Cromwell Crown Hotel London? Don't even think about it

Look it up on Google you'll see the website, you'll see numerous sites with the description of it being innocuous.

No.

This is a shithole, probably the dirtiest hotel in Britain according to the Sunday Times AND Trip Advisor. Surely the highlights of that review are:

"Most impressive is the smell. I’ve never come across anything quite like it — a swirling, gag-inducing mix of sweat and industrial-strength disinfectant, with elusive top notes of spice and decay"

"The mattress was a step into another, stomach-churning world: the eventful history of its long, long life was catalogued in a Jackson Pollock of bodily fluids. Among many other things, it looked as if someone had opened a vein in that bed. I wouldn’t have blamed them. "

"I decided to watch TV until unconsciousness arrived. The ancient set didn’t seem to work, though, so I felt back along the wire to make sure it was plugged in properly. Bad move. As I groped under the chipped MDF dressing table, I touched the plug — and the back cover promptly fell off, leaving the live wires exposed to my wandering fingers. There’s nothing like a 240-volt shock to put things in perspective."

"The phone by my elbow — yes, there is a phone — is encrusted with muck, as if a succession of people have jabbered into it while eating peanuts."

Now I might say anyone expecting much for £55 a night in London is having a laugh, but while you can expect small and basic, you should expect clean and safe. The Cromwell Crown is, quite possibly, the worst hotel in London. You cannot get a good deal to stay here.

Time to set students free

Clint Heine blogs about the next attempt to free membership of student unions from the absurd half-arsed legislation at the moment, whereby the majority of those who vote to compel all others to join a student union, regardless of whether or not that association represents their values.

It is a very simple issue, one that so clearly out the "we know what's best for you" authoritarian bullying of so many on the left. It is violence of a quite sinister kind to say you can't buy education from a university, without joining an organisation that does nothing that interests you and which represents the opposite of your views. However, I guess given that student unions have so often been the training grounds for Labour and Green party MPs, kind of makes it ok to force everyone to belong right?

Those that proclaim freedom of association suddenly go "oh um student unions are different". They argue "student unions provide lots of services for students", which of course you could say about ALL unions, or indeed most voluntary associations. The student union could simply exclude participation from those who aren't members, it's not that hard, and hardly an excuse to force people to belong to something they don't want to join. They argue "students advocate for students", which surely should be up to students. I could argue Libertarianz advocates for all individuals. Communist parties claim to represent all workers. The Maori Party no doubt claims to look after the interests of Maori.

Student unions could be organisations that provide facilities for students and advocate for them at the university, and make life at university more interesting. Most do some of that, but they also become rallying points for left wing activists. I was sick of student unions claiming to represent my views when they never did - they got 10% of students voting, and were chronic mismanagers of other people's money.

However, none of that actually matters. What matters is that you are not forced to join an association if you don't want to. Student unions should have to convince people to join them, not force them.

If you can't understand why force is wrong, then maybe I should take some money off you once a year, and tell you that you've joined an organisation you didn't want to join, and that it now represents you.

ACT'S Voluntary Student Membership Bill should be supported as government policy.

I did ask a while ago that all National candidates should be asked whether or not they support voluntary membership of university student unions.

ACT's bill will be a perfect way to out those National MPs who are lily livered wimps, that don't believe in freedom of association. Which is why John Key should declare it is party policy - let those who don't support it show themselves. Let's hope I am wrong, and none exist, after all, what better way to undermine one of the best force funded training schools of the Labour Party than to stop making students pay for them if they don't want to.

Ryugyong hotel being completed?

Not PC describes it as the worst building in the world. Wikipedia tells about its abortive history. The building that looks like a shard of glass has fallen from the sky or shot itself out of the ground.

However, someone has decided to upgrade it. Egyptian company Orascom is refurbishing it to make it a tower for cellular phone service. Quite how many customers it expects for the phones or the hotels is a mystery especially since most citizens are not permitted a private phone (for obvious reasons), and tourism is rather low. So now we have pictures of it being clad in glass (right).

Scaffolding at the top presumably to allow telecommunications equipment to be installed. Although the rusty crane that has been at the top for around 20 years appears to be there (imagine the worker who was in there - and had to get down).

It has been described as the worst property investment ever by the Times. It apparently will be finished by 2012, which tells me either Orascom knows something nobody else does, or it has far too much money.

Jobs summit outcomes?

