These were, I think, published in Metro (free newspaper). I am noting them here for reference. I have no knowledge of them other than their reported existence.
For a more comprehensive list of collaborative consumption enterprises, see http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/directory/. There are lots if collcon enterprises about, many of them overlapping in the service they are sharing. I think a shakedown is needed.
I don't want to be naive or offensive, but it strikes me that some of these may be helpful to those facing "bedroom tax".
www.storenextdoor.com - rent out loft/garage space to someone looking for storage space.
www.spareroom.co.uk - rooms to rent Monday - Friday for commuters
www.rentmyitems.com - rent out tools and DIY items
www.parkatmyhouse.com - rent out a private parking space
www.gocarshare.com - matches passengers with car drivers for journey cost sharing
www.taskhub.co.uk - search for odd jobs tradespeople.
Showing posts with label Metro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Metro. Show all posts
Monday, 30 September 2013
Friday, 25 May 2012
Popular economics
I don't really expect to see any particularly cogent comment on the letters pages of Metro, but today's crop of letters about the euro crisis are particularly meretricious. The first is a poorly extended shipping metaphor. "Greece is an anchor pulling down the eurozone ship. If you cut the anchor free the ship will not sink." What? Maintaining the shipping metaphor, the writer compares the eurozone to The Titanic. The eurozone's iceberg is "debt created by greed'".
So the Titanic (eurozone) has struck its iceberg (debt/greed) but it will not sink if its anchor (Greece) is cut free (presumably removed from or allowed to leave the euro. I don't actually think the Titanic's anchor was a significant factor in its sinking. It was the ingress of water through the hole made by the iceberg.
Next up - "The reason the whole of Europe is in financial distress is because throughout the continent the public sector is far too large. ... because of hundreds of thousands of EU-introduced laws and regulations." Remember the assumption that more private sector jobs is good, but more public sector jobs is bad. More phone shops, £1 shops, fried chicken shops, coffee shops? Yay!
Let's get to the nub of this. The vast majority of money is created by private banks and lent out at interest. The interest cannot all be paid back, because the money to pay it back does not exist. Therefore people / organisations / countries have to go bust.
That writer continues "Mr Brown [the previous UK Prime Minister and before that finance minister] reckons it's up to us to get us out of the mess he drove us into." I'm not here to defend Gordon Brown, but we can't lay the entire national debt at his feet. And even if he did drive us into this mess all by himself, he can't get us out of it.
Next: "I would have thought that the former Chancellor [Gordon Brown] would have been well advised to keep his mouth shut on the subject of debt.". This is practically straight out of a common comedy line: 'Oh, just ome other thing. Shut up!'
Finally: "What a cheek for Gordon Brown to say that Europe can't save itself. This from a man who acted like he saved the world a few years ago." Setting aside the non seqitur (GB did a, therefore he cannot say B), we have to examine whether what GB said is correct or not. If it's true, why shouldn't he say it?
None of this carping from the sidelines shows any understanding of the actual causes of Europe's or the world's problems, nor (unsurprisingly) does it provide even the slightest suggestion of any solution or ameloration.
OK, one write says there's too much EU legislation, but you can't just weigh legislation and neither can you arbitrarily decide how much is too much. Is the writer suggesting we randomly remove legislation until the "financial distress" stops? Presumably not and therefore we have to look at each piece of legislation. The writer does not cite any example, making his comment just rhetoric.
Picking up the Titanic theme, I would say that what is happening is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, that is pointlesly solving or ameliorating a problem that will become irrelevant in the event of the impending disaster. Moving money from one fund to another does not solve the problem that all the money that exists is owed to banks, and then some.
So the Titanic (eurozone) has struck its iceberg (debt/greed) but it will not sink if its anchor (Greece) is cut free (presumably removed from or allowed to leave the euro. I don't actually think the Titanic's anchor was a significant factor in its sinking. It was the ingress of water through the hole made by the iceberg.
Next up - "The reason the whole of Europe is in financial distress is because throughout the continent the public sector is far too large. ... because of hundreds of thousands of EU-introduced laws and regulations." Remember the assumption that more private sector jobs is good, but more public sector jobs is bad. More phone shops, £1 shops, fried chicken shops, coffee shops? Yay!
Let's get to the nub of this. The vast majority of money is created by private banks and lent out at interest. The interest cannot all be paid back, because the money to pay it back does not exist. Therefore people / organisations / countries have to go bust.
