I agree with Fabian Tassano:

The proposed scheme to force 16-18 year olds to go to school is a TOTALLY IMMORAL infringement of civil liberties.

Perry de Havilland calls compulsory education state conscription. Conscription == slavery.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties at 6:57 PM EDT

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The British government is paying for advertisments on IMDB. There are a few different ones and they use colourful imagery to explain “facts” about global warming. They link to a page on DirectGov, which with a straight face states:

Climate change is a serious problem that affects us all. The main cause of climate change is Carbon Dioxide (CO2), produced when we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas for energy. Currently, burning fossil fuels emits just over 7 billion tonnes of CO2 (GtC) into the atmosphere each year.

It then goes on to explain ten ways of reducing your greenhouse gas emissions.

Should the government be on one hand using our taxes to give us dubious, over-simplified “information” about a “serious problem”, while on the other hand campaigning for votes to get into office to solve that problem? Isn’t there at least a conflict of interest?

Meanwhile, Scott Burgess has interviewed Michael Chrichton. He paints a slightly more complicated picture than does the British government:

There has been so much disinformation about my position that I feel obliged to repeat what I said in my book. Yes, the globe is warming; the greenhouse effect is real; CO2 is a greenhouse gas; it is increasing from human activities; we would expect this increased CO2 to produce warming. All true.

But nothing in this sequence of statements implies that CO2 is the primary driver of the warming we are seeing. Not at all. It is one thing to say that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and is therefore causing warming; it is quite another to say CO2 is causing ALL of the warming that we see. There is good evidence (and good physical theory) for the first statement, and weak evidence, primarily computer models, for the second.

In the comments to that post, Shannon Love raises an interesting point:

I am beginning to think that catastrophic anthrogenic global warming (CAGW) doesn’t even qualify as a legitimate scientific hypothesis. I think that is why its proponents fallback so strongly on the idea of a scientific consensus.

To be a scientific hypothesis, an assertion must be falsifiable i.e. it must present some phenomenon which if observed could prove the hypothesis wrong Karl Popper famously explained this idea by saying that if you want to test the hypothesis that all swans are white you don’t go out and count white swans but instead go out looking for one black swan. We verify scientific hypothesis by trying to prove them wrong, not by piling on the evidence that they are right.

All I see in the litany of “evidence” provided for CAGW is a long list of white swans. We don’t see any scientist saying that if CAGW is in fact correct then we could not see phenomenon X. No evidence presented so far seems to show that anthrogenic CO2 is the principle driver of global warming. All the supposed evidence is also consistent with warming due to solar forcing.

We’re being ask to make major and potentially very harmful changes to the world economy based on the hunches of scientist in a field with no proven track record. The fact that they are advancing a hypothesis that they don’t seem to be able to test should concern everybody.

Maybe the individual papers are more rigorous. I suppose computer models are disprovable in the long run — but if they are there will just be “better” computer models to replace them. I don’t know of any computer model so far that has been shown to make accurate predictions. There are certainly big problems with predicting the behavior of the number one greenhouse gas: water vapour.

But the British government does not want to bother you with anything so mentally taxing as uncertainty.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, Enviro-Mentalism at 6:51 PM EDT

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I became aware of a problem last night when, with the first decent weather of the year, I decided to ride my motorcycle home from work.

The tax disc was out of date.

I wracked my brain. Had I just forgotten to put the disc in? Had the disc been stolen, leaving the old one behind? I remembered taxing something, but was it my car? When was my car tax due!?

I went home and searched through all my documents — they’re not very well organised and I couldn’t find any evidence of having taxed my bike more recently than the out of date disc showed. I looked on the DVLA website and was able to determine that, indeed, the tax was out of date. Much worry and stress ensued.

The thing is, I hadn’t used my bike all winter, and hadn’t given it a thought. I’d assumed the tax was due around August, but maybe I got mixed up with my car. I wasn’t *using* my bike, and it was stored off road, so technically I didn’t need to tax it. But there is still one problem: SORN.

Since SORN was introduced a few years ago, if you keep a vehicle off the road you have to declare it off road, or tax it, or you are committing an offence. I’ve had a close scrape with SORN once before, due to being out of the country. The problem, as I see it, is that it’s very easy to become criminalised for being forgetful.

Even worse, I’d moved house since the tax expired, and I’d forgotten to tell the DVLA, so for all I knew court summonses were piling up at my previous address.

I went and taxed my bike this morning, but I was still worried about the SORN situation, so I called DVLA. They told me to call another number which turned out to be specifically for paying fines, and sure enough, I had to pay up.

In all honesty, this was somewhat to my relief, as the fine was only £80 and I had envisaged that the situation might have escalated without me knowing, not to mention that it’s probably a crime not to tell DVLA when you move house…

So what about the whole SORN thing? Well, if we have to have car tax, it sucks. It’s pretty much a user interface problem. DVLA know that the police can’t spend all their time checking tax discs, and that therefore people get away without paying tax. But there are still people who legitimately keep vehicles off the road, hence the introductionof SORN. But it’s a crappy user interface because you can fall foul of it just by being forgetful. It’s a lot like the problem with Oyster cards where you can get fined £4 for forgetting to touch out.

