Quotulatiousness

February 11, 2010

Britain to try new method of trimming defence budget: locking the generals out

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

It’s an unusual way of “[fixing] the counter-productive incentives within the system”:

Lord Drayson, the British arms industry’s man inside the Ministry of Defence, has moved to lock the heads of the armed services out of the room in which the Forces’ future is to be settled. This is being billed as an attempt to prevent interservice bickering, but it will leave the rapacious UK arms business facing almost no uniformed opposition in its bid to pocket more government cash.

The Financial Times, having seen a copy of a speech to be delivered by Drayson, reports that a new MoD committee set up to “review direction and affordability” will not include the heads of the army, navy and air force “because we need to fix the counter-productive incentives within the system”, according to Drayson.

“We need to make sure that the decisions made about capability are rigorously examined… from the perspective of Defence overall and not a single viewpoint within Defence,” the noble lord is expected to add.

A skeptic might assume that there’s no good reason for this, but there is a plausible explanation:

The RAF, left to itself, would squander fortunes on buying more Eurofighters and then turning them into a deep-strike force capable of penetrating strong enemy air defences — a thing that it is vanishingly unlikely the UK will need to do. The Army is currently planning to spend no less than £14bn recreating its heavy tank force, despite the fact that it is 20 years since that force went to war — and the general who commanded it then has since said that in fact the last real tank battles ever seen took place 20 years before that.

The Navy is also wasting money foolishly at the moment, not on aircraft carriers as everyone thinks — those are a good idea and a joint-service one to boot, and cheap in this context at £4-5bn — but on billion-pound unarmed missile destroyers.

February 4, 2010

Unemployment insurance systems can deter hiring

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:31

Jay Goltz discusses how some state-level unemployment insurance systems actually deter firms from hiring new employees:

The unemployment insurance tax may be the most confusing and misunderstood tax there is. It is run by the states, and the rules can vary as much as the weather from one state to another.

Here’s how it works in Illinois. The important point for business owners to know is that when the state pays out claims to a company’s former employees, that company’s unemployment tax rate goes up. For each business, the state calculates how many dollars have been paid in compensation over the previous three years and adds on about 48 percent through various calculations. The result is that in Illinois, you end up paying for incremental compensation claims at a rate of $1.48 for every dollar that a former employee collects.

If you lay off or fire someone without “cause,” that person is eligible for unemployment compensation. “Cause” means that the employee violated a company policy, like coming in late or threatening a co-worker. “Cause” does not include doing a bad job, being very slow, or having a bad attitude.

I’d always assumed that the Canadian system (which is run by the federal government) was more generous than the various state-level systems in the US, but there appears to be more variation state-to-state so that may not be true. Certainly the Illinois system’s top payment of $531 per week is well above the Canadian EI top payment ($457 before taxes, according to the servicecanada.gc.ca website). If the Illinois amount is after tax, that’s significantly more than a Canadian claimant would get.

February 1, 2010

Cookie Monster after visiting Room 101

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

L. Neil Smith looks at the sad remains of a once-great Muppet:

My only child turned twenty years of age early last month, so it has been some time since I kept daily track with her of the various comings and goings of the diverse and colorful inhabitants of Sesame Street.

Thus it was with considerable dismay that I recently learned that my favorite of these denizens had been abducted, tortured, brainwashed by the vile forces of political correctness, and returned to society a broken, pitiable shadow of his former self, rather like Winston Smith in 1984, after rats had been used to force him to scream “Do it to Julia!”

A product of merciless North Korean-style mind-conditioning, the great blue googly-eyed Cookie Monster now mouths mindless, robotic platitudes and slogans like “cookies are a sometimes snack”. He even eats broccoli — the Green Death — in public, like a circus geek consuming broken lightbulbs and handsful of worms. Gone is the joyous hedonist we knew who was a living exemplar of Robert Heinlein’s famous dicta, “Dum vivamus, vivamus!” and “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!”

He has become just another “progressive” icon, different-looking on the outside, yes, but filled up on the inside with the same bland, gray, unappetizing pablum as Smokey the Bear, Bono, and Janeane Garofalo.

The bureaucratic response to pedestrian fatalities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

Along with the politicians’ leap to regulate, the bureaucracy is responding in a highly predictable way to the high number of pedestrian fatalities in the Toronto area this year: ticketing jaywalkers.

