Christian Renaud's Blog

Flying from and through Heathrow

I've received a fair number of questions from colleagues regarding the logistics of traveling through Heathrow after the recent terrorist events, so I thought I would post quickly regarding our experiences (captured in brief in previous posts) in the hope that it will help others.

I'll break it down to the discrete stages of: 1) Physical Access to Heathrow, 2) Ticketing, 3) Carry on restrictions, 4) Security

With regards to (1), the airport WAS (on 17/8) very accessible to our hired car at  0545.  There was much less congestion being dropped off than at our little Iowa airport here, and considerably less than I am accustomed to in Washington D.C., Raleigh, San Jose, San Francisco and the like.  Due to the terror events, we anticipated a long-delay in ticketing and security, so we planned extra time and were too early in the day to use our return tickets on the Heathrow Express, although I am told that the H.E. was a big pain as they had closed the lifts to the departures level altogether and people were asked to go out to the parking elevators to get to departure level.

Ticketing was made much easier due to e-tickets/electronic checkin.  We dropped off our bags at the British Airways bag-drop, tussled a little with the counter clerk with regards to the size of our carry-on bags, received plastic bags for our daughters to carry with our excess items, and were on our way.  Total time elapsed,  fifteen minutes.

Carry-on restrictions.  I am told that the size restriction is still in effect at Heathrow, and that the ban on liquids and gels is being considered as a permanent fixture.  I could be cynical and attribute this to the fact that BAA makes 50% of all profits from concessions at Heathrow, and this has been a goldmine for them, however lets give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it is for our safety.

Our own personal experience was simplified by our shipping many items ahead on our trip from London to the states, so as to have fewer contraband items in our carry-on bags.  As it was, we were asked to drink from our children's 'sippy cups' at security, but not pour the liquids out.  To my personal credit, an impromptu Academy-award- winning-performance of drinking my daughter's chocolate milk was enough to misdirect the security agents away from my seriously oversized carry-on backpack.

Security was prompt and efficient, with the exception of asking even my two very young daughters to remove their shoes and sweaters.  We were through security in an additional fifteen minutes.  By 0630, we were sitting in the terminal drinking excellent hot chocolates and eating croissants and pointing out aircraft to my youngest child.

My prior blog post was entitled 'Much ado about nothing', in reference to the amount of preparation we did for the airport, which went surprisingly well in retrospect.

One final note, days later when we were transiting through Heathrow from Oslo, the security was slightly stricter, with all passengers being frisked and all liquids being tasted or tossed-out.  Once again, this wasn't as strict as it could have been, and my wife was waved on without a pat-down when my daughter began crying. 

All in all, an inconvenience but not as bad as it was trying to get back into the U.S. after 9/11 from Mexico.

And the master said.....

"Let the Producers be many,   the consumers few."

- K'ung-fu-tzu (aka Confucius to us Westerners)

Sounds like Web 2.0 and the 'creator culture' to me.  Lots of blogs produced with few consumers.

And I don't want to hear any of that 'Information Appliance' nonsense

From the mouth of babes.....

My precocious four-year-old daughter recently asked me why her iBook is called a 'computer'.  She enumerated the things she does on it (educational games, audio, movies, video-conferencing with her grandparents, etc.) and asked why that equaled 'computer'.

I was honestly at a loss to explain.  Yes, there is computation involved in all of the above actions, but it is a somewhat outdated term, like 'horseless carriage' was for the automobile.

I told her she should call it whatever she wanted, and even name it if she so chose.

Quote of the Day

“When I am in a Socratic mood and planning my Republic, I make drastic changes in the education of the sons of well-to-do-citizens.  When they are sixteen or seventeen they begin to learn a craft and to do healthy manual labor, with plenty of poetry, songs, dancing, drill and gymnastics in their spare time.  They can thus let off their steam on something useful.  It is only when they are really thirsty for knowledge, longing to hear about things, that I would let them go to University.  It would be a favour, a coveted privilege, only to be given to those who had either proved their worth in factory or field or whose qualities and zeal were pre-eminient.”

- Winston S. Churchill

Give that man a cigar

                                          

Bruce Schneier has an excellent article in Wired that encompasses two of the memes I have written about previously:  The importance of perspective during terror events (both individual and societal), as well as how we need to make sure that we don't create a self-fulfilling prophecy by indicting all people of faiths that are not ours (which would be 'everyone else' for me, being an atheist).

"But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show's viewership."

Excellent stuff.

The Knowledge- Part 2

"You realize that the entire reason for the problems we have today is the result of the overly-simplified-response of our governments to September 11."

