Why Dont You Blog?

From this distance, the McCain campaign seems to have become so demented that you wonder if they are deliberately trying to lose. For instance, they’ve spent the equivalent of several yearly minimum wages to dress a woman (whose entire USP is supposed to be that she’s just an ordinary Mom, you betcha) as a Vogue businesswoman.

And Sarah Palin then numbed the mind further by claiming that opposition to this Olympic-standard rate of expenditure is “sexist”. (No, Sarah, how can I explain this… Where do I start? Beauty queen contestant. Pitbull with lipstick. Hockey mom. Cute winks. I suspect you know what pandering to sexist stereotypes is, anyway.)

Plus, she claimed - in some travesty of self-defence - that she hadn’t worn most of them anyway.

“The whole thing is just bad!” she said. “Oh, if only people knew how frugal we are. It’s kind of painful to be criticised for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported.”

Indeed. Like this:

It was disclosed today that she paid a make-up artist $22,000 in the first fortnight of this month, following the revelation earlier this week of a $150,000 spending spree on clothes

Oh, that awkward “sexism” again. Twenty two thousand dollars on make-up in two weeks? Thats $1571.43 a day. Assuming that the person who applies it earns $1000 a day - which is insane - that still leaves $500 worth of materials to be squeezed onto the small surface area of a human face. Even the ugliest pit bull in the world couldn’t need that much coverage to look like the Mona Lisa. How can she physically lift her head if it has to support the weight of 20 kilos of nanosome pentapeptides?

From sexism to racism. The Republicans have really pushed the boat out here. Who could even imagine anything as weird as the Republican-supporting girl - with a backwards B (that seemed to be drawn in lipstick) on her cheek and the apparent black-eye makeup - who made the patently ludicrous claim she’d been robbed by a black man in pursuit of an Obama victory?

So the deeply troubling violent attack in Pittsburgh on a McCain campaign worker by a “tall black man” who carved a letter B onto her face, telling her “you’re going to be a Barack supporter”, turns out to be a deeply troubling racist fantasy invented by someone we’ll charitably describe for the time being as disturbed (from the Guardian)

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Idly deleting the blogspam in Akismet I see that this blog appears to have got spam from… itself.

admin | info@www.whydontyou.org.uk | whydontyou.org.uk | IP: 85.153.7.194
Your investigation have been helpfull for me. I wish everybody writes article as this.

WTF? Well, I suppose it’s always possible that I am suffering from a brain disease that makes me both send out spam at random and forget that I’ve sent it.

Plus removes any native-speaking familiarity with the English langauge.

Not to mention that it seems that I’ve been absent-mindedly visiting Turkey without realising it. Because this host is what that IP resolves to (assuming, for no good reason, that the originating IP isn’t spoofed)

Turkey
City: Istanbul
Latitude: 41.0186 Longitude: 28.9647
Host: barbaros.turkbilnet.com
IP: 85.153.7.194

This really pisses me off. If the spammers are so prolific that they’ve spammed the blog they were using as a pretend source, how many other blogs have got spams that seem to originate from here?

Does anyone have any suggestions about what to do about this?

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Rachel Sylvester, wrote in the Times that “There’s a god-shaped hole in Westminster” I assumed this meant that Thor had crash landed outside the House of Commons or, at the least, that artistic roadworkers had scooped out a reverse statue of Pan from the pavements of the Royal Borough.

Disappointingly, not so. Rachel Sylvester just thinks that our politicians are too godless.

Certainly, politicians find it easier to “come out” as atheists than to profess that they have a religious faith. Nick Clegg, David Miliband and George Osborne have all said recently that they do not believe in God - something that would be unthinkable in the United States, where presidential candidates compete to win over religious voters……
……. the favourite book for politicians on holiday last year was The God Delusion.

Well, yes, of course they find it easier to say they are atheists, rather than to call their own credulity and mental health into question, by claiming to believe in an imaginary friend. They want us to vote for them surely.

