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thessalianSo in honour of rediscovering my Dreamwidth account, I am going to rant. Hi!
So this morning, I note in my Tweet feed that someone is talking about how Hunt would abolish the BBC Trust if the Tories win the next election. I'm getting a little confused about this on the grounds of ... well, there are two arguments against more or less dismantling the BBC. One is that the BBC is 'not giving the licence-payers what they want'. The other is that the BBC is 'damaging commercial competition'. See ... I'm not sure how this makes sense. How it works is: everyone who actually has a TV that they want to switch on at any point pays a licence fee. This pays for everything the BBC does, so far as I can tell - the programming, the website and all that goes with it. This, to me, means that it doesn't spend its time scrambling around for sponsors and advertising dollars. It won't even do product placement in its original programming whatever new regulations say about it being allowed in UK TV now. And yes, some of that money goes to obscene bonuses and paying some relatively ridiculous people to be jackasses on-air, but mostly, the TV licence pays for good original programming, a well-maintained website with the iPlayer option that means we don't have to miss anything because we wanted to watch something on the other side, and fairly unbiased and properly regulated news.
So, if the above isn't what the licence-payer wants, how come it's still getting used? And if it's not getting used, how is it 'damaging commercial competition'?
I've developed a fondness for the BBC. Previously, I didn't watch much TV, but now most of the shows I do watch that aren't sport in the background or US shows on DVD are on/via the BBC. Masterchef, for example, and some Mythbusters reruns. University Challenge is good for a giggle. And let's not forget Doctor Who and Torchwood (and yes, even Sarah Jane Adventures, which I've never seen but consider fondly as some way of keeping too much of the need for rubber monsters for the kids out of a show that has a wider range than that). And I like the idea that BBC News has to be at least moderately unbiased, insofar as anything written by a human being with opinions can be. That's what regulatory bodies are for.
The real irony is that I wonder how much of this 'they aren't giving the licence-payers what they want' malarkey is down to the massive protest over Ianto Jones' death in Torchwood. Beyond the Russell Brand thing, I can't think what else a BBC property has done that's actually offended anyone in any visible way. Unlike the Daily Mail, with its horrible article by Jan Moir about the Stephen Gately thing. But given the amount of very loud negative commentary fired indiscriminately at all parties over the way Children of Earth ended, one has to wonder if that's at least partially responsible for the 'licence-payers not getting what they want' thing. Irony is, of course, that so many of the people who didn't like the ending were actually American, and thus not licence-payers at all.
Anyway, point is that the Conservatives need to take a position and stick with it if they want to nack the BBC. Either the licence-payers aren't getting what they want and no one's watching, or everyone's watching that instead of commercial tat and it's damaging commercial competition. Make. Up. Your mind. Or better yet, just leave the BBC alone.
Seems like there's a lot of bids to privatise, commercialise and generally dismantle what few public services remain in this country. First up on the kill list appears to be Royal Mail, or what's left of it. I'm really interested in the insider view of RM I'm getting from this London Review of Books article, which says to me that Royal Mail could actually be a workable business if they treated their staff like human beings, stopped dicking around with quotas and fiddling the figures, screwing with the pension scheme and, oh, incidentally, stopped letting these private companies leech off the postal workers without compensating them for it. Seriously, if you're a postal service, you deliver the post from point A to point B; you don't drop the post off with the public service who's just lost money because you swooped in the moment it stops being profitable for you to deal with it. You certainly don't say that the boxes that they once said hold 208 letters now hold 150 letters, particularly not when they actually hold somewhere in the region of 270 letters. And you certainly don't stick workers with mandatory, nearly unpaid overtime and oblige them to consistently break health and safety regs just to get the post delivered halfway on time. That's not how you run a business, unless your goal is to run said business into the ground.
