Politics

Anyone familiar with computer games will have come across Halo for the XBox and PC, it's a fantastic on-line multi-player extravaganza which is instantly addictive to FPS fans. Red .vs. Blue is a cartoon spin-off of the game is itself proving very popular.

What brought this to mind?

Well the news today is that the Yanks dropped a bomb on our front-line troops in Afganistan, killing 3 and badly wounding another 2 - this was referred to an a Blue on Blue incident.

So I'm wondering, is this entertainment mirroring real life, or are we starting to get military terminology from the computer game industry?

Much has been made over the odd case of friendly-fire over the last few years, but it's quite difficult to keep track of how many such incidents there are. I recall one in particular where a US fighter plane took out one of our armored personnel carriers and they ended up showing the cockpit recording on the news.

I can't help thinking that (as an avid computer game fan) I would have been more careful about where the laser guided bomb went, than the Yank in the cockpit controlling the live rounds.

British Commander ask Yanks (politely) to bugger off!

There is an article in the Scotsman this month that claims a British commander has asked the US military to withdraw its special forces from his area because the high level of civilian casualties they have caused is turning people against coalition soldiers.

So, you've got to think that either they don't care who and how many they shoot, or that their methods of shooting are a little inaccurate (to say the least). Now the Americans would have the world believe that they can control the delivery of explosives from aircraft with pin-point accuracy, so where exactly does that leave us?

Jenny21 from Queens seems to have hit the nail on the head, her comment was "The NYPD shoots civilians, why should the Afghans get special treatment ...?". It seems they are "used" to shooting first and asking question later ...

Living in hope

One does wonder wether old Bushy will get along with our new PM.

I suspect not.

So, we live in hope that one of George's stray bombs will rid us of the most dangerous man in British politics.. I guess you'd call that a Blue on Brown incident!

I was told a story a little while back, by a local council employee, about how the tendering system works from the perspective of both the council and prospective vendors. He seemed to think that vendors were managing to get "IT" contracts running with the council, failing to deliver on time, claiming specifications had changed, then either calling for contractual compensation for having the contract canceled, OR, demanding more money to finish the contract as initially agreed.

At the time I thought it was a great story, from the vendors point of view brilliant if you could pull it off, especially as the government seems to piss money away on IT projects without a second thought, but surely just a story.

Or is it ...

I has heard 'similar' stories about a company called EDS and generally wrote them off as Urban Legend, but the more I hear, the more I wonder.

There's an interesting piece on The Register today about the government's Offender tracking system, which was apparently estimated to cost £234 million. However, it seems that the final bill is now looking like it will be more like £950 million, which is quite a change.

And if course it gets better, if they cancel the project, they get to pay £50 million compensation!

Hell, is it me, or is this just a jumped up database?!

With 80,000 criminals to track, they're looking at £12k per criminal, talk about the cost of crime!

I'm wondering what would have happened if that money had been spent on projects to keep people from offending in the first place .. and I'm also wondering exactly what sort of database requires that sort of price tag. I can't think of much that you couldn't implement with £1m, let alone £950m!

Personally I'm inclined to think they should  be putting money into building new facilities, hiring more staff, and looking at ways of keeping people out. Then have someone knock up a little web based system in MySQL that everyone can use it'll probably do the job quite happily.

Anyone got a list of government projects that have been serviced by EDS - I've love to see their track record ...

I recently found a web site offering up government and local council tenders, wonderful idea, apparently all institutions needs to offer any work over £25,000 to anyone who wants to tender for it. Apparently there's lots of work out there, mostly stuff that's priced around 10x more than it's actually worth, really juicy work .. one might think.

There is however a catch.

It seems that although they 'have' to offer up all work to Tender, who they pick to do that work is then down to the individuals responsible for specifying the jobs. The people specifying the jobs get to supply as much detail as they want, hence it's possibly to issue a specification that only one company / product can service.

Smelling a rat yet?

There I am, all innocent sending off an application in triplicate (written, email and verbal) , sat there waiting with baited breath thinking that we're in with a chance of obtaining a nice chunk of work. Hah! The response - "we don't think your company is suitable".

Hang on, the initial round was simply requesting companies express an interest in servicing the bid, there really wasn't enough information on the reply to solicit an "unsuitable" response.

