Poetry Weak

Monday's shirt is white with formality
Tuesday's shirt shows a bit of personality
Wednesday's shirt is colourful and gay
Thursday's shirt shows it's washing day
Friday's shirt is probably a t-shirt with the implicit slogan "As compensation for the fact that I'm measurably less well off than I would have been thirty years ago, I'm willing to accept the ability to dress according to a slightly modified dress code one day in the week. For some inexplicable reason, I see this as an indicator of the high esteem in which my employer holds me, as if it somehow makes us friends."

Power

So after blaming poorly designed technology for my lack of posts, I am now going to shift the blame to my feeble body. One may well wonder how a broken foot prevents the writing of a blog, indeed throughout history some of our greatest writers have used a period of convalescence to create some of their greatest work. Unfortunately, I'm not up to such feats, and I bet history's greatest writers weren't expected to log on and work from home. Deprived of my commute, I lost all blogging impetus. That's not to say I didn't travel at all during the time that I was only able to use crutches, indeed my time as a mobility restricted user of London's public transport systems has largely restored my faith in humanity. People are generally considerate of a person on crutches, in that they will make room for them and (usually if they're female) give up their seat for them. The fact that the making way was often closer to giving me a wide birth was also interesting: it seems a disability, even a temporary one nudges one into another stratum of society; I became an honorary member of the pavement underclass. This position was acknowledged on both sides: just as many 'normal' people were willing to give me a wide berth, so many of society's outcasts (the homeless, the troubled, etc) were willing to embrace me as one of their own, as if a pair of crutches suddenly rendered me visible to them.
For me, this only serves to underline how much like everyone else in society the invisible underclass are, in that they are only willing to engage with that which is familiar to them, and then only when it is right in front of them. Perhaps it is a legacy of the economic crisis that we are all increasingly short sighted, even when we are being selfish.
Whilst I've been 'off', Ed Miliband has been making political capital with his promised energy price freeze. Rightly, he has identified the growing disparity between the rate of increase of prices and the rate of increase in wages as a massive political issue. The Tory idea that an economic recovery will make everything better is laughably naive, when a global recovery will simply drive demand for the world's increasingly finite resources and increase the cost of living even further. Their plan B is even more dumb: create a brand new housing bubble so that homeowners (a shrinking constituency, but crucially one that votes) feel wealthier for long enough to vote them back into power. This is classic shortsighted democracy in action: not merely delaying a problem, but exacerbating it in the process. Unfortunately Labour's energy policy is likely to do the same, although as they are not in power, it is the reaction of the government and the energy lobbyists that will actually do the damage. The idea that ditching green levies is going to benefit anyone is so mindbendingly shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. How do the energy companies believe they will make a profit once they have burned all of the fossil fuels? Green levies are perhaps mis-named, maybe we should call them future energy security levies. After all, for our energy supply we are increasingly at the mercy of malevolent kleptocracies such as Russia. Energy companies and apparently the government are not concerned with long term energy security or indeed energy sovereignty, both appear happy to let the China and France take the big financial stakes in our future generating capacity, whilst letting the rest rely on Russian gas. Long term energy planning for the current government appears to mean wringing the last of our national fuel reserves out of the earth by fracturing the ground beneath our feet. And when that's gone, then what? What will we do when we've sucked the landscape dry and failed to build an alternative energy infrastructure? What do the government care, they won't be in power then, their housing bubble will have burst long ago and they'll have retired to their country piles powered by the rooftop generators they managed to get planning permission for after the Chinese bought out the NIMBYs next door. Because after all politicians are only like the rest of us: they only really deal with the issues immediately in front of them.
As I've pointed out before, this blog is as much about me getting it right as preaching to others, that's why I've changed my electricity supplier to Ecotricity, even though their prices are slightly higher than my current provider. You see I've decided to 'go long' as the traders say, on renewable electricity: I'm gambling on the fact that subsidising the construction of renewable energy infrastructure is going to do more to keep my energy costs down in the long term than subsidising the French taxpayer.
I'm sure those who read texts and like to find in them something altogether anterior to what is there will say that I have switched energy provider because I am a smug lefty tree-hugger who just wants to flaunt his green credentials to his urban lefty mates. If the side effect is that I get a bit of righteous-cred amongst the urban greenerati, then so much the better, but let's not sugar coat this, I'm doing it because I'm just as selfish as the rest of you. I want my energy prices to stay low, not just next year, not just for 20 months, but for the next 50 years.

