Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2010

Former TSA agent says “Shut Up And Get In The Scanner”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:57

A former TSA scanner talks about the uproar about the full body scanners:

As a former TSA Federal Security Officer aka “screener” I have seen some incredible stuff come through the airport. I have worked in every position over the 5 years I was there. I have screened you, your carry on luggage, your checked luggage and even cargo you may have sent someplace. I have seen tons and trust me a naked image of you is not a problem.

When I worked in the checkpoint and screened passengers and their carry-on luggage, not only could I see what you had in your carry-on bag, I could see you. I could connect the image on the screen with the passenger. If that didn’t humiliate you then this tiny little naked image shouldn’t either. The TSA officer who is looking at the image will never see you and you won’t see them. But that vibrator in your carry-on luggage that looks like it would satisfy an elephant, yeah I see that and I see you standing right in front of me. But sure be offended by the naked x-ray image a person in another room is seeing, don’t worry about the vibrator at all or the other weird and crazy crap in your bag.

[. . .]

The Invasive Pat Down [. . .] is bullshit. It is a terror tactic by TSA to get you to walk through the more thorough body scanner. I can’t defend TSA on this one. I have talked to the TSA officers and it is no more effective than the old pat down procedure. They tested it out with trainers and each other. It is purely a terror tactic by TSA. Shame on TSA and anyone who has to get one should write a complaint in afterward. You still have to get it though if you want to get on the plane. Throwing a fit will not get you out of it.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I’ve pretty much given up on flying except for distances that are impractical for driving. I sure haven’t missed the “joys” of airport security for the last few years.

November 11, 2010

Chinese wine buyers get all-VQA store that Ontario wine buyers can’t have

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, China, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

I’m all in favour of improving the visibility and availability of Ontario’s VQA wines in other markets, so this news is both good and infuriating simultaneously:

A couple of weeks ago the Government of Ontario announced the opening of an all-VQA wine store in China (in the city of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province). Oh happy day — now the Chinese can drink (and copy) all the Ontario icewine they want . . . but this begs the question: why should the Chinese have an advantage that we Ontarians do not? Do the Chinese drink more Ontario wine? Why is it so important that China get the opportunity to drink Ontario wines that folks in Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury can not?

I have nothing against the Chinese getting their hands on our wine; I’m glad to see a country embrace our wines as so many of us have embraced their food. But seriously, why should folks living in China have more and better access to Ontario wines then those of us living in the actual province. When I first heard the news, all I could say was an incredulous, “Seriously?” Has Ontario really become, as wine writer Dean Tudor puts it, every time he mentions Ontario, “a have not province”? When it comes to our own wine industry it keeps getting more and more “have not” and won’t get.

See what I mean? Great that they’re opening outlets in a new foreign market, but we still can’t get that kind of opportunity to buy here at home? All-VQA stores have been discussed (and rejected) before, but they’re apparently a great idea for foreign markets.

Update: Fixed the broken link.

Even more reason to believe that ACTA is a bad deal

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

From the folks at BoingBoing:

New revelations on ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a secretive global copyright being privately negotiated by rich countries away from the UN: ACTA will require ISPs to police trademarks the way they currently police copyright. That means that if someone accuses you of violating a trademark with a web-page, blog-post, video, tweet, etc, your ISP will be required to nuke your material without any further proof, or be found to be responsible for any trademark violations along with you. And of course, trademark violations are much harder to verify than copyright violations, since they often hinge on complex, fact-intensive components like tarnishment, dilution and genericization. Meaning that ISPs are that much more likely to simply take all complaints at face-value, leading to even more easy censorship of the Internet with nothing more than a trumped-up trademark claim.

November 10, 2010

“Don’t you know who I am?” UK style

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:34

It’s all very well to pass restrictions on the peons, but when those restrictions are applied to your aristocratic self, you’re apparently entitled to rant:

Britain’s anti-terror chief launched an astonishing attack on airport security staff after they stopped her taking a banned amount of liquid onto a plane.

Home Office minister Baroness Neville-Jones, in charge of national security, was en route to a Washington summit when she was found to have an over-sized aerosol can in her bag.

[. . .]

The Baroness was ticked off by border staff, who did not recognise her. But she took offence when they told her how important security is.

