economics - Ina Disguise

Posh White Trash

August 13, 2016 No Comments

Those who have been reading the blog for a while, may have picked up that I am a bit posh. Not champagne-drinking, Puccini-listening, bun-throwing posh, but certainly on the posher side. My parents weren’t all that posh, and my siblings, although they like to think they are posh, are a rather grubby, dishonest, grasping type of posh that the world could really do without.

I, on the other hand, am more of your oh-so-worthy worried scruffy noble posh. The kind of posh that nobody really wants to employ, because we value honesty and integrity over money, which makes us rather unpredictable and a bit too competent at times. There is nothing worse than trying to pull a fast one and having your underling/colleague point at you and tell you you just aren’t good enough.

This means that I am very helpful if you happen to be nearby and require some help with anything, or if you want anything organised before you get rid of me in case I show any sign of independent thought or action. This is not particularly convenient for me, but immensely helpful if you have more Machiavellian tendencies. What I really need is to be around somebody a lot more savvy and mercenary, who smiles at my attempts at worthiness and simplistic view of the world in terms of thinking that we should make some efforts to actually do the right thing, now and again.

Having said all this, a junkie in Govan once attempted to mug me at a bus stop, and I was able to talk her out of it by pointing out that she had children, a house, a nice watch, a nice phone which she was using so much I can only assume she had plenty of money for her contract, and really had no business attacking me as I was returning to my mother’s house after another miserable day in a call-centre because nobody actually wants a smartass posh graduate in Glasgow.

Even the museums refuse to take you unless you have been unemployed for some considerable time. I am not the only person who has been extremely frustrated by this, and the attitude that people like me do not need to work, just like everybody else. It is testament to my bloody-mindedness that I managed to keep myself in multiple jobs until my mother needed me, despite this.

Anyway, having given you some insight into my odd political mix in terms of the parental revolutionary communist/conservative gene mix, I have some concerns about the mess that is the DWP at present. We spend a lot of money with private companies repeatedly hammering the poor, when far more money could be gained by employing a great number of accountants to retrieve the uncollected taxes we are owed. These taxes to which I refer are owed by individuals and smaller businesses, since I believe the larger companies negotiate their enormous amounts of relief, and frankly, if they didn’t, they would simply find a way to pay their tax to somebody else.

https://speye.wordpress.com/2016/08/13/no-job-no-house-begins-7-november/

Please take the time to look at the table at the beginning of the above blog post, and ask yourself whether the government have prepared for taking an extra half million children into care due to homelessness? Conservative and Labour alike, if under Smith, are willing to follow this plan. I can only assume we will be getting articles about breeding scroungers to prepare us for the vans turning up to evict and split families, since the only way some of these people are going to be employed, is if the government shells out yet more money forcing employers like Poundland to make them work for nothing.

Iain Duncan Smith, and his half thought out, poorly planned and semi executed plans for welfare should really be prosecuted for what he has done to the disabled, welfare claimants and now families in the course of his celebration of the Conservative love of societal inequity. God Bless him, we all know he was sparing with the truth on his CV and is not terribly bright. Further, it is probable that an even nastier character stood at his shoulder egging him on as he laid waste to people that need opportunities and hope rather than eternal damnation. How clever of him to resign on the basis that he no longer agreed with his own poorly made plans! I worked in Easterhouse in the nineties, and again in the noughties, and the Easterhouse he saw was vastly improved. I wonder how he would have responded had he been hunted by a pack of dogs, as I was in the nineties? Security was tight back then.

I have seen some evidence this week, that the Conservatives are quietly trying to tidy up this mess. Labour, of course, are in no position to challenge them on anything, because they are still trying to kill Jeremy Corbyn in case something awful happens, like being voted into power. I sincerely hope, for the sake of all these children, that the Conservatives take action quickly.

May I ask why it makes sense to channel people in poorly paid work back into the welfare system to do the same job for no money? I presume it benefits the companies willing to make people work this way, but do you really think this provides people with opportunity, social mobility or a sense of optimism? Is crushing the spirit, and lowering the birth rate via housing benefit policy really good for productivity in the workplace? Perhaps people would be more motivated if instead you offered them hope, and sufficient to eat, instead of contempt and ever more punishment.

Malnutrition hospital admissions in England and Wales

This is not to say that I do not agree with anything that the Conservatives do on principle. I have far more loathing for New Labour. They have a far more sordid, unoriginal and dishonest approach to producing the same results. What does concern me however, is that a love of your country should involve pride in the inhabitants and a noble wish to provide a basic level of decent care, nutrition and health, and I do not see this at present.

There are ways of elevating the whole economy, which seem to be regarded as rather quaint and old fashioned and which our current crop of politicians appear to have no knowledge of. I am losing my patience awaiting some sign of awareness. Is it that they do not know how to do it, or is it that most of the population want to see people suffer and die for their own amusement? If the latter is the case, then evidently I am out of step.

economics, motivation

Fakery and Modern Marketing

August 4, 2016 No Comments

I see so much fakery online, particularly since I started on the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing Project. People talk about authenticity, but when authenticity includes Rihanna explaining why she did not bother to design her own shoe collection, you realise that people basically jump on linguistic bandwagons without considering what the words they use actually mean, never mind whether it means anything to anyone. I seriously offended a few Rihanna fans, when I pointed this out at the time.

Last week, I happened upon a ‘social media guru’ advising his apparently adoring fans on how to achieve – wait for it – 125 hits on your blog using twitter. He wrote an entire post on it, with largely useless and irrelevant advice, so that you too could achieve a small fraction of what I achieve with every single post, and I do that without an subscriber list or tremendous amount of effort. I am sorry to say that this guy has evidently missed the entire point of Twitter.

Likewise, people like David Wolfe put a tremendous amount of time and money into achieving massive follower lists, by hook or by crook, as investors and media alike like to be validated by looking at largely fake numbers on Twitter and Facebook. I think I have about 50 likes on the Ina Disguise page on Facebook, and I have 25,000 regular readers, and another 16,000 or so who find me in the bookshops rather than on the website.