There's been a lot of comment about how the Royal Mail should just be allowed to die because no one uses it anyway, or perhaps changed so that it doesn't deliver to 'unprofitable' areas like the countryside. Of course, that would almost entirely cut off the countryside, where it can be tricky to find a decent ISP, and any of the elderly who still rely on the postal service for news from friends and family. Yes, the internet has certainly taken over a fair few avenues, but there are some things that it will never be able to take over reliably. Sure, you can have paperless bank statements and so forth, but NHS confirmation letters are likely never going to be sent via email. That would involve a computer infrastructure that doesn't exist there yet. That's just a for-instance. And then, as pointed out in the article, there's how much shopping we do online these days. Now, a few people have pointed out in comments that, because of the Kindle and so forth, books will be more or less obsolete in the next 5-10 years. I ... severely doubt it, because given the current state of affairs economically, I doubt everyone is going to shell out for a Kindle or a Sony Reader in that time. I'm certainly waiting a few years to see how the technology goes before even so much as asking for one for Christmas, same as I waited to buy an iPod. Besides, I don't think books will ever become obsolete because, unlike the Kindle, a book will survive getting wet or dropped or trodden on, will never run out of batteries and costs a pittance to replace if it gets irreparably damaged, whereas the Kindle will, if it dies on you because you got jostled by a commuter on the trip home or its little microprocessor or flash drive storage borked, require you to buy an expensive piece of equipment and potentially replace your entire library of DRM means that you can only load these books to a certain number of machines. CDs probably won't die out entirely for the same reasons, at least until some of the more draconian DRM measures are scrapped as the crap they are. There are a whole lot of internet companies selling a whole bunch of stuff that aren't going to be replaced by digital representations too - clothes (and yes, a lot of people buy clothes online and have them delivered; T-shirts, mainly, but other things too), toys, foodstuffs, electrical equipment...
In short, there's never going to stop being a need for postal delivery. Destroying the postal delivery service that carries not only itself but every other so-called 'competitive' postal delivery service is short-sighted and stupid. If this is how they're treated, no wonder they strike.
I don't have any solutions, really, bar ... come on; leave the public service sector alone. If nothing else, aren't we having enough problems without rendering more people unemployed?
So this morning, I note in my Tweet feed that someone is talking about how Hunt would abolish the BBC Trust if the Tories win the next election. I'm getting a little confused about this on the grounds of ... well, there are two arguments against more or less dismantling the BBC. One is that the BBC is 'not giving the licence-payers what they want'. The other is that the BBC is 'damaging commercial competition'. See ... I'm not sure how this makes sense. How it works is: everyone who actually has a TV that they want to switch on at any point pays a licence fee. This pays for everything the BBC does, so far as I can tell - the programming, the website and all that goes with it. This, to me, means that it doesn't spend its time scrambling around for sponsors and advertising dollars. It won't even do product placement in its original programming whatever new regulations say about it being allowed in UK TV now. And yes, some of that money goes to obscene bonuses and paying some relatively ridiculous people to be jackasses on-air, but mostly, the TV licence pays for good original programming, a well-maintained website with the iPlayer option that means we don't have to miss anything because we wanted to watch something on the other side, and fairly unbiased and properly regulated news.
So, if the above isn't what the licence-payer wants, how come it's still getting used? And if it's not getting used, how is it 'damaging commercial competition'?
I've developed a fondness for the BBC. Previously, I didn't watch much TV, but now most of the shows I do watch that aren't sport in the background or US shows on DVD are on/via the BBC. Masterchef, for example, and some Mythbusters reruns. University Challenge is good for a giggle. And let's not forget Doctor Who and Torchwood (and yes, even Sarah Jane Adventures, which I've never seen but consider fondly as some way of keeping too much of the need for rubber monsters for the kids out of a show that has a wider range than that). And I like the idea that BBC News has to be at least moderately unbiased, insofar as anything written by a human being with opinions can be. That's what regulatory bodies are for.