(I am distracted again by exactly how Rachel Sylvester knows what politicians’ favourite holiday reading was. I mean, I’d like to believe that it was the God Delusion but I fear that falls into the category of “made-up stuff”.)

The creeping secularisation of politics was one of the factors that pushed Ruth Kelly, a devout Roman Catholic, into resigning her Cabinet position. …….
She was also disturbed by the way in which her membership of Opus Dei was seen as something weird and even rather dangerous; and she disliked the way in which Mr Blair’s Christianity was mocked during the war in Iraq.

“Creeping secularisation” suggests some stealthy process in which the religious underpinnings of British government are being progressively undermined. Nonsense. Religion plays a bigger part in public discourse now than it has before in my lifetime. If anything, Blair let ideas of “religion” and “faith” intrude into UK politics in ways that were relatively novel.

Ruth Kelly’s membership of Opus Dei may indeed have been seen as something weird. Because it is.

(Although I doubt anyone had heard of her before she resigned, let alone knew that she was member of of Opus Dei, a Catholic society not normally associated with the politics of the Labour Party, old or new.)

Blair’s Christianity “mocked during the war in Iraq”. What? What on earth are you talking about? Blair was unpopular because of the war, true enough. What did his avowed Christianity have to do with that war? Or did he think he was secretly acting for Rowan Williams or the Pope? I can’t believe that either of them would thank him for it.

He was mocked for his commitment to “faith”, fair enough. Indeed, his commitment to his “faith” was so great that he pretended to be an Anglican until he left power, then immediately “converted” to Catholicism. It’s quite hard to see this as a deep and abiding commitment to anything.

Plus, if he was indeed mocked, it must have only been in the House of Commons, which boosts my faltering trust in the judgment of MPs. Most British voters are not interested in a politician’s religion, even though Ms Sylvester seems to think that we need politicians to proclaim imaginary solutions to give us the optimism to deal with crises:

It is ironic that politicians in this country have abandoned belief - at the very moment that the people need hope.

What? This rhetoric is bilge. Have politicians all abandoned belief? No such luck. All of a sudden? No. Do people need “hope” now particularly, as opposed to any other time? Obviously not. Do people get “hope” as a result of politicians believing in sky fairies? Too silly to answer.

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A Christian Voice spokesman acknowledged to the BBC that

“People don’t like being preached at.”

To what do we owe this unaccustomed recognition of reality?

Unfortunately, he hasn’t had a sudden world-view revision. He’s talking about the British Humanist Association Dawkins-backed plan to put an anti-religion advertising campaign on the sides of London buses. Which the Christian Voice chap has oddly decided to define as “preaching.”

The complete slogan reads: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

I am a bit ambivalent about this. I like the idea of having such slogans on buses and I like the idea that Christian Voice must be a bit nervous that it will actually succeed in deconverting people. But I don’t like the idea of being told what to think, in poster format, by an invisible narrator.

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A Black Sun Journal post about the UK’s government’s cynical irrationality about diapers (that’s nappies to us) sparked this rant about other “green” things that turn out to be less than ecologically logical.

(I’m not completely convinced about the nappies argument anyway. Disposables may create less carbon-emissions in use but I’m not sure if the carbon-emission sums take into account other ecosystem effects of disposables - such as the source of the materials they are made from, or how long they stay in landfill leaking plastic toxins. I’m just saying that carbon-emissions aren’t the only way to destroy an ecosystem.)

Energy efficient lightbulbs.
These may be energy-efficient but they often can’t really be called “light”bulbs. They oftenn seem to be there just to illuminate their own presence.

So, if you are so tall that you are in danger of bumping your head on the ceiling, it acts as a safety device - at least you’d know there was lightbulb there and avoid it.

As the standard energy-efficient lightbulb gives off approximately 1 candlepower, the user who is hellbent on actually seeing anything has to use a dozen at once.

