You missed it

It is obvious: it is possible to fool everyone all the time

Of the many measures of inflation that are around, most of which are changed often enough that it is impossible to go back more than a few years to re-base them and compare them to the past, the two of greatest interest were issued today.

CPI moved to 5.2% and RPI moved to 5.6%.  I looked out my window and could see the silver cloud hunters out in force with their binoculars.  Sure enough a few lesser-silver-clouds were spotted.  This one that is so small and so feint that it is almost impossible to find.

The silver cloud I refer to  is the observation that CPI is the basis on which pensions rises are based in April next year.  Should Mervyn King be right, there will be a rise in pensions of 5.2% just when inflation has plummeted below 4%.  Only got to hang on 6 months with the pension rise of last time at 3% while inflation is at 5.2%

But it went right past you as well.  Didn’t it?  Pension increases were based on RPI last time and that is now 5.6%.  This is the inflation measure that includes housing costs and is, of course, not needed for pensioners as they all live in holes in the ground.

It would be a real giggle if I wasn’t nearly one.

It is obvious: it is possible to fool everyone all the time – it happens…all the time

Let there be light (and heat)

It is obvious: it is simple

The banks and telecoms companies annoy me as well, but not as much as energy companies.  They all have one thing in common: they are regulated.

That being the case why don’t the regulators regulate them?  Why should I have to become an expert in energy tariffs to choose the best one?  I have enough to do that is interesting to need to fill my time with intricacies of the cost of a therm or a watt and those of its friends that I might decide to consume.  From my conversations with many friends (so not a sample size of one) they are equally annoyed.

So the answer is simple and the regulator can demand it.  The solution is one line.  Every energy company produces a graph where the x-axis is the amount of energy consumes and the y-axis is the cost per unit.  It is up to the energy company whether they put the cheapest cost that they sell it at or any other cost.  Then the consumers can look at their consumption on the bottom axis, find where the line is above it, then go across to see the cost.

The nice thing about a line is that if the energy company puts any step functions into their tariffs it will show on the graph.  So you will see that if you use 1,000 units of power the cost is X per unit but if you use 1001 the cost will be 2X per unit.  The traps are revealed.

It could be extended so that the energy company must show two lines.  One for the cheapest cost and one for the most expensive cost.  This is a name-and-shame exercise which will show those companies trying to lure people into paying more than they need to.

This will put energy bills up for some people.  This is because those who are on the cheapest tariff are being subsidised by those who are needlessly on higher tariffs.  However a lot of people will get cheaper energy.  The biggest losers will be shareholders of energy companies and directors of energy companies.

What does this do to the market?  The energy guy on tv yesterday said that they all buy energy from the same global marketplace therefore their costs and consequently prices will naturally move in concert.  That being the case the only way the companies will be able to compete will be on price and that competition will be based on the efficiency of their operation and other things like customer service.

If these graphs are produced the marketing departments will shrink.  The graphs will go from very jagged lines of varying shapes to flat ones that slope very gently downwards towards the higher end of consumption.

Why doesn’t OffGen demand it?  I can think of only one reason.

Perhaps I can do it and publish it?

It is obvious: it is simple.  So why didn’t I think of it?

What is this ITEM?

It is obvious:  Trust me.

The ITEM club today revised its estimate for 2011 for UK GDP.  This is important as it uses the same statistical model as the Treasury.

It is the middle of October and they have moved their forecast from 1.4% to 0.9%.  This now brings them approximately in line with what most of the independent forecasters have been saying all year.  I have to think that nine and half months into the twelve of the year does not really qualify this number as a ‘forecast’.  At this late stage they have admitted an error in their forecast of over a third.

It also provides an important possible modification of my number rule.  Double or halve the numbers if they are bad or good.  However if the forecast is close to the point where it ceases to be a forecast then the increase or reduction should be less severe.  So for this number perhaps it should be reduced by only 20%.  This means a final figure of 0.7%.

Given that the Treasury use the same model there are two things that bother me.  First that they can be so wrong all the time and therefore are planning on the basis of innacurate data or a poor model.  Second that they come up with different numbers.  This is an admission that these things are so imprecise it is easy to put an interpretation on it that suits your ends.  Some po-faced civil servant on tv can easily defend the numbers under the pathetic questioning of the media.

It is obvious:  Trust me.  No, it really is.

