Lets adore and endure each other

Why does there always have to be someone to blame?

According to the media and the politicians, we are constantly in a fury about someone who must be censured, sacked, or bombed without delay.

Are we? Or do the shouty people want us to be furious so they can get the credit for sacking or bombing the problem away?

Look at the recent furies: Immigrants - too many. Bankers - lunatics. MPs and their expenses - cheats. Arab despots - cruel. Bent newspapers - awful. Who will be next?

Andy Worhol said we were all going to be famous for 15 minutes. Maybe we are now going to be infamous for 15 minutes. The fickle finger of fate will point at us one day and Newsnight, Channel 4 News, the Daily Mail and Parliament will all be howling for our blood like the witchfinders of old.

But only for 15 minutes. After that, no matter how dastardly it was, the scandal can be put to one side and replaced by the next awful thing.

And not in the summer. When the politicians and the media stars are at their Tuscan villas, the anger subsides. Normal life can flourish.

Enjoy it while you can. Come September, they will be back, the political parties will have their conferences and we will all be told who to be angry about again.

Or, we could take the advice of the best graffiti in London:

Witchhunt

The hacking scandal has provoked the biggest witchhunt for many a year.
Rupert Murdoch, the News of the World, News International, the police, Sky, David Cameron are all being burned at the stake.

The News of the World are clearly guilty of doing dodgy deals with private investigators and the police. Those deals may have brought them stories no one else knew about - the exclusives Sunday papers need because no ordinary news happens on Saturdays - but if they had stopped to think, they would have realised that it would look bad for them if those deals were ever revealed.
But no newspapers stop to think. They all focus on the next publication. Anything further ahead will be tackled when it arrives. Anything which happened yesterday or further back is forgotten, unless a writ turns up. There is no forward planning, no ‘where do we want to be in six months, a year, five years’. It’s all about tomorrow’s paper.
Newspaper managers ought to think a bit about the future, but they spend too much time fire-fighting what the flaming journalists insist on doing today, whatever the cost, and what they did yesterday which five lawyers want to sue them about. It is more difficult than running an insurance company and requires managers who know how to balance the freedom journalists want with the restrictions the law places on companies.

The police are clearly guilty of not investigating the dodgy deals done by the private investigators and by their own officers. They never have been good at sorting out their own mess. Senior management at fault again.

David Cameron is guilty of not checking out the skeletons in Andy Coulson’s past before hiring him to look after the Government’s skeletons.

Rupert Murdoch is guilty of not separating his businesses well enough and not separating himself from the picture well enough. Murdoch has been the devil to the Left since the Wapping battles over his British newspapers. He is the devil to many American liberals because of Fox News. He has not raided the pension fund as Robert Maxwell did, or upset the shareholders as Conrad Black did. All he has done is be a very good businessman.
Labour MPs are now demanding that he should not be allowed to buy complete control of BSkyB because of the dodgy deals done by the News of the World.
The News of the World is part of News International. BSkyB is a separate company. Different managements. Different corporate ethos. No one has suggested that Sky News has done anything wrong.
The only link between the companies is Rupert Murdoch.
He must make sure that a problem in one newspaper does not infect the whole business.


One final thought. The Guardian has been investigating this story for many months. Who is it getting its information from?

The sporting business

In business, companies are judged by how much money they make.
In sport, teams are judged by how many matches and championships they win.
A company wants customers to buy its stuff or use its services. It employs people to make attractive stuff, or deliver must-have services to achieve this.
A sports club wants fans to buy its stuff and watch its matches, but the money this generates is not the main object of the exercise. Winning is.
Building successful teams is an expensive business. It takes time.
According to fans and managers it takes money, too, but sporting life is not that simple. Even if you have unlimited funds, as Manchester City and Chelsea appear to have, you cannot build successful teams instantly. It takes time.
And there is a further complication in football. The employees are all stars. Temperamental, big-headed, stupid stars. You can pay them ridiculous money and give them daft contracts, but if you don’t produce a winning team for them to bask in, they will break their contracts and go to another team.
You could do it without stars. Find some bright youngsters and turn them into a winning team. This takes even more time. And on the way, some of your youngsters turn into stars.
You could try running it like a business. Treat all the players as assets and buy and sell them when the time is right. Mike Ashley is trying this at my club, Newcastle United. It makes winning very difficult and it annoys the paying customers, but football finances have been as stupid as the stars for many years. Who is to say this is the wrong approach?
Sport is much more difficult than ordinary business, so why do businessmen get involved?
Glory. Fame. Crowds chanting your name. You don’t get much of that making widgets.
Nor do you get the venemous hatred sports fans will heap upon you if you fail.
It’s a high-risk venture.

