Tax on cash

Ultimately, in order to get to a fair ‘post work’ society, cash would need to be eliminated in order to prevent corruption. If everyone had an income from society if would have to be their only income so that a black market selling society’s assets and resources does not make individuals rich at the of everyone else.

To move towards this ‘post work’ society a step could involve taxing cash transactions, say, to the tune of 10 percent. This would be done at the point of sale (if cash is used, but not if a card is used) and when depositing cash at a bank. This, combined with a clampdown on large scale black market operations, would soon discourage the use of all cash. Along with cash would go most opportunities for corruption so long as the electronic systems for transactions are secure.

A sad day for batteries

​Samsung has today ended its production of the Galaxy Note 7. Exploding batteries have killed the model. One of its benefits over the iPhone was a better battery life, but it looks like this was done by taking the charge density beyond what is possible.  Is Apple more astute, cautious, or just lucky?  Some said that the iPhone 7 was barely an improvement on the 6S, but at least it didn’t catch fire.

Samsung are not the first to have pushed battery technology too far.  Sony had laptops catching fire in 2014 and Boeing had fires in the lithium ion battery banks of their new Dreamliner in 2013.  The more the charge density is raised to get the longest battery life with the lowest weight, the more chance of hitting the limit, resulting in overheating leading to fire or explosion.

No phone manufacturer is going to risk their brand in the near future by pushing battery technology, so we will probably have a plateauing of developments. Unless someone comes up with processors or screens which consume significantly less power, new models will be cosmetically different but not more powerful.

Maybe the Note 7 could have been saved by using a lower capacity battery and requiring more frequent charges, but I guess that Samsung believe that the damage to its reputation means that there can’t be another chance for the Note 7. l hope the Note brand, with its stylus will be reborn next year as it’s the only phone you can write on and that is the main selling point for me.  After all, it wasn’t the stylus what did for it, it was the battery.

Civilisation

If Civilisation is based on slavery, should it be seen as civilised?

Who carved the columns in the Greek temples?

How much were the masons who built the great cathedrals and carved the statues in the niches paid?

Force and Intellect

In the distant past, force was what got you where you were in society. Force was used to get goods, chattels and money. But over the years the rule of law became the norm. The Abrahamic religions in the west were a major contribution to this. Follow the 10 commandments and force was pretty much ruled out. Laws being what they are became complex. Those who understood the laws found that they could manipulate the laws to their own ends and persuade those in power to pass more laws that favoured both those in power and those who could then further manipulate the new laws to the advantage of themselves and the powerful. Intellect had replaced force as the route to power. The aristocracy, based on a system born out of the use of force, was usurped by the meritocracy. 

It is easy to promote the use of intellect as the route to power and money. Everyone, it is said, has the same chance of making it in a meritocracy. Only that is not the case: only those with sufficient intellect have the opportunity to succeed. It is said that if you aspire to something then you can achieve it. That would only be the case if everyone had the same intellect. Just as very few people can be the next Einstein or even fully understand the theories of the last Einstein, there is a distribution across the whole range of intellects. There is also a distribution across the whole range of physical strengths and it has been a long time since anyone thought that power material wealth should be shared according to physical strength; however most people in power still seem to think that it is fair to distribute power and wealth according to intellect. That is what is inferred by meritocracy.  

An increasing problem is that this unequal distribution of wealth is getting more unequal. CEOs are earning soaring multiples of their employee’s median wage. Those who look after our money take a larger and larger share of it and those who are clever enough to find loopholes in the tax and legal systems benefit more than ever. It is seen as clever to avoid tax and the clever are increasingly avoiding tax. This is both not fair and not sustainable.  

An argument must be made that society should be fair to all. Everyone should be entitled to a job they can enjoy at an intellectual level they are comfortable with. There are enough people who can lead and enjoy leadership positions to run society without having to pay such people snowballing multiples of the median wage. If these multiples are seen as compensation for the pressure of having to take the blame when things go wrong then let’s not have a scapegoat culture. In any case, how many times are such people held to account? People are more likely to lose their jobs lower down in the organisation and with much less compensation. 

How do we get to this better society, which is much closer to equal pay for all? A good starting point would be to prevent taxpayers money going to companies which pay more to any individual than the Prime Minister earns. There is still a long way to go after that, but it would be a first step.

 
 

 
 

Tesco

Tesco is going through a bad patch at the moment and is being slated for dirty, out of date stores. I’m oblivious to that, but I have definitely noticed a decline over the last 10 years or so. I have been made to feel that I am a pawn in their scheme to make as much money out of gullible customers as they can. My response has been to try to fight back. 

There wasn’t much else to choose from when we arrived in Dinas Powys 20 years ago. Tescos were 3 out of 4 of the nearest supermarkets within 5 miles. The other was Safeway so there wasn’t much of a choice. We hadn’t used Tesco in the North East and found it to be better than what we were used to. I enjoyed the ready meals in the earlier days and the pastries were good. 

