Huguenot

Zigakly. Someone tell LadyD

Nonsense, I wasn't trying to justify anything. The forum is self regulating. If I peed off, it wouldn't change the forum.

Well, as with the cyclist jumping red lights and pedestrian walkways, that's fairly apparent. They're not so keen on the 'rest of it' either. Most Brits are okay about an export market without let or hindrance (or tariffs or restrictions), but less willing to welcome an import market on the same terms ('Romanian' horsemeat blamed for local authority cuts?). Brits are happy to regulate the quality of UK imports, but squeal against Eurocucumbers when its applied to the UK. It's entirely possible that the UK can negotiate terms that involve getting every benefit for the UK of a free and easy export market without conforming to EU compromises, but the brutal reality is that 'free rider' principles tells us that's an empty dream. Anyway, I didn't want to use this as an EU thread, it was just interesting how the 'free rider' principles heavily influence such a large proportion of my beliefs - forum, EU or queueing. And the rest.

At the moment? No, I don't think so - in the future? Yes I believe that is the driving motivation. There is a view that being an outrigger on Europe will allow us to derive all the benefits of a free market without being constrained by it. I don't believe that is plausible. Because of the 'free rider' effect I'm absolutely confident that European contributing nations will consistently act on a marginal basis against our interests, and the outcome in twenty years will be a pathetic and disenfranchised Britain.

Or even (Quids forgive) is that what drives me with Europe? That we should even attempt to gain the benefits without carrying the common cost? Is that the essence of my protest? That the UK's attempt to be a free rider on the European project will likely result in swift and appropriate diplomatic punishment from European partners simply on the basis that we're trying to get all the benefits like the cyclist running the lights?

Now, put that in context with the oft misinterpreted attention that particular individuals receive on the forum... Is it that they are 'bullied', or is it that the transgression upon etiquette (rules?) is perceived to devalue the currency of a common resource?

With thanks to the Beeb. Something about cyclists seems to provoke fury in other road users. If you doubt this, try a search for the word "cyclist" on Twitter. As I write this one of the latest tweets is this: "Had enough of cyclists today! Just wanna ram them with my car." This kind of sentiment would get people locked up if directed against an ethic minority or religion, but it seems to be fair game, in many people's minds, when directed against cyclists. Why all the rage? I've got a theory, of course. It's not because cyclists are annoying. It isn't even because we have a selective memory for that one stand-out annoying cyclist over the hundreds of boring, non-annoying ones (although that probably is a factor). No, my theory is that motorists hate cyclists because they think they offend the moral order. Driving is a very moral activity ? there are rules of the road, both legal and informal, and there are good and bad drivers. The whole intricate dance of the rush-hour junction only works because everybody knows the rules and follows them: keeping in lane; indicating properly; first her turn, now mine, now yours. Then along comes a cyclist, who seems to believe that the rules aren't made for them, especially the ones that hop onto the pavement, run red lights, or go the wrong way down one-way streets. You could argue that driving is like so much of social life, it?s a game of coordination where we have to rely on each other to do the right thing. And like all games, there's an incentive to cheat. If everyone else is taking their turn, you can jump the queue. If everyone else is paying their taxes you can dodge them, and you'll still get all the benefits of roads and police. In economics and evolution this is known as the "free rider problem"; if you create a common benefit ? like taxes or orderly roads ? what's to stop some people reaping the benefit without paying their dues? The free rider problem creates a paradox for those who study evolution, because in a world of selfish genes it appears to make cooperation unlikely. Even if a bunch of selfish individuals (or genes) recognise the benefit of coming together to co-operate with each other, once the collective good has been created it is rational, in a sense, for everyone to start trying to freeload off the collective. This makes any cooperation prone to collapse. In small societies you can rely on cooperating with your friends, or kin, but as a society grows the problem of free-riding looms larger and larger. Social collapse Humans seem to have evolved one way of enforcing order onto potentially chaotic social arrangements. This is known as "altruistic punishment", a term used by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter in a landmark paper published in 2002. An altruistic punishment is a punishment that costs you as an individual, but doesn't bring any direct benefit. As an example, imagine I'm at a football match and I see someone climb in without buying a ticket. I could sit and enjoy the game (at no cost to myself), or I could try to find security to have the guy thrown out (at the cost of missing some of the game). That would be altruistic punishment. Altruistic punishment, Fehr and Gachter reasoned, might just be the spark that makes groups of unrelated strangers co-operate. To test this they created a co-operation game played by constantly shifting groups of volunteers, who never meet ? they played the game from a computer in a private booth. The volunteers played for real money, which they knew they would take away at the end of the experiment. On each round of the game each player received 20 credits, and could choose to contribute up to this amount to a group project. After everyone had chipped in (or not), everybody (regardless of investment) got 40% of the collective pot. Under the rules of the game, the best collective outcome would be if everyone put in all their credits, and then each player would get back more than they put in. But the best outcome for each individual was to free ride ? to keep their original 20 credits, and also get the 40% of what everybody else put in. Of course, if everybody did this then that would be 40% of nothing. In this scenario what happened looked like a textbook case of the kind of social collapse the free rider problem warns of. On each successive turn of the game, the average amount contributed by players went down and down. Everybody realised that they could get the benefit of the collective pot without the cost of contributing. Even those who started out contributing a large proportion of their credits soon found out that not everybody else was doing the same. And once you see this it's easy to stop chipping in yourself ? nobody wants to be the sucker. Rage against the machine A simple addition to the rules reversed this collapse of co-operation, and that was the introduction of altruistic punishment. Fehr and Gachter allowed players to fine other players credits, at a cost to themselves. This is true altruistic punishment because the groups change after each round, and the players are anonymous. There may have been no direct benefit to fining other players, but players fined often and they fined hard ? and, as you'd expect, they chose to fine other players who hadn't chipped in on that round. The effect on cooperation was electric. With altruistic punishment, the average amount each player contributed rose and rose, instead of declining. The fine system allowed cooperation between groups of strangers who wouldn't meet again, overcoming the challenge of the free rider problem. How does this relate to why motorists hate cyclists? The key is in a detail from that classic 2002 paper. Did the players in this game sit there calmly calculating the odds, running game theory scenarios in their heads and reasoning about cost/benefit ratios? No, that wasn't the immediate reason people fined players. They dished out fines because they were mad as hell. Fehr and Gachter, like the good behavioural experimenters they are, made sure to measure exactly how mad that was, by asking players to rate their anger on a scale of one to seven in reaction to various scenarios. When players were confronted with a free-rider, almost everyone put themselves at the upper end of the anger scale. Fehr and Gachter describe these emotions as a ?proximate mechanism?. This means that evolution has built into the human mind a hatred of free-riders and cheaters, which activates anger when we confront people acting like this ? and it is this anger which prompts altruistic punishment. In this way, the emotion is evolution's way of getting us to overcome our short-term self-interest and encourage collective social life. So now we can see why there is an evolutionary pressure pushing motorists towards hatred of cyclists. Deep within the human psyche, fostered there because it helps us co-ordinate with strangers and so build the global society that is a hallmark of our species, is an anger at people who break the rules, who take the benefits without contributing to the cost. And cyclists trigger this anger when they use the roads but don't follow the same rules as cars. Now, cyclists reading this might think "but the rules aren't made for us ? we're more vulnerable, discriminated against, we shouldn't have to follow the rules." Perhaps true, but irrelevant when other road-users perceive you as breaking rules they have to keep. Maybe the solution is to educate drivers that cyclists are playing an important role in a wider game of reducing traffic and pollution. Or maybe we should just all take it out on a more important class of free-riders, the tax-dodgers.

