From 2016 you will get the chance to spend Sir Winston Churchill. The war time Prime Minister is to get the distinction of having his picture on the fiver because he is recognised throughout the world, according to the Bank of England
Recognised perhaps but not revered. I have an ambivalent attitude towards Winnie, as he was called by some of those who were close to him. On the one hand it gives me joy that Sir Winston was the minister who brought into public ownership the national grid (subsequently privatised by his successor at number 10, Margaret Thatcher). On the other, I remember the many who blamed him for the Gallipoli disaster which cost the lives of so many young men from Australia and New Zealand. Some have said Winnie wasn't really to blame, though he was technically the minister in charge of the operation. Perhaps, I don't know. But he certainly seemed to take responsibility, resigning from Parliament and resuming his army career.
Then there was the little matter of his direction of the authorities heavy handed treatment of trade unionists and left wingers.
Although half American (he is the only British PM to have an American battleship named after him a distinction reserved for Americans), he was also a thorough going aristocrat.
A political turncoat (moving from the Liberal to the Tory Party), he was a thorough going capetbagger, representing half a dozen or more different constituencies.
But many would say, at least he won the Second World War for Britain. Who knows if he did? Does a good speech and the ability to wave a cigar in a regal manner, really win wars? Perhaps it does, and don't knock it. If it works, it's certainly worth doing it. But perhaps it was the national government (particularly Ernie Bevin who kept British industry working even doing things like sending the children of toffs down the mines) that really made the difference in Britain.
In any case, it was probably Stalin's Russia that defeated Hitler in the world's biggest ever tank battle.
And immediately after the Second World War, when the people had the chance to thank a great old war horse for his stirling work, did they leap at it by voting him in for a term as peace time Prime Minister?
They certainly did not. He made his first campaign speech just up the road from where I am now, at Walthamstow Dog Stadium. He was roundly booed. He then went on to lose the election by a landslide.
But in some ways it's highly appropriate to have Winnie's face on the currency. You see the last time we had a great depression (in the 1920s and 30s) Winnie managed to lose most of his considerable fortune gambling on the American Stock Market in the Great Crash. A stark reminder, if ever there was one, of the folly of running a casino style economy, on every single fiver.
Friday, 26 April 2013
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
Scotland & the euro
In Scotland they say Tories are probably scarcer than wild haggises roaming round the highlands. So when the Tories give advice to the Scots, it might be a good time to wonder exactly why they are doing it.
The British Government (essentially the Tory Party) has warned that Scotland might not be allowed to continue to use the pound if it ceased to be part of the United Kingdom.
This seems far fetched to anyone who has been to, say Gibraltar, where British currency continues to be used quite successfully without the place being in any way, shape or form part of the United Kingdom.
One also wonders exactly what the British Government could do to stop the Scots using the pound? Could they impound (a particularly apt term) currency from anyone who attempted to cross the border to an independent Scotland? Probably not, though it is not so long since this was done more or less routinely to people seeking to spend their money abroad.
But these days, if Scotland really wanted to use the pound it would be quite hard to stop them, particularly since there would be quite a few pounds kicking about in cash registers and bank accounts at the time of independence.
The reality, of course, is a lot more subtle than this crass scenario envisages. The truth is that the Tories realise (what the Labour Party in its timorousness has missed) that with UKIP, the Conservatives have become more or less unelectable. In fact the only chance that they could ever get back to power under any circumstances is if Scotland stopped sending Labour MPs to Westminster. And this, of course, is what would happen if they voted for independence.
The one great achievement of the last Labour Government (apart from keeping us out of the euro, which since it is a negative can not really be considered an achievement) was the massive devaluation after the great crash in 2007/8.
The pound currently trades at a very attractive rate (from the perspective of exporters) and its value must be regarded as one of the contributing factors to Greek, Spanish, Italian and even Cypriot distress in recent years.
A Scotland that was an oil producer with a very low entry rate into the euro would certainly get a flying start from an economic point of view. And the earlier scare story (that Scotland would have to re-negotiate its membership of the European Union) would certainly be less significant, since the euro is in such a mess that any country willing to join it would be a shoe in for EU membership. Probably even Turkey!!!!
So in just a few years we could have an independent Scotland using the euro. Would it make a huge difference? Probably not.
Would the Scots benefit? Who knows! Basing an economy on the oil industry is highly risky, since even the largest and most sophisticated countries find it extremely difficult to control those companies. The oil industry usually ends up controlling them.
But it might enable the Tories to have a more or less permanent majority in England. For those who love freedom, pluralism and the welfare state that might prove to be a bitter blow.
The British Government (essentially the Tory Party) has warned that Scotland might not be allowed to continue to use the pound if it ceased to be part of the United Kingdom.
This seems far fetched to anyone who has been to, say Gibraltar, where British currency continues to be used quite successfully without the place being in any way, shape or form part of the United Kingdom.
One also wonders exactly what the British Government could do to stop the Scots using the pound? Could they impound (a particularly apt term) currency from anyone who attempted to cross the border to an independent Scotland? Probably not, though it is not so long since this was done more or less routinely to people seeking to spend their money abroad.
But these days, if Scotland really wanted to use the pound it would be quite hard to stop them, particularly since there would be quite a few pounds kicking about in cash registers and bank accounts at the time of independence.
The reality, of course, is a lot more subtle than this crass scenario envisages. The truth is that the Tories realise (what the Labour Party in its timorousness has missed) that with UKIP, the Conservatives have become more or less unelectable. In fact the only chance that they could ever get back to power under any circumstances is if Scotland stopped sending Labour MPs to Westminster. And this, of course, is what would happen if they voted for independence.
The one great achievement of the last Labour Government (apart from keeping us out of the euro, which since it is a negative can not really be considered an achievement) was the massive devaluation after the great crash in 2007/8.
The pound currently trades at a very attractive rate (from the perspective of exporters) and its value must be regarded as one of the contributing factors to Greek, Spanish, Italian and even Cypriot distress in recent years.
A Scotland that was an oil producer with a very low entry rate into the euro would certainly get a flying start from an economic point of view. And the earlier scare story (that Scotland would have to re-negotiate its membership of the European Union) would certainly be less significant, since the euro is in such a mess that any country willing to join it would be a shoe in for EU membership. Probably even Turkey!!!!
So in just a few years we could have an independent Scotland using the euro. Would it make a huge difference? Probably not.
Would the Scots benefit? Who knows! Basing an economy on the oil industry is highly risky, since even the largest and most sophisticated countries find it extremely difficult to control those companies. The oil industry usually ends up controlling them.
But it might enable the Tories to have a more or less permanent majority in England. For those who love freedom, pluralism and the welfare state that might prove to be a bitter blow.
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Not waving goodbye but drowning...
Thatcher, everyone agrees, transformed the British economy. This is true, or has a kernel of truth in it somewhere, but it is also complete rubbish.
The argument that Britain had many rust bucket industries which needed to be shut down and be replaced with a gleaming new service sector (merchant banks, supermarkets that stay open all night etc.) is a remarkably cruel one, especially for groups like the miners and steelworks who lost livelihoods and communities. But if Britain did get rid of the rust buckets in the 1980s the real cause was not privatisation, the sale of council houses or the Falklands War (the things Thatcher really did) but Ted Heath's steering Britain into what was then called the Common Market (now the EU).
By the 1980s Britain's mines were mostly extremely well run, safe and highly efficient. They were not rust buckets. But they had to compete against mines in countries with much more favourable geological conditions (in Britain the easy to extract coal had been taken by a mining industry that dated back to the Roman era more than 1,500 years ago). They also had to compete against miners who were paid a tiny fraction of National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) rates, in an industry that was still highly labour intensive.
But Britain saw itself as an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish. The fish (or our ability to harvest them) disappeared thanks to Ted Heath and the EU's fishery policy. The coal went (or was sealed untouched in the ground) thanks to Thatcher's wilful vandalism.
That there were rust buckets is undeniable: just think of the car makers. Intense international competition wiped many of them out thanks to the lowering of trade barriers caused primarily by the EU membership Heath had negotiated.
Thatcher's legacy was the destruction of housing. In the 1970s as many public sector houses were built as private sector ones. Thatcher did not change this by allowing councils to sell homes (Jim Callaghan's Labour government had allowed that already). What she did was to prevent councils from building ordinary houses. The idea was that the private sector would take up the slack. Private house building would double.
But it didn't.
Three decades later the private sector is building no more homes than it did when the clampdown on council house building began. In fact it's building rather less.
One reason for this is that Thatcher also encouraged the privatisation of Britain's building societies (at the time the prime institutions financing house purchasing). She wanted organisations like Northern Rock (the first British bank to have a run in 150 years) to privatise. And Northern Rock was not the only former building society to face bankruptcy in the great depression that started in the first decade of the 21st century.
When the banks stopped lending (because they had made gargantuan losses gambling in financial instruments they were too stupid to understand) new mortgages slowed to a trickle. But there never was a private sector house building bonanza, perhaps because the sort of people who got council houses could not afford any type of mortgage. The house building industry (that supported Thatcher to the hilt) lost out because it used to build those council houses, though the real losers were the homeless and those living in over-crowded slum housing.
Thatcher's second legacy was the destruction of the social democratic consensus, or to put it another way the death of Keynesianism. When she came in to office much of British industry (particularly utilities like electricity, gas, telecoms and the post office) was owned by the state. The state, not the people. We didn't feel like we owned it because it was high handed and bureaucratic, often serving its own interests rather than ours.
But it was bloody useful to have it there. During times of relative economic decline, state utilities took no notice and carried on investing. Add to that state benefits (like unemployment pay), that increased during economic down turns and the economy had an automatic stabiliser. In times of down turn, the state took up the slack and prevented mass unemployment.
Mass unemployment returned to Britain in the 1980s, then we had the long boom in the nineties and early naughties. In 2013 the British economy, like much of the rest of the so called developed world, has had five years of depression and no-one knows how to get out of it.
That there has been a massive redistribution of income from the poorest to the wealthiest is undeniable. But the world is more complicated than a simple reading of the employment or census statistics might lead you to believe. When I was a child it was a real event when we got a spin drier and my dad had a good job and earned a fair income. Today I have a fridge, electric kettle, coffee maker, washing machine, numerous computers, a mobile phone and more technological junk than you can shake a stick at. Yet my employment is very insecure and I earn little.
So did Thatcher really change the world or did she just ride the crest of a Kondratiev wave for a while? Whatever the truth, we will never see her like again, if we are lucky.
The argument that Britain had many rust bucket industries which needed to be shut down and be replaced with a gleaming new service sector (merchant banks, supermarkets that stay open all night etc.) is a remarkably cruel one, especially for groups like the miners and steelworks who lost livelihoods and communities. But if Britain did get rid of the rust buckets in the 1980s the real cause was not privatisation, the sale of council houses or the Falklands War (the things Thatcher really did) but Ted Heath's steering Britain into what was then called the Common Market (now the EU).
