Archive for the 'Shopping' Category

Congo

Published on December 28, 2008 in Politics and Shopping. 0 Comments

If you’ve ever seen the Stan’s Cafe show Of All the People In All The World, where every grain of rice stands for one person, you may have been surprised by the size of the pile representing all the people who died between 1998 and 2004 as a result of the civil war in the Congo. The pile is about the size of an up-turned wheelbarrow and is roughly as big as the mound representing all the slaves who were ever carried from Africa in British ships during the slave trade.

Ironically the largest proportion of slaves who were taken from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade were from West Central Africa, a region that includes modern Congo and Angola. They were almost all captured during wars between native kingdoms. In fact the desire to capture slaves was often the main cause of wars in Africa at that time.

I always imagined that the civil war in Congo, which is still going on, was an ethnic conflict. That is how it is usually portrayed and it’s quite a comforting view for people like me because it means I don’t have to feel any sense of responsibility for what’s going on there. Today I heard a dispatch by the BBC’s Mark Doyle, a man who has spent an awful lot of time working in Africa. His explanation is more complicated and convincing. Have a listen.

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Uncertainty

Published on December 8, 2008 in Media and Shopping. 1 Comment

Some researchers at Edinburgh University have just published a report about how easy it is to buy prescription-only medicines online. They visited sites which they found via Google and Yahoo but they did not take the final step of actually buying the drugs because they felt that would not be ethical. So they were just counting sites which offered drugs.

At the start of this year researchers at Berkeley and San Diego were doing a study into how profitable spamming could be. They set up a fake online pharmacy which was just like the real thing, offering prescription-only drugs. They counted how many people visited the site and added drugs to their basket. The only point at which the customers discovered that it was not actually working was when they submitted their credit-card details, at which point they got an error page.

So, the Edinburgh researchers probably included the Berkeley researchers in their study, and vice versa, unless they warned each other, which seems unlikely. It’s like a collaborative version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – Whenever you try to measure something by doing anything on the web you are probably affecting someone else’s measurements at the same time.

Debt

Published on November 27, 2008 in Media, Politics and Shopping. 0 Comments

Basing the growth of your economy on people borrowing money, as opposed to relying on increased productivity, doesn’t seem like a very sensible idea. An Austrian ecomomist called Ludwig von Mises described the problem very nicely:

It may sometimes be expedient for a man to heat the stove with his furniture. But he should not delude himself by believing that he has discovered a wonderful new method of heating his premises.

Nevertheless this is exactly the economic model that pretty much everyone apparently believes in at the moment. It seems to be the unanimous view of both journalists and politicians that we need the banks to start lending again in order to get the economy moving. But some of the banks are in trouble because of their imprudent and greedy business practices and so now all the banks are being extra-cautious and won’t lend. So the favoured solution is for governments to give the banks yet more money in the hope that they will lend it out to people. To go back to Ludwig von Mises, this is still not a wonderful method of heating; it’s just the government buying more furniture. Nobody is prepared to say the truth, which is that lots of people are going to have to accept a prolonged lowering of their standard of living.

Crock

Published on March 11, 2008 in Shopping. 0 Comments

Crock o compostAm I being a curmudgeonly crosspatch? I expect so. The RSPB has this kitchen compost crock in their Reuse and Recycle section. It is for putting your peelings in on their way to the compost heap. That’s fine. I wouldn’t buy one but if you’ve got a Georgian kitchen it would probably fit in very nicely.

The only problem is that it has an added feature. To keep your kitchen smelling fresh the crock has a carbon filter inside the lid. It’s a disposable plastic filter that can’t be recycled and will be regularly replaced. So now you’re actually creating more landfill waste than you were before you bought the thing.

I’m tempted to think that this is pretty characteristic of certain rural greens. They want to be eco-friendly but they also want things to be ‘nice’. So they object to wind-farms when they spoil the view and they love living in splendid isolation where public transport isn’t an option and we city dwellers must subsidise their local Post Office. But of course that’s very unfair, it’s just a bit of thoughtlessness on the part of the RSPB and I’m sure they’ll sort it out as soon as they can.

Political Playmobil

Published on March 7, 2008 in Politics and Shopping. 2 Comments

playmocop.jpgThanks to Giles for pointing out to me the excellent collection of humorous and political comments that are collecting on the Amazon page for this Playmobil Security Check-Point. Here’s an example:

Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer “well, it’s because the terrorists have already won”. Yes, they have won.

I wonder if Amazon will allow this commie protest to continue. It’s supposed to be a super-store not a community centre!

Playmobil meta

Published on November 23, 2007 in Shopping. 1 Comment

Meta CastleIf you have children under ten then you’ve probably got some Playmobil in your house. It was my very favourite range of toys for a long time so I’m pretty used to their weird German ideas. This one really takes the biscuit though. One of the most extravagant items they sell is the Fairy Tale Palace. It costs about eighty pounds and it’s enormous; three stories high with loads of columns and staircases, chandeliers, mirrors and rose-tinted windows. Now they’ve made a toy toy castle so that the little Playmobil children who live in the castle can play with a model of their own castle, complete with tiny figures of themselves. You can see where this is going can’t you? I’ll stop now before we all disappear.