And, whatever you do, don’t break them or touch a broken one. Another reason why they have to be bright enough to stop tall people cracking their heads on them is that they turn out to be stuffed with mercury.

What exactly are you supposed to do with them when they wear out? Will there be dedicated hazardous waste collections?

Eco-alternatives: No idea about this. Normal flouresecents? I don’t even know if candles would create more light per unit of carbon.

Energy-efficient washing machines

UK washing machines work by taking so long to clean clothes that natural processes of decomposition could easily have kicked in and half the dirt might have biodegraded by itself.

It bet that a two hour wash cycle in the most “energy-efficient” washing machine uses more power overall than a more powerful washing machine that finishes the washing in a few minutes. (Ditto, driers)

Eco-alternatives: Old tech could easily be adapted. There used to be a whole complex washing technology of washboards and wringers and dollies and maidens. No, I don’t know exactly what most of them were but there must be enough bits and pieces in antique shops to work out some ways to adapt them.

Old fashioned twin-tubs took a couple of minutes to ruthlessly swirl the clothes around in the washing half of the combo. The rinsing bit could be done with minimal effort and no electricity at all by directing a hose into the other tub.

Better still, there was some sort of hand-powered eco-washing machine on sale about 15 years ago. it was like a barrel that was meant to be suspended over the bath, connected to a tap by a hose and with a handle that you turned to do the washing.

Road pricing and congestion charges

These seem to operate on the principle that the richer you are, the less ecological trouble your vehicle causes. Blatantly useless except as an income generator for local authorities.

Eco-solution: So simple that it’s embarrassing. Excellent and cheap public transport - trains, trams and buses. What about building Simpsons-style monorails?

My favourite solution: Canals - there is a national network of canals. Canals are already built, ffs. They were built to move goods in large quantities. They are even already full of water. Horses could pull the barges along, as they used to.

New Eco-towns
Where do you start on this? No matter how bloody “energy-efficient” these planned new towns are, they eat up the countryside, damage any residual wilderness, threaten the survival of birds and insects and mammals and plants and add to the volume of energy-using road traffic.

In any case, the whole idea really annoys me because I work in a building that was supposed to be the last word in eco-friendly construction. It was basically assembled from a kit, like a cheap wardrobe. As you might expect, if you’ve ever tried to assemble a cheap wardrobe, within a few months, it was close to decrepit and needs constant incredibly expensive repairs.

(Aspects of its eco-friendliness are so weird that you can’t even imagine what eco-model they were following, anyway. The car park is huge. Turn on the water to wash your hands in the toilet sinks and you get enough hot or cold water to bathe a medium sized dog. There is no way to stop it. I am tempted to buy a large vacuum flask and start taking the excess hot water home. )

Eco-solution: Fix up the existing buildings and build on derelict land before deciding it’s a great idea to spread London across the whole south of England.

Traditional materials like brick, and wood and stone last more than few months before they fall to bits in ugly ways and become fit for landfill. You can reuse them almost indefinitely. There are traditional building methods - like using cob and thatch - that could be used to create genuinely energy-efficient homes.

Traditional construction skills aren’t just disposable. They can’t be replaced by a skill level that would barely put together a stable IKEA table.

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I am somewhat short of time and this is a topic that really needs some in-depth commentary to do it justice. While I fully intend to return to this over the next few days, please think of this as a mini-meme: If you read this post please have a think about blogging your opinions on the articles below. If you dont want to, that’s OK, as I said, I will address the fact that I pretty much disagree with every one of these…

Background: In light of the Credit Crisis and the environmental disaster we are bringing in on ourselves, New Scientist has put together a “Growth Issue” in which a variety of people argue we need a new social model in which economic growth is not the goal and we all adopt a fun-filled, relaxed, minimal work life.

First off the editorial: Always annoying but this sets the tone: Read it first then move on to the main feature.