By the 1980s Britain's mines were mostly extremely well run, safe and highly efficient. They were not rust buckets. But they had to compete against mines in countries with much more favourable geological conditions (in Britain the easy to extract coal had been taken by a mining industry that dated back to the Roman era more than 1,500 years ago). They also had to compete against miners who were paid a tiny fraction of National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) rates, in an industry that was still highly labour intensive.
But Britain saw itself as an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish. The fish (or our ability to harvest them) disappeared thanks to Ted Heath and the EU's fishery policy. The coal went (or was sealed untouched in the ground) thanks to Thatcher's wilful vandalism.
That there were rust buckets is undeniable: just think of the car makers. Intense international competition wiped many of them out thanks to the lowering of trade barriers caused primarily by the EU membership Heath had negotiated.
Thatcher's legacy was the destruction of housing. In the 1970s as many public sector houses were built as private sector ones. Thatcher did not change this by allowing councils to sell homes (Jim Callaghan's Labour government had allowed that already). What she did was to prevent councils from building ordinary houses. The idea was that the private sector would take up the slack. Private house building would double.
But it didn't.
Three decades later the private sector is building no more homes than it did when the clampdown on council house building began. In fact it's building rather less.
One reason for this is that Thatcher also encouraged the privatisation of Britain's building societies (at the time the prime institutions financing house purchasing). She wanted organisations like Northern Rock (the first British bank to have a run in 150 years) to privatise. And Northern Rock was not the only former building society to face bankruptcy in the great depression that started in the first decade of the 21st century.
When the banks stopped lending (because they had made gargantuan losses gambling in financial instruments they were too stupid to understand) new mortgages slowed to a trickle. But there never was a private sector house building bonanza, perhaps because the sort of people who got council houses could not afford any type of mortgage. The house building industry (that supported Thatcher to the hilt) lost out because it used to build those council houses, though the real losers were the homeless and those living in over-crowded slum housing.
Thatcher's second legacy was the destruction of the social democratic consensus, or to put it another way the death of Keynesianism. When she came in to office much of British industry (particularly utilities like electricity, gas, telecoms and the post office) was owned by the state. The state, not the people. We didn't feel like we owned it because it was high handed and bureaucratic, often serving its own interests rather than ours.
But it was bloody useful to have it there. During times of relative economic decline, state utilities took no notice and carried on investing. Add to that state benefits (like unemployment pay), that increased during economic down turns and the economy had an automatic stabiliser. In times of down turn, the state took up the slack and prevented mass unemployment.
Mass unemployment returned to Britain in the 1980s, then we had the long boom in the nineties and early naughties. In 2013 the British economy, like much of the rest of the so called developed world, has had five years of depression and no-one knows how to get out of it.
That there has been a massive redistribution of income from the poorest to the wealthiest is undeniable. But the world is more complicated than a simple reading of the employment or census statistics might lead you to believe. When I was a child it was a real event when we got a spin drier and my dad had a good job and earned a fair income. Today I have a fridge, electric kettle, coffee maker, washing machine, numerous computers, a mobile phone and more technological junk than you can shake a stick at. Yet my employment is very insecure and I earn little.
So did Thatcher really change the world or did she just ride the crest of a Kondratiev wave for a while? Whatever the truth, we will never see her like again, if we are lucky.
Monday, 8 April 2013
Thinking is painful, not thinking hurts even more
The majority is not always wrong, but given time it will become so.
If you read the press or listen to the radio you will think our problem is a huge shortage of labour. We are constantly being told that there are too many welfare cheats, people adapt to a lifestyle of living on benefits and the pension age needs to come down because we are all living too long.
People believe these things because they are told them again and again. But they are not true. The real problem is mass joblessness and particularly youth unemployment. Think for a few seconds and you will realise the best way to help young people to get work is to encourage older people, or at least those who can retire, to do so.
But we don't just need to reduce the pension age. That's just a temporary sticking plaster designed to make things better at a time of massive economic crisis. In the longer term we need to encourage brave volunteers to live without work.
This is clearly obvious because in the current stage of the quickening technological revolution, jobs are being destroyed faster than they are being created. Machines are being developed that are better, simpler and cheaper at performing complex tasks. Everything from diagnosing illnesses to complex micro-surgery, is becoming easier and more effective thanks to assistance from sophisticated machines.
This is not the current wave of Fordism (or production line automation). These machines work on their own and can be programed (or program themselves) to perform highly individual tasks.
At the same time the new industrial giants (Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon etc) employ relatively few people. The evolving businesses do not create jobs in the way that they used to.
So we either need to work fewer hours (to share out the jobs) or some people have to accept they will have a lifetime without work.
The UK government's response (today) to this is to attempt to cut £2 billion payments to those receiving long term disability allowances, in an attempt to force thousands of people to compete for jobs that do not exist.
But perhaps you remember our old friend TINA, from the days of Margaret Thatcher? TINA stood for There Is No Alternative. In this case the TINA argument would be: The tax base can only afford to pay for a limited amount of welfare.
Again, this is complete nonsense. Over the last 30 years there has been a massive redistribution of income from the poorest to the richest. A fair tax system would reverse this trend, creating enough money for the sick and disabled to eke out a dismal lifestyle on state benefits.
Another popular misconception is the idea that if you tax too hard the wealthiest flee abroad to avoid your taxes. This is because you don't tax hard, you tax intelligently. Click and Tobin taxes could raise billions irrespective of the dwelling place of the super rich, so long as the economic activity that gives them that wealth takes place in the UK.
If you read the press or listen to the radio you will think our problem is a huge shortage of labour. We are constantly being told that there are too many welfare cheats, people adapt to a lifestyle of living on benefits and the pension age needs to come down because we are all living too long.
People believe these things because they are told them again and again. But they are not true. The real problem is mass joblessness and particularly youth unemployment. Think for a few seconds and you will realise the best way to help young people to get work is to encourage older people, or at least those who can retire, to do so.
But we don't just need to reduce the pension age. That's just a temporary sticking plaster designed to make things better at a time of massive economic crisis. In the longer term we need to encourage brave volunteers to live without work.
This is clearly obvious because in the current stage of the quickening technological revolution, jobs are being destroyed faster than they are being created. Machines are being developed that are better, simpler and cheaper at performing complex tasks. Everything from diagnosing illnesses to complex micro-surgery, is becoming easier and more effective thanks to assistance from sophisticated machines.
This is not the current wave of Fordism (or production line automation). These machines work on their own and can be programed (or program themselves) to perform highly individual tasks.
At the same time the new industrial giants (Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon etc) employ relatively few people. The evolving businesses do not create jobs in the way that they used to.
So we either need to work fewer hours (to share out the jobs) or some people have to accept they will have a lifetime without work.
The UK government's response (today) to this is to attempt to cut £2 billion payments to those receiving long term disability allowances, in an attempt to force thousands of people to compete for jobs that do not exist.
But perhaps you remember our old friend TINA, from the days of Margaret Thatcher? TINA stood for There Is No Alternative. In this case the TINA argument would be: The tax base can only afford to pay for a limited amount of welfare.
Again, this is complete nonsense. Over the last 30 years there has been a massive redistribution of income from the poorest to the richest. A fair tax system would reverse this trend, creating enough money for the sick and disabled to eke out a dismal lifestyle on state benefits.
Another popular misconception is the idea that if you tax too hard the wealthiest flee abroad to avoid your taxes. This is because you don't tax hard, you tax intelligently. Click and Tobin taxes could raise billions irrespective of the dwelling place of the super rich, so long as the economic activity that gives them that wealth takes place in the UK.
Tuesday, 19 March 2013
There will be blood
A few days ago (March 8, 2013) we were reading about RBS cash machines that had stopped working, apparently because of a hardware glitch. This story in the Daily Mail was fairly typical http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2289358/Computer-fault-halts-RBS-withdrawals--While-boss-picks-700k-bonus.html. It was the hardware (or according to other stories a software update)? Oh really?
Then we learned that the Cypriot banks are defaulting, possibly because they got too much Greek sovereign debt (they took a punt on Greek government bonds). Coincidence?
Well, the RBS story would once have been thought of as extraordinary. Banks claimed an infallibility for their software/hardware that went far beyond Papal infallibility. The reason for that was that they wanted people to believe it was utterly impossible for their cash machines to make a mistake. These days, of course, we don't believe the Pope's infallible (even if we are entirely sure who holds that esteemed lifetime post) and if we have any feelings about the banks, we probably think they bat for the other side.
So if it wasn't a software/hardware problem, what else could it have been? The current economic crisis dates from August 7, 2007, when BNP Paribas terminated withdrawals from three hedge funds citing "a complete evaporation of liquidity". I became conscious that something was going terribly wrong when a friend (Mike Pinkney, now deceased) told me he'd joined lengthy queues outside the privatised building society Northern Rock in September 2007. That was the first run on a British bank in 150 years. These events were caused by an absence of liquidity. What liquidity means is trust, specifically trust between the banks.
If one bank doesn't believe another bank can balance its books, it stops lending it money (or paying out money on its behalf at cashpoints). Banks have to lend each other money because banking is an inherently crazy business. The fundamental economic principle is lend short and borrow long. Banks do just the opposite. They take your money and then let you remove it the next day, but they lend it to borrowers who may finish off repaying their loan a decade or more later. A run on any bank can finish it off, unless it gets government support.
Cash points refusing to pay out can be a sign that the banks are getting nervous. But how could this happen: The UK government owns a controlling stake of 84% of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS)'s ordinary shares, but the bank remains nominally independent of government. Surely the British government can't go bust?
RBS only had a problem for two hours and that's probably about the length of time you'd expect it to take the chief executive of a nationalised company to track down the responsible Minister and for him (or her, there are some Tory women Ministers) to instruct the Governor of the Bank of England to sort out the problem.
So is the system really seizing up again? The point of austerity, otherwise known as monetarism and in the Great Depression of the 1930s called The Gold System, is beggar your neighbour economics. We cut our costs, become cheaper, and take our neighbours' markets away by selling goods at prices they can't match. This is called export led growth.
The alternative, Keynesianism, is concerted growth in spending designed to restore confidence in the system as a whole. It's hard for one country to do this on its own (though America may be the exception to this rule), because if you grow your economy your competitors sell their products in your market creating a black hole in your trade figures.
In October 2011 in this blog I suggested that the Germans should be asked to leave the euro. See http://jbrind.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/remarkable.html. By that time it had become absolutely obvious that austerity wasn't going to work and would just create bigger debts. European governments were kicking the can down the road (putting off making a decision) not because they had any real expectation that something would turn up, but simply because they had run out of ideas.
It's now probably too late for the Germans to leave the euro and the only answer is for the Germans to become more like the southern Europeans. European governments need to print money in a concerted attempt to refloat the european economy. Will the Germans do this? Probably not.
In which case, we're in for a bumpy road. There will be blood, or at least bloody revolutions.
Then we learned that the Cypriot banks are defaulting, possibly because they got too much Greek sovereign debt (they took a punt on Greek government bonds). Coincidence?
Well, the RBS story would once have been thought of as extraordinary. Banks claimed an infallibility for their software/hardware that went far beyond Papal infallibility. The reason for that was that they wanted people to believe it was utterly impossible for their cash machines to make a mistake. These days, of course, we don't believe the Pope's infallible (even if we are entirely sure who holds that esteemed lifetime post) and if we have any feelings about the banks, we probably think they bat for the other side.
