Mandatory smoke detectors “sold” by using fear

The first of Juni 2022, the Netherlands will have a new law that makes it mandatory for every home to have a smoke detector on every level of that house. I have nothing against smoke detectors. We have them at home and I know that they work. I’m not even that much against making safety features mandatory. What I do mind very much, is selling us this stipulation under a cloak of fear and dread when it is perfectly clear that the “life saving” aspect of smoke detectors is statistically insignificant.

Government and safety institutions tout the mandatory use of smoke detectors as a great method to save lives. Well, how many lives you asked? They say as much as 13 to 22! A day you might gasp? No.. no, a year. 13 to 22 lives saved a year if everybody has some detectors on every level of their home and uses them correctly! Surely that can’t be a solid reason to make them mandatory?

Well, it isn’t of course. The argument is emotional and not rational. It also is a easy law to make because 100% of the cost will be covered by the people. Of course smoke detectors are not that expensive, but lets just break the numbers down for a minute. We have 8 million homes with, on average, 2 levels. A cheap smoke detector could cost about 20 euro’s. The longest lasting detectors last 10 years and should be replaced after that period. So that means that society ponies up 8000000 * 40 euro’s every ten years to save 13 to 22 lives a year. Lets make it a nice 25 lives saved or 250 in those 10 years. This would mean than the cost of a single live saved would be in the range of 13 million euros! I know you can’t put a price on a human life, but surely if I have a serious illness, despite the fact that I’m insured, a 13 million euro treatment is most likely not going to happen!

This is all considering the detectors are operated and maintained correctly of course. This means that they will have to be placed preferably on the ceiling along the escape route. This mostly means hallways leading to stairs and front/back doors. The manufacturers generally advice to check the detector once a month to make sure it is still operational. This is a problem.

Assume every one of the 8 billion households do their due diligence and check their detectors every month. That would mean getting a ladder, climbing to the ceiling and operate the device over your head which will make it go off near your ears. This means 8 million * 24 trips up and down a ladder per year. On average, 10 or 11 people die a DAY from falling off of things in their own homes. Making our ageing population do an extra 192.000.000 trips up and down ladders to check if the detector that they will probably never need will certainly cause more deaths due to falling from the ladder due to being in an odd position while a siren is going off in your ear! It will literally kill more people than detectors can possibly save.

Clearly the argument that a smoke detector could save your life is by far not enough to mandate the use of them. It just makes no sense. The odds of a smoke detector doing its job and actually saving lives is statistically negligible. Why not promote them based on what they actually can do, namely minimizing damage because of early warning. That would make sense and the number show this is precisely where their value lies. Do not sell us a law we have to pay for with fear tactics and lies how these things are going to save us, because they rarely do!

You could make it that fire insurance requires less premium if you install detectors or you could subsidize them, but mandatory use that could potentially cause more death that it prevents is not the correct way.

CBS : The Culture vulture.

CBS : The Culture vulture.

I have written before on how copyright and intellectual property laws are unnatural and detrimental to society and sadly there has once again been an outrageous attack on cultural expression by a company that is not only ultra aggressive when it comes to their IP, but they are also an incredible bunch of hypocrites. CBS, a couple of weeks ago shut down Stage 9. A non-profit fan made virtual recreation of the TNG starship enterprise-D. It is yet another prime example why soulless companies should not be allowed to hoard cultural expression indefinitely for their own portfolio and profit.

On (fictional) universes and the insanity of IP ownership

History and cultural heritage as a source of inspiration is truly amazing in many ways. The fastness of it, the depth and richness. The endless possibilities in analyzing histories, comparing the past and the present or juxtaposing those. You can interpret it endlessly and use it as a foundation for study, fiction, research and art. This makes it very great, but not unique in the complete body of work we call culture. What makes it so special is that, as property in the public domain, no part of history can be owned by a single person or cooperation.

It may seem really straightforward to you that when I take an era in history, say the French revolution and write a narrative history of this era, that I do not automatically own the rights to that historical event. I have copyright of my work, but the foundation on which this work has been build does not default into my care completely. I can’t bar people from entertaining the same narrative or a completely new interpretation of the French revolution just because I wrote something about it in a particular context.
Now where am I going with this?