The 71-year-old Baroness, known for being haughty, ranted: “Of course I know how important it is, I’m the Security Minister.”

It’s so tedious to have to put up with back-chat from the peasantry, isn’t it?

Pompeii building collapse triggers calls for nationalization privatization

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:30

I never thought I’d read an article in the Guardian calling for the privatization of a state asset:

Opposition politicians and commentators accused Italy’s government of neglect and mismanagement today over the collapse of the 2,000-year-old House of the Gladiators in the ruins of ancient Pompeii.

Some commentators said the Unesco world heritage site should be privatised and removed from state control. La Stampa newspaper ran a story headlined “Pompeii — the collapse of shame,” echoing national opinion over the cultural disaster.

The stone house, on one of the site’s main streets and measuring about 80 sq m (860 sq ft), collapsed just after dawn yesterday while Pompeii was closed to visitors. The structure was believed to have been used as a club house by gladiators before they went to battle in a nearby amphitheatre.

[. . .]

“Precisely because it belongs to all humanity, its management should be taken away from a state that has shown itself incapable of protecting it,”

[. . .]

Approximately 2.5 million tourists visit Pompeii every year, making it one of Italy’s most popular attractions. Art historians and residents have for years complained that the sites were in a state of decay and needed regular maintenance. Two years ago the government declared a state of emergency for Pompeii but it lasted only a year.

Roberto Cecchi, under-secretary at the culture ministry, said there had been no effective, continuous maintenance at Pompeii in half a century. Breaking ranks with his ministry, he said stop-gap, ad hoc measures, such as the appointment of commissioners, which attracted flashes of publicity, were no substitute for the constant monitoring worthy of a world treasure.

To be fair, the Guardian is merely reporting on the calls for privatization, not explicitly endorsing them, but even that is shocking enough.

Sign of the times

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Humour, Randomness — Nicholas @ 13:19

Sue Barrett took a photo of this sign in Brisbane, Australia:

UK schools to include study of Paganism with other religions

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, Religion — Nicholas @ 12:10

The Lincolnshire school authorities have decided to allow local schools the choice of including the study of paganism with the existing study of religions:

If you’re looking to improve your child’s chanting skills or enhance their moon dancing, Lincolnshire may soon be the place to go — as the county decided this week to let individual schools decide on the teaching of pagan doctrine.

At present, some six world religions are studied in that County’s schools.

According to the minutes of a meeting of the Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (Sacre) the county’s RE advisor fed back the results of her investigation into Paganism.

I’m not a fan of teaching any religious beliefs in any public school, but if you’re going to cover any of them, you can’t exclude one arbitrarily. “Paganism”, in this instance is a superset of Druidry, which is now officially recognized as a faith (that is, all Druids are pagans, but not all pagans are Druids):

This makes 2010 a very good year for UK Paganism, following the recognition of druidry as a religion in Britain for the first time in October, when the Charity Commission accepted it as a faith and gave it the charitable status afforded to other religious groups.

Critics — who have been slow off the mark so far on this issue — may also be relieved to learn that modern pagans, unlike ancient druids, are more concerned with focussing personal energies through ritual than human sacrifice. Then again, that allegation was laid by the Romans, who also accused early Christians of eating babies.

November 4, 2010

The continuing dramedy of the A400M

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Germany, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Remember when the opposition were up in arms that Canada wasn’t going to be buying the new A400M for the Canadian Forces? That decision is looking better and better:

Germany has cut its order for A400M transports from 60 to 57. This was in response to demands from the manufacturer for more money. This is not a new problem, but for those who have already ordered the A400M, it’s getting old. The new European military transport, the A400M, is already three years late and billions of dollars over budget. Those who have already placed orders (for 180 aircraft) have been told that the price they thought they were going to pay ($161 million per aircraft) will go up twenty percent. In response, some major buyers said they were considering cancelling their orders. In turn, the manufacturer said that such actions would force the cancellation of the project. With the German reduction of its order, it looks like the A400M will be getting more expensive, to the point where it will be twice what the new C-130J costs. The A400M made its first flight 11 months ago.

[. . .]

