Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture » Rant

Now remind me, who is a failure?

tulip — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:30:12 +0000

In my earlier post I mentioned the Google Bombs, which are the results that had been manipulated by people linking to pages with terms that some people may not feel are totally relevant to those pages. Famously ‘Miserable Failure’ got George W’s bio as the top result on Google and ‘Dangerous Cult’ gives the top result Scientology. After a new set of revelations about Bush’s administration finally admitting that they did take kidnapped foreign nationals, (sorry extraordinary rendition, my mistake) through Bristish territory without telling them (even though it was a shared base and the need to know was explicitly required) and showing their popularity once again overseas by getting their embassy burned down in Serbia. You cannot believe that one man’s administration managed to turn the goodwill of the world after 9/11 to complete and utter mistrust and hatred in only a few short years. You do get the feeling that the admission of the Rendition was only made to get it out of the way in the last days of the Bush government, but his record of starting off with a budget surplus at the beginning of his first term, he leaves the US with their largest deficit ever, with US popularity abraod as what can only be described as ‘detested’ a third-world currency and a looming recession and inflationary nightmare….and I haven’t even mentioned Iraq yet. I mean you have got to be amazed at the gall of the man standing in Africa having not sent any troops saying ‘It’s easier to tear down than build a country’ after he sent troops in to Iraq against the prevailing opinion in the world after circumnavigating any democratic process. However Darfur turns up and the American troops flood in to quash the violence in a moment of great…oh, no they didnt did they, I mean what would be the point of that? Oh, I see it’s about not wanting to send US troops into another Muslim country….it’s not so much the troops in Muslim countries that is the problem, but which countries they are in….and the reason why. Now he has mentioned the billions ploughed into Africa to fight AIDs, which is all very well, but it comes with strings. Now as we know it’s better to teach a man to fish, but Bush seems to think it’s better to send them fish as this shows. If he really wanted the nations in Africa to thrive and be able to deal with their own problems better you would think he would allow the African Nations the ability to trade in a free market. However much of the economic activity in Africa is based around raw materials like cotton. So does Bush and his administration continue to subsidize cotton farmers in his electoral heartland even though the WTO has ruled this illegal….oh I give up, at least he won’t be around for much longer. Still the ghost of Bush’s Google Bomb still lingers, try typing ‘Who is a failure’ into Google……

UK folk earn more than their US counterparts

tulip — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:18:02 +0000

A friend of mine sent me this from the Beeb and for the first time since the turn of the 20th Century, people in the UK will be earning more per person than their US counterparts. Partially down to currency fluctuations, but also down to the higher economic growth, which unsuprisingly are related – if your country gets stronger economically then so will your currency assuming you don’t print too much of it. Now I have never been a fan of Bush, from the start I thought he was a hawkish half-wit with a bunch of oil hungry cronies in tow…or rather paying his way. Now I could go on about how he managed to turn the huge amount of goodwill the rest of the world felt towards the US after 9/11 into a state of affairs whereby being an American abroad is bad for your health. So after spending trillions on his ‘war on oil’…sorry ‘terror’ which seems to have done a good job of increasing terrorist activity by acting as the best recruitment advertisement Al-Qaeda could ever have hoped for (and just the response the provocation of 9/11 was supposed to induce) He has also introduced some restrictive trading practices that have seen the WTO (not normally known for their anti-US bias) hand out several penalties against the US. Lastly, and probably the most harmful, is the floodgates were opened on cheap credit leading tohuge inflationary pressures on prices, which meant that globally the dollar had to fall – how does this affect anything for the average joe? I’m glad you asked, because that means I can go off on one of my periodic, but always dull economic lectures….

This low interest rate climate in the US (compared to the rest of the world) meant that credit was available for all manner of investments. So, imagine that you can get 10% for no risk by putting your money in the bank. This means that for a ’safe’ investment (ie one you consider has low risk, but some chance of losing you money) then you may feel OK to accept a 20% return in these circumstances. For higher risk you may need to look at a potential 40% return to be worth putting your money into. Now let us assume that the Fed cuts rates and the banks now only offer 5%, so for the same level of risk as before, you now only need to return 10% to make it a worthwhile investment and only 20% for the risky investment (if you consider the risk as doubling between the safe and risky investment, then you only double the return required to make it worthwhile) So all the time that the rates are kept low, then people will be tempted to borrow money at these low rates to put into investments as if you can borrow at 5% and invest at a 20% return it must be good, right? Lets say you put $1000 into ten of these investments at 20% and one fails totally, then you get 9000*1.2=$10800 or an 8% return, so that is OK? Well it is fine if you are correct in your assessment of the risk, you are only getting in reality 3% more than in the bank. Now imagine that instead of one, two of your investments fail. All of a sudden you have now got a return of 8000*1.2=$9600 or -4%! However this -4% is in actual fact -9% as you still owe the bank at the 5% rate. We can also see what happens as the interest rates rise, if it goes to 6% your return with one failure is only 2% and your loss is -10%. So in reality, these are not good investments as their actual risk to reward ratio is obscurred by the low rates.

