Audio boo

Here's a +1 to Starbucks: the wifi is now free in the UK (finally) so you don't have to remember your loyalty card username and password any more. Great stuff. Personally, I prefer the coffee at Costa, but they don't have wifi so Starbucks will be getting my business again for the time being.

Here's a -1 to Starbucks: the music is too loud. I have my iPhone with me, so if I want to listen to music while I work, then I'll sort that out for myself thanks. Right now, I'm listening to Paul Jones BBC2 Rhythm & Blues Hour from a couple of weeks ago, and really enjoying, but I have to turn it up quite loud to block out what sounds like Jazz Odyssey in the background. So, Starbucks: if I want to listen to the two girls sitting next to me discussing who got with who at the party last night I can't hear them because of your music and if I don't then I can't hear my music because of your music. Loud music in coffee shops is so last century. Please turn it down.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

A comment on tax

Suppose you earn £40,000 per annum. You decide that you want to improve your quality of life, so you decide to work four days per week instead of five and make do with £32,000 per annum. With a marginal rate of tax at 51% (40% income tax plus 11% national insurance), you take a salary cut of £8,000 but are only £4,000 per annum worse off. If you've paid off your mortgage and the kids are all college, you might well prefer a four day week with time to pursue your hobbies over the extra £80 per week.

This isn't idle speculation, because I know people who have already done this. Therefore, the net gain to Exchequer from the 50p tax rate is negative. If an employer has a couple of people who do this, and hires a part-timer to fill in for them, then the overall tax take is substantially less, although I suppose you could argue that having three people employed part-time (provided that's what they all want) is better for society than having two people full time and one on benefit.

More than 2,000 tax inspectors will be recruited to crack down on tax evasion among the wealthiest people in the UK… Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, told the Lib Dem conference that this would ensure 350,000 top earners paid their "fair share" of tax.

[From BBC News - Lib Dem conference: Minister signals tax crackdown]

Since really, really rich people don't pay tax anyway, all this suggests to me that the days of income tax are numbered and the sooner it is scrapped, the better. We should have introduced a land value tax back in Victorian times, it's time to bite the bullet. Now, people who live in big houses around Woking might whine about it, but it's a much fairer way of funding the state (and it can't be dodged).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

That's with a "z"

I enjoy reading Spiked Online of a Friday afternoon with my winding-down cuppa. I'd just got off the phone to Canada and put my feet up with some Yorkshire Gold when I read

Nobby’s disdain for south London – ‘It’s a karzi’, he says, ‘I wouldn’t go there in a tank’

[From Burnt Oak: it ain’t all doom and gloom | Brendan O’Neill | spiked]

Oh dear. Brendan O'Neill has confused khazi (British slang for toilet) with karzi (a misspelling of the name of the Prime Minister of Afghanistan), a mistake I often mentally trip over.

If I hear on the news about Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, in my head I picture noted English actor Kenneth Williams. That’s because he starred as the Khazi of Khalibar, the head of the Pashtun (I assume) opponents of the British Raj in the greatest film of the Carry On series (in fact one of the greatest English films of all time) Carry On up the Khyber.

[From a blog from a Citizen of Woking: One up the Khyber]

I shall e-mail him immediately.

.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

There's a riot goin' on

Unfortunately, with the continuous low-level background of crime to which we British have been conditioned, there's not much hope of improvement in the quality of life in the foreseeable future.

You have to WANT to be caught to be prosecuted for any half-serious crime nowadays, whereas the police are pretty good at the trivial stuff.

[From PC Bloggs - a Twenty-first Century Police Officer: Will the real blogger please stand up?]

Indeed. And the latest Channel 4 figures prove it. You're much more likely to be a victim of serious crime in London than in New York, presumably because the police are busy giving out speeding tickets and arresting people for over-filling their recycling bins. There's been a lot of serious crime recently. I woke up on a Sunday morning recently to the news channels reporting a night of criminal violence and looting in north London. Apparently the police abandoned the streets to gangs who were able to empty retail premises at a leisurely pace, burning down shops, setting fire to cars, that sort of thing.

On Saturday night, shops and homes were raided and cash machines ripped out in Tottenham. There were also thefts from shops in nearby Wood Green.

[From BBC News - London riots: Met Police launch Operation Withern]

Where were the rubber bullets? I have a conspiracy theory. The government has asked the police to cut their spending back to 2008 levels, so the police responded by letting London burn, thus making it politically impossible for the government to impose cuts. It's been a win-win for them: lots of easy people to arrest and a great PR win over the evil Tories at the same time.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Feeling a little blue (helmet)

I see that Iran is ready to contribute to a UN Peacekeeping force to help Britain control its rampaging underclass. Now, normally, the opportunity to have other countries' taxpayers fork out help us would be welcome, but I fear this is one specific idea that I will not support.

