“In the longer term, CAFE is a deadly blood-for-oil trade-off…It’s lethal effects on vehicle safety were documented in the National Research Council’s 2001 study, which found that its downsizing incentive contributes to 2,000 deaths annually. Its sponsors may pretend otherwise, but the Boehlert-Markey bill would make that death toll even worse.”
…because as we all know that its small cars that get people killed on the roads, not bad drivers…
A Brazilian man buried himself in concrete in protest at the country’s minibus legislation.
As if life wasn’t complicated enough, Fluxx introduced to Japan.
And the secret life of metronomes – from jwz, via my dyslexia reparse.
Grandi was talking some time ago about this – Long bonds are back and 30-Year Treasury Bond Revived After 4-Year Hiatus.
I don’t really remember how he explained it, but I think it went something like this….what does this revival mean? If you are in government you have a number of ways to raise money, for instance you could raise taxes, or you could issue bonds. Raising taxes will immediately cause unhappiness among your voters. Issuing bonds is like deferring taxation, so the next guys in power get to pay the price for your spending now.
Whats more interesting though (if you’ll excuse the pun) is the cost of borrowing this way. Bonds are fixed rate, this is considered to be the risk-free rate, the return you get if you don’t want to risk anything, government bonds are safe, barring the risk of the government collapsing, in which case all bets are off anyway.
Give or take the risk-free rate should roughly match up with inflation, meaning that if you’re taking no risk with your money it still buys the same ammount of stuff. Well, thats the theory. But what happens if inflation were to increase after the fixed rate bonds were issued? Your risk-free money buys less than it did before. Which surely is a risk, of sorts, an erosion risk.
Its worse than that, though, since now the government has the opposite end of that deal, it has to put less resources in to paying your bond interest. Which clearly gives it an incentive to run inflation higher. There are of course reasons for it to run inflation lower, too, but more long bonds pushes that balance.
So the next question is, what would cause inflation to rise? Well, I’m guessing things like raw material cost increasing, or energy cost increasing.
Whats the point of the fuel protests? I’d kinda read it as a bunch of truckers who just saw their bills going up without looking at the fact that everyone elses bills were going up too, if the cost of fuel increases and it still costs everyone pretty much the same ammount then the price of the end product goes up rather than the profit of the deliverer of the product coming down – this is where the futures market can help, you can buy a contract to buy diesel next month at todays prices. I wonder how big the price differential between road and rail freight transport is these days?
Maybe theres more to it than first meets the eye….
Sunday was the gathering at Woodchester Mansion. I popped in to Oxford on the way, where I caught up with Grandi, redkitty23 and purple_pen – there was much excitement including, among other things, ladders and airpumps, but it was all OK in the end.
Of course I was late leaving, so arrived at the mansion, somewhat after the arranged meeting time. Still, evilmattikinz was waiting on the bus from the car park to the mansion itself, so I was only just the last there…by the time we’d arrived at the tearoom hirez, girfan, cally_tmk and cabbage had all gotten to know each other. We spent some time plotting What The Hack, UK, and generally geeking at each other. Once we’d emptied the tearoom hirez and girfan disappeared into the fog too, as they’d arrived on time and had already done the tour without us, and without knowing how useless the rest of us can be.
The mansion is still in middle of being built – it was abandoned in a partially built state sometime in the middle of 1800s. There were clearly grand plans for it, all of the structure is in place but it has no finishing. The tour starts outside with an explanation of the context and recent history of the building – howcome it came to be preserved and open to the public in the way it is.
Then we were taken inside, through what would have been the main entrance, which now looks a little sad – after the donation of the porch to a local church. The first thing I noticed on entering the billiard room was that there was a fireplace halfway up the wall. Odd. Oh, thats the level a floor should be – theres a door next to it, and some springers for a vaulted ceiling below. The walls are unfinished, exposing the weightbearing arches behind the mantlepieces and over the doors.
We wound our way through the works, with explanations of some of the building techniques we can see en route, there was a room in the corner of building which had been hastily (and cheaply) finished for the visit of a dignitary of some kind, the only truly finished room in the house. Beyond was the chapel, filled with structural scaffolding – the stone has crumbled such that it can no longer be relied upon to hold its own weight.
