Ed Dowding

I don’t think anyone really needs much convincing over the unintended consequences of supermarkets (inner city decline, fewer jobs in retailing, etc), but they aren’t delivering the savings we think they do, either.

The EC is currently investigating the failure of supermarkets to pass price cuts on to shoppers. The cost of butter has fallen by 39% over the past year however the price paid by consumers has only gone down by 2%. The commission has also discovered that the price of skimmed milk powder was down 49%, cheese down 18% and milk down 31% but again the price paid by consumers has only fallen by 2%. (Source)

The Ethical Consumer has some excellent advice on supermarket shopping, which I’d strongly recommend you read. A few highlights:

Supermarkets have long been loudly competing over price, each using advertising to directly compare and undercut one another. They’re now being accused of hiking up the price of food more than that of inflation.

Many people believe supermarket food to be cheaper, but this is just a line we’ve been fed by the supermarkets themselves.

Through careful advertising, and placing of competitively priced loss-leaders, supermarkets are able to sneak up and hit us where it hurts for other products whose value is not so well known, and where they may actually be charging more than small independent retailers on the high street.

According to an article in the Telegraph this year, red peppers at Sainsbury’s cost £5.87 a kilo — far in excess of the average £3.45 at the independent shops — and Tesco was charging £8.87 for a kilo of Chilean cherries, considerably more than the average £6.81 that traditional greengrocers were charging.

Shiply – matches you with rated delivery firms “going there anyway”

Israel is to become the first country to give donor card carriers a legal right to priority treatment if they should require an organ transplant.

Israeli organ donors to get transplant priority, BBC News

Now if they’d make it opt-out, too, they’d have the best system in the world.

An awful joy fell upon Sir Archie’s soul. He realised anew the unplumbed preposterousness of life.

John Macnab, by John Buchan

Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice, and understanding, and to fulfil their requirements.

Herman Hesse, Journey to the East

• Dougald Hine, cofounder of School of Everything, tries to reconcile modern life and parenthood
• How to persuade people with a few magic words: because, now, imagine, please and thank you, the person’s name, ‘control’ words which suggest you know what’s going on
• A frustrated Alex Steffen of World Changing points out that the revolution needs to happen bloody quickly, and dramatically, and not be way-layed by small kludged fixes
• A flash mob for farming: CropMob
• There I fixed it (old, but just remembered it)
• A low impact co-housing project in Leeds
• You can now take an MA in Activism and Social Change
• Good list of green companies at the Green Web Awards

I really love the work of the New Economics Foundation.

It’s clear that the amount we pay people does not correspond with the amount we value them (contrast teachers with stock traders, farmers with ad. execs). The NEF has gone on to calculate the real value of different professions.

The report goes on to challenge ten of the most enduring myths surrounding pay and work. People who earn more don’t necessarily work harder than those who earn less. The private sector is not necessarily more efficient than the public sector. And high salaries don’t necessarily reflect talent.

The BBC has a nice summary:

“The point we are making is more fundamental – that there should be a relationship between what we are paid and the value our work generates for society. We’ve found a way to calculate that,” she said.

A total of six different jobs were analysed to assess their overall value. These are the study’s main findings:

The elite banker

“Rather than being wealth creators bankers are being handsomely rewarded for bringing the global financial system to the brink of collapse

Paid between £500,000 and half a million and £80m a year, leading bankers destroy £7 of value for every pound they generate”.

Childcare workers

“Both for families and society as a while looking after children could not be more important. As well as providing a valuable service for families, they release earnings potential by allowing parents to continue working. For every pound they are paid they generate up £9.50 worth of benefits to society”.

Hospital cleaners

“Play a vital role in the workings of healthcare facilities. They not only clean hospitals and maintain hygiene standards but also contribute to wider health outcomes. For every pound paid, over £10 in social value is created”.

