Gordon bloody Brown.

My employers have just announced a sharesave scheme, which is great. I was in one of these schemes once before, with British Gas Services, and it was rather a good earner. For those of you who don't know, it's a pretty simple idea. You opt to put aside a portion of your salary for three years. At the end of the three years, you get a small bonus added to the total. You then get the option of either taking the money or spending it all on shares in your company. The good bit is that you get to buy the shares at a price fixed at the start of the scheme — so, for instance, my employers could pick a share price of 50p today, and, even if the shares are worth 500p in three years time, I still get to buy them at 50p each — and then immediately resell them, if I wish. Fantastic. Of course, the price could also go down, but I can choose to take the money instead of the shares, so the worst-case scenario is that I get the small bonus. It's a very small bonus, but it's still great by the standards of worst-case scenarios.

I was just about to sign up when I spotted this in the Ts & Cs:

Remember, tax legislation can be changed by the Government, and the rules that apply today may be different when you come to exercise your option or sell your shares.

Good point. Labour are going to win this election, and they've promised not to touch income tax, which means they'll be looking for other things to tax. Would anyone in their right minds think that sharesave schemes aren't prime candidates? Brown might not tax the hell out of this at some point in the next three years, but the risk seems to me to be very high.

Sharesave schemes are good in all sorts of ways: they're a form of saving; they're easy risk-free investment for the working classes; they give employees the opportunity to exert control over their companies and to share in their companies' profits; they give people, including those on low wages, nice big fat lump sums; they give companies a good way of raising funds from their employees without ripping them off. They're just plain good. And here I am, worried about joining one because I am all too aware of our "prudent" Chancellor's record. If his actions have been so good for the economy, then how comes they are discouraging me from taking action that would be good for the economy?
 

The misery of certain impending loss.

The Passing Parade writes about insurers and why they're all so bloody miserable:

But almost all insurance people are positive party animals when compared to those sad and somber actuarial wretches who must peddle life insurance for a living. Like card counters at a blackjack table, life insurance is the one area of the insurance casino where the advantage lies entirely with the policyholder; even with the best efforts of doctors and life insurance salesmen to dissuade them the vast majority of people insist on dying. This is disheartening, to say the least, for your average life insurance peddler, who must constantly rethink his commitment to capitalism and the free market in the light of the millions of people willing to die in order to get their hands on the insurance company’s money.

 

The most stupid political analysis ever.

I just took The Public Whip's quiz and it told me:

We suggest you vote Sinn Féin in North Down
— based on how your ex-MP (who is standing again) and MPs of other parties voted in parliament over the last 4 years, compared to your opinion on these issues

Did it really not occur to The Public Whip that there might be another issue in this part of the country, that their advice really ought to consider? You'd've thunk they'd've noticed: it's been on the news and everything.

But, added to the obvious knuckle-dragging idiocy, there are hidden depths of knuckle-dragging idiocy, in the form of this basic and vastly stupid statistical error. Since the IRA's MPs refuse to sit in Parliament, hence do not vote in Parliament, they tend to have a better voting record on pretty much any issue you care to think of. Either you agree with your non-IRA MP about absolutely everything, or your opinions conflict with their voting record on at least one issue. On the other hand, your opinion will never conflict with any IRA MP's voting record, because they don't have one. I've taken the quiz a number of times now with a wide range of different opinions, and, sure enough, it's told me to vote Sinn Fein nearly every time.

Puzzlingly, despite being shown by statistical analysis to be the party to vote for, the IRA haven't even bothered putting up posters round my way. Strange to see such a lack of confidence.
 

The pending election: some advice.

OK, so here's a bit of election commentary then. I said there wouldn't be any, yet here is some. Sue me.

Whoever you vote for, they're going to need organisational skills if they win, right? Even the lowliest of MPs has some tasks to complete (I'm told), and, ideally, you don't want said tasks fucked up. At the very least, you'd like a smidgin of competence, right? Right. And what if they end up a minister or secretary of something? Then they could be organising really important stuff, like avoiding nuclear war or providing free milk to dockers. So an important criterion to consider when choosing whom to vote for is, when they're given a task, do they get it broadly right, or is it an unmitigated disaster? Well, I have worked out how you can tell.

