Archive for the 'Government' Category

Digital piracy and what jobs?

Apparently digital piracy has destroyed 2.7m jobs in Europe. Lots of assumptions in the model they are using, so we must take it with a pinch of salt. The £200m each year the government is wasting on reorganisation is definitely destructive.

Final word: as the Mash has it: most people don‘t know what their job is anyway:

I work in an open plan office with lots of orange girls and sometimes I
go to meetings at a slightly larger office in Reading where they give
me good quality biscuits.

Where else can we use checklists?

Checklists in surgery should be mandated given the extraordinary error improvements they bring. The interesting question is where else checklist thinking can be used.

Which part of health and safety don’t we want?

There’s a valid point made in this article regarding the benefits H&S has given us. The difficulty for me is that the tolerated levels of risk seem far too low as currently practised.

Homeopathic MPs

Hmm. The list of signatories to this Early Day Motion praising homeopathy might be a good reason not to vote for my local MP in the soon-to-be-announced election. His voting record against the government is pretty strong, so maybe he’s a stealth Tory after all?

Reporting polls

Very good PhD comic:

Cumbernauld or Shipley for self-assessment? Either.

It looks like it doesn’t matter which account you use to pay self-assessment. It shouldn’t, given that the unique taxpayer reference (UTR) is unique… So why doesn’t HRMC tell you this? A minor #fail.

Deliberative polling

I like this idea of taking people aside and have them think through issues in depth. I doubt we’ll have the same level of input into this year’s general election.

Intelligent analysis of drinking and drug taking

In the light of the discussions on addressing the substantial number of deaths directly attributable to drink, it is refreshing (boom boom) to find a source of reasoned analysis of the effects of campaigns on drink and drugs (one of which suggests that a five-year US programme might have increased drug taking in youths).

It could be a fun election

There was me loving the re-photoshopped Cameron poster but wondering where the equivalent piss-taking would on similar Labour missteps. And then Jonny tweeted this. “Smellderly” had me snorting my coffee.

Poverty and disease (and goat-reared children)

Britain faces return to Victorian levels of poverty”: is a slightly pessimistic look at the good work that has been done on levels of child and pensioner poverty. However, the lesson that universal benefits redistribute more to the poorest than targeted ones is important: surely they are easier to administer as well as easier to explain?

The concern must be that the impending onset of chronic diseases will spread faster in poverty than outside.

The Mash’s take on broken Britain is fabulous: “most children now raised by goats“.