Surrendering to blackmail

According to the Daily Telegraph a deal has been struck whereby North Korea will shut down its main nuclear reactor within 60 days and then irreversibly disable it - in exchange for this, the regime will get 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil and then 950,000 tons of aid. It appears the trade sanctions on luxury goods (and not least Japan's courageous termination of all financial transfers and trade between the countries) has hurt.

Well that will keep Kim Jong Il and his murderous cronies cozy wont it? 200,000 people in the political prison system including children related to political prisoners. Children doesn't mean 17 year olds, it means ALL children. It tests chemical weapons on prisoners. You might want to read Aquariums of Pyongyang for more about this.

So it's nice to help prop up this regime

Hopefully it will be verifiable, hopefully North Korea will allow spontaneous unscheduled inspections, hopefully it will allow inspections of all of its suspected facilities.

It wont. Official access into North Korea comes through 2 flights a week from Beijing, the occasional flight from Russia and a daily train from Beijing, and presumably the ferries from Japan will resume shortly. In a totalitarian police state you can hardly do anything spontaneous.

Unless it can be verified, this deal is nothing more than a way to prop up a slave state, a slave state that gets little criticism or protests from those who claim to give a damn about human rights.

Who owns YOUR life?

The book launched by Lindsay Perigo is timely, given the case of Kelly Taylor of Bristol in the UK. This case saddens and enrages me. Quite simply, how fucking DARE anyone of you tell this woman that she should endure what she must go through, when she is sane and certain that she wants her own suffering to end. The so called compassion showed by those opposing this is completely empty, and frankly NO ONE has the right to say she should not end her life voluntarily.

You see, Kelly Taylor has the heart and lung condition Eisenmenger's syndrome, and the spinal condition Klippel-Feil syndrome. She is in constant pain because doctors have been unable to find a combination of drugs suitable given her allergies. Her condition is terminal and degenerative, she wants to die with a high dose of morphine. Let her. Her life is NOT yours, you do not experience her suffering, and should not prolong it by interfering.

She has already tried to starve herself to death, but was in some much pain she stopped.

She has said:

“I have made the decision because enough is enough. I don’t want to suffer any more ...My consultant has told me that he does not expect me to live for another year. In that time I will deteriorate and that deterioration will become quite undignified. I want to avoid that.”

She told the BBC:

"I don't want to be looked after any more. I want to assert my own independence....I don't really understand why I'm here. I go from day to day just making it through the day. I don't want to be here."

She is too frail to fly easily and wants to die at home, so refuses to attempt to travel to a more enlightened jurisdiction like Switzerland. "I am in constant pain, suffer from breathlessness and have bed sores. I do not want to have to leave the UK in order to die".

Hear hear.

Try defending it, try worming your way out of allowing this sane adult woman to end her own suffering, try defending why YOU know best for her, and if you think you do - try arguing why I can't know best for you about any aspect of your life? After all, if you can't decide when and how to end your own life -do you really own your life and your body? If not, who does and why are they better equipped to know what is best for you? Who knows best for them?

Don't mention God - religion isn't compulsory - let your ghost worshipping determine your own life, not anyone elses.

Sorting out sprawl

PC and Tom Beard have been engaging in an interesting debate about sprawl and land use regulation. Interesting to me because I have been on both sides of the debate in my career, and now I largely share PC's view.

Tom’s view is that people are not very good at making decisions about things that have long term consequences, which of course raises the question as to whether those with his perspective are any better.

Private sector provision of infrastructure for greenfields developments already exists, it happens for telecommunications and electricity. If water was operated commercially (as it is in Auckland), that can be dealt with also. Roads for these developments are also already paid for. The key question is paying for the extra demand on existing infrastructure. That should be a matter between the utility provider and the property owner.

Tom’s comment that “More homes further away means more cars coming into the city, which means more space taken up by motorways, "bypasses" and carparks, thus impacting on the quality of life of those who've chosen to live close to the city.”

Well hold on. If highways were privatised, these motorways wouldn’t be collectively funded by all motorists, but paid for by those using them. Such tolls would limit sprawl and also make public transport more competitive. In addition, any savvy operator of toll roads would charge a premium at peak times to reduce congestion and make more money – with less congestion, and motorists paying the true costs of road expansion and use at peak times, there will be a limit to what Tom is concerned about. By contrast, almost all of the US has taxpayer (i.e. not road user) subsidised highways which have effectively subsidised motoring to many suburbs. He might look here as to why railways and bus companies (the latter mostly run by local authorities with little interest in service quality) found this so hard to compete with.

