That’s analogous to building hundreds of level one pellet towers and hoping you can get to level fifty. It’s quantity over quality and that’s not how I want England’s education to be heading. I don’t care if people have to get up at seven o’clock in the morning to get a fifty minutes bus to school (I had to do that for college and it didn’t harm me, and I had to go up hill both ways). It’s freaking free. They should be happy to be getting it.

I’d rather people be getting a good, well funded education a bus ride away than being taught the difference between meiosis and mitosis from a browning leaflet from a museum, in some shack at the bottom of their street.

But I also think that schools don’t make the most out of their possible revenue avenues. For instance, my old school is a sports college so we had a pretty decent sports suite. I thought they rented it out during the evenings, but every time I pass there there’s clearly no one parked outside. People would pay good money to use the massive field, three good sized sports halls, and a fitness centre.

The school also has hundreds of computers just lying around at night. It’s a computing school too, so their equipment is nothing to sniff at. Why not rent those out during the evening to people doing night courses on how to use Word and whatever?

My school also has compulsory uniform. Why can’t some company has their logo on there? For instance, Adidas could have their logo on the pupils uniform; they’re generating brand loyalty from the kids, making uniform more fashionable (I guess), and hundreds of people will see the kids walking from and to home each day with the logo. It’s pretty good advertising. So long as the advertisers knew that they could have no control over what was being taught in the school, I don’t see a problem in that. The school could earn a hefty sum from that.

Schools need to quit looking for money from the government and start looking for ways they can make money for themselves.

But anyway, my idea is this. Africa is surrounded by water. Like a farmer bringing water to his land from a near by river, why not do that for the centre of the country, where they’re dying of thirst? The idea is stupidly simple, and I’m sure there’s a glaringly obvious problem with this idea, but no one has been able to point one out to me yet.

Basically, dig a huge river (I suppose that would be called a canal) ultimately from one side of Africa to the other. Right along the equator. It’ll fill with sea water. They obviously can’t drink sea water though. But I’ve thought of that too!

Along side this new canal build a bus stop like building over the top of it. The water will evaporate and condense on the plastic of the cover and run down the sides into some sort of container or pipe, which will lead the water to a water well. It’ll now be fresh water and clean enough to drink.

The biggest barrier I guess would be funding it, but I can’t imagine that a plastic sheet and a few pipes could be that expensive. Some company could just donate them. And I’m sure the Africans would happily work for free to build the river – after all, they’re getting fresh water at the end of it.

So, tell me why this is a dumb idea?

Is it wrong that I’ve mentally already ruled out Bushill-Matthews because he doesn’t have his own website? I guess it could show that he’s not exactly technically competent, and that’s really something that’s important for me to be expressed in Parliament especially at times when file sharing policy and law is being made. However, it looks like a Conservative policy to have all their MEPs on the same site, so I guess I can let them slide. Conservatives are the only people using @aol.com and @hotmail.co.uk addresses. Don’t they see the security implications of not hosting their own email servers?

Finding out what a person is standing for is working out to be really hard… Most of these pages are like CVs, or just blogs of political news, recounting the news too, not even offering their view on the matter. Assuming though that every single one of their views is the same as the party they stand for, I guess I’ll look around the party’s websites.

But they’re not much help either. Take immigration, a blatant issue at the moment, one of the hot ones that everyone needs an opinion on. Labour’s immigration page lists various facts over what’s happened whilst they’re in power, but I really fail to see why they’ve listed a few.

In 2007, we removed an immigration offender on average, every 8 minutes.

It’s nice to know that there are that many in the country. How did they get by you? We’re an island, it’s not like people can just flee across the border. And if immigrants are up to swimming an ocean to get in, I think maybe we should let them in on merit.

Other than saying they want to give ID cards to immigrants (wasn’t that happening to everyone anyway?), and increasing the number of people who work at these borders (which everyone wants to do), I don’t think they’ve mentioned anything controversial to differentiate themselves.

Oh, I suppose when you look at the Conservative page side by side with the Labour one, you see where differences are. Labour don’t have an interest in setting a limit to the number of immigrants allowed per year, which I can understand. If we have a system where we only allow people in that we need, why set a limit? Once all positions have been filled, just stop letting people in. Tory’s do want an arbitrary limit though, the point there being that too many slip through, and if we just say no to them before even letting them speak we’ll have lowered their burden on our public services. The Government has nothing to gain by allowing millions of people to come into the country, if anything it’d just make their jobs harder. I don’t see the point in setting a limit. I think we should just let in people we need, but be very strict about the guidelines for “who we need”. If there’s not a job position already available for them, leave that job for someone that’s already settled here. I’m a little bit shocked by it myself, but I guess that’s a point to Labour…

There’s these border patrol people too; Tory’s want them to be apart of the police, whilst Labour want them to have “police like powers”. Semantics really. Just something to argue about. The police are already over stretched as it is, why give them another job which requires them to get rather niche training. Have a specialist team to do that. Increases jobs and they’ll be more focused. Labour win.