Advertising executives

The industry “encourages high spending and indebtedness. It can create insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress. For a salary of between £50,000 and £12m top advertising executives destroy £11 of value for every pound in value they generate”.

Tax accountants

“Every pound that a tax accountant saves a client is a pound which otherwise would have gone to HM Revenue. For a salary of between £75,000 and £200,000, tax accountants destroy £47 in value, for every pound they generate”.

Waste recycling workers

“Do a range of different jobs that relate to processing and preventing waste and promoting recycling. Carbon emissions are significantly reduced. There is also a value in reusing goods. For every pound of value spent on wages, £12 of value is generated for society.”

The research also makes a variety of policy recommendations to align pay more closely with the value of work.

These include establishing a high pay commission, building social and environmental value into prices, and introduce more progressive taxation.

I’m not sure who said it, but I like it.

They said I was mad, I said they were mad, but they out-numbered me, dammit

Edited highlights from an LRB article:

‘Figures are down,’ we chortle mirthlessly, as we load the third batch of door-to-door catalogues onto our frames, adding yet more weight to our bags, and more minutes of unpaid overtime to our clock. We get paid 1.67 pence per item of unaddressed mail, an amount that hasn’t changed in ten years. It is paid separately from our wages, and we can’t claim overtime if we run past our normal hours because of these items. We also can’t refuse to deliver them. This junk mail is one of the Royal Mail’s most profitable sidelines and my personal contribution to global warming: straight through the letterbox and into the bin.

[...]

One thing you probably don’t know, for instance, is that the Royal Mail is already part-privatised [...] It means that any private mail company – or, indeed, any of the state-owned, subsidised European mail companies – is able to bid for Royal Mail contracts.

Take a look at your letters next time you pick them up from the doormat. Look at the right-hand corner, the place where the Queen’s head used to be. You’ll see a variety of different franks, representing a number of different mail companies. There’s TNT, UK Mail, Citypost and a number of others. What these companies do is to bid for the profitable bulk mail and city-to-city trade of large corporations, undercutting the Royal Mail, and then have the Royal Mail deliver it for them. TNT has the very lucrative BT contract, for instance. TNT picks up all BT’s mail from its main offices, sorts it into individual walks according to information supplied by the Royal Mail, scoots it to the mail centres in bulk, where it is then sorted again and handed over to us to deliver. Royal Mail does the work. TNT takes the profit.

None of these companies has a universal delivery obligation, unlike the Royal Mail. In fact they have no delivery obligation at all. They aren’t rival mail companies in a free market, as the propaganda would have you believe. None of them delivers any mail. All they do is ride on the back of the system created and developed by the Royal Mail, and extract profit from it. The process is called ‘downstream access’. Downstream access means that private mail companies have access to any point in the Royal Mail delivery network which will yield a profit, after which they will leave the poor old postman to carry the mail to your door.

[...]

The truth is that the figures aren’t down at all. We have proof of this. The Royal Mail have been fiddling the figures. This is how it is being done.

Mail is delivered to the offices in grey boxes. These are a standard size, big enough to carry a few hundred letters. In the past, the volume of mail was estimated by weighing the boxes. These days it is done by averages. There is an estimate for the number of letters that each box contains, decided on by national agreement between the management and the union. That number is 208. This is how the volume of mail passing through each office is worked out: 208 letters per box times the number of boxes. However, within the last year Royal Mail has arbitrarily, and without consultation, reduced the estimate for the number of letters in each box. It was 208: now they say it is 150.

Doubting the accuracy of these numbers, the union ordered a random manual count to be undertaken over a two-week period in a number of offices across the region. On average, those boxes which the Royal Mail claims contain only 150 letters, actually carry 267 items of mail. The figures are down all right, but only because they have been manipulated.

Source: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/roy-mayall/diary

X factor is wrestling for people who don’t like wrestling. The bright lights, the fake rivalry, and most disturbingly, complete audience ‘boo ahh hiss’ control.