A few photos from a few weeks ago … difficult to process so I’ve been lazy in keeping them back until now …
A Sign In The Sky
Darkening Island
Sandy Southsea
Walking The Beach
Nothing To Say
This was supposed to be a trip to Rowland’s Castle, but the railways let me down – sure there was a replacement bus service which I’m sure would get me to Rowland’s Castle, but back again ? Anyway instead of heading off there, I ended up in Havant with the best option there being a quick trip to Hayling Island :-
Post Interference
The “interference” here is the interference patterns in the water breaking up the mirror image of the post.
Distant Oak
Time for a pint ?
Bridge Fastening
If you look down the side of this post, you will see some sort of advertisement, and like the majority of people I took the easy way out and chose Google to supply the ads. Of course as this blog site is a personal site of somebody who comes a long way from being famous, the amount of money that comes in is negligible. In fact I have not received a single payment as yet.
Nothing wrong with that of course – it is stated quite plainly that payments are only made when the level reaches a certain level – who needs a cheque for £0.99 ? It would cost Google more to send them out than the payments themselves are worth.
But the interesting thing is what happens to all those negligible amounts of money ? Don’t forget that morally, that money does not belong to Google: Someone who wants to advertise something online, pays Google, and Google in turn pays whoever provides online “space” to allow the advertisements to appear. As soon as the adverts appear on my (or your) blog, Google owes me money.
The interest on my queued payments is pretty negligible, but how many other sets of negligible payments are there in Google’s bank accounts ? And how much interest is Google earning ?
Or should I say “stealing” ? Don’t forget that money is owed for services rendered – it doesn’t belong to Google at all, and if Google is making any money at all through interest, then it is morally obliged to do something with that interest other than add it to the bottom line.
Now personally I’m not interested in receiving the interest on the money Google owes me – it’s a trivial amount to me. But added up together with the trivial amounts owed to thousands of others, it may well make a difference to some charity or other. What I would like to see is an extra tab on my Adsense console letting me choose which charity Google should pay the interest to.
Almost the very first thing that gets mention in the media when snow descends on the UK is the travel chaos preventing people from getting into work. Employers are worried that their employees are skiving; employees are worried that they won’t get paid because they can’t travel into work.
First of all, skiving is relatively rare not simply because people don’t want to let their employers down, but also because they know that those who do manage to get in will have to work harder because of the lack of people. They don’t want to let their colleagues down.
Of course this is one time when as many people as possible should be working from home. Again skiving isn’t very likely; as someone who has had occasion to work from home myself, you tend to work harder from home than you do from work. There is perhaps less clock-watching and more goal orientated work. This doesn’t work for all kinds of work, but sometimes employers are just a little too reluctant to allow this.
In addition working from home needs practice – you need to make appropriate arrangements so that people can do their work from home, and test those arrangements. As an example, there are places that have arrangements to allow working from home which rely on systems sized for normal levels of working from home – these will often get overloaded during adverse weather. Plus people need to be confident that they can do their work from home, and find out what works and what does not – for that they need practice.
One thing that gets left out from the usual discussion is what about the people who do make it into work ? We hear that most employers do not penalise those who cannot make it in, which is fair enough. But what reward do those who do struggle in get for going the extra mile ? Don’t we deserve a little reward for making it in ?
Lastly there is an interesting assumption that if you have to travel any distance by car or train, you may need to leave early to travel home safely. That is undoubtedly the case when you are talking about fresh snow falls. But what gets overlooked is that walking to and from work becomes far more dangerous after pavements have had the snow trampled down into sheet ice. In some cases it should be those who live locally encouraged to leave early to travel home safely!
As there are reports of large accumulations of snow, it is worth bringing up a point I have made before – winter tyres.
There are drivers out there who under the mistaken belief that their local council is responsible for gritting and salting the roads and mysteriously making them safe to drive on.
Well it doesn’t quite work like that.
Gritting and salting roads actually doesn’t accomplish much by itself – if it’s too cold it is not effective, and even when it isn’t, it requires the action of tyres grinding it onto the road to produce any effect. Of course the first few cars and trucks are not going to see any effect from the grit and salt – they’re going to get as much grip on the road as they would if it wasn’t gritted.
In most countries where conditions in the winter are conducive to snow and ice on the roads, special winter tyres with far deeper treads than normal tyres are commonly used. Indeed in many places it is illegal to drive without. Drivers are expected to take some of the responsibility for remaining safe on the roads themselves.
Yet in the UK, whenever we have traffic chaos on the roads the councils are blamed for not gritting enough – even when the conditions are too extreme for grit to be effective.
If you want to be safe on the roads this winter, get winter tyres – they will help!