Hattix

Ten years ago, smoking-related illnesses cost the NHS (England) £1.7 billion per year on treatment. Today that figure is £2.7 billion. Anti-smoking lobby group Ash sees this as a success of their lobby, claiming at least a £300,000 saving per year as the number of smokers has dropped from 12 million to 9 million.

I’m not so sure. Smoking was in decline anyway, before the measures of the last five or so years (which have not altered the decline rate), public smoking ban or not, the numbers would have been about the same. Let’s take a look at those figures again, though. Adjusting for inflation we see that ten years ago, we spent £2.38 billion (2008 pounds) on smoking-related illnesses and in real terms, the outlay has only increased by £320,000 - Or about the price of ten years of care for two breast cancer (which isn’t smoking related) patients.

Now let’s take a look at demographics, the thing the anti-smoking lobby doesn’t want you to see. That’s right, we have the 1950s and 1960s baby boomers reaching their 50s and 60s, ages where smoking-related illnesses typically take hold. Why’s the figure increasing then? Because the population is getting older - There are more older people! Unless Ash would prefer us leading our senior citizens to the gas chambers, they’re just going to have to live with it.

The anti-smoking lobby and particularly Ash, have been traditionally a very deceptive bunch. They go on about how much the NHS loses a year and how it’d better be spent on other illnesses (appeal to emotion fallacy) but what they don’t say is that in the tax year 2007-2008, HM Treasury recieved £8 billion in tobacco tax of cigarettes alone, discounting things like hand-rolling tobacco, pipe tobacco and the smaller specialist tobaccos such as chewing and snuff which add up to around another billion. Smokers pay for their own treatment through tobacco taxes and, indeed, are perhaps the only group in the UK who cover their NHS expenses near-directly. They also turn the Treasury quite a tidy profit of £5 billion too.

If anti-smoking programmes are successful, that £5 billion hole in Treasury funds will have to come from somewhere else…like perhaps the NHS.

No part of this post should be seen as supportive of tobacco use. Repeated and valid scientific study has shown that there is no harmless lower bound for tobacco use, any regular use at all at any level is significantly harmful to health and in particular directly linked to chronic and fatal cardiac and pulmonary diseases. Indirect use (passive smoking) is another matter entirely, however.

It’s not often that I agree with a Christian on religious topics.

Though I’ve got to poke a few holes in the BBC’s “we don’t want to offend anyone” piece.

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, John Packer, said that apart from the government, the Church of England was the biggest provider of social services at home.

That’s rather like saying “Apart from my car, my legs were the biggest provider of transport between Edinburgh and London.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown told them that millions of people owed the Anglican Communion a debt of gratitude for upholding the cause of the poor.

Through lavish archbishops sampling fine caviar in ceremonial robes. That’s some fine cause you’re upholding there.

Tutu goes on to rightly equate the West’s favourite scapegoat, ‘terrorism’ with poverty, though he stops short of identifying it as a political fear-factor.

Archbishop Tutu accused some of his fellow Anglicans of going against the teaching of Jesus in their treatment of homosexual people by “persecuting the already persecuted”.
Tutu [...] said traditionalists were wrong to suggest that gay people had chosen homosexuality and the dispute had to be kept in proportion.

Spreading hate is not against the teaching of Jesus. It is the teaching of Jesus if the Christians for the last one and half thousand years are to be believed.

Others, including Bishop John Packer, insist that the Church must have a sexual ethic - a sense of what is right and wrong in sexual behaviour.

Are these people stupid? They observe governments steadily losing power over the bedroom as society stands up and says “enough, we’ll do as we please out of prying eyes” and they want to get into a shrinking niché? Have they no idea as to why it’s shrinking? We’re fed up of oppression and unethical “morality”.

We demand ethics with our morality and the Christians can’t deliver. Time after time, sect after sect, all Christians have proven to be the enemy of ethics. They have no concept of “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “bad”, only a concept of “we’re right, you’re not”. Let them engineer their own demise. It saves everyone else the effort.

