Match fixing – and why sport matters

Great test cricket is magic, there is no other word for it. A great test compared to, say, a great football match is equivalent to reading a great novel versus watching a great film. The film may be more intense (or not), but the slow burn of reading a book will make the memory stay with you clearly for a long time.

The topsy-turvy England-Pakistan match at Lords yesterday prompted this in the TMS inbox:

From Brian Webb in Birmingham, TMS inbox: “What a wonderful, wonderful end to the summer. Do the players know what it means to us – who work in factories, offices, shops, banks, drive cars, taxis & lorries – when they play like this and win? For a short time, it means everything.”

An imperious batting display from Trott and Broad, and then some almighty bowling from the England bowlers must have made every England cricket fan’s heart sing.  I really can’t overstate how much cricket is more than just sport to cricket fans – it is part of the fabric of summer, life, and England (to the English).

And now this, from the News of the World:

THE News of the World has smashed a multi-million pound cricket match-fixing ring which RIGGED the current Lord’s Test between England and Pakistan.

In the most sensational sporting scandal ever, bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif delivered THREE blatant no-balls to order.

Three no-balls will certainly not affect the outcome of this game but seriously – What… The… F***?

Thousands – millions – of people will be feeling utter, utter disappointment that they can’t trust what they see on the pitch as being a proper contest.  A very few people should be feeling utter, utter shame, and hopefully will be in court soon.

“What Have I Learnt?” read to you by a bear

For the hard of reading, my recent post read to you by a bear.

Saving money and riding bikes

Whilst I’m hardly in penury, I’m trying to save a bit of money now that I am only working four days a week. This got me thinking – it is more tax efficient to cut down on your spending than increase your income.  The other bonus is that spending less subtly unplugs you from a system you may not be all that happy with.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool free market capitalist, but that concept extends to declining to participate in transactions you don’t want to be a part of.

But back to the tax efficiency.  My marginal rate of tax is 40% or thereabouts – 20% income tax, 11% national insurance, 9% student loan repayments.  I am soon to cancel my monthly bus pass, which costs £42 a month.  That is £42 a month that will be available to me to spend on other things.  If I were to increase my take home pay by that much, I would have to earn an extra £70 a month before deductions.  Can’t be bothered.  Also, every time you decline to earn more and spend more you are depriving the great beast of Government of funds, which is always a bonus in my book.

We have a strange idea of personal success.  We measure the success of a business by profit, not revenue; yet we don’t do the same for people.  If a high earner has a high cost of living (as in boring stuff like rent, transport etc) then their profit is low and they may not actually be that successful.  Earning just enough and living frugally can be just as good.

So, I’ll be saving £42 a month, or £504 a year.  I can do this because I have recently bought a bike.  Well that will have paid for itself financially after about 8 months or so of saved bus fares, which is a good pay back time.  I will also still have a bike at the end of it, rather than a small pile of expired bus passes.  I am also moving closer to work, so on the days when I don’t want to ride in I can walk, rather than get the bus (rent in new place is cheaper too).

Best of all though, I love riding in to work!  I realised how much I hate the bus.  Waiting for it to turn up, being stuck in traffic, having to listen to some selfish arse play hip hop all the way, and still a 15 minute walk at the end.  Door to desk (i.e. including showering and changing once at work) is the same if I ride or get the bus.  My endorphin-stimulated good mood wears off pretty quickly once I am at work though.  Still, you can’t have everything.

What have I learnt?

Now that I have reached a certain age milestone about which I am none too happy, I thought I would write down some conclusions I have reached about life.

• Other people don’t matter.  Unless your decisions affect them, or their decisions affect you, the views of other people don’t matter.  you can’t persuade the world you are right, even if you are.  I act on this.
• Other people matter.  Stay in touch with old friends, try and make new ones.  I need to do this more.
• Every time you spend money, you are voting for the kind of world you want.  Someone else said that, or thereabouts, but I can’t find who.  I don’t act on this as much as I should.
• Some decisions matter and some don’t.  Work out which are which.  I am generally OK at this.
• Nearly every tomorrow will be more or less the same as every yesterday.  That is, when the news is predicting catastrophe and doom, it nearly always won’t happen.  BSE, SARS, bird flu, swine flu – yes, people died, but there weren’t mass epidemics and bodies piling up on the streets like it sounded there would be.  I act on this.
• There has never, ever, in the history of humanity, been more opportunity than there is now.  Tomorrow there will be even more.  If you are invested in some kind of (probably affected) generational ennui; thinking that we have nothing to achieve, nothing to fight for; then I call bullshit.  The problem is you, not the world.
• Press Publish.  Ask her out.  Sign up for the course.  Make the call.  Whatever it is, do it.

Happiness and palaeolithic behaviour

We live in very different circumstances to those in which we evolved and are adapted to, and those circumstances gave rise to certain behaviours. Would recreating some of those behaviours make us happier?

[Frank] had written commentaries for the Journal [of Sociobiology] suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had.  Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat that they ate – just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviours might increase health and well-being.  After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors a great deal; had created the species Homo sapiens; had blown their brains up like balloons.  And to the extent they neglected these behaviors, and sat around inside boxes as if they were nothing but brains and fingertips, the unhealthier and unhappier they would be.

Frank clicked to this commentary and its list of all the paleolithic behaviors anthropologists had ever proposed as a stimulant to the great brain expansion.  How many of these behaviors was he performing now?

