How To Fit A Toilet
I’m thinking about using a Geberit Monolith toilet in my house.
My builder and I liked the video about installation.
But you don’t buy a toilet because of the video! On the other hand, you might, if you were installing it yourself.
You’re Never Too Stupid To Do Science!
I like this story about Sir John Gurdon. Eton College told him he was too stupid to do science and now he goes and wins a Nobel Prize.
I could have titled this post, You’re Never Too Stupid To Do Anything!
In my case, an English teacher, told me I’d never pass my O Level in the subject. I just did, but now, I’ve self-published a couple of books, written stories and had letters in several publications.
It’s probably still not good, as people say I use too many commas and shrieks. Shriek is printer’s slang for exclamation mark. Or it was my father’s! Wikipedia says this.
The name given to “!” by programmers varies according to their background. In the UK the term pling was popular in the earlier days of computing, whilst in the USA the term shriek was used. It is claimed that these word usages were invented in the US and shriek is from Stanford or MIT; however, shriek for the ! sign is found in the Oxford English Dictionary dating from the 1860s.
My father had never been to the United States, so it must have come from his printing background somewhere. His father was also a printer.
The Biggest Cannabis Plant In The World
This story just has to be passed on. Here’s the first paragraph.
An elderly couple have unwittingly grown the “biggest cannabis plant” police officers had seen after buying what they thought was an innocuous shrub from a car boot sale.
The question also has to be asked, as to whether the seller in the sale, knew what they were selling.
I don’t think, I’d know what a cannabis plant looked like.
NatWorst Opens The Door To The Fraudsters
Natwest have brought in a system called Get Cash based on a mobile phone app. But according to this on the BBC’s web site, it’s all started to backfire.
It looks to me that the Get Cash app is just too easy a target for fraudsters and it appears to me as a humble programmer and system designer, that they used programmers and designers, who didn’t understand the criminal mind.
If my bank offers me a mobile phone app to do my banking or use a credit card, the answer is no, no a thousand times no!
Incidentally, the computer that does my banking, never leaves my house and sits behind a door with a powerful lock on it.
I usually only draw out cash from a small number of cash machines fairly close to my house or at the Angel.
Carluccio’s Christmas Menu
When you are a coeliac in a group at an office or other place of work, you are often the only one and when Christmas comes, it is a source of tension and often unhappiness about where you have the Christmas lunch.
Carluccio’s this year have come up with a Christmas menu, that has a choice of turkey, sausage and lentils, cod, steak or two risottos. Only the turkey is not gluten-free. This is the menu for my local restaurant in Islington.
I think they’ve come up with a Christmas menu for everybody.
Do We Need A Royal College Of Teaching?
This question is raised in a news item in The Times today.
After all most professions have them and it could easily be argued that they raise the status of their professions.
In some ways, it’s strange that one doesn’t exist already.
The Gun Lobby Says No
As always the gun lobby in the UK is resisting attempts to change their sport for the good of others. In this case, it’s about the use of lead shot, which has been shown to kill birds like mallards which think it’s food and eat it. The story is here on the BBC.
The arguments put up by the shooting lobby are rather spurious in my opinion and would not be put forward by most of my friends who shoot. I used to know one old colonel, who for instance used to go shooting rabbits with a hi-tech air rifle, as he felt it was more skilful than using a shot-gun. He also got something more appetising for the pot.
We Mustn’t Forget Old Techniques
As someone, who grew up in a letterpress printing works in Wood Green, I welcome stories like this.
Abelardo Gonzalez has developed a font for those who suffer from dyslexia and it seems to work.
I don’t suffer from dyslexia, but I do have slightly sub-standard eyesight and know that reading some fonts is easier than others.
Transport for London would also agree, as years ago they developed a special clear typeface for travellers called New Johnston. It’s even on the destination boards of buses.
I also think that I do better in eye tests than I should, because of all that time I spent setting up type and especially the very small ones like 6 pt. I think sometimes my father gave me those pieces to do, as my eyes and dexterity as a child were very good.
The Big Difference Between Men And Women
I can always remember from my student days, that if you had a flat full of females, they often worked out to the nearest d., who paid what for things like food. Males usually didn’t bother with exact mathematics.
So fifty years later in a curry house tonight, I was surprised to see two about eighteen-year-old female students doing what C always remarked girls did.
I wonder why this difference exists! And hasn’t changed!
Some Financial Ramblings About Wonga
I’ve never liked Wonga, ever since I saw a presentation of it at an Internet awards ceremony a few years ago.
There is an article in the Sunday Times today, which gives a few figures about the company. It apparently lent £375m last year and has made a debt provision of more than £66m. Or about 17.6 %.
