Tag: Computing

Categories
Computing

Why are there so many recruiters?

I don't know about you, but 90% or more of my linkedin contact requests come from recruiters. I don't accept them all. Am I the kind of talented high-flyer you would want to headhunt? Probably not, in person I'm rather shy and certainly not management material. I suppose I just know a few esoteric programming tricks and have a good understanding of data and information architecture. What's more, apart from a few modules taken as part of an Open University degree, I'm entirely self-taught. With all these young whizkids graduating in IT-related degrees in a country obsessed with electronic gadgets and multimedia wizardry, you'd think I'd have plenty of competition from young twenty-somethings. Despite high youth unemployment and free access to tutorials on just about any programming framework that takes your fancy, relatively few youngsters get beyond writing a few lines of Javascript. Unfortunately the tech industry does not need mediocre code monkeys who can churn out repetitive procedural scripts, for that task can be fully automated. In the software industry you do not judge someone's productivity by the amount of code they write or even by the number of hours they work, but how well their application performs. To produce lean and mean applications, you need to get your head around various programming algorithms and design patterns. Yes, it really does matter if you pass a variable by reference or by value or if you clumsily copy and paste variants of some old procedural routine rather than encapsulate it in a neat reusable function that can be reliably tested and yields no side effects.

A good developer never stops learning new techniques to write better, more expressive, more maintainable and more efficient code, rather than clever tricks to automate monotonous tasks. That means good hands-on developers are nearly always geeks, as we have to dedicate much of our time to learning new languages and cutting-edge techniques We can learn some things by social osmosis, but only if we understand core concepts that relate to direct experience. Indeed if a subject does not actively interest us, that's what most of us do. We rely on other people's expertise, but know enough about the subject to avoid getting ripped off. In some academic fields a specialist in someone who has researched a subject extensively, but in most hard sciences specialists are people with active hands-on experience. Unless you have written and tested applications with complex and irregular business logic, you wouldn't be able to appreciate what application developers do. They just sit in front of screens writing quirky symbols with a few English-like key words. Concepts such as design patterns mean little if you have just learned how to do a simple loop. Now suppose you need to hire a new developer, for sake of argument, let's just assume you need a good NodeJS specialist. Who could possibly judge if a candidate knows their stuff? They may have an excellent CV, good qualifications and some good references, but in today's fast-changing world, these mean very little. Millions have worked directly or indirectly for major media multinationals. If you say you worked on the BBC news Website, which bit did you do? Did you just design a prototype for a new button or test a new interactive widget on different browsers? Does your recruiter really understand what skills are required?

Recruiter
Hello, Neil. It's Ryan Adams here. Look we've got a Drupal gig on at Arty Farty New Age Media over in Soho. They need a hard-core backend guy like yourself for a couple of weeks. Would £400 a day tempt you?
Me
Well, actually I'm very busy at moment (trying to fix someone else's awful code), but might be available in a couple of weeks (just in case my contract is cut short).
Recruiter
They really need someone to start straight away. This is for a massive media campaign of a leading household brand.
Me
What happened to the last developer?
Recruiter
Oh, he had issues, some of kind of personality clash, I think. How about £450 a day?
Me
If we continue this conversation, my contract here will be terminated. Let me get back to undoing the mess the last developer here created.
Recruiter
Is your boss looking for any new developers?

One way or another for every real hands-on developer out there there's at least one recruiter, one project manager, a business analyst, a marketing wonk and an accountant (because many IT professionals are contractors with their own limited companies). For some jobs in London's frenetic media sector, I've been contacted by five or more recruiters from different agencies for the same job. "Do you have experience with Solr, the Zend framework, Git and IPTV?" enquires a 22 year old IT graduate. These are really just buzzwords, which mean little until more details are revealed. In most cases they just need an experienced developer who happens to have a used the required programming language in the context of a specific framework and has worked in small teams with agile methodology. Requiring a good understanding of business processes is a good way to weed out self-taught novice programmers or inexperienced IT graduates.

For over 20 years the UK education system has produced millions of graduates who can, figuratively speaking, talk the talk, and not so many who can walk the walk. Although our way of life relies on complex technology, few have more than a cursory overview of its inner workings, but millions are employed in managing the complex human interactions between business owners, government agencies and mission-critical human resources. If all recruiters went on strike tomorrow, no essential services would be disrupted. Life would carry on as usual, except slowly lead developers would have to spend a little more time hunting new talent and would probably choose other geeks just like themselves. That is precisely the scenario, that upper management would prefer to avoid. They do not want a new category of indispensable engineers who can hold their business to ransom. They do not want technical experts to see the whole picture or even gain credit for the fruits of their labour. Meeting business requirements often means just accepting you're a cog in a much bigger machine and cannot work out of sync with all the other cogs, chains, pulleys and lubricating fluids.

Categories
Computing

The Copy and Paste Design Pattern

copy paste

All good programmers understand the concept of design patterns, creational patterns, structural patterns and behavioural patterns. We apply these patterns in different aspects of our projects. It's good to recognise common patterns so we can generalise routines into reusable functions or objects. I won't bore you with the details because you can learn more from a wealth of other online resources, but two key principles underly all design patterns:

  1. Think strategically about your application architecture
  2. Do not Repeat Yourself, aka, DRY. Organise your code so common routines can be reapplied.

Great, but in my humble experience we should add probably the most common design pattern of them all, though strictly speaking it's an anti-pattern: Adaptive Copy & Paste. The core idea here is if it works for somebody else you can just copy, paste and post-edit their code. Sometimes you can begin with some really good snippets of well-structured and commented code, but all too often online code samples are just formulaic and adapted from textbook boilerplate code. I've seen blocks of code pasted into Javascript files with references to StackOverflow.com complete with source URLs and deployed on high-traffic live sites. Let me show you a simple example:

var GBPExchangeRates = {
    USD: 1.52,
    EUR: 1.38,
    CDN: 1.57,
    SKR: 12.89,
    AUD: 1.45,
    CHF: 1.76
  };
  function convertGBPToEuro(GBPVal) {
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'string') {
        GBPVal = GBPVal.repplace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
        if (GBPVal.length>0) {
            GBPVal = parseFloat(GBPVal);
        }
    }
        if (typeof GBPVal == 'number') {
        return GBPVal * GBPExchangeRates.EUR
    }
    return 0;
  }
  function convertGBPToUSD(GBPVal) {
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'string') {
        GBPVal = GBPVal.repplace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
        if (GBPVal.length>0) {
            GBPVal = parseFloat(GBPVal);
        }
    }
    if (typeof GBPVal == 'number') {
        return GBPVal * GBPExchangeRates.USD
    }
    return 0;
  }
  
  var coffeePriceGBP = 1.90;
  
  var teaPriceGBP = 1.10;
  
  var orangeJuicePriceGBP = 1.50;
  
  var coffeePriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(coffeePriceGBP);
  
  var teaPriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(teaPriceGBP);
  
  var orangeJuicePriceEUR = convertGBPToEuro(orangeJuicePriceGBP);
  
  var coffeePriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(coffeePriceGBP);
  
  var teaPriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(teaPriceGBP);
  
  var orangeJuicePriceUSD = convertGBPToUSD(orangeJuicePriceGBP);

For a beginner, this is honestly not that bad at all. First we set up a simple object of common currencies with their exchange rates. In the real world this may come from some sort of feed. Next we devise a neat function to convert our GBP prices to Euros. Just to make it failsafe, we make sure we can handle strings with a mixture of numerals and currency symbols, which may include commas or other symbols than decimal points. If we only ever had to convert between British pounds and Euros, that would be just fine, though we may convert all prices via some sort of loop rather than make separate calls for each price. Here for just three prices and three currencies, we need to set nine explicit price variants and six explicit function calls.

