The Great Inertia Sector: A whistleblower’s account of council work where staff pull six-month sickies
Monday morning, it’s 10am and I’m late for work – but there’s no point hurrying because even though I should have been at my desk 30 minutes ago, I know I’ll be the first to arrive at the office.
Sure enough, the planning department is a ghost town.
Our flexi-hours policy means that employees can start any time between 7.30am and 10am, but council workers like to treat that as a rough guideline rather than the contractual obligation that it is.
I’m a senior planning officer: it’s my job to inspect buildings, grant planning approval and to guide members of the public looking to alter their homes.
Our department has 60 employees and – until last Tuesday – a budget of £22million.

I’ve been there for two years and in that period the only time I’ve ever seen every employee present and correct was at the Christmas party.

At least ten people will be off sick on any one day. The departmental record holder is Doreen – she has worked a grand total of eight days in 14 months.

Doreen must be the unluckiest woman in the country.
In the past year and a half she claims she has: fallen victim to frostbite; been hit by a car; and accidentally set herself on fire.

But she’s really pulled out all the stops with her latest excuse: witchcraft. That’s right, Doreen believes somebody in Nigeria has cast a spell on her and that it would be unprofessional of her to attempt to do the job she is paid £56k a year for while under the influence of the spell.
She has already been off for four months on full pay. I’ve no idea how long this spell lasts, but my guessing would be six months to the day – the exact amount of time council employees can take off on full pay before their money is reduced. [...]
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Well, by this account they seem to (almost) beat the Greek public sector. Shameful, wasteful, unacceptable – we must stop this type of government largesse with our money. De-construct the public sector now! (and – yes! – fire a lot of these people)

Socialist Pigs
Capitalism produces. Socialism distributes. The two systems do not coexist comfortably with one another. In fact, they are inimical.

Some of the most celebrated champions of socialism have coined terms like “greedy capitalist” or “capitalist pig.” By implication, a socialist is neither greedy nor a pig. But economic history suggests that socialists are just as porcine as their capitalist counterparts…maybe even more so.

One need only look to the recent goings on in Australia, your editor’s country of birth, for a glimpse into the real world outcomes of this ideological struggle. Kevin Rudd was last week ousted from Prime Ministership after a botched attempt to impose a “super profits” tax on the most productive sector of the Australian economy – the mighty mining sector. [...]

Ms. Gillard is certainly aware of the research released by the Western Australia Chamber of Commerce and Industry that suggests the “super profits” tax, as it stands, would have erased $4.4 billion and 17,000 jobs from the West Australian economy next year – before the tax was even scheduled to be implemented in 2012. The study further predicts the cost to the state’s economy would have risen each year to total $60 billion and 100,000 jobs lost by 2020. [...]

Read Article

Lina’s comment: Atlas shrugs in Australia and the prime minister falls – I hope his successor will soon follow. A lesson for all producers (don’t allow your abuse).

To the Taj in a stately rattler
We boarded the Maharajas’ Express later than scheduled, arriving at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly known as Victoria) about midnight. A red carpet led up steps. Staff, keen to avoid further delay, sped us along it. We ducked through a security arch, had our foreheads daubed with the ritual tilak mark and then, with just time to glimpse the splendid red livery with its crowns and stripes and loping tigers, we were on board. Waiters in smart tunics and tailed turbans offered glasses of melon juice. We glimpsed leather chairs in the bar and a vivid mural of a tiger. Then our young valet, Himanshu, was leading my wife and I along the corridors to our suite, Navratna. [...]
Leather seats and lunch with the maharana – Michael Kerr discovers that a new “cruise train” journey between Mumbai and Delhi comes complete with palace visits, elephant polo and a dash of opium at tea time. [...]
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Would love to see India in this “decadent” way – why not?

The unacknowledged giant – Norman Macrae
Few journalists have had as great an influence—or been proved right so often—as the man who, for 23 years, was the deputy editor of The Economist
[...] He kept the flame of free-market thinking burning during the long night of collectivism. He predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, at a time when the CIA was obsessed by Russia’s growing strength, and foresaw the privatisation of industry, when other intellectuals were celebrating the triumph of the “mixed economy”. [..]
Read Article

New Report – Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights
Based on an 8 March 2010 Seminar on Sharia Law, research, interviews, and One Law for All case files, the report has identified a number of problem areas:

- Sharia law’s civil code is arbitrary and discriminatory against women and children in particular. With the rise in the acceptance of Sharia courts, discrimination is being further institutionalised with some UK law firms additionally offering clients advice on Sharia law and the use of collaborative law.