Purchasing Power

As spring finally arrived at the end of May, I took one of my all too infrequent trips to the Maltby Street market area...
No, this isn't yet another post extolling the virtues of buying local: apart from the honey, I don't think much for sale in Spa Terminus can be classed as truly local, it's in central London ffs. However I'm not going to apologise for the pleasure I get from shopping there and judging by the numbers of other middle class foodie cliche types, I'm not the only one. For me, buying good food is a pleasure: seeing it and smelling it, the anticipation of cooking and eating it. However, I understand that not everyone feels the same. I know people who view all aspects of the food consumption process as an inconvenience to be endured for the shortest amount of time possible. I pity them in my patronising middle class foodie way, but ultimately if they think there are more important or interesting things in life than food, then good luck to them. I will continue to get my thrills at food markets.
For me it is part of my weekend entertainment, so I am happy to go and spend money that I would otherwise spend on a football match, because the amounts involved are similar. And I need to have a decent amount of money to spend because these sorts of markets are expensive right? Well, they're not cheap, but as my butcher never tires of pointing out on Twitter, neither are supermarkets. Indeed the last time I went to Maltby Street, my spend was slightly more than I might spend in a trip to the supermarket, but then I had bought slightly more of certain things than I might on a normal trip to the supermarket; I was stocking up. At the time though, it occurred to me that I had spent a lot of money, which is a thought that rarely crosses my mind at the supermarket, or at least isn't so persistent. The only obvious reason I could find for this (and this may well be obvious to everyone else) was the fact that in order to do my shopping at the market I had to make several financial transactions instead of just one.
Experts in managing personal finances are always encouraging us to use cash instead of cards, as it gives us an understanding of the value of the purchases we make. I would add that in buying our goods individually or in small batches we become strangely more aware of the total value of our purchases. This is another product of the sorts of economies of scale I'm always banging on about: if we consider adding an item to an already large supermarket shop, its cost appears insignificant against the much larger cost of the total shopping bill. We will therefore add items to our shop safe in the knowledge that they will make little difference. Of course if we were to add up all these 'insignificant' extras over the course of a month, we'd probably quickly become aware that they were actually fairly significant. But we don't add things up that way, we only see them in their immediate context, which is why, when our immediate context is a single transaction for a small number of goods, each item appears much more costly. For some reason this makes us believe that markets are expensive and supermarkets are cheap even when much of the evidence is entirely contradictory.

Product Push

You may have noticed that I haven't posted so much in recent months. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which is that I've been busy doing other things. Although I write my blog on the tube, when there is little else for me to do, so maybe it's at least partly a motivational thing, although I think it's more to do with technology. I started this blog as something constructive to do on my phone whilst underground. Most apps require constant communication with the mother ship, which is simply not going to happen on a subterranean public transport network, so I thought I'd do something that only needs uploading to the internet when it's finished. Of course form the start I was wrong about this: the blogger app would constantly be trying to find my location, or download draft posts that I'd saved whilst offline. The whole process can be incredibly frustrating, but it's an experience that is repeated time and time again with apps on my phone. They cause all kinds of havoc with the phone memory because they're storing tonnes of data offline, but when I try to use any of them it appears that all this data is insufficient to make them work offline.
I imagine this is the result of the technology being designed around the understanding of life as lived by people in Palo Alto: high spec software for high spec technology, usable anywhere there is a good WiFi or mobile signal, which is everywhere right? It is software designed to a single ideal: that more is better. Again unfortunately, it is the old world of commerce driving the new world of technology. Indeed this is the illusion that modern technology has given us: just because we have allowed it to change every aspect of our lives, we assume that in some way the underlying business structures are different, when they're still very much based on the Henry Ford model of mass production and the George Gillette model of obsolescence.
Google recently launched a test version of the balloon it intends to use to bring wireless services to the more remote parts of the world. Presumably this is done with the intention of being able to sell more services into markets such as Africa, but they may need to rethink their software offering in such a case, as I can't imagine users in the developing world upgrading their hardware every two years or less just to keep up with the software. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe that's what's so great about mobile computing: any shortcomings can always be presented as something that can be fixed by upgrading, constantly selling up on the idea that perfection is just round the corner, as long as we're willing to pay for it. It's a win win for all the companies involved, especially the network providers who get to make most of their money providing finance for buying the latest technology. If I were cynical, I would say that it is in the interests of the network providers not to improve their service too much so they can encourage people to buy new hardware to get a better service. Regardless, we are sold a dream of perfection that is ever diminishing on the horizon and we seem willing to chase it relentlessly.
I think pretty much the best thing I've ever done with this blog is name it: I genuinely do need saving from what I want, as do we all: the accelerated process of consumption and disposal drags us all along in it's wake. However I don't think I need saving by someone else; just as the agency to engage in this buying frenzy is mine, so is the agency to disengage from it. We are never going to persuade massive corporations to stop selling us stuff if we just keep on buying it: they exist to perpetuate that status quo. Consumer power is a genuine force, that is felt keenest when it is withheld altogether. I suppose the question is are we, as consumers, willing to refrain from automatically following the upgrade path like sheep? It'll be hard: I'm not 'due' a new phone for another six months, but I've probably been thinking about it for the last six. Maybe I need to spend those six months researching software (and probably an OS) that will work well on my aging phone. I'm not saying I'll never get a new phone - that would be ridiculous - but maybe I can slow down the upgrade cycle by a year or so. Maybe if we all did that, the manufacturers and software providers will divert some of their attention from the shiny future to the problems of optimising the tarnished present.
In the meantime I guess I'll just have to put up with the Blogger app constantly trying to update my location (I'm underground - you can tell by the lack of signal) and whatever else it would rather do than let me get on and write this blog. And you, dear reader will have to get used to less frequent rants from me. I'm guessing we'll both just about cope.

