Quotulatiousness

April 12, 2013

The nasty phenomenon of “revenge porn” websites

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:19

In the Guardian, Adam Steinbaugh looks at the legal side of fighting against “revenge porn”:

A jilted ex-paramour seeks vengeance on a former lover. His trump card is a nude photo he acquired in happier times. In the dark corners of the internet, revenge porn sites are happy to help out, posting these photos alongside the subject’s full name, address and even phone number. The result for the victim can be anything from terrible embarrassment to potential job loss, and all accompanied by threats and harassment from people whose greatest contribution to society is usually surpassed by the average YouTube comment.

While ex-lovers act out of malice, the site operators act with sociopathic greed. With embarrassing photos often featuring prominently in Google results, the sites often advertise “independent” takedown services charging upwards of $300 (£195) to quickly remove photos — cheaper and faster than hiring a lawyer. Those extortionate services usually turn out to be fronts run by the site owners themselves. One even concocted a fake lawyer (“David Blade III, Esq”) to give his business a more legitimate face.

While the people who upload the photos can almost certainly risk significant civil liability, revenge porn sites are protected in the United States by the Communications Decency Act. The CDA requires that responsibility for tortious acts online (like defamation or invasion of privacy) lie with whoever created the content, not those who facilitate its dissemination.

April 11, 2013

Ontario’s Green Energy Act is pushing the province to the top … of the retail electricity price table

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Ontario loves to be at the top of rankings, but Ontario electricity users should be upset that we’re surging to the top of this particular ranking:

Ontario’s Green Energy Act (GEA) will soon put the province at or near the top of North American electricity costs, with serious consequences for the province’s economic growth and competitiveness, concludes a new report from the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian think-tank.

“Already, the GEA has caused major price increases for large energy consumers, and we’re anticipating additional hikes of 40 to 50 per cent over the next few years,” said Ross McKitrick, Fraser Institute senior fellow and author of Environmental and Economic Consequences of Ontario’s Green Energy Act.

“The Ontario government defends the GEA by referring to a confidential 2005 cost-benefit analysis on reducing air pollution from power plants. That report did not recommend pursuing wind or solar power, instead it looked at conventional pollution control methods which would have yielded the same environmental benefits as the GEA, but at a tenth of the current cost. If the province sticks to its targets for expanding renewables, the GEA will end up being 70 times costlier than the alternative, with no greater benefits.”

[. . .]

The study shows that the GEA’s focus on wind generation is particularly wasteful: 80 per cent of Ontario’s wind-power generation occurs when electricity demand is so low that the entire output is surplus and must be dumped on the export market at a substantial loss. The Auditor General of Ontario estimates that the province has already lost close to $2 billion on surplus wind exports, and figures from the electricity grid operator show the ongoing losses are $200 million annually.

The wind grid is also inherently inefficient due to the fluctuating nature of the power source. The report calculates that due to seasonal patterns, seven megawatts of wind energy are needed to provide a year-round replacement of one megawatt of conventional power.

“Consequently, the cost of achieving renewable energy targets for the coming years will be much higher than the Ontario government’s current projections,” McKitrick said.

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 6, 2013

An unusual hero for a modern TV show

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

Virginia Postrel briefly reviews a British show that just made its way across to North America:

When the British drama Mr. Selfridge debuted on PBS this week, American viewers saw two things rarely on display in contemporary popular culture: a businessman hero and, more remarkably, a version of commercial history that includes not just manufacturing but shopping.

The show, which is also streamed on PBS.org, stars Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born founder of the London department store. In the first episode, he arrives in 1909, determined to shake up U.K. retailing with the techniques that made him a success as a partner at Chicago’s Marshall Field’s: showmanship, tons of advertising, and displays that let customers easily handle the merchandise. In the second, he puts perfumes and powder on display right by the store’s front door and introduces an affordable house fragrance concocted with new chemical processes.

Ambitions that an American drama might treat as self- centered greed become, in a British context, a bold strike against class privilege. “You show great potential,” Selfridge tells the talented shop girl Agnes Towler (played by Aisling Loftus), the show’s working-class heroine. “You remind me of myself when I started out — grasping for every chance, keen as mustard to learn. You love it, don’t you? The customers, the selling, the feeling of the merchandise under your hands …”

[. . .]

Yet like railroads and telegraphs, the department stores of the late 19th and early 20th century were socially and economically transformative institutions. They pioneered innovations ranging from inventory control and installment credit to ventilation systems, electric lighting and steel construction, along with new merchandising and advertising techniques. They brought together goods from all over the world and lit up city streets with their window displays. They significantly changed the role of women, giving them new career opportunities and respectable places to meet in public. They popularized bicycles, cosmetics, ready-to-wear clothing and electrical appliances. They even invented the ladies’ room.

