The Movie List 2 (of Many)

Dinner Rush – Bob Giraldi
“Am I an artist?” Asks Summer Phoenix's waitress of the famous and winging art critic. The established artists with him shake their heads: “The minute you doubt it, it's gone”. “You're an artists if you say you are,” the critic agrees, “you're a successful artist if...” “He says you are,” the established artists joke. You can hear the writers Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata telling each other this as they worked on this perfect script. Every performance is just right and the ending never fails to startle.

Dogtown and Z-Boys – Stacey Peralta / Craig Stecyk
Everything you need to know about life, but will never be able to apply here in England to yours. This was the bunch of middle-school drop-outs who defined modern skateboarding and extreme games. Which is why they practiced all the time, worked hard on their moves, knew that “style is everything”, encouraged each other, could clean out a dirty swimming pool in four hours, dodged the cops, and when the commercial opportunities came along, took them. It helped they had Craig Stecyk to publicise them and document their activities, and it also helped that Jeff Ho and Skip Englbloom were true mentors. Oh, and as a movie, a story, it is as good as any other on the screen.

Unser Taglish Brot – Nicholas Geyrhalter
Bear with me here, this is a documentary about European industrialised farming, and if your jaw doesn't drop on the floor at some of the things you see, you're not paying attention. Who invented the machine for gently sweeping chicks onto a conveyor belt? Or the cow-milking turntable? Did you know what the vaults of a deep salt mine look like? The scene involving a bull, a cow and a man with a test tube is, well, maybe that's too much information already. Watching this movie is part of your education. Don't be a townie who thinks that tomatoes grown in their packing any longer. Oh and the editing, the rhythm, the colour, the warm detachment of it? Flawless.

Basquiat – Julian Schnabel
Films about the art world are few and far between, films about the art world made by an actual artists probably number this one. The first time I saw it, I felt alive for a couple of days. The script is endlessly quotable and it's one of those films you can watch for “bits” - my favourite being the painting-in-the-cellar sequence. The performances are excellent, the ambience feels right, though Basquiat's behaviour and the sheet extent of his drug consumption is only hinted at. Also to judge from the photographs in the various biographies, Courtney Love and Claire Forlani are a lot prettier than the actual women. Apparently Basquiat's estate refused to lend his paintings for the movie, so Schnabel painted the “Basquiats” himself.

Jazz On A Summer's Day – Bert Stern
I saw this at a now-defunct cinema on Baker Street when I was seventeen. It has everything from hard bop to Bach – the cellist with the Chico Hamilton band plays the Prelude from Bach's first Cello Suite. There's a goodly cross-section of the 1958 jazz scene, a truly awful mis-match of sound and vision as Sal Salvador plays guitar, some nice films of yachts and some beautiful photography. It's a look back at a different country – when jazz was at the height of its virtuosity and was the music of the hip of all colours. It isn't now, but it was then.

Why I'm Quitting Self-Help

Every now and then I weaken and buy a self-help book. I don't mean the really hokey Men Can't Cuddle, Women Won't Fix Light Bulbs nonsense , or the Vegetarian Pie for the Soul twaddle, let alone idiot pamphlets that tell you “Don't sweat the small stuff – and it's all small stuff”. Anyone who says that should find themselves out of work with two weeks' money in a dead job market, and we'll see how small they think buying food for the family is. Most of the stuff under “Mind, Body and Spirit” in even the proper bookshops (Foyles, Waterstones) is shallow, exploitative tosh.

I remember when I read Melody Beattie's Codependent No More . There a large part of me was, right there on those pages. I ticked the fifteen traits of a codependent without the slightest hesitation: I knew exactly what she was talking about. But by heaven she's written some fluff since. So has Julia Cameron (formerly Mrs Martin Scorsese): The Artist's Way is a neat book with a lot of good ideas. I don't do my Morning Pages as much as I used to, but there was a time I needed to and so I did. And that media-free week? Let me tell you, I did that, and I've never been quite the same since. But my god some of the follow-up stuff has been new-age chanting.

Then there are the You-Can-Have-It-All books. The ones that tell you how you can have a successful, meaningful, exciting life in a great job than you wake up and look forward to. Oh, if only. I steer clear of those because I know they're a crock. If there is one group of people I would wish to turn into, oh, say a qaat-chewing Somali and see what they make of themselves then, it's all those professional speakers who tell you the only limit to what you can achieve is your dreams. Absent their ability to raise the sponsorship, these people's dreams are just that. And we can't all live on each other's sponsorship.

