The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by marek:

We are at the turning point from memory into history.

I have vivid memories of crossing the German frontiers - the long train journey from the Hook of Holland to Warsaw which went from Holland into West Germany, from West Germany into East Germany, from East Germany into West Berlin, from West Berlin into East Berlin and finally from East Germany into Poland - with all those frontier crossings through the night, making sleep impossible instead of just unlikely. And on other journeys, following the Transitstrasse - the designated roads from West Germany to West Berlin or to Poland from which no deviation was permitted, little traffic was visible, and stretches were still the original cobbles.

I am profoundly glad that people not many years younger than me cannot share those memories - or many more which are more dehumanising and sometimes more terrifying.

Dave @11 In the UK, if the employee had had the deductions made from their wages, the debt is then on the employer to the government. HM Revenue and Customs can be pretty fierce in enforcing its debts - and ultimately these are criminal offences. But as you say, there is not the slightest link between any of that and continuing access to healthcare.

Xopher @103 The 'except in the US' clause has been appearing in Penguins for at least ten years (the age of the one pulled from the shelf of books abandoned by previous renters of the holiday house I am in). I am pretty sure, though, that I can remember it from the Puffins I was reading thirty or forty years ago. The convoluted language, which was there precisely because the first sale doctrine was being recognised and (in a pretty harmless way) circumvented at the same time, has been rolling around in my head for a very long time.

I am surprised how little questioning there is in the comments so far - Nicole @70 being one of the exceptions - of the quality of Bezos' apology. Clearly it's an improvement on not apologising, but the assertion that it is 'painfully out of line with out principles' is one worth questioning. Which of Amazon's principles discernible from its behaviour more generally is it out of line with? If the action was allowable under the Kindle ToR, but was not consistent with those principles, where are the changes to the ToR to bring them into line with the principles? If the action was not allowable under the ToR because they are already aligned with the principles, where are the proposals for effective restoration? And since it isn't self-evident from Amazon's behaviour just what we are to suppose their governing principles to be, what are they and where are they to be found?

There's a big difference between 'sorry' and 'sorreee' as any parent knows. It's hard to tell from this whether Bezos had his fingers crossed behind his back.

It's worth making the connection between this post and the preceding one on torture. One of the dangerous consequences of torture being seen as acceptable is that the "golden mean" (and in this context, it's hard to think of a more inappropriate phrase) has been moved in the wrong direction to the point where some want to frame the spectrum as running from (no torture = deranged liberalism) through (some torture, but not too much really = the voice of sanity and moderation) to (unconstrained torture = justified in the circumstances, even if not quite how things should ideally happen).

In a milder version of the same effect, the head of the UK Association of Chief Police Officers is reported today as saying that the policing of the recent G20 demonstrations should be seen as reasonable, because "any other country" would have used water cannon, CS gas or rubber bullets. So if the actual police tactics can be presented as absurdly moderate, the people condemning them can clearly ignored.

Once that shift has happened, redefining the mean or - much better - challenging the entire idea of there being a mean in the first place becomes a few notches harder, which is of course why it is so important to resist the redefinition in the first place.

Jasper @99 - The London Underground may be a less hostile place than you imagine. A few years back (before 2005, but definitely after 2001), I was taking a visiting architecture student on a tour of the stations on the Jubilee line (pretty much every station from Westminster to Stratford has jaw dropping moments). At one of the stations - probably Bermondsey - on a totally deserted platform, my visitor took a flash photograph. Within a few seconds, a disembodied voice echoed round the station, "photography is allowed throughout the underground, but the use of flash is not permitted". In both phrase and tone it was like any other announcement: a piece of information we might find useful, not an admonition, however much we knew it was directed at us.

abi @8:

Harder work - obviously right, in the same way that any form of manual work is harder than having it done by a machine. But harder work yet to make them fair - on the contrary, it is the easiest thing in the world to make a manual count fair, and that's one very good reason for continuing to do them.

In UK elections, counters count in an open room, to which representatives of the candidates have access. The votes are bundled by selected candidate so that everybody has a very visible sense of how its going. If the margin is close, everybody stays on and counts again. In the last UK parliamentary election, the smallest majority was 37 votes, settled after three counts - two overnight, and the third the following afternoon after everybody had had a rest.

Is it absolutely 100% accurate? No, almost certainly not. But it is very hard to introduce systematic bias into the counting, so the answer to the more important question, does the candidate who got most votes win the election, is a simple yes. I can't remember a single serious accusation of unfairness introduced by the counting process at a UK election (there have certainly been other kinds of accusation, particularly over the fraudulent use of absentee ballots, just none to do with counting).

Seth @18. Or, as is attributed to Winston Churchill, "The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative."

