The future is dismal

I was taught that having clawed one’s way to the top it is bad form to pull up the ladder – but Blair and mostly Gordon Brown whisked and pulled that ladder as hard as they could with all the forces they could muster, putting in place enormous barriers to having it ever restored.

Moves to increase tuition fees are putting further education out of reach for anyone whose parents are not in work or who do not have job security. And to anyone whose parents do not own property against which to borrow. The likelihood of employment for boys whose parents are economically weak these days is dismal. Even getting a driving license is now a huge cost and as for insuring a car for anyone under 25 to drive – hopelessly expensive. British boys are disenfranchised at birth thanks to 13 years of Labour government.

There has to be new ways of creating avenues to success for young people. There must be bursaries; there must be fiscal advantages to encourage the creation of new ones that must not be limited to students who agreed to separate to enable access to them. Come to think of it, the tax, grant and other income advantages of being a single parent household should be widened to include stable, two parent, family households.

Making this happen is a huge challenge to any government, and getting elected on a promise to do that would be hard. But now we have a stable coalition government with a promise to serve for 5 years and do the dynamic reforms we need.
First sort out the benefits system to allow the unemployed to do short term seasonal work without the present loss of income that brings. IDS is onto that already. Then sort out avenues to betterment for all through the colleges and university funding fiasco. But most of all we need jobs, we need to make employing people easier in Britain today and tariffs on imports from places that do not pay social costs that we have to pay for workers here, such as for the NHS and for holiday and sick pay. Level the playing field so wealth creation is encouraged, profit is no longer a dirty word and job creation follows.

Vandalism costs me.

Yesterday I paid out £80 to the company that employs Glen, the very nice and clever forensic computer fixer who found Trojan worms stuck in my computer by someone who wanted to stop me writing anything at all and to stop me putting anything on this blog. Two hours, that is how long it took an expert to find, examine, record and destroy these nasty little objects.
I still don’t know how they got past my firewall. It is not as if I have no firewalls and defence like the people who were robbed by internet bank account fraud Glen and others like him had investigated and arrested. I have lots of anti-viral software regularly updated and run, and yet someone stopped me writing.
Why me? What did I ever write that might have brought such anti-social behaviour? I’m nice to animals, I help old ladies cross the road, and I do unpaid work for the community as a volunteer. I gave up standing outside shopping centres with charity collection boxes a while back - the charity didn’t get much in the box in my hand. I let someone else do those tasks these days. I am no good at standing up for an hour or two.

So having got the “why me” thing done and dusted how many others are being targeted by such malware and how to stop it happening and costing others that £80? Apart from finding out who did it and having them locked up and barred from access to the internet for life as Glen and his team intend. There must be a safe download somewhere that will block Trojan writer stoppers. Maybe an add on to one of the many firewalls I already have ?

Local authority payments system upgrading

Local government authorities are often hampered by the need to make payments by cheque but this is done for security and transparency reasons. By the need for a vote on council and multiple signatures it prevents unauthorised payments of taxpayers money. But it is out of date. LGA's need to use credit cards to buy things under guarantee and to use internet banking and there are ways of doing that if the law would allow. They need to have a credit card that can only be used after a vote approving its use with a maximum amount that can be spent on each use, (preferably one that gives cash-back). Statements must be presented for approval and voted on at each and every
meeting.
And they need to be able to do internet banking and do direct debits with council voted approval and several signatures approving each payment on a special form the clerk can present to auditors. This protects council officials and taxpayers to the satisfaction of both while enabling the cost effective use of modern financial structures.

Bar codes

I was sent this in an email and found it interesting enough to post on here.

Bar codes

The whole world is afraid of China-made "black hearted goods".

Can you differentiate which one is made in Taiwan or China?

If the first 3 digits of the barcode are 690, 691 Or 692,
the product is MADE IN CHINA.

471 is Made in Taiwan.

This is our right to know, but the government And related departments never educate the Public, therefore we have to RESCUE Ourselves.

Nowadays, Chinese businessmen know that
Consumers do not prefer products "MADE IN CHINA",
so they don't show from which Country it is made.

However, you may now refer to the barcode
- Remember if the first 3 digits are:

690-692 ... Then it is MADE IN CHINA
00 - 09 ... USA & CANADA
30 - 37 ... FRANCE
40 - 44 ... GERMANY
47 .. Taiwan
49 ... JAPAN
50 .... UK


BUY UK MADE by watching for "50" at the beginning of the number.

We need every boost we can get!

Men’s sheds.

