Black cats and signs.

Being a modern mouse I don’t take too seriously the superstitions of my parents generation, black cats, walks under ladders, crossing on stairs, that sort of thing. Actually one of our cats is black; ‘one eyed Dave’ by name, polite food Hoover by nature, so my path is constantly crossed by an ankle high black presence wanting more. As he completely disappears in anything approaching darkness I often wonder if he actually knows he’s there when the lights go out. But anyway I seem to have acquired new superstitions of my own. It is for example bad luck to blow a candle out if next to an ashtray. My most prevalent these days seems to be ‘one must achieve the pavement before a passing car reaches one’s line of crossing. I seem to have taken the Green Cross Code into the realms of mysticism. Today I was crossing the exit lane of Sainsburys car park when I noticed a car fast approaching. I focused on a point on the opposite pavement between two posts, fast enough to avoid the nebulous effects of superstitious failure, but not so fast as to appear to be suffering from OCD, and in a sense I succeeded. Being intent on my feet positions I failed to realise the reason for the two posts. They were there to support a neck high sign saying, “Drop off point only.” While successfully avoiding the car I had a significant sign accident. There must be a moral here somewhere.

Marxist Bankers.

I’ve just sat on a bus next to a woman on the phone. “Well I’ll take out 20 or 30 for the shopping, that leaves150 and we’ve got 50 int’ savings but we won’t touch that.” But this isn’t a call for pity. Or maybe it is. As I remember it in ’39 the men leaping out of windows weren’t plumbers or bakers, or the unemployed. If there’s a second dip to dwarf the first this lady might lose her £200, all of it! In fact any number from 200 to the beautiful billion of a bankers bonus multiplied by zero equals …(answer at end) In a strange quirk of stupidity the whole financial sector seems hell bent on universal financial parity for everybody, like hitting the cash till’s reset button. Could it actually be that bankers are Marxist? That’s a novel conspiracy theory. So who should I feel pity for? The woman at pound zero would be pretty familiar with the territory but Mr B the banker will have lost disastrously. He won’t even get anything for his Ferrari on a collapsed second hand car market. So all these bankers, when they could reign in all their high-risk financial trickery and keep their wealth, remain intent on selfless Marxism and equality for all. If they all refused their bonus this year, refused to trade on a mega leveraged zero capital basis, if they acted to protect the world’s financial situation instead of getting round regulatory rules at every opportunity they have a chance of remaining wealthy. But that’s not likely to happen, not if they’re all revolutionary Marxists.  

Whale meat Again.

Being easily bored with TV there’s nothing I like better than settling down with a good spreadsheet of an evening. I’m sure Nostradamus would have been far less cryptic if he’d had Excel. Tonight for example I have quantified the sustainability of whales for the next 120 years; the big fat blubbery ones that is. Assuming a local Inuit population of 100 people start with a 100 local whales. I won’t bore you with the details, but if each person consumes 400Kg of whale meat per 10 yrs the whale population grows from 100 to 337 in 80 years, and even if their appetite grows to 470Kg there’ll still be 100 whales. My guess is the Inuit have a good feel for how much to take by how easy it to catch them. At 337 available whales it’s easy, at 100 it’s tough. But as there are no fat blubbery Inuit they’re obviously happy with 400 to 470Kg. Now if one entrepreneurial Inuit decides to take more to sell for profit they could easily go past the 470Kg sustainable limit and by 500Kg they’d ALL be fresh out of whales in 80 years. Obviously the whales aren’t going to up their birth rate just to supply this Inuit with extra blubber. So this one Inuit kills and sells today’s blubber for his profit whilst in effect stealing the future blubber available to the rest. Of course we all know about levels of sustainability, but look at the mechanism. The few individuals that unwittingly exceed the sustainable limit, just because they have the machinery to do it, extract their profit directly from the future resource available to everyone. They not only take what’s available, they take away the environment’s ability to regenerate it. One wealthy Inuit thus causes 99 Inuit to starve and his own profits to go the same way. So please tell all your Inuit friends to seek out and dissuade any of their number expressing an interest in buying a factory whaling ship. 

