Why Dont You Blog?

I am somewhat short of time and this is a topic that really needs some in-depth commentary to do it justice. While I fully intend to return to this over the next few days, please think of this as a mini-meme: If you read this post please have a think about blogging your opinions on the articles below. If you dont want to, that’s OK, as I said, I will address the fact that I pretty much disagree with every one of these…

Background: In light of the Credit Crisis and the environmental disaster we are bringing in on ourselves, New Scientist has put together a “Growth Issue” in which a variety of people argue we need a new social model in which economic growth is not the goal and we all adopt a fun-filled, relaxed, minimal work life.

First off the editorial: Always annoying but this sets the tone: Read it first then move on to the main feature.

The weirdest of the feature has to be the “Life in a land without growth” article. It is a hypothetical report from 2020 detailing how great life is now we have done away with economic growth. The report has a great start:

IT’S 2020, and we are a decade into a huge experiment in which we are trying to convert our country to a sustainable or “steady-state” economy. We have two guiding principles: we don’t use natural resources faster than they can be replenished by the planet, and we don’t deposit wastes faster than they can be absorbed.

but then goes massively down hill with:

In our society, scientists set the rules. They work out what levels of consumption and emission are sustainable - and if they’re not sure they work out a cautious estimate.

Hmm. Didn’t Lisa Simpson try this for Springfield? I am more than a little worried about the idea of a culture where “scientists set the rules.” From that point on, I began to disagree with most of the report and decided, if that was our society, I’d be a terrorist.

The next utopia-article that annoyed me was the “Nothing to fear from curbing growth” one. To be fair to Kate Soper, it is better written than the hypothetical report but she hits on a theme which gets my back up on a gigantic scale: The idea that the more money you have, the less happy you are.

This is monumental nonsense. As far as I can tell it was a tool used to keep the working poor in their place by convincing them that aspiring to great-wealth would be bad for them. It manifests itself in our obsession with the failings of the rich and famous - every time some one wealthy checks into rehab, or complains about being depressed etc., the nonsense about money not making you happy is dragged out. Interestingly, this is something asserted more often by well off people than poor people, which makes you wonder about their motives.

Kate Soper shows how there is a mistaken transposition of survey data to draw this conclusion:

For example, rates of occupational ill-health and depression have been shown to be linked to the number of hours we work, and once a certain level of income is reached further wealth does not correlate with increased happiness.

Hours worked does not equal wealth and we have an odd conflation here.

Working 20 hours a day does not make you happy. I can testify in the court of Odin that, having done a 36 hour shift I was not even close to being happy at the end of it. I would be much, much, happier if I didn’t have to work.

That part of her claim I agree with. Working long hours is depressing.

Working long hours, however is not the same as being wealthy. In fact it is often the inverse. Poor people have to work all the hours Zeus sends to make ends meet. This makes them depressed. They are depressed because they are poor.

There is a middle ground, but it is a middle ground I will never have sympathy for. Some people are at the very low end of being well-off and, as a result, have to work insane hours. These are not actually rich people though - recent examples are the merchant bankers in the city of London, working 18 hours day to get million pound a year bonuses. Sadly, their lifestyle demands those bonuses and therefore demands those hours. If they are living in the centre of London, where a toilet costs a million pounds to rent, they best work as hard as the cleaner (who admittedly lives in a cardboard box under tower bridge). They are “wealthy” but not happy. However, they are an odd group and far from representative.

Then we get the genuinely wealthy. I suspect Bill Gates is a pretty happy person and enjoys his life. I think it would be foolish to say he was less happy than someone who was working 12 hour shifts stacking shelves in the supermarket, followed by a six hour shift waiting tables to try and keep a roof over their families head.

Going back to the article, it jumps from working long hours = depressing to saying that beyond a certain level of wealth the increase in happiness is not proportional. This left me with a huge so what.

If I am X happy with £100million, does it matter that I am only (X*2)-Y happy with £200million? Not to me. I am more happy, and that is enough. The rest of her article continues the conflation of work and wealth so I will leave it for now.

Now, as a final point, and going back to the title, I will again assert it is largely incorrect to say that money doesn’t buy happiness. For the screaming pedant it is correct because happiness is an emotion and unless the very existence of lots of (positive) numbers on your bank balance makes you happy the money isn’t doing that bit.

