Just a quick economics post, while this is fresh on my mind. I'm going to try and stop commenting so much on political issues but I get sad when I think that people don't understand the situation and blame things on the wrong culprits.

I know a lot of people are unhappy at the Government cutting public spending so sharply. It is going to cause a lot of hardship. But I don't think everybody realises that there really is no real choice here. Public spending was simply too high, and had to come down sooner rather than later.

Governments borrow extra money, spend it to drive growth, and that growth then means the country is doing better in terms of jobs and industry. Credit, when used responsibly in ways like this, is a good thing. It takes the cash sitting dormant in rich people's bank accounts and uses it to make work for the less rich people, which generates funds to pay those people's wages and to repay the creditors with interest. No problem. It works well when you have good reason to believe that the economy will be booming soon and you'll be able to make the repayments.

But you have to be able to make them. Labour governments borrowed heavily in the 70s when Britain was collapsing and the Conservatives paid it off with painful but necessary cuts in the 80s, eliminating the deficit to reduce the debt. It worked the other way around when the Conservatives borrowed heavily in the 90s to deal with the recession and then Tony Blair's Labour government again was able to eliminate the deficit so that debt could be reduced. Past governments knew the loans had to be repaid.

But why, you may ask? Why can we not just keep borrowing, to avoid cutting public services and drive growth, until we're making enough extra taxes to cover it?
  1. Debt costs money. All borrowing incurs interest payments. Each year we have a deficit, the debt rises. And that means our interest payments rise. That's money that is lost to us, not spent on services or employment.
  2. Continued negative cashflow makes lenders believe we risk defaulting on the debt. After all, eventually the repayments will be too high and we'd need even more money. Lenders manage risks like this via their interest rates, giving higher rates to the riskier borrowers. So if we continue to show to the world that we require more money than we actually have, our repayments grow even faster as they will charge us more and more for giving us that extra money, if they choose to continue to give it at all.
In virtually no time at all, those 2 factors work together to mean interest payments that simply cannot be made, and we'd end up defaulting on the debt.

Is that so bad? We could just opt to go bankrupt and then pick up the pieces. But that incurs its own problems. By far the most significant one is that we won't be able to borrow any more money, and instead have to just spend what we actually have instead. This means that instead of the current Government's £81bn cut spread over 4 years as the borrowing is ramped down, there would be an instant cut of about £150bn in one year as the money we were going to borrow to make up the shortfall between tax income and planned expenditure simply isn't there any more. Think about it.

Can't we just tax 'the rich' instead? No, and the reason for this is quite simple - big businesses and top earners are very mobile and don't have to stay in this country. If you tax too heavily, they move their business to other shores and instead of getting increased tax revenues you get decreased ones, plus job losses resulting from business moving overseas. (I'd also say It's somewhat unfair to keep increasing public spending in good times and taxation in bad times - at what point do you accept that the needle should swing back the other way? However, this is largely irrelevant here due to practical reasons.)

It's important to realise that the cuts are not just a Tory thing! It's easy to write this off as an ideological attack on the state but ultimately it's the economics that make this essential. Massive cuts are the order of the day in Greece (ruled by the Panhellenic Socialist Movement), Portugal (governed by the Partido Socialista), Spain (ruled by Partido Socialista Obrero Español), Ireland (governed by Fianna Fáil, a centrist party). Similar situations exist in Iceland and Slovenia too. These aren't governments that inherently want to slash the state. They just know that they have no choice. It is certainly unfair that the average worker in the public sector should have to pay for this with their job, but countries like ours and the ones above are in a position where this cannot be helped. Either a large number of public sector workers lose their jobs now, or a significantly larger number will lose them further down the line. It doesn't help that the public sector is a less efficient way to spend a country's money, and that is where there will always be conflict between Left and Right.

Some talk about how we should keep spending, to drive growth and thus increase taxes and clear the debt later. But this buys into the myth of permanent growth, the myth the bankers were selling us 2 years ago, but which the government should not have lapped up. It wasn't true then and it's not true now - growth is not a given and you can't rely on it, especially not when the cost of funding it is growing exponentially in the form of interest repayments. We're at the point where the amount of growth we need exceeds the amount of extra borrowing we can do. The only viable alternative is to change course and cut costs instead.

