SteveStreeting.com

Well, you’ve got to accept that Pope Benedict XVI isn’t afraid to tell people what he thinks.

The recent furore about his comments that the church should be exempt from UK equality laws, because it would “impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs” is pretty chilling. Cue a shot of loads of people on the street with banners saying that Catholics should have the ‘freedom’ to discriminate against gay and transgender individuals because of their beliefs. The message: that strongly-held beliefs should exempt you from having to adhere to the same rules of equality as everyone else, and to discriminate against anyone you like so long as you believe it’s right, or that a book (or rather,  your interpretation of it) tells you that it’s ok.

I’m amazed that some people can’t see the blatantly obvious flaw in this argument. If strongly held beliefs were a viable excuse for treating other people badly, then most of the atrocities in the last century could be excused too, if the people committing them truly believed their doctrine of choice advocated it. Where’s the line? I suspect the answer is ‘wherever the Pope wants it to be’.

A bigot in a fancy robe and quoting doctrine is still a bigot. There is never any excuse for treating your fellow human beings as anything other than equals, and if your religion tells you otherwise, you might want to update your thinking by, I don’t know, maybe a couple of thousand years or so. The rest of society’s moved on a tad in that time, such us not hacking each other apart with swords, or burning people at the stake for curing the local donkey. Being a decent human being to other people regardless of their race/sexual orientation etc kinda came out of that whole transition – you might want to give it a shot sometime.

There was a time when patents represented innovation. Thanks to the relaxing of patent rules as championed by the US patent office in a blatant attempt to curry favour with dubious business interests, and make a bit of money at the same time, those days are gone.

These days, patents are a tool for those who have no business model other than litigation, either because their primary business model failed, or by design because filing patents and hoping a lawsuit or three will stick (or rather, be settled out of court) is easier than actually building something good.

Inventors are supposed to be builders of things, things that astound and amaze us, and that further the interests of humankind as a whole. Patents should protect their genuine innovations. But now, for every genuine invention that’s patented, there are a thousands of restatements of ideas that have been sloshing around the IT world for the last 30 years. It seems that now, to be an inventor and make money from patents, you just need a lawyer, a web browser, a bit of seed funding and the ability to fill in a few forms. The pool of human knowledge does not expand, and the resulting patent lawsuits positively put a drain on the people who are actually going out there and trying to make ideas work in practice. You know, the doing part. The making it work part. Not just sitting on your arse filing paperwork.

Whenever I see yet another failed company trying to pretend it has value from its highly vague and often derivative patent portfolio and attacking companies that are actually out there creating stuff people like, I want to stab all the world’s patent lawyers in the face with a biro. The world is terribly, terribly screwed up when we reward people for savvy administrative & legal navigation over, I don’t know, doing something that matters.

There are too many vested interests in the industry for people to actually own up and admit that a huge proportion of the patents being registered are piles of steaming horse manure, especially since they’re paying their lawyers handsomely to produce it – even those who produce them ‘defensively’ are just as bad. The more they produce of it, the more it stinks up the place for everyone. In London repeated cholera epidemics finally made authorities deal with the Big Stink, we could do with the equivalent in IT instead of the big players merely brushing the problem under the carpet (mostly because they don’t want to lose their own expensive portfolios from their balance sheet), metaphorically walking past with scented hankerchiefs under their noses.

I’ve watched with some entertainment the latest round of scraps across the pond about health care, which has now turned into a Brit-bashing exercise. Apparantly the NHS is ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Evil’ (allegedly that particular accusation was from the eminent scholar and international expert Sarah Palin) according to the American right-wing – which, when perceived from this side of the Atlantic constitutes most of the political spectrum compared to what is considered centrist here – all of which is news to most people in Britain, barring the usual suspects on the fringes of the Conservative party that their own leader would like to disown, but who always turn up on American TV because no-one listens to them over here.

