Ed Dowding

Here’s some figures for renewable power generation in 2006:

• 62.9% – Austria
• 48.7% – Sweden
• 29.9% – Portugal
• 17.1% – Slovak Republic
• 19.2% – Romania
• 17% – Denmark
• 12.4% – France
• 4.6% - UK
  

In November 2009, Spain generated 53% of its demand from wind alone last week (it was a bit windy). So if you’re from the UK, be embarrassed: we’re getting our bottoms kicked by Hans, Abba and the Siesta Monkeys.

Since so little seems to influence peoples’ thinking about energy and the environment, I wonder if world cup style national pride could be leveraged to get some action here? The protests about petrol prices would be that much more potent if the protesters were aware that José Siesta and Pierre Le Grenouille were loading up their electric cars for a quarter of the price, whilst also benefiting from much cleaner air, having to work less since they’re paying less, and generally being far better served by their governments.

There’s also the angle that the UK seems to be slated to have a lot of nuclear. All this is planned by EDF, a French company. Nuclear, as we know, has astronomical decommissioning costs which are never budgeted for so are not fairly compared to renewables whose decommissioning costs are tiny. So it’s not a massive leap – certainly one the Daily Mail would be adept at – to suspect that France is deliberately hobbling the UK with nuclear, whilst also increasing its own competitive advantage by investing in wind power.

If energy prices effect where industry locates in the free market of Europe, shouldn’t we be treating this as a national economic welfare issue?

So ‘competitiveness’ and ‘employment levels’ join national security, economy, and ethics and morality as reasons to invest every penny we have in renewable energy generation.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you have low-cost, clean energy almost every other problem vanishes.

I finally got around to watching A Farm for the Future (available on Google Video) a few nights ago, and found it to be a great introduction to the concepts of permaculture.

Key things to realise (some not from the programme):

1. Current methods of farming will not continue to feed you during your lifetime.
2. We (and I mean all of us, including YOU, reading this right now) are running out of oil.
3. Before it runs out it will get much more expensive.
4. Oil is the most expensive component of current methods of food production.
5. Your food is going to get much more expensive.
6. We import about 40% of our food (in the UK)
7. As food gets more expensive, other countries are going to stop exporting it so they can feed their own populations.
8. Oil-fuelled production food production is only 10% efficient in energy, and about 20% efficient in land use.
9. We could – if we choose to – produce up to 50 times more food from the same land. (Ok that’s a touch unrealistic since there are bound to be inefficiencies, but let’s be conservative and say just 5 times as much. It still makes sense, right?)
10. We haven’t even got touched on the nutritional or lifestyle benefits yet. I’ll leave that to other posts, but suffice to say you could live a healthier, happier, longer life.

Here are my notes from the programme itself:

• It was in 1981 that we crossed the “using more than we’re finding” threshold with oil.
• “It’s not just that current lifestyle are unethical – they’re unsustainable”.
• 10 calories of fossil fuel are required for 1 calorie of food (global average).
• GM crops are also dependent on fossil fuels, even though they may use less – ergo they are not a long term answer.
• A litre of oil is the energy equivalent of 1 person working for a week; the oil we use equates to 22bn (unfed) slaves (c.3x world population).
• There are 150,000 farmers in the Uk, with an average age of 60.
• Normally cattle are taken off fields in the winter since they turn pasture into mud. But with a blend of tough/soft, deep/shall rooted (etc.) grasses you can leave the cattle there year round. Thus no hay production required, or unused land area. It took 60 years for one chap to perfect that, in one area.
• Don’t dig. It destroys the life in the top 6″ of soil which plants thrive on. (See other posts on permaculture, too.)
• Don’t look after plants, cultivate soil.
• 95% of all food is dependent on synthetic fertiliser.
• Permaculture: conscious design of a better system (Wikipedia link).
• Khaki Campbell ducks eat lots of slugs and lay lots of eggs.
• Willow, lime, and ash leaves / branches are good fodder crops for animals.
• In a well considered permaculture plot, 12 man-days maintenance and 40 man-days of harvest will feed about 10 people per acre.
• Nuts are more efficient to grow than cereal crops. Sweet chestnuts can yield 2 tons per acre (about 60% that of wheat, with much less effort).
• During WWII, 40% of food came from small domestic production.

