Data. Everywhere. Loads of it. Stop with the panic guys.

From Bryan Caplan:

The populists of our Golden Age are loud and furious. They’re crying about “monopolies” that deliver firehoses worth of free stuff. They’re bemoaning the “death of competition” in industries (like taxicabs) that governments forcibly monopolized for as long as any living person can remember. They’re insisting that “only the 1% benefit” in an age when half of the high-profile new businesses literally give their services away for free. And they’re lashing out at businesses for “taking our data” – even though five years ago hardly anyone realized that they had data.

Hardly a day passes without some self-appointed guardian of public interest - a media-hungry MP, someone from an anti-competition lobby group, a hand-wringing charity chief executive - telling us that all those nasty tech people are stealing your data. And hinting that, somehow the deal we're getting is a lousy one.

Well it isn't. Most of that data only exists because you chose to co-produce it with one of the tech companies' free sites - because you booked a taxi, used a restaurant app, posted your holiday pictures on Facebook or trolled Twitter for lols. There is data everywhere, piling up in huge mounds and it isn't a problem, it's not stealing your privacy and these companies are not doing anything other than trying to make a bob or two by giving the consumer value (or flogging you some stuff, so to speak).

As Caplan points out about the 'privacy' we claim we want back:

The privacy to not be part of a Big Data Set. The privacy to not have firms try to sell us stuff based on our previous purchases. In short, we have lost the kinds of privacy that no prudent person loses sleep over.

Absolutely.

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The truth about obesity - it's declining not increasing

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From Rob Lyons:

According to the Health Survey for England, the number of children aged 11 to 15 who are obese or overweight fell from 41.7 per cent in 2004 to 35.2 per cent in 2012. The peak in adult obesity was reached in 2010 at 26.1 per cent, before falling to 24.7 per cent in 2012. Are those the kinds of figures – painting a picture of a problem in decline – that suggest a state of emergency?

Just like the pandemic of drunken debauchery that Public Health and the media wanted us to believe in while consumption of alcohol was plummeting, this tells the tale about another Public Health lie - the obesity crisis. This isn't to say that we aren't fatter on average than we were three decades ago but it is to say that, just as with drinking and smoking, the trend is towards healthy levels of consumption. Levels of obesity are declining not rising.

What we have to ask is why Public Health continue to claim that unless something drastic is done - new taxes being the usual favourite followed by advertising bans and packaging controls - then the problem will spiral out of control.  It seems that what we're doing right now - educating people about a healthy diet and a healthy weight, providing good information on food products and intervening to support the very obese - is actually working pretty well.

Instead we get a collection of Public Health Lintillas screaming 'panic, panic' when there is absolutely no need for such a reaction. I have to conclude that these people are either stupid or, more likely, wanting to raise the stakes for reasons of self-interest.

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Nick Clegg's Lintilla moment...

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Crisis is an essential ingredient in modern politics - without crisis, without some dread threat to civilization as we know it, people will go home, put the fire on and have a cup of tea.

As a result politicians invent existential threats - crises that threaten the very essence of modern society:

There are  just 100 days to stop the UK Independence Party becoming a permanent major force in British politics, Nick Clegg warns today.

And this of course is a crisis, a threat to something good and kind - in this case the opportunity for Nick and his friends to get nice, well-paid sinecures over in Brussels and for others of Nick's pals to siphon across lovely 'European Grant Funding'.

The problem here is that the crisis is entirely artificial. And UKIP only become a 'major force' in British politics if we indulge their rather eclectic range of self-contradictory policies - championing liberty when it suits an audience (smoking and drinking) and promoting bans or controls when it doesn't (burkas and immigrants).

What Nick Clegg has done - his Lintilla moment - is switch on the crisis inducer:

LINTILLA:
It’s a crisis inducer. Set it to ‘Mark Nine’ and… Hurry! They’re after us!

ARTHUR:
Who?

LINTILLA:
No one! Come on! Through the tunnel! They’re coming!

We really don't have only 100 days to save the universe (or Nick's future EU sinecure) from the dread UKIP. They're maybe going to get a few more MEPs and the Lib Dems might lose most of their MEPs. But that's it really. Nothing else will change. We will have elected a slightly different set of essentially pointless (but very expensive) politicians who can - as we've seen with e-cigs - simply choose to ignore the public's opinion knowing they aren't subject to any proper scrutiny as individual politicians.

Still Nick Clegg has activated his crisis inducer, got big headlines in sympathetic newspapers and got his dwindling troops agitated and active.

There is no real crisis just an artificial and pathetic flap.

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On panic...

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I can make no comment on today's rush to the pumps that this Thurber recollection - "The Day the Dam Broke" - doesn't wholly sum up:




Enjoy!

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