- Sharia law is practiced in Britain primarily by Sharia Councils and Muslims Arbitration Tribunals. Both operate on religious principles and are harmful to women although Muslim Arbitration Tribunals are wrongly regarded as being of more concern because they operate as tribunals under the Arbitration Act 1996, making their rulings binding in law. [...]
Read Article

Genesis redux – Economist.com
A new form of life has been created in a laboratory, and the era of synthetic biology is dawning.
[...] Like Shelley’s protagonist, Dr Venter and Dr Smith needed some spare parts from dead bodies to make their creature work. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, they needed no extra spark of Promethean lightning to give the creature its living essence. Instead they made that essence, a piece of DNA that carries about 1,000 genes, from off-the-shelf laboratory chemicals. The result is the first creature since the beginning of creatures that has no ancestor. What it is, and how it lives, depends entirely on a design put together by scientists of the J. Craig Venter Institute and held on the institute’s computers in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California. When the first of these artificial creatures showed that it could reproduce on its own, the age of artificial life began. [...]
Read Article

How Federal Crackdown on Bribery Hurts Business And Enriches Insiders – Forbes.com
[...] A former prosecutor, to be sure, does not work on the defense of the same case he had as a government lawyer. But there is nothing to stop prosecutors from ginning up cases that will feed the lawyers who used to have their jobs or from looking forward to a payday in the private sector that will be made possible by their busy successors at Justice.

Many of the 150 pending cases will probably end with so-called deferred prosecution agreements. These involve the government threatening to bring an indictment against a company–which could effectively put the firm out of business–unless it agrees to adhere to certain practices. This hammer gives the feds immense power–for one thing, they don’t have to prove their legal theories of bribery in court. [...]
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Amazing tale of ridiculous regulations, insane litigation and loss of common sense – all hurting business and prosperity.

Tim O’ Reilly, The Oracle of Silicon Valley – Inc.com
[...] O’Reilly never raised outside capital; he funded his projects through profits. “There is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics,” he wrote in an early company manual. “When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.” Just in case anyone was worried the boss had lost his touchy-feely touch, he went on to compare free-market economics with the poetry of Alexander Pope.

Like almost everything O’Reilly Media has done since, the fortuitous decision to enter the book business — which coincided with the rise of the personal computer and, therefore, an explosion in the market for computer books — happened thanks to the founder’s observational acuity and a series of happy accidents.[...]
Read Article

Outfoxing the Counterfeiters- WSJ.com
The new $100 bill is the most sophisticated attempt yet to combat forgery. Since colonial times, the U.S. has engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with criminals and foreign governments eager to pass off brilliant fakes. [...]
Yet paper money flourished, thanks to private banks chartered by state legislatures. These banks began issuing their own paper money in denominations and designs of their choice. Thousands of different kinds of “bank notes” floated in circulation, each with their own unique design. Ben Franklin and the other founders appeared on some, but so, too, did everyone (and everything) from portraits of obscure politicians, Greek and Roman gods, scantily clad women, slaves, Indians and scenes of everyday life. Even stranger things—Santa Claus, sea serpents and rampaging polar bears, to name a few—showed up on these private currencies.

It proved next to impossible to remember what genuine notes looked like, never mind counterfeits, and the opening decades of the 19th century marked what one historian has called the “golden age of counterfeiting.” In those decades, millions of dollars in counterfeit notes flooded the economy. The masterminds behind these counterfeits created them with the hope of making money, not sabotaging the country.
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Fascinating story about banknotes and counterfeiting attempts through history, for profit and/or political reasons.

Gen Y & Loyalty – calacanis.com
My belief is that one third of Gen Y kicks ass. I meet these folks at
TechCrunch50, Open Angel Forum and on This Week in Startups all the
time. I love them. They inspire me and give me hope.

However, the majority of Gen Y seem to operating under the bizarre
rallying cry of: More money! Less responsibility! Shorter hours! No
stress! More freedom! It’s all about me!

It’s so obvious to me why our country is spiraling like a regional jet
piloted by a $9 an hour, 20 year-old pilot with under 1,000 hours of
flight time.

[...]

If you leave after a year, you don’t get a ticker-tape parade and you
don’t get celebrated. It’s not always about you and your karaoke going
away party–after 90 days! (really? 90 days and you host your own
going away party? lame.)
Read Article

Lina’s comment: Interesting post by Jason Calacanis (I like many of his posts because they are very personal and opinionated). I agree loyalty should not be forgotten. When a company treats you well, you must honour that and not slam the door on their face on your way out. It’s ungracious.