You could say that I am stupid for not taking all the conventional advice on offer, for not bothering with vanity advertising on facebook or google, for not bothering with heavy marketing budgets or promotion, but the reality is that fake followers are worthless, that your regular readers like to dip in and out of your topics, depending on what they are, and that they do not want to commit to hanging on your every word without you providing something unique and special.

What is important is getting your work into the right hands, very easy for somebody well connected such as Nigella Lawson, who did not even have to know anything about cooking, but extremely difficult for everybody else. Matt Haig was lucky enough to be circulated amongst the ‘right people’ for his book on depression, and now he gets media coverage before he even writes the book. As he is on my friends list on facebook, I have a peep now and again, and he is an extremely unassuming guy. One of the writers on the Hunger Games also friended me for a while, and he was also very dull.

Really what I am trying to say is – you will not get your follower number on your gravestone, and it is entirely meaningless in terms of being picked up by someone who matters. It just isn’t how social media works. Spending your time and money inflating your numbers, is time and money you would be far better to invest on producing better work and thinking of ways of getting it to the right people.

The only people impressed by huge numbers, are people who seek to leech from you as much as provide you with opportunities. It is a marketing con, designed to promote flotsam over serious content, and unless you plan to produce endless flotsam at a rapid rate, it is not much use to you.

For Wolfe, I can understand it. He is interested in ignorance. Ignorance pays the bills. Ignorance lasts for a year or so, and ignorance makes money when people want a fast solution rather than acquiring any knowledge. Wolfe is in the ignorance business. He has taught me an awful lot about the difference between depth and distribution, and he is right about many things. He is right, and he is wealthy, at the expense of being respected or particularly liked long term.

Especially for writers, there is a wealth of useless vanity advertising that you could indulge yourself with, but it will not get you into the hands that help. Spending your time oiling up a crew of equally vacuous authors and hangers-on on facebook may sell a few books, but it does not demonstrate love of your craft or a development of your skill. It is up to you which you prefer, but as with most things, success does not correlate with talent or skill.

On the first day of my author’s page on facebook, I was attacked by a gaggle of genre writers who refused to believe that anybody could write in several genres for the same series, which was essential for the Best Ever and Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing series to attract people to David Wolfe. This was considered rookie madness. It has, as any raw foodist will tell you, been a very successful strategy rather than churning out yet more tiresome raw recipe books that only raw foodies will read in terms of numbers.

At the same time, another writer complained that nobody should put out free work. A year later she complained that she could only dream of the numbers I had reached, with minimal effort. She is still churning out the same Agatha Christie rip-offs and her sales number in the hundreds.

My journalist friend asked with considerable disinterest how I was doing, as she is in this ‘no free work’ school of thought. My view is – get over yourself – your first two books will be worthless, your third might be OK, and why on earth should anyone want to pay for an unknown author, any more than they would pay to hear a pop song for the first time? You have to establish yourself. Yes, an email subscription might be a good idea, but it is probably better for you, and better for your readers, if you spend your first few years establishing your name, learning your craft by putting out some free work and seeing what works for you. There is a host of options for doing this, some are covered in previous posts (see Shameless self-promotion)

Look a bit more closely at the big names you admire. Are they really any good? Rather than matching up to the numbers, look at actually being better than they are, regardless of the financial benefits. You will be a lot happier with lower financial, and higher personal expectations.

economics, politics

The Cyber and Media War against Scotland

July 26, 2016 No Comments

Yet more evidence of the cyber and media war being waged against the Yes movement.

A few months ago, a contact in alternative health warned me that posting about alternative health was likely to attract trolls. Paid trolls, who in the case of alternative health are paid per tweet to dispute anything you say.

I doubted this very much. Pharmaceutical companies make an awful lot more money than alternative health practitioners, I reasoned, and there is little reason for them to be spending money on banks of people to dispute you if you happen to enjoy a bit of acupuncture or whatever. I was wrong.

One afternoon, in particular, I spent several hours chatting (not even about health) with a person with such a superficial knowledge of health that I could not understand why he was continuing to even talk about it. Fortunately, my American friend messaged me to say that he was a known paid troll, being paid by the tweet. I just changed the subject and earned him a few dollars, since apart from his insistence on commercial medicine, he seemed reasonably pleasant.

Since we have an open admission of this practice being employed by rUK, I would caution my enthusiastic friends in the SNP and Yes movement to avoid lengthy conversations with planted individuals, obvious trolls. I got one at the referendum with no content whatsoever, who bored on about nothing for an entire day, and one more recently who wanted to exploit my apparent ‘confusion’ with the announcement of the ‘Boris Experience’ project.

To digress slightly from today’s topic – the ‘Boris Experience’ project is nothing to do with my views on Scottish independence. I saw an unhappy person being exploited, and I didn’t like it, any more than I like seeing Scotland being exploited. Boris may, in may respects, be a natural enemy, but it does not mean I cannot show a bit of kindness when someone has taken advantage of him.

I am sure many in the Yes movement will recognise this. We do not hate the English, we do not necessarily hate the UK establishment, we hate the exploitation and misinformation. Crushing it out of us just won’t work. We are well aware that Scotland would clearly benefit from removal from the UK. What concerns me at this point, having had a brief flush of sympathy for a kindred observant spirit, is that the UK cannot afford to lose Scotland, and they will continue with paranoid and frankly ridiculous attacks, designed to appeal to people’s feelings of anxiety, complacency, or more general lack of confidence.

If you happen to be English and reading this. Scottish people are not stupid. We have had a steep learning curve, and we are not likely to respond well to yet more misinformation and poor treatment.

If Westminster is desperate to keep us, they really need to come up with a better strategy. Even the English are starting to complain about the quality of BBC reporting, for example. Personally, if I was the SNP, I would be seriously considering putting MPs forward in England, but then, like Boris, I have big visions.

