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John_from_Hendon

Listed below are comments made by John_from_Hendon between Thursday, 12th November 2009 and Tuesday, 17th November 2009.

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Tough times ahead 4:25pm on 17 Nov 2009 The conflict in the blog seems to be to be around the impossibility of fixing anything because it is always impossible to propose solutions that are cost free.

However I think that the financial tail has for too long been wagging the national dog and indeed that this progressive developing imbalance has caused the financial crisis.

The only available solutions are going to hurt us all. Indeed they have to as we have essentially been living beyond our means for too long and it is in the nature of things that this situation will correct one way or other.

Can this necessary correction be put off indefinitely? History shows us that this is not the case over the long term. But what is the long term? Does the vastly overvalued housing stock have to fall in price to an affordable level overnight? Indeed can it?

(As an aside consider what is a sensible average long-term price for somewhere for a family to live? A view is of the order of 12 percent of a single income if a family is to be economically viable - and families have to be economically viable to replace the population which is itself a necessary function of any nation.)

We have seen the hugely destructive social effect on families that has resulted from the imbalance between wage levels and house prices. Can this go on, and will we have any society left if it goes on any longer? And indeed can and should we fix it or will it self correct?

I am off now visiting till early December and I look froward to reading your views on my return. I hope that someone can square the circle and find a cost-free answer!
Tough times ahead 10:05pm on 16 Nov 2009 #1. glanafon wrote:

"The majority are not expecting what is to come, they have no idea."

Quite so, but who is to blame for this situation? Who has been deliberately misleading the British public? Politicians on all sides, but they are just professional politicians who know nothing but politics. They rely on the advice of economists so it is these economists who have been deliberately misleading the public. It is not reasonable to suggest that economists, as a group, do, at least, have the insight of history to help them produce estimates of the out-turn of any economic situation.

The economists (indeed we who contribute to this blog and Ms Flanders) either are not capable of producing any rational predictions or produced these outcome estimates and decided not to tell the truth.

Was it right that we chose not to tell the truth to the public (and to deride those who did tell the truth)? Well possibly, as the economic outcomes are improved by both rational and irrational misinformed optimism. I however think that we should always offer the more Germanic and brutal unalloyed truth as not to do so will inevitably as day follows night create the maximum of irrational expectations, another bubble, and this is exactly what we are suffering from now. We cannot permit the re-inflation of the bubble for one very good reason - it will not work!

I know many of us have been writing just this for well over a year, but reading Ms Flanders's it seems that no-one was listening.

To repeat: the banks are too big (because if they fail no economy can sustain the damage). Therefore they must be broken up - it is the only logical conclusion. Even Mervyn King knows this (and if you heard it, on the World Service - The Interview -, Eliot Spritzer) - everybody know this - but nobody wants to do anything about it. Unless and until something rational is done we cannot hope to recover. In the UK we have 4 banks we need 50.

My solution as I written before is to force the banks to divide their businesses in twelve roughly equal parts by giving each shareholder in the existing banks shares in the twelve new banks after the banks have been forced to spit their operations. Further more these new banks cannot be permitted to merge. The economic disruption will be gigantic, but without it there is no solution to the present crisis. Just imagine the incandescent rage of the British Banker's Association representative of the box - I think the veins on her neck would burst!

How else however does one solve the 'too big to fail' conundrum? And if this is not solved how can we recover?

To tax or cut is a trivial problem compared to the 'too big to fail' problem, but without a practical solution to the 'too big' problem taxes or cuts will not fix the economy!

#20. barni101 wrote about steps towards a more egalitarian society.

Bravo, but I fear that you will find that you will be alone when you too march on the post office in Bologna (see P.J.Proudhon c 1874)

The hole we are in is still getting deeper!
Points of View and HD Picture Quality: a response 2:54pm on 16 Nov 2009 #125. tagmclaren wrote:

... "So, why are you transmitting @ 1080i 50 * 1440?"...

Perhaps because they are stuck in a HD (or rather HDV) backwater? (HDV shoots in 1440 after all...)