However, what money gives you is the ability to become happy. If you are wealthy enough to not have to go to work, you can spend quality time with your family; you can spend more time doing hobbies; you can learn new things; you can read new books; you can travel the world. There are more things that I want to do than I will ever have time to do so it is a constant battle with the clock. Money buys that wonderful thing called time. The problem is we have to give up time to work so the key for most people is finding the best balance between lots of work, and lots of time.

Being slightly scientifically oriented, I am open to having my mind changed on this topic - but I suspect any arguments will just go back and forth on issues of pedantry. What I propose instead is a simple experiment.

If you feel, like so many others, that money does not make you happy then send me £50,000. With this we can see if having less money makes you happy and if having more money makes me happy.

As this is a fixed amount and may well be below the threshold that Kate Soper was referring to there is a second experiment: I will make a note of my current happiness using any criteria you choose. Then I am given £1million and my happiness is re-assessed. Next this is increased to £10million (with another assessment) and finally a sum of £20million and a final assessment. From this we can see if the increasing sums of money show a corresponding increase in happiness.

Does that sound like a good idea? I am more than willing to take part in the experiment at a moments notice.

On the other hand, if you aren’t willing to give me all your money, don’t claim being rich doesn’t make you happy.

–

Footnote: I used “you” and “your” a lot, these are just generic terms. I didn’t mean you unless you are Bill Gates [or similar] and fancy the experiment. Do you?

Popularity: 12% [?]

I am kicking myself for not running an online gambling book on how long it would take to find a scapegoat for banking crisis. But then, less than a week would have seemed too short a time, so, as the bookmaker, I might have actually lost out on this one.

As T-W said yesterday, the UK immigration minister has stepped up to meet our government’s desire to get re-elected at any cost, by announcing a “clampdown” on immigration. This lurch towards shamelessness has been predictably attacked by the Tories - whose natural constituency is the HYS nutter and the Daily Mail reader - as not being tough enough (garbage) and stealing their policies (true)

Mr Grieve [the Tory equivalent to the immigration minister] said Labour were matching Tory policies on setting immigration limits. (from the BBC)

I have a picture of someone who finds that they have lost their housekeys and believes that beating the crap out of their next door neighbour will magically get them inside their own front door.

I.e Does not compute. This sort of thing bears about as much relation to reality as something dreamed up in an alcoholic stupor by someone who has had their frontal lobe removed.

In any case, (apart from the use of “immigrant” as if it means “black person”) the “immigration” that gets little England so irate is immigration from Eastern Europe, over which the UK government can have no control, under EC rules. So the only immigration that they can control involves a tiny number of people from the commonwealth countries and people seeking asylum.

The treatment of asylum-seekers is already a scandal. Is it possible that the government plans to make it even worse, so that people impoverished by the financial collapse will feel they’ve got their money’s worth?

Does anyone seriously believe that they are about to lose their job or their home because of “immigrants”, rather than because of the economic meltdown? Such people are clearly too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time. How on earth do they manage to survive anyway?

As I write this, the unpleasant immigration minister is on the Politics Show saying that stronger immigration controls will lessen racism, indeed that it is the ethnic minority population that’s calling for it…..

Back to my conceptual online betting scheme. What are the odds that the minister would claim that tougher immigration controls would actually counter racism? (less than evens) What are the odds that this is true? Basically zero.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Anyone who learned some Tudor history at school has probably heard of “privateers”. (Licensed pirates,)

Plus ca change etc. According to Voice of America,

Private Contractors May Protect Against Somali Pirates

Pirates have captured 20 ships in and around the Gulf of Aden so far this year.

Naval vessels from about 10 nations will soon be patrolling the waters off the Somali coast, trying to prevent pirates from hijacking cargo ships.

The international efforts may soon be extended to include “private contractors”.

Now, Blackwater, a firm providing thousands of private contractors in Iraq, is offering its services to battle pirates.

VoA (somewhat unaccountably) interviewed a Maryland college professor for a view on this. (Is Maryland twinned with the Yemen?)

“I think it’s important to note first that historically this has been done. In fact, several hundred years ago, when piracy was rampant off the coast of Africa, it brought English trade in that region to a standstill. And the East India Company actually employed private convoys to protect their ships from pirates..

I will try to temporarily ignore the fact that “several hundred years ago,” English trade off the coast of Africa was the Triangle Trade (manufactured goods taken from England to Africa; slaves from Africa to the Americas; and sugar from the American plantations back to England.) All the same, this could hardly be seen as “trade” in any good sense.

I am also a bit confused by this particular historical parallel. The East India Company? My foggy memory of history had me thinking that the East India Company had something to do with India - indeed basically colonised India on a for-private-profit basis, not to mention caused any number of wars in its wake. Indeed, Wikipedia seems to share my delusion.

