Also known as thieving bastards
Lets say a pint costs £3 (so £3 logically costs 1 pint), there's only £9 in existence, and I've just set up a bank.
Andrew puts £3 in the bank. I know money's not a good store of value, so I buy a pint and put that in the vaults.
Ben puts £3 in the bank.
Charlie asks to borrow enough for a pint, so I give Ben's £3 to Charlie.
Dan is wize to my shenanigans, so keeps his £3 in his pocket.
Ella, Francis and Gerry all want to borrow £3 to get a pint each. I don't have it, but I'm a bank so I just credit their accounts with £3 each, creating £9.
Whoops! I've just doubled the amount of money in existence. Simple market forces: if the supply doubles but the demand remains the same, the cost of money will half. So, £3 no longer costs a pint, it costs half a pint; or, a pint now costs £6.
Lets look at what happens:
Andrew wants his money back. I sell half his pint and give him his £3 back.
I go to Charlie and demand my £6 back. I explain that as I lent him enough to buy a pint (£3 in yesterdays prices), he now has to pay me enough to buy a pint (i.e., £6 in todays prices). I can summon a police officer to use the threat of Reasonable Force to the face if he disagrees, so he gives me £6.
Actually, he gives me £6.50 (£3, adjusted for inflation + interest).
Ben comes along. I give him his £3 back. Actually, I chuck Ben and Andrew 20p extra each (interest).
I now have half a pint and £3.10. Because I know money's quite shit, I spend £3 on another half-a-pint, giving me a pint and 10p (£6.10, in todays money).
Ella, Francis and Gerry each owe me £6 (plus interest), and Dan's pissed off that, despite having nothing to do with me, he's suddenly only got enough for half a pint.
In numbers:
Andrew and Ben each gave me £3, and I gave them both £3.20 back.
Charlie borrowed £3 and had to pay back £6.50; likewize with Ella, Francis and Gerry
Dan had, and still has, £3
I have total assets (money + a pint + debt) worth £25.60 (10p + 1 pint (£6) + 3 * £6.50 debt (£19.50) )
In terms of wealth:
Andrew and Ben each gave me enough for a pint. I gave them back just over half-a-pint's worth of wealth.
Charlie borrowed enough to buy a pint. He payed back just over enough to buy a pint. likewize with Ella, Francis and Gerry.
Dan had enough for a pint, and now only has enough for a half.
I have a pint, plus am owed enough to buy over 3 pints
wealth is going from everyone (even dan, who has nothing to do with me) to me.
Specifically, notice how much 'money' there is knocking about:
Andrew: £3.20
Ben: £3.20
Dan: £3
me: 10p
For a total of £9.50; more than actually exists! Generally, if I fuck up and there isn't actually enough money to cover my scheme the government will simply print me some more money.
It gets worse tho.
Andrew: £3.20
Ben: £3.20
Charlie: £0
Dan: £3
me: 10p + £25.50 assets
That's a total of £9.50 (actual money), or £35 (total money, including in assets).
Lucky assets != money. However, if I can somehow blur the line between money and assets (by, perhaps, trading in debt as if it was cash), then we've gone from £9 (9 of which existed) to £9.50 (9.50 of which exist) to possibly £35 (9.50 of which exist).
If we actually print off extra cash so that £35 exists, a pint will now cost approximately £12 and Dan'll be absolutely furious, to the point where he might be ruined or simply decide not to trade in money. So we can't actually do this , which begs the question:
If Ella and Gerry can't pay their collective debts of £13 back for some reason, and I've been trading in their debts with other banks etc. as if they were money; iow if £13 of the £35 is backed on Ella and Gerry, and they can't pay their debts, so suddenly over a 1/3 of the 'money' is worthless, what happens?
Recession.
So, why's this allowed? Well, the banks and the government regulate the banking system.
The banks lend the government money.
The banks complain about lack of money that actually exists.
The government say 'we've checked, and that's not your fault'.
The government print money and give it to the banks, paying back their debts.
The banking system checks, and says 'the government aren't "just" printing money to pay their debts, they're printing money to cover non-existing money'.
So, iow they back each other up. The government are allowed to print money, the banks are allowed to create money, and they both say the other's not being irresponsible.
I've also noticed that, in a recession, small businesses tend to go bust whilst large businesses tend to expand; recessions unfairly favor large businesses over small. In return, large businesses not only give the political parties cash, but also are more compliant: wanna introduce an ID-fucking-everybody policy? Betcha every Tesco's will comply, but only half the smaller offies and corner-shops will.
Big business: government-compliant, government-funding
Government: pro-big-business, manipulate the economy to allow big-business expansion; allow banking scheme
Banks: facilitate government influence of economy; government-compliant; allow government to print money
Small business: gets suppressed
Small people: get fucked.
Showing posts with label sneaky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sneaky. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Friday, 15 October 2010
innefficient money laundering
Schools (hospitals, police, etc) all have liability insurance, so if they get sued the insurance company picks up the costs.
This seems incredibly dumb for two reasons:
1/ it ruins the deterrent effect -- it replaces 'if you do anything illegally dangerous or you'll have a hefty fine; if you don't, you wont' with 'if you do anything illegally dangerous you'll have a slight insurance cost; if you don't, you'll have a slight insurance cost'.
2/ the government are responsible for the costs of each school/hospital/etc. when looked at from their pov, it'd make more financial sense to centrally manage the liability costs, effectively doing the same as the insurance companies but without making any profit (i.e., slightly less costly for the tax payer).
iow, the government pass liability laws which are effectively neutered by the insurance companies, who, btw, cost more than if the government simply payed the liability (tho admittedly they make sense for each individual department, when viewed as a whole the gov' is loosing out).
Betcha the liability insurance companies pay the Labour party money. thus, tens of millions* of our tax-pounds go to liability insurance companies who pass on hundereds of thousands* to the Labour party.
Government inefficiecy, eh? it even extends to money laundering...
* NOTE: figures are wild assumptions; must check at some point.
This seems incredibly dumb for two reasons:
1/ it ruins the deterrent effect -- it replaces 'if you do anything illegally dangerous or you'll have a hefty fine; if you don't, you wont' with 'if you do anything illegally dangerous you'll have a slight insurance cost; if you don't, you'll have a slight insurance cost'.
2/ the government are responsible for the costs of each school/hospital/etc. when looked at from their pov, it'd make more financial sense to centrally manage the liability costs, effectively doing the same as the insurance companies but without making any profit (i.e., slightly less costly for the tax payer).
iow, the government pass liability laws which are effectively neutered by the insurance companies, who, btw, cost more than if the government simply payed the liability (tho admittedly they make sense for each individual department, when viewed as a whole the gov' is loosing out).
Betcha the liability insurance companies pay the Labour party money. thus, tens of millions* of our tax-pounds go to liability insurance companies who pass on hundereds of thousands* to the Labour party.
Government inefficiecy, eh? it even extends to money laundering...
* NOTE: figures are wild assumptions; must check at some point.
Thursday, 29 July 2010
How to Evade Tax and Get Away With It
courtesy of Tescos
Cheap booze! Gotta love it, because it's booze and it's cheap.
However, there is something wrong with cheap booze; no, it's not the gangs of feral youths, pissed off their head from half a shandy who will undoubtably rape your mum given half the chance, or the £3b/year cost to the NHS.
No, it's worse: it's tax evasion, on a rampant scale, being aided-and-abetted by Tescos (and other supermarkets), those cheeky bastards!
See, most people would answer the above 'a quid'. And thats why most of us are poor.
Rich people would say 'it depends': on how much it costs to get that quid, how many quids you already have, how many pounds you need, when you're going to get the pound, and various other factors, one of which is how much tax you're going to have to pay on it.
For an example, lets change the tax rate to something less confusing than 17.5%: lets say that everything has a VAT of 10%, except booze, which has a duty of 50% instead.
Now, you earn £1 on bread, or clothes, or newspapers or bogroll or anything other than booze, and (ignoring production costs etc) that £1 is worth 90p to you, as 10% of it is tax actually, something that cost 90p before tax and that then takes a 10% tax would come to 99p, and to cost £1 after tax it's original value would have had to have been 91ish-pence, but fuck it I'm going to ignore that for the sake of simplicity
But, you earn £1 on booze, and it's only worth 50p to you, 'cos that's how much you get to keep after tax.
Obviously, then, a quid made on bread is worth more to you than a quid made on booze; it's less efficient to earn money on booze...