However, later an intrepid project manager decides we need to support other currencies and may need to convert other units too, such as measurements or clothes sizes, so a busy code monkey promptly copies, pastes and adapts the first method to USD. Not too bad we only have two functions, but they contain much shared logic. Indeed the only difference lies in the conversion rate. We should break down this logic into steps. First we test if the input is a number (Javascript has a generic Number type that covers both floats and integers). Next we strip any non-numeric characters and cast to a float if the result is not empty. Only then do we apply our conversion rate. The above code could be even worse. We could have opted to hard-code the conversion rate. This may work for constants, such inches to centimetres, but it doesn't work for variables like exchange rates. What we need a generic method to convert number-like strings to true floats and another generic method to apply conversion rates from simple key/value objects.
Javascript makes it very easy for us to apply the decorator pattern by extending an object's prototype. This allows us to chain methods in a very self-descriptive way.

String.prototype.numeralsOnly = function() {
    return this.replace(/[^0-9.]/g,'');
}
String.prototype.toFloat = function() {
    var self = this.numeralsOnly();
    if (self.length < 1) {
        self = 0;
    }
    return  parseFloat(self);
}
Number.prototype.toFloat = function() {
    return parseFloat(this);
}
Object.prototype.matchFloat = function(key) {
var obj = this, val;
    if (obj instanceof Object) {
        if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
            val = obj[key];
            if (val) {
                return val.toFloat();
            }
        }
    }
    return 0;
}
Number.prototype.convert = function(fromUnit,toUnit,units) {
    if (units instanceof Object) {
        return this * (
        units.matchFloat(toUnit) / units.matchFloat(fromUnit)
        );
    }
}

We then apply a simple conversion table:

  var rates = {
    GBP: 1,
    USD: 1.53,
    EUR: 1.37,
    YEN: 132.2,
    RUB: 12.7
  };

Then if we were to allow users to convert to the currency of their choice, we could simply add prices in the base currency (in this case GBP) via some hidden element and then apply the conversion factor via the Document Object Model (or DOM):

  $('table thead .currencies .option').on('click',function(e){
    var it = $(this),
      tb = it.parent().parent().parent().parent(),
      selEl = it.parent().find('.selected');
    if (selEl.length < 1) {
      selEl = it.parent('em').first();
    }
    var selCurr = selEl.text().trim().toUpperCase(), tgCurr = it.text().trim().toUpperCase();
    tb.find('.price').each(function(i){
      var td = $(this),
      nVl = td.attr('data-gbp').toFloat().convert('GBP',tgCurr,rates);
      td.html(nVl.toFixed(2));
    });
    
  });

This may look like more code, but we now have a solution that works with any currencies and any number of data items to be converted. Moreover, our convert method may be applied to any units. If we wanted to present volumes in either millilitres or fluid ounces we would just include our decorator methods as a library, set up a conversion table and write a short DOM script. 90% of the code would have been tested for other use cases:

var volumeUnits = {
    ml: 1,
    l: 1000,
    floz: 29.5625
}

Good programmers always think out of the box, not just how to solve the current problem as presented by a project manager, but how do I solve other problems like this? More important, we should ask how to make our code more maintainable and easier to test.

Common Mistakes

  1. Placing editorial content in code files that only developers know how to edit: e.g. A senior manager has decided to edit some text on your company's online shop. The only reason she needs to involve you in this editorial change is because your predecessor placed the text in a template or even worse embedded it verbatim on line 1451 of a fat controller file. What should you do? To make your life easy you could just edit the offending line and write a note for future developers that this text is hard-coded in such and such a file. Management will then think that whenever they wish to edit content they need to ask your project manager to ask you to apply some cryptic code change. However, later they will review their IT budget and decide you are too expensive and then outsource the whole project to a low-wage country or replace it with a state-of-the-art content management system that let's them edit any content without any programming knowledge. What you should do is suggest all such content should be editable in a special admin area and all hard-coded text, media or numbers should be replaced with references to editable content.
  2. Quoting one programming language in another: This is surprisingly common. The main reason for doing so is to inject server-side variables into client-side scripts, e.g. using PHP to build a Javascript routine with a few variables generated dynamically by the server. Not only does this make your Javascript very hard to debug, but it inevitably leads to more repetitive and thus slower Javascript. If you want to fetch data from the back-end, you should inject it as hidden attributes that Javascript can read or simply inject some JSON easily converted from native server-side objects or make an asynchronously request with a JSON response. Keep your javascript lean and mean and ideally in separate files, so your browser can cache these resources more efficiently. If you're using backbone.js or jQuery or other framework, these can be loaded from a content delivery network or CDN.
  3. Repeating routines: Whenever you find yourself repeating a routine more than once, you need a new function or at they very least a loop:
    var d = new Date(item.created);
   item.created_date = d.getDate() + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) + '/' + d.getFullYear();
   
   var d = new Date(item.modified);
   item.modified_date = d.getDate() + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) + '/' + d.getFullYear();

This is messy. What we need is a generic date conversion function:

var isoDateToEuroDate = function(strDate) {
    var d = new Date(strDate);
     return d.getDate() . zeropad(2) + '/' + (d.getMonth()+1) . zeropad(2) + '/' + d.getFullYear();
}

And if we're doing a lot of date manipulation,we might like to include a date library to make our code simpler. Your bosses may not notice that you are just writing the same code over and over again, but if your code becomes very expensive to maintain, they will either ditch it or outsource your work to some hapless code monkeys on a fraction of your wage.

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics

Surprise: The Big Business Party won

I predicted a hung parliament that would ditch any manifesto promises at the behest of corporate lobbyists. A weak government is arguably more malleable than a strong one, unless the strong government does exactly what its true masters want. I suspect the new Conservative administration will disappoint many traditional small-c conservatives as it pursues a rigorously corporatist agenda while undermining the very United Kingdom it claims to champion.

I seriously expected Labour to do just a bit better and for the SNP wipeout not to be quite as complete (with only three Scottish seats not won by the SNP). How could the English electorate differ so markedly from the Scottish?

