Bread, Loved Ones and Keble Crackers

Bread

For the first time in a long time I baked my own bread the other day. Easy and the results are brilliant.

Loved Ones

Evelyn Waugh wrote a brilliant satire on the American Undertaker business called The Loved Ones many years ago.

Over the last year or so the 12 year olds on the radio and television have exterminated our friends and relatives in favour of LO.

If anyone is left to mourn my death, please call them friends and relatives.

Keble Crackers

A couple weeks ago a woman was interviewed on the Today programme on Radio 4 who was talking about the dumbing down of women in films. I was so shocked by this woman's appalling use of, like, language yeah, that I went to the Keble College, Oxford University, web site.

This woman is a senior academic and used to be a Professor of English at another University.

I wrote to the woman and asked her why on earth she spoke the way she did. I also asked if her students could understand her. Very direct of me I know.

To her credit she replied to my message. However, she tried to accuse me of confusing her language with her feminist message. My message missed its mark and she remained completely unbowed, I am afraid.

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Philosophy?

Is this philosophy? What follows is a variation on something you are almost certain to have seen before.

We’ll be fine but let’s knock these out, and to end a little [Redacted] Zen for you to ponder: If a dog barks in the woods and a tree falls on him, did someone clap their hands?

Source: http://molls.tumblr.com/

I like it anyway!

DW

Computing Top Tip

Let this be yet another one of my most valuable lifetime top tips.

Young Dima told me before I went to visit him in Bristol this week that his computer was running very slowly and that he needed to reinstall Windows. He asked me if he could have my old laptop.

When I got to his place I took a look at the computer and after a bit of digging and delving I realised that there was something starting up when the thing was booted that was going round and round in a loop for as much as 30 minutes. Dima knew the sloth but he never got to understand the reason behind it.

I identified vsmon.exe as the culprit and a simple search online showed that Zone Alarm Firewall software was the cause. To cut a long story short, we uninstalled and then reinstalled ZA Firewall software and bingo, problem solved.

The moral of the story is that it doesn’t take a lot to track down an error like this and the chances are that if your computer suffers, someone else has also already suffered from the same problem. That often means that a solution is also waiting for you. Reinstalling the software is just one option in the case of the well known vsmon.exe problem.

DW

Guantanamo Jamboree?

Now, I didn't SEE the news yesterday but am I right in thinking that the Ethiopian resident of the UK who was released from Guantanamo Bay detention centre was flown home in an RAF aeroplane and was accompanied by several immigration and foreign office staff?

If that is true, why did they do that?

I understand he is a free man and so could have been put on a scheduled airline and met at the gate at Heathrow ... he even went to RAF Northolt I think.

Then again, is this part of the boosting of the economy we need now? Increasing public spending so that someone else will benefit too?

DW

The Car Industry

This is my message to the world vis a vis the car industry.

Banks fell apart, the housing market is still falling apart and the car market is in serious trouble.

The banks have been very badly managed and essentially unregulated since Margaret Thatcher and Ronal Reagan were let loose on the world.

The housing market was fed by the rotten banking system.

The car market has been fed by the severe inflation that became a  normal part of the housing market. Now we are seeing the pay off: many billions of Pounds are being asked by the car industry to prop it up.

For decades, the car industry has suffered from over capacity as every car manufacturer has expanded more and more. GM has to be allowed to fail now as the worst of the worst. One UK car manufacturer may well have to be allowed to fail. Don't worry, any slack that GM and the other one leave behind will be taken up by what's left.

I don't know how many tens or hundreds of thousands of us were encouraged to remortgage our houses to "release the equity" but as they did so, they spent the money on new kitchens, on holidays and on cars. Of course, many people will have used it to pay off (consolidate!) their debts. This is what has kept large parts of the UK economy booming over the last decade or so. Now that these three avenues of the economy have been revealed for what they were, we are suffering now.

Bad managers, bad economists, bad politicians.

DW

Counting to one Billion

We used to ask this question as children, if you could count from one to one million in increments of one second, how long would it take you to get to one million?

The answer is 11.57407 days.

Now that we are throwing around out billions and hundreds of billion of Pounds, Dollars and so on, answer this question: if you could count from one to one billion in increments of one second, how long would it take you to get to one billion?

The answer is ... probably a shock to you.

