Holes and Air

Holes are critical to life. It's a fact. If you live in a large multi-cultural city like Bognor or smaller villages such as London you will have noticed that there are rather a lot of holes in the street that appear to be abandoned. Some of them have water spouting from them, or gas, or fire. In the small village where I live I have talked to the Council Scientists about this. They have told me that these holes are not Council or utlitities negligence, but are a critical part of modern life. They have told me that in order for a village or city to live and thrive it needs a certain number of holes. These holes allow the place to breathe. 

They told me that the number of holes goes roughly as 1:10 for every tax-paying citizen in that locale. Without these holes the environment would quickly shrivel-up and die. They told me that it costs a lot of money to dig these holes and keep them and even more money to compensate people, cars and animals that fall into them. 

So, next time you see what appears to be a neglected hole ignore it as it has a very specific function.

New Investment Opportunities

You, like me probably get a lot of junk mail sent to your place. There is one piece of mail coming around delivered by people in pinstriped suits that you may be interested in. It's to do with floating yourself on the stock market. Investment banks are currently bored with the existing set of assets they can invest in and want to invest in you. This means that they are interested in you paying them to make money out of you.

 

Sounds interesting?

 

Here's how it works. First, they take out options on aspects of your working day. Such as how long it takes you to get to work and how much you spend on food etc. And then they sell those options to other institutions at a marked up price and then they short those options and then hedge against your failing to keep your job and failing to get to work on time. Then they hire people to make sure there are enough hurdles in your way so that their simulations of your working day are correct (you may have noticed new hurdles and obstacles in the way of you getting anything useful done already).

 

Ideally you should be given the opportunity to invest in yourself (technically called self-investment or in-investment), but it's not cheap, buying shares in yourself means hiring a financial management person to tell you that shares in you will go up and down like a yo-yo for a hefty price. You will also need to pay for an financial auditor to come and check that you are not carrying out any insider trading and are completly ignorant of anything that can affect you.

New Year Resolutions

We have conversed with a team of economical and political scientists in order to extract a few salient markers for the coming year. They have worked hard and ignored all the present events and weather in order to come up with these predictions. Here they are (in reverse order):

1) France realise their president is a mushroom and resign en masse. During the year an enterprising investigative journalist pieces together several facts about the incumbent president: he seems to only be seen in dark damp places. He seems to be seen mainly at night. He has a mortal fear of steak and chips. Using a complex computer program and a bag of peanuts he concludes that the president is a mushroom and publishes the findings. France, who like to see their champignon in hors d'ouvres and not addressing the nation, are disgusted and refuse to get up in the morning.

2) Berlusconi returns. The special one realises that he performed miracles during his term as first minister of Italy and is identified as the reincarnation of Buddha by a complex computer simulation program. He takes up the mantle, replaces the pope as the grand father of the world and converts Italy and the world to Roman-Buddhism. His first task is to appoint all the weather girls in Italy as Roman-Buddhist high priests. RAI TV broadcasts his mantras 24hr daily.

3) Greece makes a massive financial turnaround as they find the entire debt behind the back of a sofa in the waiting room of the presidents palace after being guided there by his holiness Berlusconi.

4) Germany convinced of world-wide depression and gloom does what all good people do in times of crisis and bakes an enormous cake covering the entire country. It provides employment for the entire country during the baking process (which goes through many iterations until head chef Merkel is happy). The cake forms a protective layer over the country insulating it from the economic gloom. The head chef is hailed as a miracle worker and sent to the most dangerous parts of the world to see if she can work a miracle there.

5) The UK government solves the financial crisis by considering every person with any debt as a foreigner. The steps solve the financial, health and housing crisis simultaneously by classifying every single citizen as foreign apart from a refugee Swiss dictator.

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).