Places to avoid during Christmas

If you are looking for a good place to go for Christmas you can start by knowing the places to avoid during the holiday season:

1) Paris - scientists have discovered that during the holiday season the whole perfume industry descends on the town along with a large number of famous people (although I am not sure who they are). If you have alergies to famous people, cliched adverts or perfumes it's a good place to avoid.

2) Victorian London - it has long been known that Christmas time is when there's heavy snow in Victorian London followed by mean-ness, poverty and tall, black hats. 

These are at least two places to desperately avoid during the holidays. If you can avoid these places it may improve your chances of a decent holiday. 

Remembering Things

Yesterday I brought some cheese from a really expensive cheese shop in London. We are lucky in London as we have really expensive shops for many things. Even the reasonably priced shops become ridiculously priced shops when they open in London. 

Anyway, that is progress and not the purpose of this note.

I put the cheese into the fridge at work and then promptly forgot to bring it home in the evening. I have now written a note to myself and put it on my computer to remind myself. However, I have written many notes in the past to myself (things like 'fix the economy' and 'print more bank notes'), but I always tend to forget what they were about after maybe 10 mins. So, I am looking for ways to remind myself such that I know what I am meant to do. 

Once I figure that out I will be able to look at fixing the economy and putting the country back on an even keel.

Now, this sticky note says 'investigate deplorable jobless figures' I wonder what I was meant to do about this one...

Chat With a Giant

I recently had a chat with Flatt Sales who is a giant in the media and marketing world. We were waiting for the next train and had roughly 5hours to kill. I am interested in media and marketing and how it works so I asked him a few beginners questions regarding the industry. His responses were quite insightful. Fortunately, I was able to record the entire conversation on my cell phone and am able to report the high points here after paying Flatt a small fee of three thousand pounds for the privledge of using his intellectual property.

Me: So what is marketing then?

Flatt: Well it's all about taking an organisations product that is already on the market and selling well and putting it on the market and getting it to sell well.

Me: But, if it's in the market why does it need to me marketed?

Flatt: There you show your stupidity. If you market your product you probably will do very well indeed without the services of a marketing firm. But, you will not appear in the marketing world because you will not use any of the marketing terms that are currently in vogue. So, to the marketing world you will be invisible.

Me: Does that matter? I mean I will be selling my product won't I?

Flatt: Yes, but you will be doing it without marketing. You need marketing to tell other marketeers that you are selling a product quite well. They can then take your ideas and reuse them to market their products.

Me: Ok. What about products that don't sell well. Does marketing help there?

Flatt: Of course. We can take a product that doesn't sell well and through careful planning (it's not cheap) run the product into the ground. If we're careful enough we can actually take down the whole business by marketing in the right areas.

Me: Do you market other things? Like people?

Flatt: Marketing is always expanding and consuming. Marketing people is old hat. We market many things: people, animals, the weather. We're currently looking at a new hush-hush product that's being pushed by the utility companies.

Me: Do tell. What is it?

Flatt: Well, I think it's ok to say since the devils in the details and if people know the product they won't know the correct marketing terms to use to market the product so I think I'm safe. The product is air. 

Me: Air?? The utility companies want to sell air??

Flatt: Yes, well not any old air, but air that we can breathe. Air that's harmful to us is of course free, but you will have to buy from the utility companies a special filter that will magically transform the air into breathable air.

Me: Will that work? I mean air is free isn't it?

Flatt: Technically yes. But, breathable air needs to be processed which is not free. Just look at what we did with water. 30 years ago people would have thought you mad if you brought bottled water, but through careful marketing we've managed to convince people that the water they pay for from their utility company is no better than sewage and they need to buy bottled water to survive. And, they need to drink lots of it. Typically 10-20pounds worth per week.

Me: I see your point. Well, thank you. I see that our train's arriving. Ah. No. It's going backwards. Well, it's getting late now and I'd better get home. It's been very interested Flatt.

Public Transport - the way to fitness

Have you been to a Gym? They are expensive aren't they? And, they tend to keep 'bank hours' where they are only open between 10am and 3pm Mon to Fri and closed at any other time. This is in order to keep the equipment in pristine condition for further promotional material to attract more people to join the gym.

Now, I have noticied that our enterprising public transport system has discovered a new way to increase revenue to pay for the desperately needed rail improvement works. By closing stations, turning off escalators and disabling lifts the system ensures a healthy workout for all privileged patrons of the system. With honest marketing a 50% increase in the cost of the fare is justified. They have installed saunas, step-aerobic systems, weight training rooms and general cross-training environments. 

A New Voting System

I have been thinking about the voting system. Currently, it's terrible. The poor politicians every few years go out to the country to show how popular and well known they are and how good their teeth are and every few years only 5-10 people and a few dogs vote for them. This is very distressing.