I am preparing a piece of work designed to present a potential solution, in the form of the usual cute series of riddles concealed within a deceptively simple story. It will take a little while.

In the meantime, try not to engage with trolls, and think about ways of reaching the No voters that do not involve argument. We got this.

economics, politics

Finest British Bullshit

July 11, 2016 1 Comment

OK, so according to the media, we are supposed to believe that Andrea Leadsom was so hurt by the Times that she immediately gave up to go home and wear an apron, that Theresa May is now an angel, that Boris has been thwarted in his attempt to take a massive pay cut and be PM, that George Osborne is strutting around a remarkably fake looking New York street waiting to be puffball interviewed about some vague double dealing on Wall Street, and David Cameron is doing an impersonation of Dick Van Dyke on his way out of Downing Street, having been released from his weighty responsibility for the entire country. (Still no mention of the several thousand dead disabled people we are not supposed to notice)

According to the media, we are supposed to be doubting Jeremy Corbyn as a leader, we are all basically Conservative anyway, and the country is supposedly past the need for collective representation because we all worship money and if we don’t, we deserve to be repeatedly stabbed in the face until we do.

Angela Eagle is a false flag, designed to thoroughly put anyone off voting labour until the UK is safely out of the Brexit zone. I have rocks in my garden with more charisma and leadership ability. As is usual with the former New labour, someone we cannot see has told them what to do, and they are all repeating the same line because if they keep repeating it, we will eventually believe it.

So what has actually happened? Here is my view:

As per my previous posts of the last week or so, Boris was not interested in being Prime Minister at all. He was somehow volunteered for/pressured into the Leave campaign, and could not really be bothered with it, so stupidly trusted Gove to do all the actual work, hence the rather out of character and lame campaign. They all imagined that people would vote to ensure that everything stayed the same because they don’t actually see people, they see statistics, and according to the statistics, everything in the garden is just lovely for everyone, including the 3.9 million shoeless children and dead disabled people nobody cares to remember.

These statistics are now produced by private companies who do not take a huge interest in responsibility or accuracy, as in order to land the research contracts the line managers pressure the staff into getting high returns. I know because I have extensive experience in social research data gathering. Even when you are conducting a survey to determine people’s views, the questions are ordered in a way to determine the result. In a way, all research is futile because in the absence of a previously formed opinion, you basically force one on people. Hence, our governments are deluded into getting the response they wanted in the first place. Months of work used to go into making sure you got a result approaching accuracy, but the level of response was not enough when the companies were honest, so now they are not. This is important, because labour are making decisions on the same faked statistics as the conservatives.

So, this morning, in a very predictable turnaround, Leadsom steps down, meaning that no plan has to be published for our Brexit from the EU. Had the leadership campaign been allowed to continue, we would be told how they plan to go about actually doing it. The ‘sophisticated opposition’ mentioned by one of her supporters was basically just the Conservative elite deciding that more interesting deals can be struck without the watchful eye of the public. Whilst some are arguing that Murdoch is responsible, in the form of the Times article, I do not think that this is the case at all. Leadsom gives the appearance of extreme malleability, so were I a billionaire powermonger, I would push her for PM. She was clumsy and inexperienced.

Now we are being told that May is the best thing to happen to the UK since the much-lauded Blair. We already know that this is not the case, and in any case we are a bit more savvy than we were back then. The line they are taking, that fat cat executives are now to be scapegoated to appease the angry public, is not helpful at all. It is a commercial irritant, and it will not change the structure of business, the nature of business, or the threats that we absolutely must avoid of business legally challenging government and avoiding taxation on the promise of job creation. The latter is literally killing the country.

So, the usual Conservative rhetoric, that they are going to beat up on the boardrooms, and give you more control over your level of misery, is just that. Leadsom said she was concerned about mothers getting no stimulation, and her solution was to cut maternity pay – this is the Conservative way of solving problems. And yet people vote for this self-inflicted punishment, over and over again. Will the English ever learn?

I have already suggested an alternative solution, and this solution involves taking a larger scale approach altogether. You do not prune a garden by taking off single twigs in the form of fat cat executives and pointing at them. That is extremely wasteful of your time. There are far more effective ways of decrowning trees in order to let your newly propagated seeds grow. (HINT HINT)

Anyway, I digress. Labour, on the other hand, appear to be being directed by the invisible hand of Blair’s PR machine. I am now wondering if this guy is a narcissistic sociopath. He appears to feel no genuine remorse for his errors, and is enjoying a very nice life thanks to his devotion to his own wallet. I do not believe for one second that Labour consists of New Labourite robots, tainted with with the poison of the genuine socialists in the party and devoid of any memory at all of what Labour are supposed to stand for.

Jeremy Corbyn, their most popular leader in the last four decades, by far outshines Blair with the public, which ought to be telling our political parties that people are suffering. You have to starve people into being politically motivated, whether this is starvation of opportunity, starvation of hope, or literal starvation makes little difference. The population is clearly hungry, and Jeremy Corbyn is shaping up to be a contender.

We are supposed to believe that the PLP consists of extremely stupid people, obsessed with the memory of Blair and Brown, reading incorrect statistics, believing that they would really rather be in the Tory party, but lacking the expensive education. We are supposed to believe that these people are all suffering from a collective delusion in which they burn the Corbyn witch and return to bland, centrist politics which does not genuinely change anything apart from making life more expensive for the squeezed middle.

It is my view that the people trying to bring Corbyn down are career victims, on a party line set by a retired politician so obsessed with his own image that he is prepared to destroy Labour in order to preserve his creation, New Labour. They are deluded by a politics which is out of date. Corbyn represents the core values of the real labour party that we remember pre-Blair. As such, if these people are so far gone that they fail to recognise it when they are reminded of their own values, they really need to leave the party and form a new one.

