Spotted Owls

There is a long running environmental issue in Northern California concerning the logging industry. There are many restrictions on their operations due to them working in the habitat of the endangered spotted owl. This doesn't sit well with the local timber and paper business, who have produced some propaganda bordering on genius:

Also available as a bumper sticker, naturally.

Thirty

This started out as a post on Friday, mourning the passing of my twenties. However, events in real life came along and took the wind out of my sails before I had a chance to hit ‘submit’.  And if I wasn’t feeling all introspective anyway with regards to life, career and everything, I’ve even more cause now. 
As the curse says: I’m living in interesting times.

Anyway, my original post was going to point out that, all things considered, I’m not that bothered about getting older. This is mainly because I envy the youngest generations less and less with each passing year. As AJ remarks, we have several generations of kids/young adults utterly failed by the education system, to the point of being functionally unemployable.  I left secondary school on the cusp of Labour taking control and don’t feel that hard done by, but kids these days…..Jesus.  Browsing the discussion boards of Facebook is an exercise in utter exasperation.  So like Al, I too hold no fear from younger competitors on the jobs market, which might prove for the best depending on how things turn out.

But enough of this mawdling bollocks, I’m actually watching the England game and am sharpening my pitchfork like everyone else after THAT decision.
I mean, ref-er-ee….

Update: Scratch that, reckon there’s another target for the England fans’ collective ire.  I mean really, what was that?

NICE Mission Creep

In the States, on the back of some high-profile class action lawsuits filed against major food producers back in 2003, the fast food restaurant chains ended up pledging to switch to cooking oils free of trans-fats. It seems now that NICE –as part of our societies’ ceaseless quest to meddle with other people’s lives in every single way imaginable- have decided to follow suit with the public interest ban-hammer. 
Yes, trans-fats are bad by pretty much every metric you care to gauge bad foods by, but although it's possible to eliminate the addition of trans-fats to fried foods, some foods, like meat and some vegetables, contain naturally occurring trans-fat. 2-5% of the fat in livestock is trans-fat. Whether you’re indulging in the great British pastime of post-pissup mystery meat consumption, or searing a Waitrose fillet steak to perfection: you're getting trans-fats in some form. A Big Mac, for example, contains 1.5g of trans-fat, which is more than you want, but only about 8% of the daily amount the World Health Organization says you really, really need to keep it under. Eight percent — those hallowed arches do get a lot of stick for not-much.

Of course if you’re going to kick the back out of it and make every meal an hydrogenated frenzy of lipid-soaked disgracefulness, your longevity will no doubt be somewhat compromised.  Thing is, that’s your choice. If we’re going down this tiresome road of bleating about the costs to the NHS due to the indulgences of smokers, drinkers and fatties, by all means allow them to unburden it by taking their patronage (and approx 17% of their taxes) elsewhere. 
I’ll argue my lifestyle choices with my insurance company, ta.

If we don’t get a choice about paying for this very average universal health service; these interfering and self-important ancillary arms of the NHS should get precisely the square root of fuck-all say in how we end up using it.

A couple of points about the article, though:

Experts who worked on the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines say 40,000 of the 150,000 annual deaths are "eminently preventable".

I can tell you something right now: this is incorrect. Those 40,000 people will actually die.  The question I keep coming back to is: what form of illness or ailment is an acceptable way to go for the hangwringers at NICE? What form of old-age organ-failure or gradual loss of function and faculties (while being a massive burden on the NHS) would they consider superior? 

And when the fuck did it become acceptable for publically-funded ‘healthcare professionals’ to mitigate their workload by overt legislative lobbying using tax-payer’s money?   I know it’s nothing new, it’s just I honestly cannot remember a time when the hectoring calls of our would-be guardians weren’t a perpetual background clamour.

Just.Fuck.Off.

Public Sector Pensions

 Deputy PM Mr Clegg said that was "unfair" and unaffordable. BBC political editor Nick Robinson said pensions cuts were on their way.

It’s going to happen at some point. One of the ways I reconcile selling my soul to HMG is the fact that I’m not likely to retire for about 35 years and there is not a hope in hell that the pension scheme will still exist in the same form by then.  But wait, apparently Clegg is being unreasonable:

Dave Prentis, general secretary of Britain's biggest public sector union, Unison, said the government was not looking at the situation over a long enough time scale.

He told the BBC: "Over a 20-year period, costs are not going up. We have taken measures already to control public service pension schemes.

"In the health service people are being asked to go into a new scheme, in local government we've already implemented one, and the civil service have done the same.

Now there is some variation between the many, many heads of the hydra that is the civil service, but in case you don’t know, this is roughly how the civil service  pension schemes work:

Assuming you’re a civil servant who started work before October 2002 - when you eventually retire, you get a pension of

(Number of years worked) x 1/80 x final salary

On top of that you get a lump sum of 3 x your annual pension upon retirement.  Your ‘contribution’ to this is a massive 1.5% of your salary. 

The slightly newer scheme (between October 2002 and July 2007, which I’m on until they bin it) has a greater contribution of 3.5%, and if you want the lump sum it comes out of your pension.  This time however, the multiplying factor is 1/60th of your final salary; meaning working 40 years nets you 2/3 pay during your twilight years.