So if it wasn't a software/hardware problem, what else could it have been? The current economic crisis dates from August 7, 2007, when BNP Paribas terminated withdrawals from three hedge funds citing "a complete evaporation of liquidity". I became conscious that something was going terribly wrong when a friend (Mike Pinkney, now deceased) told me he'd joined lengthy queues outside the privatised building society Northern Rock in September 2007. That was the first run on a British bank in 150 years. These events were caused by an absence of liquidity. What liquidity means is trust, specifically trust between the banks.
If one bank doesn't believe another bank can balance its books, it stops lending it money (or paying out money on its behalf at cashpoints). Banks have to lend each other money because banking is an inherently crazy business. The fundamental economic principle is lend short and borrow long. Banks do just the opposite. They take your money and then let you remove it the next day, but they lend it to borrowers who may finish off repaying their loan a decade or more later. A run on any bank can finish it off, unless it gets government support.
Cash points refusing to pay out can be a sign that the banks are getting nervous. But how could this happen: The UK government owns a controlling stake of 84% of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS)'s ordinary shares, but the bank remains nominally independent of government. Surely the British government can't go bust?
RBS only had a problem for two hours and that's probably about the length of time you'd expect it to take the chief executive of a nationalised company to track down the responsible Minister and for him (or her, there are some Tory women Ministers) to instruct the Governor of the Bank of England to sort out the problem.
So is the system really seizing up again? The point of austerity, otherwise known as monetarism and in the Great Depression of the 1930s called The Gold System, is beggar your neighbour economics. We cut our costs, become cheaper, and take our neighbours' markets away by selling goods at prices they can't match. This is called export led growth.
The alternative, Keynesianism, is concerted growth in spending designed to restore confidence in the system as a whole. It's hard for one country to do this on its own (though America may be the exception to this rule), because if you grow your economy your competitors sell their products in your market creating a black hole in your trade figures.
In October 2011 in this blog I suggested that the Germans should be asked to leave the euro. See http://jbrind.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/remarkable.html. By that time it had become absolutely obvious that austerity wasn't going to work and would just create bigger debts. European governments were kicking the can down the road (putting off making a decision) not because they had any real expectation that something would turn up, but simply because they had run out of ideas.
It's now probably too late for the Germans to leave the euro and the only answer is for the Germans to become more like the southern Europeans. European governments need to print money in a concerted attempt to refloat the european economy. Will the Germans do this? Probably not.
In which case, we're in for a bumpy road. There will be blood, or at least bloody revolutions.
Sunday, 22 July 2012
Electric Liz
In the early months of the Second World War, even after the so called phoney war, there wasn't much hatred of the Germans, my father says. They were clearly the enemy, or at least the opponents, but people had yet to develop a passionate loathing for the Nazis. That came later.
At the time my dad was about 12 or 13 years old and living in West Norwood, south London. He says that even when the Luftwaffe bombed the area people bore it with resignation. That was just what happened in wars.
All that changed when they killed Electric Liz.
My dad happened to be there at the time when the German plane appeared over Norwood High Street. He jumped over a wall and hid. Liz did not.
When the plane had gone her dead body was lying in the street.
Electric Liz was something like a street person. My dad doesn't know how she got her name but it might have been through begging for small change for the meter.
In those days most people had to put a coin in the slot to get both gas and electricity.
However she got the name, Electric Liz was a street person, not exactly homeless but as close to it as may be. She looked like a tramp, a destitute person.
Clearly she was also a character. Everyone in West Norwood knew her.
If she had survived the war, the National Health Service, would probably have done its best to help her. Today, of course, we are far more enlightened than in those post war years, and there are again thousands of street people all over the country (though I believe they have been cleared away for the duration of the Olympics where I live in north east London).
The death of Electric Liz really brought home the horrors of war to Norwood High Street and from then on my dad says, people really hated the Nazis.
They must have known before that war is always about killing and being killed, but the English are a soft lot and it takes the death of an innocent to raise their passions.
At the time my dad was about 12 or 13 years old and living in West Norwood, south London. He says that even when the Luftwaffe bombed the area people bore it with resignation. That was just what happened in wars.
All that changed when they killed Electric Liz.
My dad happened to be there at the time when the German plane appeared over Norwood High Street. He jumped over a wall and hid. Liz did not.
When the plane had gone her dead body was lying in the street.
Electric Liz was something like a street person. My dad doesn't know how she got her name but it might have been through begging for small change for the meter.
In those days most people had to put a coin in the slot to get both gas and electricity.
However she got the name, Electric Liz was a street person, not exactly homeless but as close to it as may be. She looked like a tramp, a destitute person.
Clearly she was also a character. Everyone in West Norwood knew her.
If she had survived the war, the National Health Service, would probably have done its best to help her. Today, of course, we are far more enlightened than in those post war years, and there are again thousands of street people all over the country (though I believe they have been cleared away for the duration of the Olympics where I live in north east London).
The death of Electric Liz really brought home the horrors of war to Norwood High Street and from then on my dad says, people really hated the Nazis.
They must have known before that war is always about killing and being killed, but the English are a soft lot and it takes the death of an innocent to raise their passions.
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Baby booomers
The boomers. Millions of them aren't there? All the soldiers went home and started families after the war.
Actually it's all a load of nonsense and the truth is that in the key decade (1951-1961) the population hardly grew at all!
The increase in population of England and Wales in that decade was about 2 million. Even if you take 1939 to 1961 it was only 4 million. Between the 1951 and 1961 censuses there were 7,121,000 live births, rather less than in any decade between 1871 and 1921. In fact the population increase was on the low side in the 1951/1961 decade.
And right now there's a wave of immigration, mostly young East Europeans. Net migration to the UK is running at about a quarter of a million a year (according to the latest statistics).
In the so called boomer years the net increase in population was about 200,000 a year.
So according to the statistics there might be an extra 200,000 pensioners each year, but there's also 250,000 mostly young, economically active people to take their place.
According to the latest statistics there are 29.13 million economically active people http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/february-2012/statistical-bulletin.html in employment. I can't find the statistics but thanks to the increase in female employment, improved health and the fact that many jobs are now less physically demanding, I believe this is a far higher percentage of the population than in the 1950s.
Right now there's mass unemployment and many people who want to get a job are unable to do so. There may be feckless and idle people out there but not all the unemployed are like that. Many are absolutely desperate to get work.
The idea of making it harder for younger people to get jobs by forcing older people to work when they would prefer to retire, is plain evil. It also makes no economic sense.
The wealthy and those with extreme right wing views want to reduce public services because they don't use these services and they want to cut taxes (since even the wealthiest person has to pay some tax, VAT for example).
In the 1960s and 1970s (when they knew all about the baby boomers story) we were promised a reducing retirement age, as automation took over and we moved into a leisure society.
But in those days there were fewer billionaires and their ability to manipulate the public agenda was not so profound.
One thing should be retired (permanently) and that's this story about the baby boomers.
Actually it's all a load of nonsense and the truth is that in the key decade (1951-1961) the population hardly grew at all!
The increase in population of England and Wales in that decade was about 2 million. Even if you take 1939 to 1961 it was only 4 million. Between the 1951 and 1961 censuses there were 7,121,000 live births, rather less than in any decade between 1871 and 1921. In fact the population increase was on the low side in the 1951/1961 decade.
And right now there's a wave of immigration, mostly young East Europeans. Net migration to the UK is running at about a quarter of a million a year (according to the latest statistics).
In the so called boomer years the net increase in population was about 200,000 a year.
So according to the statistics there might be an extra 200,000 pensioners each year, but there's also 250,000 mostly young, economically active people to take their place.
According to the latest statistics there are 29.13 million economically active people http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/february-2012/statistical-bulletin.html in employment. I can't find the statistics but thanks to the increase in female employment, improved health and the fact that many jobs are now less physically demanding, I believe this is a far higher percentage of the population than in the 1950s.
Right now there's mass unemployment and many people who want to get a job are unable to do so. There may be feckless and idle people out there but not all the unemployed are like that. Many are absolutely desperate to get work.
The idea of making it harder for younger people to get jobs by forcing older people to work when they would prefer to retire, is plain evil. It also makes no economic sense.
The wealthy and those with extreme right wing views want to reduce public services because they don't use these services and they want to cut taxes (since even the wealthiest person has to pay some tax, VAT for example).
In the 1960s and 1970s (when they knew all about the baby boomers story) we were promised a reducing retirement age, as automation took over and we moved into a leisure society.
But in those days there were fewer billionaires and their ability to manipulate the public agenda was not so profound.
One thing should be retired (permanently) and that's this story about the baby boomers.
Monday, 2 July 2012
John Massey
I was John the video maker, then there was John the author and John the murderer. Of the three of us, I thought John the murderer was by far the nicest.
I wasn't quite sure what John the murderer was doing there. Once he cleaned my car for me and did a very good job. John the murderer likes clean cars.
Many people say driving with me is exciting (code for terrifying). John the murderer was kind enough to say he thought I could be quite a good get away driver.
He didn't tell me his second name and I didn't ask. It was none of my business and I'm rotten at remembering names anyway. I'd probably have forgotten even if he had told me.
It was only some time later when I discovered John was really John Massey, an escaped convict, Britain's longest serving prisoner. By that time he'd been captured and was back in prison.
John Massey is an amazingly talented craftsman and fixer. He can fix anything even his escape from almost any prison.
He created a widgit for my tripod that made it work in an emergency but as well as the practical he has an artistic side: he showed me amazing, intricate art works he had produced.
At the time he was on the run having walked out of Ford open prison. It was not the first time he'd absconded from jail.
Escape is a serious crime (from the perspective of the jailers who don't like prisoners who slip the leash). So when he was recaptured instead of returning to an open prison he was sent to Pentonville.
I've never been to prison but I have tried to video the outside walls of Pentonville and that scared me. But John worked out a way of making a rope and then used it to scale the frighteningly high walls.
John Massey's crime was unforgivable. He used a sawn off shotgun to kill Hackney bouncer Charlie Higgins. If there is any justice in this world this will still haunt his conscience when he goes to his grave.
But the legal system in this country has laid down that a life sentence for murder usually means 14 years in prison. If John Massey had been a model prisoner he'd have been out by 1990 (22 years ago).
How is it possible that a man convicted in 1976 and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment is still in prison in 2012, more than 35 years later?
John Massey's downfall is a strange combination of heroic virtues. He is intensely loyal to his friends and his family. When he's escaped it's always been a last ditch attempt to see a close member of his family who was dying or seriously ill. Most people wouldn't be able to climb the walls of Pentonville (something like 20 feet high). But 64-year-old John Massey is incredibly fit for someone of any age. Then, few fit men would have the ability to construct a rope capable of taking their weight from bits of rubbish lying about a prison.
He was the wrong person, in the wrong place at the wrong time,
When he escaped from Pentonville, police warned the public that he was dangerous. This was so absurd that it did not damage John's reputation but just made the police look like a lot of shifty, lying bastards. Let's be kind to them and say they simply didn't know, after all John was in the prison authorities care.
