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The Tom Sawyer Principle (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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As us farmers know, we're coming up to crunch time. The old system of the CAP paying our wages is coming to an end to be replaced by the British government paying our wages. Sure, they've promised they will replace Europe's billions pound for pound (pound for Euro) but they are taking the opportunity to slip in some environmental stuff that will involve us in some hard graft and some hard decision-making when all we want to do is to plant rape seed like we did last year and get a slightly larger cheque than we did last year.

But help is at had! There's been a bad veggie harvest in Spain, Portugal and north Africa leading to Sainsbury announcing customers are only allowed three lots of tomatoes per customer this week. Crisis! We're being held to ransom by the world market. Food security demands we grow it all at home. Farmers must be given enough money to grow their rape seed in peace and tranquility. It's the CAP reborn or we'll all starve in our beds.

Just for the record, food security comes from being able to buy food anywhere we want. And that mostly doesn't include Britain. Always assuming Karl Dönitz won't return. The way the EU is going that's not guaranteed.
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Mick Harper
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More on (non)energy supply. The Cubans had a super-duper energy sector when the ancien regime was in power. (I assume, probably 'fit for purpose' would be nearer the mark.) They had a super-duper one when the Commies came to power and the Russkies built power stations all over the island. Then came fifty years of socialism and now they are reduced to offshore Iranian floating power stations (what's that all about?) to keep the lights on only some of the time.

This is particularly interesting for two reasons
1. You would have thought power supply would be like literacy programmes, metro systems and sport -- something socialist regimes would be good at.
2. Even Al-Jazeera, when reporting the above, was reduced to a formula "The government said US sanctions were holding up vital spare parts."
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Mick Harper
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President Ji has set the lowest GDP target in decades. Is China's rip-roaring growth coming to an end or will it outpace the US? Al-Jazeera, Counting the Cost

Well, since that target is 5% and is that low because of temporary circumstances, whereas the US hasn't achieved five per cent growth except for temporary circumstances in its entire history, I would put my money on China.
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Mick Harper
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Dominion Voting Systems has launched a one point six billion dollar lawsuit against Fox News
over its coverage of Trump's claims that its machines were rigged to prevent his re-election.
Agencies

AE takes no view on the case itself other than to point out that insufficient evidence was produced at the time to make the rigging 'news' as opposed to Trumpian claims of rigging 'news'. AE does point out however that for Dominion Voting Systems to claim that it has suffered one point six billion dollars worth of damages because of it is an outright lie.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Mick Harper wrote:
President Ji has set the lowest GDP target in decades. Is China's rip-roaring growth coming to an end or will it outpace the US? Al-Jazeera, Counting the Cost

Well, since that target is 5% and is that low because of temporary circumstances, whereas the US hasn't achieved five per cent growth except for temporary circumstances in its entire history, I would put my money on China.


Chinese economic statistics are political. The idea that these in any way match real performance is incorrect. You don't get growth through massive Covid Lockdowns. Chinese performance will turn out to be like the famed and feared Russiam army, ie fearful folks at the bottom assuring folks at the top they have met their unrealisable targets.
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Mick Harper
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Chinese economic statistics are political.
Agreed.
The idea that these in any way match real performance is incorrect.

Not agreed. China has clearly been roaring away ever since Deng Xiaoping came to power in the 1980's.

You don't get growth through massive Covid Lockdowns.
Nor did they report much (by their standards).

Chinese performance will turn out to be like the famed and feared Russiam army,
ie fearful folks at the bottom assuring folks at the top they have met their unrealisable targets.

I think it will turn out to be something like five per cent.
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Mick Harper
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The wave of Greek protests demanding the resignation of the government because of a rail crash has some important lessons. First of all, this was the worst in Greek railway history. Which is some going. I (just me) have been close to three worse British ones -- St John's, Hither Green and Ladbroke Grove -- so even allowing for size, Greece is not exactly a byword for large scale fatal rail accidents. Nobody hit the streets demanding the government must go after St John's, Hither Green or Ladbroke Grove.

But what of this latest Greek one? It was because a station master sent a train down the wrong track and, it is claimed, would have been prevented if a particular safely mechanisms had been in place. This is doubtful -- it would have required somebody far away noticing he had done so -- but that is not the point. Rail accidents are almost always human error, they are almost always preventable if a particular safety mechanism had been in place.

But the truth is you just can't run a one hundred per cent safe railway. You can only run the safest railway feasible at the time. And for this not particularly important line to have had this particular safety device fitted was way beyond any cash-strapped Greek government at this particular time.

Never mind all that. The rascals must go! Something similar happened here too quite recently...
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Mick Harper
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This was the derailing of the east coast mainline at Hatfield in 2000. Since it was -- or seemed to be -- the culmination of other complaints about track maintenance, popular discontent had the rascals kicked out, to be replaced by the current publicly-owned Network Rail. But then again this was all part of a wider debate about how the railways are to be run.

In every country. If they are already publicly-owned, as in Greece, then it's the government. If not, then it should be the government. And so on. It's also down to whether the government is unpopular and whether there are any other ways the populace can demonstrate their unpopularity. Nobody ever does the numbers.

