Voicing Opinions

In the UK, and across much of the world, there is an obsession with paper qualifications. As I have said before, they often merely supply just a snapshot-in-time measure of a narrow band of capabilities of a person. Yet they are promoted to be the vital components of education required to compete with others. The quote I offer below shows that someone without decent qualifications but with job and life skills may sail into jobs that the qualified flunk.

It is from “Among the Hoodies” by Harriet Seargent, referring to a business start-up guru called Scott :

The year before, Scott had interviewed 52 graduates. On paper they looked ‘brilliant students’. Each had three A’s at A level and a 2:1 degree. He shook his head. ‘There’s a big difference between people passing exams and being ready for work’.

This was obvious even before the interviews began. Out of the 52 applicants, half arrived late. Only 3 of the 52 walked up to Scott, looked him in the eye, shook his hand and said good morning. The rest ‘ambled in’. When he asked them to solve a problem, only 12 had come equipped with a pad and pencil.

The 3 who had greeted him proved the strongest candidates and he hired them. Within a year they were out due to their ‘lackadaisical’ attitude. ‘They did not turn up on time in the morning. For the first 6 months, a manager had to check every one of their emails for spelling and grammar. They did not know how to learn. Their ability to ‘engage in business’ was ‘incredibly’ disappointing and ‘At 5:30 on the dot they left the office.’”

It would seem to me that the highly rated school and University grades should come with good English skills be default.

But it is evidently not the case.

By teaching to the test, and allowing students to use spell checkers to aid their English, they failed to acquire the basic skills.

Where was their education for interviews and a working environment?

The only 3 seen fit to be given a job then failed to turn up on time, as if the ‘education’ they received was a passport to a salary and an easy life. As if they had done the hard work already.

In the cafe by the famous Roath Park Lake here in Cardiff is an A3 sized framed print of swans I took a few years ago. They recently started selling postcards, not many of which are terribly inspiring, so I thought it prudent to get my swans picture in postcard form.

There are many companies who provide postcard and business card printing, so it is hard to know which to use. Price alone is just one factor.

A key clue as to the attitude of the company, and hence presumably to their quality is likely to be how environmentally-friendly they are. So I plan to use one that uses sustainable sources for their paper and card. And one that offers offset printing – digital printing is commonly adopted these days but not quite up to the standard as offset printing.

I first need to revisit the cafe to see if they are receptive to the idea, and if so, how many cards they would take and at what price per card.

Update : I visited the cafe and got the go-ahead. I bought a sample postcard from their current stock and discovered it to be semi gloss digitally printed. It lacks sharpness and demonstrates some banding :

I am keen to do better.

12 Sep update : I placed an order for 250 offset-print postcards. Here is my design (subject to print cropping) :

22 Sep update Received the postcards. The finish is more matt – less silky than I had hoped. I checked the description on the site and it did indeed describe them accurately – teaches me to check the details rather than rush to make an order.

26 Sep update decided to order some samples, which arrived 2 days later. The gloss finish is indeed what I should have ordered. But the spot gloss example they sent was amazing – really sharply delineated areas of gloss, picking out key parts of an image. Will go ahead and make a second order for 250 high gloss postcards. I might also order a ‘stamp’ – for about £12 you can get a ink stamp with customised text or even graphic image!

2 Oct update I took the opportunity to tweak the swans image to give it better contrast and remove the green cast on the water before placing a 250 item reorder with a high gloss finish. I also ordered 100 copies of a new postcard I thought I would try out :

11 Oct update Received the two sets of postcards through the post. They are OK to sell now – the Swans postcard is excellent now with the gloss finish. I cannot say that it is high gloss, as claimed, however. And I should not have relied on my Mac to get the colour right on the colourful card – the Mac displays colours too vividly, so the card is not as vibrant as I had hoped. All part of the learning curve. The sharpness is excellent, however, thanks to the offset printing process.

Click here for further on the US arm of the print company I am using.

Since I am most certainly not blessed with a natural understanding of economics, I can only write about money in a naive, lay-person manner. I leave myself open to correction, but feel free to indeed correct my understanding.

The currency, sterling, of my country, was so named as it represented sterling silver on which it was linked. Each bank note was convertible into silver if needed – the note was issued on that promise.

