I haven't written anything here for a long, long time. Somehow LJ has survived when many other similar services have fallen by the wayside.

My main journal now is at www.stevehemingway.com, but I think I may write some entries here from time to time.

This piece by jan-martin feddersen has a hilarious spoof advertisement. But don't fail to read the text. It shows that credit creation at very high rates is out of control in the USA today. (Thanks to Merryn Somerset Webb for the link in her newsletter).  I remember the chairman of Lloyds Bank saying that the personal sector should not acess credit - funds loaned to his bank by depositors should all go to the firms sector of the economy. Now it seems that the USA needs between $7 and $8 of debt to create $1 of additional GDP. Undoubtedly easy credit has been the engine of asset price inflation.

Tags: economics, house prices
Current Mood: worried

 

And can I interest you in some Travel Insurance?

The above image is from the Spectator website. Just check its properties to see where it came from. No, I didn't get permission. Yes, I'll remove it if the copyright holder asks me to.  

Post Offices are about to close a two and a half thousand offices, mainly rural ones. It seems very odd that post offices are being forced to close. In practice the Post Office is probably the retail outlet I visit more than any other, invariably to do something to do with ... the post. I don't think I've ever been tempted to buy home insurance, change money, get a full-body massage or partake of any of the other services the PO offers. At larger Post Offices now there is always a long queue and a flat screen display telling you how wonderful the Post Office is at doing things that you can easily get elsewhere. Actually collecting and delivering the post seems to be a kind of guilty secret that the marketing boys at the PO dare not mention. A dreaded legacy activity that will soon evaporate as soon as its protected, monopoly status is preserved.

It seems odd that the PO does not supply, well, useful things. Like franking machines. Or stamps, by post, ordered on a website. Or even a 'stamp folder' where stamps of different denominations may be safely and securely stored. Or envelopes. Or letter weighing scales. Or label-printing software or hardware. Or first class mail that arrives the next day. Or mail that gets reliably delivered. Or a service that closes, across the board, at 5:30 just as people are getting out of work. Or makes it remotely easy to pick up mail because it could not be delivered because the postman/Parcel Force man didn't bother calling at the house until everyone had left for work/school/pub. I am sure that a marketing genius like Allan Leighton would have spotted that these are not strategic and have no place in the the goods and services provided by a 21st Centry Post Office. And Adam Crozier, advertising specialist and CEO, with a salary of more than one million pounds a year, would hardly have missed anything so obvious.     

I often go to my local sorting office at around 7:15pm. The last collection is not until 7:30, but the counter is closed at 7:15. There are plenty of postmen in the building - the car park is full to bursting. But the counter is closed on the dot. The counter is really meant to handle pickup of mail items that couldn't be delivered, because they were too big, or required a signature. As a special concession it is possible to send items by recorded delivery and registered post. But only one item. There is an officious notice on the door telling customers that their business is not wanted, and that the one-item rule is a gracious favour to the the mailing public. This is natural behaviour for a monopoly supplier. One of these days we'll have genuine choice about  to  whom we entrust our letters.

It is quite clear to me that the Post Office is a relic from the days of paper-based transfer of money and information. It should jettison all the services (such as renewing tax discs, paying pensions, and handing out forms for driving licences and passports, and just focus on letting people post and receive their stuff.

Independent Article

Tags: economics, shame
Current Mood: crushed

I want a nice, light, laptop with a good video card. I bought the one I'm typing this on, an IBM Thinkpad T40p about three years ago. Looking at the likes of Dabs, laptops really don't seem to have moved on. There is a new operating system on the block, Vista, but apart from that nothing much has changed, except there are now quite a few laptops with Nvidia cards.

Word on the street seems to be to avoid Vista at all costs. Certainly the ads don't inspire me to get it. It seems to offer a few fancy graphics UI effects, and 'improved security' (inevitably). Frankly, I don't care a damn. My PC runs twice as fast without NAV running in the background, and since I got rid of it I haven't had a quarter of the problems installing and running new software that I used to have.

There are now lots of different processors, but somehow clock speed doesn't tell you much any more. My tentative choice so far is a Samsung Q70 review, but just because I stumbled across a review of it in CNET. Surely there is some authoritative review site that will explain why a laptop retailing at 1500 pounds is five times better than one retailing at 300.

References

Samsung Q70 review from CNET.