Maybe protecting the East India Company sounds a more respectable instance of the use of private naval warfare contractors than if you think of privateers in terms of the Pirates-of-the-Caribbean. Indeed, maybe, international co-operation can’t stamp out piracy in the Gulf of Aden. But in that case, what chance would an ad hoc private navy have?
More from VoA:

Cost of the private escort duty may outweigh the risk of sailing unprotected.
Berube says, “That would depend I think on the contracts themselves, but if you are a shipping company, for example, you would have to balance off the cost of providing that extra protection versus the potential loss of revenue… …
Berube says that his research shows most agree private contractors would provide escort duty and not hunt down pirates. “This is really simply just an extension of security that is already provided on some ships. We have armed riders for example. Some shipping companies are providing people on board to protect themselves from pirates,” he says.
He says, however, they must comply with international law, as well as local agreements

Hmm, Somalia has been in a state of complete chaos on and off for a couple of decades. International law doesn’t seem very big there. If it was - there wouldn’t be any pirates…… Or the UN would be able to stamp out the piracy threat, using member states’ existing navies. Without recourse to any private navy. Anyway, what is international law on the high seas? Who enforces it?

Are international governments like cash-strapped Tudor monarchs, forced to pursue their international objectives through fortune-seekers who’ll do the monarchs’ dirty work while enriching themselves?

It’s not just 1984 any more. Welcome to the Realpolitik of the 15th century.

Popularity: 8% [?]

As usual, the Daily Mail has been busy rousing Little England’s rage. Not against short-sellers or hedge-fund managers or inept financial regulators, of course. Against “scroungers”.

Blimey, not just any old scroungers - but immigrant scroungers, black single mother scroungers, and families-with-ten-kids scroungers. If the Mail has a News Topic Bingo card, this may constitute a full house.

Mail readers are finding that their imaginary property fortunes have all but disappeared and that they might lose their jobs and pensions. And they need someone to blame. So step forward, handy scrounger targets.

Like
The jobless couple who rake in £32k a year in benefits and still aren’t happy.

The article is deeply unpleasant sneering attack. (No surprises there) For example:

And it seems that she does not have the time for housework.
The walls of her home are dirty and peeling and the floor is covered in videos and magazines.

Would the Daily Mail prefer to see these 10 kids homeless and starving, then, to make their parents pay for their perceived improvidence? Would spotless paintwork have allayed some of their spite or annoyed the Mail even more?

Single mother lives in Britain’s most expensive council house.

This story defies belief. This woman has been temporarily housed in an expensive empty council property while her own house is being repaired. What possible benefit could the house’s market value be to this woman? Would the Daily Mail be happy to see her and her child rehoused in a modest cardboard box, regarding that as more appropriate to her single-parent status?

How about the Afghani family living in a £1.2 million house? With a big screen plasma TV, in case the Mail readers aren’t already frothing at the mouth. Again, this isn’t their home, nor - despite the misleading heading - is it a council house. Their private landlord charges huge amounts of rent (£12,458 per month) and Housing Benefit is currently paying this. Apart from that, the only evidence that this woman with 7 kids is any better off than anyone else on benefits is the presence of games consoles and a plasma tv. All of these have been costed at top brand-new shop prices by the Mail, which has unaccountably never heard of second-hand goods or market stalls.

This family are castigated for not living in a shabby home. The first family was castigated for living in one. The second family was insulted for having the temerity to get moved into an empty council property.

The Mail doesn’t actually suggest that any of these people has done anything wrong, what with libel laws being as they are… Instead, the Mail just holds them up to be hated. To make its readers - who are worrying about the effect of economic meltdown on their own income - feel doubly hard done to. To redirect the readers’ rage and fear towards handy individual hate-targets and against the “system” that appears to penalise them but reward the undeserving.

As an example of the Mail’s hypocrisy, some of the children’s faces are pixellated out. It’s not as if their locations and the full names and images of their parents wouldn’t identify them to anyone who knows them…. People who don’t know them aren’t going to be insulting them in the street or beating them up in the playground, in any case.

One distasteful aspect of the story of family A is that the Mail reports that the woman is being insulted in the street as a scrounger. (I can’t actually say that the newspaper takes any pleasure in this fact or that they are subtly suggesting this action to their readers. I can of course hint at it, in a Daily Mail style way.)

Popularity: 6% [?]

