A BAR owner in Liverpool once described his trade as “high-volume vertical consumption”.
This involves people drinking lots of booze while standing. There are no chairs or tables in the bar. Clearly, the aim is to pack in the punters and get them drunk. The consequence of high-volume vertical consumption is, of course, high-volume horizontal emission.
I don’t visit Liverpool city centre’s nightspots all that often, particularly not on the big nights at the weekend. In common with many other town centres, I expect Liverpool to be dominated by drunken youths. Not my scene.
Nor do I expect government measures announced yesterday, to impose a minimum price on a unit of alcohol, will have any perceptible effect on demand for high-volume vertical consumption services. Indeed, Royal Liverpool University Hospital liver specialist Professor Ian Gilmore has made his view known that the low minimum price level set by the Government will cost lives, often relatively young lives. It should, he insists, have been set much higher.
One reason the low minimum price won’t have any effect is that demand for alcohol is what economists call “price inelasticity”. A rise in price won’t stop many people drinking. The Government exploits the price inelasticity of alcohol for its own ends every time it increases duties on wines, beers and spirits.
It will take more than mild economic measures to change drinking habits. We could revert to more restrictive opening times to limit the damage done by drinking in pubs, but then people are free to drink at home. So what can you do?
On the one hand, it seems a pity that the promotional methods of the city centre night time economy contribute to serious health problems, but there again it’s a free world and everybody is free to follow the example of those that find other things to do with a Saturday night.
TECHNOLOGY is changing our world rapidly, and not always for the good or in ways that are easy to understand, control or predict.
Take the US/Israeli Stuxnet cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In some senses, this is an ingenious alternative to the use of conventional military force. Yet, on the other hand, it is a sign of the dangers all societies face from cyber attacks, whether perpetrated by states, terrorists, criminals or obsessive geeks with nothing better to do.
The cleverness of Stuxnet is hard to gauge from here. It might not have been particularly clever at all, but was nevertheless able to get around poor Iranian computer security measures.
The question now is how will the Iranians respond?
Clearly, they don’t have the option of attacking the US or Israel using conventional arms, so they might be tempted to retaliate in kind by visiting a software attack on the US, Israel or, perhaps, western banks.
States can always talk to each other and settle their differences. Imagine, though, if a criminal gang persuaded a bank it had implanted a similar bug into its IT systems and threatened to unleash it unless money changes hand.
IT’S a good thing that Professional Liverpool will continue, though in a scaled-down form.
Certainly, tenacity has been shown to keep the thing going after its public funding dried up.
A bit odd, though, that the people running it won’t tell us how much the new pro bono voluntary organisation has raised to fund its activities. The secrecy could well reflect touchiness about just how small the donations have been.
