Money Saving Idea #1 Grow your own garlic - week 8

Darren's got to be one of the most weedy and ill looking from my brood. He's all crumpled and sad. I've tried giving him love and affection and water and more love, but its having no affect, he's just the garlic version of a cripple. Maybe he peaked too soon, maybe I put to much pressure on him to succeed. I am a bad father.

On ther other hand, the other kids are doing swell.

The Twins have multiplied, each tub somehow having two sprouty chaps growing, and although they started kind of slowly, they're all tall and strong now.

Sharon, that blessed little hussy is doing, dare I say it, better than the twins too, she's sheltered away on the other side of my windowledge, although not quite as tall as the twins, she seems more wholesome and friendlier.

Out on ground level in the wee bit of dirt we call the garden, there's a herd of garlic who are doing okay, their leaved have been nibbled on a wee bit by passing insects, but I'm thinking as they have more root space, they'll survive and thrive and will feed me well in the months to come.

The potatos are doing great too, the wee sprouty chaps who I saw the other week have grown and grown. They're all healthy, and no signs of nibbling, although I am concerned that these chaps are going to need more rioot space, and at some point I'll have to transfer them out of the box and into the ground with nibbly beasties.

Ah well.

Job vacancies update - 02-APR-2009

Its Thursday, time for another Job Vacancies update.



Still drifting downwards, Reed'll probably have less than 100,000 vacancies listed by this time next week. The number of jobs listed on Job Centre Plus is noodling all over the place.

By extrapolating these figures up, there's about 415,000 vacancies in the UK. That'll be one's that aren't advertised at the Job Centre or Reed, so notes pinned to shop doors or listed on gumtree and the like.

Lets look at the top six sectors on Reed.


They're all drifting downwards now, Temping has been the most consistent over the last month, and Graduate jobs are still plummeting, those poor bastards. The best thing the government could do to help is provide step by step information packs about how to start your own business. These university folk are going to have lots of fresh ideas for how businesses should work, and it'd be nice if they could easily try them out rather than sign on the dole.

I also track weekly averages and by the looks of things the sectors where vacancies are growing are Actuarial , FMCG, Manufacturing, Public Sector, Purchasing and Training. Actuarial's up by about 15% over the week, the others are just noodling around 1% and 2%.

Good luck.

And if you fancy giving me a job or want a look at my CV, leave a comment with your email address.

The pinnacle of human achievement

The iPhone is a marvellous thing, the touchscreen wifi smartphone, that is so ubiquitous that unemployed folk can own them, that is the pinnacle of human technological achievement.

But is it right?

I was talking to a brand manager chap the other night, its generally agreed that the world economy has been mismanaged for the past fifteen or twenty years. The world has appeared to be a lot wealthier than it is, mortgages offered to folk who can't afford them, cheap money borrowed from the future.

It is my conceit that without with mismanagement, we would not have the ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphone today. We wouldn't have such technological innovation for another decade at least.

The brand manager disagreed, he said "Who knows? Someone else may have developed the ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphone,". It doesn't need a world of such apparent wealth to make these things.

Brand Manager, my arse. I'm an engineer, I'll going to pull rank here.

There's this plot device thing in films, most recently in Transformers but also Men In Black, where so alien race has crash landed on earth and all modern technology has been "reverse-engineered". Microwaves, computers, the internet, all reverse engineered.

Reverse engineering is difficult and the whole concept is a great disservice to engineers slaving away in R&D departments continuously improving and developing new things and stuff. And it costs money. It depends on support and management and companies continously investing.

To get that touchscreen wifi smartphone it takes largest technolgie companies, hundreds of them all competing making each module each function, better thantheir competitors and better than the previous version.

To get that touchscreen wifi smartphone you need enough false money and easy credit floating around to enable a culture of tens of millions of people replacing their phone every eighteen months, upgrading to better and faster models.

It doesn't just happen.

And that, your honour, is my case in support of the financial mismanagement of the past fifteen to twenty years.

If the world economy had been managed prudentially we would right now still be ten years away from ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphones.

Was it worth it?

Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

I tried having a similar discussion with a friend who works for the council, but rather than go with the economic mismanagement thing, they suggested "What's best for the human race and what's best for the planet."

We had a screaming row when I pointed out that these were two different things and you can't have both. You can have a trade off between the best thing for the human race and the best thing for the planet, but this trade off point will be a long way from having ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphones and will probably involve more people living in 'poverty'.

Blog stat pron - March

So, according to google analytics, for March, this blog got:-

1,046 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,438 Pageviews

Compared to February's

538 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,953 Pageviews

Its a vast improvement over previous months, unique views almost doubling and and then according to pageviews folk never coming back, kind of weird that the additional 508 unique viewers only lead to 485 additional pageviews. It'll be the spikes of visitors from Iain Dale and EU Referendum what done it.

