Things I saw in the news today - part 3

http://www.ifaonline.co.uk/ifaonline/news/2121212/warning-record-cpi-force-govt-dump-pensions-triple-lock

This is a really quick one.  It just really bugs me when people say "oh noes!  The guberment are being ebil and nasty and screwing over pensioners" before we actually know.  I know that the lefties don't like what they're doing, but please can they not at least find something that's confirmed: why not criticise over the lack of a referendum on the EU (oh, sorry, forgot that Labour were part of that too), or the pisspoor sentencing that's happening (hmmm - that wasn't much better under Labour, was it?) or something like that?  Don't just make crap up.

If they announce the end of the triple lock, then pensioners will be no worse off than they were under Labour, will they?  But let's at least wait until they do...

Three things I saw in the news today - part 2

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/david-prosser-pension-funds-should-be-a-tempting-target-if-the-chancellor-wants-to-be-progressive-6255470.html

There are suggestions that the government may wish to remove the ability to take a tax free cash sum from your pension pot.  It's not the first time that it's been suggested, and I doubt that it will be the last, but it's still stupid, and would likely be the end of personal pensions.

Pension investments have three main benefits: (i) You sometimes get contributions from your employer (free money!) - and this will be more likely once NEST comes in and it's mandatory for all employers to contribute, but the rates of employer contribution that are mandatory are tiny, and really not significant enough to make much difference.  (ii) You can take 25% of the value of the benefits tax free. (iii) They can serve as a way to defer income, so you can avoid paying tax now, but pay tax on the benefits when you receive them.

If you take away the 25% tax free element, then the only people for whom pensions will be worthwhile are those who are getting free money from their employer (and even they would likely be better off with a higher salary) or those who are currently paying higher rate taxes but who will be on a lower rate in retirement (due to lower incomes).

So if you abolish the tax free cash, the vast majority of people who would still benefit from a pension would be those who are higher rate taxpayers - which doesn't sound like a progressive move in my book.

Also, giving tax relief doesn't cost the treasury anything.  If the school bully normally takes half of your lunch money but one day decides to take only a quarter, it's not cost the bully anything - it just gives you a little more money to get your lunch with.  Leaving the money in the hands of those who earnt it is surely not a bad thing?  I know the tradition these days is to believe that the state knows better than we do, and can spend it so much more efficiently (oops, there goes the sarcasm detector again) but I reckon leaving a little bit of money with those who've worked for it for all their lives is not a bad idea...

One final point: If people have less pensions, guess who has to pick up the slack?  Do we really want people relying more and more on state handouts in retirement?  Surely it's better to offer some incentive to get them saving up for retirement...

Edit to add: I know they're saying that they'll just make it so that you pay higher rate tax on it if you have more than x amount.  This will still impact just about everyone.

Consider a small final salary scheme.  Someone on a pretty average wage (say £25,000) works for them for 20 years.  The pension that they'd accrue on 60ths is £8,333 a year.  Not a lot to live on, right?  Now, suppose the scheme offers the same commutation factors as the governments pension protection fund: 18.66 at age 65 (for post 97 service) - that means that they'd be able to take £40,931.81.

That's about the limit that they're proposing before tax is applied - and that's come from less than half of the average working life.  If they'd been there for 40 years (or had worked elsewhere with similar benefits) then they'd be looking at paying 40% tax on £40k - or to look at it another way, the government would be taking about 16k from the average earner on retirement.  I don't know about you, but I reckon they'll have had enough of my money by then...

Three things I saw in the news today - part 1

First: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/01/state-pension-scheme-ats

"Now: Pensions, set up on a not-for-profit basis, will charge £18 a year for administration plus a 0.3% annual management charge, compared with the 1.25%-1.5% common in Britain."

1.25-1.5% may be common in Britain, but that's often for a managed fund with specific risk expectations.  NEST is going to be the cheap and cheerful provider that this new scheme is meant to be competing with and a quick look at the TPAS website shows that they're looking at charging 1.8% on contributions and then 0.3% annually.  Just looking at the charges, we can see that if you contribute £1,000 a year it will cost the same in both schemes; with less than £1,000 a year you'd be better off in NEST and with more than £1,000 a year you'd be better off with Now:Pensions.  That's completely ignoring investment choices and returns, so the real picture may be rather different and we'll have to wait and see how both of them do.

My issue is that that's not the impression that the article gives - it reads like an advertisement.  Why not say how much the annual charge for NEST will be in the article, rather than using the rate that's apparently common in Britain (without any citation).

So let me get this straight

It's bad when we pay the bankers massive bonuses, but it's also bad when we don't?

http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2011/10/27/uk-banker-bonuses-to-slump-tax-take-will-suffer-consultancy/

The referendum

With all three main parties having a three line whip, I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that it got as many votes as it did.

I do find it really frustrating that the MPs who are there to represent our interests clearly don't give a crap what the people think.  I know that those in government think that they are our rulers and that we should let them make all our decisions for us, but I had hoped that a few more of the backbenchers might be on the side of the people that they work for.