E.g., imagine you spend £3 on cider, and £3 on bog roll (cos cider gives me the squits): thats £1.50 Tesco keeps on cider, and £2.70 it keeps on bog roll, for a total of £6 received and an after-tax net income of £4.20.
"Bingo!" say the execs at Tescos, "we'll lower the price of booze and subsideze it with an increase across the board on other products".
So this is what happens: you're pleasantly suprized to find that you only have to spend £1 on the cider, then slightly miffed to have to spend £5.70 on bog roll, but you can't be arsed to buy your cider from one supermarket and your loo-roll from another, and anyway the total bill is still £6, so fuck it.
Tesco gets to keep 50p of that money spent on cider (after 50% duty) and £4.43 from the bogroll (after 10% VAT) for a total after-tax net income of £4.93, which is more than £4.20, so a win for Tescos by effectively transferring pounds from products where they would have to pay 50% tax to other products where they only have to pay 10% tax.
Those clever gits!
In fact, if you spread the increase thinly across products no-one will really notice that they're a bit more expensive, especially if Tescos shares some of this goodness with it's customers: e.g., for every pound lost due to cheapening the alcohol (that pound was only worth 50p to Tescos, remember), only 70p extra will be made on other goods (that's worth 63p to Tescos after 10% VAT), resulting in us customers paying 70p more on other goods for every £1 less spent on booze, for a net saving to us of 30p for every pound we would have spent on booze whilst Tescos make 13p more per pound-we-would-have-spent-on-booze.
OK, the end result is cheaper overall prices for us customers, and higher net income for Tescos, with the added benifit that they can attract customers with the promise of lower booze. Everybody wins!
Except the government; because this scheme works by avoiding (or, you could say, evading) the duty (also known as tax) on alcohol, the government misses out on some tax revenue at a time when it reeeeeeeally needs money and probably isn't in a mood to tolerate what amounts to large-scale tax-evasion being co-ordinated by the supermarkets.
Of course, this is a sticky situation for the government. Times are tough, and we want to save money and quite like the option of getting pissed every now and again with our mates on the cheap. The government are being blamed for times being tough and don't want to piss us off. Yet, the government effectively has to tell us that either taxes are going up to compensate for this new, exciting, world in which Tescos helps us evade tax, or we're going to have to lose our only-recently-aquired cheap booze. "Boo!" either way.
So, here's what I think is going to happen.
The government are going to approach newspapers and say that they will grant interviews with high-level figures, invite the reporters to all their meetings, and give them sound-bites from the PM, BUT only if they tow the 'cheap booze is bad' line. Any newspapers caught trying to point out that 'mostly drunk teens don't rape peoples mothers' or 'if you increase the price of booze beyond the point where youths can afford, some of them might get jobs ohwaittheyarentallowedto they might start nicking stuff to buy booze' won't get invited to the press conferences or granted interviews with Officer Highup, and therefore will have a harder time actually writing articles.
So, furnished with Official Figures given to them in interviews with Important People, we get articles like the one I linked to earlier, bemoaning the cost of alcohol to the NHS whilst carefully avoiding mentioning that the £3 billion/year cost is easily off-set by the in excess of £7 billion/year claimed in alcohol duty so that the government will keep talking to them and giving them a hand writing their articles
(btw, that source: download the XL spreadsheet, and it's in tab A2, 7.278 UOM in the period 04-05 from alcohol where UOM = Units Of Mystery, which are only refered to as being 'in real terms'; from tab A1b, which is measured in £millions, a quick addition confirms a total from-alcohol-duty income of somewhat in excess of £7billion)
So, my prediction is:
So, in summary, the government will manipulate the media into manufacturing a demand for less cheap booze, and then pass minimum-price laws so that they can carry on taxing us for something that they know we won't give up. The bastards.
Cheap booze! Gotta love it, because it's booze and it's cheap.
However, there is something wrong with cheap booze; no, it's not the gangs of feral youths, pissed off their head from half a shandy who will undoubtably rape your mum given half the chance, or the £3b/year cost to the NHS.
No, it's worse: it's tax evasion, on a rampant scale, being aided-and-abetted by Tescos (and other supermarkets), those cheeky bastards!
How much is £1 worth?
See, most people would answer the above 'a quid'. And thats why most of us are poor.
Rich people would say 'it depends': on how much it costs to get that quid, how many quids you already have, how many pounds you need, when you're going to get the pound, and various other factors, one of which is how much tax you're going to have to pay on it.
For an example, lets change the tax rate to something less confusing than 17.5%: lets say that everything has a VAT of 10%, except booze, which has a duty of 50% instead.
Now, you earn £1 on bread, or clothes, or newspapers or bogroll or anything other than booze, and (ignoring production costs etc) that £1 is worth 90p to you, as 10% of it is tax actually, something that cost 90p before tax and that then takes a 10% tax would come to 99p, and to cost £1 after tax it's original value would have had to have been 91ish-pence, but fuck it I'm going to ignore that for the sake of simplicity
But, you earn £1 on booze, and it's only worth 50p to you, 'cos that's how much you get to keep after tax.
Obviously, then, a quid made on bread is worth more to you than a quid made on booze; it's less efficient to earn money on booze...
E.g., imagine you spend £3 on cider, and £3 on bog roll (cos cider gives me the squits): thats £1.50 Tesco keeps on cider, and £2.70 it keeps on bog roll, for a total of £6 received and an after-tax net income of £4.20.
"Bingo!" say the execs at Tescos, "we'll lower the price of booze and subsideze it with an increase across the board on other products".
So this is what happens: you're pleasantly suprized to find that you only have to spend £1 on the cider, then slightly miffed to have to spend £5.70 on bog roll, but you can't be arsed to buy your cider from one supermarket and your loo-roll from another, and anyway the total bill is still £6, so fuck it.
Tesco gets to keep 50p of that money spent on cider (after 50% duty) and £4.43 from the bogroll (after 10% VAT) for a total after-tax net income of £4.93, which is more than £4.20, so a win for Tescos by effectively transferring pounds from products where they would have to pay 50% tax to other products where they only have to pay 10% tax.
Those clever gits!
In fact, if you spread the increase thinly across products no-one will really notice that they're a bit more expensive, especially if Tescos shares some of this goodness with it's customers: e.g., for every pound lost due to cheapening the alcohol (that pound was only worth 50p to Tescos, remember), only 70p extra will be made on other goods (that's worth 63p to Tescos after 10% VAT), resulting in us customers paying 70p more on other goods for every £1 less spent on booze, for a net saving to us of 30p for every pound we would have spent on booze whilst Tescos make 13p more per pound-we-would-have-spent-on-booze.
What?
OK, the end result is cheaper overall prices for us customers, and higher net income for Tescos, with the added benifit that they can attract customers with the promise of lower booze. Everybody wins!
Except the government; because this scheme works by avoiding (or, you could say, evading) the duty (also known as tax) on alcohol, the government misses out on some tax revenue at a time when it reeeeeeeally needs money and probably isn't in a mood to tolerate what amounts to large-scale tax-evasion being co-ordinated by the supermarkets.
No, counter-intuitively enough, you DON'T like cheap booze (this statement sanctioned by the government)
Of course, this is a sticky situation for the government. Times are tough, and we want to save money and quite like the option of getting pissed every now and again with our mates on the cheap. The government are being blamed for times being tough and don't want to piss us off. Yet, the government effectively has to tell us that either taxes are going up to compensate for this new, exciting, world in which Tescos helps us evade tax, or we're going to have to lose our only-recently-aquired cheap booze. "Boo!" either way.
So, here's what I think is going to happen.
The government are going to approach newspapers and say that they will grant interviews with high-level figures, invite the reporters to all their meetings, and give them sound-bites from the PM, BUT only if they tow the 'cheap booze is bad' line. Any newspapers caught trying to point out that 'mostly drunk teens don't rape peoples mothers' or 'if you increase the price of booze beyond the point where youths can afford, some of them might get jobs ohwaittheyarentallowedto they might start nicking stuff to buy booze' won't get invited to the press conferences or granted interviews with Officer Highup, and therefore will have a harder time actually writing articles.
