My inner ACoA thinks lockdown will be forever. Even though my rational self knows it won't be. I'm worried that by the time it does end, I won't care anymore and there won't be anything worth going back to. But mostly, I'm tired of the denial. I'm tired of telling myself that I have to treat lockdown as if it is normal, just a different normal.
Yeah. Well. Frak that.
This ain't a different normal.
Pretending otherwise would be outright denial.
I'm tired of trying to be nice about this nonsense and the traitors who push it.
Find some other damn way of protecting people over 70 or with chronic bad health, from a nasty virus, should their immune system over-react to it. If someone called a Chief Medical Officer can't do better than this, they should resign. Maybe replace them with a monkey throwing darts at a list of policies.
Ah, the heck with all that. It's not my problem.
You know what? I do not care about reasons. I care that I can't do the things that I enjoy doing. I need Foyles and the Curzon and Fopp and the National and the Tate(s) and London AA meetings and the parks and the restaurants and cafes and Jermyn Street and walking across the Thames and the South Bank and and and. I was hoping to add travelling around the UK this year. Go ahead, call me petty.
I had all the answers in a post on the 28th December. At least in terms of actions. What I didn't have was the answer in terms of attitude. Which is why I've been circling.
So here is my new attitude...
**** everyone who legislates lockdown. **** everyone who enables lockdown. **** everyone who enforces it.
MP's, Ministers, Police, so-called scientists, Chief Health Officers, Chief Scientists, compliant business owners, journalists, doctors, so-called-experts, pro-lockdown activists, the media agencies producing Project Fear propaganda, and everybody who would rather be safe than free.
**** everyone using this to push their dumb ideologies, pitch for funding, save money by closing offices, force social change, and otherwise make hay from a crisis.
**** all of them. When they die they are going to a new circle of hell, dug just for them.
So this is what being authentic and honest about my feelings is like.
Feels good.
Monday 25 January 2021
Thursday 21 January 2021
Class Ain't About How Much You Get Paid, It's About Being An Employee At All
Thinking about class is skewed by the fact it is mostly conducted by academics (salaried State employees) and journalists (salaried private sector employees). They want to think of themselves as special people, and so define the Good Class in such a way as to include them. Or at least, they think the Good Class should be defined so as to include them.
But it never is, and never will.
The Upper Class were literally the people towards the top of the feudal hierarchy. Kings, Lords, Bishops, Dukes, Princes, Viscounts, Earls, and Barons. There aren't many of those people left now. They people get their money from granting privileges, usually to merchants who kick back some of the profits to the aristos. Mostly the Upper Class has been replaced by the State, but that doesn't make Ministers and senior civil servants aristocrats: it makes them people who need to be carefully watched, lest they decide to shut down businesses all over the country, and then tax us to pay for it. It would be better if those people - the elected riff-raff - did think of themselves as aristos, because then they would have to accept noblesse oblige.
The middle class emerged in the 1700's (or pick some other date you like). My reference example is a ship's Captain who might make two or three successful voyages to the Spice Islands (or some other such destination) and, on the proceeds of his share of the profits, could set himself up with a nice house in Greenwich and never go to sea again. The middle classes had enough money that they did not need to work again, and made that money through commercial ventures rather than the exercise of privilege. The Middle Class do not need privileges to be granted by aristocrats, or today, the State. They make their money in the open market. Today's middle class are all those CEO's with seven-figure payoffs and share options, hedge-fundies, millionaire entrepreneurs, and anyone else who could afford to stop working now and live off what they have already made (don't count looking after your stash as `working', though it is).
The Working Class work, usually for someone else, and if they don't, they run out of money and into poverty or the Unemployment Exchange (whatever they call it now). A lot of workers make decent money, especially emergency plumbers and IT consultants, while quite a few have enough money in the bank to tell their current employer to take a hike (aka "f**k you" money). If you pay income tax on Schedule D (Self-employed) or Schedule E (Wage Slave), you're Working Class, and I don't care if you make six figures as an NHS paediatric consultant.
