing the global economy.”

September 28, 2011

“‘Sensitivity to hurt feelings’ is not, in fact, a First Amendment value or a justification for censorship”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:42

Follow-up to Monday’s link to Popehat on bureaucratic censorship at the University of Wisconsin, Ken has a few words to say about the administration’s “justification”:

2. The problem with demanding a campus free of “implied threats” is illustrated by this case. Campus police first censored a poster of an imaginary space cowboy with a fan-pleasing quote. Next, just to say FUCK YOU IRONY they used threats of official retaliation against a poster condemning threats of official retaliation. No rational person could construe either poster as a threat, actual or implied, to commit violence against any person (although I suppose the second could be construed as a warning — a correct one — that thugs will act thuggishly when questioned.) If a rational person wouldn’t take it as an actual threat of violence, then it’s not a true threat that can be censored, however much the hysterical, irrational, nanny-stating, coddling, or professionally emo think about it, and however much university chancellors would like to believe otherwise.

3. Similarly, this case illustrates the problem with an approach to freedom of expression premised on “sensitivity” and making people feel “welcome, safe and secure.” “Sensitivity to hurt feelings” is not, in fact, a First Amendment value or a justification for censorship. In fact, stopping people from speaking because the speech hurts people’s feelings is the essence of censorship. A system in which what we can say is premised upon the likely reactions of the mentally ill and the undernourished pussywillows of the world is a system that encourages suppression of all unpopular, forceful, interesting, or challenging speech. The irrational and the morally and mentally weak are not entitled to have their feelings protected through the force of law, however prevalent they are on campus.

September 26, 2011

Gorram purplebelly censors

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

A Mal Reynolds poster falls victim to academic censorship:

Dateline: Wisconsin. At the University of Wisconsin-Stout, theater professor James Miller put up a poster on his door with an image of Nathan Fillon in the character of Captain Malcolm Reynolds with one of Mal’s better lines: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.”

In a better world, nothing would happen — except perhaps Firefly fans would geek out and people who roll their eyes at geek culture references would roll their eyes.

But this is modern America. In modern America, the Browncoats are people who like to use vigorous figurative language to speak their mind, and they are often outnumbered and outgunned by the Alliance, made up of silly, professionally frightened moral and intellectual weaklings who see expressions of dissent (particularly dissent rendered in vivid figurative terms) as upsetting and potentially all terroristy.

So naturally the campus police at University of Wisconsin-Stout went all Mrs.-Grundy-With-A-Gun-And-A-Badge on Professor Miller. They threatened Prof. Miller with criminal charges for disorderly conduct, taking a page from the cops at Sam Houston state. They also took the poster down. The redoubtable FIRE has the story and has sent the necessary letter asking the University to grow the fuck up and pull its shit together. (That might be kind of a paraphrase by me.)

September 24, 2011

Canadian military: “the bureaucratic tail is wagging the Parliamentary dog”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

Christie Blatchford looks at the amazing ability of the military bureaucracy to frustrate, delay, obfuscate, and disobey their parliamentary masters:

Written by distinguished military scholar and veteran Dr. Jack English, it shows how the bureaucracy in Ottawa — an incestuous nest of regular army bosses with turf to protect and intractable civil servants — has consistently ignored or thwarted government directives to increase the size of the reserves.

What’s more, either those defence ministers whose pledges came to nought had the collective attention span of gnats, or they failed to grow a set of nuts sufficient to demand their instructions be followed, or they were simply shifted within Cabinet and the new fellow came in.

Any way you look at it, Dr. English says, the bureaucracy is calling the shots.

In the result, despite pledges to grow the reserves, the militia part-time head count remains still at about 16,500, or, as Dr. English wryly notes, about the size of National Defence Headquarters, or NDHQ as it’s called.

By the way, just getting the damn numbers out of NDHQ is a trick.

[. . .]

Virtually everyone who has studied the Canadian army, and their number is legion, agrees on a couple of things: The bureaucracy is obscenely bloated, far out of proportion for the size of the army; the citizen soldier, who until called up to full-time service costs only about 20% of the regular one, is a bargain for the taxpayer; the militia is more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than the regular army.

September 15, 2011

National Post headline funnies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

The article discusses a day planner that was distributed to students at a Toronto primary school. The planner included a printed version of an online “Days of Significance” calendar that had references to sex workers, female genital mutilation and Palestinian solidarity. The board agreed with the complaint that this material was not appropriate for a kindergarten-through-grade 5 audience (although they did not say whether the planners were being withdrawn). The National Post headline, however conveys a slightly different message:

Sex workers, genital mutilation not suitable for children: TDSB

I should hope that sex work and FGM would be considered unsuitable!