I don’t mean to minimize the impact of these accidents. Several years ago, someone very close to me was killed by a car while crossing the street. Without going into the details of the incident, I can tell you that I understand firsthand the pain of losing a loved one in a sudden, senseless way.

Yet, it’s no salve for a mourning family to know that the men in blue are out making a show of ticketing jaywalkers (and at intersections nowhere near where the fatal accidents took place, no less). That’s not education. It’s wasting valuable resources for the sake of appearing to be “doing something.”

The one sensible bit of advice for pedestrians I’ve heard come out of the recent rash of deaths is this: Don’t assume it’s OK to cross just because you have a green light (or friendly white walking man) on your side. Look around with your own eyes. Check the intersection and take a glance behind your back. In other words, don’t blindly rely on someone or something else — a driver or a traffic indicator — to keep you safe.

Interestingly, it’s precisely the opposite of the message the police are sending every time they dramatically nab a pedestrian for not slavishly following the rules. Go figure.

I drive into downtown Toronto a couple of times each week. Every day, I see pedestrians doing stupid, dangerous things. Every week, I see drivers going too fast, making sudden lane changes, and turning without signalling or appearing to visually check before turning. Given all that, it’s amazing that there aren’t more accidents.

Posting police officers on busy intersections to hand out jaywalking tickets is an almost complete waste of time and effort, but (as so often is the case) it provides a visible mark that the city is doing something about the problem. The fact that the something is useless doesn’t deter the bureaucracy: that’s a feature, not a bug. No newspaper or TV reporter is going to be able to say the city isn’t doing something. Mission (bureaucratically) accomplished.

January 29, 2010

Australia’s film censors got bored, so decided to call attention to themselves

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 19:12

At least, that’s a sensible an interpretation as I can come up with for this lovely little policy change:

A reader writes, “Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as ‘abhorrent.'”

Hard to come up with a sensible explanation for this, you have to admit.

January 27, 2010

Where Virginia is headed, will Ontario follow?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Law, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

January 26, 2010

A message from Transport Canada

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

From the Rick Mercer Report.

January 20, 2010

This has got to be a mis-communication

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 21:55

At least, I hope it’s just a miscommunication:

Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.

It was not known whether the action reflected a high-level policy decision at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or confusion in a city where dozens of entities are involved in aid efforts.

“We are not supposed to get rations unless approved by AID,” Maj. Larry Jordan said.

Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.

Surely not even the most pig-headed rules-lawyer would have required this . . . I hope.

H/T Castle Argghhh.

Update, 21 January: For reasons of incompetence, I forgot to actually include the URL in that link to Castle Argghhh. Fixed now.

While I’m updating the post, this may be relevant:

The MRE (Meals Ready to Eat, in a pouch) are frequently used as emergency rations. The MRE has evolved from its initial introduction in 1983 (12 separate entrees) to today (24 menu entrees). The MREs change from year to year, and new entrees are added in place of others. The U.S. military has generally switched out entrees each year (apparently the notion that such a deal is a zero-sum game seems to persist, as opposed to just adding new ones). This constant evolution has done much to diminish the bad reputations MREs had early on. Back then, the MRE (officially, “Meals, Ready to Eat”) was often called “Meals Rejected by Everyone”.

The United States also has other rations, including variants for cold weather (which has a higher calorie count than the regular MRE – 1540 per meal compared to 1250 for an MRE), and a kosher/halal variant for Jewish and Moslem soldiers (both religions, for instance, forbid the consumption of pork). Vegetarian entrees are provided, as well. The United States also has developed the Humanitarian Daily Ration (HDR), which has three meals and is based on vegetarian entrees to provide a low chance of offending cultural sensibilities. Many of these HDRs were dropped over Afghanistan in late 2001. Several hundred thousand HDRs are stockpiled for disaster relief, and production can be ramped up quickly. MREs and HDRs are particularly attractive because they provide uncontaminated food that does not require refrigeration, in a compact package. The UN, and many other food aid organizations, use the HDR for situations like Haiti.

January 13, 2010

Toronto bureaucrats and politicians at odds over pond skating

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:11

After yesterday’s article at the National Post, Peter Kuitenbrouwer finds that the new “no skating” policy was implemented without informing the elected politicians:

Toronto parks department bureaucrats permanently banned all skating on city ponds without consulting any elected city officials, Councillor Paula Fletcher, the parks chief, said yesterday.

