Matthew S

Singularis Porcus

2011-10-28T19:42:06Z

I have a desire to make a Latin version of Peppa Pig, called Pepperus Pigus (possibly Pepperus Porcus, but I don't think this sounds as good).

We could then have a Peppa pig/Life of Brian crossover:

People called the Pig they go the house?

Top tax rate continued

2011-09-08T17:52:00Z

This is a very funny article by the FT on the call to lower the top tax rate.

It starts:

We’re joined now by Sir Reg Croesus, former chairman of Wongabank. Sir Reg, why do you feel that you should pay less tax?

>Because it’s my patriotic duty.

I beg your pardon?

>It’s my duty and as such I feel it’s time to speak out. There are too many people trying to stop me >expressing my love of my country.

A love you’d express by paying less tax?

You might need to register

50% tax rate

2011-09-07T19:27:02Z

Some economists have written to the FT saying that the 50% tax rate harms the economy.

This has got me thinking - do you support the 50% tax rate:

a) In general
b) If it raised no net tax due to leakage, would you still support it?
c) If it did raise tax short term but by lowering growth in the long term meant that it did not reduce debt as a % of GDP

on b) and c) if you still support it, what is the reasoning?

I would personally like to see a crackdown on avoidance, on the basis that a 50% rate it useless if we do not enforce it on the rich. All we do is capture a small number of people who are rich enough to be caught (due to other changes anyone on £100k +) but not rich enough to avoid it.

Riots

2011-08-27T14:28:30Z

I assume in the wake of the UK riots someone somewhere has done a joke about apple launching a blackberry messenger competitor, to be called the iPredictariot.

However, I cannot find anyone having done so.

Anyone want a free sat nav?

2011-07-21T21:31:37Z

Does anyone want a fairly elderly Tomtom satnav?

It has UK and Europe maps

It does occasionally lose track of were you are, and the maps are a bit old, but it basically works ok.

It is anyone's for the cost of getting it to them. Pickup preferred.

Business/economic illiteracy

2011-05-16T18:30:55Z

Channel 4 news just really annoyed me with a piece on Boots - paying little tax on a large operating profit.

But they paid lots of interest, and deducted this for tax. Now in this case the interest is a cost of the acquisition, which I am less sympathetic with. But most interest is a legitimate business expense - you needed money to make something, you borrowed it, the cost reduces your profits (but notably increases someone else's - the lenders). This it seems to me is a legitimate tax deductible expense, in the same way that rent is a deductible expense.

The whole article seemed to me to show a lamentable lack of business knowledge. It makes me ashamed to call myself left wing to see such ignorant comment calling itself reporting.

I find such obvious bias undermines everything it has to say.

And then they followed it up with a bit on Puma, who, very commendably, started to publish an environmental impact assessment of the whole supply chain. C4's response - isn't your whole business damaging the environment by encouraging consumerism?

I find it hard to counter the right's argument of bias in the broadcast media with this to defend. Leave such blatant bias for Fox news - C4 news should be above this!

My son the comedian...

2011-03-18T20:00:26Z

Daniel is developing a line is surreal jokes:

When is a man upside down and not upside down? When his house is upside down

When is a mirror not a mirror? When it is a sideways house

When does a foot have 5 toes and 2 toes? When 3 fall off in the bath.

I think he has the structure and the idea it has to be unexpected/wacky, but not the core of the concept...

People I know being famous and all

2010-12-09T20:21:43Z

smhwpf was quoted in this week's Economist on China's military spending!

Coo!

Gordon's Alive!

2010-11-08T20:35:09Z

You can now get Brian Blessed on your Tom Tom...

"You've reached your destination. Congratulations. Onwards and upwards! To Everest next, and the North Pole..."

A story that cheered me

2010-09-30T21:50:18Z

This story really cheered me up - a WWE wrestler who listens to Tori Amos before fights - specifically Winter.

And he goes to meet her and she gives him a hug when he is tongue tied!

vectorious @ 2010-09-30T22:47:00

2010-09-30T21:47:02Z

Does anyone want to comae and see <a href="http://www.thebloomsbury.com/event/run/1496>Milton Jones</a> at the the Bloomsbury Theatre on the 1st April? I am thinking of booking tickets.

vectorious @ 2010-03-01T18:36:00

2010-03-01T18:36:09Z

Can I recommend this article from, of all places, the Evening Standard.

Is is a surprising powerful piece on poverty in London - I actually find that the start on the article on pauper's funerals is a bit of a diversion from the main point of the article, so feel free to skip to below the first picture.

I found that one of the most striking points was the person who could not afford the £19 for his UCAS form - it would be weeks of saving for him. Also the way the article has of showing he lives in a different world - he simply does not see all the expensive shops - they are not in his world.

cognitive biases

2009-12-28T20:33:51Z

An article in the independent (Here) on cognitive biases. In the lyrics to pop songs.

