economics - Ina Disguise

Why the UK needs le Pen to win

April 30, 2017 No Comments

Greetings fellow couch potatoes.

Never did I think I would see the day that I would actually want Front Nationale to win in France. I spent some time observing them in Second Life, and the crowd ten years ago were not particularly edifying. An older le Pen was in charge then.

Times change and so do we, and I was commenting only last week that our fortunes in the UK depend heavily on the outcome of the French election.

Why? Macron is the French equivalent of Tony Blair, a corporatist who welcomes Europe and wholly imaginary ‘unity’ in France (Front Nationale has always been a far stronger right wing force in France than we have in the UK – my ex, who was rather swarthy himself, was a keen supporter.)

If Le Pen wins however, our negotiating position significantly improves in Europe. Two feeder economies in negotiation are far stronger than one. It is, to put it simply, our best chance of having a country at all in a century or so.

The EU was set up on the basis that there was safety in size – you can easily see the future being China versus India versus Russia versus the USA in only a couple of decades. An attempt to form a super-state rather than forge shaky alliances with other countries in Europe is therefore considered desirable for defensive and negotiating purposes. The other reason for the EU is corporatism.

Labour is significantly cheaper when there is plenty of it and it creates a nice division amongst the population in terms of fighting for employment rights or even having a job at all. As far back as 2002, there were over three hundred applicants for each relevant job available in Scotland, and I am sure if you asked other people, it goes far further back than that. In the event that you want 30 or so specific PHD qualified applicants, you can easily have them under a system of free movement.

As I have said before this is bad for you as an individual. More supply means you are compensated far less for your skills, and you have limited means to fight back if you simply cannot get a job at all.

So as a Scottish Nationalist, I am afraid I cannot buy into the idea of unlimited immigration in the face of the lack of employment I have experienced. It is utterly soul destroying to find your government offering grants to people from other countries to stay after their degree, whilst doing nothing at all to aid natives in the form of providing relevant jobs in sufficient quantity.

The entire system in fact, falls down if you cannot secure a sufficient supply of jobs. The sociological basis of racism is competition for resources, as we have seen from the example of the north of England. These people are not all racist, they are starving and living in decaying circumstances.

This is why Brexit was a good move for the English population, and an unusually intelligent decision. Weak pound equals jobs, stalling immigration means less competition for jobs. This adds up to a potentially better standard of living for everybody in the UK. A revival in manufacturing was exactly what the UK needed, and a low pound is the most exquisitely democratic way of making sure that happens.

We have not even begun the system of starve-in-order-to-boom yet, and people are complaining, backtracking and I am getting the impression that the Conservatives believe that we cannot Brexit at all. This is extremely shortsighted, and there seems to be a prevailing misunderstanding of Conservative history in the party. Conservatism has not always been the party of the rich cutting taxes. The idea is that you provide opportunities for the masses, and the government is thereby enabled to cut taxation because everybody is paying it. What we have now is a system where they cut taxes at any cost, including people quite literally starving to death.

Perhaps it would take a messy haired free thinker to point this out, once we have secured a Frexit. It would seem unlikely that a thinker is going to emerge from anywhere else in the party. A more egalitarian, conscience-led Conservatism would be considerably more popular.

I will be going further into this topic in Lucifer Ogilvie, but I thought I would just plant the seed, if it is not already there.

Boris’s carpet is going very well, and the first layer is almost complete. I think it is going to be rather nice.

Toodle Pip, chums

Ina

economics, politics

Manifesto of Murder

April 23, 2017 No Comments

So far on our trip along the path to the General Election, we have some disastrous proposals from both Labour and Conservative.

Speaking as a Scot, I am glad that I do not have to consider any of them.

Your choice in England is as follows:

Labour:

Tenner an hour official minimum wage
A spurious fake tenner for carers which would immediately be lopped off income support
Common Purpose ‘Let us pretend that we do not have an underground third world economy run by people of other colours exploiting each other by using a noisy liberal racist agenda under the banner of diversity.’
Let us also cling to Brexit as a vote winner because the North of England is tired of having massive populations of immigrants using up all the social housing and yet having no work.
Let us continue to pump money into London despite saying that we are doing something for everywhere else
Let us set up a committee to discuss the above for at least ten years without actually implementing anything
Please let us not notice that the ship is sinking and we will never be out of debt
Let us enjoy more PFI and employ Irish builders to rebuild the last lot of crumbling buildings we still haven’t paid for.