Actually, one of those spike represents the first time ever that this blog received more hits in a day than my old Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes site. Warm fuzzy feelings of shrugging off porno-shackles.

These are my top referers for March (not including google wanderers)

1. Iain Dale (92 visitors)
2. EU Referendum (48 visitors)
3. Facebook (34 visitors)
4. Twitter (30 visitors)
5. Celestial Junk (29 visitors)
6. Number Watch Web Forum (26 visitors)
7. Bloglines (7 visitors)
8. Technorati (7 visitors)
9. Anorak Forum (4 visitors)
10. Behind Blue Eyes (2 visitors)

So quality posts, with original content seem to be paying off in terms of visitors more than any kind of comment pieces.

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during March.

1. Facebook IQ test gubbins (199 views)
2. Sea Level Rises (156 views)
3. Band Nationalities (133 views)
4. Guide to doing animations on Windows Movie Maker (78 views)
5. Last month's blog stat pron (44 views)
6. Origami instructions (43 views)
7. London Blogger Meetup writeup (33 views)
8. Facebook Scramble graphs (32 views)
9. Facebook Scrambles statistics (30 views)
10. Unsent letters Unwritten books (24 views)

So aye, finally, for this blog was getting between 40 and 50 hits a day, but thanks to links from some more popular blogs for March we were averaging 69, stiffies all round then. Plans for next month are to get an average of 80 hits per day, mostly from people searching google for bomb making instructions (it'll be worth it) and hopefully to quality original content that gets linked to from all over teh interwebs.

Submitting something to the Britblog Round up should drive traffic here it'd get me a 1,000 hit spike, no worries, but I fear nothing I scrawl is really of high enough quality, so that'll have to wait.

Entertaining flickr pic of the day

Hot shit
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Was in Tescos trying to buy coconut milk or maybe coconut oil, and found this in the ethnic section.

It made me chortle.

Our Health and Safety shame

Via Samizdata, from The Times

A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them. The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.
...
“There were lads with aluminium ladders who wanted to get to them but the police were shouting, ‘Stay away, get out of the yard.’ They were saying, ‘You have got to wait until the fire brigade gets here.’ Michelle was standing at the window banging on it – we all saw it – and shouting to save her kids but the police were just below her pushing us out and telling everybody to stay away.”
...
A South Yorkshire Police spokeswoman said: “The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place.”

The behaviour of the police kind of reminded me of what happened at the 2002 Mecca Girl's School fire in Saudi Arabia where the polis prevented rescuers from entering the build for fear of coming into contact with women

It has been claimed that Members of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), also known as Mutaween, would not allow the girls to escape or to be saved because they were 'not properly covered', and the mutaween did not want physical contact to take place between the girls and the civil defense forces for fear of sexual enticement, and variously that the girls were locked in by the police, or forced back into the building.

Back in the UK The Samizdata piece goes on to cover the Watts Memorial / Postman's Park:-

The memorial was set up by a Victorian artist, George Frederick Watts, to commemorate those who died saving others. It consists of hand made plaques each bearing the name of a person who sacrificed his or her life and a brief citation. Very quaint they are, with their crowded lettering with the extra-large initial capitals and little swirly plant motifs and curlicues in the corners. Even the names are quaint, laboriously given in full. Police Constables Percy Edwin Cook, Edward George Brown Greenoff, Harold Frank Ricketts and George Stephen Funnell are among them. I wonder what PC Percy Edwin Cook, for instance, who perished when he "Voluntarily descended high tension chamber at Kensington to rescue two workmen overcome by poisonous gas" would have made of his successors in the South Yorkshire force.

Co-incidentally I was reading about Postman's Park earlier today on Caroline's Miscellany. Those who died saving lives are remembered more than a century later.

George Funnell, a 33-year-old ex-soldier turned police constable, was on his beat in Hackney when he noticed a fire in the Elephant and Castle pub on Wick Road. After raising the alarm, he rushed into the burning building: the landlady and two barmaids were still inside. First he brought out the landlady, then one of the barmaids. Now burnt himself, he nonetheless went back in for the third woman.

PC Funnell reached the woman, and directed her to a back door. However, he himself was overcome by the heat and smoke. The woman escaped into the street, but by the time rescuers reached Funnell he was unconscious and burned on the face, neck and arms. Eleven days later, on 2 January 1900, he died of his injuries.

The inquest jury commended Funnell and his colleagues for gallant behaviour. The Society for the Protection of Life from Fire gave awards to those colleagues; during the ceremony, Mr G B Fordham commented that "he died the death of a thoroughly brave and sincere man" giving his life for three women who were strangers to him. Funnell's funeral was attended by several hundred police officers and firemen, as well as local people. A memorial committee was set up to support his wife and two children. His memorial plaque reads:

GEORGE STEPHEN FUNNELL - POLICE CONSTABLE - DEC 22 1899 - IN A FIRE AT THE ELEPHANT & CASTLE, WICK ROAD, HACKNEY WICK, AFTER RESCUING TWO LIVES, WENT BACK INTO THE FLAMES, SAVING A BARMAID AT THE RISK OF HIS OWN LIFE.