September 8, 2011

Play it again, Gibson

Filed under: Bureaucracy, India, Law, USA, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Allahpundit posted the video clip above, saying:

If I’m understanding the applicable law correctly, Gibson is as much a victim of Indian protectionism as they are federal meddling. Watch the quickie John Roberts segment for the gist of it. The wood they use to make guitar keyboards is sufficiently rare/endangered that it can’t be exported legally from India unless it’s already been finished by Indian workers, and under U.S. law, if the export is illegal under Indian law, then it’s illegal here too. The governing statute, the Lacey Act, was passed in 1900, but only in 2008 was it expanded to include plants as well as animals, which is why Gibson’s now being hassled about the wood. All of which is jim dandy — except for the question of why Gibson seems to be getting so much federal attention vis-a-vis other firms. Roberts touches on that.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who commented “I like the way he pulls the finished guitar fret out of his ass.”

Update: Speaking of Jon, he’s all over this issue with another link and extra commentary:

CHRIS DANIEL: Mr. Juszkiewicz, did an agent of the US government suggest to you that your problems would go away if you used Madagascar labor instead of American labor?

HENRY JUSZKIEWICZ: They actually wrote that in a pleading.

[. . .]

He’s even warned clients to be wary of traveling abroad with old guitars, because the law says owners can be asked to account for every wooden part of their guitars when re-entering the U.S. The law also covers the trade in vintage instruments.

As Jon points out, this is more than just an issue for the musical instrument makers and musicians:

It’s only a matter of time until this is applied to tools and furniture.

I wonder where [hand tool maker] Lie Nielsen’s politics lie — but he should be safe, using domestic cherry for his totes and knobs.

Lee Valley might have a problem exporting to the US, what with bubinga and rosewood components and being based in Ottawa, which is now a hotbed of hard-right conservative political thought. (A co-worker is wondering why I’m giggling to myself here).

September 7, 2011

If they take away your freedom of speech, you can’t defend any of your rights

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Europe, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Mark Steyn on the rapidly constricting “right” to free speech in most of the western world:

To be honest, I didn’t really think much about “freedom of speech” until I found myself the subject of three “hate speech” complaints in Canada in 2007. I mean I was philosophically in favor of it, and I’d been consistently opposed to the Dominion’s ghastly “human rights” commissions and their equivalents elsewhere my entire adult life, and from time to time when an especially choice example of politically correct enforcement came up I’d whack it around for a column or two.

But I don’t think I really understood how advanced the Left’s assault on this core Western liberty actually was. In 2008, shortly before my writing was put on trial for “flagrant Islamophobia” in British Columbia, several National Review readers e-mailed from the U.S. to query what the big deal was. C’mon, lighten up, what could some “human rights” pseudo-court do? And I replied that the statutory penalty under the British Columbia “Human Rights” Code was that Maclean’s, Canada’s biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth. [. . .]

And what I found odd about this was that very few other people found it odd at all. Indeed, the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters. Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse—and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of “racism” for some remarks about Islam’s treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world.

A bit more on the Lacey Act

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, India, Law, USA, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

The Economist has a brief mention of the Gibson raid:

Agents barged in and shut down production. They were hunting for ebony and rosewood which the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) alleges was imported from India in violation of the Lacey Act, a 1900 law originally designed to protect fauna from poachers. This law has metastasised: it now requires Americans, in essence, to abide by every plant and wildlife regulation set by any country on Earth. Not having heard of an obscure foreign rule is no defence. Violators face fines or even jail. FWS claims the ebony sent from India was mislabelled, and that Indian law forbids the export of unfinished ebony and rosewood.

[. . .]

Guitarists now worry that every time they cross a state border with their instrument, they will have to carry sheaves of documents proving that every part of it was legally sourced. Edward Grace, the deputy chief of the FWS’s office of law enforcement, says this fear is misplaced: “As a matter of longstanding practice,” he says, “investigators focus not on unknowing end consumers but on knowing actors transacting in larger volumes of product.” But Americans have been jailed for such things as importing lobsters in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran rule that Honduras no longer enforces. Small wonder pluckers are nervous.

Original report on the Gibson guitar raid here. Rules like the Lacey Act are tailor-made for petty bureaucrats to exercise immense amounts of judicially unsupervised power. It’s hard to believe that this kind of rule is being enforced evenhandedly, and rather easier to believe that it is being used selectively as a way of paying off scores, providing a “service” to certain firms at the expense of others, and creating lots of opportunities for bribes, “protection money”, and the like.

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