April 5, 2013

Northern Quebec is the home of the world’s best gin

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Or so Maclean’s says. Thanks to Canada’s odd patchwork of post-Prohibition trade restrictions between provinces, Ungava by Domaine Pinnacle is only available in Alberta, BC, and Quebec itself:

It is a difficult gin to miss. When Ungava won a Best of Show award at the prestigious World Spirits Competition last week, a judge noted its “unusual colour that helps grab your senses.” It’s perhaps the most polite way of drawing attention to Ungava’s yellow tint, about which Pinnacle president Charles Crawford is slightly more blunt. “It’s a bit like morning’s vitamin-enriched urine,” he says. His PR people prefer “sunshine yellow.”

The process by which Ungava gin is made is even more peculiar than its colour. An ice cider producer by trade, Crawford has a history of wonky tinctures — Pinnacle also produces maple-infused whiskey and a cider-brandy concoction. “Ice cider is a good product, but you can only make so much of it,” he says. “We decided to get into spirits, because there aren’t many that are uniquely Canadian.” In fact, Crawford wanted the gin to be truly, pre-colonially Canadian. He whittled down a list of 40 indigenous herbs, berries and flowers (“Nothing planted by Europeans”) to six ingredients, all found on the Ungava Peninsula in Nunavik: cloudberries; crowberries; Labrador tea; a Labrador tea cousin known as Ukiurtatuq, or “Arctic blend”; wild rosehips, which lend the gin its yellow colour; and of course juniper, without which Ungava wouldn’t be proper gin.

Every year, Crawford hires “these two guys from Kuujjuaq” (he’s unsure of their names) to pick the botanicals during Ungava’s four-week harvesting season, which usually begins in late August. The pair pack “a couple hundred kilos” of their pickings into clear, pillowy bags and send them 1,500 km straight south to Ungava’s production facility in Cowansville, about an hour’s drive east of Montreal. A neutral spirit made with locally grown corn is infused with the botanicals.

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.

March 30, 2013

All those manufacturing jobs are never coming back

Filed under: Britain, Business, China, Economics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Tim Worstall explains why this is at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

I’m always rather puzzled by those who shout that we’ve got to bring manufacturing back to the UK. Apparently this will solve all our problems over what to do with dim Northern lads or something. Once they’re all hammering out whippet flanges then we just won’t have a problem with unemployment ever again. The problem with this idea is that modern manufacturing simply doesn’t provide many jobs. And if it were to provide mass employment it would be very badly paid employment too:

    Americans working to produce traded goods and services earn, roughly, according to their productivity. If low-skill workers in America aren’t much more productive in manufacture of traded goods and services than low-skill workers in China, then they can’t earn much more than workers in China while being employed in manufacture of traded goods and services. They can earn a rich-world wage in production of non-traded goods and services, like sandwiches and haircuts, so long as there is sufficient local demand. In other words, the only way to get less-skilled Americans a good wage in a manufacturing industry is to significantly raise their skill and productivity level. If that can’t be accomplished, they can only hope to find good wages in non-traded industries. At least, that is, until wages of less-skilled workers across the developing world come much closer to converging with those in America.

Of course, that’s all about America but the same logic pertains here as well. Chinese manufacturing wages are around $6,000 a year at present. Meaning that if we had mass employment in manufacturing, as they do, then wages would need to be around that level. Or, alternatively, UK based manufacturing would have to be much more productive to support higher wages. And “more productive” is the same as saying “uses less labour”. Thus you can have few well paid jobs (in the Rolls Royces etc of this world) or you can have many badly paid jobs (Shenzen). It isn’t actually possible to mix and match between the two.

Looking at crowdfunding as a replacement for venture capital

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:43

ESR looks at where crowdfunding fits in the traditional tech start-up food chain:

In How crowdfunding and the JOBS Act will shape open source companies, Fred Trotter proposes that crowdfunding a la Kickstarter and IndieGoGo is going to displace venture capitalists as the normal engine of funding for open-source tech startups, and that this development will be a tremendous enabler. Trotter paints a rosy picture of idealistic geeks enabled to do fully open-source projects because they’ll no longer feel as pressed to offer a lucrative early exit to VCs on the promise of rent capture from proprietary technology.

