Housing Shortage

Why is there one?

Lack of land to build on is the reason often given. Builders who get permission to build a new housing estate then build as many as they can as close as they can for minimum cost vs return. And max return is I believe proportional to the number of rooms a house can claim to have.

Ok that explains why they don't build houses with the very useful/essential item of a cellar, even though it would be worth its weight in gold for most people and add minimum cost to the price of the house (at least I believe this is try, perhaps this is a case of citation needed).

So why not build about 2 stores, one fo the first things a lot of people do when getting a house is to turn the loft into an attic room, so there is clearly desire for it. My guess comes down to planning regulations again. That said the new development near us some houses do have 4 floors, but they are mainly flats so...

All this bugs me, because underground is so well insulated that is effectively perfectly insulated - hell if you dug deep enough you'd have as much free heat as you could ever want ;-) So there should be every reason to dig out at least one layer of cellar if not several. As for building higher, well gardens are that small these days, and many are paved/decked over so the reasons for keeping them in sunlight fall down.

So I would say that if the government wants to improve the housing sitation, get them to build cellars and encourage them to build taller houses.

Bailing out Manufacturing

So this Times article got me thinking.
Bailing out manufacturing vs bailing out the high street.
Call this simplistic, but a person employed in woolworths serves the UK itself, however from a simplistic analysis they do nothing for anyone else in the world. If you use the old cliche of UK PLC, then they don't produce anything that someone outside the UK wants, in fact they consume vast quantities of goods manufactured abroad.

At least car manufacturers produce something that is exported.

This may be 1st year economics, but to the country as an export (i.e. to pay for imports) what use is any of the high street? The high street may make the country itself more efficient, but it doesn't actually contribute to the bottom line, whereas the car industry does.
Ah, you say: that business has been making a loss for years. Well once you take away subsidies farming makes a massive loss and yet there are plenty of arguments for having a local farming industry.

Transport Let me Down

I had an idea for a new blog:
Open to as many people as possible to post(some limitations to prevent abuse). You then give your tale of how a particular form of transport has let you down.

Could be good for collecting tales about transport woes, particularly some sort of relative measure of how much different forms of transport cause woes. It could also be absolutely dreadful.

You never know until you try, next time I get 10 minutes...

Who throws a shoe?

I've been thinking about the current news story of the shoe thrower; particularly the allegations that he was beaten after he was detained.

Now, two options are possible, either he was beaten up after he was detained, or he wasn't.

If he wasn't, and the injuries are from while he was being detained then, then do I think he was justified in the event. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and call it a protest. Not really, no, I don't think it is valid to use physical violence to make a political statement; it happens a lot, but seeking to hurt others in order to further political aims has got to be a big bad, and the cries of 'he did it first and worse' might be valid, but the use of retaliatory action should always be condemned; after all, an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. I think if the middle east in general could learn that lesson then things would be much better.
Now let's assume that he was beaten up after being detained. Words fail me trying to say how wrong this is if it were true, this is Guantanamo Bay level of wrong if it is true. Now this man's protest that I think is a bad thing has exposed a larger wrong. It's not quite the level of Jaywalking to bring the attention of Concentration camps to the public eye, but it is certainly I believe a lesser wrong to highlight a greater wrong.
You know I can't help thinking that did the shoe thrower himself put Bush at risk? Not really no, I'm fairly sure that a shoe even to the head isn't life threatening; whereas Bush ordered the bombing of this Journalist's city. Looking at the big picture Bush put this Journalist's life in much greater danger than the Journalist did Bush's.

Maybe it's me, I expect very high standards from law enforcement agencies, well I expect them to follow the law if you can call that a high standard.

So let's assume an almost worst case scenario that he was beaten after being detained and that this is exposed in light of investigations. Do I think the thrower did the right thing. Absolutely not, even if it did expose a greater wrong he didn't know that at the time. Fundamentally in the ideal case a society in all forms must be able to cope with unstable elements and survive without breaking its own principles; if you're going to break the principles at least admit that you are universally breaking this and state that you aim to break them before you break them - i.e. make it official public policy that terrorist suspects even in lack of any reliable evidence will be officially tortured for information on the country's home soil. If you see that any element of this is wrong and therefore want to not do that, then you have to give up on the whole thing.
Or at least that's how I believe things should work, as it stands it looks like I'll carry on being the good little automoton.