I agree with most of what Not PC has already suggested here, here and here, as an alternative view to the Jobs Summit. These are:
- Government should get out of the way;
- Government should resist pressures for protectionism (one positive thing it COULD do is lobby hard internationally to reboot the Doha Round to make the biggest push for free trade since the 1950s);
- Production drives the economy, not consumption. Precious little government does encourages production. As Government spending takes money out of the hands of the productive, there should be further tax cuts. I'd suggest simply dropping company tax to 20%. What better signal to the world to locate to NZ?
- Abandon the minimum wage;
- Cut government salaries;
- Allow malinvestments to be liquidated;
- Restrict the Reserve Bank's ability to inflate the currency;
and so on.

However, in one respect I DO digress from PC, I do NOT believe all government spending is consumption. It is possible for government to spend money and generate more wealth than it spent. However, this really only happens in two areas:

1. Spending money on capitalising SOEs to expand. A very risky endeavour indeed. Singapore does it well, but you'd question whether NZ governments ever can do it well. Air NZ and Kiwirail being Labour's greatest dud investments.

2. Spending money collected from consumers of a government service to benefit those consumers beyond the cost of the spending. I mean roads. The private sector is almost entirely shut out of providing roads, so government taxes road users and can spend that money on improving roads to reduce delays, wasted fuel, accidents etc. For example, the widening of the highway through Paremata-Plimmerton north of Wellington generated savings in travel time, fuel etc of around $5 for every $1 spent on it. The dangerous side to this is politicians get excited about roads too much, and want to spend money on the ones that DON'T do that. Transmission Gully and the Helen Clark Memorial tunnel (aka Waterview Connection) are examples of this. Japan is littered with such bridges of the sort Henry Hazlitt referred to.

In short, if anyone is advocating spend up on projects, they need a seriously rigorous piece of economic analysis. Will the project really generate wealth based on proven demand, what is the risk contingency on this. If there is a reasonable risk it wont generate at least $2 for each $1 spent over a 20 year period then it isn't worth doing. Sadly the ideas that have come out include the insane idea for a cycleway (although if the government was rational about Kiwirail it mind find it has plenty of corridors for one) and the Green Party's rather predictable favourites.

However, regardless of the economic efficiency of government spending it does not justify it morally. Theft is still theft. I undoubtedly think I can spend your money better than you can, but it hardly justifies me doing so does it?

Finally, it is tragically notable that the leftwing commentary on the Jobs Summit has been virtually nothing about substance or policy (with the exception of the Greens. The Greens played the identity politics card and then ideas), but about identity politics. The Standard showed pictures of men, said everyone has an ideology (true), damns the cycleway (but forgets that Labour started pouring money into cycleways itself) and makes a few comments about what was said. However no new ideas. Idiot Savant goes on about men, and then damns the cycleway (yet this is Green Party policy), and goes on about identity politics again. Hand Mirror thinks it shows John Key does not value women. Apparently women can't be represented by organisations that are open to them and include them.

Not enough women, not enough people of different races. Apparently if you have a vagina or differently coloured skin it means you have different ideas. Those don't come from a brain. If you don't feel represented there, then say so - it isn't because there aren't enough women, Maori, Koreans, blondes, cross-dressers, asthmatics, pianists, vegetarians, balloon fetishists, dancers, nudists or twins - it is about ideas. The truth is that if the summit was full of leftwing women, which would surely cheer many on, the ideas are unlikely to be about getting government out of the way of the productive.

Most of those at the summit were there because it showed they were wanting to work with the government, and because they wanted some booty from the rest of you.

Like I said before, the Fourth Labour Government had an economic summit conference shortly after it was elected, and promptly ignored most of what came out of it. That seems the appropriate precedent.

UPDATE: I see the whingy 23yo unemployed woman who thought the world owed her a living at the Lange Economic Summit Conference, Jane Stevens, retains her Marxist view of the world in the Herald. Given she works for an organisation partly supported by taxpayers and ratepayers, I'm hardly surprised. Shame her passion and commitment didn't teach her that the government produces nothing, and that the free market generates wealth.

Sending freedom messages to North Korea

A Japanese organisation advocating for victims of abduction by North Korea is calling for people to send spam faxes to North Korean fax numbers, in order to facilitate change and revolution.

The blog post above includes the fax numbers, suggests you send a message in Korean only with a photo of Kim Jong Il - because it is illegal to throw away images of the General Secretary. The message should not be confrontational, but be about sending factual information, making the recipient think, and it is important the faxes be individualised.

It IS an innovative approach. Takes a bit of effort to get some Korean written by those who do not know the language, and it isn't cheap. North Korea charges a lot of money to terminate any fax calls in its country (after all that's foreign currency it can earn from overseas telcos).

Imagine if you were in a totalitarian state, knew little better and received a fax from overseas that told you that some of the things your government told you were a lie. Would you tell anyone else? Would you keep it secretly? Would you send a response?