Let's take a closer look at what really happened. In percentage terms the polls were not entirely off the mark, Labour gained 2-3% less than expected, while the Conservatives attracted 3% more and SNP 4-5% more. The Liberal Democrats did worse than expected, while UKIP's popular vote was only marginally lower than most opinion polls suggested. We saw three divergent dynamics at play.

  • In Scotland many Labour and Liberal Democrat voters switched to the SNP. In working class provincial England many Labour voters switched to UKIP.
  • In middle class provincial England and much of Wales, Liberal Democrat voters switched to Conservatives, while most affluent Tory voters stayed loyal. In short UKIP took more votes from Labour than from the hated Tories especially in key marginals, where most disaffection went to the one party that had serious proposals to address unbalanced mass migration.
  • In urban areas with large immigrant populations, especially Muslims, Labour did modestly well even gaining a few seats, but mainly from the LibDems, except in posh areas of London with affluent immigrants where the Tories posed as the party of international business.

UKIP gained 3.9 million votes, but just one MP, Douglas Carsewell, whose love of free trade and Gladstonian Liberalism sets him apart from most UKIP voters, who would support not only tougher immigration controls but also import controls to bring back manufacturing to Britain. The offspring of Great British working class are now represented by three parties who look down on them. Labour and the SNP support greater EU integration, free labour movement, greater surveillance and generally more state interference in private lives. UKIP would increase military spending and expand hydraulic fracturing, while promoting free trade and doing little to address fundamental problems of outsourcing and reliance on volatile financial markets. They won support primarily on two issues: immigration and exit from the European Union. Yet millions of workers across the Europe distrust remote transnational entities not because they want an even more deregulated labour market, but because they want to regain the power to regulate their local labour markets to meet the long-term needs of the local population. It clearly makes little sense for millions of young Europeans to move to other countries because free trade deals have caused relatively inefficient local industries to close as production moves to the Pacific Rim or elsewhere. By and large ordinary workers support greater protection, while privileged professional and business classes benefit from a more dynamic globalised economy able to tap into an almost unlimited pool of talent. It's clearly duplicitous to advocate free trade, but not to allow free movement of labour. However, in an unequal world such globalist policies benefit the privileged and well-educated to the detriment of the unskilled poor. To make such a system vaguely fair we would need to extend Western European welfare provision and workers' rights to the whole world and impose a global living wage. This is precisely the kind of fantasy that the Green Party entertains. That would also mean raising everyone to Western European levels of consumption. Alternatively, we'd have to lower consumption in Western Europe to some sort of global average, but this would inevitably prove not only very unpopular but would lead to cutbacks much more severe than current austerity measures, which are by comparative international standards very modest reductions in a welfare system that has grown considerably over the last 40 years.

Labour should stand up for the long-term interests of ordinary working people in its country. Instead it defends the short-term interests of client groups. If you're a low-paid worker, a single mum with a part-time job or a recent immigrant, Labour's policies may seem slightly more appealing than the Conservative alternatives of cutbacks in welfare provision or tougher restrictions on access to welfare for newcomers. But these are only short-term fixes that address the symptoms of unbalanced unsustainable development rather the root causes. More disturbingly, welfarism combined with global free trade promotes dependence on state institutions beholden ultimately to the same multinational corporations that cause so much inequality and misappropriation of resources in the first place. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, neoliberal corporatism means the privatisation of profit and the nationalisation of losses and social deprivation.

SNP Wipeout

Why would Rupert Murdoch's News International support the Conservatives in England and the SNP in Scotland? They appear both rhetorically and ideologically at loggerheads. The English Conservatives have a public image as the party of business, economic stability and fiscal responsibility. Conversely the SNP present themselves as staunchly anti-austerity and to the left of Labour on most issues, e.g. they oppose Trident and have opposed most recent military interventions. Yet such deceptively radical stances are common in the global business community, who see nation states as a thing of the past and much prefer a porous mosaic of interdependent regions subservient to remote transnational organisations like the European Union or NAFTA. As British imperialism is very much a dead duck, international big business does not really care about peripheral British disputes such as Northern Ireland or the jurisdiction of the Falkland Islands. They merely want privileged access to any resources in these territories and to wider global markets. Any concerns about cultural diversity or self-determination are pure political posturing designed to appeal to local sensitivities.

The SNP leadership could promise increased public spending because it knew it could blame either Red or Blue Tories down south. It could always blame Westminster for any economic woes. If Labour had won, it would demand unsustainable increases in government expenditure way beyond the meagre 2-3 billion saved by scrapping Trident. SNP strategists advocate the kind of radical debt-driven Keynsianism that Labour pursued for two-short years under Gordon Brown in the wake of the 2008 banking collapse. While such quantitative easing boosted the retail and property markets, it failed dismally in stimulating productive growth. The ConDem coalition merely reduced welfare spending to its 2008 levels, while still pumping more money into the economy and deregulating the labour market through zero-hour contracts. For all the emotive talk of slash and burn austerity cuts, total welfare spending continued to rise until 2013 and has only fallen slightly since due to lower unemployment, a by-product of zero-hour contracts and the growth in temporary work contracts. Far from shrink, the beloved UK economy has continued to grow, as has net migration. Yet millions of British residents find it hard to make ends meet. This is largely because the real cost of living, not the fiction portrayed by official retail inflation statistics, has risen astronomically. Property prices in London and much of Southern England exclude a growing section of the workforce. If you do not qualify for housing benefit and are subject to market rates, you could not hope to buy a modest semi-detached house for less than 10 times the average salary or rent a decent two bedroom flat for less than ½ the average the average salary. Moreover, our post-modern way of life requires us both to travel further for work and pleasure and to allocate more of our meagre earnings to communication gadgets and services. Living without an Internet-enabled smartphone, laptop and/or pay-TV package seems increasingly unthinkable. A typical family of four needs not one, but 4 mobile phone contracts at £25-40 each a month plus a broadband/Pay-TV package.

Ultra-conformist SNP activists

While it's easy to dismiss UKIP as a Dad's Army of climate-change-denying xenophobic little Englanders and latter-day Thatcherites, for some inexplicable reason the Scottish National Party has convinced a large cross section of pundits and electors of its radical leftwing credentials. I guess it all depends what you call leftwing. Does it mean empowering the working classes and favouring policies in the long-term interests of ordinary working people or does it mean pursuing a corporate agenda of far-reaching social change whose implications ordinary voters cannot fully comprehend? The latter variant is often known as progressivism, ongoing change towards to a new better tomorrow. Indeed it's surprising just how many politicians on both sides of Atlantic love to talk vacuously of the need for change, without dwelling too long on its definition or on its impact on our everyday lives.

