Our pensions were re-engineered 3 years ago, carefully, and taking time, and the scheme remains in surplus for the future.

Pensions are complicated, and not best fixed by liars or the innumerate.

And we have great sympathy for those whose private sector pensions were stolen by plutocrats, media moguls, fraudsters and the like, or turned out to have been based on wrong arithmetic and prospects, but we suggest fixing yours, not wrecking ours to match.

An egalitarianism where each of us does what he wishes, for about he same hours, and draws the same income and facilities from society while working and while not working has its attractions. But it doesn’t seem likely. As it is, we stash away a lot of our not inconsiderable income for a pension, and we don’t want it turned into a tax, thank you.

And if you think we’d be an exception, you are an optimist.

Via Bevan’s Run

However, rather than simply saying it is bad and should stop, lets consider what it means if I send you a wodge of correspondence, with a comment and over my name.

Do we have reasonable grounds to conclude that if there is some assertion or fact or argument in the mass of text I’ve sent you, that I have not and need not have read it?

I think in some circumstances we do not, and life might be complicated in ways which simply excising all previous commentary except anything I wish to positively bring to your attention, whether by quoting it to you, or by commenting on it.

So chop it out.

Later:
In another place and under the Chatham House Rule (of which there is one, no s), a sage remarked that

There are many pitfalls associated with not trimming the long threads that can build up with top posting.

Scrolling through such screeds often finds things that I’m sure the most recent authors really did not want disclosed and which are sometimes used to great advantage.

Often early material has nothing to do with the current subject but people have just
been lazy using reply-all rather than starting a new thread as this is an easy way to copy to and cc lists which are intended to be *nearly* the same
in a new email. (AKM: This could result in secrets from one conversation being passed on to members of anotehr conversation, which could be very embarrassing. ).

It may also be interesting to observe who has been added to or dropped from the recipients as a thread develops.

AKM: A general principle remains, that sending something out over your signature whch you have not read is amazingly dumb.

Its fundamental principle[2] may[3] be worth adopting. NPfIT started from 0/2 on that basis, and if anything got worse.

So the internet works by providing wires on which sit a load of computers (referred to as “hosts” or “peers”[4] ). Each can talk to each using a simple set of rules. Some vaguely central directories of machines are kept, and anyone may make a list of machines they trust and identifiers for them. This is a task which governments could do well, if they could do it well.

If the computer in the casualty department wants to know something about a patient, then it can send a question to the computer in the patient’s general practice. It could ask around to the Darzi Centre, the Nuffield[5], and the Orthopaedic clinic in Val Thorens[5] as well.

And then the patient should get an account showing what access has been made to their medical record[6], which tends to keep everyone honest, or at least visible.

(Adding a registry and security to this is not as hard as it may seem. Not trivial, and not something to do with secret programs, but the problems are known[8])

[0] After Al Gore steered funding for it through Congress the nerds just got on with making it work.

[1] Correlation does not prove causation

[2] Rough consensus and _running code_

[3] I mean is, but this is supposed to look more tactful

[4] An indication of the attitude which works, and prevails, and is opposite to that favoured in NPfIT thinking, where _our_ machines are regarded as clients of _their_ servers

[5] examples of places excluded by the currentfailed and abandoned approach to NHS sharing of records[6].

[6] whatever a medical record is, something which Accenture, Fujitsu, and CSC turned out to be no more sure about than the DoH, I think. I’m not sure about it either, but I’m quite keen on saying so because I think it is interesting to consider.

[7] refer to note 7 if you want to demonstrate having paid attention

[8] Some people may say understood and solved, but at least the latter group tend to be selling secret source programs that they claim solve them. The former group may be optimistic, but are likely to say that closed source solutions are unreliable, and are correct in that.

He may be depending on the use of the present tense, that until the bill is paid, no effect has occurred from it.

Alternatively, he might be asserting that if someone gave the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust another £2 000 000 nothing could be found to do with it which would improve patient care.

Or perhaps it is just one of those things that NHS managers and directors say when things have gone badly wrong.

Is it compatible with the behaviour Trusts publicly demand from their doctors and other people who actually carry out healthcare? I think there is a gap, and should not be, in such expectations.

Case report in The Independent

John Watkinson, former chief executive of Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust was illegally dismissed.

I continue to prefer keeping the data on the server in the building.

If on the other hand (OTOH) you call your organisation “The Right To Know” then some degree less reticence might reasonably be expected of you.

“Neither Dorries nor Field, nor the Right to Know campaign – which was set up to lobby for support for the amendment – will reveal the details of who is involved with Right to Know and who has funded it. It has paid for a poll of MPs carried out by the private pollsters ComRes as part of a lobbying operation.

MPs who are opposing the amendment have called on Dorries to reveal the full sources of the backing for the campaign.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/02/anti-abortion-critics-nadine-dorries

Ms Dorries describes her blog – the closest one can expect to get to seeing exactly what a politician wishes to say directly to peoople in general – as 75% fiction.

The Independent yesterday noted that on BBC1′s World at One programme Ms Dorries stated that she did not have abortion figures with her (unusual, I’d think, for someone called there to speak about them) but proceeded to make some upgive an estimate.

                            Now              15 years ago
Dorries                     200 000           40 000[1]
Independent,                189 100          167 916
after looking it up

The Grauniad also reports that the misleadingly named organisation includes or is associated with our colleague Dr Saunders of the CMF. A commitment to accuracy in statements is sometimes excused by references to religion, but not in doctors, I think.

[1] “may have been around 40 000″