The weirdest of the feature has to be the “Life in a land without growth” article. It is a hypothetical report from 2020 detailing how great life is now we have done away with economic growth. The report has a great start:

IT’S 2020, and we are a decade into a huge experiment in which we are trying to convert our country to a sustainable or “steady-state” economy. We have two guiding principles: we don’t use natural resources faster than they can be replenished by the planet, and we don’t deposit wastes faster than they can be absorbed.

but then goes massively down hill with:

In our society, scientists set the rules. They work out what levels of consumption and emission are sustainable - and if they’re not sure they work out a cautious estimate.

Hmm. Didn’t Lisa Simpson try this for Springfield? I am more than a little worried about the idea of a culture where “scientists set the rules.” From that point on, I began to disagree with most of the report and decided, if that was our society, I’d be a terrorist.

The next utopia-article that annoyed me was the “Nothing to fear from curbing growth” one. To be fair to Kate Soper, it is better written than the hypothetical report but she hits on a theme which gets my back up on a gigantic scale: The idea that the more money you have, the less happy you are.

This is monumental nonsense. As far as I can tell it was a tool used to keep the working poor in their place by convincing them that aspiring to great-wealth would be bad for them. It manifests itself in our obsession with the failings of the rich and famous - every time some one wealthy checks into rehab, or complains about being depressed etc., the nonsense about money not making you happy is dragged out. Interestingly, this is something asserted more often by well off people than poor people, which makes you wonder about their motives.

Kate Soper shows how there is a mistaken transposition of survey data to draw this conclusion:

For example, rates of occupational ill-health and depression have been shown to be linked to the number of hours we work, and once a certain level of income is reached further wealth does not correlate with increased happiness.

Hours worked does not equal wealth and we have an odd conflation here.

Working 20 hours a day does not make you happy. I can testify in the court of Odin that, having done a 36 hour shift I was not even close to being happy at the end of it. I would be much, much, happier if I didn’t have to work.

That part of her claim I agree with. Working long hours is depressing.

Working long hours, however is not the same as being wealthy. In fact it is often the inverse. Poor people have to work all the hours Zeus sends to make ends meet. This makes them depressed. They are depressed because they are poor.

There is a middle ground, but it is a middle ground I will never have sympathy for. Some people are at the very low end of being well-off and, as a result, have to work insane hours. These are not actually rich people though - recent examples are the merchant bankers in the city of London, working 18 hours day to get million pound a year bonuses. Sadly, their lifestyle demands those bonuses and therefore demands those hours. If they are living in the centre of London, where a toilet costs a million pounds to rent, they best work as hard as the cleaner (who admittedly lives in a cardboard box under tower bridge). They are “wealthy” but not happy. However, they are an odd group and far from representative.

Then we get the genuinely wealthy. I suspect Bill Gates is a pretty happy person and enjoys his life. I think it would be foolish to say he was less happy than someone who was working 12 hour shifts stacking shelves in the supermarket, followed by a six hour shift waiting tables to try and keep a roof over their families head.

Going back to the article, it jumps from working long hours = depressing to saying that beyond a certain level of wealth the increase in happiness is not proportional. This left me with a huge so what.

If I am X happy with £100million, does it matter that I am only (X*2)-Y happy with £200million? Not to me. I am more happy, and that is enough. The rest of her article continues the conflation of work and wealth so I will leave it for now.

Now, as a final point, and going back to the title, I will again assert it is largely incorrect to say that money doesn’t buy happiness. For the screaming pedant it is correct because happiness is an emotion and unless the very existence of lots of (positive) numbers on your bank balance makes you happy the money isn’t doing that bit.

However, what money gives you is the ability to become happy. If you are wealthy enough to not have to go to work, you can spend quality time with your family; you can spend more time doing hobbies; you can learn new things; you can read new books; you can travel the world. There are more things that I want to do than I will ever have time to do so it is a constant battle with the clock. Money buys that wonderful thing called time. The problem is we have to give up time to work so the key for most people is finding the best balance between lots of work, and lots of time.