To those of you facing job losses or funding cuts or other hardship as a result of this; I can understand it's really unfair and you're being punished for something that wasn't your fault. :(  But I really don't see how it could be any different under Labour or any other government at this point. Debt is a dangerous trap to end up in.
Apparently future students in the UK might have to pay up to £9,000 a year for their tuition fees. This is a fair whack of money and you hear that people will be put off studying by the "crippling debt" they will emerge with.

This term is, however, hyperbole of the highest order. The plans are apparently as follows:
  • The threshold at which graduates have to start paying their loans back would be raised from £15,000 to £21,000. This is more like the situation was when I took out my loan, and is reasonably favourable. You can live adequately on less than £21,000 in most parts of the country (ie. anywhere that isn't London) and such people won't be paying anything at all. It's a threshold of £1750 gross per month before you pay anything back, which isn't bad.
  • Graduates would pay back 9% of their income each month above that threshold.  Let's say you earn £25,000 a year - a pretty average graduate salary I'd say. That's £2083 a month, of which £333.33 is over the threshold. 9% of £333.33 is a £30 payment. (If you earn £29,000 then you're paying £60 back a month - but you're earning £1800 after tax anyway.)
How much is an extra £30, really, when you're already bringing in about £1600 after tax? Is this level of debt 'crippling'? Hardly.

I don't mind people making ideological arguments that education should be free or whatever, but I don't like people using complete exaggeration to paint the Government as callously ruining the lives of thousands when the actual economic reality is far less draconian.
Practical question for you all - what ways can money be saved by spending more in advance? I'm in a position of having a bit of spare cash now but needing to save money in the long term so it seems like the ideal time to economise by buying socks in batches of a hundred, or the like.

I'm not sure what sort of things to look at here: food? utilities? consumer electronics? Serious ideas welcome!

positive

Oct. 12th, 2010 11:52 pm
You know, we hear about so many negative things and hear so much bad news, but this rescue of the Chilean miners is quite amazing by comparison. Humans have been mining for thousands of years, and accidents have happened all that time, and for most of our history those men would have been left to die. Now, despite them being a third of a mile underground, and it taking 17 days just to make contact with them, never mind the 70 days they've been waiting down there, it looks like they're going to all make it back to the surface alive.

"Fifty-four-year-old Luis Urzua is scheduled to come up last. He's has been credited with showing the leadership that enabled the miners to survive the first 17 days - when they were entirely cut off from the outside world."  He was keeping morale up all that time, and now is seeing the job through by making sure everybody's out safely, even though at his age they'd be more than willing to bring him up quickly - what a guy.
The political point-scoring by the Labour party over removing the 'universal benefit' of child benefit from those who have someone who earns over £44,000 a year is making me angry. I'm well aware that political parties are full of shit at the best of times and will attack their opponents regardless of merit but this really takes it to a new level. For all their years of claiming that the Conservatives would only ever serve the rich, as soon as a measure comes in that only affects the top half of society, Labour chime in saying, "oh, by 'the rich', we meant the poor, sorry'.

If you have 1 person earning £44,000, that's about £32,270.40 after tax, which is roughly the same as 2 people earning £20550 each. That's very close to the national median wage of £20,801. In other words, even if there was just one of you, roughly 49% of the country already earns less than you. But in fact there are two of you, typically living in the same house and saving money as a result. The idea that such a couple requires a child subsidy on top is ridiculous. (And if it was a one-earner household, that one earner is almost in the top 10% of earnings in the UK - I won't accept any suggestion that they can't afford to bring up a kid given that they are typically going to be paying a big fat zero for childcare.)

And calling it a "universal" benefit is bullshit anyway - it's only "universal" if everybody has a child, which we don't. It's bad enough that the rest of us pay taxes to subsidise those who choose to have children anyway, never mind paying those who can clearly afford to pay for the privilege themselves. This is far more unfair than the awkwardness around the £44,000 figure - if you're anywhere remotely near triggering this threshold then you shouldn't be getting government handouts.