Ignore the cycling issue (if you can) and you get the motivation: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130212-why-you-really-hate-cyclists/2 It applies to every choice I make (and even to my fury on the forum with people I believe gain advantage from other people's cooperation)! I happily pay a personal price to recover a social benefit.

Well rats are hungry too susiq, why not feed them? More to the point, you suggest you feed foxes to kill rats, is that correct? If so, why? I'll expand: given that foxes are so prevalent, it seems that you are not unilaterally responsible for their survival, so why single them out for favours? To clarify, I'm not questioning any resentment of human criminality, I'm merely asking why foxes have precedence? Why not feed burglars?

Silverfox, I'm not sure I ignored plague, I was pretty specific about HIV. I believe plague is a subset of pestilence. Whilst contemporary history would preclude war being laid at their door, their history certainly does. Thankfully, the Catholic Church accepts GM food, so it's doing its bit to avoid famine. I wonder whe their investments lie? I suspect Ratzinger himself has demonstrated the incapacity of the Catholic Church when faced with death. Mixed bag to date then, let's hope the new incumbent takes his responsibilities more seriously.

I don't know if you feed rats susiq. I asked you why you feed foxes, but you didn't answer? Why do you feed foxes?

Yes Otta and I think it's Karren not Karen. It's not like the Beeb to get those facts wrong.

Why have you been feeding the foxes susiq? What motivates you? From what you say, it sounds a bit like guilt. Do you feed rats for the same reason?

There's commentators who say it better: "the Vatican has seemed to be pressing hard in the opposite direction: into a cul-de-sac of conservative authoritarianism which neither inspires nor revives the mass of cradle Catholics, who are still deserting the church even in heartlands such as Spain and Ireland. Fifty years ago, governments in Catholic countries would tremble at the Vatican's displeasure; now they just wag their fingers back and press on with their plans for gay marriages or easier abortion. There is no comeback when the church has squandered its moral authority across the world over child abuse." (Stephen Bates) In other words the problem in the church doesn't lie with the moral bankruptcy of the west, but with the moral bankruptcy of the institution. If they push ahead with conservatism they have lost their power base in a world that can see through their destructive hypocrisy, if they liberalize they lose the hard line core who believe in totalitarian politics and a mandate to abuse. At least a liberal Catholicism has a chance to survive the next 100 years.