Why do we buy self-help books? Because we think the writers know something we don't. But they don't. There's no research on this stuff. Pop economists always quote this or that paper by some behavioural economist or other, but you will never find a self-help guru quoting from research papers about motivation, regaining confidence, keeping unproductive thoughts out of your head, dealing with sudden redundancy (one piece of research found that people who were chucked out with a lot of money were more confident than those who got nothing – having been in both conditions, I will agree). Even if the research was there, I doubt they would quote it, because it would find that the way you felt was pretty much a function of your economic circumstances and the exact degree of insult inflicted on you. There would be a finding that certain people weren't badly affected, but they came from unusual backgrounds and had rare temperaments. Almost invariably the authors are peddling themselves as the success story – and it turns out that they have the temperament to handle being a self-employed author, speaker and trainer. Which makes them just like you and me. You can ignore the examples they quote, those people don't exist.

We buy self-help books because we don't have anyone we can trust to turn to for advice. Think about what that says about your parents, uncles, aunts and friends. That they're as clueless as you about how to handle whatever it is that's happening. If you thought they had some useful advice, you would ask them, not make some publisher's friend (self-help gurus are all friends of one editor or another) a little richer.

We buy self-help books because one of other of the “whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes” eventually knocks us flat, and temporarily takes away our self-confidence, our belief that we can get back up and start all over again and that there is anyone out there who wants to hire us, love us, help us, pick us for their team or generally extend some sign that we're not a total waste of space. From redundancy with beggar-all payoff, through re-organisations, re-locations, separation, divorce, break-ups, not even getting a date, not even getting an acknowledgement to your job application, being rejected for a job after a terrific interview, to being turned away at a nightclub or pub, finding all your alleged mates went off to a party Saturday night and forgot to tell you... the list is endless. The sources of happiness are few, the sources of upset almost infinite: so few Yes's, so many No's.

Thrashed with those whips and scorns, we have two choices. We can lie down and die or get back up and fight the endless fight. The only issue is how long we spend recuperating. Well, there is a third choice – sometimes: we can organise, so that employers can't just sling you out on the street with a couple of month's money or send the jobs over to Chennai. In the literature of self-help, the third choice does not exist. You are an isolated actor with no politics – though the guru may suggest you enlist friends as “coaches” or “cheerleaders” or some other such role.

Most people can take the whips and scorns of time reasonably well, experiencing a short-term loss of faith and general slump, before their natural good spirits plus some luck gets them back in the game. Also, being “most people”, they don't get whipped and scorned too often – one good reason for getting married and working at it. Some people don't have those natural good spirits, they don't believe in good things happening in the future, nor do they believe that anyone will keep their promises. Some people are just in the wrong places at the wrong times too often, others just can't choose decent people to work for, or love or befriend. Some people, in other words, don't do life very well. Self-help books are not for these people. Self-help books are for “most people”.

All these books need you to have an idea of what you want to do with your life. If you want to stop any self-help guru dead in her tracks, simply claim you have no idea what makes you happy or what is your dream job or lifestyle. Watch them ignore you or worse, tell you that “you must have some idea”. Most people can tell you what they want to do with their lives, just like most people can smile for the camera. Some people have no idea what they want to do with their lives, or worse, they do, but they can't make any money doing it or don't have courage to start and the determination to continue and the sheer damn stamina to finish. Self-help books are not for these people. And that would be me those books aren't for.

The Movie List 1 (of Many)

I've never been that keen on the blockbusters and Worthy Movies From Big Name Directors – Mainstream movies. Sure Angels and Demons is okay for the Sunday Afternoon Movie but it's not what I want to watch on a Monday evening to set me up for the week, or a Friday to reward for showing up every day. As I get older, I'm more and more interested in little movies that tell a story and are strong on character and sense of place. (Genova was really good for sense of place: when I emerged from the Prince Charles Cinema in the evening, I felt a real shock that I wasn't actually in Geonva. Take me back now! I felt.) So here's a few I think are worth watching if you find them...

Strong Language – Simon Rumley
A bunch of London-based twenty-somethings talk about their lives to the camera, and one anguished guy in a warehouse tells a story about the night his girlfriend was attacked in front of him. It comes together in a remarkable way and works because the editing works so well. The characters are interesting and the actors are having fun with them. It's all in the writing.

Kids – Larry Clark
Never mind the “wake-up call about our children” bit. Watch this for the breakout performances from Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, the photography, one of the few convincing party scenes in a movie and performances so natural you don't even think it's a script and there's a director. Okay, the lead male characters are pretty much sleaze-bags, but did you miss the bit where I said Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson?