Some of the early evidence from crowdfunding successes does seem to point at this kind of outcome, especially near 3D printing and consumer electronics with a lot of geek buy-in. And I’d love to believe all of Trotter’s optimism. But there’s a nagging problem of scale here that makes me think the actual consequences will be more mixed and messy than he suggests.

In general, VCs don’t want to talk to you at all unless they can see a good case for ploughing in at least $2 million, and they don’t get really interested below a scale of about $15M. This is because the amount of time required for them to babysit an investment (sit on the company’s board, assist job searches, etc.) doesn’t scale down for smaller investments — small plays are just as much work for much less money. This is why there’s a second class of investors, often called “angels”, who trade early financing on the $100K order of magnitude for equity. The normal trajectory of a startup goes from friends & family money through angels up to VCs. Each successive stage in this pipeline is generally placing a larger bet and accordingly has less risk tolerance and a higher time discount than the previous; VCs, in particular, will be looking for a fast cash-out via initial public offering.

The problem is this: it’s quite rare for crowdfunding to raise money even equivalent to the low-end threshold of a VC, let alone the volume they lay down when they’re willing to bet heavily. Unless crowdfunding becomes an order of magnitude more effective than it is now (which seems to me possible but unlikely) the financing source it will displace isn’t VCs but angels.

March 29, 2013

If cable company ads were honest, we’d see something very similar to this

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

H/T to Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla for the link.

If North American cable-and-internet providers were honest, they’d produce an ad that went like this. Note that there’s some swearing involved, as is often the case with cable-and-internet providers.

March 23, 2013

“Having it all” versus “being happy”

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

In the Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente talks about the tension many women feel in trying to lead full lives, both professionally and personally:

Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire COO of Facebook, is everywhere these days. Her new book, Lean In, is a smart, strategic guide for women who want to succeed. Be more assertive, conquer your fear, manage your guilt, don’t sabotage yourself.

All good advice, in my view. But these days, a lot of smart, highly educated thirtysomething women are having an entirely different conversation. They’re not talking about leaning in. They’re talking about leaning back.

[. . .]

Given the realities of the modern workplace, the mystery isn’t why there aren’t more women at the top but why so many want to get there. “To reject a high-flying career … is not to reject aspiration,” Judith Shulevitz writes in The New Republic. “It is to refuse to succumb to a kind of madness.”

Most women, if they have the choice, are happy to trade long hours and money for flexibility and control. This explains why nearly a quarter of women who have MBAs and children have dropped out of the work force 15 years after graduation, according to a U.S. study. When these findings were released, they produced much hand-wringing about the failed promise of feminism and lingering discrimination in the workplace. But what they really reflect is women’s stronger preference for a balanced life.

High-achieving younger women don’t think this is going to happen to them. It takes them by surprise. They get an MBA or law degree, a demanding job and an equal-opportunity husband. And then they have a baby and – wham. As one young mother in her early 30s puts it, “I had no idea I’d be so crazy about my child.”

I suspect a lot of the frustration young women encounter is that they’ve been lead to expect that they can cope with both a full-time, active, fulfilling career and raising a child simultaneously. The reality is that for most women, it’s a binary choice: you get either the job or the family, but not both. When this realization hits home, it can feel like a betrayal.

March 20, 2013

QotD: The mad, mad, mad world of author royalty calculation

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Author/publisher contracts specify royalty rates in the craziest way imaginable. This is because they consist of archaeological strata of legal boilerplate, accumulated over decades and haggled over by publishers’ lawyers and authors’ agents. Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?”

And so we have constant re-use of legal boilerplate that’s decades old. “For sales under 10,000 copies, a royalty of 10% will be assigned based on the undiscounted suggested retail price. From 10,001 to 15,000 copies, a royalty of 12% will be allocated … from 15,001 up, a royalty of 15% will be allocated … for copies sold at less than 40% discount off SRP, the full royalty will be paid; for copies sold at discount of 41-50% 80% of royalties due will be paid: from 51%-65% 50% of royalties will be paid: above 65% 40% of royalties will be paid.” You can think of it as a stack of IF () THEN () ELSE () statements switched off the number of copies sold and the discount the wholesaler extorted for taking them off the publisher’s hands.

Charles Stross, “Things publishers can’t do (yet)”, Charlie’s Diary, 2013-03-19

March 16, 2013

More on the Cyprus banking situation

Filed under: Business, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:44

At Forbes, Tim Worstall explains why the mandatory levy on bank accounts is an epic facepalm:

There’s nothing particularly bad about making depositors carry some of the load of a bank failure. Indeed, it has something to recommend it: if it happens occasionally then people will take more care over where they put their money and what the banks do with it.