In reality John Massey is a very kind, gentle, talented, warm and friendly old man. He shouldn't be in jail. If the prison authorities had any sense they'd offer him a job helping to make British prisons less leaky, making escape more difficult.
I'm not the only one who thinks John Massey should not be in prison. He has some powerful allies as Eric Allison reported in the Guardian. But my guess is that John's going to be in prison for several more years until everyone forgets the fuss. He will be in prison not because he needs to be but because the authorities have egg on their face and want to pretend that justice is on their side.
They are wrong.
I wasn't quite sure what John the murderer was doing there. Once he cleaned my car for me and did a very good job. John the murderer likes clean cars.
Many people say driving with me is exciting (code for terrifying). John the murderer was kind enough to say he thought I could be quite a good get away driver.
He didn't tell me his second name and I didn't ask. It was none of my business and I'm rotten at remembering names anyway. I'd probably have forgotten even if he had told me.
It was only some time later when I discovered John was really John Massey, an escaped convict, Britain's longest serving prisoner. By that time he'd been captured and was back in prison.
John Massey is an amazingly talented craftsman and fixer. He can fix anything even his escape from almost any prison.
He created a widgit for my tripod that made it work in an emergency but as well as the practical he has an artistic side: he showed me amazing, intricate art works he had produced.
At the time he was on the run having walked out of Ford open prison. It was not the first time he'd absconded from jail.
Escape is a serious crime (from the perspective of the jailers who don't like prisoners who slip the leash). So when he was recaptured instead of returning to an open prison he was sent to Pentonville.
I've never been to prison but I have tried to video the outside walls of Pentonville and that scared me. But John worked out a way of making a rope and then used it to scale the frighteningly high walls.
John Massey's crime was unforgivable. He used a sawn off shotgun to kill Hackney bouncer Charlie Higgins. If there is any justice in this world this will still haunt his conscience when he goes to his grave.
But the legal system in this country has laid down that a life sentence for murder usually means 14 years in prison. If John Massey had been a model prisoner he'd have been out by 1990 (22 years ago).
How is it possible that a man convicted in 1976 and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment is still in prison in 2012, more than 35 years later?
John Massey's downfall is a strange combination of heroic virtues. He is intensely loyal to his friends and his family. When he's escaped it's always been a last ditch attempt to see a close member of his family who was dying or seriously ill. Most people wouldn't be able to climb the walls of Pentonville (something like 20 feet high). But 64-year-old John Massey is incredibly fit for someone of any age. Then, few fit men would have the ability to construct a rope capable of taking their weight from bits of rubbish lying about a prison.
He was the wrong person, in the wrong place at the wrong time,
When he escaped from Pentonville, police warned the public that he was dangerous. This was so absurd that it did not damage John's reputation but just made the police look like a lot of shifty, lying bastards. Let's be kind to them and say they simply didn't know, after all John was in the prison authorities care.
In reality John Massey is a very kind, gentle, talented, warm and friendly old man. He shouldn't be in jail. If the prison authorities had any sense they'd offer him a job helping to make British prisons less leaky, making escape more difficult.
I'm not the only one who thinks John Massey should not be in prison. He has some powerful allies as Eric Allison reported in the Guardian. But my guess is that John's going to be in prison for several more years until everyone forgets the fuss. He will be in prison not because he needs to be but because the authorities have egg on their face and want to pretend that justice is on their side.
They are wrong.
Monday, 25 June 2012
The madness of archivia
Archives are a good thing aren't they? The British Library, county archives, Kew and the many other, all fantastic organisations whose only purpose is to serve the historians and the curious. What could be better than that? True altruism?
Well up to a point, Lord Popper, to quote Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
There used to be a sort of deal with public records (wills, birth, marriage and death certificates, census records, etc.) that the people would provide the information, park it in a central registry and then have access to it in perpetuity.
No-one minds a small administrative charge being levied in order to allow the archive to continue to exist. Well, that's an exaggeration (perhaps). In these days of the internet, in which it is said information wants to be free, people do mind but they put up with it.
What is really galling is that these organisations have started to claim copyright over the documents, as if they own them rather than the original creators (or their heirs and successors).
But surely, you object, copyright only lasts for 70 years after the death of the creator of the object (whatever it is)? How can wills, for example, be the copyright of anyone if they are more than 70 years old? Most people only start to get interested in wills when they were issued a century or more ago, so what's the problem?
Well, the archives make it as difficult as possible for you to copy the things they hold. You can not wander into a gallery and photograph an old master. It may be hundreds of years old but it is effectively the copyright of the gallery because photographic copies of it are tightly controlled by the gallery.
Many archives refuse to allow you to copy the documents they hold. Copies will usually be available but you have to pay an extortionate fee to get the copy. This fee will be something like £5. It didn't seem like a lot in the days when photography was expensive (you needed negatives and paper), but in these digital days, it's possible to create thousands, perhaps millions of photos for a fiver.
But a fiver (you protest) that's not much! Well, first of all you don't know how poor I am. Second, it isn't just one fiver if you are searching for something it can be quite a lot of fivers.
I run a kind of mini archive myself. I am one of the GOONS, a member of the Guild of One Name Studies. I have registered the name Brind and I am supposed to get an index of all the basic information relating to Brind births, marriages and deaths. Up until recently I could buy a single copy of a document and then provide it to any Brind family history researcher.
Up until recently I could pay the fivers, get the documents and copy them, even posting them online. Of course the archive would know I had breached its copyright (the copy of the copy, if you see what I mean), but since I was giving it away for free there would be little point in the archive pursuing me.
I can't do this any more. Archives have discovered a new technology that prevents, or makes difficult, the copying of documents. Since the originals are usually pretty awful, this additional level of obstruction makes the whole process more or less pointless. The archives have won. They control the documents. They own them.
The purpose of copyright is supposed to be to give the author of the piece, the due rewards of his or her work. Edward Munch created four versions of The Scream. I could imagine each being hung in a gallery and that gallery having the right to control access to the physical object. That makes sense. But when it comes to making copies of the The Scream, I think it belongs not to any one of those galleries but to Edward Munch (or his heirs and successors), if it belongs to anyone. To buy an object is not to buy the copyright. If you buy a copy of one of the Harry Potter books, believe me, you do not own the copyright.
People often donate things to archives because they believe they are providing a public good or they are putting something important on record. Think of the photographer who hands over an archive to the local library so that the pictures will be available for the local community. Such altruism is not uncommon.
If the archive then exerts copyright over those photographs isn't that a kind of artistic theft: wrong on two levels? It is wrong because the archive doesn't own the copyright (the originator still owns that), but it is also wrong because on many levels, it subverts the whole purpose of copyright.
Firstly, there's the 70 year issue. No one owns the copyright of something produced in antiquity. It is a public good. Anyone can use it. Secondly, what is happening is that copyright is being changed from something belonging to artists or creators to an organisational or corporate right.
Big business rules or big business sets the rules.
Well up to a point, Lord Popper, to quote Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
There used to be a sort of deal with public records (wills, birth, marriage and death certificates, census records, etc.) that the people would provide the information, park it in a central registry and then have access to it in perpetuity.
No-one minds a small administrative charge being levied in order to allow the archive to continue to exist. Well, that's an exaggeration (perhaps). In these days of the internet, in which it is said information wants to be free, people do mind but they put up with it.
What is really galling is that these organisations have started to claim copyright over the documents, as if they own them rather than the original creators (or their heirs and successors).
But surely, you object, copyright only lasts for 70 years after the death of the creator of the object (whatever it is)? How can wills, for example, be the copyright of anyone if they are more than 70 years old? Most people only start to get interested in wills when they were issued a century or more ago, so what's the problem?
Well, the archives make it as difficult as possible for you to copy the things they hold. You can not wander into a gallery and photograph an old master. It may be hundreds of years old but it is effectively the copyright of the gallery because photographic copies of it are tightly controlled by the gallery.
Many archives refuse to allow you to copy the documents they hold. Copies will usually be available but you have to pay an extortionate fee to get the copy. This fee will be something like £5. It didn't seem like a lot in the days when photography was expensive (you needed negatives and paper), but in these digital days, it's possible to create thousands, perhaps millions of photos for a fiver.
But a fiver (you protest) that's not much! Well, first of all you don't know how poor I am. Second, it isn't just one fiver if you are searching for something it can be quite a lot of fivers.
I run a kind of mini archive myself. I am one of the GOONS, a member of the Guild of One Name Studies. I have registered the name Brind and I am supposed to get an index of all the basic information relating to Brind births, marriages and deaths. Up until recently I could buy a single copy of a document and then provide it to any Brind family history researcher.
Up until recently I could pay the fivers, get the documents and copy them, even posting them online. Of course the archive would know I had breached its copyright (the copy of the copy, if you see what I mean), but since I was giving it away for free there would be little point in the archive pursuing me.
I can't do this any more. Archives have discovered a new technology that prevents, or makes difficult, the copying of documents. Since the originals are usually pretty awful, this additional level of obstruction makes the whole process more or less pointless. The archives have won. They control the documents. They own them.
The purpose of copyright is supposed to be to give the author of the piece, the due rewards of his or her work. Edward Munch created four versions of The Scream. I could imagine each being hung in a gallery and that gallery having the right to control access to the physical object. That makes sense. But when it comes to making copies of the The Scream, I think it belongs not to any one of those galleries but to Edward Munch (or his heirs and successors), if it belongs to anyone. To buy an object is not to buy the copyright. If you buy a copy of one of the Harry Potter books, believe me, you do not own the copyright.
People often donate things to archives because they believe they are providing a public good or they are putting something important on record. Think of the photographer who hands over an archive to the local library so that the pictures will be available for the local community. Such altruism is not uncommon.
If the archive then exerts copyright over those photographs isn't that a kind of artistic theft: wrong on two levels? It is wrong because the archive doesn't own the copyright (the originator still owns that), but it is also wrong because on many levels, it subverts the whole purpose of copyright.
Firstly, there's the 70 year issue. No one owns the copyright of something produced in antiquity. It is a public good. Anyone can use it. Secondly, what is happening is that copyright is being changed from something belonging to artists or creators to an organisational or corporate right.
Big business rules or big business sets the rules.
Wednesday, 30 May 2012
A thousand lines
Who would you prefer to do business with, a giant faceless international corporation or your friendly local craftsman, a person you know and can get hold of if something goes wrong?
Well it turns out that in almost all circumstances it's the faceless corporation. Yes, you prefer to do business with organisations that have huge profit margins, who will despoil the Earth's resources, exploit child labour, prop up dodgy regimes and worst of all contribute to one of the political parties in America!
You like brands. You like high street shops and impressive web sites.
There are so many things you could buy (or even better barter) from people in your community, but apart from a few specialist services (like plumbing) you will almost always choose the corporation to do business with.
Somehow you just don't trust those locals. They aren't up market enough, they might be unable to do what they claim or it might make the whole process more difficult.