Stupid Sweets

Published on November 3, 2007 in Shopping. 1 Comment

Child CatcherMasterfoods, who produce many of the shite sweets that make so many people in this country unhealthy, have started using animal rennet in their waxy, flavourless chocolate. I am mostly pleased about this because now I won’t have to even discuss the possibility of my daughters buying or eating this crap; there’s no way they will want anything to do with something that is extracted from the tummies of dead baby cows. The fact that the chocolate in Mars Bars, Twix, Maltesers and Milky Way was already offensive because it is made from cocoa that is the product of a ruthlessly exploitative and unethical trade that causes suffering and deprivation for many children in Africa obviously wasn’t enough for these scumbags. I suppose once evil becomes your main interest in life you just have to keep trying to push the envelope.

Postal Strike

Published on October 7, 2007 in Politics and Shopping. 3 Comments Tags: , , .

Postman PatThe postmen are going on strike, and the news story about it didn’t really say why. On the postal union’s site there was a Message to the Public which I didn’t find persuasive. They talked about how they were faced with the prospect of arriving at work and being told to do a completely different job to the one they usually do and of having their hours of work changing from day to day. These are things that I and many other people have been used to for years. They also talked about how Royal Mail want to reduce their pension benefits and increase their retirement age.  At the moment the Royal Mail pension scheme is so expensive to run that Royal Mail have to pay an extra 730 million pounds a year into it in addition to its member’s contributions. The CWU are in the enviable position of having the government underwrite their pension scheme if Royal Mail eventually go bust. Meanwhile final-salary pension schemes are closing in most companies in the UK.

Ladybird PostmanSo I don’t really feel very sympathetic towards the postal workers. In attempting to explain their grievances they have simply highlighted how out-of-touch with the real-world they are. Since their members’ pensions are protected if Royal Mail become insolvent maybe they’re calculating that it would be better to protect their cushy benefits and drive the company under than it would be to negotiate a less advantageous deal. It is of course the job of a union to protect its members’ interests, but sometimes that involves looking at the long rather than the short-term and even the CWU recognises that the current pension scheme is too expensive.

The amazing popularity of online shopping should have been a bonanza for the Royal Mail but instead they are in deeper trouble than ever. This may well be because the management is useless, or it may be because the organisation is bureaucratic and inflexible and many of the people who work there are unimaginative jobsworths, I have no way of knowing. In any case, this strike won’t help their situation. Like Millie Banerjee of Postwatch, I find it hugely disappointing to watch a great British institution tear itself apart. But on the other hand, maybe the demise of the Royal Mail will create a brilliant opportunity for a new, much better mail service. Here’s some things I’d like them to offer:

  • Destination tracking – Every time a parcel addressed to me is processed they should check to see if it is too big for the letter box or if it needs a signature. If that’s the case they could send me an email or text asking if they should deliver it the next day or on some other day when I am going to be at home.
  • People who are at home all the time could act as mini local post offices. Big parcels for anyone in their street would be left with them at the start of the day, outgoing parcels could be collected at the end of the day.
  • Tracking the delivery man. It would be so easy to put a GPS receiver on each delivery person and then track them so that I could see an ETA for them.
  • Smarter redelivery. I’m going out for the day but I still want my eBay parcel to be there when I get home so I go to their site and ask for all today’s mail to be delivered to my friend up the road.
  • Parcel aggregation. It’s daft for several delivery companies to all be calling at the same address. Why don’t they set up a clearing-house for data and then they could all deliver each other’s parcels.

Crikey, I could go on all day with this. Anyone fancy going into business?

Northern Rock

Published on September 19, 2007 in Shopping. 1 Comment

Account ClosedIt is so irritating to read that Northern Rock ‘managers’ are now whining that the government should have done more, earlier, to prevent everyone from taking all their money out. The company’s own response to the problems has been unbelievably useless. On Friday, when I went to their site to see what they had to say about their situation, there was absolutely no mention of any problem at all. I found that very disconcerting so I cycled down to the Maddox Street branch to take my money out before it was too late. There was a queue, in part because only two out of the three counters were open. If there hadn’t been a queue I might have felt reassured, but since there was and since I’m English I obviously had to join it.
Northern Rock is unavailableOnce I’d closed my account I checked the Northern Rock site to see if online customers were having any luck logging in. I couldn’t even get the log-in page to open. It continued to be unavailable every time I checked, over the whole weekend. This must have been unbelievably frustrating for all those customers who had online-only accounts and couldn’t withdraw their money at a branch. By Saturday there was a very small link at the top of the home page leading to a mildly reassuring notice. By Sunday the link had got larger. On Monday they finally got around to replacing their front page with a big apology note. It they had done that on Friday, and if they’d thought to send all available staff to the counters, and if they’d properly managed their online account access then maybe there would have been no queues, no panic and no hours of frustration and stress for all their customers.
I am delighted that I’ve closed my account, it was only paying 4.8% and I would have closed it earlier if I’d noticed, but there must now be thousands of people who’ve got a whole load of money that was in a tax-free ISA and will now have to go into a tax paying account instead. They are victims of a combination of greed and incompetence on the part of the management of Northern Rock and those managers should now be committing Hara-Kiri, not whinging about how the government should have bailed them out sooner.

Consumer News

Published on April 23, 2007 in Briefly and Shopping. 0 Comments

Equifax collect credit data about you and then sell that data to financial institutions who are considering lending you money. If you want to know what they’re saying about you, you can pay them £17 to see a copy of your own records, which seems a bit cheeky to me. However, thanks to the Data Protection Act, you can also ask them to give you a copy of all the data they hold on you by demanding a Statutory Credit Report from them, and that only costs £2. You can even pay by credit card, an idea I find ironically appealing, for some reason. Equifax.

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