But eventually, the artificial, abstract nature of bank notes was exploited – the link to tangible metals was removed. This allowed governments to print even more money than they had done before since they had no duty to back it up with tangible assets. The world’s financial assets can and have grown out of all proportion to the world’s assets they are meant to represent.

In parallel, capitalism was flawed from the start because it was predicated on growth. The context for such growth – our planet – is finite in resources. To ease ourselves from the immediate plight of economic problems can only be a temporary solution, a fudge to the big problem.

The key to the world problems, as elucidated in the excellent Michael Ruppert film “Collapse”, is that these two distortions to sustainable human life are colliding with massive population growth.

But no one country or government owns the population problem, much as none own the global warming problem. Who can afford to make strides? History shows that unified efforts are slow and lumbering and fractious.

So my feelings share those of Ruppert. That we are on a crash course, and the best advice is for each of us to seek self-sustainable life-styles.

But one final thought. The vast bulk of the money in the world sits with people who have no time to spend even a fraction of it. But even if it were now distributed to the poor and needy, that would help sustain an even further population growth. And even greater consumption of the world’s resources. So, you see the problem is a deep, almost intractable one. In the much-studied pond-life, there are boom and bust cycles – populations grow too big for the resources available and collapse rapidly, only to recover as the balance is regained between resources and living things. So it may simply be that this is what is and will be happing to us.

In a sense, it is like a time-bomb ticking. The run on banks when people suspect there money is at risk can close them down. If the rich decide to do something similar and liquefy some of their vast fortunes by buying tangibles, then prices can rapidly escalate for the rest of us. We would get caught up in a financial game that of course suits the rich minority far more than the relatively poor masses – we would be pawns in the game. But the point is that we are already there, teased into submission and dependent on institutions for the bulk of our needs.

One way or other, I anticipate brutal times ahead.

For more on this subject, read The end of money.

Sometimes in life, something dawns on us that has been sitting under our very own noses for all our lives. Its invisibility, in spite of it blatant proximity, is that it is too obvious.

For those who know me, and especially those who tolerate my stream of verbal chatter, my dominance of conversations, my frequent rude interruptions, they too will probably not see this something I am leading to also. For them, it will be that the torrent of words that wraps around the something blinds them to it.

The dawning of the awareness that I will soon reveal was triggered by a conversation on the net I had tonight with a warm, genuine Go player in South Africa. A natural Go genius I feel. I was explaining to him that one of the most exciting discoveries I had been experiencing in my life in the past few months was the degree of creativity that I have unleashed by the simple expedient that I am extremely fortunate to be in a position to do :

To focus on exploring my abilities and improving my health as a priority over knowing where my income will come from

My focus has been my www.learngo.co.uk web site, were I am developing a Go commentary facility, and on my books and idea writing. But these matters of focus are the context – the outlet for my creativity, almost arbitrarily so.

With this endorsement of expression, liberated from the normal end-product driving force (income), I am experiencing an explosion of ideas. At 4am this morning, I was so wide awake with ideas that I was far too excited to sleep. These are not crack-pot notions either. Many are about the finer details of my Go programming, or the nucleus of concepts for blog entries.

But only now, this very evening, aged 54, did I have an epiphany, linking my capacity to chat endlessly with this stream of ideas.

The two, as you will observe, are very similar – one idea in conversation triggers another, that links to another that forges a new concept that triggers another. Great fuel for a manic state, which I sometimes enter.

But the absolute luxury I have to be able to follow my nose, to follow my ideas, unconstrained by schedules, is vital to the liberation.

A close friend laughed when I said that I was leaving the coffee shop to resume my work. Because I am self employed, involved with my own projects, this is not really deemed work. Yet I work on many days harder and longer and much more productively than in my IBM days. The fluid nature of my trains of thoughts and freedom of schedule are synergetic – they enable a fabulous productivity and often blissful happiness as computer artisan.

So far, I earn nice small streams of income from my ventures, but I will not focus on maximising that. This would miss the point entirely. I will pursue my ideas and let them take me where they will.

I read today that the professional football world rates most highly indeed the maverick, creative player, like Eric Cantona, who can unlock defences in ways skillful, but orthodox players cannot. I do not compare myself to such players, but do seek to emulate the focus on creativity. A delicate matter that can no longer be contained and manipulated than a butterfly.