Ms. Fletcher (Toronto-Danforth) and the committee’s vice-chair, Karen Stintz (Eglinton-Lawrence), believe the ban on pond skating is wrong, and plan to bring the topic to the Parks and Environment meeting at City Hall this morning. Ms. Fletcher suggested yesterday people should continue ignoring the signs, as long as they believe the ice is safe.

“I believe that there should be skating on ponds,” Ms. Fletcher said yesterday.

“It certainly was not a public policy,” she added, to ban skating on city ponds. The councillor said she was unaware of a document, “Activities on Frozen Open Bodies of Water Policy,” until I reported on it in the National Post yesterday.

“When this is a public debate it should be a public document,” added Ms. Fletcher.

January 12, 2010

“You should not obey every sign you see”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:03

I’m not even a skater, but I thoroughly agree with Rob Roberts Peter Kuitenbrouwer on this:

Toronto’s biggest skating rink is now (unofficially) open for your winter pleasure.

Please ignore the City of Toronto’s yellow plastic signs, fastened to trees and posts around Grenadier Pond in High Park, which read, “Danger. Ice unsafe. Keep off. Municipal Code #608.”

The affirmation on these signs is false, as hundreds proved this past weekend when we piled onto the city’s largest pond. Some cross-country skied. Some walked dogs. A photographer from a community newspaper got on to take pictures. One young man who had a thick Russian accent brought an ice drill and bored eight holes (the ice is about 25 cm thick) and sat down on his cooler to fish.

Mostly, we skated: people shoveled off five beautiful hockey rinks along the 1.2 km-long expanse of ice, linked by ice lanes. Shinny was never so glorious. Yesterday I skated again, joined once more by skaters, skiers and walkers.

Flaunting the municipal signs doesn’t bother me; I explained to my son (who is seven) that, “you should not obey every sign you see.”

Update: Corrected attribution to the actual author of the piece. I must say that the National Post author attributions are sometimes rather confusing. The page currently says the piece is by Rob Roberts, but elsewhere on the site, Chris Selley refers to it as Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s article. Selley also perfectly encapsulates the municipal government’s preferences: “Just do what the government says and no one gets hurt”.

January 9, 2010

QotD: The awfulness of airports

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Over the weekend, an idiot walked the wrong way through a secure exit for arriving passengers at Newark airport. An entire terminal was shut down so that everybody on the “sterile” side of the security barriers could be herded back out and rescreened. The entire process took just under seven hours. The cascading delays disrupted air travel worldwide. They didn’t even catch the doofus who caused the ruckus. No doubt, if they’d announced his location over the paging system, he’d have been drawn and quartered by a mob of traveling salesmen from 3M and a gaggle of middle-school girls returning from a volleyball tournament.

Now, I should back up. When I referred to the “sterile” side of the security barrier, I was using the term narrowly, to refer to folks who’d been through the metal detectors. Because to use the word “sterile” in its usual context in a sentence with “airports” — those belching Petri dishes of bathroom effluence and unidentifiable noisome miasma — would be a grotesque abrogation of journalistic trust.

According to the latest epidemiological research, airports reside somewhere between no-frills Haitian brothels and Penn State fraternity bathrooms when it comes to hygiene. USA Today recently surveyed the health-inspection records of airport restaurants and found that serious code violations were as commonplace as rat and mouse droppings; 77 percent of 35 restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport had at least one major violation.

I could go on, of course. The petty humiliations, the routine deceptions from airline employees desperate to rid themselves of troublesome travelers (“Oh, they can definitely help you at the gate!”), the stress-position seats, the ever-changing rules for what can and cannot be in your carry-on, being charged for food that the Red Cross would condemn if it were served at Gitmo: Air travel is the most expensive unpleasant experience in everyday life outside the realm of words ending in -oscopy.

Jonah Goldberg, “A No-Fly List? Count Me In: Flying before 9/11 was already awful, and it has only become worse”, National Review, 2010-01-08

January 4, 2010

Ohio moves to protect wine drinkers from themselves

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

Ah, those Ohio wine drinkers . . . they must be consuming wine at much higher than the national average. How else can you account for the state government legally imposing limits on how much wine you can buy each year?

As laws go, Ohio’s limit on wine purchases appears to be simple:

“No family household shall purchase more than 24 cases of 12 bottles of 750 milliliters of wine in one year.”

That’s 288 bottles per year — plenty for most people. But it raises questions if you’re a collector, entertain a lot or just prickle at the thought of another government regulation.

How do they know how much wine I buy? Why do they care? How many cases have I purchased this year?