It being the independent the first comment is about the Iraq war.

vectorious @ 2009-12-19T08:38:00

2009-12-19T08:38:01Z

My mate’s allergic to rice…

He’s basmatic.

Shappi Khorsandi

Turn of phrase

2009-11-24T20:39:50Z

A turn of phrase from this article on Roald Dahl, that I liked:

"but within a few lines little James' parents had been dispatched (day out in London, escaped rhinoceros)"

BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG (23 mins ago)

2009-11-02T22:24:55Z

The latest celebrity to take up twitter...

Word meme

2009-07-21T20:51:44Z

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

atreic gave me

Mathematics

Mathematics is something I was always comfortable with – when I was small I used to ask for sums to do rather than a story at bed time, and when I was travelling in the car I would suddenly call out a number and it transpired I had added up the digits of a phone number on a sign or something similar. It just seemed to make sense to me and each time I found a new bit it would fit in a gap I had previously found. This was probably at its peak at A-level – or first year University where I really felt on top of what I was doing while simultaneously charging through new territory at a good pace also.

Even now I find I still have that comfort with maths – it may not be what it was but I find I can see how things would react when you change something. The inter-dependencies, the dance of the numbers, how X will mean Y without ever having to do the sum. It annoys me sometimes when I am forced to do a long laborious task just to show what I could see in a second to a sceptical person.

This last maybe my greatest weakness in a work context – impatience, not considering the audience, pitching things wrong. It probably means I could not be a teacher, although I have done maths tuition when younger (between 16 and 18) – one on one I can gauge reaction, re-pitch the idea, find the way in. Writing, or to a group it is harder. When I give training at work it is in smaller groups of equals and the interaction is probably better, although not perfect.

Fatherhood

This is something I am learning all the time – as Liz and the children are teaching me. Hard work, but nothing beats the beam of a one year old who is pleased to see you. Mini things! Mini things niiice.

What am I good at? Well I am playing a lot of the traditional father’s role – the more physical play (picking them up, twirling them around, playing football by swinging them at the ball…), the silliness – I do a lot of entertaining by silly activities – at dinner going past the door way with silly walks, pretending to be a deflating balloon wooshing round the room, ending up nibbling noses, giving rides on shoulders (called Ba ba da ba as I tend to do the William Tell overture while doing it), giving hugs and reading to them – Daniel will tend to revert to asking for those if other things don’t work as we rarely if ever deny them to him.

I need to work at consistency, sticking by what I say, and making decisions about what they can do when they ask. I also need to work on helping Liz more when both babies are demanding her. I have problems just looking after them as they play – I need to be doing something to occupy my mind so I get bored quickly, and hence tired walking them round the house or waiting for them to finish dinner.

It is very nice when they want you, sometimes only mummy will do: "Mummy come help me get rid of Daddy" (Daniel when I was checking on him at bedtime)

Money

I am slightly worried this is one of my words in some ways. I don’t think this is something I want to make people think of when they think of me.

I earn more than I ever thought I would and a younger age than I ever thought I would. It is nice not to have to worry so much about it. I am slightly bemused about what I earn as I cannot believe my skill set is that rare - I feel most of my friends list could be taught to do my job in about a year, or at least the mathematical ones. I don't earn anything like what the bankers earn, and what they do does not seem that special, beyond ridiculous hours so there is more amazement that there is still more room above!

I am still amazed at various bits of economics that don’t seem to make sense to me –

e.g. a recent BBC article put the top 1% of wage earners at around £100k – so who is buying the £600k houses then? £100k won’t pay for them and it seems to me that there are too many of said houses compared to the earners.

Who was wiling to pay £300/hr for my time (my charge out rate) at my former job, when I was paid less than I am now? How can that make sense? What is happening to the money? (I only got a fraction of that!)

Readthroughs

I enjoyed the ones of these we did when we did single plays that I knew, and therefore could perform. I very much enjoyed Earnest, Arcadia and a few others. However, I almost never take part in these anymore. I am not a good enough actor to do a major role, and would feel uncomfortable doing one, or even asking for one when there are better people to do them. Also, I have not much interest in just doing smaller roles (although some parts in my favourite plays are worth doing). So I do nothing instead. I might be better at roles in plays I know well.

So I am now child wrangler – which can be difficult when their mother is lying dead on stage…

Career

I started at the national audit office, trained as an accountant, but after a while I found it just too slow and frustrating (I felt like I was working at about 50% capacity, but this still marked me down as a high flyer). I left to join Grant Thornton where I was public sector advisory and gradually moved into financial modelling, really by just doing it when I could. When the modelling team manager left I was asked to step into the team as manager. I then left to go to Balfour Beatty Capital where I bid for public sector work, as head of a modelling team I was employed to set up. I nearly left soon after joining, as I felt that my role was an unnecessary cost without much benefit, but I carved a niche and set up the team, and have saved some serious money in some projects - £4m in one case where I was better at using our model than our advisers. Given we had just given £5m in savings to the public sector without any clear idea of where they were going to come from, this was very welcome.

