Labour-saving devices

Throughout history, mankind has invested in labour-saving devices. From the first flint axes extending the power of the human arm to cut and smash, the wheel to carry heavy items, there's been a continual number of inventions which either make life easier for people or make them more productive (or more destructive in the case of weapons). In many parts of the world, farming productivity is still dependent on the horse, donkey or ox to drag a plough or cart.

Since electricity was discovered in a useable form, we've had domestic appliances which alleviate the drudgery of chores (washing machines, dishwashers, blenders, food mixers etc). The internal combustion engine has provided motive force for vehicles making journeys almost effortless, and with the alternator provides electricity to power in car entertainment so that a journey can be almost as comfortable and pleasant as sitting at home!

Productivity in farming means there's sufficient food for everyone. The problem of food shortages in the world is a problem of distribution, with localised famines often being turned into disasters by a combination of lack of transport, governmental incompetence, and governenmental corruption.

In relatively recent history, there has been a proliferation of exercise machinery, some simple, some complex devices intended to make it easy for people to put their otherwise unused muscles to work, to make them fitter, stronger and more healthy by reducing excess fat. These machines are usually costly, and yet many people who buy them only use them for a short period of time before abandoning them in their spare rooms or garages; some equipment is bought and never used, or even is never unpacked.

There are also companies which operate places called gymnasiums, gyms for short, where people can pay go to use premium quality exercise machines and get coaching on how to use them more effectively. Many people who use these gyms drive there in their labour-saving devices called cars, to get the exercise they would have achieved had they walked, run or bicycled there.

And yet people are getting fat, to the point where in the western world one third of the population are obese, ie. so far they are unhealthy and at risk of shortening their lives significantly.

Am I the only one to see the irony in this?

Tesco Direct - A lesson in how to make shopping harder

Tesco Direct is a web and catalogue sales operation run by the hugely successful Tesco superstore chain in the UK. I imagine their theory is that they want to expand their business but can't carry every product line in the shop, so by having an online shop as well as catalogues and an orders/collection desk in store they can steal market share from online and offline shops: you can order online or in-store and have items delivered to your home or collect them.

Unfortunately it seems that TD are not very joined up with the main retail operation. I've never ordered anything from TD before (I've always found them to be more expensive than other online shops, and their postage prices aren't favourable either) either online or in-store.

Just recently I wanted a cheap spare phone capable of 3G, and noticed that the Tesco Direct website had the Nokia 2730 on special offer, a smidgen under £40, cheaper by £20 than most places (even ebay). I didn't want to incur delivery charges for a relatively low-valued item, so I decided to check if the local shop had any on the shelf at that price - usually TD lower their prices first then the retail outlet follows.

I went into the shop and found one on the shelf for £60 so went to the TD desk and checked their laminated paper catalogue, where it was still listed for £60. I wrote down the SKU and the lady at the desk checked the computer and it showed up at £40.

Said I wanted it, so the lady went to the store room and found one, scanned the barcode and the till showed£60. She asked me if I wanted it for £60, or preferre to wait whilst they order it in from TD to get it at the lower price. This Tesco is quite local to my workplace, so going there was fairly convenient, not being in a rush I decided to wait. I ordered and payed, getting an order confirmation receipt.

I commented to the lady at the desk that this was a crazy situation, that the catalogue had the wrong price which could deter some customers, and she couldn't sell me the item in her hand so I'd have to wait for them to order it in. She asked why don't I talk to someone about it?! I responded that since I'm not a shareholder it wasn't my problem how they run their business, if they wanted to lose customers that was their problem. She gave me a funny look like it was my fault.

Death penalty for spammers?

If someone lives for 90 years, that's about 47 million minutes.

If a spammer sends out about 90 million emails and each one wastes half a minute of someone's life, then essentially they waste an entire lifetime due to their activities.

Now, you may say that 90 million emails is unrealistic, but a techradar report says that a spammer needs to send over 12 million to get a single response, so to get eight responses they incur one wasted lifetime... it would seem likely that they would want to a lot more responses than that.

On top of that there are people and organisations whose entire lives are spent combatting spam, people such as Postini, AMBX and MessageLabs, doing their best to block spam in a King-Canute-like demonstration that it's spam is a nearly overwhelming tide of junk-mail traffic.