Final destination

A quick phone call yielded a "we're looking for an off-the-shelf package", possibly a slip of the tongue as nothing in the specification indicated that the potential vendor already had to have written the software. Also followed by a "don't have time to wait for software to be developed" , along with a far more detailed specification - which was strangely missing from the initial request for Tender.

Could it be they already picked a product and vendor, but were "required" to issue a request for Tender? In this particular instance, with the facts that I have, I'm convinced that this particular instance was a case of "we have to have 'that' software, but we have to offer it for tender 'cos those are the rules".

Stupidity

So how stupid a system is that! First you make the department who needs to make a purchase go through a tendering process, then you waste the time of other companies who are trying to bid for a contract they can never win!

Bureaucracy at it's worst?

No, but bloody annoying. Checks and Balances, anything to stop contracts being awarded to Golf buddies in the same way? Well, I'm sort of under the impression that this is what the rules were designed to protect against. It seems that all they've succeeded in doing it removing the audit function once contracts have been awarded .. unless there's an audit function that remains hidden somewhere.

I'm making enquiries, we shall see .. in the meantime you'll find me down at the Golf school ...

Did anyone notice when the news stopped being the news? Was it an overnight switch or a gradual process? I can't help thinking it was a gradual process otherwise I'm hoping I would have noticed before now.

On the news this morning, they had apparently closed a Motorway as the result of a major accident in which a motorcyclist was shot! Well, as a biker I watched and listened with interest, it's not a common occurrence these days, bikers being involved in trouble, much less shot.

Anyway, up flashes a notice at the bottom of the screen saying;

Police say the shooting may be gang related

What what a complete and utter load of bull, talk about making it up as you go along!

How can I say that? Well, at the time I was watching them interview the head copper on-site, who wasn't giving too much away, but was disclosing the basics.

Everyone's a hell's Angel

Apparently this weekend saw the "Bulldog Bash", Europe's top biker "party" that happens every year pulling in over 20,000 bikers from all over Europe, typically without incident. Why without incident? who knows, but it would be true to say that the sort of people who can buy and ride nice bikes these days tend to have a reasonable amount of money and are not the sort of people who can afford to spend any sort of time behind bars - have you seen the price of insurance premiums these days if you have a clean license and no record?!

Anyway, the news presenter asks; "So, do you think this incident was gang related?" and the copper says "Well anything is possible, we really have no idea at this stage".

And there it is again at the bottom of the screen, apparently the police say that it might be gang related.

So, how exactly do we get from "anything is possible" to "the police think is might be gang related"? Well, I'm sure that someone has spoken to a copper with more information and it really will be gang related and the copper on-site isn't up to speed ... yes?

Well a quick look at the web site reveals that "Police have said they do not believe it was a road rage attack." .. yet "anything is possible".

Is it possible that the police keep releasing stupid comments, or could it be as demonstrated live that the police say one thing and the news reports twist in on it's head to make it 'more interesting'.

Not your sat there thinking "yeah, Sky, artistic license, it's what you expect" .. nope, this is all the BBC! I WANT MY LICENSE FEE BACK!

It's been a long running dispute. Do you put your money into property, shares, or simply a high interest bank account. Apparently all the smart-money has been going into property, which I guess has contributed to hugely over-inflated house prices and a distinct lack of housing for people who want to buy.

Now I've been sitting here looking at the price of my house, which apparently has increased in value by 2.5x in the last 8 years - and I simply don't believe it.

Let's just say for the sake of argument you have a property that's valued at £400k, going by normal calculations (3.5x salary) that would require a salary of £115k in order to get a full mortgage.

Now, you look around the estate and all 150 houses are in the £300k-£450k range, where exactly are we going to get 150 people with salaries in that bracket. Simply not happening, which means that you're limited to people who already have equity.

Now, take the 200,000 people per year who are leaving the country. I appreciate there will be a mix of people here, but something tells me that a fair few will be going to Canada, America and Australia. Which means that they will be relatively skilled and not too badly off .. (not to mention all the people buying properties abroad and retiring there)

This has "got" to deplete the sources of people with equity, so surely we're going to run out of people in this "top-band"?

If this is the case, the top band pricing is going to have to drop, in which case the next level will have to drop, and so on. So I've been waiting for the drop for some time, and I guess I'm still waiting, however ...

Northern Rock

Didn't think much of the announcement last week (that it had to refer to the Bank of England for cash) and indeed it wouldn't have worried me even if I had money there. However after watching the queues outside NR branches over the last few days - if I had money there, I'd be queuing too (at this point).

