France Postage

 The Week, 1 October 2022, News section, Page 7

Paris

Book delivery: The French government is planning to force booksellers to charge at least €3 per delivery, in an attempt to loosen the grip on the market of e-commerce giants such as Amazon. In 2014, France reacted to pressure from independent retailers by making it illegal to offer free delivery for books, but Amazon got around this by charging its customers a nominal one cent. By contrast, independent booksellers, who are reliant on smaller logistical networks, have to charge as much as €7 per delivery. Amazon condemned the proposed minimum fee, which applies to sales of up to €35, on the grounds that it would "negatively impact the purchasing power" of French book lovers who do not have close access to bricks and mortar bookshops. The proposal will now be passed to the European Commission for approval. 

I remember reading that Amazon had a free postage tier above a certain spend in every country except France. And that when Amazon changed the token amount of postage in France (for a spend above a certain amount) – sales in France went up. In other words, free has a huge attraction even in relation to a very small delivery cost.

Local Fonts

 Local fonts means the the web-font is on the server that hosts the website. A web font is recognisable from the .wof and .wof2 file type.

JenT posted a helpful post on the consequences of a court case where the claimant was successful in arguing that the owner of the web site had breached GDPR regulations by loading Google fonts because Google fonts trace the IP address of the person visiting the web site.

As Hacker News points out, Google Fonts is a font embedding service library from Google, allowing developers to add fonts to their Android apps and websites simply by referencing a stylesheet. As of January 2022, Google Fonts is a repository for 1,358 font families and is used by over 50.1 million websites.

For self-hosted sites, which our e-commerce site at FLYING TWIGS is, then the process of swapping over to local fonts is doable. We use GeneratePress and this an Adding Local Fonts page in the documentation on how to pull down Google fonts and host them locally using this tool – google-webfonts-helper that identifies the files for Google fonts.

I have already done this on Flying Twigs and I am working my way through my other self-hosted sites. That said, in WP 6.2 it looks as though WP will incorporate some method of doing this without having to add custom CSS and without having to temporarily add php code to the functions file to allow uploading .woff and .woff2 files.

The code one needs to add (and then remove once one has uploaded the .woff files) to the functions file is to allow uploading .woff files, which to protect against malicious code being injected, are normally not allowed.

WP Tavern has articles on local fonts, and suggests Bunny Fonts as a plugin as an easier way to replace Google fonts. I read the documentation for Bunny Fonts and it seemed just as straightforward to use the GeneratePress method. And there is every reason to think that the same GeneratePress method would work on any theme, not that I have tried it. And it would work with any web font that one might buy and download.

All this said, none of this applies to WP.com that operates above the site owner’s head so to speak,

But for an overview of all of this – I recommend WPCOMMAVEN’s article on Google fonts and GDPR.

I thought I read somewhere that Google claimed that the IP addresses were obfuscated so that no GDPR rules were broken, but I may be imagining that. Maybe Google will take the initiative and put the fonts somewhere that is air-gapped form the rest of Google so that nothing is fed back to Google. It seems easier than getting a reputation from fifty million disgruntled web site owners who may or may not know how to cure such problem as there is

Poaching News

 

Poaching News

The iNews newspaper of 19 July 2022 reports on page 34 that elephant tusks and pangolin scales had been seized in Malaysia

Malaysian authorities said yesterday they seized a container of African elephant tusks, pangolin scales and other animal skulls and bones estimated to be worth 80 million ringgit (£15m).
The Customs Department said in a statement it discovered the contraband hidden behind sawn timber following checks on 10 July on a ship coming from Africa. This included 6,000kg of elephant tusks, 100kg of pangolin scales, 25kg of rhino horns and 300kg of animal skulls, bones and horns, it said.
Investigations are ongoing on the importer and shipping agent.
Ivory tusks, rhino horns and pangolin scales are believed by some to have medicinal properties and are in high demand in Asia.
The World Wildlife Fund said the illegal wildlife trade threatens the survival of many species and has led to a 60 per cent decline in population sizes of vertebrate species.

I looked up how much an average elephant tusk weighs, and its 23kg. So 46kg per elephant – which means that someone had killed 130 elephants to get that haul.

And around sixteen rhinos at 1.5 to 2.5kg per horn.

There is a huge variation in the number of scales on pangolins, varying with species, and an average of 0.47 kg per animal is very approximate, but let’s say 200 animals killed to make the weight of scales found.

Is that a lot? The United Nations page on pangolin scales shows that 69.3 tons of pangolin scales were seized in 2019. That’s 147,447 pangolins.

Commons Select Committee On Standards and Owen Paterson

Kathryn Stone is the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards of the House of Commons.

The Commissioner is an independent officer of the House of Commons, and the Commissioner’s remit is to investigate allegations that MPs have breached the rules found in paragraphs 11-18 of the House of Commons’ Code of Conduct for Members.

Once the investigation is concluded, the Commissioner reports to The Commons Select Committee On Standards.