Retired people keep their class in the last few years of working. Children inherit the class of their parents until they leave education, when they enter the working class and work their way back up.
And then there's the Underclass, which we can think of as the people who can't or don't want to play nice with the economy and society. Honourable exceptions for the people who deserve honourable exception.
Very little is sillier than someone who calls teachers 'professionals', as if associating teachers with snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants in some way raises their status, when snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants are employees like any other.
But Bordieu? Cultural capital, social capital, economic capital and all that jazz. For one thing, those terms have been grossly de-valued. Here's Amanda Spielman (who she?) "By [cultural capital], we simply mean the essential knowledge, those standard reference points, that we want all children to have". Nope, Amanda, that's called 'The Basics'.
Bordieu was onto two things: the first was that certain cushy jobs required a certain kind of education, and the holders of those cushy jobs tended to want to mix with each other, make sure their children got that education, and other people's children did not, and also that their children only mixed with children whose parents also held those kinds of cushy jobs.
The second was that many jobs were, in the 1960's, taking a serious hit to their social status: teachers, civil servants, doctors, and other State-employee roles that had been lower-paid but respected. Those people were making themselves feel better about their declining status by pretending that the music they listened to and the books they read, and in some cases, the people they associated with, had an equal-but-different role in determining their class. If they read Proust, they should be in a higher class than those who read Asterix de Gaulle. Bordieu researched this in the 1960's, played it back to them, Owl of Minerva style, in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, and they made it a best-seller and got him a job at the College de France in 1982.
I think the whole thing was a huge irony. Look at these deluded people, thinking it matters if they attend the Cinémathèque Française.
Bordieu was the son of the working class. He knew class was way more structural than the size of a paycheque.
Which puts journalists (well-paid lackeys of rich corporations) and academics (less-well-paid lackeys of Governments) in the same group (Schedule E taxpayers with little or no f**k-off money) in the same class as couriers, cooks, bus drivers and data bashers like me.
Personally, if I was a courier, cook, or bus driver, I would take exception at being grouped with academics and journalists, who toil not, though they do spin, and that is their sin.
But it never is, and never will.
The Upper Class were literally the people towards the top of the feudal hierarchy. Kings, Lords, Bishops, Dukes, Princes, Viscounts, Earls, and Barons. There aren't many of those people left now. They people get their money from granting privileges, usually to merchants who kick back some of the profits to the aristos. Mostly the Upper Class has been replaced by the State, but that doesn't make Ministers and senior civil servants aristocrats: it makes them people who need to be carefully watched, lest they decide to shut down businesses all over the country, and then tax us to pay for it. It would be better if those people - the elected riff-raff - did think of themselves as aristos, because then they would have to accept noblesse oblige.
The middle class emerged in the 1700's (or pick some other date you like). My reference example is a ship's Captain who might make two or three successful voyages to the Spice Islands (or some other such destination) and, on the proceeds of his share of the profits, could set himself up with a nice house in Greenwich and never go to sea again. The middle classes had enough money that they did not need to work again, and made that money through commercial ventures rather than the exercise of privilege. The Middle Class do not need privileges to be granted by aristocrats, or today, the State. They make their money in the open market. Today's middle class are all those CEO's with seven-figure payoffs and share options, hedge-fundies, millionaire entrepreneurs, and anyone else who could afford to stop working now and live off what they have already made (don't count looking after your stash as `working', though it is).
The Working Class work, usually for someone else, and if they don't, they run out of money and into poverty or the Unemployment Exchange (whatever they call it now). A lot of workers make decent money, especially emergency plumbers and IT consultants, while quite a few have enough money in the bank to tell their current employer to take a hike (aka "f**k you" money). If you pay income tax on Schedule D (Self-employed) or Schedule E (Wage Slave), you're Working Class, and I don't care if you make six figures as an NHS paediatric consultant.
Retired people keep their class in the last few years of working. Children inherit the class of their parents until they leave education, when they enter the working class and work their way back up.