Now since more money is being called on to invest, in these seemingly good investments, the money supply increases as there will always be more lower rate risky investments then higher rate risky investments as firstly there are always more mediocrity than excellence and also the good investments will simply charge more – you can always charge more for excellence after all. This has the effect of devaluing the currency – think about it, if the economy grows by a smaller amount than the money supply (relative to other currencies!) then it must devalue. Now if inflation kicks in, the rates must rise to compensate as this means that you must get a better rate of return to borrow money to invest in it or spend it (remember an investment is anything you spend money on as you are investing in your happiness if you buy yourself new toys….or something like that!) so people buy/invest less, which puts less demand on the markets, which means that inflation will decrease, but it will also mean that the things that were giving a risky 20% (which is in fact only an 8% return as we saw above) are now devalued as who wants this when they can get a safe 10% in the bank? Now imagine that those people who have bought these risky 20% investments have done it with borrowed money and this borrowed money is now more expensive, so they cannot afford to pay it all back. They have two options, they can default or they can sell some of their assets to pay back some of their money, but these assets are worth less than before, so they cannot pay back all their money. Since they cannot pay back their creditors, their creditors also have less money to put into the pool, further decreasing the money supply…. The boom/bust seen in the mortgage market is simply this playing out. Had the US held their base-rates at a sensible amount, the bubble would not have formed as prices and expectations would not have deformed as we saw. It may have made people a lot of money during the boom, but due to the leverage (the borrowed money) there is always far more to lose than was ever made. The UK and Europe have been far more circumspect with their economic policies and the Japanese, after years of deflation have seen their currency and interest rates rise too, leaving the US in a very unfortunate position – the Japanese and Chinese have been buying US bonds for years. US Treasury bonds are essentially IOUs. The Chinese have been buying these to allow the US to continue to buy their stuff, the Japanese have been buying them because they could get Yen at very low (try 0%!) rates, buy US bonds and, even at their low rates of return, make money pretty much risk free. However as soon as Euros, Sterling etc started to offer better rates for similarly low risk the money started going there instead and, as the interest rates rise, the value of the lower rate bonds has to decrease to match the valuation of the new, higher rate bonds. All of this means a lower demand for US debt and since US debt is currently at it’s highest level ever and demand is dropping for the reasons above, it’s not a good thing for the US economy as it will struggle to maintain it’s debt load. As the US bonds are retired (they have a lifespan) the new ones have to be issued at a higher rate to be attractive to investors and support the current debt load. The only way they can do this is to up the rates, which affects the money supply. So the dropping rates you see in the US can only be short term as they have no way of retiring the debt quickly. The last part of the sorry tale to clobber the beleagered US economy is the rising prices globally of commodities. Since demand from India and China is increasing for copper, gold etc and the supply cannot increase as fast (it takes years to open new mines) then if the basic materials are increasing, then inflation must increase as inflation is, after all, simply a reflection of the annual rise in prices. That is yet more inflationary pressure for an economy that is currently trying to reduce rates to increase money so it’s financial institutions can get enough money to simply service their current liabilities….it’s not very pretty is it.