I suppose the question is “Neat. Is there any large scale permaculture so that we can feed lots of people? All the ones, like me, maybe in the cities, who don’t garden?”

Large scale production permaculture is probably going on somewhere (I understand that Pittsburgh Permaculture showcases examples), but to a certain extent it’s a bit of an antithesis to the small, intensive, and hyper-local principles. However the cities still need to be fed so.. a few answers:

1. The goal is community efficiency not self-sufficiency
2. It can be a great business opportunity, especially if more people know about why it’s being done.
3. It’s not an industrial farm, so don’t expect it to behave like one. If the old models aren’t working, don’t expect to see permaculture behaving in the same way. (That said there are some neat multi-storey urban farms.)

New ID cards are supposed to be ‘unforgeable’ – but it took our expert 12 minutes to clone one, and programme it with false data

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1204641/New-ID-cards-supposed-unforgeable--took-expert-12-minutes-clone-programme-false-data.html"Mail Online.

I’ve just been watching ‘The World According to Monsanto’. It’s pretty compelling stuff. As one of the contributors says,

“Seed is more powerful than bombs, more powerful than guns”

and given that, you’d have thought that we’d be a little more careful about what we do it.

70% of the food in the USA contains bio-engineered ingredients. They are not allowed by law to label if a product contains GM ingredients.

Monsanto has repeatedly falsified studies, bribed, and spread misinformation, sometimes even allowing their agents to masquerade as scientists to run a smear campaign against those scientists who contest their studies.

This is simply bad science.

I’m not anti-GM crops, but I do think that progressing at such speed, with such scant and ambiguous positive evidence, is dangerous folly. This is, after all, the whole world’s food supply we’re talking about.

In fact this whole documentary is basically about bad science: tailoring interpretations to achieve economic ends.  It’s worth having a watch. It’s even conveniently divided up into bite-sized 10 minute chunks.

Summary of arguments against GM crops:

• Don’t do what they say
• Tested to only very low standards, riding on a ’substantial equivalence’ test (NB this similar to how Thalidomide occured)
• Can not be contained and can thus undermine the genes of related and non-related organisms.
• Create dependency on chemical companies
• Take from the soil without putting back
• Reduce biodiversity and encourage monoculture
• Contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance
• Genes can mutate with harmful effect
• “Sleeper” genes could be accidentally switched on and active genes could become “silent”
• They impact on birds, insects and soil biota
• Transfer of allergenic genes, triggering reactions in humans and animals
• Mixing of GM products in the food chain
• Transfer of antibiotic resistance
• Loss of farmers’ access to plant material since keeping seeds it not permitted both by legal terms, and terminator and / or traitor genes
• Intellectual property rights could slow research

Sources: ‘The World According to Monsanto’ Online For Free. | The Good Human and  http://www.fao.org/english/newsroom/focus/2003/gmo8.htm

It’s tempting to think that DNA databases are OK, because it’s just a way of uniquely identifying someone, just like a long number which no one else has, which is intrinsically linked to you.

If you believe that, I can see why you think you may have nothing to worry about.

But the problem is that we do not know as much about DNA as we’d like to think we do.

Not only are our ideas about the uniqueness of DNA false, but also we do not know what DNA is responsible for. There have been studies claiming correlations with depression, alcoholism, and homosexuality, and now there’s a new study which shows a correlation with violent crime.

“This gene is predicting gang membership, but it’s really predicting it for the very violent gang members,” Beaver says.

from ‘Gangsta gene’ identified in US teens, 19 June 2009, New Scientist

We don’t have to look too far back in our history (uh oh), or too far in our future, to ponder what kind of rules well-meaning governments will do with this information. It would take a Government with considerably more spine than those we have seen of late to not react to a Daily Mail headline of “Government does nothing to stop violent gang members”

Read ‘6 reasons never to give up your biometric data or DNA‘

1. It permits lazy policing

If you have someone’s record on file, you’re more likely to assume he’s a criminal. And if that DNA matches a sample which has been discovered during the investigation… well it’s jolly tempting to think that you might have your man.

