Last weekend I had the pleasure of being driven from Buffalo Airport to Toronto. It was night time, and neither driver nor navigator had completed the route before, but they did have the benefit of two GPS machines. Supposedly one worked better in Canada, the other better in the USA. I was tired, and vowed to keep my mouth shut.
Maybe predictably, the two GPS’s proved a dubious blessing. They took time to calculate routes, they didn’t seem to know landmarks, they were for ever blaring out “cancel” like a couple of Daleks, and even when they gave out routes they contradicted each other.
Somehow, we made it to Toronto, thanks to a calm and careful driver. But we took a couple of wrong turns, went over a different border crossing than the one we wished, and had some pauses at the side of the road for the GPS’s to get their breath back.
From my vantage point in the back seat, I think I could have avoided all the missteps, despite also never having completed the route (except once in reverse). Often there were helpful road signs. When there were not, simply knowing roughly where North was would have done the trick, or heading for somewhere which seemed sure to be in the right direction.
The reason the driver and navigator missed all the clues were the GPS’s. They were so focused on the machines that they weren’t really tuned into to other available data. Later, I wondered if it was even more fundamental. Having become used to driving with GPS, perhaps they had lost the art of being able to navigate any other way.
I am a bit of a navigation nerd, being a mathematician, having had to learn to get around strange cities on foot and by car, and with a bit of network planning experience for Shell. This has also helped me in New York, with its scale and its variety of transport options. One thing I have really enjoyed is discovering the city on foot and bus and subway.
I sense these arts are disappearing, and the GPS experience offers a clue as to why. Even mobile phones are partly responsible, with their ability to google up support and call friends. I am not saying these are bad things – indeed how did we ever manage to complete appointments at unfamiliar private residences before the days of mobile phones? But I am saying it is a shame if a valuable life skill is lost. Technology does not always work and is not always available, especially in emergencies. And people looking lost are more vulnerable to pickpockets.
For me, geography at school would have been more useful if map reading had replaced learning capitals. Rote learning has become increasingly redundant anyway, due to the internet. We need a new skill now to know the capital of Honduras, rather than the memory of old. This made me think about other skills that had been lost, and which ones should be mourned.
IT itself has seen the biggest changes. I actually came from a very narrow generation who learned to program computers, and was taught all sorts of technical stuff about how computers worked (which I then forgot again). Computers were just come in, but they were large machines rather than personal ones, and it was believed that we would all need to be able to give them instructions in strange codes. Then IBM, Microsoft and Apple changed all that. The nerds in shops and marketing departments haven’t completely dropped the bit and byte speak yet (why not?), but the idea of anyone but a specialist writing programs now seems very quaint. I wonder how IT education has responded? What I hope is that time is spent on stuff like how to navigate a web menu to buy things, how to research information quickly and reliably, and perhaps on creating websites. The former two have become critical life skills now.
Language and writing has changed too. Is accurate spelling a lost art, with spellchecker everywhere? And does it matter? Perhaps we should not mourn the need for mastering spelling too much, especially us English speakers with all our exceptions. The other day I had to write a hand-written letter, and a proper one, not just a one-pager instructing some financial institution of an address change. I found the actual physical act of writing difficult, and the letter construction was not simple either. For me, it is sad that these arts are being lost, as letters are powerful ways to communicate. With text, even alphabets are curtailed. It is efficient, and perhaps it is only sentiment that makes me mourn the traditional methods.
My Mum used to knit a lot. Who does now? It is so cheap to buy finished products, that the only benefit of knitting now is as a creative pastime. Darning does not even have that merit. I think Mum also used to use a mangle, though I am not all that sure what for. This sort of lost art probably doesn’t require us to do anything but celebrate.
What other arts have been lost? Dancing is one that was almost lost in some societies, but is gradually being found again, thanks partly to Strictly (Dancing with the Stars here). A regret of mine is that my generation were the ones who lost the joy of dancing, instead just jumping up and down. I have gained a lot of pleasure from ballroom and Latin lessons these last two years, and recommend them wholeheartedly.
Last month I taught our twelve-year-old how to tie a tie. I enjoyed that. Then I wondered how old I was when I learned, and how many times in the last ten years I had actually worn a tie. Probably more often than he will in how whole lifetime. We need not mourn that sort of lost art, I think, and there are probably many more female equivalents we can be grateful to see the back of. The tie was actually needed for a wedding, but this month I also attended a funeral, indeed had to help to organise one. My sister and I needed help with everything. I wonder if this sort of skill was handed down more effectively in the past?
