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ancientdream

Listed below are comments made by ancientdream between Friday, 19th September 2008 and Monday, 28th September 2009.

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Who wins from an Orange iPhone? 8:06pm on 28 Sep 2009 The winners are - Apple and consumers. The losers are - networks who can't offer iPhone.

Apple has used iPhone to force carriers to an affordable flat-rate mobile data service that doesn't penalise data not from the carrier's "walled garden" of proprietary services. Mobile handhelds will never be the same again.

This forced change has been good for consumers, and immensely profitable for Apple. Government and regulators will soon have to change the rules in the consumers' favour to level the playing field. Until they do, Apple (and to a lesser extent other smartphone makers) will continue milking carrier cartel revenues indefinitely via subsidies, and consumers will continue to overpay for mobile service.

Me? I've got a factory unlocked 3GS from Italy, thanks, and I can use it with any carrier I like. That would be T-mobile via my nice original 1999 Virgin contract at £0 a month, just as soon as my £30 a month iPhone 3G O2 contract finishes.
Discuss our English quiz 6:22pm on 24 Jun 2009 We oldies are all incensed after getting 7/7 on the previous tests. Pleas set tests we can answer easily so we can carry on being grumpy and superior about modern "education".
Discuss our English quiz 3:34pm on 24 Jun 2009 Is it true that GCSE English Lit requires the study of all these texts? When I did O level English Lit, I remember studying only 2 texts for the exam (Macbeth and Chaucer's Prologue).

(But the teacher did write on my report that I was the worst pupil he had ever taught!)

4/7 by chance.
Piracy: Did someone blink? 7:07pm on 15 Jun 2009 Music is strange in being both the product for sale and the advertising for the product. Music distribution has always been both paid for and free - buy the disc; listen to the radio free. Labels spend heavily on getting music played on radio. What we pay for is the convenience of listening on our own terms, when we want to. There used to be a considerable cost in distributing music; that cost is gone, and the labels are now struggling to cream off their huge revenues on the back of nothing. Don't sign up to Virgin, BT, Sky and other big businesses attempting to act as tax collectors. They stitch us up bundling what we don't want with what we do, rental instead of sale, minimum contract terms and push advertising. We don't have to put up with them any more, so let's not. The music will find us. Fight to enjoy the content you want when you want it without further commitment. No-one wants to rent music recordings.

And why no mention of the number one paid for download service: iTunes. Apple actually gives the customer what they want - to buy and own just the music they want for the rest of their lives, knowing it isn't expiring, rented, or unfairly restricted in how they can use it. People are happy to pay for that.

The iPhone Application store shows with software what happens when the dead hand of old media distribution is cut out of the process; lots of free and cheap content sold direct, worldwide by the artist (programmer in this case). Let's get on with the future now please, and stop obsolete businesses trying to stop it.

And let's hear some real technical details of what they are offering. What's the format and bit rate; what are the precise contract terms. I'll bet that once again they promise nothing except to take your money for a minimum of twelve months.
Rose on pay and VAT 6:55pm on 08 Jan 2009 I'm actually suprised how little change there's been year on year. Instead of the absurd "war on terror", we've now got an absurd media frenzy of "war on recession/depression".

Retailers ran big discounts and sales before christmas, including 20% off days at M&S. So disappointing sales were guaranteed. We've all bought the same amount of actual stuff as the previous year, but they discounted it heavily this time, so in pounds the sales have fallen by a few percent.

Next year the sunken pound will mean the same stuff is much more expensive than this year (when we were still protected by importer currency hedging). We'll buy the same amount of stuff again, and the media and politicians will be reporting a retail sales "recovery".

In fact, most of us carry on as normal while they mess with our money but pretend it's us changing our habits.
One law for the rich... 5:17pm on 09 Dec 2008 Now that the banks are more or less nationalised, why not make all personal bank accounts into tax exempt savings accounts, but deduct income tax + NI completely automatically when money is spent from the account, not when it is paid in?

This would simultaneously encourage saving, largely prevent tax evasion, save enormous amounts of bureaucratic admin overhead, and facilitate an entrepreneurial approach to work (because income tax/NI would no longer be heavily biassed in favour of steady earning wage-slaves). It could also neatly do away with the hard and fast one time retirement event that the government can't afford any more.
Wikipedia is censored 11:47am on 08 Dec 2008 We are born naked, and to proscribe images of children in their natural state is absurd. The problem here is with over-prescriptive legislation that makes this quite innocent image illegal, even though it did not involve any exploitation or abuse, according to its subject, and even has a "fig leaf". To censor this image is absurd, but it is an illegal image under New Labour, and the IWF is just doing its job.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin:

"He who gives up freedom for security deserves neither."

