Small Business Server

So, you own a small business with between 5 and 15 employees and need to buy a server. Which one should you get – Windows based or Mac OS X based? Let’s look at the costs involved, because lets face it, businesses need to make money, right?

BBC F1 TV coverage – Australia

How do the BBC compare to the job ITV did last year? ITV weren’t perfect, but the BBC weren’t that much different. So much for their “huge coverage” they promised. So what was it like?

The next crash will be…

Sometimes we tell people with unrealistic expectations that they live in a bubble, disconnected from the real world and only able to see it through a distorted film. Over the last ten to fifteen years or so most of us have lived in successive bubbles. Will we ever learn? Somehow I doubt it because the next bubble is already upon us.

Which mortgages were ‘foolish’?

The BBC website reports:

Banking minister Lord Myners has said banks were “foolish” to offer 100% mortgages, after Gordon Brown called for “prudent and careful” lending.

Er, no, I don’t think that’s the cause of the current problem, although it certainly doesn’t help after things have gone wrong. But it surely didn’t start them on that track. No, that was clearly something else.

Since when did learning to read become a narrow pursuit?

Oh dear. The Pinko Professor’s at it again. Apparently, concentrating in Primary School in the UK on getting kids to be able to read and write restricts them too much, and doesn’t ‘develop’ them enough as individuals.

Obama’s not entirely new Middle East direction

So, Senator Mitchell was duly despatched by the new President to the Middle East. He sorted out the Northern Ireland troubles, so he is given credit for a magic touch when it comes to these things. But in N. Ireland he spoke to both warring factions, In Palestine he will only speak to one. And not the one involved in the fighting.

The Path to Peace in Gaza?

Here are some excerpts of what I wrote during the last few days of the 13 day attack by Israel on Gaza. It’s a basic summary of news reports, official figures, analysis, and my own opinions. I support both the State of Israel and Palestinian Statehood, but this recent conflict shows up one side to have lost rather more humanity than the other.

Saving the American Auto Industry

US car makers are in the news right now as just the latest in a line of beggars knocking on Washington’s door. They’re asking for $37 billion in support from cheap finance because, as GM’s Rick Waggoner puts it, “We made mistakes, and because circumstances beyond our control pushed us to the brink,” referring to the global economic downturn.”

Except for one thing. As I wrote in 2007, Ford has been making losses for years and the others haven’t done so well either. While they didn’t change their strategies, newcomers have set up shop in the US and grown and grown and grown – profitably.

The actions of the US car giants so reminds me of the 1960s in Britain, when the British motorcycle industry sank from world leader to bankrupt nothingness in a decade, and the British car industry was Nationalised to the point of rewarding failure with survival while punishing companies who were successful by not allowing weak competition to disappear.

The current US proposals for bail out are very uniquely US focussed. ”It’s got to be US projects – it would by and large favour, on balance, US companies.“ General Motor’s Fritz Henderson was reported as saying. Conveniently, there is a clause excluding support for US plants that have been built during the last 20 years. That means very little money for newcomers such as Honda, Toyota and VW who all make cars in the US in volume.

US workers working in those factories will not be protected, it seems. Except, for the most part, they don’t need to be.

There are problems for the US over this policy though. First off, there are the issues of illegal state support that will no doubt at some point be raised at the WTO. The US was the first to complain on behalf of Boeing that Airbus was receiving illegal money.

There is an even more serious issue hiding in the shadows here though. If the deal goes through and is seen by outsiders as discriminating against foreign investors, the attractiveness of the US as a place for inward capital flows will diminish – and with a double deficit in both government spending and trade the US Dollar relies on inward capital flows to support the greenback.

While the Dollar has been lifted of late by Barack Obama’s recent election victory and world woes, it is still based on weak fundamentals. I do think Obama will do a good job for the US here though, so perhaps the US will once again build the kind of budget surplus that accumulated under Bill Clinton’s Democrat Administrations.

As for the car industry, I can’t help thinking they still really don’t get it. I think it was GM who was talking of using the money from Uncle Sam to launch some 22 new models of greener vehicles.  Twenty two new models?! No wonder they can’t make a profit, they have too many models, too many brands.

They really need a clean out. But will they get one? Not if their political influence has anything to do with it. What they want is the bail out, not the clean out.

Britain’s Parliamentary Democracy is slowly crumbling away

British MPs have enjoyed what is known as “Parliamentary Privilege” for hundreds of years, since Henry VIII in fact. This has prevented them from being arrested in Parliament, and allowed them free speech immune from prosecution.

It is the job of the Speaker of the House of Commons, and the Serjeant at Arms, to protect and uphold the rules of the Houses of Parliament, and to protect parliamentary privilege. In fact, the English Civil War was started when the King attempted to have five MPs arrested within the House.

On 27th November 2008, it happened again. The police marched in and arrested Tory MP Damian Green, searched his office and took away his computers and disks. Without a warrant. 

Unfortunately, it seems we have a rather weak Speaker of the House at the moment, and his Serjeant at Arms seems to have just caved in to whatever the police asked of her. Not only did she not refuse them access, which is her duty as well as her job, she also didn’t ask the Clerk of the House (pdf) for advice on what she or the Police could or could not do, and then she even signed a Consent Form allowing the police entry to the MPs office without any involvement from anyone else.

In such a case as this it would be easy to paint her as the scapegoat in this story, but to my mind it shows more a portrait of the Speaker as a weak man with little control over his underlings, and from his own mouth little knowledge of events that are his responsibility. He clearly has an iron grip on things.