This week’s data-loss story is a Ministry of Defence hard drive that’s gone AWOL. Another example of the UK government’s seemingly bottomless commitment to freeing up access to its data, by distributing it at random around the globe.

Ministry of Defence, that was.

An investigation is under way into the disappearance of a computer hard drive which could contain the details of about 100,000 Armed Forces personnel.

And when it says detail, it means unencrypted detail:

There may also be some personal information including bank and driving licence details, passport numbers, addresses, dates of birth and telephone numbers.

Of serving members of the Armed Forces. Does information get much more personal? It’s not as if that sort of data would be any use to enemies in the ongoing TWAT. (*heavy sarcasm*)

How much confidence does that inspire in the security of the information they’ll have on us mere civilians, when the ID-card scheme includes us all? (*Rhetorical question*)

A commenter said in the Independent

The MoD didn’t lose this data, EDS did. Nobody cares about data that isn’t their own. If this data had been handled in house and the work not outsourced it wouldnt have been lost

EDS is the MOD’s main IT contractor. Here’s their web page.

.. as an HP business group, EDS delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of information technology and business process outsourcing services to customers in the manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, and consumer and retail industries, and to governments around the world.

The About us page has US contact numbers. It seems to have been written by someone from a Dilbert cartoon. Everything they do is “innovative” and their

highquality, cost-competitive services are provided from the optimal mix of onshore, nearshore and offshore locations.

This determinedly shore-heavy focus may refer to their “related companies”(part-owned companies) which include companies based in the UAE, India (workforce:28,000+ ), the USA and other unspecified locations. One provides “Benefits, Payroll and other HR Administration services to more than 34 million active and retired employees from its client organizations.”

On the 8 September, 2008, prison officers were disturbed about EDS’s loss of their personal data, to the point of threatening a strike.

At that time, Computer Weekly pointed out that EDS already had something of a track record in the data-loss area. The Burton Review Report, published in April 2008, looked into an earlier loss of MOD personnel data, in which EDS were involved.

One of the themes emerging from the Strategy for Transformational Government (2005) was the increased emphasis on sharing services, particularly in information and infrastructure. The Armed Forces have been early pioneers of this approach, through a range of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public Private Partnership (PPP) contracts. (from page 4, Burton Report)

Hmm. Need look no further for the culprit methinks: the whole processes for giving out PFI and PPP contracts.

You might assume that the UK must be desperately short of cash, if it’s prepared to hand over its most crucial information to any company that offers to undercut government employees, while providing a better service and still making a profit. (Well, it must sound convincing to UK governments,) But, it seems that the UK government has a bottomless pit of money for bailing out banks, so shortage of cash can’t be the reason.

If you are interested in looking up the track record of other private companies that keep public data, datalossdb.org could fill in an obsessive hour. Type the name of your chosen PFI company and see what turns up.

Popularity: 8% [?]

In case anyone was in the slightest doubt that anti-terrorism laws couldn’t be applied to any situation, no matter how completely unrelated to “terrorism”, the UK government has decided to freeze Iceland’s UK assets under anti-terrorism laws.

Iceland’s prime minister Geir Haarde said it was “not very pleasant” to learn that anti-terror laws were being used to deal with the company (from the BBC)

Well, the damage done to the world economy seems to have put the impact of any standard terrorist atrocities in the shade. How ironic that the economic destruction seems to have been carried out by the staunchest believers in the world’s financial systems.

The idea that thousands of UK “savers” and dozens of UK councils put their money into Icelandic banks is so baffling that it offends logic, anyway.

It must have taken a fair bit of effort to even find an Icelandic bank. Don’t tell me they just really like Bjork. I’d assume that they chose an Icelandic bank - rather than their local bank or the Post Office - because it offered a big financial inducement in the shape of unfeasibly high rates of interest? So, basically, this investment choice was a bit of a gamble, really.

Experience eventually teaches most of us that “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” If you were to fall for a scam email that said you’d won a Eurolottery that you’d never entered, people would think you were a fool. No one would recompense you.

As far as I can make out, under the laws (”theories”?) of capitalism, investors have to be free to take a risk. (The idea that councils might be better off investing in their local economies would be heresy under said laws.)

Fair enough. But doesn’t the whole concept of risk imply that they might lose money if they make stupid fiscally unwise investment decisions?

Oh no, the taxpayer has to make sure they don’t lose anything…..

Well, there are a few implications of this that don’t seem to have been thought through.