Armageddon

It is obvious: we are all doomed

I was asked by a friend if I thought that Armageddon was coming.  Obviously he thought that with my bright and cheery blog I would have an optimistic view on things.

There are a number of things that worry me, and probably shouldn’t.  For example we are going to run out of oil.  I cannot find consensus on when.  My impression is that it will be sooner than is convenient for us.  The way I think it will effect is that it will act as a governor, going up in price and damping economic activity as economic activity picks up.  With luck it will move the point to where it is in seriously short supply beyond the point where I care.

His interest, though, was in the current state of world economies.  My quick answer was that the likely course of events will be a slow grind down to a much different lifestyle.  I chose my words carefully because being poorer and not having so many luxuries does not mean a worse life.

I would add to that thought.  There will be steps down in the long, shallow, downward slope.  To the people around at the time it will seem like Armageddon except to those who are prepared.

There is another thought I have to add.  As low as they are, the chances of Armageddon happening are increasing.  I am not encouraged by the actions of those in charge.  Indeed I wonder if they are actually in charge.  If you look at the hair of a Tony Blair or an Obama, they start off brown/black and are grey within a couple of years.  I’m convinced this is because they are told a lot of stuff that is pretty dire when they take over.  I also think they have to lie about the true state of affairs because the consequences of everyone knowing the truth are also dire.  Can you imagine Merkel/Sarkozy/Cameron/Obama/King saying on tv: I’m off.  Can’t see any way out of this mess.  Got a decent pension and I’ve built myself a nice little compound up in the hills.  Bye.

So, everything is going to be OK-ish.

It is obvious: we are all doomed – the sun is going to run out of fuel

I want to lose some weight

It is obvious: you can make this up

I have written about losing weight here.  If you have three negative factors your doctor will take an interest.  Two or less and he is not interested – you are not in a risk category.  My BMI was 25.1 when I started thinking about weight.  This is just into overweight, and is one of the risk factors.  I got it down to 23.2 and really want to go a little lower.  It is above that at the moment.  That took me out of the at-risk group.

The normal BMI is 18.5 to 24.99999.  At 18.5 I’d look like a person from a Lowry painting…who wasn’t well.  At 24+ I would oscillate into overweight lots.  So something between 21 and 23 is my target.  My wife told me that at my current weight I look too thin.  She just wants the insurance.

My target is to eat a little below 2,500 calories every day and on most days tack on another 800 calories of burn  through exercise.  At weekends I might eat more than 2,500 each day.  When I’m doing it that comes out at about a pound a week, 3,500 calories being a pound of fat.  The problem is that I hit plateaus where I seem unable to get below a certain level for quite extended periods of time…and I buy wine.  That 2,500 figure is only a rule-of-thumb produced by the government.  I sit at a desk so it is likely generous for me.  For a gardener it would  be nowhere near enough.

In the car I heard on the radio that there were new figures for daily calorie intake being produced by government sponsored research.  So many of us are overweight, the government is putting effort into persuading us to lose some weight.  I waited for the number for men: 2,605.

This was another of those swerve into the ditch moments.  You are trying to persuade a lot of the population to lose weight so you give them a target that is higher than the old one!  I can see a lot of people today saying “I’ll have an extra biscuit at break because the government have said I can eat more and not get fat.”

Had I come up with 2,605 after my research I would have fudged it and publicised 2,495 and said that the old figure was just about right and we were more confident in the new one.  I would have said anything…except to increase it.

It is obvious: you can make this up, but you don’t have to, people are doing it all the time for real

The seven P’s

It is obvious: preparation is required for all human endeavour

I go to the gym.  I used to run but my joints are not up to it anymore at the level of exercise I want to have.  My interest is in fitness and weight control with low impact exercise.  There is a lot of evidence that weight lifting combined with aerobic exercise is a good way to burn fat.  The gym does that for me.

The gym costs £6:50 a session but I joined (eventually) and pay £28 a month – being old helps.  I often manage 20 sessions a month, though not in the summer, and always more than 5.  I have been going for many years and used to take my boys a lot.  They would go down to the pump-room to lift proper weights for the American Football training and I would pound the rower and cross-trainer in the gym.  Do it on my own now and always ‘waste’ myself.  There seems little point going in there, as I see many do, and power walking on a running machine for 20 minutes.  You can do that in the sunshine.

I always take a jumper or towel and wipe down equipment after I have been on it.  Twenty minutes on the rower leaves me covered in sweat.  So when I sit on the weight machines I often sit on my jumper and use it to wipe down the hand grips and back rest.