As I have said in my previous post Capitalism, Socialism and Corporatism, Conservative and labour are supposed to mutually regulate, and allow us the illusion of choice in how we treat each other. They are not supposed to determine our culture, our values and predetermine that the poor are to be left behind whilst we create elites that care for nobody. Money is not supposed to accumulate in vast piles. It is supposed to circulate, to benefit everyone.

In case nobody in our political class understands this, I repeat once again:

DEAD PEOPLE CANNOT SPEND MONEY

STARVATION PRODUCES ACTIVISM

DEMOTIVATION PRODUCES REVOLT

I am sure you can all manage to do better than this. Should you require further input on core social values, I am sure you can either read a book, or ask questions.

economics, politics

The Fear Defence

July 8, 2016 No Comments

The Fear Defence

Watching the horrific video of the licensed-to-carry black male in America being killed by a terrified sounding cop, it struck me that fear is being used as a method of justifying violence rather a lot.

Both of the recent killings of black males this week were committed by police who appear to be trained to fear first, think later and to kill before risking their lives. The result has been that far more have been killed, and yet again America is displaying the usual inability to react appropriately.

Today an Etsy seller was promoting her bluelivesmatter wristbands, and rather than just roll their eyes and move on, she was duly challenged on facebook by a variety of other sellers. Why do people stop and discuss this stuff? It is not acceptable for the police to kill civilians going about their business. It is not acceptable that they feel they are working a warzone because these same civilians are armed, and what on earth does it take before America decides to take action on gun control?

It does not take an enormous amount of effort to determine that the real problem is that the population is armed, therefore the police need to be armed, therefore life is cheap. Likewise it does not induce huge strain to see that American foreign policy and cultural influence is not beneficial to the rest of the world. I am not sure why people would be confused about this. Life matters.

From the perspective of someone like me, looking at culture and economics, America’s devotion to capitalism means that social stratification is used by marketers and government alike to suppress wages, to market goods, to encourage social groups to compete with one another for goods, services and rights. If the population were not being kept stupid via tension and overmarketing, they would soon see that racial tension is a method of divide and conquer, useful only to an oppressive regime which relies on capital labour to maintain a hugely unfair economic system.

Instead Americans of any colour continue to get confused over things like how airline staff should talk to them when they have some money, and whether it is OK to risk being murdered because you want to carry a gun around with you.

The solution to the problem is very simple. Strict gun laws lessen the need for armed police, putting fewer people at risk from trigger happy and apparently poorly trained police.

It has been said that in a military situation, American troops are extremely wasteful with ammunition for much the same reason. Bullets are apparently cheaper than discourse. Lose the bullets, lose the problem. We have reached saturation point in terms of feeling sympathetic to a problem which has been going on for far too long, for entirely spurious reasons. America is not OK, and we should be distancing ourselves as much as we can. It is a rude, stupid and violent society, and it is not improving with events like this. Having money does not justify crappy behaviour towards others. Being poor should not put you at risk of being shot dead. Not rocket science.

Interestingly, under our beloved Conservative government, it appears that jobcentre staff have been retrained much the same way as American police. Even if you are asking for a form to be signed off or a simple question, the staff will react as if you are a potential assailant, and each jobcentre has security staff on hand to haul you out of the door if you should raise your voice for any reason. The appearance of fear is being used as justification for making sure that you are aware that you do not matter, that nobody cares about you, and that you should not expect to be treated with the smallest amount of dignity. In this way they can laugh about making sure that you cannot survive, and that you cannot question them when they get it wrong.

They have also been instructed to give you no information, and calls are recorded to retrain anyone stupid enough to be helpful. I am aware that there are American companies involved with the DWP, and so I am forced to wonder whether we are all entering a war situation, in which those fortunate enough to not need anything assume everything is OK, whilst those who do are in a vortex of pain leading to premature death in the form of being repeatedly told that they do not matter, that they are frightening, and that they will not be getting any help from anywhere.

If this is the case, and from the evidence I have looked at, it certainly seems as if it is, then we are already in a situation that cannot continue. Either the politics of fear and loathing will kill even more people, whilst everyone else becomes dimly aware that there is a problem, or we have to decide that this is not acceptable to us as a society. I move that we adopt the latter policy.

Black lives matter, blue lives matter, life matters. You matter. We need to take action in our own countries to defeat the loathsome strategy of the fear defence, especially when the fear is staged to justify murder. Murder by starvation, or murder by shooting innocent people. It is all murder.

economics

Underemployment and the new reality

July 7, 2016 No Comments

Underemployment and the new reality

I have talked about sticking out from the crowd, the indignity of constant temporary work, and the failings in the treatment of carers by family and state in previous posts, which you are welcome to go through from the news tab.

Today, I am going to talk about the years following graduation.

When I graduated, I already had a successful career under my belt, and had run a business. This made me unemployable for several reasons:

Desperation for a new career
Being a threat to middle managers responsible for recruiting trainees
The perceived likelihood of my staying only until I found a better job
My location, even in a major city in Scotland

I can say this with confidence for several reasons:

I was obsessed with work to the point of working three jobs at a time for the sheer hell of it
I had enjoyed an almost 100 percent success rate at interview in my first career
Since I had got to the top of that rather limited career ladder it was clear that work was a priority

Several reasons were given for my lack of attractiveness as an employee:

Why would I want to work alongside graduates ten years younger than me?
Why didn’t I have a family on the go in my thirties? (they would also have rejected me if I had)
Too much experience

One employer became irate, because I quickly applied for jobs which did not require a degree, and which I would have got easily without it. I applied for a job typing this guy’s letters twice, and eventually he chased me away on the grounds that I was more qualified than he was.

I did apply all over the UK for the first year or two, and as my father became more unwell, and my mother showed no signs of really understanding the responsibility she was attempting to bear, I eventually shrunk the geographical region to the one I was in. Even with these restrictions, I managed to keep myself in temporary and part-time work until 2014. Fortunately this coincided with my mother requiring more in the way of attention.