All this bank propping-up is supposed to restore confidence in the banking system, isn’t it? Well, what about the unfortunate savers who stuck their money in a more solid bank and got a lower return on their investment. Shouldn’t they be compensated for the extra interest they didn’t get, solely because they were more careful? Surely, rewarding gamblers doesn’t send out a message that supports prudence.

However, the current message is that if you fuck up the economy on a truly grand enough scale, no one can afford to let you lose.

I am contemplating taking my wages to a casino. If I win, fine. I’ll be a lot happier. A few businesses might be boosted by my enhanced wealth. Blimey, I might even be able to trickle down a tip to a grateful waiter. How unselfish and wealth-generating am I?

Of course, if I lose, I expect the government to cover my losses.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The Register has a piece on the “melamine in whey protein” story that’s been disturbing me. Obviously, it’s nowhere near as disturbing to me as it has been to the thousands of Chinese babies become seriously ill with kidney damage and even died, as a result of imbibing the product when it found its way into milk.

One thing about this incident that inspires true shock and awe is the evil chemical genius that it shows. Imagine that you are a milk producer whose yields are a bit disappointing. Even, if you were completely unscrupulous, you might think that watering down the milk was as far as you could go.

Not so, a company called Xuzhou Anying can provide a sciencey-sounding “protein” powder. Well, a powder that tests as if it was made of protein, when you do an assay on it. It turns out to be melamine. How on earth did anyone come to think “Mwa ha ha, I can pass of melamine as protein”

In the first quarter of last year, the Chinese company, Xuzhou Anying, was advertising dust of melamine as something it called “ESB protein powder” on the global market trading website, Alibaba. “The latest product, ESB protein powder, which is researched and developed by Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., Ltd… Contains protein 160 - 300 percent, which solves the problem for shortage of protein resource,” it boasted. (from the Register)

So this magical protein powder claimed to contain more than 100% protein. Shouldn’t that have set off just a few alarm bells in the minds of prospective buyers.

“Dust of melamine” How tasty does that sound? I mean, if it’s good enough to make kitchen worktops, melamine must be great as a food item.

Awkwardly worded and a bit fishy, it nevertheless apparently hooked North American pet food makers and animal feed distributors ….

(killing off lots of pets in the USA)

…China makes a lot of melamine and the country also manufactures and exports tens of billions of dollars worth of powders and concentrates for use in processed food. Readers can see where this is going. Completely stamping out criminal rings making and diverting melamine for use in processed food is going to be a long process, if it can be done at all.

I start thinking of all the ways that “protein” powders get into the food chain. There’s a big enough market for cheap whey protein, for a start. Plus, protein powders are added to most manufactured foods.

It doesn’t inspire much confidence to consider that an assay for the nitrogen content of a product is enough to render it acceptable, especially when the readings are so far off the scale as to be incredible.

I googled “ESB protein powder” “about 2,430 for ESB protein powder.” The first page of Google results gives no apparent indication that this is a completely blag product.

(The accompanying Google ads list several online supplement sellers, who might probably feel that they definitely haven’t had their money’s worth for their ad dollars, given that that guilt by association isn’t normally seen as an advertising plus. But then, there’s nothing in the hits to suggest that ESB protein powder isn’t a miracle new bio-engineered protein.)

I follow the top listed Googled hit.
Here on the page, in a list of other doubtless meticulously-safe protein powder products, I see:

4. ESB protein powder
The latest product ESB Protein Powder which is researched and developed by Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., Ltd. contains
Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co.,Ltd. [China \ Jiangsu\Xuzhou]

I am tempted to order some for a sick laugh. I follow the link. It only says “Enquire now” though but it does provide some information on this nutritionally astonishing powder:

The latest product ESB Protein Powder which is researched and developed by Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., Ltd. contains protein 160%-300%, which solves the problem for shortage of protein resource. Reasonably making use of NPN and reducing the production cost of feed factor, ESB Protein Powder is a good additive to supplement the shortage of protein resources in animal feed applications.
After eating this, protein powder will be transformed into mycoprotein in the alimentary canal under the action of digestive enzyme; it will be normally digested, absorbed and used by the livestock and poultry. It is safe nonpoisonous, without bad reaction

I feel momentarily smug as a vegetarian. At least I won’t be eating animals fed on tasty melamine. Wait a minute. Mycoprotein? Doesn’t that mean “protein derived from fungus”? Is melamine now being classed as a mushroom? Doesn’t Quorn claim to be derived from mycoprotein? Feel notably less smug. I hope they don’t outsource the Quorn ingredients.

