Dear Labour... An idea for you.

The Labour government, in their most recent budget, have increased National Insurance on employers. That is, in effect, a tax on companies for each person they employ, which amongst other things will encourage them to avoid hiring, and to reduce their workforces.

One of the ways companies are already cutting workforces is via automation - checkout assistants are replaced by self checkout, fuel is provided via "pay at the pump", switchboard operators are replaced by chatbots and now AI, and so on. Automation represents a huge and upcoming shock to the labour market; it's going to hurt us all, really badly.

So, here's a suggestion:

Why not tax companies for each time a UK-based customer has to interact with a machine instead of a person? If I go to self-checkout, the supermarket gets taxed. If I phone my insurer and have to battle with an automated switchboard, they get taxed. And so on, and so forth. I'm not talking a huge tax, but a small charge multiplied by millions of interactions each day will quickly add up.

I would also note that the tax needs to be based on the location of the customer, not the chatbot/AI/whatever - if not, companies will respond by putting in thin UIs to all their terminals and put the intelligence offshore, and hosting their AIs out of the country. But tie it to the customer, and they can't so easily dodge it.

Anyway, there it is.

Day 300: Update on Goals

I've been giving a lot of thought to the topic of goals recently, in particular focused on the larger question of "what do I want?" This has led to some interesting conclusions... but that's a topic for another day.

For today, it's time for the penultimate update on goals for the year...

• Books: By this point I should have read 24.6 books, and have actually read 18 and parts of two others. I'm therefore well behind target - so far behind in fact that I've actually deleted the part of my spreadsheet that tracks the target for me. (Yes, I have a spreadsheet for these things.) I'm now hoping to complete another five books or so by the end of the year, which would leave me well away from the target, but does at least represent something approaching a decent last two months for the year.
• Blogging: I've gradually restarted blogging here after many slow months. Hopefully that will stick. I'm also in the process of bringing the Imaginarium to the 1,000 posts milestone - I hope to reach that by the end of the year; whether I achieve that or not, I intend to place that blog on indefinite hiatus at the end of the year.
• Redecoration: This was considered complete in the previous update.
• Complete my Campaign: This was considered complete in the previous update.
• Update the Church Website: There has been only a tiny update since last time. There will be a couple of further small updates before the end of the year (one for the Armistice and one for Christmas), but that's probably all. I really need to start the ball rolling on a fuller update - that will be a key task for next year, I think.

The consequence of all of that is that I have completed two goals but have accepted that the other three are now failed. However, I am now making renewed progress on two of those three goals, which is something - in terms of the year it will of course count as a failure, but since the formal goals are a means to an end, making some progress is better than just shrugging and giving up.

The US Election: What are Labour Playing At?

Eight years ago, Kezia Dugdale famously traveled to the US to campaign for Hillary Clinton in the US election, and so profound was her impact that she ended up taking a selfie with a cardboard cutout of her chosen candidate. Americans just don't care about UK politicians one way or another, and frankly that is the way it should be.

Apparently, this year there are some hundred or so Labour members who have travelled over to the US to campaign for Kamala Harris. No doubt, their impact will be every bit as potent as Dugdale's was.

However, there is a very important difference between the two scenarios: back in 2016 Labour were in oppositio in the UK, and indeed were essentially an irrelevance in domestic politics, never mind the US. In 2024, however, Labour are now the party of government in the UK, meaning that the actions of representatives of that party are, at least in some ways, reflective of the attitudes of their party, and by extension our government as a whole. Kier Starmer is going to have to work with (well, play lapdog to) whoever wins the US election, and if that is Trump he's going to be starting from a position of having provided at least tacit support to the other side.

Bottom line: I don't particularly think members of UK political parties should be getting involved in the US election at all, on any side, but I certainly think our party of government must stay out of it.

But maybe that's just me.

(I have no particular dog in this fight, mostly because it's for the US to pick their own leaders, and partly because they seem to have found the two absolute worst possible candidates. I have a very marginal preference for Harris, but as with Biden before her, her only selling point is that she's not Donald Trump. Whoever wins, I think the next four years are going to be pretty horrible.)