So I'm wondering what the next step is.  Do we all just sign another petition (https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/356 looks like it's doing ok, at over 30k signatures already) and keep on making them whip their MPs, while noting carefully who slavishly obeys their political masters, so that we can actively campaign against them next election?

If anyone has any better ideas, I'm all ears!

Those Neutrinos

There's a bit of a hubbub going on about the OPERA neutrinos and how they seem to have travelled faster than the speed of light.  I don't know enough about relativity or quantum effects, but wondered if there might be a more simple explanation.

It's been suggested by some that maybe Neutrinos just do travel a little bit faster than light.  Those people have referred to a supernova that occurred a little while ago, and pointed out that the Neutrinos arrived hours ahead of the light from the supernova, so perhaps Neutrinos are just a bit quicker and this is another example of that.  The thing is, if the Neutrinos are just a bit quicker than light to the extent represented by the OPERA experiment, the Neutrinos from the supernova would have arrived here years ahead of the light, rather than just hours.

So I got to thinking that maybe that there's something between the transmitter and receiver used in the OPERA experiment that made the Neutrinos faster than light for very brief periods of that journey, and the same something lies between Earth and the supernova.

So we need something that there is a relative lot of between the OPERA transmitter and receiver, and a relative little of between earth and the supernova. 

Could it possibly be matter?

The Neutrinos passing from the transmitter to the receiver for OPERA moved through the Earth.  The Neutrinos coming to Earth from the supernova moved through space - an almost complete vacuum, but the key word is almost.  Could matter speed Neutrinos up?  If so, the relatively tiny amount of matter in space could have accounted for a 3 hour difference between light and Neutrinos over a sufficiently big distance (and the distance to the supernova was something like 160,000 light years).

Anyone know if that's at all plausible?

Climate Change - why it bugs me

One thing that really bugs me about the whole Climate Change thing is the way everyone asks the wrong questions.

The way that I see it, there are three questions being asked here:
(i) Is the climate changing?
(ii) Can we stop it changing?
(iii) Whose fault is it that it is changing?


I think this is very short sighted.  We're missing several very important points.  I'm willing to concede that the climate is changing, largely because it should be changing.  Whether you believe it's because we're emerging from a little ice age or because of the crap we're pumping into the atmosphere, I'm willing to accept that temperatures over the last hundred years or so have showed a slight upward slope (although that does seem to be coming to an end for now).

What we're not asking though is what impact will a hotter world have on humanity (and stop claiming you're trying to "save the world" - the world would be just fine if the temperature was 50 degrees higher, it's humanity that would suffer, and humanity that we're trying to save).  I've seen reports that a hotter UK would lead to less deaths overall, and not have any serious downsides.  What other impacts would there be?  Let's see what we can figure out, and then we can ask the next very important question: are the changes for the better overall?

Only if we decide that they're definitely not for the better should we then look to point (ii) above - can we stop it changing?  But at the same time, we need to ask: Would we be better off by mitigating?  People often refer to the Stern report, where I believe it was reported that we would be better off providing money to mitigate rather than preventing the changes.  That means that if the sea levels will rise by x metres, it's better overall to provide money to build sea walls or move people elsewhere than it is to cripple our economy to prevent the warming.

If the world is warming (and I'm not saying that it's not), I believe that it cannot be 100% negative however you look at it.  Plants will grow faster, less people will die of hypothermia in the winter, maybe we can generate more tidal/wind energy as a result of the changes, etc.  What we need to consider is how we can use the positive aspects and deal with the negative aspects in the most efficient way, rather than to assume that any change is negative and nothing good can come of it (except the chance to raise lots more in taxes).

As to point (iii) above - whose fault it it?  Who cares?  If the climate is changing, we need to deal with it.  If it turns out that mankind had nothing to do with the changes, we still need to assess how we'll be affected and decide how we want to deal with it.  If it's all our fault, it changes nothing, except for the most loony of eco-loons, who would no doubt say that if it's a natural process, we should just let it happen and who cares if it affects millions of people...

River Song's first meeting with the Doctor

It was suggested way back in Silence in the Library that River and the Doctor are having a relationship in opposite directions.  This is a cool idea - a mysterious woman from the Doctor's future who knows him intimately (or at least that's what's implied) but who he's never met?  Cool!  And to have their timelines running in reverse relative directions, so each time they meet, it's the next time for the Dr and the previous time for River?  That's cool.  A pain to stick with (so some wiggle room is required) but cool.

But this would surely mean that the first time River meets the Dr should be the last time the Dr meets River - and the episode Let's Kill Hitler implies otherwise.  Or does it?

At the start of the episode, Amy and Rory get the Doctor's attention by drawing a massive crop circle that he spots in a paper some time in the future.  But which Doctor is it?  It's somewhat taken for granted that it's the same Doctor that we last saw in A Good Man Goes to War, but how do we know that he hasn't been around and had lots of adventures since then?  What if this is the Doctor at the end of his time, aged 1300+ ?