Being slightly scientifically oriented, I am open to having my mind changed on this topic - but I suspect any arguments will just go back and forth on issues of pedantry. What I propose instead is a simple experiment.

If you feel, like so many others, that money does not make you happy then send me £50,000. With this we can see if having less money makes you happy and if having more money makes me happy.

As this is a fixed amount and may well be below the threshold that Kate Soper was referring to there is a second experiment: I will make a note of my current happiness using any criteria you choose. Then I am given £1million and my happiness is re-assessed. Next this is increased to £10million (with another assessment) and finally a sum of £20million and a final assessment. From this we can see if the increasing sums of money show a corresponding increase in happiness.

Does that sound like a good idea? I am more than willing to take part in the experiment at a moments notice.

On the other hand, if you aren’t willing to give me all your money, don’t claim being rich doesn’t make you happy.

–

Footnote: I used “you” and “your” a lot, these are just generic terms. I didn’t mean you unless you are Bill Gates [or similar] and fancy the experiment. Do you?

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I am kicking myself for not running an online gambling book on how long it would take to find a scapegoat for banking crisis. But then, less than a week would have seemed too short a time, so, as the bookmaker, I might have actually lost out on this one.

As T-W said yesterday, the UK immigration minister has stepped up to meet our government’s desire to get re-elected at any cost, by announcing a “clampdown” on immigration. This lurch towards shamelessness has been predictably attacked by the Tories - whose natural constituency is the HYS nutter and the Daily Mail reader - as not being tough enough (garbage) and stealing their policies (true)

Mr Grieve [the Tory equivalent to the immigration minister] said Labour were matching Tory policies on setting immigration limits. (from the BBC)

I have a picture of someone who finds that they have lost their housekeys and believes that beating the crap out of their next door neighbour will magically get them inside their own front door.

I.e Does not compute. This sort of thing bears about as much relation to reality as something dreamed up in an alcoholic stupor by someone who has had their frontal lobe removed.

In any case, (apart from the use of “immigrant” as if it means “black person”) the “immigration” that gets little England so irate is immigration from Eastern Europe, over which the UK government can have no control, under EC rules. So the only immigration that they can control involves a tiny number of people from the commonwealth countries and people seeking asylum.

The treatment of asylum-seekers is already a scandal. Is it possible that the government plans to make it even worse, so that people impoverished by the financial collapse will feel they’ve got their money’s worth?

Does anyone seriously believe that they are about to lose their job or their home because of “immigrants”, rather than because of the economic meltdown? Such people are clearly too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time. How on earth do they manage to survive anyway?

As I write this, the unpleasant immigration minister is on the Politics Show saying that stronger immigration controls will lessen racism, indeed that it is the ethnic minority population that’s calling for it…..

Back to my conceptual online betting scheme. What are the odds that the minister would claim that tougher immigration controls would actually counter racism? (less than evens) What are the odds that this is true? Basically zero.

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Anyone who learned some Tudor history at school has probably heard of “privateers”. (Licensed pirates,)

Plus ca change etc. According to Voice of America,

Private Contractors May Protect Against Somali Pirates

Pirates have captured 20 ships in and around the Gulf of Aden so far this year.

Naval vessels from about 10 nations will soon be patrolling the waters off the Somali coast, trying to prevent pirates from hijacking cargo ships.

The international efforts may soon be extended to include “private contractors”.

Now, Blackwater, a firm providing thousands of private contractors in Iraq, is offering its services to battle pirates.

VoA (somewhat unaccountably) interviewed a Maryland college professor for a view on this. (Is Maryland twinned with the Yemen?)

“I think it’s important to note first that historically this has been done. In fact, several hundred years ago, when piracy was rampant off the coast of Africa, it brought English trade in that region to a standstill. And the East India Company actually employed private convoys to protect their ships from pirates..

