Interesting Links for 14-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• Universities dumbing down on maths to fill places.
  (tags: university academia mathematics)
• Tips for Not Appearing Crazy on the Internet
  (tags: internet politics writing crazy)
• Dr. Who's real name - Steven Moffat has an idea and posts it to rec.arts.drwho in 1995...
  (tags: doctorwho StevenMoffat usenet)
• Caroline Lucas looks to decriminalising drugs
  (tags: drugs law uk)
• Terry Pratchett starts process to end his life
  (tags: suicide terry_pratchett)
• Neil Gaiman fantasy and Salman Rushdie both have sci-fi TV series in the works
  (tags: SalmanRushdie neilgaiman scifi tv)
• Labour considiner giving people in work priority for council housing. For fuck's sake BUILD MORE HOUSES.
  (tags: responsibility labour politics uk housing)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Countdown to someone informing me that he's not called "Dr. Who"...

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

THE FUCKING CRAZZZY PEOPLE SHULD NOT BE ALLOWED ON THE INTERNETS OR THE GOOGLE! They are all just JEWS and SOCIALISTS who helped kill JFK so they could pretend that MEN WALKED ON THE MOON! For that matter, MEMBERS OF THE CIS GENDERED PATRIARCHY should also not be allowed in the Internet Tubes! I'll have you know that I know SEVERAL CIS GENDERED PEOPLE and they all want to create a never ending RAPE CULTURE. If you are a not a member of the LGBT community or an ally and belive in the MYTH OF BINARY GENDER then you should get off the INTERNET and start realizing how your BRAIN WAVES CAUSE RAPE! Stop using electricity to perpetuate the myth of HETERONORMALITY and the scroughe of VITAMIN CULTURE THAT WILL TRICK YOUR CHILDREN INTO GETTING VACINATIONS! yOU ARE CAUSing global warming while creating victim culture and keeping Muslims in the White House! This is how the black man is always keeping the WHITE Man down.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

You forgot "Curse you and your ONE-CORNERED THINKING" and "UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS."

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

FML.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Mash it up with Doctor Who and we have ... TIEM CUBE

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Caroline Lucas's views on drug use are eminently sensible. Unfortunately, she is exactly the wrong politician to champion those views. What she needs are respectable senior, experienced MPs who don't look remotely like drug users themselves to be her allies. What she'll inevitably get is a bunch of celebs, twitterati, Guardian-readers and younger MPs who probably smoked dope at Oxford. And that's a group of people with a bad recent record of influencing public opinion (see the AV referendum).

[andrewducker]

I totally agree.

It needs Conservatives to stand up and do it, because anyone else will be tarred with the insane lefty brush.

Sadly, this seems unlikely.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I'd go further and say "Not just any Conservatives" - not the young bright things who went to trendy parties at Oxford, so not Cameron and Osborne.

It might seem strange, but John Major could have done this. There's not many of his generation left. Maybe it would give Kenneth Clarke something to do, but he's damaged his own standing of late, both in the party and with the public at large.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

There is an interesting way in to a Conservative lead end to the war on drugs.

If you could persuade a few of them that the savings to be had by dimantling the drug enforcement capability and the extra revenue to be had from taxation on the drugs themselves and the additional profits on house contents insurance sales meant that they didn't have to push ahead with some of the harder to do budget cuts or could offer a nice fat tax cut you might hook them into a decriminalisation policy.

I think demographics are on the side of decriminalisation, in the long run.

[anef.livejournal.com]

I think you are confusing Conservatives with people who think logically.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

there does seem to be a correlation to being Conservative and outright denying that which is both stunningly obvious and part of basic human nature.

reminds me of the Catholic Church, now I think about it.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think it's a mistake to assume that folk on the other side are always either stupid or bad.

More often than not they just have different priorities and different definations of what The Good is.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

Tax the damn drug users. Turn them from a cost to a revenue source. With any luck you can use the proceeds to fund a further tax cut / NHS rises which will 'enhance economic growth'. Run a strong rhetoric that from now on drug users will become net contributors to society.

If you can get the older conservatives and the far right conservatives on side by pointing out it avoids closing a hospital in their constituency you might be in with a chance.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Hey, do you know what would create work for construction firms and help house people looking for council houses?

Building council houses.