@349 Owlmirror

"Smok" is perfectly good modern Polish for dragon - most famously living in a cave under Wawel castle in Krakow.
Getting from there to schmuck feels like quite a jump, though.

which is not to say of course that shampoo is to be taken seriously as a weapon of terror

We don't have to imagine the plot being entrusted to a woman, we just have to remember it.

On April 17 1986, a young woman presented herself at Heathrow's gate 23 for that morning's El Al flight to Tel Aviv. She had cleared the airport's own security check-in procedures, but to El Al's security staff something didn't appear right. A search of her hand luggage revealed 1½ ounces of Semtex and a detonator, hidden in a calculator.

The young woman was Anne Murphy, a white, Catholic girl from Dublin.

The technically assisted tailor does exist. In men's tailoring (at least in the UK) it's 'made to measure', which more expensive than ready made, but considerably cheaper than bespoke. It's essentially done by taking a much wider set of measurements than for ready made clothing, but the suit is then fully made up (in the case of the company I use, still in a northern mill town). When it comes back, they can do minor tweaking to improve the fit, but won't casually rip it to pieces and reassemble the way a bespoke tailor would do.
All of that is probably a quarter of the price of a bespoke suit - but it's still at least twice the price of ready made. I am too tall and too oddly shaped to have any choice, but paying £500 or more a go really isn't any fun.

Yonmei, what a great idea! I can't get marmelade oranges in this benighted town, alas. Do you think I could substitute blood oranges?

You could - but it wouldn't be the same. The reason why marmalade made with Seville oranges is so special is that extremely tart fruit plus lots of sugar makes a sweet but still tart jam. Sweet fruit plus lots of sugar makes very sweet jam. The flavour of Seville orange marmalade simply cannot be beaten.

It has to be home made though. There are lots of jams where the bought variety is more than good enough to put me off the effort of making my own. I have never found a commercial marmalade which is more than a pale shadow of home made.

Making it yourself brings out one other attraction too. Seville oranges are among the last remaining strictly seasonal fruits. If you don't make your marmalade in the next few weeks, you will miss your chance until next year. I will be making my supply for the year on Saturday week. It'll be fun.

And the tools available to airport screening staff do nothing to counter the problems of low wages, poor training and low motivation - as the Confessions of a baggage screener from last month's Wired show:

The current system discourages screeners from thinking for themselves, says Issac Yeffet, a former security chief of El Al who's now a consultant based in Manhattan. "Let's say I'm a screener, and I open the luggage to do a search and find chocolate or peanut butter - I'm happy because I found what the machine flagged." Although the CTX highlights suspect items, screeners don't run bags back through the machine after the hand search to make sure they've correctly identified what really caused the alarm. No one's taught to think in terms of how a would-be terrorist might try to game the system. "I can assure you, from my experience and knowledge," says Yeffet, "that most of the explosives will be in a false bottom."

TNH: But it ought not be arbitrarily enforced, which is what I'm (perhaps erroneously) hearing in this story

But the solution is the opposite to the one implied in the post. Much parking enforcement - certainly in south London which is where the subeject of the original post is said to operate - is somewhat inconistent. That allows people to get used to getting away with parking illegally and getting self-righteous if they are occasionally caught. The solution is to do more enforcement, not less. If people's expectation of incurring a penalty goes over a critical threshold, their behaviour improves. I am amazed daily at the selfishness with which many people are prepared to park. The prospect of paying a ticket is clearly inadequate discouragement, the inconvenience of getting a clamp released has a real effect.

I live and park and use public transport in South London, so I find it mildly amusing that the only time I had ever heard of 'angle grinder man' was on a New York blog. Curious to know whether that's because I lead an unduly sheltered life, I googled to find his site. The (not very pleasant) flavour of it comes across in this sample:

As there are not enough car parking spaces in London and because the public transport system is a joke, drivers (paticularly builders and other tradesmen) are forced to park illegally on a regular basis. These are people who have paid for road license tax discs! Having allowed this crisis to develop, central and local government should be sued for shambolic mismanagement, not allowed to claw back revenue from the very people whom they have let down! And that is the reason that most cars are clamped. Money. The borough of Southwark alone clamps hundreds of vehicles per day, in side streets and in uncongested areas, at a release fee of a385.00 a throw. Is it any wonder that the Traffic Gestapo are paid such high wages? Never mind parking permits, why are these guys allowed a license to print money!??

There is no clear evidence on the site that a car clamped on a public road has ever been cut free - the prictures of a-g man supposedly in action are fairly obviously taken in a private car park. Which makes sense, because anybody daft enough to let him loose on their car clamped by legal authorities on the public highway could be completely confident of finding themselves in court facing charges much more serious than a simple parking violation.

In short, this whole story looks like self-publicity taken rather more seriously than it deserves by a couple of journalists who should perhaps have been a little more sceptical.

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