And then there's the Underclass, which we can think of as the people who can't or don't want to play nice with the economy and society. Honourable exceptions for the people who deserve honourable exception.
Very little is sillier than someone who calls teachers 'professionals', as if associating teachers with snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants in some way raises their status, when snotty-nosed twenty-eight year old Chartered Accountants are employees like any other.
But Bordieu? Cultural capital, social capital, economic capital and all that jazz. For one thing, those terms have been grossly de-valued. Here's Amanda Spielman (who she?) "By [cultural capital], we simply mean the essential knowledge, those standard reference points, that we want all children to have". Nope, Amanda, that's called 'The Basics'.
Bordieu was onto two things: the first was that certain cushy jobs required a certain kind of education, and the holders of those cushy jobs tended to want to mix with each other, make sure their children got that education, and other people's children did not, and also that their children only mixed with children whose parents also held those kinds of cushy jobs.
The second was that many jobs were, in the 1960's, taking a serious hit to their social status: teachers, civil servants, doctors, and other State-employee roles that had been lower-paid but respected. Those people were making themselves feel better about their declining status by pretending that the music they listened to and the books they read, and in some cases, the people they associated with, had an equal-but-different role in determining their class. If they read Proust, they should be in a higher class than those who read Asterix de Gaulle. Bordieu researched this in the 1960's, played it back to them, Owl of Minerva style, in his 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, and they made it a best-seller and got him a job at the College de France in 1982.
I think the whole thing was a huge irony. Look at these deluded people, thinking it matters if they attend the Cinémathèque Française.
Bordieu was the son of the working class. He knew class was way more structural than the size of a paycheque.
Which puts journalists (well-paid lackeys of rich corporations) and academics (less-well-paid lackeys of Governments) in the same group (Schedule E taxpayers with little or no f**k-off money) in the same class as couriers, cooks, bus drivers and data bashers like me.
Personally, if I was a courier, cook, or bus driver, I would take exception at being grouped with academics and journalists, who toil not, though they do spin, and that is their sin.
Tuesday 12 January 2021
Plan For Another Four Years of Lockdown. Here's Why...
I used to be a strategic planner. Micro-economic modelling of the company, economic forecasts, translating business policies into numbers, five-year projected P&L's, Balance Sheets and Cash Flows.
We would run at least three different sets of assumptions, which would later be called scenarios. These would be: Do Nothing; do this; do that. Do Nothing was the shocker: what would happen if we just sat on our butts. The answer was always some kind of wasting commercial illness. Scenario planning was a good technique: it made management think about the future and what they might or might not do.
All those scenarios were run against the same background, and we were hardly aware of it. There would be no wars, space invasions, plagues, civic uprisings, collapses of social order, no changes to the overall political, social and economic structure of the country, and no 'this changes everything' new technology. At least not that would involve our home markets.
Some things are just elephants that you have to wait to leave the room. Wars are an obvious example. Turns out that Government-imposed emergency public health measures are another. When something like that happens, there are no if's and maybe's and what else could we do's. There's only the freaking elephant in the room, and it is going to move when it wants to. The plans you make when there's an elephant in the room are not the plans you make when there isn't. Elephant-in-the-room plans are all short-term, because, well, the elephant never stays that long in the room?
Does it?
Typically, most businesses and people fall into a holding pattern: do as much as we can to keep what we can remember of pre-elephant life going, and wait for the elephant to leave. The short-term is a lousy planning horizon, when you don't know how short a term it is. That's how you put on weight, go soft, lose customers, delay maintenance, and don't upgrade.
What if the elephant never leaves the room? At least for another four years?
A never-ending series of erratic lockdowns. But they never repeal the laws. They never make it illegal. They never stop the Lockdown Committee meeting. Public Health professors never stop muttering about a possible lockdown this winter, and the press never stops reporting them. The mask signs are never taken down. Every now and then the Police stop a pensioner getting on a train. Each summer there is less point in going anywhere, because each summer less remains open.
