Archive for January, 2006
From boom to bust
There are lots of benefits to being your own boss - such as the joys of sitting around in your dressing gown with sticky-up hair and too many days’ beard growth - but as I’ve written before, there are negatives too. Not just the lack of holiday pay, sick pay or job security, but also late payment which, in many cases, results in a flurry of bank charges that wipe out most of your wages long before they turn up.
While late payment is bad, non-payment is worse - and when a firm goes bust owing you money, you’re stuffed. If you’re self-employed and a big client goes to the wall, your chances of getting even a fraction of what you’re owed are effectively zero (careers advice: if you want to make money, go into the liquidation business. When one of my former employers went bust last year, the firm had around £30K in assets - which went to the bank and to the liquidators. The firm’s army of freelances didn’t get a penny).
Aaaaaaanyway… on a journalist forum I frequent, various writers are comparing notes on late payment and non-payment. The winner? A writer whose biggest client has gone down the tubes.
She’s owed nearly £7,000 :-o
Technology will save us from drudgery: BillMonk
BillMonk is a new “social money” site that solves a really big problem: reminding people that they owe you money.
Here’s how things worked in the bad old pre-internet days:
YOU: OK, I’ll get the bill this time. It’s your shout next time.
Or:
YOU: Hey, you owe me money! Give me it now or I’ll break your legs!
Not good enough! You need Internet Power!
Here’s how it works with BillMonk:
* Sign up to BillMonk
* Enter details of the bill
* Enter the email addresses of the people who owe money towards the bill
* Billmonk emails them
* They sign up to BillMonk
* They can see how much they owe you
* They pay you some or all of the money
* You log back into BillMonk and note the payment
* BillMonk reduces the owed amount accordingly
* You wonder why you don’t have any friends any more
Stay tuned for my own Web 2.0 venture, whoseturnisittotakethebinsout.com.
Blue-hoo!
On DVD February 21st (US-only, so far. Thank god for multi-region players).
Things that aren’t real
In no particular order:
* The download speed advertised by your broadband provider
* The speed listed on your Wi-Fi kit
* The battery life quoted by hardware manufacturers
* The 4x speed increase if you move from a Powerbook to a MacBook Pro
* The 2x speed increase if you take an intel iMac over a G5 iMac
* The song capacity on any MP3-style player
* Leprechauns
Woe le taxi
I was stuck in traffic behind a taxi earlier today, and spotted - or rather, couldn’t miss - a huge LCD screen sitting behind the driver’s head. It was showing a medley of ads, news snippets and so on, in a package that I assume is similar to the really annoying stuff you get on some trains now. Although it’s for the entertainment of passengers, it’s crystal-clear when you’re in a car behind it - and it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off.
The downsides of in-car videos have been apparent for some time - amusingly, in the US there have been cases of “drive-by porning” where unsuspecting commuters are subjected to porn clips courtesy of the car next to them - but a giant, back-facing screen in a taxi is downright dangerous, even when its content is perfectly innocuous.
God bless Fark.com
Thanks to the ongoing battle between Farkers to be the best story submitter, Fark.com routinely runs story summaries such as this:
Woman shocked after getting electrical bill for $250 million from power company. Chagrined company admits its error, but says it only needs one person to pay a bill like this for their elaborate scheme to work
Phone pain
Sorry for the lack of updates; I’ve been trapped under deadline mountain again.
Um, I’ve just trashed my mobile phone’s address book, and the backup’s fritzed too. Can I ask a favour from those of you who’ve had the dubious joy of talking to me on the phone? If you could drop me an email with your mobile number, that’d be dandy. Thanks. Ignore that bit. I managed to get the backup to work. Yay me.
“Our booze is cheaper than water”
So screams The Sunday Mail, which is so alarmed at the cost of booze it’s done some world-standard pockling to try and justify its headline. Here goes:
HEALTH experts last night demanded the price of drink be DOUBLED after it was revealed booze is cheaper than water.
Sunday Mail investigators checked out prices after reports linked bargain-basement drink to Scotland’s spiralling death rate from alcohol abuse.
At Tesco, Scotland’s best-selling lager Tennent’s sells for 37p a can or 84p a litre.
That compares with 59p for a 500ml bottle of the leading mineral water Vittel - £1.18 a litre.
Um, not quite. The lager is based on multipack prices during a special offer, not single cans; the water is a sports bottle, one of the most expensive ways to buy bottled water.
