Bad politics and bad journalism

Based on votes counted so far: the great British press has decided that Nigel Farage has thoroughly trounced the Tories, and Labour has ceded ground to the Lib Dems by its vacillation.

This is stupid. Look at the numbers (for all of England and Wales - Scotland and Northern Ireland still to report, at time of writing), as compared with 2014. (All numbers below are expressed as a share of the total vote.)

The great "triumph" of the Brexit party, taking the plurality, has come overwhelmingly not from the Tories, but from the utter collapse of UKIP. That 33.3% of voters for Brexit needs to be balanced against 25.6% of voters deserting UKIP. The net gain to (Brexit plus UKIP combined) is a rather more modest 7.7%.

(As a bonus, the separation of the two parties has allowed the respectable Brexiters to distance themselves from the swivel-eyed bigots of UKIP, and a full 90% of their voters have taken the opportunity to do just that. Good for them.)

Now, granted 7.7% isn't nothing. But it's hardly a tsunami.

So of the 15.8% of voters deserting the Tories, we can say with confidence that less than half have switched to pro-Brexit parties. Which implies that what's disaffecting them is not the "failure to deliver Brexit".

Similarly, Labour's vote declined by 10.8% (of the electorate), but the Lib Dems' increased by 14%. Which implies that even if every single one of those Labour voters turned LD (and they didn't), there must still be a substantial number of defectors from other parties. In fact, those Labour defectors must be reckoned to include at least 2.5% going to Change UK, and probably at least half of the 4.6% swing toward the Greens - call it 2.3%. So the "Labour to Lib Dem" shift accounts for less than half of the Lib Dem's gain. The rest - fully 8% of the total electorate - must have come from the Tories.

I would go on to some regional analysis, but a quick glance makes me very doubtful that anything in those figures would change my mind.

Now, the Tories seem to think that if only they can deliver Brexit, all those Brexit and UKIP voters will return to the fold. But again, the numbers tell a different story. During UKIP's rise, it gained voters from both Labour and Tory ranks; there is no reason to imagine that if Brexit happened, and those parties evaporated together with their supposed raison d'etre, they would all flock back one way.

No, the real danger for them is that they will permanently lose the 20%-or-so of their party who have (provably) defected to the Lib Dems. If they press on with a hard Brexit, the Remainers will not forgive or forget that. It hurts to have your country sold out from under you.

For Labour, the message is clearer. If Corbyn can deliver a second referendum, the coalition of voters waiting to swing behind that is overwhelming - and even better, he'll frustrate the Tory plan to draw a line under the Brexit/UKIP insurgency. The Tories are suffering because they are torn apart by this issue. Labour doesn't have to be the same.

Dumb meters and dumber journalism

This post was inspired by a bunch of press coverage last month of a Dutch research paper, which found big differences between the measurement of certain "smart" meters and a regular (old-style) electromechanical meter. Here is one of the more sober reports. Choice quotes:

Smart meters are giving readings up to six times higher than the energy consumed by households when connected to energy-saving light bulbs, according to scientists.[...]

It is the first ever proof that smart meters, which the Government wants in every household by 2020 to improve the accuracy of people's energy bills, are producing readings which are too high.[...]

So called "green" devices such as energy saving light bulbs, heaters, LED bulbs and dimmers change the shape of electric currents which can result in a distorted reading, it said.

The whole article illustrated by a picture of a pensioner's hands, clutching on to the last of their meagre savings in front of a log fire. Heartrending stuff, obviously. But nothing on the really hysterical coverage:

Smart meters can give readings almost seven times higher than the actual electricity consumed – particularly in homes when energy-saving bulbs are used, a study found.

Modern devices including dimmer switches and LED bulbs can confuse some smart meters, leading to massively inflated readings and higher bills.

All this is based on a paper published in the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Magazine, from research conducted in the Netherlands. The University of Twente's press release is here, and the abstract is here. (In theory you can buy a PDF of the full paper for the modest donation of US$33, but the IEEE's portal defeated my best efforts to give them money. I eventually managed to read the paper from my local academic library.)

Now, the first thing to note about the above coverage is the heavy emphasis on household bills. The Telegraph article mentions the word "household" twice in the first three paragraphs, and backs it up with that scary picture. The Mail unabashedly talks about "homes" and "massively inflated readings and bills". But as even the paper abstract makes clear, it's not about household meters. Your average household has a single-phase electricity supply and a single-phase meter to go with it. Here is what the paper has to say about single-phase meters:

Several single-phase static energy meters were measured in various setups. [...] The results can be summarized in one sentence: no deviation beyond the specification could be observed; no influence of interference due to interfering or distorted voltage, and no influence caused by interfering currents were observed.

No, all the headline-grabbing results concern three-phase meters, generally used in large commercial and industrial premises. That poor old pensioner with the fire? Not affected. "Homes where energy-saving bulbs are used"? Not affected. (Well, to be completely accurate, it's not unheard-of for a home to have a three-phase supply. But unless you've got a welding station in your garage or something, it's pretty unlikely.) The household meters? - those took everything the researchers could throw at them, and ticked along like clockwork.

So, about those three-phase results. The Torygraph makes the connection to "So-called "green" devices such as energy saving light bulbs, heaters, LED bulbs and dimmers". In fact, to get the big anomalies, you need to be using both a dimmer switch, and energy saving (CFL/LED) bulbs - and not just a handful of them either, you need dozens of the things, all connected to the same dimmer switch. And then you need to turn the dimmer switch to 135°. If you leave the dimmer switch alone, or turn it to a mere 90°, you actually save money. Here is the, pardon the pun, money chart from the paper:

Dimmer	Meter	Resistive	CFL	CFL+LED	CFL+LED+Resistive
0°	SM1	-2%	-4%	-4%	-3%
	SM2	-3%	-9%	-11%	-3%
	SM3	-3%	-7%	-6%	-3%
	SM4	-3%	-7%	-6%	-4%
45°	SM1	-14%	0%	-4%	-16%
	SM2	-14%	6%	-5%	-16%
	SM3	-3%	7%	-8%	-3%
	SM4	-4%	7%	-6%	-3%
90°	SM1	5%	-46%	-52%	-40%
	SM2	5%	-46%	-53%	-40%
	SM3	-1%	3%	1%	-6%
	SM4	-2%	-26%	-28%	-20%
135°	SM1	122%	253%	169%	265%
	SM2	105%	268%	180%	276%
	SM3	-1%	-10%	-3%	-4%
	SM4	2%	-46%	-36%	-39%

So you need a three-phase meter and a whole lot of low-energy bulbs that are connected, in series, to a single dimmer switch that for some reason is permanently melted into position at 135°. And then you'll get inflated readings?

