AV and all that

I've decided to vote in favour of AV in the coming referendum; not because I am actually in favour of it, but because the "No" campaign talks such bollocks.

For example, they say that AV is like the third placed person in a race being given the prize - of course it's not like that at all. This "argument" is just an example of the type of sloppy thinking by analogy that I do my best to beat out of people. Analogies are fine to illustrate a point, lend weight to an argument and occasionally give insight into a complex subject. Unfortunately, lazy and cynical people use analogies in place of actual thought, and you can see how easy it is to end up talking nonsense.

Then the Noes say that it is unfair that some people get more than one vote. This is just either a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts or a total lack of understanding of how AV works. In truth it works as if every round of counting started again from scratch, but with the first preference votes of the least popular candidate being discarded and the second preference votes of their supporters being counted instead. The reality is that everyone gets the same number of votes - one for each round of voting.

But perhaps I'm doing the Noes a disservice in thinking that they are cynical and or deliberately misrepresenting the facts; the other "argument" against it that they use is that its too difficult to understand! True for themselves perhaps, but anyone who can understand the complexity of the voting for "X-Factor" or "Strictly Come Dancing" will surely have no trouble ranking the candidates in order of preference. Patronising so-and-sos.

My own objection to AV is based in my view that the purpose of voting is to choose a new government - that is, one that is constituted of new people - every 5 or 10 years. People get fat and lazy and start to believe in their own infallibility if they are in power too long. My fear is that under AV there may be a party (Lib Dems for example), who are permanently in power and become corrupted. Happily, I'm persuaded from reading a few articles on the Internet, that AV is no more proportional the FPTP and my be even more perverse! I feel oddly comforted...

Hello, World!

I wonder how many blogs there are that are called "Mike's Blog"? I should really have tried to be more creative. Perhaps a little less literal. Anyway, I'm here now.

Strange that I should take so long to get round to blogging. My first experience with the Internet was in 1992 - yes, 1992! There weren't even proper web-sites then; it was email, newsgroups and FTP sites. To sign up and use the Internet wasn't straight forward. Here's what I had to do.

First of all, the computer I had was an Amstrad PC clone, with a black and white screen (I think), limited graphics capability (like high lighting, reverse video, one font plus italics). It had 2 x 5.25in floppies and 512k of memory! I upgraded it with a 10MB (yes, MB) hard disk, which cost almost £100 (which would only work if the expansion bay were left open) and a 1440baud modem, which I think also cost about £100 (but I managed to get the company I was working for at the time to pay for that).

So I called Demon Internet (on the phone) and signed up to pay my £10 per month - I was customer number 64. Then I had to set the modem to dial up their server and down load the software (which I think include an TCP/SLIP stack or something similar, a news group reader, an email client and a few tools like FTP, Telnet, whois, ping etc.). Then I had to figure out how to install it all (not too difficult I recall, but I was a lot more technical back then), and then I was off.

Naturally, in those days the main fascination was in newsgroups (some were very rude indeed), looking through the library catalogues of universities, FTPing interesting stuff and pinging computers in Australia! I quickly realised that I could buy books from O'Reilly in California (so cool - I bought Ed Krol's The Whole Internet Guide, which mentioned in passing this new thing called the "World Wide Web" and predicted that it would be a big thing) and chat to people in Russia about them buying second hand computers from the company I worked for. There were lots of technical forums which were really interesting to me in my then job. I was instantly a fan! This will change everything, I told my wife. Yes, I saw the bandwagon coming, it stopped at my front door, I didn't get on and I watched it roll past and on over the hill!