Hares and tortoises

I’ve changed my mind about tax. When I heard that Amazon, Starbucks and others were paying minimal tax, my knee-jerk response was to dump Amazon and do my Christmas shopping elsewhere. I couldn’t dump Starbucks because I prefer Costa and Nero.
The Christmas presents arrived, but not quite as quickly, or as well-packaged as Amazon do. So why was I punishing Amazon for being cleverer? The Government doesn’t do what it does as well as Amazon does retail
The successful international companies operate above individual governments.
Starbucks and Amazon show what can be achieved by looking at the global picture rather than saying: in England we work this way, in France cette mode and so on.
Successful companies constantly review how they do what they do. If they stand still, some bright spark in Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai or Shanghai will disrupt their market faster than a speeding bullet.
Governments are concerned only with their country, their voters and are hamstrung by special interest groups who threaten to vote for the other lot if anything changes. We in Britain are the best example of this. Join forces with Europe? Not likely. Improve the way we run the Health Service, the BBC, our local councils? Heaven forbid.
If politicians want international companies to pay more tax, they must become cleverer.
Simplify the tax system. Look at how the world works, not simply how we in Britain work.
Work out how to attract international companies and see the benefit of having them here in terms of jobs and business, not just tax.
Europe has more success with international companies than we do because it is more beneficial for a company to deal with Europe than with individual governments.
Whipping up anger about international companies not paying tax doesn’t achieve anything. Working out how to keep pace with the cleverest companies in the world would.

Driving skill

London has great public transport. Trains, tubes, buses get millions of people where they want to go every day.
On Boxing Day we saw the best and worst of this.
The worst were the ASLEF train drivers who went on strike because the generous wages they get are not enough to get them out of bed on a bank holiday.
The best were the bus drivers who packed in as many of us as possible and got us to and from our sales, our football matches and our tourist sites.
Driving a Tube train is easy - so easy it can be automated. Driverless trains are operating now and will be the norm in a few years.
Driving a bus is difficult. You share the road with car drivers who don’t know which lane to be in, cyclists who wear black at night and come up the inside and pedestrians who get drunk and wander into the road.
The men and women who drive buses are, like the people who drive big trucks, skillful, calm and courteous. They are better drivers than the rest of us.
The Association of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen are not engineers or firemen. They are the skills we needed when steam trains ran. We don’t need those skills today.
Nor do we need the union belief of the 1970s that going on strike forces employers to pay higher wages.
It should be clear by now to even the locomotive engineers and firemen that going on strike forces employers to work out how to use technology to replace you.

Pots and kettles

I see the payday lenders are being criticised for letting people take out loan after loan when it is clear they cannot pay the money back.
Isn’t this what every Western government has been doing for years?

Why don't my e-books play video?

I read books on screen. It is convenient, simple and cheap.
But why are e-books not designed?
If I buy a book in a bookshop, it will have a particular typeface and chapter headings.
If there are pictures, they will appear at the relevant point in the narrative and they will probably fill a page.
If I read the same book on my Kindle, the typeface is in one of the Kindle’s standard typefaces, as are the chapter headings. And the pictures, if they appear at all, will appear as tiny images, sometimes all together the end of the book.
Why don’t publishers take advantage of the new medium and use video instead of the static pictures in a physical book? Why no sounds files in my Leiber and Stoller biography?
Why is the index not displayed as clickable links to take me to the relevant page?
Is it that publishers see e-books as an annoyance, something cheap and tawdry which is eating into their traditional business?
They would do better to see them as an opportunity.
If video and sound would make a book too large to download in a reasonable time, why not store the video and sound files in a cloud and give people who buy the book at the publisher’s price, or with the publisher’s app, access to them.
I want to hear Riot in cell block #9 when I read my Leiber and Stoller autobiography.
I want to see Bobby Charlton scoring when I read The footballer who could fly.
I want to see Eddy Merckx flying up mountains when I read Half man half bike.
Come on publishers, bring books up to date.