So, furnished with Official Figures given to them in interviews with Important People, we get articles like the one I linked to earlier, bemoaning the cost of alcohol to the NHS whilst carefully avoiding mentioning that the £3 billion/year cost is easily off-set by the in excess of £7 billion/year claimed in alcohol duty so that the government will keep talking to them and giving them a hand writing their articles
(btw, that source: download the XL spreadsheet, and it's in tab A2, 7.278 UOM in the period 04-05 from alcohol where UOM = Units Of Mystery, which are only refered to as being 'in real terms'; from tab A1b, which is measured in £millions, a quick addition confirms a total from-alcohol-duty income of somewhat in excess of £7billion)
So, my prediction is:
- an increase in newspaper articles mentioning:
- The total cost of alcohol to the NHS and thus taxpayer, and how this could be avoided if only alcohol cost less, thus discouraging 'binge drinking'
- emotive examples of a small number of crimes committed by people who had binge-drunk, followed by figures of total number and/or cost of alcohol-related crimes, subtly implying that all alcohol-related crimes were committed by people pissed out of their heads because they'd binge-drunk cheap booze from Tescos
- shocking stories, with emotive details, or how Johhny Teen raped someones cat 'because he was pissed', probably with Wild Speculation as to how many feral youths might rape our cats if they can afford a bottle of scrumpy (answer: ALL OF THEM!)
- Expert Opinion from Experts in the Alcohol Business (i.e., landlords) who's completely unbiased opinion which they're offering for free as a service to society is that Tescos selling cheap booze is a Bad Thing
- whilst religiously avoiding mentioning
- the fact that, according to the government, alcohol duty is more than alcohol's cost to society, effectively admitting that duty isn't an exercise in internalization so that we don't blithely overspend, but rather an exercise in taxing us a lot on our hobbies because we won't exactly stop doing it and therefore because they can, the cunts
- suggesting that if someone goes out and gets pissed and beats someone up, they're probably just an arsehole who likes both beating people up and getting pissed, and if he couldn't afford to drink he'd probably just beat someone up, steal their money, buy booze, and then beat someone else up for fun
- finishing the stories that a nice police representative helped you write by answering all your questions with 'but then he got pissed in a pub, not off of cheap supermarket booze, so it's kind of irrelevent', or with anything other than 'therefore cheap booze is bad boo!'
- mentioning inconvenient facts about the crime stats, such as 'the person who binge-drinks 27 pints and is still capable of beating someone up is an exception, not a representative example of people who commit crime whilst drunk
- suggesting that some, let alone most, underage drinkers don't commit crimes (except underage drinking)'
- sarcastically focusing on 'unintended consequences', such as people who are too young to legally work stealing to buy expensive alcohol, or a likely increase in illegally imported booze in response to it's rise in price
- pointing out that the landlords probably are biased by a cheap stay-at-home-where-you-can-smoke competitor
- relatedly: interviewing the brewers to see what they think
- Culminating in a Sun/Express 'campaign' to 'save us from the horrors of cheap booze'
- A compliant government, democratically bowing to our demands and passing minimum-price laws
- but not on spirits, that's what they drink
tl; dr?
So, in summary, the government will manipulate the media into manufacturing a demand for less cheap booze, and then pass minimum-price laws so that they can carry on taxing us for something that they know we won't give up. The bastards.
Friday, 23 July 2010
Alternative Votes
Would you like us to ignore you like this, or like that?
The basic idea behind alternative voting is that if a party doesn't get enough votes to get elected, then their voters will be able to have their votes transfered to an 'alternative' preference; in other words, you can now try to vote lib-dem, and when that doesn't work, you can have your vote transfered to another party.
Sounds cool, no?
No.
See, the parties that drop out first are the smaller ones. So, you can vote for the green party, or the BNP, or the Monster Raving Loony party, and you can even vote "green OR IF THEY DON'T GET IN monster raving loony OR FAILING THAT I'D LIKE MY VOTE TO BE TRANSFERRED TO ukip" or whatever... but these small parties, catering, democratically enough, to what some people want, will always be 'knocked out' and silenced, and your vote will be transferred elsewhere, bouncing around from party-that-isn't-going-to-be-given-any-power to party-that-isn't-going-to-be-given-any-power.
Until it reaches one of the big three, in which case it'll 'get stuck there' as those parties -- Lib Dem, Lab, and Con -- are too big to be knocked out. If they are, it'll be right at the end so your vote will ONLY be transferred to another big party or ignored.
Rather than wasting your vote, AV steals it; unless you don't vote for one of the big 3 at all, in which case AV will waste your vote anyway.
An example:
Lets say you vote like this, with your choices ranked in order of preference:
1 green party
2 yellow party
3 red party
4 lib dem
5 monster raving loony party
6 conservative
0 BNP
0 UKIP
Now, lets say the results of the vote are like this:
26% Labour
25% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
5% yellow
4% UKIP
3% green <-- your vote is here
2% BNP
1% red
0% ignored
OK, what happens first is that the red party, having lost, gets knocked out and it's votes redistributed. for the sake of example, lets assume that every single red voter wanted yellow as their second choice.
26% Labour
25% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
6% yellow +1%
4% UKIP
3% green <-- your vote is here
2% BNP
0% red -1%
0% ignored
Now the BNP get knocked out. lets say half the BNP had UKIP as their second choice, whilst the others had conservatives down as number 2.
26% Labour
26% Conservative +1%
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
6% yellow
5% UKIP +1%
3% green <-- your vote is here
0% BNP -2%
0% red
0% ignored
Now... aww, nuts. it's your number 1 choice, the green party that gets knocked out... not to worry, your vote is transferred, right?
Your vote is transferred to your number 2 choice, the yellow party. And, lets say for simplicity that every other green voter also wanted yellow as their second choice:
26% Labour
26% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
9% yellow +3% <-- your vote is here
5% UKIP
0% green -3%
0% BNP
0% red
0% ignored
Horray, my vote wasn't wasted! Now UKIP go out. lets just say that their voters didn't have a second preference, so their votes are now dropped:
26% Labour
26% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
9% yellow <-- your vote is here
0% UKIP -5%
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
5% ignored +5%
Aww... your second choice goes out now. Your vote now would go to your third choice, red, but they're out of the running. So, instead, it goes to your 4th choice, Lib Dem. lets say there's quite a lot of variety amongst the yellow voters as to who is next best:
28% Labour +2%
28% Conservative +2%
26% Lib-Dem +2% <-- your vote is here
12% monster raving loony +2%
0% yellow -9%
0% UKIP
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
6% ignored +1%
Hmm... that 'quite a lot of variety' has rendered down into 'four parties' 'cos the others have been knocked out; apart from 1% of the voters, who are now, therefore, not having their votes counted.
Now MRLP goes bye-byes, and also has a variety of next choices:
32% Labour +4%
32% Conservative +4%
30% Lib-Dem +4% <-- your vote is here
0% monster raving loony -12%
0% yellow
0% UKIP
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
6% ignored
Note that the big three are collecting all the votes (even tho there are a variety of next choices, they -- being big -- are the only ones left not knocked out)
Now it's lib-dem getting knocked out, and your vote being transfered again; 2/3rds of the lib-dem voters prefer conservative over labour, 1/6th prefer labour over con, and the other 1/6 don't like either and so will be ignored. Note that 'prefer conservative over labour' might mean that they have many inbetween preferences, but they're being ignored as all the other parties have been knocked out:
37% Labour +5%
52% Conservative +20% <-- your vote is here
0% Lib-Dem -30%
0% monster raving loony
0% yellow
0% UKIP
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
11% ignored +5%
And the conservatives win!
But... wait... your vote ended up at your last choice. In fact, conservative could easily be most voters last choice. And if you didn't like either Lab or Con, your vote would have been ignored!
What's happening is that, by knocking out the smaller parties first, you almost guarantee that everyones' vote will end up with labour, conservative, lib-dem, or ignored.
This is another way of forcing us to 'choose' one of the big parties,
The only good things about it? There's a fractional chance that one of the non-big-three will actually win (fat chance, but slightly better than under FPTP); and Lib-Dem might actually win and therefore give us the Single Transferable Vote system (much better)
Tho why we can't just say that, in the above example, labour get 26% of the vote, cons get 25, etc. etc. and your party (green) get 3% of the vote -- i.e., why can't we have a directly proportional system -- is beyond me.
As an example of how it can go completely wrong, imagine everyone had put the red party as it's second choice: they'd be clearly the best choice to be in charge, but -- having so few 1st preferences -- they'd have been knocked out in the first round and end up with 0% of the votes.
Also imagine if most people would like any party other than the big three, but can't agree which one. That's right: rather than the AV system determining which one gets power, it will instead steal any votes that it can and transfer them to Lab, Con, or Lib-Dem, or if the voter refuses to co-operate and doesn't rank Lab, Lib-Dem or Con, it'll ignore their vote.