In Germany there are loads of mum and pop businesses. It is the heart of their economy. In Britain they usually have to duck and dive to survive. You don't want to know about that ducking and diving.
So why is that? When they become popular everyone beats a path to their door and they can quickly become mega businesses (defeating the object, you might say). But it seems impossible to run a very small business serving your community (providing help with computers, growing vegetables, repairing shoes, making curtains, designing and installing electronic systems, making furniture, whatever).
It's hard to think of anything that can not be done better by the small, local business: banking services and insurance might be examples but it's pretty obvious to anyone who's followed the eonomy over the last few years that these enterprises should be run on a co-operative basis. Profit making banking in a world where people gamble trillions on invented financial instruments every hour, is obviously lunacy.
So be a revolutionary or stick up for Adam Smith (the big corporations do everything they can to avoid market disciplines, that is what branding is all about) buy or barter local. Take a thousand lines from your community. You will regret it, lots of times, but as you pick up experience as a local trader you will also empower both yourself and your community.
The excuse used for sticking with the brand is "no-one ever got sacked for specifying Big Blue". Big Blue is (or was) IBM the huge American computer giant parodied in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Big Blue racked up some of the biggest losses in financial history because it was unable to understand what was happening to the market (Apple, Microsoft etc.). And as a consumer who's going to sack you?
Well it turns out that in almost all circumstances it's the faceless corporation. Yes, you prefer to do business with organisations that have huge profit margins, who will despoil the Earth's resources, exploit child labour, prop up dodgy regimes and worst of all contribute to one of the political parties in America!
You like brands. You like high street shops and impressive web sites.
There are so many things you could buy (or even better barter) from people in your community, but apart from a few specialist services (like plumbing) you will almost always choose the corporation to do business with.
Somehow you just don't trust those locals. They aren't up market enough, they might be unable to do what they claim or it might make the whole process more difficult.
In Germany there are loads of mum and pop businesses. It is the heart of their economy. In Britain they usually have to duck and dive to survive. You don't want to know about that ducking and diving.
So why is that? When they become popular everyone beats a path to their door and they can quickly become mega businesses (defeating the object, you might say). But it seems impossible to run a very small business serving your community (providing help with computers, growing vegetables, repairing shoes, making curtains, designing and installing electronic systems, making furniture, whatever).
It's hard to think of anything that can not be done better by the small, local business: banking services and insurance might be examples but it's pretty obvious to anyone who's followed the eonomy over the last few years that these enterprises should be run on a co-operative basis. Profit making banking in a world where people gamble trillions on invented financial instruments every hour, is obviously lunacy.
So be a revolutionary or stick up for Adam Smith (the big corporations do everything they can to avoid market disciplines, that is what branding is all about) buy or barter local. Take a thousand lines from your community. You will regret it, lots of times, but as you pick up experience as a local trader you will also empower both yourself and your community.
The excuse used for sticking with the brand is "no-one ever got sacked for specifying Big Blue". Big Blue is (or was) IBM the huge American computer giant parodied in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Big Blue racked up some of the biggest losses in financial history because it was unable to understand what was happening to the market (Apple, Microsoft etc.). And as a consumer who's going to sack you?
Sunday, 29 April 2012
Police demonstrate outside anarchist film show
End:Civ
I went to see End:Civ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--FsPMKkt9c) with director Franklin López in Whitechapel last night. It was like entering into a science fiction world, Children of Men, perhaps. End:Civ preaches deep green environmentalism and is as hostile to light green groups like Greenpeace as it is to the oil companies. Frank is a self avowed anarchist and I took it that the premises the video was shown in was run by an anarchist group. In the street, the forces of law and order, police officers who I took by their uniforms to be from outside the London area, massed in some numbers. I don't think they were too bothered about us, it seemed to be just another pre-Olympics show of strength. These police demonstrations are becoming quite common in north east London right now as the forces of law and order seek to exert control over the streets, signalling that no repeat of last summer's rioting will be tolerated in 2012. Frank explained how his video was made for about $20,000. Some bits were simply stolen, most of the very impressive interviews were shot at an environmental conference, and other sections were shot while Frank was attending events. One model of 21st century video making, perhaps. If the distributors are not going to distribute and the tv companies are not going to broadcast, what difference does it make if you rip off a few giant corporations by stealing their video? It's a point of view. The basic message of End:Civ is that the system is so rotten that it has to be overturned in order to save the planet. If the corrupt governments and the over mighty corporations threaten the world then you have to do whatever is necessary to topple them. Reform is simply not possible. A bleak message. Malthusianism with a 21st century twist.
Sunday, 25 March 2012
Zen Management
This is both a handbook to help you succeed in the modern world of work and a survival guide for those unfortunates who have no desire to climb the greasy pole but would prefer not to get on the wrong side of the powers that be in the organisation in which they work.
It introduces the idea of Zen Management. This sounds like a highly exotic technique but is actually the commonest form of corporate organisation in the workplace today.
Zen management is by its nature chaotic and destructive. It is one of the most profound reasons why the corporation is likely to be replaced by a loose network of individual contracts, with people working together on a freelance basis on individual projects, connected only by the internet.
In a world where roads are permanently jammed by crawling traffic, it makes no sense for people to spend perhaps ten hours a week getting to an office that has worse equipment (computers, phones, faxes, broadband etc.) than they could afford to buy for their own home.
Ten hours a week is about the same as 1.2 working days. The average person goes to an office about 45 weeks a year. That means the total travelling time is about 54 working days or nearly 11 weeks. That is the equivalent of working from January until the last fortnight of March! Apart from the damage done to the planet, this wastes an awful lot of resources. It is not uncommon for people to spend £2,000, £3,000 perhaps even £5,000 a year commuting. There are parts of the world where an income of £5,000 a year would be regarded as wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. In the age of the internet people who live in these areas may be able to compete against some of the commuters for their jobs. Call centres have already started to do this. Quite clearly the current level of commuting is not sustainable.
Right now the corporation seems stronger than it has ever been. It is the dominant form of social organisation and thrives while other social systems (churches, voluntary organisations, cinemas, clubs and societies, even pubs and drinking clubs) languish. It is likely to remain that way for at least the next decade. It wouldn't be worth writing the book if it was any other way.
But all forms of organisation wax and wane. They have a natural life span. And when an organisation seems to be most powerful it is a likely sign it is about to decline. Has the corporation reached its apogy! Probably not just yet. But it will at some time. Probably some time in the 21st century.
Zen Management conjures up the image of Tibetan priests in spartan temples ringing bellls annd using prayer wheels. But these are not the signs of Zen Management. The most obvious sign is that when you deal with an organisation the first thing junior staff tell you about the middle management is that they do nothing.
If you then talk to the managers themselves they will usually tell you they are fiendishly busy and have to work incredibly long hours.
Both groups are often guilty of a degree of self delusion (managers may still be in the office three hours after the end of working time, but they may also slope off at other times when they believe no one is looking--- workers come to believe that everything they do is entirely their own idea and forget that the job has been set up for them). But to some extent both groups are right in what they say. Middle managers do work hard and they do appear to do nothing. This is the nature of Zen.
The Zen Master causes things to happen without appearing to do anything. And the Zen Master has to spend a lot of time in contemplation in order to reach enlightenment. From the outside this meditation looks an awful lot like doing nothing.
Many who have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will be reluctant to believe this. ZAMM, as its fans call it, made Zen appear to be a bullshit free zone. Engineers doing things because they were the right things to do rather than to impress anyone.
Zen is like that but there are many forms of Zen. You could have a Zen of military force, perhaps even a Zen of thieving or contract killing.
Zen management is unpleasant and inefficient but it is nowhere near as immoral as the Zen of contract killing, if such a thing exists.
It introduces the idea of Zen Management. This sounds like a highly exotic technique but is actually the commonest form of corporate organisation in the workplace today.
Zen management is by its nature chaotic and destructive. It is one of the most profound reasons why the corporation is likely to be replaced by a loose network of individual contracts, with people working together on a freelance basis on individual projects, connected only by the internet.
In a world where roads are permanently jammed by crawling traffic, it makes no sense for people to spend perhaps ten hours a week getting to an office that has worse equipment (computers, phones, faxes, broadband etc.) than they could afford to buy for their own home.
Ten hours a week is about the same as 1.2 working days. The average person goes to an office about 45 weeks a year. That means the total travelling time is about 54 working days or nearly 11 weeks. That is the equivalent of working from January until the last fortnight of March! Apart from the damage done to the planet, this wastes an awful lot of resources. It is not uncommon for people to spend £2,000, £3,000 perhaps even £5,000 a year commuting. There are parts of the world where an income of £5,000 a year would be regarded as wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. In the age of the internet people who live in these areas may be able to compete against some of the commuters for their jobs. Call centres have already started to do this. Quite clearly the current level of commuting is not sustainable.
Right now the corporation seems stronger than it has ever been. It is the dominant form of social organisation and thrives while other social systems (churches, voluntary organisations, cinemas, clubs and societies, even pubs and drinking clubs) languish. It is likely to remain that way for at least the next decade. It wouldn't be worth writing the book if it was any other way.
But all forms of organisation wax and wane. They have a natural life span. And when an organisation seems to be most powerful it is a likely sign it is about to decline. Has the corporation reached its apogy! Probably not just yet. But it will at some time. Probably some time in the 21st century.
Zen Management conjures up the image of Tibetan priests in spartan temples ringing bellls annd using prayer wheels. But these are not the signs of Zen Management. The most obvious sign is that when you deal with an organisation the first thing junior staff tell you about the middle management is that they do nothing.
If you then talk to the managers themselves they will usually tell you they are fiendishly busy and have to work incredibly long hours.
Both groups are often guilty of a degree of self delusion (managers may still be in the office three hours after the end of working time, but they may also slope off at other times when they believe no one is looking--- workers come to believe that everything they do is entirely their own idea and forget that the job has been set up for them). But to some extent both groups are right in what they say. Middle managers do work hard and they do appear to do nothing. This is the nature of Zen.
The Zen Master causes things to happen without appearing to do anything. And the Zen Master has to spend a lot of time in contemplation in order to reach enlightenment. From the outside this meditation looks an awful lot like doing nothing.
Many who have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will be reluctant to believe this. ZAMM, as its fans call it, made Zen appear to be a bullshit free zone. Engineers doing things because they were the right things to do rather than to impress anyone.
Zen is like that but there are many forms of Zen. You could have a Zen of military force, perhaps even a Zen of thieving or contract killing.
Zen management is unpleasant and inefficient but it is nowhere near as immoral as the Zen of contract killing, if such a thing exists.
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Droughts
There's a long standing tradition in Britain that just before a lengthy rainy spell, the authorities announce that we are in the middle of a terrible drought and there will need to be a hose ban pipe in the summer.
This, of course, is excessively optimistic, because we don't always get summers in Britain. But what is even more extraordinary is that the powers that be have an uncanny knack for announcing droughts shortly before the heavens open and we are all drenched in a downpour.
No Native American witch doctor ever performed a more effective rain dance than do the weather experts when shuffling uneasily (even on radio you can tell they are shuffling) as they threaten us with the dreaded hose pipe ban.