So not only did Labour want the entire country to live outside of its means, it believes that families should still be encouraged to spend more than they know they earn, even if they already are well above the poverty line in the first place. That's not social justice, that's stupidity. Stop wanting to spend our money on people and things that don't need it. Idiots.
I have been to the Peak District, and down in a cave. I like the Peak District and caves are interesting too. I play a lot of computer games where I explore caves, usually armed with a sword to fight off the inevitable goblin attack. There were no goblins this time but there were a few small Polish children. I blame budget cuts.

The day after that was band practice without our singer, who was up in Leeds visiting his girlfriend who's just left to go to university. Apparently this time is very stressful for him with regards to their relationship, but it does mean he gets to write lots of Twilight's Embrace lyrics about his woes, so it's all good. (From a selfish point of view...)

The rest of the week was mostly just a case of going to work, doing work, and coming home from work, which is the same old thing every day. The evenings saw occasional socialising with other people's girlfriends in various pubs.

Yesterday morning I started rewriting a song for the 3rd or 4th time. I have 55 minutes of recorded material for it and yet am still struggling to pull 6 to 10 minutes of coherency out of there. Ah well. If a record deal was to land in our lap tomorrow though, at least we have have enough material in some form or other.

Yesterday evening I went to the Fires of Rebellion night, which was good fun, 7 folk-themed extreme metal bands at the Old Angel. Unfortunately there was this implied aspect of "oh, it's bands singing about their cultural heritage, which means it's racist", which makes me angry for several reasons - firstly, because it's simply not remotely true, secondly, because Scandinavians sing about the same things without getting any grief (is it only ok if foreigners do it?), and thirdly, because there's this stupid taboo which implies that if you know a racist, or have ever been in a band with a racist, or have ever worn or displayed any symbol whatsoever that has once been used by a racist organisation (despite it being native to some historical period, or significant in wicca or other paganism, or being your own country's flag, or whatever), then you are, by necessity, a racist. It's a modern witch hunt encouraged by the far left, who like to claim that anybody who disagrees with them is obviously part of the British National Party (or 'has links to' - weasel words which can be applied to almost anybody that you want to discredit), and which is adhered to by people scared of losing their liberal colours by being labelled as some sort of fascist collaborator. Very tiring. Nobody should have to defend their interest in history or in supporting traditions, nor should we be expected to only ever surround ourselves with people that completely agree with us on every political aspect.

Grr. Anyway.

There's not all that much happening with me next week - another band practice, maybe going along to see how well Lisa manages this year's batch of rock-loving students on Wednesday, and it's the Assault rock/punk/metal/plus-industrial-due-to-pressure-group night on Friday, which I'm sure will be as bad as it always is (if not worse) but most of my friends will be there.

Now, I am going to either go and write music, or play Braid, or program in Python and Actionscript, while listening to "oh but it might be racist because they sing about Saxons" music.
I put this on Facebook; for those of you who don't have me on there, here it is again for your pleasure.

"Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen videogames you've played that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes."

If I was being more rigorous about this list rather than just picking the first memorable 15, Id probably have listed Deus Ex, Oblivion, Microprose Grand Prix, Elite, Frontier, Laser Squad, Bloodwych, Trackmania, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, New Star Soccer 3, Passage, The Price of Magik, Soul Blade... but instead, here are the 15, with some historical notes as I prefer that to just a list.

1. Green Beret. This was the first computer game I ever played, I think. It was on an arcade machine at Oakdene Forest Park in Dorset. I didn't particularly know much about green berets or guns or bazookas but this rather typical side-scroller was great fun to this neophyte.

2. Scramble. I played this on the Vectrex machines at the youth club when I was about 7 or 8. (That's not 'youth'!) It had 2 colours - off and on! - but the gameplay was addictive, and you always felt good when you reached a section you previously hadn't got to.