The rot set in in the early 2000s. I was shopping at the Tesco Extra off the A48 near Gabalfa because it was close to where the kids went to orchestra. The first negative I can remember was a comment back from a staff member after I had remarked that my shop was taking longer after they had reorganised the store. ‘You’ll get used to it’, I was told. They reorganise the store to try to get the customers to buy things they don’t really want and I, the customer, have to go along with it. Around this time I found a number of cases where the multi-buys were more expensive than the single purchase or the shelves were confusingly or incorrectly labelled. The customer support staff seemed quite surly when I pointed this out. I’m meant to fall for the trick, not complain. 

Tesco had a Shopper Thoughts web based customer survey and feedback scheme which I joined. Although initially promising, I found that the main aim seemed to be to promote new products and ask whether you might buy them. In the end I gave up on it as it would reject my input part way through the survey when it realised I didn’t want to buy what they were pushing. I decided it was a waste of time; in fact it was another example of Tesco wasting my time. 

The Clubcard Voucher scheme was a good idea executed in a way designed to piss me off. I would forget vouchers and feel ripped off. If I should be getting so much off, I was obviously paying too much without the voucher. Recently we have been getting so many vouchers for £6 off a £60 shop or similar that the overall effect is to convince me that if I don’t have a voucher I’m paying 10% too much, so I shop elsewhere. Sometimes the combination of vouchers and discounts can mean I’m paying half of what I would the next week. So I don’t go the next week and feel elated that I have beat Tesco at their own game. 

Tesco has some good points. The pastries are still good, as are the puddings and cereal, but the ready meals went downhill and I now go to the local butcher which not only is much better quality but also cheaper, as is the local fruit and veg shop. I like the ‘scan as you shop’ because I shop by bike and I can check my panniers will take what I’ve bought and I like trying to ‘game’ the vouchers and discounts. Tesco is still the second closest supermarket after Lidl (which I now use almost as much) and if we have some vouchers I am still tempted there, but the pricing is so erratic that if something I buy regularly is not on offer I don’t buy it and would prefer to pay the full price anywhere else other than in Tesco.

EU Enlargement

The British government’s narrative is that the 25% of the EU voters who voted for nationalist parties in the European Parliament elections are calling for reform of the EU.  I think that they are more worried about the effects of enlargement over the last decade.  On a day when Cameron votes alone against Juncker as President of the Commission, he goes along with the rest by agreeing an Association Agreement with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

The main reason cited by people voting for UKIP and similar parties in other countries is that migrants are taking their jobs and housing and using up scarce services.  This has been exacerbated due to the rapid enlargement of the EU over the last decade. What Europe needs most now is a period of stability in order that a new status quo can be established.  What it doesn’t need is a new agreement which sets a path towards over 50 million new members, many of whom will want to move to earn more.

Romania and Bulgaria between them have a population of 27.5 million and an average GDP of $8,600 per person. Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova have a combined population of 53.1 million and an average GDP per person of $3,700. Twice the number with over double the incentive to migrate.

Why is Cameron happy to sign an agreement which stores up problems for the future, which dwarf the current problems that have put people off the EU? Is it because he wants the EU to fail?  Or does he think he can put an end to the EU right to migrate? If so, he is ignoring the aspirations of the Maidan Square demonstrators who clearly voiced the ambition to be able to join the EU so that they could migrate to a better life.

The right of the free movement of people to work across the EU is fundamental. It helps prevent one country taking jobs off another, and where it does happen people can move with the jobs.  This must not be diluted or overturned because of political pressure to expand in the short term to put one over on Russia. Once the current pressures from past expansion have settled, then would be the right time to start to welcome new members; but slowly.

Ukraine

The west is undermining the concept of democracy with its approach to the situation in Ukraine. There was a democratically elected president, but he was brought down by a few thousand demonstrators. Our politicians have sought to justify this on the basis that they must have had a just cause, otherwise they would not have demonstrated for so long in the cold.  Their approach to Ukraine is consistent with their approach to the coup against Morsi in Egypt, but since when is it acceptable to remove a democratically elected leader outside an election?

This begs the question: how many demonstrators does it need to change a government, and how long do they need to demonstrate for?  Will the same approach be tolerated if the demonstrations are in a western democracy?

In any case, the agenda being played out in Ukraine is counter to the UK Government’s agenda here at home. If we have enticed the Ukrainians away from the Russians and their loans and cheap gas with promises of closer ties to the EU, surely the expectation for Ukrainians is that Ukraine could join the EU in the near future.  That would not go down well with the Eurosceptics. 40 million more people coming to the UK? Or maybe the idea is to encourage the rest of the EU to allow Ukraine to join and then to for the UK to leave!