Only Seventeen Months...

Back in July of 2023 I posted that it was time for Phone #6 - at that time I'd concluded that my existing phone had become slow, wasn't holding a charge, and the storage had become way too full. I then proceeded to do nothing about it.

The week before last, something happened to that phone that has damaged the charge circuit - it still works, but it will no longer "fast charge". That's probably a failure of the USB-C port such that it can no longer negotiate power needs. Regardless, it meant that that was no longer any ducking the issue, and it was time for a new phone.

So I've now purchased said new phone. The good news is that I now have a clear view of my needs (or lack thereof), and they're such that any smartphone on the market would meet them. And since the old device is seven years old, literally any phone on the market will be superior in every way.

The consequence of that is that I have bought the second-cheapest smartphone offered by the same vendor as the old one. Now I just need to set it up.

Enough is Enough

After several years of drought, we've now been invited to a wedding in the summer of next year. And, unlike the most recent weddings we've attended, it is likely that we'll be called upon to dance at this one.

In a convergence of events, we've also recently returned home from our most recent trip away, and getting back onto the scales made for a fairly horrific experience. The one slight mitigation there is that any trip away always leads to a spike, and it always drops back to normal. But, inn all honesty, things have been in a fairly bad way there for a long time, rising gradually since the halcyon days of 2009. Repeated goals to reduce this have gone completely neglected, and so we arrive at today.

The upshot of all of this is that enough is enough. Time to take this one seriously, and sort it out.

Et Tu, Coco Monkey?

While we were away recently we decided to pick up a box of cereal to share between us. In the event, I think I was the only one who had any, but never mind... We decided to allow Funsize and Surprise! to choose the cereal between them, and they opted for Coco Pops, and we even treated ourselves to the name-brand box rather than the store's own-brand.

Big mistake.

Opening the box, it turned out that most of the Coco Pops were, in fact, not. Instead, it was a box almost entirely of Rice Crispies, with just enough Coco Pops to turn the milk hint-of-chocolatey.

Needless to say, this is the most horrific of betrayals, and not one that Coco Monkey will be forgiven for a long time.

(I'm reliably informed, on the internet so it must be true, that this was actually a case of production failure. That is, the box of Coco Pops should indeed have been Coco Pops. But I'm also reliably informed, by those same wise heads, that name-brand Coco Pops are now the worst of all Coco Pops.)

#18: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", by John Le Carré

Clearing the Decks

I'm currently in a process of tidying things up, decluttering my life (physically, but mostly temporally), and generally clearing the decks. Hopefully once that's done normal blogging may resume - it's been unsatisfactory for rather too long.

In the meantime, continue talking amongst yourselves...

#17: "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang over the Moon", by Frank Cottrell-Boyce (a book for Funsize)

Day 250: Update on Goals

Another update on goals, again with almost nothing on the blog since the last one...

• Books: By this point I should have read 20.5 books. I'm now well behind that target - having got back on track, I promptly got bogged down in a fantasy doorstop novel that I just couldn't face and so lost several weeks.
• Blogging: By this point I should have posted about 82 times here. I've long since admitted defeat on this one.
• Redecoration: Since the last update we have re-repainted the study and replaced the carpet in that room. That wasn't part of the stated goal here, but it was definitely a good job to have done. I'm now happy to declare this goal complete.
• Complete my Campaign: The campaign has come to a successful conclusion. This goal is therefore complete.
• Update the Church Website: No update since last time.

That's now two goals having reached completion, one that is well behind target (and unlikely to be completed successfully), and one that has long-since been accepted as failed. The fifth and final goal needs some attention - it will probably be the difference between a 60% passing marking and 40% abject failure for the year.

I'm going to need to think carefully about goals for next year - whether to set any at all, but also what they should be. The redecoration of the house has now reached a stage that it is essentially complete (ideally, the remaining rooms could do with more than just a lick of paint), while both the Book and Blogging goals seem to be lost causes. We'll see.