A connected spate of lazy policing happened recently. Having a suspect reduces the search for other explanations and will lead to more evidence being found against the individual (eg no alibi) since we search to validate opinions more readily than we seek to refute them.

Additionally it leads to inquisitorial moments such as this example when the police asked – or is that threatened? – 4,000 men local to a murder to give their DNA ‘voluntarily’, but “if someone does refuse then each case will be reviewed on its own merits.”

Now of course that’s also an argument to put EVERYONE on the DNA database instead… so read on, because you’ll like the bit about facial recognition.

2. It does not aim to reduce crime, only to make it easier to solve

The Home Office* website says that “the national DNA database is a key police intelligence tool as it helps to: quickly identify offenders, make earlier arrests, secure more convictions, provide critical investigative leads for police investigations.” Which is to say that police-work takes less time, and more people are convicted. This is jolly good (notwithstanding the ‘lazy policing’ observations above), but this is not the same as bringing the much more useful social benefit of reducing the amount of crime committed.

But could a DNA database reduce crime? Well there’s some deterrence for minor crimes, but bigger crimes are born of passionate intent, and the perpetrator only thinks of the consequences later, if he cares about them at all.

It’s early days with DNA, so let’s look at the promises of another great idea which was going to keep us all safe, only only the very slightest cost to our wallets and liberty, CCTV.

It’s been an utter fiasco: only 3 per cent of crimes were solved by CCTV. There’s no fear of CCTV. Why don’t people fear it? (They think) the cameras are not working.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office at New Scotland Yard

• Fewer than 1 crime in 30 is solved through CCTV
• Dover council introduced CCTV in 1993. After 12 years, they found that burglary in the areas covered had halved, car crime was down 87 per cent, but public disorder and crimes of violence had almost trebled.
• A study in Gillingham concluded that crime in the High Street had fallen by a third five years after CCTV was installed, while it was static in areas where there was no CCTV.
• A study for the Home Office in 2004 examined 14 CCTV systems, and found that only one had really cut crime. That was in a car park. The others, they concluded “had no overall effect on crime.”
  Source: Independent.co.uk

So does CCTV reduce crime? Yes, but not by much. And on occasion, by removing the very human desire (even need) for a low-harm crime, it displaces it in into a more serious and socially harmful category. CCTV rarely works for the public benefit, even if judged solely on it’s ability to do its intended job.

*This conjures a completely different image in this teleworking age.

3. We do not know as much about DNA as we’d like to think we do

Not only are our ideas about the uniqueness of DNA false, but as the aforementioned discovery of a 6th nucleotide shows, we do not know what DNA is responsible for. There have been studies claiming correlations with depression, alcoholism, and homosexuality. We don’t have to look too far back in our history (uh oh), or too far in our future, to ponder what kind of rules well-meaning governments will abstract from that.

“We found that 98% of people with this nucleotide on this gene are disposed to violent crime, Sir.”

— “Really? That’s more evidence that we had in Guantanamo! Round ‘em up!”

“And how about this one for alcoholism, Sir?”

— “Three compulsory group sessions per year for awareness training and evaluation!”

4. If they lose it, you can’t request a new PIN

This one’s quite simple. If someone leaves your bank data on a train you can change your PIN number and your bank details can be assigned new random numbers. This is embarrassing and potentially very expensive, but easily fixed.

(As an aside on this same topic, have you noticed how many CCTV cameras film you when you tap in your PIN? Isn’t that therefore open to massive abuse? Because now we have a lot of valid data (correct PIN numbers) which are easily accessed and abused if the intent is there.)

But if they lost your biometric data (retina scans, fingerprints etc) or DNA… well, you can’t change that. If someone can use your genetic and biometric information to pretend to be you, it’s a lot harder to deny. It may seem far fetched to suggest the criminals might leave fake samples around (though they have); but if DNA is too abstract and distant, think on biometrics. We now store and use biometric data in more places, to get in to anything from laptops to buildings. We will most likely be using it more as the technology to do so gets cheaper, because it appears to be more secure. After all, it’s linked directly to me – what could be more unique than my own fingerprint?