In one generation the world has seen a technological revolution. The average kitchen, where our mothers and grandmothers would have aspired to have a fridge and an electric washing machine, now has scores of computers built into the microwave, the dishwasher, the washing machine, the fridge, the cooker and endless gadgets we all take for granted. We expect supermarket or shopping mall doors it to open for us automatically. The people on the checkout no longer have to figure out the change or stock levels, the computerised system automatically does all that for them. Even the family car now has an onboard computer silently waiting to tell the garage mechanic what happened to it and what it needs. Car factories are now run by robots, which build the cars and deliver them at the Out Door all perfectly shiny and quality tested. Warehouses serving shops now have robots stacking shelves and sorting deliveries ready for a driver to take to the customer or to retail outlets.
All of this was achieved by people working hard in Silicon Valley USA and in the M4 corridor in the UK, and like the builders who put up St Paul’s Cathedral they are mostly now out of work and kicking their heels or playing games on home PCs. Their enterprise and ingenuity made our lives better and safer but they put many people out of work and have now found themselves out of work.

The last decade has shown growth only in government; obviously unsustainable when so many of those who paid for them in taxes are now out of work or in part time or low paid jobs. The service industry is the only one left, trucking, transporting goods made by robots, selling buying and marketing goods. These are mostly jobs for presentable young women, leaving young men and middle aged people scrabbling around looking for any bit of income they can by any means, all now unable to afford to reskill and retrain for a new career. I.T. specialists can be plumbers but that costs £8000 per annum for each certificate upgrade unless you can claim to have done them cheaper abroad. They need to get together and make things happen together instead of sitting around worrying, lost, broke, bored and lonely.

In Australia they have a problem that had a completely different cause but the same outcome and they have come up with the idea of Men’s Sheds. Women tend to organise themselves more readily than men. Men of all ages seem to need a push to do it. Men’s Sheds are what you would expect of a men’s shed – wooden floors, benches, tools, dust, mugs of tea and only what they have made to sit on. Each has an attendance rate of around 50 men a day dropping in to learn of job news, to exchange ideas and to make things. There are woodworking lessons and other trades to be tried and learned in the shed. Marketable qualifications to be aimed for and relationships to be established.

Here we have Working Men’s Clubs often with little more than a bar and a pool table open on set evenings during the week.
These need to evolve!

Electoral reform was rejected yesterday.

The only party that presented a policy of proportional representation instead of first past the post was the Liberal Democrats and they were hammered at the polls on May 6th. It is very odd the day after the electorate gave their garbled answer that the issue that will allow us to have a stable government is the one that lost its party so much. It is clear this country wants the policies of the Liberal Democrats less than they want those of the others and yet the merchandise Mr Brown, present leader of the Labour Party, is offering in exchange for a coalition with the Liberal Democrats is the already shunned Proportional Representation. Being worst has made Nick Clegg into the “kingmaker”. And the most favoured bargaining chip is one of the least favoured policies, PR.

That is not democracy as we knew it and desire to keep it. And if we do adopt PR we will have to stomach endless least favoured options of the same ilk.

We need to hold another election and to get it done right this time; no more running out of ballot papers, no more locking people who want to vote out of the polling station for lack of a proper management in place. The senior person in the polling station should have known about the need for speed and for extra staff and have been able to get those staff from less busy stations, as happened in most of the country. There should be no more unequal constituency numbers – they should all be the same size constructed on the basis of the last completed electoral roll, not the last census as it is now.

It could be said that the little hopeless parties promoting a single issue be excluded from this one next snap election to make it fairer, faster and more decisive as the nation requires but only for the one emergency election.

Frequent deaths of socialism and its causes

Socialism, be it Lib Dem or Labour, will never live up to its aspirations because it attracts people who would take personal advantage of it and allows the many, through dearth of mental strength and confidence, to permit the few to take over. Even Stalin might have started out trying to bring the poor into power, but convinced of his own poverty of birth took all power to himself to the exclusion of all others while speaking the mantra of inclusively.
And after thirteen years of Labour in Britain we see inclusivity being preached and exclusivity being practiced in all walks of life. They even gerrymandered the election constituency boundaries to ensure Labour alone would be included in power in spite of having been awarded fewer votes than another party at the ballot box.
Socialism excludes imaginative wealth creators while pandering to them when in need of second hand glory or profits. It excludes people and ideas of difference and initiative while calling all their little bits of social engineering and meddling initiatives.
Socialism is a beautiful dream described by someone who does not know about humanity by not being in among it and part of it. It is written by observers not by partakers, like the theatre critic watching from the stalls the vagaries of courses and lives being lived out beyond his reach.
On the ground it does not work. It actually makes the poor even more poor than they would have been if socialism had never been invented. It prevents the children of the poor from dragging themselves and their own from the mire of underachievement. It conspires to remove and block any avenues to self-betterment that appeal to their core supporters.
Basically it does not work because it eschews profit making and confiscates any proceeds of work and effort thus cutting off its own supply of capital with which to appease the poor. And it can never be seen to have worked because that would allow for the applauding of success, another dirty word in the dictionary of socialism.
So we see socialism peddled at election time in underhand and devious ways as if it would work if only we all agreed to be poor.
We the people are human and we do not assent to be poor, rather we aspire to something better and strive to achieve it from the cradle to the grave.