Surely this madness has to end? I can only think it will when we have the death penalty for professional spammers as a proper deterrent!

Kindness

I was recently visiting my daughter in Arizona, and damaged my knee the day before I was flying back to England. An emergency trip to hospital left me needing to wear a leg brace 24x7, use crutches, and take anti-inflammatory painkillers.

The first angel to help was my daughter's grandmother, but the way she rearranged her entire day to help me collect my medicine, ensure I was fed, and get me back to my hotel was such a blessing, without her the situation would have been so much worse. As it was, I was able to spend the afternoon sorting things out for my journey home and liaise with the travel insurance people.

For various reasons neither I nor my unsurance agent were unable to get Delta to upgrade my seat (flight overbooked, customer phone service overloaded), so I had to hope that turning up at the airport in a disabled state would trigger the staff into sorting things out as I was clearly unable to bend my leg at all. Sine I was flying cattle class. the prospect of 13 hours on a plane in that state made me quite worried.


On the first partof the journey, Phoenix to Minneapolis, I was given a seat in a row of three behind a partition which meant a little bit of extra leg room; even so it was clearly a struggle for me. As I was trying to sit down, a lady behind me, whose seat was of in a row of four and thus had an offset seat with extra leg room offered to swap seats. I was very grateful as I was able to sit down properly! It might not have been a big thing for her but made all the difference to me! I don't know her name, I thanked her on several occasions to the point where she seemed a little embarassed!

The next stage of the journey was from Minneapolis to London, and whilst waiting to board I struck up conversation with true gentleman called Ivan. Just having a sympathetic person was a real boost. On hearing that Delta were unresponsive to my plight he went up to the gate clerk and remonstrated them in some way; I don't know what he said but they changed my seat to one behind a partition. I didn't know before boarding what I would face, but Ivan was a true saint and said that if the seat allocated was unsuitable then I was to come to business class and he would swap seats with me. Well, I was stunned; I'd never flown business, not even premium economy, but I had a good idea of how much it cost, and recognised a true self-sacrificing offer.

As it happened I had a reasonable seat, and using extra pillows and blankets I was only fairly uncomfortable; sufficiently so that I would have felt dishonest swapping with Ivan.

There were other people who helped, but these three made a huge difference to me, two total strangers, and made me realise that the world is still full of kindness, it's just not always visible.

The Tyranny Of Software Maintenance

When we bought a new fridge/freezer, I bought a named brand with a good reputation in the expectation that it would be reliable and give years of reliable service. I evaluated the risk of breakdown and the costs of repair against the merits of an extended warranty. I opted at a reasonable price to extend the warranty to three years.

I recently bought a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium along with the upgrade voucher to Windows 7 Home Premium. Actually, according to the product, I bought a DVD with some basic instructions along with a license to install and run the software, but that's a whole can of worms we'll ignore.

From a consumer viewpoint, I expect the product to be supported with security and bug fixes for quite a while, and that it should be fairly reliable and any problems should be unusual. I would be disappointed if there were obvious bugs or I had major problems installing it in the first place. As a consumer, I want it as cheaply as possible, reliable as possible, and above all to live up to the expectations set in the glossy adverts! As a consumer I have a love/hate relationship with product support and maintenance: I feel I shouldn't need it, don't want to have to pay for it, but know I will need and use it (even if it's just automated patches), and resent the interruption and time taken to carry it out; but I would feel more aggrieved if there were no post-sales support/maintenance.

From a product developer viewpoint, it's impossible to make a perfect software product, especially when that has to run on a huge variety of computer hardware, so it's impossible to test ever variation and yet stick to the high-pressure timetable when the product has to be launched - whose dates may be set six months in advance.

From a corporate viewpoint, I'd want the product to be developed within budget with few surprises, to ship on time, and to need as little post-sales support as possible other than to ensure customers come to rely on the product and recommend it to their friends to ensure they will be future customers - any money spent after sales is, after all, mostly overhead and not investment (since giving away improvements to the existing product raises the bar for the next).

Unfortunately, these combinations of expectations mean big problems - complex products need real-world testing to perfect, customers are reluctantly willing to pay for fixes and improvements, corporate accountants see the overheads rising for testing and maintenance, and developers get fed up fixing bugs when they could be working on new technology.