My career has gone better than it had any right too (see money above), especially considering that I never really pushed. I never asked for a promotion, never asked for a new role, never asked for a payrise. I just did what I did the way I do it and got where I got to. My entire career is an accident.

There is an assumption in large parts of UK workplaces that you have to be ambitious – they look for management qualities in everyone, but not everyone can manage. They assume that only ambition can make people work hard and succeed. Someone once asked me about teachers who made me motivated to get good marks at school. Their assumption was that I must have been pushed to be ambitious, to work hard. (I cannot remember exactly how the conversation went, but this was the gist. It clearly excluded the possibility of parents, but I cannot remember how). I tried (and I think failed as I introduced Aristotle and the Tao at various points) to explain – that no-one had motivated me to try hard - it never occurred to me not to. Someone once attributed this to guilt at not doing something (at the time attributed to the fact that my mum was Catholic) but it was not that. It was never guilt at not doing something, it was just that this is what I did.

This is not expressed very well, but the book the Tao is Silent, by Raymond Smullyan seems to sum up how I find things a lot of the time.

The Large Hadron Rap

2009-07-13T19:54:56Z

I recently came across the large hadron rap.

Apparently it became a run away hit for the LHC - 5m views and running.

I don't have much to add to that...

A little glib, but quite quite a lot of truth

2009-07-05T19:22:05Z

I found the following quote in an article online:

Theologically speaking, the two parties have divided the Seven Deadly Sins as follows: Republicans oppose lust, sloth and envy; Democrats scorn gluttony, greed, wrath and pride.

A little trite, perhaps, but some insight as well, I think.

vectorious @ 2009-06-13T18:54:00

2009-06-13T17:55:34Z

I very much liked this:

There was an old lady...

Yesterday will return at 6am

2009-05-01T19:49:25Z

A message after close on the new channel "Yesterday".

I find this pleasingly Zen

vectorious @ 2009-04-26T16:07:00

2009-04-26T15:22:23Z

I have just watched "Did Darwin Kill God?" which was a programme arguing that God and Evolution are not in conflict, argued by a evolution scientist who also believes in God.

It was very interesting, and highlighted how the Creationist position is a recent one with little or no basis in the traditions of Christianity.

He had me agreeing for a lot of the programme before a random section at the end attacking what he called "Ultra Darwinists" with a ridiculous straw man argument concerning memes that he gave no opportunity for any of the so called "Ultra darwinists" to respond to, and that I felt could be shot down in seconds.

He then went on a silly diversion about science is provisional and how can anything provisional disprove God without actually making an argument that held water.

After an interesting programme I was very disappointed by this ending. Particularly as there are better arguments that the programme used earlier which showed the lack of conflict and how the God of the Gaps argument that evolution was shooting down was not what Christianity was about.

The Bottom Billion

2009-04-24T17:26:44Z

Can I recommend The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier - A researched backed look at the world's poorest and what we can do about them.

The central premiss is that the "middle 4 billion" in developing countries are being lumped together with the very poorest and this is obscuring the issue - the very poorest are the problem as the development of the rest of the world will help the others, but the bottom billion are no developing at all.

It looks at traps, methods of helping, and reviews how aid works and does not work, and how we need to reverse some assumptions to get it it be fully effective. It also explores military intervention, trade rules and so on.

It challenged a lot of my ideas and made me think differently about how to help the very poorest.

vectorious @ 2009-04-24T18:09:00

2009-04-24T17:20:39Z

I was on a training course and there were various exercises to disrupt peoples thought processes - one was quite a fun one where you had to speak on a subject and another person had to disagree with a particular point - "No they are not X" and they speaker then has to agree with that and keep going. My conversation went like this:

Partner: Tell me about flowers
Me: Well they are a member of the vegetable kingdom...
P: No they are not
M: Well actually they are mineral and carved out of stone...
P: no they are not mineral
M: you are quite right they are animals that scurry into...
P: I don't think they scurry
M: Ok, they saunter, but they freeze when you look at them so you see them as still
P I don't think they are still
M: Well actually they are moving so fast they appear to be in just one place
P: No they don't
M: Quite right you see them in multiple places - when you see a bed of flowers there is in fact only one flower you see multiple times over
P: I don't think I do
M: Well actually you just see a red blob as they...
P: I don't think it is red
M: Of course it is actually blue but it appears red due to the doppler effect as they are moving so fast
P: It's not the doppler effect
M: No it actually a breakdown in the laws of the universe at a quantum mechanical level
P: I don't think it is the universe
M: No it is just in Brighton...

At which point the exercise was over, but I found it quite interesting and fun

P&P

2009-04-23T21:45:56Z

Pride and Prejudice, Comic book style

Some very good headlines: I particularly like the "Lizzy on Love, Loss and Living" - makes it sound like a Good housekeeping magazine.

But "How to cure your boy crazy sisters", and "Bingleys bring Bling to Britain" are good follow ups...