Well, maybe. It's still far from a sure thing, because only some three-phase meters show this effect - and the researchers, bizarrely, decline to name them. They do say that the offending meters use Rogowski coils (a century-old technology) for measurement. But no-one seems to know, and the researchers aren't telling, which meters those are.

Which brings me neatly to my topic for part 3 of this series: what really is wrong with smart meters. For now, what I can tell you for sure is that if your bill has gone up since you got a smart meter installed? - there is no reputable evidence to support the idea that it's the meter's fault.

Future lies ahead

Last week, we heard that the New Zealand Press Association is closing. One of its joint owners, Fairfax Media, is no longer willing to support it.

I find myself conflicted. On the one hand, I've been moaning about the quality of journalism in this country since I got here. (Honestly, it's pathetic.) But now I'm pretty sure it's about to get a whole lot worse.

To explain why, I'm going to have to go into a little context.

• Fairfax Media is an Australian-owned company that bought into the NZ newspaper business in 2003
• Fairfax owns the NZPA jointly with its (also Australian) rival APN
• Fairfax publishes the Dominion Post, Sunday Star Times, and a motley bag of local and suburban newspapers
• APN publishes the New Zealand Herald plus sundry other titles, and also owns a handful of widely promoted radio stations
• The NZPA, which has been in business for 130 years, provides news feeds indiscriminately to whoever will pay for them.

The important point to note here is that NZPA is a relic from the days of actual newspapers, whereas its owners are both modern transnational corporations.

But why should that matter? Give me a chance, I'm coming to it...

The reason Fairfax gives for taking its ball home is that it's not happy with the NZPA's output. "Often those stories aren't investigative, they're not stories carved out by the NZPA", says Fairfax's "Group Executive Editor", Paul Thompson.

But isn't that the point of an agency? They're supposed to provide facts, not "stories". Investigating, and writing stories, is the newspaper journalists' job. What an agency provides is the raw materials for this process.

There is, however, no money in facts. Facts aren't protected by copyright; it's impossible to 'own' them (barring a few special cases, such as trade secrets). The only type of information that you can monetise is the type you've made up.

And that's why the most successful media organisations of our time would rather not report news; they prefer "comment", "analysis" and outright fiction. Because we ask to the free market to provide our news, but - now that information is no longer tied to a physical object, or even a persistent medium - we have completely failed to provide any incentives for it.

And that's why Paul Thompson is, quite rationally, doing away with the supply of facts. Oh, I'm sure the decent journalists - of whom there are a few, although criminally overworked - will do their best to be truthful. But fact-checking takes time, which is in ever-shorter supply nowadays; and worse, it often derails the train of your story.

Much easier just to go with what seems likely. Worst case, if anyone calls you on it, it'll just drive more traffic to your website. Win-win.

(Incidentally, I saw this news story on TV3, owned by yet another Australian consortium. Oh well, at least none of them belongs to Rupert Murdoch.)

A question of lies

Has anyone but me noticed the very odd form of code that politicians speak, when talking about Libya?

There's "the Libyan army", which as far as anyone can tell consists mostly of mercenaries from Mali. There's the "rebel leadership", who seem to lack even the most basic qualification to lead anything, viz. a sense of their own aims.

(Hint, fellas: read this.)

There was Col Gadhaffi's "ceasefire" on 18 March, which was clearly a signal for "Finish them off quickly!"

When NATO, or whatever they're styling themselves currently, first started bombing, they said it was "to protect Libyan civilians from their own regime. Not, we must stress at length, not to force Colonel Gadhaffi out." So - after all the rejoicing at persuading the good colonel to give up on his weapons and terrorist training programmes, NATO was going to all this trouble to antagonise him, only to leave him in power to live out his days as "the man who beat NATO"? Yeah, right, and I've got this beautiful bridge to sell you...

A few days later, President Obama wanted to "hand over operational leadership from American to international authorities". And so, after days of trivial wrangling, the American operations commander signed over command to a NATO commander, who continued using the same (mostly American) planes and missiles to fly the same missions.

A couple of days ago, it was the African Union's turn to say what they clearly didn't mean. When they triumphantly announced that the regime had accepted their "ceasefire" proposal, it didn't take much of a visionary to foresee that the rebels would refuse it. And thus that this "proposal" had more to do with the need for the AU to be seen to be doing something - taking the initiative, not letting NATO have everything their own way - than stopping the fighting.

Today's headline is "Former (defected) Libyan foreign minister says Libya could become 'next Somalia'". In other words, he's also afraid of the possibility that NATO will fail to finish the job, and so he wants to stiffen their resolve.

In short, everyone and his dog is talking about Libya in these curiously coded terms. It's not hard to see what they really mean. My question is: who are they lying to, and why?

It's one thing for tinpot African dictators who control their own media to talk like this. But in the USA and Europe, surely the Free Press is supposed to keep some kind of a check on what is really going on. And yet, as far as I can see, nobody is being called on this bullshit.

Do we all take it for granted, that politicians won't say what they mean? Are we so numbed by the 24 hour news cycle that we don't even notice? Or are we just comfortable with the pretense, so we don't want to discuss reality? Seems to me that none of these options reflects well on "democracy"...

Rumour as news

"Christchurch struck by another major quake, worse than last September's."

That was the news that somehow osmosed into the office yesterday afternoon. The usual New Zealand news sites, unaccustomed as they are to being viewed by more than three people at once, promptly vanished from the web. The Herald, TVNZ, Stuff were all unavailable.

So where to find out what was going on? Experimentally, I tried Twitter.


Now, there are those e-vangelists who claim that Twitter is the only news source you need nowadays. You get breaking news from people on the spot, far faster than conventional media can deliver it. And, of course, unfiltered by editorial policy or bias.

And this is true, kinda. On the other hand, the news is filtered by the fact that it's being written by twits. But now let's see how it covers this breaking news story...

