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Political

PSA: Don’t be a dick

August 14, 2011 – 11:17 am

I was In Sydney when the UK riots broke out, and I didn’t hear about it until it had become an international story which showed Britain in the worst possible light. Much hay will be made about this over the coming months, but I thought I’d add my tuppence worth.

Firstly, there can be no justification whatsoever for this behaviour, regardless of your background or surroundings. But it is a good idea to try to understand it, because locking people up after the fact only goes so far. None of what I raise here excuses what we saw on Britain’s city streets, but it does provide a context.

Society is based on the concept that most people will be law-abiding, because it is in their collective interest to be so. It’s one of the defining characteristics of being human that we have the self-control to defer our own short-term gratification in order to achieve longer term objectives, particularly shared objectives. What is happening with increasing frequency is that some people are no longer willing or able to do that – and they’re not all wearing hoodies.

Now, it’s quite easy to point at an obvious example of self-absorbed gratification from the last week, such as someone looting expensive electronic goods from their neighbourhood store. But on a more subtle level, this lack of willingness to defer gratification is something that increasingly pervades our modern society, just at a less visceral level. Our consumer society has for years encouraged people to buy things they can’t afford through the high availability of credit – don’t save up, have it now! Even worse, at every level of society now there is a general attitude that what matters isn’t “what’s right”, it’s “what you can get away with”.

There are myriad examples of this. Politicians scamming their expenses system because it wasn’t strictly disallowed, even though anyone with an ounce of sense should have known it was immoral. Bankers risking all to get rich in the good times, knowing that in the bad times someone else will pick up the tab. Patent trolls gaming a broken legal system to make money from doing nothing at all, by taking it from those that do. Basically, the message at all levels is: if you think you can get away with it, go for it. Even if common sense would tell you that you’re being a dick, it doesn’t matter – law of the jungle and all that.

What we’re really seeing on Britain’s streets is the very ugliest incarnation of this, but it’s rooted in exactly the same attitude, and we can’t pretend they’re separate things. The political or white-collar side of amoral behaviour doesn’t result in houses burning down and people dying, so we don’t notice as much until it goes really badly wrong (like in the credit crunch), but it’s ultimately the same thought process – I know this is wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway, because either I think I won’t get caught, or there’s some clever legal wrangling that lets me off the hook even if I do.

Some might cite the demise of religion as a cause of the lack of moral fiber, but that’s not it at all (the Catholic church is one of the worst perpetrators after all). No, it’s really very simple – more people need to stand up for a singular and easily communicated principle: “don’t be a dick”. And stop pretending that you don’t know when you’re being a dick, or that you have some kind of justification for it. We need to stop looking for technicalities to excuse behaviour we know is wrong, and for ways to avoid getting caught. Laws are there as a distillation of this concept (sometimes they get it wrong too), but the original form is much simpler to understand – you really don’t need a lawyer to tell you when you’re being a dick. All the people involved in the subprime mortgage crash knew they were doing something dodgy, but they carried on anyway. Take this same attitude and put it in the mind of an ill-educated thug with a brick in his hand, and what do you think is going to happen?

If you want to live in a pleasant society, live by example, whether you wear a hoodie or an Armani suit. You really don’t want to live in a society where everyone just does what they think they can get away with. Maybe it took thugs in the street burning and looting to demonstrate the eventual trajectory of this to you, but that’s just the tip of a particularly dirty iceberg that every one of us has a part to play in cleaning up.

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Local Political

Living longer means working longer, obviously

July 14, 2009 – 12:13 pm

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 ;)

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Business Personal Political Tech

Process: no replacement for people and principles

February 27, 2009 – 4:22 pm

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.

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Business Development Local Open Source Political

Making a new home for patent trolls

February 7, 2009 – 1:11 pm

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.

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Local Political

Remember who elected you

October 12, 2008 – 4:01 pm

I generally don’t have a lot of time for politicians. I’m of the opinion that a large number of those who actively pursue political power are also the ones least suitable to wield it, and that even the few that enter the halls of power with the best of ideals will have most of them eroded away within a few years, or be largely marginalised.