A bright light in a dark world

The bigger Google gets, the louder grow the cries from politicians and media commentators to investigate it, curb it, emasculate it. Sarko is the latest.
I trust Google more than any politician. As far as I am aware, Google never went to war with anyone.
Google started off with a brilliant idea: Make it easier to find stuff on the Internet.
Larry and Sergey made that idea work, but it didn’t make any money.
So Google came up with another brilliant idea: Make it easier for people who want stuff to find people who are selling that stuff.
Larry and Sergey made that work and made shed loads of money because the people who sell stuff have discovered that it is much better to pay Google to find the people who want their stuff than it is to pay for advertising in publications or on television, where very few of the readers or viewers want their stuff.
I’m all for people who make ideas work making money from their talent. The world is full of people with good ideas. Very few make those ideas work. Larry and Sergey earn their success.
And Google do good things with all their money. They provide Internet services for the general public to use free. I use Google Mail to communicate, Google Docs to write stuff, Google Photo to show people my pictures, Google Reader to read stuff, Google Maps to find my way. All for nothing. Brilliant.
If companies want to use Google’s Internet services, or if Joe Individual wants to use them excessively, Google charge them. That sounds fair.
The shouty people want Google to reveal more. The more I find out about Google, the more they seem better than the rest of the world. They treat their employees better than most companies do. I would love to be clever enough and young enough to work for Google.
How many companies tell the world about their philosophy as clearly as this?
http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tenthings.html
When politicians act as fairly as Google do, I’ll take them more seriously.
When the companies employing media commentators treat their employees as clever, valuable parts of the business, I’ll listen with a less cynical ear.
Leave Google to do what Google does so well. It is a shining light in a gloomy world.

Individuals 1 Old guard 0

The Ryan Giggs injuction shows just how quickly the world is changing and how slowly the old guard is realising this.
Governments think they decide how everything works in their country.
Companies think they decide how everything works, no matter which country they operate in.
Lawyers pride themselves on being able to write unintelligible documents about any country’s legal rules in any language.
But more and more, individual people are able to use international services over the internet. The people in France, Malaya and India are deciding to use the services provided on the internet by Google, Facebook or Twitter without worrying about where those services reside or whose laws they obey.
The old guard haven’t worked out how to cope with this.
Much of the debate about the Giggs injunction has centred on whether his off-pitch moves meet the public interest test. This is old thinking. Public interest is something you can use in the UK to justify publishing something other people want to hide. Newspapers and broadcasters worry themselves sick over whether something is in the public interest or not.
Twitter doesn’t bother about justifying any of the tweets its punters throw out. It just lets them throw them. The volume of garbage people tweet every days makes it impossible to monitor.
If the twitterati start to gossip about something, they don’t stop to check whether there is an injunction.
Ten years ago, if you wanted to publish something, you needed a fairly big organisation to do it - a newspaper, a magazine, a TV or radio station. If a publisher publishes something it shouldn’t, you can sue it, with a reasonable chance of collecting any damages if you win.
Today, any cheapskate can publish on Twitter, on a blog, with an e-mail. They can do so anonymously if they choose. Try suing an anonymous cheapskate who published on a service run from Tucson, Arizona and see how much you collect.
The Arab spring has shown how the internet allows people’s voices to be heard even in countries which use force to stop them complaining.
The inability of a British legal injunction to keep sexy gossip hidden shows people’s voices can be heard because the old rules were made for the old world.
The internet is allowing the individual to blossom.

Engineers

London Bridge is one of the busiest areas in the city. Big station, carrying thousands of people every day; big bridge taking people and road traffic to and from work in the City; big bus station taking people to and from other parts of London; big hospital sorting out people who don’t feel too good; big market where thousands go to buy great food.
And in the middle of all this hubbub are two massive projects: the Shard and a new railway bridge. Both are being managed superbly.
I worked in newspaper production. It’s a fairly simple process; it’s the same process every night;  most of the people work for the same company. And it is always chaos.
A building is much more complicated. Each one is different; hundreds of sub-contractors do their specialist bit; the raw materials are heavy.
The Shard is wedged between the stations and the hospital, but all the concrete, steel and glass cladding comes in and is dealt with, just in time and without disturbing the buses and ambulances too much.
The bridge goes across Borough High Street at the end of London Bridge and its viaduct goes through the famous market. The engineering solution: Build the viaduct first, build the bridge on top of it, then slide it over the road over a bank holiday weekend, without disrupting any of the trains going over the existing bridges. They did it this weekend. The sub-contractor they called in to do the sliding was Mammoet, the Dutch team who are the world champion heavy lifters.

Start

Going

Going

In

I take my hat off to the engineers who are doing these massive jobs. I also marvel at the people who did massive jobs in this same area hundreds of years before. Those who built Southwark Cathedral and the brickies who built the arched viaduct which takes the railway through South London to Kent. They had no tower cranes, no computer design or control systems.

Engineers have always been giants. Thank you, gentlemen.

Zap

Smart phones are rapidly taking over from the umpteen remote controllers which lose themselves in the home.
Why does a TV manufacturer need to design and build a zapper for each TV he makes? Why not get someone to create an app for the iPhone and Android which will do the job.
I have different zappers for four devices in my home. They range from the sticks which come free with a TV set to the hand-held controllers for my Sonos music system which have sealed-in batteries and cost £279 to replace when those batteries die.
Luckily, Sonos controller apps are available free for my Android phone and my wife’s iPhone. We use them, now. How long before we can zap the TV with our phones too?
Our phones are always with us. They have intuitive interfaces which are weaning people off the idea that a Windows interface is the only one they can use.
Manufacturers who need a device to operate anything in the home, in the car, on a bus or train, will find it simpler to create apps for the phones everyone has than to manufacture a unique controller.
Grandpa, what does this thing with buttons do?