Conservative:

We must continue to kill the disabled and welfare claimants rather than create jobs anywhere apart from London
We must expand the commonwealth and exploit it as we no longer have the will or capacity to create jobs in the UK
More tax breaks for American companies!
More tax breaks for foreign billionaires!
More tax breaks for us!
The NHS must be destroyed!
No more pensions and useless eaters!
Tax rises for the squeezed middle!
We will pay for a hard Brexit by punishing you for voting for it!
Negotiation is hard, please vote Labour

So basically it is not looking good for England. People seems to be very stupid, and the dangerous assumption that politicians have some sort of divine right to distribute misery rather than shock, horror actually administrate the country properly seems to prevail very widely indeed.

Just to remind you, no politician is more talented than you are, you are perfectly capable of taking action yourself and those very impressive soundbites they are so fond of are actually written by graduate interns who barely know what they are doing, never mind anyone else.

In other words, nobody is capable of running the country and you should drop the assumption that either political theory is better. One leads to your premature death, the other leads to bankruptcy.

Perhaps the answer is to vote for whatever is less painful in the short term, perhaps you enjoy reading about the suffering of others. You have certainly been conditioned not to feel it if you have followed the media over the last few decades.

I miss the days of my childhood, when people still had meetings that you were allowed to disrupt and protest and actually cared about the cause they pretended to support. It is all so fake now, and people seem to be drugged into stupidity.

Personally, I suspect that looking at Liam Fox, Philip Hammond and David Davies, Theresa has decided that she would like to just take the pension and run. As manifestos go so far, it does not look as if the Tories actually want to be in power at all.

Whatever you do then, prepare for a thin Christmas, because as far as I can see, disaster now looms, regardless of Brexit.

creativity, economics, motivation

General Election blues

April 19, 2017 No Comments

In a shock move, Theresa May has decided to call a general election in 7 weeks. This after saying that a second independence referendum would cause instability. The only instability she refers to, of course is the instability of losing the collateral of a billion barrelsworth of oil that Andrew Neil blatantly denied the existence of only a few weeks ago.

Whilst I am grateful to Andrew for circulating my every tweet on facebook in addition to promoting me to his own fans by openly denying the truth that we in the village of Scotland already knew before the 2014 referendum, I am thoroughly pissed off with the hypocrisy of the English war against my country.

After conducting a small survey a few months ago, I ascertained that the Scottish electorate were not particularly clued up about economics and that even the most diehard supporter of managing our own destiny was not playing with a full deck of cards, I seriously considered leaving the SNP due to the hostile and rather hysterical response of the members to my short and comic survey on the attitudes of yes and no indy voters to the issue of brexit. People are easily shocked, confused and inclined to crap behaviour, and since the class war is alive and well, particularly in central Scotland, there often seems no point in considering anything beyond your own nose, since inevitably someone will try to cut yours off without actually hearing anything that you had to say.

In any case, our feeling is that we have a hope of scouring the last Conservative from our fair country, leaving the rabid killers of the disabled few choices in their war against Scotland. As someone with quite a pedigree in the long term issue of Scottishness and the crushing thereof, with feet in the communist and conservative camp due to my odd but extremely healthy gene mix, I am hopeful that we will get the issue of a more realistic attitude to the management of Scotland cleared up. We simply do not need to be paying for more bridges in London or killing disabled and long term unemployed people to sustain Scotland.

I still do not agree with SNP policy in regard to immigration before job creation, and the word is that I am not alone, however, as a voter, they are on safe ground. It is only backbiting, status seeking and rather sickening empty headed mortgage victims that need persuading as far as I can see, so rather than fighting with each other, I would suggest that cybernats concentrate on actually constructing arguments for Edinburgh types.