FA blaming lack of English players in Premiership for England struggles

tulip — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:40:12 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was a bit dismayed about the comments of Trevor Brooking in the run up to the England vs Israel game. He and the FA believe that the number of foreign players in the league is harming our own aspirations. Really, why is this Sir Trevor? “Well,” he says, “take a look at Italy, almost all their players play in their league and they won the World Cup” Good point Sir Trevor, but statistically it’s a little irrelevant, it’s a bit like saying “I flipped a coin and it came up heads, so it must always come up heads” So, lets have a look around the other power houses in International football shall we….
OK, lets start with Germany. They had a good showing last time around with a young team and yes, the vast majority of them are playing in Germany. OK, they were playing at home, but let’s let Sir Trevor have that one. let’s move on. How about Brazil, France, Argentina and even Portugal? Can’t think of too many of their top players playing in their domestic leagues, can you? Now let’s take a quick look from the other side of the fence, what about other nations that have a strong domestic league with plenty of home grown talent playing in it. Well we have dealt with Italy and the Premiership, the other big domestic league is in Spain – the perennial under achievers in world football. They have been even worse than us with nothing to show of note in the international game. So the balance is, while not conclusive, in favour of the teams that have their talent playing in the more competitive leagues around the world.
Sir Trevor went on to then blame the acadamies of the Premiership sides for not taking in enough local talent. I’m sorry, am I hearing this right? Whose job is it to get kids up to a decent standard by the time they are 11-13 when they are likely to be taken on by one of the Premiership sides? Why should it be that other nations are producing kids with more technical ability than ours that means they get the palces in the acadamies? It’s the FA’s job to get these kids up to standard. The way we teach it is terrible. In Gianluca Vialli’s book ‘The Italian Job’ he points out that in Italy kids that want to play are taken off and given proper training, including after school. In the UK, everyone is sent out for a few hours on a Wednesday afternoon and it is made to feel like a torture. There is no way of taking the keen, talented and motivated kids off to do something to make them into the players the acadamies are looking for. One of my friend’s has a 13 year old son and his school has had one of the best local teams for years. They do not have football as one of the sports they teach, all the kids that want to play do so outside school hours.
The simple fact is though, that you need to sift an awful lot of dirt to find a nuggest of gold, the more you can sift, the more you will find. Luckily the nuggets will also catch your eye – OK this metaphor is getting a bit stretched now, let’s put it this way, the Gerrards of the world were obviously good from a young age and were then picked up. The teams need to stay ahead of their rivals and finding this talent is their priority, regardless of it’s source. Going back to my stretched metaphor, if you don’t find any gold in the stream you are sifting, there maybe more elsewhere, it helps to spread your efforts.
Now lets take a quick look at the other side of this arguement. The FA claim with the dearth of English players making the grade we are harming the national team. Sorry, but the competition means that only the good get to the top. The stronger the competition the better they need to be. If they are really trying to tell me that the current England first team is not good enough, then please explain why it is that the likes of Lampard and Gerrard are almost always in the running for player of the year awards? Look down the England team sheet and there are very few really weak spots when the team is fit. In fact there are very few spots where the team doesn’t have depth too. I mean Jamie Carragher is talking about retiring from the international game because he cannot guarentee himself a first team place.
So, why aren’t we winning? Well, we currently have a coach that has never won anything of note. He had an immensely lucky run to the final of the UEFA Cup, but what else? Had the FA not completely screwed up by deciding they needed to have a new coach before the last World Cup, we could have had a Scolari or a Hiddink. As Scolari rightly pointed out he could not accept a new job prior to the World Cup as he still had to motivate his team. Hiddink also rightly said, that they know what he does, if they want to offer him the job great, but he is not going through an interview process. I mean what do the FA think they are doing, recruiting a new intern?
The simple fact is that the Premiership is the most watched sports league anywhere in the world. It is no longer ‘ours’, I’ve walked around in Malaysia, South Africa and even parts of the USA and you see Chelsea and Liverpool shirts being worn and games on in the bars. The clubs and the Premiership itself have the onus on them to make it as entertaining and competitive as possible. The talent coming through from the grass-roots is the FA’s responsibility, so whinging about a lack of English talent coming through is basically complaining about not doing their own job properly. The FA still shares too much DNA with the organisation that for years refused to send a team to the World Cup and even fined Manchester United for playing in the early days of the European Cup. It needs a good kick into the 21st Century

$84 million for 30 minutes ‘protection’

tulip — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 15:31:21 +0000

I live in London, there are lots of Aussies here, usually whinging about everything - the weather, the food, whinging Poms etc. but generally a good laugh. You’ve seen the pictures of the Mardi-Gras and the closing ceremony at the Sydney Olympics….however it hides a dark secret, many of the Aussies back home are nearly as scarily right-wing and religious as their US counterparts. In fact they have spent $84 million on an internet porn filter, which a 16 year bypassed inside 30 minutes. OK, so a government spending money on dumb ideas is nothing new, as always it’s the quotes that make the interesting reading….

“It’s a horrible waste of money,” he (Tom Wood, the kid that disabled the block) said. “They could get a much better filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for an ineffective one.”

er shouldn’t that be “They could get an ineffective filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for one”?