Well, first observation is that it doesn't merit inclusion among 'Trending Topics', being squeezed out by news of greater moment, such as "Libia" and "rafa araneda" (the Chilean TV presenter, of course). If I were relying on Twitter to tell me what's new in the world, I'd have missed this story entirely. Granted, one of these is, objectively, a bigger story - but surely Christchurch should outrank "BIEBER ALERT"?

Hard information from Christchurch? Almost none. What I'm seeing is the accounts of people all over the world who are watching their TVs. New media feeding off old. There are some excellent pictures (I think this one deserves some kind of award, but Lord alone knows who took it or who first posted it online), but if I were watching TV I'd have seen a lot more, a lot quicker.

Decisive victory to old media.

Observing the observers

The local New Zealand media doesn't even pretend to care what's going on in Egypt, not when there are truly important stories such as Lindsey Lohan's alleged kleptomania to talk about. So I've been watching a lot of Al Jazeera lately.

AJ, for those not blessed with its coverage, does care about Egypt. It cares a lot. It seems to have covered absolutely nothing else for the past two weeks. And apart from the obvious partiality of its coverage (it makes no attempt to hide its contempt for Mubarak and his regime), there's one other thing that bothers me about it...

Western media has tended to portray the protests as "pro-democracy". Yet that word is significantly missing from most of AJ's coverage. Rather than aspiring to future democracy, they are passionate about purging current corruption.

Just to prove I'm not imagining this slant, I compared Al Jazeera's coverage with that of several major Western news outlets (by searching their websites for current news stories featuring "Egypt" plus either "democracy" or "corruption" or both). What I found:

Dear Mr Mubarak,

First, congratulations on being Egypt's longest-serving ruler since Muhammed Ali Pasha. Egypt is an ancient and widely respected country, unlike some in your neighbourhood, and having earned a place in that history should stand as an achievement in itself.

And congratulations also on remaining in residence long after many lesser dictators would have given up. You are clearly a man of principle and tenacity. We must stress, however, that at this difficult time it is more important than ever to avoid seriously blotting your record with the Americans. Keep this up, and you can look forward to a retirement peppered with prestigious speaking engagements, talk-show appearances and memoir-serialisation rights that will keep you in both hookahs and hookers for life.

We understand that you're not a democrat. We understand why you're not a democrat. That's fine with us. Our media may quack up a storm about "democracy", but as William Hague made clear on Al Jazeera last week - we're perfectly happy for you to govern Egypt however you like, just so long as you do it quietly. And if you can end your present domestic crisis - or even just ride it out until October - without spawning an international one, then good for you.

And we understand that people in your position should be appropriately rewarded for your efforts. It's a stressful job. Nobody begrudges you a few millions in your Swiss retirement fund. You absolutely should give plum jobs to your unqualified cronies, treat yourself to the occasional duck island or private business trip or bunga-bunga party at your taxpayers' expense. That's expected.

But there is such a thing as moderation. When you've amassed a family fortune that's one-seventh of your country's total GDP, you have run your course and then some. The time to retire was probably about $60 billion ago. You're not Rupert Murdoch.

On your way out, if you could forward this note to every other Arab leader in your address book, it would save us the trouble of researching them.

Sincerely,

The People of Europe

At least it's not a tabloid...

If you're not in New Zealand, chances are slim that you've heard anything about the Wellington Declaration.

But here in the middle of the sea, we're pathetically grateful when the Great and Good, in this case in the shape of Hillary Clinton, deign not merely to notice us, but to pretend for a few minutes that they give a damn' what we think about anything. (If that were true, the Fed wouldn't have announced yesterday that it was deliberately devaluing the US dollar - sorry, I mean "reinvigorating the economy" - by printing an extra $600 billion.)

The press release celebrating the Wellington Declaration is thin on detail, and the Herald's coverage does nothing to improve matters. We're treated to a description of Mrs Clinton's dress and a blow-by-blow account of her reception (which leaves me thinking someone must have mistaken her for the president); then we get to the political insights of Steven Beban - an 18 year old 'Wellington local' who has never been to the US, but he has an Obama poster.

Seriously. If you've read the above paragraph, you now know as much about 'Steven Beban' as I do. There's no suggestion of why anyone should believe a word he says.

It's nice of the Herald not to overburden our poor provincial little brains with any actual facts or analysis. Discussion of what 'co-operation' might mean, how it reconciles with our oft-reaffirmed 'nuclear free' policy, how the new relationship will differ from the existing one, what exactly New Zealand is likely to get out of so lopsided a deal - well, who knows? Not the Herald, that's for damn' sure. As far as I can tell, they haven't even tried to find anyone who might have so much as thought of these questions. They've reprinted the press release (and the text of the "declaration" itself), and called it a story.

Welcome to small-country journalism.

On people who are less trustworthy than politicians

It's a sad fact that journalists are lazy buggers - and if they think they can get away with not working, they will.

Witness the coverage of last week's publication, in the UK, of the Department for Transport's (whatever happened to the Department of Transport? Fed up with people asking whether they were "for" or "against" it?) latest efforts to siphon obscene amounts of public money into private investors' pockets. Oops, sorry, I should have spelled that "... periodic survey of public attitudes to traffic congestion".

There wasn't much coverage, but such as there was, was clearly based on the Department conjunction Transport's press release. The BBC's headline is "Half of UK road users support usage-based road charging". And other outlets are no better. Even the normally-cynical El Reg has swallowed this line of spin.

There is no indication that any of these journalists has read the survey itself. If they had, they might have noticed that's not what it says.

True, over half of people are against the present system, and I don't blame them, because road tax became indefensible around the time horse-drawn carts became rare. But they don't express approval of the options being pushed here. Quite the opposite: when asked "Do you think a new charging scheme is fair?" - without giving any information about what it might involve - over half of those questioned return an unequivocal and full-throated "No!". Barely one-quarter say "Yes". And this opinion has actually hardened over the past few years.

The headline figure, as far as I can tell, comes from asking whether the current system "should be changed so that the amount people pay relates more closely to how often, when and where they use the roads" - that elicits about 50% of "Ayes". But faced with the more specific suggestions that people who drive on busy roads, or at peak times, should pay more, that proportion drops to 25% or less.

If you're advocating road pricing, those answers don't add up. The public appears to be "confused". Me, I think the public understands the issue far better than the people framing the survey, and certainly better than the journalists covering it.

