Evil In Big Business – Tobacco and Ethical Behaviour

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 102010
 

This blog entry is going to have a rather unfortunate number of the words “opinion” and “apparently”, getting in the way of the prose. Normal people realise that when I say that X is a scum-sucking, arse-licking slimy snake, I don’t really mean it literally and that it is an opinion. Abnormal people on the other hand are likely to see an opportunity to silence a critic. In my opinion the tobacco industry is inclined to keep hunting packs of rabid attack lawyers ready to pull to pieces the most trivial critic, so it is wise to be a little cautious.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the tobacco industry was just another industry – perhaps a little hick in my opinion as it merely added a bit of value to an agricultural product by rolling up leaves in cigarette papers in a ready to smoke form. But people did not assign tobacco company executives to the same category as corrupt politicians, child molesters and serial killers.

Somewhere along the way it changed as the health risks of smoking gradually become known – with the tobacco industry apparently fighting every step of the way. At some point every tobacco executive woke up to realise he was going into work to help his company kill zillions of people with their product. And apparently the instant reaction from every single tobacco company was to fight the truth.

It must have been easy to deny the truth in the beginning where it was the opinion of one established industry against the opinion of a few wacko medical researchers. Fair enough. Who is going to give up a good income because some odd-ball begins to suspect that smoking tobacco may not be healthy.

But when the evidence began to pile up, wasn’t there one tobacco executive who sat back and said “Hey! This is wrong” ? Nope. I mean sure there was Jeffrey Wigand but he was not so much a tobacco executive as a researcher (who became an executive) who worked in the tobacco industry. And in that case we are talking about the 1990s which is far later than when the tobacco companies first knew that they were selling poison.

So it seems that every tobacco executive since the 1950s has felt that his (or her) income and the safety of the company they worked for was more important than the fact that they were in my opinion going out of their way to kill their customers.

Is there something specially corrupt about tobacco executives ? Well, we can probably guess that they were not necessarily the brightest sparks in the box – how much intelligence does it take to sell drugs to a drug addict ? But they were probably no more morally corrupt than any other company executive.

Which brings us to the question, should we really entrust power to the kind of people who become company executives ?

Computing In The Good Old Days … Not! But Maybe There Was Something …

 Computing  No Responses »
Jul 082010
 

I have just spent the weekend doing all sorts of stuff that you won’t be interested in because it’s really boring (moving the main desktop machine, etc.) with News 24 on in the background. About every 4 hours I’ve been treated to Chip or Chop or whatever it is, proclaiming that home computing in the good old days was far better than it is today.

What a load of rancid rhinoceros dung! There is of course an element of truth to it, but in reality home computing back in the 1980s was a continual struggle with limited resources – we often had less than 32Kbytes of memory to play with. Yes that is 32Kbytes not 32Mbytes! The first computer that I was employed to work with had 4,000 times as much memory as the first computer I used; and 2,000 times as much as the one I spent a lot of time writing software for. Of course the machine I am writing this with has no less than 4,000,000 times as much memory as my first machine!

When we look back in time to early home computing, we tend to use nostalgia tinted glasses. In addition to the limits on memory, early home computers had a number of other drawbacks :-

  • Graphics were ridiculously bad. If you were lucky you had two colours at 640×256 resolution. If you were unlucky, graphics were made up of special “blobby” text characters that could produce “graphics” of a resolution of something like 80×50!
  • The screen was typically a discarded old colour TV … big and fuzzy. Even if you were lucky enough to have a colour monitor, it would usually refresh at a rate guaranteed to produce eyeball frenzy.
  • Sound quality was a little below par. You could get computer music – see the Commodore’s SID files – but the likelihood of  anything approaching the quality of 128Kbps MP3s just wasn’t going to happen.
  • Storage was extremely small in capacity and very slow. If you were lucky you had access to floppy disk drives with around 80Kbytes to 320Kbytes (there were floppy drives with 1Mbytes of storage available but they were not common), and these were slow.