Now onto the political lobbyists, who once again come up with something sane and insightful

“You need both. You need it at the ISP and at the PC level,” Senator Fielding (a cyber safety campaigner) said. “The Government has not listened to common sense and it leaves kids exposed.”

So throwing more money and bad legislation at it will make everything O will it? What planet do these people live on, do they really think kids have no knowledge of what goes on out there? That somehow blocking the outside world will suddenly make kids into those cute fluffy things you see on TV commercials or The Cosby Show? Post puberty kids get interested in this stuff. I grew up well before the internet and there was a healthy(!) black market in dodgy magazines (or even sections of!) back then. If someone wants to get hold of this stuff it will never be difficult. You are not going to stop the lot, the internet is organic, new sites will come up that filters will miss. Or kids can simply go round to their mates place and use a non-school computer to get the stuff. Most employers do not let you download porn at work, neither should schools, but trying to stop it before it gets there is futile and a waste of money. As for the issues around privacy…..

Bodog.com, NewBodog.com – but hey, what’s in a name!

tulip — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 01:34:49 +0000

A quick update, it appears that the problem stems from a dubious patent infringement claim. Bodog, not being a US company, did not respond to it as they felt it was outside the juristiction of the court, so the judge awarded the name to the patent holder

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

So, Bodog are having some ‘issues’ with the Bodog.com name. According to their release there is a legal issue around the ownership affecting them. They really are not having too much luck over the last year or so, I mean who would have thought that after sponsoring lasy year’s World Series of Poker winner, Jamie Gold, you would get so much negative publicity….who said there is no such thing as bad publicity

Good luck to them though, I honestly hope they sort it out soon. I live in the UK where we can play poker online, where it is regulated. This means they are policed, aren’t laundering money and you are pretty damn sure you are going to be able to get your money out (I should point out that Bodog are licensed over here) which sounds like the sensible way to go about things. I mean you’ve seen those casinos in Vegas? Something must have paid for those, something good for the economy? Don’t hear too much about gangsters running the place these days, maybe something to do with the regulation and legislation in Vegas? However for some reason Bush and chums still seem to think that prohibition is the smart way to go and are doing everything they can to stop US based folk playing. I know some people have gambling problems, but some people have drink and mental health problems, it does not mean that you ban drink or brains….ahhhh, now I understand where George is coming from

Oh you mean that black Lamborghini roadster…..

tulip — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 20:08:50 +0000

It’s good to see that wherever you go in the world those nice sports stars do a great job of driving like we do when we get behind the wheel of our Lamborghinis. The only difference is that when we get to drive a Lambo we are playing Grand Theft Auto. However, like me, I am sure you drive carefully in GTA too, stopping at all stop signs, letting old ladies cross the road, just like Lance Briggs does in real life, so when a Black Lambo registered to an NFL Linebacker appears wrapped around a telegraph pole one night with no driver or any theft filed, there must be a sensible explanation?

I am sure he would never drive like an idiot late at night. I’m sure he has learnt well from Price Naseem crashing his Mercedes McLaren leaving a man near paralysed and getting put away for a few years or, even more recently, the tragic death of the 19 year old QPR striker Ray Jones and several others in a car crash this weekend. I’m sure that the huge amounts of adoration and money thrown at them from an early age has not made any one of them think they are invincible or above the law in any way, shape or form……

Mr Brooker, hats off to you

tulip — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:11:38 +0000

I always loved Charlie Brooker’s witty, world-weary and more importantly, usually spot-on take on the world, such as

This week Charlie shook his head in tearful dismay at Sally Morgan: Star Psychic on ITV1: “If the TV networks want to ‘regain trust with the viewer’, why gleefully promote the kind of bogus supernatural bullshit a stunned foetus could see through?”

and I read this and I just have to say….I agree.
I love going to gigs, but I have never really got the hang of clubbing. Well back in the days of Britpop, they just stuck on the tunes that I went to gigs to see people play, so it was fun if only an approximation of the ‘real’ thing so people just jumped around on the dance floor like a moshpit. I tried to get into the whole clubbing things and there are a few nights I remember fondly, but generally I go to clubs for a dance and to hang out with my mates, but what happens? You get rammed in there so you can’t move, let alone dance, you can’t find anyone, you have to wait hours to get fleeced for a drink and then have to queue to get into the toilets (and I am a man and I thinkg th queues for ours are too long!!) where you find some bloke trying to get paid for squirting soap into your hands and handing you a towel or turning on the blower. Who the hell thought that was something that would add to our quality of life? I’m pretty sure I have been able to work out the nuances of washing my hands by now….