I live in a jurisdiction which has leaned towards a conservative approach to government for decades (our island has it’s own government, separate from the UK). Early on in life I just kind of assumed political conservatism was a normal, sensible approach that was probably for the best – after all I grew up during the Thatcher years. However, as I’ve matured and gained more life experience, I’ve become more liberal in my views and have come to realise that I disagree fundamentally with many aspects of traditional, right-wing conservatism. I’m far from a militant, banner-waving leftie, but I definitely have a greater sense of my own political opinion, rather than taking what other supposedly ‘knowledgeable’ people say on face value, and whilst I consider myself mostly in the centre ground, if I lean anywhere at all it’s slightly to the left.

I’ve talked about the banking crisis a little on this blog already, but this week it very much came home to roost in our little rock when Landsbanki Guernsey was taken into administration, a victim of the general meltdown in Icelandic financial affairs. I don’t have any money in Landsbanki thank goodness, but a lot of ordinary local people did, as well as many ex-pats. Now, banks are failing in other places too, but for the most part ordinary personal depositors have been protected in those circumstances, either through ad-hoc political guarantees (Ireland led the way here), or existing depositor protection schemes.  However, Guernsey has no depositors protection scheme, and no ability to make an ad-hoc guarantee since despite the huge amounts of money sloshing about in trust funds here, next to none of it generates tax revenue (only local people pay tax), which means that at least in theory, personal depositors stand to lose every penny of their life savings. These aren’t millionnaires, for the most part they’re ordinary people who have worked really hard for their nest egg. Now, they almost certainly won’t lose everything (although it’s very unlikely that they’ll get it all back I think) but the point is that they have absolutely no idea what to expect – the most they’ve had is wishy-washy attempts at calming their nerves from some politicians that frankly are worth less than the newspaper they’re printed in.

The fact is that uncertainty is to a large part responsible for the current financial mess, and a lack of a depositor protection scheme just adds to that. It’s incredible to think we’re one of the few places in the world not to have one of these schemes, despite supposedly being a ‘respected financial centre’ – the idea has been floated in the past, particularly after such collapses as Barnett Christie and BCCI in the 70s and 80s, but in the end nothing happened; the reason being that the banks didn’t much feel like setting up such a scheme, since it obviously has a cost implication for them. Our government, which has become utterly dependent on the financial industry, ultimately didn’t want to rock the boat and quietly let the issue drop. Their excuse for such negligence has been that ‘no-one could have predicted this crisis’ which even if we ignore the precedents already set by other collapsing banking institutions, is frankly entirely missing the point; it’s like saying that you’re not at fault for not taking out house insurance, because you couldn’t have predicted your house would catch fire. It’s drivel. The simple fact is they didn’t want to upset their industry backers, and just hoped that it wouldn’t happen again, despite historical evidence to suggest such things were an inevitability as cycles come and go.

Our government has for years now bowed to pretty much whatever the financial services industry wanted, in order to keep them happy. While the stance is completely understandable to a degree, some people (myself included) believe it’s been taken too far in recent years. A case in point is that our entire taxation system was changed this year solely in order to satisfy the needs of this sector; an enormous, costly and disruptive task which also now places the taxation system on a footing that requires considerable year-on-year local growth to avoid having to raise additional taxes from the common man. This was always a dubious gamble given that, as an island, we’re limited by land and population – clearly many members of financial sector lobbying groups couldn’t give a damn about whether they caused even more overpopulation and relative poverty problems, so long as they can keep the money rolling in. But now, with a protracted recession looking likely, these already rather optimistic growth targets look impossible, and that will ultimately require a ‘rethink’ – which is political speak for finding ways to raise more tax from everyday residents (since non-residents pay no tax no matter how much money they make through investments here).

Personally, I say it’s time to re-evaluate our priorities. Government is elected by regular people, and this is who they need to answer to first, not to lobby groups from particular industries. There have been years of decision making based on the premise that by keeping the rich (sorry, ‘high net worth individuals’) happy, the rest of the population will benefit from the trickle-down effect. That’s certainly true up to a point, but there is always a delicate balance to be maintained to avoid going from making sensible trade-offs for mutual benefit, to allowing bare-faced exploitation, and in my opinion at some point in the last few years we tipped over it. There seem to be a few politicians in our government that see this, but they are so far in the minority. Maybe when others have to face down members of the electorate who have lost their savings because of a decision that was made in the interests of industry rather than the people who gave them their jobs, it will start to finally dawn on them.

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