I live in a Crown Dependency which unfortunately doesn’t benefit from the NHS, and frankly I’d love to have it over here, instead of paid-for primary care and state-run specialist care as we have (I’ve spent an awful lot of money on physios and doctors over the years). My parents moved back to the mainland a few years back and have had nothing but positive experiences with the NHS since; when we were visiting, my Mum was taken ill late at night and an NHS doctor was on the scene at her home within 45 minutes, all for no charge – something you would pay through the nose for here. It’s not perfect, but frankly IMO anyone who considers it optimal to have profit interests involved in the process of saving lives is either smoking something, or has a vested interest.

But, regardless of your point of view, it’s the blatant lies which are most amusing. My favourite is this quote from the editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, a national American financial newspaper:

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,”

For goodness sakes, who writes this nonsense? Prof. Hawking has lived in the UK all his life, and has hit back himself at this article explaining that he’s around today precisely because of the NHS, not despite it. Clearly facts are irrelevant when it comes to reinforcing your personal point of view. They’ve tried to take it back, but it just makes them look a little more stupid, especially casually tossing the word ‘Colony’ in there to somehow bolster the emotive side of the argument (taking speech tips from Mugabe now? not smart). Stephen Hawking was ‘a bad example’? In other words, they’re just making it up.

So, in our local juristiction we’re finally having the discussion about retirement age, ie raising it to 67 by 2031, and probably higher than that later (not mentioned yet, but it’s bound to happen). Somehow, this is a shock to some people.

The fact is that the welfare system, retirement packages, and  even the economy in general were just not constructed on the understanding that an increasing number of people would be retired for up to one third of their life. The retirement age of 65 was set on the understanding that not everyone would make it, and those that did would maybe have 5-10 years, it just can’t cope with people being retired for 20-25 years on average, as it will almost certainly be in 20 years time.

I actually think 67 is being conservative – I’m personally expecting to have to work until I’m 70, and provided I still have my marbles, I’d actually welcome that in many ways; I do think that being active keeps you sharp, and work-related things for me are the best way to stay on the ball. I also think that we need to think differently about retirement; in the days of people living longer I don’t think a simplistic 2-speed arrangement – ‘work’ and ‘retirement’ – really fits with how people live anymore. In practice, a lot of people switch careers one or more times, quit and start businesses, take a gear shift when their kids grow up or their mortgage is paid off, all before ‘proper’ retirement, so how about supporting that kind of multi-stage transition in the ‘retirement’ structure? People in the armed forces or police have that sort of arrangement already; they generally retire from the service with a pension in their late forties or early fifties, and then carry on doing something else between then and state retirement, allowing them some level of security while still being economically active. That sort of ’staged’ approach seems more suitable to me in a situation where people are living longer lives.

What’s clear though is that things can’t stay the way they are; people who thought the current retirement age could continue as it is were frankly being incredibly naive. In the end, would you rather:

• Work longer
• Pay higher taxes
• Be forced to smoke 40-a-day, or partake in high-risk recreational activites to thin the ranks?

Them’s your choices

Over my years in working in the IT business, one thing that’s a constant is that we’re never short of talk about the latest “Process” that we should be following. There have been a shedload of them over the years I’ve been doing this, and I’ve tried a load of them out and encountered them via third parties, and while some are interesting and useful when taken as a basis for adaption to individual circumstances, one thing I absolutely cannot stand is the kind of people that focus on this as a proof or guarantee that their projects are being run well.

Anyone who has dealt with a large consultancy firm will have encountered the scenario – that they of course tick all the boxes and fulfil all the paper requirements of procedure and ‘best practice’, but when push comes to shove all that really matters is what individual you get doing the job in the end. All the procedures and accreditation in the world will not change the fact that if you get some of the pieces of dead wood in the company, you’re screwed – it’s just that the process of becoming screwed will be handled with the appropriate paper trail and procedural tick-boxes. Conversely from the same company you can get some absolute stars who totally carry the project and make it much better than it would be otherwise. What difference did the process make to this outcome? At best, if it was a good process it might have oiled the wheels – often the opposite is true of course, especially with large bureaucracies. Good people will function well with no process, and may function better with an efficient, lightweight process, whilst bad people will do just as badly with any process and may well enjoy hiding behind the more complicated ones when things don’t work.