What I, and many others who remember and have actually bothered to study Labour Party history wonder, is whether Corbyn will actually remember that Labour was supposed to support PEOPLE WHO GO TO WORK in addition to bleating about diversity a la Common Purpose. Immigration is still a huge issue, particularly for people in Wales, Yorkshire and Cornwall, some of whom have even less hope of ever working than people in the more obscure areas of Scotland. Grants for computers and internet access would go far further towards making work available for such people online than persistent starvation, but apparently it is preferable to force people onto useless courses, run by recruitment agents that have gone into the welfare punishment business. Making an extra tenner available for carers, which would in any case be removed from the accompanying benefits, is not a vote winner and so I am unsure as to why this was the chosen carrot this morning.

Anyway, I am unsure as to where things have gone wrong in terms of Theresa’s lack of actual mandate, since it has never bothered the Conservative Party before. I can only assume that your vote in the General Election refers to the willingness to starve part of the population to death, blame them for pisspoor economic management, the sale of the NHS and the continuation of the totally fucking useless trickledown policy that makes the luxury goods market the only growth sector worth being in. Show me the jobs, show me the quality industry and show me the poor that sustain their local shops by actually eating, and then we will discuss my vote.

creativity, economics, games

The Gamebia Project Update 2 and Boris Johnson

April 7, 2017 8 Comments

I know I haven’t been posting a lot recently. Mother has been in hospital and I am a bit stressed about a forthcoming court appearance as I continue to attempt to run a family of exceptionally stupid and vindictive people who seem intent on making people unhappy just because they can.

The furniture is significantly held back by lack of funds at the moment. The hazard of making more expensive items is that they require more money to develop. So far I think I have the new principle about half right, but it will take another £600 or so to finish the first few pieces and free up space for the next six, never mind finish them.

The distraction of the Gamebia Project has meant that I have not started working on the book for Boris as yet. I have some background reading still to do, although some of the biographies are less than flattering so far. I can see why Boris withdrew authorisation from one of them, as I find myself liking him and Stanley, in particular less and less as I read it. Not my cup of tea at all, but then I am wildly unsuccessful at social climbing or making money, unlike them. It apparently pays to be a cold and selfish fish.

I am selling off the detritus from the Gamebia Project as progress seems to be exceptionally slow. I am still being updated by my former friend, although I suspect he is only bothering because he thinks he will get more stuff that way and I have lost interest entirely due to the very slow pace of development. People often think films have to be epic slogs, but when you need to put out two a day you have to be a little bit more pragmatic. At the rate he is working, he will never make any money from youtube, and he has not even attempted to create the project on fiverr, which on my schedule would have started paying for his rice by now.

So much for trying to help people that cannot be helped. The subject of the project apparently only sees one word in ten that I write, and so he has no idea how the project has to be managed. As he has now stopped pestering me online every time I am on, as he did before he got the equipment, I cannot even repeat the same information ad infinitum to put him on the correct track.

So, I think the next affordable bit of product development is going to be the range of shoes I was planning, which has an initial outlay of about a hundred pounds or so. The Gamebia has, due to cashflow issues, left me without even that for the forseeable future, so I am understandably nervous about going ahead.

The games project and the writing then, since it costs me nothing. I could have farmed some of the work for the game out, if my Gambian friend had paid any attention to what I was saying, but I am having to do it myself.

Getting very bored with pacing myself for normal people. It seems piteously slow. I guess that is how my former muse, Wolfe felt. Nobody sees your vision like you do, and anything else seems like a distraction if you don’t pay attention to the lesson you are learning.

economics, motivation

The Gamebia Project Update

March 20, 2017 8 Comments

I wish that this post was going to contain good news, but the project is not going well at this point.

Scuppered by limited funds, I am scratching together the funds to continue as I was sold a bad batch of computers, at this point if I am successful I will bring the project to break-even at this end.

My protege in the Gambia, who told me that he knew what he was doing, seems to not know what he is doing at all and is now only in communication once every twenty four hours to ask when the next computers are coming rather than getting on with his end of the project.

