The important issues of the day

Since time immemorial, ministers have travelled around the place in large cars (save only McDowell, who just turned into a bat and flew, which is Carbon Neutral); this is because ministers cannot in fact walk. As of a few days ago, the media has noticed this, and latched on to it with a fervour. They point to the wonderful example of David Cameron, who has forced his MPs into taking public transport (a horrifying concept; imagine sitting next to Alistair Darling on the bus!), which is absolutely the most wonderful thing any politician did ever.

Why, if we can only make our politicians take public transport, assuming we had such a thing, then we could be just as good as Cameron's Britain! It's at least got to be worth a couple of basis points on the bond market, right? It's certainly far more interesting to write angry letters to the paper about than NAMA, which is quite frankly getting rather old, and no-one really knows what it is, anyway.

Really, I suspect there's someone deep in the bowels of Fianna Fail headquarters whose job it is to think up really stupid stuff to get the media annoyed about, to distract it from less interesting matters like the economy.

More DRM pitfalls

So, with the popularity of e-readers and tablets, DRM, and thus piracy, has found a new frontier... books. eBooks have been around for a while, of course, but it's only lately that they became a big thing.

I wanted to read the new Iain M Banks book, so went to Apple iBooks to get it. Only to find that, for the moment, iBooks doesn't sell books in Ireland at all. Apparently, even in countries where it does sell books, the selection is pretty minimal.

Now, Amazon has a Kindle app for the iPad, so off to the Kindle store! They did have it, and I bought it, for 10 euro. Now, that's cheaper than it would have been in the shops, as it's new release, but not much cheaper, surely not enough to cover the cost savings in electronic distribution.

It wasn't just the cost that was an issue, though. You see, Kindle for iPad has a much, much worse interface than Apple's iBooks reader, but of course they use different styles of DRM; Apple uses ePub with its own DRM (seemingly everyone has a different, incompatible ePub DRM style), while Kindle uses its own personal made-up format. So you have to read it in the Kindle reader. Not only would it (of course) have been cheaper to pirate the book, but it would also have been more convenient!

This is something that eBook vendors need to deal with, quickly. The problem is actually worse than that with, say, DRMed video; at least most video players basically have the same features. Every eBook reader, though, is different, and it is rather annoying to have to read eBook type A in reader A, type B in reader B, and so forth. A single standard that all apps could read and that everyone could publish to would be a massive improvement, and would, I think, help to push eBooks as a credible concept quicker.

And then, of course...

 Unlike print books, digital books are subject to VAT.

Oh, yeah, that will help the format. Not Amazon's fault, of course, but it's a bit stupid.

Doling out the blame

We seem to hear a lot lately about how terrible all of these people on the dole are. Lazy, not wanting to get a job, spending all of their dole millions on booze and fags like a low-budget Patsy Stone, while decent honest hardworking people pay tax to support them. Never done a day's work in their lives! Why aren't they required to work for their ridiculously vast dole payments, mad people who write into the papers ask!

There's just one problem. It's complete nonsense.

The way the dole works in Ireland is as follows. There are two things generally called the dole; Job Seekers' Benefit and Job Seekers' Allowance. JSB is based on PRSI contributions, and is not means tested, while JSA is not, and is means tested. Yes, PRSI. That PRSI, the one that appears on your payslip. No, it's not just giving money to the government for fun, it's actually for something!

So, in 2006, before the Great Depcession, the unemployment rate in Ireland was about 4%. That's really about as low as is practically possible for unemployment to be. It is now about 15%. So, at least 11% of the working population is (a) unemployed and (b) was working before the economic problems. Is it really sensible to assume that these people are turning down jobs (minimum 346 euro per week) for full time employment, so that they can continue the high life on the dole (max 196 euro per week)? The whole thing is absurd.

And then there's the idea of requiring people on the dole to do some sort of work in exchange for their payment. This is one of these ideas which sounds brilliant if you either don't bother thinking about it at all, or are simply extremely stupid. Once you start asking questions, though, cracks emerge. What would be the nature of this work? Would it be work which needs doing, or make-work? If it's work which needs doing, then, well, somebody is probably already being paid to do it, and replacing them with someone on the dole working below the minimum wage is, well, sort of counter-productive. If it's make-work, well, that's going to cost a lot to administer, which is also sort of counter-productive.

