Stardate 20020128.1250

(On Screen): Sometimes brainless bureaucrats can put you in a no-win situation.

There is a cartoon I saw once, years ago. It showed a dead-end alley with a sign on the wall leading in saying "One Way", one door permitting exit with a sign on it saying "Do not Enter", and a big sign at the end of the alley saying "No loitering". And in the corner sitting under that last sign, was a man making himself small, hugging his knees, looking miserable and fearful.

I once worked at Tektronix on logic analyzers. Those are devices which permit electrical engineers to put probes on wires in a digital circuit and to monitor what it does. All wires radiate; it's known as EMI (electromagnetic interference) because it can ride in on other wires through capacitive or inductive coupling and cause cross-talk. The FCC had created a specification for how much EMI we were permitted to generate with our probe leads.

Unfortunately, someone at the FCC screwed up; they apparently just picked a number that sounded good and wrote it down. I'm pretty sure of that because one of our EE's did some calculations and proved that the only way we could make the spec was by altering the laws of physics. Our management hastily arranged a trip for some of our people to Washington to have a little talk with the regulators about that spec.

Now, in its endless quest to protect the environment, the EU is concerned about chloro-flouro-carbons emitted from certain kinds of foam. One major use of those foams is as insulation in refrigerators, and the EU has issued a ruling that old refrigerators can only be disposed of in special plants designed to capture those CFCs without releasing them into the environment.

Alas, the rule went into effect on the first of the year, and there are no plants in the UK yet equipped to legally process old refrigerators. So people have taken to dumping them in the middle of the night in the countryside to get rid of them.

And everyone is pointing figures at everyone else. Friends of the Earth says it's a good policy badly implemented. The government of the UK blames the EU. Farmers who are being stuck with these things are pissed at everyone. (One of them has fifty of them so far.)

The problem, of course, is tyranny. One definition of tyranny is when there are people who have authority without commensurate responsibility. Bureaucrats in Belgium (I like that phrase; it alliterates nicely) have the ability to decree these changes but no responsibility for making sure that their policies can actually be carried out.