3. Ultima VII. Probably the best RPG of all time, and both its storyline and its vast explorable world probably will never be topped. This kept me occupied for months during my college days, when access to the family PC was limited, but once playing I'd be occupied well into the night.

4. Thief: The Dark Project. This game grabs me both on a visceral level and on an intellectual level. There's something about hiding and sneaking that makes it easier to identify with than the far-fetched power fantasies of most games. Add a dark storyline and a reluctant anti-hero and you have a perfect mix.

5. Championship Manager 2. Myself and my friend Andrew Grist used to lose many evenings to this addictive game back in the mid 90s. Even if you strip away the footballing aspect it's still a suspenseful game of strategy and resource management that keeps you going back for one more match.

6. Sensible Soccer. Another one best enjoyed with a friend: I used to take my joystick round to Tom's on the weekends and play 2-player 'Sensi' on his Amiga. Completely the opposite of Championship Manager in that this is all speed and action and very little thought, but always fun.

7. The Bard's Tale. This game shaped me as a person more than most things in my life. Playing it expanded my interest in roleplaying and swords and sorcery in general, and mapping out the dungeons of Skara Brae on graph paper showed me that you could explore a virtual world that existed inside the computer.

8. Kung Fu Master. Another arcade game played while on holiday as a child, and it sticks with me for that reason. Also, my first experience of the long gone mechanic of 'joystick waggling', the technique that launched a thousand Daley Thompson games.

9. Doom 2. Our PC at the time wasn't up to playing Doom but when we finally got a 486 (SX, 33MHz. 4MB Ram I think?) Peter Denby happily supplied me with this sequel to the seminal first person shooter. It was as if the sort of game we used to dream would be made was finally possible - a world in 3D that you could move through in real time, and plenty of demon-based action to boot. I'd never seen anything like it before and I'm not sure I'll ever have such a horizon-expanding moment at a computer ever again.

10. Realms of the Haunting. Like Doom, RotH is a 90s game utilising a first person viewpoint, 2.5D graphics, and has demons in. But there the similarities end. RotH is 1/3rd interactive film, 1/3rd graphical adventure, and 1/3rd first person shooter, and for this reason it never had mass appeal, but the spooky storyline combined with the intimidating presentation made my Resident Evil playing housemates concede that this was by far the scarier game.

11. Lords of Chaos. I got this as the free gift when I subscribed to Amstrad Action magazine, and was hooked instantly. It's a turn-based strategy game, ultimately owing some of its mechanics to Games Workshop board game rules, and the character customisation and multiplayer mode made it very replayable. Some of my co-workers worked on one of its sequels, strangely enough.

12. Abattoir MUD. If the Bard's Tale showed me that you could have virtual worlds in a computer, playing MUDs in the early 90s showed me the next step: worlds that kept going when you logged off. The game was text-based but that didn't matter any more than it matters that this website is text-based: you read the words and your mind fills in the blanks. You entered the game and talk to and adventure with people from all over the world, truly something new in the 90s. Modern MMOs are derived directly from the MUD experience but they have lost a lot along the way, not all of which can easily be explained to today's players, which is a shame.

13. Civilization. Possibly the best strategy game of all time. This was another one I enjoyed in the 90s where I'd start playing late on an evening and then realise it was getting light outside. Sinking battleships with Greek phalanxes is the sort of fun you can't easily get these days.

14. Baldur's Gate. This was basically the rebirth of party-based RPGs on the PC, picking up where Ultima VII had left off almost a decade earlier, and basically taking much of the latter, giving it a Diablo style point-and-click interface, and setting it in TSR's classic Forgotten Realms world. I played through this game with my American friend Jen (who I'd met on Abattoir MUD), which was both a very enjoyable and incredibly annoying experience as the quality of the game, enhanced by the cameraderie of playing with a friend, was often marred by the awful networking code that tended to hamper our cross-Atlantic gaming sessions.

15. Football Superstars. Half arcade soccer game, half roleplaying game - this didn't exactly turn out as I would have hoped, but I worked on it, and thousands of people enjoy playing it today, which is encouraging to think about.

?