Patronising

A while ago, the concept of personal responsibility came up in conversation with my most entertaining colleague when it comes to political discussion (we'll call him Lewes Leftie). When I said that I thought people were responsible for their own actions, he only just managed to stop himself from saying that was a very 'Tory' viewpoint. Fortunately for the conversation he said enough for me to realise what he was about to say and I pulled him up on it. Essentially his argument boiled down to the fact that because we are not responsible for our circumstances, we cannot be responsible for our actions. I pursued this line of reasoning and discovered that he seemed to view it as an absolute, that he was a pure determinist. We didn't get a chance to go further, but I'm sure that he saw this as an inherent part of his 'socialist' philosophy.
I forget who it was, but recently a Labour politician argued against the policy of London boroughs buying social housing outside London on the basis that it would disrupt children's lives. Both Ms P and I poo pooed this in unison: we both moved towns in the middle of our childhoods and it did neither of us any harm. Sure, at the time it felt like quite an upheaval, but in the grand scheme of things it was of no consequence. What the politician should have pointed out is that the policy of moving the poor out of London is just another step on the road to London becoming a ghetto of rich people entirely separate from the rest of the country; a state of affairs that no one should be encouraging.
Conservatives often paint progressive policy as patronising, as the nanny state interfering in people's lives because it thinks they're too stupid to look after themselves. From the rhetoric of many politicians, this appears to be the case, which is unfortunate because no one likes to be patronised. However, the attitude of conservatives is that the poor are poor because they are too stupid to get rich, which really isn't much better, yet somehow appears more acceptable because it is a form of honesty.
This is a genuine problem that is faced by all those who wish to help their fellow humans, or at least that's the way I see it. The desire to extend compassion to others is a good thing, yet can easily appear patronising, which in many senses it is. The words 'patron' and 'patronising' are based around the same concept, but the latter has gained negative connotations whilst the former hasn't and with good reason.
A society should be capable of helping those who require help, but it should not assme that those who need help are helpless or incapable. Circumstance can place a person in a situation where they need help, but that does not mean that they are eternally condemned to the whim of circumstance. People can help themselves if they have the means and the belief. Of course some people are constrained by ability, but that doesn't mean we should assume that those constrained by circumstance lack ability. To look at this another way, you cannot simply say only help those who cannot help themselves, as that requires us to decree from on high that certain people need help, stigmatising them and potentially convincing them that they are beyond self-help.
When I was a teenager and people told me that I was acting like a child, I usually felt that my action was merely a response to being treated like a child. My argument was that we act up to expectations. It was perhaps a slightly childish argument, but is nevertheless probably at least partially true. If we tell people that we are helping them because their circumstance renders them incapable of self help, we should not be surprised if they conclude that they are incapable of influencing their circumstances.
I am not saying at all that we should leave the helpless to help themselves. What sort of society would we be if we did that? We just need to take more care over how we view that help and how we present it.