I have a credit card with MBNA. I pay the full amount each month by posting a cheque. Or, more appropriately, I try to do so. Often, it is impossible as there is simply not enough time to do so by this route.

First, I have to allow for 1 or 2 business days for the cheque to arrive at MBNA. Second, I have to allow for the draconian 5 business days for the cheque to clear (they must hang onto this ridiculously long time in this electronic age simply because it suits them to do so). If I miss the deadline, I incur a fee. Their malpractice is to make it easy for the fee to be incurred – they make the time to pay too small.

The first thing they do is post the statement to you normally 1 week after the date of the statement. This is a blatant delaying tactic for which I see no defence. In most cases, the statement arrives about 7-9 business days before the deadline date. For a cheque, that is barely enough time at all – 1-2 days postage time and 5 days clearance time.

Second, all of their payment methods except Direct Debit incur a processing delay. The cheque delay is the longest, but even online payment by Debit card incurs a 3 business day delay before it is accredited to your credit card account if paid after 5pm – when most of us get home from work. This is totally and utterly unacceptable when the transfer is electronic and immediate. Imagine having to return to a shop 3 days later to get goods paid for by debit card.

So Direct Debit is the way they want us to go. But many of us want to choose how much we pay each month. To do that, it seems, we have to incur a business processing delay.

If we are on just a one week holiday when the statement arrives, even the 3 business day Debit card payment delay may well be enough for us to incur a late payment fee.

This is all very avoidable but for one thing. They make too much money in late payment fees to ever want to make it safer for us to pay in time. This is the really sour, anti-social side of business I am afraid. If the bank were run by members of our community, would we be treated with this greedy contempt?

In the Chinese game of Go that I fervently play, to achieve a good standard, you must not run before you walk – you must get the basic fundamentals right. This is a mandatory foundation from which excellence can spring. Without it, your game will readily be undermined.

I was reminded of this as I reluctantly set about making two DVDs of Wedding photographs for a friend. To copy a set of image files from my Windows PC to a writeable DVD constitutes a fundamentally basic operation. Yet Microsoft manage to make it a traumatic process.

First, as I insert the disk into the drive, Windows 7 promptly ejects it. There is no message to say why. I put it back in and now it accepts it and kindly throws up a dialog asking if I want to burn files to the disk. I then have to select one of two methods, but the help is OK on this choice.

So I am now presented with a Windows Explorer screen for the DVD. It neatly says to drag files to the large empty space on the screen to write them to the disk. So I navigate to the folder containing the files and the nice empty space disappears! What the hell is all that about? It expects me to open another WIndows Explorer screen, rather than design it to work in one screen.

After resizing both explorer screens to fit side by side, I drag the files across, and click burn. And it works fine. It even asks at the end if I want to burn the same files again.

Of course I do, so I put another blank disk in. It rejects it saying it needs a writeable disk. But it is a writeable disk. I try 3 times before cancelling.

I insert this formerly rejected disk back in and now it likes it and will let me burn to it.

This is 2011, with decades of development in the many incarnations of Windows, yet the basics are so poorly handled – the code so ill-thought out – that is serves only to frustrate and interfere. By comparison, my Apple iMac generally fails to intrude. It just works elegantly and efficiently. It makes me feel in control. One way or another Microsoft cannot let go and seem always to want to control and irritate the users that they should be serving.

It is a perpetual source of surprise to me that industry respects forecasting so much that the following type of announcement fails to solicit any reaction :

Market research firm ISuppli, a unit of IHS Inc., forecasts 57 million tablets will be sold this year and 171 million in 2014. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-31/android-tablets-gain-on-ipad-in-fourth-quarter-researcher-says.html)

It is January, and they are forecasting portable tablet computer sales 11 and 23 months ahead with precision that is simply unwarranted and meaningless. They employ such precision, apparently, in order to look more plausible – sales rarely hit exact ten or hundred boundaries. But can they honestly predict the fickle whims of the buying public with over 98% accuracy?

I would love to see an analysis of forecast versus actual results in previous years to see if rounding their predictions had a tangible impact on their accuracy. Will they be more accurate with a 57 million prediction for 2011, or will 60 million be almost equally likely to be correct?

