Rob's Blog

I always seem to get sucked into these traffic cop fly on the wall shows. Tonight on the BBC, Traffic Cops is in Wales, and there are a few funny moments.

At 2 minutes 45 in, have a look at the crash between the police car and the red Clio. I think that at 2m52s it’s obvious what is about to happen and the police driver could have avoided the accident, even if the kid in the car is technically at fault. The cop never concedes anything like this, and even drags out the old I’ve-been-doing-this-for-fifteen-years / he’s-just-passed-his-test non-sequitir. It takes humility to learn from mistakes; there are very few accidents you can’t prevent yourself.

And two-tones are almost useless. It’s almost impossible to hear where they’re coming from and mostly they make drivers panic.

Then fast-forward to 38m40s. The whole exchange between the Irish bloke and the cops is hilarious. He’s driving on two flat tyres, but he does have a point when he says he was not driving dangerously.

The cops in the show seem like good sorts, but I do enjoy the way that as much as these shows try to make the police look like saints, it’s easy to take the side of the scrote.

This is good.

I’m particularly impressed with the high quality of camera-work and editing on display here. I found it using something called Google Reader Play, which is a slideshow of interesting movies and videos, and a good way to waste a Friday afternoon.

The people who made the video are called Britanick and they have made many more.

This quality of production is available to anyone.

Eric Raymond has a good post about the cause of rising unemployment in the USA. He describes two of his unemployed friends as “marginally employable” for various reasons, including:

He’s black, which makes him a EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] lawsuit risk — and if you don’t know how much that hurts his chances, you haven’t been anywhere near a small or medium-sized business in the last 30 years.

And all the interesting things happen at the margins:

These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

Meanwhile, Tim Worstall has noticed that the cost of employing women is about to increase in Europe. Some women’s “rights” committee has voted to let women have lots more paid maternity leave.

Increase the (potential) cost to employers of hiring women of child bearing age and you’ll both reduce the number they’re willing to hire and the wages they’re willing to offer them.

Once you understand that costs drive behaviour, and that tiny changes in costs cause big changes in behaviour at the margins, all this becomes pretty obvious.

Update: Jonathan Pearce comments on the same Eric Raymond article.

Big Media announces a Big Party announcing its Big Slogans. I heard about this from my wife who was listening to the radio, just as I was watching Brian Micklethwait talking about how Big Parties like to use slogans instead of ideas (about 2m20s in). He also talks about how the Internet might make small parties more successful, because they don’t need Big Media any more.

Last night I was invited to a Skeptics in the Pub debate about whether political blogging has any effect. I couldn’t go, but my friend who went sent me a couple of links about it.

Mark Reckons review of the event; some video and audio.

Guido was there and said this, which I think is true and important:

Paul Staines started by saying that there are about 3,000 people who run the UK (politicians, financial people and the media) and about half of them regularly read his blog. They are the people he is trying to reach although his primary purpose in writing it is to amuse himself.

(This fits in with what someone, possibly Perry de Havilland, told me when I complained that no-one I know reads blogs: it doesn’t matter because you only have to influence the influential people.)

Apart from that there was some talk about whether the comparitive roles of bloggers and professional journalists when it comes to investigative journalism. I think it’s pretty clear that blogs increasingly lead on the stories and the MSM follows. It’s not clear whether the MSM is needed to influence those 3,000 people.

Read about my previous encounter with Skeptics in the Pub when they discussed global warming with Fred Singer.