The farce of protecting the creative

The slogan the dutch lobby group BREIN and its operational manager, Tim Kuik, go by is the cheesy and awkward “The art of protecting the creating”. This is an interesting slogan not only because only three words here have merit and the other three have not. These three words are… naturally… “The”, “of” and “the” (again.. so arguably only 2 words.. (but i digress)). These words only have merit because, structurally, these tie the sentence together, regardless of content. The other three words are completely inappropriate for BREIN in every imaginable way.

Tech journalism : Worst than the gossip pages

Very little journalism is good journalism. In fact, calling the majority of reports journalism is an insult to proper journalism. The vast majority of journalism is shoddy, poorly researched, click-bait driver regurgitated drivel often with a biased agenda one way or the other. This is true for most media, but the internet surely takes the cake here and within this realm lives the “tech journalist”.  On par with the gossip column, but often mush more incompetent with regards to the subject.

Ow, how I hate tech journalism at large. Their lack of any form of vision or insight. The random tangents and hyperbolae they shoot forth for no apparent reason. The oblatory lack or research or citing sources. The obvious extension to the tech and ad-industry that they are.

There are very little mainstream tech article in which either a single miscomprehension nullifies the entire bloody thing or where the one-sidedness is so thick that even the fact sheets should be doubted. The stupidity of the conclusion that are drawn from various sources, often uncredited, without any form of analytical explanation.

Cultural re-appropriation : Why going after individual downloaders is wrong and misguided

This week a film distributor, Dutch film works, in the Netherlands announced that they have a list of IP addresses and will go after individual downloaders first with a warning and after multiple infraction with a “fine” or a court case. These strong arm tactics have been deployed elsewhere in Europe and are admittedly meant as a deterrent.

What is notable here is that these actions have been mostly undertaken by middleman in these industries like distributors not the authors or producers nor television and cinema companies. This is telling because it tells us something about the relation between the audience and the different parties involved in providing film entertainment. There is a very clear reason why a distributor would go after individuals whereas TV stations of creators rarely do so. Also, there is a very good reason why distributors like Dutch film works are in the wrong when they assume that they have a right to do so.

Copyright enforcers and civil disobedience : Why we have a duty to resist.

 

“I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

2002 ~ David Bowie

For years around the world, especially in western nations, copyright watchdogs for the content and entertainment industry have predictably pushed and pushed to gain more rights and reduce peoples privacy and disown us of our active cultural environment. In the Netherlands we have BREIN as a shill for the industry and they have again increased their target spectrum, now by having gained the right to use intrusive, possibly fishing software, to find and match uploads.

At this time of writing BREIN claims only to go after “BIG” uploads, whatever the metric for that would be, but it is barely a slippery slope argument if one predicts that this will lead to “smaller” uploaders or even .torrent file downloads in the future. These thugs have been pushing the acceptable boundaries for years now and I do not see them having any reason to stop here.

Tim Kuik ~ Thief*

 

Why you need to use Adblock all the time

There are many good reasons to use adblock and anti tracking software for your browser. Ads and tracking sites are annoying, potentially dangerous, they slow down your browser and they hog your bandwidth. All very good reason to simply block ads no matter how much a youtuber or website is whining about lost ad revenues. Within these bounds the user is perfectly in his or her right to choose to use this software.

But there is another good reason to block ads. A reason that could actually make NOT using adblock a bad thing to do.

Sites whining about ad-blockers. Cry me a river.

Occasionally I visit the “tech” website tweakers.net. Mostly through links, but sometimes just to see what nonsense the editors and the community are whining about this time. Aptly named, for it is seemingly run by a random collection of crystal-meth addicts, this dutch tech site has been popular in the tech scene in the Netherlands for years. Now sensible people understand that popularity does not equate quality and this certainly is the case with this site. Poor and biased reporting, generally a payed lip-service site to the highest bidder, a North Korean mentality like community and not worthy of the label “news”.

Polemic : The shameless arrogance of an amateur identity historian

The shameless arrogance of an amateur identity historian.

Identity history : The act of interpreting parts of history in order to project onto yourself the roll of hero of victim or project onto others the roll of the villain.

Most historians shun this amateurish approach to historical narratives due to obvious reasons. Most examples of Identity history seem harmless enough, genealogy for instance often focusses on ancestors that were somehow notable, mostly ignoring the lesser known forebears. The famous ancestor then somehow reflects its attributes on the contemporary individual, although odds are that (s)he is just as unremarkable as most of the genealogy that was ignored. The BBC show, “who do you think you are?” is a good example of seemingly innocent identity history. Famous people track down their ancestral roots until they find some remarkable story about the success or grievances of somebody down their family tree.