I Know How Kevin Phillips Feels
It is being reported that Kevin Phillips penalty kick in the Championship Play-Off Final was worth £120,000,000.
I know to a certain amount how he feels today.
I was part of the team that sold Metier Management Systems to Lockheed for a similar sum in 1985., although with inflation it’s probably worth a lot more today.
As we went about the pre-sales process, we realised we had good methods and software, but everything was rather boring. So I was asked if I could create a version of Artemis with style and charisma. I did nothing else for six weeks, except write software, eat and sleep occasionally, but the result was that we received a lot more money, than we had decided we would accept.
It was the software and business equivalent of Kevin Phillips’s spot kick.
I also have two other characteristics that I share with Kevin. We’re both about the same height of 1.70 metres and we both performed our most important feats at just under forty years of age. He also is a man from North Hertfordshire, whereas I was brought up in that part of London, that used to have a Barnet, Herts postal address.
Google, Amazon, Starbucks Etc. And Tax
Google’s Eric Schmidt says he is perplexed in this article about the debate on his company’s tax status.
I’m not, as what these companies do is fraud.
Not necessarily on Corporation Tax, but with respect to VAT.
If say I go into John Lewis and buy say a television, I will pay VAT on the purchase. If I buy it from Amazon, I’ll probably pay some fiddled VAT rate, which will make it cheaper.
My belief is that by doing transfers like this, companies like Amazon are hurting genuine UK businesses. Andy Street of John Lewis is saying just that here.
So it should be that if you buy a television and it’s delivered in the UK, then the VAT rate should be 20%.
But Eric Schmidt is against this and is quoted in the BBC article.
The Google chairman has previously argued that corporate taxes should be paid on a company’s profits, not revenues, and should be levied in the country where it conducts economic activity and takes risks, rather than where products are consumed.
The trouble with Google, is there is no alternative, to some of the things they do.
On the other hand, I don’t use Amazon, Apple, Starbucks and quite a few other companies.
Bankers Don’t Get It Do They!
My bank, Nationwide, has just made me an offer. If I pay them ten pounds a month, I get a special account, which gives me the following benefits.
- Free worldwide travel insurance for you and your family, including winter sports, golf, wedding and business cover
- Free Worldwide mobile phone insurance
- Free UK & European breakdown cover
- 3% AER (2.96% gross p.a.) variable in-credit interest on balances up to £2,500
Is this a joke?
They say it’s designed to make my life simple.
Let’s take each point.
Starting with the travel insurance.
I don’t have any family, who are dependent on me. I don’t do winter sports or golf. I don’t have any plans to get married and my business, if I have anything is enjoying myself.
I suppose I do need some form of travel insurance, but at the moment, I’ve no plans to go outside of an area, where I get decent healthcare on my EHIC.
The mobile phone insurance is irrelevant, as I use a £10 phone for my communications. If I lost it, I’d just buy another in the nearest O2 shop for a tenner.
Is the third point about breakdown insurance serious? I don’t have a car.
But I reserve my highest condemnation for the derisory interest rate on savings. I’m getting a safeguarded five percent on over a hundred thousand pounds with Zopa. So it’s not government guaranteed, but the company is run by people with intelligence and not a wunch of bankers.
There is no mention of the features I would like.
- Text messages every time, a transaction over a particular amount happens on a credit card or bank account.
- Annotated statements, that allow me to comment on transactions. Taken to its logical conclusion, you could even add a cost code, which could then be used by software to create a simple set of accounts.
- Full tracing on cashpoints, I’ve used. I’ve noticed that the records of those I used in Switzerland are much more detailed than the one I used yesterday in Islington.
- Customisation of my bank account, so that I set levels for alerts, withdrawals etc.
There is an opportunity out there and the first bank to go that way, gets my business.
The Anti-Fraud Advantage Of Sites Like Zopa
If you wanted to get money out of someone else’s bank account, all you need to do is login to their computer and have the equipment necessary to perform a transfer.
My bank account is probably as secure as any other, but I never keep my card reader and the card together. Admittedly, all card readers for Nationwide are the same, but my passwords are only written in my brain.
But if you did manage to login, you could perform a transfer to your bank account, but it would probably require me to give in to threats to release the passwords.
But with a site like Zopa or Ratesetter and probably many others, where the only transfer out of the account can be to the bank account, where the money came from in the first place, you’d have quite a problem getting round the security measures. The very fact, that they exist, would probably mean you’d try to crack a more mainstream system, like an account with one of the major banks.
It illustrates how often a simple absolute rule, is often a much more secure method of protection, than something based on complicated hardware and tortuous passwords.
Giles Andrews On Zopa
I found this article on Wired, which is an interview of Giles Andrews, the CEO of Zopa; the peer-to-peer lender.
Read it, remember the salient points and if you don’t swallow the message about the banks, you don’t deserve to have your savings protected. Take this statement from Giles.
A lot of banking is in a black box and consumers don’t really know what happens. Give your money to Barclays, in a savings account, and god knows that happens to it. Is it going half way round the world to buy some weird book of securities, or is it being lent to a small business in Sheffield?