I believe that a much better and fairer voting system would entail putting the candidates in a big hall (just like the hall you sat in when you did your exams) and give them a large stack of voting paper. Then, they must fill in as many voting papers and vote for the best candidate for the position (which could be themselves). They must fill in as many votes as possible in 5hours.

The one that fills in the most votes wins. 

Of course, it's important that the voting be representative which means that every hour the environment in which the candidate is sitting must change. One hour a sun-lamp is brought in and the candidate toils under the glare of the sun-lamp. The next hour a person pours buckets of water over the candidate, another would be placing the candidate in a refrigerator, a penultimate would see the candidate working under the force of a wind generator and the last would see the candidate voting in total darkness.

This system would be fair and we would know that our candidate can not only write a lot, but is hardy to all weather climates.

Phone me. Please!

I fly a bit and have noticed a strange pattern. As soon as we land and have driven up to our gate and the seat-belt sign has gone off almost everyone gets their cell phone out and starts to text or call someone.

Why? Who are they calling? 

In order to answer these questions I have taken lots of flights on many different airlines and have come to the following logical conclusions:

1) The airlines with the worst record for anything have the largest number of people calling. It seems that most people are notifying their next-of-kin or their lawyers that they have arrived, thanks be to God, and it looks like the right location and please can they not inform the police that they have expired. 

2) The airlines with the best record for anything have the smallest number of people calling. This is usually because the people fly these fantastic airlines in order to escape. They don't want to inform people they have arrived just yet so they can have a little more time away from more pressing matters.

What is a city?

I live in London which is technically not a city as they haven't finished building it yet. It's what one could term a 'c' as the rest is under construction. I do hope that they manage to finish building the 'ity' part of London soon. 

Rush Hour

We all know that rush hour is a phenomenon that happens because the sun rises and sets at well defined times in the day, various television programs (such as the max-factor or some other reality-soap-drama-game-show) start and end at well defined times with well defined scripts and we all panic at well defined times.

It has set me thinking that this is probably not restricted to people, but also to animals of all types. It may even apply to ants. It's very possible that ants have a rush hour. I have spent the past week in careful study of ants nests and have not observed any rush hour. Which leads me to the logical conclusion that since there must be a rush hour they are using a mode of transport that I cannot see. The only correct inference that can be drawn is that the ants are using standard underground subway systems during their rush hour. Since I have not seen them at peak times on the subway my correct conclusion is that the ants rush hour must be on the Northern line and happens roughly between 9:23 and 10:00 in the morning and 19:45 and 20:30 in the evening. It's clear that they have very long days.

I am not sure if birds have a rush hour.

Optimum Route

Are you in a rush? Do you need to get from place A to B in the most efficient and optimal manner possible? Scientists have improved the current satellite navigation systems and journey planners to optimise our route and give us more valuable time to watch reality programs.

Scientists have observed that ants tend to find the shortest distance between their nest and a bowl of sugar. They have attached the smallest GPS enabled cell phones to ants and have placed nests and bowls of suger at strategic locations (for example a nest at a train station and a bowl of sugar at a place of interest). They have then been able to map the ants optimum location thanks to the magic of GPS and have been able to update the journey planners with the best route. 

It works. Although sometimes the optimum route requires passes through cracks in walls and occasionally ends up in the wrong place if there is a larger bowl of sugar available.

The new routes are becoming available on various journey planners soon.

How to Generate More Wealth

We are in a bad way. The fund managers that we have given all our money to have run out of insane and incredibly risky things to invest in. This is a bad thing. Without these risky and insane things for our fund managers to invest in we are not going to be able to generate the wealth that they have become accustomed to. What we need to do is to think outside the box. We need to come up with new investment schemes.

This is what our government is doing. They are generating a critical mass of depression and misery such that it can be sold as a commodity and compared with other countries. At this point we can have trading in misery and depression between countries which will generate investment opportunities and will allow our fund managers the chance to make more insane and risky investments.

Better Train Travel

I have figured out a way to make long train journeys (which constitutes all journeys - even to the next stop) more enjoyable. The carriages should be split up according to conversation type: dull and uninteresting, business and executive, spies, opionated, arguments. We can then get rid of First Class etc and just have these categories.

It could mean more revenue for the train companies (who I think are really organised crime) who would have more gradings of ticket type and they could fine people heavily for starting up the wrong type of conversation in a carriage. They could also fine people if they don't start a conversation suited for that carriage during the journey.

The approach could be extended to all modes of transport: buses, planes, boats, national health, etc.

When is the best time to make New Year resolutions?

A new year is full of exciting disasters and potential calamities and is a great time to make resolutions. But, you need to be careful just as you want to avoid making promises that you cannot keep to your customers (unless you are an elected body, or a financial institution, or any type of service organisation) you want to avoid making bold resolutions that are doomed to fail.