Further, we see the laundry room and the kitchen, fitted with a range suitable for a modern two bedroom cottage, not the extensive mansion this should be – it was, apparently, inhabited by one of the owners for a while, but he couldn’t afford to do more than make a small section livable.
Upstairs we find a bat expert who explained in disturbing detail the reproductive cycle of horseshoe bats, complete with video accompaniment, thankfully just a live feed of the bat colony living in the building.
Onward and upward – we reach the top of the building where we are walking on the vaulted ceiling of the floor below – there is no floor here – from here we can look down into the rooms we were in at the begining of the tour – we are at the level of one of the sets of fire-place-in-the-wall. From here we can see some of the tricks they use in constructing these big old piles – handling the keystone/rose of the vaulted ceiling, formers for creating arches, etc.
We descend the main staircase, and down into the cellar, where there are some great acoustics and out of place smoke alarms – why do you need an alarm in a stone building which has nothing in it to burn?
The building as a whole is an unusual restoration project – they are attempting to maintain the half-finished quality to the building, so restoration cannot be completed, but has to be good enough to be long lasting. Worth visiting, I can’t do it justice in words. More interesting than your average stately home.
And, to finish off, a lesson in customer service (I don’t remember the exact words, and I was probably angry by this time having decided that all service stations had some reason why their toilets were off limits to customers):
Me (after wandering around a deserted petrol station building): “Excuse me, do you work here?”
Him (having a cigarette out the back door): “Yes”
Me: “Do you have a toilet I could use?”
Him: “I can’t let you in because I’m on my own and if you mug me its my fault”
Me: “Oh, the last service station had its toilet broken, too, what am I supposed to do?”
Him: “Drive to the next one, thats only six miles”
Me: “And that’ll be closed too, won’t it?”
Him: “I don’t know its not one of ours”
Me: “Maybe I could go round here somewhere?”
Him: “If you did I could have you arrested for indecent exposure”
Me: “Well what am I supposed to do?”
Him: “Drive to the next services”
Me: “Thats not good enough, I’d like to submit a complaint, do you have an address I could write to?”
Him: “Its not my fault, I told you, its health and safety”
Me: “Well, that doesn’t help me, does it, I’m bursting here, what can you do?”
Him: “Sir, I’m going to go and push the panic button, you are getting abusive”
Me: *leaves*
A rather fabulous collection of three accusations of criminal behaviour and obstruction of my attempt to complain through the proper channels. Sadly I can’t remember whether this was a Shell or a BP station, the closed one I visited before was the other. If I can figure it out I shall be submitting a written complaint. You’ll notice, also, that he volunteered the information that he was on his own with the back door open and with him some distance away from it, which, if I was the kind of mug him, would have been a very good time to try.
“I’m going to go and press the panic button now, sir, because you are getting abusive”
Lessons learned from the aftermath of Katrina…there are, I’m sure, many lessons to be learned. But one thought in particular struck me, and I figured it was worth a little more exploration. It is really an extension of my concern about the continuing viability of cities.
By living in a city, in the kind of civilisation we live in, we are handing over responsibility for a lot of aspects of our lives to other people. I cannot grow enough food to survive in my garden, I have to pay someone else to provide food for me. The same with the many services that keep a city running, electricity, water, garbage collection, even clothing and education, all of them benefit from economies of scale to the extent that it isn’t viable for anyone who lives in a town or city to provide for themselves.
Thats all OK while the basic fabric of society holds everything together – the capital system we have supports this kind living with market forces pushing up prices of things that are scarce or need a lot of manpower to produce and bringing them back down to the point where people are prepared to pay for them. We’re all used to this system no matter how much we consider it inequitable.
What holds this system together? There are distribution mechanisms for physical things, like food, which rely upon a common infrastructure. This infrastructure, in Britain at least, and I suspect most places around the world, is provided by the government. We are reliant upon their ability to maintain that infrastructure in working order.
One of the things that happened in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago was that the infrastructure was incapacitated en masse, across the entire city. That caused the distribution mechanisms to fail.