I don't own a hose pipe and if I did I wouldn't know what to do with it since I live in a flat and have no garden. Hose pipes are effectively banned from the Brind household, come rain or shine.
Even so I took notice when I heard the drought warnings because it was clear what was to come. As expected it has rained more or less continually. It's amazing! How do they know it's about to rain? If they do have a sixth sense for these matters, why when they see the signs of coming rain, does it suddenly make them fixate on the poor hose pipe?
After the drought warnings, after the flood, the next step is usually the imposition of a hose pipe ban anyway. A lot of rain doesn't mean we don't have a drought. Oh no, we just have a very wet drought.
The usual excuse is that the rain happened at the wrong time, or it was the wrong kind of rain. Despite the whole country being a sodden mess, it's still officially a drought.
We haven't reached that stage yet but watch out for it. I'm confident it will happen. I can't predict the weather, but I can predict the weathermen!
This, of course, is excessively optimistic, because we don't always get summers in Britain. But what is even more extraordinary is that the powers that be have an uncanny knack for announcing droughts shortly before the heavens open and we are all drenched in a downpour.
No Native American witch doctor ever performed a more effective rain dance than do the weather experts when shuffling uneasily (even on radio you can tell they are shuffling) as they threaten us with the dreaded hose pipe ban.
I don't own a hose pipe and if I did I wouldn't know what to do with it since I live in a flat and have no garden. Hose pipes are effectively banned from the Brind household, come rain or shine.
Even so I took notice when I heard the drought warnings because it was clear what was to come. As expected it has rained more or less continually. It's amazing! How do they know it's about to rain? If they do have a sixth sense for these matters, why when they see the signs of coming rain, does it suddenly make them fixate on the poor hose pipe?
After the drought warnings, after the flood, the next step is usually the imposition of a hose pipe ban anyway. A lot of rain doesn't mean we don't have a drought. Oh no, we just have a very wet drought.
The usual excuse is that the rain happened at the wrong time, or it was the wrong kind of rain. Despite the whole country being a sodden mess, it's still officially a drought.
We haven't reached that stage yet but watch out for it. I'm confident it will happen. I can't predict the weather, but I can predict the weathermen!
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Ken Dodd
Years ago I was the editor of a coal industry magazine called Solid Fuel. Late one night I was sitting in the office when I received a call from a very angry Ken Dodd. My assistant at the time, David Cusworth (who subsequently went to Perth in Australia and long monopolised the state press awards for his headline writing), had been causing Ken grief.
David had been pursuing Ken's brother Arthur, a coal merchant who (from memory and as unlikely as it may seem this is how I remember it), was based in Knotty Ash, Merseyside. For those who don't know Ken Dodd's act, Knotty Ash is an almost mythical place he refers to, the home of the Diddymen. The Diddymen, who definitely are mythical, are Pinky and Perky type characters.
Anyway, David had been ringing Arthur Dodd's business phone line, asking him to get in touch with the magazine. We thought a bit of publicity might do him some good and it would certainly make interesting reading for our coal merchant audience.
So back to the call. There I was working on something (in those pre-email days the phones seemed to ring all day so sometimes the evening was the only time you could actually get anything done) when the phone rang.
I could tell immediately Ken Dodd was angry. This was not the loveable character he mostly portrays in his stage act. The conversation went something like.
"I'm Ken Dodd,"KD
"Oh, hello Ken," me.
"Why are you ringing my brother?"KD
"Oh that's not me, that's my assistant David," me.
"Why is he ringing my brother?" KD
"We wanted to do a feature about him," me. "We thought it would be interesting."
"Well don't." KD.
"He's a coal merchant and we write about coal merchants in Solid Fuel,"me
"He doesn't want to talk to you,"KD.
"But why, Ken?" me. "It would be good for his business and a positive, interesting story."
"If you have to do something write about me," KD.
"But I can't Ken you're not a coal merchant," me. "We write about coal merchants."
"Well leave my brother alone!," KD.
"Ok Ken, I'll tell David to drop the story," me.
The next morning I told David that Arthur wasn't going to talk to him so he should drop the story.
A shame really. The story I'd heard was that the Dodd coal business used to be owned by Ken and Arthur's father. When one of the sons had to take over it turned out that Arthur was a first rate comedian but also a great coal merchant. Ken was not a bad comedian but he was certainly a worse coal merchant. So Arthur got the business and Ken took to the stage.
Rubbish, of course, you don't get to be as good a comedian as Ken Dodd through natural talent. It's practice, practice, practice, practice. It takes years of heart break and failure to make a great comedian.
But all the same it's a good story and it would have been great to have some photographs of the Knotty Ash coal business.
David had been pursuing Ken's brother Arthur, a coal merchant who (from memory and as unlikely as it may seem this is how I remember it), was based in Knotty Ash, Merseyside. For those who don't know Ken Dodd's act, Knotty Ash is an almost mythical place he refers to, the home of the Diddymen. The Diddymen, who definitely are mythical, are Pinky and Perky type characters.
Anyway, David had been ringing Arthur Dodd's business phone line, asking him to get in touch with the magazine. We thought a bit of publicity might do him some good and it would certainly make interesting reading for our coal merchant audience.
So back to the call. There I was working on something (in those pre-email days the phones seemed to ring all day so sometimes the evening was the only time you could actually get anything done) when the phone rang.
I could tell immediately Ken Dodd was angry. This was not the loveable character he mostly portrays in his stage act. The conversation went something like.
"I'm Ken Dodd,"KD
"Oh, hello Ken," me.
"Why are you ringing my brother?"KD
"Oh that's not me, that's my assistant David," me.
"Why is he ringing my brother?" KD
"We wanted to do a feature about him," me. "We thought it would be interesting."
"Well don't." KD.
"He's a coal merchant and we write about coal merchants in Solid Fuel,"me
"He doesn't want to talk to you,"KD.
"But why, Ken?" me. "It would be good for his business and a positive, interesting story."
"If you have to do something write about me," KD.
"But I can't Ken you're not a coal merchant," me. "We write about coal merchants."
"Well leave my brother alone!," KD.
"Ok Ken, I'll tell David to drop the story," me.
The next morning I told David that Arthur wasn't going to talk to him so he should drop the story.
A shame really. The story I'd heard was that the Dodd coal business used to be owned by Ken and Arthur's father. When one of the sons had to take over it turned out that Arthur was a first rate comedian but also a great coal merchant. Ken was not a bad comedian but he was certainly a worse coal merchant. So Arthur got the business and Ken took to the stage.
Rubbish, of course, you don't get to be as good a comedian as Ken Dodd through natural talent. It's practice, practice, practice, practice. It takes years of heart break and failure to make a great comedian.
But all the same it's a good story and it would have been great to have some photographs of the Knotty Ash coal business.
Monday, 30 January 2012
Sarkie
Nicolas Sarkozy's last ditch attempt to win re-election to the French presidency by promising a 0.1% share transaction tax could be a sign that the tide is turning. Those who like me believe in kondratiev waves and have long been waiting for the economic nadir to be reached, may find this encouraging. This may be the sign.
After the Second World War people in Europe and across the world rejected the rapacious capitalism of the 1930s that had caused so much human misery and destruction to the fabric of society. In Britain a Labour Government introduced the modern welfare state, nationalised the basic industries that were seen as the backbone of society at the time and Conservative and Labour governments competed with each other to see how many council houses they could build!
This social confidence petered out in the 1960s with the so called individualism of flower power and drug culture. We had rooms full of students, each expressing their individuality but from a distance looking exactly the same as each other.
In the 1970s and 1980s with Thatcherism and Reganism there was the emergence of the lunatic assertion that there is no such thing as society and the creation of a world fit for small shopkeepers and B movie leading men. Labour and Conservative parties competed with each other to see how many industries could be de-nationalised.
The nineties and the noughties were decades of excess and unprecedented collapse: boom and bust on a previously unimaginable scale.
Inequalities multiplied with the richest taking an ever greater share of the pie, while the majority in America and Europe, got poorer. This was very much the story of the 1920s and 1930s.
A financial transaction tax will not damage investment, since long term investors like Warren Buffet will scarcely be affected. If you don't make transactions you don't have to pay the tax!
What it will do is tax churn, by that I mean the relentless speculation and financial manipulation carried out by banks and other cowboy outfits. Banking should be boring.
Tax the transactions enough and all the credit default swaps and financial derivatives become transparently a mugs game. Even the people who believed they could make a killing out of trillion dollar zero sum games, come to realise the process is fundamentally flawed.
And when you think about it every other transaction is taxed. When you buy a packet of baby food, or a house or pretty much anything else there is a sales tax. The only major exemptions are some forms of gambling and the stock market.
Tax all the transactions and you strike at the heart of the giant machine that has been grinding wealth and prosperity away from the mass of the people to an unelected elite. A tax on share transactions is a first step.
Britain, of course, has much to fear from a financial transaction tax. Much of the British economy is devoted to the City and finance. A British transaction tax could cost the economy dear if the city upped stumps and moved elsewhere. But the City is hardly going to move to Paris and if Sarkozy starts a trend it may be that there are fewer and fewer bolt holes for speculators who don't want to live in the Cayman Isles or Lichenstein.
And Britain also has much to gain. While a 0.1% transaction tax won't raise much in France (a billion euros perhaps), it would raise quite a lot in Britain and might make the current Government's doomed attempt to balance the financial books, a little more plausible.
After the Second World War people in Europe and across the world rejected the rapacious capitalism of the 1930s that had caused so much human misery and destruction to the fabric of society. In Britain a Labour Government introduced the modern welfare state, nationalised the basic industries that were seen as the backbone of society at the time and Conservative and Labour governments competed with each other to see how many council houses they could build!
This social confidence petered out in the 1960s with the so called individualism of flower power and drug culture. We had rooms full of students, each expressing their individuality but from a distance looking exactly the same as each other.
In the 1970s and 1980s with Thatcherism and Reganism there was the emergence of the lunatic assertion that there is no such thing as society and the creation of a world fit for small shopkeepers and B movie leading men. Labour and Conservative parties competed with each other to see how many industries could be de-nationalised.
The nineties and the noughties were decades of excess and unprecedented collapse: boom and bust on a previously unimaginable scale.
Inequalities multiplied with the richest taking an ever greater share of the pie, while the majority in America and Europe, got poorer. This was very much the story of the 1920s and 1930s.
A financial transaction tax will not damage investment, since long term investors like Warren Buffet will scarcely be affected. If you don't make transactions you don't have to pay the tax!
What it will do is tax churn, by that I mean the relentless speculation and financial manipulation carried out by banks and other cowboy outfits. Banking should be boring.
Tax the transactions enough and all the credit default swaps and financial derivatives become transparently a mugs game. Even the people who believed they could make a killing out of trillion dollar zero sum games, come to realise the process is fundamentally flawed.
And when you think about it every other transaction is taxed. When you buy a packet of baby food, or a house or pretty much anything else there is a sales tax. The only major exemptions are some forms of gambling and the stock market.
Tax all the transactions and you strike at the heart of the giant machine that has been grinding wealth and prosperity away from the mass of the people to an unelected elite. A tax on share transactions is a first step.