That is a high figure and is totally out of line with good, well-run and profitable finance companies. I used to part-own one and our bad debt ratio was if I remember correctly about five percent. Which was well below the industry average at the time.
I also have my own figures from Zopa, where I invest money to lend to third parties. My bad debt to invested money ratio has never exceeded one percent. But I do have a fairly conservative lending policy.
I have done extensive financial modelling in the area of finance companies and like to think, I know why well-run ones make a lot of money.
The first rule is to only lend to those with good credit ratings. Here, Zopa and Wonga are two very different animals.
Zopa creams the top of the market, acts like a normal finance company to borrowers and cuts its investors in on the deal. In fact, I wonder how many Zopa borrowers think of Zopa as a cheap source of finance with excellent terms and conditions?
Wonga on the other hand is a bottom feeder, targeting those with problems and might well look like a loan shark to many possible customers.
Other lenders like say Nationwide, Lloyds and the other reputable banks and finance companies are closer to Zopa, but probably not as much as they’d like to be.
The second rule is making sure that borrowers keep their payments up. Wonga don’t seem to be doing this judging by the bad debt ratio of 17.6 %, whereas Zopa is probably much better than the average for a reputable bank or finance company,judging by my experience. My ex-partner in the finance company feels that the Zopa figures are better than any he’s seen.
Wonga’s model is different to any other finance company. Banks and in effect, Zopa, get their money back over a period of time, typically measured in months or years. Whereas Wonga, probably gets it back in days, so the money goes round and round in the course of a year. Or it should do!
You might consider that Wonga is a money rental company, rather than a lender. Even if it is one of last resort.
At present the Wonga model seems to be working, with a profit of about £26 on each transaction, of which the average size is £150. The Sunday Times doesn’t give the average length of each loan. Estimating what a typical reputable company might make on each deal, it looks like Wonga are really making quite a bit more money!
But there are two sides to every financial equation; money in and money out.
We ran our finance company on a very lean basis and if you are reputable and you get the business you need to grow the business as you want, then you don’t really need to spend too much money on things like advertising or promotion, as your customers do that for you. Even the banks don’t spend much on promoting their loan services! But they are uniquely placed to sell their loans with a big branch network.
Wonga are really spending it, judging by the adverts and the sponsorship you see. Recently, it has been announced that they are pursuing a sponsorship deal at Newcastle United. Remember that the world of personal finance is littered with companies that thought they had a better model, but in fact didn’t. I’m old enough to have seen quite a few!
Wonga’s financial model seems to rely on putting your name in front of as many mugs as you can to carry out its bottom feeding.
If you compare Wonga with any reputable finance company, it would be unlikely that the latter would fall into trouble over its borrowers, as it would probably treat them fairly and respectfully. Using Zopa as an example, it only lends to those with good credit ratings, makes no charges to those, who don’t get loans and generally charges a lower interest rate.
Wonga too, has already aroused the ire of some politicians like Stella Creasy over its policies and high interest rates. Politicians it should be said, need easy targets, like bankers with huge bonuses and payday lenders. Wonga in particular is a very easy target.
My financial modelling experience though does lead me to an important conclusion.
Wonga’s model will only generate profits, whilst there is a large pool of willing borrowers. At present there are obviously enough, but as more and more suffer because of defaulting to Wonga, will the general public get the message that has been preached by the papers, like the Sun here and learn to use alternative sources of credit, like credit unions. Or in fact will they, just manage their finances better?
I gave the example of the Sun, as it is more likely to be the paper of choice of a possible Wonga borrower. On the other hand, there are some nice pieces about Wonga in the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Mail and the Mirror It is also interesting to read some of the comments on a report of the Newcastle United sponsorship deal in the Newcastle Journal.
There is another big difference between the model Zopa and other reputable banks and finance companies use and that of Wonga. The former rely heavily on personal recommendations from satisfied customers to get business. Wonga would probably like to too, but with their high admitted default rate, the number of recommendations would be lower, especially if you’re being chased by them for the money.
So this all makes me think that at some time, Wonga will be unable to sustain the current growth. Especially, if legislation to limit their interest rates of over two thousand percent was passed by parliament.
I wonder whether they have already found the limit to growth, given the Newcastle United deal and the fact that the annoying bus adverts in London have reappeared in large numbers. After all what is a shirt sponsorship deal, but getting your company’s name in thousands of places on the street. If you are selling a quality product like say Emirates, Samsung, Standard Chartered or Waitrose, it doesn’t probably matter having thousands of football fans promoting your brand, but if you’re a payday lender, it might just be counter-productive It would be very informative to read a learned paper on the effectiveness of shirt sponsorship.
The Anonymous Widower 