:-D

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Am I the only person who is rather startled at Ed Milliband wanting Labour to be the party of grafters? I know Labour people have been convicted of various sorts of shenanigans recently (postal vote fixing, expenses, etc) but I thought political corruption was the sort of thing that went down badly with the electorate. But maybe making the aim explicit will change things round.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

Build stuff? Nonsense!! the Market was left to sort that out, and look what happened?

that's right: houseprices rocketed and the economy tanked.

all because of houses. We need LESS houses, then there'd be less of a housing bubble cos uhm... uhm..
fuck, I've lost my train of thought.

but are you seriously suggesting that putting money into *utterly fucking essential* affordable housing for people who seriously fucking need affordable housing right fucking NOW is the answer?
cos if it was, Market Forces would be making it happen. The Right keep saying so. And it isn't. Which means the Right must be totally, insanely wrong. And they're in charge.





oh

[andrewducker]

The problem is that houses are too expensive to build at the moment - largely because planning permission is horrifically expensive. Apparently it can add £100k onto the cost of the average house.

Reduce that cost, and you'd suddenly find yourself with a load more homes.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is more subtle than just a failure of unfettered supply and demand.

Firstly, there appears to have been a market preference for building swish flats for well off people rather than basic housing for poor people. I think this makes sense when one looks at the relative costs of each type of housing (similar but for the finishing touches and the land values) and the relative selling prices (not similar for a variety of reasons, probably most importantly the differential availability of credit to the well off and the poor).

The market exists to let people make money. It doesn’t exist to make people provide socially useful things.

Secondly, I think the planning permission issue shouldn’t be under estimated. The process is not easy. Part of this is because the process is not easy but the significant difficulty is that where the market would like to put the houses, in the South East, there are serious issues with infrastructure. Too little water and electricity, over burdened transport systems, too few ecological sinks. Generally not enough room.

[andrewducker]

If we build enough posh flats then the price will drop for them, because we'll have oversupply relative to the number of people that want/can afford posh flats. Eventually you'd expect the profit margins on them to drop below the profit margins for less nice homes.

Alternatively, you'd expect other people to enter the market, supplying the lower end. If it was profitable to build homes for the poor then you'd think someone would be doing so.

The fact that they aren't would tend to indicate to me that it's not profitable to do so. So either we need a blanket subsidy to make it profitable, or we need to look at why it's so expensive to build homes for the poor, and what can be done to make it cheaper.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Eventually you'd expect the profit margins on them to drop below the profit margins for less nice homes.

Absolutely. I think (but I don’t know) that a steady supply of credit kept the sales prices of posh homes moving up ahead of the reduction in profit margin brought about by over supply. Until, for example, Leith happened and the bottom dropped out of the aspirational posh market.


The fact that they aren't would tend to indicate to me that it's not profitable to do so. So either we need a blanket subsidy to make it profitable, or we need to look at why it's so expensive to build homes for the poor, and what can be done to make it cheaper.


You could use a subsidy but if you are subsidising houses in the South East of England I would suggest we subsidise jobs in the North instead and shift people and jobs to where there are cheap houses already. A little bit like the relocation of the civil service from London in the last few decades.

You could explicitly change the planning rules so that social housing got priority when allocating available infrastructure. For example, if a council area decided that they had a shortfall of, say, 500 affordable houses and only sufficient additional water capacity for 300 new homes, no non-affordable houses could be built.

You could use a stick such as a requirement for larger developments to include a mix of social housing. Which is currently the case.

My own view is that the problem has so many externalites that only a combination of central and local government can access the value in providing large numbers of affordable houses and do so in such a way that they don’t turn into slums

There is a third element to the difficulty which is focused on the shortage of available land.

If I have a small amount of land in London if it is in a posh area I can build posh houses and sell them for a posh premium so long as I can get planning permission. I’ll build the property and take the money. Lucky me. If I happen to own a small parcel of land in a shabbier part of London I can’t reach that posh premium because I can’t change the quality of the surrounding area enough. I’m competing for builders etc with people who will get the posh premium so I won’t make money so I won’t bother to redevelop the land.

However, if I own a large amount of land I can decide how posh the area is. I can do what Quartermile* are trying to do and encourage only posh businesses to set up near my only posh flats. So I can take shabby land and turn it into posh land and access the posh premium. Again, no homes for the poor are built, or no more than are required by planning consents.