While on the subject of kids, this month we were delayed four hours waiting for a flight, and neither child had any electronics with them. That made me think two distinct arts might be in the process of being lost. The kids were less resourceful than those of a generation ago in this situation, having been brought up with electronics available almost everywhere. And the parents were also less resourceful. I remember Mum having all sorts of games and gadgets up her sleeve for that sort of eventuality. We struggled but managed, while some of the other parents in the lounge seemed even more lost than we were.
Finally, an art that is still relevant, but I don’t understand why, is driving a stick shift car. Why do we still have these things? Automatic gearboxes make better decisions than humans nowadays and are more economical. Yet many people insist on carrying on making driving more cumbersome than it needs to be by using a gear stick. Well done USA, that is something you have got right, I think.
There must be many similar lost arts, and newly required arts to replace them. Some of the lost ones will be preserved, and hopefully the most creative and satisfying might make a comeback, like dancing. I hope our educators get the balance right between responding to change and retaining skills that, though less critical than before, can still make a difference.
Next time I am in the back seat with a GPS as competition, I wonder if I’ll still be able to keep my mouth shut? Maybe the next generation would find it even harder, as keeping ones mouth shut might itself be a vanishing art, not that I am generally effective at that one myself.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Fair Fines
It seems Americans are obsessed by taxes, and New Yorkers are additionally obsessed by tickets.
I am amazed how often tax comes up in everyday conversation over here. In Europe, we don’t like tax, but generally we let it happen. I have a general saying that people who complain about tax, specifically income or wealth tax, have too much money. The more you have, the more you pay. So suck it up.
Here, it is different. There are many possible reasons why. Perhaps wealth here is something you brag about, and tax conversation is a good way to flaunt your wealth. Somehow, many taxes seem more in your face here. Sales tax is added on at the point of sale. To me, this is crazy. An item will be labelled at a cost of ten dollars, but at the checkout it rings at ten dollars eighty something. So it is much harder to budget your overall spending, and, if you pay in cash, you end up with pockets full of change (and loads of paper single dollars as well. Why?)
For me, this flaunts a basic principal of consumer rights. A price on an item should be its price. But Americans seem ready to accept it, and some even express a wish to know what the tax is. Some say that because tax varies between states, the retailer has to do it at the point of sale, but that strikes me as BS. Tax varying by state is another way tax assumes a higher profile and higher everyday concern.
The retailers lobby may be one reason this regime remains acceptable. But I also suspect the politics. It suits the right that tax is always top of the agenda. In some ways that is good, as in Europe it can be the opposite – there everyone wants everything from the state, and don’t think of the trade-off involved. Here it is the opposite. No one accepts tax, and they don’t link that to poor schools or infrastructure or elderly care. On neither continent is there much intelligent debate. And it also makes point-scoring very easy, suiting the side with the big advertising budget.
Last weekend in Atlanta there were referenda where the proposition was a sales tax for a limited time to be spent exclusively on improving the transport infrastructure. They all got voted down. It becomes very hard here to complete any project for the common good. No wonder the roads are all full of holes, and the bridges and tunnels feel unsafe. At least in New York City, there is a well-functioning system overall.
Anyway, as well as taxes, New Yorkers love to moan about tickets. So far, I haven’t got any, not least because I am not driving here yet. But the belief is that the police treat tickets as fair game to raise money, and give them out very loosely. And fail to pay, and you yet loaded with interest, and pretty soon a ban.
I may change my mind when I suffer a glut of tickets, but overall I am in favour of the approach. There are so many police on the streets here all the time, raising money is one way to make use of them. And rules are there for a reason, so we should not complain if we get fined for violating them.
How many times have I been delayed for an hour or so in London because some rich guy chose to park illegally and created a bottleneck? Fine him, say I, and at least we all get some compensation for our inconvenience. If the result is more fines, then presumably we can have good enough service, without higher taxes.
The London example raises the issue of differential fines. The reason the rich guy parks illegally is that the fine is peanuts to him. To get around that, the authorities in London started towing cars away, reasoning that this would hurt the rich guy more, since time matters more to him than money. Good move, except that the very rich guy then pays some contractor to retrieve his vehicle for him.
In Finland, I understand fines are proportional to the ability to pay. I remember this being introduced in Britain years ago, and then withdrawn again almost immediately. The elite managed to find a few old ladies who was fined thousands of pounds for a minor offence, and used them to turn public opinion.