There are 42 protein powders listed on these pages, almost all from Chinese companies. The site is directed specifically at the wholesale market and at resellers.

“Hi! Start here to find Protein Powder manufacturers,exporters,suppliers,distributors and wholesalers related to Protein Powder. from china and around the world “

Here’s another reseller’s blurb from exilion.

… Reasonably making use of NPN and reducing the production cost of feed factor, ESB Protein Powder is a good additive to supplement protein resources in animal feed applications. After eating this, phalli protein will be transformed inside the alimentary canal and upon effect from digestion enzyme; it will be normally digested, absorbed and used by the livestock and poultry. It is safe nonpoisonous, without bad reaction. Use Methods. For poultry feed: adding 2% is capable of increasing protein by 3.2%-4%. 2. For cattle/sheep/pig/fish/shrimp feed: adding 3% is capable of increasing protein by 4.8%-

I give up on working out what phalli protein means (isn’t that the plural form of phallus?) I see that sheep, pigs, fish and chickens are all likely to get fed this crap.

Every link to ESB powder relates to a product from a single Chinese factory. This is slightly reassuring. At least this particular scam seems to have some limts. But the massive plethora of resellers doesn’t exactly allay suspicion. And these are just the resellers who are citing the original source. I would imagine there must be many more who have rebranded the product or would be quite willing to do so.

Now, just in case one gets the idea this is bagging on China too much, consider it takes two parties to make this crime work. The people who make and sell the melamine. And the western firms in the food industry working the territory for the best possible deals, in the process giving up tight supervision and quality control of their suppliers. (from the Register)

Popularity: 10% [?]

So, here I am, rushing in like a fool… (and interspersing my rant with palinisms, thus inspiring complete confidence in the down-home wisdom of anything I say)

I can understand pretty well nothing about the “credit crunch.” Except that we seem to have got worse and worse at naming things. The “Great Depression” has a certain grandeur. The “credit crunch” sounds like a crappy breakfast cereal.

* hey joe*

And naming things seems to be the crucial component of this crisis. When “money” is the cause of the whole fiasco, it must be so much a matter of what people believe. Money is paper backed up by promises. If you don’t trust the promises, what value does the paper have? As far as I can see, once money is divorced from production there is nothing to back it up.

If a steelworks goes bankrupt, it has assets: plant, materials, the skills of its workforce. Someone else can buy its carcass and make steel. If a bank goes bankrupt, all it has is the ghost of bits and bytes on a computer system. You surely couldn’t treat the financial skills of its money-making experts as a saleable commodity, on the present showing.

*maverick*

Is it possible that enough people have £50,000 in savings to make it worth the UK government’s electoral while to guarantee £50,000 rather than £33,000?

How the fuck could anyone “save” £50k? The “savings” word conjures up an image of respectable austerity. Making do and mending. People buying supermarket own-brand tins of beans, rather than the costlier branded version. Darning sweaters rather than throwing them out at the first hint of a hole. Do me a favour, guv. (Affects cockney accent.)

This sort of stuff might save you £50 a year at most. So that’s a thousand years of savings then. Let’s be insanely generous in the estimate. Imagine our conceptual saver is dining on bread and dripping (I’m not sure what that is, but it sounds economical) and saving £500 a year. That still means it would take a hundred years to save £50k

I can think of a few circumstances in which a reasonably well paid person might have £50k (such as having sold their house and keeping hold of the money until they can buy another.) However, people in that situation can’t account for any notable fraction of the population.

So let’s do away with any idea that the £50k limit represents “savings” rather than bank deposits. The newspapers are full of the horrific possibility that people with more savings (maybe about 3% of the bank customer population) might take their money to another EC country, unless the government guarantees it all. In fact, all EC countries seem to be facing this horrific possibility and are randomly guaranteeing or not guaranteeing all deposits, depending on the time of day.

*you betcha*

Hmm. Isn’t that the nature of global capitalism? This free movement of money, yada, yada, that we’ve been getting told (for decades) is the solution to all social evils. The money supply must be freed from constraints. The markets bring prosperity through some miraculous trickle-down effect. Any constraints upon the money markets would destroy free trade, and so on.

So, how confused am I? Don’t tell me that was made-up stuff? Who’d have thought it?

Irony upon irony. The IMF reckons the US economy (and hence, the rest of the world’s economy) is in much worse shape even than we’ve been told.