I'm guessing these restrictions have been introduced to prevent miscreants getting flammable or explosive materials onto a plane when the passenger is not present. So I imagine that perfume sales through duty free would be unaffected. I still think you're giving up too easily lame duck. Clearly airmail is out of reach unless you set up some sort of specialist relationship with couriers that will require industrial scale time and money. However there must still be distributors working with sea mail. I actually do this in reverse: to purchase stuff in the US for US citizens I get stuff delivered to a US based fulfillment house who then collect and mail to me in larger packages at more irregular intervals. It costs me a couple of weeks, but if these perfumes are as rare as you say, I'm sure your customers would both understand and wait. Get creative!

Why is Western moral bankruptcy a given? If any institution has lost a sense of right and wrong it would be the Catholic Church: from paedophile priests having their crimes covered up, to the murder of homosexuals in Africa and preaching against condom use worldwide despite the fact that it prevents the transmission of HIV. This is not an organisation that can tell right from wrong. It is foolish to assume that because the developing world has shown a predilection for religion that any individual from that region is representative of it: drawing conclusions about individuals because of the broader population is simply racism. What the developing world has suffered is exploitation, dictatorship, corruption and summary 'justice', so it may well be that these are themes from which the Catholic Churhc may like to draw sustenance.

As a .com name that would be regulated from ICANN in the US, I suspect that so long as Michelin Guides have trademarked the name, the domain would eventually be allocated to them.

The fact that this horsemeat came from Romania or Luxembourg is neither here nor there. That is not a failure of the EU, the responsibility for food safety lies with suppliers, distributors and manufacturers. The EU has merely provided standardized regulation across the continent to ensure that all suppliers will be held to the same level of accountability. The responsibility for breaking laws lies with those who break them, not those who make the laws. It also makes ABSOLUTELY clear that the implementation of the strategy should be controlled by the competent NATIONAL authority. i.e. NOT the EU Edited to add: I've since discovered the FSA actually lost control of this regulation when in 2010 the UK coalition government changed responsibility from the FSA for food composition to local authorities. The inability to check the composition of food lies entirely at the hands of UK government decisions NOT the EU. You may not have noticed, because it doesn't fit in conveniently with your anti-European agenda, but we have our own problems with food safety within the UK. Stores in our very own Peckham have been revealed to be retailing highly questionable meats with very little attention to safety or provenance. The EU regulations regarding proactive checking of EU food is simply there to make sure that countries deliver to the spirit of the open market; and don't create barriers to entry by creating false 'procedures' for imports. EU food is still subject to exactly the same safety checks as UK food throughout the supply chain. The FSA can be as rigorous as they wish - so long as the same treatment is meted out to all foods without prejudice. This is not trying to prevent spot checks on DNA (that never took place anyway), and the consistency of EU regulation ensures that overseas suppliers will be held to account as much as a UK supplier would be - something that could not have been done before the EU. European arrest warrants also mean that miscreants can finally be chased across borders (something that could not be achieved without the EU). So stop this silly partially informed Europe bashing - that it is based on national prejudice is clearly obvious by the way that you refuse to identify any of the parties without naming the country of origin. You clearly see their nationality as part of the crime.

Resigning because he's too old? WTF? He's supposed to be infallible, the voice of God on Earth. He can't resign like a sales manager from Peterborough. Well apparently he can. Will hopefully do a world of good. He was fiercely old school.

I think the clue regarding Peckham is in 'East Dulwich Councillor' ;) Cockerel owners seem to be remarkably selfish and deluded. I think I'd probably ask them nicely to keep it indoors until 8.30am, make a formal complaint about noise nuisance for the record, and then I'd kill the bird and be damned.

"That was a great video, it makes me excited for the game this afternoon!" *sighs* Not another American who thinks they're Irish??

Oh fer crying out loud. We don't 'live in a society with predators like this': society doesn't give them permission and does everything rational to prevent it. People who commit these crimes don't live within the boundaries of any society, they are unable to understand consequences or empathize with their victims.

There must be a way - you're giving up too easily. Try parcel delivery firms, and even contact the perfume manufacturer, it would be good PR for them to demonstrate how they go one step further for loyal customers.

My karma rides over my dogma My dogma rides over my zen My zen doesn't know where it's going So bring back my karma to me Bring back, bring back etc.

I love the remorseless directory of FB pages - I can see Tom entering into an orgy of page creation, spittle raining on the monitor, fingers battering the keyboard in a blur as he realizes all these empires are up for grabs! You GO girl! :D Hahaha