Both of those points aren’t relevant to this election though, European Parliament doesn’t have the power (or the need) to touch either of those things. But it really shows that I have no other information to go on, other than the party policies. I can’t find much about what the hopeful MEPs want.

I can’t find anything the Lib Dems have said about immigration… What? I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t seem to have written up, public policies for most things. I’m not going to bother looking at UKIP. I’d never vote for a less globalised world.

Lib Dem Liz Lynne’s site has a few sections on her website listing a few things; Iraq, business, various campaigns. That’s exactly what I want to be reading! I clicked through to the business one. The links on there link to search results… completely pointless. Meh, I had such high hopes, Liz! Looks like she’s about giving business more power over themselves, and deregulating some things though.

Liz was [...] on the Vibrations Directive and the Noise Directive, negotiating a number of key amendments to make them less onerous on businesses.

I like this pro-business stance. I’m really all for businesses creating their own morals, even to the extent of Ayn Rand’s ideologies, and so they’re the ones that get punished for them if there’s a mistake.

All in all though, the Internet doesn’t really tell you enough to decided on who to vote with. I’m going to keep researching, but unless something changes my mind, I think it’ll be Lib Dems for me, despite it being a wasted vote here (but hey, maybe enough people will think like me).

I’ve known for sometime that’s not my thought pattern, not how I feel the world should be. People should be making money to make stuff, not making stuff to make money. That just leads to patterns and habits, which are always bad for development. Ender was brilliant because he noticed this – noticed that flying in formations is stupid, people get used to formations, but never change them, no innovation comes out of it. So lets not do formations.

To make that analogy make more sense, look at cars. People like cars, they get the job done. Consumers don’t have any problems with them, and will keep buying them. So the manufacture companies keep making them. Sure, this engine goes a little bit faster, but it’s the same technology. No innovation.

I want someone to develop a new engine, which doesn’t require petrol or diesel. Maybe we can up the game even more and say lets not have any type of fuel. But Shane! You need fuel to make the wheels move! I disagree. I’m no engineer (so maybe this was a bad example), but it looks like magnets can cause a pretty powerful motor. Oh. That’s cool. Why don’t I have this in my car? Because no one wants to risk losing money investing, and researching it, and potentially realising that in fact, magnets make a sucky engine. Why look into an engine that won’t make us money?

The liberal part of me really doesn’t want the government to interfere by forcing private companies to invest in innovation. The socialist in me (which seems to be growing more and more each day) really thinks that if they’re not helping humanity willingly, maybe they should be forced.

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

–Ayn Rand

HMS Vanguard being tugged back to Falsane by random civilians.

The first thing I’m annoyed about is why are we even hearing about this? No one was harmed, there’s no nuclear fall out. The subs took a bit of damage, and so I suppose that they’ll need to find some reason as to why they crashed in order to get insurance, or at least explain why they need another few million to fix it up.

I expect that’s what France was doing when they said they “hit a container of some sort”. They didn’t want to tell us they hit another nuclear ship, we don’t need to know that. Then England come up and was like “oh, btw, it wasn’t a container, it was actually us that hit you!”

The reason I think it’s dumb to admit that two ships collided is that now even a stupid person can find out where our nuclear ships hang out. We know how long it took the ship to get back to Faslane, we know the speed the ship can travel. That doesn’t help us much, but add that to us knowing where the French base is, and how long it took them to get back to base, and it’s just simple trigonometry to find out where they were (and where they’re likely to end up again).

We shouldn’t even know what ocean their in, let alone their rough location to within a few miles.

Lib Dem defence spokesman Nick Harvey has called for an immediate internal inquiry with some of the conclusions made public.

“While the British nuclear fleet has a good safety record, if there were ever to be a bang it would be a mighty big one,” he said.

–BBC article on the matter

This man is an idiot.

What does he expect an inquiry to deliver? There was nothing either party could have done to avoid this, short of handing over their route plans. There’s no way to update procedures to take accidents like this into account. The submarines can’t, and shouldn’t, see each other. They’re both “cloaked” from each other. This is just a huge accident that’s not likely to happen again, ever.

But the designers of the ships probably realised that likelihood and put precautions to stop the nucs from detonating every time someone pokes them. They’re designed to be safe at a time of war, a friendly nudge is hardly going to be enough to cause colossal problems.