What? £80,000?

Other bloggers have been tearing this blogpost to shreds. Its essentially a business plan for how to do a collectivist Left-wing Local blog.

What sticks out for me most of all is this paragraph on costs:-

My initial workings suggest that a local blog covering a population of 30-40,000 people might be able to survive on turnover of around £80,000 per year inclusive of a living wage for two staff and operational costs, but exclusive of delivery costs (see below) which will need to remain volunteer based in the short term.

Its frankly insane.

Blogging platforms are pretty much free. Blogger, wordpress, Livejournal, even Facebook groups/notes. Sure, you can spend money on a TypePad blog and hosting on your own server somewhere, but its not really necessary, its a vanity thing like getting 7 inches pressed.

And whilst a living wage for blogging alone would be nice, it does suggest that you'll be employing people who don't really want to write blogposts.

Me, I work for little over minimum wage, in London, making sandwiches. The blogging I do for free, because I want to.

The author of the post does go on to cover where the money comes from. Not specifically from the website itself, but

...in the longer term these costs should as far as possible be covered by worker organisations like trade unions (and thereafter a Labour party more open to wider left engagement), the reality is that funds may need to be raised from charitable/employment creation sources (see, for example, this kind of opportunity coming along in Wales), and from very local advertising.

Lets turn this into a bullet-pointed list:-

• Local blog
• Trade Union blog
• Labour party blog
  
• Charity blog
• Employment creation sources (no idea what this means)
• Local advertising

Such a list makes me squint at the screen in confusion and despair. Why would anyone want to read such a thing. Why would a trade union paying for such a thing be in the interests of its members, or a charity for that matter? And just what are employment creation sources?

I like knitting, its a fun diversion, I'm not very good at it, but the end results are pretty neat. I'm currently working on a scarf, its taking me ages. About six weeks so far, not every day mind, but a few hours here and there. One day it'll be finished and I can give it to a loved one as a gift. Someone suggested I could sell it, I could have some kind of knitting business.

This is insane. It takes about fifty hours for me to knit a scarf. At minimum wage that would be about £300. Three hundred quid for a scarf of slightly lower quality that TK Maxx.

There's no way anyone would ever buy from my scarf knitting business, it would never be able to pay its worker.

Likewise, a blog that costs £80,000 would never work.

Okay, maybe it would, such things have happened in the past, sometimes overnight. Very rarely, but sometimes.

But if that's your businessplan, its insane.

Pay cuts, pay rises

Here's a question for you. A personal, moral question.

Without reference to your colleagues or managers, would you accept a pay cut in return for the lowest paid staff at your company getting a pay rise?

Answer in comments below, cheers.

Body Scanner Porn the legend continues

I read on The Register:-

The proliferation of airport body scanners will spark a flurry of low-grade porn, internet conspiracy theorists claimed last week.

But officials at Manchester Airport, where full body scanning is already due to be tested, have been quick to dismiss this as urban myth. Who to ignore?

A number of websites have suggested it is a simple enough matter to transform the slightly abstract, solarised images currently taken by airport scanners and turn them into slightly fuzzed smut.

"internet conspiracy theorists claimed last week"? I was going on about it last October

...asserting that the images are not erotic or pornographic. Clearly she is unaware of Rule 34,

Rule 34 - If it exists, there is porn of it.

We're just hours away from something appearing on ffffound

Besides, Boing Boing reckons that the Technical Specs do allow for storing and sending the images.

365 Days - Week 1 update

So, a week has passed since I started doing the 365Days flickr meme thing where I take a self-portrait photie every day for 365 days

These are the top three most viewed pics for the first week:-

22 views

14 views

10 views

And the least viewed pic

1 view

The full set is here

Back to the Academies International scam

Its been about six months since I blogged about Academies International, they were an organisation who nabbed my CV off Reed.co.uk and phoned up offering a guaranteed job if I went for one of their training schemes. I went along and merrily signed up to a £9,000 loan taken out on my behalf.

Anyhoo, that blog entry has consistently been really popular, with literally hundreds of folk searching on google for it.

There's a whole handful of websites attached to Academies International now including The Financial Training Academy, The Financial Recruitment Academy, The Business Development Academy, The Vocational Training Academy, The Technology Recruitment Academy, The Technology Training Academy and The Application Development Academy. The sites all look very similar and there's a load of overlap in the people they have leaving testimonials about how neat the company is.