Obviously, in the course of all this mobility, I met a lot of people and worked my way through a number of industries, which made my CV rather messy. Basically, my view was that earning money and doing something was better than focusing on one industry and being unemployed. I am not what you would call a lazy person. When you are fielding 30 rejection letters a day, at times, and working in jobs which will only last a week or two you have little time to do anything apart from secure more work. It is amazing how many companies and agencies expect you to participate in not one but two interview processes for a two week job.

As you can see from this, an economy which is strictly aimed at benefit to business does not allow individuals to get a mortgage, commit themselves to loans of any kind, or to spend any money, since you have to ensure that you have enough in the bank to see you through to the next job. On one notable occasion when this did not work, I tried to extend my credit card, which I had restricted the limit on myself, in order to get to work to pay the next month’s bills, and was told that I could not do this as I had placed a limit on my credit rating. This astonished me. Being careful with money rules you out for money to get to work to pay the bills.

Employment agencies are yet another way of putting you another layer of administration away from gaining employment. I was told by one agency that agreeing to temporary work meant that they would not consider you for permanent work as the bonuses for the staff would come in more frequently if you filled the small jobs. If you are in this position, it is wise to identify the agencies in your local area which provide the most temporary work, and register for permanent work only on all the others.

Broadly speaking, however, you would be well advised to develop a second career online, using the means at your disposal. Zoella and Pewdiepie are two examples of people who provide inane yet extremely popular videos for a living, which not only provide for them using youtube hits, but the goods and fees they can command from companies wishing to promote their product. Bear in mind if you choose this route, that your face is your fortune. Ina, if she had a face, would probably have another twelve thousand or so followers on youtube, but since she has no face, the hits on audio work are minimal.

Instagram is very important now, if you want to go down this route. Mobile apps generally are winning over aging social media such as facebook and twitter, although I see that facebook has finally caught on and is vaguely threatening to let us see our friends’ and family posts again. Personally, I do not exist under my real name online, as far as I am aware, so Ina is my primary identity these days.

From a governance perspective, having a vast number of underemployed and demotivated people is not wise, since they will inevitably spend their time looking at what is going on in the rest of the world. Telling them that it is their fault, no matter what set of circumstances affects their opportunities and future, does not actually help them get anywhere at all, in the same way that benefiting only those with savings and investments does not stimulate local economies. Scotland is not the only part of the UK which has seen local economies decline due to a lack of interest from central government in doing anything at all for anywhere outside their personal interest area. David Cameron’s famous letter of complaint to his local council is a case in point. Sitting in Westminster, it simply did not occur to him that his country pile would be affected by his own cuts to local government spending.

Living in a country where your government consists of fallible people, rather than advisory teams working from accurate statistics (much of the statistics they are fond of quoting are now provided by private companies, who are unable to attain accurate samples since they are pressuring their staff to be inventive to keep the paperwork looking good) is not fun if you can see how and why the decline in your quality of life and future is happening. It means that you seek change, and when change happens, it has the potential to improve your hopeless case. I caught the Panorama programme on leave voters this evening, and a guy who could barely string a sentence together was complaining that 14 pounds an hour was not enough for him. Oh how I laughed.

As I was saying in my previous few posts, the previous two decades or so have separated politics from the people they claim to represent, and the views that they hold, to the point that they have no idea how people are affected by their decisions, and they either do not care, or do not know, how people feel about those decisions.

It is my view that we should make the Brexit and Chilcott events the end of this dubious period in British history. Understand that you are just as capable as the politicians you complain about, so that there is nothing to stop you replacing them. Understand that the media is feeding you a line, and that it is up to you to pursue the truth. Prepare yourselves for a more serious, and yet more progressive way of looking at the world, because ignoring what little power you have means that you only have yourself to blame when it all goes wrong. Filling yourself full of consumer information rather than the information you need to reach your own potential will lead to the ideocracy that we should all fear. Unless you are choosing to be the next Zoella, it is not useful to be more concerned about bath bombs than bombs in Istanbul or Bangladesh.

creativity, economics, motivation, politics

Broad Brush Thinking

July 5, 2016 No Comments

Broad Brush Thinking

I have cleared 15 ton bags of garden rubbish from my garden in the last month. Not that the garden was a jungle, it is just a large garden, consisting of three lawns, around 35 trees, 4 shrubberies, a large scale rockery and what seems like a mile of mixed hedging.

Occasionally over the years, my friends, whom as I have mentioned are all male, have stopped by to help, which invariably causes great merriment as their ideas about gardening are somewhat different scale to a person trying to manage a large house and garden without spending money on contractors.

The flatulent pedant, as he is known in my memory, recounted a tale of a two week war with his mother about a weed on his 4 square metre patio before he saw my garden. Another ex took a full afternoon to present me with a square metre of perfectly weeded rosebed, and another likes to tell me that I should pave the lot. It always makes me laugh, this variety of approaches to life and thought.

Obviously, dealing with something on this scale when you have limited time, you have to organise your time effectively. At one point I was working 6 days a week at the bank, researching for the government, and conducting corporate interviews by phone whilst decorating and taking care of this garden, all with no assistance and a great deal of criticism from the rest of the family. Any spare time was spent making lists of things to do, their level of urgency, and the likely time of paint or varnish drying so that I could then schedule hoovering, mowing or chopping whilst waiting for other things to be ready to progress. In fact, the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing collection was started whilst I was conducting research from home, since the interviews were by telephone, nobody could see that I was sewing whilst working, hence my time was used productively.

You learn a lot about strategy from all this. Many people have the luxury of never having to learn about strategy, time management or having to accept a margin of error they would never consider if they did not have this level of workload.

So, to get to the point, debating detail is not effective for a broad brush thinker, who is likely to be more interested in the overall structure of the problem. A broad brush thinker is likely to become a large scale strategist, whereas a ‘devil in the detail’ expert is what you require when you have already determined the shape of the problem at hand.