Tom also claims that in Wellington, the well off use public transport as much as or more than those on lower incomes. He is correct and there is a very good reason for that. The higher income jobs are concentrated in downtown Wellington and the public transport system was designed so that state servants and council employees could easily get to work. Lower income jobs are in the Hutt, Porirua and the suburbs. It is far more difficult to get to these jobs by public transport, so public transport subsidies in Wellington are about subsidising the middle class and high income earners to get to work in downtown Wellington from their homes in Karori, Khandallah and Kapiti. The Wellington Regional Council trialled subsidising a direct bus from Porirua to Hutt City for commuters, and it was a dismal failure because workers and their jobs were too dispersed for a public transport option to be viable. The target case for mode share in Wellington by the regional council is for public transport to hold its own against growth in total trips for both car and public transport – for commutes. Off peak car traffic continues to grow much faster than public transport, because public transport cannot meet the demand for diverse spontaneous trips with multiple destinations within a reasonable timeframe. Public transport mode share has changed because the costs of motoring have gone up exponentially compared to public transport. The key problem is that too many people want to travel at once, using infrastructure that would remain unused most of the day – like trains and buses. The solution is that all modes should be priced commercially, roads, trains and buses – this can help spread demand more evenly (and raise money to finance more infrastructure if it is financially viable). Note that about two-thirds of Wellington's rail rolling stock sits around depreciating doing nothing for about 20 hours a day, five days a week (24 hours the other two). Efficient? You might argue people do the same with their cars, but the difference is that they pay for that - they are paying for the option of convenience. You pay for the trains whether you use them or not.

Changing the pricing of transport would, in my view, make an enormous difference to how cities function and grow. There are different ways of doing this, but in essence it would involve:

- Replacing fuel taxes and ratepayer funding of roads with tolls that vary according to roads by time and location, so that roads are priced high during congested periods and next to nothing off peak. The money raised would be for maintenance and construction when the construction would generate a return. New roads would be justified financially, not politically (Transmission Gully is the latter), and existing roads would be far better managed. Yes this is congestion charging to put it bluntly, but not as bluntly as Ken Livingstone does it and not to pay for everything but roads.

- The Public Works Act and RMA would be gone, as enablers and inhibitors of transport infrastructure construction. Road building would be easier in some places, harder in others – in cities it might mean more tunnelling.

- Public transport subsidies would cease, and operators would charge what the market could bear. At peak times as tolls would be high, there would be high demand for the alternatives. The road operator would charge for bus stop use (and for bus companies to use roads, including if they wanted to pay for exclusive bus lanes), and may even finance some bus operations if it sees fit. At peak times, it would cost far more to commute than at present, off peak bus and rail companies would charge far less as there would be excess capacity.

- Employers would be allowed to time shift employment, encourage employees to work at home or off site where appropriate in order to reduce transport costs. With transport now charged efficiently, there would be significant incentives to avoid peak tolls/fares.

The result would be less peak time commuting, perhaps less sprawl for those working in congested areas, but with more employment diversifying to more outlying places (where commuting was cheaper/closer to housing). In other words, it may actually deliver what Tom wants – by using economics rather than regulation. It doesn’t talk about underground railways or light rail or any of the other transport fetishes of the left, or indeed big motorways which are the fetish of some on the right – it is about remaining completely neutral and letting users pay for what they use. I happen to be agnostic about transport modes - I used to regularly walk to work (when I could have taken the bus in half the time), I like driving and I like taking some trains. I've also used good bus services, and experienced many bad bus and rail services. You see, I supported the Wellington inner city bypass because it made good sound economic sense, but oppose Transmission Gully because it does the exact opposite.

Tom is right to suggest that there is plenty of potential for different forms of housing, including higher density to be attractive. The fundamental point is whether the market should be skewed by planning restrictions to coerce development to being in that direction - the so called nodes proposed by Auckland planning authorities with the fantasy idea that people would want to live in high rise developments around suburban railway stations. Some people want to live downtown in apartments - good for them - but if you want a house on a quarter acre section why is it anyone else's business, as long as you pay for it and the associated infrastructure?

Imagine that – users pay.

Top Gear, David Cameron and City bonuses

Top Gear is back, has been for three weeks. With Richard Hammond back fighting fit, the series is better than ever. This is truly one of the best series ever produced by the BBC, and ought to be on commercial television because it would make the BBC a bomb in advertising.

The first show included the video of Hammond’s accident, enough said. In fact it outrated the final of Celebrity Big Brother, showing that there is still reason to have faith in Britain (imagine the single TV households with teenagers fighting with dad about what to watch).

Since then there has been the Bugatti Veyron taken to its limits on a track in Germany by James May – the perfect car for bullying the average anally retentive ecologist, and at £800k the perfect car for one of the 4000 or so city traders who earned their £1 million bonuses. Finally, last night Clarkson, May and Hammond did a road trip from Miami to New Orleans, which was a hilarious hour watching them face challenges – the most threatening being to paint each others clapped out American vehicle in the most provocative way for driving through Alabama.