A few weeks ago I missed a great opportunity.  I will describe it as it should have been.  As I was leaving the gym one of the instructors came up to me and asked if I had a good session as he could see I was covered in sweat.  I was a little surprised as they are an idle bunch and just sit at the entry desk doing…nothing…and said that I had.  He said in that case I should wipe down the equipment after I had used it.  For a moment I was speechless.  Then I decided to push back.  I said that I always did and what was he on about.  He replied that he had just had to wipe down a particular piece of equipment after me.  I had done only a cursory wipe of that piece as another bit that is difficult to get on to had come free and I wanted to grab it.  I started that explanation and had immediately lost that negotiation…for that was what it was.

The response should have been:  OK.  What other bits of equipment had I failed to wipe down to his satisfaction?  There were no others, but even if he had mentioned another I would have said OK, give me another occasion I have failed to meet your standard?  There is no need to answer the point.  It is not conceding it to ask for the full list.  You can return to the specific when you have collected them all.

In this situation there is seldom a second example and never a third.  If you end up in a courtroom the opposing lawyer will do this to you.  You will always need at least 5 examples and 10 would be better.  Your lawyer will step in long before it gets that far.

Then I could have said to the instructor: I’ve been coming here for 8 years and this is the first time anyone has said anything to me.  Why did you mention it this time?  Where are the instructions for wiping down?  Are you applying it to everyone – I see lots of people get off equipment and not wipe it.  Over a thousand gym sessions and you mention it now?

So it is with politicians.  It would be so easy and so entertaining.  The next time Mr Balls or Mr Miliband says that we must switch to plan B and go for growth the interviewer has two lines of attack.  And how much growth should we be going for?  Is it 0.5%?  Is it 1%?  Is it 2%?  No number will be forthcoming but then there is a golden opportunity to roll out the rule of 70.  That is not the end of it.  They could then be asked: how will this policy (whatever it is) create growth?  I doubt there will be an answer.  If there is then ask: in what other ways will this create growth?  A politician can be properly nailed to something specific or exposed as being ill prepared and spouting hot air as opposed to something useful.

Indeed this should not be reserved for easy targets like Balls and Miliband.  To mis-quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning: How do I question thee? Let me count the ways.  Every politician can be so nailed.  A bit of forced honesty in politics would not come amiss.

It is obvious: preparation is required for all human endeavour – it is never difficult and it puts you a long way ahead of everyone around you.

Do I pay for this?

It is obvious: the future path of our economy is going to cause a lot of pain for a lot of people

Parliament has started up so PMQ’s ought to be a day full of things for me to write about…and it was.

Maintaining anonymity I saw Andrew Neil interviewing a Conservative MP.  It went something like this:

Well (sic) you are going to borrow half a trillion so you can’t talk.

We are reducing the rate of increase.

But you can’t talk about debt because you are going to borrow half a trillion.

We are reducing the increase so that in 2014 we will be in surplus and can start to reduce the debt.

But you are going to borrow half a trillion.

It is a structural deficit we can’t cut it to zero overnight.

But you are going to borrow half a trillion

At this point the MP gave up and wanted to let the Labour guy have a go talking to an obvious loony so he said: but we are not going to increase the rate of borrowing like Labour are.

Andrew Neil switched targets.

That conversation rattled down to the Labour guy saying that they were going to tax the bankers to pay for employment for all the young people.

At that point I had to go back to the broom cupboard.

The Conservative said the right thing but did not dumb it down enough.  I have an analogy to help him out for the future.  The Labour party got us all on a train moving at high-speed.  When we came out of the fog of the election everyone could see buffers up ahead.  The Conservatives (coalition really) decided to put the brakes on and try to stop before the buffers.  Stopping a huge train on a sixpence is just not possible.  The Labour party are proposing to throw more coal into the firebox, build up a bit of speed and hope someone will build more track and move the buffers before the train gets there.

Frankly it is not a matter of whether there will be a train crash or not, it is just about how big it will be.

The idea of taxing banks/bankers to create jobs for young people is a bizarre concept.  They will not be creating jobs.  What they will be doing is taking people off one type of dole and putting them on another.  They want to replace the people being taken off the government payroll by a bunch of younger people.  I don’t see how that helps at all.