Peripatetic

There was a laughable section on BBC Radio 4's PM program a while ago discussing the Radio 2 poll to determine their listeners' most popular album. Not only did Eddie Mayer get the title of Coldplay's 2003 sophomore album wrong (what's a rush of blood to the heart Eddie?), but a senior music journalist got very angry about the poll, saying that it proved people who listen to Radio 2 don't like music. My guess is that the journalist in question comes from the punk tradition that anything popular must, by dint of being popular, be rubbish. For some of us it's a familiar sense: the feeling that the world is wrong because the world doesn't agree with us. It is familiar from our youth, from the comfort of collective alienation.
This sense of identity in opposition was something that many of us had as a result of dressing differently or listening to certain types of music: a tribe mentality. Much has been made in recent times about the loss of youth tribes, as instant access to so much music and cheap fashion - not to mention contact with a whole world of other people - allows today's youth to change their identity weekly if not daily. Solidarity comes not from a select group of friends who share your passion for a certain band of musical genre, but from millions of online 'friends' who may be as diverse as they are mono-sympathetic (i.e. with so many friends, one may only need to have one thing in common with each). One can be niche, but with a global community each niche is almost a nation of its own. The flip side of the always-on community is that there is nowhere for freaks and geeks to hide. The old youth tribes were a place of safety, a place where those who felt detached from society could be surrounded by those they liked and avoid those they feared, protected by the cloak of collective difference. Social networks mean that there is no respite for the different, so you may as well at least pretend to fit in. The homogenisation of youth culture is at least partly a result of fear. The bullies, who have always been the sentinels of normal, appear to have won. Except it's not quite that bad: in many ways kids are able to be more individual and creative* without having to conform to the dictats of a single group aesthetic.
Of course such a situation is scary to a music journalist, whose role it has traditionally been to tell the youth tribes what is and isn't acceptable. In this community, there is clearly fear at the loss of control that the new society brings and such fear can cause people to lash out. For these people, the enemy is the mainstream and everything associated with it: if people like anything mainstream then they are fools who didn't listen to enough music journalists.
I am perhaps being harsh to music journalists, but I think this peculiarly British form of judgement will not be missed. The idea that for anything to be popular it must be bad is a ridiculous one, especially for a journalist whose job is to make things popular. In the digital assumptive generations** there is even a strand of subculture based around an appreciation of cultural artefacts (mainly films) that have been rejected by the mainstream as not very good. It is not the sort of subculture that exists as a visually identifiable tribe, it's not that sort of subculture. It is just one of the many strands of subculture that weave itself through and inbetween the current cultural landscape. Of course as the digital natives take over, it is an identification of subculture that will disappear, as such concepts of bad and good culture become replaced by personal associations of liked and disliked.
The danger, as the music journalists justifiably see it, is that this will result in a cultural race to the bottom, with the bottom being a homogeneous mass of cheap cultural gunk churned out by big business. The reality would seem to go a considerable way to banishing that fear, in that the new cultural reality allows, if anything, more variation. If we wish to worry about the fact that many of these microstrands of culture are not financially viable for their practitioners, that we are possibly moving into a hobbyist culture, then go ahead: that is a valid debate. However, regardless of its source, some subculture is still going to become popular (and therefore mainstream), possibly through more numerous and varied routes than before. Becoming popular is not going to invalidate any subculture or subcultural artefact, as its 'validity' will no longer be measured, or cared about. Then music journalists will be able promote the things that they like AND feel good when they go mainstream.

*although far too often this appears to involve putting ears on things.

**i.e. pre-digital native

Pedantic

I have on occasion been addressed with the epithet of pedant, I can't think why. I guess I do have a tendency to wish to correct inaccuracies where I find them, or to ensure that my communication is as unambiguous as possible (unless, of course, I am being willfully ambiguous). However, to my mind this serves a practical purpose. As I recently pointed out, I like writing code, which is as close to unambiguous as any language can ever come, and still there are many ways the language can be used to get the desired result.
Ms P and I simply cannot have a discussion about the ambiguity of human language, as she refuses see any ambiguity, whereas I see human communication to be a minefield of ambiguity. In my linguistic world you cannot ever fully understand what another person means when they use a word, as you do not have full knowledge of their understanding of that word.
Take the word 'comfort': the sensations you associate with that word are likely to be event or location specific. It may just be your bed on a cold winter day, but even so, if I've never been you in your bed on a cold day, my closest approximation of your idea of comfort is me in my bed on a cold winter day. OK, so in that instance our individual definitions are fairly comparable and we will have a decent understanding of each other if we use the word 'comfort' because there is sufficient crossover between our two experiences for the translation of sensation to lose little of consequence. For this is what human language is: a way of translating my experience into yours. This translation becomes more difficult when we start dealing with concepts that are less familiar to each of us, or even with concepts that may have broad range. If we look at the word 'few': I always take this to mean a number greater than two but not much greater*, whereas some people will take it to generally mean a number around ten or possibly even greater as indicated by the phrase "quite a few". Subsequently if I asked such a person to get me 'a few' of something, I may end up with more than I bargained for.
One of my favourite books is Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier, which is sometimes called 'The Wanderer'. However, 'meaulnes' does not mean 'wanderer'; there is no direct translation of the word in English. This could easily be dismissed as high handed French refusal to acknowledge the existence of any other language, but for the fact that such words exist in all languages, indeed entire tenses do or don't exist in other languages; entirely different concepts of linguistic time and therefore our relationship to time. So there are concepts of time that are precluded from some cultures because they are not within the structure of their language. It is clear therefore that language, any language is insufficient to fully communicate human experience, but has the ability to circumscribe it. If we cannot articulate something, how can we be said to have experienced it. This means language can have a control over how we see the world, which was very much the point Orwell was making with newspeak in 1984. The language in that book seems faintly ridiculous for its seemingly hamfisted attempt to redefine common objects or experiences, but Orwell's point is that if you'd grown up with those words, they would simply be natural to you.
There is clearly a worrying aspect to the ability of language to shape people's ideas and attitudes, especially since the language that we have has been inherited from a monotheistic patriarchal system. We are so familiar with aspects of our language that we do not even think about their origins or inferrence. We will assign gender to unknown others based on their profession and our unconscious prejudice. This is partly a fault within our language, as we have no specific gender neutral subject like the French 'on', but we can use 'they' in this context. However, as a rule, we don't. Try changing your default gender assumption next time you are aware of it and see if it impacts on your perception (or indeed anyone else's) of the conversation.
That is a little change of preconception rather than something embedded in language, so perhaps we should consider the impact of the use of the word 'Man' as in mankind. Whilst this word is simply intended to identify the whole of humanity, it is hard not to associate it with the singular noun denoting male gender (they are the same word after all). This implicit association permits the assumption of patriarchal precedence. One can argue that 'Man' means 'mankind', means all humankind, but people will still hear and associate it with 'man', meaning the singular of 'men' and (not necessarily consciously) assume man is the important part of Man. We can know this is not the case, but the language will reaffirm it with every use.
I wonder who first assigned the descriptions of political inclination that are 'right' and 'left'. One would have to assume that it was someone on the right of the political spectrum, because you've missed a trick if you're not associating your cause with all that is correct, with rectitude, with being right. It might just be me, but it seems that those on the right wing of politics take this sense on board. Left wingers (or progressives, to change the referential context) will always present their arguments as rational logical or emotional things to be understood through thought or feeling; right wingers (or conservatives) feel no need to present their argument even as an argument, it is quite simply right, by linguistic definition. If ever there was a good reason to change the political lexicon, that is one. People engaged in ideological battles are aware of the power of language: it is the reason why anti-abortion campaigners refer to themselves as 'pro life', it sounds so much more friendly. More than that, it is a linguistic attempt to close down the argument: only psychopaths are anti life, so how can you, as a rational being, not be pro life? The answer of course is that this is not telling the whole story, that there is a debate to be had about abortion, and there always will be (not necessarily by me, I'm not a woman) and that debate cannot and should not be precluded by linguistic assumption. Indeed it shows an unwillingness to engage in an argument, which is typical of extremists everywhere, for debate leads to understanding and understanding leads to compromise.
So yes, I am a pedant, I try to be careful what words I use, because the words I use define the world I live in and I want it to be a world based on rationality, not assumed precedent.