Clarkson’s car said “Country Western is rubbish and I hate Nascar”. May’s said “Hilary for President and I’m bi” and Hammond’s said “Man Love Rules”. The three of them, plus the camera man were being chased by a service station owners’ “boys” who threw rocks and wanted the queers to be run out of town. Don’t mess with redneck inbred troglodyte Americans!.

Needless to say, the show is absolutely brilliant, a breath of fresh air and fumes, of good humour, a sense of life and adventure and fun. Now who would you rather spend an evening with, naysayer humourless do-gooders or this lot?

Secondly, David Cameron actually has become more interesting. It has been hilarious seeing the newspapers and television get hysterical about revelations he smoked cannabis at 15 at Eton – when his colleagues and even politicians from other parties have been doing a “so what?”. What absolute wankers the media are? You could hardly find an industry more filled with drug takers than the media – no doubt some were hoping it would be a huge national scandal. Thank the British public for being sensible on this.

Cameron also has made some sensible statements about citizenship and immigrants signing up to the values of British society. He said that Muslim extremists are a mirror image of the pro-white supremacist British National Party. Good! He said “Those who seek a sharia state, or special treatment and a separate law for British Muslims are, in many ways, the mirror image of the BNP.” Indeed, and if you come to Britain wanting to turn it into an Islamic state expect a robust rebuttal of it. The right to free speech does not include a right to not be offended.

Finally, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain is calling on those earning huge city bonuses to hand them over to those who didn’t earn it. He said two-thirds should be compulsorily paid to charity – which is code for tax surely. City bonuses are already taxed of course, but more importantly they reflect London as the leading financial centre of the world – attracting the best and brightest to work extraordinary hours for pay which is almost unrivalled outside personal entrepreneurship or the entertainment industry.

Simple point Mr Hain – the people earning it already benefit London by spending much of it on goods and services here, many already contribute to charities by their own choice, and frankly without London being such a financial centre it, and the UK would be far far worse off than it is at present. Mr Hain, you live off of other people’s compulsorily confiscated income – fuck off and get a real job before you start telling others what to do with theirs!

Census prosecution

Nik Haden, Wellington economist, is being charged by the Statistics Department, because of his alleged behaviour in relation to protests last year against the compulsion around filling out census forms. This protest was about one simple point – that the state should not require you, by threat of force, to fill out a form just because you happen to be in the country at a certain time. There would be nothing wrong with it being voluntary, but the concept of people actually being able to choose themselves is alien to statists. Like I said at the time, I never filled out the two before it and nothing happened, and well I was in London for the last one.

Most of the economy seems to work on the basis of surveys, such as the entire broadcasting sector. Imagine if you were legally required to fill in a TV survey form every year, or a radio one and if you did it incorrectly, you would be prosecuted? No, seriously. It IS like that.

It is a crime in Clarkistan, though it also was in Bolgeria and Shipleyvakia. When Katrina Bach was a Deputy Secretary at MED, a contractor had his contract summarily terminated for sending round the joke email about entering your religion as a Jedi – the sense of humour bypass clearly was a roaring success. By contrast, the UK Office for National Statistics was relaxed about it for the 2001 UK census, because more people filled it out because they enjoyed putting their religion as Jedi.

If you want to know who supports this sort of prosecution then you might ask one David Farrar. He said of this issue:

“as the census is used to in construction of electoral rolls etc, then my view would be that if you refuse to fill in a census, then you lose the right to vote.
AFter all if you want to be a non-person, then you can't demand rights.”

So filling in a census grants you rights!! So is the anonymous census actually used to match people to houses? Hmmm… What gets me is that yes, to many people this seems simple – fill in a form, what’s the big deal?

The point is principle, something that most people associated with a major political party sell like a whore, it is that I have the right to remain silent. The same should also apply to entering the country, given that many countries have virtually open borders (I crossed between Denmark and Sweden four times in two days and didn't have to show a passport, and as a UK resident (not citizen) I do not need to fill in any damned form when I arrive from anywhere in the world).

If I peacefully go about my day to day business, I have the right to not be forced to fill out a damned form because the state wants to assist itself with planning etc. Yes, if I want to vote I should go on the electoral roll and then let electoral boundaries be determined by who is on the roll, not the entire population.

I am quite agnostic about there being a census, but it should be voluntary. It is telling that the state can charge Nik Haden so swiftly, whereas if you are burgled or your car is stolen, you’ll probably never hear of it again. The efficient by which the state prosecutes those who threaten its taxes and statistics far outranks its efficiency in protecting the population.

Go Nik, defend this on principle. There is a right to protest against the census law, a right that few are interested in, but which does go to the heart of what a liberal democracy is. You shouldn't be prosecuted for protesting against a bureaucratic law.