I've been wondering how much these testimonial folk exist in real life, are they on Facebook or google? These are their names:-

• Carley Watson
• Kuldeep Wassel
• Jamal Khan
• Steven Clark
• Scot Williams
• Kazi Jubaer
• John Wright
• Kantilal Tywol
• Rabab Halabi
• Wayne Li
• Abdullah Jama
• Cara Richardson
• Xu Li
• Pete Banks
• Matthew Sulivan
• Fiona Brown
• Sharifa Marshall
• Jennifer Matthews
• Riddhima Moothoo
• Matthew McCarthy
• Jakub Jez
• Neil Turnnidge
• Henry Costa
• Martin Pluck
• Mitchell Hayes
• Joseph Davies
• Sairan Mosadegh
• Ahad Miah

That blog post last summer has garnered 22 comments so far, a record for this blog. Folk sharing their stories, mostly the same deal of phonecall referring to details on an old CV and then offering a guaranteed job.

Its true about what they are saying about the Business development acandamy, or the financial acadamy, or what ever they want to call it. i attended the course for 10 weeks, and i spent more then 8 000 pounds, for a promise i that was lie from the begining. i couldnt belive i fell for such a scam. i am trying my best to get my money back if that is possible. i would want an advice from any one who also a victiem to this crim, if there is any one who has a way to help me to get my money back. i am a 22 year old man who has quite his job, to get a better oppotrunity in the IT field, and now i am flat broke, with no money for food travel or bills. and am struglling to cope with the stress on my mind, if there is any one out there who can help me to do something about it.. i am very upset and i dont have any words to describe how am feeling.

Some people left advice in their comments, this from iyah:-

I contacted the Guardian, and they said I should report it to Consumer Direct on 08454 04 05 06. They will log it and if there are others then this may get picked up by the most relevant Trading Standards Office, but that was the only advice they could give me.

Maybe if we all report them, it will be picked up?

I contacted the Guardian too, but it was a futile gesture.

Rather interestingly former employees of Academies International also left comments:-

i was also a manager until i realised what they got up to there

they are sexist bullies who think employing young women will somehow get men especially to buy

yes it is a load of crap

there are no jobs

and now they are going downhill trust me!! ppl have them sussed now

New Year's Resolutions status update

So, after a week, how have I been getting on with my New Year's resolutions:-

• Play a gig in London
  Haven't even touched my guitar this year, but I did promise my girlfriend I'd write a song about her.
  
• Find a job
  Updated my CV once and had a look at reed.co.uk
  
• Build my own audio pre amp
  Had a look on Maplin and RS com for that preamp kit they used to sell.

• 100+ pageviews a day here
  Did it for a few days, but it's kind of tailed off now. Having said that, average views has gone up from 70-ish last month to 85 this year.
  
• Reduce my debts by more than 50%
  Jesus wept, the other day my gas got connected again, and I ended up spending £8 on one day's worth of heating. £8, that's like two hours work for me. So I'm going to have to wear my warm clothes in the house more and turn the heating off.
  
• Mercilessly crush my enemies
  I did a bit of a project plan for this, but have failed to identify any realistic external enemies.
  
• Run 10K in less that 25 minutes
  Its a bit cold out, but I did see my running shoes in my wardrobe the other day.
  

Links and stuff

A wee roundup of my favourite blogposts this morning

• The Libertarian Party on the government banning Winter
• Raedwald on the same topic
• Bishop Hill on Norfolk police finally investigating Climategate
• Mark Wadsworth on the changing figures for Alcohol-related deaths
• Luciana Berger is quite possibly the UK's last genuine Labour activist
• Ambush Predator on what we pay the binmen for

List of internety bloggy things to do

1. Write a deep and personal blog post that begins with the phrase "I'm a troubled soul..." And then goes on to cover my recent lack of going to gigs, the triumphant return of The Yummy Fur, that Mars Hotel gig in 2002 and my job's horrendous working hours and conditions.
2. Some kind of website where you pay me £10 and I send you something cool in the post every week for X weeks.
3. Some kind of website like FreeCycle but for services rather than goods.
4. Blogpost with the top three of my 365 Days photos.
5. Another blogpost about that Academies International Scam where I write about the people the have giving testimonials.
6. Start doing those blogposts where its a list of links and include that Dick Puddlecote one about alcohol, with the Tim Worstall quote.
7. Scan in and post the Mr ToiletRoll sex photos from 1999.
8. Long blogpost about manufacturing and databases and availability of information, basically ranting about things that annoy me at work and how Linn Products really know how to have a great MRPII system and its given me an unrealistic view of the world.
9. Come up with an idea for what a website called Indie Central Tonight would actually be about.