With this piece of information in mind the best time to make a resolution is when you have all the facts in hand. Since the New Year is full of the unknown it is best to make the resolutions at the end of the year. Which of course leads to the dilemma how can you keep your resolutions if you only make them at the end of the year?

So, with this in mind it's ok to make resolutions at the beginning of the year, but  since we are dealing with the unknown it's best to make them vague. Here's a list of suggestions for New Year resolutions:

1. I will do something this year.
2. I will stop doing something this year.
3. I will think about doing something this year.
4. I will stop thinking about doing something this year.

Governments over time have adopted these four cornerstones of successful resolutions (albeit with slightly more embellished words).

How to recover from lost work days

There have been many reports about lost work days due to illness, goofing-off, bad weather, football, ballroom dancing, cheese tasting, etc. And, all these types of loss have one thing in common: they call cost our poor economy ONE BILLION POUNDS EACH DAY! You may wonder how all these different causes can result in the same amount of financial loss each day (there are sound technical reasons why which appear in many different places which we won't go into here).

That's a lot of money that we are losing!

But, there is a solution. A tank of economists have come up with the solution of moving the financial end of the year forwards. This means that for each day of loss due to some laziness (to use the economist term) the end of the financial year (here 31/Mar) would moved forwards by:

days to move forwards = (number of days lost) * 1000 * exp(4.9/3)**2

There are technical reasons as to why the amount of money lost in a day does not equal the amount of money earned in a day (this is explained in any standard economics book). 

So, if we loose say 1 day we must move Mar/30 forwards by approx 26,000 days (give or take a few days). This should help to recover the lost revenue in a simple, easy to use manner.  

Understanding the Global Economy

Just how does this global economy work? It's a question that many people ask and it's one that many with a firm, wide-ranging grasp of finance and economics do their best to avoid answering. And, with good cause as it's really quite trivial. But, if you missed out on 3rd grade (what is that anyway) education then this reasoning should help:

We are in a global market. And, as everyone knows global means circular (if you're two dimensional) or spherical (if you have more dimensions) which of course means we are in a circular market. This circular market is consumer-based. This means that when I buy something in store 1 then store 2 has to buy something from store 1 and all the way down the line until store N buys what I brought from store 1. Of course, the process isn't perfect and usually I end up selling the item for roughly 0.0001% of what I brought it for.

That's of course putting it quite simplistically in reality there are about 10 stores with about 20 million people buying things in store one etc and all these items are usually different (ipops, jelly babies, gobstoppers etc).

Now with this understanding it's easy to see what has gone wrong with the current system: we have run out of paper - more specifically we have run out of blue ink. So, in order for the people in store X to buy from store Y they need to the currency of store Y and detailed analysis by economists and fund managers (technically called mis-managers) have identified that the currency of store Y is predominantly blue in colour and store X does not have any blue ink with which to make the currency to make the purchase.

Once we manage to find some blue ink - which isn't cheap and typically costs around 4 Trillion pounds or dollars we should be able to get the market circulating again according to economic forecasters it could be a Tuesday.

Ornamental Transport

You can tell when you are in a highly civilised and affluent society because there are many attributes superfluous to basic living. Take for example the public transport system. As everyone knows in a highly civilised society there is no need for public transport as everyone is out of a job. The more civilised the society the more redundant the transport system.

In the society I live in we have a problem. A portion of society (the affluent and civilised part) believe we have achieved utopia whilst a smaller and, dare I say, insignificant portion believe we are as close to the stone-age as we have ever been. Fortunately, the civilised portion of society have a majority of control and are busy dismantling the trappings of baser society in order to make room for evidence of true civilisation. The current project approaching completion is the creation of an ornamental transport system - whose purpose is purely for decoration. 

Unfortunately, the smaller baser portion of society insist on assuming the transport system is not ornamental and is meant for actual usage and are therefore constantly disappointed at the price and function of the system. Once this smaller useless portion of society realise the ornamental nature of the system and thus the true beauty of the fragile infrastructure they will (a) gladly pay small fortunes to support the system (d) realise the system is not for under-privileged and under-civilised drones and stop using it.

Improving Performance

Our fantastic public transport system has hit upon a brilliant approach to improving performance without sacrificing staff. The key is to out-source. Well actually, more like sell-off the poor performing routes. Then you can announce 100% improvement in the performance and have saved some money for yourself as well.

This only works if you sell-off the poor performing routes.