The SNP has a simple rallying cry, Independence from Westminster, a convenient slogan that masks the deep-seated historic animosity and distrust that many Scots feel towards their English neighbours. On two issues I agree wholeheartedly with the SNP: Scrapping the Trident Nuclear missile system a colossal waste of money and devolving power from the UK. I would stop short of full independence because Scotland shares not only an Island with England and Wales with much of its transport infrastructure, but has very close social and family bonds with other regions of the British Isles. In an ideal world I'd probably have a British Isles Federation including the Republic of Ireland. Such a Federation would mark a clear break with the UK's imperial past and would grant its member nations considerable autonomy. It would merely recognise the fact that these Islands have long lived as an extended community and need to work together on many practical logistical issues, from transport to energy, fishing to telecommunications.

Yet for all its talk of independence, the SNP seems very happy to transfer power to a much larger multinational entity, the European Union, which they portray as a progressive force for social justice and environmental protection. This is certainly the outward image that the European Commission would like to convey to younger Europeans. In reality the EU promotes an essentially corporatist vision, in which large transnational companies collude with multitiered state institutions to set rules and regulations in their hegemonic interests. Big businesses find it much easier to comply with new regulations than smaller local enterprises, but if need be they can always outsource nasty low-paid jobs to third parties. Back in the 1990s many on the left saw the EU as a kind of fortress Europe protecting workers against greedy multinationals. 20 years later, an expanded EU looks much more like a microcosm of a new emerging borderless global corporate empire, in which local democratic institutions merely implement policies decided by corporate consultancies. Indeed even today, the UK government has very limited power over a whole range of key issues that affect our daily lives.

Big business does not really need a UK nuclear deterrent, but merely local institutions that collaborate with its favoured multinational military forces, whose main purpose is to ensure access to strategic resources and to open up markets. Even some UK military chiefs oppose Trident. The rationale for its existence belong to a bygone era of superpower rivalry. Besides even if Russia, India and China overtake the EU as economic and military powers, they would be exceedingly unlikely to invade Western Europe militarily. They could simply expand their large property portfolios and buy up more leading enterprises. The SNP leadership focus on Trident because they know its an easy win in any future negotiations over the status of post-UK Scotland.

However, the SNP preaches a mix of extreme Keynsianism and regional advantage. They claim to oppose the UK government's austerity and campaigned in increased spending throughout the UK. Yet if the new Conservative government granted Scotland Full Fiscal Autonomy, they would have to find an additional £8 billion just to keep public spending at its current levels. The price of crude oil would have to rise way above its 2014 level of USD $100 a barrel to make up the difference. Of course, it can be argued that Scotland with many deprived communities and sparsely populated outlying regions needs more per capita funding, but the same would be true of many other regions in the UK from Cornwall to Northeast of England. The SNP hope the EU may be more generous than Westminster, but with vast areas of Eastern and Southern Europe. If the SNP tried to borrow more than the rest of the UK, it would inevitably lower Scotland's credit rating especially as the country has a very high dependency ratio and a large proportion of young people lack practical skills.

Would Rupert Murdoch let the Scottish Sun support the SNP in Scotland while backing the Tories in England, if he seriously thought the SNP would challenge his business interests? I very much doubt it. If you dig deeper, you find that on most important issues that SNP harbour very little debate, other than ranting and raving about Westminster-imposed cutbacks and Trident. They have no power to change the former, while the later will probably be dropped anyway. Indeed they agree with the much maligned BBC and Guardian establishment on virtually everything else.

In the coming EU referendum, the SNP will join forces not just with Labour, Liberal Democrats and mainstream Tories to support continued EU membership, but will be firmly on the side of big business and against those of Scottish fisherman unable to compete with large fishing fleets from other EU regions. Their love of corporate power is reflected in other policies too. For instance the first majority SNP administration of 2011 opted to allocate extra money to fund free prescription charges. As they did not increase taxes or were unable to borrow, this meant diverting funds from other public spending priorities. It can be reasonably argued that some low-paid people who require medication to stay alive should not pay for being sick. Such people are usually entitled to other benefits anyway and the Scottish government could have simply restricted free prescriptions to genuinely worthy cases. However, Scotland suffers from another more prevalent problem: over-medication, especially for subjective conditions such as depression or other mental health conditions. With one of the highest antidepressant prescription rates in Europe, the SNP administration just made it easier for GPs and patients to choose the biochemical route. Inevitably, this policy affected poorer working class Scots more than others. If you're an affluent professional, a mere £6 a month is not going to influence your decision to keep taking antidepressants. But if you're on the breadline and cannot manage your money very well, the availability of free antidepressants will sway the balance in favour of biochemical intervention instead of addressing a hundred and one other potential issues, such as booze, recreational drugs, lifestyle, exercise, employability, relationships etc. Prescription charges served not so much to pay for healthcare as they were subsidised anyway, but to promote wise use of prescription drugs. Do you really need antibiotics for a viral infection which a healthy immune system should defeat in a couple of days anyway? More often than not, patients will demand quick fixes such as antibiotics for minor ailments such as sore throats against the better judgement of independent medical professionals, but writing a quick prescription is often for GPs to easiest way to placate a patient demanding instant remedies rather than advice on lifestyle choices. Naturally, medical professionals have differing opinions on the suitability of prescription drugs, but most would agree while in many cases they are life-savers or life-enablers, in many others they offer only modest short-term alleviation or may actually counter-productive, i.e. have more adverse side-effects than benefits. Worse still, once you start taking many medicines it's hard to wean yourself off them. Current SNP policy clearly benefits the pharmaceutical industry, who now have a captive state-subsidised market, while the underlying social and environmental causes of so many ailments remain. My attempts at reasoned debates with SNP activists prove futile. One may not challenge the need for antidepressants for fear of offending the 1/7 Scots on SSRIs. If one persists in citing the many whistleblowers within psychiatry such as David Healy or Robert Whitaker, one is quickly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist siding with outliers who fail to get their writings peer-reviewed. The same paternalistic attitude is applied to the venerable EU. SNP activists will cite official reports by EU-funded institutions uncritically, while dismissing critiques as the mischievous work of rightwing think tanks. If the Scots may not debate healthcare or the hegemony of transnational organisations over every aspect of our lives without submitting oneself to official experts, one wonders what else we may debate in a post-UK Scotland, controlled by the SNP's corporate backers.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing

The Nice Party Manifesto

As an environmentally friendly, safety-aware, anti-racist, disability-positive, anti- homophobia, feminist, pro-growth, pro-children, pro-happiness party, we oppose all nasty policies that may harm other human beings.

Global minimum salary:

If elected the UK Nice Party will provide everyone in the world with access to an online bank account and transfer 1 bitcoin ( £150) a day to ensure a min. global living standard. Any work will be optional.

Pollution outsourced to Mars:

All industrial activities will move to the Moon and Mars. All resource extraction, manufacturing and shipping processes will be fully automated.

Imagine there were no countries:

We will abolish all border controls and provide free public transport for anyone wishing to move from one region to another.

Free Fertility Treatment:

We will encourage people to have as many children as they like and provide free fertility services for all those unable to conceive naturally.