This 'pensioners burning books' story

God, its everywhere, in all the newspapers, in all the blogs, everywhere. In the Guardian, The Metro, The Seattle Post, EU Referendum, the list is endless.

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Some PR/marketing company have done a great job, and some sites are smelling a rat, The Civil Society quotes the Association of Charity Shops as having heard no evidence of this new trend, and has firmly declaring that there is “no truth in it”.

I reckon it was a bit weird the were no charity shops named and the folk in them also nameless.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

Which leaves only Jonathan Stearn from Consumer Focus and Ruth Davison from the National Housing Federation as the shameless publicity seekers.

Jonathan Stearn, energy expert for Consumer Focus, said: ‘If pensioners are taking such desperate measures to heat their homes it is shocking. With low wholesale prices and increasing profit margins, there is clearly room for energy companies to make price cuts immediately.’

Ruth Davison, of the National Housing Federation, said: ‘The spiralling cost of energy means heating homes has become a luxury rather than a necessity for many people – particularly the elderly, low paid and unemployed.’

Both of them? or was one just a witness dupe, tricked into providing a quote for a groundless news story. Kind of like that bit in Brass Eye where Labour MP Syd Rapson said that paedophiles were using "an area of Internet the size of Ireland".

I reckon Ruth is the dupe and Jonathan Stearn is the Chris Morris with a message to put out, demanding energy companies make price cuts right now.

Maybe the companies could, but according to the internet here, the wholesale cost of fuel makes up 50% of yer power bills, so a 10% drop in the wholesale price, would be a 5% drop in your fuel bill. Actually, there's this neat document here from early December detailing how profitable energy companies are.

I dunno where Stearn gets his info from but the NERA report says

Even though wholesale energy prices have fallen recently, gas and electricity suppliers are earning very little margin on their sales to domestic customers, according to analysis by NERA Economic Consulting (NERA). The analysis takes the energy regulator’s own research, and builds on it using data extracted from public sources or supplied by the energy companies.

The energy regulator, Ofgem, has previously estimated a “gross” margin between the domestic customer bill and some of the costs of a notional energy supply business. At the request of Energy UK, NERA has updated Ofgem’s method to current conditions and has extended it to include a more complete set of costs.

Based on current tariffs, Ofgem’s method would show an annual gross margin of £204 per dual fuel customer. NERA’s analysis shows that additional costs reported in public sources (including Ofgem itself) absorb £133 of this gross margin. Accounting for more realistic customer characteristics (e.g. average consumption and tariff discounts given to customers who shop around) absorbs another £39. NERA also estimates that the cost of specialised energy trading, needed to match energy purchases to customers’ demand, costs another £34 for a dual fuel customer. As a result, suppliers are not quite breaking even on dual fuel customers. (The annual overall margin is actually minus £1 per customer.) For customers who take electricity and gas from different suppliers, NERA finds that suppliers make on average a small positive overall margin – £9 and £10 per customer per year, respectively.

Excess Winter Deaths - then and now

Elsewhere on the internet Mark Wadsworth ponders checking old news stories for predictions about climate change.

Intrigued, I went back to the BBC in 2000 and found this promising fewer winter deaths, so I nipped over to the Office of National Statistics and rung up the Excess winter mortality stats. These are defined as:-

the difference between the number of deaths during the four winter months (December to March) and the average number of deaths during the preceding autumn (August to November) and the following summer (April to July)

So there's been a sweeping decline since the 1950's

So aye, there's a bit of decline, and the cold snap killer winters are taking fewer lives each year. I reckon that's technology and legislation rather than the winters getting less severe, central heating and winter fuel allowance, that sort of thing.

But in the context of the BBC story, we can have fun with statistics. If you take just the data for the 1990's, the trend seems to be increasing deaths.

And for the 2000's, even we only look at the last decade, whilst the numbers are a thousands below the 1990's the trend is also an increase.

Anyhoo, more snow is forecast for the next few days here in 2010. The stat to look out for in news stories, in a couple of months time, after the powers that be have done the paperwork, is that this winter 2009/10 will buck the trend having highest level of winter deaths since 1975/76 (58,100 deaths) or possibly 1969/70 (67,790 deaths).