Britain, of course, has much to fear from a financial transaction tax. Much of the British economy is devoted to the City and finance. A British transaction tax could cost the economy dear if the city upped stumps and moved elsewhere. But the City is hardly going to move to Paris and if Sarkozy starts a trend it may be that there are fewer and fewer bolt holes for speculators who don't want to live in the Cayman Isles or Lichenstein.
And Britain also has much to gain. While a 0.1% transaction tax won't raise much in France (a billion euros perhaps), it would raise quite a lot in Britain and might make the current Government's doomed attempt to balance the financial books, a little more plausible.
Thursday, 29 December 2011
a new type of search engine
Imagine everything you have ever been told about the internet in general and search engines in particular. Then reverse it.
This is a counter intuitive idea, yet when I explain it, people always say it must exist already. Perhaps it does, but I haven't come across it.
Information they say wants to be free and perhaps it does but advertisers want different values placed on different types of information: so free means different things at different places.
Let's put it this way, but it is only one of millions of potential examples, suppose you are looking for orange Egyptian cotton sheets in Ebay, you can find them but it is a very tedious process. These are standard high street products but you will have to wade through enormous quantities of stuff you are not interested in at all (pillow cases, polycotton sheets, which is probably not cotton at all and a lot of other stuff as well, almost none of it coming from Egypt).
Ebay probably tries its best to serve people who want to buy the goods offered via its service, but I believe internet traders attempt as hard as they can to compete on anything but price. In other words they hope that you may forget what you are looking for and instead click to buy their offerings on impulse. There seems to be no other conceivable reason for the fact that many of the entries are virtually identical, as if the search engine had been stuffed in order to crowd out low priced competition.
It's the same story with Google and other search engines. Googlewhacking is the name given to the process of entering search terms into google - often two words - with the aim of finding a search with just one result on Google. There is a word for this phenomenon because it is so rare. Many searches will give you millions of results. It is said that you can even get billions of results if you enter a term like if!
So far as most of these searches are concerned the results are of little value to anyone except the advertisers, reminding one of the old adage, he who pays the piper calls the tune!
So is the internet doomed to sink into a commercially driven miasma? Unfortunately, it probably is and, of course, this has driven the creation of selective search engines and web sites that catalogue related information. It's also possible to refine the way you search but fundamentally so long as the advertisers are paying it's never going to be a level playing field. If it was they wouldn't pay!
From a consumer's point of view this is all pretty depressing. Just as the internet really takes off as a commercial forum and high street stores start to feel the competition, consumers begin to find it almost impossible to discover what they really want.
So there is a huge unmet demand for an intelligent search engine and at the same time there is a vast amount of extremely cheap untapped intelligence: About three billion people (half the world's population), live on less than $2.5 a day. Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats
It's hard to avoid watching techy or third world development tv programmes without seeing stories of African towns, or sometimes whole African countries, aiming to be internet hot spots. But what exactly are they supposed to do with the internet (apart from attempting to obtain the bank account details of people who believe they are about to get $100million from some phoney source)?
Obviously, there are legitimate things people can do, like compete for jobs on services like peopleperhour, but they don't seem to do it a great deal. Perhaps it is too complex to get access to an internet enabled computer and perform quite sophisticated duties (like designing a Powerpoint presentation)?
But doing a search is quite a simple operation, if tedious. Pay internet enabled people living in these desperately poor areas $5 a day and I imagine it would seem like wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Even if they had to spend 20 minutes wading through an Ebay search sometimes, they'd probably be able to do a dozen searches a day. Charge the consumers $2 a search word ($8 for Orange Egyptian Cotton Sheets) and it could be quite profitable.
Save the core information obtained on an intranet and it might be possible for second line searchers to do a hundred searches a day, so you could make a good profit even if you were charging 25c a word.
Of course, there would be considerable consumer resistance to a search engine like this. People expect to get information for free and even premium services usually offer limited use for free.
Then there's the problem of micro transactions. It might be difficult to charge 25c via Paypal (or similar) so there would be a need to register and pay a subscription. Many consumers might give up at this point and say they can't be arsed to pay for something they know little about, particularly if they have to go through the process of registration.
On the other hand, I don't think it would be worth doing unless some (preferably a handful) of charities like Computer Aid and Oxfam, bought into the process. These charities have enormous databases and a vast ability to publicise a scheme like this. Their involvement would also make consumers feel better about parting with their cash.
Then there's the problem that search results would be delayed. They would not be instant. Could this be presented as an advantage?
For one thing this search engine is really intelligent and does not simply appear to be intelligent. It passes the Turing test so you can engage in a genuine conversation with it. If you don't like the response you can ask for the engine to take another look (possibly for a small additional fee).
Then there's the cooling off period angle. I can imagine the advert: ever bought a blow up purple rhino on the internet and wondered why when it was delivered a few days later? Using this search engine if you want to buy something you get to look at what you want to see yet the transaction takes a while. It isn't instant.
This idea would change the world. It could make internet shopping work better. It could improve the lives of the poverty stricken. It could force companies to be more transparent when they list their wares on the internet.
Lots of people have talked about providing internet enabled $100 computers in some of the poorest parts of the world. This search engine could afford to pay for and distribute such machines in meaningful numbers and at the same time create a lot of value for the people who construct it.
This is a counter intuitive idea, yet when I explain it, people always say it must exist already. Perhaps it does, but I haven't come across it.
Information they say wants to be free and perhaps it does but advertisers want different values placed on different types of information: so free means different things at different places.
Let's put it this way, but it is only one of millions of potential examples, suppose you are looking for orange Egyptian cotton sheets in Ebay, you can find them but it is a very tedious process. These are standard high street products but you will have to wade through enormous quantities of stuff you are not interested in at all (pillow cases, polycotton sheets, which is probably not cotton at all and a lot of other stuff as well, almost none of it coming from Egypt).
Ebay probably tries its best to serve people who want to buy the goods offered via its service, but I believe internet traders attempt as hard as they can to compete on anything but price. In other words they hope that you may forget what you are looking for and instead click to buy their offerings on impulse. There seems to be no other conceivable reason for the fact that many of the entries are virtually identical, as if the search engine had been stuffed in order to crowd out low priced competition.
It's the same story with Google and other search engines. Googlewhacking is the name given to the process of entering search terms into google - often two words - with the aim of finding a search with just one result on Google. There is a word for this phenomenon because it is so rare. Many searches will give you millions of results. It is said that you can even get billions of results if you enter a term like if!
So far as most of these searches are concerned the results are of little value to anyone except the advertisers, reminding one of the old adage, he who pays the piper calls the tune!
So is the internet doomed to sink into a commercially driven miasma? Unfortunately, it probably is and, of course, this has driven the creation of selective search engines and web sites that catalogue related information. It's also possible to refine the way you search but fundamentally so long as the advertisers are paying it's never going to be a level playing field. If it was they wouldn't pay!
From a consumer's point of view this is all pretty depressing. Just as the internet really takes off as a commercial forum and high street stores start to feel the competition, consumers begin to find it almost impossible to discover what they really want.
So there is a huge unmet demand for an intelligent search engine and at the same time there is a vast amount of extremely cheap untapped intelligence: About three billion people (half the world's population), live on less than $2.5 a day. Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats
It's hard to avoid watching techy or third world development tv programmes without seeing stories of African towns, or sometimes whole African countries, aiming to be internet hot spots. But what exactly are they supposed to do with the internet (apart from attempting to obtain the bank account details of people who believe they are about to get $100million from some phoney source)?
Obviously, there are legitimate things people can do, like compete for jobs on services like peopleperhour, but they don't seem to do it a great deal. Perhaps it is too complex to get access to an internet enabled computer and perform quite sophisticated duties (like designing a Powerpoint presentation)?
But doing a search is quite a simple operation, if tedious. Pay internet enabled people living in these desperately poor areas $5 a day and I imagine it would seem like wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Even if they had to spend 20 minutes wading through an Ebay search sometimes, they'd probably be able to do a dozen searches a day. Charge the consumers $2 a search word ($8 for Orange Egyptian Cotton Sheets) and it could be quite profitable.
Save the core information obtained on an intranet and it might be possible for second line searchers to do a hundred searches a day, so you could make a good profit even if you were charging 25c a word.
Of course, there would be considerable consumer resistance to a search engine like this. People expect to get information for free and even premium services usually offer limited use for free.
Then there's the problem of micro transactions. It might be difficult to charge 25c via Paypal (or similar) so there would be a need to register and pay a subscription. Many consumers might give up at this point and say they can't be arsed to pay for something they know little about, particularly if they have to go through the process of registration.
On the other hand, I don't think it would be worth doing unless some (preferably a handful) of charities like Computer Aid and Oxfam, bought into the process. These charities have enormous databases and a vast ability to publicise a scheme like this. Their involvement would also make consumers feel better about parting with their cash.
Then there's the problem that search results would be delayed. They would not be instant. Could this be presented as an advantage?
For one thing this search engine is really intelligent and does not simply appear to be intelligent. It passes the Turing test so you can engage in a genuine conversation with it. If you don't like the response you can ask for the engine to take another look (possibly for a small additional fee).
Then there's the cooling off period angle. I can imagine the advert: ever bought a blow up purple rhino on the internet and wondered why when it was delivered a few days later? Using this search engine if you want to buy something you get to look at what you want to see yet the transaction takes a while. It isn't instant.
This idea would change the world. It could make internet shopping work better. It could improve the lives of the poverty stricken. It could force companies to be more transparent when they list their wares on the internet.
Lots of people have talked about providing internet enabled $100 computers in some of the poorest parts of the world. This search engine could afford to pay for and distribute such machines in meaningful numbers and at the same time create a lot of value for the people who construct it.
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Biutiful (2010)
Biutiful written and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu is probably the most depressing film I've ever seen. I would cheerfully break off watching it to see Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Ingmar Bergman is a comic film maker (and I'm not talking about Now About These Women) in comparison to Iñárritu.
Yet Biutiful is gorgeously made and has some of the best performances ever recorded on celluloid, particularly Hanaa Bouchaib, a teenager, though it was actually Javier Bardem who got nominated for the Oscar. In truth his performance is phenomenal but in this Spaniish film that is not unusual.
It is set in a Catlonian badland, so bleakly depressing that it seems as if it would be impossible for things to be worse: and yet almost immediately they get much worse and continue to spiral downwards at an ever increasing rate.
If you imagine something ghastly might happen, it almost immediately will. Yet this is not done for comic effect and it is hard to believe that Iñárritu thinks it will actually change anything. It probably won't.
The only redeeming factor is that you may emerge a better person having gone through an emotional wringer (a roller coaster with only downs and no ups). I sincerely hope so.
If you have to see the very best film making (which this is) go see it. But if you value your happiness, stay well away.
Yet Biutiful is gorgeously made and has some of the best performances ever recorded on celluloid, particularly Hanaa Bouchaib, a teenager, though it was actually Javier Bardem who got nominated for the Oscar. In truth his performance is phenomenal but in this Spaniish film that is not unusual.