A lot of people put their money in the Co-operative Bank because of reasons like this.
Do Banks Design Systems To Trap Us Into Extra Payments?
Twice now in the last three months, I’ve been late with credit card payments. Nothing serious, but I got an extra charge of £12.00. I think it happened, as did the other one, because I tend to pay my credit cards all at the same time at the end of the month, when my American Express Card comes in and I’ve just had my pension payment.
So as I was flush at that time, I paid off most of the debt on the card. But apparently, I paid too early in the last accounting period or something.
The last time, it happened on another card, they phoned me to say why hadn’t I paid. When I said what about the extra payment they gave it back.
But how many of us, get caught out by rules, that need to be read by a lawyer with a fine tooth comb?
What would help, would be the ability to define your payment date on your credit card. I seem to remember doing this many years in the past. Zopa incidentally, allows this when you borrow and even allows you to change the date, due to a change of circumstances.
In some ways I’m getting my own back. For travel, hotels and large purchases, I now use my American Express card and for small ones, I now use cash. The problem is Waitrose, where their self-service tills don’t take cash. Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury, who both have better tills, do.
Peer-to-Peer Lending In The Times
There is a good review of peer-to-peer lending in The Times today. One of the most significant things of the piece is that Google has taken a small stake in Lending club. There’s more on the Google deal here.
The banks might not like it, but the writing is on the wall.
Today, I’ve started to move my working deposit account to Zopa.
A Bail-Out Too Far
The Sunday Times is reporting that because of the big fire at Daw Mill, UK Coal is close to collapse. The story is also here in the Newcastle Journal.
For many decades now, I’ve been against the mining of coal and its use as a fuel. My objection probably stems more from the dangers of mining, the bad disasters of my childhood years and recollections of a few former miners, that I’ve met, and not from any political reasons. When global warming became known, it just reinforced my views that we should get rid of this dangerous and polluting fuel.
If we don’t put UK Coal out of its misery this time, we’ll only be delaying the inevitable for a few years, as some other problem will come along.
A New Superwheat
You’d think as a coeliac, I would not be in favour of the new superwheat developed at Cambridge as reported on the BBC.
British scientists say they have developed a new type of wheat which could increase productivity by 30%.
The Cambridge-based National Institute of Agricultural Botany has combined an ancient ancestor of wheat with a modern variety to produce a new strain.
But I think this is a victory for traditional high-class science. As I understand it, after hearing the scientist on the radio, the combining of the two plants was done using the sort of methods, that have been used for years. Albeit with some clever seed incubation. No direct manipulation of the genes was involved.
So as this could give a yield increase of 30%, what would happen if these methods were applied to the other staple crops of the world.
Sadly, the problem is that, the Cambridge route doesn’t make any money for the big corporations of this world, who feel that the GM route is much more profitable.
I am not totally against GM, but it has to be used ethically and where it is demonstrated that it the only way to create an important product, such as a new cancer drug.
What Shall We Do With The Royal Mail?
I get very little useful mail today and haven’t for about ten years. My friends either, e-mail, text or phone me and all of my banks, utilities are on line. The only important post I get is tickets for various events, I’ve ordered on-line or by telephone and the odd small package delivered by the postman, like my INR test strips.
Most of the rest of the mail is junk usually addressed to the Occupier of my house. Make non-specific junk mail illegal and the Royal Mail would go bust. The worst offenders are estate agents and Virgin Media. I think I’ll get some cards printed, that I can post to the worst offenders, saying they will be charged £50 for wasting my time, if they send anything more.
Incidentally, I do post letters more regularly than I used to, as I have a post box on the corner.
Most of us love the Royal Mail and in rural and sparsely populated areas, I will admit, they do perform a regular social service. But where I live now in Hackney, I wouldn’t even recognise my postman, if I sat next to him in a pub or cafe. We though have a guy, who performs that low-level social service. We have this very accommodating guy, who keeps the streets clean and tidy, with his barrow and he always wishes you a hello and how are you, every time, you meet him on the street.
The real problem, I have is with parcels and packets, delivered by all of the companies and not just Parcelforce and Royal Mail. Usually, they come early in the morning, when I am still here, but often I return to find a card through the door.
Royal Mail/Parcelforce are in a strong position to create a proper on-line tracking service, as they are generally trusted.
You would need to register your name and address on their site, so that if you were getting a parcel delivery, they could send you an e-mail to say it was coming. I know some on-line vendors do this, but it often means logging in to a site and entering a tracking number, which means you have to have on-line skills.
Obviously, you wouldn’t always get an e-mail before it arrived, but you could have standing instructions like leave with number 27 or something similar.
A properly designed system would make it more efficient and probably save the Royal Mail money.
The first courier that gets it right and completes the loop between supplier and customer, will make a fortune and clean up.
Privatisation is not the cure, but augmenting the local link with technology may just be.
Just look at how easy it is to track trains and collect tickets at stations, compared to say ten years ago.
The Anonymous Widower 