Electoral-reform.org.uk
Beeb
The basic idea behind alternative voting is that if a party doesn't get enough votes to get elected, then their voters will be able to have their votes transfered to an 'alternative' preference; in other words, you can now try to vote lib-dem, and when that doesn't work, you can have your vote transfered to another party.
Sounds cool, no?
No.
See, the parties that drop out first are the smaller ones. So, you can vote for the green party, or the BNP, or the Monster Raving Loony party, and you can even vote "green OR IF THEY DON'T GET IN monster raving loony OR FAILING THAT I'D LIKE MY VOTE TO BE TRANSFERRED TO ukip" or whatever... but these small parties, catering, democratically enough, to what some people want, will always be 'knocked out' and silenced, and your vote will be transferred elsewhere, bouncing around from party-that-isn't-going-to-be-given-any-power to party-that-isn't-going-to-be-given-any-power.
Until it reaches one of the big three, in which case it'll 'get stuck there' as those parties -- Lib Dem, Lab, and Con -- are too big to be knocked out. If they are, it'll be right at the end so your vote will ONLY be transferred to another big party or ignored.
Rather than wasting your vote, AV steals it; unless you don't vote for one of the big 3 at all, in which case AV will waste your vote anyway.
An example:
Lets say you vote like this, with your choices ranked in order of preference:
1 green party
2 yellow party
3 red party
4 lib dem
5 monster raving loony party
6 conservative
0 BNP
0 UKIP
Now, lets say the results of the vote are like this:
26% Labour
25% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
5% yellow
4% UKIP
3% green <-- your vote is here
2% BNP
1% red
0% ignored
OK, what happens first is that the red party, having lost, gets knocked out and it's votes redistributed. for the sake of example, lets assume that every single red voter wanted yellow as their second choice.
26% Labour
25% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
6% yellow +1%
4% UKIP
3% green <-- your vote is here
2% BNP
0% red -1%
0% ignored
Now the BNP get knocked out. lets say half the BNP had UKIP as their second choice, whilst the others had conservatives down as number 2.
26% Labour
26% Conservative +1%
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
6% yellow
5% UKIP +1%
3% green <-- your vote is here
0% BNP -2%
0% red
0% ignored
Now... aww, nuts. it's your number 1 choice, the green party that gets knocked out... not to worry, your vote is transferred, right?
Your vote is transferred to your number 2 choice, the yellow party. And, lets say for simplicity that every other green voter also wanted yellow as their second choice:
26% Labour
26% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
9% yellow +3% <-- your vote is here
5% UKIP
0% green -3%
0% BNP
0% red
0% ignored
Horray, my vote wasn't wasted! Now UKIP go out. lets just say that their voters didn't have a second preference, so their votes are now dropped:
26% Labour
26% Conservative
24% Lib-Dem
10% monster raving loony
9% yellow <-- your vote is here
0% UKIP -5%
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
5% ignored +5%
Aww... your second choice goes out now. Your vote now would go to your third choice, red, but they're out of the running. So, instead, it goes to your 4th choice, Lib Dem. lets say there's quite a lot of variety amongst the yellow voters as to who is next best:
28% Labour +2%
28% Conservative +2%
26% Lib-Dem +2% <-- your vote is here
12% monster raving loony +2%
0% yellow -9%
0% UKIP
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
6% ignored +1%
Hmm... that 'quite a lot of variety' has rendered down into 'four parties' 'cos the others have been knocked out; apart from 1% of the voters, who are now, therefore, not having their votes counted.
Now MRLP goes bye-byes, and also has a variety of next choices:
32% Labour +4%
32% Conservative +4%
30% Lib-Dem +4% <-- your vote is here
0% monster raving loony -12%
0% yellow
0% UKIP
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
6% ignored
Note that the big three are collecting all the votes (even tho there are a variety of next choices, they -- being big -- are the only ones left not knocked out)
Now it's lib-dem getting knocked out, and your vote being transfered again; 2/3rds of the lib-dem voters prefer conservative over labour, 1/6th prefer labour over con, and the other 1/6 don't like either and so will be ignored. Note that 'prefer conservative over labour' might mean that they have many inbetween preferences, but they're being ignored as all the other parties have been knocked out:
37% Labour +5%
52% Conservative +20% <-- your vote is here
0% Lib-Dem -30%
0% monster raving loony
0% yellow
0% UKIP
0% green
0% BNP
0% red
11% ignored +5%
And the conservatives win!
But... wait... your vote ended up at your last choice. In fact, conservative could easily be most voters last choice. And if you didn't like either Lab or Con, your vote would have been ignored!
What's happening is that, by knocking out the smaller parties first, you almost guarantee that everyones' vote will end up with labour, conservative, lib-dem, or ignored.
Short Version
This is another way of forcing us to 'choose' one of the big parties,
The only good things about it? There's a fractional chance that one of the non-big-three will actually win (fat chance, but slightly better than under FPTP); and Lib-Dem might actually win and therefore give us the Single Transferable Vote system (much better)
Tho why we can't just say that, in the above example, labour get 26% of the vote, cons get 25, etc. etc. and your party (green) get 3% of the vote -- i.e., why can't we have a directly proportional system -- is beyond me.
Completely wrong
As an example of how it can go completely wrong, imagine everyone had put the red party as it's second choice: they'd be clearly the best choice to be in charge, but -- having so few 1st preferences -- they'd have been knocked out in the first round and end up with 0% of the votes.
Also imagine if most people would like any party other than the big three, but can't agree which one. That's right: rather than the AV system determining which one gets power, it will instead steal any votes that it can and transfer them to Lab, Con, or Lib-Dem, or if the voter refuses to co-operate and doesn't rank Lab, Lib-Dem or Con, it'll ignore their vote.
More
Electoral-reform.org.uk
Beeb
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Freedom of Choice*
(*offer is limited to one free choice per customer per election. Other terms and conditions apply)
Ok, so last time I waffled about Simpsons Paradox, and how it can result in skew-if results. However, there's another significant implication of the whole dividing-and-counting-per-constituency malarkey that we've got going on, and that's wasted votes.
The way it works is like this: basically, either Labour or Conservative are going to get elected, and that's that: the chances of a hung parliament are slim enough to more-or-less ignore.
The result? Well, lets imagine a hypothetical situation in which someone dislikes Labour, and really wants to kick them out. Their preference would be for -- I dunno -- lets say Lib-Dem for the sake of example.
The person has TWO parts to their vote:
Now, both parts would seemingly be satisfied by voting for Lib-Dem, but for the fact that Lib-Dem won't get elected, will they? So, in actual fact, because Lib-Dem have an appalling votes --> power conversion rate, and because the electoral system tends to grant a majority to either Labour or Conservatives thus rendering any power that the Lib-Dems actually get rather moot (Labour don't need to ally/co-operate with any other party, so the non-Labour MPs at the moment are collectively powerless), Lib-Dem's votes tend to be wasted and so voting for them strangely enough isn't actually a very good idea if you hold the above two objectives.
However, there is one -- and and only one -- alternative, and that is to treat a vote for the Conservative party as a vote for 'not Labour'. This is actually your only option if you hold the above objectives, as it at least accurately gets across the 'not Labour' part of your desires.
The system we have, therefore, limits our choices:
These issues all have something to do with the whole 'splitting country up into constituencies' thing: were it not for that, there'd be no wasted votes; no party would likely get a majority, forcing them to form alliances and thus making the votes/power of the parties that came in 3rd, 4th etc place still important and possibly the extra x% of the vote that an alliance need to form a majority; given this, there'd actually be the freedom to form and vote for new parties, thus allowing us a greater freedom of choice when it comes to who will represent us, and thus greater freedom to vote on a wider range of issues.
Or, in other words, there's no reason why someone couldn't start a party with Labour's environmental policies and the Conservatives' policies on crime, and then there'd be no reason not to vote for this party; if they don't 'win', that's ok, they can team up with Labour on environmental issues and the Conservatives on issues of law and order, so the fact they only got 5% of the national vote doesn't result in those votes being 'wasted'. At the moment, by making it all-or-nothing, any party that tries that will find no-one voting for them 'cos they don't want their votes to be wasted on a party that doesn't get elected (which of course will be because no-one votes for them... because they don't want their votes wasted on a party that won't get in because no-one's going to vote for them... etc.).
The disproportionality of the electoral system results in 'wasted votes', and the 'fear' of wasting your vote stops you from voting for a party that's not likely to win, amplifying the disinclination of our electoral system to elect any party other than Lab' or Con'.