Fortunately, there is one group of people whose livelihood really does depend on interpreting this kind of survey correctly: politicians. Things have come to a pretty pass when I'm appealing to politicians to save us from the idleness and corruption of journalists, but that's where I find myself today. And the UK's coalition government, bless its insecure little heart, has correctly divined what its civil servants are up to here. It "has ruled out for the duration of this Parliament national road pricing on existing roads and any preparation for such schemes beyond that time".

Let's hear it for the politicians...

On officers

When I received my training, such as it was, in the law as it applies to journalism - in 1989/90 - the lesson that stuck most in my mind was the simplest:

The only special treatment you can claim, as a journalist, is the right to be treated exactly like everyone else. You have no authority to go anywhere, to do, say, photograph or talk to anything or anyone, that any member of the public couldn't do. You can flash a press card, sure, but all it does is maybe help to persuade the person you're talking to that you're not just a random prodnose. Legally, it means bugger all.

At first it didn't seem like much. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It's very comforting to be just a part of the crowd. And it has a flip side: "no rights" also means "no obligations". There's no requirement, for instance, for a journalist to identify him/herself, except as a courtesy.

(There was also a very cool lesson about libel: "If you're going to libel someone, don't pussyfoot around. Lay into them properly. At least that way you'll get your money's worth." But I digress.)

Sadly, I believe this is no longer the case in Britain. I've read, for instance - with what accuracy I don't know - that journalists now enjoy the right to take photographs of some types of events and places. The implication being, of course, that ordinary people don't have that right.

It's always a mistake for a law to single out a group of people for special treatment. Show me a law containing a personal label (such as "journalist", "teacher", "police officer", "minister of religion", "foreign national"), and I'll show you a bad law. ("Bad" in the sense of unnecessary, ineffective, morally corrupt, or any combination of the above.)

For example: police officers are entitled to enter your house if they have a warrant, and that's fine - anyone can do that, although most of us would have a hard time persuading a judge to issue the warrant. They can also enter if they have a good reason to believe that it's necessary to protect someone or something from imminent harm. Again, well and good. If you hear someone yelling "Help! Rape!" from a private house, you should probably do the same, so long as you're reasonably sure you'd survive the experience.

But somewhere along the line, some fool (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt in assuming that they were probably just stupid, not actively malicious) decided that police officers, in particular, should also force their way in where they have merely the suspicion that something illegal might have happened - for instance, if they smell cannabis smoke. And that's how we end up with stories like this one. Which leads, as inexorably as eyes follow legs, to more special rules being made, driving the wedge ever deeper between Us and Them. Until you reach the position where both parties forget that they are supposed to be on the same side.

Two concepts of fairness

Sarah, my sis-in-law, was talking about the State of Kids Today the other month. Not complaining exactly. She likes kids, and prides herself on talking to them on their own terms. But still, she sometimes gets a shade exasperated. "She kept saying 'It's not fair!' So I asked her 'Can you tell me what you mean by fair?' When she thought about it, she had to admit that basically she meant 'I don't like it!'. That's all 'fair' really means."

(Sarah is an eloquent woman. She really does talk like that, punctuation and everything.)

I thought it was a good observation, but incomplete. 'Fair' may be vague, but vague isn't the same as useless. And it doesn't only mean 'fair to me' - there is more to it than that. Kids will often invoke 'fairness' on behalf of others, not just themselves.

Last week, no less an organ than The Economist ran a leader headed 'Against fairness'. This frankly bizarre piece argues that it's a weasel word used by politicians to fudge the necessity to make hard choices.

Fairness is fudge. This newspaper will have none of it. We reject the wide, woolly notion of fairness in favour of sharper, narrower words that mean what they say, like just or cruel.

When I read that, it was my turn to be exasperated. This is pure Newspeak: limiting language, with the aim of limiting thought.

'Fair', in case anyone was in doubt, is not meant to be a synonym for 'just'. When lawyers talk about the concept of fairness - and surprisingly, they do in fact talk about it quite a lot - the word they use is 'equity'. Therein lies a clue to how the concept works.

I recalled an essay I wrote, a couple of years ago now, on the difference between 'liberty' and 'freedom'. I had always kind of assumed that the two words were synonymous; and if you look in a dictionary, the meanings are very similar. But if you look at the historical and cultural baggage they bring with them, they are very different. The bird that symbolises liberty is an eagle - an apex predator, majestic, fearless, and above all strong - liberty is something that must be asserted, defended, recognised. Whereas freedom requires no special size or strength: in the canonical representation of 'captivity', it's not an eagle that's in the cage, but a canary. I associated the two words with Isaiah Berlin's concepts of "positive and negative liberty" - freedom to, and freedom from.

Freedom - what Berlin calls 'negative liberty' - is the area within which one may act without being prevented. As such, the very word implies limits. "If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air [...] it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced." Whereas liberty - Berlin's 'positive liberty' - recognises no such constraints: "I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside."

I think there's a similar relationship between 'fair' and 'just'. 'Free' and 'fair' are Anglo-Saxon words whose meaning is so simple that any kid can grasp them, even without being able to define them. Anglo-Saxon rhetoric flows from the soul, not the mind. Whereas Latin-derived words, like 'justice' and 'liberty' (and, of course, 'equity'), are the subject of endless debate, political demagoguery and hair-splitting sophistry.

Back to The Economist's uncharacteristically ill-thought-out rant:

To one lot of people, fairness means establishing the same rules for everybody, playing by them, and letting the best man win and the winner take all. To another, it means making sure that everybody gets equal shares.

Personally I would have no hesitation in telling anyone who expressed either of those views that their game design was deeply flawed. Good games are not 'winner take all', because that leaves the losers with nothing, and people with nothing have no way to play; nor do they guarantee 'equal shares', because that would be not so much a game as a story. Equity is 'balanced', but it does not prejudge the outcome - it is not equality.

'Playing by the rules' may be just, but 'winner take all' is clearly not equitable. 'Fairness' implies balance, in much the same way as 'freedom' implies limits. The same word 'equity', that lawyers use to describe 'fairness', in finance means 'shares'. That's not a coincidence.

, != &

Today's New Zealand Herald carries, as the subheading on its lead story, "Prison tower looming over motorway and schools offends mayor, community".

I've always hated the hideous American journalistic habit of using a comma to mean "and". In this case it's not even necessary to save space - the line, as printed, is about three characters shy. But I've always been able to comfort myself that it's only an Americanism, and civilised newspapers don't do it.