The point of this post: I want everyone to appreciate just what one billion really represents. It is a huge number. So, when these bankers and others who are wasting our hard earned cash are prepared to spend it by the billion, you've got some idea of what they're doing now.

DW

The answer is ... 31.07979 YEARS

Do YOU waste all of this food?

Of course you don't but just look at this:

A survey commissioned for Love Food Hate Waste suggests that British workers are shelling out £5.5bn on shop bought lunches each year, while they leave almost the same value of perfectly good lunch foods at home to go off.

Ham, bread, cheese, cold meats and other typical sandwich and lunchbox foods such as fruit, crisps and yogurts are forgotten and eventually binned, to the tune of £5.06bn every year**, while we buy sandwiches and take aways at lunchtime.

2.1 million tonnes of food fit for a packed lunch is heading to landfill each year, including:

• £821m worth of breads (530,000 tonnes)
• £94m worth of sliced meats (23,000 tonnes)

But the nation seems split on packed lunches. The research shows that nearly a third of workers (28%) say they never bring in lunch from home, while another third (33%) say they take lunch to work every working week day.

See: http://www.wrap.org.uk/wrap_corporate/news/buying_lunch_costs.html

In other words, there are some people who've got some bread, butter, lettuce, ham, cheese and so on in their cupboards and fridges. However, rather than spending just a few minutes a day putting something decent together with the food they have already spent their money on, they throw that away and then go to a shop that sells them something that will include good food together with seasonings and preservatives etc that they do not need.

Who are these people?

Read the rest of that article for more shocking stats on the food that we throw away. You will also see a link on that page to http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/ which is well worth a look even though it's a bit brown rice and sandals in parts. The message is clear. There are people in the world who think they have a right to grab some of our scarce resources and waste them. Some of these people are bleating now because they have fallen on hard times for a while and are looking for someone to help them out with cash and other things. As it says on the love food web site, if only you hadn't wasted all of that food, you could have saved yourself more than GBP300 a year.

On the other hand, as someone who lives alone I need to add that British supermarkets and other shops cater badly for singletons. So, loaves of bread can be too much and the last few slices can go furry before one gets the chance to eat them. In that case, let the birds and other wild life eat them, don't just put them in the bin.

Then again, though, how about the dabbawallas of Mubai: you'll never waste another meal again if you adopt that system. Find a video on that system by taking a look at www.economist/audiovideo/asia (I think you don't need a subscription to view that short video of how the dabbawalla system works). Every day 5,000 dabbawallas deliver 175,000 tiffin boxes to their respective destination with an error rate of just one in 6 million. That's one error every 34 days or around 10 errors a year during which a total of 63,875,000 tiffin boxes will have been delivered. Better than Six Sigma that!

DW

HP: the saga goes on

Just before I left for my latest trip, I wrote to the Director of Customer Relations at Hewlett Packard in the UK. I explained how they have got my laptop more than I have etc.

Yesterday I got a call from their complaints department and she assured me that she was monitoring my case personally and that if they keep it more than 8 weeks, I get a new comp. They are waiting for a spare part for my existing machine.

Just in Time? Kaizen? Six Sigma? All of these buzz words and techniques and more must be floating around HP and yet for the want of a button of some sort, they are prepared to give me a brand new laptop ... if I'm lucky ... I've only got to wait another two weeks as they have had my machine for 40 days now. I really don't want that one back as it's a disaster.

What a shower!

DW

Cheating Footballers ... Again

Just seen a rerun of Steve Gerrard diving in the penalty box in a Merseyside derby from a couple of years ago.

The shame of it and the simplistic fooling of the referee.

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Pitter Pat

Don't put that pat of butter you took from the restaurant in your trouser pocket in case you forget to take it out until many melted and runny hours later.

Top tip, that! Not that I did that of course. It was a friend.

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Family Tree

I have started the quest to compile my family tree. Only using online resources so far but have made some good progress. I have got back to 1778.

I am aiming at filling the generations up until the start of 19th Century or so, so 1778 is about the limit.

So far they're all labourers with a sprinkling of professional types. No ne'er do wells that I know of!! Apart from me of course.

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Wembley

Did you know that you can see the arch over Wembley Stadium from Heathrow Terminal 1? Maybe other terminals too but I haven't noticed and I'm not going there today!