It hugely surprised me, when I was working on a (personal) three dimensional economic project in 2009 or so, that the economists I wanted to involve in the problem did not understand what I was talking about. After much messing around, I finally found a physicist in France who understood exactly what I was saying, who told me that basically I was a car designer, trying to explain myself to a crew of mechanics who wanted to know the specifics of the problem. I desisted with the project at that point, since I felt it unlikely that I would find a crew willing to spend months experimenting to achieve something on my say-so. Such is the problem of the broad brush thinker. We have great ideas, but without the means to carry them out via a team of detail mechanics, we may not be much use. When it comes to tackling improbably large projects however, we are exactly what is required for the job.

It struck me last week or so, when despite the screamingly awful Leave Campaign in the UK, I felt very concerned for poor Boris, that I now recognise and resonate with other broad brushers without even realising it. (Wolfe was a broad brusher too.) I wonder how many more I can find, if I look around? And will my own capacity for grand strategy ever achieve anything useful or be given an opportunity for useful endeavour? So far it seems to have done little for me apart from ensuring that I become extremely bored with small problems and making sure my parents’ family is taken care of.

I cannot help the way I think, any more than someone who imagines that their love of following rules or sticking to tradition despite the disadvantages can help the way they think. I get a lot more done, and require less in the way of help, especially in situations where the way forward is not always clear. This does not mean that you end up with a precise result, but you do get a result.

It all comes down to approach, your ability to prioritise, your willingness to get the job done. A detail oriented person is fabulous when you approach the end of a task, but they are as useful as a chocolate fireguard when you are creating something new. You cannot add the bells and whistles before you have something to hang them on.

So, before you create your masterwork, always draw the sketch. Before you add the embellishments, create the scheme. Before you list the tasks, determine the problem. All of this takes careful thought and a willingness to stretch and bend your reality. Once you have done all that, then you will have a good idea how to present the tasklist in order to solve the problem.

economics, politics

Brexit and Scotland

July 1, 2016 No Comments

Brexit and Scotland

Once upon a time, there was a nightclub. It was called Club Europa. In order to be a member of the nightclub, you had to agree to host the members of the club at your house if they needed somewhere to stay. In return for this, you could enjoy staying at other member’s houses, exchange information and buy and sell to the other members of the club.

Unfortunately Club Europa’s management was distant and difficult to talk to, meaning that none of the members that wanted to do things other than having visitors or buying and selling to each other were particularly happy. Club Europa also had an extensive list of terms and conditions, and if you got things wrong, you were subject to penalties and additional fees.

On the plus side, Club Europa was fun, and if you were a member you would get to know all the other members, meaning that you were viewed as being more significant than a non member. In addition, you were sort of insured against running out of money completely, since lots of lovely banks and giant companies provided favourable terms and conditions on the basis that Club Europa would cover your debts.

Several members overspent because of this, and the richer members of the club objected, even though they admitted that the overspenders had spent on their goods.

One couple, Scotia and Albion, were members for forty odd years. They had benefitted in some ways, but over time Albion got fed up providing beds for all the visitors, objected to the giant list of terms and conditions, and wanted to see what life was like without the club. Unfortunately, Albion could not afford the rent without Scotia, and Scotia was not only tired of him, but extremely enthusiastic about Club Europa.

Albion’s answer to this was very simple. If he kept telling the lovely Scotia that she was ugly, poor and could not cope without him, she would simply do as she was told and he could leave the Club. With Scotia all to himself, he reasoned, she would settle down and they could live a more impoverished, and yet freeer life without the interference of the club.

Scotia did not agree with this. Aware that Albion could not pay the rent, she felt sorry for him, but she loved all the visiting members of the club, loved going to parties and loved the recognition of being a member of Club Europa.

Albion was very cross. He gathered his closest friends and told them all to tell Scotia how utterly awful she was. Surely she would become depressed enough to keep paying his rent? He hesitated over cancelling his membership, in the meantime, as he simply did not know what to do?

Have we got this straight yet? Scottish Independence is nothing to do with Brexit. Two separate issues. Scottish Independence is also nothing to do with hating England. Scotland would be better off independent. If England had oil, we would hear all about it, ad infinitum. Every day would bring more insults and accusations than we already tolerate.

Independence is also nothing to do with oil. Scotland would be doing OK without oil. The oil is a bonus. It is a question of wanting the government you actually vote for to carry out your business, instead of constantly having to tolerate the policies of a government which not only pumps out a lot of misinformation about you, but takes advantage of your resources in order to do it.

Independence, for me at least, is not a class war. I, for one, fully appreciate private money paying for wilderness in Scotland and would not seek to build new towns all over it, unlike some other SNP members. The fact that many objectors seem to miss, is that independence would create an entirely new political landscape which we would be free to shape ourselves.

Brexit is not about racism. In some cases it is certainly about English nationalism, and the most aggressive Brexiteers seem to think that England owns the other three nations. How inconvenient that people live in those nations, and have a vastly different culture and outlook.