So much for comfort. Next thing I know they'll be talking about what "we reported May 27th". And the day I see the word "ouster", that's the day I stop buying this crappy paper.

Whose health is it anyway?

Susan gave me a book for Christmas. Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre, based on his regular Grauniad column of the same name, deals with how the media reports science. Specifically the British media, and mostly medical science, but the principles are fairly generalisable.

This fine read has taught me a bit about experimental design and medical ethics, and quite a lot about the placebo effect. One factette that lodged in my mind: when a new drug is released, older drugs that treat the same condition actually become measurably less effective. That is to say: if they previously had a 60% chance of curing the condition within a certain time, that chance may drop to 40% when the new drug becomes available.

No-one is quite sure why this should happen. Could be something to do with experimental design or sample selection. But Goldacre's money is on the placebo effect - the doctors themselves, being subject to the ferocious marketing tactics of drug companies, have more faith in the newer treatment.

Another case is the story of fish oil. Thanks to the charlatanry of "nutritionists", most journalists now accept as Proven Scientific Fact^TM that fish oils are good for the brain, and feeding fish-oil capsules to children makes them perform better in class. All over the country, to hear Goldacre tell it, parents are shovelling pills into their children daily; in some schools, not doing so is considered tantamount to child abuse. And yet there's not a shred of clinical evidence to support this superstition.

Big-time win for the drug companies. They've successfully persuaded a whole generation that "taking pills" is a normal activity for healthy people.

I thought of this today when I saw this story in today's paper. "Wear gloves to avoid cancer in the car" says the headline. Even by the Herald's standards, that's a pretty opaque headline - is there some nasty type of cancer that affects drivers, carcinogens in that rubber-like material that coats the steering wheel perhaps? But no. The story turns out to be about exposing your skin to sunlight while driving. Glass, it transpires, doesn't stop all UV radiation.

Plain, clear vehicle glass blocks only 37 per cent of UV-A radiation. The main risk comes from long or frequent trips exposed to sun through side windows.

Intrigued, I did a little more research into UV-A and UV-B.

UV-B is the stuff that causes sunburn, and plain ol' glass stops nearly all of that. But that nasty UV-A gets through, and according to the Cancer Society, that too is dangerous, even though it doesn't burn. I'm not qualified to comment on the health risks of UV-A, but my suspicions were aroused when I came to this line in the story:

The issue was highlighted by sunscreen maker Oasis Beauty, which urged drivers to apply sunscreen before driving.

The Cancer Society, to its credit, is leery of that suggestion. It recommends instead long sleeves and, optionally, gloves. (In summer, no less.) But, I had to wonder, what sort of weight should we apply to health advice from a company that's selling a product?

Even these measures are only necessary if you're driving long distances, because UV-A takes a good long exposure to do harm, and laminated windscreen glass stops 80% of it - it's only exposure through the un-laminated side windows that's really dangerous. So long sleeves should pretty much eliminate the risk, at no real cost.

But as with pretty much everything health-related, there's another side to this story. No UV-B means no vitamin D. And if you're of the male persuasion, no vitamin D is a recipe for, among other things, prostate cancer.

Over 200 people die of skin cancer in New Zealand every year. But roughly 600 men die of prostate cancer. In other words, as a man, I'm approximately six times more likely to die of too little UV-B than too much. So why is all the public-health propaganda telling me to get less sun?

The obvious answer is: sunscreen is bottled, marketed and profitable. Whereas sunlight is, as yet, still free. It's a lot harder to make money by telling people to use less of a product.

And this is why our health advice is so confusing: because it's all coming from people who have a product to sell. Nobody is disinterested. Nobody is on our side.

Health advice I believe in: eat fresh vegetables, don't get too fat or too thin, don't smoke or drink to excess, and last but not least, don't let the bastards grind you down. Everything beyond that, I'm now convinced, is guesswork based on information that is partial in every sense of the word.

Editing the Herald

Since James is, apparently, still on holiday (bloody academics), it falls to me to get angry about today's New Zealand Herald.

"Half of Kiwis doubt global warming: poll" says the headline. Curious, I click to the article. "A Herald survey", it reports.

Oh, excellent. So the Herald has commissioned its very own poll? That means it'll be telling us all the data, not just cherrypicking a few findings that happen to catch the reporter's eye. It'll tell us how many people were surveyed, when and how, what questions they were asked, and how their answers varied with their demographics...

Well, not so much as it happens.

Almost one in five of 2296 respondents said the concept was a giant con, and a further 28 per cent said global warming had not been conclusively proved.

"Almost" one in five? You wouldn't care to be any more precise about that figure? Did they use the words "giant con", or was that suggested to them as Option 1? As for "conclusively proved" - what does that even mean?

An online survey of the Herald Readers' Panel was conducted by the Nielsen Company between December 10 and December 17, as world leaders prepared to meet at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

Thirty-eight per cent said global warming was a serious problem that needed action now, 13 per cent said it was the world's biggest challenge, and 2 per cent did not know.

Again, your words or theirs? I'm going to guess yours, but would it hurt you to publish the damn' questions?

Nineteen per cent - including almost 30 per cent of men aged 45 or older - thought it was a giant con and a waste of money.

A giant con and a waste of money. Two separate options, one portmanteau one, or just the reporter's own interpolation? I guess we'll never know.

And that, believe it or not, is all the data we're given about this poll - the one commissioned by this newspaper, for which it has presumably paid good money. No list of questions (let alone answers), nothing about the design of the form, the sample selection process or the demographics of the sample. Without which this research quite literally isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

This is a newspaper, right? Its entire raison d'etre is to report stuff. And this particular stuff is its own exclusive property. If the Herald doesn't tell us this stuff, no-one else even has the right to it.

No wonder Kiwis are uninformed about science, when their leading national daily newspaper can't even be bothered to publish its own original research...

Newsprint wrestling

A few months ago I was excited to pick up, in a secondhand bookshop, a copy of John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. I'd long been curious about this book, widely admired in its day (the 1860s) and remembered as a highly accessible work of Victorian theology. When I began to read it, I discovered it was in fact a highly charged polemical shot in a bitterly personal ongoing argument between Cardinal Newman and the progressive, yet orthodox, Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley.

