We've been talking about putting it on a financial basis.  Simpler in the long term, all things considered.

Thanks for the Noseybonk flashback.  Way ahead of his time, in covering up to avoid leaving DNA evidence on the scene.

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Metus amatores matrum compescit, non clementia.

I haven't read the book. The slippery slope fallacy though, to me, is not a case of taking an argument to its logical conclusion, it's of taking an argument to its narrative conclusion, even though that is not logically supported. So I guess you could still find an analogue in that, making a runaway train a case of stopping at an argument's narrative conclusion rather than following to its logical one.

That decentralisation article is a bit depressing. Thing is it's quite possible to observe inefficiency and failure at an individual level when dealing with a centralised bureaucracy, but I can also see, once such a structure in place, things falling apart with radical attempts at reform. If I feeling particularly fatalistic today I would say that decentralised systems are fine, but the process of decentralising is much easier to screw up than centralisation.

_{The Political Science Department of the University of Woolloomooloo}

For example, you cannot get causation from correlation. True, though the Bayesian network stuff from Pearl, Glymour etc, is interesting.

That still leaves you with the question: where do you get causation from? You can take a hard line and say that only randomised controlled trials count. That is fine for science, but ones personal life is short, with forced choices. Tweaking up the hit rate of your guesses can make quite a difference.

My general point is that you have choices to make, and must decide what to base them on. You are very lucky if you can rigorously prove that you are taking the right route. A book of fallacies that tells you that the arguments you are using are not certain is unhelpful. A book about decision making under risk and uncertainty is much more to the point.

And then the personal and the political are not so far apart. It doesn't help to say to knock down public policy A, because that doesn't prove the alternative B. We are not convinced by the arguments for either A or B. Nevertheless we must choose, and it would be nice to have an agreed framework for weighing indicative arguments in an uncertain world.

If you think seeing VB/Java/PHP/whatever HLL programmers get accolades for their work is painful, you should try watching graphic designers get praises heaped on them from marketing people for copy-pasting some simple animation code they find on the web into a Flash animation.

It argued that, among other problems, decentralized school boards don't have the critical mass to fairly negotiate with national corporations (text books, etc.) and labor unions and, consequently, only the largest school districts are bargaining on a level playing field with these areas.

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There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic

I read that recently as well, and agree with you (especially the spoiler bit you've covered up!) He was very young when he wrote it which probably has something to do with it. I'm going to try one of the later ones.

A good police thriller I read recently is Savage Moon by Chris Simms. Set on Saddleworth Moor near Manchester, and involves escaped big cats and paedophilia - you can't go wrong with that!

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It's political correctness gone mad!