Groove – Greg Harrison
Set in the San Francisco rave scene at the end of the 90's and featuring an appearance by the world's greatest DJ, John Digweed, it's a night-of-revelations story with excellent dance music from real DJ's and general all-round craftsmanship. It's only the second time round you realise how good the writing and structure is.

Baise-Moi – Virginie Despantes / Coralie
Ignore the pseudo-intellectual hype. The first fifteen minutes or so are a standard French abduction / rape porno and the rest is full of casual, sordid, meaningless sex and violence. In the end one of the women is killed and the other arrested by the police. It would be much easier to ignore if it wasn't so well made and acted. This isn't art and it's not uplifting, but compared with the infamous tunnel scene in Irreversible it's a stroll in the park.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist – Peter Sollett
“Are you sorry we missed it?” Asks Kat Dennings as she and Michael Cera go their separate ways at the end of a long night of teenage adventures which ended by missing the concert of their favourite cult band. “We didn't miss it. This is it.” Cera says. And he's right. The night is a metaphor for adolescence, and the “it” is finding their first adult relationship.

The Fallacy of Individual Event Probability – A Real Life Example

Identifying the proportion of a population willing to do X with the probability that any individual in that population will do X is a fallacy – the Fallacy of Individual Event Probability. What follows is a real example of it in action.

A very large bank of my acquaintence has a gadget that calculates the value of a given loan L of amount £A and term T months for a APR of r, call it V(r; L). It also has a gadget to calculate the probability that a customer in a credit segment S will accept an APR of r for the loan L, call it P(r). Maximise the product – the expected value - of the two by changing r. The APR that maximises the expected value is what the customer gets.

The most important thing the bank needs to know is what the default rate or bad debt will be from lending to a customer. Ideally, every customer should pay back the original loan and the interest, but in practice some don't. Credit analysts spend a lot of time trying to work out parameters that will tell them who doesn't and to what extent. In particular, they worked out that people in the segment S will lose x% of the original loan on average. That number is used to calculate the price r_max. Let the probability of purchase at r_max be p_max. At the lower-quality end of the risk scale, the maximising APR is surprisingly high and the corresponding probability of purchase is astonishingly low – around twenty per cent and sometimes even lower.

Take a look at the buying psychology. Each of the customers in the segment has a price beyond which they won't go, either because they can't afford the repayments, because they think they can better elsewhere, because the sheer folly of the entire enterprise hits them when they hear the cost or a dozen other reasons. Call that APR the shut-off point r_shut. Let the proportion of customers in this segment willing to accept a price of r or higher be D(r). When you set the APR via the maximisation, you are only getting those customers for whom r_shut >= r_max.

Here's why the bank has a problem. They are treating P(r) as the probability that any customer in the segment will buy at the rate r: their calculations assume that every customer in the segment has a probability of p_max of accepting the r_max. This makes the use of the loss rate of x% in the calculations correct. But it doesn't work like that. Why not? Because it's a logical impossibility: an individual customer either accepts the price or not, there's no probability. Uncertainty, yes, probability, no. What their gadget actually tells them is D(r) – the proportion of people willing to put up with a rate of r or greater. But this means they need the loss rate for that sub-segment, not for the whole segment, when they calculate the value of the loan. They have gone from a proportion of a population to a probability over the whole population and been mislead about the nature of the model they need in so doing.

Like many fallacies, a suitably benign world will not punish anyone too harshly for commiting it. To get round it in this case, the bank either has to calculate the appropriate loss rate, or has to show that within the segment S, for each subsegment defined by a value of r, the loss rate varies only randomly and with a small variance at that.

Blame The Victim – Variation 1,237

Back in the day when men were men and I worked for American companies, they told you you were redundant or re-organised to your face. Blunt. “We're letting you go” or “You'll be based in Cardiff from next week”. So what are the HR weasels doing? Well, we can apply for jobs in the new organisation. Only jobs of the same grade and only in the same business area. We can “preference” three – our applications will be sent to the “hiring manager”. Except the hiring manager doesn't know who he/she is yet. So we don't know who we're applying to. So when we don't get a job, it won't be because they decided they didn't want us, it will be because we “weren't successful in finding a position”. Our fault. Not theirs. Our fault if we are made redundant or have to go down a grade. Not theirs. Sure, go right ahead and blame the victim. And I have the slightest doubt I need to be out of there?

The next couple of weeks are going to be distracting. And then I can get back to making sensible posts and looking for a job.

The Danger Signs: You'll Want to Move On When You Realise...