A Luxury Villa for everyone:

Our automated builders will provide luxury eco-friendly villas for anyone with long or short-term accommodation needs.

Electric Cars for all:

All global citizens over the age of 18 months will be entitled to their own eco- friendly driverless electric car. These cars will automatically recharge to overcome rage anxiety.

Food for all:

We will build gigantic greenhouse satellites to grow practically unlimited supplies of sumptuously juicy health food to meet all tastes.

Sex for all:

We will provide all sexually repressed human beings with free humanoid sex dolls to suit all possible erotic preferences.

Free Gender Surgery and Body Transplants

Anyone dissatisfied with their current gender or body shape will be entitled to free gender realignment surgery or potentially a full body transplant.

No more accidents

We will repeal Isaac Newton's outdated and frankly misanthropic Law of Gravity and replace it a kinder Law of Floating Attraction. Everyone will thus be able to fly, float or walk as they please. Cliff-jumping, sky-diving and skateboarding will be safe leisure pursuits and pigs will be able to fly.

No more sadness

We will add Soma to the water supply to banish all residual forms of sadness or stray critical thoughts.

Caveat

A combined software and hardware upgrade is required to implement the above policies. We will migrate all physical human beings currently on planet earth to cloud servers interfacing with massively multiplayer virtual reality simulation software.

Categories
All in the Mind Computing Power Dynamics

What the enlightened elites really think of you

Opinion leaders love to use inclusive first person plural forms, like we, us and our, when addressing unenlightened plebs who fail to share their enthusiasm for all things post-modern and mistakenly reminisce about the positive aspects of our recent past, like greater social cohesion, more respect for age and experience, simpler rules of social etiquette and above all a lot less social anxiety.

Yet despite their matey rhetoric, the opinion leading intelligentsia look down on the masses, treating divergent perspectives, not as important contributions to a vibrant democratic debate, but as symptoms of nostalgia, stubborn conservatism, uninformed conjecture, pathological prejudice or simply a lack of enlightenment, i.e. a refusal to embrace the kind of change they see as an inescapable next step in our evolution to a higher form of humanity. To oppose the winds of change, in the eyes of the neoliberal elite, is to uphold everything that is bad about our past.

Some may look at other good things that seemed better just a generation or two ago, like an extensive railway network that connected most small towns, more countryside, higher home ownership and local shops within easy walking distance that sold everything ordinary people needed and not just booze and snacks. Instead we have motor cars, more roads, smaller houses, more out-of-town retail parks, cheap foreign holidays and a wealth of electronic gadgets unthinkable to most of us just half a century ago. In short we are increasingly disconnected from our immediate surroundings. Few of us truly understand all the complex industrial processes that underly our globally interconnected high-tech lives.

Nobody voted to close down the last television set factory in the UK or outsource the production of electric kettles to South East Asia. It just happened due to circumstances beyond the control of humble citizens. Some may have protested against factory closures or job losses, but politicians were powerless in the face of the global steamroller, a force set in motion 4 centuries ago by the then expanding Dutch, French and British mercantile empires.

Yet our liberal opinion leaders would like us to believe that everything good about our times has been won through a long democratic struggle of progressive forces against reactionary conservatism. Progressivism has come to embody the notion that all change towards a more globally interdependent world is good, and while conservative naysayers may win temporary reprieves, they will in the end be proven wrong, i.e. we may debate the pace of change, but never the need for it.

As all amateur etymologists know, democracy is just an anglicized form of the Greek δημοκÃÂÂÂαÄία or people power. Most of us like to think of it as a good thing, but know deep down our politicians have their hands tied by various external forces such as the global economy, transnational organisations, banks and various other vested interests. However, true power does not come without responsibility and true responsibility is impossible without a clear, accurate and detailed understanding of the way the world works. The elites see democracy not so much as an ideal to which we should aspire, but an effective means of change management, i.e. by consent if we can, by force if we must (to paraphrase Madeleine Albright's summary of US foreign policy). As long as popular desires can be placated through bread and circuses, the spectacle of democratic debate and elections gives people a sense of participation in the decision-making process. Indeed the global elites are sometimes quite happy for people to vote for policies at odds with their long-term plans. If a country or region happens to possess key resources, their local democratic institutions may be allowed to provide better services and defend traditional ways of life or customs at variance with the new global superculture. One may think of oil-rich countries like Norway or Saudi Arabia that in very different ways adapt the concept of global governance to meet very local needs. In Norway this means protecting the fishing and whaling communities while ensuring everyone enjoys a high minimum standard of living, while the same principle of subsidiarity in Saudi Arabia means keeping alive the semblance of a theocracy. The global elite can tolerate such diversity as long as it is manageable and its relative success or divergence can be attrbuted to local factors. However, like all ruling classes, the new global elite cannot tolerate any organised group of people powerful enough to challenge their hegemony. Thus the lucky inhabitants of Norway, Singapore or Sydney are afforded higher material lifestyles in exchange for loyalty with the New World order. However, concentrations of highly skilled and well-educated workers present a particular challenge to ruling elites. Mission-critical professionals need to be culturally separated from the masses through international professional networks and a more refined variant of global consumer culture.

Modern society depends more than ever on technology that requires a complex sequence of industrial processes. No modern urban settlement could function without electricity, a sanitised water supply, transportation links, telecommunications and raw materials extracted from mines, forests or oil wells thousands of miles away. Yet few of us have more than rudimentary grasp of the underlying sciences. We have all come to rely on technocrats, yet complain whenever technical hitch, such as a power cut, burst water pipe or congested transport network, causes widespread disruption. Our modern lives would be unimaginable without electricity, clean water and rapid transportation. In their absence we would be disconnected from the mediasphere (cinema, radio, TV and now the Internet), unable to operate most household appliances, unable to cook or wash and only have limited range of local food available in shops. City states like Singapore would become ghost towns, if the rest of the world imposed an embargo. This hyper-dependence infantilises us by both raising our material expectations and denying us the freedom to fend ourselves. Why should the labour of a Vietnamese production line worker be worth just a fraction of a London advertising executive? The latter merely promotes sales of goods manufactured by the former with technology neither fully comprehend.

The managerial classes like to ridicule the naive opinions of the masses, usually accusing their amateur naysayers of fruitcakery (applicable to all opinions outwith the range of permissible dissent), religious myopia (if someone opposes three-parent babies), racism (if they oppose extreme labour mobility), homophobia (if they oppose gay marriage) or conspiracy theorism (if someone suggests the Iraq War was really about oil) or simply ludditism (if someone opposes nuclear power or hydraulic fracturing). This marginalising technique is most effective if issues can be isolated and analysed in the context of mainstream assumptions about almost everything else. Nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing seem so much more necessary if we plan to continue our high-consumption happy-motoring lifestyle. If you challenge the very foundation of modern economics, continuous material growth, then you risk biting the hands that feed you. If retail sales decline as people stop buying superfluous consumer goods, then not only do many retail workers lose their jobs, but the banking, marketing and advertising industries suffer too.