The chances of 171 million for 2012 being more accurate than the rounded value of 170 is tiny (it all depends on the shape and width of the bell-curve distribution of plausible values). Why complicate matters with low odds of being right?

Having recently embarked on a share dealing venture, I have regularly topped up my share-dealing accounts to fund purchases. The money transfers directly from my Barclays current account, and I subsequently replenish that account from my Barclays e-saving account, another PC-bound transaction.

Except that recently I forgot to top up and went over £500 overdrawn. I immediately received a letter from Barclays pointing out my misdemeanour and stating that I would be charged £22.85. This hurt. The fractional part hurt most – they charged 15% a month for the overdrawn status, with 85p the charge for the 6 days overdrawn.

I wrote to them, explaining that this was only the 2nd time in 36 years as a customer that I had gone overdrawn and it was a draconian treatment of loyalty. They disagreed and stated that they would not refund as they had not made a mistake.

So I spoke to my Bank Manager. She was not authorised to refund me. Nor was she concerned when I threatened to leave.

So I replied to Barclays, and received a final reply today. Fundamentally, they have no interest in retaining me as a customer. They made no concessionary move whatsoever.

So I will leave and sell my Barclays shares – I do not want to deal with a company so flagrantly disinterested in their customers.

I will transfer to the co-op, who appear to treat business and their customers humanely.

Yet again, the Royal Mail chose exactly the hour from 11:30 to 12:30 on Saturday when I was out having a coffee to try to deliver a parcel.

Gone are the days when the card they put through you door indicated that just 4 hours must elapse before you can drive to the sorting office to collect your parcel. Now, in their infinite wisdom, you must wait 48 hours.

Except this was a Saturday, so I would have to wait 72 hours to collect on Tuesday.

Let’s put this in perspective. The parcel contains 3 copies of a book I have just written. The book was ordered on Wednesday, and eventually printed on demand on Friday, and then shipped to me at the lowest shipping cost. The whole process lasted the same length of time that I must wait for Royal Mail to simply redeliver the parcel.

Except that I cannot face waiting in all day on Tuesday, so I arranged to collect at the nearby post office. And I have to pay £1.50 for the privilege of this redirection, some 800 yards from my house.

The slippage from 4 to 48 hours is a 12 fold degradation in service redelivery efficiency. This is enormous, and we are expected to just accept it. When Amazon books are delivered to my house by an a commercial company, they automatically try to deliver again the next day.

It is as if the Royal Mail have given up and do not care. If they took a more proactive approach, as this other company has, then things could be very different. Failure to deliver parcels must be a large destructive factor in their business, so it is to their advantage to reduce the chance of re-deliveries. Like keeping an eye out for neighbours who might take parcels in. I am always willing to help out. But this is somewhat ad-hoc.

Why not look at a different approach – allow Royal Mail customers who have gone onto the Internet to redirect a parcel the means to furnish a list of neighbour houses that can take in parcels? The delivery man can take a mobile device that can swiftly look up alternative delivery addresses for a house with an absent owner and too small a letterbox.

Now this is not ultra high tech. It is common sense. But such an idea will never be implemented unless the fundamental attitude is one that embraces change and improvement.

The state of the stock market has almost become defined by the price index known as the F.T.S.E. 100 – the Financial Times Stock Exchange top 100 most capitalised companies. These are the top 100 companies on the London stock exchange in terms of their highest market capitalisation value – essentially the sum value of their shares in the market place.

Yet few people seem to ponder on the artificial nature of that index.

Whilst it is artificial in the arbitrary delimitation at 100. But the principle problem is that this population of 100 companies is not static. Companies drop in and out of the ‘footsie’ (as it is commonly called), as their market capitalisation rises above or drops below a threshold value – the 100th company in the list will be replaced when another company capital value exceeds it. The net effect of this attrition rate is that the footsie cannot be seen as a such a meaningful long term indicator of the state of UK businesses. It is always the top 100 ‘biggest’ companies, so will always be artificially buoyant.

If they had chosen a static list of 100 companies, then the list would, over time, be depleted of members, as companies eventually fold.

I suspect, therefore, that the FTSE 250 or 350 are likely to be more representative of the state of the nation. At least with these companies, poorly performing companies that drop out are balanced by top performing companies that go up to the FTSE 100.

But the FTSE 100 is the prestige list. So it gets the spotlight.