So far as I know the BBC will not vet accept AVCHD (pro) shot in 1920x1080 50i (or 25p) even though the origination quality is better at equivalent bit rates c.f HDV) They generally want full HD SDI I think. Although many of the news cameras (BBC and others) I've seen are HDV.

I suspect that their infrastructure is also older than it should be from their optical switches onwards, and they are unable to deliver higher bit rates - that is, it is an engineering question and accounting problem - they purchased their internal editing and transmission infrastructure some time ago and have to continue using it until it is fully depreciated.

The other problem that many posters are ignoring is the differences between reception equipment - the BBC may be transmitting better quality than your reception equipment is capable of decoding and displaying? There are considerable differences between the generations of decoders and manufacturers of TVs - just think about the different capabilities of PC graphics cards! (That is after all what you have in your TV these days.) Some TV's will make a better fist of displaying a picture stream than others. If you want to complain first receive the picture stream on an internal PC TV card and display the image via a high quality high spec. video card than complain if you don't like the result - just looking at the telly is rather unfair!

(I am not implying anything about the BBC's encoding technology - I don't know what they are using - it might be nice to know but I don't know. Perhaps BBC Engineering could tell us?)
Climate change: the worst case scenarios 7:49pm on 13 Nov 2009 Robin,

You were not at Piers Corbyn's 'CO2 is not to blame for Climate Change' conference at Imperial a week or so back you might have enjoyed it. (See your colleague's Richard Black's blog)

The 'facts' that underlie most of the very simplistic understanding of the politicians are unravelling as soon as they are looked at in detail. But the poor dears, and their even poorer civil servants, just don't understand enough of the science to ask sensible questions all they are left with is their Allan Johnson arrogance that fires the messenger if you don't like the message (no change there then).

The subtlety and complexity of the message that we are damaging our planet cannot be reduced to lowering CO2 emissions (a gas which is by the way vital for life - but I won't go on about this here.)

I think the reason that the CO2 message is the only one that came to the fore is the financial community's ability to run a racket with Carbon Trading. Make no mistake Carbon Trading is a racket and a fundamental fraud against the interests of the World's people and will only benefit the city slickers and the World's mega corporations. (It will also neither reduce CO2 nor will it moderate climate change - as CO2 is not the cause of climate variability -as is even shown in the IPCC's data - but not their summary report.)

You are however quite correct to note that there are many other destructive man-made disasters going on around the world from exporting hazardous waste to cutting down the rainforest to grow bio-fuel source plants (Oh, bio-fuels - is another racket of no benefit to the globe at all and indeed at a huge cost to the globe.)

We as a planet are still doing idiotic things - building more airports included, but worse we are chasing an illusion that we can manage the planet when we have very little knowledge about how the planet works or its weather. (Professional meteorologists can't get the weather right for more than about 4 days ahead and then the basis is that tomorrow will be much like today!)

The guess that CO2 was the 'cause' of temperature rise grew from the 'analysis' of CO2 in ice cores and associated temperature 'measurements'. (Both the analysis and measurements are in fact so full of unaccounted for experimental error that the data is almost meaningless.) This showed that when temperatures were higher so was CO2 (some of the time!.) Some bright spark then erroneously said that a high CO2 leads to a high temperature. The IPCC data, when properly analysed, showed that CO2 when up after the temperature had risen so could not have been the cause. But the City slickers had already persuaded their politician dupes that they could manage CO2 by giving licences to pollute to the existing polluters and letting the city sllickers trade these (and options and futures and derivatives and synthetic conglomerated instruments of these licences to pollute.)

Now, politicians are a generally greedy bunch with an eye for the main chance, their pension and seats of the board when they retire, so once started Carbon Trading became unstoppable even though its whole basis is false.

There are also huge problems distinguishing local climate variability to global aggregates - right down to the quality of the global temperature data.

Global dimming and high atmospheric/stratospheric cloud and water vapour is a major problem, and my guess, it is locally quite important. Of course if we were to limit air flights that generate the vast majority of the man-made clouds in the sky that would apparently be such a bad thing that it can't be done - this is of course nonsense, but just like the armaments industry we can't do anything that would hurt the airlines and the operators of the tax free shopping malls (sorry airports)! Hypocrisy! (See also politicians free travel perks and retirement plans!)