That writer continues "Mr Brown [the previous UK Prime Minister and before that finance minister] reckons it's up to us to get us out of the mess he drove us into." I'm not here to defend Gordon Brown, but we can't lay the entire national debt at his feet. And even if he did drive us into this mess all by himself, he can't get us out of it.
Next: "I would have thought that the former Chancellor [Gordon Brown] would have been well advised to keep his mouth shut on the subject of debt.". This is practically straight out of a common comedy line: 'Oh, just ome other thing. Shut up!'
Finally: "What a cheek for Gordon Brown to say that Europe can't save itself. This from a man who acted like he saved the world a few years ago." Setting aside the non seqitur (GB did a, therefore he cannot say B), we have to examine whether what GB said is correct or not. If it's true, why shouldn't he say it?
None of this carping from the sidelines shows any understanding of the actual causes of Europe's or the world's problems, nor (unsurprisingly) does it provide even the slightest suggestion of any solution or ameloration.
OK, one write says there's too much EU legislation, but you can't just weigh legislation and neither can you arbitrarily decide how much is too much. Is the writer suggesting we randomly remove legislation until the "financial distress" stops? Presumably not and therefore we have to look at each piece of legislation. The writer does not cite any example, making his comment just rhetoric.
Picking up the Titanic theme, I would say that what is happening is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, that is pointlesly solving or ameliorating a problem that will become irrelevant in the event of the impending disaster. Moving money from one fund to another does not solve the problem that all the money that exists is owed to banks, and then some.
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Restorative Justice
The report about the riots in England last summer was out today (28 March 2012). From my fairly bried skim through it I can see that it favours restorative justice strongly. I was reminded of a recent item on BBC Radio 4, probably last week, in which meetings had been set up between the parents of someone who had been brutally murdered in the street for no apparent reason, and the perpetrators of another, I believe violent crime (meeting the actual people who had killed their son would be unbearable, and I assume this is the reason it wasn't done that way). What really struck me was how the perpetrators used expressed in their own words how they hadn't really previously considered what the loved ones of their victims might feel as a result of their activities. This is what seems 'restorative' for the perpetrators, who in so many cases 'see' and reform their lives - and of course don't re-offend. For the victims or their loved ones, what's restorative is to see that change happen. Something good has come out of the dreadful actions and consequences.
The background and early life of those who commit crimes are often harrowing to hear of. They haven't been raised in a supportive and loving home, and have often been victims of something much worse than neglect. Perhaps even their parents had an upbringing like this, and are passing on what they know. Violence begets violence. The challenge for society is to break the chain of bad upbringing - and one way of helping might be using some of the techniques of restorative justice. Maybe a young person on a trajectory towards violence, if shown (for example) the restorative justice process I described above (featured on BBC Radio 4) , would be convinced not to continue on that trajectory. A tragedy could thus perhaps be avoided by the restorative's application prior to the need for any justice.
On the front of the London Metro free newspaper today, someone was opining that there's not enough deterrent in the likelihood and severity of prison sentences. Maybe people who were brought up in harsh or even violent homes will fear more of the same in prison, and restrain themselves. I don't know, but I'm not sure fear is what we really want to tap into - not ideally, anyway. The problem of the prison regime though, is for those who go through it. They've maybe started life in a harsh environment of punishment. They've committed a crime, and they're consequently subjected to another harsh regime of punishment. It's all they know. And not only does prison continue the harsh regime of their childhood, it mixes them with hardened re-offenders and gives them the opportunity to study in an academy of crime with the experts.
So, we can look at what happened to offenders before their offence, and make sure that the same thing is not happening to children and young people now. The prevention of re-offending is wise, but if the techniques used on offenders were used on pre-offenders, wow many offences might be prevented?
The riot report says that 50% of the crimes committed in the riots were acquisitive (looting, theft and robbery) and also comments on deprivation. Unfortunately it doesn't hit on the concept of inequality that is used in the book The Spirit Level, and shown to be a good predictor of social ills. Deprivation must be a key feature of those homes where children are badly brought up. Tackle that, and your dealing upstream with violence and rioting, which can only be logical as well as good.
The background and early life of those who commit crimes are often harrowing to hear of. They haven't been raised in a supportive and loving home, and have often been victims of something much worse than neglect. Perhaps even their parents had an upbringing like this, and are passing on what they know. Violence begets violence. The challenge for society is to break the chain of bad upbringing - and one way of helping might be using some of the techniques of restorative justice. Maybe a young person on a trajectory towards violence, if shown (for example) the restorative justice process I described above (featured on BBC Radio 4) , would be convinced not to continue on that trajectory. A tragedy could thus perhaps be avoided by the restorative's application prior to the need for any justice.
