Archive for June, 2016

On Thursday 23 June, we will have the choice for Britain to remain in, or leave, the European Union. I will be voting for us to remain a member, and want to explain why.

This is not a short term decision

Both sides have argued over what the short term effects on the country would be. But the truth is that that is not really important. This is a decision about our future and one that will affect our entire lives. We need to think about what kind of country we want 50 years down the line.

I know what kind of country I want. One that is open and inclusive. One that does not shrink away from being a part of the global community. One that builds relationships and tolerance by saying that we are a united continent, held together by an organisation set up to promote the common good.

Relationships are better in Europe

My wife is from Finland. Our marriage was easy. She can live and work over here, or I can live and work over there. When we visit each other’s families, travel is easy. Pretty much everything inside the EU is easier.

Most of my friends are EU immigrants. They’re all awesome people, kind people, interesting people. They all have jobs. Not a single EU immigrant I know is on benefits: they are all contributing to our economy. They’re not cheap labour, they’re the best that their country has to offer. And they’re humans. Humans with feelings, and fears, left wandering what will happen to the country they live in and love.

Freedom to go where one wants

When I was going to move to San Francisco to work for a software company, we had months of complexities trying to sort out visas. I’m a high skilled worker with a skill that the United States needs, and still it was incredibly difficult and complex to get me the right to work in the country, let alone settle there.

I found this an incredibly bizarre experience. As a British citizen, my passport is normally a golden ticket to anything. I won the genetic lottery when I was born in the UK. Yet here was a country that wouldn’t let me even, even with a passport in which Her Majesty “requests & requires” the barer to be allowed free passage.

Right now I can go to any other European nation. I can live there, I can work there, I can use their healthcare system. I have that right because of the relationships we have with our European neighbours. Risking that would be only be a step backward.

Lead, not leave

27 countries send MEPs to the European Parliament. We send over 10% of them. The average country sends 4% of the MEPs, we send more than double that. Along with Germany and France, we have the biggest seat at the table.

And what a community to lead. The European Union is the world’s largest economy. It is bigger than the United States, it is bigger than China. It is one of the few powers in the world that can stand up to global corporations.

Europe sticks up for workers, and consumers

Europe is not making judgements and legislation to make our lives more difficult. They make a positive impact on our lives. They guarantee us holidays, rights, a limited working week and maternity leave.

Consumers benefit too. Take mobile roaming charges for example. It is literally free for operators to do this. The idea that roaming costs money is bullshit. The whole internet works on people sending data all over the world. There is no reason for these fees to exist other than for operators to take advantage of consumers. The EU are putting a stop to that.

There is no financial benefit

All countries that want access to the single market, which we would need to do to continue to trade with the rest of Europe, we would continue to have to pay into the EU budget. This is the reality Norway find themselves in.

However, even if we did save some cash after the new EU bill, and we somehow kept the economy going, and thereby ended up with in the black, the idea that that money would go to the NHS is dubious. As one meme pointed out, if you trust people live Johnson, Gove and Farage to take the money we save and put it into the NHS, rather than giving further tax breaks to the rich, then I have some magic beans to sell you.

Nor will leaving the EU allow us to avoid the European Convention on Human Rights or avoid the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights. These are part of the Council of Europe and leaving the EU will now exempt us from them.

There will be no immigration controls

The other major touted benefit of leaving the EU would be that we would have control of immigration. However, it has now been shown how this would be the case. Norway and Switzland both have free movement agreements in place and actually receive a higher proportion of EU immigrants than we do.

Summary

I am voting for remain because the European Union represents a better world. A world where we can go where we want, work where we want. A world where we welcome in our friends and our lovers, and do not worry about whether our relationships will be allowed to continue or rejected for visa reasons.

A world where we stand side-by-side with our neighbours to defend human rights, and the rights of workers and consumers across the continent. There is no economic argument for leaving: our economy will function best when we have open trading with our European partners.

United we stand, divided we fall.

We used Manchester Airport fast track for the first time last week. We received a discount on it with our car parking, though it is only about £4 anyway. Is it worth it? I would say that it probably is.

It’s pot luck of course. You might end up going through on a day when the regular line has no queue. Or you might find that there are long queues in both regular and fast track. In fact, it reminded me of the speedy boarding passes in Come Fly With Me.

However, on the day we went through there was a queue at the regular line, which from what I remember seems fairly standard for Manchester, whereas we got straight through. Given the cost is fairly small in relation to the wider cost of the travel, it seems like it is worth the gamble to speed the process up and reduce my stress levels.

Earlier this month we held our AGM at West Yorkshire Humanists. It was a really positive meeting: this year we have significantly increased our membership (more than 20% increase), turned a financial deficit into a surplus and have completed more charity work than ever before.

We had lounge access included in our outboard flights to Iceland. This was my first experience with an airport lounge, so I was keen to see what it was like.

We had access to the Aspire lounge at Manchester. It was easy to find but there was some confusion on arrival. Everyone else had lounge passes, but as we had electronic tickets, we had not received any. It wasn’t clear on their system that our ticket included lounge access, but this was eventually cleared up by a senior member of staff.

The area itself was reasonably comfortable, with a variety of seats and tables. There were power sockets embedded in our table, but no view of any flight boards. The view was reasonable.

Food and drink

The food and drink is included. We ate our way through a pastry, two bowls of soup, four bags of crisps and a slice of cake. They also brought out a few sandwiches as we were leaving.