And there is a newer post-2007 scheme which is based on your overall average salary, but with a multiplying factor of 1/43rd and only being able to retire at 65 (the other two have it at 60). So you end up with your average career salary pretty much as your pension.

Thing is, these schemes are unfunded, i.e the ‘contributions’ are only really reductions in salary. Much like the Ponzi scheme of National Insurance, there is no ‘fund’ into which you are investing in the same manner as private sector pensions(almost none of which are now final salary-based due to the raping and pillaging of funds by Brown et al), and in return for this notional reduction in salary, the taxpayer pays you directly from the public coffers until the day you die.

You can see the details of the various other schemes here.
Why the contributions are so much higher for those who would probably be defined as ‘proper’ frontline staff like nurses and fire-fighters than for the likes of office-bound creatures like me is anyone’s guess.  Well, I suppose it could be because I’m on the same scheme as the civil servants who make the command decisions regarding who pays what - but now we’re just getting cynical.

I can’t blame the public sector employees for their terms of employment (I’m hardly in a position to), but the long and short of it is that this situation can’t go on as-is. There’s too many public servants on the payroll (blame Brown’s limitless generosity with other people’s money) and far too many people in the real world whose contribution-based pensions have taken a kicking for these public-sector equivalents not to take a similar beating in the budgetary bonfire which is hopefully imminent.

We haven’t ‘earned’ that money, it’s a relic entitlement from a era when the state’s largess for it’s own was less overtly offensive, due in no small part to the public sector’s then more modest size.  In these times of bloat and profligacy, if for political if not economic reasons, I reckon these schemes are as good as gone. 

This, as with most of the rest of our hopes and expectations, will no doubt hinge upon the sharpness of George’s pencil next week.

The World Cup

Egads, something else for me to not care about and yet not stand a chance of avoiding. 

Ah well, rather than write something witty and original, I thought I’d spend my time hunting down an excerpt from a Charlie Brooker TV Go Home issue on the matter back in 2004 with which I remember agreeing with demented fervour.  The only problem being that is that it’s no longer around and the archive section of the site is somewhat lacking. 

So, after finding a crossroads, selling my soul to Satan, and going through some old drives filled with stuff I’ve kept for posterity; here it is the best image I could find - no apologies for quality:

This.

Printed out four times and hung out of my fucking car windows.

Galt's Gulch

In a reversal of scenario and despite evidence to the contrary, I now find myself with an abundance of things I want to write about, but am too otherwise distracted to follow-through from that cursed draft stage.  The draft folder mocks my weakness.

However, since I am not yet done harvesting my non-blogging friends for material, here is something else which has emerged from conversations with omnipresent Dave, He Who Glows With Perpetual Atomic Luminescence.  We’ve had the beginnings of a thought experiment which we thought we’d crowdsource to see where it’ll take us.

This here is Urup, one of the Russians’ various bits and bobs they have floating about the Pacific:

It’ll do.

So if we had enough capital, and if we promised not to sell it to the Japanese, do you reckon that Ivan would sell it to us?  They don’t seem to be doing much with it.  And by ‘us’ I mean an enterprising group of rich people of indeterminate national origin looking to set up a place free from the baggage of your modern day first-world country so that we could go about our evil capitalist ways unhindered.    Like seasteading only without the inconvenience of being science fiction.


The climate would be a little cool (but way better than the populated Aleutian Islands), but there can't be many 75 mile by 12 mile uninhabited islands. That's not just some bizarre microstate; you could have an actual country there. Obviously, we would have need of highways and maybe a railway but they’re no biggie. The volcano's are a downside too, but Iceland lives with it. And it gives it a James Bond feel.

Thing is, we’re going to need an economy to attract prospective citizens, and one widely held to be legal by the international community - otherwise it’ll all be so very awkward (and there’s a chance my readership are all sociopaths, so reign in your baser inclinations for this discussion).

With this in mind, our first thoughts gravitate toward offshore finance (and the Cayman Islands are nicer), fishing (low margin, and as it's near Japan I can't imagine there's much left) and the big family fall-back favourite: arms manufacture. But small arms are low margin, and the competition something fierce. Ballistic missiles will sell well, but will attract more attention to us than is wise. The UN embargo on North Korea does mean there is unmet demand, but only from folk the Russians won't sell to. And we don't want to annoy the neighbours.


So Hivemind, you have a blank slate.
Assuming there is a state to speak of, what form will it take?   And what are we going to make or do which will fill a suitable profitable chasm in international trade in order to establish ourselves as legitimate players?

Dazzle us with your fevered imaginations.

Made up

Since I seem to have broken the seal on writing again, I am presently throwing together some those long-overdue posts that I’ve been told are of vague interest. Such things take time and I’ve been having a bit of an S&M relationship with Windows 7 on the netbook recently – she treats me bad, but I can’t help but come back to her. So bear with me.

In the meantime I have been done the supreme honour of being made into one of Mr Civil Libertarian’s collectable Blogemon cards:

I have never seen somebody displace away from studying so hard since my own filthy days at university.  But still: good drills that man.