But lockdowns can't last forever? Wouldn't society wither away? And anyway vaccines?
Not the point.
The point is that assuming the lockdowns go on forever forces you to think about what you would do if you weren't twiddling your thumbs waiting for Governments to grow a pair. You know what you're going to do if the restrictions ever end. You don't know what you're going to do if they don't.
The moment I thought of four more years, I knew that I would retire by Autumn 2021 (certain things assumed having happened), because I did not want to see my life vanish three-months-at-a-time. If I'm going to be locked in my house, I'd rather be reading, writing, playing music and watching movies. Bashing away pointlessly on a laptop? No thank you. I've had enough of that.
You will make other decisions. Yours may be tougher than mine, because you could be looking at four more years of home schooling. But suppose you were? Wouldn't you go back to your employer and say Sorry, but I have to give my children four hours uninterrupted a day, then I have to do an hour's lesson prep for tomorrow. You get about four hours tops. And I get full salary, because you won't be able to stop calling me when it's teaching time. Right now, you won't have that conversation because this is an emergency that will be over in three months. But you would if you knew it was going on for four more years.
Will lockdowns really go on for another four years or more? I don't know. I do know that this one is going on until Easter, and it will be followed by a period of lighter restrictions over summer, to be followed by another winter when old people will start dying again. Vaccines? Are developed six months after the latest super-spreader / super-killer variation of the original Virus, and we will need to be locked up for those six months. It's a flu virus, so it will always mutate. And every year there is another bunch of vulnerable old people.
What part of that sounds like a process with an end?
We would run at least three different sets of assumptions, which would later be called scenarios. These would be: Do Nothing; do this; do that. Do Nothing was the shocker: what would happen if we just sat on our butts. The answer was always some kind of wasting commercial illness. Scenario planning was a good technique: it made management think about the future and what they might or might not do.
All those scenarios were run against the same background, and we were hardly aware of it. There would be no wars, space invasions, plagues, civic uprisings, collapses of social order, no changes to the overall political, social and economic structure of the country, and no 'this changes everything' new technology. At least not that would involve our home markets.
Some things are just elephants that you have to wait to leave the room. Wars are an obvious example. Turns out that Government-imposed emergency public health measures are another. When something like that happens, there are no if's and maybe's and what else could we do's. There's only the freaking elephant in the room, and it is going to move when it wants to. The plans you make when there's an elephant in the room are not the plans you make when there isn't. Elephant-in-the-room plans are all short-term, because, well, the elephant never stays that long in the room?
Does it?
Typically, most businesses and people fall into a holding pattern: do as much as we can to keep what we can remember of pre-elephant life going, and wait for the elephant to leave. The short-term is a lousy planning horizon, when you don't know how short a term it is. That's how you put on weight, go soft, lose customers, delay maintenance, and don't upgrade.
What if the elephant never leaves the room? At least for another four years?
A never-ending series of erratic lockdowns. But they never repeal the laws. They never make it illegal. They never stop the Lockdown Committee meeting. Public Health professors never stop muttering about a possible lockdown this winter, and the press never stops reporting them. The mask signs are never taken down. Every now and then the Police stop a pensioner getting on a train. Each summer there is less point in going anywhere, because each summer less remains open.
But lockdowns can't last forever? Wouldn't society wither away? And anyway vaccines?
Not the point.
The point is that assuming the lockdowns go on forever forces you to think about what you would do if you weren't twiddling your thumbs waiting for Governments to grow a pair. You know what you're going to do if the restrictions ever end. You don't know what you're going to do if they don't.
The moment I thought of four more years, I knew that I would retire by Autumn 2021 (certain things assumed having happened), because I did not want to see my life vanish three-months-at-a-time. If I'm going to be locked in my house, I'd rather be reading, writing, playing music and watching movies. Bashing away pointlessly on a laptop? No thank you. I've had enough of that.
