Nanny state abuse

Oh how I hate it when the term “Nanny State” is abused.

As far I’m concerned, a state can only be accused of “nannying” if it attempts to stop people doing things that (and here’s the nub) don’t adversely affect anyone else. Examples of activities that a “Nanny State” might want to prohibit are:

• Hang-gliding.
• Smoking in ones own home.
• Consensual mutual harming (I’m not saying it’s not weird but…consensual is the key here).
• Riding a bike.
• Swimming in the sea.
• Sales of large amounts of paracetamol.

None of these adversely affects anyone else. Ok, there are some ways in which they do impact others. Hang-gliding might endanger others. Smoking at home might be a problem if your health visitor has to breathe in your smoke. Swimming in the sea could be argued to impact the coastal-rescue services. On the whole though, these things are consensual acts that impact others very little, and endanger mainly the perpetrator.

There are many other activities that a government might want to ban that are not examples of “nannying”. For example:

1. Smoking in a workplace containing non-smokers.
2. Driving at 70mph in a 50mph zone.
3. Sale of fireworks to people who will not use them responsibly.

These activities have an unacceptably high risk of impacting third parties: If you believe the bulk of the evidence, passive smoking is a risky activity. Circa 3,500 people are killed on Britain’s roads yearly. Many bystanders are injured each year by people using fireworks irresponsibly (ask the fire brigade and the hospitals!). 1000 people are injured each year (quite a few, for a two week period!).

Governments have a duty to ban such activities. It’s not “nannying”.

Nannying is protecting you from yourself.

Protecting the majority from the irresponsible acts of the minority is NOT “nannying”.

You might disagree with a workplace ban on smoking but it is not the act of a “nanny state”. It’s the act of a state that has a mandate (and a duty) to protect its inhabitants.

Numberjacks are in our head

Numberjacks, a children’s tv programme on cbeebies (part of the BBC), has always struck me as a bit sinister. Not quite sure why. I think it’s a combination of the wide-eyed earnest looks on the main characters, some strange sound-effects, along with the fact that the villains appear to be mute, which makes them twice as scary.

The Numberjacks are bunch of computer-animated numbers, living in a sofa, who attempt to solve problems, generally caused by one of the resident malevolent characters. The darkest of the lot is The Numbertaker. The show is aimed at 4/5 year-olds but our little boy has stopped watching it, citing the reason: “Sometimes I see the Numberjacks in the night-time”.

If I were to find out that Scooby & Shaggy smoked drugs and watched past episodes of the Numberjacks before each mission, I wouldn’t be surprised. It would completely explain their paranoid demeanour.

Numberjacks is made by Open Mind Productions. I don’t think it’s awful. I just think it’s a bit spookier than it’s intended to be!

Negative equity – will I shed a tear?

Like many people, I’m kind-of fascinated/obsessed by property prices in Ireland at the moment. Many commentators are suggesting that they’re over-valued, with some even predicting an imminent property crash.

I’m one of the non home-owners (and there are lots of us!). Why? Well, we’re completely completely priced out of the Dublin market at the moment. This is partly of our own doing (we’re late arrivals to the party, are in our mid-thirties and have two small children, so we can’t really buy a typical first-time-buyer’s property – a one or two bedroom new-build apartment) but also because – if the doom-merchant commentators are correct – we would be paying X+20% for a house when it would only be worth X.

Why is the market (allegedly) over-valued? I’m no economist, but it appears to be the result of historically miniscule interest rates, and the decade-long economic boom here (aka the “Celtic Tiger”). But individuals have to take some of the blame for it. No-one seems to think “what’s a sensible amount for me to borrow?” and then go and find a house for that much. They seem to think “wha’s the absolute maximum I could possibly borrow?” and then go and buy a house for more than that!

Anyway…the point of this post is that if there is a crash, and property prices fall by (lets say) 20%, will I be sad for home-owners who find themselves in a negative equity situation?

Well…I’ll be sad for the people whose income drops for some other reason (e.g. redundancy) and who then can’t make the mortgage payments and end up having their house repossessed. Of course I’ll feel sad for them.

But…what about the people who complain to me that they’re stuck with a house that’s worth 20% less than they bought it for? Who complain that it’ll be years before their house is worth more than they owe the bank for it? Who complain that their mortgage payments are essentially going into a big pit?

Sadly, I won’t be feeling sorry for them. This isn’t schadenfreude. I won’t be gleeful at their predicament but…I’m really in a negative-equity situation myself at the moment. For the last 10 years I’ve been paying rent, awaiting house-prices to fall into line with earnings. I’ve had 10 years of negative equity. Ok, granted, I’ve always had the option of moving house. I’ve never been “trapped” by negative equity. However, financially, I’m in the same situation. I’m throwing (rent) money into a pit, awaiting for houses to be worth the prices folk are paying for them!

During this boom, not one of our home-owning friends has said “Here, share some of the spoils of the 60% profit we’ve made on our house!” so – I’m afraid – I won’t feel that sorry when they inform us they’ve now made a 20% loss on it and “can we buy them dinner?”.

(Secretly, of course, I’m hoping that prices will drop below what they’re really worth so we’ll be able to snap up a real bargain. However, Ireland is a fairly small country so any such bargains will probably be snapped up fairly quickly [maybe by overseas buyers], which would probably stabilize prices fairly quickly).

Carbon offsetting & the end of oil

Carbon Offsetting debacle

From an article in Saturday’s Guardian discussing carbon offsetting:

Dan Welch, a Manchester journalist who investigated offsetters for Ethical Consumer magazine, summarised it neatly: “Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.“

Peak Oil

According to last night’s Future Shock: End of the Oil Age on RTE, it’s all kind-of irrelevant anyway. We’re going to run into economic meltdown before carbon offsetting even has half a chance to reduce global CO2 output. Who will really care about global warming when the oil runs out meaning they lose their job, everything doubles in price and they can’t afford to fill their SUV at the petrol station?

Rather worryingly, we in Ireland are particularly prone to oil shocks. Very little is grown/manufactured here. More-or-less everything (food, goods, people) has to be flown, or shipped here. And the internal distribution network is heavily based on HGVs and roads. Great when oil is cheap. Horribly expensive when it isn’t. Still…at least we have some wind, and lots of waves to generate energy in the future. Hopefully that means we won’t freeze (pending what happens to the gulf stream of course).

java InputStream.read()

I found out today that when you’re writing an InputStream, you can’t just write the following:

  public int read()
    throws IOException
  {
    byte b [] = new byte[1];
     if (read(b)==-1) {
       return -1;
     } else {
       return b[0]; //(*)
     }
  }

It will fail if your source contains any bytes >=127. In particular, it will generate garbage for such bytes, and also – if your source returns a “255″, then “-1″ will be returned, therefore truncating your data. This method needs to return an “unsigned byte” (well, its int-equivalent). What you need to do is to change line (*) to:

       return b[0] & 0xff; //(*)

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