Perfect Tens and Sexy Sixes

The things that obsess a chap... Everyone knows what a Ten (as in Perfect Ten) is, but what's an eight? Or a five? Okay, here's how it goes.

First the general rules. These scores do not apply to anyone under sixteen or over fifty-five. For gallantry, women over forty-five retain their score at that age to fifty-five, unless it gets better. Anyone's score can vary from day to day and even hour to hour: a Seven can, by choosing her clothes and haircut and carrying herself with an unusual vivacity, be an Eight for a day. I work with a girl who looks like a Seven only because she refuses to let her Inner Eight shine through. If it did, she'd be taken less seriously at work. It's my personal opinion that women reach their best in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties – with the exception of a handful of models who burn bright and out. Men reach their best a little later. Young people can be a bit puppy-fatty and blurry of feature for my taste – as if they are as outwardly uncertain as to the exact shape of their cheekbones as they are of their personalities.

Now the specifics. Ten is Penelope Cruz and Christy Turlington, George Clooney and Clive Owen. Fit, sexy, handsome, beautiful and with added magic. Tens can and often do make a living on or because of their good looks. Not all actresses and models are Tens, but few Tens aren't. Tens are the people that other people want to think they look like.

Eight is top-end generic: catwalk model / actress, fit Spanish / Russian / French / Sloane / California girl. Ditto for boys. The keys are refinement, class, style, manners, charm, a sense that they take care of their appearance. Trophy wives and Handsome Gay Men are all Eights. Eights almost always went to fee-paying schools. Very few men are Eights – except for a few years in their early twenties. British male Eights are either gay (Rupert Everett) or put on weight and turn into Sevens (Colin Firth). All the pilots in Battlestar Galactica are Eights. Kylie Minogue is a fine example of an Eight (generic pretty Aussie girl) who made it to Ten (around the time of Spinning Around) and then returned to Eight.

To judge from the comments on the Vice Do's and Don'ts, Eights are American size Tens.

Sevens are generics who can't be bothered to try, or to whom Nature wasn't quite as kind as it was to their Eight sibling. A good-looking generic with a foul mouth or really bad dress sense is a Seven (at best). Seven is the default setting for reasonably fit sixth-formers and undergraduates who haven't yet decided what they look like and who they are.

So far we've been tracking the beauty axis. Seven is where it ends: the Pretty Line. Seven and above is genetic. If you're a Six or below, you will never make it above the Pretty Line. This is the fundamental unfairness of life.

Sixes have one feature that puts you off and one that you like. If they went to the gym and wore exactly the right clothes, they might pass for Seven on a sunny day. Sixes are still sexy, actually, come to think of it, Sixes can be sexier than many women above the Pretty Line. Most attractive or sexy women are sixes, because attraction and sexiness are unrelated to beauty. Any man who isn't obviously handsome or pretty, and isn't a fat slob either, is a Six.

Five is a special and very subjective category: rough but shaggable: you would, but you wouldn't want everyone to know you had. We're talking sex here, nothing to do with beauty, charm, looks or anything else.

Now we've come to the end of the sexy axis. From now on it's sexless all the way. Don't ask me how people get to be sexless: there are a lot of them and for all I know they get laid more often than people above the Pretty Line. I have no idea what sex with a Four is like, but since the human race continues to reproduce large numbers of them, I assume other Fours are content. To be blunt, Fours and below may as well be a separate species, as they will never mate with anyone with a higher score. Four is what happens to sixes when they get married, have kids and live in the suburbs. Go to the NHS drop-in centre in a nice suburb on a Saturday afternoon: all those young mums who brought in the kid with earache? Fours. Not sexy.

Zero is fat, foul-mouthed chav. Do you care about the difference between and One, Two and Three?

Which brings us to Nines. A Nine is the prettiest boy or girl in the room unless there's an actual Ten there - but they don't have the Magic. If a Ten walks in the room and causes everyone to faint / gasp / whisper to each other / stand back, a Nine causes everyone to decide that he / she will be (insert your hopes here). Skiers will think you ski; backpackers will think you backpack; sun-hunters will think you know every beach in the world and bookworms will think you've read everything. Whatever the fantasy, it gets projected onto a Nine – even Tens project. The only people who don't are other Nines. When everyone finds out you're not like that, they get so pissed off with you. Find a photograph of the young Brian Prothero or Nick Drake.

I used to be a Nine until age and a few bad years turned my face into a featureless mask I barely recognise each morning when I shave.

"World Class" as BS

I've been to two team strategy meetings where the conclusion was that they wanted to be a “World Class” team. Maybe that was so early Oughties and no-one does it now, but just in case they still do...