You will make other decisions. Yours may be tougher than mine, because you could be looking at four more years of home schooling. But suppose you were? Wouldn't you go back to your employer and say Sorry, but I have to give my children four hours uninterrupted a day, then I have to do an hour's lesson prep for tomorrow. You get about four hours tops. And I get full salary, because you won't be able to stop calling me when it's teaching time. Right now, you won't have that conversation because this is an emergency that will be over in three months. But you would if you knew it was going on for four more years.
Will lockdowns really go on for another four years or more? I don't know. I do know that this one is going on until Easter, and it will be followed by a period of lighter restrictions over summer, to be followed by another winter when old people will start dying again. Vaccines? Are developed six months after the latest super-spreader / super-killer variation of the original Virus, and we will need to be locked up for those six months. It's a flu virus, so it will always mutate. And every year there is another bunch of vulnerable old people.
What part of that sounds like a process with an end?
Monday 4 January 2021
What Do Plumbers Have In Common With Girls?
You got their number from a web site.
They never answer the phone. But they might answer a text.
If they do answer, they might sound quite enthusiastic about what you have in mind.
You send them over a couple of photographs and your address.
Then....
(crickets)
They never call back.
It feels like stalking if you chase them.
They never say why they don't want to do what they sounded so enthusiastic about back then.
Yep.
Tradesmen.
And you thought I meant girls on dates.
I would rather spend my time on some BS work-related phone call than call a tradesman. I swear the moment they realise I live in a postcode that they know only has small houses, they lose interest. They are all after the three sixes:
Six-bedroom house
Six-day job
Six-grand payment
Gardeners seem okay. They stand to make a decent amount on any garden.
Carpenters, plumbers, handymen, gas fitters, roofers, and electricians are awful. They are always busy. They have families in terrible health that require a last-minute cancellation. I can tell they would rather be working on a nice detached house in Woking than my modest mid-terrace.
Calling tradesmen is an endless stream of rejection. Nothing is ever worth them returning the call with a quote.
I shave. I wash. My house is clean. It has electricity and running water and gas.
Tradesmen these days just don't want ordinary decent customers who want to pay them a fair price for a fair job. Now. They want glamour, big money, fancy postcodes. All so they can take impressive photographs for their social media.
Huh!
They never answer the phone. But they might answer a text.
If they do answer, they might sound quite enthusiastic about what you have in mind.
You send them over a couple of photographs and your address.
Then....
(crickets)
They never call back.
It feels like stalking if you chase them.
They never say why they don't want to do what they sounded so enthusiastic about back then.
Yep.
Tradesmen.
And you thought I meant girls on dates.
I would rather spend my time on some BS work-related phone call than call a tradesman. I swear the moment they realise I live in a postcode that they know only has small houses, they lose interest. They are all after the three sixes:
Six-bedroom house
Six-day job
Six-grand payment
Gardeners seem okay. They stand to make a decent amount on any garden.
Carpenters, plumbers, handymen, gas fitters, roofers, and electricians are awful. They are always busy. They have families in terrible health that require a last-minute cancellation. I can tell they would rather be working on a nice detached house in Woking than my modest mid-terrace.
Calling tradesmen is an endless stream of rejection. Nothing is ever worth them returning the call with a quote.
I shave. I wash. My house is clean. It has electricity and running water and gas.
Tradesmen these days just don't want ordinary decent customers who want to pay them a fair price for a fair job. Now. They want glamour, big money, fancy postcodes. All so they can take impressive photographs for their social media.
Huh!
Friday 1 January 2021
Happy New Year - Yeah Right
Who am I kidding?
While there's the virus it's not a New Year, it's just more of the Long Year of The Virus (2020 - 2023?). The Long Year of The Virus will take in all of 2021.
If you thought 2020 was bad, just wait until 2021 gets going.
All flu viruses mutate. So there is an endless stream of new versions of The Virus for the public health people to pretend might overwhelm us.
This only stops when the Government tells them that there's no more money to pay for the party.
There is a lot of ruin in a great nation.
So the money will hold up for this year and a lot of 2022.
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