Then the episode takes on a different tone - when River poisons him, and there's no known cure for the poison, he hops in the TARDIS and goes to get help (the Doctor from Amy and Rory's wedding?  Or from the end of the season episode which is apparently something to do with the wedding of River Song?) then heads off to meet the girl on the edge of the lake and gets shot (the Impossible Astronaut).

The timing works (32 minutes until he's dead, and he's in Impossible Astronaut for less than 32 minutes before being shot iirc) and the change of outfit seems odd otherwise, given how that was a big thing about last season (with the Doctor's jacket in the Time of Angels).  The only questions that then remain are: was it even the real Doctor (I thought it would be the ganger Doctor that was killed on the lake edge - but maybe he's the Doctor that keeps on?) and what happened to River's Regenerations (could the Doctor have taken them away from her, knowing that she won't need them?  Could that let him somehow survive being shot on the edge of the lake?  Could it give him more than 13 lives?).

Doctor Who - Night Terrors Review (warning: Spoilers)

I managed to watch the latest Dr Who last night.  It was called Night Terrors, and was (in my opinion, anyway) a big step up from last week, but still not as good as some episodes we've seen.

The episode started off interestingly.  It seems that with River sort-of dealt with last episode, the Doctor and his pals had little to do.  They're just hanging out in the TARDIS somewhere in deep space.  Meanwhile, there is a little kid on an estate in the UK somewhere who is afraid of everything.  He's so scared that his fear manages to send out a telepathic message to the Doctor's psychic paper saying "Save me from the monsters"

So the doc and friends decide to go and help the kid (well, the Doctor does anyway - Amy and Rory seem less than enthused about the idea).  This involves lots of knocking on doors but gives the impression that they're not really that good at the job.  They don't seem to ask anything that would lead towards finding the kid.  This bit starts to drag on a little (I know they're establishing some details about other people around, but it still feels a little overlong) then thankfully the Doctor spots the boy in a window.

At about this time, Amy and Rory get into a lift (which we're told the boy is terrified of) and plummet for no particular reason.  They wind up in a creepy doll's house.

Long story short, the Doc gets into the house and saves the day, by persuading the boy that he made all of the bad stuff, and only he can stop it.

It was a reasonable episode with a nice message and feel to it, but some of it felt a little rushed (like how Amy and Rory were dumped into the house by using an elevator) or a little slow (like the knocking on doors, or waiting for the Doc and the Dad to open the closet.

I'd give it a solid 7 out of 10.

Bury Council pissing away money

Via the Register, we learn today that Bury Council has bought 22 Ipads for it's binmen, at a cost of around £9,000.

They claim:

...the products, made by Apple, could produce significant savings by helping to reduce the number of bins missed by trucks and therefore the number of trips made by the vehicles.

I'm really not sure how.  You either get the bin, or you don't - having a touchpad isn't going to help you remember which bins you're meant to be picking up, is it?

The council, which collects rubbish from 83,000 houses each week, revealed that there were 4,228 reports of missed bins last year. Costing £40 each to revisit, it spent around £170,000 going back to empty bins missed on rounds.

So 83000 bins collected each week, and they missed 4000 in a year.  That's a miss rate of about 1 in 1000 - doesn't sound too bad.  So I guess what I'm wondering is why they have to spend £40 to revisit - surely they have other binmen in the area the next day, why not pick up the rubbish then?  Each household would only have about a 1 in 20 chance of having their bin missed once a year, which is surely low enough that people will manage.

What I don't understand is why having an ipad would help.  Are they going to program the locations of all of the bins onto the ipads?  If so, why not just get a map?

A council spokeswoman said: "For a modest investment of £9,000, this technology should save us many thousands of pounds, provide residents with a better service, and promote recycling.

How the hell does it make any difference to recycling?

"We know how much residents value a responsive and reliable bin collection service. This system should ensure that the number of missed collections is reduced to an absolute minimum, because any problems are reported in real time to our customer contact centre.

So the problems are reported in real time - and then what?  

"The system should also allow us to respond more quickly during the winter to any enforced changes in the collection route."
The council also said the soaring landfill costs contributed to the decision.
The spokeswoman added: "We need to urgently improve our recycling rates to avoid passing on crippling landfill taxes to local residents, which is already costing every local taxpayer £134 a year each and is set to rise to £250 a year if we keep dumping waste in landfill sites.
"This new technology will help us to log and monitor this, and help us in our ongoing efforts to promote recycling across the borough. It is absolutely vital that we increase recycling and reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill."
This article was originally published at Guardian Government Computing.

 So you log the problems - well done.  I don't see how this reduces waste - from the sounds of it, they hope that it will increase the efficiency of collections, and thus increase the waste put into landfill...

Call me a cynic, but I wouldn't mind betting that the person who signed off on this purchase is either related to or good friends with at least one of those who gets a shiny new ipad...