There is a very small chance that the Conservatives will pull us through and there is no chance whatsoever that Labour will.  My problem is that we may well get the chance to see what Labour can do.  It will be bad enough adding another half trillion to the debt before we can start to pay it off, however doubling it, as Labour propose, will put us firmly into the debt default cycle without the enemy: significant growth.  Why they think that spending money will grow the economy I do not know.

Then I heard bites from PMQ’s.  Mr Milliband did not disappoint.  He said that the cuts were putting people out of work, reducing the tax take and increasing benefits.  This is simply wrong in important detail.  You have a civil servant on £30,000 a year (say).  A rule of thumb is that it costs £30,000 to employ him.  So the government puts out £60,000 and gets back about £25,000 in tax.  On benefits it won’t even cost £12,000 for that person…£5,000 of which will come back in taxes.  Not as efficient as it might be and a disaster for that individual but the more you can do the better things will be.  Every lost government job saves about £28,000 on a £30,00 salary.  It does not matter that private jobs are lost as they were only paid for by that original government expenditure it just goes through a civil servant first.

If they can pull it off, and they won’t, the Conservatives will have an interest bill in 2014 of £30bn…£2,500 million each month.  Labour would have us footing £8,000 million each month.  That is a very high body count.

My point?  A lot of information comes at us that is simply wrong and at best misleading.  We rely on the purveyors of this information to give us truth and the media to assure it is so.  They don’t.

It is obvious: the future path of our economy is going to cause a lot of pain for a lot of people – we all have to work hard to reduce our own pain and make sure that it is terminal for as few other people as possible.

I still don’t have a job

It is obvious: this is not logic

When this child grows up he will be a member of the criminal classes, it says in my school report.  How wrong was she?  Miss Norah Gibson.  Says it all.  She went some time ago.  It is only now that I realise that she was off-the-wall.  Probably as much as me.  We clashed and I hated her with a vengeance – likes oppose.

I watched the bin-men this morning.  How much time have I on my hands?  Not a job I could do for many reasons.  A commentary on me not them.  What is there to being a bin-man?  How long does it take to learn?  There was a uniform disdain for their jobs shown in the way that they tossed bins around and left them, with a nice judgement, in the place that was just acceptable for the absolute minimum of effort.  Indeed there was a skill in their minimalisation of effort.  Show your contempt enough that you don’t get any retribution and are done with the job as soon as possible for as little as possible.  I might not be happy with the treatment of my bin but I can understand it.

When you are applying for a job how much difference in value is there for 23 years emptying bins or 2?  Is it 23 years of experience or one week of experience repeated 1,196 times?  I sit at home doing…stuff.  Out there are people who are competing with me for a job though they don’t know it who are gaining experience every day.  I can’t work last Monday to catch up.  It has gone.  So the gap between me and competitors widens inexorably.  Unless of course they are just doing the same thing over and over.

There are plenty of examples of this elsewhere.  If a hotel had nobody in a bed last night they cannot ever sell that night.  It has gone.  Revenue lost for ever.  Same for a seat on a train or bus.  A lot of things have a very short shelf life.  Alas, this includes 61-year-old software engineers.  My partner and I often considered ourselves busy fools: too busy making money to stop and make real money.  I don’t have that problem now.

So it is that I am sitting around with lots of time to think and come up with ideas.  Some of these ideas are even legal.  I have a nice plan to yank cash machines out of walls.  I need to wait for rolling power cuts for it to work.

But I have a conscience and anyway I wouldn’t do anything illegal unless the rewards were huge.  I can’t mug a pensioner and run off to Brazil to live on the proceeds for the rest of my life.  So I am thinking.  It is ‘out-the-box’.  It is ‘off-the-wall’.  Who said that buying something for 50p and selling for a pound is any less criminal than mugging a pensioner.  Dammit I mustn’t put ideas in people’s heads – I’m all but one of those myself.

There are a lot of people who are having more and more time to sit and think.  A lot of them are young with no qualifications and no experience.  However they are innovative, they have little to risk losing and they have brains that make Einstein look a bit slow…at least some of them do.  Many of them are bright enough to out-think the police, social services, the job-centre and the legislators.

Perhaps my route to an idle retirement is to start some enterprise that I can lure these people into and then live off the backs of their hard work.  Damn!  The bankers got there before me.  Have to think of another idea.

It is obvious: this is not logic – its my blog I’ll damn well write what I please.