And where will the money come from to replace the Russian billions. It is not as if the UK and Europe are awash with money. Whatever happened to Austerity?

Someone should have told the Ukrainian opposition the truth. They have a choice. Its either Russian subsidies, loans and exports, or closer ties with the EU to allow imports to flood the market and put their uncompetitive factories out of business.  Subsidies or Market Forces?  What a choice!

Amazon

From today’s Observer

I don’t think that not paying tax is the biggest Issue with Amazon. The biggest issue is what its business model means for our society. Amazon wants to give us all the largest range of stuff at the cheapest price. In the process it changes our relationship with stuff. We demand to have it even cheaper.

It also changes society.  Putting aside whether Amazon is a mayor tax avoider, its business model does not leave much scope for profit, so not much tax is avoided. It also pays its staff virtually the minimum wage so they don’t pay much tax.  How can society function when a major business and employer does not provide the tax revenue to pay for schools, hospitals, roads, and the benefits for its own employees?

The other part of the model is the businesses which fail as a result of competition from Amazon. These are businesses which had many more employees, paid more, paying more tax. These were sustainable businesses in the wider meaning of the word. These were businesses which could sustain society for the long term-which Amazon cannot.

Energy Bills

Freezing energy bills is not the right way to tackle the problem with the un-competitiveness of the energy market. The energy market is not within the power of individual companies to fix. If world energy prices go up the companies could go bust and that would not be so good. If world energy prices drop the companies will have a bonanza. Politically, for Labour, the move could be disastrous as the energy companies blame power shortages caused by long term under-investment on the prospect of a next Labour government. Pension companies will blame Labour for a fall in investment returns while those managing our pensions will continue to profit from our loss. 

One aspect that anti-greens blame the rising energy costs for is the levy imposed to pay for the renewable energy subsidy. The policy, which Labour started of adding this to energy bills, is a form of regressive taxation. The lower your energy bill, the more you pay at the higher unit cost; therefore inflating the bills of those who can’t afford to use a lot and those who try to save. It would have been better to either fund this out of progressive income or property taxes, or to reform the pricing structure to penalise those domestic customers who use the most energy. If there was a clearer breakdown of what constituted each bill it would help to highlight where the profits are coming from. How much is due to purchased gas/fuels being cheaper than expected? – the common cause of distrust being the bills rising with the increase in wholesale prices but not falling as much on the price falls.  

The link with pensions is a poisonous one. Profits extracted as dividends rather than being spent on investment in new power stations don’t all go into pensions. However the financial sector has form in blaming political meddling for the fall in the value of funds, when it is mainly down to the fact that financial investment is largely a zero-sum game, with large chunks being extracted in fees. 

Finally, the energy companies will use the fear of a Labour government as an excuse for not investing. There is already a chance that there could be power shortages especially as the government and EDF argue over future pricing and new nuclear power stations are delayed, Centrica has pulled out of investment in nuclear and in gas storage, E.ON has pulled out of investment in Kingsnorth and RWE has closed Tilbury. There is a huge problem with the functioning of the UK energy market which needs to be exposed and put right. A future freeze on energy bills will only make it harder in the short term to expose tackle the real issues. Free market economics will not ensure that sufficient investment is made in our energy infrastructure (that’s why the CEGB had to be set up in the first place), and the barriers to entry prevent the competition which will drive prices down.

Dreams

I woke from a dream this morning with the thought that I had made a wrong decision or reacted wrongly to a situation and that I should learn from the experience.

It made me think about whether this could be the purpose of dreams: 

Dreams could be the subconscious mind rehearsing reaction to events and situations. The dream puts the unconscious conscious mind into situations like what the conscious mind may find itself in in real life. Thus it can role play the situation and be better prepared when it comes along in real life.

I think that it is the conscious mind doing the dreaming, because dreams contain language – which the subconscious mind can’t do (another of my theories), but the dreams are erased so that imagined memories don’t clutter up the mind and confuse the real memories. People for whom this erasure doesn’t happen might be classified with a mental ‘illness’, such as schizophrenia.

The role of the subconscious mind in this could be the provider of the role playing scenarios.

This could explain what the evolutionary purpose of dreams might be. What is it that allowed dreaming to evolve with us? It is unlikely that something as apparently complex would remain in our genes unless it gave us some sort of edge. My proposed explanation above provides a clue to the evolutionary edge. It is that dreaming homo sapiens had already rehearsed the tricky situations it found itself in, whether it be the next door tribe or the pack of wolves. The reaction to difficult events would have been better suited to succeed if it had been anticipated. Dreaming homo sapiens would have an evolutionary edge on its rivals.

It might also lead on to an explanation of why people are creative. If we have within us a role playing/ scenario setting mechanism, the next stage is to use it to act out our dreams or ideas springing from the remnant of our dreams (such as this one) in order to entertain (another evolutionary edge which kept us going through the difficult times).