And what, precisely, is the upside supposed to be? As far as I can see, the only real function would be to make people who resent people claiming the dole feel better about themselves. And really, the country has more to be worrying about than massaging the egos of people who are clearly just looking for something to complain about.

And then there is the idea of reducing the dole, perhaps significantly. This is another one of these 'looks good on paper, but isn't' things; people on the dole generally spend all the money they receive, so in effect you would be reducing the amount spent in the consumer economy. It's generally more effective to reduce benefits to the middle class, who don't necessarily spend all that they receive.

Last, but by no means least, there's the fairness issue. Many, perhaps most, people on the dole are getting JSA, so they have, in fact, paid for it through PRSI, which is a form of compulsory social insurance. Now you might complain that you've paid PRSI all your life, and have never gotten the dole, and people do complain about this. But, erm, yes, that is what insurance is. If you claim on it, you often get more than you put in; otherwise there'd be little point in it in the first place. Few people, on hearing that somebody has died and his family has received life insurance, cry "Oh, well, I could do that, but I refuse to die due to my superior work ethic". In countries which use mandatory health insurance, few people resent the guy who gets sick and has to go to hospital. So why resent people who are in the (un)fortunate position of being able to collect on their income insurance?

I've really come to the conclusion that most of the people who object to the dole, or who advocate work-for-dole or whatever, do not understand, and do not care about, what the dole actually is or what effects their advocated solutions would have. They just want something to complain about.

UPC-tastic

Just got TV and Interwebs in the new place. 15mbit/sec nominal.

Looking pretty good, especially for the city centre. I could have gone for 30mbit instead, but really that would have been sorta overkill.

As for the TV... well, I already have an episode of one of those Channel 4 shows about buying houses, doing them up, and selling them for more money on to record. They're one of my guilty pleasures.

Who do you think you are kidding, Mr iPhone?

Possibly the most suspect pictorial representation of '59%' that I have ever seen.

Kevin Myers asks a silly question

Kevin Myers: Just whose moral guidance would you prefer? That of the Pope, or Stephen Fry?

Er, is this a trick question? One is a nice man who writes funny stories and likes Apple products and advocates being nice to people, the other refuses to apologise for his organisation's nasty habit of deliberately protecting thousands of child rapists for decades, and advocates lying to Africans about condoms.

As is normal with a Myers article, by the way, the title has little to do with the content.

The excitements of money on the computer-machine

From AIB's business banking login:

We really, really, enjoy online banking a little more than is good for us.

But wait, from the Revenue's online system, recognise anyone?

Forget the boring banking! Look, tax! On the interwebs!

Seriously, who are these people? Is this a weird union thing? Are they the only people allowed to appear in stock photography on websites involving money?

Sadly, they don't make an appearance on Bank of Ireland's business site, which instead went for this frightening mess:

And Ulster Bank just went for this puzzling graphic which wants to be a real flowchart when it grows up:

If you select the bank for your business-banking-interweb needs by their clip art, of course, your route is clear. You must go with AIB, for the people who show such joy in the presence of fine online tax-return forms.

Bonus person from the Revenue site:

She's still quite cheerful, but not quite as happy as Mr AIB because she's just realised that she's going to have to claim the tax credit for when your lower arm and laptop start dissolving into the table, and she can't remember which form one uses for that.

Help us, our small businesses are trapped in iTunes!

Personal loans for your personal needs. Does this sound like a mortgage on a sex toy to anyone else?

Having had her youth restored through the power of online VAT forms, Mary attempts to hide her unseemly excitement about the new income levy rules behind a semi-transparent bar chart.

Over on the Bank of Ireland website, Una sulks into her mobile, as the clouds rumble overhead. It could have been so different. She could have had fun like those people on the Revenue site, or the happy couple with 'personal needs'. But no, she had to open a business account with Bank of Ireland. Sighing, she crawls through the pipe back to the blue conference room.

Okay, okay, I'll stop now.

Microsoft's unexpected Internet support-base

Tomorrow, Microsoft is launching Windows Phone 7. It's, well, an interesting platform, a total re-imaging of their old Windows Mobile platform, with a radically different UI, and a totally different feature-set.

It also has very serious issues, though. The UI, while certainly innovative, may not be for everyone, but we'll just have to wait and see on that one. There are other less subjective things. For instance, there is no copy-and-paste, and iOS3-level multitasking, that is no multitasking, but a push notification service.