Alcohol is included, so if you are a heavy drinker you can probably reclaim your £20-30 entry fee in that.

Downsides

The wifi was awful.

The lounge has no toilets of its own, but shares communal ones. These were tiny. One of the things I like about airports is that they usually have large and airy toilets, but these were not.

The lounge was not too busy, but then neither was the airport. Assuming it scales up proportionally, I think you would find that at busy times, escaping the bustle of the airport would only bring you into the bustle of the lounge. Online reviews seem to agree.

Conclusion

If it’s included in your ticket, then it is worth taking advantage of lounge access. If not, I’m not sure. I need a bigger dataset before I can really make a recommendation.

You may have heard of the idea that there can be too much choice. It’s a paradox because we think that more choice is always better. However, in his book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz claims that once you have a certain level of choice, more actually makes us unhappy because it raises our expectations. If there are three choices of trainers, we pick one. If there are a hundred choices we agnoise because with such much choice we expect to find a perfect one, and don’t.

He makes a similar case in a TED talk.

A lot of this comes from a famous study about selling jam, conducted by Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar. They noticed that if you offered people six different choices of jam, they bought more than if you offered them 36.

All of this is easy to identify with. However, to muddy the water, a blog post by Freakonomics suggests that it is less clear after all. When looking at real-world datasets it is actually quite difficult to find examples of this working.

They make a similar claim in a YouTube video, pointing out that you cannot generalise one specific study, such as the jam study, and assume it applies everywhere.

How much is too much jam? Perhaps there is an upper limit. However, more research is needed before we can start making generalised rules.

Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, gave a talk at TED in 2005. In it, he put forward the idea that child car seats do not outperform just using a seatbelt to a significant degree for children over two.

In some ways, this is shocking but believable. Take handsfree kits for example. There is no evidence that they are any safer than holding your phone. The dangerous bit is having a phone conversation, regardless of the phone being on handsfree or not. However, because it seems intuitive, because it allows the government to look like they are doing something, and because it allows manufacturers to sell us more stuff, everyone goes along with it.

Could the same thing be happening here?

Well, maybe. It is difficult to argue with the data he presents. However, in the Q&A at the end of the talk, Levitt touches on the issue of whether car seats do provide a reduction in injury and it turns out that they may well do. Other datasets suggest that there is a significant benefit.

Also, the following year the University of Michigan published a study suggesting that there was a significant reduction in risk of death: 28%. The study seems to group front and rear facing seats into the same category so it would be interesting to see if these groups showed a difference.

Therefore, unless further evidence is published, it makes sense to continue to use child car seats.

When the EU referendum arrives, I will be voting to remain. I want to see an open, inclusive country that plays its part in the global community and helps lead the world forward at the head of the world’s largest and most powerful union.

However, I have been disappointed about the amount of bullshit being put out by the remain campaign. Tim Farron’s case for voting for the country we want is drowned out by the scare tactics being constantly pumped out by the remain-Conversatives. I want to challenge some of these.

£4,300 a year worse off

George Osborne made the claim that families would be £4,300 worse off. This is obviously is not true. Could you find £4,300 spare in your household? Most people couldn’t. Certainly someone earning £12,000 a year on minimum wage couldn’t. Many people live below though: working part time, being unable to find a job, being on long-term sick or retirees living on a pension.

I earn in the 90th percentile, so I could afford it. However, I couldn’t afford to subsidise it for the other nine people who earn less than me. There simply isn’t that much money going spare in the UK. It would be impossible for Brexit to cost households that much.

On the BBC Fact Check they explain he is actually talking about GPD, and not actual cost to families. However, it was explicitly not reported that way.

Nobody would sign trade agreements with us

US President Barack Obama claimed Britain would be at the back of the queue for a trade agreement if we left Europe. This could be true, but I very, very much doubt it. The UK is the United States’s 7th largest trading partner, second in Europe. If we left, having no trade agreement hurts them. Are we expected to believe they would cut off their nose? In reality, we’re likely to be first in the queue, being the most valuable trading partner now without a trade agreement.

Europe will send all the British expats back

Britain doesn’t have more people living abroad than any other country, but we do have a substantial population (somewhere around 1.2 million) of expats living in other EU countries.

However, it is unlikely that Brexit would mean much. Unlike Eastern European countries that are pumping out the cheap labour some people in the UK object to, British expats tend to be high-skilled workers or wealthy retirees. They also mostly live in Western European countries such as Spain and Ireland who most likely would continue to enjoy a good relationship with us.

Life and Death Row is a BBC documentary series looking at young people on Death Row. Unsurprisingly, it paints quite a gloomy picture. A man with a history of depression insists on having the death penalty. A another man is executed for beating eight members of his family to death: how is that possible without any of them fighting back or escaping?

In another episode, the documentary looks at the Death Penalty Clinic, a department run by the University of Houston. Undergraduate law students come together to try and put in appeals for convicts about to be executed. It was at least heartening to see people fighting.

Details can be found on the BBC website.

Remember that for a short few minutes during Eurovision 2016, the UK was on the left-hand side of the scoreboard.

The May 2016 Sunday Assembly Leeds had a theme of “friendship”. The Assembly Line performed two songs, I’ll Be There For You by The Rembrandts and With a Little Help From My Friends by The Beatles.

I’ll Be There For You

With a Little Help Frm My Friends