On the front of the London Metro free newspaper today, someone was opining that there's not enough deterrent in the likelihood and severity of prison sentences. Maybe people who were brought up in harsh or even violent homes will fear more of the same in prison, and restrain themselves. I don't know, but I'm not sure fear is what we really want to tap into - not ideally, anyway. The problem of the prison regime though, is for those who go through it. They've maybe started life in a harsh environment of punishment. They've committed a crime, and they're consequently subjected to another harsh regime of punishment. It's all they know. And not only does prison continue the harsh regime of their childhood, it mixes them with hardened re-offenders and gives them the opportunity to study in an academy of crime with the experts.
So, we can look at what happened to offenders before their offence, and make sure that the same thing is not happening to children and young people now. The prevention of re-offending is wise, but if the techniques used on offenders were used on pre-offenders, wow many offences might be prevented?
The riot report says that 50% of the crimes committed in the riots were acquisitive (looting, theft and robbery) and also comments on deprivation. Unfortunately it doesn't hit on the concept of inequality that is used in the book The Spirit Level, and shown to be a good predictor of social ills. Deprivation must be a key feature of those homes where children are badly brought up. Tackle that, and your dealing upstream with violence and rioting, which can only be logical as well as good.
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Ticket machines dispense fewer and more expensive [rail] tickets than a booking office
This is an argument produced by Manuel Cortes of the TSSA union, acording to today's Metro free newspaper (London). It is true as things stand, but it is entirely possible to produce a ticket machine that can dispense the full range of tickets and corresponding prices. A major step towards this would be simplifying our ridiculous fares structure. One obvious thing would be not to have a fares system where a ticket from A to B and another concurrent ticket from B to C works out cheaper than a ticket from A to C on the exact same trains.
Cortes makes the point as if it is technically impossible for machines to be as good as humans at selling tickets. It's his job to keep people in work. In a sane world, we wouldn't try to create mundane jobs for humans to do. Everyone would do socially constructive work that a machine can't (yet) do, or no work at all. Machines would be perfectd so that they are as good as or better than humans.
The idea of buying a ticket off a person standing behind a bit of glass is so antiquated with today's technology as to be ridiculous. Setting aside the obvious development of smart ticketing, itself argued against on spurious grounds but because it takes jobs, the logical thing for expert ticket sellers to do would be to guide people using the ticket machines, or buying tickets on the www.
Cortes makes the point as if it is technically impossible for machines to be as good as humans at selling tickets. It's his job to keep people in work. In a sane world, we wouldn't try to create mundane jobs for humans to do. Everyone would do socially constructive work that a machine can't (yet) do, or no work at all. Machines would be perfectd so that they are as good as or better than humans.
The idea of buying a ticket off a person standing behind a bit of glass is so antiquated with today's technology as to be ridiculous. Setting aside the obvious development of smart ticketing, itself argued against on spurious grounds but because it takes jobs, the logical thing for expert ticket sellers to do would be to guide people using the ticket machines, or buying tickets on the www.
War 'vital to our national security'
This is a headline quote in today's Metro free newspaper (London). It is from UK Prime Minister David Cameron. One of the things that provokes terrorism is our armed forces' presence in various countries. In particular, I believe I am right in saying, where this involves non-Muslims being in Muslim countries.
Of course, terrorist attacks, whether real or false flag, generate work for our security services, either setting up the false flag attacks or trying to prevent attacks. Is that really what 'Dave' meant?
Of course, terrorist attacks, whether real or false flag, generate work for our security services, either setting up the false flag attacks or trying to prevent attacks. Is that really what 'Dave' meant?
Smoking and unhealthy food are good for the economy
Text of a letter I sent to London's Metro free newspaper:
"Fat and Fags
It’s not just the tax that smokers pay that’s paradoxical,
Beth (London), METROtalk, 8 March. Smoking creates wok for those who make,
advertise and sell smoking and stop-smoking products, for the lobbyists - both
pro and anti, therapists and advisers to help people give up, and medical staff
to treat those made ill by smoking. Unhealthy food has similar contradictions,
plus, topically, McDonald’s at the Olympics (page 30). If ‘fat and fags’ mean
more jobs and tax paid, are they good things? Until we accept as a society that
only jobs that are socially constructive should be done, we will have
this problem."
