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Don’t all energy companies reward their customers for using less of their product, by charging them less?
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This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Advertising, Enviro-Mentalism, Signs at 6:10 PM EDT
Typing on my phone keypad is slow. I wish the singularity would hurry along. I want to compose articles in my head and post them to my blog just by thinking about it, like Manfred in Charles Stross’s Accelerando
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This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection, Singularity at 8:08 AM EDT
Blair has proposed to give police the power to stop and question people even when no crime has been committed. Talk of a tradeoff between liberty and security, or of discrimination against minorities misses the point. There is a principle at stake here: the principle that a man should be free to go about his lawful business unimpeded by the state.
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This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties at 7:57 AM EDT
Can I do a post with a title using BlogPlanet? I want to do some moblogging so that I can write about signs and other things I see while out and about. Too often I get blog inspiration and by the time I get to a PC I’m not so excited about what I was going to write about. There’s surprisingly little software about for posting to a WordPress blog from a mobile phone. BlogPlanet is almost perfect apart from a viewfinder issue when taking pictures. But the author has already been in touch with me saying he is working on it.
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This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.
Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 12:45 PM EDT
Here is a picture of my mouse taken with my mobile. Just testing!
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This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.
Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 11:03 PM EDT
This is a test post from my mobile phone using BlogPlanet. More later!
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This post was made with a trial version of BlogPlanet, a photo blog client for mobile phones. For more information visit www.blogplanet.net.
Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 10:55 PM EDT
If you use the UK ISP Be you may be unable to connect to this site. I am trying to get this issue resolved with Be. In the meantime you can work around the problem by putting the following line in your etc/hosts file (on Windows this file is in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts).
65.254.250.110 robfisher.net
The reason this works is that you can connect to the domain but not to the name server. Which is *wierd*. Technical discussion here. I’ll update when I know more.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Geekism at 8:42 AM EDT
The EU law to control how much mobile operators charge for international roaming is now down to the formality of approval by member governments.
I’ve been blogging about this for a while. An EU committee backed the proposal last month; I first became aware of it in April 2006 when I wrote about why it was a bad idea.
Liberal Democrat MEP Fiona Hall said the new law would protect consumers from “abusive charges” that bore no relation to phone operators’ costs.
Can Fiona Hall really be economically illiterate enough to believe that charges should be related to costs? Companies charge what they want and customers decide whether they are prepared to pay. It is individuals coming to agreements between themselves. It’s called a free market.
But now it would seem that it is considered okay for governments to use violence to tell some groups of people how much they can charge other groups of people for their services. So much for freedom.
Also posted to Spontaneous Order.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, Civil Liberties, News at 4:11 PM EDT
Margaret Hodge has been spouting nonsense about welfare and the “sense of entitlement” of indigenous Britons. As ever, there are some insightful comments on the Samizdata article about it.
The problem is that ordinary people regard the welfare state as a reciprocal arrangement - you identify with the culture and follow the rules and pay your taxes, and in return the state looks after you. It’s a bit like insurance. As with all something-for-something deals, people instinctively dislike freeloaders. They think in some fuzzy way that the British people somehow own the British state, and that it was created for the benefit of the British - like a company is created for the benefit of its shareholders.
I think we have the fixed wealth fallacy lurking in the background, actually. There is so much wealth and so many houses and so such, and it is the job of the government to divide it all up. THe idea that people actually create wealth through work and the natural order of things is to actually create your own wealth that you then live off (rather than asking the government for help) is missed. The fact that all political parties are now filled with career politicians who have never done an economically productive day’s work in their lives doesn’t help the situation.
What everyone agrees on is that immigrants are not a problem, but welfare is. Indigenous people are no more entitled to my money than anyone else.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 11:27 AM EDT
There’s an interesting presentation about nuclear fission on Google Video. Nuclear power plants are safe, and can be small and cheap. Via Spontaneous Order.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Enviro-Mentalism, Links at 11:24 AM EDT