Things that have been banned in 2005 or are about to be banned or are being considered being banned in 2006:
Bans lifted and stories about things not banned in 2005:
Other ban related news:
All these links are to BBC news stories since August, found by searching on the word “ban“.
Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 8:13 PM EST
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Another landlady has defended her property against burglars.
Feisty landlady Mo Richards, 58, grabbed the shocked raider, flung him on to a bed and held him until police arrived.
The 5ft 4in Aikido brown belt remembered her martial arts training from 30 years ago when she found the intruder under her daughter’s bed.
On the TV she said she wouldn’t recommend other people try the same thing as she could only do it because of her training. Presumably she recommends they hide in a corner while burglars walk away with their stuff. I recommend that people too weak or infirm to use martial arts shoot burglars in the face.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Self Defense at 3:50 PM EST
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A pub landlady used golf clubs to fight off robbers:
She said: “I heard it and I brought my son’s golf set downstairs and gave my husband a club as well.
“They hit me about three times - on my arm and shoulder - but one tried to get upstairs and I was having none of it.
“He kept going for me but I hit him a couple of times.
“I took a couple of good swipes at him because I feared for my children but I took a beating for it.”
I saw her interviewed on BBC news. She said something to the effect of, “you have to make a stand.” Two things occur to me: One is that she explained her actions. Another is that she had to improvise with golf clubs and didn’t just fill them with lead.
Posted by Rob Fisher as News, Self Defense at 1:34 PM EST
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More of this type of thing:
A Philadelphia Gas Works field worker shot and wounded one of two teenagers who held him up at gunpoint in Southwest Philadelphia yesterday, police said.
And less of this type of thing, please:
PGW spokesman Doug Oliver said company policy prohibits employees from having “unauthorized weapons” at any PGW work area.
Lucky he wasn’t following company policy, really.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Self Defense at 9:43 PM EST
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Paul Graham writes an interesting essay about how to get rich by starting a startup. On the way, he also concisely explains the most important fundamentals of economics.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 2:07 PM EST
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Victor Davis Hanson gets it about right, I reckon:
The world does not hate the United States. Of course, it envies us. Precisely because it is privately impressed by our unparalleled success, it judges America by a utopian measure in which anything less than perfection is written off as failure. We risk everything, our critics abroad almost nothing. So the hope for our failures naturally gives reinforcement to the bleak reality of their inaction.
The Europeans expect our protection. The Mexicans risk their lives to get here. Indians and Japanese want closer relations. The old commonwealth appreciates our strength in defense of the West. Even the hostile Iranians, North Koreans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Chinese, and radical Islamists — despite the saber-rattling rhetoric — wonder whether we are naïve and idealistic rather than cruel and calculating. All this we rarely consider when we read of anti-Americanism in our major newspapers or hear another angry (and usually well-off) professor or journalist recite our sins.
And as for Iraq?
Few anticipated that the turmoil in Iraq would force the Syrians out of Lebanon, the Libyans to give up their WMDs, and the Egyptians to hold elections — and that all the killing, acrimony, and furor over these developments would begin to engulf the Middle East and threaten the old order.
In the face of that growing ulcer of discontent, we quietly kept on killing terrorists, promoting elections in Iraq, pressuring Arab autocracies to democratize, and growing the economy.
Link via NewsBump.
Update: In a similar vein, someone called Fred wrote this in a Samizdata comment, in reference to the Asian tsunami:
What about people who can deliver functioning hospitals, fresh water, a working airfield, global communications, and thousands of workers almost anywhere in the world in days? The U.S. Navy and Marine Corp did that with their nuclear carriers and assault ships.
Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 12:28 PM EST
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When most people ignore it. According to the Times,
The proportion of cars exceeding the 70mph limit was 57 per cent in 2003, up from 54 per cent in 2002.
I don’t know how this is measured, but it means that at least this number break the motorway speed limit at some time. On certain sections of road (for example the M3 between the M25 and London) in good traffic and weather conditions, one is hard pushed to find a single vehicle doing less than 80mph.
Some questions: what does it mean in a democracy when the majority ignore a law? Is the 70mph limit merely a pragmatic attempt to control the average speed, rather than a serious law intended to be obeyed? It certainly is not enforced.