Consider the concocted debate on unbalanced mass immigration, where the establishment poses on the internationalist left, but sometimes pretends to share the concerns of indigenous workers. Some believe public concern about extreme labour mobility is fuelled by irrational prejudice against foreigners, rather than job security and social cohesion. By dismissing opposition to mass immigration as xenophobic and reactionary, the business elites can dodge real issues caused by a massive oversupply of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, i.e. de-skilling of indigenous working classes, disappearance of stable jobs with easy hiring and firing of human resources and dwindling class solidarity. If you have a stable long-term job and are fully integrated in your local community, you may join trade union and care more about the welfare of other workers in your neighbourhood. By contrast, if you only have temporary work contract in another country your main concerns are your pay cheques and staying out of trouble. However, rational debate on the subject is often difficult because mainstream opinion leaders are committed to economic growth at all costs, which relies on a dynamic labour market and bigger profits.

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All in the Mind Computing

Twitter Mob: Don’t Blame the Users

How lobbies have turned consumer groups into victims

Twitter does not exactly lend itself to critical analysis. I doubt many people have changed their minds on anything after reading a mere 140 character tweet. Such short messages tend to reinforce existing prejudices and opinions and often build on concerted advertising and awareness-raising campaigns. You can tweet a link to an article, but usually only those sympathetic to your cause will read it. Twitter also encourages conformity as nobody wants to be unpopular or offend their virtual friends. It's fine to support widely publicised causes, but not to voice views that others may easily misinterpret. When issues are simplified, many will readily interpret any divergence from the mainstream view as an act of tribal betrayal, like a crowd of Glasgow Rangers supporters spotting a loner wearing a Celtic scarf.

As I often take nonconformist stances, I've grown used to the devious tactics employed by seasoned opinion leaders, such as dismissing any embarrassing evidence against their case as mere conspiracy theories. However, another very effective tactic is to champion the rights of consumer groups to consume the very product or service that some dissident suggests may harm them.

By this logic, nobody could have ever exposed the harmful effects of cigarette smoking simply because millions of consumers enjoyed, or rather believed they enjoyed, this product. Smoking relieves stress and helps people befriend other smokers. It often serves as a great socialising tool and an act of defiance against an increasingly invasive nanny state. Indeed there is much evidence suggesting nicotine acts as an antidepressant, which might explain why so many smokers find it so hard to quit. This vice may be a little outmoded today, but fifty years ago non-smokers had to tolerate smokers at work, in their extended family, neighbourhood and in many public spaces like pubs, cafés and public transport. Some would complain, but generally had to keep quiet in many everyday social situations. Indeed some would have to claim to suffer from a special medical condition to persuade a friend to refrain from smoking in their presence. Yet as evidence mounted that smoking has all sorts of nasty side effects, smokers began to quit and non-smokers became much more proactive in reclaiming smoke-free areas. More recently smokers have been turned into outcasts, often having to escape outdoors on cold rainy days to indulge in their filthy habit.

Fast forward to the 21st century and antidepressants are not only a multi-billion pound industry, just as tobacco was, but they are actively endorsed by celebrities and state-sponsored healthcare institutions as the primary treatment for the growing number of people who feel stressed or depressed. Yet as smokers, alcoholics and recreational drug users know, mind-altering chemicals may offer you a temporary escape from your melancholy, but they come at a huge price in terms of long-term ill-health and some rather unpleasant neuro-psychological side effects. This change of public opinion, from the largely psycho-social model of emotional distress to the mainly biological model, is largely the result of a four decade long campaign to associate in the public mind a chemical imbalance with people's nonfunctional states of mind. Human feelings have been medicalised, although there remains scant proof of a link between natural serotonin levels and state of mind. Many substances we ingest can affect our natural mood-regulating compounds (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine). It should come as little surprise that many diagnosed with clinical depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD etc.., have a bad diet and have indulged in booze and other recreational drugs. Often bad lifestyle choices arise from a downward spiral of emotional insecurity and a tendency to seek solace in anything that turns your mind away from the immediate cause of distress. As our expectations for higher material goods and personal achievements grow, so does our sense of inadequacy and isolation, when we fail to reach these goals. We are not all blessed with perfect athletic bodies, excellent hand-eye coordination and extraordinary musical talent. We will not all be premier league footballers, Olympic medalists, world-famous pop singers, TV celebrities or fashion models. Most of us are fairly average with relative strengths and weaknesses, but our current obsession with status symbols turns minor personal deficits into medical conditions that require treatment. How personality traits develop has long eluded neurologists. Why are some people so gregarious with an upbeat and ebullient disposition, while others have a more reclusive, independent and sobre character and tend to reflect on events and observations in greater detail? If worrying about things were so bad, then why would such instincts evolve in the first place? In essence worrying is about caring about yourself and loved ones. If we didn't worry about anything, we would lack motivation to try harder. Most creative types need plenty of time for introspection. As we obsess more with image and social networking, detailed analysis can fall by the wayside. While some may be enhancing their social status through better presentation and socialisation, others prefer to build a better life through hard work and contemplation. However, in the age of industrial automation and outsourcing, many lack the motivation to make or even repair things themselves. In today's perverse world, a non-productive lawyer not only earns more than her cleaner, but also more her car mechanic and all the other manual workers who helped make her lifestyle possible. Yet many higher-earning professionals in the burgeoning hot-air sector succumb to work-related stress and even depression.
There may be a good argument for short-term medication to wean people off junk food and booze or simply to get the out of bed in the morning, but little evidence that the any pre-existing chemical imbalance caused them to make bad lifestyle choices. Millions now believe antidepressants are essential medication for anyone whose relative lack of cheerfulness or bad moods cause others so much distress. We have thus wished away the underlying causes of depression in our incessant drive to promote mandatory bubbliness, i.e. where we all feign happiness through fake smiles and frequent giggles ? Casual observations would suggest offices have been transformed from relatively sombre places of work into comedy workshops. 50 years of TV satire and now endless YouTube gags have had their effect on the collective psyche. Yet, we are not all born actors. If you fail to take part in mandatory amateur theatrics, your jovial teammates will soon write you off as a loner. Whereas 50 years ago a lack of practical skills could prove a handicap in all but the most privileged families, today it is a perceived lack of social skills that sets many at a distinct disadvantage. Social anxiety, here in its literal non-psychiatric sense, is a prime cause of social alienation, leading to a lack of self-worth, a sense of inferiority and inevitably melancholy.

Handing out free antidepressants to address social alienation is like distributing morphine tablets to combat tooth decay. They may temporarily alleviate unpleasant symptoms, but they fail to address the root causes of the problem and may have very nasty adverse effects with prolonged use. Suggesting that opposing state-subsidised mass-medication of unhappiness offends the unhappy is like accusing an opponent of hydraulic fracturing of condemning the elderly to freezing homes in winter (the elderly would be the first to suffer from polluted tap water). These quick fixes are simply not the solution.