We’ve cured cancer, or at least one variety of it. Cervical cancer has long been linked to human papilloma virus (HPV) and it is now known to be present in almost all cervical cancer cases. There are many strains of the virus, the majority of which are utterly harmless, but strains 16 and 18 cause over 70% of all cases. Now here’s the kicker. Strains 6 and 11 cause genital warts. Those four are by far the most common, but 13 others cause cancer (roughly 25% of cases) out of a total number of strains nearing 100. All strains are sexually transmitted infections.

In the good ol’ USA, right wing extremists have constantly opposed vaccination programmes, citing increased promiscuity (something which has utterly no evidence to support it) and that’s what I was expecting over here. Not quite with the same blindly ignorant zeal, but at least some “concerns” or “worries” in the right wing press.

The Daily Mail is about as right-wing as a newspaper gets, but its article is overwhelmingly positive, if a little lacking in facts and substance compared to what the BBC have to offer.

What puzzles me is the choice of vaccine. Worldwide most health services have favoured Gardasil, which protects against strains 6, 11, 16 and 18. You get free protection from genital warts thrown in with the protection from cancer. The Department of Health has favoured Cervarix, which only protects against strains 16 and 18, the two major carcinogenic ones, but to no greater degree than Gardasil does. I personally believe that’s becaue Cervarix has fewer side effects and they’re less severe, but I can’t help wondering whether GlaxoSmithKline lubricated the right palms.

From this school year onwards, girls in year 8 (12-13 years old) will be offered the vaccine in schools free of charge and a two year catch-up campaign starting next year will offer it to all girls up to the age of 18 with the aim of a near saturation coverage by 2011. The programme is expected to cost up to £100,000,000 a year.

I think that’s a good deal. Let’s check out the stats. According to Cancer Research UK, 2,730 cases per year are diagnosed in the UK and 950 deaths result, giving a rolling mortality rate of about 35%. Each one of those 2,730 cases requires treatment which costs (numbers were scarce) about £175,000 per patient per year over ten years (assuming they survive that long, the actual number will be lower as 20% are dead after the first year). Now if our vaccine is more effective, it’ll be cheaper. It’s only 70% effective so our 2,730 cases are reduced to 819 which, with that hundred million shared out over them, works out at £122,100 per year, saving around £50,000 per patient. However, we’ve also saved the whole £175,000 for 1911 patients. Shared out among the lot of them, it costs just over £36,000 per patient.

We save money, the hell of cancer is reduced, we save 665 lives per year, mostly of women aged between 15 and 30. Sounds like a damned good deal to me. Wonder what the yanks are so fussed about?

The tension between Russia and Georgia has finally spilled out into open warfare. Ossetia has its roots as one of the many provinces which united into nations as the Renaissance swept Europe and the near-East. Ossetia, both North and South, were part of the USSR before its dissolution and North Ossetia is now part of Russia, however South Ossetia took a different view. When Georgia exercised its right to self-rule, South Ossetia wanted to do the same. However, South Ossetia was not recognised as a nation within the USSR so had no constitutional right of secession. Georgia rightfully claimed South Ossetia remained Georgian.

South Ossetia was governed largely as an autonomous entity within the Georgian federal state (much like how US states can make their own laws and largely self-govern), but it itself considers itself to be a republic (it is not recognised by any international body) and is friendly toward Moscow. Russia sent over peacekeepers to mediate between South Ossetia and Georgia but in actuality sponsored and supported their resistance to the Georgian government.

To make matters worse, the US Army has been supplying and training Georgian forces (under the cover of Georgian involvment in Iraq) and Georgia has had ambitions of joining NATO, an organisation the Russians aren’t too keen on.

Russia for its part has been supplying citizens of South Ossetia with Russian passports and granting them citizenship, in a pretty flagrant violation of Georgian sovereignty. Russia is now using “protecting our citizens” as an excuse to invade the region and attakc Georgia.

All the requirements for a proxy war are there.

At the moment, the West has remained quite sedate. Britain has urged for a ceasefire, France has stated that Russia’s relations with the EU will suffer and the US has condemned the invasion as unacceptable.