*in fact I think I have previously confessed that I traditionally interchanged 'few' and 'couple', perhaps as a result of my early contextual encounters with these words.

Piles 2

Some little while ago, I blogged about the pointlessness of the upscaling of the economic models of most large companies and the fact that they brought no discernible advantage apart from a large amount of money to a small amount of people. I can't remember if I said so at the time (I'm certainly not reading all that again), but there are circumstances where upscaling is desirable. Certain industries require large infrastructure that is best managed under one corporate structure, although many fewer than are probably reckoned. In fact many 'large' companies already undermine the argument for monopolistic structures by outsourcing many of their functions. Unfortunately, many people's experience of such arrangements is not good, as the motivation for such outsourcing is rarely anything other than a reduction in costs, which leads in many cases to a commensurate reduction in service. However, a small number of companies have led the way in genuine specialisation,  with IBM being perhaps one of the most extreme and successful examples.
There is another area where upscaling is essential: in the provision of the services that the citizens of any civilized nation expect as a prerequisite: infrastructure, social security, education and healthcare. All of these things are expensive, but fortunately are all delivered to a large enough population (usually) for the economics of scale to be such that small amounts of tax from each individual will cover the costs of delivery. Obviously this doesn't always work, as the UK pension system is discovering, but largely the principle is sound: the combined value of everyone's contribution is greater than (or roughly equal to) the total cost of maintaining the service. In the case of many of the services provided, the total amounts of money involved can be staggeringly large. Large amounts of money have a habit of attracting the sort of captains of industry who believe it is their right to take charge of such large sums of money and in recompense take a (compared to the total sum) small amount of it for themselves. This was the basis of privatisation; the excuse was that the public sector was inefficient and that the efficiency of the private sector would save money. After all, only a comparatively small amount would be taken out as profit compared to the total amount of the public budget, right? Maybe we should look at a case study.
Southern Rail is the rail franchise I have used most over the last ten years and they generally run a good service (contrary to the impression you might get from my Twitter feed), however, they are a subsidised company; as taxpayers, we pay them to run the service whether we subsequently pay them additionally to use it or not. We currently pay somewhere around £40m in subsidy for this route, up from around £20m a few years ago. This is apparently because reductions in passenger numbers were threatening GoVia's profits (GoVia is Southern's parent company). It's worth noting that profit was threatened, not eliminated, and presumably after the subsidy was increased, profits returned to normal. So just to be clear, the government are paying extra so that a private company can make a profit at a time when actual public services are being cut due to lack of money. I'm fairly certain £20m a year would pay for a decent chunk of hospital. I wouldn't really object if the subsidy was paying for a service, but it's not, it's paying dividends for shareholders, and fat bonuses for people whose egos allow them to believe they make a difference. You can't have a profit if your outgoings are greater than your income, and all rail franchises have greater outgoings than their income, so why are we paying extra just to generate profit? The prevailing logic is that, as rail transport is a public service, we should pay a dividend for its loss making, a loss premium if you will. This idea comes from the people who see the amounts of money involved and are aware that if they take a comparatively little amount out it won't make much difference. In many ways they're right as well: the subsidy for Southern Rail is less than £1 a year per head of the population (although probably closer to £2 a year per taxpayer), so we wouldn't exactly miss it if it was just taken from us and paid directly to the least deserving person. However, we might still resent it if we had to hand over £10 a year to a bunch of faceless corporations who make no discernible difference to our lives. Besides this is slightly missing the point, the reasons why we pay these small amounts of money is so that when they are all added together they can make a difference for the good of society, not line the pockets of the bolshy.
Of course the people who profit from our taxes see their remuneration as reward for making the system more efficient, to which my response would be: fine, you can take your efficiency dividend when your company makes a profit. I'm all for free market economics, but if these services can't make money in the free market, then perhaps they should be looked after by the state. If we really want to save money as a nation maybe we should make sure all privatised services are truly private and withdraw any government funding. Those that manage to survive on their own, then well done them. Those that fail can be nationalised, just like the banks. That way we can save money and be sure that we know just which services can be privatised and which need to be run by the state.
Obviously for such a model to function like 'proper' capitalism (i.e. like no market in the world truly functions) we as consumers need to have somewhere else to go for our services, otherwise there is a monopoly - something that is vehemently opposed, indeed banned in the commercial world. Quite clearly certain privatised services simply don't offer any alternative and therefore are monopolies; it can only be argued that rail franchises are not a monopoly because you can theoretically get a bus, walk or drive to your destination instead. If a service fails this other rule of free market capitalism, then it think it also fails as a privatised service.
I think that there are two exceptions to the above tests: health and education. Both services have thriving private sector versions, but not everybody can afford them. Therefore, there needs to be a state provided service for those who cannot afford to pay for these very expensive services, and the only way that can be funded is through the economies of scale generated by all of us paying a little bit. If you don't think you should be paying to ensure the health and education of your countrymen, then I fear for you as a human being.

