Archive for March, 2009

How the British make laws

Tuesday 17th March, 2009 at 10:59:22 · Filed under House of Lords, Politics

This has to be read to be believed. It is a description by Frances Gertrue Clair “Baroness” D’Souza, CMG, a member of the House of Lords, of an attempt by a Liberal Democrat peer to restrict membership of that club only to people who are registered to pay tax in the UK. A reasonable aim, you might think, and certainly one that should be
discussed seriously.

Or, if you have no respect for ethics or even a desire to look like you’re concerned with ethics, you could take advantage of the Government’s power to schedule time to discuss Bills — which in this case was about two hours — and just talk a lot about nothing particularly relevant until time has run out.

This is actually a real tactic, and is called a “filibuster”. Read the whole debate, if you dare, if you can understand it, and sigh with despair or boredom or frustration. This is how laws are made around here.

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Film review, of a sort

Saturday 14th March, 2009 at 20:51:57 · Filed under Media ·Tagged , ,

love is funny
life is funny
“vicky cristina barcelona” is very very funny: Woody Allen at his adolescent best

[Why did it take so long to be released in the UK legally? According to the Internet Movie Database, it was released in the US in August 2008, but here only in February 2009. There are no translation issues, so what's going on?]

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Emacs has it

Wednesday 11th March, 2009 at 18:01:02 · Filed under Site news

You can blog from emacs too, as I just did with this post — if you’re crazy enough to use emacs, which I am.

(Adding categories requires the inefficient and far too common method of using a Web browser for now, but given time and misplaced effort I’ll find a way around this too).

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How many countries can a citizen visit without a visa? [Bonus Economist Graph Edition]

Thursday 5th March, 2009 at 22:22:51 · Filed under Politics, The Economist, Travel

I have considering the titular question for some time, and today The Economist did its job of answering it for me by relaying the findings of Henley and Partners, who apparently “are the world’s leading specialists in international residence and citizenship planning”, as well as being tax avoidance advisers, by their own reckoning. I’m proud to advertise their services.

A graph showing some of the more notable countries and interesting statistics is at The Economist’s website, while H&P’s full list is in PDF form at their site.

Some of the most interesting finds for me are:

  • Afghanistan comes last, followed by Iraq. Is this because of the American invasions? They rank even lower than Somalia and North Korea.
  • What causes some of the small discrepancies between the countries whose citizens have greatest freedom to travel? To take the most obvious example, what is that extra country that gave Denmark the sole lead with 157 countries not requiring a visa from its citizens? Which countries let in Portuguese but not Brits?
  • Courtesy of the cat: If one could have two passports from any on the list, which ones should be chosen in order to maximise the number of visa-less countries one could travel to? Denmark’s might not necessarily be one of them, of course. Similarly for three passports, and so on. And so what is the minimum number of passports needed in order to visit every country in the world without a visa, assuming it’s possible? Is it possible?
  • Even more interesting would be to list the countries in order of how many other countries’ citizens can enter them freely. I suspect it’d look quite different from this one, maybe even to the extent that merely listing them in the opposite order to the current one would almost suffice…

    • A 0-1 matrix showing which countries let in which other countries’ citizens will answer most of the questions. Come on, Economist, I’m waiting…

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