Let’s look at Tesco again. How much is a can of Tennents? 83p for a 500ml can. That’s £1.66 per litre. And the Vittel? I can’t find a 500ml bottle; the closest on Tesco.com is a 1.5l bottle at 59p, or 39p per litre. So rather than booze being cheaper than water, it’s more than four times more expensive. Hold the front page!
Perhaps the writer was pissed.
Sick and tired
A bout of Martian Death Flu seems to have morphed into something more unpleasant, so I’ll be offline for a couple of days :(
What if… Luddism returns?
Originally published in PC Plus
In 1812 thousands of textile workers attacked a mill near Manchester, determined to destroy the power looms they believed threatened their jobs. Ten of them were shot dead, and in the aftermath a further four men were arrested, convicted and executed.
The men were Luddites, and if they thought power looms were scary, today’s technology would give them heart attacks. Technology is transforming everything: the way we work, the way we live, and even the genes inside us - and one day, it could become our master rather than our servant. As technology’s reach extends ever onwards, will Luddism live again?
Like King Canute, the Luddites get a raw deal from history: Canute was demonstrating his fallibility, not his power, and the Luddites weren’t a bunch of thugs protesting against technology for technology’s sake. They knew that the new mill machines – coupled with the abolition of price controls and the arrival of a free market – would destroy their jobs. They were right, and the issues they faced are back with a vengeance today.
The Luddites’ big problem was that the rest of the world couldn’t care less about their jobs. Sure, it was a tragedy if you were a skilled knitter whose job was replaced by a machine, but if you weren’t then new technology and the abolition of price controls meant cheaper fabric. The same thing happened in the 20th century as technology moved on to hot-metal printers, to car assemblers and to factory workers. Again, bad news for the people in those industries, but hey! Cheaper, colour newspapers! Better-built cars! Cheaper goods!
In the latter part of the 20th century, the combination of new technology and a free market was good news for lots of people. Areas such as Scotland’s Silicon Glen created new jobs in the form of circuit board population, computer case moulding and mobile phone assembly. Cheap imports slashed the cost of consumer goods as Asian firms perfected high-volume, high quality, low-cost manufacturing. Clothing had never been cheaper. Yes, the old jobs were gone, but we had new ones: high-tech firms! Retail! Call centres!
By the late 1990s, though, the cracks were beginning to show. The same electronics firms that had brought new hope to depressed areas started upping sticks, moving to other countries that offered the same level of technology but much lower labour costs (and in many cases, fewer environmental or workers’ protection regulations). In the first few years of the 21st Century such firms were leaving the UK en masse – and technology had turned its attention to the service sector.
While we were setting up call centres and teaching former shipbuilders to use PCs, technology’s march continued. We didn’t notice until we got our first telesales call from Mumbai, when we lost a lucrative contract to a cheaper, smarter, overseas firm, or when the tech support staff were made redundant and first-line support transferred to Bangalore. Suddenly everyone’s job was at risk, and Luddism was back.
Of course, nobody calls it Luddism – but when record companies demand government action against file sharers and new laws to criminalise copying; when IT workers campaign against outsourcing; when unions and tabloids protest as insurance firms shift their call centres to Bangalore; when retailers are wiped out by low-margin online shops; when book publishers attempt to stop Google from digitising everything ever printed… they’re all fighting against the relentless march of the terrible twins, technology and a global free market. In many cases it’s selective Luddism - anti-capitalist protesters make good use of cheaply made, imported mobile phones and computers to co-ordinate their protests, and video cameras to record them; the very firms that want protection from the relentless march of technology are quick to implement IT within their own businesses - but it’s still Luddism.
Stereotypical Luddism - a knee-jerk reaction to technology - is back too. You see it in the fringes of the environmental movement, in the reaction against GM crops, in campaigns against mobile phone masts, in the proliferation of quack homeopathic “cures” and in conversations with people who buy organic because “chemicals are bad”. While many - and probably most - of the people concerned about the environment, genetic research and so on have sound concerns, their concerns act as a magnet for the anti-technology crowd whose motto might as well be “if I don’t understand it, it’s evil.”
So should we expect angry mobs roaming the streets, destroying Dells and assaulting iPod owners? Probably not. However, whenever a speed or CCTV camera is destroyed, when GM crops are vandalised or anti-capitalist protests turn violent, it’s clear that neo-luddism has a distinctly ugly side. As technology’s influence on the way we live grows ever stronger, it’s a side we may see much more of.