Seeing through the Windows

Windows 8 is interesting. It moves away from the traditional Windows Start menu and into the world of clickable icons.
For decades Microsoft have made millions because the world has been compatible with Windows.
Most companies use Windows, so most commercial software is created to run on Windows.
Windows is on most of the computers we buy to use at home, so most of the software written for people at home has been created to run on Windows.
And most of the printers, scanners, cameras and other devices we buy come with software created to run on Windows.
The world works on Windows.
Or it did until Steve Jobs showed non-geeks how to download music and Google’s Android made millions of phones cool.
Now people are as happy to touch apps as they are to start a program from a menu. The Windows spell has been broken.
I bet there are more programmers writing software for iPads and Androids than there are writing code to work on Windows PCs.
Windows 8 shows Microsoft have accepted this. Why is it taking so long for the people who make printers and other peripheral bits of kit to provide an app as well as a Windows CD for people to set them up and use them?

Why go from A to B to C when A is all we need?

The Independent had an interesting story this morning under the headline:
The scientists who turned fresh air into petrol
A bunch called Air Fuel Synthesis up in Stockton does this alchemy by:

a. producing hydrogen from water and air by electrical hydrolysis

b. grabbing carbon dioxide from the air and combining it with the hydrogen to produce methanol

c. using the methanol to produce petrol for cars and aviation fuel for planes

The new bit is b. a and c have been done commercially for some time.
But grabbing the carbon dioxide is tricky, inefficient and expensive. Air Fuel Synthesis have produced five litres of petrol in two months. They hope to make this operation more efficient and cheaper, but that could take several years.
Why bother? We can power vehicles using hydrogen now. London has a fleet of hydrogen-powered buses and Honda have a fuel-cell car which works a treat and is waiting only for a few hydrogen pumps to appear alongside the unleaded ones at your local filling station.
Why spend years developing refineries to turn hydrogen into petrol to feed our present gas-guzzlers when all we need is a few new tanks and tankers?
It is suggested that capturing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will slow global warming. Not if we put it straight back into the atmosphere by driving to Tesco.
I know everybody hates change, but it is surely less of a change to put liquid hydrogen into your car from a pump and drive off than it is to plug an electric car into a socket, wait eight hours and then drive off.

On cormorants and humans

I read that anglers want cormorants to be killed to stop them eating all the fish.
Fish are food for cormorants. They are sport for anglers.
In the animal world, big eats small. Strong kills weak.
In the human world, we are supposed to be more civilised. Big and strong are not supposed to kill small and weak - not unless you are a member of a government, or a bunch of religious fanatics.
Cormorants are fantastic hard-working, team-building birds.
If anglers run out of fish, they could take up golf or running or any one of a dozen of other sports which would take them out of the house and into the countryside and wouldn’t involve impaling anything with barbed hooks.
The anglers are just like the farmers who want to kill badgers to reduce the risk of their cattle getting diseased. We think we have the right to kill animals which threaten the animals in which we have an interest.
I'm a veggie. I don't want to kill any of them. I know they kill each other. I think we ought to know better.

Witch watch

Every time I read a newspaper, or hear the news on radio or TV, someone or some organisation is being pilloried.
This clearly should be documented, otherwise the flood of tutting this week will make us forget the dreadful goings-on we tutted about last week.
To this end, I am starting Witch Watch. This will attempt to identify every witch who is identified and sent to the bonfire.

Update Nov 12 2012: The witchfinder mob turned on the BBC because it pulled a Newsnight programme about Jimmy Savile and child abuse. Now it’s turning on the BBC because it didn’t pull a Newsnight programme about child abuse on Wales.Businesses have risk committees to ensure they don’t go off the financial rails. It is clear they now need witch committees to work out what to do when the mob turns up at the plate glass entrance with flaming torches.George Entwhistle wasn’t a bad director general. He didn’t have time to establish whether he was bad or good. He simply didn’t have a witch committee with a plan.