I know, from personal experience, how one's best work can be provoked in the heat of verbal battle, and then sadly loses its pith, point and relevance when taken out of that context. Newman may have had the wisdom of a poet and a prophet, but today, without the context of Kingsley's snide insinuations, he comes across as a petulant teenager.

For this reason alone, I think, Newman should be required reading for anyone who wants to take part in public life. Moral: don't duel in print.

The New Zealand Herald's leading crusty-old-fogey columnist, Garth George, thought almost as poorly of Don Brash's '2025' task force as I did. Granted his reasons are slightly different from mine - he thought it was ideologically motivated, whereas I, I regret to say, thought it driven by the interests of corruption - but all the same I was pleasantly surprised, on the basis that he probably thinks like a significant constituency of Kiwis, to find myself agreeing with GG for a change.

Today, I was - what's a word that means simultaneously incredulous and amused? - slightly flabbergasted, perhaps - to see Dr Brash taking the time to rebut Garth's attack specifically. This abuse of newsprint is remarkable for its amateurishness. Dr Brash makes no attempt to hide his passive-aggressiveness, his theatrical aggrievement at being so misunderstood, for all the world like a sulky pre-teen:

Mr George also suggests that we recommended abolishing subsidised doctor visits, and implies that we are advocating an American approach to healthcare. This is again utter nonsense. We suggested targeting subsidies for doctor's visits at those who need them, either because they have low incomes or have chronic health problems.

I think I'm not the only one to hear this undertone, because the Herald's subeditor has given the piece a title that perfectly sums up the juvenile level of the debate: "Don Brash to Garth George: You're wrong".

Finally, Brash goes on to admit the central charge of his critics: that he basically cribbed the whole thing from OECD or IMF reports and right-wing 1990s manifestos. Well, that's not quite how he puts it. What he says is:

The recommendations of the 2025 Taskforce are actually totally in line with orthodox thinking in most developed countries, and are almost entirely consistent with the recommendations of the recent OECD report on New Zealand.

In other words, there's not a spark of thought or originality here - his $150,000 report hasn't told us anything we hadn't already been told by other people who mistake us for a wannabe tax haven.

Second memo to Don Brash: This is not an argument that's worth getting into. Arguing in newspaper columns is like mud-wrestling: no matter how well you do, there's no way to come out looking or smelling cleaner than you went in.

It feels odd to be giving this level of unsolicited advice to a supposedly experienced politician and former leader of the opposition. I mean, William Hague may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but even he would never have made himself look quite this dumb.

In which I tell journalists their business

I buy at least one newspaper a week. Every Thursday, the New Zealand Herald publishes a simple, easy-to-follow and mostly accurate seven-day TV guide; buying that issue relieves me of the need to buy TV Guide, with its irritating layout and pages of guff about soap stars and other people I don't ever want to know about. (The Herald's own pages of that guff are an order of magnitude less irritating.)

Some weeks I also buy The Economist. It gives me something to read in the bath. And it makes me feel as if I'm still part of the world, not completely cut off on this tiny island a thousand miles from anywhere. So that's two newspapers some weeks. Let's say an average of six per month.

On top of that, there's a couple of freebies that get dropped in my letterbox: a council newsletter of no interest (it doesn't cover anything controversial, and I haven't taken an interest in any of what it does cover), and the Howick & Pakuranga Times, a very local sheet that covers school sports, amateur dramatics, road changes and the like.

The latter is really pretty good. I read more of it than I do of the Herald, for reasons I'll come to presently.

All this dead-tree consumption probably puts me ahead of most people, nowadays. I've been hearing a lot about how newspaper circulations have dropped off a cliff. Ad revenues have dropped, and big-name players are in trouble. Back in June Richard Posner, a highly regarded US blogger on things legal, made this the basis of an argument for stronger copyright for online newspapers. Unless online newspapers are able to charge for content (Posner argued), they'd all end up out of business.

Naturally I rolled my eyes and started to dream up reasons why such a change either wouldn't or shouldn't work. But it's only more recently that I've discovered a clearer and more objective flaw in Posner's reasoning: his premise is just plain false. Not all newspapers are in trouble.

The Economist, for one, goes from strength to strength. So does the Wall Street Journal. The Financial Times has compensated for circulation falling in its home market by expanding its international subscriptions.

Apparently it's not such a bad time to be a journalist, if you're a business journalist. And that's an important clue to what's really going on in the news business.

To be sure, the Internet has changed the news-publishing game by making practically all published news available for free. Why (the conventional wisdom runs) would people buy the New Zealand Herald when they can read the whole thing online?

But conventional wisdom is severely underestimating the problem. Not only can I read the Herald online - all of it - I can also read the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, or the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Jerusalem Post or Cape Times. Every English-language newspaper is now available in every English-language market. That's a lot of competition.

There are still things the Herald does better. (NZ TV programmes, for instance.) But those things probably aren't enough, in truth, to justify publishing and distributing a whole broadsheet paper every day.

Newspapers need to understand, not only what it is that they can deliver 'better' than anyone else, but also who their target audience is. Historically, that was clearly defined by their circulation areas, which in turn were dictated by the logistics of printing copies and distributing them to readers. Now, that's no longer the case. The Herald's target readership should include not just the northern part of New Zealand's north island, but every English-speaking person in the world who, for whatever reason, wants to know what's going on in New Zealand.

The Economist understands this. Anyone with a reasonable education in anything can pick up an issue and read it, without feeling that they're missing out on vast swathes of vital background knowledge. Try that with - ooh, any other paper you don't read regularly - there are plenty of links above. The press's central problem isn't with protecting their content, but simply with a massive global overcapacity in their business.

And that's where Posner's idea comes from. From an economic perspective, it makes sense to address that overcapacity by wider syndication of content - which would, indeed, require simpler and better ways to control unauthorised copying. Posner's problem is that he only sees a tiny part of the overall issue, and offers no way to address the rest of it. His proposal makes sense if, and only if, you trust that the big players in the market will deal fairly and honestly not only with each other, but also with every small-timer and two-bit blogger.

Professionalism

The New York Times announces it's laying off 100 newsroom staff. Oh well, at least it's still healthier than The Observer.

Our own New Zealand Herald shows what happens when a newspaper thinks that cutting its newsroom staff is a sensible answer to falling circulation. Basically, the less news-writing resource the paper has, the more news gets written by those who are willing to put money into it. Namely, those who stand to make money out of manipulating public opinion.

