Postage

When I bought some first class stamps a few weeks ago, I was astonished to find that 12 stamps cost more than 5 pounds. Before I got round to blogging about that, I learnt that there is to be further price increase, this time to 60p.

When I worked in Lincolnshire an occasional treat was the five course dinner at the Grand Hotel in Lincoln; it cost 12/6, only slightly higher than today's first class stamp.

In those days a modest cheap and cheerful three course 'business lunch' could be had for less than 4 shillings.

Even allowing for inflation, sending a letter is becoming a serious expense, and one that can usually be avoided by sending email or telephoning.

Had I not largely abandoned Christmas cards last year, I should have resolved to do so now.

I wonder how long we shall have a Post Office ?

After the Arab Spring, the Arab Winter.

Various Arab states seem to have disposed of one set of obnoxious rulers only to get another set not conspicuously more virtuous than the first lot, and less capable of maintaining order.

We are urged to intervene in Syria to help bring about a similar change there, so that a new government can set about the popular task of persecuting minorities.

I very much hope our Government will not intervene.

For once I'm glad of the Russian veto in the UN Security Council. That it is self interested does not prevent its being useful.

A Cheerful Pensioner Refuses to Sulk

Some politicians discussing the budget tell me I ought to be discontented because my personal income tax allowance has not been increased while other people's allowances have been.

Yet I have lost nothing. My personal allowance has not been reduced. I just had an increase a few years earlier than other people; now they are being allowed to catch up.

There are several consolations for being a pensioner. One need not work, one doesn't make National Insurance contributions, and bus travel is free.

I refuse to feel aggrieved just to feed the ambitions of unscrupulous politicians.

In the Service of God.

I've just seen this in the Daily Telegraph:

"The Dutch government has promised to investigate "very serious and shocking" allegations that hundreds of teenage boys and young men were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church as a treatment for homosexuality in the 1950s."

there's more at:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/7j495ge

Apparently there were cases of young boys being castrated after complaining of sexual abuse at the hands (or should I say penises ?) of priests.

Now that they are on the defensive Priests confine their homophobia to whining about the meaning of the word 'marriage", so it is instructive to recall what they were capable of when intoxicated by the servile adulation of a gullible flock.

Human employers are held responsible for the misconduct of their employees, yet theologians never apply that rule to God.

The Right Man for a Bad Job

John Yates, formerly of the Metropolitan police, was interviewed recently about the phone tapping affair. It was he who decided that no further investigations were justified even though the police held voluminous records of profligate wrong doing.

I noticed that Yates was speaking from Bahrain, where he now works with the local police.

Given the recent record of the Bahraini police, he seems the right man for the job !

Non-Verbal Communication

'Can you sum up in words...' I just heard an interviewer ask an interviewee in the BBC 24 hour news program.

How else might he have summed up ? telepathically ? by farting in Morse Code ?

A Freudian Slip ?

I've been reading Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and finding it very tedious. I suspended reading of it for a few days while I finished another book, and when I decided to return to Freud I couldn't find the book anywhere.

There are several places where I'm likely to put down partly read books, but it wasn't in any of them !

Freud would have found that most significant.

Valentines Day

I've never felt any interest in Valentine's day, I've never been inclined to send a Valentine's card, and have never received one.

I understand that the custom is for cards to be anonymous. As one of the obstacles to romance is a shyness that prevents people declaring love, anonymity seems absurd.

False Economy

In Sainsbury's today I noticed a 'special offer' of two packets of cherries for £3-00. Each packet contained 200 grams, so that was 400 g for £3-00.

In the market similar cherries were being sold for £1-00 per pound, that is £1-00 for 454g, instead of £3-00 for 400g.

Sainsbury's profit margin must be huge!!

Rare Talent and Huge Salaries

In an earlier blog I doubted whether the ability to run a large business is rare enough to necessitate the vast salaries many directorships attract, and suggested that people were often mistaking good luck for business acumen.