This isn’t an argument for not adopting reasonable processes – like I say they can oil the wheels when they’re appropriately deployed. Rather, this is about recognising that they are entirely secondary to the qualities of the people involved. I really wish more people would recognise this truth instead of pretending they can rubber-stamp an organisation with universal seal of quality through processes alone. People matter. What those people believe in and are motivated by matters. Process – it’s really just icing. It makes management types feel better, and allows them to believe they’re doing due diligence when vetting companies, but in the real world, it’s nothing but a helping hand.

What made me think of this today? Banking, oddly – specifically the FSA talking about how much of a pigs-ear they’d made of banking sector regulation. They were ticking all the boxes, making sure bosses didn’t have criminal records, tidying up the minutiae – but not once did they ask whether the principles of what was going on at the banks were at all questionable. They just assumed that bankers would act rationally, and all they had to do was check the processes were in place, whether reporting was in place, the right number of risk managers were on board etc. And here too, it’s proven that process doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things – what matters is the people you have doing the job, and what their principles and motivations are. No process is going to save you if the people don’t have the right stuff – and the FSA have rather belated realised that as they watch the ashes of the economy smoulder because they let a group of unprincipled, reckless, money-grabbing banking executives continue to run the show, just because they had the right paper trail.

I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties of late, not because I don’t have anything to say (it takes strong gaffer tape to achieve that particular result), but I just seem to be juggling a lot of stuff at once right now and there’s always something else to be doing. This post is therefore for those who have been missing my particular brand of opinionated rambling.

I recently watched Dave Gorman’s America Unchained. For those who aren’t familiar with the man, he’s a British alternative comedian / stand-up whose work includes such classics as Are  You Dave Gorman? and Googlewhack Adventure, both of which I highly recommend. In this instance, Dave decided to try to cross North America without paying any money to any ‘chain’ – every business he patronised had to be an independent, ‘Mom and Pop’ set-up.  That meant no staying in Holiday Inns, no buying petrol (gas) from chain-owned gas stations, no Starbucks or McDonalds. Having an affinity to independent business myself it sounded like a pretty interesting premise.

As it turned out, the film wasn’t as entertaining as his previous work, but it raised some fascinating issues about society and modern culture. He originally decided to embark on the journey because on a previous whistlestop tour through America, he’d lamented that by staying in chain hotels and often eating at chain restaurants, he got absolutely no feel for the individual character of a particular region – everything was homogenised, standard. This is increasingly the case wherever you go – high streets that have all the usual suspects lined up along them, all containing all the same products that you’ll find anywhere else. Why is it that, as a culture, we seem to approve of this removal of individuality, and excessive standardisation of our consumptive environment?

Ok, cost is one issue. Big chains can buy in bulk and sell cheaper (although not all operate like this of course – some sell at quite ridiculous prices). But I think it’s about far more than that.

I’ve said I’m something of a fan of independent business. I hate just about every major fast-food chain and have experienced first-hand the soul-sapping experience of staying in a chain hotel in a foreign country. However, if there was one chink in this armour (ignoring Amazon for a minute), then that was Starbucks. Earlier in the life of my coffee appreciation arc, I was a big fan of Starbucks, and would seek it out wherever I saw it, wherever I was in the world. Why? It wasn’t because it was cheap – their prices are ridiculous. I was because I knew I liked it. It was a safe, easy option, guaranteed – and I’m convinced that deep down, this is the primary factor for most people who unfailingly patronise chains. As time has gone on, however, I’ve discovered that by seeking out Starbucks rather than something else, I’ve risked missing out on broadening my experience. Going elsewhere sometimes means a dud, but that’s the risk you take. These days, I’ll drink Starbucks (although it never seems to taste as good as it used to, probably because I’ve broadened my palate), but the fact that I know precisely what it’s like actually means I’m less likely to buy it if there are other options now. Been there, done that – let’s try something else. Happily, the best take-out coffee in my local town is an independent (‘Woodies’, who also source their blends locally), but actually my favourite coffee is now my own; because I have the equipment to make good espresso and I regularly experiment with different beans.