Of course, the limit isn’t really a limit: there’s no mechanism to track your actual purchases from retailers, Ohio drinkers, it’s only to limit sales direct from wineries to consumers. This limit was introduced after the US Supreme Court decision a few years back which struck down state-level restrictions on shipments from out-of-state wineries.

In several ways, it’s a typical bureaucratic response to a non-issue, providing work for several new civil servants, requiring uncompensated form-filling and legal compliance on the part of the sellers (over and above the normal requirements for selling alcohol), and being remarkably ineffective, to boot:

All wineries or importers for wineries that produce fewer than 250,000 gallons per year pay the state $25 for a license that allows them to ship directly to customers here. They have to pay the state’s alcohol and sales taxes. They also have to tell the state who received the wine — and how much that person got.

The Ohio Division of Liquor Control, which receives the reports on wine sales from the S permit holders, uses the reports to determine whether someone might be violating the purchase limit, said Matt Mullins, a spokesman for the division. “It’s the division’s interpretation that it’s related to the amount of wine shipped from an S permit holder. That’s what we believe the intent (of the law) was.”

The reports are due each year in March, he said, and the first came last year. No one was flagged as a violator.

If the reports did show that someone had purchased too much wine by mail, Mullins said, the information would be turned over to the Ohio Department of Public Safety Investigative Unit, which enforces state alcohol laws. The law allows a fine of up to $100 if someone is found guilty.

I’m not at all in favour of this sort of legalistic bullshit, but if they’re going to go to the effort of setting up this system, it’s farcical to — a year or more after the fact — track down a “perpetrator” and then fine them “up to $100”. A hundred bucks wouldn’t pay the state for the time and effort to track down that criminal mastermind who legally ordered an extra case of wine . . .

Of course, the statist’s response would be to substantially increase the fines, rather than dismantle the whole ridiculous tracking system.

January 2, 2010

This isn’t the way it was supposed to go

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:39

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, “Purple Avenger” tries to decipher the inscrutable Obama administration policy on information classification:

Here’s what I’ve found so far that I’m 100% sure of:

— There’s a 10 year “default” on declassifying classified info unless a longer time frame was specified and justified.

— Unclassified information may BECOME classified upon submission of a FOIA request for it . . . thus allowing for a public veneer of openness while reserving the right to clam up if said openness should prove inconvenient when someone actually learns of a document’s existence and has the nerve to request it.

Its a very lengthy and tortuously worded EO and people will be analyzing its ramifications for quite a while I suspect. I don’t imagine the professional intelligence community is terribly happy about the Byzantine procedures outlined here. Their jobs just got a lot harder.

December 31, 2009

“We put the jerk in knee-jerk with the way we respond to threats”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 20:22

Tom Kelley sent me a link to this Miles O’Brien article:

[. . .] my family and I will face long lines, lots of questions, pat down searches and an hour of lockdown time in our seats before landing. It is as if my ruler-brandishing first-grade teacher Sister Grace took over Delta Air Lines. “Books away — feet on the floor — hands on your desk — eyes straight ahead . . . ”

It is brilliant thinking like the new seat arrest rule that should tell you a lot about our ill-conceived approach to thwarting terrorists who continue to find plane loads full of innocent Americans to be tempting targets. I don’t suppose future terrorists might try to light some portion of their clothing 61 minutes before landing do you?

What about the baby who needs a bottle or a passy on descent and is crying his lungs out? God help him, his mother and the rest of us . . .

We put the jerk in knee-jerk with the way we respond to threats.

Our Homeland Security Czarina Janet Napolitano tried to spin the whole thing into a triumph of our security apparatus. At least she didn’t get a “Nappy, you’re doin’ a heckuva a job!” from our Commander-in-Chief

Government moves quickly on TSA . . . to silence critics

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

In a bold move in the wake of the latest terrorist bomb attempt, the government has pounced . . . on the bloggers who reported on the TSA’s response:

As the government reviews how an alleged terrorist was able to bring a bomb onto a U.S.-bound plane and try to blow it up on Christmas Day, the Transportation Security Administration is going after bloggers who wrote about a directive to increase security after the incident.

TSA special agents served subpoenas to travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott, demanding that they reveal who leaked the security directive to them. The government says the directive was not supposed to be disclosed to the public.

Frischling said he met with two TSA special agents Tuesday night at his Connecticut home for about three hours and again on Wednesday morning when he was forced to hand over his lap top computer. Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn’t cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo.

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