Despite my own lack of funds I have sent the following items to The Gambia:

Two PC tablet computers, which were intact when they left here, well packed with chargers. One arrived broken, and has been sold to provide 3000 dalasi (£60) to provide immediate assistance to the recipient.
A digital camera, capable of producing video plus cables, batteries, charger and SD card
A condenser microphone for recording interviews and connector cable
A multi adapter to enable several different items to be used with the tablet
An SD reader, in case any of the cables get lost or sold
Three memory sticks, to assist with transferring information should mobile broadband be too expensive
A speaker, to enable testing of the material before sending to me for editing
A mini to usb cable for tethering, but this is now free because the recipient figured out how to get the tablet online despite the expense
An SD card, unspecified

The speaker was taken by the recipient’s brother on the first night, and the SD card went to the recipient’s boss as he had provided loans to the recipient. He has failed to update me on the other items, and so I am unable to report how many of the others he has lost or sold. I included two tablet computers, since I was aware the recipient has constant financial difficulties as this is why he started talking to me in the first place. This should leave sufficient equipment for him to start a channel on youtube, a blog and procure work from fiverr which would easily provide him with an additional income.

I suggested that as the recipient is very shy, that his somewhat more go-getting brother be the face of the project, and sharpen his presentation skills in addition to making better use of the equipment than selling it. The recipient tells me that in Africa, people expect money before success, which tells you rather a lot about why some areas of Africa are in a constant state of economic failure.

The recipient has not said thank you yet, nor is he staying in communication. Before the parcel arrived he was constantly talking online, he now appears once every twenty four hours and either complains, or asks when his next parcel is arriving. I have told him that unless I see some evidence of the project at his end, no further parcels will be forthcoming, which he has responded to with more complaints and excuses. I set up two email addresses, a youtube channel, a separate account for linkedin, a facebook page with likes and recommended a specific twitter account be created for the project. He appears to have struggled with all of this, and now seems not to have understood any of the conversations we had prior to my sending out the equipment.

I have also given instructions for handling the project, and no attempt seems to be being made to actually carry them out. Instead I read messages indicating that he does not know what he is doing at all, and is not really trying to make the thing work.

As you can see, things are not going well so far. From what appeared to be an intelligent and serious person who wanted to self-develop and fund his enormous family, we have a whinging creep who is now trying to say just enough to get more equipment without doing any actual work. I am not at all happy with this so far.

Still, I did this with the full knowledge that it was possible that he would just sell all of it, in which case I need not bother with this silly dude again, so the situation is not beyond saving if the recipient pulls his finger out.

I have been told a story from Germany, which indicated that African workers in Germany managed to work like Germans, and when that project moved to Africa, suddenly forgot how to do it. Perhaps sunshine is to blame, or perhaps the problem is blaming other people when what you really need is a work ethic.

economics, motivation

The Danger of Seeking Approval

March 9, 2017 54 Comments

As a devil-may-care type of chick, both in appearance and in attitude, I have, inevitably, attracted many desperate seekers of approval in the course of my life. Some men seek approval as a habit, some it takes the form of a horrific psychosis. Either way, it doesn’t tend to cut a whole lot of ice, since I am a rebellious responsibility freak who doesn’t really care what anybody thinks to a great extent.

Prior to falling stupidly in love with Wolfe, I was a very serious, very shy version who had been severely bullied for years and who wanted to make a genuine contribution to progressive thought. I felt so stupid after this episode, that I am now an artist and fiction writer working on some instructional but fairly pointless computer games. What a waste of a great education and work ethic.

My mother has a kind of cold war going on with her approval seeking children, and a red hot war with me, in which she kindly accepts my endless care and then complains about it. This has led to a wider war of nuclear proportions, in which my allegedly very nice sister feels quite free to phone me the night after my mother’s stroke to advise me that the stroke, which she sat and watched before going shopping, was in fact my fault and that she was entitled to her mother’s property. When she told my brother that I had refused to listen to this, he backed her up on it. It is the family property unless it comes to doing any actual work, that of course is mine all mine.