Ok, amateur psychology time. So one of the factors I think is in play here is that our modern lives are so fast, so competitive, so turbulent, so mobile, so devoid of the predictability that previous generations encountered (discounting war and famine of course), that we cling more to any kind of perceived rock of stability and certainty that we can find. In an age where consumerism so dominates our existence, surely it’s very natural that some of the things we cling desperately to in the storm are brands. If your life is fast, tough and regularly complex and challenging, maybe it’s nice not to have to think quite so hard about where you get your coffee, where you got to eat, where you buy  your clothes. Maybe in the past, with a slower pace of life, people had the time to build one-to-one relationships with local, independent traders and evaluate things individually – but when you’re moving around and have so much else to think about, fast, easy decisions with a predictable outcome are no doubt attractive. It sort of reminds me of speed dating – no time to consider the subtleties, just get the process done fast.

Personally, I think looking down a high street in any place in the world and seeing 90% country-wide or worldwide chains is pretty depressing. It represents a homogenisation of the world, a removal of individuality, and a ceding of personal, local character to faceless, amorphous giants. I agree with Dave Gorman that we should lament the steady decline of ‘Mom and Pop’ businesses, which may be less predictable, non-standard and quirky, but that’s part of the charm.

I live on an island that often gets bad press for being a ‘tax haven’. Those in the local financial services industry don’t like that term of course, pointing out how standards-compliant the finance industry is, and how many information exchange agreements we have with other countries (the line ‘the lady doth protest too much’ bubbles to the surface in some people’s minds I’m sure at this stage). So, we’re not technically a tax haven according to the OECD definition, but we’re certainly a place for people to stash their money and avoid paying tax on the income they derive from it in the juristictions in which they live. There’s no getting around the wider political debates about whether that’s a morally respectable position to take, particularly that the reason taxes can be so low is that the state doesn’t have to pay for defense, which is sponged from the UK government, provides precious little in the way of healthcare, and generally takes a right-wing policy route that seems to actively promote social division, but let’s leave that for the moment. Obviously being somewhat of a left-leaner I find it all slightly distasteful and am quite grateful my career path has so far kept me doing other things. I don’t deride people for choosing to be involved in that business – it’s their choice, and certainly it pays better than most of the alternatives in a small locality, but for a little while now (certainly since developing my own political opinions rather than inheriting them from the community around me) I’ve felt much better to be ‘aligned’ with the goals of whatever organisation I’m spending my working time with. Seems to me that we spend so much of our lives working, it probably ought to be for something we actually believe in, and I personally can’t say I have any significant motivation to help people avoid paying tax. While I can, I’ll keep doing other things, although increasingly our local government doesn’t seem very interested in seriously promoting much else.

However, I have been dismayed with one of the latest developments locally which are supposedly ‘branching out’ beyond financial services, because it’s actually worse - our IP law has been revised now so that patents from any juristiction can be re-registered locally to obtain the same protection (previously, it only applied to IP registered in the UK  I believe). Simple enough, except that articles in our local news have been chest-beating about it specifically with reference to the fact that now, patents that wouldn’t be valid in the UK can now be registered, so long as they are valid in another juristiction – and in particular they singled out business method patents as registered in the US, which are currently not allowed in the UK. They’re happy that ‘asset holders’ can now ‘bolster their protection’ by re-registering their ‘IP’ even though the UK would have thrown it out as worthless.