The real irony is that I wonder how much of this 'they aren't giving the licence-payers what they want' malarkey is down to the massive protest over Ianto Jones' death in Torchwood. Beyond the Russell Brand thing, I can't think what else a BBC property has done that's actually offended anyone in any visible way. Unlike the Daily Mail, with its horrible article by Jan Moir about the Stephen Gately thing. But given the amount of very loud negative commentary fired indiscriminately at all parties over the way Children of Earth ended, one has to wonder if that's at least partially responsible for the 'licence-payers not getting what they want' thing. Irony is, of course, that so many of the people who didn't like the ending were actually American, and thus not licence-payers at all.
Anyway, point is that the Conservatives need to take a position and stick with it if they want to nack the BBC. Either the licence-payers aren't getting what they want and no one's watching, or everyone's watching that instead of commercial tat and it's damaging commercial competition. Make. Up. Your mind. Or better yet, just leave the BBC alone.
Seems like there's a lot of bids to privatise, commercialise and generally dismantle what few public services remain in this country. First up on the kill list appears to be Royal Mail, or what's left of it. I'm really interested in the insider view of RM I'm getting from this London Review of Books article, which says to me that Royal Mail could actually be a workable business if they treated their staff like human beings, stopped dicking around with quotas and fiddling the figures, screwing with the pension scheme and, oh, incidentally, stopped letting these private companies leech off the postal workers without compensating them for it. Seriously, if you're a postal service, you deliver the post from point A to point B; you don't drop the post off with the public service who's just lost money because you swooped in the moment it stops being profitable for you to deal with it. You certainly don't say that the boxes that they once said hold 208 letters now hold 150 letters, particularly not when they actually hold somewhere in the region of 270 letters. And you certainly don't stick workers with mandatory, nearly unpaid overtime and oblige them to consistently break health and safety regs just to get the post delivered halfway on time. That's not how you run a business, unless your goal is to run said business into the ground.
There's been a lot of comment about how the Royal Mail should just be allowed to die because no one uses it anyway, or perhaps changed so that it doesn't deliver to 'unprofitable' areas like the countryside. Of course, that would almost entirely cut off the countryside, where it can be tricky to find a decent ISP, and any of the elderly who still rely on the postal service for news from friends and family. Yes, the internet has certainly taken over a fair few avenues, but there are some things that it will never be able to take over reliably. Sure, you can have paperless bank statements and so forth, but NHS confirmation letters are likely never going to be sent via email. That would involve a computer infrastructure that doesn't exist there yet. That's just a for-instance. And then, as pointed out in the article, there's how much shopping we do online these days. Now, a few people have pointed out in comments that, because of the Kindle and so forth, books will be more or less obsolete in the next 5-10 years. I ... severely doubt it, because given the current state of affairs economically, I doubt everyone is going to shell out for a Kindle or a Sony Reader in that time. I'm certainly waiting a few years to see how the technology goes before even so much as asking for one for Christmas, same as I waited to buy an iPod. Besides, I don't think books will ever become obsolete because, unlike the Kindle, a book will survive getting wet or dropped or trodden on, will never run out of batteries and costs a pittance to replace if it gets irreparably damaged, whereas the Kindle will, if it dies on you because you got jostled by a commuter on the trip home or its little microprocessor or flash drive storage borked, require you to buy an expensive piece of equipment and potentially replace your entire library of DRM means that you can only load these books to a certain number of machines. CDs probably won't die out entirely for the same reasons, at least until some of the more draconian DRM measures are scrapped as the crap they are. There are a whole lot of internet companies selling a whole bunch of stuff that aren't going to be replaced by digital representations too - clothes (and yes, a lot of people buy clothes online and have them delivered; T-shirts, mainly, but other things too), toys, foodstuffs, electrical equipment...
In short, there's never going to stop being a need for postal delivery. Destroying the postal delivery service that carries not only itself but every other so-called 'competitive' postal delivery service is short-sighted and stupid. If this is how they're treated, no wonder they strike.
I don't have any solutions, really, bar ... come on; leave the public service sector alone. If nothing else, aren't we having enough problems without rendering more people unemployed?