As I understand it, building societies take savings from people, and lend those savings to others to buy houses. (in the form of mortgages) They then get interest payments back from the house buyers, some of which goes back to the people with savings, and the rest goes to the building society as profit.

Generally, if they run short of cash, it's not a problem as the equity they effectively own in terms of secured mortgages should be more than enough to cover any shortfalls. So long of course the value of the property they've lent against is actually *still* worth the amount secured.

If on the other hand the value of houses has dropped substantially between the point the money was lent and the point where the value of the property needed to be realised, then the house buyers could end up with substantial amounts of negative equity. If these amounts are large enough, house buyers will simply file for bankrupcy leaving the building societies holding the bag.

So what happens ..

If NR have to either call in some mortgages or sell them on to other lenders in order to re-acquire cash to pay all the people who are now screaming for their money.

Well, the housing market is fairly flat anyway at the moment and you would expect other lender to want a bit if a discount to take properties of their hands .. so you can probably expect a re-valuation followed by a bit of a hit on each property for NR, yes?

Depending on how much NR have in terms of equity reserves, I'm guessing this might leave them short?

Not the end by any means ..

Trouble is that anyone who's bought a house in the last few years has probably paid massively over the odds, so there are probably *lots* of other building societies (and Banks!) out there who are probably rather more exposed than they want to be .. wanna put your money in their hands?

Interest!

Then of course, the more difficult it is to get "cash" (NR's initial problem) the more people with the cash are going to want to charge in terms of interest rates.

So for the last decade we've been floating on Gordon's economic raft, oblivious to the fact it's been carrying us way higher than we had any right to be. So now we're right at the top of the tank, there's only one way to go. The only question is, will the water drain away slowly, or will it instantaneously vanish, leaving us with a 100ft drop into the darkness ... !

Is it not interesting to look at events in Iraq over the last few years and note that the governments and journalists use the term "war"?

Using a historical context, I generally assume war to mean one of two things. Either a nation defending itself from attack, or a nation attacking another for material gain of some sort. In either event, the aim of the soldiers who fight in that war is to kill any combatants they find who support the other side.

I don't recall any historical "wars" where the intention was to spend a lot of money to take over a nation and them immediately give everything back to the people you've just beaten ...

I mean, for kick off, going to war costs a lot of money (and lives), so how come we spent many billions of pounds going to war and then, after winning, walked away without trying to recoup at least some of that expense?

As a Tax payer I'm a little pissed of about this.

If I were a soldier, an injured soldier or a soldier's widow, I'd be wanting to know why we weren't extracting compensation for those involved before walking away .. instead of some of the things I hear about the way the armed forces are treated. Whatever happened to the quote; "to the winners go the spoils" ?

What is a soldier?

On top of that, you've got to ask .. historically you might consider a soldier to be an aggressive character, trained to fight wars and kill people.

If this is not true, technically we may have a problem in the event of a war.

If it is true, then why are we using people who are so trained as a "peace keeping" force?

Maybe we should be using an International Police force instead of the army, that is of course if we just want to sent our people across to be target practice for terrorists.

But they have rights!

You can't fight a war against people and give them rights at the same time, unless of course those people as a nation accept those rights and provide a mutual agreement that they will give you those same rights.

The Geneva convention for example, because that's worked so well in the past .. at least when the parties concerned have felt like following the rules.

So ...

If the British government are going to fight a war, then fight the sodding war!

If they're going to fight Iraq, then do it. If they're going to pussyfoot around and effectively lead our soldier through mine fields and in front of Iraqi firing squads then (a) they should get the hell out and (b) the people responsible should be sent in the place.

Let's have Tony wandering around Basra with a machine gun and we'll see how good an idea he things going to "war" was.

Did you support the War?

Initially, yes.

It was said Saddam had Nukes and Bio's, taking them off him seemed to be sensible.

The advert was "war" and not "peacekeeping" aka not paying to get your asses shot off.

If you buy a beer, take it home, open it and start drinking it .. then discover the contents are not what's shown on the tin .. say it's vinegar instead of beer, do you;

• Keep drinking it because you've paid for it
• Pour it down the sink and throw the can in the bin
• Take it back to the off-license and demand a refund
• Take it back to the off-license and stuff it down the owners throat

??

Anyway, it seems like we're drinking vinegar.

I have this strange feeling that Tony and his cronies should be drinking it instead!