Why doesn’t the Sale of Goods Act (1979) apply to software?

My “work” yesterday consisted almost entirely of dealing with faulty software.

The 4 year old PC  that I have at work had ground to a halt and needed a complete reinstall of the operating system. Then I found that I couldn’t get hold of drivers for the video card, that had worked previously, that let me rotate my screens to portrait mode.

My daughter’s car needs to be driven miles to the main dealer because the airbag light is on, which would make it fail its MOT. The local mechanics can’t clear fault codes for such new cars. It’s 6 years old. (The airbag light is a real case of using “safety” as an excuse for dangerous and dishonest business practices). The dealers are suggesting £120 as a starting figure.

The slide scanner at home turns out not to work on Macs or under Windows 7,  so more, perfectly good, hardware will end as landfill because the software is lousy. That, and the Epsom printer that is just the wrong age to understand the Epsom control codes from our accounting software.

If tax can’t be collected, the action is banned.

We don’t get much snow in the UK, so it isn’t worth having thousands of snow ploughs rusting away to be used for a couple of weeks every decade.

One solution was to provide much cheaper snow plough attachments that farmers could put on their tractors to help clear rural roads on the odd occasion that they were needed.

Apparently that’s not allowed to any more, because tractors run on untaxed (red) diesel fuel and are therefore not allowed to do work on the roads.

Well I don’t know how much tax fuel duty the government would miss out on if they let farmers clear snow on red diesel, but it must be an absolutely miniscule proportion of the fuel duty collected. By insisting that tractors can’t be used, the roads don’t get cleared, no tax is collected anyhow, and it just adds to the disruption.

It isn’t even safety fascism, it’s just a case of banning something because tax can’t be collected on it, when it would benefit everyone if it were allowed.

Get a machine or another company to do what isn’t acceptable.

Every now and then I’m subjected to unreasonable demands, and it’s usually done by a machine. Sometimes one company hires another company to enforce rules so that the original company doesn’t have to look as nasty.

Examples: I used to use a Psion computer and a mobile phone to dial up to my ISP to collect email. This would even work from abroad. Then the mobile phone companies decided to handle data calls differently, and banned them from abroad. They didn’t charge more, they just banned them

I tried to use my Orange contract phone to phone customer service about my daughter’s Orange PAYG phone, which has stopped working. Banned again. I could call them on a landline or from a rival network, but not from Orange.

The Post Office charge £13.50 to handle collecting of import duty. According to them, it is only a “small proportion” of the duty. Well when the duty is £9.00, I don’t regard £13.50 as a “small proportion”. Add an additional 2 days delay (while they post a letter telling us we have had £13.50 stolen and then take the money and schedule a delivery) and it an insult, and they are in a monopoly position. My company has a deferment number so that all other importers can quote that so we pay the government directly, but the Post Office won’t use that unless it is a lot of money. I forget how much, but our company doesn’t spend that much.

UPS have just started charging £3 for same day collection, and £3 to phone in a collection request. (Only £5 for both together). Well we make stuff. I know that is unusual in the UK, but we do. We don’t just take stuff off the shelf and put it in boxes, so it isn’t always easy to know when stuff will be ready. Also, we always phone in requests rather than using the web because when we phone in, all we need to tell them is the 6-digit account number. On the web, they demand we type in our address as well, so it takes longer. So they have stupid rules, and a machine to enforce them.

It all takes time.

Rules set by those who don’t understand them

I was in Rushton, Northamptonshire today.

The old town centre has a small car park, and the authorities want to limit parking to smaller vehicles. There is a limit of 1.5 tonnes.

Here in the UK, the weight limit signs apply to the MAM, or Maximum Authorised Mass of a vehicle, so it doesn’t matter whether a vehicle is loaded or not, if it’s MAM, as written on the identification plate, is over the limit, it isn’t allowed.

So how big does a car have to be to exceed 1.5 tonnes?

A Mini, as sold today, has an MAM of 1510 kg or more, depending on the model. So that’s banned from the car park in Rushton.  The name of the car is possibly a clue that it isn’t very big. Other cars, like a Nissan Micra, squeeze under the limit at 1475 kg while a Peugeot 107 is way under at 1190 kg. The smallest BMW or Audi in their current ranges is about 1800 kg MAM.

