(11 February 2022). Despair at having a government who do everything wrong has frozen my fingers and brain from this site. Nevertheless, slightly enlivened, by a little sunshine and Google telling me that this site had 13 visitors in January I will be trying to post more frequently.
I have talked about energy before and feasible solutions that make energy costs fairer (apologies for unsophisticated link, don’t know how to make fancy ones)
Today I am puzzled by the scheme to give a council tax “bonus” to those in Bands A to D. Not everyone in an ordinary house is poor- and many poor live in rented accommodation.
It is not too late for Mr Sunak to consider the following alternative.
Every household that has an online account with an energy supplier (and is eligible according to benefits and household income) simply goes to their supplier and claims the money off their bills. They also promise that they are eligible and will go to prison for a month if they cheat. They will also allow all claimants to be on a list for journalists or others to check if well-known people are cheating.
For those without an online account they can go to the post office and fill in the form -sent to their supplier.
(10 November 2021) I apologise to all my readers, a combination of technical issues and despair at the world have kept me away from the keyboard. However, there is so much to talk about my thoughts are near exploding.
So, today I pondered on MPs and other jobs.
Many MPs had a real life before being elected (I exclude the caterpillars whose entire working life is as advisor, lobbyist etc as they attempt to turn into butterflies on election).
Many MPs might not last very long so it is entirely reasonable if they want to keep in touch with their previous working life.
For example, a plumber might want to keep on a few long-term customers, a lawyer might have some ongoing cases and a medical person might want to keep up their skills (as well as doing something useful rather than sitting around). Their interest is known to the public and seems entirely reasonable.
However, Jacob Rees-Mogg for example, who was a highly paid director of a private equity firm (parasites for short), still continues to work for them but does not get paid. This is legal.
But one does wonder how it works.
At the end of the week when he pops his timesheet into the tray in HR do they simply put them in a drawer and wait until he ceases to be an MP?
Or does he not fill in a timesheet and simply work out of the goodness of his heart. I am sure this is the case.
The jobs that I fail to understand are those that they get just because they are MPs.
Companies are not stupid, given the sums they are paying one has to wonder (despite declarations of interest and all that) what they do discretely and behind the scenes to help their paymaster (“I deleted the old messages on my phone to free up space” though given the sums involved they could buy a new gold-plated phone every month).
Thus, I propose that MPs should not be allowed to take second jobs unless it relates to their profession. Rather than setting up a commission or body to do this any method would be open to criticism.
The simple method to make it fair would be as follows.
MPs fill out a form on the .gov website giving the reasons why they want to do the job, what they will earn and how it benefits their constituents and the population by doing it.
The public would then have a monthly vote on whether they should be allowed to take the job. Simple, transparent and reflecting the public’s view.
But they won’t listen.
One still has to hope so a picture reflecting this.
(31 July 2021) A couple of weeks of extreme weather and much gloom. I remain puzzled about the competence of our “Leaders”. They recently announced that they were selling more shares in RBS.
When the financial “crash” came the government, bought the shares in RBS at a fiver each (502 pence to be precise). This gave lots of people money (£45 billion) which was our money from taxes.
They have been slowly selling them off at a loss- the current price is about two pounds.
I fail to see how “the party of business” think this makes sense; selling an asset at a loss for short term expenditure. It puzzles me why this is not a major scandal.
Mr Branson and Bezos both went briefly into space recently. I thought it was pointless- they pollute the planet with various things, pump out a vast quantity of CO2 – for a 90-minute trip costing roughly £175,000.
It is not that I am a miserable curmudgeon about those who are super wealthy; it is the fact that they distort the allocation of resources away from much more needed things.
Finally, the Olympics is on. I like the Olympics especially the obscure sports. Sadly, the European Broadcasting union were outbid by Discovery+. So now much of this sport is behind a paywall; I will no longer have a chance to get genuinely gripped by something unexpected.
Furthermore I remain irritated when there are three races to decide the participants in a Final and they call them “semi-finals”. Surely they should be Tri-finals.
To cheer me up I am using one of my diminishing supply of kittens.
The world is a confusing place if you are small and vulnerable
(14 July 2021) There is something that resonates deeply when a match is lost (or won) in a penalty shootout. It is the utter finality of it. Even when one’s team make a dreadful error or have a moment of genius, the match usually continues for a while. With a penalty that is it. They remain moments embedded in my memory.
For example, when we got a penalty near the end of the game, against our rival to top the second tier, our penalty taker, a craggy old pro playing at the back, slowly walked the length of the pitch, the stadium silent and certain of a goal. The opponent’s goalkeeper unfurled his white flag. The ball went to its destiny in the upper corner.