Protein

One of the greatest challenges of modernity was always that that it afforded Man the understanding that there is no external arbiter of morality, indeed that there is no absolute right and wrong. This presents people with more problems than any of the products of modernity solve, if indeed we believe that such things solve any actual problems. As much as we may hate to admit it, we like to think our life has a 'direction', a place it is going other than the grave. Religion was always pretty helpful in that respect although in many ways a bit dumb also. I mean, what's the point in being careful with your life if it turns out it's just the appetizer for eternity. And an eternity spent doing what exactly? The classical definitions of paradise all centre around lying around doing not much but eating and drinking and maybe having sex. Whilst it all sounds very nice, I'd worry about getting bored of the endless eating, drinking and sex. Also, I think I'd struggle to stop thinking "if this was all so sinful whilst I was alive, why's it OK now?"
I digress.
Without the promise of eternal 'salvation', our lives require other sources of purpose as well as the associated moral absolutes that religion provided. Being fairly unimaginative beings, many of us have simply decided to combine our spiritual sustenance with our physical sustenance in a manner more literal than the symbolic bread and wine of communion.
I always find it odd when people say "oh I can't" when offered cake, when they are clearly perfectly able to eat cake, as if some invisible force (or unknown deity) prevents them. Perhaps stranger still is when they do accept cake, saying they'll "be naughty", as if someone is going to tell them off if they are caught eating cake. Such ideas of unhealthy eating as transgression are likely to be unhelpful, as in making something transgressive we instantly make it appear more desirable; and in most cases, it really isn't. The kind of mass produced cakes that turn up in most offices when it's someone's birthday have little objective appeal, but that doesn't dissuade us from eating too many of them. Anything with that much refined sugar in it is designated as a treat, even though eating too many will actually feel bad. So we avoid gluttony by saying "oh I shouldn't" as if it is in some way morally wrong to eat too much cake. It isn't, it is simply stupid. What we should be saying is "I won't, as from past experience I'm aware that eating too many cakes makes me bloated and uncomfortable" or "I'm choosing not to, as too much cake isn't very good for me". These are the kinds of things that sentient adults say. Sentient adults don't use terms that apply some kind of moral scale to eating habits, not because it is not possible to do so - it is easy - but because it is an irrational response. One can easily argue that gluttony is morally wrong when so many people are starving around the world, but as I have pointed out before, going to the gym to work off your excess is equally as morally dubious from that perspective. Fundamentally, the new morality is not about concepts of fairness, equality or social justice; it is about an aesthetic. The new high priests of this religion are the designers, magazine editors and bloggers of the small, odd world of fashion. However, I'm not saying we should blame these people entirely for the cult that they guide; whilst the ideals that they present are often unrealistic or entirely unreal, they do not (actively) ascribe a moral scale to the level of adherence. We have chosen to take the ideals of this world and make them our moral yardstick. As a society we are happy to see sin in the slightest show of fat on any body, but especially on the bodies of those who would otherwise be cannonised by the new religion: the celebrities who walk the moral highwire, hoping to attain some utterly impossible goal: immortality, eternal youth, endless cliche? Who knows? Who cares? Seemingly we all do, or at least we all appear to. Why else would we so readily subscribe to the fat as sin morality?
Ms P never tires of pointing out that one of the great things about being a grownup is that you can eat what you like and you don't have to clear your plate. I would add that implicit in that is the fact that you are competent in estimating your optimal food consumption and aware of the kind of dietary balance you need to maintain for a relatively healthy lifestyle, or at least are aware of the consequences if you chose to ignore these things. I guess what I'm saying is that freedom of choice only really works if you are willing to take responsibility for your actions. I guess that if we are willing to be told what to do by a diet then we are clearly not willing to accept responsibility for our actions. The Modern death of God freed us to be agents of our own fate, but diet fads and binge culture would tend to suggest that we're not mature enough to cope with that freedom. Modern life is complex and we would probably make a total mess of it if we didn't look to others for advice from time to time, but taking advice is very different from wanting compulsion.
After Adair Lord Turner's report into pensions, it was concluded that people are more likely to contribute to a pension scheme if they are compelled to do so. As a result, Auto Enrolment is currently being introduced in the hope that once forced into a pension scheme, people will not bother to leave. Whilst the intentions behind Auto Enrolment are good and the logic (that once someone realises that the contributions make little difference to their net pay, they probably won't cancel them) is sound. It's just a bit sad that we have to be forced to do this, like reluctant children. It means we feel forced and resentful and the less mature of us want to kick against that regardless of whether it is good for us or not, because compulsion is for children and we're not children dammit, so why should we be treated like children?
So if compulsion drives us instinctively to rebel, why do we  seek it out? Why do we invent compulsion where there is none? Perhaps if we invent a compulsion for our actions we can convince ourselves that we are not responsible for them. This may be of comfort if they fail, but it has the adverse effect of making them less likely to succeed.
With God dead, our best excuse for success or failure has disappeared, so it is perhaps not surprising that we diefy our diet: that way of we fail in the pursuit of our heavenly bodies, we have someone to blame.