Robin as you are about to retire due to your age I will pass on a small nugget of info. I picked up at Pier's Corbyn's conference. It goes like this, in summary, for about the next decade and a few bits the planet will get generally cooler and then the temperatures will pick up to levels higher than 1999 by 2030 - so move to South West France till you are 75 and then return by 2030 to Scotland when it will be warmer by then - and also enjoy free domiciliary care! This 'strategy' will permit you to keep the same wardrobe and avoid deciding on new styles of dress - that old jacket with the elbow patches should do a while longer!
Mobile TV: Ready for take-off? 7:01pm on 13 Nov 2009 Mobile TV: Ready for take-off?

Take-off like a brick!
New name for a new economy? 6:59pm on 13 Nov 2009 New name for a new economy?

Legally sanctioned fraud and corruption.

It is not a new economy at all it is what always happens when the monopoly power of small groups (cartels) becomes greater than is manageable by a society. (see K Marx)
Gordon Brown and the military 2:55pm on 13 Nov 2009 Did someone say firing squad!!!

Politicians start wars - the children of the poor die fighting wars and once a year we remember them.

We have had two wars to 'end all wars' where one Nation led by a German monarch set about wiping out another nation led by a German monarch. The children of Queen Victoria need their bottoms smacking and to be sent off to bed without their supper. Mechanised slaughter is not glorious, as is the way that the Nation remembers, it is just slaughter.

It really is not Gordon Brown's problem through he is just the temporary leader who is carrying on the 'fine' tradition of waging war. Most wars in recent times have, I think, been more properly laid at the door of the right wing parties in the World's nations. Most left wing parties are generally more persuaded by the internationalist position whereas most right wing parties seek to define themselves by the people they hate (see David Cameron's Tory anti-Europeans for example.)

Gordon needs an Afghan exit strategy. Perhaps we should consider removing Kazhai and putting him on trial for the masterminding of electoral corruption as has been so widely reported? He does appear to be one of the most morally repellent (see the way women are treated) and administratively bad (failed to properly 'fix' the ballot) puppets that we have ever had the misfortune to put in and maintain in power (and there is a long list I am deeply sorry and ashamed to say!)
Mobile TV: Ready for take-off? 2:37pm on 13 Nov 2009 Mobile TV?

Technically this is never going to be possible for two main reasons: first the computing power needed to decode the highly compressed video stream means that you either get very very poor video or if you drop the phone in a puddle it explodes leaving a small crater - because of the power density of the battery needed to run the high powered computer.

Quite apart from the fact that the UK's 3G networks are incapable of delivering a satisfactory user experience due to capacity and bandwidth limitations - even 4G can't do it either (and we don't have any operators offering the service in the UK yet - see Scandinavia)

In short, the mobile phone companies were insane when they bid for the 3G licences. They were bereft of reason and engineering logic and now they still need to find new revenue raising opportunities and this is still one of the daftest. When are we going to get 4G phones in the UK?
Mobile TV: Ready for take-off? 1:25pm on 13 Nov 2009 "Mobile TV: Ready for take-off?"

Short answer - no it never will.

It is, and always wa,s a commercially daft reason to overpay for a 3g licence.
Cautious good cheer 11:02pm on 12 Nov 2009 #157. glanafon about

Assets or Debt?

Is money not the problem? You can and do have ownership of assets without money, but you can't I think have debt without money. (Well, contradicting myself you probably can have debt without money in which case it is duty or obligation, perhaps.) Liabilities are a contingent future charge on assets.

When money costs nothing (as it does now for large borrowers - including and especially banks) what is the pressure to use it economically and to maximise the return on its investment - indeed when there is not return on investment (as there is now for the vast majority of owners of money.)

This is the basis of the problem with the so-called economic support - I can, using the argument above, make the case for it not being 'support' to have money that is worth nothing (or indeed for the recipients of QE - having a negative value).

Money has to be worth something - i.e. owning it as an asset must produce a return otherwise the whole basis of running an economy collapses - and that is Mervyn King's great error. His stupidity has removed the value of money and money having a value (or price) is critical to the operation of any economy. He is killing the Nation.

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