OK, please somebody tell me if this gets tedious, but I am in general a big fan of repurposing, reworking and repackaging material.
- I now very much hope that Rand Paul runs for President in 2012, picking as his running mate the Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. If elected, I would immediately demand that the Paul/Daniels administration make a state visit to Chad, where they would meet President Idriss Déby, in a marquee.
- The basic problem for the Times' online subscriptions (summary; 105k, v weak) is that they have not yet found an online equivalent of their successful offline sales model, which relies on people picking up a copy in Starbucks and then not realising it isn't free. Thinking about it, this is basically the iPad free trial, isn't it?
- With the victories of Harry Reid (vs Sharron Angle) and Christopher Coons (vs Christine O'Donnell), it looks increasingly to me as if the Republican Party has missed out on control of the Senate specifically because of the personal negative vote of inexperienced female Tea Party candidates in winnable seats. This is surely not great news for Palin '12?
- This was a bit of a throwaway joke, but the more I think about it, the more I like it; Windsor & Maidenhead council are barking up the wrong tree trying to bring crappy supermarket vouchers into it. What they ought to be giving everyone is a "Single Social Behaviour Allowance", unifying the ASBO and Big Society regimes, rather as tax credits are integrated into the benefits system.
This would work on the basis of scoring various activities with positive and negative points (ie, visiting old people in hospital: +50 points, serving as a school governor: +25 points, noise nuisance: -10 points, gross indecency on Clapham Common: -30 points), and setting a per capita budget for how many positive points you required citizens to contribute (or, if there was a subsidy from central government, how many per capita negative points you could tolerate). The basic idea being similar to the trusty system in prisons; that if you were a good upstanding and well-behaved citizen, you could be permitted a few liberties not allowed to the masses.
I am not sure that I would push this as far as they did in 1950s Ireland (where, as far as I can tell, it was at least tacitly accepted that if you were a good parish priest, this could excuse quite serious crimes), but the underlying idea is quite horribly attractive in a glib thinktankish way. And of course, it paves the way for the real agenda, which would be to integrate the Single Social Budget into the actual income tax system and to thereby formalise the arrangement of there being one law for the rich and another for the poor (or at least, for those among the poor who didn't do sufficient supererogatory duties subsidising the social care system).
The ingenuity would come in when you published the price lists and people started competing to invent the most baroque way you could have a Net Zero day.
ReplyDeleteSo if you shoplift a chicken (-80) but then give it to an old person for dinner (+30) but dump the bones as litter (-10) and then pick them up again (+10) while screaming abuse (-20) at a graffiti artist (+30)...
A bit like those web forums about hacking the Tesco Clubcard rules. I remember somebody realised that if they got X number of points, they could convert them through Clubcard Deals and then claim Air Miles against them at a highly advantageous exchange rate.
ReplyDeleteHaving further noted that Value Biscuits were both a) on special and b) attracting extra points that day, she (IIRC) realised that she could go to New York for £140 worth of Tesco Value Biscuits.
The store manager was pretty surprised, but at least had the decency to help handle all the cases of biscuits (which, I think, were eventually donated to charity). No doubt some sort of screaming red-flashing alarm went off in the Dunnhumby bunker and they zapped that promotion sharpish. I have the impression they've got better at avoiding corner cases like that over the last few years.
This is surely not great news for Palin '12?
ReplyDeletePotentially not, but she also backed a number of victorious female candidates for Senate and gubernatorial races in early primary states.
In particular, the unexpected rise of Nikki Haley in South Carolina was somewhat at her behest, which will make the odds-on dirtiest component of the 2012 campaign even more amusing.
That's the voting dynamics of the Senate, where a single Senator can stop most legislation. Senators get very good at "go along, get along."
ReplyDeleteWould we be better off without the Senate? Well...consider that right now it has the more liberal majority.