Ugh. One of the things I was proud about in the UK is that bullshit patents on business methods weren’t valid. I was happy that total nonsense like the Amazon 1-Click patent and it’s ilk were deemed not to be valid inventions, for they are widely acknowledged to suppress innovation and play directly into the hands of patent trolls. The world is blighted by people who register widely known techniques as patents with a registrar who is so ignorant and/or compromised by conflicting interests that they’re incapable of acknowledging the prior art, and an entire industry wastes precious resources either fighting patent spam, or building their own equally rancid pile of patents as a self-defense mechanism, all instead of actually inventing significant things, or you know, making great products that stand up in their own right. If even half the time that went into the overheads of establishing, debating, licensing and fighting low-brow, pointless patents was spent on the creative process, who knows how much we’d actually advance the human race. Instead, that effort gets spent on lawyers instead – it’s no wonder that the people lauding these ‘advances’ are from that particular profession.

At a time when everyone else, even big companies like Microsoft in the US, are recognising that software / business method patents are proving corrosive to the industry, locally our law makers are puffing themselves up over having allowed such nonsense to happen here too.

But hey, it’ll make a quick buck, both for the registrar and for our local legal firms, so it’s ok right? Favouring the financially convenient over the holistically respectable seems a common line around here. I despair sometimes.

We all know that the economy is badly screwed. And this isn’t just some country-specific problem, it’s economic buggery on a global scale, thanks to the wonders of a joined-up international banking system run by people who thought they were a lot smarter than they actually were. “Gold rushes” always collapse eventually, it’s just that in this case the gold rush knew no national boundaries and when it ended, everyone is left with a hangover, even (or perhaps even especially) the people that didn’t benefit stratospherically from the good times.

It’s already getting ugly, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

Like a lot of people, I’m outraged with those that drove this particular bubble to such a bursting point; I’ve always been sensible financially – I only buy things I know I can afford, I make sure I have appropriate plans in the event of bad times, etc, and now I’m paying for other people’s folly anyway. I refused to participate in the Internet bubble in the late 90’s too, knowing full well that it was built on hype and lies – and despite offers to get involved in the booming sector, it just felt wrong to start jumping into something I knew would fall apart at any minute as soon as people woke up and smelled the coffee. Basically, if I wouldn’t invest money in something, I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand there and encourage others to do so, just because we might have a fun ride for a few months. It’s immoral. But, that’s exactly what the supposedly reputable banking sector has been doing for the past few years.

I was annoyed by the Intenet bubble too, that the sector I worked in was crippled for a while by people who didn’t (or refused to) acknowledge that what most of them were doing was total, unsustainable nonsense. The difference that time was that at least it was mostly confined to one sector, to the people that screwed up (although some of us also got dragged into it too). This time of course, everyone suffers.

But, the scale of the repercussions of the utter financial folly of the last few years may have one positive effect – to force people to consider the sustainability of what they do, and to hold others to account in the same way. Short-term thinking, get rich quick schemes, the dream of that ‘one big break’ – all these things are distractions, glittery diamonds dangled just out of your reach that more often than not simply lead you directly over a cliff. I personally think that if people put more thought into how they might positively contribute to the world around them in the long term (as well as making a living of course), and less about how they might be able to get on the cover of Forbes or Hello, or wangle the purchase of yet another unnecessary status symbol, they’d actually be much happier, and we’d all benefit.

The culture of worshipping celebrity, coveting great wealth, chasing the high life – it’s a mirage and entirely void of substance. The few that do make the transition to that kind of life (especially in the public eye) often turn into emotional train-wrecks along the way anyway, so quite why this is a laudable goal is beyond me. Better to aim for real, practical and substantial goals – such as a decent living,  being happy, and preferably doing something with your life that you can feel content with (or even proud of), in a way that doesn’t require that you put a monetary figure on it before you can justify the time you spent doing it.

Maybe facing the reality of the folly that caused this economic recession/depression will trigger some people to reassess their priorities a little. If not, then it’s all been for nothing, and the only legacy will be a small bunch of people having gotten rich on the back of crippling the rest of the world for years afterwards, and the whole thing will be repeated in a decade or so once everyone’s forgotten. I’d rather not think that’s the end result.