This was another pearl of wisdom dispensed by a remarkably articulate taxi driver in London last week.  He and I were waiting and whiling away the time discussing geo-politics.  The London terror situation was just cooling down, and we were discussing what could have been done to diffuse the pressure that causes the terror we read about every day in the press.

I try very very hard to not get my news from the standard sources, and actually cringe when faced with Fox News while waiting in an airport lounge.  The bias and distortion are palpable.  If I believed what I heard just while waiting for the Heathrow flight in Chicago:

- All Muslims are extremists, Islamo-fascists (sic), and hate the United States

- The reason for the terror we see and face directly is because the United States and the United Kingdom believe in Democracy and Freedom and the terrorists are bloodthirsty anarchists and fascists.

- The governments of the US and UK are doing everything in their power to protect you from these bad bad men, who wish nothing but to do you harm.  If this includes the random cruise missile into a crowded residential neighborhood, so be it.  If this includes most of your civil liberties under the bill of rights, then you should gleefully sacrifice them at the altar of patriotism.

Bullshit.  No wait, even worse, Pigshit. 

(Fact- You can actually smell pigshit miles away, whereas bullshit is not nearly as aromatic.)

The reason we are the target of terror, in my opinion, is the result of three things:

1) First and foremost, terror organizations, like religions, governments and corporations, are constituted of men.  Men in power relish that power and want more.  Men rarely give up their power without resistance.  Osama Bin Laden's arguments for why he is hostile to the United States change frequently, playing on the US opinion polls like Karl Rove's ruler on a speechwriter's knuckles.

2) The West has a broken model of conflict resolution.  How asinine is the statement 'War on Terror'?  Seriously.  Can you find a more self-illustrating comment, and self-damning, that represents the conflict-resolution skills of the Western superpowers?  When in doubt, shoot first and provide justification later.

The taxi driver was right, it is our overly-simplified response to an overly-complex issue that is exacerbating and escalating the friction between the United States and the rest of the world.  Not just the Middle East, the rest of the world. 

When we were in Norway last weekend, enjoying a short break after the absolutely perfect wedding of my friends Gunnar and Anja, I had the pleasure of relaxing on the lawn of the Walaker Hotell on the Sonnenfjord with a number of erudite people from Norway, Denmark, and Dubai.  There wasn't outright hostility towards the United States, but rather a combination of resignation, and an almost sympathetic sadness, as if we were perpetually living with a turrets-syndrome-spewing, bi-polar administration.  I felt the need to repeatedly apologize for the actions of my elected government and how it affected the rest of the world.

In contrast, they had a very mature perspective of conflict resolution, ranging from Norwegian dialogue between parties to the more capitalist perspective of the Dubai contingent that the 'markets would sort it out'.  'Bomb them into a parking-lot' was not a phrase in usage.

3) There is a considerable collection of baggage between all the involved parties.  You could start in BCE and still not catalogue all of the slights and transgressions waged from either side.  No one in this conflict is without sin.  Each party selectively adjusts their starting counter to whatever is the most convenient for their argument or intended actions.  This is the one variable that is least diffuse-able (not a real word, sorry). 

As Bernard Lewis, ironically George Bush's favorite Middle-East scholar, stated so well in 'Crisis of Islam', the West will say 'That's history' to refer to something that is irrelevant, whereas educated Muslims will say the same thing in reference to today's actions as context.  Faulkner said the same thing when he said "History is not 'was'.  History 'is'."

We will only make things worse until we seek first to understand, then to be understood.  This is not the overly-simple clash of cultures that Fox News and the US administration would have you believe, and it is possible to make a space where everyone on the planet can live in peace, justice and dignity, without having to force their way of life upon someone.

Life, a culture, way of life, and the planet itself, is not an item of scarcity to be stolen from other person, but an abundance to be enjoyed with them. (except the water, of course)

Thirsty?

Peter Hesseldahl had a quick post about profligate water usage by neighboring Garden City Kansas (well, 597 miles my neighbor).  The photos he found on Google Earth do not look remarkable if you fly over the midwest of the United States at all.

One of the messages that was reinforced for me over and over again at WFS in Toronto, as well as in Jared Diamond's Collapse, was that water is going to soon be the new oil, and there will most certainly be wars fought over access to the increasingly scarce resource.  This is already taking the form of open hostility in a number of states in the US, here, here and here, as well as open violence in Australia, Bolivia and elsewhere.  The United Nations is already offering dire predictions about the lack of fresh water as soon as 2025.

You need it to live.  Any ideas how to conserve it?

Implicit Values? Books and Beer

As I flush my buffers (and my Ecto cache) from my European holiday, there was one meme that I didn't want to fall through the cracks.