Pay attention at the back…still

It is obvious: important events are happening

The US Senate has just passed a bill that will impose tariffs on Chinese imports.  The bill’s fate is uncertain – it may not make it all the way into enactment.  That it has got this far is a perception by voters and lobbyists that the Chinese currency is being kept low thus giving Chinese exporters an unfair advantage and ultimately costing US jobs.

It is a complex situation.  For example Chinese workers are paid a lot less than US workers and in any ‘fair’ fight will put US workers on the dole.  The Chinese have funded the import of their goods into the US by holding a lot of US debt.  If the Chinese currency is devalued might it be a good time to convert their dollars to Yuan?  The US dollar would soon devalue if someone came to the market with a trillion to sell.  Just the threat and the sale of $50bn would probably be enough.

However that little (sic) local difficulty is not the whole story.  Protectionism is almost as big a fear as the coming bank collapses.  There is a good model from the 1930’s of what happens when trade is tariffed out of existence.

(Have you noticed that you can make up words and people accept them.  There is a lot of turning nouns into verbs.  If the meaning is received why not do it?  There is a long debate.  Stephen Fry would nail it in a sentence so I’ll leave it to him and continue to verbify nouns…)

How much value should I put on this bit of news?  It is possibly a strong indicator of a very large problem that will affect all our lives as other countries start doing the same.  It is also possibly something that governments will in general see as having few benefits and many downsides.

I hear a lot of shouting that it is important we stay in Europe.  I think they mean the EU.  I have had that debate on this blog.  However as it is our biggest trading partner but export much more to us than we do to it. I’m sure that they will find a way to deal with us in or out the EU.

My interest was awoken today.  It was the first I heard of this bill when trawling someone’s blog.  This lead me to the BBC site where it was mentioned.  However it was a long way off being a headline.  Clearly someone at the BBC made the decision for me that there was little importance in it.  If I find out who it is I’ll send them my priority list of interests.

It is obvious: important events are happening that I never even know about

How wrong am I (2,893)

It is obvious: there is something slower than a snail

I have a small number of sayings.  I think they are mine though I’ll bet that someone has written them before me, even if I’ve never read them.  They are not as good as those of my dad that I published a while ago.  One of them is: nothing changes until someone suffers pain.

In any endeavour (and for me it is mostly writing software) you hope that everyone is trying to create the system that meets the requirement (if a requirement actually exists).  However everyone will have a different view of the requirement and a very different view on how to meet it.  This comes out in interfaces.  Here there are titanic battles and even when it is to their advantage people will not change.  Pain has to be brought to bear to get people to do something you want them to do.

So it is with just about anything.  Until pain is applied why is there any reason to change what you are doing.  Noise from someone suffering is merely a distraction.  If they poke you with a sharp stick as well as moan, then you might do something.

At the moment, despite borrowing lots of money with no plans to pay it back other than relying on the great enemy, growth, nobody is suffering.  OK a few distant foreigners don’t have jobs.  A few people in this country also.  However mostly we do have jobs and the state does provide some help.  Nobody died out there…not many anyway.   All we have is people like me warning of doom.

So we have it that the plans to save us all from economic catastrophe are 3 weeks away – Merkel and Sarkozy are not ready yet.  The EU ministers have delayed their meeting a week.  Greece is being given another £9bn that will never be seen again despite not meeting the conditions for getting it, thus delaying a default by a month.  Slovakia has delayed the ratification of the EFSF expansion and the agreement for a 20% Greek default on its debt.  This plan was drawn up on 21st July.  It is likely to be 3 months in the ratification.  Indeed this is prompt and decisive action, so much so that the £440bn EFSF is now recognised at too small and needs to be £2tn.  Everyone agrees that the Greek default needs to be 50% and 20% is too small.  (Did you notice that I said ‘everyone’ agrees…I’m sure my cat doesn’t for one – there may be others.)

Such is democracy.  Slovakia holds the power over the EU at the moment.  Of course we will ratify.  How much EU money is coming our way?  Whatever figure is proposed they will want it doubled – I would.  Then of course when the new agreement with bigger numbers is proposed Slovakia will be last to ratify and make some more demands.  Except if I was, say, Malta I think that the scheduling of the ratification vote would be unavoidably delayed until after Slovakia.  Getting wind of that Slovakia might then have another longer and unavoidable delay.

I had thought the fate of the EU might rest in the hands of a few voters in Greece.  It is still a small number but the country was wrong.

It is obvious: there is something slower than a snail…it is just about anything that needs to be fast in politics