In October 2021 the Commissioner found that Owen Paterson had breached the paid advocacy rules for making three approaches to the Food Standards Agency and four approaches to the Department for International Development in relation to Randox and seven approaches to the Food Standards Agency relating to Lynn’s Country Foods.

The Commissioner said Paterson had “repeatedly used his privileged position to benefit two companies for whom he was a paid consultant, and that this has brought the house into disrepute” and that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of behaviour in failing to separate private and public interests”.

Acting on her report, The Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that Paterson be suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days. The Government decided they didn’t like that and voted to overturn the suspension. The uproar that followed resulted in Own Paterson resigning as an MP.

Before the uproar, the Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Sky News that he believed Kathryn Stone should review her position after her suspension of Owen Paterson was blocked by Parliament.

But here’s the thing. She didn’t suspend him. She reported to the Committee and they suspended him.

According to the Committees page of Parliament the current members of the Committee on Standards are:

Chris Bryant MP Labour Rhondda Commons Chair
Dr Arun Midha Lay Member
Mrs Jane Burgess Lay Member
Mr Paul Thorogood Lay Member
Mrs Rita Dexter Lay Member
Mrs Tammy Banks Lay Member
Dr Michael Maguire Lay Member
Mehmuda Mian Lay Member
Andy Carter MP Conservative Warrington South
Alberto Costa MP Conservative South Leicestershire
Allan Dorans MP Scottish National Party Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock
Mark Fletcher MP Conservative Bolsover
Yvonne Fovarque MP Labour Makerfield
Sir Bernard Jenkin MP Conservative Harwich and North Essex

How did they arrive at their decision on the penalty to impose on Mr Paterson? There are four Conservative MPs on the Committee. How did they vote?

Bearing in mind the Commissioner’s finding that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches” was as bad as Mr Paterson’s, it might have been more appropriate for the The Commons Select Committee on Standards to suspend Mr Paterson for the rest of the Parliament.

If Parliament had not voted to overturn the suspension, then Mr Paterson would not have resigned and he would have been suspended for 30 sitting days.

The Standing Orders of Parliament dictate the consequences of being suspended.

45. Members suspended, etc., to withdraw from precincts
    (1) Members who are ordered to withdraw under Standing Order No. 43 (Disorderly conduct) or who are suspended from the service of the House shall forthwith withdraw from the precincts of the House.
    (2) Suspension from the service of the House shall not exempt the Member so suspended from serving on any committee for the consideration of a private bill to which he may have been appointed before the suspension.

45A. Suspension of salary of Members suspended
The salary of a Member suspended from the service of the House shall be withheld for the duration of his suspension.

So there is a financial penalty, assuming ‘withheld’ means that it is never paid to the MP, rather than held back and paid later.

So how much is it? The basic annual salary of an MP in the House of Commons is £81,932, as of April 2020. How does a withholding of pay for a sitting day tie into that? The Commons Library records the number of Commons sitting days by session since 1945, and from the latest figures (2015-2016) there seems to be around 150 sitting days. So would Owen Paterson have forfeited 30 of 150 of £81,932, which would be £16,800?

Or would it be 30 of 365 of £81,932, which would be £6,700? Or something else?

The newspapers reported that Mr Paterson made something around four times his MP’s salary as a consultant. So having his name in the public eye associated with sleaze may have hurt him more than it did his pocket. Or perhaps not. Without knowing Mr Paterson, one cannot say.

All of which is blood under the bridge, because he resigned and lost all his pay. Who could have predicted that outcome? And bearing in mind the 80 seat majority that the Conservatives have in the Commons, what skin was it off their nose if one of their MPs was suspended for 30 days? It makes you wonder.

What the eye sees - what the camera sees

The eye can isolate something in way that the camera cannot. Yes, I know you can use a longer focal length lens that sees a smaller part of the scene, but that’s not what I am talking about. 

What I mean is that the eye can take a small part of the scene it sees, and see it in sharp focus, and blur off or almost discard the rest of the scene.

This is quite apart from the fact that the eye has around ten times the discrimination of shades from light to dark compared to a film or a digital camera.

So with that in mind, take a look at the first photo here. The camera sees a jumble of things, all more or less equally. The only thing that matters to the camera’s ability to split up a scene is the depth of field, or the distance from front to back that is in focus.

In this scene, most objects are the same distance from the camera. The pieces of wood in the pile further back on top off the barge/boat are out of focus, so they are less prominent in the way we see the scene when we look at the photo.

Our eyes also give more prominence to colours like bright red. And I notice that little yellow pot right away. Still, the whole scene is a jumble of objects.

So let me tell you, though, that that is not how I saw the scene with my eyes when I approached. My eyes caught on something that stood out and pushed everything else out of the way.

It was this – the round mirror with a view back up the way I had walked. The water by the boat was moving and the water in the round mirror was moving – and the view in the round mirror just grabbed my attention.

After many adventures, the tree was glad to have the opportunity to pass on its wisdom to the new generation

 

Steve Jobs Quote about keeping on

 When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

-Steve Jobs