Sep. 24th, 2010 10:54 am
This morning I dreamed that I was being chased by a female zombie. Somehow I knew she was a zombie despite her not really looking like one. My friends had shotguns and baseball bats to defend themselves from other zombies but I was annoyingly unarmed. Luckily I somehow was aware that this zombie's weakness was paint. So I fled to an arts and crafts store and when she came in, some associates of mine held her down while I attacked her with a tube of acrylic paint. After she was covered with about half of the paint, it transpired that she wasn't actually vulnerable to paint - she just found it unpleasant. So I had to run away again.
The 10th most important article on BBC News Online, according to its RSS feed, is that Twitter has made the right-hand column of its website wider. Jesus Christ BBC, sort your act out. IT'S NOT THAT IMPORTANT. The only Twitter users that spend much time on the actual website are people like me that dislike the service and only use it under duress. Most of the others view it through their phone or TweetDeck or Seesmic or some magic cross-posting system. I still don't like Twitter much, as you may have guessed.

What else? Oh yeah, I'm tired of reading article after article about how "Budget cuts will make <something> worse". Of course they will, and they should. If it were possible to reduce the budget for something without harming any of its output then that implies the money was being wasted or stolen in the first place. (Of course, this is the case in some areas, such as welfare, even if a lot of people who've never set foot in a Jobcentre don't want to believe that, and indeed in many places where people fight to maintain a budget that arguably they don't need.) So the question is not whether hospital waiting lists will get longer, defence will weaken, standards of living will decline, unemployment will rise, etc. Of course these things will happen. The question is, are the measures necessary?

I would argue that they definitely are. The country's books have to balance and you have to bring in at least as much money as you're spending. You can't just keep borrowing more and more on the pretense of 'investment' because for it to be actual investment and not just expenditure you need proof that you can repay what you borrow. But public sector spending does not do that. If it did, we wouldn't need taxes! We spend because it's beneficial for society to spread the wealth around on infrastructure and it helps to have a central body coordinating these things. These are positive actions, but they're not investments in the normal sense. They're just expenditure and you don't fix excess expenditure by spending even more in the vain hope it will help you spend less later. It's like eating a gâteau to find the extra energy to go running so that you can lose some weight. It doesn't work that way.

So I'm afraid I won't be supporting any campaign to stop NHS / arts / job / defence cuts, no matter how well-intentioned, because at the end of the day you have to live within your means. Sadly the Labour government in the last years of its tenure chose not to do that, meaning we were caught out when stuff went wrong. (And that's without even mentioning the £21.4bn of annual interest on the national debt that dwarfs the £6bn in planned cuts. If the last government had been prudent and worked on cutting that back when times were good instead of using economic stability as an excuse to borrow even more, we'd be in much better shape now.)

What was my original point again? Oh yeah, I want the media to stop saying "this person says this service will suffer" because I already know that, and so should you. It's not the point.

Another one: news people, stop telling me that some Liberal disagrees with something a Conservative said or vice versa. I should damn well hope that they disagree on some things otherwise they aren't worthy of the name 'Liberal' or 'Conservative'. But for the moment they have to cooperate to decide how the country is to be run and it would be lovely if the media could concentrate on constructively critiquing their actual policy decisions rather than trying to stir up dissent.

Maybe I'll write a non-contentious post soon...

burning

Sep. 10th, 2010 12:14 pm
I'm intrigued: why is it an outrage to burn the Qur'an, but was considered fairly unremarkable to burn the American flag or effigies of George W. Bush?
Over the last few years, we've seen the rise of Facebook, allowing people to connect with their friends in a fairly effective way. This has come at the expense of various other online networks - individual web forums are losing traffic, MySpace has obviously been cannibalised by people moving to Facebook, older haunts like Yahoo and MSN Groups have become deserted and closed down respectively, ICQ and Yahoo Messengers have lost favour, postings to Livejournal have dried up a lot, and so on.

All these other sites and services were a bit more anonymous. You could find interesting people and join their community or subscribe to their page and get to know them that way. Because they were mostly anonymous there weren't so many concerns about privacy and so you'd make new friends quite easily, by searching based on interests or whatever.

