I have a share. It's in Rio Tinto. I didn't mean to buy it, it was all sorted for me as some sort of protest. But for years they kept sending me little notes saying that wanted to give me my dividend, which was frequently 7p and would have required me to cash a cheque in order to benefit. I like to think I cost them a lot in postage, anyway.
They gave up in the end, but I assume I still a Rio Tinto shareholder. Does this make me a capitalist?
Tuesday 21 September 2010
Query
I'm not very good at asking questions. Rubbish, in fact. This doesn't mean I don't question things, probably more that I don't question small things. It might be part of my inability to master small talk. I am more interested in the fact that you had a good weekend than I am in the details. Unless they're interesting details. And I doubt very much the details are going to become more interesting if I cross examine you. You'd probably have mentioned if you'd found out that your toddler was a werebadger, or if the Montgolfier brothers accidentally sailed their balloon through a rift in time and across your front room while you were watching Spooks.
All in all this is a slightly worrying proposition for a writer. Aren't I supposed to be interested in everything?
Even worse, it means I will never get a job anywhere where they expect you to ask an interesting question. I'm too terrified of asking something and getting the reply "I think you'll find that's in the information we sent you". It's not going to happen, unless I develop a list of special catch all questions that are very unlikely to be in the supporting documentation:
* do you have any giraffes working here?
* what is your average room temperature at 4pm?
* do you have the same number of Tuesdays as [fill in rival organisation name here]?
* when was the last time you decorated the office?
* if you added together all the salaries of the people working here, how many square feet of the moon could you buy?
That should do it.
All in all this is a slightly worrying proposition for a writer. Aren't I supposed to be interested in everything?
Even worse, it means I will never get a job anywhere where they expect you to ask an interesting question. I'm too terrified of asking something and getting the reply "I think you'll find that's in the information we sent you". It's not going to happen, unless I develop a list of special catch all questions that are very unlikely to be in the supporting documentation:
* do you have any giraffes working here?
* what is your average room temperature at 4pm?
* do you have the same number of Tuesdays as [fill in rival organisation name here]?
* when was the last time you decorated the office?
* if you added together all the salaries of the people working here, how many square feet of the moon could you buy?
That should do it.
Note
Because I sometimes just have to have a massive rant about something and it tends to distort this little(tardy) word project, I now have a sister blog for no-one to read called Speedy Rants, because he frequently does.
Tuesday 14 September 2010
Sending
Everything is sending me mad at the moment.
As this HR Review article points out, a right-wing think tank thinks trade unions are "more powerful than ever".
Given that Labour didn't repeal any of Thatcher and Major's anti-union laws, this takes some stomaching. But hilarious they justify this on the basis of unions being anti-democratic. Their argument is that only 31% of the UNITE membership of the recent strikes voted for action.
They are pushing for the assumption that if you don't vote you don't want to strike. But since strikes cost staff money, if you didn't want one surely you'd make more of an effort to oppose it?
But since the general election turn out was 65% and the Tories got 36% of that, if 31% isn't enough for a strike, when did 24.5% become enough to fuck up the country?
Tale
It's quite alarming at times how the "narrative" of what's happening starts to get in the way of, say, the truth, or reality. Lots of people have commented before how press stories rely on articles that contribute to an expected pattern - the latest stage in some minor or major story that makes sense to the reader and does not jar them out of their torpid acceptance of what's told them.
But hilariously, the public sometimes make these things up for themselves.
Having watched with an inchoate horror as poll after poll affirmed that the British people were firmly behind Dave and George's deficit slashing mania (despite the lack of economic backing for it), I am entertained to find a poll in the fire-walled Times today suggests that 49% of the public think the deficit is Dave and George's fault.
Normally I'd be outraged by such a gross misrepresentation of the truth. But this time it's just making me laugh. For a start The Conservative members of the coalition have repeatedly talked down the economy, using the admittedly scary numbers involved in deficit calculations to terrify the voters into accepting their harsh medicine. Most of these statements have been reprehensible lies: continuous comparisons to Greece, for example, when most actual economists agree we have almost nothing in common with them. Talking down an economy is a very dangerous game to play, and when it's based on lies and deceit is pretty despicable. So the deficit might not be their fault, but they're playing fast and loose with it for their own agenda. Secondly, they've not stinted in their efforts to portray the debt as Brown and Labour's fault, despite the fact that Governments always emerge from recessions with big deficits (Thatcher and Major both did) and that this particular recession is widely believed to have been the worst since the Depression (so quite logical to expect a Big Debt). Given there's a considerable body of expert opinion (Nobel laureate Paul Kruger, for example) who believe that the Brown-led fiscal stimulus packages around the world saved us from another actual Depression, just smacking Gordo over the head and screeching "your fault!" is such a one-sided argument that it doesn't exist in the other two dimensions.
Blaming previous Governments for things is par for the course. The interesting thing is that the Coalition have sought to justify almost everything they have chosen to do in the name of opposing what Labour did. They don't have any kind of vision of for the country, or at least not one they actually dare tell us about.
Therefore it's kind of funny that the thing they are most trying to pin on Labour is now being blamed on them, even though they - by definition of "opposition" - had very little to do with it.
The most encouraging thing, however, having got used to the flow of 'narratives' is that the poll shows the public reading a different tale the one recently promoted. So they blame not the gold-plated public sector pensions and welfare layabouts as promoted by the Daily Mail, or the Labour politicians as suggested by the Tories. 74% of them are blaming the banks.
For once, at least, the narrative tale read by the public is a true story.
But hilariously, the public sometimes make these things up for themselves.
Having watched with an inchoate horror as poll after poll affirmed that the British people were firmly behind Dave and George's deficit slashing mania (despite the lack of economic backing for it), I am entertained to find a poll in the fire-walled Times today suggests that 49% of the public think the deficit is Dave and George's fault.
Normally I'd be outraged by such a gross misrepresentation of the truth. But this time it's just making me laugh. For a start The Conservative members of the coalition have repeatedly talked down the economy, using the admittedly scary numbers involved in deficit calculations to terrify the voters into accepting their harsh medicine. Most of these statements have been reprehensible lies: continuous comparisons to Greece, for example, when most actual economists agree we have almost nothing in common with them. Talking down an economy is a very dangerous game to play, and when it's based on lies and deceit is pretty despicable. So the deficit might not be their fault, but they're playing fast and loose with it for their own agenda. Secondly, they've not stinted in their efforts to portray the debt as Brown and Labour's fault, despite the fact that Governments always emerge from recessions with big deficits (Thatcher and Major both did) and that this particular recession is widely believed to have been the worst since the Depression (so quite logical to expect a Big Debt). Given there's a considerable body of expert opinion (Nobel laureate Paul Kruger, for example) who believe that the Brown-led fiscal stimulus packages around the world saved us from another actual Depression, just smacking Gordo over the head and screeching "your fault!" is such a one-sided argument that it doesn't exist in the other two dimensions.
Blaming previous Governments for things is par for the course. The interesting thing is that the Coalition have sought to justify almost everything they have chosen to do in the name of opposing what Labour did. They don't have any kind of vision of for the country, or at least not one they actually dare tell us about.
Therefore it's kind of funny that the thing they are most trying to pin on Labour is now being blamed on them, even though they - by definition of "opposition" - had very little to do with it.
The most encouraging thing, however, having got used to the flow of 'narratives' is that the poll shows the public reading a different tale the one recently promoted. So they blame not the gold-plated public sector pensions and welfare layabouts as promoted by the Daily Mail, or the Labour politicians as suggested by the Tories. 74% of them are blaming the banks.
For once, at least, the narrative tale read by the public is a true story.
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