7 Reasons HMV Closed

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Carps

HMV was part of the fabric of the British high street but – like Woolworths, Jessops, Currys, C&A, Ethel Austin, Borders, Virgin Music and a slew of lesser known names – at some point in the last decade time caught up with its business model. A lot of people speculate as to why it failed.

Here are my thoughts.

  1. Tax
    I don’t want to sound like a stuck record on the subject, but the last 15-20 years has seen a steady increase in running costs for business. National Insurance was blithely increased from 10% to 11% by Gordon Brown back in the day and he was loudly cheered. For a company with thousands of employees though, that quickly means a few million extra quid. Chuck in the equally casual rise in VAT from 17.5% to 20% and who’d a-thunk it – economics 101 comes into play: supply and demand change as prices rise.
  2. Energy Prices
    No. It isn’t a merely function of higher wholesale prices. The price of energy is largely determined by Government policy – particularly subsidies to ‘renewables’, but also on exploration taxes, various duties and so on. Racheted up over several years on top relatively high wholesale prices, it becomes more expensive to keep those nice high street neon lights running. Those costs come to you the consumer in the form of higher prices. And seeing as you have less money yourself in the first place because of higher energy prices, then the effective is a double whammy that stifles demand on the high street.
  3. Parking
    Another familiar bugbear of mine. Whether stupidity is compulsory for councils or whether it results (as per) in some obscure EU directive or other, free parking has vanished from the high street. A trip to town now routinely results in you having to find £7 in coins. The motive of councils is ostensibly to raise money and to encourage the use of public transport, but in fact it just means you stay at home more often which is cheaper and more convenient than both.
  4. Personal Selling/Buying
    Anecdote: for under a fiver I recently bought Jaws 3, a phone cover and Silence of the Lambs. They were delivered to my door. I paid no VAT on these purchases. The sellers weren’t paying employment taxes or running expensive front of house. In fact, they were people like me who have a massive inventory of ‘stuff’ lying around the house and are either going to chuck it in the bin or flog it on eBay for nowt. Taken across the country, there are probably billions of books, CDs and DVDs that will eventually get sold by people who don’t want them to people who do. Amazon Marketplace and eBay will make pennies from each transaction, but so what: it costs them even less to facilitate and is thus profitable.
  5. Corporation Tax specifically
    I’ve mentioned this before too, but if you tax a business at a certain rate for being based in the UK and it can equally happily run its UK business from overseas and avoid tax, then it will. HMV, stuck unhappily and inescapably on the high street and rooted in Britain, could never compete with Amazon who can move their taxable HQ wherever is most beneficial. Again, those who complain about this miss the point: it’s just a fact whether you like it or not. Either you encourage people to base themselves in Britain and contribute to employment and all the benefits that brings, or you encourage them to locate in Malta.
  6. Technology
    Times change. Maybe 200 years ago we’d be lamenting another 4000 farm labouring jobs being lost because of the invention of the seed drill. The fact is that analogue formats for music, film and books alike are dying the death of a thousand cuts as people replace it all with more efficient storage means – i.e., digital. It may be that this alone will undo ALL music shops in the end.
  7. Demographics
    All of the above point makes HMV and similar businesses seem alien and weird to a new generation of customers. “You want me to either pay £3 on the bus or £7 in parking to visit a store that is more expensive, has less choice and no search facility to buy my music? Shut up Grandma!” Never exposed to the joys of a good record shop, it’s not in their blood and they don’t even place sentimental value on buying there – much less any actual cash value. The next generation will find it all amusingly quaint that we once had to go look manually through a fancy warehouse to find our Ned’s Atomic Dustbin records.

Solutions

The Government won’t do any of the following, so it’s a moot point, but if they were genuinely interested in saving jobs and the high street they’d slash corporation tax to encourage companies to headquarter here. They’d end subsidies to certain energy sources and hack away at the duties on other sources. They’d cut parking fees. They’d lower VAT. They’d reduce business rates.

They won’t. Prevailing ‘consensus’ in our crony corporatocratic political cartel is against all of these things. Vote Labour, Lib Dem or Tory they will merely tinker with the margins until every business here has been eaten alive by China and the internet.

The argument against this is loss of revenue for the exchequer. Well, I’d rather have 4000 people in employment, paying tax and spending their wages than 4000 more people on the dole, wouldn’t you?

Still. No need to listen to me. I’m just a nobody and not one of the cunts currently intent on ploughing the country into the fucking sand.

Posted in Carpenter's Britain, Ecommerce, Libertarianism | 1 Comment

I repeat: STAY ON THE DRUGS

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Carps

As people who know me – all 8 of them – will attest, I am shambling berk. Prone to forgetfulness, thoughtlessness, generally disorganised, unmotivated and in a semi-permanent state of disarray, I shamble from one near-disaster to another.

No surprise then, that I failed to notice my brain drugs running out during October.

Friends, dear friends, there is no dignity in waking up on the bedroom floor, naked and shivering, blood oozing from your mouth where you bit your tongue. But such it was that I again found myself in that state, with paramedics again in attendance.

