A short communication - by Richard... Thursday, May 12, 2011

A short communication - by Richard... Thursday, May 12, 2011

... from a software developer:

The new kettle in the office has an LCD readout and three programmable settings with four buttons and no matter which one I press it just f***ing sits there doing nothing. I have to actually get the f***ing manual out and read it for the f***ing kettle!!!!!!!!

This is what is known as progress.

COMMENT THREAD

Share

Print ready

Can I have some of that? - by Richard...

If I promise completely to screw up my job, get it totally wrong and then lie about it, can I have £10 million of public money as well? That certainly seems to be the way to get rich, given the outcome of the House of Commons Transport Committee deliberations, where they recommend that the Met Office is given extra funding after getting last winter's forecast egregiously wrong.

The current seasonal predictions "do not provide a firm basis on which decision makers can act with confidence", the report says, and in line with the government's general policy of stealing money from the poor to reward failure in public service, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond has put a £10 million price tag on the additional computing the Met Office says it wants.

The big joke is that the Met Office is claiming that more and bigger toys will enable it to provide more accurate decade-long forecasts, when the real problem is the programming and base assumptions that go into the computer models. But such subtleties are beyond idiot politicians. Their only function in life seems to be giving away more of our money to an increasingly large constituency of losers.

COMMENT THREAD

Share

Print ready

Part of the problem - by Richard...

According to The Guardian, BBC Radio 4 has just recorded its biggest-ever audience of nearly 11 million listeners in the first three months of 2011. The station had an average weekly audience of 10.83 million listeners between January and March, up eight percent on the same period in 2010. Radio 4's Today programme also had a record audience of 7.03 million listeners, 600,000 up on the previous year.

Compare and contrast this blog's 7,000 daily hits and one can immediately see the scale of the problem. For the time being, the high and the mighty feel they can ignore minority opinion, as long as the majority is tucked up with the BBC and an expanding audience is talking its daily dose of mind-gel.

The BBC's "success", however, contrasts sharply with the fate of the national print media, which is showing losses almost across the board. Roughly, over half a million people less read a daily newspaper than did last year, a drop of five percent in readership, bringing total average daily sales to 9.7 million.

The situation for the Sundays is even worse. Here, the year-on-year drop is nearly 700,000, bringing total average daily sales to 8.9 million. That produces a seven percent fall on the year, with The Observer (-10.7) and The Sunday Times (-7.2) particularly badly hit.

Interestingly, a Radio 4 spokeswoman attributed the rise in its audience to the big, breaking news that dominated the year's start, including the Japanese tsunami and the "Arab spring". That suggests that people are interested in the news, and are actively looking for it. That might point also to one of the reasons why people are deserting newspapers in their droves – a reflection of how unreliable they have become as news providers.

Here, one does not have to be a great genius to observe that, if you market a product under the generic label of a newspaper, it is a reasonably good idea to provide news in your product ... the higher the quality the better. And, given that the market share for the print media is in decline, while other media are prospering, it might also be a good idea to find out why.

So far, though, all we have seen of the newspapers is that they are copying the political model – find out what really pisses people off and give them more of it.

I suppose the BBC is also doing that, but since people are paying for it anyway, there is some value in turning the radio on and shouting at it. Unfortunately, that sheer size of the audience gives it traction with the politicians and the clever and sophisticated people who know so much more than us and believe it is their mission to run our lives. And that is very much part of the problem we have in seeking to change opinion.

COMMENT THREAD

Share

Print ready

It ain't fair dealing - by Richard...

We can't do everything on this blog (I still write "we", even though Szamuely has departed to higher realms – the amount of help I get behind the scenes truly makes this a team blog). The territory is too vast to do other than nod vaguely in the direction of some subjects.

One of those is the advanced kleptocracy in the US banking system, itself the subject of much theorising and declamation. But the stakes have been raised with the publication of a Senate subcommittee report which fingers Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks, calling them out as thieves and liars on a colossal scale.

The magazine Rolling Stone (the very same which outed Gen. McChrystal - and which produced this piece on Goldman Sachs from the same author) has no doubts about the importance of the report, and the impact (so far) of the lack of any enforcement action. It declares:

This isn't just a matter of a few seedy guys stealing a few bucks. This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it. But the prominence of this bank and the high-profile nature of its confrontation with a powerful Senate committee makes (sic) this a political story as well. If the Justice Department fails to give the American people a chance to judge this case - if Goldman skates without so much as a trial - it will confirm once and for all the embarrassing truth: that the law in America is subjective, and crime is defined not by what you did, but by who you are.

I have no means of judging quite how sound, or otherwise, that conclusion might be. I haven't done the background work, nor read the report nor followed the hearings. Nor can I – there simply isn't enough time in the day. What one observes, however, is that the report is having a visible effect in dragging down the reputation of the bank.

There is also a wider effect, precisely the issue which the Rolling Stone article addresses – the corrosive perception of a divided society, the split between as "us" and "them", with one rule us and another for them.

It is my view that, more than anything, this perception is beginning to dominate society. It is not the daily fare of pub talk – not that people talk so much in pubs these days ... the beer is too damn expensive, you can't smoke there any more, and you can't hear yourself anyway as the Sky TV is too loud. But the perception is there – and pops up in a myriad of ways. It is the same perception that drives the antagonism on immigration, on MPs' expenses - such as the Laws case, as Cranmer points out - on bankers' bonuses, "fat-cat" salaries and the rest.

In the United States, there is some small indication that the net is closing, with the recent conviction of hedge fund owner Raj Rajaratnam for insider trading, after Rajat Gupta, a former board member of Goldman Sachs and chairman of management consultancy McKinsey, tipped Rajaratnam off to a $5bn (£3bn) investment by Warren Buffett at the height of the financial crisis.

But what may come back to haunt Corporate America – with strong resonance this side of the Atlantic - are the words of assistant prosecutor Reed Brodsky in his summation: "The defendant knew the rules, but he did not care", he said. "Cheating became part of his business model".

The elites can get away with their cheating for a long time – they are clever, sophisticated people and can bamboozle us lesser mortals. But, eventually, when they get too careless and too arrogant, their sins catch up with them. Then the reckoning comes. The Anglo Saxon in us will tolerate many things, too many things ... but not this.

COMMENT THREAD

Share