The international community is generally united against Russia in condemning Russia’s hostilities:

China called for an “immediate ceasefire”.
United Kingdom urged “an immediate ceasefire and resumption of direct dialogue”.
United States believe the Russians should “show greater restraint” and must “respect Goergia’s territorial integrity”.
A joint statement by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (all nearby to the conflict) “strongly condemns” the “unilateral military actions” of Russia.
In general, the international community stops short of condemning Russia directly but is far from condoning their actions.

In my opinion, Russia couldn’t care less about some nobodies in some tiny little state. It cares more about showing the West that it will not be intimidated and it still has a lot of bite with its bark. Russia has long been distrustful of the West and especially NATO; It isn’t likely to give a damn what we say.

However, Russia ought to be very careful about who it chooses to tangle with. The European Union is an extremely powerful military force and is increasingly well-coordinated and united. The EU has quite some interest in Turkey, which borders Georgia.

Via any British news outlet you care to name, this story (BBC News) is making the rounds. It’s like we get one of these every month or so, some nutcase refuses to take off jewelry which they somehow associate with their favourite ghost in the sky and goes all lawyer happy about it.

Schools, in this case, have dress codes for a reason. That reason is to keep people equal. Now, flying in the face of equality comes this arrogant whelp who thinks she’s more equal than everyone else.

Being asked to take a steel bracelet off is not a bloody violation of your human rights you useless waste of oxygen.

A religion is not an excuse to break the rules. A religion is not a reason to grant exceptions. Funnily enough, Islam is quite good about this; A believer can be excused symbolism or even prayer if it would be unsafe or rules would prevent it. I don’t know enough about the Sikhs to know if they absolutely must wear a steel bracelet, but I sure doubt it.

What really got me was this hilarious quote from Miss. Headuparse’s lawyer: “Our great British traditions of religious tolerance and race equality have been rightly upheld today.”

I’m sorry? Treating someone specially because they’re a Sikh is somehow “tolerant” or “equal”? This means that treating the Jews specially during the Holocaust was also “tolerant” and “equal”, right?

I don’t care what your faith is. I don’t care if your ghost in the sky is bigger than anyone else’s ghost in the sky (or wherever their ghosts may be), you do not use it as a crutch, as an excuse, to get special treatment. Equality is a great thing, throwing a temper tantrum because you’re not special is just foolish.

Do some people really understand what they’re actually saying? Relating to Max Mosley’s successful defamation trial where the tabloid rag News of The World was deemed to have unreasonably invaded Mr. Mosley’s privacy, we get the Christians jumping in.

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, considers the ruling to be a dangerous precedent and uses the argument of “free speech” while giving an appeal to passion fallacy, claiming that without “public debate or democratic scrutiny” the courts have “created a wholly new privacy law”. You then realise where his agenda actually lies when his next line is “I am deeply sad that public morality is the second victim of this legal judgement”.

He bumbles on “Unspeakable and indecent behaviour, whether in public or in private, is no longer significant under this ruling”.

Is he even paying attention to what he’s saying? Well, the answer is no. The ruling was made because we have privacy laws created by “public debate or democratic scrutiny” and also we have laws against Lord Carey’s “unspeakable and indecent behaviour” in public, this ruling does nothing to those laws.

It’s important here to note that the press can legally invade an individual’s privacy if it can be shown such invasion was in the public interest. Breaching the privacy of a corporate executive to expose corruption is in the public interest. Doing so with the head of a sporting organisation’s private life, which has nothing to do with his public activities as head of that organisation, is not in the public interest. This is the line which the News of The World illegally crossed.

In his ruling, according to the laws of the land, Mr Justice Eady said Mr Mosley could expect privacy for consensual “sexual activities (albeit unconventional)”.

It leaves one wondering, however, exactly what constitutes “immoral”? According to Lord Carey, a spot of light bondage and roleplay is “immoral” and right away I can point out quite a few people in my circle of friends who’re into that kind of thing, would I ever consider them immoral? No, they’re the nicest folk you’re ever likely to meet. One of them, indeed, has spent hours of her time and incalculable amounts of effort raising funds for cancer charities.

By wanting to shackle what consenting adults can and cannot do behind closed doors, Lord Carey is the one guilty of immorality, the highest form of immorality is that of demanding obedience and forcing control where none is necessary.