It goes without saying that neither of the teams had a cat's chance in hell of being world-class anythings – they weren't even very good bullshitters. The first team, at a telco, was half contractors and half full-timers; the second, at the current employer, were reeking with the smell of booze and barely compos mentis after a company ball and piss-up the previous night. (If they'd been working for me, I would have told them all to go home and booked them off sick. Then read them the riot act about getting that drunk on a school night.) Both groups had been assembled to think through what they did and what they needed to change to do their jobs better. Neither team had the slightest idea of how to do this, nor, I believe, the slightest inclination. Desperate for something to say, the telco team came up with “world class” as they were putting together the Powerpoint thirty minutes before presenting the results to the Marketing Director, and the drunks came up with it about two-thirds of the way through the day as one of many merely random noises they'd been making.

What does “world class” mean? Well, since they don't do things too well anywhere except in Westernised countries, it means “doing it as well as they do in (insert company X name here)”. Company X, of course, pays well over the market rate for its people, which it selects by a rigorous three-stage process involving actual tests as well as interviews with a range of people. Which is not where the rest of us work.

It means you win awards from your industry or professional body (and my employer refuses to spring for the relevant membership, let alone the qualification fees). It means you're invited to give talks at conferences and that people from non-competing companies visit you to see how you do whatever it is you do. It means every time anyone wants to hire, they say to the head-hunters “see if (insert your name here) wants to come over”. It means you have published research and there are a couple of universities who could be interested in hiring you should you want to retire from the rigours of the private sector. It means the government ask you to sit on committees and you are asked to give evidence to official enquiries. The journalists who deal with your industry or profession know your name. It means you're at least as good as the people with the connections and desire for publicity to gather all these things to themselves.

The people in those two teams had no idea what is involved in being “world-class”. They said it because the truth is too painful for them to describe and admit to themselves, they don't think their manager wants to hear it and they don't believe anyone can do anything about it anyway. So they blow smoke up their manager's... face and in their own. And because he knows the truth and that he can't do anything about the problems they face, he nods along with it. The only people who win are the guys who hire out the room and facilitate the meeting.

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

What is wrong with this picture? Click to get a good look.

Take a look at the guy's left hand...

And the woman's left wrist...

Yep... no guitarist would hold a chord like he is or wear bangles and bracelets like she is. Let alone hold a pick between thumb and forefinger.

It isn't that the people who do this stuff don't know as much as they should. It's that they assume that we don't know anything or don't care. But your subconcious picks it up and you react to the fakery, even if it takes you a week or so to spot it as it did me (I wasn't focussing on the guitars).

On Reading Roger Scruton Once Too Often

All right, I've had it. Roger Scruton is supposed to be a philosopher. So hear him on the subject of sexual temperance: it is to be thought of “...not as the avoidance of desire, but as the habit of feeling the right desire towards the right object and on the right occasion. That is what true chastity consists in, and it provides one of the deep arguments in favour of marriage or, at least, in favour of the constraint upon sexual appetite that is offered by love, that it makes sexual enjoyment into a personally fulfilling habit.”

This is how a trained philosopher discusses a serious subject? What's wrong with his definition? Not the content, but the form? It's empty, because we don't know what he means by “right desire” or “right object” or “right occasion”. This is why you nodded along, because you immediately interpreted those words your way, so how you possibly disagree? Or you guessed that he had some middle-of-the-road interpretation in mind that involved wives, bedrooms and did not involve leather hoods and strap-ons.

The next sentence confirms some of your suspicions. The “right object” is your wife, the “right desire” is to show your love for her (rather than shag her brains out because she looks so hot in that red dress) and though there's no “right occasion”, I'm guessing that frequency plays a role here, so that “twice a year” isn't going to cut it. So sexual temperance is, for Mr S, making love to your wife at least twice a week (or near offer).

Temperance is modest or self-restrained behaviour, with special emphasis on the consumption of alcohol. The point about temperance is that it kicks in when you see someone with whom you would like to perform a variety of sexual acts now (no self-restraint) and over there and damn anyone who sees us (no modesty): temperance either stops you (self-restraint) or at least makes you wait until you've got into the hotel room (modesty). Now if there is one thing that will kill your married sex life, it's going to be modest and self-retrained behaviour in and around the literal and metaphorical bedroom. There is nothing either modest or self-restrained about sex that's worth having. If one or other of you is having to restrain yourself (because the other one won't do that and certainly not that either), it is eventually going to cause problems. My guess is that the best marriages are between partners with the same kinks (which includes having a very low sex drive) or who are pretty plain vanilla and easy to satisfy. Where there is a mismatch, there will be a problem.