For more on this theme may I recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker .

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Computing

Now for something different: Web Fonts

You may wonder just how I added these custom font types. I'm the last person to believe your choice of font should affect the message you wish to convey. Alas Web designers love custom fonts and often spend countless days wrestling with various technical solutions to reproduce the graphic designer's wishes on all browsers. Back in the day, they had to resort tricky Javascript libraries such as Cufon or, heaven forbid, Flash-based solutions such Sifr. These solutions could actually crash some browsers. Some will even buy special fonts and then waste more hours testing them on different browsers and devices. Luckily with Web fonts those days are over.

As a backend Web developer (I do all that Geeky database and data-mining stuff in my day job), I'd be very pleased if everyone could just make do with Courier, ideally using a text-only browser like the venerable Linx. However, now thanks to openfontlibrary.org, you can easily jazz up your site. All the fonts here are available in font packs to support all modern browsers. If you combine this resource with the free FontPrep application (sadly available only for Mac) or a Web service such as everythingfonts.com or freefontconverter.com , you can even support older versions of IE.

FontPrep and everythingfonts.com will even generation the @font-face CSS for you. Then just reference your new custom font in your stylesheet by applying font-family: MyCustomFont, Helvetica, Ariel, sans-serif; either to the body tag or a specfic region or set of tags. It is that simple.

If you fancy creating your own font, you can download and install the free BirdFont app. This is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. It seems to import best from the newer OTF font types and let you import SVG files for individual glyphs.

I then resorted to a little javascript magic to load a random custom font on each page load. Doesn't change the meaning of anything I write and you can always change it in the accessibility toolbar on the right.

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Computing Power Dynamics

Rebel without a cause

Do you like to indulge in drugs and booze ? Surely only boring losers would abstain from the exciting social life facilitated by binge drinking, cocaine parties and ecstasy-enhanced all-night raves. Maybe you like to gamble or play first-person shooters online with your virtual friends and imaginary foes. And what self-respecting young adult would not watch hardcore horror movies and gory action thrillers? You might even enjoy rapid-fire techno music and gangster rap. Could you conceive of a better way to unleash your inner demons than a visit to the nearest laser shooting range or a whole weekend of unadulterated paint-balling? It's hard to deny the growing popularity of these pursuits.

Any discussion of their potential long-term psychological or, indeed, neurological side effects would open another can of worms. Gamers are adamant that their favourite vice has no adverse psychological effects and endlessy recycle the theories of industry-friendly experts. However, many participants still feel they are somehow rebelling against someone or something. At the back of their mind are images of puritanical clerics, admonishing them not to sin against God, their grandparents telling them to turn down that awful noise or some populist politician promising a crackdown on drunken and disorderly behaviour. By conjuring up these effigies of a bygone establishment (against which to rebel), today's hedonists can always cite former opponents of cultural progress such as Mary Whitehouse (mainly concerned with pornography) or the occasional conservative columnist decrying our youth's obsession with these unworthy pursuits.

Oddly these apparently subversive acts of rebellion are a multi-billion business. Booze, gambling and gaming millionaires have friends in very high places. Indeed the UK government not only deregulated gambling, but went as far as granting video game businesses special tax breaks and reaping huge windfall revenue from the licensing of premium adult services on 3G mobile. Advertising for these hedonistic goods is ubiquitous in all media from billboards to the sides of buses, TV ads and, of course, the Internet. Saturday morning shoppers are greeted by sales teams promoting Sky-TV contracts, paint-balling fun sessions and the latest and greatest shoot-em-up games, all with the full blessing of the shopping centre management. Such endless promotion is often punctuated with ads for financial services. A growing number of public places resonate to the deafening blast of loud fast-beat muzak, supposedly to entertain and enliven customers. The entertainment business promotes even technically illegal drugs by glamorising narcotised pop stars and providing venues for mind-numbing sounds, which frankly can only be enjoyed under the influence of MDMA (ecstasy). Away from the remotest rural backwaters, it is practically impossible to avoid advertising for these pursuits. Today abstaining from all such indulgences sets you apart from the rest of the crowd, especially if you're under 40.

In my misspent teenage years I briefly identified with the so-called punk scene, yet another expression of youth culture reflecting the anxieties of the age of consumerism, industrial decline and economic uncertainty but skilfully exploited by big business. I could see plenty wrong with the world around me. Screaming at the top of my voice "God Save the Queen and the Fascist Regime" seemed an apt act of rebellion against the hypocrisy of teachers who would allow little discussion in class or against class mates more interested in football and cars than overthrowing the capitalist establishment. Of course, most Punk music was absolute drivel, barely listenable and anyone paying attention could easily learn how wealthy media executives manipulated the masses, not just to boost their bottom line, but to channel all dissent through safe outlets. All was revealed in the 1979 exposé movie "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" on the Sex Pistols' short-lived stardom.

My father worked for the military-industrial complex and despite all the grandiose talk about freedom and democracy, life seemed pretty monotonous with little room for manoeuvre. One just had to fit in and go with the flow, although compared to the current era a wider of selection of hobbies and special interests were acceptable. If you wanted to collect snails or build rudimentary radio transmitters from electronic kits rather than play football or hang out with the cool kids, that was just fine. In reality the mid 1970s saw, comparatively speaking, the greatest level social equality and general prosperity that had ever existed in Britain and in the pre-PC era there seemed to be much more heated political debate. Revolutionary trotskyists and devout catholics with very traditional views on family and marriage could somehow coexist in peace or antinuclear campaigns as I discovered during my CND days. With no Internet, only very primitive video games and a limited choice of terrestrial TV stations, rebellious teenagers were attracted more to outdoor activities, clubs and protest groups. Yet gangland crime was mainly confined to a few inner city areas, pubs would close at 10:30 and few young adults could afford to frequent nightclubs on a regalar basis. To put things in perspective it was not until the late 1970s that basic video game consoles and video recorders became affordable. If you wanted to unleash your dark side back then, you might consider joining a gang or the army, but most kids just played with Action Men, slingshots and plastic guns, nothing even approaching the hyper-realism of today's games, but at least providing great haptic feedback, i.e. contact with the real physical world. If you chewed the head off your Action Man, you had a headless male doll and could not simply restart the game and parents were back then much less inclined to surrender to infantile pestering for a replacement toy. Your only option was to paintakingly repair it. As detailed by Canadian authors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their 2004 book the Rebel Sell, the advertising business has simply co-opted all deviant strands of contemporary counter-culture. even if the ideologies, associated rightly or wrongly with past regimes or revolutionary movements, have been re-marketed as mere brands that may appeal to non-conformist individuals seeking to set themselves apart from dominant cultural brands. MacBooks tend to appeal to more creative nonconformist types precisely because they are not a regular laptops preloaded with Microsoft Windows and associated with boring conformist office workers. While digital revolutionaries would run a free and open source Linux distribution, many of us would hardly bat an eyelid at the sight of a jeans clad advertising executive whose top of the range MacBook Pro not only sported an illuminated Apple logo but also a CND peace symbol and a Che Guevara sticker. It would also not surprise us if the very same advertising executive were discussing a comarketing venture between a leading gay bar chain and paintballing events company. It is all just a game.