In summary: software maintenance is a headache for everyone. And it will get worse as things get more complex and more devices become software driven - not just your computer, but your games console, TV, media player, in-car navigation and entertainment... I predict that one day we'll be spending a quarter of our lives simply ensuring everything we own has appropriate security patches installed and is reasonably up to date with the latest software.

BTW, don't get me wrong, just because I used the example of Microsoft Windows doesn't mean to say that Linux doesn't have many of these problems too.

why do governments love snooping?

Whilst technology has given us the internet and all the benefits and problems it comes with, the ability to capture and process vast quantities of data means that governments can also snoop on their citizens with unprecedented detail.

A long time ago my father visited Soviet Russia, staying at an official tourist hotel. At that time the KGB controlled the hotels as the state needed to ensure tourists did only what was allowed, and particularly to control the black market and the flow of highly desired western currency!

One of the parties in my father's group noticed that there were floors in the hotel that the lift wouldn't access without a key, and being an engineer and tinkerer managed to fiddle with the lock and send the lift to the "hidden" floor. When the door opened, he observed a whole row of people sitting at benches with headphones, and suddenly a security guard ushered him back into the lift where he was escorted back to the proper places.

Such monitoring was labour intensive, and had to be targeted simply due to lack of resources. Technology allows snooping on global scale without the vast army of people to do the monitoring.

The same technology that allows you to carry music on a tiny memory card also allows speech-quality recording of everything you hear and say every waking moment - a 64GB card will last over one hundred days, more if it doesn't record at night. Basically it'd be possible to plant a bug on someone that would record a whole year's worth of sound, provided you can make a battery that would last that long, a problem I'm sure that western governments have already solved.

Since pretty much all western telephone systems are digital, then logging all phone calls made with origin and recipient is trivial. Relatively few people use email encryption by default. GSM Mobile phone voice encryption has been shown to be weak, deliberately so, and even determined amateurs can snoop on calls.


So, snooping has never been easier, but why are governments so set on using it?

I'll post a few theories, but here's one the cynic in me came up with after the recent UK government's debacle on expenses. People tend to think other people are much like them, it's part of being human to relate to others and see ourselves in them. The expenses scandal showed that many Member of Parliament took advantage of the system to satisfy their own greed, there was no proper oversight and they behaved dishonourably. So, if these people assume others are like them, then they will assume every citizen is at least somewhat dishonest and will also try and cheat the system and thus need to be watched.

Taxation and maths illiteracy

I read, again, about the arguments over taxation and how the rich should pay more and how society is ever more polarised between rich and poor. Many people have read the appended joke about the ten guys who go for a beer, which I have appended without attribution (not through lack of trying; the joke is so ubiquitous I couldn't find any).

Throughout all the rants and faves over tax rates, tax thresholds and tax credits etc, one thing seems obvious to me: a significant number of the people arguing about it are illiterate at maths!

One of the ideas that gets floated repeatedly and dismissed as being unworkable is "flat tax". Can it be that people who oppose it think that it's a fixed absolute amount of tax, rather than a rate?

Taxation is usually expressed as a percentage, which means that if you earn more, you pay more! There's no need to have a higher percentage for higher incomes, it's already taken care of.

Let me really spell it out. For example, if you earn 100,000, and pay a rate of 40%, you pay 40,000 in tax. If you earn 200,000 then you pay 80,000.

Am I missing something here? Have governments simply made tax so complex that most people cannot cope and have switched off their brains? Has tax simply become a political game? Is it too much to hope for a clear, simple and understandable tax system that the average person can deal with and see is fair?

To try and understand, I found someone whom I thought might represent the average person in the street and asked them to explain percentages and tax. She struggled to explain percentages and had only the very vaguest idea of how taxation was calculated, whether income tax or sales tax (known as "value added tax" in the UK ).

Ok, the above example is oversimplified a little, there's usually an income threshold below which no tax is paid, but it doesn't defeat my argument.

P.

--- the old joke ---

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

* The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
* The fifth would pay $1.
* The sixth would pay $3.
* The seventh would pay $7.
* The eighth would pay $12.
* The ninth would pay $18.
* The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.”Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

* The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
* The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
* The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
* The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
* The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
* The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,”declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got TEN times more than I!”

“That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back When I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!” The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine Sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the Bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between All of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.