Meanwhile, Jacqui Smith, Home Office Minister in charge of the Police claimed “ignorance” about the matter, although she did admit in Parliament that the Cabinet Office was involved – and she is of course a member of the Cabinet. The Serjeant at Arms, always previously an ex-Army officer who enforced the rules rigorously but now no more than an office manager who clearly didn’t know the rules and who didn’t request to see a warrant just let them walk past her rather than doing her job of protecting Parliamentary privilege. Scottish Labour MP and Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he has a “great deal of confidence” in fellow Scottish Labour MP and Speaker of the House, Michael Martin.

The Speaker of course has a lot of power over MPs, so you won’t hear many of them slagging the Speaker off. But over his own underlings, clearly he exercises little control at all. For instance, today the Speaker, rather limply, if not exceedingly limply, only managed to squeak out some ineffectual nonsense about he “did not know the Police did not have a warrant…” Clearly he should be more in control of his underlings so they do inform him then.

One of the foundation stones of any healthy democracy is adherence to and respect for the rule of law, but it seems even at the the highest levels of British political life, liberties are being taken that affect all our freedoms.

It certainly seems we need more than at anytime a Government which believes in Civil Liberties, rather than one composed of either of today’s two most partisan parties, the Labs or the Cons. Unfortunately, I don’t think the LibDems yet have the ear of the people although they probably do have many of the right ideas.

Why are we in such a mess, Chancellor Darling?

Today UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced a £20 Billion fiscal stimulus package and an increase in borrowing to a whopping 57% of GDP or more. Tax cuts on consumption (much of which comes from imports) are to be paid for by future tax receipts (much of which comes from earnings paid to bring those same imports in).

Well, this is what happens when you base an economy on consumer spending funded by debt underpinned by house price inflation (at the expense of manufacturing and productive industry). 

For years, some people have imagined themselves to be better off because their house “doubled in value” in a short space of time, and then spent some of the “profit” on consumer goods to re-equip or redecorate or restock their new house after a move, or their current house just because they were bored with the old look. 

Personal debt, underpinned by this artificial feel good factor soared, and when the debt bubble collapsed it showed that the housing bubble was not newly created wealth, but a thin veneer with little substance. 

Maggie Thatcher created this monster with dual attempts to kill off the power of the unions and turn Labour voters into Tories. She attacked the Unions by killing off manufacturing, she turned large numbers of non-rate paying council house owners into poll tax paying property owners who could begin the process of accumulating debt as their artificially cheap houses rapidly increased in value, giving many people the false impression that this would always be the case. 

Few people have wanted to criticise this gravy train which ran for two decades until hitting the buffers last year. 

What this government debt package is effectively doing is attempting to transfer some of the personal debt into government debt. They picked VAT rather than income tax because they thought the UK might follow the US where 80% of any tax credit is saved, not spent, meaning it has far less impact as a fiscal stimulus. Because you only save tax with VAT if you buy something, 100% of the money would be used to enhance consumption, they hope. 

This does rather seem to miss the point that if the large part of people’s previous disposable income came from increases in unsustainable and ephemeral house price increases, with no such increases today, 100% of the money that was available to spend is now missing from the economy. Therefore, no 2.5% VAT tax cut will fix it, although over the course of a year it will mean people can buy more things. 

Doing nothing as the Tories suggest isn’t an option either though. I am, of course, ignoring their stated aim of reversing the hike in income taxes from 40% to 45% for those earning over £150,000 a year. Other than lining their own pockets though, they really have no idea what to do, or perhaps the correct word should be “no inclination” to do anything other than play party politics and utter disingenuous sound bites.

Having said that, judging from George Osborne’s delivery in the House earlier today one can only assume he wishes to drink through the crisis. He slurred his words, both his boss and his colleague who were sitting next to him in the Commons looked concerned he might fall over or totally lose it, and he gave the distinct impression of someone who had clearly had too much to drink. Well, he is an ex-member of the hard-drinking Bullingdon Club. Just like his boss, Cameron then. Which is why he got the job – his degree isn’t too hot if you look him up on Wikipedia…

Getting back to finance, and Tory claims that borrowing on borrowing is not the answer, they singularly fail to provide any idea of what they would do: they have no clue really, do they? Anyway, businesses use overdrafts when things get tight, and people borrow money on mortgages when they want to build a new house. But that’s what happens when you have a Tory Party stuffed with too many lawyers and accountants and self-promoting ideologues who have never taken a risk in their lives – well, not with their own money anyway. You can’t equate government spending with household budgets, even though Maggie Thatcher made good politicial use of this over-simplification of the issue. 

If you do nothing, less money goes into the economy, the recession is far deeper, and like during the 1980s recession huge parts of the UK lose out, not for a year or so, but for decades if not forever. Last time it was heavy industry, now it’s probably going to be anything related to housing, banking, and perhaps a little on the Chinese (imports). 

The problem has now reached such proportions though that there may no longer be any quick fix. Whoever gets into power next will have to fix these huge structural problems and this will take five to ten years to sort out. 

If only people had paid more attention to what the LibDems have been saying for years, the problem may have been caught and prevented much earlier. If only they could be elected to power the problem may last less time before being fixed, too.

Maggie Thatcher’s Tory ideas sowed the seeds for this calamity, and the Labs just went along for the ride because it was so called “established wisdom” and they didn’t want to rock the boat. 

The LibDem’s Vince Cable has been warning against this and suggesting we consider rising house prices as part of the inflation index, which would certainly have alerted people to the problem before it grew too big to handle, as it now almost is. 

But for some strange reason, people will only flip between one extreme to the other, from the party who laid the foundations of the current problem to the party that didn’t do enough to stop it.