Tags: geeky, i want one of those
Current Mood: impatient

The Tories have thrown in their lot with The Liberals and Labour in explicitly opposing  grammar schools. It's not as though Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher or John Major actually did anything about re-introducing them. The famous circular 10/65 and Crosland's intemperate remark "I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England" date back to 1965. This is ancient history: not only were all children at school now not born then, but there can hardly be a parent of a child about to go into secondary school that was alive at this time.
Abolishing abolish these pesky schools that still exist, and still supply a large proportion of all the state school students who go to Oxbridge.

Of course these kinds of announcements are not really about policy but about the search for Cameron's very own 'Clause 4 moment'. Presumably the voters who defected to Labour aren't very fussy about Grammar schools.

Two-brains' magic bullet seems to be CTC's, oddly-enough the very same magic bullet that Tony picked, but can't actually deliver. It seems to me that the Scandinavian experience has shown that the solution is to take away the monopoly supply position of LEAs with respect to free schools. It is quite clear that consumers value enormously the education provided private schools.  In fact some parents value choice so much that they will make huge financial sacrifices to obtain it. Is it that offering true free choice of this type will remove schools from political control forever?

Tags: politics, shame
Current Mood: angry

Only the Left supports Freedom of Information. The anti-establishment is convinced that that they are conspired against. The Right feels that the plebs cannot relied upon to support the right policies, so that a few white lies to ensure their support is justified.

After decades of campaigning the Labour Government of '97 brought in FOI information, but inevitably, when it was used to expose that same Government's incompetence and mendacity, it lost its enthusiasm for openness. FOI is like proportional representation, supported by all opposition parties until they actually get into power.  A notable recent success of the act is to force the Chancellor to admit that he was told that the decision to remove tax relief on pension funds's dividends would have a large effect on the solvency of those funds.

Anyway, now it seems that we are continuing to erode the powers of the public to access information. Specifically, and shamefully, MPs have granted themselves a blanket exemption from the FOI Act.

This follows the decision to restrict the number of FOI requests that a body (e.g. a newspaper) can make in a year, and to use the cost of collection of the information requested as a reason for refusing the request, the threshold being equivalent of an hour or so of a senior civil servant's time.

References

Article from Poltics.co.uk

Melanie Phillips article discussing how the government have tried to water down provisions of the FOI Act.

Tags: politics, shame
Current Mood: angry

You know Google Checkout has to be pretty good. Why else would eBay so strive so hard to prohibit eBay sellers from accepting it as a means of payment?

What I didn't realise is how good Google Checkout is. From my point of view,  the most important thing about shopping cart payment system has to be its convenience. My own requirements are very simple - I just want to give users a way of using their credit card online to pay me a hundred pounds to cover the cost of my processing their application to become a tenant.

I used to use NoChex, but they are a complete waste of space. As soon as you get anything working they shut it down on the grounds of requiring mounds of paper to verify your identity. As soon as that is completed they demand you upgrade to a premium account before you can receive electronic payments. It is quite clear that if they had any confidence in their own system they'd make it as easy as possible to use and simply collect a small percentage of each transaction as a fee. Since they don't do that it's quite clear that they don't regard their own system as having any staying power against the competition from PayPal etc.

Anyway, back to Google Checkout.  The first big, pleasant surprise is that it is part of Google Accounts. So the same account I use to get my email works for my taking money, for my small company, through the web. The sign-up was therefore completely painless. This alone makes it vastly better than all the rest of the competition. Note that although eBay own PayPal, you still have to separately enter all your details. Recognising a person as an entity, distinct from all separate customer roles he plays is something that bankassurance companies have been trying to for decades. I would be surprised if they manage it before they are taken over by Google.

The rest of it is fantastically easy. To put a buy-now button to buy a fixed-price service took a matter of seconds. Take a look at my handiwork, aided by the script generated by Google. I don't pretend that this is the finest shopping card system you've ever seen, but it might be the quickest-produced!!

Tags: geeky
Current Mood: impressed

I love to read Martin Wolfe. We all crave certainty in our lives, particularly important aspects of them, such as how we should be governed and how society should be ordered. Since I do not accept devine authority as a source of temporal power I look for secular institutions to provide a secure, well-ordered society. But governments always seem to be making it up as they go along, which is far from comforting.

The country, and indeed the world, would be much better governed if Martin Wolfe were in charge. In this article which explains the distinction between conservatives, populists, social democrats, constitutional republicans, popular democrats, who is what, where each of their weaknesses lie and why Tony and Gordon have and will fail in their distinct ways because they have signed up to the wrong ideology.

