In which I put some thoughts down about things I’ve seen in the news recently. News is often about spin and spectacle and superficiality and lacking in substance, hopefully this is slightly better.
Tom Daley ‘out’ Video
Tom Daley has made a youtube video in which he announces he’s in a relationship with a guy.
He says himself, “In an ideal world I wouldn’t have to make this video.” It isn’t an ideal world where sexuality seems to matter. In this far-from-ideal world, it is of course great that he has gone public to try and push the ‘gay agenda’.1 It shouldn’t be the case that this is news worthy: it ought not be particularly relevant that his relationship is with a guy instead of a girl and it should only get the same coverage as any normal celebrity relationship. Special treatment because it’s with a guy is not equal treatment and shows we aren’t in an equal world. Even the phrase “out” appears to me to suggest that being non-straight is something remarkable, which in an ideal world it would not be. I think that the situation now is better than it used to be, in our society, but we still have a long way to go.
It doesn’t need to be said, it’s pretty obvious that this is brave, but I think that holding him up as a brave idol might ignore lots of other similar acts of bravery, such as those gone through by non-straight people on a daily basis. Not that I want to take anything away from Daley.
It also seems to me that in some places it is being treated as if he is gay. As he says, “obviously I still fancy girls”. Presumably this means he is bi, but it seems there is a dichotomy of “straight” or “out” which forgets that there is much more variation and more of a spectrum. It might be that there’s some subtlety in the background to this that I’m not aware of, as he does mention that this topic has come up in previous interviews,
Green Levies
The government has announced the possibility of reducing the green levies in fuel bills.
The coalition government is making a complete hash of this. For months, if not longer, there has been a lack of stability on this topic with different offices saying different things and disagreeing with each other, at some point making simultaneous conflicting statements.
Energy production is incredibly important for a country. For all the talk of helping the economy, this is surely equally as important, if not more so. Having secure energy sources in the future is non-negotiable, especially in our current electricity-and-technology-dependant society. Energy production is, due to its nature, always done in advance: it is very expensive investment which pays off over a longer period. As our society grows, we use more electricity per capita and we have more dependent lifestyles, it is more important than ever.
This requires stability for investors or public investment. The government cutting green levies or being unclear about it is a big problem. The Tories claimed they were going to be “the greenest government ever”, but they’re like children.
In the 1970s with Thatcher there were power shortages (due to strikes by coal miners) and we did not have enough electricity; to cope with this we had the three-day working week and a system of blackouts in which certain areas didn’t have power on some days. Today that would be unthinkable: we depend on electricity so much, and the talk of “harm to the economy” would be huge. The case for investment is so obvious, it’s ridiculous that the politicians are playing games with it.
It’s an example of the politics game, which is partly necessary in a democratic system: it’s an easy rhetoric to talk about “cutting bills”, especially when Labour has said that they would freeze them for a year if they come into power (another thing-said-for-popularity, I’m not sure if this would be a good idea). Bills are going up anyway, so it isn’t really a cut, more just a smaller increase.
Venezuela currently has a powercut in the capital. Imagine if that happened here. We aren’t as prepared as we used to be: many people would find it hard to get good food; I’m not sure if shops would be able to work properly with scanning items and charging people, or if we could pay by card; with our reliance on technology for entertainment, people would be completely lost without it (actually, this one might be a hidden benefit).
RBS Problem
Apparently all of the cards used by customers of RBS didn’t work yesterday.
RBS is in the press saying it “must do better” and will “compensate those out of pocket”. Of course they must and of course they should, this is far from acceptable.
As in the previous section, it reminds me of our reliance on electricity in daily life. I saw one person quoted in the news as saying: “I was trying to do some shopping, so of course it was a huge problem.”. Unless this was food shopping, hardly what could be described as an actual problem, more an inconvenience, but that isn’t really the point.
Cash is used less and cards are used more. In some countries, they pay with mobile phones instead of actual cash. I wonder if in the future, cash will be used less and phased out.
Our reliance on cards is incredible fragile. Most people don’t have enough cash and need their cards daily, be it for food or petrol or just normal shopping. It’s a fragile situation to be in when a bank failing or a powercut, or even a card simply being lost, is an inconvenience, and we should move away from this fragility – have a stockpile of cash at home incase.
Amazon Prime
Amazon released a publicity video in which they suggested using drones to deliver packages.
This reminds me of google on April Fools’ day, coming up with an elaborate hoax. This isn’t a hoax as such, but it doesn’t seem to me like it’s as serious as most papers seem to be taking it.
It seems to be it would be quite expensive to have drones deliver parcels to people directly. I can’t imagine it would be efficient for fuel, and what about the safety of having drones flying about? Amazon said themselves that they cannot avoid people, so clearly they’re years from it being an actual possibility. If there’s a fault or powercut (recurring theme apparently) they could crash and be destroyed and even hurt people.
I think it’s silly that this stunt has got so much attention.
More interestingly is this video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsMdN7HMuA – in which there is a warehouse run by robots instead of human people fetching things, like Amazon uses.
Male and Female brains
Some scientists have done some research into male and female brain differences.
Science reporting is (almost) always done terribly by newspapers, always looking for sensation and never containing much science.
This research is of course useful in the general bundle of scientific research, but the reporting is terrible. One headline was “Why men and women think differently“, as if this is the final answer and all we need to know. It also seems to ignore the fact that “Scientists have documented sex differences in specific structures in the human brain and in the proportion of white matter for over two decades.“, as one article says itself.
It is interesting and apparently (though I haven’t looked at the actual research) suggests that male brains are more concentrated and female brains work more generally, so the idea that women are better multi-taskers may have some truth…
So there’s some of my thoughts on some things I saw in the news this morning.
There’s certainly plenty of news I didn’t pick up on, I just checked the BBC News App this morning and read some of the stories, and these are the ones I thought I would write about.
1 I use this in a tongue-in-cheek way: as far as I’m aware, the phrase ‘gay agenda’ is used by anti-gay people to act as if there is some gay conspiracy to infect all of their children; in my opinion the gay agenda is just for equal treatment, and I use the phrase to mean that. ↩
Re RBS – I would question the extent to which customers have the basis to complain and banks the obligation to grovel in the context of 1) a competitive retail banking sector where customers can move with relative ease between competing providers, and, more significantly, 2) free retail banking.
It's safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of RBS customers do not pay to use the bank's services. It's not that the bank is doing its customers a favour, but it does deserve recognition of the fact that margins esp. in credit cards are exceptionally tight (< 1pc). If I bargain with someone for something and provide consideration for the service, I have a clear basis to be angry when my partner fails to deliver on their obligation. If someone promises to confer a benefit on me for free, I feel like I should have considerably less license to whinge.
That doesn't mean the bank's services should be capable of being withdrawn at any time, but it does seem a bit odd to complain quite so vociferously about something which looks to me more like a gift (albeit not a selfless one) than a bargain.
Conclusion – if people want high-quality, personalised, customer-centered banking services, backed up by resilient back-office systems, they might have to actually pay for them.