Beware the snivelling creatures that Health & Safety has turned us into.

Parential Leave Rights

Last week the London Blogger's Meetup was sponsored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, they wanted to open up new ways to engage with people, be it blogs or twitter or forums or whatever.

My take on it was if they want to listen to what I have to say to them, my message would be a very clear "Please cease to exist, please stop using tax-payer's money".

Days later I read in t'Guardian that many of their directors were resigning cos they didn't like the direction the organisation was going. Cool, maybe somehow they had heard my message.

Alas, the commission is still in operation and I read more of their doings in the Guardian this morning.

Concluding that it was time that "policy-making enabled men to play an equal part in parenting", the EHRC proposes that the first 26 weeks of a baby's life would remain dedicated maternity leave for mothers, but with higher rates of pay, so that they would receive 90% of pay for the entirety of their maternity leave. Fathers would still get two weeks of paternity leave at the birth of their child, but this would also go up to 90% of their pay.

Beyond the first six months of maternity leave, the commission proposes three blocks of "parental leave", which could be taken any time before the child's fifth birthday, each of about four months, one block dedicated to mothers, one to fathers and one either could take.

The first eight weeks of each of these blocks of leave would be paid at 90%.

Danger!!

We already have Government Advisor Sir Alan Sugar saying that

... he would be less likely to hire a woman of child-bearing age. Explaining that the law was "counterproductive", he said: "If someone comes into an interview and you think to yourself 'there is a possibility that this woman might have a child and therefore take time off' it is a bit of a psychological negative thought."

So it follows that if the parential leave rules extended equally to men, then men of child-rearing age would similarly be at a disadvantage.

Raedwald has it

One of the other consequences will be that employers will tend to employ men and women beyond their childbearing years, or those who can be classed as confirmed bachelors or spinsters. Half a percent of GDP may be peanuts in this age of fiscal profligacy, but the costs of parental leave to a small enterprise can often be crippling. The public sector will take the proposals up willingly, but with the longer term consequence that single men will earn more and occupy higher positions than married men.

In other words, the changes are likely to improve overall the employment conditions of every group other than young would-be parents.

If I ran a company, a small manufacturing organisation perhaps, where you could easily track that one person working one day produces for the company just enough wealth to pay to employ themself and cover overheads, following the direction of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, that one person working is going to have to generate enough wealth for the company to pay for more staff who aren't working.

Hmm, is this going to drive down wages?

Say a worker for a company generates wealth for the company equivalent to twice his wage, so he gets paid, the boss/admin function gets paid and the overheads and material costs and tax and all that, and the woman currently on maternity leave.

If the company now has to pay for a bloke on maternity leave too, a bloke who previously was a good worker, but is now not generating wealth for the company but still getting paid, then the remaining working chaps are going to have to cover for him and generate wealth for the company equivalent to two and a half or three times their wage, just so the company stays in business.

We can't afford to employ more people, so there's only two ways it can go, the workers who are still working have to increase their productivity by a huge chunk and keep the same wage, or get a wage cut and maintain the same productivity.

Neither of these options are particularly easy to implement, aye we're always striving to improve productivity using engineering skill and technological innovation, that's standard practice, so the only thing we can do different is cutting wages or not increasing them for a few years and keeping them low.

Sorry reader, I'm not in a very productive industry, my guys only generate a few times their own wages in wealth. We can't put up prices or we go out of business, we can't afford to employ more people cos they're going to get pregnant anyway.

Equalities and Human Rights Commission, tell me how I am supposed to afford to pay staff 90% pay when they are not generating any wealth for the company?

Sea levels

I generally skip the Sunday papers these days, prefering to spend my weekends catatonic in existential angst, but via EU referendum, Booker in The Sunday Telegraph reports that the sea-level rise thing is all a big lie.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

Its nice the way that this scientist's work is based on actual real-world measurements rather than computer models.

The other week when I was looking over BBC coverage of sea-level rises, I was somewhat concerned about the inhabitants of Tuvalu, who ten years back were going to have their island washed away by the rising sea levels predicted, luckily EU Ref is reassuring.

To that effect, the climate hysterics have recruited the government of the Maldives, and indeed the leaders of Tuvalu – another of the supposedly threatened Pacific islands - where the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. By lining their pockets with gold has the "international community" kept the island leaders "on-side" willing to promote the myth which sustains the whole scam.