The current plan for our fantastic public transport system is to degrade the high-performing routes so they become low-performing routes through a number of measures:

• Rail improvement works - the methodology is to slowly improve the route such that it doesn't work anymore. Technically this is called degrading the route, but the clever public transport scientists have realised that by using the phrase Rail degradation works hedge fund traders would get wind of the idea and immediately amass huge numbers of options on the route that they can sell at a massive profit when the route is sold off.
• Personnel improvement - by decreasing the number of personnel at a station and ensuring the automation process that replaces the personnel is faulty this ensures that the station also becomes a poor performer and can be sold off. This technique works especially well for the buses where elimination of the ticket collector increased the un-safeness factor and then reducing/eliminating the bus drivers should ensure many buses do not run increasing the poor performance factor and hence the sell-off desirability.

In this way the sold off routes do not enter into the efficiency equation and daily reports can be announced to the grateful, stranded public that the public transport system is running a fantastic service. This should also guarantee justification for increasing the fares above the rate of decency to further carry out rail improvement works to further sell off and improve the service. 100% efficiency should be attained when the public transport system runs no routes.

Coffee time

I recently went into one of those chain coffee houses. I was mis-directed, I needed a new light-bulb and was helpfully directed to the nearest super-coffee-house. Indeed they do sell light bulbs (I thought only that only the burger bars sold them). It set me thinking about these coffee houses and why it is that they increase their repertoire of drinks.

Well, I believe I have discovered the reason: it is a well known fact that life is quantised and, everything has an infinity of possibilities until after the event (in which case it was obvious that it would be that and why would we think any different). Taking the quantum doctrine the coffee houses have determined that by offering a huge range of drinks (many unnatural) there is the remote possibility that one or two of them may turn out to be coffee. 

Based on this finding it should be easy for you to get the best coffee by following this simple procedure:

1) Wait until the number of drinks reaches no less than 5**e.

2) Wait until the queue length approaches infinity (a good approximation is roughly 15 persons). 

3) When making your order change your drink choice no less than 5 times and no more than 12 times.

4) Misspell your name by using all the characters of the previous person in the queue.

 

This recipe has been tested in 12 independent countries with statistically conclusive results (although your mileage may randomly vary since this is quantum).

How to reduce spending

Here where I live in the UK the Government is concerned. Apparently we have to save money. We need to save 40%. That may sound a lot, but there are ways to do it that are totally painless. Government think-tank (withoutAClue) have come up with the ingenious, thinking-outside-the-box idea of a scheme to achieve this cuts and even more. They have deduced a 40% cut in spending means spending 40% less a year. So, rather than spending for something now, if departments wait 40% longer they will have made a saving of 40%. For example, if I need to buy a pencil today what I do is to wait until tomorrow morning and then buy the pencil thus incurring a 40% saving.
If I wait little bit longer (say 70% of a day so I wait until tomorrow evening to buy my pencil) then I will save even more.

And the icing is: if the Government departments generate 40% more paperwork when purchasing something it will clearly take 40% longer to buy something. AND, we can employ 40% more people to make the saving. The logic and economics are flawless.

World cup Football

I have been watching the world cup and according to my analysis the French appear to have won. Well done. I very much enjoyed it. The tactics from the coach were excellent. He was right: if you argue you go home or you don't play. My way or the highway. I think that was right. Everyone chose the highway except for little Mercure (the very fast winger from Bordeaux) who was the only player not to choose the highway because he doesn't speak French and had to play South Africa on his own. Which was ok, but he didn't understand the
directions from the coach.
He scored 389 own-goals and 3 goals. I hope they will be back again.

What a Party!

Here in the UK we had an election. The system we have in the UK is called majority dictatorship and we have typically three companies that take part in this majority dictatorship. When a company wins the election there is no obligation to implement the contents of the manifesto (usually, they are written by the company lawyers with opt-outs and exceptions in case they win the election) and they have a mandate to run (or ruin) the country according to their own agenda. Their agenda usually consists of amassing as much money or power (which equates to money) as quickly as possible. That's the history and it works.

But, now something went wrong with part of the system and no company won. This could have been a problem, but the major shareholders in the UK had already foreseen such a possibility and had implemented additional systems that kick-in in this case. The new systems execute merger procedures which entail the company that won the most and the company that won the least to go into merger processes. This might seem a little strange since you may think that there are ideological differences. But, fortunately there are not. The merger processes first start with sitting around a large table with sandwiches and chanting 'what are we going to do now' 10 times. Only after that time does the merger start in earnest. The merger entails each manifesto being placed on a chairs roughly 10m apart. The party leaders run from chair to chair whilst music is playing and when the music stops they tear out a page of the manifesto and eat it. Only when one of the party leaders throws-up does the game stop. The vomiting leader is the deputy prime minister and the non-vomiting one is the leader. At this point the rest of the team take off their jackets and roll up their sleeves and each tear out pages from the manifestos and eat them until the entire manifestos are consumed.
At this point the merger is formed and the new merger company can now ignore the manifesto and get down to majority dictatorship in the interests of the country.