On another occasion, in a penalty shootout against a continental team, we needed to score the fifth to stay in the contest. Our diminutive striker approached the spot with all the slow trepidation of a naughty schoolboy trudging towards the headmaster’s study. The goalkeeper lit a cigar and leaned against a post; only moving to onehandedly pick up the ball which dribbled towards the goal- not even worthy of the description “shot”.
I woke up on Monday missed penalties flying past my weary eyes with a kind thought that I hope the players go on to have reasonable careers though never scoring against Chelsea.
I took the picture below on Monday to represent my feelings.
(7th July 2021) The government have finally given up governing and are prepared for and aware of increasing the level of Covid infections (to get them out of the way before winter flu returns).
For those of a conspiratorial bent this PROVES either:
It was all made up anyway and they have given in to common sense, or
This man-made virus is not “culling” enough people so needs to be stepped up, or
“Big Pharma” (not to be confused with six-foot seven John a smallholder in Devon) have not made suitable profits from Covid vaccines and want to recoup from all required for hospital treatments, or
The National Undertakers Society have a sinister influence behind the scenes.
I don’t agree with these, I just think the government do not know what they are doing.
Personally, I shall continue to wear a mask on Public Transport.
Also, if I go into a shop they expect me to wear trousers. This is quite reasonable and I am sure they are within their rights to refuse my trouserless entry. So, they could still insist on masks to protect their staff.
(1 July 2021) Apologies to my readers but I now seem to have fixed the site (PHP 7.4 did the trick whatever that is).
Today I was thinking about email and the absurdity of ministers using their private email addresses for Government business.
Anyone, at any level, who joins an organisation and is given an email address is, quite rightly expected to use that for their business as an employee. Most organisations have strict rules about not using the official address for personal matters.
Yet, somehow an MP can become a Secretary of State, carrying out an important job and yet they appear to be using their personal email for all sorts of contractual matters. This is not very transparent and could lead the cynics into thinking there was something dodgy going on.
[NOTE: I am not suggesting, in any way, that the hard working and competent former Secretary of State for Health did anything untoward in his time in office].
The rules appear to say that if a private address is used on departmental business the department should be copied in for the record.
However, to my simple mind, why not have a simple rule – “Everything to do with the departmental role has to be through the official email system”
The same should apply to the use of mobile phones.
This is the only transparent way.
Rant over and to celebrate the return of this site here is a delightful kitten.
(14 March 2021) A lot of fuss about the royals this week. I have no particular comments to make- many have been made by people cleverer than I (and probably even more by those who are not). All I can say is that have great respect and love for them (as much as they do for me).
As we blink slowly into the light of a post lockdown world the papers are full of articles about WFH being the new norm. This is fine for journalists who have always been flexible but is it actually going to make sense?
I delved into the statistics. The UK workforce is around 32.21 million. It is obvious that many jobs cannot be done at home. Obvious examples are agriculture, arts and recreation, construction, health and social care, manufacturing, retailing, transport, etc. My crude sums give me just under 21 million working in these industry sectors, or nearly 65% of the working population. Of all the rest I simply assumed that 25% of jobs in all other sectors could not be done as WFH. I therefore conclude that WFH could only work for around 8 million people or just over a quarter (26.7%) of the workforce.
Does this matter? I think it does. It has proved useful in lockdown for keeping people employed but as a lifestyle?
Some established workers could benefit from some more flexibility it is true.
However, the eagerness of large employers to embrace this as a model for the future is a concern as I am not sure whose interests it serves (I know that really it is for them, not you)
Thus:
You lose proper benefits of face-to-face contact, reading body language and chance conversations over the water machine of other communal places.
You lose some of those bonding elements such as birthday cakes and occasional socialising over lunch or after work
It is not so easy to test out casual “Lightbulb” moments or check a difficulty if colleagues are remote.
Monitoring is likely to become more intrusive
It is fine if you live in a place that is large enough for an “office”; but we have the smallest properties in Europe and continue to build to such standards. Living and working in a room in a shared property could become quite tedious.
I think that when an employer talks about a “flexible workforce” it is shorthand for “cruelly exploited”.
I think we will see a growth in shared workspaces where facilities are used by many different people but even so this is a slightly dystopian model of a near future world where a quarter of the population float around in cyberspace supported by all the people who have to make the physical world work.
(26 February 2021) Having struggled to get my January photos to post (503 error anyone?) I did at least get excited at the landing on Mars. Amazing technology and also a very good example of global co-operation. It cost roughly £2 billion to land a piece of machinery the size of a large car on the surface.
