andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2012-05-04 12:00 pm
andrewducker) wrote2012-05-04 12:00 pm
Entry tags:
- ableism,
- acting,
- assault,
- bullying,
- business,
- cbt,
- children,
- comic,
- conservatives,
- copyright,
- disabilities,
- disability,
- drugs,
- email,
- exercise,
- expression,
- finance,
- funny,
- gender,
- groups,
- happiness,
- hazing,
- health,
- iainbanks,
- icecream,
- improv,
- internet,
- interview,
- ip,
- jogging,
- labour,
- law,
- libdem,
- lifespan,
- links,
- media,
- membership,
- middle_east,
- money,
- music,
- mybloodyvalentine,
- newspapers,
- opinion,
- osamabinladen,
- pay,
- pinterest,
- piracy,
- politics,
- psychology,
- reporting,
- rupertmurdoch,
- school,
- scotland,
- sexism,
- sleep,
- sports,
- squee,
- technology,
- terrorism,
- theatre,
- theculture,
- uk,
- usa,
- welfare,
- women
Interesting Links for 04-05-2012
- Judge: An IP-Address Doesn’t Identify a Person (or BitTorrent Pirate)
- I don't remember any company losing the vote on executive pay before. I wonder how they'll react...
- If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right
- Man has both legs amputated, applies for disability benefit & gets asked: 'So, how far can you walk?'
- How to report on Pinterest without coming across as horribly sexist.
- PE lessons put girls off exercise (and me. I hated them.)
- Have sleep problems? CBT significantly more effective than drugs, especially in the long-term
- Cover art and blurb for the new Iain M. Banks Culture novel. Mine is already on order.
- There are some things that do not require data to back them up.
- Kevin Shields interviewed on the My Bloody Valentine remasters
- Murdoch has been the bravest media owner in Britain in the last 40 years
Purely because it's worth hearing the other side of the argument sometimes.
- A fascinating series of posts on theatre, directing and improvisation
- What should we pay MPs? You won't like the answer.
- Less than half the seats at the last election had Labour and Conservatives in the top two positions
- Why is hazing so common, and what do people get out of it?
- E-Mail Confused Osama, and 5 Other Revelations From the Bin Laden Files
- One to Two and a half hours jogging per week increases lifespan by six years.
- To Hell With The Lot Of Them (A better post on the elections than I wrote, but much of the same thoughts.)
- Quiet Hands - on forcing people to conform.
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... I have zero respect for any of the PE teachers I had at school.
One of them even gave me detention once because I had the temerity to have a letter from my doctor excusing me from doing sports that day because I had a chest infection.
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I'm not sure which bright spark thought it was a good idea for teenagers to have to take communal showers on their own, because it was really the place the very worst bullying I've ever seen took place.
And despite complaints from parents, the PE teachers refused to do anything about it. Character building they called it.
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We didn't actually do communal showering except after swimming where we showered in our swimming kit; which I guess is a bit gross, but at least avoids the bullying.
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The lazy fuckers all pissed off to their office to have coffee though.
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I have a lot of stored resentment against PE teachers, just waiting for an excuse...
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I went to a fairly good school, and the PE had no bullying, and seemed fine for most people, but I wasn't very good, and didn't have the ambition to catch up, so I got high marks just for trying, but never really got into it, and didn't really get the idea that PE was a good thing to do, which seems to be the case for some people at most schools.
(And indeed, I think many people had a similar experience in academic subjects -- however hard people tried to teach well, if someone has fallen behind and doesn't understand the subject, they're going to fall into "just try to fake it for the exam" mode, and never really get it -- many people and many schools only ever really operate in that mode.)
So I don't know if it's truly MORE of a problem for some classes of people -- it seems likely, but not really demonstrated. But either way, it woudl be better if PE was in general fun and inclusive, even if you weren't very good.
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I think my school was maybe just particularly bad for having a department of really awful PE teachers. I can remember one particularly glorious day in our 6th year when we were given the choice between doing PE or taking Bridge classes with the depute rector for the year.