I’m now having second thoughts.

Even if running a business does not require any single very rare skill, it might still still require a rare combination of common skills.

I’d expect the successful captain of industry to be well above average in each of the following.

Intelligence (1/10)

Power of concentration (1/5)

Stamina and perseverance (1/5)

Co-ordination - ability to avoid muddle and confusion (1/2)

Memory (½)

Ability to assess people (½)

Ability to manage people, to delegate, supervise adequately without overdoing it, to judge when to listen, and when not. (1/3)

After each I’ve put an estimate of the proportion of the population who meet the standard.

Assuming independence, the probability of someone qualifying in all respects would be the product of all those probabilities, namely:

(1/10)*(1/5)*(1/5)*(½)³*(1/3) = 1/(6000)

Senior posts are usually taken by people in the age range 40 to 60, who I guess amount to less than a third of the population, so the proportion of the population qualified by both age and ability is at most 1/18000.

The population of Great Britain is around 60 million, so the number of people is between 3000 and 4000. That number must be further reduced to remove people of the requisite abilities who have not chosen business careers - some will have chosen instead to be doctors, lawyers, academics, journalists, computer programmers, soldiers or civil servants.

How many people are needed to run our large companies? I’m not sure how many companies are involved. 1300 companies are quoted on the main market of the London Stock Exchange, though not all those a British. All companies in the FTSE 350 index have their primary listing in Britain, so I guess that at least 350 companies need directors of high ability and each company will need several. With fewer than people 4000 available, leadership talent may be rare after all.

Terrified by Batch Files

Recently several emails have not reached their destinations, though they were sent to valid addresses, and I received no error messages.

All the messages had a particular attachment, consisting of a file created by zipping a folder containing instructions for connecting to a web site that I manage. There were three files in the folder. A batch file that opened a DOS window to make an ftp connection to the site, a text file that contained information required by the batch file, and another text file giving instructions. I needed to send all that to other officers of the association that owns the web site so they can operate it in the event of my sudden demise.

Other emails, including ones in which I assured intended recipients that I’d sent the information, were delivered promptly, but the messages with that attachment disappeared without trace; they weren’t even in the recipients' spam traps.

The destination addresses unable to receive the emails in question were on either Google, or ntl. When I sent a copy of the problem message to my icuknet mail box it arrived safely.

Eventually I renamed the batch file by changing its extension to ‘txt’ and changed the instructions to include a specification that the name should be changed back again before use, and the message was safely delivered with its attachment.

Google and ntl seem so terrified of batch files that they are even peering inside zipped folders in case one should be lurking there, and they hide the evidence afterwards.

Faith and its Consequences

The Archbishop of York recently objected to proposals to allow marriage between people of the same gender.

As reported in the media, his argument stressed the linguistic impropriety of using the word ‘marriage’ in a different sense from the customary one, but I suspect that his objection was not primarily a defence of linguistic usage. It is in some places the custom for one man to have several wives, so there is an established use of ‘marriage’ in which it does not imply the monogamy that I’m sure the Archbishop favours.

I think his primary grounds for objecting are religious. That raises the question of the grounds for religious belief.

It is common for religious people to say that religious belief should not be assessed according to the same criteria we apply to other beliefs. Faith, they say, is at least as important as evidence. It is common for religious people to extol as a virtue having faith in what cannot be justified by evidence.

Insofar as religious faith reflects a personal choice of a world view that someone finds reassuring, that is all very well, until that world view affects the way the people of faith deal with others who don’t share their faith.

The Archbishop was not just advising members of his flock not to marry partners of the same gender, he was objecting to anyone at all contracting such a marriage, whatever their faith or lack of faith.

That is an example of a systematic intellectual dishonesty found in much religious thought. The evidence put forward to support belief is weak, but once the belief is considered to be established it is used to justify conclusions much stronger than the original evidence justifies. Thus can an personal whim be magnified into a moral imperative.