Not that there is anything wrong with nostalgia of course – I run a few software machine emulators to play around with the computers of my childhood. And in one particular sense those old 1980s home computers did have one advantage over modern computers that modern machines do not have.

They were very easy to get trivial results out of.

Fire up a Commodore PET, and less than a second after switching on, it would type “READY?” at you. And it does mean that … it is ready for you to type the commands needed to load a program from tape or disk, or for you to start writing a program. No loading of an operating system; no complex IDE to learn. Just you, the computer and the keyboard.

Despite the primitiveness of the interface, the immediacy of the results is very attractive to new hackers of child age. For instance, a simple program can produce interesting results for a child :-

10 for i = 1 to 1000
20 for j = 1 to 20
30 print tab(j); "Name"
40 next j
50 for j = 20 to 1 step -1
60 print tab(j); "Name"
70 next j
80 next i

Such a simple program produces a snake of your name down the screen; with a few modifications a child can produce more interesting graphics. And many home computers of the time came with far more extensive manuals that would teach BASIC programming.

Whilst BASIC is perhaps an unfortunate language for language purists and probably does teach a few bad habits, it does have one big advantage over more “proper” languages. It is easy to produce simple programs to produce simple results. Of course there is nothing preventing us from creating a better BASIC than the original with enhanced features, but the key is not programming purity, but ease of use and the ability to produce interesting results easily even if that means losing flexibility.

iPhone: What’s Missing (5): Plugin Input Methods

 iPhone  No Responses »
Jun 262010
 

I have yet to play with (or indeed spend much time reading about) iOS4 so it is possible that I am totally wrong with this one and this missing feature is actually supplied by the latest iPhone operating system. But if not … what about plugin input methods ?

That is allow other people to write extensions to the on-screen iPhone keyboard. Whilst Apple have undoubtedly come up with the best possible method for inputing text on a touch-screen, there are always a few who would like to try other ways such as :-

You could even allow users to craft their own on screen keyboards to allow easy access to extra symbols such as emoticons – which for some strange reason are available on certain far eastern keyboards but not on English ones ?!?

Public Sector Pay Freeze/Cuts and Gold-Plated Pensions

 Politics  No Responses »
Jun 252010
 

Well we have had the emergency budget and one of the announcements was a two year public sector pay “freeze”. Of course in reality it is a pay cut because of inflation. Of course if politicians were a little more honest they would actually announce it as a pay cut by freezing cost of living increases; one minor sign of improvement was when the prime minister admitted afterwards on a debate with the public that it was actually a pay cut. After all in the past, politicians have blindly and foolishly proclaimed that a pay freeze was not a pay cut at all.

For those that doubt that it is a pay cut, take a hypothetical public sector worker who earns £20,000 a year and who spends every pound on buying a £1 loaf of bread. This is of course ridiculous, but makes the arithmetic easier. Now let us assume that the current UK inflation rate is 3% (it’s actually a smidgen higher) and stays that way.

In the first year our hypothetical worker can buy 20,000 loaves of bread.

In the second year, the price of a loaf increases by 3% to £1 * 1.03 or £1.03. Because our worker has not had a pay increase, he can now afford just 20,000 / 1.03 loaves of break … 19,417 loaves of bread. In the third year, the bread goes up yet again to £1.06 and the number of loaves our worker can buy drops again to 18,867.

In a very real sense the value of the work that our worker does for the public is being nibbled away year by year. And don’t forget that it lasts until the cost of living increases above inflation eventually restore the value. Sure our worker still gets £20,000 a year, but the value in money is not the in the symbol printed on the bank note, but in what it can be exchanged for.

Whilst the government has plenty of reasons to reduce government expenditure and reducing the total public sector pay bill is perfectly reasonable, the way it was done is a little old-fashioned. One of the noticeable things about the similar efforts in the private sector in this recession as compared with previous recessions has been the amount of negotiation involved. More enlightened managers have negotiated with the workers to find a mutually least disagreeable way of reducing the cost of salaries.

