Mr Bean at the Bank of England

When I heard that Mr Bean worked at the Bank of England I naturally assumed that he would not be the bungling fool played by the actor Rowan Atkinson. Sadly I fear I was mistaken. This afternoon I read in the London Evening Standard and also on the Press Association that Mr Charlie Bean (Deputy Governor) was urging savers to spend their savings to help the economy.

This stupid fool deserves to be shown the door! Fired! Thrown out!

It used to be prudent to save for one's retirement, to put money aside for a rainy day. A responsible citizen would ensure they have enough money to tide them over economic problems. No, the Bank of  England proposes fiscal irresponsibility by the savers. Go on a spending spree and buy more imported goods? How on earth will that help the UK economy? Is he not content with punishing savers with artificially low interest rates? This man favours the people who spend spend spend with money saved from their ultra-low mortgage rates.

The printing of money (quantitative easing) by the Bank of England will effectively devalue our savings by devaluing the pound, now the absolute buffoon wants us to fritter away the money put aside for our futures.

The man is a Brownian Dinosaur and should be removed from post.

I'm so glad I moved my money into gold when the Bank of England was selling our reserves. Now it is "worth" four times what I paid for it. More realistically it is a glaring measure of how much the pound has fallen and how poorly the idiots at the Bank of England and the previous Labour Government  managed the economy.

Alaric

Some common sense over children at last

The UK coalition government are showing some common sense over the vetting of adults who make contact with children other than their own. The BBC reports on it's web site there is going to be a proper review of the overbearing draconian rules developed by the previous Labour government and its Vetting and Barring Scheme.

The clue is in the title of the scheme, it assumes all adults are guilty until proven innocent. It would have been an expensive and ineffective scheme that would help destroy the trust between adults and children. Predictably the boss of the children's charity Barnardo's, Martin Narey says the scheme is needed. That self appointed guardian organisation does more harm than good. Instead of being a well paid lobby organisation it should go back to its roots and actually provide care for orphans.

In my Teen Valour series of books I take care to show how children can develop without the need for government interference. The officialdom of the previous Labour government has help prevent good honest people from volunteering to help lead children to their development. Hopefully some balance will be restored.

Alaric

The consequences of Terry Jones

Pastor Terry Jones in Florida announces the planned burning of the Koran. The cost of his ignorant blind intolerant irresponsible actions:

Bad feeling against hundred of thousands of Christians;
Recruiting Sergeant for Al Qaeda;

Shot & Wounded in Afghanistan - 3 people
Shot & killed in Badakhshan - 1 person

How much blood does this stupid man want on his hands?

Connecting the NotSpots

The welsh village of Erbistock had been quoted a price of £550,000 by British Telecom to connect them to the Internet. Rutland Telecom will deliver the same for £50,000 according to a report on the BBC website. It seems that BT is not the super-efficient public guardian of the Internet that it claims to be. From my viewpoint it is still a bloated monopoly charging high fees for poor service, its latest price increases are a clear example. They chose a Chinese manufacturer of network equipment over a British one to supply the network equipment for the upgrade of their whole network. It seems it is a massive corporation which feeds off our nation rather than investing in it.

I well remember in the early days of the Internet when two BT Account Executives came to my office in the City of London and offered a dialup 16K internet connection at a special price of £150 a month. It was such a special bargain I laughed in their face! I already had in my home the same service (via Demon) for £10 a month.

It seems like history repeats itself.

Alaric

Has Barnardo's lost its way?

I note this morning that the children's charity has chosen to pass comment on the school selection criteria. This venture into the political area is dangerous ground for the charity. The schools policy is something for the government to resolve. The government which was recently elected by the UK electorate. The Barnardo charity was set up by Dr Barnardo to look after the welfare of orphans and abandoned children. The charity no longer provides orphanages for these children, but has chosen to designate itself as as an un-appointed mouthpiece for all children. It is now largely an irrelevance which sucks in charity donations to keep itself running. They should either revert to their roots and focus on orphans/abandoned children or close down.

Alaric

Lewisham Council - Park land care

I've just visited my publisher's home for a coffee. It is located in a pleasant part of South East London (SE4) and is blessed with a large open park area nearby. The park is called Hilly Fields. He took me for a walk in the park with his dogs. Our peace was disturbed by the noise of large mechanical diggers and graders gouging out the ground in the middle of the level ground used by football players. At weekends the local soccer club uses the area for providing training of around 50-60 children. That soccer club has been active for at least 15 years. During the week a lot of people use the area for casual football playing. The place is a valuable social asset for the crowded urban area. 

So why has the council allowed the football area to be dug up? Well, at the end of the school summer holidays and the real start of the soccer season, they are allowing the construction of a cricket pitch! No doubt to avoid damage to the cricket pitch they'll ban the use of the area by footballers. Football is far more popular than cricket at the site. I wonder who was consulted before the work was allowed to destroy the football area?

My publisher tells me the Council has also given the local girl's school to annex part of the public park land on Hilly Fields for the purposes of building "temporary" classrooms. In fact it is not the school but a limited company who own the school who have been granted permission to move in the bulldozers and take over the public parkland. Good for their profit potential, not so good for the public park land obtained for the whole community over 100 years ago.

It seems to me that Lewisham Council are being rather careless in their management of this public land. Once lost it will never be recovered. There will be some feeble excuse like "We'd really like to restore the land, but unfortunately there is no budget this year.."  The public money was probably wasted on building a cricket pitch, which few people want, over the ground used by the much more popular football.

Alaric

Note: 13th May 2012
The "temporary" class rooms remain on the the park land with planning "permission" extended to December 2013.  As of today the "Cricket Pitch" is unused, footballer have to play around the area..

Google Adwords

We've been running a Google Adwords advert for the second book Company Mole. The click-through response rate has been low and even those click-throughs have had a poor conversion into sales. It's been costing in the region of only $30 a month, so we let it runfor a few months to see if things improved. It hasn't. We thought we'd improve the advert by providing a direct link to the Amazon Kindle page where the book is on sale.. 

The Google editorial staff have decided that the shown URL link and and destination URL link are not related, though if they'd taken the effort to actuually check they would rapidly realise there is a very strong link.

Given the poor performance of the Adwords and Google's careless rejection of the revised advert we've as a business have decided to give Google Adwords a miss for a while. It's their loss, not ours. We're diverting the advert funding for this and our other Adword adverts to other marketing.

Alaric