Now, we have Facebook which is big on having your real identity. In itself I don't think that's a bad thing, as there's definitely a place for networking with your real life friends and having a web site dedicated to facilitating that. But with real identity comes a need for privacy, which in turn means it's actually quite hard to find new friends on Facebook based on what they do or like. If you don't already have a mutual friend, you may never come across them, and even if you do, chances are high that their profile will be mostly closed off to you so contacting them is just a stab in the dark really. So as people have abandoned other services for Facebook, they've disappeared off the public web into a more private area.

I used to meet lots of people through online gaming. There was something really cool about going onto an online game and ending up on these make-believe adventures with people from England, the USA, Holland, Canada, none of whom you'd met before, but who you would get to know. But games things aren't the same any more either - it seems like most of the online games these days are carefully set up so that you can enter what is nominally a 'massively multiplayer world' and yet have as little to do with anybody else as possible, except for meeting up with your real life friends to go and play in a dungeon reserved especially for you.

I don't think any of this is a particularly good thing. It feels like the internet has lost some of its appeal in letting people form communities that ignore geographical distance, in favour of becoming something that just makes real world communities a little more efficient. It's a bit of a shame, I think. A lost opportunity.
Today I met 'GatientheH3'. I don't understand how people can be like this, expecting you to tell them why they're speaking to you.

(5:28:18 PM) GatientheH3: Hi
(5:30:03 PM) kylotan2: hi
(5:30:09 PM) GatientheH3: up ?
(5:30:40 PM) GatientheH3: HF ?
(5:30:45 PM) kylotan2: what?
(5:30:56 PM) GatientheH3: assembler ? xbox-scene ?
(5:31:09 PM) kylotan2: no, I don't do anything like that
(5:31:42 PM) GatientheH3: u from hf ?
(5:31:47 PM) kylotan2: no
(5:31:54 PM) GatientheH3: form ?
(5:32:07 PM) kylotan2: I don't know who you are or why you're asking me this
(5:32:16 PM) GatientheH3: itchy ?
(5:32:37 PM) GatientheH3: Or ya maybe
(5:32:39 PM) GatientheH3: MSDN ?
(5:32:48 PM) kylotan2: you're not making any sense
(5:32:57 PM) kylotan2: you sent me a message, so you should know where you got my user name from
(5:33:05 PM) GatientheH3: ya
(5:33:10 PM) GatientheH3: but i don't remember
(5:33:21 PM) GatientheH3: i added u a day ago
(5:34:01 PM) kylotan2: I see
(5:36:10 PM) GatientheH3: u work for ms no ?
(5:36:20 PM) kylotan2: no
(5:36:37 PM) GatientheH3: u post on msdn forum ?
(5:36:44 PM) kylotan2: I don't think so
(5:38:15 PM) GatientheH3: dream spark ?
(5:38:20 PM) GatientheH3: or any m$ forum ?
(5:38:23 PM) kylotan2: no
(5:38:30 PM) GatientheH3: d'uh
(5:38:36 PM) GatientheH3: U play x360 ?
(5:38:56 PM) kylotan2: no...
(5:39:03 PM) GatientheH3: whare are u doing ?
(5:39:03 PM) GatientheH3: o_o
(5:39:07 PM) GatientheH3: u programming ?
(5:39:21 PM) kylotan2: dude, you need to work out why you added me, then come back. not ask me 101 questions
(5:39:38 PM) GatientheH3: but i don't remember !
(5:39:39 PM) GatientheH3: -_-
(5:40:06 PM) GatientheH3: tell me what are u doing ,and i will remember

Bloodstock

Aug. 11th, 2010 08:08 pm
Any of you going? Post below!