Sex is not a bodily function like eating or evacuation: masturbation is, but not sex. If masturbation is eating a sandwich at the office, sex is anything from a seven-course Michelin to an order-in pizza eaten to satisfy the munchies. The point is, it's supposed to be fun. Once it starts being a source of emotional reassurance or bodily relief, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Because you're using the other person as an object to satisfy your desires, instead of a partner in a mutually-satisfying dance. Sex is not there to express anything or fix anybody – it's there to make babies and for fun. That's why God gave women a clitoris.

Now my guess is that if Mr Scruton were ever forced to get down to specifics, his view would not be so different from mine. Or we would discover he really was a prissy spoil-sport. All that twaddle about “sexual temperance” and “true chastity” is a schtick.

In the article that set me off, he's arguing that once you take the restraints away, Puritans turn into a bunch of grunting, binge-drinking pigs. The English, in fewer words. Or at least some of them. They do so because they don't appreciate, as the French and Spanish do, the subtle differences between, say, intoxication and drunkenness, or between chastity and sexual temperance. The English behave like pigs because they haven't read Aristotle and didn't go to school in Provence.

Except it doesn't work like that. A Puritan is not going to impressed by some fancy hand-waving about intoxication vs drunkenness or the true nature of sexual temperance. Puritans know very well the difference between taking the edge off with a glass of wine and having your mouth turn numb from drinking cider, and they disapprove of both. They know very well the difference between a Saturday night shag and a couple of married romps a week, and they disapprove of both of those as well. Puritans know very well that the best sex is simple fun – it's exactly fun they don't like.

It's not because some of the English are Puritans who lack a sophisticated view of virtuous pleasure that so many of them behave like pigs, it's because some of them are pigs that they lack a view of virtuous pleasure. But you can't say that – not an get invited back for another column in Standpoint Online. And as ever, he's poking at a straw man: you've got to know where to go to see truly revolting binge drinking, and decent people don't go to places like that anyway. The English don't binge-drink because they are Pigs or Puritans – they drink because Newcastle is not Barcelona. England is a northern European country, and northern Europeans drink because it's cold, cloudy, dull, grey, their food is tasteless, their jobs are awful and they have to live in the suburbs because the city centres are given over to shopping malls, hotels and offices. Manners, grace, dignity, dressing and eating well are much easier to do when the sun shines more often than not, you can get fresh bread at a corner shop even at five in the evening and you don't have to spend hours a day crammed into a train too many people and not enough seats.

But that would be too political and way too practical. What Mr Scruton writes is a kind of high-falutin' escapism, Mills and Boon with pretensions of learning. What worries me is that some editor thinks that people who, given that they have the attention span to wade through it, will be fooled by it. It's entertainment masquerading as thought and an abuse of his role as a philosopher to produce it.

Payment Methods Are Not Product Features

Recently I had to sit through a discussion of why what my employer does is better than what the other companies do. Since they don't actually make anything – it's financial services – it was all about the payment scheme. Payment methods are not product features.

I mean, what would you say to the man in the off-licence who made it seem like he was doing you a favour by accepting twenty pound notes as well as ten pound notes and credit cards?

A product or service is one thing, and how you pay for it entirely another. Insurance is a product, and I'm going to choose company A over company B because of price, excess, coverage and comments about them I read on the web. How I pay for it is more or less irrelevant and may be a deal-breaker (“What? No direct debit?”) but is not going to be a deal-maker. Look at personal loans: they make a huge issue about being able to defer the odd payment, delay the start of payment, paying over longer or shorter terms that the competition will allow, you name it. None of those are the product. The product is, well, gee, money. Not even cash. What you're getting is the permission to withdraw what you borrowed from your account. Chances are you won't even be able to lie on the bed and throw it up in the air. All that stuff about how you repay it is not the product, any more than how you pay for your Bose noise cancelling headphones is part of the headphones (Bose do an instalment plan) or the one year's interest-free credit is part of the sofa. At Hertz back in the day they made a big deal about how they could give you different payment options and how neat their invoice was – as if that mattered. The decision was about the car and the price.

Amazon offer me various delivery options, but that's not what I'm buying. They offer me those options to make it easier for me to buy what I want to buy. Same with payment methods: it makes it easier for me to buy what I want to buy, but it isn't what I want to buy.

But don't Visa offer me a product (service)? Yes they do, but they don't make an issue about how I pay for it: Direct Debit or nothing. The fact that I can use Visa to buy a book is not a feature of the book, though the fact that I can't use Mastercard is a reason I might not go back to that retailer.

Payment methods are hygiene factors. And hygiene factors aren't product features – they are product givens (you know, like not falling apart after three days and being easy to clean).

If payment methods are all you've got, you don't have a product. Or you don't understand what your product really is.