Programaddict

I don't count myself as a professional coder, I'm not. I may write a healthy amount of SQL queries during the course of my normal working day, I might even get the occasional chance to write some pretty impressive (largely for their brevity) Unix shell scripts, but I don't spend every day at work writing code. The days when I do are the ones I like best. On those days I almost don't exist: I hover in the liminal space between conception and execution, I drift through data fields like a space tourist. This all sounds utterly pretentious, but it is the best description of the sense of freedom I feel when coding. In a world where so much discovery is precluded by the success of history, the infinite possibility of an empty command line is the greatest uncharted territory left. The satisfaction of making the world change instantly through language alone is hard to beat and it always leaves further possibilities. With code there is no end. If you genuinely enjoy programming, there will always be something new to find out. It is often problem solving, but it is more than that: people who enjoy programming will invent new problems to solve for the joy of solving them. This may sound like a waste of time or energy, but I would argue that it is a vital part of the creative process.
A friend recently pointed out his indignation at those who say that coding is not very creative. He should know, he does quite a lot of it in order to make some of the films you see look quite as spectacular as they do. I guess you could argue that Hollywood isn't that creative, but you'd be clutching at straws. Anyway, regardless of its current uses (and they are myriad) coding is as creative as the person doing the coding, much like writing or painting, but with the potential to change the world in which we live directly. As I have already said, I enjoy this creative process and I am by no means alone. I remember hearing a profile piece on Mark Zuckerberg on the radio, in which a friend said "he just really likes to code more than anything else". So it is understandable that on finding a vehicle through which to do this, he did. Never mind what you may or may not think about the outcome, Zuckerberg has got what he wanted. He'll be able to code long after his company's star has faded, and he may yet get the chance to change the world with it. However, in the interim, as I have previously pointed out, he has settled for a position within the standard corporate structure in return for the opportunity to pursue his passion. As much as we believe that the act of writing code will change the world, we are deluding ourselves unless we are willing to look at the contexts within which that process happens. We have the power to restructure society and yet almost always we leave it to the old fashioned venture capitalists and politicians to impose the same tired old structures on the systems of the future. Philosophically any change to this status quo would be hard, as the language of the tech startup is still largely the old fashioned language of venture capital, which instantly boxes anything new up as a marketable product; unique, simple and isolated. This is understandable: 'monetizing' a chunk of code in this way is a tried and tested way of earning a living and everyone needs to eat. Fortunately the world of code is awash with myriad examples of people who have subverted this system in one way or another, hence the fact that I can legitimately build a complex web platform without having to pay a penny for software. I may be encouraged to make a donation to its creators (and I will get round to it at some point, honest), I may be expected to pay for software support, but I am not expected to pay simply to use the software. I am certainly not expected to pay for the software as part of the cost of buying hardware (ahem, Microsoft). The alternatives exist, but they are not common to the mainstream, meaning that weirdly people prefer to engage in piracy of proprietary software rather than look into the 'free' alternatives. This may be for many reasons, not least because the marketing budgets that come with the levels of income generated by highly priced proprietary software backed by classical investment structures mean that a wider audience is easier to reach. I am not saying that it is all down to advertising by any means: I am a keen user of Ubuntu (a Linux operating system for those who don't know), but I wouldn't recommend everyone switch to it, I wouldn't recommend my parents try and use it. Whilst it is fairly user friendly and works in pretty much the same way as most modern operating systems, it still requires an amount of confidence with computers in general that is lacking in many people's approach. The fact that for years most computers have come pre-loaded with Windows and, by and large, it functions with little active maintenance has clearly worked in its favour; users have been able to use software with little understanding of how to. Of course the new exception is Android, which is free, open source, pre-loaded on most devices and easy to use. Seemingly, Google's rationale for doing this is twofold: making something open source gets the geeks onside and having everyone on your platform can help you nudge them towards other revenue generating services. As long as that remains a nudge, then no one minds, but Google is - financially at least - still a classically structured company with shareholders who expect an ever increasing return on their investment, so the danger of them suddenly deciding to hold their users to ransom is always present, even though it would probably be commercial suicide. It would certainly be interesting to see what would happen in such circumstances. In all likelihood, the geeks would take up the mantle of creating an android clone. In such a case, it would be interesting to see whether commercial organisations backed it, as many have a tendency to like proprietary software because it makes them feel like they have some sort of comeback. Of course it would be interesting to see how much sway any commercial customer of Microsoft or Apple has over development requests or bug fixes. I guess in the end, people in big companies like to be able to talk to other people in big companies about their software; it fits with their ideas about how business should work. Old fashioned ideas that are out of touch with the new world of technology. Hopefully, one day, the the old world of finance will catch up.
In the meantime, people like me will carry on coding just for fun.