It’s a question I’ve asked (and answered) often on my blog. A knee-jerk over-reaction, what does it achieve?

In the case of threats to our freedom, we’re happily destroying that freedom to protect it. Better we sink our own ship it seems.

But it works elsewhere too. Civitas, a social think-tank, have run a comprehensive study showing that our headless chicken reaction to the supposed threat posed by paedophiles is achieving precisely the opposite of what we’d like it to.

Adults are now scared of interacting with children, paedophile has the same social stigma attached that rapist once did; A conviction isn’t necessary, just a suspicion, an accusation, and an innocent life is ruined. The innocent life isn’t that of the child’s, children are well versed at saying what needs to be said, true or otherwise, to get attention: It’s that of the man or woman accused of abuse.

According to Civitas, the spectre of suspicion and distrust has achieved exactly what it was meant to protect. It has poisoned and destroyed the generation relationship between child and adult. Children are now without adult friends, friends who would recognise signs of real abuse perhaps better than the child or his peers or his parents (parents who famously have a rather polar view of their own offspring) would, increasing the ease at which real paedophiles may take advantage of them. Isolated and ostracised the child has nobody external and impartial to turn to or confide in. In our rabid panic, we have spurned the children.

As we busy ourselves in crying wolf over our obsession that children are sexual in some way or that anyone with a camera is clearly a kiddy fiddler, we don’t tend to notice that we’re making paedophiles of normal people. In 2003 it became illegal, very much so, to document a perfectly legal act for the first time ever. If Jack is a normal 16 year old and his girlfriend Jill is a normal 17 year old, they can have a sexual relationship as much as they like. But if Jill sends Jack some naughty pictures of herself to brighten his day when he’s at work, Jack is then a paedophile and may be jailed or worse. His marriage plans to Jill are now off, his plan to work as a doctor won’t ever happen and Jill’s ambition to work as a care assistant is wrecked as neither would pass a CRB check.

Paedophiles wreck lives. In our blind panic, we wreck young lives just as badly. So what does over-reaction achieve? Is it not the precise damage that it was aimlessly attempting to prevent? Who’s worse?

It’s been a while so I have two stories for you.

The first needs no attribution, it’s all over the news. The Government somehow, with great concessions made (bribes), managed to get the controversial 42-day detention bill through Parliament. The Government are trying to spin it as powers needed by the police to combat the “terrorism threat”.

What “terrorism threat”?

We didn’t need to hold an innocent man for six weeks while the well-organized US-funded IRA were bombing the shit out of metropolitan areas nationwide. Yet we do when a rag tag bunch of rabid extremists post vague videos on the Internet?

The Government has proven time and again that it will abuse the Terrorism Act 2006, using its power to spy on citizens dropping litter, on babies crying at night, to monitor private areas…The list goes on.

‘Disappearing’ people for six weeks with neither evidence nor charge is unacceptable.

Our second is related to the exploding Nimrod in Afghanistan. The MoD yesterday flew a Nimrod over London to salute the Queen’s official birthday and, predictably, the relatives of the servicemen lost in Afghanistan are in uproar.

But wait, that’s not the whole story.

While the coroner of the investigation deemed the Nimrod “unairworthy”, he was not an aeronautical engineer, he was not familiar with the DeHaviland Comet or the Nimrod (the Nimrod is a militarised version of the Comet) and likely not familiar with the Nimrod’s essential role in supporting ground forces.

The experts, the aeronautical engineers, the Nimrod designers, the Nimrod ground crew, the people who know what they’re talking about all insist that the Nimrod is one of the safest and most reliable planes in the fleet. We employ experts for a reason.

Are we off the hook? Has nature conspired to save us from our mistakes? No warming for over a decade? Is this great news?

The answer to all the above is “no”. It’s terrible news. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany believe that a natural cycle of cooling will offset partly or completely any warming over the next decade or so. This may initially sound great, a stay of reprieve, but it’s anything but. The findings are largely a result of increased cloud cover caused by increased storms caused by climate change superimposed onto a small existing cycle. It’s bad news because it gives politicians several terms where they have a ‘look at the last five years’ excuse not to do anything; Give a politician the choice of doing something and doing nothing and he’ll do nothing every time.