Talking of which, perhaps we should hand it all over to the anoraks at the end of the platform with their Ian Allens and their weak lemon drink. At least they love the railway. Except they'd probably bring back steam trains.
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Mick Harper
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In the Budget on Wednesday, the Chancellor intends to do something about the 800,000 extra economically-inactive people since Covid. There will be measures to encourage them back into the workforce. Agencies

Good luck with that. The Newsnight wall spelled out what 'economically-inactive' actually means in today's thrusting go-ahead full-employment Britain. There are 8.8 million of them. In the old days they would have been called 'unemployed'. Today they are called

students 2.3 million
carers 1.7 million
sick 2.7 million
retired 1.1 million
other 1.1 million

None of these categories was available in the bad old days. Take 'the sick' -- two of whom were interviewed on Newsnight. They had 'mental problems'. I'm not knocking it, I'm just saying in less enlightened times such people were expected to suffer nine-to-five at work rather than at home. People who were physically disabled were expected to join schemes that catered for them. And that have been largely abolished by successive governments.

Or 'the retired'. This is not people who have reached retirement age, these are people that have taken advantage of government schemes that allow them to retire even though they haven't reached retirement age!

Or 'carers'. We are not talking about housewives who are content to be housewives and for hubby to earn a living for the both of them, but people (overwhelmingly women) who prefer looking after children to going out to work, and the state allows them to. Who wouldn't, but in the old days you might get away with this if the kids were under four but otherwise you had latchkey kids just like everyone else.

'Other' refers mainly to people claiming to be self-employed ["Oh yeah, and how much freelance work did you get last year?" M J Harper: "Nothing as such, but I'm working on something."] but there are other schemes of similar bogusness. Including students, whoever they are. It does not necessarily refer to the ordinary kind.

In other words they are all people that are unemployed but getting benefits because governments always prefer to report full-employment and are prepared to pay for it. I know, I was in one or other of these categories very happily for most of my ... um ... working life.
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Mick Harper
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I have been recounting my recent trials and tribulations interfacing with the NHS in Cabinet of Curiosities and since, on mentioning this to others, it seems everyone is having the same sort of problems with all sorts of institutions, I thought I would analyse why this is.

1. It occurs with any large organisation that holds a de facto monopoly e.g. the NHS, government departments (local and national), utilities (privatised or nationalised), Amazon etc.
2. It does not occur when they're vying for your custom i.e. supermarkets, voluntary organisations, Amazon etc
3. The procedures that get botched are always completely routine and could be done competently by any primate. Making appointments with the NHS for instance.
4. Procedures conducted by the same organisation requiring skill and engagement are done routinely well. Medical ones in the NHS for instance.

So, how to account for the fact that (1) the same organisation can do both but (2) other organisations of a similar size do not recognise there is any difference.
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Mick Harper
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The key question is: do incompetent people gravitate to these dysfunctional organisations or do dysfunctional organisations create incompetent people? This is hard to answer because all (employable) human beings are capable of doing dull repetitive tasks. So the key sub-question becomes: do human beings, left to their own devices, become deliberately incompetent (i.e. careless, uncaring, uncooperative, downright nasty) when carrying out dull and repetitive tasks?

The industrial revolution was built on getting human beings to voluntarily carry out dull and repetitive tasks and do it all their working lives. It worked a treat. But this was because the worker had no choice, short of putting a literal spanner in the works. When you are doing the same thing behind a desk, you do have a choice. You can screw the customer.

In a factory an incompetent worker gets sacked but in a well-functioning bureaucracy incompetent workers also get the sack. In a dysfunctional one, it seems, they don't. But this only returns us to the start point: why don't the dysfunctional organisations just sack such people? We can only conclude that all organisations keep people, both good and bad, unless the tooth and claw of competition forces their hand. And is presumably why deliberately nasty people gravitate to dysfunctional organisations.

Except I don't really believe such people exist. Or to put it another way, being nasty if we can get away with it is part of the human condition. Nope, still haven't got there. But that is all I have to offer.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Why do you always get (hypothetically) uncaring GP receptionists.

The answer is you want to see a GP but the GP has more important things to do. You cannot get an appointment.

So you dial 111. These days they give a very caring service, which normally starts with a discussion of your symptons, and ends when they discover that it is likely not life threatening, with advice to call your doctor's surgery. When you explain that this is tried, they email the doctor's surgery for you, asking them to get back to you as you do need to be seen. But this doesn't happen as the Surgerys does trust the 111 service, folks on 111 are not medically trained, they are using computers to pathway out how you should be triaged. The computer says it's a GP referral. The customer, after getting sick (as well as being sick) of no call back, will attend A and E. Where they face a long wait, a few meds and an instruction to attend a GP surgery.

You don't fancy that? Clearly not, the unhelpful receptionist won't think it's important.

The problem is you want to see a doctor. In actual fact this doctor is not going to cure you at all, he is going to check, like the medically untrained 111 service did with a computer, that you are not seriously ill and but also give some relief for symptons. The good news is that you are by now feeling better, the relief (that is a relief) is not required.
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Wile E. Coyote


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You have a good large national organisation that is locally not agile.

Of course we all know this. It's just we can't solve the problem, we can't flexibly adapt.

We can build a Nightingale hospital, but can't fill the beds.
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Wile E. Coyote


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A GP surgery in 2015 on average had something like 7200 patients, it now has 9700 patients. Most GPs want to work less hours, so receptionists on average have many more balls to juggle so they will stress out more and will drop them more often. GPs certainly don't see themselves as the problem. They can't see more people. It can't be the NHS, so it must be the fault of the government or the patients.
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Wile E. Coyote


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The funny thing is that we actually have things that are really quite good at triage, much much better than GP receptionists, and they don't offend anybody.......they are called computers pathways that the 111 folks use.
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