BatFlattery

This graphic claims that only three countries in the world do not use the metric system. None of them is the UK. Now anyone who lives here knows that we don’t really use the metric system. Roadsigns are in miles and MPH. Beer and milk is available in pints. And people weigh themselves in stone. There is even some progress to report as well. Next year, four?

Was thinking a bit more about the Tesla and my reaction to it, which is similar to my reaction to low-energy lamps. I buy the latter, not because I give a sod about so-called global warming, but because they last longer (hate changing the buggers) and cost less to run. When LED bulbs finally become available I’ll buy them because they last forever (yay!).

In the same way, I would buy a Tesla (if I had £50k to spend on a car) because it’s a fantastic performance machine, looks cool (you can see Lotus are involved) and it costs less to run. Starting to see a pattern here? If you serve a real need, offer a real advantage, people will want your product. No hectoring required.

And this explains my basic antipathy to the global warming bandwagon. It’s stuffed with people who live to hector, who can’t be bothered finding out what people want because they’re so busy telling them what they ought to want. The antipathy to the market is most marked, I think, in those who have the guilty knowledge, deep down, that what they want is not what most people want. And therefore they have to avoid, at all costs, any mechanism for making that fact known, while promoting any scheme, from socialism to anti-discrimination to environmentalism, that gives them license to tell other people what to do.

Not that it’s news, I suppose, but his latest bit of Jobs-hate is just laughable. In an article entitled “Steve Jobs, Proud to be Non-Union”, which sounds like something to be proud of in my books anyway, he’s in full swing, displaying a masterly lack of sense.

The teachers’ unions, Jobs believes, are ruining America’s schools because they prevent bad teachers from being fired.

Well? Isn’t that what any sane person believes? Apparently not:

I know for a fact that Jobs’ ideas about unions are absurd, he’s-on-a-different-planet bullshit.

Hmmm, tough talk. Let’s see some facts:

But don’t you love it when a billionaire who sends his own kids to private school applies half-baked business platitudes to complex problems like schools?

Would those be the same half-baked platitudes which have seen Apple’s stock price go up like a rocket? But of course, building and selling simple little things like iPods and MacBooks are nothing compared with the complex problem of, um, teaching kids to read and write. (How long have we as a civilisation been doing that? Three thousand years? More?) In fact, it’s such a complex problem, more and more Americans are doing it themselves, at home. Just like those Americans building their own MP3 players and laptops at home.

And don’t you love it when some smug journo slips in the “sends his own kids to a private school” bit. Hello, moron: that’s the whole point. Private schools are run to give a good education, by hiring the best teachers. That’s why people who can afford to, send their kids to them. By restoring choice to parents who cannot afford to do so, you could get some of the same benefits in the public school system.

Jobs has also been a long-time advocate of a school voucher system, another ridiculous idea based on the misplaced faith that the mythical free market will fix schools by giving parents choice.

Ah, isn’t it wonderful to dismiss realities you don’t like by labelling them “mythical”? And why isn’t Steve grateful to the State which created his company and anointed him CEO? That’s what happened, right? Because there’s no free market? And who are these stupid parents to want choice, anyway? Choice is fine for choosing a Big Mac or a QuarterPounder, but education is too important to be left to their simple little minds; only the State in its infinite wisdom can decide for them.

Well, Leander, here’s a suggestion: why don’t you emigrate to the socialist holy land, Sweden? Whoops, scratch that: Sweden has a school voucher system! The horrors!

Kahney then goes wittering on about the real crisis in education being caused by the awful disparities in income in the US, as evidenced by a crackpot UNICEF report which was comprehensively demolished by The Times. The UN, lying. I know. Who’d have thought?

Well, the ones in America, anyway. They argue that big sites like Google get a “free ride” on the networks, making money from users that they don’t share with the ISPs. Some free ride. I’d hate to have Google’s monthly bandwidth bill. But as Vint Cerf points out, the real issue is with the users: the ISPs have contracted with the users to provide Internet access to the whole internet, ie any website the user chooses to go to. Now they want to say “Well actually, you can only go to Google and Yahoo if they pay us money to let you.” They are breaking the basis of the deal.

And best of all, they are doing it because they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the internet: all this talk about “prioritising streaming video” means they are trying to re-create a video network on the Internet. But that’s now how people use video on the Internet:

[I]f you’re paying any attention at all to Tivo and iPod and other fairly modern communication services, you’ll find people downloading things and then listening to or watching them later. And if you are no longer watching the video as its being delivered to your hard drive, then you no longer need for it to be delivered in realtime in a viewable form. The broadband providers seem to be reinventing the cable and satellite television service model for the Internet. What mystifies me about this is that they are therefore going after an already hotly competing-for market with a finite revenue stream. So the best they can do is a share of that market. Their entry is not going to increase the market, in my view.

So they’re breaking the contract with their users to go into competition with satellite TV. What a good business decision. Must be a few MBAs involved there.

One of my favourite current authors, the very insightful and well-researched Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, in debate about the relative merits of the American and Canadian healthcare systems:

If you look at the level of medical innovation in the world in the last 25 years, virtually everything comes from America. Absent America, medicine in the world is in the dark; it is retarded; it is at a level that all of us would find unacceptable. What is happening right now is that all these cheap single-payer systems are essentially poaching. They are cherry-picking off the American system. The American system is pumping money into research, has got this free market system which is incredibly dynamic and incredibly innovative. Everyone else just sits back and cherry picks all of the things we come up with. What happens if there’s no America tomorrow? What happens if we junk our system? Where does medical progress come from?

Which is something I’ve often thought myself. The day the Democrats get their NHS in the US of A, G-d forbid, will be a dark day for medicine.

You can ignore markets, but that doesn’t mean that markets will ignore you. It seems that green legislation in the developed world, enacted in a misguided attempt to force consumers to use more “environment-friendly” energy, is encouraging the destruction of the rain-forests so beloved by the greenies.

Heh.

Early indications are that bringing British licensing laws into the 21st century have not resulted in the breakdown of civilisation.

How surprising.