A principle which the present UK government has repeatedly legislated against, obliterating British traditions of personal freedom and responsibility.
The £5,000bn bailout 2:25pm on 28 Oct 2008 Simple, and obvious truths, on the whole:

The mistake of bankers was not: lending against assets that "were not worth the valuation". The asset is only security for the loan - the loan is primarily against a revenue stream (earnings) that can repay it with interest - for a mortgage, that's against future wages or rents.

In the new world economy, our full time labour is no longer required - except for optional services like coffee shops. There is no revenue stream that can be relied upon for twentyfive or more years to pay back a mortgage.

With nearly all money created out of nothing by fractional reserve banking, very quickly, all the debt outstanding on loans exceeds the total amount of money in circulation. So the debt can never be repaid - there simply isn't enough money in the world. Without constantly growing debt levels, the system is intrinsically unstable, and as soon as the lenders who create the money stop growing their loan books, a rapid and violent collapse in money in circulation is inevitable.

Like the blood supply flowing round our bodies, delivering nutrition and removing waste from every cell uniformly, regardless of the merit of the cell, the money circulation is what provides the nourishment to the people in the modern economy. The lenders charging interest are like a heart that requires more blood returned than it pumps out. As soon as it stops manufacturing new blood (new debt) there is a catastrophic fall in blood (money) volume that kills the patient regardless of his general health.

Instead of creating the required money by means of debt that must be repaid, as in fractional reserve banking, we need to create money as value by government distributing a basic level of money to every citizen, and simply creating new money to pay government employees. We are rich enough to do this. Fractional reserves need to be grown progressively until they are full reserves, tapering off the role of bankers as creators of capital.

The national health service has been a huge success by delivering care free at the point of need without paperwork, means testing etc. We simply need to extend such a policy to provide sufficient funds for citizens to meet all basic needs. Many parts of our complex bureaucracy would simply disappear. Individuals would be free to contribute their labour where they felt they could offer the most benefit. This is analogous to the way the open source software movement works. Workers self select to create the software wealth, and are hugely outnumbered by users who pay nothing for the use of the software.

Takeaway: money created as debt must end - it is intrinsically unstable; money must be created by distributing new fiat money to everyone, who will spend it. It's how our bodies work, and it's a fantastically successful system.

Of course there are many many details to be worked out. But it might even mean the end of personal taxation, of specific money benefits for the needy (their special needs are met by free supply). The level of the general distribution would be such that individuals would nevertheless be strongly motivated to contribute their efforts to the general good.
B&B: taxpayers on hook for £40bn 7:36pm on 27 Sep 2008 Mr Peston; it is your duty to make the BBC expalin that this is is not billions being paid to crooked fat cats for their personal profit:

1. money is not real. Google "money as debt".
2. When there is a credit squeeze, those in a position to buy get real assets at a discount in exchange for cash. The wicked speculator gets the innocent punter's foreclosed home at auction at a huge discount. This time, that's being described as the downtrodden businessman bailing out the reckless punter.

The taxpayer is in a position to take the bankers mortgage assets at a discount. And take the revenue streams associated with those assets. And have the chance to fudge the economy later to enhance the resale value of those assets before selling.

Why aren't the taxpayers clamouring for this? Because no-one's explained it. So we risk the taxpayers jumping off a cliff to avoid receiving a massive gift from the banks, and driving us all into poverty.
The American way to fail 4:24pm on 19 Sep 2008 Watch the video "Money as Debt" (Google it). Virtually all money is current debt, created by banks under license from government. When debt is repaid, the money literally disappears again. But since interest is added to debt by banks, there cannot be enough money in the world to pay off all bank debt, so by definition the problem grows every year because the only way money can be created to pay interest is by issuing yet more interest bearing debt. Unrepayable indebtedness to bankers grows in perpetuity. In a crisis of confidence, new debt is unavailable. With no other source of money to pay off old debt, defaults and foreclosures expand without limit. Our financial system is literally founded on unsustainable serfdom to a banking system which in turn depends on perpetual growth in debt for its very existence.

Hence the demand for "economic growth", or at least inflation, so that money debt can grow without limit to pay off old debt. When we approach limits to growth on a finite planet, by definition the current financial system fails, unless inflation is forcibly fed into the system at the same rate as the bank interest charges. But in that case the banks have no margin for real profit. This huge but simple truth ought to be common knowledge, but isn't. Fractional reserve banking is unsustainable as the foundation of a stable money system, even without greed and dishonesty among the bankers.

Rules were in place to delay (politicianspeak: "prevent") this inevitable crisis. But the banks were allowed to bypass those rules off balance sheet. This gross failure of regulation may, paradoxically, be a good thing in view of the flawed basic design of the money system. We need a new way to create and destroy money.

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