I think it is a problem that is very difficult for the private sector to solve unless it behaves like the public sector.

*Quartermile is not a great example because I think it’s too small to be self-sustainingly posh. If it weren’t near the Old Town, Marchmont, Bruntsfield, Morningside and the University it wouldn’t work. However, the developers have chosen to pitch the development as very posh rather than just averagely posh for the part of Edinburgh it’s in.

[andrewducker]

I totally agree that the councils, etc. need to be involved, and make sure there is affordable housing everywhere.

And yes, moving people out of the SE would be high on my priority list too. I am very glad that the BBC, for instance, has been doing a lot of this, as well as chunks of the civil service.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think infrastructure that helps businesses relocate from London to the Midlands or the North would also be really useful.

High speed trains for example.

[andrewducker]

They would be good, yes. Also, now is the perfect time to spend money on infrastructure!

Did you notice that Glasgow/Edinburgh rail service is about to get a massive upgrade?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13779114

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I clocked it on the news.

Journey times down from 60 minutes to 37 minutes or thereabouts.

Good stuff I think.

It interests / amuses me that a 37 minute train journey would be considered inter-city in Scotland but inner city in London. I think it makes us appear a little parochial.

I reckon I could get to central Glasgow after the upgrade about as quickly as I could get to the Gyle. Certainly, not that much in it.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure that the fact that our cities are relatively close, with fast trains, makes us parochial...

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

No, I don’t think the fact that the cities are close together and well connected makes us parochial.

I think what makes us look parochial is that we tend to view Glasgow and Edinburgh as quite separate instead of as interconnected as, say Ealing and Southall.

Not that all people behave like this all the time but some do.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure what you mean by "quite separate"?

I mean, they have quite different cultures in many ways, different councils, different problems and priorities, different accents, etc.

There's also a massive swathe of empty space between them.

That you can get from one to the other in less than an hour shouldn't make two places identical, should it?

You can, of course, see the whole of Scotland as being about the same size as London - 6 million versus 7 million. And it's just spread over a larger area - and that makes Alex Salmond about as important as Boris Johnson :->

You can, of course, wonder whether people from the West Coast are more different to people from the East Coast than people from Marleybone are different to people from the East End. I'm not sure how you'd measure that.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

You can, of course, see the whole of Scotland as being about the same size as London - 6 million versus 7 million. And it's just spread over a larger area - and that makes Alex Salmond about as important as Boris Johnson :->

Which is reflected in the quality of the hair cuts both of them receive.

[andrewducker]

Hah!

(See, also, today's poll.)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Rather lazily I think quite in both senses of the word. Some people think of the two as quite (distinctly) separate and some as quite (somewhat) separate.

And both are probably true.

I don’t think that fact that two places are close together should make them identical. I think it probably gives them some common economic interests. My observation of the East Coast / West Coast divide (as a relative newcomer to this EPIC battle to the Death) is that the differences are occasionally / often over done and this can cloud thinking about how the two cities, their hinterlands and the relatively densely populated area between the two can best work together to deal profitably with those shared concerns.

This is not a universal truth but I think it has happened often enough in the past to make us look a little daft.

I have heard it seriously suggested that a project would be better not undertaken at all than it should be done in the wrong city and by some people whose job it is to make decisions about big projects.

[andrewducker]

I do agree that city rivalry can be silly - but I also know that if one city was being selfish and the other wasn't then the selfish one would get more funding.

I would tend to agree that decisions about projects that affect the whole central belt (or country) should be decided at a higher level than either of the cities alone, and shouldn't be based on what's better for Glasgow or Edinburgh.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I wonder how areas like Belgium where cities are very close view that sort of thing. Or in fact the Midlands in England, where cities like Derby, Coventry, Sheffield and so on are 30 mins apart or so.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

You can travel across parts of the Ruhr and surrounds in Germany, hardly ever leaving an urban area but going through multiple cities, all with their own identity. It's quite odd.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

having taken several rail trips [including today] to Glasgow of late, this makes me happy.

central glasgow seems to me to be a larger-scale and slightly friendlier version of Edinburgh's New Town. That is in no way a bad thing.
[I am definitely an Old Town guy.]