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Double standards?
I hear it said fairly often that women/families who can't afford to bring up children should not have them. When I hear it, I cringe. Who has made it so that these families can't afford children? How do we know what genius will not be born if this socially Darwinistic rule is followed? What kind of species limits its own growth to account for the unequal distribution of wealth among its members? Will my English teacher forgive my string of rhetorical questions?
In Lomdon's Metro free newspaper there was an article on 9 February 2012, which complained that women's career progress is hampered by the 'lack of affordable childcare'. The article did not say that these women should not have children if they can't afford them. Do they want subsidised child care? If so, how is it different for the taxpayer to pay a child carer to look after children than to pay a mother to look after her own children?
In an RBE, childen would be bought up optimally as far as possible. This surely has to mean quality time with mum and dad, even if professional carers are used. Those who care for children (or anyone vulnerable) are, I am confident, motivated by the good they are doing, not only the £ they can get.
In Lomdon's Metro free newspaper there was an article on 9 February 2012, which complained that women's career progress is hampered by the 'lack of affordable childcare'. The article did not say that these women should not have children if they can't afford them. Do they want subsidised child care? If so, how is it different for the taxpayer to pay a child carer to look after children than to pay a mother to look after her own children?
In an RBE, childen would be bought up optimally as far as possible. This surely has to mean quality time with mum and dad, even if professional carers are used. Those who care for children (or anyone vulnerable) are, I am confident, motivated by the good they are doing, not only the £ they can get.
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Behavioural economics: Not just making up the numbers
This refers to an article in London's Metro free newspaper, by Rory Sutherland - www.thewikiman.co.uk
"Those wedded to a neo-classical economic view of the world are liable to assume that the world's population consists entirely of independent actors making decisions on the basis of rational, calculating self-interest. ... "Homo economicus" - a beast created to conceive elegant mathematical models of behaviour but with no regard for how people behave in reality. ... Opponents of this view, ... such as George Soros and Charlie Munger have long been enthusiasts for behavioural economics. ... A recession, combined growing concerns over the environment , are increasingly leading people to believe that the way to solve the many human problems is not with 'more stuff' but by using less stuf in a more humman centred way.
"Those wedded to a neo-classical economic view of the world are liable to assume that the world's population consists entirely of independent actors making decisions on the basis of rational, calculating self-interest. ... "Homo economicus" - a beast created to conceive elegant mathematical models of behaviour but with no regard for how people behave in reality. ... Opponents of this view, ... such as George Soros and Charlie Munger have long been enthusiasts for behavioural economics. ... A recession, combined growing concerns over the environment , are increasingly leading people to believe that the way to solve the many human problems is not with 'more stuff' but by using less stuf in a more humman centred way.
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Plane ticket price madness
"Code sharing" is the selling of one airline company's flights by another airline. The price for the same seat on the same flight can vary drastically. I read about this in Metro (London, 8/12/10). In the article one airline's spokesman said "We always advise customers to shop around for the best fares to suit their needs". Setting aside the odd concept of "needing" to spend more money to get exactly the same thing, this point is also odd as we have an airline effectively marketing other airlines' tickets. Let's not forget in all this oddness that there are of course companies that exist to find the cheapest fares for you. Yes, special websites that uncover information that is already known, but that has been covered, or not shared. Thus a market and competition and jobs are created to achieve nothing.
Friday, 26 November 2010
How money distracts our focus
In today's Metro (London), Oxfam expressed concerns at the decline in Christmas card sending because of the money that is raised through selling them.
I'm not having a go at Oxfam, or Christmas, but if Oxfam need money to feed the hungry, etc, we can actually just give them money without buying anything.
As I argue here often, what people want / need is a full belly, a roof over their head, and a source of information and communication (that's not an exhaustive list, but indicates life's necessities simply). As things stand they need money to get these, but it doesn't have to be like that, and by extension, we shouldn't need to buy Christmas Cards to make it happen.
I'm not having a go at Oxfam, or Christmas, but if Oxfam need money to feed the hungry, etc, we can actually just give them money without buying anything.
As I argue here often, what people want / need is a full belly, a roof over their head, and a source of information and communication (that's not an exhaustive list, but indicates life's necessities simply). As things stand they need money to get these, but it doesn't have to be like that, and by extension, we shouldn't need to buy Christmas Cards to make it happen.
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