* big shout out to class 6b*

In its latest twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Review, the Washington-based institution dramatically raised its estimate of losses to the US banking system to around $1.4 trillion (£800bn), 45% up from the $945bn it estimated in April and reaffirmed just two months ago.(from the Guardian)

So the billions that Congress has finally agreed to hand over are not going to cover more than a little section of the losses? (The spare $billions that can be instantly conjured up from the vaults but just weren’t available to prop up failing real industries or to provide free healthcare system?)

As soon as banks are in trouble, nationalising them is acceptable. Once as they start to show any profit again, they’ll be handed right back, of course.

If there aren’t a few people with wealth beyond the proverbial dreams of avarice, the rest of us are in trouble, you see.

Well, no, I don’t really see. However, I can quite see how the losses of the mega rich have trickled down, so that minimum wage-earning taxpayers get a democratic share in those losses.

We were being told, only recently, that taxing the mega rich was a “bad thing” because, then, we wouldn’t benefit from their wealth-creating magic if they weren’t free to accumulate as much wealth as they wanted. How satisfying to find that they now believe in share and share alike.

*winks girlishly*

Popularity: 8% [?]

According to the pope, quoted in the Times, the world financial system is built on sand.

Pope Benedict XVI today said that the global credit crisis shows that the world’s financial systems are “built on sand” and that only the works of God have “solid reality

Well, yes, to the first bit. The “house built on sand” story seems metaphorically appropriate. (About which I can remember little more, from the time when my religious education teacher tried to explain - to a room full of architecturally ignorant 12 year-old girls - why building on sand wasn’t a good idea.)

Granted, the world financial system is pretty much a con trick, with imaginary gains and losses that have only an accidental relationship to the production and distribution of goods. And the whole system can collapse as easily as a building with no foundations.

But, talk about a non sequitor. The world financial system is built on myths, so this other myth must be true….What? Nonsense.

He added: ”We are now seeing, in the collapse of major banks, that money vanishes, it is nothing. All these things that appear to be real are in fact secondary. Only God’s words are a solid reality”.

Let’s ignore for one minute that the Catholic Church itself isn’t exactly destitute, and assume that the Pope maintains a state of religious poverty.

I abhor the worship of money as much as I abhor the worship of gods. However, there is a big difference between greed and need. And many things that “appear to be real” about access to money are “primary”.

Access to food, housing, healthcare, water, clothing.

Try doing without these for a while. A few days is all you’ll manage without water, but you’d barely survive a few weeks without the others, either. (Although large swathes of the world’s population seem to have to pull off this trick every day.)

Try doing without the “word of god”. Hmm. Not too difficult, that one. You can probably keep going like that for, oh, I don’t know, a human lifespan, say.

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Jonathon Freedland wrote about the hate email he’s been getting from Americans who tell him, in picturesque terms, that non-Yanks shouldn’t have opinions on the US election.

The counterblasts featured all the usual themes ….America had saved Europe’s “ass” twice before — and we would doubtless come bleating for help again when we inevitably sought rescue from the Muslim hordes imposing sharia law on London, Paris and Berlin. We can’t defend ourselves, of course, because we are limp-wristed “Euroweenies”, effeminate socialists whose own decline robs us of the right to say anything about the United States, which remains the greatest nation on earth. …….
One Bill07407 managed to capture the flavour of this virtual avalanche — including the curiously homoerotic undercurrent that runs through much rightwing American invective — with this effort: “If you want Comrade Obama we will gladly ship him over after he loses in a landslide. Meanwhile you can kiss my ass. I bet you would enjoy it faggot.” Equally reflective, this from bioguy777: “I love it! A pansy-ass limey Brit begs the US to do his bidding while his own country slips further towards total Islamic rule. We’re electing McCain, and the rest of the world can piss up a rope if they don’t like it. 1776, BITCH!” (from the Guardian).

I am impressed by the sheer energy of this rhetoric. But a bit stung, on a patriotic basis. Surely, our own home-grown right wing nutters can’t achieve this level of ranting? This is a hard act to folllow. These comments manage to combine communism; homo-eroticism; islam and the bottom word. all . They are slightly lacking in the random-capitalisation and generous-use-of-exclamation-marks that normally distinguish such comments, but nobody’s perfect.

Bah, can the British product compete in this growing international market?

I was irresistibly drawn to the Daily Express by a front page I saw today which claimed that muslim fanatics were planning an attack on EastEnders (a British soap) I fought back the thought “Finally, a use for Al Qaeda.”