• Talking (he talked much of the day)
• Walking upright (he hiked a lot in the park)
• Running (he ran with Edgardo’s group and the frisbee guys)
• Dancing (he seldom danced, but he did sometimes skip along the park trails while vocalizing)
• Singing (‘Home-less, home-less, oooooooooop!’)
• Stalking animals (he tracked the ferals in the park for FOG)
• Throwing things at things (he threw his frisbees at the baskets)
• Looking at fire (he looked at the bros’ awful fire)
• Having sex (well, he was trying.  And Caroline had kissed him)
• Dealing with the opposite sex more generally (Caroline, Diane, Marta, Anna, Laveta, etc)
• Cooking and eating the paleolithic diet (research this; hard to cook in his treehouse, but not impossible)
• Gathering plants to eat (he did not do that; must consider)
• Killing animals for food (he did not want to do that, but frisbee golf was the surrogate)
• Experiencing terror (he did not want to do that either).

Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below

Which of those do you do?  Which of those would you not do?

Life sucks, but it doesn’t have to

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to kill time.  They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment – a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger’s face seen in a bus – a moment when each had known a different sense of living.  And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Paying the way to Mars

I’ve had an article published in The Mars Quarterly, the Mars Society magazine. You can find the preview version here which, you will be excited to know, includes my article.

Here is a taster:

We have the technical know-how to send humans to Mars if we choose. Where the whole endeavour fails, of course, is money.

The obvious source of money is government spending. This worked extremely well to get to the Moon. The goal was set in 1962 and achieved seven years later. That is a phenomenal achievement, but the

effort could not be sustained for long after the race was “won”.

That success makes the solution for Mars seem so simple: persuade the President, get money. But the space race was a product of the Cold War; a very different time to the present, which lacks the burning imperative to climb hard and fast toward the stars. Unless a new space race begins, such an imperative will continue to be absent.

I dumped an unedited first draft of this on the blog some time ago, here.

PS: That photo is a little old now – I no longer have a goatee, although the youthful good looks remain.

Micromanagement as a substitute for masterly inaction

Elsewhere, I have said that you should always look at the data.  That is not always the case.

When I worked for Norfolk Children’s Services, we reported monthly on the number of Looked After Children – i.e. children staying with foster carers. We looked at the total number, children leaving foster care, children entering foster care, the demographics and all that. “Benchmarking” had shown that the number of Looked After Children was “too high”. I’m sceptical – can you really compare the aggregate of such complex lives between one local authority and another? And surely, if a child needs foster care they need foster care and that should be that.

The Powers That Be decided that the number that was “too high” should come down. To this end, we were asked to report weekly with details of every child that had entered and left care. Why? What could possibly be achieved by this? The highly-paid head honchos were agonising over data that should have been the concern of the social workers involved and their managers. THEIR concern was and should be the children, but now they had weekly numbers to be implicitly judged upon. But if a child needs foster care he needs foster care. End of. Should the social workers decline to put children into care, or take them out too early in order to bring the figure down?

The Powers That Be wanted to do the right thing. But is it within the power or remit of a Local Authority to affect the number of children who are or should be in care? Surely that is far too wide and deep a societal issue for a council to solve. But when Something Must Be Done, that answer is unacceptable. If nothing can really be done, then the appearance of action (to deceive oneself as much as others) is necessary. When no meaningful action can be taken, only meaningless action is possible. Hence, an ineffectual but well-meaning micro-management.

If you sell a commodity, customer service is all you have

The Sceptical Manager, new blogger on the block and a colleague of mine, writes here on customer service:

You are welcome to amend your booking at any time but we will ensure that we make you feel like a criminal for asking; after all you are only the customer. Actually who the hell do you think you are? You pay our wages? Hmmph, I don’t think that matters in the slightest. If you give us a load more money then we will give you what you want. Otherwise, sod off!

James is comparing Timpson (cuts keys, fixes shoes and watches) – good customer service; with Holiday Inn (chain “hotel”) – bad customer service. At least these two companies have a distinctive service/product, irrespective of their differing attempts at treating customers appropriately.

But what about when your product is completely undifferentiated, a commodity, like a utility? If you sell gas or electricity, you aren’t really selling gas or electricity because to the consumer it is exactly the same irrespective of what company you paying for it. Sure there are different price plans but in the long run I reckon price evens out between suppliers – how could it be otherwise? The wholesale price is the wholesale price and that affects all the suppliers.

As far as the customer is concerned, utilities sell customer service because that is what they come up against – not a choice between different styles and colours of electricity. So why are they SO BAD? nPower is messing me around again because they are sending me bills in my former-neighbour’s name. They know this, because I have told them. They have confirmed that for some reason this other person’s name appears on one of the name fields, but mine appears in the other so it is OK. Firstly, why two name fields?! Second, no it isn’t OK. Third, why is it so difficult to fix these things? Why is it broke in the first place?

I have had loads of problems with utilities at this flat, and whoever I speak to is always polite and helpful, and assures me that this time it’s fixed. It isn’t. You want to rage, but you can’t because the person you are speaking to is not usually at fault. Shop around? Forget it, I’ve had problems with all of them. Can’t they just get it right?

Surprises are more valuable than confirmation of what you think you know

Daniel Hannan (UK Conservative Member of the European Parliament) was describing a speech he did at a Republican committee meeting in the Deep South of the States.  In the context of something else he mentioned gay marriage, and immediately felt that he had dropped a clanger.

Sure enough, after I had finished, a man with a beard and a red baseball cap sauntered up to me.

“Son,” he said, “Ah ’preciate you comin’, an’ Ah ’greed with most of wut you said. But Ah must disagree with your position on so-called homosexual marriage.”

He paused to hitch his jeans up his great belly, looking into the middle distance.

“Far as Ah kin see, not bein’ under any pressure to git married is one of the main advantages Ah enjoy as a gay man.”