Net Present (Lack of) Value

Once again I sat through a meeting about NPV calculations and the assumptions behind them. This time NPV's are being used to calculate sales bonuses. Huh? You assign the loan to the gal who sold it: every month the loan instalment is paid, she gets a percentage, just like a regular salesman does. Who needs NPV's?

There is one circumstance when you do. That's when you want to sell a commercial building with a known and reliable rental income from a tenant who isn't going anywhere until the end of the lease. Then the NPV of the cash stream is the capital sum you would need to invest now in a quarterly-paying bond at the discount rate you chose to generate a cash flow with the same NPV. (Quarterly because commercial rents are usually payable on quarter-days.) And that is only possible because the cash flow from a commercial lease is basically the same as from a bond.

In this example, the forecast of the net income stream can be done accurately and has a high degree of probability of being true; while the NPV itself has a real interpretation, as the value of a bond, and as the purchase price of the building.

Now consider a mortgage or personal loan. This has a net income stream, payable monthly. It is much more difficult to forecast: loans are closed early, the default rate is very high (banks make loans to people with a 30% chance of defaulting and think it's good business – the people who financed your neighbour's sofa live with default rates of 50%) and the timing of a repayment or default is erratic. The bank can calculate averages, but the variances are high and the tails correspondingly fat.

But here's the real difference: for a commercial building, the net income stream repays the capital amount, but for a loan, the capital is repaid by the gross income. So if you discount the net income from a loan and call that the NPV, whatever meaning it has, it is not the amount you would pay for the loan. If you wanted to own the net income stream from the loan, you would have to buy the whole of the outstanding capital at the time of purchase, less a discount equal to the expected default on the remaining term of the loan. So if the discounted net income isn't the purchase price, what is it? It turns out to be the amount the shareholders would need to invest in a monthly bond offering the rate of return used in the discounting calculation to yield a cash flow with the same NPV as the loan. So it's the value now of the net income stream to the shareholders. It's what the loan is “worth” to the shareholders.

Or at least that's what everyone around me keeps saying. It sounds convincing. Except it isn't what the loan is worth to shareholders. What the loan is worth to shareholders is the contribution it makes towards their annual dividend payments, and that is measured by the gross margin (net income minus variable costs) of the loan taken year by year. As a rough guide, most of the value of any reducing-balance instrument is in the first half of its life.

Do not ask me why they calculate the NPV – I suspect it's because they're in banking and calculating NPV's is what you're supposed to do when you're in banking, like taking ecstasy when you go clubbing. That the discount rate they use is around 12% - good luck getting that in the money markets – makes the whole exercise silly.

So aside from the fact that it's the wrong measure, what else is wrong with using NPV's? It's a distraction from the job of finding the right measure for the job; it gives them the undeserved feeling that they are being sophisticated and clever; and it soaks up analysis time doing monthly lifetime factorisations of all sorts of things that should be left as totals: defaulting, bad debt, early closures. It creates an air of utterly spurious accuracy. But hey, get with the programme. This is, after all, the same industry who thought that lending money to people with no incomes was a good idea.

William James - Part One

"...if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation...take the man who has no interest whatever in its results; he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool. The most useful investigator...is always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived." (William James, The Will To Believe)

I've been reading William James this week. A very long time ago, when I was a teenager discovering philosophy and libraries had Real Books in them, I tried to read James' Psychology, but I don't think I got very far. I'm reading the Pragmatism and Other Essays Penguin Classic and I have The Varieties of Religious Experience in the stock-cupboard.

Pragmatism is the book A J Ayer modelled Language, Truth and Logic on - the use of a single simple principle to cut swathes through metaphysics, morals and pointless disputes. I'm not too sure they don't cover much the same ground. James's bluff, breezy, conversational writing style influenced the authors of the "Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous (a work with which I am very familiar). The idea that we weave new information and experience into an existing web of belief and knowledge, possibly rejecting it if it doesn't fit, is one of Quine's Big Ideas - though Quine's formulation is usefully more detailed. It's also been travestied as "the coherence theory of truth".

Anyway, I found the quote rather apt in the light of my interest in mistakes. I'd slowly come to the realisation that one reason I didn't see wrong numbers is that I had no expectations as to what the numbers should look like - I wasn't looking for a particular result, and I wasn't looking because I didn't care about the result - I was more interested in the method of getting there and how to get there more quickly next time. So mistakes just sailed on straight past me.

Being "the warranted incapable" is not such a good position for an analyst to be in.

A couple of photographs of London, snatched during an inter-office trip...

Seven Dials, Covent Garden in the afternoon

St Paul's Courtyard, lunchtime

By the Tate Modern...