Advertising pulled from Facebook

tulip — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:25:20 +0000

Following on from the last post about Facebook, according to Auntie Beeb, the likes of First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the AA, Halifax and the Prudential have all withdrawn ads from Facebook. The line they have given is that they could not control where their ads appeared. OK, so this may be true, but across the site how many pages are actually dedicated to the likes of the BNP? I may just be cynical, but in this world of spin do people really believe this line? Isn’t there is a much more simple explanation – money?
I was looking through the blogs of a few people that spend a great deal of time and money running ads for other people’s products (they are called affiliate marketeers) and apparently many of the social networking sites like Facebook cost them a fortune in ads and produce very poor results (they don’t specifically mention Facebook.com but give YouTube.com and MySpace.com as examples of domains that do not convert into sales very well) However, the big advertisers come up with a load of *&^% to justify their decision. I’m not sure if they just don’t want to lose the association with something ‘cool’ like Facebook, but rather than just say that Facebook traffic doesn’t convert very well, they throw out some line about withdrawing due to social concerns and pandering to the ‘Angry Mob’ (copyright Kaiser Chiefs!) Amazing how it all happened at once isn’t it? Did one of them came up with idea and all the rest quickly followed suit, thinking ‘brilliant ruse, why didn’t we think of that earlier?’
I know I am just feeding my own cynicism with theirs but their cynical attempts to manipulate an economic decision just annoys the tits off me. So, as a point of pettiness I’m going to find a load of First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, the AA, Halifax and Prudential ads and click on as many as I can find to waste their ad budgets…..

Manchester United sign Aussie 9 year old

tulip — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:47:55 +0000

I read the story about Manchester United signing a 9 year old from Brisbane with a bit of sadness. As was ponted out here there have been a lot of youngsters that have shown promise but not lived up to it. Manchester United claim they have not broken the rules in any way and I am sure they have followed the rules. The problem is that you are now seeing the pushy parent syndrome kicking in and moving the whole family thousands of miles to be within the catchment area for the club. Having done this the entire family now lives miles from their friends and the only reason to be there is for the kids football career – how much pressure is that!!

Now I would love to have been really good at football (or any sport!) but I never was, but I have always loved playing sport and still do regularly. Having said that I used to love kicking a ball around at school and getting yelled at by my Mum for ripping my school uniform when I, inevitably, fell over (OK so the last bit wasn’t so much fun, but I still carried on kicking a ball around regardless so it must have been worth it!!) Can you imagine how different it would be if you were ten and your kickabout in the playground was now a regimented training session that you went to almost everyday, you’d almost look forward to homework? Can you imagine if your folks turned around to you and said ‘no you can’t have that ice-cream, your nutritional balance will be thrown out’. Or even ’stop playing with your friends you might injure yourself’. It’s not only football, it’s happened many times with prodigies in various sports getting burned-out before they make it out of their teenage years. It’s also happened with other areas too – showbiz parents, beauty pagent parents etc.

Quite simply shouldn’t you let kids grow up normally? Kids need a chance to grow up before they can reasonably be expected to handle that kind of pressure. If your child was that gifted wouldn’t you want them to grow up knowing what normality is so they can distinguish between that and the bizarre world they may find themselves in, under the glare of the spotlight and, more importantly, the world they will find after their career when the spotlight is no longer on them?

Just when you thought IQs could get no lower…..

tulip — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:27:42 +0000

A friend of mine sent this link through to me. It starts out as a vaguely amusing thing about Gingers and how we have lots of them in the UK. However, in true US style reporting, the histerics kick in and soon it becomes a story or Ginger persecution that would make Papa Doc Duvalier proud. Then I started reading the comments and I was caught in that weird state between laughing your head off and utter dispair.

Now I know there are some very intelligent, elloquent Americans out there, but somehow the good ‘ole boys (and girls) reading this have determined that it is not safe to come over here without dying their hair or wearing a hat and managed to extrapolate a thing about people getting the mick taken out of them for having red hair into proof that this is in actual fact just our hatred of the Irish! It’s not hatred of the Irish, it’s the Plastic Paddies over there still thinking it’s the 1970s. If they had said the French, then they might have been onto something…..