Road charging involves tracking your car’s movements, and taxing you based on the distance travelled. The twist is that you would be charged more for travelling on bigger, busier roads, and charged more if you travelled at certain busy times of the day and days of the week. The idea is that this will encourage motorists to travel at less congested times, and use alternative routes, and — holy of holies — use more public transport (and we all know my feelings on that one).

Most people are up in arms about this, based on the sophisticated “Fuck you, I don’t want to pay more money” argument. However, the real reason that road charging is daft is this: for a tax to be an effective deterrent, you need to be able to easily predict how your actions are going to affect what you get charged.

The London congestion charge is a good example of this. The rules are simple: if you drive within this area between 7am and 6:30pm, Monday to Friday, you have to pay a fixed fee for that day. The entry points to the charge zone are clearly marked with signs and road markings. It is very easy to understand how to avoid being taxed, and if you are taxed it is very easy to know how much it will cost you.

The road charging scheme, on the other hand, is likely to be incredibly complex. It won’t be possible to classify roads simply, since an A-road in Britain can be anything from a two-lane country road to an eight-lane behemoth coursing through the capital city. And since different roads (and directions) get busy at different times, it’s likely that they’ll have different charging schedules for each different road.

In other words, it’ll be very difficult to predict what charges you’ve incurred; you’ll just have to trust the bill that your black box generates at the end of each month. Not the most effective recipe for a deterrent tax. (And a hellishly expensive one to implement, too, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Michael J. Fox is a class act.

However, a recent report by NY education officials paints a far less rosy picture. Rather than being a carefully managed treatment administered by medical professionals, it appears that shocks are administered for range of minor, everyday offences, such as ‘nagging, swearing and failing to maintain a neat appearance’, and that even ‘newly-hired staff with little to no training’ are allowed to shock students.

I can’t comment on the potential benefits of a proper medical programme that includes electric shock aversion therapy. It may well be a good treatment. But it’s not what’s going on here, by a long shot. If the report is accurate, then what’s going on here isn’t medical treatment. It’s just plain fucking disgusting.

The center can trot out a handful of ’success stories’, but that doesn’t justify putting these young people through what amounts to a daily life of fear.

(As an aside, how would you respond if you started a new job supervising students, and without any training were told that you could and should administer electric shocks to the children when they misbehaved? I think I’d be horrified at the suggestion, and I think I’d be too worried about the wrongness of the situation and my inexperience and lack of understanding to actually do it. But then we all know about the Milgram experiment.)

“They call it pollution. We call it life.”

They’re pro-CO₂ ads. Apparently all that stuff about how bad carbon dioxide is, and how it’s causing global warming, is all lies! For instance, did you know that we breathe out CO₂, and plants breathe it in?! How could it possibly be bad?!

I mean, come on. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t try to avoid tsunamis because water is good for us.