This drastically limits our choice, i.e. to Labour or Conservative; and in the issues that Lab' and Con' agree on, our choice is effectively non-existent. Which is hardly democratic.
Ok, so last time I waffled about Simpsons Paradox, and how it can result in skew-if results. However, there's another significant implication of the whole dividing-and-counting-per-constituency malarkey that we've got going on, and that's wasted votes.
The way it works is like this: basically, either Labour or Conservative are going to get elected, and that's that: the chances of a hung parliament are slim enough to more-or-less ignore.
The result? Well, lets imagine a hypothetical situation in which someone dislikes Labour, and really wants to kick them out. Their preference would be for -- I dunno -- lets say Lib-Dem for the sake of example.
The person has TWO parts to their vote:
- Do not want Labour
- Do want Lib-Dem
Now, both parts would seemingly be satisfied by voting for Lib-Dem, but for the fact that Lib-Dem won't get elected, will they? So, in actual fact, because Lib-Dem have an appalling votes --> power conversion rate, and because the electoral system tends to grant a majority to either Labour or Conservatives thus rendering any power that the Lib-Dems actually get rather moot (Labour don't need to ally/co-operate with any other party, so the non-Labour MPs at the moment are collectively powerless), Lib-Dem's votes tend to be wasted and so voting for them strangely enough isn't actually a very good idea if you hold the above two objectives.
However, there is one -- and and only one -- alternative, and that is to treat a vote for the Conservative party as a vote for 'not Labour'. This is actually your only option if you hold the above objectives, as it at least accurately gets across the 'not Labour' part of your desires.
The system we have, therefore, limits our choices:
- We can choose to be ruled by Labour or Conservative, but we can't choose any other party
- We can choose on the issues that Labour and Conservative disagree on (right now, for example, electoral reform) but NOT on anything they agree on (they both want tax to stay the same? Then tax stays the same, and we have no say in the matter)
- We can choose on one of the issues they disagree on: like Labour's environmental policies but the Conservatives' policy on crime? Tough, choose one and only one issue; choose Labour or Conservatives
- We can choose between city and country: do you vote in your Labour MP who you think will do good for your city, or the Conservative MP that will help the Conservatives gain control of the country?
These issues all have something to do with the whole 'splitting country up into constituencies' thing: were it not for that, there'd be no wasted votes; no party would likely get a majority, forcing them to form alliances and thus making the votes/power of the parties that came in 3rd, 4th etc place still important and possibly the extra x% of the vote that an alliance need to form a majority; given this, there'd actually be the freedom to form and vote for new parties, thus allowing us a greater freedom of choice when it comes to who will represent us, and thus greater freedom to vote on a wider range of issues.
Or, in other words, there's no reason why someone couldn't start a party with Labour's environmental policies and the Conservatives' policies on crime, and then there'd be no reason not to vote for this party; if they don't 'win', that's ok, they can team up with Labour on environmental issues and the Conservatives on issues of law and order, so the fact they only got 5% of the national vote doesn't result in those votes being 'wasted'. At the moment, by making it all-or-nothing, any party that tries that will find no-one voting for them 'cos they don't want their votes to be wasted on a party that doesn't get elected (which of course will be because no-one votes for them... because they don't want their votes wasted on a party that won't get in because no-one's going to vote for them... etc.).
tl; dr?
The disproportionality of the electoral system results in 'wasted votes', and the 'fear' of wasting your vote stops you from voting for a party that's not likely to win, amplifying the disinclination of our electoral system to elect any party other than Lab' or Con'.
This drastically limits our choice, i.e. to Labour or Conservative; and in the issues that Lab' and Con' agree on, our choice is effectively non-existent. Which is hardly democratic.
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Electoral Systems 101
The illusion of control
I had a post on the proposed Alternative Voting System, but it was too gargantuan for me to bother fact-checking, so I'm breaking it up into parts.
Gerrymandering is the act of changing constituency borders in order to change the result.
Simply illustrated, take the following group of people, geographically distributed with one blob of Conservative voters up north, and a blob of Labour voters down south:
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
CLCLC
LLCCL
LLCLL
LLLLL
LLLLL
Now lets see where the constituency boundaries are:
CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
----------- constituency boundary
CCCCC
CCLCC 1 Conservative MP
CLCLC
----------- constituency boundary
LLCCL
LLCLL 1 Labour MP
LLLLL
LLLLL
1 Labour
2 Conservative
"That's no good", think Labour, who happen to be in power; "lets change the boundaries":
CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
----------- constituency boundary
CLCLC
LLCCL 1 Labour MP
LLCLL
----------- constituency boundary
LLLLL
LLLLL 1 Labour MP
2 Labour
1 Conservative
Or simply:
CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
----------- constituency boundary
CLCLC
LLCCL
LLCLL 1 Labour MP
LLLLL
LLLLL
1 Labour
1 Conservative
Note that in neither case did the actual votes change, just the boundaries (and, thus, the number of MPs elected for each party).
It was apparently used a lot Northern Ireland, in an attempt to stifle separatist parties, and in the UK we have an allegedly indipendant boundaries commission to set the boundaries, supposedly to prevent gerrymandering.
Nonetheless, if you want people to assume they've got control and live in a democracy whilst still maintaining power yourself, gerrymandering should be in your vocabulary.
I had a post on the proposed Alternative Voting System, but it was too gargantuan for me to bother fact-checking, so I'm breaking it up into parts.
Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering is the act of changing constituency borders in order to change the result.
Simply illustrated, take the following group of people, geographically distributed with one blob of Conservative voters up north, and a blob of Labour voters down south:
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
CLCLC
LLCCL
LLCLL
LLLLL
LLLLL
Now lets see where the constituency boundaries are:
CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
----------- constituency boundary
CCCCC
CCLCC 1 Conservative MP
CLCLC
----------- constituency boundary
LLCCL
LLCLL 1 Labour MP
LLLLL
LLLLL
1 Labour
2 Conservative
"That's no good", think Labour, who happen to be in power; "lets change the boundaries":
CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
----------- constituency boundary
CLCLC
LLCCL 1 Labour MP
LLCLL
----------- constituency boundary
LLLLL
LLLLL 1 Labour MP
2 Labour
1 Conservative
Or simply:
CCCCC
CCCCC 1 Conservative MP
CCCCC
CCCCC
CCLCC
----------- constituency boundary
CLCLC
LLCCL
LLCLL 1 Labour MP
LLLLL
LLLLL
1 Labour
1 Conservative
Note that in neither case did the actual votes change, just the boundaries (and, thus, the number of MPs elected for each party).
It was apparently used a lot Northern Ireland, in an attempt to stifle separatist parties, and in the UK we have an allegedly indipendant boundaries commission to set the boundaries, supposedly to prevent gerrymandering.
Nonetheless, if you want people to assume they've got control and live in a democracy whilst still maintaining power yourself, gerrymandering should be in your vocabulary.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Criminomics 102
Or: how to maintain a secret-service branch on the cheap
Put yourself in the position of a secret-service high-up.
You've been given a big task: you're to create an organization that can achieve 'things' within the UK. These things will be 'ground-work': the actual 'doing stuff' leg-work that exerts small-scale, local influence which, if carefully applied (to, e.g., politicians, police-chiefs, etc) could have useful larger-scale effects. Your organization will work with other departments (psyops/propaganda, political, economical, military, etc) in order to exert influence within the UK.
The exact specifications are:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff: espionage, entrapment/framing, bribery, forgery of documents, theft, breaking-and-bugging, kidnap, torture, blackmail, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, manufacturing stuff; finances (movement of cash); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives; etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary.
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not traceable back to us) and be as cheap as possible.
Now, the 'cheap as possible' requirement kind of rules-out many potential approaches: armies of operatives spread thickly throughout the UK would cost a bomb and, anyway, it would kind of risk the 'deniable' requirement.
A much better idea is to pass 'stupid' laws.
See, illegalizing cannabis, for example, contributes to the profitability (and thus sustainability/maintenance) of the UK criminal infrastructure. It funds illegal transportation networks, and criminal gangs. Cocaine does likewize, and also makes it financially viable for 'organized crime' to maintain some (at least small and basic) chemical manufacturing plants. All drugs contribute to the profitability of crime, and thus facilitates criminals bribing police officers for information.
Patent laws lead to forgery, which includes stuff like, e.g., televisions: make a sub-par TV that just-about works, slap a 'sony' label on it, and sell it above what it's worth, and you get 'organized crime' maintaining electronic-equipment factories and the skilled electronics and machining experts who are required to set up the factories.
