Layman's Logic

Snopes, the people who debunk urban legends and chain mail, have a Christmas quiz up. Go try it. (I got 50%, which I'll claim to be quite good...)

It turns out some acquaintances of mine weren't aware that Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and font of wisdom, was damn fool enough to send money to a Nigerian scam e-mail. So I'd just like to point out that if you hear ANYTHING from her on human nature, etc, in future, assume she's a little below par on that...

Oh, and if you bother following the link, note how she blames it (mostly) on Bush.... Not quite a Fisk-esque "I'd have ripped myself off", but close...

Part one and part two of a discussion of how defence contracting work make for interesting (for some) reading. Part three will address Dick Cheney's old company directly - read the first two, then wait to see if you have ammo against them....

"Hark the harried cash tills ring!
Glory to the new bling-bling!
Parents buy brands for their child.
Kids and adults reconciled. "

I concur - what a great example:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

I love it when people save stuff I wanted to link. Andrew Sullivan does the honours -


"GALLOWAY AWARD NOMINEE (for thinly veiled disappointment at the capture of Saddam): "I'm a bit sad that it puts an end to this battle of David against Goliath. We must acknowledge that Saddam Hussein is a cunning, if not a talented leader. He may look defeated, tired, dejected but when you think of all the means deployed to get rid of him, it's just a tremendous achievement to have been able to survive." - BBC listener/viewer, Bernard Franck Dehlinger, Ris-Orangis, France. Where else?"

The Plymouth to Dakar rally. That's right, not Paris, but Plymouth. Competed for by cars that cost their proud owners less than £100.

"[T]o Julian Nowill [driving across seven countries in 20 days in a banger that costs less than £100] provides the perfect recipe for adventure.

Last year he set up the first Plymouth-Dakar rally, in which a convoy of seriously old bangers, mostly held together with gaffer tape and superglue, have to cross 3,700 miles and two continents. The rules are simple: the car must cost less than £100, pre-event preparation expenses are limited to £15, and once the rally is underway no outside support, mechanics or back-up trucks are allowed.

The organisers emphasise that “participants are on their own”. There are no official helpers to ease the way across tricky west African border posts, and the pre-rally publicity warns drivers there are no arrangements for medical emergencies or even to repatriate bodies should things go awry.

However, it seems the public’s thirst for something genuinely eccentric and adventurous is stronger than ever and the event is blossoming. In 12 days the second and much bigger rally will leave Britain. Last year 45 cars took part, this year there will be 141 and 500 people have already signed up for next year.
...
At the end of the three-week adventure the only other rule is that all the cars must be donated to charity, thus benefiting about 100 charities across Gambia, where they end up. The idea is that unlike the real rally which, according to Nowill, “rips through these countries and gives nothing back to them”, the country gets something in return.

The line-up for this year’s Plymouth-Dakar rally reads like the graveyard section of the small ads. Alongside the aforementioned 28-year-old Bedford ice-cream van is a 1982 Ford Cortina, a London taxi, a 1962 Ford Corsair, an A-Team replica van, an FSO Caro complete with rusty caravan and a shaky-sounding eastern bloc Moskvich 408.

Plucky contestants get their trusty heaps from a variety of imaginative sources, from scrapyards to hedgerows, as in the case of Nowill’s Lada Riva, which was abandoned in Devon but ran perfectly after a good cleaning.


The race route starts in Plymouth (because of its convenience for Nowill’s Devon home), traverses France, Spain and Gibraltar, and heads down to Morocco, the Sahara, Senegal and Gambia. Despite the larky atmosphere, the route is dangerous by any standards....

Then there are the miles of ground littered with landmines to negotiate, a stretch of the rally that has to be accompanied by an experienced guide.
...
Only five cars failed to make it to the finishing line last year — they were abandoned in the desert and their keys left to local guides. The winner was Paul Osbourne, a 32-year-old director of a management consultancy. He found his winning 1974 Hillman Hunter 1.8 languishing in a back garden, being used as a greenhouse with mushrooms growing out of it. However, somehow it completed the 4,000-mile journey without even stuttering.

“Most of the people along the way cheer and seem really supportive and curious about what we’re doing,” says Osbourne. “On reflection I suppose it was a bit dangerous but only in certain later sections, and anyway the exhilaration is priceless. You just have to relax, be quite chilled out, and you’ll enjoy it.”

The entry list for this year’s race is now closed, but for details of how to take part next year, see www.plymouth-dakar.co.uk"

"Viggo Mortensen estimates that, during the course of filming the entire trilogy and including all takes, he killed every stuntman on the production at least fifty times."

A chappie called Bern makes rather spiffing rugby shirts. Among his offerings are a few England RWC victory shirts. Here's the graphic from one of them (with match quotes on the back). Go buy one.

Having recently been galivanting around Australia (yes, it was very good, thanks), a thought struck me. One, I admit, prompted by the IT supplement in the Sydney Morning Herald, but still my thought:

"Surely Australia presents useful lessons on the future of outsourcing?"

Why, you may ask? Well, think location, location, location. Australia's only a couple of time-zones off the big outsoucing nations. Apparently, India's not really targetted them (though has won contracts), but there are options with the Phillipines, probably stuff further north in Asia, all around.

Lots of IT work has been lost off-shore from Oz, with great concern about there being a future in the industry. The rate of job losses does sound like Oz has little competitive future in standard IT processes, and this has produced something of a backlash

"Should Australia introduce anti-outsourcing laws? The answer was an overwhelming yes--approximately 98 percent of respondents to an IT Manager Australia survey welcomed some form of regulation
....
Valiant Wooi, a veteran IT professional with Asia-Pacific experience, said for the first time in his life, he visited the unemployment-benefits office because he simply could not obtain any work in Sydney, even on a contract basis.

Wooi, who has been on the job hunt for the last three months, said his next option was to relocate to Canberra for government-related technology positions.

"We need to create a union very quickly in order to be able to represent IT workers in Australia and we need to impose high tariffs on outsourcing to foreign countries...we need some protection and representation and I need my job back," Wooi said emphatically. "

However, there have been problems in the implementation of outsourcing as well (the type that has perhaps seen Dell bring work back on-shore to America), with problems arising in "cross-border project management, security [and] data management".

Nonetheless, the main reaction has apparently been to seek to renegotiate contracts rather than bring them to an end or bring work back into the original company.

This has turned outsourcing (and also importing Indian IT labour) into at least a minor political issue in Australia.

So far, so predictable. And sadly, this roundabout reaches the end of my investigative skills. But what would be really interesting would be for a journalist or two to put together a really good feature on the Australian experience, as it's likely to have pointers for what's to come for the rest of us. Things do seem further advanced than in the UK or US (with the trend having been a political issue for rather longer), and you'd think a paper somewhere would think this worthwhile...

I haven't really followed this "The Regans" thing - who really cares about what channel a show goes out on abroad. But this is funny, particularly the second....


Why the Regan show didn't go out