Sometimes this has meant a number of voluntary redundancies; sometimes a cut in the hours worked with an associated pay cut, and sometimes it has been a simple pay cut. Or a combination of all three.

Why hasn’t the government tried a similar path with the public sector workers ? After all, these things can be negotiated. One obvious compromise is to not only freeze the pay, but also to reduce the standard working week every year by the amount of inflation. This is still a pay cut, but at least values the work of the public sector worker the same – it gives the public sector worker something in exchange for less pay – a shorter working week.

By imposing this pay cut without negotiation, the government is behaving like an old-fashioned tyrannical employer who treats their workers like wage slaves.

And where does this idea that all public sector workers get gold-plated pensions from ? Sure many get final salary pensions which in the majority of the cases is not a spectacular amount. Despite the demonising propaganda floating around in the press, most public sector workers do not earn immensely large salaries; on a personal note, I earn roughly half what my brother earns for roughly the same job – and that excludes his yearly profit bonus.

Fact is that the private sector has slowly been dropping final salary pension schemes for years without any great reflection on whether this is necessary to ensure pensions are affordable, or whether this is a means to ensure fatter profits for the fat cats. And yet still there are a significant number of private sector firms that offer final salary pensions.

The targeting of public sector pension schemes by the right-wing fascists is little more than playing up to the insecurities of private sector workers who have been deprived of their final salary pension schemes.

As someone mentioned on a TV debate on the increase of the pension age to 66 in 2016, we not only need a review of government provision of pensions (to both the workers in general and the public sector workers), but we also need a review of how pensions are paid for in the private sector. We are a richer society now than we were 20 years ago, but pensions are less generous.

Is this simply because people are living longer than they used to, so pensions cost more ? Or is there something else at work ?

In dealing with pensions, I have more questions than answers but it needs some serious thought about how pensions can be paid for. Can we as a society really not afford to pay pensioners a decent pension ? We have a belief that the wealth created by private sector workers belongs to the entrepreneurs who risked everything on setting up a company. But all too often these entrepreneurs are merely managers of very large companies that are risking very little. That is not to say that genuine entrepreneurs do not exist, but the assumption that every head of a company is an entrepreneur is wrong; indeed the ones who earn the most are rarely the ones who risk much.

This is beginning to sound like I am in favour of some kind of old-fashioned hard left socialist state. Not at all, but the belief that the free market can solve everything is just as foolish a belief.

The Skin Colour Is Chocolate

 Politics  No Responses »
Jun 172010
 

I’m watching Malcolm X about the “black” civil rights activist; there is a point in the film where a point is made about colours in the dictionary – black is bad and white is good.

This is supposedly the result of some sort of racist conspiracy to persuade people that black people are bad and that white people are good. There may be some level of truth to that.And this little rant is not aimed at undermining the achievements of the black civil rights activists.

However I have my own dictionary which is somewhat more extensive that the one used in the film – the OED. This includes references to the earliest uses of the word black in various contexts. The first use of the word black in reference to something evil goes back as far as the 13th century; the first use in reference to people of a certain skin colour is in the 19th century.

The meaning of black meaning evil to some extent obviously has its origins in the fear of the dark at night. Everyone has walked home on a dark night and been a little spooked by what can come out of the darkness. Today’s dark nights are a lot less spooky than they were in the past – we have far more artificial lighting and even where it isn’t close, a little of that distant light sheds a little into the darkest corner.

Trying to change things so “black is good” just doesn’t work historically.

And when you come down to it, “black” people don’t have black skin at all – it isn’t even a good colour description. We all have chocolate-coloured skin … mine is like white chocolate; others have milk chocolate skin, and some have dark chocolate skin. But it is all chocolate-coloured.

Humans have chocolate-coloured skin. All of us; every member of the human race.

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