An astonishingly timely hotel concept launches today with the opening of the first 7 hotels in the newborn X-Hotels™ chain. This infant in the worldwide hospitality scene is expected to grow fast – there will be 30 X-Hotels open within 6 months and brand-linked cafes and restaurants under the X-Presso™ and X-Delectable™ names will start appearing on every continent by year’s end.

After the record breaking success of 5 Star Raft Hotels (only one problem occurred with a 5 Star Raft Hotel that is still un-tethered and floating in a non-constant elliptical pattern in the south China seas) X-Hotels chairman and CEO Goodnight Sleep will preside over the launch today which will be screened live at Wi-Max cinemas worldwide (3D glasses provided).

A revolutionary and discriminatory pricing system will use data gained from customer’s internet search preferences to fix a price that the Psycho-Pricing™ system shows they will at that moment, be willing to pay. No more crude REV PAR and revenue management systems. Where one guest is “happy” to pay 300 dollars another may pay only 37 all the way on up to the X-Presidential Suites – that’s what they’ll be quoted. Prices might vary for these 400 square meter dens of luxury and convenience, from 200 to 357,000 dollars per night.
In most cases check-in will take place after each guest has been amply welcomed at the hotel bar – experience shows that this “conditions” guests to be a bit more free-spending, thus agreeing to a higher per night room price.

Rooms will all be equipped with rainforest™ shower heads to give a “real meaty shower” avoiding the dribbling faucet experience justified in a lot of feverishly eco-obsessed hotels today.

X-shaped pools improve swim-flow during peak swimming hours.

A new active social policy from X-Hotels means we won’t charge any sales taxes, VAT or hotel taxes – we just don’t charge them, we don’t believe in them. So we take care of squeezing this money back out of the politicians so you don’t have to pay it when you stay at an X-Hotel, why should you?

With an XtraFast™ growth strategy, the chain is expected to quickly become the world’s first “Too Big to Fail” hotel chain and part of the pitch to investors has been this very approach and the top goal to find its own way to benefit from Geithner/Bernanke-Care.

Modeled on the original English pub system of Public bar and Lounge bar – X-Hotels will be designed to operate well in areas of the world where rival warlords would never be seen drinking together….from Check-in counter and lobby areas, to cafes, restaurants and bars there will be “two sides” to everything – designed by renegade UN peacekeeping officials-turned-architects.

Why the name “X-Hotels”? CEO Goodnight Sleep says “it’s obvious really, X is the next letter available in the one letter brand market and we decided on a name that’s easy to remember, write and say – or at least have fun trying. Also we decided to take it before anyone else got there”.

We will also theme some elements of each country’s X-Hotels to provide the ideal haven, For example in the UK guests will be able to enjoy the total lack of surveillance cameras and also be provided with dummy camera toys in case withdrawal symptoms set in. In the USA “no change” zones will be provided to offer peace and quiet and a chance to really relax in the Homeland.

In the larger X-Hotel Resorts there’s a new Gordon Brown room for those who wish to be on a deprived diet or think “pain and suffering, guilt and misery are good for longevity”.  Specialist misery therapists will give you the best “reduction and deterioration” treatment anywhere.

These larger leisure properties will also have an Obama-Care™ Spa Courtyard and Lounge offering a self service set of therapies (had to be self-service because no doctor or qualified professional was willing to appear within the walls of this new offering) . The Deluxe X-massage Self-Massage can only be imagined!

Proof of the future success for X-Hotels is seen in the large number of enthusiastic TripAdvisor reviews prior to the opening of the first hotel.

The first 7 X-Hotels:

X-Hotel Bleeker street, Manhattan
X-Hotel Adobe, Santa Fe, NM
X-Hotel Monterey Bay, CA
X-Hotel Miraflores, Lima, Peru
X-Hotel Leicester Square, London
X-Hotel Ronda , Andalucia, Spain
X-Hotel, Kano, Nigeria

In July the X-Hotel Rangoon will bring luxury back to Burma.

A NASDAQ listing is planned for early April 2011

X-Hotels™ = Xceptional Xhilarating Xciting and Xtraordinary™

- – -

X-HOTELS
For further details contact (On 1st April 2010):
Frank Opignon – press, push and pull
Eggs Welldone – commercial contracts

- – -

The Economics of Being Nice
Where the researchers and commentators go wrong is in the beginning. They think that buying an ‘ethical’ mutual fund…or a ‘green’ car…is a form of being nice. It is nothing of the sort. It is a substitute for being nice. Being nice is not always easy. Many people have a hard time with it. Others judge it not worth the effort…or even counterproductive. Niceness was probably as useless to Attila the Hun as virtue is to a prostitute or integrity is to a politician. [...]
Nice people don’t have to pretend to be nice by buying supposedly ethical products. They are nice; that’s what counts to them. The person who buys ethical products, on the other hand, is a scalawag and a hypocrite. He is not really nice at all, which is what the researchers really discovered.
Read Article

Lina’s & Roger’s comment: Just as we thought…
PS. “Fair trade” is an oxymoron – trade is by definition fair.