Persistence

I was thinking about Oliver Burkeman in the shower yesterday. Not like that. Having battled my way through the January gym with all its attendant new year's resolutes, I was feeling good about myself. This wasn't anything to do with managing to get to the gym, I always manage that, largely because I know I will stand in the shower at the end and feel good. I attribute this feeling at least partly to chemistry and the endorphins that exercise floods your body with, but part of it is also a sense of certainty.
In one of his brilliant 'This Column Will Change Your Life' columns a while back Oliver Burkeman addressed the problem that people who are broadly to the left of the political spectrum tend to be less happy than those on the right. This is apparently down to certainty. If you are a bit of a lefty wooly liberal type, you tend to question the rectitude of everything you do and worry about its impact on others (cf the rest of this blog), whereas if you're a right wing chin you're certain of the rectitude of all your actions and unconcerned whether they affect other people. The result is that being heartless and uncaring makes you happier, because in order to do so, you need to be certain that you are right/justified in your actions. Obviously, I would look at it that way; perhaps if I was more right wing, I'd say that if you're a feeble whingeing loser, you are bound to be miserable and deservedly so. Either way you want to cut it, this observation brings up some interesting questions about temperament and ideology, and illustrates one of the many problems with the left as a whole: that in order to compete as a political force, it has a disproportionate amount of navel-gazing to work through as a matter of course.
On a personal level this navel-gazing also needs to be overcome to avoid crippling stagnation and/or the depression that is apparently the curse of lefty liberals everywhere. According to Burkeman (who was summarising someone else - yes this is tertiary) the key is in planning ahead, having fixed goals and definite plans. If we fix our plans, we reduce the opportunity for change and uncertainty, and therefore also doubt apparently.
At this time of year we quite often think about making changes in our lives and I find this sort of thing to generate a large amount of uncertainty, as we may have ambition to change, but whether we manage to is reliant on so many factors that it is hard to imagine a person who has sufficient blind self-confidence not to be affected by the uncertainty. In such a climate, it is nice to find anything that will introduce a little certainty. Hence why I like the gym: it is based on a simple transaction with definite outcomes.
I suppose the danger is that I comfort myself with these minor certainties to a sufficient extent to avoid facing up to the major uncertainties that I need to face in order to move my life forward. Although it is odd to think about what I mean by 'move my life forward', what does 'forward' refer to? It surely cannot mean forward in time, as everyone's life moves that way without prompting. It has some sort of goal oriented meaning requiring a specific goal: wealth, career progression, social movement; any kind of achievement of accumulation. I'm human, so sure I want to accumulate stuff, I'm just not sure what it is exactly or whether I can justify it... Oh hang on, here I go again. Clearly I need to go away and come up with a plan.
See you next year.