It's a Wonderful Life.

Just watched ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ where George Bailey, with good heart and ‘not a thought for himself’, runs Bedford Falls not for profit ‘Savings and Loans’. His nemesis, Mr Potter, is the cynical and self-serving owner of the local bank. Due to a moments bad fortune George goes to commit suicide but meets an angel who shows how the world would have been if he hadn’t been born and the Mr Potters of this world have won the day. Presciently this depiction closely resembles the one we know today. It’s not so much a tearjerker as a heart jerker, arousing it like a stroked cock into fortitude, and reminding me of values I seem to have been born with. It proves, unlike the common saying, that ‘joy is other people.’ One can search, insist and inveigle for what one wants, but if not for the benefit of others the product is just a veil in front of a banquet, an empty promise that the powerful endlessly pursue. But the heart shines like the light from the windows of a house and travels as far as whatever it falls on. When the shutters are closed it only illuminates the needs of the self. It seems in this age of moral cynicism we have accepted misery as a fact of life, as if happiness lies out there in pockets like ore in a gold mine that we need to prospect for, as if, no matter how we live, we might find it. We look inside for what we want and outside to get it. By now the house, shutters closed, is blindly banging round the universe hoping to bump into a gold bar. I ask myself, is it likely to happen? I also ask myself am I drowning in my own metaphors? Perhaps cynicism is a truth told too many times; perhaps we each only need to find it once.

In Bed with a Wad.

Remember Oliver North? He was at the centre of the Iran-Contra affair where, as part of official covert CIA activity, hugely over ordered on guns for the Home Security initiative, shipped them to Latin America to arm gorillas who in gratitude shipped cocaine on the return flight back to the USA. Hard drugs apparently contribute many billions to the US GDP per year. He was convicted for this win-win economic ingenuity but, and here’s where I’m getting to, some one said, quote, “Steal a yard (garden) and you go to jail. Steal a country and you’re a hero.”

Now I met my financial advisor today, no names, no pack drill. After a long, wide ranging conversation about the current investment situation, banks and world economics he said these astonishing words. “I’m (personally) considering getting a chunk of cash out and putting it under the bed.” Read that again, “I’m considering getting a chunk of cash out and putting it under the bed.” That from a financial advisor! He hasn’t done it but for a financial advisor to even have that thought is a touch alarming. Unfortunately Gordon Brown would have benefited from it when he sold £billions of the UK’s gold reserves in 2002 for 20% of what they would be worth today, the price of gold having gone up five times since he sold it. Oooops!

Psychotic Group Collusion, the capacity for any expert group to drift away from normal rationality, suggests when bankers meet bankers meet bankers in the Basil Accord and such like they will, as a group, gradually drift unwittingly into irrationality. When someone asked a top banker who was part of the second Basil Accord how they came to the decision of requiring bank capital reserves to be 8% he said, ‘well someone came up with 7% and we thought that was a bit low so we went to 8.’ I’m guessing if that someone has suggested 12% they’d have thought that a bit high and gone for 11%. I’m thinking if the complete global financial system collapsed or not on these decisions a little more prudent calculator work is required rather than just sticking your finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.

Well done Colin.

So Colin Firth, yes that one, asked for a study of Conservative brains as part of guest editing the BBC’s morning news program. What started as a joke showed a significant difference between con brains and ‘progressive thinking’ brains. Certain areas were thicker in con brains, resist obvious joke, and progressives were thicker, nay wider in others. Being a proud owner of the latter let me venture an explanation. It’s the difference between equivalence and extrapolation. If you have 10 bricks and acquire 10 more, what do you have? Equivalent thinkers say ‘20 bricks’ and extrapolation thinkers say a barbeque. Where equivalent thinkers search for connections extrapolation thinkers search for possibilities. Where an equivalent thinker would weld ten unrelated items into a rigid framework by a set of connecting equivalences the extrapolation thinker would examine the numerous permutations, approx. 3.6 million if I remember correctly, 99% of which would be silly but that still leaves three thousand odd interesting ones. The difficulty in government arises from the perception of these two brain types. Whilst one absolutely ‘knows’ the answers and always has and is not about to apologise for his mistakes which by his definition he doesn’t make or change his views in some unsavoury ‘u’ turn, the other is bouncing off the walls in floral shirt and sandals trying to explain hypotheses that nobody quite understands. Where one says ‘new’ and means, “we tried it before and it didn’t work then but it will do this time”, the other actually means ‘new’, or rather, “what we tried before didn’t work so learning from that experience we’re going to do something different this time.” So it doesn’t come as a surprise that conservatives and progressives have different thick areas. So well done Colin. You’ve managed to prove what we always knew. 