I've read up the IPCC report with its sea level rise predictions, and they do say that sea level rises will be accelerating, which is possibly when we don't see any rise now, but as soon as the Greenland icesheet melt, then seas will bubble up and we'll all be moving to the highlands. But one thing that nags at the back of my heid is that the predictions are all for the year 2100, by which time most of the reports authors will have passed away, and thus be unaccountable. Actually, by that time, two and a bit generations, the world's populations will have gradually drifted away from the present day coasts anyway, like how people don't buy houses on flood plains in the UK so much.

Anyhoo, my point that I drifted away from is that there are few published predictions of sea level rises within lifetimes, say twenty or fifty year timescales, where you'd be able to measure the sea level now, hold your breath for a few years, then check back and say to the authors of the IPCC reports "you were so wrong, get the hell out of my way" or as may be more appropriate "you were right, please take this mountaintop palace and all our country's riches.

I want a sea level rise prediction that we can actually hold people to account on.

Voluntary MPs

So today's blogosphere headlines are mostly about how our Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has been claiming porno movies on her expenses. Hilarious stuff, how can she keep her job with the shitstorm about claiming second homes allowance on her constituency home when she spends three days a week in her sister's spare room as a 'main home'.

So Devil's Kitchen has done the sums and stuff

Let us just look at this objectively. Jacqui Smith is a minister, and so pulling in a salary of about £120,000 £141,866; she is also paying her husband a further £40,000: this is a grand total of £160,000 £181,000 in salaries alone.

On top of that, Jacqui Smith claimed £152,683 in expenses last year; minus her husband's £40,000, that is an extra £113,000. Some £24,000 a year, as we know, goes to pay the mortgage on her Redditch "second home" (even though it has been established that she spends most of her time there, and not in her sister's flat).

It all adds up to the fact she's getting paid several times the UK median wage and she has everything the rest of us have to pay for out of our own wages paid for in expenses.

I'm quite tempted to support yon article in The Times which calls for MPs not to receive any pay at all.

An MP is not employed. Therefore he should not have a wage. His expenses are not an issue. The office, the secretary or the PA can be provided by the Civil Service. The question is how, without employment, MPs should live. In an ideal world, they would live frugally, as Plato said the guardians should in his Utopian Republic. In the real world, an MP's temporary mandate might be seen as National Service.

On the other hand EU Referendum suggests that MPs should be paid as much as they want, if only they did their jobs properly.

If MPs performed their tasks anything like adequately, therefore, they could save us billions, in addition to safeguarding our rights and freedom. If they could put up a balance sheet to that effect, then they could easily justify their own costs, and who could possibly disagree with them being well rewarded.

Maybe its not a contradiction, if MPs did a good job than aye, but since they don't then no, we should cut their pay and make it performance related.

But how would you decide their performance levels? Who would decide? The people by referendum? The Lords, The Queen, the blogosphere? The parties in their manifestos?

Hmm, I wonder which films they were.

UK Web & Mini Comix Thing 2009

IMG_6621
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Hi, my name is Chris Gilmour, the artist formerly behind the spectacularly successful art website 'Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes', earlier today after a morning's protest marching, I took myself along to the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing at Queen Mary University in Mile End as a wanderabouterer.

There were lots of people there and I was feeling pretty quiet, but oh there were sights to be seen.

I was accosted by a chap offering sweets and trying to sell a comic called My Name Is Chipmunk, it seemed quite cool, some young and nubil superheroine fighting crime in a latex costume, and then having a shower by page 17. Not much in the way of a website to link to though.

There was a stage at one side of the great hall and some kind of question and answeer session going on, but with broken microphones so no one in the audience could hear anything. Or maybe it was just me going deaf.

So many tables set up selling comics and things and stuff, I tried to find something familiar to hold on to and stumbled upon OddFish, its this hilarious webcomic full of truly dreadful puns told between the two main characters of Lovecraft the octopus and Howard the pufferfish. Its drawn in a rather warn pencilyshady kind of way.

I could have sworn I saw Saz of t'internet, but kooky comic people all look the same. The whole homemade vibe going down was breath taking.

Last week I tried to brief myself of which comicy folk would be there and what their work was like. My Cardboard Life looked cool online, but then to see the actual comics were really card glued on paper, that was beautiful.

I think I saw whoever draws Bunny, but I didn't linger for too long in case some kind of conversation started.

On the stage were tables set out with paper and felt tips, so I drew a few naked chick drawing from memory, but I got scared that people might see them so I hid them under piles of comics, and tried stalking people.

According to the program websitey thing, John Allison from Scary Go Round was there, but I could place his table. Then I overheard the chap who previously drew the Beaver and Steve webcomic mention that RStevens who does Diesel Sweeties was there, so I did a few more passes of the tables until I'd located him.

Very shocked to discover that Clango has feet, but we chatted briefly and I bought socks.

Slightly better write-up by other people
here
here
here
and here