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Travel Insurance

In the old days we couldn't travel anywhere abroad without travel insurance: we had to have it. We all railed against it because there was no choice about the matter and therefore the cost of travel insurance was ridiculously high. Monopolies for you!

I have been watching warnings on the television all day about the perils of travelling abroad without any insurance: there has just been a piece on Inside Out on BBC 1 showing a few very unfortunate people who have had serious accidents whilst travelling.

The problems being faced by people injured or falling ill abroad include being stranded in a foreign land, possibly alone, in a hospital providing just the basic level of care or even worse in some cases. Alternatively, there are stories of six figure sums having to be spent to repatriate someone.

I have travelled without travel insurance for the last 20 years or so on the ground that I refused to pour far too much money into something I always thought I didn't need. I certainly didn't want to tempt fate!

Following today's knee jerks I bought a year's worth of travel insurance. It wasn't that expensive and it covers a wide variety of problems. It also includes business cover for some of the things that one doesn't need as a holiday maker: loss or breakage of my computer for example.

I really don't want to have to claim on this insurance for any reason of course. Then again, I really don't want to find myself dumped in a hospital bed in a foreign land being treated in only a rudimentary way without the wherewithal of getting home.

Think carefully.

DW

That FSA Chap

The number two man at the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has resigned this morning following a bit of a charade over whether he sacked a prophetic whistleblower at HBOS or not.

Sir James Crosby says he has resigned to protect the FSA since he is innocent.

Reminds me of that poor and uneducated chap on television many years ago who was arrested for some heinous crime. The poor man had no idea what was happening to him but to try to make his life as tolerable for himself as possible, he decided to admit to the crime. He said this, though, as the police started to take him off to the cop shop:

OK, I'm guilty but I didn't do it.

Sir James?

DW

These are fantastic

I have just come across this list in a discussion forum and couldn’t resist sharing them: if they are true they are frightening. In any case some of them are creasingly funny.

 

Disorder in the American Courts

These are from a book called 'Disorder in the American Courts' and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while  these exchanges were actually taking place.

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?

ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he  doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's twenty, much like your IQ.

ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you sh***ing me?

ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid

ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS : Your Honour, I think I need a different attorney. Can I hire a new attorney?

ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.

ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.

ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.

ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.

ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And Mr Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I had finished.

ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS: Are you qualified to ask that question?

And finally:

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Evolution: Darwin or Deity?

Rather a surprising set of results come from The Economist’s Daily Chart for 5^th February, http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933596&story_id=13062613:

 

In Iceland about 80% of people believe evolution to be true

In Britain the figure is just under 75%

Germany 70%

Ireland around 65%

 

But

 

The USA around 40%

Turkey about 26%

 

There is a BIG gap between these latter two and the next lowest believing country, Greece, which stands at about 55%.

 

How does one account for that? Is this a sign of strength or of weakness? Does it matter?

 

All of these issues are discussed in the comments section at the end of this short article. Daily Chart view.

 

DW

 

Mad Madoff

Firstly, the relative trivia: have you noticed how the 12 year olds at the BBC are calling this man Bern’ard Madoff as if they were Americans rather than the B’ernard that we know?

 

Secondly, I have just found time to start reading up on some of the technical things that Madoff was or wasn’t doing with the $50 billion that he is supposed to have squandered. He is accused of running a Ponzi Scheme. However, in an article in the FT there is a fascinating piece in which they run through the thought processes of Wall Street wallahs as they studied Madoff and his mad cap work. They ascribed some fancy finance footwork to the man when he was clearly pussyfooting and not cutting a rug at all.

 

For example,

 

Mr Madoff’s returns appeared to many to be too good to be true (see chart below). But advocates claimed they were the result of a “split-strike conversion strategy” that used derivatives to minimise risk, while intelligence from his market-making business allowed him to time investments almost perfectly.

 

The SEC investigated Madoff in 2005 and again in 2007 and found nothing (the chickens in this scenario started to come home to roost this week too! See the whistleblower snippet below) so:

 

Several investors believed he might be front-running – illegally trading ahead of customers of the market-making division – but many stayed with him anyway. “He had a clean record from the SEC and it wasn’t our job to spot this,” says one.

 

Some funds offered a more complex explanation. Split-strike conversion enabled him to profit from periods of rising share prices by setting up what was called a “bull spread”. This involved buying shares in 40-50 companies to mimic the blue chip S&P 100 index, while using put options to protect against falls. The cost of these options was covered by selling call options, limiting the potential upside.