There is a logical fallacy here, much like the same one which bought us the arms race. Security can be increased in any number of ways, and the ability to hack that security will increase to compensate. But it is true that better technology can create better security. This is true, but only whilst good, trustworthy people who have access to the technology. People like the police, for example, or the government, who we know never lie or try to cover things up.

So what are we laying on the line for convenience in security? Many measures can be taken to increase security without the need to go biometric.

5. It is financially expensive for the benefits it brings

The social benefits are minimal. But what does it cost? Perhaps the minimal benefits might be worth it.

There are over 4.2 million CCTVs in the UK. Unfortunately I can not find any information about how many of these belong to the government, but it is a lot of them, and public sector ones alone cost billions to install and operate.

As for biometric ID, not only will it cost individuals £72, but on top of that it costs us £5.4 billion (which is more than the ENTIRE POLICE FORCE costs for 1 year). And that’s the conservative estimate. Other studies put it at more like £15-20 billion (which is about the same as the police, the judiciary, prisons, and public safety).

6. It drives a wedge between people and authority, making the problem of security harder to solve

It is the obligation of any government to protect the liberty of its citizens. It should be protecting us from the very laws it is making. Instead, it is alienating us, treating us all as suspects. We should not need to be authorised to exist. We should not need to worry for our safety and our legality if we protest peacefully. We should not need to worry who can track us as we walk through a town.

If you treat someone like a prisoner, they will behave like a prisoner. Resentment will increase against authority, and there will be less cooperation.

The government is collecting the biometric facial data of everyone who applies for a passport. They also have a huge digital CCTV network. Programmers are developing better and better facial recognition systems. How long before this is all tied together? They know who you are, where you are, and can watch what you’re doing. They can watch you protest, and if they don’t like you, they can act. Even against people of conscience who dare to speak up.

Is the government going to come along in the night and round us all up? Well, not yet, we hope. But read this description of plans for a database once upon a time:

The aim is to centralize and analyze data on people aged 13 or above who are active in politics or labor unions, who play a significant institutional, economic, social or religious role, or who are “likely to breach public order.”

The information that can be collected includes addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, physical appearance, behavioral traits, fiscal and financial records, and details about people who have personal ties with the subject.

Nazi Germany? North Korea? China? McCarthy America? Nope. This is the Edvige database from current day France.

Why do they do this? Because they want to protect their citizens, and serve them more efficiently and effectively. So this is not an abstraction into a dark distopian future, nor does it require an act of malice, nor a grand conspiracy. If we allow it to happen, it will be because we have slowly, bit by bit, handed over our liberties for the false promise of greater security.

The nightmares of governments turning nasty seem distant. But it happens. More often than we’d like to think, far more quickly than we expect, and yet far too slowly for us to notice it happening.

I’m not suggesting that Great Britain is going fascist, but why put in place a structure which would make the slide into oppression so very, very easy? Why put in place a structure which is of negligible use to a free society, and terrifying to a suppressed one?

Other countries may use ID cards and biometrics more and more, making it seem inevitable. They may start collecting data from people who travel there, and they may pressure us into having biometric documents, but this is Great Britain. We have long been a free country. Millions of us have gone to war to fight and kill to protect the liberty we take for granted, and millions of Britons have given their lives to give you your freedom today. A freedom many of us seem so willing to give up. Were they wrong to fight and die for this? Or have we just become acclimatised to a culture of powerful governments?

Using biometrics and DNA erodes our liberty, freedom of movement, freedom of protest, right to privacy, and right to security. The small amount of crime we have does not justify gambling these hard fought for rights.

We can increase cooperation with authority by not treating us all as prisoners and suspects, and can increase security without using biometric data.

We can, today, make a simple decision that will save us money, increase our security, preserve our liberty, and bring government and the people it serves closer together. We can, if we so wish, say that biometrics will never be a compulsory part of a government issued document, nor stored longer than is absolutely necessary to serve justice.