What’s worse is that change after the cycle is over will be rapid and that it does not affect high latitudes. Antarctica will still lose ice shelf after ice shelf. Arctic pack ice will still be all but gone in five years.

 When the sun dawns on 2020 and the crutch holding us up collapses, do you think we’ll be ready? Call me a pessimist, but I sure don’t.

It’s been touted so long that it has its own catchphrase. “Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted”, a term used derisively whenever any claim of anything that would harm the ‘net arises.

In the late ’90s, it was legislation crafted by ignorant lawmakers which outlawed vast swathes of online activities or technology. In the mid ’90s, it was a fear of running out of bandwidth, subscribers were signing up in such numbers that every three months the number of ‘net connected people was doubling.

As 1999 turned to 2000 and the dotcom bubble burst quite amusingly, various ‘experts’ claimed that the Internet was not viable for commercial operations, yet Google and Amazon, starting out as academic experiments and online bookstores respectively, have become corporate behemoths with valuations in the high billions.

The fickle nature of the net claims its casualties, however. Yahoo, once the darling of the web, saw its marketshare obliterated by a combination of MSN Messenger in the IM space and Google in the search space. Altavista, formerly the king of search engines, is now a little used curiousity next to the mighty Google.

So when we get alarmist re-runs of the Internet’s imminent death, it’s quite easy to turn a disbelieving eye.

The gist this time is that the ‘last mile’ is becoming too much of a problem. In 1998, the Internet became the World Wide Wait as users stuck on 56k modems managed to overwhelm websites full of graphics but this time it’s not the websites being overwhelmed, but the users themselves. The feed to the home is usually piggybacked on fibre or copper originally intended for television or telephone and it is these links which are becoming inadequate.

User generated content, such as what makes up the entirety of YouTube is growing exponentially and the bandwidth available to the home is not. BBC’s iPlayer has become so successful that many ISPs in Britain are throttling it back during the day, artificially slowing it down so it doesn’t clog their networks.

There are two key points of congestion to consider. Firstly, especially in the UK, most ISPs do not own any of their own infrastructure. Service providers like TalkTalk don’t own a single router, instead buying capacity from other service providers such as Tiscali or BT. Wanadoo have, even in their early Freeserve days, been a customer of Planet Online. It’s good business sense to buy as little capacity as possible, so the ISPs are deliberately throttling users during the day and even disconnecting heavier users.

BT, for example, market their “ideal for families” plan with a pathetic 5GB per month allowance. One child on YouTube over a rainy weekend can use that entire 5GB in just the weekend. Heavier users still, such as myself, can burn through 5GB in hours. With the advent of high definition content and services such as the BBC iPlayer, the end user bandwidth use is only going to get bigger.

This conveniently brings us to the next key congestion consideration: The last mile. A standard BT DSL link touted as “up to 8Mbps” is nothing of the kind, most users achieve between 3Mbps and 6Mbps. Even worse is that the upstream speed is a worthless 400kbps (448kbps, but ATM overhead ‘wastes’ one part of every nine), not even half of one Mbps. Wondered why uploading that video to YouTube was so slow? That’s why. Even the new ADSL2+ services, offering “up to 24Mbps” or 12Mbps are not any faster, usually offering only 400-600kbps upstream, let alone not improving download speed at all for anyone who already doesn’t get 6Mbps or more.

Cable’s even worse for many users, while it can theoretically go much faster, it is limited by the number of subscribers on one cable loop, usually an entire street or estate. A single fibre cable can perhaps handle 100Mbps or even less if it’s being loaded with many TV channels. A copper cable is a bit worse. Divide that up by the 8Mbps being offered to most cable subscribers and you have a grand total of twelve people who can use the service at full speed. Add a thirteenth and the speed drops. Most residential cable loops have fifty to two hundred subscribers.

The last mile connection just isn’t getting any faster or any more spacious anywhere near quick enough to keep up with demand. Is it going to be a crunch? It’s too early to tell but signs are there that over 2009-2010, the web will become the World Wide Wait yet again as the limits of DSL and cable become the proverbial brick wall awaiting the unwary driver.