You see, I've been looking at the various vote-for-me posters littering our world, and I have noticed that most of them have something in common: bloody awful photos. The sort of photo that, if it were of you, you'd say, "Oh, that one was at that party. God, we were all so drunk. And Keith had got hold of the camera, and he's just got no hand-eye co-ordination at the best of times, but then Samantha jogged his elbow just as he hit the shutter. And I think I was about to throw up. And, anyway, I always look like a monkey in photos. And, Jesus, that lighting's just dreadful." Except these are photos of (probably) sober candidates, in professional photographers' studios, with professional lighting, not at parties, not throwing up. And they've had a whole load of shots done and spent ages going through them all to pick just the right one — what you're looking at could be what they think is the best of maybe a hundred shots. Even worse, they might be right: it could actually be the best one. And it's not just crap. It's really, really crap, with a capital crap.

So your candidate was given a very, very simple task; simpler than most of the things they're likely to be asked to do as an MP: "Get a decent photo for the posters. Here's a wodge of money. Hire a professional photographer. Make sure the end result says 'Vote for me. I'm reliable, honest, friendly, efficient.' You don't have to be good-looking — hey, you're a politician; we're not demanding the impossible here — just try not to look like a leering brain-dead twat."

Now, would you want someone who can't even manage that handling the situation with Iran?
 

Comedic redevelopment.

A new development on the my-two-year-old-niece-learning-to-speak front. As mentioned before, she can now, sadly, pronounce the letter L, destroying the comic glory of not doing so. However, she is so pleased with her new sound that she overpronounces the letter, always giving it a syllable all of its own. As a result, if you now ask her, "What do you build with?" she replies, clear as day, "Bollocks."
 

Mobilapropism.

One of the things I love about modern phones is that you can buy all sorts of different applications for them. But that's not why I'm blogging; that's just background, to set the mood. No, so I was browsing through the Nokia Software Market and I found TimeTool, which, among other things, does this, apparently:

The Planner helps you to manage weekly repeating events and exonerate the Calendar.

For all your falsely-accused-calendar needs.
 

Happy birthday to me.

Tomorrow, I will be a hundred and seven. Well, it feels that way. When I am a hundred and seven, I will look back at this and scoff, of course. "No, no," I will say to myself across time itself, "this feels like being a hundred and seven. What you're thinking of is feeling tired and achy from excessive laying of patios, which is, let me assure you, young man, a breeze in comparison. Where's my cocoa?"

To which I reply, "Look, you crazy old bastard, I've been trying in vain to unblock our drains for the last couple of hours, up way above my elbow in shit, and I could quite do without being condescended to by my older self. The reason I feel like I'm a hundred and seven is that, what with the drain situation and my lack of a rubber suit, I smell like you probably smell all the time. Furthermore, piss off."

Anyway, I'm thirty-one tomorrow. Woo.
 

A small observation.

Laying a patio is surprisingly easy.  Mixing sand, cement, and water, however, is the sort of thing the devil would make you do in hell, though I'm sure even Satan would balk at making anyone do it for eternity.  A couple of days would be quite bad enough.  Maybe a week for the guy who invented the new type of bath plug that may not have the unbearably unsightly chain but also doesn't let the bloody water out of the bath.  That's "bloody" as in "cotton-picking".  I've not been killing people in my bath or anything.  Oh no.  What a thought.  Ha ha ha.  Anyway, yes, what was he thinking, whoever he was?  Are plug chains really so bad that we should be willing to trade the excitement of plug levers for the ability to actually empty the actual bath?  Well?  It makes me so angry, I could strangle a manatee in the nude.  There's an obscure quote for you.  Some sort of worthless prize to whomsoever identifies it correctly.  Obviously correctly.  Why would there be a prize for identifying it incorrectly?  That would be quite odd.

Still no election commentary here, then.
 