1.Just how much is outsourced to EDS, Capita or IBM
2.There is no Style Book – anyone can format a letter any way they like
3.You have a better computer and better software at home
4.There are whole sections of the office that are spookily empty
5.Expenses are paid from India
6.There's no induction to the company's products, senior management, history and main procedures
7.All the people you like turn out to be contractors
8.No-one can remember the last time anyone was promoted internally
9.When you ask for any information about anything, everyone refers you to the Intranet, but no-one knows where on the Intranet
10.A lot of people have been in their jobs for less than two years
11.When you ask about career development, they tell you it's for you to define for yourself
12.When you ask about training, it's all online
13.Half the projects you hear about are cancelled, delayed or held over because of some mega-project that is always in another part of the business
14.You ask how you get an “outstanding” on your appraisal, and no-one knows: when you ask your manager, her answer is vague and unhelpful
15.You are encouraged to develop “people skills” and your personal presentation, not to develop substantive technical skills and knowledge
16.Everyone spends a lot of time explaining the past rather than trying to plan for the future
17.The organisation talks about “leadership” not management
18.There's a six paragraph procedure about sending information by mail
19.The toilets keep blocking and the ventilation is poor
20.The boys / men are better-looking than the girls / women

Welcome To My Wonderful World of Work

A pricing team adds value in one of four ways: first, often as being the only people in the company who understand marginal costing and contribution analysis, the fundamental techniques needed to evaluate the worth of a product and the profitability of a price; second, by building tools to automate price and proposition analysis, administration and reporting; third with their knowledge of the market: competitors, suppliers, customers, the commercial relationships between them and the prices between them; and fourth, by being the only people with the sheer nerve to make the decisions. If it doesn't do these things, it's really only a pricing admin team, preparing and evaluating quotes from account execs and sending prices and specs for data entry.

There is no market. Banks pretend they are in competition for loans, but they aren't. If you don't have a current account or a mortgage with the bank, they might not quote you at all, or they may give you a silly price. The very act of having them look up your credit rating with Experian or Call Credit actually affects your credit rating – downwards. You can't go shopping for prices: what you see in the window is not what you will pay. The few lenders who don't need you to have a current account only lend to the top end of the credit bracket, so the odds are that's not you. There are no suppliers – the money comes from captive depositors or the money markets via the Treasury function. The customers? We knows everything about them except the things any real marketeer would want to know.

The cost analysis is done for the pricing people. The largest cost is bad debt from people not repaying loans and that is the domain of credit risk. I grant that consumer credit risk is a specialist subject, but it's not that hard and people don't do it that well. All the models are backward-looking. In all the banks. No-one has built a forecasting model. They have had thirty years since I started working and learned to look for relationships between GDP (or inflation or industrial production or average earnings or whatever else was published by National Statistics) and whatever we wanted to model. They haven't looked at using Black-Scholes option-pricing techniques, where there is a huge literature on forecasting. I say this to prove that what banks do is not that sophisticated – tedious maybe, but not sophisticated. The point is, the cost analysis is done elsewhere.

The pricing models have been devised and coded (in Excel – nothing like a sharp, professional look) by a specialist part of the business where dwell all the model-builders and data crunchers who aren't in credit risk. So the pricing team has no internal programming and modelling expertise of its own – except me and neither are on my job description.

It doesn't set prices because it doesn't make decisions. Those are made after endless crunching of huge samples by a group of “senior” managers, and they always ask for more figures or re-assurance. Because making a profit is all very well, but it can't get in the way of sales. Banks are not so sales-driven as sales-obsessed. No, actually, obsessed is mild. Banks have a mania about sales. Compared to banks, Mars, Tesco, Sainsbury or Microsoft think that it's nice you buy their products. Banks want to have both their hands in all your pockets and the only reason they haven't taken more is that that Chancellor of the Exchequer got their first. And all the pricing analysts around me do is report and analyse sales, model the effect of pricing on sales and notionally on the improvement on profitability. They aren't pricing analysts, they are sales analysts.

Finally, I've understood why I just can't get that interested in what they do. No market knowledge, no commitment to developing technical skills, no interest in the outside economy, no decision-making, no modelling and tool-building. Nothing I like doing. Not pricing at all, really.

And then there's the hygenie stuff: the Internet connection is awful, we only get to use M$ Office and VBA, the bullshit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it, productivity is daily hampered by "risk management" and IT policies dreamed up by people who don't use computers, there's no training and the idea of Cool New Stuff being fun and paying off down the road? The list is a LOT longer than this. Don't even discuss the toilets.

And I've got to pick a job in the new organisation – to show willing. They will put me in the one they want me in anyway – but they are pretending we get to choose (or “preference” as a verb) up to three jobs. Before they tell us we're doing the fourth.