Obviously, chuck thieves and thugs, forgers and whores in there too, as they're all illegal. And, for every law that pushes more 'economics' into the hands of the organized criminals, and -- given that even the 'victimless criminals' such as prostitutes can't really go to the police -- there's more and more demand (and more and more money available) for organized crime's 'police' -- People Who Go Have Words With People, People Who Break Other People's Legs, People Who Kill People...
Mostly staffed by People Who Do Things For Money, and administrated by People Who Know People...
Lets look at the requirements of our organization again:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff:
espionage; breaking-and-bugging: Pay the more-skilled thieves to break and enter, and plant bugs (the bugs can be manufactured by the patent infringers in bulk, or the people who design their factories in small numbers, or by the gov. and then smuggled in by the drug smugglers); use the police/etc contacts for internal information.
entrapment/framing/blackmail: whores and drug-dealers would be good for this. 'Got caught snorting coke off of two whores breasts' makes an awful headline, don't'cha think... as does anything relating to whores or drugs, tbh.
bribery: of officials? drug-dealers, crime-lords, etc, already do so for early-warning of raids and 'accidentally' losing evidence. Of other people, you just need the money and someone to go make the offer.
Forgery of documents: forgers
theft: theives
kidnap, torture, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing: organized crime is quite versatile enough to get all of these things done, given sufficient money, and half of those things are done by their 'police'.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, (drug smugglers mainly) manufacturing stuff (patent infringers; drug-makers for chemical stuff); finances (have their own trust-based money-moving systems, and money-laundering too); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives (the 'leaders'); etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary (umm... yes).
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not tracable back to us, criminals take the blame) and be as cheap as possible (no maintenance costs, simply pay on an as-needed basis).
Bloody cheap way of doing it. You just need to make sure that the criminal infrastructure remains strong. That's easy, just illegalize enough that they have a crapload of stuff to do and make money off of, and ignore all arguments based on 'makes organized crime more powerful' and police badly ('zero tolerance' policing, for example, leads to more and more people not being able to go to the police == more power for organized crime; underfunding would work too).
Now you have a branch of the secret service that can do the 'ground-work' cheaply. No one who matters will get hurt.
On the down-side you'll have to constantly fend off 'hippy liberals' who want to decriminalize stuff, and you'll have to play silly-buggers with the organized criminals so that they don't get too powerful (maybe arrest the leaders who try to unite the gangs, and leave the more conflicty bosses in charge to keep the society less cohesive?), not to mention that others could, in theory, use this system against you; but on the plus it's a method that can be applied to other countries as well, as long as you can put enough influence on them to pass organized-crime-friendly laws and have enough money to be 'the highest bidder' when it matters.
If we assume that the secret service desires a large, deniable network of people who can get local-scale dodgy stuff done in order to exert control, with its own supporting infrastructure (e.g., logistics) and all on the cheap, then organized crime doesn't half fit that need well...
Also, it works to exert influence on foreign countries as well, as long as you can influence them enough to get an organized-crime friendly set of laws passed.
Therefore, our arguably stupid approach to law and order (especially conceptual crimes) may well not be so stupid, if you assume they're supposed to promote, rather than suppress, crime (especially organized crime).
Put yourself in the position of a secret-service high-up.
You've been given a big task: you're to create an organization that can achieve 'things' within the UK. These things will be 'ground-work': the actual 'doing stuff' leg-work that exerts small-scale, local influence which, if carefully applied (to, e.g., politicians, police-chiefs, etc) could have useful larger-scale effects. Your organization will work with other departments (psyops/propaganda, political, economical, military, etc) in order to exert influence within the UK.
The exact specifications are:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff: espionage, entrapment/framing, bribery, forgery of documents, theft, breaking-and-bugging, kidnap, torture, blackmail, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, manufacturing stuff; finances (movement of cash); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives; etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary.
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not traceable back to us) and be as cheap as possible.
Now, the 'cheap as possible' requirement kind of rules-out many potential approaches: armies of operatives spread thickly throughout the UK would cost a bomb and, anyway, it would kind of risk the 'deniable' requirement.
A much better idea is to pass 'stupid' laws.
See, illegalizing cannabis, for example, contributes to the profitability (and thus sustainability/maintenance) of the UK criminal infrastructure. It funds illegal transportation networks, and criminal gangs. Cocaine does likewize, and also makes it financially viable for 'organized crime' to maintain some (at least small and basic) chemical manufacturing plants. All drugs contribute to the profitability of crime, and thus facilitates criminals bribing police officers for information.
Patent laws lead to forgery, which includes stuff like, e.g., televisions: make a sub-par TV that just-about works, slap a 'sony' label on it, and sell it above what it's worth, and you get 'organized crime' maintaining electronic-equipment factories and the skilled electronics and machining experts who are required to set up the factories.
Obviously, chuck thieves and thugs, forgers and whores in there too, as they're all illegal. And, for every law that pushes more 'economics' into the hands of the organized criminals, and -- given that even the 'victimless criminals' such as prostitutes can't really go to the police -- there's more and more demand (and more and more money available) for organized crime's 'police' -- People Who Go Have Words With People, People Who Break Other People's Legs, People Who Kill People...
Mostly staffed by People Who Do Things For Money, and administrated by People Who Know People...
Lets look at the requirements of our organization again:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff:
espionage; breaking-and-bugging: Pay the more-skilled thieves to break and enter, and plant bugs (the bugs can be manufactured by the patent infringers in bulk, or the people who design their factories in small numbers, or by the gov. and then smuggled in by the drug smugglers); use the police/etc contacts for internal information.
entrapment/framing/blackmail: whores and drug-dealers would be good for this. 'Got caught snorting coke off of two whores breasts' makes an awful headline, don't'cha think... as does anything relating to whores or drugs, tbh.
bribery: of officials? drug-dealers, crime-lords, etc, already do so for early-warning of raids and 'accidentally' losing evidence. Of other people, you just need the money and someone to go make the offer.
Forgery of documents: forgers
theft: theives
kidnap, torture, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing: organized crime is quite versatile enough to get all of these things done, given sufficient money, and half of those things are done by their 'police'.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, (drug smugglers mainly) manufacturing stuff (patent infringers; drug-makers for chemical stuff); finances (have their own trust-based money-moving systems, and money-laundering too); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives (the 'leaders'); etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary (umm... yes).
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not tracable back to us, criminals take the blame) and be as cheap as possible (no maintenance costs, simply pay on an as-needed basis).
Bloody cheap way of doing it. You just need to make sure that the criminal infrastructure remains strong. That's easy, just illegalize enough that they have a crapload of stuff to do and make money off of, and ignore all arguments based on 'makes organized crime more powerful' and police badly ('zero tolerance' policing, for example, leads to more and more people not being able to go to the police == more power for organized crime; underfunding would work too).
Now you have a branch of the secret service that can do the 'ground-work' cheaply. No one who matters will get hurt.
On the down-side you'll have to constantly fend off 'hippy liberals' who want to decriminalize stuff, and you'll have to play silly-buggers with the organized criminals so that they don't get too powerful (maybe arrest the leaders who try to unite the gangs, and leave the more conflicty bosses in charge to keep the society less cohesive?), not to mention that others could, in theory, use this system against you; but on the plus it's a method that can be applied to other countries as well, as long as you can put enough influence on them to pass organized-crime-friendly laws and have enough money to be 'the highest bidder' when it matters.
tl; dr?
If we assume that the secret service desires a large, deniable network of people who can get local-scale dodgy stuff done in order to exert control, with its own supporting infrastructure (e.g., logistics) and all on the cheap, then organized crime doesn't half fit that need well...
Also, it works to exert influence on foreign countries as well, as long as you can influence them enough to get an organized-crime friendly set of laws passed.
Therefore, our arguably stupid approach to law and order (especially conceptual crimes) may well not be so stupid, if you assume they're supposed to promote, rather than suppress, crime (especially organized crime).
Friday, 22 January 2010
Crimonomics 101
Really obvious stuff about economics and the black-market
Lets take John Smith. John likes drinking beer. So, John has several problems:
Now, people have sprung up to solve John's problems: brewers make beer, land-lords store beer and maintain a nice drinking environment, and taxi drivers will ferry you to and from the pub. They'll do all this under the assumption that you'll give them money. Pretty much economics 101.