Update later in Oct 2012: The mob howling for blood were told Jimmy Savile was dead, so they tried to burn down the BBC instead, on the grounds that Savile appeared on BBC television. For the only sane voice in all this frenzy of righteousness, read Simon Jenkins in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/jimmy-savile-witch-hunt-paranoia

Update Oct 2012: Jimmy Savile is a posthumous witch. Everyone in the pop business was chatting up schoolgirls in the 1960s. 

Update Aug 21: Clearly witchfinders go on holiday in August. Isn't it nice.

Update July 19: Nick Buckles of G4S is the new pariah. He screwed up the Olympic security contract, therefore G4S must be totally incompetent and should have all other contracts cancelled. 
The Olympics will be fine. Security will work fine. And in a week or so, another witch will be found and we will forget all about Mr Buckles.

To start it off, I nominate the dudes of Barclays Bank as today's witches. 

Watch this witch space.

A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound

The people who are insisting that governments should stop being austere and start growing their economies must still believe that governments have some control over economics. 
It is clear from the endless summits and agreements that they don't.
Their solutions all depend on someone coming up with large sums of money, whether it is to bail out banks, or countries, or to pay for jobs which don't need to be done.
Economics is controlled by those who make a buck out of it. ‪And crises are great for them.

In England's green and pleasant land

The most ridiculous image of a the Jubilee weekend was a bunch of elegantly-attired singers standing on a boat in the pouring rain singing Jerusalem to the Queen,  standing with her family, in full Ruritarian fig, on another boat. Monty Python could not have done it better.

What use is my personal data if only I know it?

The European Union is complaining about Google again. Old world says the new world doesn’t play by its rules, again.
In the old world, companies provided services and charged for those services. We needed to be protected from fly-by-night companies who took our money but didn’t provide the advertised services.
In the new world, companies provide services for free. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Grooveshark let us e-mail, write, calculate, store and display our pictures, read the news, socialise, rant, or play music without paying a penny.
We don’t need to be protected because if the service doesn’t work as advertised, we can drop it. No three months notice, no stopping standing orders. Just quit.
How do these companies do it? How do they get the money to pay their brilliant staff and the investors who bought their server farms?
They do it, very cleverly, by allowing people who sell things to advertise to the people who want those things.
This is significant improvement in the advertising business. In the old world, the people selling cars put adverts in newspapers, on TV and on huge billboards beside busy roads. Most of the people reading newspapers, watching TV or stuck in a traffic jam don’t want these adverts, but they put up with them. Most of the people seeing these adverts don’t want a new car.
It is an inefficient way of selling. Get your message to a couple of a million people in the hope that a couple of hundred are interested.
Google and Facebook know their customers better than most of the old world companies. They know who is actively interested in cars. They don’t sell this information to the car companies. The car companies create an advert and pay Google to display it to those who are interested.
If I am thinking about a new car and an advert for Ford pops up as I’m reading my mail, I may click it and be taken to a Ford site.
Ford now have a bloke who is thinking about a new car looking at their cars.
This is much better than the old world. Why does the European Union think it needs to protect me from this? Why didn’t the EU try to protect me from scatter-gun advertising?
The EU is concerned about personal data. I’m not. I keep my passwords safe, but my likes and dislikes, my opinions, I’m happy for the world to know. The kids who use Facebook are happy for lots of people to know them. They can be more famous than kids used to be.
And what use is your data if only you know it?

This sporting life

Last Saturday, Spurs scored five. What did all the TV and newspapers think was the big story: one player not shaking hands with another player.
Last Sunday, West Brom scored five. What did all the TV and newspapers shout about? The same non-handshake.
I'm a sports fan. I love to see brilliant sportsmen doing brilliant things. 
I couldn't care less what rude things players say to each other, what obscenities the fans sing and shout about.
I don't expect sportsmen to be model citizens, any more than I expect or want rock stars to be model citizens.
I want them to lift me out of my seat with their brilliance. And I want the TV and newspapers to tell me about their brilliance, not about their social graces.