A trip to hospital followed, which now seems routine. But then, during that same day, I suddenly awoke in an even less dignified state. My pants around my ankles, sat on the toilet, blood dripping down the bathroom tiles, head jitterbugging against the wall, dressing gown open, my Auntie Barbara helping me to my feet.

My Auntie Barbara, bless her. Called by my wife in the midst of her panic, desperate to find anyone to help her deal with me as I sat on the toilet, seizuring like a lunatic.

So once more, I remind and implore anyone who has had a brain operation: STAY ON THE DRUGS.

The worst of it is the effect on my wife. Now, she is stuck with the near-constant fear that at any moment I will suddenly keel over and tremble and piss myself and all the other stuff that comes with the territory. Every loud or sudden sound brings her out in a reflexive jerk of fear. Each night, if I wake for a drink, her hand snakes out to touch me to see if I’m OK.

It is damnably hard on her to live with me with this fear gnawing at her mind. And I can offer no assurance that it won’t happen again. The drugs only limit the likelihood of seizure – and cannot prevent them never happening again. And so until at some unknown remove I given the all clear, we have to live under this shadow.

Still, by the standards of the shadows we could be living under, it is a relatively minor one. I just wish it was easier for my long suffering wife.

Posted in meningioma | Comments Off

Social Media “Justice”: Be Careful What You Wish For

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Carps

I am, at many points of any given day, prone to saying the most outlandish and reprehensible things. I joke about death, murder, paedophilia, scat, religion, fisting, piss and Mancunians alike. Sometimes, like other people, I probably go too far. In some company it’s fair enough – two lifelong mates sat in a front room drinking beers can and should be able to say anything to each other. Taste and decency need not apply.

And then there’s other company where you’d keep your mouth a bit less flappy. That classic Ian Huntley line you told down the pub on Friday night is probably not one to whisper in your mum’s ear as you kneel down at Sunday mass.

But, ’twas ever thus. Since the dawn of time, when cavemen first told jokes to their mates about their cavewives’ taste in mammoth cocks, knowing what to say and when and where to say it has been an essential part of your social armoury in a quest to win and retain friends/partners.

But what was also every thus was the unspoken right to get it wrong: to say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person is incredibly easy. That comment about anorexia sounded funny in your head as you see a colleague about to snaffle a tub of lard, and then it turns out that anorexia killed their mum and then you look straight into the face of mortal embarrassment and must either:

  1. Be a cunt and carry on laughing as they run, crying to the toilet
  2. Man up, apologise and make a mental note to stray away from those kind of jokes with that person again

Only now, you can play those mistakes out in the public with horrible personal consequences. The Twitter Joke Trial and Rileyy_69 affairs show that suddenly you’re not dealing with people you know, but whole swathes of people who you only know from the casual, witty bon mots they splatter their Twitter feeds and Facebook walls with.

The next thing you know is that your little off-colour joke offends. But instead of it ending there and then with an embarrassed apology, it’s in the lap of the gods as to what happens next. Maybe the exchange gets retweeted. Then retweeted again with a little “this guy’s a twat” addendum. And then it snowballs until some cunt like Piers Morgan retweets it. And from there, your off-the-cuff failed-humour moment is a hop, skip and a jump away from the pages of the press. Where it reaches your mum, your boss and wreaks terrible havoc on your personal life as you suddenly find yourself in a media fishbowl you never imagined.

Hell – the police are apparently all over this stuff. It’s easy pickings in a world where other kinds of crime (rape, murder, robbery) are difficult to prove. The evidence for you being “offensive” is produced at the push of Ctrl+P. It must do wonders for police detection rates – and don’t think those cunts ignore that stuff. Notice that Dorset police – so quick to break down Rileyy_69′s front door at 2.45am have a detection rate of 25%. Of 603 sexual offences, they managed to solve the princely sum of 155 in 2011 but they can round up a set of lads to go door breaking in the wee hours because the risk of failure is so slight and it’s such a soft target. Slow handclap. (at this point I must recommend Cranmer’s take on why Reilyy needs help, not arrest.)

And so, you must start to self-censor – essentially in fear of the mob. Apologies for the now obligatory quote from 1984 (which increasingly seems to be less a work of fiction and more a blueprint)

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

As Twitter explodes into one of its periodic spasms of moral indignation over this comment or other and you pile in with your two pen’orth of self-righteousness, think about what you’re doing. Who knows what horrors lie in your own timelines or in a long-forgotten email exchange?

“The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

Every email, text, tweet and status you’ve ever made could and can be held against you in a court of law. Do you want that? Are you so perfect to have never called someone a cunt unnecessarily? Or to have made a quasi death-threat in jest? Good luck trying to establish it as a joke when it is dug up by the hate mob 3 years later.

And the law is closing its deathly noose on your daily discourse of bilge and rudeness. Section 5, anyone?

First they came for people who made terrorism jokes because computers and the law don’t do irony and you maybe claimed you were Spartacus on Twitter. But then they came for the people who made racist epithets, but you didn’t say anything because no-one likes racists, eh? Then they came for people who like edgy porn, but you didn’t say anything because you like edgy porn yourself and you don’t want that getting out. Then they came for people who sent sweary emails to their MP and then you definitely didn’t say anything because the universe proves you’ve called yours a cunt, like, a million times. And eventually they came for you because why the fuck not?