Which I think is fine as the cost of a “Bunker Buster”- very large American bombs the size of a large car devastating an area and making a big hole in the ground (GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) as they are known), is around $3 million. So, less than 40 of them would cover the costs of the Mars mission (the price of the bombs excludes the cost of the planes, fuel and all the other stuff).
Putting it into context, our (the UK’s) new aircraft carrier cost £3.1 billion- just to build and equip though one of these MOPS could take it out. I am sure that people much cleverer than me have worked this out.
As a further point it is estimated that the entire “Green Wall of Africa” project- to plant trees coast to coast across North Africa to help reduce the spread of the Sahara Desert and create productive areas for people to live sustainably, is estimated to cost $8 billion. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Space I then got to thinking about space-specifically planets, stars and suchlike rather than an overcrammed wardrobe. I read, watch and enjoy science fiction but wonder, if actually, it is no more a trope than vampire or zombie movies rather than a realistic imagining of the future.
Initially there is a problem with distance. Space is quite big. It takes 6 months (on a good alignment) to get to Mars. It took Voyager One 36 years to leave the solar system. To get to the nearest star system (where there might be habitable planets) would take at least 81,000 years. Which is rather a long time. Sci fi gets round this with
a “wormhole” a natural phenomenon, (perhaps), which the internet tells me sits near Saturn (no me neither, I fear it leads to an internet wormhole from which escape is difficult) or
a “portal” (usually left by a long vanished galactic alien race of immense technology and wisdom) or
the “Hyperdrive” has been invented (assuming the laws of physics have been abolished) and intergalactic travel is a bit like popping over to Spain.
These are not necessarily likely.
Further space is not very safe. Solar radiation is dangerous and even I can see the difficulties of a spaceship covered in lead (though I am told that water and sewage can be in the outer shell-insert crude joke here) to act as shielding.
Secondly the movies show us massive ships with empty corridors and high ceilings whereas the International Space Station (ISS) is claustrophobia inducing to see as they seem to be living in a series of large freezers stuck together. Returning to the cost, that of such a large spaceship would probably be prohibitive.
Finally, there is gravity. Without it our bones dissolve and we turn into jelly fish. Those from the ISS returning can’t walk and are wheeled away; this despite them all being fit and doing all sorts of exercises.
Sci invents either the “anti-gravity drive” or shows ships with spinning things that magically make gravity.
It matters because we are not doing enough to save the planet. Many people are still in the mindset of early “explorers” or “colonialists” who would exploit and trash a place and move on to uncharted areas. This is now not possible, as we should be aware. Space exploration and colonising is simply a diversion from the issues we face; it is an unrealistic future fantasy not a road map.Household tip. I have sometimes pondered on whether a battery charger draws power when it is not charging. It actually does; just a very small amount of 5 volts but it is still a waste of power so turn them off at the mains when they are not in use. (What If Charger Is Plugged to Supply But Not Connected To A Device? (scienceabc.com)
January 2021
Having failed to get my 31 chronological pictures of January to post here I have put them on another site should you be interested.
(12 February 2021). Thirteen million first doses of vaccination is positive. I also succeeded, for January, in taking at least one photo a day. However technical problems have prevented me putting them on the site; I shall pursue.
Two items in the news have twitched my thoughts.
Firstly Education. I am sure Mr Williamson is providing firm leadership and direction to the schools sector; it is my ignorance on the side-lines that hints at the opposite. I therefore have a helpful suggestion for him.
It is unclear what will happen about exams in the summer and how assessment will be done. Inevitably this will cause problems and is likely to have particularly negative effects on publics from less advantaged circumstances (however defined).
Therefore, I suggest that there should be no exams this summer and that in September, as we have emerged into the jab light, all school years are repeated- no one moves up a class and the oldest pupils have to stay.
Teachers could use the rest of this school year to help and assist their charges as they see fit
At the lower ages some expansion of nursery provision could be targeted. I also note that we do start school at an earlier age than many other countries and this would be a wonderful opportunity to reset the system.
At the other end- Further and Higher Education it is probable that there are plenty of people who would welcome the opportunity, particularly those who did not get such good results but will have matured.
Second Borrowing Shares. The recent flurry of news about Gamestop and hedge funds “shorting” shares shed light on a bizarre practice (legal). It works like this this.
I go to you and say “Can I borrow your shares in company X please? I’ll give you some cash and you can have then back in six weeks.
You say “OK”
I then sell the shares intending to drive down the price. My mates are doing this as well.
When the prices are low I buy back the shares, give them back to you and trouser the profit.
Your shares could be worth less than before but you’ve had a few quid from me.
This is legal, but does it benefit the economy in any way?
