2016 — 11 September: Sunday
It amazes me that the TUC can take so long to "discover" the amazing discrepancy between pay of bosses and pay of workers.1 Meanwhile our bellicose neighbour across the Pond is contemplating unilateral action against the country they last fought in what, I believe, was technically a "police action" that has also, I believe, never technically ended. Happy days.
Isn't it good...
... to see that a few "bad apples" in banking aren't restricted to the UK?
How many barrels are needed to hold 5,300 employees, I wonder?
Oh, good grief
Round and round the stories go.
The entrepreneurs (also mostly white men) often work on a lot of meaningless stuff, like using code to deliver frozen yogurt more expeditiously or apps that let you say "Yo!" (and only "Yo!") to your friends. The entrepreneurs generally glorify their efforts by saying that their innovation could change the world, which tends to appease the venture capitalists, because they can also pretend they're not there only to make money. And this also helps seduce the tech press (also largely comprised of white men), which is often ready to play a game of access in exchange for a few more page views of their story about the company that is trying to change the world by getting frozen yogurt to customers more expeditiously.
I don't care for yogurt, and tend not to say "Yo!"
I may have...
... dodged a bullet by leaving physics behind not long before it left me behind. Jon Butterworth explains what a femtobarn is:
A barn is a unit of area. It was supposed to be something big and easy to hit (as in "barn door") and is roughly the cross sectional area of a Uranium nucleus. It is small by everyday standards — 10-28 square metres, or one ten billion billion billionth of a square metre. This is a nonsense number, I know, and it gets worse. A femtobarn is a million billionth of a barn. We just have to deal with the fact that nature operates on a variety of distance scales and not all of them are easy to imagine, I guess.
I find myself wondering how many angels can dance on the side of a femtobarn.
I've nearly finished...
... the first of the Paul Levinson trilogy. It's marginally more convoluted — but much more enjoyable — than reading about the UK's current tax rules. I dodge most of the complexity as my finances are as simple as they come. One IBM pension. One annuity. One State Pension, starting next month. Anything above £11,000 is taxed at 20%. So I shall allow myself one extra cheese rind and stale crust. Occasionally.
There may be some form of "Old Age" pension socked away somewhere from my miniscule contributions paid as an engineering apprentice over 40 years ago. I shan't waste time looking. It was on a par with the ludicrous £0.29 per month that IBM pays to stop me suing them under Age Discrimination legislation. (Don't ask!)
Hollow laugh dept.
A paragraph from one of my weekly letters to dear Mama, back in the day:
Were I the saving sort, I would probably take heed of the fact that National Savings has just raised the interest rates on its Income bonds to 5.75% before tax from March 9 (on a minimum of £500). Of course, if you stick 'em with £25,000 (chance would be a fine thing in my case, but I know you're loaded!) they give you 6% gross. And should you happen to be a pensioner, they're now giving away 6.2% gross on their Pensioners Guaranteed Income bonds (fixed for two years). Hmmm. Maybe that's where my extra tax is going... I trust you can put Mr Hale on your case.
I know she took me up on my advice. How? Well I was the one who (15 years later) cashed her bonds in a couple of months before she died — when National Savings decided they were now too generous. In fact, that was the "financial gorp" I had referred to at the time. By then, she had no clue about such things, of course.