Expensive paper. Oh, and we're doomed.

Living in a highly modern, technologically advanced country like Britain is great because we can use technology to make ourselves more efficient, and stuff.

Yet somehow it costs the British taxpayer £60 per page for the printing costs associated with Early Day Motions (see a guide to EDMs here) tabled by our MPs in the Houses of Parliament. £60 per page? Mental!

In other news... a wee thought about this globalisation malarkey. To sum up my previous arguments, basically the West is doomed because of the sheer numbers of engineers China and India are churning out year upon year. Eventually, they're going to kick our collective asses - so now would be a good time to learn Mandarin.

Hold on a minute, say the other side. India and China aren't so much producing engineers as spewing them out; in other words, they've got the quantity, but they ain't got the quality. And when they ain't got the quality, it takes superior Western engineers to come in and sort the mess out when they screw up. And that makes any cost savings pointless, and so the West is saved.

Let me finish, say I. They might not be the world’s greatest engineers just now. But give them 10 years (I’m feeling generous, I reckon it’s more like 5). The point isn’t simply that they’re churning out more engineers, but also that they’re getting better and smarter faster than we are. And that’s a bad thing. Because not only are they getting smarter, but in general we’re getting dumber. And we’re graduating fewer engineers every year, not more.

So like I said – we’re screwed. Welcome to the future.