It is set in a Catlonian badland, so bleakly depressing that it seems as if it would be impossible for things to be worse: and yet almost immediately they get much worse and continue to spiral downwards at an ever increasing rate.
If you imagine something ghastly might happen, it almost immediately will. Yet this is not done for comic effect and it is hard to believe that Iñárritu thinks it will actually change anything. It probably won't.
The only redeeming factor is that you may emerge a better person having gone through an emotional wringer (a roller coaster with only downs and no ups). I sincerely hope so.
If you have to see the very best film making (which this is) go see it. But if you value your happiness, stay well away.
Wednesday, 23 November 2011
Brief Encounter of The Third Kind
This is a treatment for a film script I could write (or produce in collaboration with other writers).
The background is very steam train heavy. Lots of steam trains since there are many steam railways run by enthusiasts and it might be possible to get access to their system at a reasonable cost. The project would also need a disused railway station, a sand pit in a park (with a nearby path big enough for an ice cream van) and a hill with a railway line running up it (Snowdonia would be nice but might be expensive).
The kernel is boy meets alien (or dreams alien). Falls in love. Lips quiver. He obsessively starts to build train shaped sculptures (for example a train shaped sandcastle in a sandpit). Meanwhile everywhere he goes he hears a set of five to eight notes and sees people with bent arms moving them backwards and forwards in a co-ordinated way like children playing trains. The ice cream van, for example plays the five to eight note refrain while he is creating the train sandcastle.
The film starts with images of pipes being oiled, clearly overheating. The pipes thrash about in a frenetic way as old fashioned steam piping does but the camera is so close it is impossible to see any context. Eventually as the tension builds the viewpoint shifts to a billowing white cloud, through which a steam engine appears.
It concludes with a meeting as a railway station on top of a hill at which the two star crossed lovers decide that cultural differences are just too great and their love can never be consummated (apart from anything their plumbing works in such radically different ways making such an event quite impossible). It ends with the alien departing on the train.
Along the way there is a psychiatrist who says the leading character (let us call him Trevor Howard) is mad, police officers who chase him to a field where wide eyed locals have gathered to watch the ghost train pass by and a station tea room where Trevor imagines he entertains the alien (let us call it Celia Johnson) and she seems to take embodiment.
The background is very steam train heavy. Lots of steam trains since there are many steam railways run by enthusiasts and it might be possible to get access to their system at a reasonable cost. The project would also need a disused railway station, a sand pit in a park (with a nearby path big enough for an ice cream van) and a hill with a railway line running up it (Snowdonia would be nice but might be expensive).
The kernel is boy meets alien (or dreams alien). Falls in love. Lips quiver. He obsessively starts to build train shaped sculptures (for example a train shaped sandcastle in a sandpit). Meanwhile everywhere he goes he hears a set of five to eight notes and sees people with bent arms moving them backwards and forwards in a co-ordinated way like children playing trains. The ice cream van, for example plays the five to eight note refrain while he is creating the train sandcastle.
The film starts with images of pipes being oiled, clearly overheating. The pipes thrash about in a frenetic way as old fashioned steam piping does but the camera is so close it is impossible to see any context. Eventually as the tension builds the viewpoint shifts to a billowing white cloud, through which a steam engine appears.
It concludes with a meeting as a railway station on top of a hill at which the two star crossed lovers decide that cultural differences are just too great and their love can never be consummated (apart from anything their plumbing works in such radically different ways making such an event quite impossible). It ends with the alien departing on the train.
Along the way there is a psychiatrist who says the leading character (let us call him Trevor Howard) is mad, police officers who chase him to a field where wide eyed locals have gathered to watch the ghost train pass by and a station tea room where Trevor imagines he entertains the alien (let us call it Celia Johnson) and she seems to take embodiment.
Monday, 21 November 2011
House building
In 1980 when Maggie Thatcher was rolling back the public sector and was about to begin selling off council housing at bargain basement prices, the private sector embarked on building 131,990 while the public sector notched up 110,010 housing starts. The balance was roughly 55% to 45%.
The UK housing stock is about 25 million so total starts of 242,000 meant the average new property had to last a shade more than 103 years. Build 242,000 houses every year for 103 years and you get 25 million.
But the design life of much new housing is only 30 years. This is not just a theoretical constraint. Much 1960s housing has already been demolished.
One of the motivations for cutting back public sector housing was to liberate the private sector: to let the free market provide the needs of the country.
In reality house building has been declining.
In 2008 there were only 182,820 housing starts. This is a quite remarkable reduction. A third more housing was built in 1980 than in 2008.
In general the private sector has built more houses than it did in 1980 (in 2008 private starts stood at 150,720) but the additional units were nothing like enough to make up for the decline in public sector building brought about by Thatcherism.
At the same time the population has been climbing quite rapidly, it hit 62,262,000 in mid 2010, compared to 56,330,000 in 1980, an increase of more than ten per cent.
In 2003 the Barker Review of Housing Supply calculated that 39,000 extra houses needed to be built each year just to accommodate population growth and changing patterns of household formation. (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/press_barker_03.htm).
A paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (UK Household Formation: Nuclear Fission?) pointed out: "There have been dramatic changes in patterns of marriage and childbearing behaviour in the United Kingdom in the past 15 years. Divorce rates have risen, the propensity of unmarried couples to 'cohabit' has increased, and the proportion of babies born outside marriage has risen, from 8% to 19%."
If the nuclear family really is melting down then there will be a need for extra housing units even if the population stays the same.
The press often talks about a population time bomb caused by baby boomers reaching pensionable age and putting unacceptable pressure on the social fabric of our society. In reality this does not seem to be happening (for various reasons). If the proportion of pensioners was too high you'd expect births to decline. The opposite is happening. In 2010 live births reached 797,000, the highest since 1991.
More births, of course, means more demand for housing both now and in future years.
Government statistics reveal that things are much worse in 2010/11 (April 2010-March 2011) with total housing starts running at 131,040 of which 99,050 are private sector. At a rate of 131,000 houses built each year, the average new property will have to last 190 years.
Well some may, but to return to that Barker report house prices have risen much faster in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, suggesting there is already considerable over demand (or to put it another way, scarcity).
source:e Office for National Statistics (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13975481)
source: http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/research/2010/50_Years_of_Housing_UK.pdf (Communities and Local Government *Based on Experian forecast for Great Britain)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_pop-people-population&date=1980
The UK housing stock is about 25 million so total starts of 242,000 meant the average new property had to last a shade more than 103 years. Build 242,000 houses every year for 103 years and you get 25 million.
But the design life of much new housing is only 30 years. This is not just a theoretical constraint. Much 1960s housing has already been demolished.
One of the motivations for cutting back public sector housing was to liberate the private sector: to let the free market provide the needs of the country.
In reality house building has been declining.
In 2008 there were only 182,820 housing starts. This is a quite remarkable reduction. A third more housing was built in 1980 than in 2008.
In general the private sector has built more houses than it did in 1980 (in 2008 private starts stood at 150,720) but the additional units were nothing like enough to make up for the decline in public sector building brought about by Thatcherism.
At the same time the population has been climbing quite rapidly, it hit 62,262,000 in mid 2010, compared to 56,330,000 in 1980, an increase of more than ten per cent.
In 2003 the Barker Review of Housing Supply calculated that 39,000 extra houses needed to be built each year just to accommodate population growth and changing patterns of household formation. (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/press_barker_03.htm).
A paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (UK Household Formation: Nuclear Fission?) pointed out: "There have been dramatic changes in patterns of marriage and childbearing behaviour in the United Kingdom in the past 15 years. Divorce rates have risen, the propensity of unmarried couples to 'cohabit' has increased, and the proportion of babies born outside marriage has risen, from 8% to 19%."
If the nuclear family really is melting down then there will be a need for extra housing units even if the population stays the same.
The press often talks about a population time bomb caused by baby boomers reaching pensionable age and putting unacceptable pressure on the social fabric of our society. In reality this does not seem to be happening (for various reasons). If the proportion of pensioners was too high you'd expect births to decline. The opposite is happening. In 2010 live births reached 797,000, the highest since 1991.
More births, of course, means more demand for housing both now and in future years.
Government statistics reveal that things are much worse in 2010/11 (April 2010-March 2011) with total housing starts running at 131,040 of which 99,050 are private sector. At a rate of 131,000 houses built each year, the average new property will have to last 190 years.
Well some may, but to return to that Barker report house prices have risen much faster in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, suggesting there is already considerable over demand (or to put it another way, scarcity).
source:e Office for National Statistics (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13975481)
source: http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/research/2010/50_Years_of_Housing_UK.pdf (Communities and Local Government *Based on Experian forecast for Great Britain)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_pop-people-population&date=1980
Passwordphobia
I hate passwords and so should you. I just signed up to pay my electricity bills online and EDF, the French nuclear power company that runs the old London electricity board, required a password from me. Why?
I can understand that some people might not want their electricity bills widely known but can't those who have a fetish about these things simply get the option of password protecting their account? The rest (the sane people) could simply have an account area that is not available from any kind of search (you can only go to it if you have a link).
Now it may be objected that EDF is storing confidential information about me and doesn't want to divulge this to anyone. Well again why?
Not why should they keep confidential information confidential. Why should they have confidential information online at all!
I probably have dozens of passwords. Sometimes the organisation sends you a password and you have no choice about it. Sometimes I can enter whatever password I want. But usually I get to enter a password but there are strange rules (it has to include a capital as well as lower case letters, there must be at least one number or some such thing). As a result it is quite impossible to have the same password for everything and so you have to be a memory specialist to be able to recall every password.
OK, it's usually (though not invariably) possible to get them to email you a link to a place where you can create a new password. But this is often a very tedious process so by the time it arrives I may have completely forgotten why I wanted it.
No I am not losing my marbles. I have quite a good memory, but I'm also very busy and it's easy for me to get preoccupied with something more important than a bloody password.
OK it's not a mater of life and death but it is just another one of those things that makes the internet slower and less useful than it could be.
I can understand that some people might not want their electricity bills widely known but can't those who have a fetish about these things simply get the option of password protecting their account? The rest (the sane people) could simply have an account area that is not available from any kind of search (you can only go to it if you have a link).
Now it may be objected that EDF is storing confidential information about me and doesn't want to divulge this to anyone. Well again why?
Not why should they keep confidential information confidential. Why should they have confidential information online at all!
I probably have dozens of passwords. Sometimes the organisation sends you a password and you have no choice about it. Sometimes I can enter whatever password I want. But usually I get to enter a password but there are strange rules (it has to include a capital as well as lower case letters, there must be at least one number or some such thing). As a result it is quite impossible to have the same password for everything and so you have to be a memory specialist to be able to recall every password.
OK, it's usually (though not invariably) possible to get them to email you a link to a place where you can create a new password. But this is often a very tedious process so by the time it arrives I may have completely forgotten why I wanted it.
No I am not losing my marbles. I have quite a good memory, but I'm also very busy and it's easy for me to get preoccupied with something more important than a bloody password.
OK it's not a mater of life and death but it is just another one of those things that makes the internet slower and less useful than it could be.
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