During the Cold War, such air transports were very low priority in Europe, because if there was a war, the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union was going to home deliver it. But now all the action is far away, and the military needs air freight for emergencies and other urgent missions. For that reason, the Russian An-124s get a lot of work from NATO nations. This aircraft can carry up to 130 tons of cargo, as well as outsized and extremely large cargo. The more numerous American C-17 can only carry up to 84 tons, while the new A400M can lift a maximum of 40 tons. The advantage of the two smaller airlifters is the ability to operate from shorter unpaved runways, which makes them less dependable on existing infrastructure. Russia has put the An-124 back into production, partly because of the delays in the A400M project.

November 2, 2010

James Delingpole: “Thank God for the Tea Party!”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

James Delingpole clearly wishes he could vote in today’s American elections:

Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt — as you do on returning to Britain these days — as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.

God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of “don’t tread on me” and “live free or die.” Not all of them, obviously — otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years — and not just in the US but throughout the Western world — government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.

What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this. Sure, we may feel in our hearts that — as Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe put it in their Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party manifesto — “We just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others”. And we may even confide it to our friends after a few drinks. But look at Australia; look at Canada; look at New Zealand; look at anywhere in the EUSSR; look at America — at least until things begin to be improved by today’s glorious revolution. Wherever you go, even if it’s somewhere run by a notionally “conservative” administration, the malaise you will encounter is much the same: a system of governance predicated on the notion that the state’s function is not merely to uphold property rights, maintain equality before the law and defend borders, but perpetually to meddle with its citizens’ lives in order supposedly to make their existence more fair, more safe, more eco-friendly, more healthy. And always the result is the same: more taxation, more regulation, less freedom. Less “fairness” too, of course.

October 30, 2010

“People, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

Air travel, already burdened with far too many special Security Theatre Extravaganzas, is about to get even more awful:

This past Wednesday, I showed up at Baltimore-Washington International for a flight to Providence, R.I. I had a choice of two TSA screening checkpoints. I picked mine based on the number of people waiting in line, not because I am impatient, but because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack — a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.

[. . .]

At BWI, I told the officer who directed me to the back-scatter that I preferred a pat-down. I did this in order to see how effective the manual search would be. When I made this request, a number of TSA officers, to my surprise, began laughing. I asked why. One of them — the one who would eventually conduct my pat-down — said that the rules were changing shortly, and that I would soon understand why the back-scatter was preferable to the manual search. I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. “No way. You think Congress would allow that?”

I answered, “If you’re a terrorist, you’re going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina.” He blushed when I said “vagina.”

“Yes, but starting tomorrow, we’re going to start searching your crotchal area” — this is the word he used, “crotchal” — and you’re not going to like it.”

In other words, enough people are refusing to go through the “Dick Measuring Device” that TSA is deliberately going to make the alternative so invasive and degrading that people will have to go through the back-scatter imager. Not that it will actually improve anyone’s safety, but it will increase the compliance ratio for the next stupid policy to come down from the security theatre directors.

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

October 29, 2010

Would KFC’s Double Down have been a hit without the Food Police panic?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Lorne Gunter salutes KFC and their surprise hit menu item:

Way to go KFC! Your Double Down sandwich has the health police in a tizzy. Those preachy, prancing, eat-your-peas pokenoses can’t decide whether to tax you, shield their children’s eyes from you or send you to re-education camp — or perhaps all three at once.

I’m am happy to hear your new bun-less concoction is your most successful new-product launch in company history. May the marketing mastermind who came up with the Double-D get an unhealthy bonus.

To be honest, I can’t even imagine trying one — two deep-fried chicken breasts wrapped around two strips of bacon, two slices of processed cheese and some sauce doesn’t appeal to me — except maybe as a dare; a Double Down Dare. Still, I am genuinely pleased that you have had the chicken balls to come out with an item that thumbs its nose so completely at conventional public-health wisdom.

I’ll never eat one myself, but I cheer on the spirit of those who tell the Nanny State’s food police where to go.

October 27, 2010

Why can’t Chuck get his business off the ground?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:13

The new broom in Toronto

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

After a particularly hard-fought election campaign, Chris Selley looks at the opening moves Toronto mayor Rob Ford will be making:

It’s kind of funny to see people who’ve spent the past 10 months trashing Rob Ford now insist he needs to extend olive branches to the progressive community. If I were Rob Ford, and I had an olive branch, I might be tempted to extend it rather violently towards my harshest critics. (Then, in accordance with my new and improved image, I’d take two deep breaths and calm down.)