Since my brother has no hope of ever getting my approval due to this lazy greed, he naturally has to turn to her to get this, and so he and my drunken sister kow tow to a psychopathic narcissist who has pursued her obsession with superiority based on bank account alone for more than twenty years. She is also potentially violent, and so I now live with double doors locked and when they choose to visit my mother, they do so locked in an annex which means that I am safe from their unwanted and very negative attention. The only good thing about my brother is that he is interested only in money, whereas the sisters are incredibly spiteful and try to get more complaints from my mother in order to discredit me, the most educated person out of all four of us.

Desperation for approval may look benign, but it can take extremely vicious forms. Compared with a tiny bit of approval from somebody else, you do not matter at all, and you should identify this trait in the people around you and AVOID IT. There is nothing more depressing than a friend you have had for years turning around and telling you that you do not matter in comparison with them getting some fleeting approval from your aging parent. Desperation for approval, therefore, involves quite a deep level of dishonesty and lack of initiative that is really not worth having in your life. Similar to the recent studies of people who habitually swear, showing them to be more honest and hardworking, approval seekers will happily smile at you and stab you in the back if they think they will get some brownie points from some imaginary authority.

In a working context, whistleblowers are the enemies of the approval seekers, who have kept the economy in a wasteful mess for generations. There was a golden time of growth during which change was desirable and new ideas were welcome. This golden time has been over for nearly forty years, replaced with the desire of fat cats to maintain a level of incompetence in others which is not at all useful or pleasant.

So, to conclude, if you agree to be an approval seeker to pay your mortgage, you are spawning the next generation of useless, facile, greedy backstabbers who will continue to rape the economy until one of the African nations finally grabs the bull by the horns and takes it all away from you. A motivated, honest and non-wasteful workforce will destroy your dreams of your third car, your triple glazing and your bullshit holiday to Cuba so that you can snigger at the poor people you spit on every day.

economics, politics

Thank you Boris!

February 15, 2017 2 Comments

Thank you Boris. At least somebody does what they say on the tin.

My friends in the Gambia are over the moon to be rejoining the commonwealth.

Furniture is up next after I get these computers out to The Gambia to get the project off the ground.

Good luck with South America

Kisses,

Ina

creativity, economics, motivation, politics

Lack of imagination in politics

February 12, 2017 3 Comments

Lack of imagination in politics

I see the ongoing battle between left and right is being won online by the right at present.

Fake news and misleading headlines are not new. All this ‘new’ phenomenon should tell you is that you should have been reading more carefully in the first place. There is always more than one way to read any article.

Many years ago, I was placed next to a young radical Muslim male at work, who dismissed anything I said as being ‘white cow’ and who was generally a bit uncouth. He was brought up in a very wealthy area of Glasgow, at 19 had his own Mercedes, and although he was allegedly studying politics and philosophy, could not understand it when I said that reading newspapers should be regarded in much the same way as studying philosophy or history. Nobody is telling the truth, because everyone is trapped in their own time with their own social mores.

You can argue that as a Muslim, he would be rather attached to the idea of ultimate truth. That is until I mention that a far more devout Muslim that was also in the work group understood me perfectly. A scholar is a scholar after all, and it belies the argument of all Muslims hating everyone that isn’t, when you consider that the scholars are often more open-minded than the victims of a domineering imam.

This is a good analogy for the current state of politics. Labour appear to be too afraid of offending the few voters they have left, do not seem to see that the party needs radical reform to Labour, rather than New Labour values and that being decisive is a basic requirement of forming any kind of opposition. We seem to be trapped in this idea that politics consists of left versus right, when the truth is far more complex.

At bottom line, the difference between Conservative and Labour in the UK is similar, but not the same as the difference between Republican and Democrat in the USA. The Democrats are still further to the right than the UK Conservatives, but they adhere to the principles of communitarianism as a method of benefitting capitalists. There does not seem to be a party representing socialism in the USA, certainly not one we would have heard of.

As I have mentioned before, politics is not a straight line. It is s circle, and you will find that far left and far right are closely bound if you look at the examples of history. Both believe in a nation, both believe in the rights of people within that nation, the disagreement actually hinges on whether you are a team or an individual within that nation. Taken further, it is the difference between opportunity and rights. Socialism can, in certain circumstances be considerably less fair than conservatism. My personal viewpoint is that opportunity always out performs the right to stay in your social place, therefore I am considered as being towards the right rather than left by my less interested protesting socialist friends.