Doris Haddock – Obituary, The Economist
The question she wanted people to ask was not how (on earth!), but why. Why, in January 1999, had she set off to walk from Pasadena to Washington, DC? The simple answer was that she had lost patience with the power of big money in American politics. Congressmen and senators did not listen to people like her—people who spent years nursing their husbands when they had Alzheimer’s, or who battled to keep the interstate out of their small towns, in her case Dublin, New Hampshire. They patted little old ladies like her patronisingly on the head, while taking wads of money from special interests for whom they would do favours later. Mrs Haddock was sick of it. She had organised petitions for campaign-finance reform, with tens of thousands of signatures, but got nowhere. So it was sneakers on, and hit the road.
Read Article

Lina’s & Roger’s comment: What a life, what an achievement, what a woman!
Very inspiring story.

Coming To America – Open immigration is essential for a libertarian country
[ Forbes.com ]
So, I say to immigrants: Come on over! Bring your friends. Bring your families. Help us restore an America that was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. If you’re already here, I’m glad you are. Please stay awhile. If you’ve just arrived, welcome. I hope you like it here as much as I do.
Read Article

Scientific Regress: The Case of Scurvy
On his blog, IdleWords.com, Polish-born Maciej Ceglowski tells the fascinating story of how the cure for scurvy was won and lost in a culture confident in scientific progress, and why Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole struggled with a disease that had supposedly been cured in the 18th century.
Read Article
and Original Article

We need to look far into the future

We need to put our house in order – this is our last chance, so please, don’t lend us any more money.
Don’t buy our bonds, don’t give us aid.
We need to feel the pain of bankruptcy to correct our ways.

You all know how profligate we have been.
Don’t let the demonstrators fool you “how can you live on 400 euros pension (a month)?”
Answer: You can’t.
None of the people who are demonstrating will admit that apart from their pension they have other revenue sources: rent from property they own, a little business they do on the side (in a relative’s name, so they can collect their pension too – mostly without paying taxes), income from some agricultural activities (or subsidies) or similar.
Granted, they need to have these additional sources of income to live on.
But know that they oppose the austerity measures with false claims that misrepresent the reality of the Greek economy.

In a country of 11 million people, we support (pay for) 600,000 public servants.
If public organizations are shut down, we don’t fire anyone – they must be re-assigned and we have to pay them for life (even if they do little or no work) because of a law we refuse to change.

Each member of a family (including all teenagers) has a mobile phone – sometimes two per person.
With monthly phone bills of 30, 50, 100 euros or more.
We are indeed a poor country of rich people.

How do we do it?

The answer lies somewhere between bursting credit card bills and consumer loans and the black economy, estimated at about 30% of GDP (a gross underestimate in my opinion).
And the supply of artificial money, like the 3.25 billion euros worth of bounced checks that were in circulation as of 2008 to facilitate “doing business” with no money.

Run a quick calculation – if Greece could bring the black economy into the daylight and tax it, then the Germans and the French would not have to rescue us.
But it’s not going to happen.
Not if you keep helping us.
We are over-reliant on outside help, aid, subsidies. Like Africa, we have been helped to death.
Stop it now.
You are only postponing the inevitable (bust) and putting yourselves at further risk – just think of the 3 billion bubble of these bounced, many-hands-changing and future-dated checks (a Greek original!).

It is time we learn to stand on our own feet, love our country again (with real, patriotic feelings that should make us rise to the occasion to make sacrifices, do ourselves whatever it takes to re-shape and save our country – not indulge in the the “patriotism” that is easily “offended” when people call it as they see it – even when they do so in a distasteful way).

It is all within our power – we just lack the will.
And our politicians lack the courage.

We can do it.
If we were clever enough to lie our way into the Eurozone and now hold you to ransom, we can find ways to be productive again.

But why, you may think in sympathy, should poor Greeks pay for the incompetence and corruption of their governments (and complicit actions of outside institutions)?
Because we elect them.
Because we corrupt them (by benefiting from or turning a blind eye to their corrupt ways).
So ours is the blame and so it should be our cost to bear.

Forget how much you love Homer and Socrates and let us correct or perish.
Visit Greece, enjoy the history and hospitality, get value for your money – don’t give hand-outs.

It is our responsibility to save our country, and we never will if we are bailed out once more.