Charles on… anything that comes along

• Nee Naw - Blog of a Dispatcher in the London Ambulance Service’s Control Room
  

  I did derive some pleasure from telling the maternataxis/toothaches/crying babies etc things like “Sorry, we’re extremely busy, and we have to give priority to genuine life threatening emergencies. You could be waiting some time, if not forever” but I hate, loathe and despise telling genuine callers that they are not getting an ambulance right now because they are all out dealing with silly football fans who can’t handle their beer. The people that were really suffering were the Assist Onlys - that is, old people who have fallen over, can’t get up, and need an ambulance to lift them and check them over. They aren’t a priority, because they aren’t seriously injured, but I just hate to think of old people languishing on the floor, alone, scared and helpless.

  The sort of insight that I would have killed for back when I was writing about the LAS (London Ambulance Service) computer flaws. But this is simply great reading too. (Spotted via Fraser Spiers)

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• Gavin Shearer (he’s a Microsoftie who does Macs) has read “Garbage Land”, by an author who followed where all the stuff she put out for the bin men in New York actually goes:

Toward the end of the book, Royte writes:

If we have a garbage problem, it is that landfills and incinerators make it too easy to get rid of things. Burying or burning waste only spurs more resource extraction to make more products. Our trash cans, I believe, ought to make us think: not about holes in the ground and barrels of oil saved by recycling, but about the enormous amount of material and energy that goes into the stuff we use for an instant and then discard. Garbage should worry us. It should prod us. We don’t need better ways to get rid of things. We need to not get rid of things, either by keeping them cycling through the system or not designing and desiring them in the first place.

Here then is how you get people to recycle more: (1) have less frequent rubbish collections, but more frequent recycling collections; (2) sue the hell out of anyone who flytips. They’ll leave clues. Follow the clues - letters, cards, stuff like that. People who are so lazy they flytip will also be so lazy they’ll leave those sorts of clues.

He also went to see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, about which he says

I just watched a film that discusses, with great frankness, the very real possibility that Earth will no longer support our species by the coming century.

The same thought had occurred to me this afternoon; I wondered if I was really preparing my children for life as it will be. If scarcity becomes more common (if you see what I mean), what happens to the social contract? Or as Shearer puts it:

we’re talking about the future of the species, here. Some petty little extra 2% return doesn’t outweigh the rights of hundreds of millions of people not to get flooded out of their houses as the sea rises. (Send my regards to Wall street.)

(Seen at Gavin Shearer (MSoft, Mac))

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• If you take out more from the Earth than you put in, it'll stop eventually (30 March 2005; score: 21.31%)