So they have this rule that means that some really small cars are the only ones allowed to park at that car park. And who would understand or enforce that rule? No one. Most people wouldn’t have a clue what the MAM of their car is. It’s only commercial vehicle drivers and owners that worry about it. And I am sure that few drivers would realise that the limit doesn’t apply to the weight of the vehicle as is. I guess that whoever put up the sign never intended to ban the vast majority of cars.

It is just another example of a rule put there for the sake of having rules.

 

Unfair Penalties

We were 10 days late paying our VAT bill. This was because we are short of money, unsurprisingly. The government has charged us 10% of the bill, or a bit over £400.

The same government that won’t let us charge people who owe us money more than the base rate + 8% per year, plus a £70 fee. We also have to go to court to enforce fees like that.  Late payment fees would have come to about £1 per day plus the £70 if the government stuck to its own rules.

Good Regulations

Sometime, just once in a blue moon, the rules have a big benefit, often indirectly.

Years ago, when unleaded fuel was being introduced to the UK, hardly any garages sold it. The tax on leaded fuel was increased to put the price the same. That made no difference, as most garages didn’t want to stop selling several grades of leaded fuel (91, 94 and 97 octane, sold as 2 star, 3 star and 4 star) so they had no tank space for unleaded, although few cars used anything other than 97 octane, and the price difference was small.

In a clever move, the government increased the tax on the lower octane fuels, to bring their prices above that of 97 octane. That meant that there was no point in selling the low octane fuels, and very quickly the garages stopped selling low octane fuels and used that tank space for unleaded.

A bit later, catalytic converters started to be required on all cars. There were a lot of complaints that cars with catalytic converters would be slower, thirstier and break down more often. However, for most cars the opposite is true. The catalytic converters are fussy, and if the cars are to pass the emissions tests when a few years old, the air/fuel mix has to be right all the time. That forced the manufactures to get the fuel systems right, giving reliable, economical cars. Not the primary aim of the legislation.

I would like to suggest a new tax. Split air conditioners should pay £100 per unit. I don’t particularly want to pay £100 extra, but a tax would mean that air conditioning units would not be split, so all the refrigerant gas would be in the outside unit. Then water / antifreeze would be used to shift the heat from the room. Such systems are made now, but are rarely used because they are more expensive.

The advantage is that specialist fitting isn’t needed, as only water and antifreeze are moved around the building. Leaks are obvious and it is so much easier to move or reconfigure the systems. Refrigerant leaks are rare, because the gasses are totally contained in the outside unit. It won’t happen, it would be too useful.

Useless WEEE regulations.

The WEEE regulations are supposed to reduce the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment that is being produced and that is not being recycled. It is failing to give any incentive, especially to small businesses.

There is no minimum production level for registration, and there are large registration fees. Once you have registered, there is a cost for disposal of equipment, but it is only a few hundred pounds per tonne, a tiny cost for many manufacturers.

So if I want to sell a tiny electronic device in small quantities, it costs me thousands of pounds in registrations fees. Someone already registered pays nearly nothing for end of life disposal, even if they make a larger and more wasteful device.

We’ve needed some transfer belts for colour laser printers in the past. They aren’t obtainable, and massive, expensive assemblies that contain the belts need to be replaced. If the government wanted to reduce the quantity of waste they should force manufacturers to make parts available.

The WEEE registration scheme has one of the classic indicators of over-regulation. Companies that want to register have to go through registration agents, they are not allowed to register directly with the government. This puts the registration agents in a near-monopoly position and they can charge what they want, while the government can say that the huge annual fees are not the government’s fault.

Hazardous Substance?

Our scuba diving club has been asked for a COSHH (Control of Substances Hazardous to Health) assessment for the gas we keep in the scuba tanks kept at the swimming pool we use.

It’s air. We need to write an assessment including how to treat people exposed to air.

Stealth tax

I couldn’t find a bit of paper that the government sent me about 3 years ago. I had to pay £25, and wait 3 days for a replacement.

So that I can send it to the government.

I could be contributing to GDP if I wasn’t chasing paper.

Appreciation of quality systems

One of our customers seems to have had some problems with the components we make failing when in their assemblies, so I was talking to on of their engineers to try to work out what is going wrong in details.

He mentioned that we could expect a visit from his quality department. I joked that we would get out the brooms and whitewash.

He said that I would be better off with garlic and silver bullets.