However, there’s a very great difference between allowing depositors without government insurance to take losses and actually reneging on the previously promised government insurance. And it’s that second that they’re actually doing here. [. . .]

Under the system until yesterday all depositors in Cypriot banks were insured up to the value of €100,000 with any one bank. Today that solemn and governmental promise has been shown to be false. And not even the European Union nor the European Central Bank are going to make them stick to it. Indeed, very much the other way around. The EU and ECB are insisting that the Cyprus authorities breach this deposit insurance provision.

As I say, there’s nothing wrong with making uninsured depositors take some of the pain. Certainly nothing at all wrong with making those with large deposits take a haircut. The problem is when government has said “we’ll insure this” and when push comes to shove they say “err, no, we won’t”. And the problem with this is that it makes all future EU deposit insurance worth that much less.

March 15, 2013

Will the death of Google Reader also be the death of RSS?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Felix Salmon on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader:

But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service — a way to find what you were looking for on the internet — and didn’t stop there. Google would also do things like buy the entire Usenet archives, or scan millions of out-of-print books, or put thousands of people to work making maps, all in order to be able to get all sorts of information to anybody who wants it. [. . .]

The problem with the death of Reader is that it was the architecture underpinning lots of other services — the connective tissue of just about all RSS readers and services, from Summify to Reeder to Flipboard. You didn’t even need to use Google Reader; it was just the master central repository of your master OPML list, all the different feeds that you were subscribed to. Google spent real money to provide that public service, and it’s going to be sorely missed. As Marco Arment says, “every major iOS RSS client is still dependent on Google Reader for feed crawling and sync.”

Arment sees a silver lining in the cloud, saying that with Google gone, “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” I’m less sanguine. Building an RSS sync platform is a hard and pretty thankless task, it costs real money, and it might not work at all — especially in a world where less and less content is actually available in RSS format. (You can subscribe to my Tumblr feed in RSS format, but there’s no such feed for my posts on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Path or even Google+.)

RSS has been dying for years — that’s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won’t last much longer.

Is Lockheed’s C-130 Hercules the all-time champion in US pork barrel politics?

Filed under: Business, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Ian Geldard linked to this rather interesting history lesson on the Lockheed C-130 transport aircraft (the RCAF is also a user of this type of plane, along with a large number of other air forces):

USAF Lockheed Hercules C-130 at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo (Photo from Wikimedia)

USAF Lockheed Hercules C-130 at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo (Photo from Wikimedia)

Here’s where the story starts to get interesting. After 25 years, the Pentagon decided that it was well stocked with C-130s, so President Jimmy Carter’s administration stopped asking Congress for more of them.

Lockheed was in trouble. A few years earlier, the Air Force had started looking into replacing the Hercules with a new medium-sized transport plane that could handle really short runways, and Lockheed wasn’t selected as one of the finalists. Facing bankruptcy due to cost overruns and cancellations of programs, the company squeezed Uncle Sam for a bailout of around $1 billion in loan guarantees and other relief (which was unusual back then, as William Hartung points out his magisterial Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex).

[. . .]

So what did Lockheed do about the fate of the C-130? It bypassed the Pentagon and went straight to Congress. Using a procedure known as a congressional “add-on” — that is, an earmark — Lockheed was able to sell the military another fleet of C-130s that it didn’t want.

To be fair, the Air Force did request some C-130s. Thanks to Senator John McCain, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) did a study of how many more C-130s the Air Force requested between 1978 and 1998. The answer: Five.

How many did Congress add on? Two hundred and fifty-six.

[. . .]

The Air Force’s approach of passing unwanted Herks off to the Air Guard and Reserves worked out nicely for Lockheed. The company allied with Air Guard and reservist advocacy groups to lobby Congress further. In an era of base closures, heavily lobbied governors would use the arrival of new planes to argue for the continuing life of bases in their states. In turn, states and their congressional delegations would fight to get new planes or hang onto existing ones. It was a veritable Lockheed feedback loop. Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus quoted a Pentagon official as seeing C-130 politics as a twist on the old military-industrial complex: “a triangle of the Guard, Lockheed, and politicians.”

The result: the military was often prevented from retiring the oldest Herks, the ones that really needed to be put out to pasture. For example, as Pincus reported, the Joint Chiefs and the Air Force concluded in 1996 that they had 50 more C-130s than they needed, but Congress stymied efforts to retire any of them. One tactic used was to hold nominees hostage: a Kentucky senator repeatedly held up Air Force promotions until four Kentucky Air Guard C-130s were taken off the chopping block.

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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