I am currently running to be an MEP in the South West. If you like what you read, please text  EDDOW01 to 86837 to show your support. Your votes will make a huge difference to my ability to bring in the future that you would like to see, and steer us away from the future you do not want.

Anyone who studied a little genetics in high school has heard of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine – the A,T,G and C that make up the DNA code. But those are not the whole story. The rise of epigenetics in the past decade has drawn attention to a fifth nucleotide, [...]. And now there’s a sixth. [...]

[This] suggests that a new layer of complexity exists between our basic genetic blueprints and the creatures that grow out of them. “This is another mechanism for regulation of gene expression and nuclear structure that no one has had any insight into,” says Heintz, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The results are discrete and crystalline and clear; there is no uncertainty. I think this finding will electrify the field of epigenetics.”

Genes alone cannot explain the vast differences in complexity among worms, mice, monkeys and humans, all of which have roughly the same amount of genetic material. Scientists have found that these differences arise in part from the dynamic regulation of gene expression rather than the genes themselves. Epigenetics, a relatively young and very hot field in biology, is the study of nongenetic factors that manage this regulation.

Source: EurekAlert, via @azeem

This is why I’ll go to prison (oh the irony) before I allow myself to be on a DNA database.

(EDIT 19 Apr 09: I realised I had more to write and have pulled information out into this post for greater clarity: Reasons not to be on a DNA database.)

There are many, many arguments against genetic databases, and very few reasonable ones for.

If we have genetic databases at all, they should be

1. run by a transparent organisation, independent of government
2. only collect information from those convicted of crimes
3. never collect samples from minors
4. only used for security and justice
5. routinely protected with multi-tier anonymity
6. only permitting named access at the end of a regulated judicial process

How the EU is involved

(Updated: Sunday 19th April 2009 — I forgot to include all the EU bits.. whoops!)

It is in situations like this, where one’s own government is being spineless and settling at an unnecessarily draconian point on the liberty <–> security continuum, that the supra-national EU becomes really rather useful. After a celebrated petition by 2 British men,

the European court of human rights in Strasbourg said that keeping innocent people’s DNA records on a criminal register breached article eight of the Human Rights Convention, covering the right to respect for private and family life.

Guardian, 4 Dec 08

It has been 4 months since that ruling, and the illegal data, which is to say that of people like you who have never been convicted of a crime, still has not been removed.

It is a odd and disappointing that the same EU has insisted that fingerprints be stored on our passports in future, but this is a far less bitter pill to swallow, and with far more moderate side effects.

Even though the Americans are stepping up their database drive, a move towards a biometric state and all its sinister implications is not inevitable. The inevitable is only that which we fail to avoid.

Biometric security and surveillance is essentially an arms race, which raises the stakes for all of us. It erodes our liberty, freedom of movement, freedom of protest, right to privacy, and right to security. The small amount of crime we have does not justify gambling these hard fought for rights.

The good news for Britain’s energy supply is that the sheer scale of the recession has cut our electricity demand and carbon emissions. An impending energy security crunch has been postponed.The bad news is that the recession will almost certainly delay investment in Britain’s energy infrastructure and encourage complacency.

[...]

For the past two decades we have had ample reserves to absorb the shocks: now the margins are beginning to wear thin. Many of the existing power stations were built in the 1970s or earlier. All the coal-fired stations are more than 30 years old, as are most of the nuclear ones. They are all coming to the end of their lives and their reliability is inevitably beginning to suffer.

[...]

Time is now very short in energy terms. Investment does not fit into neat electoral cycles. With about five years to go if the economy recovers, there are still things that can be done. Our energy policy was designed for the years of energy surpluses and North Sea gas. It is still focused on keeping costs down and sweating assets. What is needed is a radical rethink, with investment the priority. It will take a national effort to prevent a serious crisis in the middle of the next decade.

Without such a redesign, if there is a rapid economic recovery, things could get nasty quite quickly. As energy systems operate closer to the margin, small shocks have large consequences. Today a few demonstrators cannot make any serious impact, and even a prolonged interruption in Russian gas supply can be withstood. But as margins tighten, prices respond disproportionately. Britain has probably already committed itself to higher and more volatile prices.

Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College, writing in The Times.

Economics has a great deal to answer for.

A short while ago some people tried to work out what should be done with the economy. They wanted to formalise it and build in growth and progress as a goal. All very noble and worthwhile, and really very effective when you look at where we are now versus where we were a few hundred years ago.

But… actually has it been successful? It’s worked, that much is clear. But a car with a flat tyre ‘works’, it’s just more likely to crash, won’t get you where you want to go as quickly, will use more fuel, and after lots of miles will undermine the structural integrity of the other parts. (Is there any problem anywhere which can’t be equated with some aspect of cars?!)

Actually much of the progress we’ve enjoyed has come in spite of the way we do things, not because of it.  I can’t help thinking that it has been largely due to the paradigm shifts in medicine, and the socially progressive effects of the industrial revolution, which was pushed forward by polymath and socially conscientious revolutionaries (eg) who enjoyed innovation and exploration for its own sake and had a desire to help their communities.

But I digress. This is not intended to be a diatribe on economic models and their suitability for the modern world (but you can be sure there will be one soon enough), this is intended to provide an introduction to the topic and draw attention to the impeccably constructed paragraphs of Robert Kennedy talking about GDP values pretty much everything, apart from that which is truly important. (Also available in video form below, which is probably better because it was written as a speech, not an essay, and benefits from his delivery.)

We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the gross national product. For the gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highway carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods, and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads . . . It includes Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our country.

And if the gross national product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of public officials . . . the gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile; and it can tell us everything about America — except whether we are proud to be Americans.

With reference to this conversation on facebook, wherein Crispin was suggesting that 5,000 days of lost workforce productivity (on account of the G20 demonstrations) could have been better spent, I was compelled to work out the following.

—-

Well if it’s maths that worries you…

Total spend on bailout so far:

£1,200,000,000,000 (1.2 trillion)

But let’s be generous and say that’s not all that is cost since there’s some asset purchase in there. (Though those assets are declining in value..), so let’s say half that, so, total COST of bailout =

£600,000,000,000 (600 billion)

TOTAL yearly revenue in taxes (in 2007, which was a good year don’t forget):
£600,000,000,000 (600 billion)

The Chancellor said that total public spending would rise from £589 billion in the financial year 2007-08 to £678 billion in 2010-11.

So you can see that the government was spending every penny it had (yay Labour!). Which means that to pay off that debt, taxes need to go up, right?

So UK GDP is:

£2,130,000,000,000 (2.13 trillion)

Working population is:

29,380,000,000 (29.3m and this number is falling as the population ages)

Working days per year: 223

So the average British worker generates the following per working day:

GDP divided by working population = GDP per capita
GDP per capita divided by working days = our answer

2.13tn / 29.38m = 72,498
72,493 / 233 = £325 per person productivity per day

So to pay off £600bn will take 600bn / 325 =

1,845,560,520 (1.845bn) days of extra work.

Divide that by the population to find out how much more the average person will have to work to pay this off =
1.845bn / 29.38m = 62.81 days

So if EVERYONE WORKING IN THE UK worked an extra 62.81 days, not taking ANY income at all, or contributing anything to any other public spending, we’d pay off the debt.

To put that in perspective, if we went the whole hog and worked a full 63 days, we’d generate another £28.8m, which is about what it would cost to provide the whole North East with an electric car infrastructure network.

So whilst your concern about 5000 working days lost is noted, that’s 0.00027% of what we’ll have to do to pay for these ‘mistakes’ (aka greed and legislative spinelessness).

Notes:

1. In case anyone reading this is thrown by the large numbers (which is probably everyone, since they are VERY large numbers), here’s a comparison:

1m seconds = 11.5 days
1bn seconds = 31.6 years
1tn seconds = 31,688 years

2. These numbers are not going to be right. They’re going to be worse, since the population is aging and we’ll be paying more in pensions and healthcare (already the largest slices of the tax spend pie); and we’ll be paying interest on the debt it generates. So… yeah.. sorry to bring you down, but next time think about who you choose to work for, and who you choose to vote for, eh?