Old Favourite: Cow Economics

A view of life versus politics, business & religion that applies the warped logic of the latter to a simple example of the former. First, you need are two cows. Then you need to read on ... 

Born Between 1930 & 1970

Congratulations To All My Friends who were born in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s and early 70s! 

NHS Greater Glasgow

Apparently these were actually typed by NHS secretaries in Greater Glasgow: 

Ethics & Integrity. Good value?

There is a simple but powerful truth that effective government requires a first-rate workforce with a well-developed sense of right and wrong. Most importantly, it requires people who are more concerned about the public good than personal gain. 

Public service is an opportunity to raise the standards for country, community, family, and fellow citizens; to make peoples’ lives better and their futures brighter. 

Jobcentre Plus: Rhetoric vs reality.

The ‘New Deal’ from Jobcentre Plus - neither ‘new’ nor any kind of deal.

Gibbon famously described the Holy Roman Empire as neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Likewise the UK government’s flexible new deal is neither flexible nor new nor any kind of deal – at least if that implies a symbiotic contract. 

This is the experience of a redundant former senior executive on a compulsory 13 week Jobcentre Plus New Deal experience in Summer 2009 …. 

The Sharia Solution To Sub-Prime

There was a widely available form of consumer credit called “rent-to-own” which, though still available, has been much less common since, roughly, the 1970s. For the previous hundred years or so it had been a very common form of installment plan purchasing. Rent-to-own began with a court case in England which effectively legalized the contract, which then spread throughout the countries using Anglo-Saxon Common Law. Quite simply you rented the product, paying a slightly higher rent, and when the cost of purchase plus interest had been paid off, you became owner of the product. In the court case the product was a piano – a very substantial, but important, purchase, for a family in Victorian England. Such contracts became common for other major purchases such as furniture, cars and, from the 1950s onwards, consumer goods such as TVs and washing machines. 

How To Borrow Your Way Out Of Debt

So, what was the cause of the credit crunch? Put simply, people borrowed money they couldn’t afford to repay. So now the government, which is also over-borrowed, and has escalating liabilities in the form of Social Security and Medicare, has a solution to this debt problem. The government is going to borrow more money. 

Funny, You Don't Look Jewish!

A Jewish American businessman, in the last half of the 19th century was in Shanghai on business and arranged to meet the head of the local Jewish Community at his hotel. The visitor duly arrived – a small Chinese man with a pigtail, moustache and traditional Chinese clothes. He looked at the American and said, “Funny, you don’t look at all Jewish”! So who are the Jews, where do they come from and what “should” they look like? 

Woman’s Lib = Man’s Freedom

A man goes to see his mistress and, because of the day he’s had, has the temerity to complain about bourgeois women and how he hates them and their values. 

Obama versus Cheney and Martingale (first published September 2009)

What did Madoff do wrong? Imagine you have placed a bet of $10 on red at a casino. You lose. So then you place a bet of $20 and lose again. Your third bet is $40 and you win. You lost $30 but won $40, so you are $10 up. No matter how many times you bet, you always end up $10 up when you, eventually, win. This is the Martingale system. Foolproof? Not quite. If you keep doubling, the bets will soon get very large. You could hit the casino’s limit. You could run out of money. But that only happens when there is an exceptionally long run of black numbers. What are the chances of that? The depressing and, perhaps, surprising, answer is that on a completely fair bet, such as tossing a coin, the odds of losing a cripplingly large amount of money on a long losing streak are exactly the same as winning the same amount of money in slow, steady, $10 increments. No strategy you can possibly adopt affects the 50:50 outcome. In a casino, it is worse. The existence of 0 and 00 makes a small but decisive shift in the odds in favor of the house. In the long run the house wins and you lose. 

PM Gordon Brown's right to silence (first published September 2009)

English cricket fans were delighted when their team defeated Australia – long the foremost nation in international cricket. Supporters of Brighton & Hove Albion Football (soccer) Club were no doubt joyous when their team escaped relegation from top flight English football. Supporters of both teams were no doubt pleased, if a little surprised, to learn that British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was sharing vicariously in their joy. Brown is not English (he is Scottish) and hails from a part of Britain that could not be more distant from Brighton & Hove. 

The Wedding Test

I was a very happy person. My wonderful girlfriend and I had been dating for over a year, and we had decided to get married. 

Ban the Ban: The Human Cost of Prohibitions

Prohibition describes the outlaw of the manufacture, distribution, sale or provision of particular goods and services by consenting adults.