Masterfoods, 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.
Archive
The 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.
So 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?
It 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.
Once 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.
The heavily trailed report to Congress by Gen David Petraeus about how well the ’surge’ is going was given a special 2.5 hour programme on the World Service. This is what happened when the General got up to speak.
Is that hilarious or what?
And now, this advert has appeared in the Washington Post:
Ever since mankind discovered that the Wii remote uses Bluetooth for its wireless connection nerds people have been trying to use it for doing music. There have been some PC based drum instruments and of course the performance artists over at Cycling 74 had someone who was controlling a fancy sample playing looper thingy. I wanted something simpler, as easy to use as the Wii itself, so I wrote a straightforward monophonic string drum playing thing. It’s hard to describe, I’m going to record myself playing it and put it up here later, but to be honest if you’ve got a Mac with Bluetooth it’s probably easier to just download the program and have a go yourself. I’ve given this project its own page (or just click on the KS-3ii link at the top of the blog), with instructions, downloading links and room for your comments and suggestions.
The incompatibility between cartoonists and Islam is inevitable. Cartoonist are very frequently irreverent about everything and resistant to censorship. Some muslims are very touchy and, I’m afraid to say, authoritarian. There’s also the fact that many strands of Islam don’t allow representative art so the whole issue of cartoons is never going to be popular in the first place.
This weekend the Washington Post and numerous other American newspapers have refused to publish their regular cartoon strip Opus. Berkeley Breathed, the writer of the strip, announced on his site that the strips had been witheld from publication but he didn’t say why. The subject of the no doubt soon-to-be controversial strip is a young American woman on a spiritual odyssey who keeps trying out crazy religions. Last week she was trying to teach nude yoga to the Amish, this week she’s a “Radical Islamist”, complete with veil. It’s August, there’s not much news about, let’s see what happens.
You can see the possibly offending strip at the excellent Salon magazine.
Dave Gutteridge just wrote a rather nerdy, rambling but interesting article called Windows Is Free in which he explains that the choice between Linux and Windows is effectively a choice between two free products because of the ubiquity and wide acceptance of software piracy. Since this effect works to preserve Microsoft’s domination of the Operating System market he suggests that they might have an interest in allowing a certain amount of piracy.
I have noticed the same thing with other software companies, in particular Adobe. One very popular Mac BitTorrent site has a very clear policy about what files they will allow to be shared via their server. They have no Apple software on there and they remove products from any software company if they are asked to do so. However, they have the most recent versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, in fact everything that Adobe make. Why doesn’t Adobe ask them to take it down?
When software manufacturer’s organisations are talking to journalists about software piracy they claim that every pirated copy of a program represents lost revenue. The journalists tend to take this claim at face value but it’s obviously not true. Most people who have pirated copies of Photoshop wouldn’t have bought it if the illegal version wasn’t available; they would have made do with the free version of Photoshop Elements that came with their scanner or their digital camera.
Just think how hard it would be to launch an image editing program to compete with Photoshop. Adobe have every type of customer covered: Rich corporate types buy the full version, home users use the free version and impoverished creative people use a pirated copy. If Adobe could successfully close down the software piracy market tomorrow then a decent cheap shareware program would soon spring up and become the editor of choice for creative people and then Photoshop would be doomed.
There is a phase in the life of any piece of software where piracy threatens its existence. It’s not during the earlier stages when a program needs, above all, to be taken up by as many people as possible. After all, most people don’t want to waste time learning how to use something if it’s useless but they might take the risk if it’s free. This is why there are so many free demo versions out there. Then, once a program is dominating the market, piracy helps again; this time it works to suppress any competition. It’s in the middle stages, when a company needs extra revenue to grow and develop its product and support new users, that piracy can do the most damage.
So, I’m not defending software piracy, I’m just saying that the consequences are more complicated than they are presented as being. When you pirate very popular programs it’s competition that suffers, not the manufacturers. And maybe, if you pay for just one piece of software this month it should be something that is just gaining ground because in reality they are the only people that really need your money.
People buy SUVs for the same reasons that some teenagers carry a knife: They feel insecure, their environment seems dangerous and they long for the admiration of their peers. Both behaviours are clearly anti-social but driving an SUV is more blatantly so because rather than being hidden in the owner’s pocket it is aggressively shoved in everyone’s face, a full-on “F**k you” to the rest of society.