When I was in Helsinki in 1999, I went to a local bookshop and purchase some new travel-reading material.  I settled on a large paperback edition of The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas.  At the time, I thought my mathematical faculties were failing me, as my exchange rate calculations stated that I paid around three US dollars for the thirteen-hundred-page book.  Good value.

I then ambled to the closest pub and sat down outside in the sun to enjoy Edmund Dantes' trials with a pint of the local lager.  I was stunned to discover that the pint of beer was four times the cost of the very large paperback book.

This occured to me again last week in Norway, while grocery shopping in the quaint hamlet of Solvorn. The fresh bread, milk and the like were very inexpensive, given the remote location of the village.  What was pricey was a simple can of Tuborg beer.  Very pricey.

When is the last time you sat down in a restaurant in the US with your $10 paperback from Barnes and Noble or Amazon, and received your pint of beer with a bill for $40?

Is this some sort of implicit value statement from Finland and Norway?  Do they subsidize books, and heavily tax beer?  Do they have a vice-tax, like on cigarettes in the United States, where beer is surcharged 300%?

If this is a broader reflection of their societal values, I'll bet long on the success of those countries that incent literacy and nutrition and not alcohol consumption.  Not that I encourage government to dabble in the daily affairs of men, but if they do have to dabble.........

Viva la Techno-Libertarians!

In September 2004, the NSA released a study (now unclassified, but not posted on the net) entitled "Tackling Tomorrow Today: Alternative Futures and Convergent Technologies of 2020".  In this document, Toffler Associates spelled out a number of different technology scenarios and how they would impact the world as we currently know it.

One of the four scenarios was 'Techno-Libertarians', which was obviously my personal favorite.  A few snippets, so as not to get in to trouble with my favorite three-letter governmental agency:

"Hyper-empowered individuals, not corporations, lead this growth.  They create enormous wealth and new industries by combining breakthrough technologies with worldwide networks of experts."..."The ability of individuals to create vast new forms of wealth leads to worldwide political and economic revolutions."

"The wave of economic growth and individualism pushes political power into smaller and smaller units.  Small groups demand more individual attention from government.  They are no longer willing to accept one-size-fits-all solutions from federal bureaucracies.  Their demands force governments to redistribute power from the national level to communities."..."Central governments 'fight' to maintain their position..."

Sound familiar?

I was speaking with a London taxi driver the other day and he said that all of his peers were expatriating to Spain with their hard earned money before the influx of immigration (and the resultant impact on policy and entitlement programs) causes England to blow up like a Wachowski-brothers movie.  These expats were then imposing their willpower on the small Spanish enclaves they had relocated to.

Corporations have long been in the game of playing governments against each other for favorable tax structures.  One large firm went so far as to relocate its entire European operation to a new country when the incumbent attempted to exercise excessive regulation and taxes.

Firsthand, I have seen hyper-empowered individuals re-assert their strength against local governments.  In the small city I live in, there is an ongoing litigation with the city suing itself over a zoning decision, brought on by one individual standing up to the planning committee's ruling to not let him rebuild and expand his barn, which inconveniently sits just off of the main commercial street of the town.

He's not a techno-libertarian, but in watching the Institute for Justice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other like-minded organizations take the fight to the government in the name of individual liberties, it's easy to see that the ever-expanding beast of government is being challenged if not remanded to more of a service organization by people with the means to do so.

Lets hope this is a consistent trend. 

P.S. I'll gladly stand by a 'smaller, service-oriented government' message if I ever create a political party or run for office.  If not, please shoot me.

The Knowledge- Part 1

Having spent a fair bit of time in London taxis of late, and having had occasion to converse with the affable and smart taxi drivers at length, there were two particular conversations that stuck with me.

The first of these, and the subject of this rant, was the remarkable insight of the taxi driver on the secondary economic impacts of telecommuting and geo-arb'ing. 

The driver illustrated the point by explaining that the majority of his fares are the cliche London businessperson, going from home or local-tube-stop to the office.  Over the last three years, he had seen a precipitous drop in the number of these fares on Mondays and Fridays.  He had gone as far as query his regular customers as to this trend, and explained to me that they were 'working from home, because of the Internet', which resulted in less trips in taxis to the office.  This had materially impacted his income and those dependent upon same.

He then expanded the discussion to include those of his regular customers who had chosen to move away from London to the English countryside and now work remotely, practicing the fine art of Euro-Geo-Arbing.  They had checked-out of the very-expensive London rat-race entirely.

It would be interesting to get ahold of before/after figures of the number of telecommuters in London when they initiated the Charge. I suspect that, like bus and underground usage, the amount of working-from-home increased considerably.