Developers will not be allowed use sockets in their applications, which excludes a few classes of applications, including IRC clients, SSH clients, and VOIP, while making other classes, like IM, trickier to implement and almost certainly clunkier. There is no database provided for developers' use; they'll either have to roll their own (asking for trouble) or use a .NET third-party solution, which are thin on the ground right now. Apple and Google provide SQLITE.

There's also no native code. While this has some potential upsides; it'll help security, for instance, it won't help people to port apps. Many games are largely in C and C++, for instance, meaning that they can get away with wrappers to work on iPhone and Android, but will likely have to be completely rewritten for Windows Phone. It's believed that a few big players, such as Adobe, will be exempt from some or all of these restrictions.

The browser, based on IE7, supports neither Flash, Silverlight, nor common HTML5 features long available on Mobile Safari and the Android browser. This means that there'll be no embedded video of any sort, and no prospect of making highly functional web apps with local storage and so forth.

As on the iPhone, applications will need to be approved, and will be distributed only through Microsoft's app store. Like Android, manufacturers and carriers are likely to have some latitude to mess about, even extending to having their own app stores. These strike me as the worst features of each platform.

And yet, the Internet will hear little criticism. Anyone pointing out any of these issues on social sites like Reddit will be mercilessly down voted, with commenters on blogs attacking even trivial criticisims. For instance, today it emerged that promotional material for the platform had been using the icon of Angry Birds, an extremely popular game for iPhone, Android and Symbian without permission; there are no plans to bring the game to the platform. On blogs which pointed this out, commenters went mad, apparently blaming the developer of the game.

Even the criticism of people who've previewed the platform has been oddly muted. They sometimes damn with faint praise, saying things like the browser is acceptable, compared to old IE Mobile, but the harshest thing I've seen is the suggestion that WP7, with its absence of multitasking and copy and paste, was perhaps more suited to phones like the doomed Kin than to the expensive, high-end smart phones it's being aimed at. There are also veiled references to deficiencies in the preview devices they've been given, though they aren't currently allowed comment on these.

Altogether, though, it's strange. An Internet commentariat which will happily rail against Android or iPhone or PS3 or various other Microsoft rivals seems to be curiously unwilling to complain about WP7, or Windows 7, or XBox. I don't think it's actually astroturfing; it doesn't seem that stage-managed. It is surprising, however. The Internet's full of people going on about how they'll definitely get one, and it will be the best phone ever, and so forth.

All in all, I'll be extremely interested to watch its launch. I honestly don't really see the high-end phone buying demographic embracing this thing; it's just a bit too limited. One very common excuse given is, "well, iOS usen't to have some of this stuff", which is true enough, but it has it now, and particularly in the case of multitasking it was only just soon enough.

Oh, well, maybe I'll be proven wrong and it'll take the world by storm. I don't see it, though.

And while I'm on this, what's with Windows 7? It has been generally treated on the Internet like the second coming of Christ. I hadn't used it until a couple of months ago, and have still hardly used it, but everything I've seen has left me unimpressed. It just seems to be Vista, but a bit faster. Though hardly fast enough; on new high-end hardware it feels generally less responsive than MacOS 10.6 on my three-year-old laptop. What's the hype about?

Dreams, hopefully can't come true

I've recently had a change in my dreaming habits. Normally, my dreams are about being lost in very large buildings; odd, but there you are. For the last few months, though, I've had a recurring one about somehow being in the position where, despite having finished college, I had to re-do my Leaving Cert. for some reason. To the extent that I wake up and worry that I'd better go to an English class. Strange, and very unpleasant.

I envy those of you who actually, from time to time, have nice dreams.

A bit of recovery time

So, I was off for the last two weeks. It was quite nice; I didn't really get up to all that much, but it was relaxing. Unfortunately, I spent the first week sick; ever since I remember, whenever I come down from a period of stress, I get a nasty cold. I assume that it's my immune system foolishly thinking it's getting a few weeks off, too. In any case, I got through it with copious quantities of paracetamol and sudafed.

And then, of course, I came back to work, and got so caught up in what I was doing that I didn't leave until 9:30, just over twelve hours after I arrived. Speeding things up, you see; very satisfying work, but it's easy to get lost in it. On the plus side, I got lots done. Oh, well, I guess I'm a workaholic at heart...