The Daily Express. Surely, if there’s a serious national challenge to foreign rabid-ranting supremacy, it must be in the Daily Express? The Express has a website. Imagine my delight to find it even has a Have Your Say page.

I would have to say the Express may be guilty of trying to juke the stats though. It may be trying to win an award from the twat-a-tron. It provides a list of questions that its readers might want to Have their Say about. These topics have obviously been cynically calculated to get comments by the shit-bucketload, applying a simple “Bull and red rag” principle.

More Have Your Say
•Should it be illegal to break manifesto promises?
•Is it time for Labour to stop bankrupting Britain?
•Is Brown to blame for credit crunch?
•Should ALL police forces get back to basics?
•Have you had enough of high taxes and poor services?
•Is Gordon Brown a laughing stock?
•Should Labour halt the war on motorists?
•Are we living in a Big Brother state?
•Should doomed Brown take the hint and quit?
•Is ‘nanny’ Brown just full of hot air?
•Are rubbish fines just a way of ripping us off?
•Have you been badly affected by the dismal property market?
• Will ex-soldiers bring discipline to our schools?
CLASSROOM yobs will be brought to heel by former soldiers trained as teachers, the Conservatives pledged last night.
• Should Ecstasy be downgraded from a Class A drug?
ECSTASY could be downgraded from a Class A drug despite a three-fold rise in the number of deaths.
• Does our benefits system reward scroungers?
TODAY The Daily Express reported that Brits are better off on benefits.
• Are you sick of the EU meddling in British affairs?
TODAY the Daily Express reported that British motorists will soon be forced into driving with their lights on in the daytime under a new EU edict.

Hah. I don’t even need to read the comments. The Express reporters might as well have written them at the same time they picked the topics. They know exactly what buttons to press to get that fear-filled little-England worldview spewed out to fill their empty webpages.

I spent a fair bit of time scanning the 99 “benefits scroungers” comments but you could tell their hearts weren’t in it (maybe with some secretly fearing they might end up in that category themselves, in a world recession, and are possibly suddenly realising that £60 a week would barely heat and light their homes, let alone feed them.)

Better entertainment from the “ex-soldiers” in schools thread. I become uncomfortably aware that not only do these people hate and fear children (no surprise) but they believe that Britain’s armed forces are staffed by the human equivalent of pitbull terriers, who, if ever let loose on schoolkids would terrorise and bully them into behaving. And they think this is a good thing.

Well, except for those who fear that gaining actual teaching skills would draw their psychopathic teeth.

The answer is no, how will they instill discipline,
they would not be alowed to punish the kids, they could not yell at them the same as a squadie, and off coarse they will need to go through collage or university to get thier teaching degrees or deplomas, by the time they have been through the system they will be just as PC as the present teachers, or will they go striaght into schools with out any degrees or deplomas, and we will have teaching on the cheap.

(How beautifully ironic that this educational expert has managed to come out of school without grasping the rudiments of spelling and punctuation.)

Or there are still some who feel that the troublesome rule of law will still hamstring the psychopaths.

IT WONT WORK
unless Cameron is going to get rid of the softly softly approach and the human rights loony lot , then this is a waste of time,

It’s probably too much to hope that these people can’t breed. In which case, no wonder that the UK has been told off again by the united nations for making its kids miserable.

It’s also something of a pretty serious insult to the British forces. These nutters somehow assume that any serving soldier is basically a thug, who has has been brutalised through training.:

Only if we get rid of the PC mongers and allow them to use the same discipline that army recruits face.

I don’t know anything about army training that I haven’t learned from watching Vietnam war films (Full Metal Jacket, etc) but I suspect they don’t either. It’s just that they misread the message about what happens when you brutalise young men into becoming disposable killers. They assumed it was a template, rather than a warning.

Quite by coincidence, I just saw the British National Party’s manifesto (I am buggered if I’m putting a link to that) and its central concerns seem to be the exact same “issues” that feature as topics on the Daily Express’s Have your Say. The BNP apparently plans to go after the Tories’ more rabid voters.

(Well, at least it would split the Tories’ vote, so I can see an upside. But generally, this shit just frames political debate in terms that are ever more rightwing. So, we see the Labour party fallling over itself to be tough on immigrants and scroungers.)

So, in your face, right-wing Yanks. Britain still has much more than its fair share of people after your own twisted hearts. (OK, the Brit ones don’t care about abortion and wouldn’t recognise a creationist theory if it bit them on the nose, and the American ones don’t seem to hate teenagers much, but they certainly seem to be brothers and sisters under the skin.)

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