I will try to temporarily ignore the fact that “several hundred years ago,” English trade off the coast of Africa was the Triangle Trade (manufactured goods taken from England to Africa; slaves from Africa to the Americas; and sugar from the American plantations back to England.) All the same, this could hardly be seen as “trade” in any good sense.

I am also a bit confused by this particular historical parallel. The East India Company? My foggy memory of history had me thinking that the East India Company had something to do with India - indeed basically colonised India on a for-private-profit basis, not to mention caused any number of wars in its wake. Indeed, Wikipedia seems to share my delusion.

Maybe protecting the East India Company sounds a more respectable instance of the use of private naval warfare contractors than if you think of privateers in terms of the Pirates-of-the-Caribbean. Indeed, maybe, international co-operation can’t stamp out piracy in the Gulf of Aden. But in that case, what chance would an ad hoc private navy have?
More from VoA:

Cost of the private escort duty may outweigh the risk of sailing unprotected.
Berube says, “That would depend I think on the contracts themselves, but if you are a shipping company, for example, you would have to balance off the cost of providing that extra protection versus the potential loss of revenue… …
Berube says that his research shows most agree private contractors would provide escort duty and not hunt down pirates. “This is really simply just an extension of security that is already provided on some ships. We have armed riders for example. Some shipping companies are providing people on board to protect themselves from pirates,” he says.
He says, however, they must comply with international law, as well as local agreements

Hmm, Somalia has been in a state of complete chaos on and off for a couple of decades. International law doesn’t seem very big there. If it was - there wouldn’t be any pirates…… Or the UN would be able to stamp out the piracy threat, using member states’ existing navies. Without recourse to any private navy. Anyway, what is international law on the high seas? Who enforces it?

Are international governments like cash-strapped Tudor monarchs, forced to pursue their international objectives through fortune-seekers who’ll do the monarchs’ dirty work while enriching themselves?

It’s not just 1984 any more. Welcome to the Realpolitik of the 15th century.

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As usual, the Daily Mail has been busy rousing Little England’s rage. Not against short-sellers or hedge-fund managers or inept financial regulators, of course. Against “scroungers”.

Blimey, not just any old scroungers - but immigrant scroungers, black single mother scroungers, and families-with-ten-kids scroungers. If the Mail has a News Topic Bingo card, this may constitute a full house.

Mail readers are finding that their imaginary property fortunes have all but disappeared and that they might lose their jobs and pensions. And they need someone to blame. So step forward, handy scrounger targets.

Like
The jobless couple who rake in £32k a year in benefits and still aren’t happy.

The article is deeply unpleasant sneering attack. (No surprises there) For example:

And it seems that she does not have the time for housework.
The walls of her home are dirty and peeling and the floor is covered in videos and magazines.

Would the Daily Mail prefer to see these 10 kids homeless and starving, then, to make their parents pay for their perceived improvidence? Would spotless paintwork have allayed some of their spite or annoyed the Mail even more?

Single mother lives in Britain’s most expensive council house.

This story defies belief. This woman has been temporarily housed in an expensive empty council property while her own house is being repaired. What possible benefit could the house’s market value be to this woman? Would the Daily Mail be happy to see her and her child rehoused in a modest cardboard box, regarding that as more appropriate to her single-parent status?

How about the Afghani family living in a £1.2 million house? With a big screen plasma TV, in case the Mail readers aren’t already frothing at the mouth. Again, this isn’t their home, nor - despite the misleading heading - is it a council house. Their private landlord charges huge amounts of rent (£12,458 per month) and Housing Benefit is currently paying this. Apart from that, the only evidence that this woman with 7 kids is any better off than anyone else on benefits is the presence of games consoles and a plasma tv. All of these have been costed at top brand-new shop prices by the Mail, which has unaccountably never heard of second-hand goods or market stalls.