Indeed it would be difficult to implement this system in practice, and well done to the Finns for persevering – no doubt the wonderful public IT systems there help. Without that, the debate about what income counts or wealth counts, foreign income, who owns the car and so on could make things very complicated. Unlike for the Tobin tax, this is a fair argument against a variable scheme. But hardly insurmountable, I would think. The Dutch have become smart at making fines variable depending on previous offences. Variable for some income/wealth coefficient should not be too hard to devise. That might deter the guy on Putney High Street – as long as he wasn’t a diplomat, which seems to be another insurmountable problem – hard for me to understand as insurmountable, and then I suspect some other elite conspiracy.
Joe Public is not the only one worrying about fines just now. The summer has seen many corporate fines, with more to follow. Barclays, HSBC, Google, Airlines, Glaxo and the rest are starting to pay dearly for their indiscretions. First, I often wonder where such fines go. They can be eye-watering amounts, and could help plug some debt holes just now.
Again, in principle I support these fines. In the Economist, Schumpeter argued recently that businesses will do whatever they can get away with, trading off risk against benefit. I am not quite so cynical, but I still favour harsh sanctions. If the regime is fair and consistent, it only creates a level playing field and protects the consumer.
Competition law fines started to become an issue at Shell a few years ago. A Dutch EU commissioner put a strong regime in place, including fines according to ability to pay and previous record. They also included the wonderful incentive of penalties imposed on individual managers not just their corporations. Ouch. Shell was heading into the hundreds of millions, and it had an impact. We all had lots of training, and legal scrutiny became stronger. Training beforehand had seemed half hearted, but not after the fines got nasty. Well done Nellie Kroes.
Businesses also have to worry about a secondary quasi-fine that arises from lawsuits, and a tertiary one in the form of reputation loss. Barclays and the other LIBOR miscreants seem very vulnerable to these now. I often thought Shell under-estimated this type of risk, perhaps as a European rather than a US company. I once did a study assessing the risks to a business of Shell offering services to other manufacturers, and I concluded that litigation and reputation was the biggest risk category. We could earn a few thousand dollars for some advice, but what if, either because the advice was flawed or the customer mis-applied it, the result was some catastrophe? For our own operations, we had to accept these risks, but why extend them outside the company boundary, for only a small reward? Like most of my advice, this was duly ignored – probably quite correctly.
I foresee an era when fines, litigation and reputation become even more important drivers to business success, as regulators and lawyers step up their game, supported by IT and rampant media. Rupert Murdoch may well agree. In general, I find this all to the good, with caveats.
One caveat is the risk that we all feed the lawyers even more than today. Regulation needs to be simple and transparent wherever possible. Another is that regulation becomes a weapon in trade wars between countries. Like so much else, this is a hidden benefit of the EU: Europe regulates as one nowadays.
But generally, just like individual taxes and tickets, if people cheat and are punished, the consumer benefits and money flows to the law-abiding. If you complain about tickets, try the alternative of following the rules. Most of them are there for good reasons. If taxes and tickets and fines reflect your ability to pay, celebrate that you have that ability in the first place.
But I am sure the New Yorkers would still find something else to moan about.
I am amazed how often tax comes up in everyday conversation over here. In Europe, we don’t like tax, but generally we let it happen. I have a general saying that people who complain about tax, specifically income or wealth tax, have too much money. The more you have, the more you pay. So suck it up.
Here, it is different. There are many possible reasons why. Perhaps wealth here is something you brag about, and tax conversation is a good way to flaunt your wealth. Somehow, many taxes seem more in your face here. Sales tax is added on at the point of sale. To me, this is crazy. An item will be labelled at a cost of ten dollars, but at the checkout it rings at ten dollars eighty something. So it is much harder to budget your overall spending, and, if you pay in cash, you end up with pockets full of change (and loads of paper single dollars as well. Why?)
For me, this flaunts a basic principal of consumer rights. A price on an item should be its price. But Americans seem ready to accept it, and some even express a wish to know what the tax is. Some say that because tax varies between states, the retailer has to do it at the point of sale, but that strikes me as BS. Tax varying by state is another way tax assumes a higher profile and higher everyday concern.
The retailers lobby may be one reason this regime remains acceptable. But I also suspect the politics. It suits the right that tax is always top of the agenda. In some ways that is good, as in Europe it can be the opposite – there everyone wants everything from the state, and don’t think of the trade-off involved. Here it is the opposite. No one accepts tax, and they don’t link that to poor schools or infrastructure or elderly care. On neither continent is there much intelligent debate. And it also makes point-scoring very easy, suiting the side with the big advertising budget.
