Thursday, April 26, 2007

[blogfocus thursday] some home truths

This evening, we're dealing with absolute rubbish.

1 Matthew Sinclair shows that the most important issues are often those close to home:

More and more councils are having waste collection take place every other week. The Conservatives I am campaigning for are likely to introduce fortnightly collection. The change is a response to a major increase, by the government, in landfill charges. Councils can either take drastic action to increase recycling or face heavy new charges and be forced to cut other services or increase taxes.

Fortnightly collection is not popular, it comes up on the doorstep and people really resent it enough to change their vote.

2 Olly's Onions has the good oil on these rubbish collections:

Campaign to save weekly rubbish collection stepped up Refuse collectors across the country today appealed for support to help save the Daily Mail which has been publishing rubbish every week for over a hundred years. Oswald Mosley was last night unavailable for comment.

3 Speaking of the good oil, J. Arthur MacNumpty gives the Scottish lowdown on the infamous Eurovision voting system:

Brian Taylor has compared the STV system to the voting in the Eurovision Song Contest, of which I am a fan (stereotypical? moi?).

I disagree with him. Firstly, the ESC is closer to FPTP than STV - all though each nations' votes are ranked, the points are allocated according to ranking rather than proportion, so a song in first place can win by 5 votes in a country and get as many points (12) as if it had won by 50,000. Secondly, the people who draw up our electoral boundaries are obsessed with 'parity', i.e. getting the size of the electorate in each constituency to be as equal as possible, while in ESC, Malta and Andorra have the same voting strength as Turkey or France. Thirdly, the STV system does not allow voters in neighbouring areas to support each other's candidates.

4 Longrider writes of the counterproductivity of trying to bring pressure to bear on smokers to stop:

Well, I do have some personal experience of addiction and I am painfully aware just how difficult it can be to quit. But, and here’s the rub, the addict has to want to quit. NICE seems to be assuming that all those hooked on gaspers fall into that category. While many smokers talk the talk, most of them in my experience are happy enough to puff away given the opportunity.

Mrs Longrider has no intention of quitting, so her employer would be wasting time, effort and money trying to get her to do so. Indeed, the more the government and the health fascists try to make her into a pariah, the more determined she is to fight back and puff away regardless.

5 You're not going to know these gems unless you get yourself over to Mutley the Dog:

The first canal in Britain was not the Bridgewater Canal as is often claimed – it was the Ste Helens/Mersey Canal, known as Sankey Brook, which was opened in 1757. The Bridgewater Canal - used for transporting the Duke of Bridgewater’s extensive collection of travelling Commodes - did not open till 1761. One of those commodes, carved entirely from Ivory weighed nearly 3 tons, or the equivalent of seventeen middle sized motor cars. The Sankey canal was briefly filled with spermicide in the 1960s.

Between 1777 and 1896 it was illegal to urinate in a Canal or to dispose of turnip tops or pigs trotters. Curiously, it remained legal to defecate in a canal and specifically to dispose of all food remnants from barges.

6 The afficianados are going to know exactly what Peter Cruikshank is talking about:

People are beginning to wise up to the implications of allowing those cuddly Web2.0 services to host all that nice information your give* them (see Because you can’t do bettr than Flickr for instance for the enthusiasm that Web2.0 can generate - sorry Simon, only picking on you because my comment on your blog raises the issue of data protection)

In For Your Information | ‘Web 2.0′ and data control Peter Bradwell of Demos has picked up that even Tim O’Reilly (not a poor man, I don’t believe) has noticed that internet business are interested in money, not some dream of participatory democracy.

7 It's interesting that Wulf is writing of anonymity on the net and tracing comments back because he does seem to take direct comments himself [I might be mistaken]:

However, by and large, I think some level of identification is valuable. If I post a comment on someone else's blog, it is backed up by links back to other places I have made a mark. That online trail is only my representation of part of who I am but it gives an identifiable persona. Even for those who have never met me, or met those who have met me, "I" am unlikely to be a marketing bot designed to hawk a product (see my earlier posting, False Accounts) or a bored teenager creating a complex fantasy world to wind other people up.

Equally, I want some degree of traceability from those I encounter on my Internet travels, including those who might comment on my blog. Not addresses and bank details but simply the option of following their trail back a little way so I can decide what credence to give their contributions.

8 JMB admits what many of us know full well - we are not that technically savvy and it's a learning curve we all take. We go out this evening, as we started, with some home truths:

I have to tell you, quite ashamedly, that the reason I could not see how to resize in the photo software programs, which I already have on my computer, was that I did not have a file in place. As everyone but me already knows the relevant options are grey until you have an image to work on! I assumed it was because I had an inferior version which came with some hardware or other I had bought.

Well as I always say, these things are sent to make us humble when we get too big for our boots. Another of my sayings is that I hope to learn something new every day and yesterday I learned quite a few new things.

Hope to see you on Saturday evening, readers.

3 comments:

  1. Great selection, as always, James. Liked your introduction!

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  2. Excellent as always my friend. People here are not happy with the way this rubbish collection change has been forced on councils by the government.

    Yes recycling is the right way to go and landfill is not an ideal solution. But no alternatives are being discussed, just Labour's usual "it is going to cost you more".

    We do not have a level playing field with European countries and our leaders seem incapable of putting forward long-term solutions rather than just increasing charges.

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  3. nice one. I am getting quite excited about all this rubbish.

    boom boom.

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