It's most obvious in political coverage, both here and in the US. Reporters no longer make any effort to cover politics: they simply reprint, largely unchecked, the stories fed to them by professional spin doctors. (I know how that works. I've edited a magazine myself.) In the US now, "political reporting" means getting two insane people to shout at each other for three minutes, while a nominal moderator makes token efforts to drag them back on-topic. The ghost of Joseph Pulitzer forbid that they might say something that could be interpreted as critical of the talking heads. That would be "expressing an opinion".

(And that, dear Americans, is why Fox News is wiping the floor with the older networks, and why your best current-affairs programme comes from Comedy Central. Those journalists are not only allowed, they're actively encouraged, to take up a position of their own.)

In the UK, the BBC has been a layer of insulation against this effect. But even the Beeb has spread its abundant resources too thin, in pursuit of the chimerical 24-hour news cycle. And now it's under direct attack, by the likes of Murdoch Jr and his minions in the Tory party. "It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism", bleats James Murdoch, "that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it."

Newsflash, Mr Murdoch: nobody pays for "independent digital journalism". There are some things you just can't pay for, even if you want to. If journalism is to be independent, it has to be free in both senses of the word.

Let's try to formulate a pithy observation here:

Professionals do what they're paid to do.

Okay, that seems a little... oblique. But it's actually at the heart of the problem. Let's try a corollary:

Professionals hate to work when they're not being paid.

Still not clear? Okay, try this:

A true professional will do the bare minimum amount of work required to get paid.

Really, that's implicit in the word "professional". If we want people to do better, that's the word we have to focus on.

Already, it's obvious that bloggers do a far better job than "professional" journalists of covering many stories, because they're keen. Therefore, they don't stop working the moment they've got "enough" for today.

Sadly, there's no way of getting an actual news feed from blogs, because blogs simply don't try to cover all news. If they did that they'd be newspapers, employing professional staff paid to do things they weren't particularly interested in, and we'd be back to square one.

Right-wing doublethink

Sometimes - just sometimes - I get the impression that the rest of the world, the great and good in places like the USA and Europe (heck, even Australia for that matter) - don't pay all that much attention to New Zealand politics. It's almost as if they see it as remote and irrelevant to them.

Go figure.

And so I was quite pleased to see the Wall Street Journal today devote an entire editorial to saying that we'd gone crazy. Not least because it gives me the chance to retort in kind.

Background: our beloved leader is trying to set up a "cap and trade"-type scheme to limit carbon emissions. There is a great deal of debate as to what targets should be set for reducing emissions, but almost none as to the desirability of the goal in itself. New Zealand simply doesn't have a noticeable community of global warming doubters. From where we sit, human damage to the world environment is all too obvious.

But the WSJ thinks differently. That journal belongs firmly in the camp of those who hold that global warming is some kind of hoax designed by the global Marxist conspiracy to reduce the rightful profits of rich people. I had heard that the Journal had escaped lightly from the Murdochisation process, but having sampled its writing, I no longer believe it.

Now, I'll admit there are problems with the global warming theory. And I'll be the first to agree that a great deal of alarmist claptrap has been spouted about it - much of it by Mr Murdoch and his cohorts, in their unending quest to sell the indefensible. (The Day After Tomorrow, let it be noted for the record, was a 20th Century Fox production.)

But it's a long, long way from those two concessions to the conclusion that "there's nothing to worry about". I did the maths on this myself back in the early 90s, and I worked out then that if we dug all the known coal reserves out of the ground and burnt them, we would approximately triple the atmospheric concentration of CO₂. You can't tell me that the environment could simply mop up that much change without dramatic effects.

Compare the WSJ's language:

Their report, issued last week, doesn't question disputed United Nations climate-change assumptions, nor explain the cost to the average Kiwi of taxing every corner of the economy — especially agriculture, the country's biggest export. The authors brush aside the fact that New Zealand only emits 0.2% of global emissions, calling it "small," but "not insignificant." Thus Wellington should "act now" to reduce emissions "to protect our international reputation, particularly in the areas of trade and tourism."

...

The best advertisement for New Zealand isn't to support ideas that make the country poorer. Instead, Mr. Key's government would do better by focusing on encouraging strong economic growth to support a vibrant, entrepreneurial society. That way, tourists may want to come to New Zealand and stay.

I should damn' well hope that a NZ Parliamentary committee wouldn't spend its time "questioning" United Nations climate-change assumptions. They don't have the expertise, the resources or the time for such a masturbatory exercise. The only reason I can imagine for doing so is to make sure your inquiry comes to an answer that you'd already decided on before you began.

Then the Journal goes on to tell John Key his job. Now, while I might privately believe that Key needs a great deal of help in that department, I can't help but wonder about the author's motives here. "Tourists may want to come to New Zealand and stay" - actually, that happens quite a lot already, and I have to tell you there's no great clamour among most Kiwis for higher immigration. (Personally I'd welcome it, but I'd be in a minority.) I get the feeling that the author has his (or, possibly but improbably, her) eye on New Zealand as a place to retire to, and wants it to be a tax haven.

As for "vibrant, entrepreneurial society".... whatever makes you imagine we'd want one of those? What do you think we are, Australia or something?

But the real 350kg gorilla in this argument is the curious assumption that a carbon tax will, axiomatically, be bad for the economy.

Now, I understand the basic libertarian argument that all taxes are bad for the economy, because they distort the free market. As an argument it may be dumber than a sack of bricks, but at least it's coherent. What I don't see is any prima facie reason to believe that a carbon tax is any worse for "the economy" than, say, a road tax, or compulsory employee health insurance, or a sales tax. What it does, like all taxes, is to favour certain types of economic activity at the expense of others.

But a carbon tax, in particular - what that does is to encourage efficiency. Doing more with less. The WSJ is not backward in criticising China and India for subsidising fuel, because they "thwart prudent energy consumption".

But then, of course, those subsidies are aimed chiefly at the poor...

Businesses, the WSJ assumes, need no incentives to restrain their energy consumption. It's not as if they'd ever treat externalities as "free". Surely it's sheer paranoid Trotskyite fantasy to suggest that businesses, left to their own devices, would wilfully or wantonly poison our air and our beaches, slaughter wildlife and destroy whole environments?