Another week, another plan to stimulate the economy from the UK government. I actually think what they’re doing this week is pretty sensible, which basically means an insurance / underwriting scheme dependent on mandated lending to individuals and small businesses. But I think today is actually less about this individual step, and more about the fact that most commentators are in agreement that if this doesn’t work, ie doesn’t restart the flow of credit to sound lenders, then it’s going to lead to pretty much a wholesale nationalisation of the banking sector in the UK.

It’s happening piecemeal already of course, in almost every country in the world – Ireland had the latest case in the Anglo Irish Bank – as each bank fails, it gets bought up by the state to prevent the ripples it causes becoming tidal waves. But what we appear to be talking about now, if this latest initiative fails, is a major policy shift away from the concept that institutions as important as banks should be allowed to entirely run their own affairs.

That doesn’t mean Whitehall beuraucrats directly controlling operations of course, but major shareholders and board members do set the tone for how a company operates. I think it would mean a complete shift in the way banking is perceived (even more so than now) – in the last decade or so, certain elements of the banking sector seem to have been suffering from the ‘Hello magazine effect’ – i.e. focussing entirely on chasing the high life rather than on the fundamentals of their profession. Sure, it’s led to the sector becoming sexy and glamourous, made a lot of people a disproportionate amount of money – at the expense of, oh, just the entire world economy. Shame that.

If full nationalisation happens, and it means that banking becomes suddenly less sexy and attractive to graduates looking for the quickest way to their first Ferrari, I won’t shed a tear. The whole industry badly needed a reality check, and if it takes nationalisation to make it happen, so be it. I do think, however, that all those who received huge bonuses in the last 10 years for doing what amounts to selling snake oil, should be bankrolling the recovery schemes, not the general public. But we know that’s never going to happen – the fat cats stay fat, and the general public gets to pick up the tab for their excesses. Again.

It’s been clear for some time that the US is becoming more and more paranoid about border security. My first trip to the US was in late 1993, when we hopped over to New York on a special deal (less than 2 weeks notice), and I remember it being much like any other international destination, or if anything easier. In particular if you held a British passport, you were pretty much waved through at the border with very little fuss.

Since 2001 things have gotten more difficult, obviously, but in the last 5 years it’s been getting increasingly silly. The need to fingerprint every traveller seems rather unnecessary and certainly slows down the process. On arriving in LA a couple of months ago I was struck by just how unfriendly the officials were, one in particular being pretty damn rude to a family in front of me in the queue who were unsure about which of the multitude of forms they were supposed to fill out when. Sure, it’s really big and clever to swank around with a gun at your hip, shouting at people when they don’t fill in your forms correctly. It’s not universal – recent trips to San Francisco and Boston have been a little more relaxed, but I can’t help but notice that the tension towards ‘outsiders’ appears to still be increasing.

Every time I’ve gone to the US I’ve travelled under the Visa Waiver Programme, which is very convenient – basically you don’t have to apply for a visa if you’re just visiting on business or pleasure, just turn up with your passport, a local address and a return ticket and you’ll be fine. From January 12th next year though, they’ve decided that’s far too easy, and travellers from countries that are eligible for the VWP will have to apply for clearance before travelling, via the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). The system appears to be largely automated, so it’s much quicker than getting a ‘real’ visa, but it’s still an extra step to remember to do, and another bureaucratic process that can get screwed up.

I’m not sure why they’ve chosen to do this, I can only assume it’s related to their wish to do pre-checks on travellers, and that they’re not getting ‘enough’ information from airlines – who already have to pre-warn the US authorities of the personal information of incoming travellers (unlike every other country) and give them information which is probably contrary to many local Data Protection laws.

I know 9/11 was a big deal, but honestly I don’t think there’s a need for border control to be quite so unfriendly as it seems to be getting in the US. It’s akin to DRM – hugely overcomplicated processes that mainly put barriers in the way of the kind of people you want to welcome, while almost certainly not impeding the real criminals / terrorists in any proportionate, practical way. Maybe once the current swaggering, fear-mongering chimp of a president is finally gone, the culture of xenophobia and paranoia may start to abate a little.