Wolfe's argument is that Blair is a populist, like Hugo Chavez, who reaches over the institutions to connect directly with the people, but of course who fails through a lack of understanding of or ability to work with the institutions whose involvement is essential for a proper delivery of service to the population.  This has lead Blair down the route of '.. mountains of half-baked initiatives, the manic news management, the higgledy-piggledy constitutional reforms, the frantic propensity to legislate, the hostility to legal restraints, the indifference to the past and the preference for courtiers over permanent officials.' 

Brown made one classically liberal decision, to grant independence to the Bank of England to set interest rates. This was an incremental improvement to an existing good institution to improve the overall institutional framework. Sadly, this type of action has been very much the exception to Brown's modus operandi. Brown is identified as a social democrat: but a social democrat. A dominant characteristic of social democrats is reliance on hierarchical organisations for delivering specified targets. Certainly we can see the management of schools and hospitals as having been carried out in a social democratic style.

Wolfe's view is that with the absence of a strong Treasury to check  Prime Ministerial  bad decision making, we are in for a rough ride. The success of the past ten years, he says owes a lot to the fact that Brown was in the Treasury stopping the spending departments making stupid mistakes. This will all now stop unless we ensure that Martin Wolfe himself is made the new Chancellor. If you want to join me in supporting this campaign please visit www.martinwolfeforchancellor.org.uk now. Well, maybe not, but you could perhaps write a letter to the FT or the Times arguing for a stronger counterbalance to Brown at the top.

BTW, the idea of the title of this entry is that Brown and Blair are are tutorial partners having their politics essays marked by MW, who is giving them a very average mark.

Tags: politics

The current government has had three attempts to introduce a new Mental Health Act over the last nine years. Each of them has been opposed strongly. The current one is opposed not only by virtually all the independent peers, and by the opposition parties, but also by eighty mental health organisations including Mind, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, SANE, the King's Fund, Turning Point, UNISON - virtually every voluntary and professional body working in the field, as far as I - someone with no professional involvement with mental health - can see.

The core issue seems to be that of treatment without consent. The government's position seems to be entirely a result of fear of the tabloids' lurid coverage of the odd murder committed by mentally disturbed people.  The reality is that mentally ill people are really very unlikely to commit murder, and if they do so, they are likely to murder a member of their own family (as members of the general public are) or to murder a mental health professional.

The interesting thing about this legislation is that the Scottish equivalent bill has been enacted and appears to have none of the faults of the proposed England and Wales bill. I strongly urge you to inform yourself by reading the analysis on the Mental Health Alliance Website.

I was very interested to hear that Northern Italy has probably the best provision for the treatment of mentally ill patients in the EU and that the treatment of such patients in the USA is actually much better than you might imagine. Mental Health Trusts in the UK are run well, without much press coverage, but, perhaps inevitably, because they avoid deficits, money is increasingly being taken away from them to plug holes in the financing of PCTs, or whatever they are called these days. The NHS is a seriously broken institution, and it is a great pity that its status as something akin to a national religion in the UK inhibits any government from anything approaching the sort of radical reform that would be needed to give us anything resembling world-class physical and mental health treatment.

The Europe, Australasia and Far East Index is a very old multi-national index (it has been calculated since 1969). It is designed to reflect the performance of 'foreign' stocks from the point of view of an American investor. The nice thing about it is that by combining it with a US only index such as the S&P500 or the Russell Index you can get a measure of the performance of global stock markets.

Even better, since a future on this index is traded, it is possible to get some proxy for the performance of the global equities from positions in only two futures. My own preference is for the S&P500 index, which can be traded in 'mini' form at about $50 a point, so that the margin required can be kept modest.

The EFE index is traded, in principle, around the clock, as is the mini S&P500. However putting in a market order outside regular trading hours in CBOT (CME?) would be a big mistake. It is tricky to trade because there isn't a whole load of liquidity, so stops are difficult to use. Of course this opens up the opportunity for someone with more time on his hands than I have to make some money by providing some liquidity to the market by actively trading this future.

Of course a more liquid exposure to global stock markets could be achieved by taking positions in the major European and Far Eastern indices. Probably it would be sufficient to take a position in something like the STOXX 50, and then the Nikkei and Hang Seng. This would use up a lot more capital though, and would miss out Australasia entirely (adding the ASI to the mix would not be too difficult, I suppose).

I'm very sorry if this is means nothing to you. It is certainly not any kind of investment advice: only you can take a view about going short or long.

Tags: investment
Current Mood: tired