The people of the city are reliant on the infrastructure, without it they cannot obtain the things they need, they have to find a way to obtain those things. One way, in the NO example, would be to leave the city, go and stay elsewhere. Another would be to stock up beforehand, though that may be less practical in the those particular circumstances. There will always be those who cannot, for whatever reason, provide for themselves in these situations, they must be helped somehow, by reinstating the infrastructure upon which they (indirectly) rely, or by delivering the things that would normally be delivered via the infrastructure. If they don’t receive that help they become desperate – if its a matter of survival what happens to your morals?
There are two significant factors contributing to the rapid decivilisation of NO. Drugs and governmental inpreparedness. If you’ve got a city full of addicts looking for their next hit and a government that is unable to get the city back to its normal functioning quickly you’re going to end up with problems.
What are the consequences? There are a number of ways it could play out – one suggestion has been that Bush is not going to loose any sleep over the dead, since they’re mostly voting for the opposition anyway. But what if FEMA was upset at its underfunding? Why not use this as a means of highlighting just how badly things have been handled over the last few years by making sure the relief efforts are disorganised?
But its probably worse than that – the world is looking on, asking itself “is this the freedom we want here?”, increasingly the answer to that question is going to be no, its a freedom that places the values of business higher than the values of people. This is comes from being run by economists – its much easier to measure money than suffering, concern, happiness or any of the other kinds of things people feel.
What have we learned?
Lesson 1 – civilisation falls apart very quickly given the right circumstances
Lesson 2 – it is possible to insulate yourself to some extent from this kind of disaster
Lesson 3 – none of this happens in isolation
I’m only being philosophical ‘cos I couldn’t install Settlers 3 on XP
Should I be worried or happy that Clint Mansells Requiem for a Dream soundtrack seems to have leaked into Radio 4s daytime schedule? I thought I heard it a couple of weeks back, and this morning it was backing music for a very sensible program about comprehensive education.
I never did write up my day at the Little Gransden Airshow, did I? It started with me wishing I’d paid more attention to the map before leaving home – I figured I’d see what happened when I got out the other side of Little Gransden itself, since I’d hardly expected to find an airfield in the village, and suddenly there were ‘no parking’ cones everywhere and an obvious way to head.
Then they’d found some spare spaces at the far end of the car park and I was ordered to follow the car in front and park next to him…this was a grassy field that had been turned over to being car park for the day, and there were a surprisingly large number of 4x4s there creeping along really slowly in case they broke anything – these conditions are fine for family cars doing 30mph as long as you don’t try to stop too suddenly, if you’re gonna drive those monsters at least drive ’em properly.
Just as I was entering the main arena there was the disturbing sound of the engines of the plane overhead cutting out. I looked up to see a freefall, thinking “I hope that was part of the show”.
There were a good number of people there, with many stalls close to the entrance, then an area with a good view of the runway and taxiway – they’d both been taken over as flying areas for the day, they can’t fly over the public areas these days. Then beyond that was a vintage car rally, where I found lark_ascending and crazyscot hiding in the shade of a Hummer.
The engineering on show was incredible, there were a few highlights of both automotive and aeronautic kinds – the crop dusters running with a stall speed of around 60mph, they shouldn’t fly, not that slow, but they did. The aerobatics, a team of four identical planes flying in formation, then bursting balloons and flying under a line held by some fearless assistants. The Merlin engine. The Hurricane, just like the airfix model I remember as a child, but with a much better sound to it.
And the cars – I found myself drawn to the sixties and seventies sports cars. And the Jags. There was a Jensen Interceptor, a Bond Bug, and a whole bunch of beautiful old Triumphs and Capris. There was a surprising absence of Rover SD1s, which is a shame, they’re such nice cars, but that was made up for by an over representation of Rollers and Marcos.
It was time to go home when the Hurricane finished and the commentator started talking about remembering the brave who fought in the war for us….while I think it is valuable to remember these things, I think we are better off spending our time and energy figuring out how to make sure it never happens again, rather than dwelling on things that have happened before. Annoying, but that I can deal with. It was when he started turning it into a chance to preach to us that I decided it was time to leave – I don’t want to hear about your God, hes not the gentle understanding person you think he is, he wouldn’t have asked you to go to war if he were. It was out of place and a sad end to an otherwise lovely day out.