Now lets take Druggy McCokehead. Druggy likes snorting coke. So, Druggy has several problems, pretty similar to John's: for a start, he needs cocaine.
Again, people will have sprung up to solve Druggy's problems. A taxi-driver might ferry him to and from his local drug-dealer, who stocks cocaine for him.
If you have a problem, and are willing to sacrifice money to get it fixed, there will be people available to fix your problem, whatever it is. Economics 101.
Similarly, there's infrastructure for other problem-solvers. Take the person who solves John's beer-problem: he'll need a way of getting the beer from the brewers to his pub, hence there's a transportation infrastructure. Some of these transporters might address clients/goods with special requirements: maybe those goods are perishable and thus require cooling/freezing whilst being transported, or maybe the goods need to be hidden and transported covertly because armies of big men with sticks are out to find and confiscate the goods. Either way, there will be people willing to solve your transportation needs... for money.
Similarly, John's land-lord might, in his quest to provide an enjoyable drinking environment, encounter the problem of violent drunks; if he can't, or doesn't want to, solve this on his own, there are bouncers who will solve his crowd-control problems for him. For money.
And, in the worst case, if the problem can be summed up as 'so-and-so is being a problem for me and the people who's problems I solve', there's always lawyers and/or the police (or bouncers).
Exactly the same exists within the black market. As a support-service for out-sourcing the problems that you encounter whilst trying to solve other people's problems, there are available:
The latter one consists of:
People who stand there looking intimidating (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who physically remove someone from the premises (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who go and have a word with people (police, lawyers, 'heavies')
People who go and have a stern word with people (police, lawyers, people who break legs for money)
People who remove other people from the equasion. (police & prison service, hit-men)
All for the same fundamental reason: if someone else has a problem, and you will solve it, there's money in it for you. OK, granted, police are done socialistically via tax, but whatever, I'm mainly focusing on the black-market equivalent here.
Both legal and illegal economies also have people who know what's going on and wander round organising stuff, whether they're called managers or crime-lords.
And there's much, much more to the criminal infrastructure. Coke-dealers, for example, quite often give discounts and are friendly to any of their customers who happen to be taxi-drivers or police, because taxi-drivers tend to go everywhere (so make passable 'spies' and relatively inconspicuous traffickers) and pigs have inside information on 'the enemy', for example; a successful coke dealer often moonlights as an information broker.
My point? Just that problems beg solutions, and that if you have both problems and money, you will have people solving the former for the latter. Laws create crimes not only in the strait-forward 'this is illegal now so everone who does it is a criminal' sense, and not only in the 'criminalising coke creates coke-dealers as well as coke-takers' sense, but also in the 'each law contributes to the existence and financing of the organized criminal infrastructure' sense.
Now... this is all relatively obvious. And the main point of this blog is to force me to write stuff down, and thus check it (in fact, I'm relatively sure I don't have any readers, but whatever). So, the next part of this avenue of thought will come later, when I've checked some (relatively mundane) facts.
Lets take John Smith. John likes drinking beer. So, John has several problems:
- He needs beer
- He needs a nice place to drink the beer
- He needs to get to and from the place where he drinks beer (as he'll be drunk, the normal solution -- driving his car -- might not be appropriate)
Now, people have sprung up to solve John's problems: brewers make beer, land-lords store beer and maintain a nice drinking environment, and taxi drivers will ferry you to and from the pub. They'll do all this under the assumption that you'll give them money. Pretty much economics 101.
Now lets take Druggy McCokehead. Druggy likes snorting coke. So, Druggy has several problems, pretty similar to John's: for a start, he needs cocaine.
Again, people will have sprung up to solve Druggy's problems. A taxi-driver might ferry him to and from his local drug-dealer, who stocks cocaine for him.
If you have a problem, and are willing to sacrifice money to get it fixed, there will be people available to fix your problem, whatever it is. Economics 101.
Similarly, there's infrastructure for other problem-solvers. Take the person who solves John's beer-problem: he'll need a way of getting the beer from the brewers to his pub, hence there's a transportation infrastructure. Some of these transporters might address clients/goods with special requirements: maybe those goods are perishable and thus require cooling/freezing whilst being transported, or maybe the goods need to be hidden and transported covertly because armies of big men with sticks are out to find and confiscate the goods. Either way, there will be people willing to solve your transportation needs... for money.
Similarly, John's land-lord might, in his quest to provide an enjoyable drinking environment, encounter the problem of violent drunks; if he can't, or doesn't want to, solve this on his own, there are bouncers who will solve his crowd-control problems for him. For money.
And, in the worst case, if the problem can be summed up as 'so-and-so is being a problem for me and the people who's problems I solve', there's always lawyers and/or the police (or bouncers).
Exactly the same exists within the black market. As a support-service for out-sourcing the problems that you encounter whilst trying to solve other people's problems, there are available:
- People who move things from A to B
- People who store things
- People who get things
- People who make things
- People who stop other people from being a problem
The latter one consists of:
People who stand there looking intimidating (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who physically remove someone from the premises (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who go and have a word with people (police, lawyers, 'heavies')
People who go and have a stern word with people (police, lawyers, people who break legs for money)
People who remove other people from the equasion. (police & prison service, hit-men)
All for the same fundamental reason: if someone else has a problem, and you will solve it, there's money in it for you. OK, granted, police are done socialistically via tax, but whatever, I'm mainly focusing on the black-market equivalent here.
Both legal and illegal economies also have people who know what's going on and wander round organising stuff, whether they're called managers or crime-lords.
And there's much, much more to the criminal infrastructure. Coke-dealers, for example, quite often give discounts and are friendly to any of their customers who happen to be taxi-drivers or police, because taxi-drivers tend to go everywhere (so make passable 'spies' and relatively inconspicuous traffickers) and pigs have inside information on 'the enemy', for example; a successful coke dealer often moonlights as an information broker.
My point? Just that problems beg solutions, and that if you have both problems and money, you will have people solving the former for the latter. Laws create crimes not only in the strait-forward 'this is illegal now so everone who does it is a criminal' sense, and not only in the 'criminalising coke creates coke-dealers as well as coke-takers' sense, but also in the 'each law contributes to the existence and financing of the organized criminal infrastructure' sense.
Now... this is all relatively obvious. And the main point of this blog is to force me to write stuff down, and thus check it (in fact, I'm relatively sure I don't have any readers, but whatever). So, the next part of this avenue of thought will come later, when I've checked some (relatively mundane) facts.
tl; dr?
- Criminals are people who do things.
- They do all sorts of things, including boring logistical stuff like moving shit and killing people.
- They do this for money.
- Obviously.
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Nice weather for it
Random observation:
When the UK introduced the smoking ban, I honestly expected lots of people to just simply disregard it. Yet they did not, at least not in the pubs that I drink in (which aren't ruff as shit, but aren't exactly upper-class or anything).
It might have something to do with when the ban was introduced, which was July.
A few facts about July[1]:
It's one of the hottest months, as are August and September.
It gets dark later than most months, as do August and September.
It's drier than most months, as are August and September.
June is also a nice month weather-wize, but not as hot, gets darker a bit earlier, and is wetter.
Had the government introduced the law in, say, November, I'm sure that more people would have smoked inside: new law, pissing it down, bugger that lets just smoke inside, fuck off pigs, etc.
A semi-detailed assessment of this plan is quite interesting:
Strait-off the bat, lots of people would have resisted: you have three months to allow them to rack-up enough warnings to justify a 'final warning', and during these three months most people won't resist as they don't mind going outside too much in nice weather.
Three months later, you've got a new set of rebels as the weather has turned bad, BUT these people cannot rely on the support of the original (instantly-rebellious) people, as their landlords have earned their 'final warning'. This is less draconian than actually legislating that a land-lord will instantly lose his licence on his first offence, but acts the same for a large number of land-lords when it counts, i.e. they've reached that point when the weather turns bad and lots of other land-lords are considering rebelling.
Hence, you get a smaller group resisting when the weather turns bad. You've now got a few months before it starts snowing to ensure that this group is also 'fairly' given a few warnings, so that, come the snow, the number of pubs that say 'bollocks to that, it's snowing, just smoke inside' is much smaller than you'd expect.
In other words, it divides and conquers the pubs by allowing land-lords to resist, and get to the draconian 'do it and you'll have your licence (i.e., livelyhood) revoked' point, in spurts rather than all at once.
