This last January I made the fatal mistake of buying a scanner from Epson. That was about 6 years after swearing never to buy another Epson product in my life after being burned by several of their ultra-broken printers. I should have kept my promise.

As a matter of pure academic interest, I will state that EPSON Scan is some of the worst software I’ve ever used, possibly second only to Sony’s Movieshaker. Its badness is legendary. Nevertheless, it basically worked, in that I eventually managed to extract a JPEG file bearing a vague similarity to the scanned page.

Naturally, the scanner broke after a month or two of very infrequent use. The moving arm with the scan head on it just jammed at one end and never moved again. I forgot about the useless hunk of trash for a few months, then in October realised that I wanted to scan something, so I took advantage of the fact that it was still under warranty and took it to the local repair centre.

Two months later and I’ve finally got it out of them that they haven’t got a replacement for me yet.

Two gosh darned months.

The warranty will be up in January 2007. I wonder if they’ll give me a hard time about that if they still haven’t got a replacement for me by then, the pathetic cretinous scam-artists.

I will not buy another Epson product until everybody involved in the current company is dead and buried, and since I assume there are a few teenage secretaries presently employed by them, it’s going to be about 120 years, assuming no major medical breakthroughs.

The Economist’s famous Lament for Scotland article (subscription required) claimed in May that each Scot is subsidised by England to the tune of about £1,000 per head. At the time, I thought that sounded reasonable, and that the magazine would probably not make a calamitous error when putting an actual figure on Scotland’s effective subsidy.

Someone later suggested to me that if Scotland were independent, its geography would give it a legitimate claim to about 80% of North Sea oil revenues, which currently go straight to the treasury in London. The implication of this is that if Scotland received its own oil revenues, it would be more than able to pay for itself. This is the position taken by the Scottish National Party. This also sounded reasonable, so I decided to look up the actual figures.

It turns out they are contained in a document called Government Expenditure and Revenue in Scotland. It claims that the subsidy of Scotland stands at £11.2bn - that’s the total government expenditure on Scotland minus the total revenue from Scottish taxpayers. The SNP have long criticised the GERS as a piece of propaganda which propagates the myth of the subsidy, as this Scottish blog says about the Economist article:

It perpetuates the lie that Scotland is subsidised by England to the tune of £1000 per year. I know. I’ve met the guys that started the lie and they don’t care about keeping that lie in the public mind. It suits their ends and it maintains the union.

However, the latest GERS for 2003-2004 (full document) takes account of the SNP’s oil revenue complaint and calculates that if Scotland kept it all for itself, the subsidy would still be £6.9bn. That’s about £1,400 per head.

A high oil price could tip the balance of the equation, with oil revenues forecast to grow to £11.7bn in 2006-2007, up from £4.3bn in 2003-2004. But the linked article also forecasts state expenditure will grow to £51.6bn in 2006-2007, up from £45.3bn in 2003-2004.

I fully support the SNP’s goal of Scottish independence (principle: people should govern themselves), but it’s clear that their budgeting is just plain wrong. Scotland will never be free so long as it is hooked on handouts from England.