This family are castigated for not living in a shabby home. The first family was castigated for living in one. The second family was insulted for having the temerity to get moved into an empty council property.

The Mail doesn’t actually suggest that any of these people has done anything wrong, what with libel laws being as they are… Instead, the Mail just holds them up to be hated. To make its readers - who are worrying about the effect of economic meltdown on their own income - feel doubly hard done to. To redirect the readers’ rage and fear towards handy individual hate-targets and against the “system” that appears to penalise them but reward the undeserving.

As an example of the Mail’s hypocrisy, some of the children’s faces are pixellated out. It’s not as if their locations and the full names and images of their parents wouldn’t identify them to anyone who knows them…. People who don’t know them aren’t going to be insulting them in the street or beating them up in the playground, in any case.

One distasteful aspect of the story of family A is that the Mail reports that the woman is being insulted in the street as a scrounger. (I can’t actually say that the newspaper takes any pleasure in this fact or that they are subtly suggesting this action to their readers. I can of course hint at it, in a Daily Mail style way.)

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This week’s data-loss story is a Ministry of Defence hard drive that’s gone AWOL. Another example of the UK government’s seemingly bottomless commitment to freeing up access to its data, by distributing it at random around the globe.

Ministry of Defence, that was.

An investigation is under way into the disappearance of a computer hard drive which could contain the details of about 100,000 Armed Forces personnel.

And when it says detail, it means unencrypted detail:

There may also be some personal information including bank and driving licence details, passport numbers, addresses, dates of birth and telephone numbers.

Of serving members of the Armed Forces. Does information get much more personal? It’s not as if that sort of data would be any use to enemies in the ongoing TWAT. (*heavy sarcasm*)

How much confidence does that inspire in the security of the information they’ll have on us mere civilians, when the ID-card scheme includes us all? (*Rhetorical question*)

A commenter said in the Independent

The MoD didn’t lose this data, EDS did. Nobody cares about data that isn’t their own. If this data had been handled in house and the work not outsourced it wouldnt have been lost

EDS is the MOD’s main IT contractor. Here’s their web page.

.. as an HP business group, EDS delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of information technology and business process outsourcing services to customers in the manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, and consumer and retail industries, and to governments around the world.

The About us page has US contact numbers. It seems to have been written by someone from a Dilbert cartoon. Everything they do is “innovative” and their

highquality, cost-competitive services are provided from the optimal mix of onshore, nearshore and offshore locations.

This determinedly shore-heavy focus may refer to their “related companies”(part-owned companies) which include companies based in the UAE, India (workforce:28,000+ ), the USA and other unspecified locations. One provides “Benefits, Payroll and other HR Administration services to more than 34 million active and retired employees from its client organizations.”

On the 8 September, 2008, prison officers were disturbed about EDS’s loss of their personal data, to the point of threatening a strike.

At that time, Computer Weekly pointed out that EDS already had something of a track record in the data-loss area. The Burton Review Report, published in April 2008, looked into an earlier loss of MOD personnel data, in which EDS were involved.

One of the themes emerging from the Strategy for Transformational Government (2005) was the increased emphasis on sharing services, particularly in information and infrastructure. The Armed Forces have been early pioneers of this approach, through a range of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public Private Partnership (PPP) contracts. (from page 4, Burton Report)

Hmm. Need look no further for the culprit methinks: the whole processes for giving out PFI and PPP contracts.

You might assume that the UK must be desperately short of cash, if it’s prepared to hand over its most crucial information to any company that offers to undercut government employees, while providing a better service and still making a profit. (Well, it must sound convincing to UK governments,) But, it seems that the UK government has a bottomless pit of money for bailing out banks, so shortage of cash can’t be the reason.

If you are interested in looking up the track record of other private companies that keep public data, datalossdb.org could fill in an obsessive hour. Type the name of your chosen PFI company and see what turns up.

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