Iranian military commanders say that if the United Nations decides to send peacekeepers to the U.K., Iranian troops are ready to go now.

[From Britain Burning: Iran ready to send troops, calls U.K. leaders autocratic oppressors | Blind Bat News]

But in her excellent book Emergency Sex, Heidi Postlewait recounts her time with UN in various places in Europe, Asia and Africa and concludes with a very stark and specific piece of advice (I paraphrase, since I don't have the book to hand) that if some UN chaps with blue helmets arrive at your village and tell you that they are there to protect, grab what you can and run, don't walk, in the opposite direction as fast as you can. So I think we should turn down Iran's kind offer.

However, I can see one area where Iran might be able to provide practical support. Our Prime Minister, David Cameron (Eton, Oxford -- a man well-versed in modern technology and with a Digital Champion to hand in the form of Martha Lane Fox (Westminster, Oxford) who understands modern youth and their use of that technology -- has his finger on the pulse and intends to "crack down" on social media to prevent looting in the future. Now, I understand that in Iran, the revolutionary guards have been forcing suspected troublemakers to log in to their Facebook accounts in front of them so that they can see if the miscreants have been posting counterrevolutionary or blasphemous messages, or if their friends had. Perhaps some Revolutionary Guards could be dispatched to the streets of Hackney, where they could support the Prime Minister's strategy by asking passing youths to log in to Facebook, Twitter and BBM. If they see a message saying something like "Meet at Currys at 3am" then they could execute a citizen's arrest. Job done.

Facebook has been banned in Pakistan for a year or so, and I imagine civil disorder must have fallen substantially in that time.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Deranged debit

I got a letter from the tax persons today, pointing out that after paying tens of thousands of pounds in tax over the later year, I still owed them about fifty quid. I put it in my bils pile, because I generally do the bills on Sunday morning when I log into to my internet banking and pay things. I was surprised to see a flyer tucked in to my tax bill, though, inviting me fill out a direct debit form for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs so that they could, in future, remove the money directly from my bank account.

Are they nuts? Who is responsible for this potty pamphlet? Anyone with even a passing knowledge of public sector IT would sooner fill out a direct debit to the widow of former Nigerian strongman General Sani Abacha, who only this morning e-mailed me with news of a financially-rewarding scheme, than give the Revenue this access.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

By, of, and for... the consultants

There were several Twitter conversations going on last week about UK public sector IT. Generally speaking, it's been pretty disastrous and billions of pounds have been completely wasted. Why? There are lots of theories, but mine is that the nature of the British establishment means that all technology-related policy is disastrous.

When the words "former management consultants" are invoked, watch out. There is very little idealism in these types, mainly on a gravy train and with a tendency to just re-formulate and re-play back what the people working for their customers tell them.

[From Charles Moore warns that the Downing Street machine isn't working | The Spectator]

As someone once said - but I can't find on Google - New Labour created a government by, of and for management consultants. It was inevitably going to wreck both the economy and society. How different things are in a successful operation.

Agarwal tells us that Apple is completely run by its engineers. "They don’t have a lot of product management," he says. "Most of the project teams are really small, and they’re all driven by the engineers." On top of that, Agarwal says that most managers are all engineers as well, "not product people or MBAs." That means that the people overseeing projects understand the technology, what's necessary for a project, and can really relate to their team.

[From 8 Management Lessons I Learned Working At Apple]

This so very different a culture to public sector organisations in the UK, where being an engineer, or having any understanding of a technical topic at all, is see as a positive disadvantage. This is all rooted in Britain's pernicious class structure. When you go into a meeting with senior civil servant about some important and expensive IT project, he or she will almost certainly begin the conversation by telling you that, of course, they don't understand the technology. Which is true, they don't. But that's not what they are really telling you, which is that you are "trade" - you are a member of the grubby commercial class, and scarcely fit to be in their presence. From then on, your comments about the feasibility or otherwise of the proposed scheme/system/standard can be simply discounted before the project is handed over to one of the large management consultancies to run for a few years before it gets cancelled. And the civil servant you are talking to doesn't care in the slightest.

MP Richard Bacon suggested yesterday that the only accountability for the failure of the project was Sir Robert Kerslake's having an uncomfortable two hours before the Public Accounts Committee. As for his officials, the only accountability for the waste of £469m was to sit in seats behind him, periodically passing him notes.

[From £469m waste on Firecontrol vindicates setting up of Cabinet Office's Major Projects Authority - The Tony Collins Blog]

Half-a-billion quid down the train, and no-one so much as struck off of the Departmental Winter Festival card list.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]