Sex Education

Is on my mind at the moment thanks to technocrat.

So I am obviously for it, I don't believe anything has ever been gained by hiding something that is both useful and truthful to all who hear it. After all, we tell children from a very early age how dangerous knives are, and endeavour to teach them about their proper use as soon as they become capable of using them.
I'm not going to do old arguments to death though, so instead I ask a thought experiment of you: Suppose contraception was 100% effective. Suppose that either there aren't STDs, or even where there are, we have easy effective cures for them. I ask this now in the hope that one day both of these conditions will be met; I doubt they will be met perfectly during my life, but we may get close, so let's think about the impact of this to society.
If sex is risk free what do you teach teens/children about sex? Does it change your opinion on how we do teach sex education if that were the reality?
But which way does your opinion change? Does this mean we should teach about it more or less?
I can see arguments both ways, but if you truly do have sex without consequences then how does society change? Do we go the way of the bonobos monkey, do the swinging sixties actually return and this time include people outside of a tight social group in London? Or does life just carry on as it always has?
Most likely I see us continuing on our current course, England was recently found to have the most one night stands of anywhere in Europe, so this may well continue.

As for education, forewarned is forearmed; if you're talking about the body anyway...

Christmas and the turth

Looks like you can be fired for telling the truth in school.

I can understand why in some ways, but even if this was malicious, is there anywhere in any code of conduct that teacher is out of order? If the teacher was mistaken, then this is even worse. What happened to verbal and written warnings? It's not as if this was criminal? This sounds no different than being persecuted for denying the existence of god.

Which comes back to Santa. It seems to me that the lies associated with Santa are terrible; we tell lies to children in order to make lives easier for children so that they'll behave themselves for a month or so. This sounds like one of those Taboos of the modern world that Paul Graham was talking about.
And don't argue that this is taking the magic or innocence out of youth. If we wanted children to live in blissful ignorance of the real world we'd tell them about faeries at the bottom of the garden and an all loving omnipotent being. Granted some people still do this, but many don't, isn't it time to stop lying to children about Santa in the same way many parents have stopped telling them about that other bearded omniscient being?

Clearly "you'd better watch out"

So you're a child being taunted in the playground...

I was thinking about children who get in trouble in the playground for physically attacking someone who has been teasing them, calling them names, etc.
Then I thought about the pen being mightier than the sword, the idea that ideas are more powerful than actions. Of course when the pen is mightier than the sword it is only when the pen is a proxy for greater physical violence; but the point stands.

Of course no-one ever died from being called a name, but to be telling the child at one point that ideas and intentions are vitally important, and then in the second instant that name calling should be ignored sounds a little vacuous.
Also, what do you want the child to do? In the limit, how much verbal abuse should a person take before they do something else about it.
In the real world (such as the workplace) you'd have someone in court or fired for verbal abuse. Any physical action would cause police investigation with either a charge of GBH or ABH. So why then as a child was I repeatedly punched and kicked in school and nothing was done about it by the police? Why are so many children being told that they should ignore name calling, while adults are taking each other to court and getting serious compensation for racial and sexual slurs.

A few reasons I guess:

• Children aren't yet fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
  

Yes for a three year old I buy this argument. I don't buy this argument for a twelve year old. But where do you draw the line? The answer to me is simple, you have a rapidly increasing punishment and responsibility requirement.

• It happens far too often to bother the police/courts with.
  

Again this is an excuse, not a reason.

• It's part of growing up to experiment with this method of solving problems.
• Adults can't be bnothered to get into the depth of details for children
• Children are often a mirror for their environment, and in their predudices we see our own and we don't want to face this.
  
• A reluctance to treat children as young adults.

My old thought experiment is were I now with my mind, put back in the situations I was in as a child (particularly with bullying) what would I do? the only answer I can come up with is to form the playground equivalent of the UN. Not form our own gang as such, but at least try and convince others to form a united front to be protected as a group.