I’m torn on the issue. I don’t like being threatened with the violence of law for something that is not wrong. On the other hand, I’d hate to think that all laws were rigourously enforced in the belief that they are perfect. From that perspective, the idea of a law that everyone just knows you can ignore as long as you don’t ignore it too much doesn’t sound so bad.
In an ideal world, of course, roads would be privately owned and their owners would set the rules. What I think would happen if this were the case, is that the rules would mostly standardise for reasons of practicality and the economics of liability. Insurance companies would more or less dictate speed limits to a level that minimised their costs. They would be pragmatic and likely set a lower limit than was enforced to control the average speed, understanding that it is human nature to bend the rules. In other words, pretty much what I think is happening in the real world with the motorway speed limit.
Things would get interesting if the speed “limits” set for purley pragmatic reasons were then strictly enforced. The Times article I linked to dates back to April 2005, and is what I found when investigating what the speed camera signs on the M4 were all about. The idea that motorway speed limits might actually be enforced is, frankly, a little shocking. Clearly no-one on the M4 could quite believe it because they were all happily speeding despite the signs. Thankfully, rumours that a system was in place to automatically record the average speed of all vehicles turned out to be just that. There was no sign of the mobile camera units mentioned by the Times, either. Perhaps they are not used because it was realised early on that they caused traffic to bunch up and increase the accident rate. Perhaps there are no real cameras and the signs are just another pragmatic attempt to play on human nature and get people to slow down and pay attention a bit more.
The problem is that roads are not privately owned but controlled by the state. It is probably only a matter of time before something like SPECS is implemented on motorways by power-crazed politicians because they, unlike insurance companies, are not bound by economics.
A final question: what would happen if motorway speed limits were either abolished, or raised to 100mph? Would everyone drive everywhere at 100mph or would they settle at between 80 and 95 like they do now? Given behaviour I’ve seen on rural roads which often have limits set higher than you can safely drive, I predict the latter.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Driving, Introspection at 11:34 AM EST
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Pete Smith takes photos of cars and digitally modifies them into, well, modified cars. It’s really kind of cool. I stumbled across his site while searching for information about Photoshop. Sometimes it’s nice to discover something unexpected.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Driving, Links at 9:45 PM EST
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Brian Micklethwait has an excellent article up at Samizdata in which he responds to a report that says things like this…
Globalisation has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world. That has to change, and as many leaders have already said, we must make decent work a central objective of all economic and social policies.
…with things like this:
At no time did Juan Somavia, or the writers of this report, judging by this report of their report, say that globalisation is worse than their proposed alternative, for they propose no such alternative. Had they done so […] that alternative would presumably be (presumably was) non-globalisation. More or less big gobs of: tariff barriers, laws against importing and exporting, subsidies for existing industries, etc. etc.., the whole discredited panoply of command-and-control, national socialist, bugger-the-damn-foreigners economic policy which, the last time it was seriously imposed, caused the Great Depression.
Juan Somavia and his cohorts moan about globalisation in the same feeble and pointless way that others moan about the price of beer or the bulkiness of SLR cameras or the noisiness of washing machines. Should beer be done away with? Should big clunky SLR cameras be illegal? Should laws be passed demanding silence of washing machines? Well, no, but, but, but, … it’s just … not good enough!!! Idiots.
It’s all very good writing and very good thinking. Read the whole thing.
Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 7:35 PM EST
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Please bear with me while I work on this site update. I have upgraded Wordpress and the theme management system has changed, so I’ve thrown away the old layout. I’ve picked the Gila theme for now because I like the layout but I don’t like the colours. The books will reappear when I figure out how to use the new Media Manager plugin. I’m not sure about having “recent comments” so prominently on the front page — I like the idea but I’ll probably hide it away under a link somehow. Normal orange colours will resume shortly!
Update: Orangey colours are all in place and some layout issues are fixed.
Update 2: The media manager works now. Everything is so easy, I’m really impressed with this new version of Wordpress. I particularly like the previous page link at the very bottom for quickly getting to older posts — this works with the category archives too, which is great because these used to be huge pages. Alex King’s mobile edition script still works, too!
Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 6:00 PM EST
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The Alan Bown Set Before and Beyond