Socialism, as we have traditionally understood it, has relied heavily on someone already owning the means of production, so we must rail against it to protect our rights. This is all very well, but there is no reason why you cannot go and procure some means of production by yourself, and support someone less able in earning a living. Here is where I differ from your average Conservative, who says that they already have their piece of the cake, and you aren’t getting any. For a society to survive under either political system, it would be a whole lot healthier if Conservative thinking was a whole lot more about pride in concern for others and the dignity of work, no matter what level you happen to be at.

This is now considered very old fashioned thinking. Who on earth reveres the cleaner? Communists would very quickly tell you that without the cleaner, the system breaks down, so you must show some respect to your comrade no matter what task they have been assigned. This now starts to look like a class war, when in fact it is all about resources and social values, an entirely different prospect. Having worked for old and new aristocracy, I can tell you that old school aristos are very much appreciative of their staff, whereas new money and younger aristos prefer to employ someone they can abuse. Again, nothing to do with class, this is to due with cultural values, and our cultural values currently stink.

So, I propose that a new party is formed, abandoning the principles of right and left for an entirely new paradigm. How about a party that does the following? I propose we call it the Healthy Culture Party

teaches the basic principles of economics in primary school
reinstates the old arithmetic qualification that taught people how to understand the news, banking documents and how to manage money generally.
ensure that everybody understands that work is a means to earning a living, and no reflection on your worth as a person. On the contrary, the school janitor may be the person who writes the next world changing treatise on education, so you had better be polite.
Take pride in ensuring that NOBODY STARVES TO DEATH IN YOUR COUNTRY
Encourage innovation, free thinking and genuinely free speech, in the place of labelling hate figures as we have been doing for the last twenty years. Conservative culture is now at the point of point and hate at every opportunity, with Labour failing to call them to account or opposing them on anything, a very dangerous state of affairs for anybody in this country. Don’t forget, tomorrow that hate figure could be you.
Respect borders. Much the same as respecting boundaries in any relationship, it is simply not your call to tell other countries what to do. If you are respecting the right of Saudi to behead and bomb people, you have to respect the right of other countries to run themselves as they see fit and vote for. We have mobs instead of diplomacy currently. It does not seem to help.
Rate opportunity above preserving the notion of class oppression. It is far more important to have a liberal financial system that fosters the growth of new and small businesses and looks on failure as experience, than encourage the idea that born poor means that you stay poor.
Reinstate the laws against monopolistic behaviour and discourage over large business generally.
Stimulate and encourage diverse thinking and alternative ways of doing things in an effort to produce the next generation of creative thinkers rather than fostering conformity, which is only for the benefit of the very large corporations and multinationals that will dictate future political activity. To preserve the notion of the nation state and the idea that there is a government between you and a Walmart education and health record, this is extremely important.
A housing benefit system that adequately reflects property values, to encourage investment and discourage false valuations on property. This has damaged our formerly diverse economy almost as much as incentives for large American food and beverage chains. It is no good for the economy, and no good for the many talented people who could be creating British brands.
Encourage the preservation of history, conservation and power that does not destroy the planet we depend on.

Of course, this set of ideas makes me an unusually liberal conservative, with communist tendencies, which is quite close to the truth, I suppose, given my background. I would vote for that. It would render us a lot closer to France in terms of views, which can only be of benefit given our current medium term future.

creativity, economics, motivation

Spent £100, gave £50,000

February 8, 2017 2 Comments

Would you spend one hundred pounds in order to give someone else £50,000?

The Gamebia project, as it is now known, has costs and benefits.

The costs are to me, and once I have completed all tasks, the costs are going to be between £0 and £100.
The benefits are to an individual/ family in the Gambia, and will be the equivalent in local money of between 5 months and 4 years of the average Gambian wage. We worked out how much this would be for one modest person in the UK, and this worked out at £50k.