Link dump

Aug. 6th, 2010 02:07 pm
Found on Reddit: "I created a website so our executives could monitor the status of our web servers. They requested I improve it so they could "see it better" when Tomcat crashes. This is what awaits them... " (video link)

On BBC News: Living alone costs singletons an extra £250,000 over a lifetime compared to couples, it is claimed. Any pretty girls volunteering to save us both some money? ;)

Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution Preview . The original Deus Ex is the game I'm currently spending most of my time on, and it's good in many ways to hear that the second sequel is much like the first game. There are some warning signs in there though, and ultimately I'm still unhappy that we just take one company's creation and pass it to a completely different company to make a follow-up. We need to do more to protect the people who come up with the real creativity.

Google Wave is shutting down. It was an interesting idea but it seemed to be trying to do too much, and not well enough. Still, I'd like to see an email replacement one day. Shame this wasn't it.

Some of you may be familiar with lmgtfy, the site you send someone to when they ask you a question that they could have easily answered themselves with a web search. It turns out that there is a live updating version so that the wider world can see exactly what things people are asking about, or rather, the things some people are grumpy at being asked about.

I also found myself on the Transformers Wiki recently and was impressed at how all the memories came flooding back when I read through some of the summarised storylines. All the different continuities and stuff makes me angry though. Series 'reboots' and 'non-canon' stories just seem wrong. I think all works of fiction should be entirely self-consistent. This probably marks me as a geek. Or mildly autistic.
Another week down. The demo's done - musically, that is. Perhaps it's too loud in the bass frequencies, but I can't tell any more. Maybe I'll drop it down a decibel or two later. Now I'm just waiting for our singer to finish the artwork so we can send a package to the cd duplication people. It's very time-consuming and it's not been terribly cheap either, so I'm currently liable to strangling any of the pro-file-sharing brigade at the moment if they say the wrong thing. (Although this will indeed be available free, in some form.)

I was going to post some of the band pictures up here, but I'm not going to now, as I don't like them. They're good pictures, but they have me in them, which makes looking at them less enjoyable. I get self-conscious enough just linking people to my music, but at least I know that is pretty good. The same can't necessarily be said about my face. There'll be pictures on our MySpace page before too long anyway. (And the website, if I can work out what the hell to do with it.)

I had wanted to get some completely different music done this weekend, as well as work on some programming and long term life goal planning, etc etc., but I've had no time for that, with people to catch up with, barbecues to attend, gigs to see. Two-day weekends are just not sufficient for living a decent life.
Ok, so the result of England vs. Germany didn't come as too much of a surprise. After all, we played centre-backs who didn't stay in the centre, a holding midfielder that can't hold the ball, and of our two strikers, one currently isn't striking. Hard to see how such a team could ever progress. Even so, I think 4-1 was a bit generous towards the Germans who weren't really that good - they just made fewer mistakes. My footballing interest shall now revert back to being limited to my ongoing game of Football Manager on the PC (where Glen Johnson plays better for me than he does for England in real life, though Lionel Messi plays worse to balance it all out).

My attempts to Get Things Done over the last couple of days have only been partly successful, as anticipated. My desk in-tray is half emptied, I'm down to 32 Firefox tabs from 38, I'm on 17 emails waiting to be handled instead of 24, and my official To Do list is down to 24 from 36. All well and good, except I required time off work to get that productive. Back to work tomorrow, and no doubt it'll all start mounting up again.

Backlog

Jun. 25th, 2010 11:32 am
Today, I'll be making use of my time off to catch up on my backlog of stuff that needs doing, cleaning, moving, sorting, installing, categorising, removing, etc. Nothing terribly interesting - I'd love to be able to make a start on the computer games I'm half way through (about 10) or not installed or started yet (about 55 of them), or finish the books I'm reading (about 6) or start the ones which haven't been opened yet (about 70), or the various magazines I've bought but not looked at (20, at least). I also have various musical, programming, or writing projects on the go (over 20, at last count) but they're going to have to wait.

Before I do anything actually interesting or productive I have to clear out my in-tray on my desk (filled with bank statements, cds, flyers, cereal bars, microphones - ok, so it's not a typical in-tray), get rid of all the tabs I have open in Firefox "for later" (38 tabs including this one), answer all the emails that I've flagged as needing answering or otherwise handling (I count 24) and at least halve the remaining actions on my To-Do list (36 items outstanding). I also have laundry to do and a kitchen to clean.

