Bumper Banker’s Bonuses Are Back

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Aug 072009
 

… goes the headline, but did they ever really go away ?

All that really happened was that last year the bankers did not get much of a bonus because their banks were losing money, and now that things are looking better the bonuses are back. This should not surprise anyone; plenty of people get bonuses. What is really happening here is that people are questioning the size of the bonuses.

In fact when you look around, you will realise that there are plenty of people who get ridiculously large amounts of money for doing their jobs. When someone questions whether someone is earning too much, the first thing that occurs to everyone is “Is this jealousy?”.

Well perhaps a bit. I would not mind earning a bit more money, but I am reasonably comfortably off. And to earn more money at my current type of work, I would have to resort to working to make rich people even richer. Which I would much rather not do.

I have no great solutions to solve the problem of income inequality, but it is something that is worth trying for. And screw those who whinge about how taking money away from people with high incomes will drive talent overseas.

The most obvious thing to start with is to start making tax avoidance an activity that brings contempt from the public so that someone at a social gathering who admits it is likely to be shunned. There is a tendency to believe that money that one has earned is solely one’s own, and that tax is somehow “theft”. Whilst the anarchist within me would agree that governments taking money off individuals by force is theft, those who usually complain about this theft are merely being selfish.

No man is an island, and the cleverest banker who earns millions in bonuses, would not be able to do that in any sensible way without public services – police to protect their property, firefighters to try and save their property (and life), and health service workers to try and fix them up when their health fails. The more tax you pay the more proud you should be.

Perhaps we should encourage people to pay more tax than they are required to.

Whatever we do, we should remember that a society that pays some arsehole more money in a week than a nurse earns in a year just for kicking a pig’s bladder around a field has something wrong with it.

Last Of The Veterans Dies

 General  No Responses »
Jul 252009
 

This morning, Harry Patch died. At 111, he was the last of the “Great War”‘s veterans to have fought in the Western trenches and experience the senseless slaughter of trench warfare. One of the “lions led by donkeys”, Harry was an ordinary man who went through extraordinary experiences like countless others. He was lucky enough to survive the war relatively intact physically and mentally.

And he was fortunate enough to live to a great age, outliving all the other veterans of the great war. After he began talking about the war, he became a media celebrity not because he was any more special than any of the other veterans, but because he was still alive and prepared to talk about his experiences.

One thing that may be missed in the media was that he was a dedicated pacifist saying that war was the “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings” and that “war isn’t worth one life”. And another time: “It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it…the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it”.

We all owe him a debt of gratitude for fighting in WWI, for talking about it afterwards, and perhaps most of all we owe him a debt of gratitude for making it plain that war is not something to celebrate.

Theft Insurance – Who Should Pay For It ?

 General  No Responses »
Jul 122009
 

Just a random thought that just occurred to me … who should pay for insurance on the theft of things … cars, the contents of homes, etc. ? We all know that is normally the victims of theft who pay for it, but why should we ?

Why shouldn’t those who are convicted of theft pay for the cost of insurance ? Attach their earnings after they leave prison until they have paid back enough to cover the cost of insurance in proportion to the amount they have stolen.

Living With A Robot Cleaner (Roomba)

 General  No Responses »
Jul 032009
 

Well, I have been using a robot vacuum cleaner for a few months now and it’s brilliant. No need to push around a vacuum cleaner once a week; you can set the robot going in the morning just before heading off to work and it gets going.

Of course there are a few “issues” involved :

  • If you have anything that is just the wrong height, the robot can get stuck underneath. It is short enough to vacuum under sofas and the like, but gets stuck under my coffee table, and my storage heaters. I can move the coffee table, but the storage heaters need to be blocked somehow.
  • It has not happened to me, but if you have something a little on the wobbly side it is possible that the robot could knock something off when it nudges around. In fact it is a bit more of a knock than a nudge.
  • You cannot really leave things lying around. Of course that is really good if somewhat tedious. And of course you’ll find things you thought you lost during the first week whilst it nudges all those hidden things into the light.
  • Cables need to be tied up out of the way of the robot. You may think that seating them carefully against the wall will be fine, but the robot will try and drag that cable into the middle of the room. I’m sure it found more usb cables than I’m supposed to have 🙂

Lastly, it may be worth thinking more carefully about whether you need a clock and a scheduler on the robot. I do, but have only used it once to make sure it works. It is easy enough to hit the ‘start’ button that scheduling seems unnecessary. Besides it is always an idea to give a room a quick scan to check that the robot isn’t going to try to do something you don’t want.

Now all I need is a robot that will go up and down the stairs!

Inappropriate Use Of The “Paedophile” Word

 General  No Responses »
Jun 252009
 

One of my pet hates is the inappropriate use of the word paedophile. If you look up the proper definition of the word it is someone who is sexually interested in children specifically prepubescent children. That means children who have not been through puberty.

Is that the same as someone who is sexually interested in post-puberty “children” ? No it is not. Yet people assume that anyone who has sex with someone under the age of consent is a paedophile. However wrong it is to have sex with someone under the age of consent, it is a different order of magnitude with a child under the age of puberty.

Even more ridiculously, people have even used paedophile to refer to anyone who expresses an interest in anyone a great deal younger than themselves. The “victims” of such “paedophiles” are well over the age of consent.

By misusing the word paedophile, we trivialise the ofense. Sex with an “adult” under the age of consent may be bad, but it is ridiculous to compare it to abusing a 2 year old.

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