I have written previous posts on Brexit showing an alternative view of why people would vote. To put it in very simple terms:

The existing UK is better off outside Europe. Europe is likely to split over the next twenty to thirty years, over issues such as bee death due to chemicals and GMO (Germany) Debt (Portugal, Spain, Greece) Immigration (Poland, Hungary, Eastern bloc, France) Paying in too much (Germany, Belgium, France)
Regulation is for the benefit of very large companies. eg. Codex Alimentarius prevents poorer nations participating in the trade of certain goods. It does not benefit small enterprises or individuals at all and suppresses innovation and growth. This, in turn, suppresses the UK, wherever you are.
Scotland would prefer to be in the EU for the purposes of safety and recognition. Ideally this should be achieved before England exits, to make the process of retrieving our resources with the aid of the European courts easier and safer.
TTIP will create the largest single market in the world. It is a bad idea, but the Brexit question is a question of how much control you want to have over who signs it. Do you trust the EU or Westminster? Scotland’s past experience with England indicates that the EU is the better bet. England gets the government they vote for, so naturally they prefer Westminster.
The deal made with Europe, killing our coastal economy, madness for a giant island, is not likely to change without significant renegotiation. Whether we stay or go, Brexit was a good result for discussing this with the EU.
Scotland does not belong to England, and the Union was not supposed to create English dominion. It is not OK that we fought alongside England for centuries, and Tony Blair stole our sea and disbanded our regiments. Fatal error.
In terms of the future, endless merging with other political economies is shaping up to be an extremely bad idea. To refer back to the example of GMO, chemical accidents and patenting of seeds – either Germany or the USA are going to be in control of food production if people are stupid enough to sign up to an agricultural plan which involves killing 80 percent of bees, paying for patented seeds which you can be sued for if you adjoin a user, buying chemicals which are destined to increase in complexity as time goes on. GMO will ultimately produce the same result as antibiotics. Superweeds and Superbugs already exist.

Got that? Scottish nationalists are not racists. Brexiteers are not all racists. There are plenty of alternative reasons for either or both decisions. To recap:
Scotland better off without England
UK better off without Europe but can’t afford it without Scotland.

economics, motivation, politics

I’m right, quite a lot of the time

May 20, 2016 38 Comments

The entire story of this blog can be summed up in one word. Confidence. From the day I went from a disparaging stranger to first commenting to Wolfe in an effort to initiate the conversation we never had, almost six years ago now, the entire episode was all about confidence. Why would a keen thinker even bother trying to explain herself to a promiscuous dude selling health food in the first place? It all comes down to confidence, and in my case familial abuse. I thought for a long time before I even tried talking about my ideas to him, and then a lot of emotional upheaval took place which has led me to where we are now.

There are good elements and bad, in terms of consequences. I offer up a far more well rounded and arguably useful package now, since I have always been reasonably good at breaking down complex subjects into terms that even my not-particularly-interested friends could understand. I am less inclined to be flashy for a small audience, rather than down to earth and faintly comedic for a slightly larger one. You may not listen, and you may choose to block it out, but at least I now get a hearing in the first place.

There are several things which came to my attention have assured me that I was right and David Wolfe is/was wrong to ignore me:

A report, possibly two relevant reports, have indicated that GMO has failed to do anything at all for world hunger, as predicted in the writing he did not care to discuss with me.
Yanis’ view indicates that I am right in my thinking in relation to the ethics of allowing corporations to legally challenge governments. We have been at the mercy of false information via discreet lobbying for years, and now we are to get less than discreet legal challenges to force us to live according to profit makers’ wishes. Also as predicted in the original book.
The information on the European Union, provided for the referendum, indicates that the US encirclement policy against Putin is indeed at the heart of these not-particularly-nice trade deals we are being told we have to negotiate. (ditto) We are all supposed to form a giant trading circle around Russia. This is unhelpful, childish and stupid, and frankly I have more respect for Russia as a result.
The Asean nations may be quite happy to go along with this, but the Asean nations have a host of different costs and benefits to Europe. I always previously thought of Europe as being the responsible continental bloc, with less pressure in terms of suffering populations and being more fussy about food in particular, I imagined that the EU would save the world from the mortgage on life that GM has been turned into by American corporatism. As the German chemical companies are also rather keen on modifying genes to accommodate chemical profit-making, this is not going to be the case.

I am sorry Wolfe. I am sorry that I am not also 22, blonde, wearing a bikini or whatever your limited criteria is for speaking to people without messing about like a squirming five year old for several years. I am sorry that I am not a confident person. I am sorry that I thought that you would understand anything that I had to say.

It is a shame that I was going through so much at the time that I did not just dismiss him as an idiot instead of putting myself through all this in order to come back to the point where I appreciate my own mind. I could have lived without the food related self torture too. That side of things isn’t his fault, if I hadn’t bothered actually speaking to him at all, I could have avoided any of it. Discovering that he is even more insecure than I am in some respects, clouded my vision even further.

For the benefit of the rather stupid science ‘experts’ I frequently come across online – here is a short, concise description of what GMO actually does.

Patenting a seed, and then suing landowners if that seed is blown onto their land is a bit like granting the company doing it ‘God-like’ powers for the purposes of profit. It would have been very easy for a supposedly ‘God-fearing’ nation like America to simply spot the ethical problem with this and make an ethical decision that life is not patentable. They did not.
As with the Green revolution, where the USA sent chemical-treated seeds in an effort to feed the starving, instead of paying a blind bit of attention to local foodstuffs and issues with land, profit is at the heart of American altruism. All that happened was that small landowners were put out of business in favour of larger landowners who could afford equipment and chemical supplies to support the growing of unsuitable and unsustainable crops which did not provide year round food availability. This led in one notable case to a poorer village having to feed the next village, the next village having been stupid enough to agree to accept American donations. GM simply took the Green Revolution a step further. According to America, the entire world should pay them for growing food. This is what TTIP will lead to. It is a social and capitalist revolution, not one of altruism or concern for others.
Nature is extremely good at coping with interference. The only thing GM actually does in terms of reducing pesticide or herbicide use, is ensure that ecosystems develop systems for defence against man-made chemicals. This means that the aforementioned chemical company gets to invent another chemical, and stays in business indefinitely, passing the costs of development on to the idiots that agreed to this moronic system in the first place. It is only a matter of time before, like the movie, the Americans produce a crop which can be watered only with Coca Cola.
GM may have saved the papaya, but it kills thousands of suicidal Indian farmers every year. Yes, of course these people matter.
TTIP, TTP etc means that the very very large chemical companies will have the right to challenge any government objecting to feeding the population with GM food. They have already sneaked in a few without telling us, and now they will insist on the same non-labelling policy in Europe that they have inflicted on the American population. This will ultimately lead to a global disaster of mammoth proportions, with the double whammy of chemical resistance and no labelling. Who cares, right?
In addition, TISA can still allow American health companies to lobby for the right to invade our health services. You can look forward to lots of not very tempting bad food advertisements, in tandem with solutions for health problems you need never have had. That is how America works, and they would like us to share their bad management for fun and profit.