Clearly Mr. Ford is sticking with his gravy train priorities off the top: departmental efficiencies, contracting out services, cutting councillor budgets and staff. At a media scrum on Tuesday afternoon, his message hadn’t changed, that I could discern, from what it was during the campaign. Basically: Trust me. The money’s there to be saved, and it won’t hurt a bit.

Still, Mayor Ford will have a city to keep happy. And while they received very little notice during the campaign, his platform included several populist, pro-democratic and dirt-cheap measures I’d defy anyone to oppose and that could earn him some grudging praise from disaffected Pantaloons and Smithermanians.

The large turnout and the not-quite-majority of votes cast for Ford should at least quiet the claims that he “doesn’t have a mandate” for a little while. If he can actually deliver on some of his campaign promises to reduce spending and eliminate some of the least useful municipal programs/initiatives, he’ll be a vast improvement over the last mayor. Even if he doesn’t — he only has a single vote on council, so it’s not automatic that he’ll be able to implement his agenda — it should be an interesting term in office.

Kathy Shaidle shows why Rob Ford had “hidden” strength in the campaign that the media couldn’t account for:

What is Rob Ford most famous for?

No, not that he looks exactly like everybody’s drunk, abusive stepfather. No, not the “gravy train” line.

Rob Ford is “the guy who returns every call.”

That was always Ford’s claim to fame: that even if you didn’t [live] in his ward, he returned your call. If you were wrapped up in red tape and called Rob Ford, an hour or maybe a day later, the tape got snipped. The Wheeltrans showed up at your elderly mother’s door. That stupid problem you’d been screaming at bureaucrats about got taken care of.

Everyone in Toronto knows a Rob Ford story like that.

October 25, 2010

Studying bureaucratic bias

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:56

I’ve always thought that behaviour patterns of bureaucrats are fairly easy to predict: it all hinges on risk/reward. A bureaucrat with expectation of retiring at the peak of pension eligibility will have a very high aversion to risk — but not quite what most people refer to as risk. A bureaucrat has a built-in bias to “stay the course”, to avoid “rocking the boat”, and to prevent the kind of change that will introduce exceptions to normal process.

Expecting a bureaucrat to react like an entrepreneur is unrealistic, because the bureaucrat’s risks (loss of promotion opportunities, loss of status, but not usually loss of job) do not scale well against the possible rewards — except in particularly corrupt jurisdictions, bureaucrats do not directly benefit from making risky decisions.

Given that, is it any surprise that bureaucrats, as a whole, are quite unwilling to step outside “normal practice” or to allow variances, exceptions, or (sometimes) even common sense solutions?

I should be careful (except that I’m a blogger, where “careful” really just means “avoiding lawsuits”), because there’s a risk I’m suffering from one of the traits identified in behavioural economics, the illusion of competence in my preceding horseback judgement:

There is a fashionable new science — behavioral economics, they call it — which applies the insights of psychology to how people make economic decisions. It tries to explain, for instance, the herd instinct that led people during the recent bubble to override common sense and believe things about asset values because others did: the “bandwagon effect.” And it labels as “hindsight bias” the all-too-common tendency during the recent bust to imagine that past events were more predictable than they were. Behavioral economics has also brought us notions like “loss aversion”: how we hate giving up a dollar we have far more than forgoing a dollar we have not yet got.

But while there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that “in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence.” Public servants are human, too.

Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence.

In the last case, psychologists have shown that we systematically overestimate how much we understand about the causes and mechanisms of things we half understand.

October 23, 2010

“How Many Australian Politicians Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?”

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

None:

The (tangential) Free-Range issue here is this: Why are we increasingly subject to rules and regs that have nothing to do with REAL safety and everything to do with litigation, worst-case-scenario-fantasizing and good ol’ CYA? It’s a time, money and morale-waster, with the added benefit of turning competent people into incompetent cowards. Just like so many rules and regs are implementing with kids: No, children, you CANNOT ride your bikes to school. No, children, you CANNOT do your own chemistry experiments. No, children, you CANNOT babysit/whittle/get a paper route/smile at a stranger. It is all TOO DANGEROUS.

And someday we will wonder why no one in the world (except, perhaps, electricians) can do anything.

H/T to Walter Olson.

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