And as a whole, the entire of 5th and 6th years stood up and went down to the end of the hall that was offering Bridge. Leaving the grand total of 3 pupils choosing to do PE. (Who were the kids that were really good at sports, who were the PE teachers chosen few.)
I don't think they ever let kids choose between PE and Bridge again after that, because it was such a humiliation for the PE department. But if ever there was a message that they were doing something wrong.
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We didn't do very much team stuff, which helps - with more individual sports you can give more individual advice to people, allowing the best to get useful coaching whilst the worst can see they are achieving something.
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I'm fairly sure I'm not parsing this the way it was intended :)
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All I could think was "I've never tried CBT, but I think it would keep me awake!"
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Plus can you imagine if that kind of CBT worked to solve insomnia??
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I do find the people baying for News International to be banned from the media very troubling. I'm all for massive fines for illegal activity, but I'm also for free speech - and that means being in favour of people saying things I dislike.
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(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Surface-Detail-Iain-M-Banks/dp/1841498939)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_of_the_Culture_setting
(and yes, best bit)
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(also - icon love)
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I think MPs should be paid the national minimum wage and if they have a requirement for a second home it should be at the level the council would provide for a single person (their family, if they have one, should be living in the primary home). They should be able to expense only the cost of public transport between their homes (not private car use). (I know MPs also have office related expenses, which they still need to have paid).
This isn't because I think MPs are vastly overpaid fatcats; it's because these people set what the minimum wage is, they set what level of accommodation is deemed to be acceptable, they don't actually run the public transport network but they do dictate much of its funding. I want MPs to experience just how bad life on what they have determined is "enough" money, "enough" house space.
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People who are already on minimum wage can run without a loss, and incredibly rich people can run and just not care, but if you asked me to take that kind of level of pay cut in order to do the job of MP then I wouldn't be able to justify it. As it is, lawyers, doctors and other well paid professionals do take pay cuts (and I'm fine with that), but when you get to the point where you'd be asking almost anyone who has a degree and has had a job for a few years to drop the wages they're supporting their family on by a large amount, you're cutting out an awful lot of people who would be good MPs.
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I'm sick of MPs making all these decisions about systems they don't ever have to rely on, with no compassion for the people who do.
Oh yes and- MPs should be absolutely banned from sending their children to private schools, or obtaining private medical care for themselves. Of course once they are earning 6quid/hour they won't be able to; but maybe we could start there.
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This is effectively the same argument against part-time legislatures: if it's not your full-time job to write laws, then other people will write laws for you.
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Although mostly my hope is that this would raise the standard which we claim is the "lowest acceptable" standard of living.
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But remember that they are claiming that the minimum wage and a bed-sit are ACCEPTABLE LIVING CONDITIONS for many people. If they themselves are not willing to live in those conditions why are they claiming they are acceptable?
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I accept I'm never going to get this to actually happen though. Because,well, people are selfish and want nice stuff.
Maybe we could require MPs to try living at that level for say... 1 week a year? at least let them see what the working poor are living with.
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Just as I don't want my airline pilot to be worrying about if he can afford cup-a-soup when he's supposed to be flying me around, I don't want my MP leaving the house of commons early to pick up some extra cash working behind the till in their corner shop when they're supposed to be attending an important vote.
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Now obviously if it was legal for me to publish a plain IP address and every IP address it connects to people would raise hell.
The main law we had to deal with was the one about the release of personally identifiable information. Hence we had to ensure that the IP addresses were suitably anonymised.
Without that legal protection (that the IP address counts as personally identifiable information) I'm not sure there would be much to stop an intermediate carrier (say your ISP) from publishing all the IP addresses you connect to. (They would not because it would be commercial suicide -- nonetheless it is good to have legal protection in place to stop this).
My point is that completely decoupling IP address from personal identity might have unexpected and bad consequences in european law.
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If a legal system is fundamentally unable to hold both sides of that statement in its head at once, it has a problem.
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I wonder what the equivalent for a postal address is.
If the police can prove someone living at my address committed a crime, I presume they also have to prove who or prove that only one person lives there.
If a newspaper wants to libel someone living at my address without specifying who (assuming that more than one person lived there) I would hope that would be actionable by me.
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