When someone buys an SUV they are trying to buy an advantage on the road. They hope that if their vehicle collides with somebody else’s the added height will cause their bumper to smash through the windows of the smaller car, crushing the occupants and absorbing the impact. In fact, while it is true that you are more likely to be killed if you are hit by an SUV rather that a normal car, some SUVs have much higher that average driver death rates, according to a study by the IIHS in the US, so like knives they endanger the owner as well as everyone else.
Given all this it’s really not surprising to read research, conducted by car manufacturers and published in Keith Bradsher’s book Bumper Mentality, showing that:
SUV buyers tend to be “insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are.”
So what’s wrong with keying SUVs? It makes them less attractive to own, possibly makes people think twice before buying one and may be the only way to make the owner realise that the stares they get all day aren’t admiring glances. Even so, criminal damage is just as anti-social as buying an SUV, and if the owner bought the thing because they are afraid of their environment then keying their car may just make them behave even more badly. I personally think that a sticker campaign would be a good idea. Something like “I love you but I hate your ugly car”. Maybe I’ll design some. In the meantime, I’m really glad that Ken is intending to increase the London congestion charge for vehicles that produce loads of CO2. Social pressure doesn’t often work with anti-social people, financial pressure just might.
Someone sneered at my bike yesterday. It was Steve Hellier. He was lounging around outside Bush House, by the crossing, and I stopped in front of him because the lights were red. He looked down at my bike with a mocking laugh and said, “That’s a blast from the past!”
“I got it for my eighteenth birthday,” I said.
My Mum actually drove me up to the Brixton Cycles co-operative to choose it. I lived in Surrey at the time and to my delight as we drove into Brixton a mob was hanging Thatcher in effigy from a tree outside the Ritzy cinema. I particularly wanted to get my bike from the co-op because I knew a couple of the people involved in setting it up and I was sure they wouldn’t sell me a dodo. After we’d talked through what kind of cyclist I wanted to be they suggested a Holdsworth Claud Butler tourer with a Reynolds 531 alloy frame, made in Birmingham. The only problem was the colour; like a child I wanted it to be red but all they had was a very uncool turquoise. It was also a bit more expensive than my Mum had budgeted for, but she could tell it was a great bike and so could I, so we bought it despite the uncool 70’s styling.
“It looks like it,” Steve said with a curl of his lip, “Doesn’t it belong in a museum?” ”Curses,” I thought to myself, “should have seen that coming.” Luckily the lights changed and I rode away before he could pour further scorn on me.
I love my bike and I’ve had it so long it really seems like a part of my body when I’m riding but it also has a life of its own, springing forward with energy and enthusiasm when I get on to it. It is so efficient and well-designed that I sometimes overtake people on mountain bikes as I free-wheel downhill.
It is this fantastic efficiency that I love about bikes and also what I find depressing about cycling when it’s perverted by sport. The great thing about a bike is that you can spring onto it and immediately go where you want to, with no mucking about. So why do people feel the need to get up in fancy dress when they’re riding? It’s the influence of things like the Tour De France, I tell you. It’s not healthy. That’s why Steve thinks a bike needs to be new to be good. Bikes become like mobile phones, people start to think their bike says who they are: Am I a Californian downhiller, am I an aesthetic pursuit rider, am I wearing my yellow sweater, is my helmet cool yet?
Come on cyclists, we’re better than this. We don’t need daft Lycra outfits to ride in, and our machines are easily efficient enough to carry some baggage without slowing us down. We can ride everywhere, the more we do it the easier it will be. Don’t kid yourselves by buying a mountain bike if you live in the city, that’s like those idiots in the SUVs, get a bike that will take you where you need to go. Most of all, don’t let the pernicious influence of sport turn cycling into a marketing opportunity for the capitalists. Bikes are cheap, they don’t need accessories, they perform best when you are happy and you don’t need any help from The Man to do that.
This political spat with Russia has got me thinking. At first I was so annoyed by their infuriating posturing that I was all for going to war straight away. But then I realised that although they are drunk and useless we could never win a war against them because they can also be cunning and dogged when the mood takes them. So we can’t win a war against Russia, and of course as we know Russia couldn’t win their war against the Taliban, so doesn’t that prove that we can’t win a war against the Taliban? It’s logic, pure and simple. So who can we beat? Well, we sort of beat Germany before and they beat Poland before that, so maybe we should try invading Poland instead of Afghanistan, or Slovakia, which is now even smaller than it was when it was Czechoslovakia. Now if only there was a reason, it doesn’t have to be a good one…
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