Last weekend in Atlanta there were referenda where the proposition was a sales tax for a limited time to be spent exclusively on improving the transport infrastructure. They all got voted down. It becomes very hard here to complete any project for the common good. No wonder the roads are all full of holes, and the bridges and tunnels feel unsafe. At least in New York City, there is a well-functioning system overall.
Anyway, as well as taxes, New Yorkers love to moan about tickets. So far, I haven’t got any, not least because I am not driving here yet. But the belief is that the police treat tickets as fair game to raise money, and give them out very loosely. And fail to pay, and you yet loaded with interest, and pretty soon a ban.
I may change my mind when I suffer a glut of tickets, but overall I am in favour of the approach. There are so many police on the streets here all the time, raising money is one way to make use of them. And rules are there for a reason, so we should not complain if we get fined for violating them.
How many times have I been delayed for an hour or so in London because some rich guy chose to park illegally and created a bottleneck? Fine him, say I, and at least we all get some compensation for our inconvenience. If the result is more fines, then presumably we can have good enough service, without higher taxes.
The London example raises the issue of differential fines. The reason the rich guy parks illegally is that the fine is peanuts to him. To get around that, the authorities in London started towing cars away, reasoning that this would hurt the rich guy more, since time matters more to him than money. Good move, except that the very rich guy then pays some contractor to retrieve his vehicle for him.
In Finland, I understand fines are proportional to the ability to pay. I remember this being introduced in Britain years ago, and then withdrawn again almost immediately. The elite managed to find a few old ladies who was fined thousands of pounds for a minor offence, and used them to turn public opinion.
Indeed it would be difficult to implement this system in practice, and well done to the Finns for persevering – no doubt the wonderful public IT systems there help. Without that, the debate about what income counts or wealth counts, foreign income, who owns the car and so on could make things very complicated. Unlike for the Tobin tax, this is a fair argument against a variable scheme. But hardly insurmountable, I would think. The Dutch have become smart at making fines variable depending on previous offences. Variable for some income/wealth coefficient should not be too hard to devise. That might deter the guy on Putney High Street – as long as he wasn’t a diplomat, which seems to be another insurmountable problem – hard for me to understand as insurmountable, and then I suspect some other elite conspiracy.
Joe Public is not the only one worrying about fines just now. The summer has seen many corporate fines, with more to follow. Barclays, HSBC, Google, Airlines, Glaxo and the rest are starting to pay dearly for their indiscretions. First, I often wonder where such fines go. They can be eye-watering amounts, and could help plug some debt holes just now.
Again, in principle I support these fines. In the Economist, Schumpeter argued recently that businesses will do whatever they can get away with, trading off risk against benefit. I am not quite so cynical, but I still favour harsh sanctions. If the regime is fair and consistent, it only creates a level playing field and protects the consumer.
Competition law fines started to become an issue at Shell a few years ago. A Dutch EU commissioner put a strong regime in place, including fines according to ability to pay and previous record. They also included the wonderful incentive of penalties imposed on individual managers not just their corporations. Ouch. Shell was heading into the hundreds of millions, and it had an impact. We all had lots of training, and legal scrutiny became stronger. Training beforehand had seemed half hearted, but not after the fines got nasty. Well done Nellie Kroes.
Businesses also have to worry about a secondary quasi-fine that arises from lawsuits, and a tertiary one in the form of reputation loss. Barclays and the other LIBOR miscreants seem very vulnerable to these now. I often thought Shell under-estimated this type of risk, perhaps as a European rather than a US company. I once did a study assessing the risks to a business of Shell offering services to other manufacturers, and I concluded that litigation and reputation was the biggest risk category. We could earn a few thousand dollars for some advice, but what if, either because the advice was flawed or the customer mis-applied it, the result was some catastrophe? For our own operations, we had to accept these risks, but why extend them outside the company boundary, for only a small reward? Like most of my advice, this was duly ignored – probably quite correctly.
I foresee an era when fines, litigation and reputation become even more important drivers to business success, as regulators and lawyers step up their game, supported by IT and rampant media. Rupert Murdoch may well agree. In general, I find this all to the good, with caveats.
One caveat is the risk that we all feed the lawyers even more than today. Regulation needs to be simple and transparent wherever possible. Another is that regulation becomes a weapon in trade wars between countries. Like so much else, this is a hidden benefit of the EU: Europe regulates as one nowadays.
But generally, just like individual taxes and tickets, if people cheat and are punished, the consumer benefits and money flows to the law-abiding. If you complain about tickets, try the alternative of following the rules. Most of them are there for good reasons. If taxes and tickets and fines reflect your ability to pay, celebrate that you have that ability in the first place.
But I am sure the New Yorkers would still find something else to moan about.
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