As for solutions, I don’t know. Any technological solution would likely be highly intrusive — think number plate recognition. Given that we have car tax, maybe the balance is about as good as it’s going to get: they do send out reminders, and the fine is low, and remained low even though I “ignored” it for months.

But I’m conceding a lot of ground to my enemies, here. In a better world, there would be no car tax. There’s no need for it: we pay fuel duty. It’s in some sense fairer because you pay it more or less by the mile. It’s almost like a road toll.

But it’s still tax and it’s still theft.

Let me be clear: In an ideal world, roads would be privately built and privately owned. You would pay a subscription or toll to their owners in exchange for using them. Your relationship with the road companies would be a lot like your relationship with Tesco. Tesco does not use language like “if you fail to do X, you are committing an offence”. When was the last time Tesco fined anyone for being forgetful?

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 11:46 AM EDT

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The BBC has published an article listing 10 things it alleges the EU has done for me.

1. Easy Travel — I still have to deal with customs officials and border controls. My driving license seems to be valid in the USA without the help of the EU. The rest sounds like regulation of private companies which sounds like it just makes travel more expensive. The benefits don’t require the EU, the Schengen Treaty suffices.
2. Living Abroad — These benefits are indeed good, but don’t require the EU, just a simple treaty would do.
3. Equal Pay & Non-Discrimination — No thanks, I’ll make my own agreements for trading my time for money, and I’ll hire who I like for my own reasons. No interfering third parties necessary.
4. Foreign Study — Why does a university need thousands of politicians for it to be able to accept foreign students? Why should I want to subsidise someone else’s education, no matter where they’re from?
5. Paid Leave — I’d rather not have a third party tell me how hard I can or can’t work.
6. Cheap Flights — Deregulating airlines is good. More please. It seems to me that not regulating airlines is something the EU *isn’t* doing that benefits me. We’ll see how long it lasts, though, what with budget airlines being the new Satan.
7. Cheap Phone Calls — Huh, the EU privatised telecoms? I’m skeptical. Wasn’t it Thatcher in the UK? And as for reducing the cost of roaming, that’s just regulation which will make telecoms more expensive.
8. Consumer Protection — more regulations to make consumer goods more expensive. No thanks.
9. Food Labelling — If people want their food labelled, market forces will suffice to get it labelled. No stupid regulations needed here.
10. Clean Rivers and Clean Air — Maybe, maybe not. I’m pretty sure that, say, car manufacturers would have developed cleaner cars from consumer demand without regulatory interference.

So where’s the BBC’s list of 10 bad things about the EU? Or is my license fee just funding pro-EU propaganda? Commenters at 18 Doughty Street, where I found the link to the BBC article, can think of a few.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, News at 7:14 PM EDT

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Apparently, a third of the food we buy just gets thrown away.

My initial reaction when I heard that news on the radio was, Yeah And So What?

I was somewhat astonished to read that the report is “focused on global warming”.

Most of the waste food goes into landfill sites, where it breaks down and causes greenhouse gases.

But think about it for a microsecond. Didn’t it the carbon in food come from the air in the first place, when it was grown, or if it was an animal, when it ate plants that were grown? Even if we ate it instead of throwing it in a landfill, wouldn’t the carbon just come out in our breath when we metabolise it?

And as for “running out of landfill sites”, just look out the window next time you fly. There’s plenty of space. According to an article about recycling by John Tierney, “if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side”.

I did think of one reason that throwing away food might be a bad thing: paying people to grow food only to throw it away is economically equivalent to paying people to dig a hole and fill it in again. It’s a waste of human labour and wealth creation potential, so it effectively destroys wealth. To what extent depends on how much human labour goes into growing that extra third of food.

But I don’t think even that bears up. People behave rationally. If they’re buying too much food and throwing it away, there’s probably a good reason: doing so costs them less than not doing so. There are clues in the BBC article, under the heading, “things people could do to prevent wasting food”.

These include, “simple things like looking in the fridge, looking in the cupboard, before you go shopping”. And then there’s food that, “we may not feel like eating it after buying it”.

The amount of food wasted just represents the extent to which people find it cheaper and more convenient to buy extra to make sure there is enough food and enough choice of food in store, as compared to the time and effort to make sure there is the exact amount of food needed.

In other words, that labour spent growing extra food is less than the labour it would take to make sure no food gets wasted.

Update: More on this at Picking Losers. It seems that the people behind this useless report are a Quango who leech £80m in taxes every year. Your taxes at work…

Update 2: Don’t miss Bruno Prior’s comments. It seems that, w.r.t. landfill, methane from rotting stuff is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, but it doesn’t matter because most of it is not released into the atmosphere: it is burned into CO2 for renewable energy.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection, News at 9:38 AM EDT

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