The reason for the disparity is as follows:

The person I am doing this for may decide to sell some of the equipment I am salvaging and keep only the laptop, which will yield about 5 months of local wages at the value of the equipment before I fixed it. It means that the postage was a bit pointless, but if this is what he has to do to survive, this is fair enough. I am not doing this to control anybody.

Assuming that I manage to fix as many machines as possible, the repaired value is 4 years of Gambian average wage, again quite a lot, but how many local people can afford this?

In the event that he decides to use the equipment to get other people used to computers and working, it will mean that he can use sites like fiverr, clickworker, youtube and hubpages to establish a presence online and create some passive income – income derived from work done once, and viewed many times. It also means he can be supported towards the ultimate aim of the project, which is to create a small gaming company producing visual novels, which are not all that cost effective to produce for most people here, but would make a very good income there. This makes the potential value of the project, provided that he puts the time in, which I believe he will, limitless. I reckon it will take a full year of fairly intensive work to get to the point of handing over control of new projects. In the meantime, I will have a team of people who can use work I can provide to train and earn at the same time, which seems to me to be mutually beneficial as I will be able to make a lot more novels in a short space of time. In addition to this I get to learn how to fix a host of new machines I would not otherwise have looked at.

So, all in all I believe this to be a worthwhile way of spending some time. My friend was wondering why on earth I would do it, and I think my friend in the Gambia was wondering if he was a ‘bumster,’ which I believe is a local term for gigolo. Not at all, I just thought limitless was a lot better than 5 months wages.

As a caring person who believes strongly in the value of opportunity, and as someone who gets by on almost nothing as a rule, I think I am spending my time wisely.

So, tell me, would you spend £0-100 on giving someone else £50,000?

creativity, economics, games

New Project – The Gambia

February 3, 2017 51 Comments

I just opened the studio after a three week hiatus whilst I got the computer games off the ground, only to find I had left a heater on. Not good.

Family stress is likely to be intense over the next six months as I try to preserve my mother against all odds due to the most unreliable friend I have ever had. The fact that this ‘gentleman’ was supposed to be a pillar of the community has just made his common-as-muck behaviour far far more expensive.

Being me, I have decided to make this the springboard for yet another project. It is a salvage operation which is designed to help generate some future income for a community in the Gambia. Not strictly a charitable act, since if the games are successful, this will give me an enthusiastic crew of people to work on future pieces of work.

For those who don’t get it – this is how to make the most of the world the way it already is, and make it sustainable for a population across the globe to actually survive. The ‘liberal’ sentiment that has you demanding more refugees to reduce your income apparently does not understand the concept of ‘labour specialism’ or the benefits of economic variety.

Were I to want to move to Africa, so far I would move to Morocco, which is a bit like the Europe of the 1930s in terms of economy. Ironically, I was made more welcome there than I was in London. As a Scot, this is not entirely surprising but it goes to show that struggling people are a whole lot more welcoming to certain people than people who believe that they have earned the right to be mean-spirited, self protective and bad mannered.

As someone who has worked hard all my life, to so far have next to nothing, with what I have left about to be taken to pay for my comparatively secure mother because of the inaction and snobbery of a lazy old man, it would seem strange to most people that I would choose to use my remaining time to benefit a community in a country I will probably never be able to afford to actually visit. My friend found this very strange, until I pointed out to him that it is in my nature to be practical and helpful before I think about my welfare, at which point he remembered that this is indeed the case.

From an economic perspective, it is most interesting already how people can be financially oppressed by something as simple as lacking a postcode or secure mail service. I am having to come up with ingenious ways of getting around a system in which you can send ten mobile phones in secure parcel, only to find that only three are in the parcel by the time they arrive.

As for the costings from this end, there is a subtle bidding war between parcel companies that has expressed itself via facebook and twitter. The cost of sending my parcel is going down by the day, via adverts that look as if they have randomly appeared on my timelines. We have even automated bidding wars.

Anyway the first two games are going well. I have a strong concept for both, and I think Wolfe, in particular, will be delighted at what I have come up with in terms of infogaming. It is a lot of work for one person.

Ina

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