By giving the land lords a few warnings (when the gov' can afford to be light-handed, i.e. before the next group of people start resisting) the gov' appear fair and less heavy-handed, even tho forcing compliance by threatening -- at the right time -- to take away their licence if they disobey even one (more) time is an integral part of the plan: when it matters -- when their resistance would have an effect because they'd be resisting with many other people -- they can't, because doing so would result in an insta-ban. But, if called on it, the gov' can say 'we gave them numerous warnings' and seem fair...
Now, had they spent about 5 months obeying, but trying to whip up support against the ban, then all resisted at once in December, maybe people wouldn't have accepted the law just because it had been 'unchallenged' for 5 months, and there'd have been a lot more people resisting at once...
Or, y'know, if the government had tried to pass this law in November... which is probably why they didn't.
When the UK introduced the smoking ban, I honestly expected lots of people to just simply disregard it. Yet they did not, at least not in the pubs that I drink in (which aren't ruff as shit, but aren't exactly upper-class or anything).
It might have something to do with when the ban was introduced, which was July.
A few facts about July[1]:
It's one of the hottest months, as are August and September.
It gets dark later than most months, as do August and September.
It's drier than most months, as are August and September.
June is also a nice month weather-wize, but not as hot, gets darker a bit earlier, and is wetter.
Had the government introduced the law in, say, November, I'm sure that more people would have smoked inside: new law, pissing it down, bugger that lets just smoke inside, fuck off pigs, etc.
A semi-detailed assessment of this plan is quite interesting:
Strait-off the bat, lots of people would have resisted: you have three months to allow them to rack-up enough warnings to justify a 'final warning', and during these three months most people won't resist as they don't mind going outside too much in nice weather.
Three months later, you've got a new set of rebels as the weather has turned bad, BUT these people cannot rely on the support of the original (instantly-rebellious) people, as their landlords have earned their 'final warning'. This is less draconian than actually legislating that a land-lord will instantly lose his licence on his first offence, but acts the same for a large number of land-lords when it counts, i.e. they've reached that point when the weather turns bad and lots of other land-lords are considering rebelling.
Hence, you get a smaller group resisting when the weather turns bad. You've now got a few months before it starts snowing to ensure that this group is also 'fairly' given a few warnings, so that, come the snow, the number of pubs that say 'bollocks to that, it's snowing, just smoke inside' is much smaller than you'd expect.
In other words, it divides and conquers the pubs by allowing land-lords to resist, and get to the draconian 'do it and you'll have your licence (i.e., livelyhood) revoked' point, in spurts rather than all at once.
By giving the land lords a few warnings (when the gov' can afford to be light-handed, i.e. before the next group of people start resisting) the gov' appear fair and less heavy-handed, even tho forcing compliance by threatening -- at the right time -- to take away their licence if they disobey even one (more) time is an integral part of the plan: when it matters -- when their resistance would have an effect because they'd be resisting with many other people -- they can't, because doing so would result in an insta-ban. But, if called on it, the gov' can say 'we gave them numerous warnings' and seem fair...
Now, had they spent about 5 months obeying, but trying to whip up support against the ban, then all resisted at once in December, maybe people wouldn't have accepted the law just because it had been 'unchallenged' for 5 months, and there'd have been a lot more people resisting at once...
Or, y'know, if the government had tried to pass this law in November... which is probably why they didn't.
Thursday, 3 December 2009
ID cards
IMO = In My Opinion; IANAL = I Am Not A Lawyer; tl;dr: = too long; didn't read (i.e., what follows is a summary)
A little insight into how the government seems to work:
ID cards aren't exactly the most popular idea the government's ever come up with: whether the complaints are cost, over-authoritarianism, or the government's track-record for looking after our data, the idea seems quite unpopular.
Yet, it's being rolled out — currently[1] on a 'voluntary' basis.
A few tricks the government is using to 'encourage' us to adopt ID cards:
Divide and conquer
Of course, no-one likes immigrants, and so no-one complained when they were given compulsory ID cards.
I'm sure no-one will complain when other 'jews of today' are forced to adopt ID cards:
Opt-out tax
Thinking of going to Spain for your holidays, but need to renew your passport?
Well, maybe the government could interest you in a cheaper alternative? Why pay £77.50 on a new passport when £30 will get you an ID card, which will allow you to travel to EU countries?
Given that the government could surcharge or subsidize either of these government-issued licences as much as they want, the fact that the one the gov' want you to have is cheaper than the one they don't is not a coincidense.
Compulsory volunteering
Far more sneakily IMO: the alternative to voluntarily carrying ID is choosing to go without ID — and alcohol and fags.
At the same time as the ID cards were being slyly implimented:
Note that, in a few years, this will result in several young adults who have had a few years' experience carrying ID, and who may object less to the idea of it being made compulsory.
I suppose the next logical step — other than making challenge 21 (25? 30?) outright compulsory — would be to 'fix' the 'oversight' of a previous (less authoritarian) government, by making it obligatory to carry driving licences whilst driving (currently, the police may issue you with an order to produce it at a station within 7 days), meaning that there's one more thing that you can 'volunteer' to go without if you wish to decline the 'voluntary' ID card scheme.
And that seems to be how the government are sneakily implementing ID cards, bit-by-bit.
(By-the-way: there's a difference between 'an ID card' and 'the ID cards' of the government's ID-card scheme: the latter involves a national database of data, including biometric data; I'm just thinking that getting in the habbit of carrying normal ID-cards would be a step towards the acceptance of the national ID-card scheme).
I'm curious as to the exact reasons why (presumably) it wouldn't work to simply refuse, en mass, to co-operate... but that's enough for today.
===========
[1] http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/en/ukpgaen_20060015_en_1; part 4 and section 7, or ctrl+F and search for 'compulsory'.
A little insight into how the government seems to work:
ID cards aren't exactly the most popular idea the government's ever come up with: whether the complaints are cost, over-authoritarianism, or the government's track-record for looking after our data, the idea seems quite unpopular.
Yet, it's being rolled out — currently[1] on a 'voluntary' basis.
A few tricks the government is using to 'encourage' us to adopt ID cards:
Divide and conquer
Of course, no-one likes immigrants, and so no-one complained when they were given compulsory ID cards.
I'm sure no-one will complain when other 'jews of today' are forced to adopt ID cards:
- Paedophiles (or at lest the potential paedophiles that are teachers)
- Students
- Unemployed (to 'combat benefit fraud')
- Terrorists (or maybe not)
Opt-out tax
Thinking of going to Spain for your holidays, but need to renew your passport?
Well, maybe the government could interest you in a cheaper alternative? Why pay £77.50 on a new passport when £30 will get you an ID card, which will allow you to travel to EU countries?
Given that the government could surcharge or subsidize either of these government-issued licences as much as they want, the fact that the one the gov' want you to have is cheaper than the one they don't is not a coincidense.
Compulsory volunteering
Far more sneakily IMO: the alternative to voluntarily carrying ID is choosing to go without ID — and alcohol and fags.
At the same time as the ID cards were being slyly implimented:
- The government 'unrelatedly' amended the Licencing Act (the amendments made by sections 23 and 24 of the Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006 seem to be the culprits, but IANAL), granting the police new powers to order to 'combat violent crime' (caused by underage drunkards).
- The police use said powers in order to crack down on under-age sales (so as to 'crack down on violent crime').
- The government release some advice on how to avoid losing your licence (tl;dr: adopt challenge 21|25 scheme).
- In fear of their trade, alcohol retailers started adopting challenge 21|25 schemes.
Note that, in a few years, this will result in several young adults who have had a few years' experience carrying ID, and who may object less to the idea of it being made compulsory.
I suppose the next logical step — other than making challenge 21 (25? 30?) outright compulsory — would be to 'fix' the 'oversight' of a previous (less authoritarian) government, by making it obligatory to carry driving licences whilst driving (currently, the police may issue you with an order to produce it at a station within 7 days), meaning that there's one more thing that you can 'volunteer' to go without if you wish to decline the 'voluntary' ID card scheme.
And that seems to be how the government are sneakily implementing ID cards, bit-by-bit.
(By-the-way: there's a difference between 'an ID card' and 'the ID cards' of the government's ID-card scheme: the latter involves a national database of data, including biometric data; I'm just thinking that getting in the habbit of carrying normal ID-cards would be a step towards the acceptance of the national ID-card scheme).
I'm curious as to the exact reasons why (presumably) it wouldn't work to simply refuse, en mass, to co-operate... but that's enough for today.
===========
[1] http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/en/ukpgaen_20060015_en_1; part 4 and section 7, or ctrl+F and search for 'compulsory'.
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