Do you want to exist in corporate slavery, to please a few lobbyists and politicians too stupid and irresponsible to see the consequences of their actions?

Do you want to live in a world where you are effectively forced to spend a large part of your life ill, in order to pay someone to make sure you do not become even more ill?

Do you want a world of opportunity, or do you prefer to live in a world where you have to toe the corporate line, whether that is about what you eat or what you do for a living?

Do you want to put up a barrier to your own entry to a market, whether that be by being a small landowner, growing whatever you want rather than being told, as many Americans are, that you cannot grow food on your own land because it doesn’t fit in with the fascist regime? Or by starting a business in an impossibly regulated market?

Do you want private prisons and capital labour?

Do you want armed police turning up if you milk your own cow? (yes, this has already happened in the US of A.)

Do you want an inferior, uncritical corporate education to enable you too to cheer people like Trump?

Do you want to be denounced by a faceless PR company or even your own doctor if you speak out against any of this?

If this is what you want, keep going as you are, because that is the future we are looking at. Sit and play some more Candy Crush Saga, and see if that helps. Make sure that you rid yourself of conscience, self directed thought or any feeling that you can do anything about it. Look forward to corporate militia, because once the stupid politicians and corrupt individuals willing to agree to this retire to their tax haven, this is what you are left with.

Right, Mr Superhero, read it and weep. Move your ass, if you know how

economics, politics

The Future of Capitalism

May 18, 2016 No Comments

The Future of Capitalism

Listening to the delectable Yanis Varoufakis this evening, (he moves beautifully) it struck me what a marvellous idealist he is. His ideas about society and capitalism are charming, but they will not work, sadly. The future for the Eurozone and for the USA is extremely bleak for the general population, and there is very little chance of turning back.

Why? Yanis’ take on the relationship between capital and state is based on the idea that:

businesses appropriate research from society, which is governable
society has responsibility for the people in it

What we have seen from our government in the UK, is that a large proportion of society feels no responsibility for the people in it, and that governments cannot be trusted to function effectively or responsibly when there is a possibility of personal profit. As a thinking and feeling individual, Yanis is adorable, but as a realist, he falls down on a number of counts.

TTIP will give business the right to challenge governments on issues of regulation. In the UK and the rest of Europe, regulation is currently dictated from Brussels, by faceless people who debate in private and are seemingly unchallengeable by the well paid MEPs who sit in the European Parliament. What we have found out about TTIP has been either leaked, or interpreted by people who have limited time to look at the documents, and who are prevented from making notes, taking the time they need to study it, or fully evaluating the information they are provided with. This will not do, for a number of reasons which the public appear to be choosing not to understand.

Yanis’ view of society as being something which falls within governable boundaries has disintegrated thanks to the internet. Intellectual property now has to be seen as individual in nature, rather than as something produced by a collective will. This makes it far easier to exploit, and far more difficult to regulate. In addition, enforcing taxation on business effectively has become impossible, in the event that we do not have tax haven income, we will simply be undercut by systems in place in countries such as Switzerland, the villages of Zug and Pfaffikon being cases in point.

We are all about to be crushed under a capitalist jackboot which is not going to be under anyone’s control, and if there is a suspicion that it is, the person concerned will simply be presented with a self interest situation that they cannot, and probably will not, resist. Responsible idealists such as Yanis and I are a dying, almost dead breed.

Add to this the massive proportion of the UK and USA population who appear to believe that nothing unfortunate will ever happen to them, and that as long as they support the mighty they will be protected, which is not only untrue but a vicious state of existence, and you have a storm which ends in disaster.

As Yanis says, the future mechanisation of deskilled work means that the very people baying for the blood of the less fortunate will very soon be suffering alongside them. As Yanis says, it only takes a small development for AI to pass the Turing test, meaning that human labour will cease to be relevant at all in a massive proportion of cases.

The only good thing about this is that the businesses still need someone to sell to. If we cannot tax businesses effectively, and businesses require nothing but customers, what are we left with but resource hogging consumers with no income? Then nation states truly do become irrelevant, since inevitably anyone functioning internationally will simply choose to base themselves wherever corporation tax is lowest.

The good news here is that individuals can only consume so much. As I have said in previous posts, you have to trickle up, otherwise you cease to function at all. There is no point in continuously benefitting the haves at the expense of the have-nots, because the haves have limited wants. Otherwise you end up with very dirty luxury, since nobody can afford to do the cleaning.

So, what is the answer? My proposal, in my extensive paper for Wolfe, was that the answer is to create maximum income limitations, return to anti trust legislation, and break up large companies. Genetic modification for example, should not be in the hands of chemical companies, and companies such as Walmart should be restricted to one line of retail trade. This keeps companies as competitive instead of domineering forces, and it creates new opportunities for the general population. We certainly do not want TTIP or TISA, which are inherently corrupt deals designed to confuse those being courted to sign them. We allowed them to get too big, and now we have a major and urgent problem with companies bigger than nation states.

If we cannot persuade the public to vote with their wallets, we have to persuade governments to join together to prevent the unlimited growth of individual businesses. Capitalism is lovely, but it is no respecter of human suffering. Since there is no way of making a global decision to do this, we also have to take into account that a less altruistic country is always going to allow the existing giants to function without restriction, and we have to be prepared to punish them accordingly. Otherwise the future involves destruction beyond our current imagination, as we return to a dark age of clearing the starving bodies from the street, whilst others hide in their rooms, eking a living from underselling their ideas to unfettered corporate monsters.

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