Shit and Cheese for 2011.

Recent psychological experiments on our response to money have proved, a) salaries above £75,000 don’t cause greater productivity or higher satisfaction, b) even an unconscious awareness of money impairs enjoyment, and c) wealth is best enjoyed by giving it away. These aren’t wish lists of, “wouldn’t it be nice if…’, they’re university based research studies. Oh also statically wealthy people and men give away less percentage of their wealth than poorer people and women. The obvious conclusion is wealthy, well bonus-ed, male bankers are deserving of our pity for being unhappy, unsatisfied specimens. My limited experience of the financial sector confirms this. It’s not that they are permanently glum and suicidal but rather, in their pursuit of the finer things of life, they lose an awareness of the simple pleasures of it. Why enjoy the rain or a kick about with your mates when you can sip Chateauneuf Du Pape in the sanctuary of your Sheraton suite? The more interesting point is they, to overcome this dredge of expensive vacuity, conclude, “just a little bit better champagne and perchance another Ferrari will do the trick.” If these studies are to be believed they are barking up the wrong dead horse, sinking deeper in the wrong mire, ramping up the drug of their choice. They are in the grip of a never-fulfilling prophecy. They are a dead parrot. OK that’s established. But, they are intelligent individuals and well capable of levering more of the money supply in their direction. So this proven aberration can result in the under funding of the rest of us. We are getting poorer to fund the rich getting unhappier without them even realising it. This will be my theme for 2011, that and cows and their excrement. I think that constitutes a balanced portfolio. 

Thank God for Wood Yards.

So I can buy a 2 terabyte hard drive from ebuyer for £69.99, proof technology may change but not 9.99 price points. And this is enough to store 500,000 songs, which will take on average 1.5 million minutes to play. At eight hours solid listening per day that would take up nine years of my life. The equivalent LP record collection would be 180 meters long and weigh approximately 3.5 metric tons. As CDs the volume and weight would be roughly the same but I would need a bicycle to travel the 400 meters from one end to the other. In my youth my record collection at its height was less than a meter but they were chosen and cherished, individual packets of sonic delight that I sat down and listened to. We are apparently spoilt by choice, we lose functionality, get moribund with confusion. ‘Which out of my 500,000 will I play next?’ It doesn’t happen, I just let on one marginally less unappealing than the rest. I don’t listen to it with an oooh of pleasure, just dum-di-dum along to it as a sort of half remembered reassuring presence like a wall. My 2 terabyte record collection has become lift music in a high rise to outer space. My TV has become the window. I am somehow being lulled into suspended animation, forever on route to somewhere I can’t arrive at. 

Now health and safety may at first sight seem unrelated to my gigantic record collection but cycling round it in my perpetual space ship has its dangers. The library of legislation designed to protect me results in restricting me from much activity. It contains me in my survival pod of consumer employment. One only has to imagine Lord Sainsbury sponsoring a bill, based on government statistics of  home deaths by eating, that private cooking be banned. How could one argue with such good intentions? That Sainsburys profits would go up is merely a side effect. Which brings me to the third layer of my cocoon. Whilst I can buy products my access to raw materials is dwindling. Maybe soon we’ll only be able to buy carrots, pre washed, pealed and diced for easy assembly, as part of hobby kit for those with an interest in the ancient art of cooking. So as my lift ascends past the stratosphere I can still thank God for wood yards.