Gah. I wish I knew a way of avoiding this sort of burden, without simply not doing or looking at anything interesting.
Now, 'tis time to tell thee of my journey to a Gaulish field to witness a gathering of wandering troubadours. Or something like that.
Clickez-vous ici... )
Pictures, for the curious, can be found on Facebook here. If I find the time I may upload some of the better ones to Flickr too, but don't hold your breath!

Budget

Jun. 23rd, 2010 01:20 pm
A quick note on the budget. Looking at it all, it seems quite reasonable to me. A lot of people are upset at the cuts, but ultimately there comes a point where an entity - in this case, the UK - is living beyond its means and simply has to start spending less. You can't just keep borrowing in the hope that eventually the spending will pay for itself because eventually the interest payments mount up, and you're left more vulnerable in the meantime. We currently spend more as a country on interest payments on our borrowing than we spend on housing, the environment, and transport, for example.

It's not just about cutting the deficit, it's about eliminating it entirely. National debt is fine, if you have the capability to pay it off, but as long as there's a deficit of any size then that debt grows and grows and we fall further behind on repayments. We've been spending more than we actually make since 2002, hoping that we can pay it back later, pretending it's "investment" when it is not. It's pretty irresponsible spending really. So things have to change.

Cuts in the Budget that seem fine to me include these:
  • Child benefit frozen for three years. That'll be a cut in real terms of about 10% after the three years but it gives people time to tighten the purse strings.
  • Public sector workers face a two-year pay freeze if they earn over £21,000. Again, they will just have to learn to spend less. Yes, it's a pay cut in real terms, but the country doesn't have enough money, so that's how it goes. Better than being made redundant.
  • Tax credits reduced for families earning over £40,000 next year. Cry me a river - why are we paying any benefits to families on £40,000 a year? If you're earning £40,000 a year and you can't afford to pay for your family, then your family is too big. Try looking at your spare income before you squeeze out another kid.
  • Housing benefit: New maximum limit of £400 a week for properties with more than three bedrooms, £250 a week for a one-bedroom flat (etc). I don't know about London but it's trivial in Nottingham to find properties below those prices and hard to find properties above them. People have no right to complain. Housing is perhaps a right but luxury housing is not.
  • Introduce a medical assessment for Disability Living Allowance from 2013 for new and existing claimants - good. If done properly, those who need it will have nothing to worry about. No doubt it won't be done 100% properly but is that a good reason not to do it at all? You can't go doling out public funds giving people the benefit of the doubt all the time.
I can understand worries about the whole 'double dip' recession thing but there is plenty in the budget to encourage businesses to create jobs and to invest:
  • The "entrepreneurs relief" rate fro Capital Gains Tax of 10% on the first £2m of gains will be extended to the first £5m.
  • From April 2011, the threshold at which employers start to pay National Insurance will rise by the rate of inflation plus £21 per week.
  • Corporation Tax will be cut next year to 27%, and by 1% annually for the next three years, until it reaches 24%.
  • The small companies' tax rate will be cut to 20%.
  • People setting up new businesses outside London, the South East and the east of England will be exempt from £5,000 of National Insurance payments for the first 10 workers.
As for the people complaining about the Liberal Democrats (and to a lesser extent, the Conservatives) breaking election promises, it needs to be borne in mind firstly that the current Government didn't have access to the previous Government's balance sheet when campaigning, and secondly that it's necessary for coalition governments to compromise in order to pass bills like the Budget. It's disappointing that some of the people who seem to demand proportional representation in order to benefit their favoured Liberal Democrats won't accept that under such an electoral system compromises are inevitable.

There's one negative for my job in the Budget: tax relief for the video games industry will be 'scrapped'.I put scrapped in quotes because I don't think it was ever enacted in the first place, just planned. I think this was a small mistake as the UK is well placed to make a lot of money from knowledge-based industries such as software, entertainment, and, well, entertainment software. It requires little in natural resources, next to no reliance on imports or foreign labour, and benefits from a well-educated and densely populated work base, which we have. Oh well!

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