 

My reaction at this point was to think that if only he had been doing this sort of thing, maybe he could really have returned some of the profits that he did pay back albeit within a Ponzi Scheme: a bit like burglars and the like who put huge amounts of effort into their robberies that could just as well be channelled into something legitimate.

 

In a US Congressional hearing this week, a man labelled as a whistleblower in the Madoff case, sorry his name eludes me, made the point that the graph of Madoff’s returns fell on a straight and 45 degree line. This man went on to say that everyone else’s equivalent graph would rise and fall with or against or generally in tune with the market: here’s the link for the kind of graph that gentleman was talking about

 

http://media.ft.com/cms/aa499604-ebd3-11dd-8838-0000779fd2ac.gif You can see what he means and why he said he warned the SEC over a ten year period that there was something rotten in the state of Madoff.

 

There’s a nice time line summary of events here, by the way: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cc1ceb9e-ebd5-11dd-8838-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=b7a8d610-caaf-11dd-87d7-000077b07658.html

 

Regulators, lawyers and Parliamentarians have all tried to make these things impossible to get away with but Madoff is here, Satyam (who??? ... watch this space) surfaced around the new year in a cash reporting scandal in India. The Sarbanes Oxley Act from the US, for example, Corporate Governance rules in the UK for example ...

 

I imagine that a lot of people are wondering how Madoff can still be holding on to his flat in New York, reputedly worth as much as $7 million, when there are probably people who need a mere fraction of that just to live on ... but Madoff stole it from them.

 

Finally for now, you might care to remind yourself of the two basic types of Ponzi scheme I discuss on my web site: http://www.duncanwil.co.uk/ponzi.html Give me time to get back home and put together a summary of what people think they know about Madoff and I will include that on a revised or supplementary Ponzi page.

 

 

DW

 

The Dutch Cap?

Interesting what you can learn and I wonder if this is something that everyone else knew about except me.

 

In my course in Bangkok this week, discussing International Financial Reporting Standards, we talked informally at one stage about the credit crunch, 100% - 125% mortgages and remortgaging.

 

There was a Dutchman on the course and he said that in Holland, anyone taking equity out of their property as a result, for example, of a remortgage and who did NOT put that money back into the property in the form of an extension, new kitchen, new garage, upgrading central heating and so on, would be charged income tax on the money as if it were income and not a capital flow of cash.

 

I wonder why we don’t do that in the UK as I think we don’t; and how effective it is at limiting/controlling equity release schemes. I also wonder if it made matters worse by encouraging borrowers to gross up their requirements so that they effectively borrowed enough for their needs and to pay the tax as well. That is, they want, say, £50,000 but take £60,000 to cover their £50,000 AND the £10,000 tax bill.

 

 

DW

 

Thatcher, the daughter

Good! She's been sacked. Good. She's bleating now, or at least there is bleating in the newspapers on her behalf.

Loud, grating and with a speech impediment, Carol Thatcher gets on my nerves. Whenever she was due to appear on the One Show on BBC1 I changed channels. The same when the likes of Graham Norton appear too.

Would Thatcher be where she is without being her mother's daughter? Doubt it. So, as Harold Wilson would have it, ditch the bitch!!

Good riddance.

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

CB/BBC

Panorama on BBC 1 did a programme last week on swearing on the telly etc. I said, good. I said, I doubt anything will change as a result of it.

Well, I have had a good idea for change. I would like the BBC and probably ITV and Sky as well, to set up some new channel:s:

CB/BBC which is Cor Blimey BBC
CB/ITV which is Cor Blimey ITV
CB/Sky ... Cor Blimey Sky

They can put all of their swearing programmes on there, their nonsense "celebrity" programmes and their idiotic "reality" stuff. If people want to speak AmerEnglish they can go there too.

As for BBC 1, BBC 2 etc, they will then be free of low level standards. I don't mean that we need posh TV or anything like that, I mean i want entertainment, news and so on without worrying about anyone effing and blinding at me and expecting me to swoon over stunted gays and other ne'er do wells who exhibit neither talent nor charm.

Radio 4 is also in need of reform as we are now subjected to gratuitous swearing on there at virtually any time of the day or night. I don't want it and their infantile justification of it.

There: another top solution from yours truly.

DW


Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device