I'm delighted that our government is exposing our industry to harsh competitive conditions. Just as we have some of the most liberal agricultural trade policies in the world, and those haven't - contrary to many predictions - either destroyed our farmers, or forced them to go to wholesale industrial production such as used in countries like, ooh, America... so I look forward to our industry becoming leaner, fitter and stronger by having to pay the true costs of its activities.

Local differences

I saw an intriguing news story this morning, about some study of the quality of husbands in various countries. Well, twelve countries anyway. Norwegian and Swedish men fared best, followed by Britons, Americans and miscellaneous other Europeans. New Zealanders came in eighth (out of 12, remember), beating Japan, Germany, Austria and, most importantly of course, Australia. Australian men, it seems, are like my ex-cat, who would instinctively flee the house when faced with a vacuum cleaner.

(Come to think of it, I don't recall him ever washing up either. But I digress.)

No surprises so far. Scandinavian countries always seem to do best in these kinds of sociological comparisons.

But there's a certain amount of, shall we say, difference in emphasis between how various agencies cover the same story. America's FOX News has a particularly novel spin. Study: American Men Make the Best Husbands, attributing the report to "Dr. Almudena Sevilla-Sanz from Oxford University in London", characterises the findings as "American men were considered the best husbands, along with men from other “egalitarian” countries such as Norway, Sweden, England and Northern Ireland."

Hmmm... I know "accuracy" isn't FOX's greatest strength, but is it asking too much of them to work out that Oxford University, surely one of the world's more famous universities - is in Oxford? Apparently. As for the loose use of "England" to describe Great Britain...

ABC Local (local to where? - Los Angeles and Southern California, apparently the only part of the US that might be interested) at least got that right, only to blow it by referring to "North Ireland".

Seriously, does nobody employ subeditors any more?

Australian coverage, such as it is, leads (naturally enough) with Australia's poor ranking. Reader responses are disappointingly muted: the only really good quote I could find was

"Do the housework and quit your whinging." - Wally R.

Way to hold the position, Wally.

The Swedes, however, do not disappoint. An English-language Swedish news site, confusingly named "The Local", gloats unapologetically, and its reader responses immediately degenerate into exactly the kind of intensely pointless bickering you'd expect.

Here in NZ, only one thing matters: beating Australia. The rest of the world is a distraction. We came higher than the Aussies, which means we win, end of story.

Isn't that nice?

Vicarious road rage

Some days I don't know which is worse: Auckland's demented road rules, its drivers, or its journalism.

This offensive piece from yesterday's Herald tells the plaintive story of a motorist complaining about being ticketed for an illegal left turn. He points to the "Turn left" sign that appears just a few metres before the very clear "No left turn" sign that he defied.



What the Herald doesn't mention is what I realised the moment I saw the photograph, what is obvious to any honest person on the road, and what the journalist could've learned with three minutes of research: that the "Turn left" sign applies to a completely different lane.

See, I know that junction. I used to take it on a daily basis. At busy times, there's often a very long queue of motorists trying to get onto the motorway. And there exists the option for antisocial scumbuckets to save themselves a good seven minutes or so by zipping straight past that queue in the sparsely-populated lanes reserved for people heading to Newmarket, then making that clearly-illegal left turn. Google Streetview gives a fairer impression of the road:



And that's what this git is complaining about being pulled up for. He vows to fight a $150 fine. And he expects sympathy from us, the public, in his righteous struggle.

(Do you think everyone else on the road is just queuing up for fun, because they've nothing better to do with their time? Do you enjoy cutting into the proper lane at the last possible moment? What would you do to get home ten minutes earlier? Would you cut off an ear? How about an eye? You could wear a cool eyepatch over it and make up some tacky story about a terrifying hostage rescue, so that no-one need know it's part of a Faustian bargain to save you from missing the start of Shortland Street. No? Then why are you so happy to maim your own soul like that? Don't you feel it twitching inside you, gasping, dying a little more, every time you brag about shaving another 40 seconds off your commute? Or has it already shrivelled to a leathery, walnut husk, like that of an estate agent or a newspaper columnist? Do you feel a smug, sick pleasure in knowing that right-thinking drivers around you fantasise about dragging you screaming from your cosy driver's seat, kicking you brutally in the stomach, and leaving you by the side of the road to choke in a pool of your own blood and vomit? Or would you secretly welcome it as a blessed release? The Jerry Springer team would like to hear from you.)

I'd like to see him appeal the fine. Really I would. Then I'd like to see the court order that his car be crushed in front of his eyes, without giving him time to take his personal effects out first. This is the kind of crime we really need to clamp down on: the kind that is not motivated by anger, but engenders it; the kind not driven by fear or hate or lust or any natural human emotion, but by cold, rational selfishness.

Watching the watchers

There's a by-election going on here.

British readers will know what this means - fringe parties being treated by the media as if they mattered, mindless speculation about how badly the government will be thrashed, even more mindless projections about how, if these trends continue, by 2015 we'll be governed entirely by dolphins and probably a good thing too. While I'm on the subject, I'd like to be among the first to welcome our new cetacean overlords.

In New Zealand, things work a little differently. There are only 60-something MPs representing constituencies, so by-elections are a pretty rare event in themselves. And what we lack in experience, we also lack in intelligent investigative media with varied agendas. If I had to sum up our media in one word, that word would be "lazy".



I was planning to write about how the media's coverage of the by-election has now descended from trivial to virtual self-parody. But in the course of researching, I found something I wasn't expecting at all. The coverage on blogs is actually not bad.

Did (the frankly thuggish) Trevor Mallard sic Campbell Live onto Melissa Lee? Okay, so there's no actual "evidence"... but there is a plausible connection, as Mallard was formerly minister for broadcasting. Surely worth some reporter's time to at least ask the question?

Blogs range from the nakedly partisan to the tediously factual, but both these extremes are vastly better than anything I've seen in the commercial media. Better yet is the geekily specialist type that focuses on a single issue, and focuses well.

I've previously argued that blogs can never replace big media. And there are still serious issues with finding the material - if you search without knowing what to look for, you're immediately snowed by more-or-less official party hacks, apologists and thinly-veiled "professional journalists" trying to justify their own feebleness. But if you can dig through that snow, there's some decent analysis.

Hint to Google: if a search engine can find a way to distil that material, it'll wipe the floor with you guys.