Anatomy of an insufferable self-absorbed wanker.

In my last post, I mentioned that I don't much care for the philosopher Michael Tye. I wasn't going to go on about it, but then I saw this on his homepage:

My interest in philosophy was awakened at Oxford while an undergraduate (though not by my tutor, who spent most of our tutorial time together in silent meditation).

Michael Tye criticises his tutor for not doing enough to teach him philosophy? Well then.

Tye was to be my tutor for the first half of my fourth year at St Andrews. He had just arrived at the university, and so my first tutorial with him was, I think, his first tutorial. Unfortunately, I had one hell of a bad throat at the time and was under doctor's orders to stay in bed — I had a throat ulcer, my doctor said, which sounded alarming. So I called the department, like I was supposed to, and left a message to let Professor Tye know I wouldn't be there. This was totally unexceptional stuff; happened all the time.

So up I turned the next week, feeling better, and the guy just laid into me. He took my ill health to be a personal affront. He clearly didn't believe that I had really been ill; he had received the message I'd left to apologise in advance for my absence but didn't feel the message was good enough in some unspecified way. He informed me that he had turned down a very prestigious professorship in America to accept the St Andrews job, as if that had some bearing on my health. When I refused to apologise for insulting him on the simple grounds that I had not done so, he started his little vendetta against me. He started by giving me two days to write an essay as punishment for my transgression; I refused: I didn't have enough time over the following two days anyway (I did have other classes), and I refused on principle to accept a punishment when I hadn't even come close to breaking any rules. For the next couple of weeks, he ridiculed every single thing I said in tutorials, sneering at me and telling me that my contributions were stupid or unimportant or irrelevant or taken from books that he felt hadn't contributed anything to the field. He also complained that I didn't say enough. (There were three students in those tutorials, and the American girl whose name I forget never uttered a single word. He didn't complain about her lack of contribution.) He made an official complaint about me to the department, including the detail of my missing the first tutorial but carefully leaving out the bit about my letting him know in advance — lying, in other words. Luckily, the then Head of School, Stephen Read, was a very nice and reasonable man who had taught me before and, I think, knew that I wasn't a trouble-maker, so he accepted that I had done nothing wrong and I didn't get any black marks against my record. However, Michael Tye was, by now, refusing to teach me unless I grovelled to him.

Those tutorials were a required course for my degree. The department gave me a special dispensation so that I could still get the degree without ever having to go near Michael fucking Tye ever again.

My interest in philosophy was awakened at Oxford while an undergraduate (though not by my tutor, who spent most of our tutorial time together in silent meditation).

Oh, you poor man. That must have been awful for you.
 

Philosophy.

Mr Save The Queen links to this brilliant article about the ignorant arrogance of the anti-religious, a subject which, as it so happens, I was arguing about only the other day. It's a very good article, and I thoroughly recommend it. But that's not why I'm blogging.

No, I mention it because it twice mentions the philosopher John Haldane, who is, apparently, a bit of an authority on the philosophy of religion these days. This is interesting to me for pure reasons of nostalgia, as I well remember sitting through Professor Haldane's lectures on moral philosophy — which were superb: interesting, enthusiastic, informative, and clear (and what a rare thing clarity is in philosophy). Back in those days, he wasn't a famous philosopher who got name-dropped and recommended, but it was clear to anyone who attended his lectures that the man was brilliant. I understand that he's a devout Catholic, but it says something about the quality of his lectures, not to mention his integrity, that I had to pick that up via the grapevine: six months of moral philosophy lectures and he never once gave even the slightest hint of his own views on abortion, sex, marriage, euthanasia, etc. In fact, it was his recommendation that introduced me to the philosophy of Peter Singer.

While I'm talking about St Andrews philosophy lecturers, it's nice to see that Dr Peter Clark is Head of School now. His lectures were so entertaining that I've based a character in my forthcoming novel on him. (Whether my novel will ever finally come forth is far from certain, but, for now, it's forthcoming.) And it's great to see that this man is no longer on this page, as he was an insufferable self-absorbed wanker.