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Computing Power Dynamics

Multinational Scroungers and Tax Dodgers

Just before Christmas the British media revealed some large up and coming multinational outfits had taken advantage of tax loopholes and the wonders of early 21st century globalised trade to evade taxes. Suddenly Labour supporters had a cause they could all rally behind and win support from hardworking voters rightly fed up with high taxes and shoddy services. Let's force evil Amazon and Starbucks to pay their taxes in the UK. For a fleeting second, I thought we had returned to the early 1970s when the Trade Unions and Labour activists advocated import controls and high tax rates for the rich. Then as my mind returned this century, I remembered the spectre of a New Labour-appointed EU commissioner, Peter Mandelson, urging other European countries to open up their markets to competition from the Far East and elsewhere, to deregulate big business and banking and cut corporation tax. Under New Labour, the financial services sector continued to grow as manufacturing shrunk even further.

While I sympathise with the various populist campaigns to force multinationals to pay more taxes (e.g. Ensure that international companies like Amazon UK, pay fair tax), much of the UK economy depends on tax evasion, money laundering and huge government handouts to myriad service sector agencies. Organisations like KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY) and PricewaterhouseCoopers specialise in corporate tax avoidance. Moreover, most contract workers have their own limited company, yet to you or me, they're just nurses, teachers, software developers, office workers etc. They would lose their competitive edge if they had to pay full UK income and corporation tax.

The trendy left's newfound enthusiasm for local independent retailers seems rather perplexing, given the previous and current governments' track record. Retail chains and large agribusinesses have expanded to the detriment of independent traders and small farms as detailed in Joanna Blythman's excellent book Shopped. Small book shops are only a very small part of a much larger picture. Paper books will inevitably suffer the same fate as typewriters. People will buy a few as collectables and for display purposes, but books are going electronic. Of course, it is very important that no one entity has control of something as important as literature, but oddly it is much easier to find "dissident" books on Kobo or Amazon than in Waterstones or specialist bookshops. Fortunately, as long as the Internet remains open, it is relatively easy to set up rival outlets for electronic books. We may wonder why some powerful lobbies would like to restrict this freedom in the name of questionable intellectual property rights.

Starbucks has been notorious not only for tax dodging but also for employing mainly newcomers to the detriment of young adults born and bred in the UK. Yet the politically correct left dare not mention this fact and have often suggested such progressive employers boost the economy through their smart branding of caffeinated froth. A casual visit to any Starbucks in London will soon reveal most customers are Guardian-readers, whose favourite newspaper is on sale before they part with at least £2.50 for your fair trade jug of flavoured hot milk.

Considering the government's love affair with big business we may reasonably ask who benefits most from this negative publicity campaign. You guessed it, other multinationals, who use a slightly different strategy to embezzle ordinary taxpayers. Much of the left has been rather uncritical of some of the worst quasi-monopolists and control freaks and Microsoft is a prime example. Amazon built its empire on open-source software. Its servers run Linux as do its now ubiquitous e-readers and tablets (Kindle Fire). Microsoft had successfully persuaded key policymakers that word processing, spreadsheets and presentations were their exclusive preserve. To suggest using a word-processor other than Microsoft Word in public sector IT departments not only attracted bewilderment and ridicule but usually fell on deaf ears. As a result, UK taxpayers have transferred billions of pounds to one US Multinational, which has only ever spent a very small fraction of that on actual software development. Besides Microsoft Office and Windows licences, they earn hundreds of millions for SharePoint, Exchange and SQL Server. Now Apple, Amazon and Google have shown the public IT not just Microsoft. Software development is moving to the Web and Microsoft's desktop franchise is under threat. If you can knock up a diagram and Gantt chart online, why spend over £100 on a piece of desktop software that will be out of date soon anyway? Do we seriously want to entrust our digital future, including the internals of what was until recently the dominant desktop operating system and productivity software, to a US based multinational? By not releasing the source code to their ubiquitous products, Microsoft can spy on you (and they have a dismal security record too). In the open-source world, you can view the human-readable source code to find any hidden backdoors. In my experience, the UK tax and social welfare system penalises honest hard workers and rewards fraudsters the Banks! Hedge Funds. Some benefits cheats are just small-time chancers and other huge international operations with their tentacles in most government bodies.

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All in the Mind Computing

All true conservatives are green

I sometimes enjoy Peter Hitchens‚ antidote to mainstream trendy Neo-Liberal thinking, but fear he is on some subjects in bad company and a tad ill-informed. No rational person could deny volumes of hard evidence showing the exponential rise in humanity's collective impact on our planet's delicate ecosystem, both in terms of our numbers (rising from just 750 million at the start of the industrial revolution to 7 billion now) and our per capita consumption. Our population will probably peak in the next 10 to 30 years, but at the expense of adopting modern high-consumption lifestyles. And now 2500 million Chinese and Indians are preparing to join the mass consumer frenzy, resources that previously seemed almost unlimited, are nearing depletion.

The fact that scientific forecasts have so often proven wrong should lead us to take a more rather than a less cautious, and thus conservative, approach to future development. Climatologists know full well our climate is subject to multiple natural and, dare I say, anthropogenic factors, but man's impact on our environment has reached unprecedented levels. But climate change is just one of many potential side effects of our rapid overdevelopment. James Lovelock has merely conceded that some of the more alarmist forecasts made 20 years ago have not been supported by subsequent observations. So what! They were just forecasts. Meanwhile, other forecasts, such as available oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, have also turned out to be gross exaggerations. That's why Brazilian geologists are busy surveying fossil fuel deposits 2 miles below the surface of Mid Atlantic Ocean, the Chinese are sealing deals with Nigerian businessmen and Western Oil companies see Libya as a mere gateway to oil in Chad and Darfur, despite the huge costs of building pipelines and other infrastructure.

Wishful thinking cornucopians would like to see the current era of cheap mass motoring for all continue without drastic consequences and place blind faith in scientists to find to magic techno-fixes. Climate change denial, so popular in Neo-Conservative circles, has little to do with any understanding of the actual climate (which may get warmer, colder, wetter or drier in different parts of the globe) and everything to do with the same culture of entitlement Mr Hitchens so rightly denounces in his columns. Claiming to have a god-given right to drive your car to a suburban shopping mall, funded by your non-productive marketing job, is just the same as claiming a right to welfare handouts to subsidise your hedonistic idleness. If we are to tackle our very real environmental challenges and avoid unprecedented loss of life resulting from a grotesque overconsumption, we need to power down.