I can’t be the only one finding some kind of irony in the fact that we bombed Libya on the premise of protecting free speech, accompanied by laudatory praise for the way social media played a role in disseminating protest, and yet seemingly all love to pile into some poor schlub with a big mouth who says something off-colour on Twitter.

The internet, partly born from an idea about indelible free speech, is instead becoming am open prison where the public are the police – but not in the way that Peel ever intended. Instead we’re seemingly all on the edge of reporting someone to the police for offending us and deciding more or less on the basis of mob sentiment who should be punished for what.

I’ll leave you with another Orwell moment. Try and think about it the next time you’re tempted to join a Twitter mob attack. We’re this close:

“It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak —  ’child hero’ was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.”

Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments

Had a brain tumour? Stay on the drugs, kids

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Carps

Earlier in the year, operating under the delusion that I was back to normal and getting my driving license back following a conversation with a nice (but entirely wrong) guy on the DVLA helpdesk, I subconsciously drifted out of taking my Keppra (Levetiracetam). This steroidal drug is taken after a brain op to lessen the chance of further seizures so it was more than a little retarded of me to stop taking it.

So it was in March that I woke up once more in the bedroom with a bunch of smiley paramedics tactfully trying to lever me into a pair of underpants. No stranger to indignity, I had also managed to piss the bed – thus completing the set of bodily fluids I have deposited there over the last decade or two.

Naturally I received a tongue-wagging lecture from, variously, friends, doctors, parents, wives and random passers-by. STAY ON THE DRUGS. Yes… yes… I know this now.

But even so, as June rolled around I once more awoke to the now numbingly familiar sight of high-vis jackets in the bedroom. “Not a fucking gain” thought I as I shuffled down the stairs on my backside. This time, I had been taking my drugs religiously. But even so – the function of the Keppra is merely to lessen the chance of recurrent seizures. They can still happen.

As luck would have it, the seizure occurred on a Thursday night, and on Friday I was seeing the nice neurologist who saw me after my first seizure. We exchanged pleasantries and began talking. I explained about my two recent seizures and the puzzled doc began asking about whether I was stressed, tired, taking recreational drugs, staying up late, boozing too much or just being generally crap. After some minutes of this talk, I suddenly sensed that he was unaware of the fact that I’d been diagnosed and treated for a meningioma.

“Can we just start again? You don’t know I’ve had a brain operation do you?”

Aghast, he checked my records. Nope. Nothing there. No record of the diagnosis, the scan, the operation, the previous post-op seizure. Nowt. Nada. This merely serves to reinforce my belief that the NHS is just too fucking unwieldy. Eventually, he found my records, but they weren’t attached to my NHS number, but to some entirely other system against my name and address.

This is 2012 and my 6 year old son can program a database capable of dealing with this shit. I was immediately reminded of some of the poor bastards I’d met during my op who’d been stuck in similar bureaucratic black holes for months or even years.

On the subject of mysterious bureacratic black holes, what’s the gig with the DVLA? You have a seizure and have to hand in your license to them. And then some time later they tell you how long they’re banning you for driving. All fair, right?

Well: you aren’t told anything about your case. Who decided and what criteria they use are left shrouded in mystery. I spoke to my neurosurgeon about the matter and he told me that a mysterious medical panel convene every so often to look at all the seizure cases and decide their driving fate. They phone the surgeon and ask for particulars of the operation = all factual stuff about the size/location of the tumour, but his input is otherwise unsought. The neurologist who deals with you isn’t consulted. Your doctor isn’t involved. You yourself are certainly not asked to make a submission. A letter arrives in your mail with a curt notice of the decision and that’s your lot, mate.

I think that kind of sucks. It’s not that I’m in a position to contest the decision, but it’s my brain, my life and I’d rather it not be discussed anonymously by remote experts and then handed down like some kind of fucking judicial sentence. Even just filling in the letter with a  tiny smidgin of detail or local colour would be fair: “considering that your tumour was about the size of a golf ball, we had to cut a massive hole in your heed and you seem to be incapable of taking your meds, we decided not to let you loose on the roads. Especially as you’re a shit driver even in your normal state.” That and a signature would do for me.

Considering an FOI request, just on general principle.

Anyway: as the title of this post suggests. Keep up with the drugs, eh?

Posted in meningioma | 2 Comments

Acropolis Now

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Carps

Back in November, I mused on the prospect of a nationalist strongman arising in Greece in response to the EU’s apparent willingness to override national sentiment and the democratic process in Greece. While no Nostradamus, I point you to the entrance into the Greek parliament of the crypto-Nazi “Golden Dawn” party as well as the communists as evidence that my foresight was about right. My suspicion is that while this is being treated as a kind of dramatic sideshow, it actually will form a template for events across Europe.

In France, the voting share of the National Front shocked the commentariat who even now have no idea how deep the roots of nationalist resentment at the European project have spread. That Hollande has been routinely called a socialist by the press overlooks the fact that his main appeal is actually to this latent French nationalism.

Suddenly, Angela Merkel is facing the end of her much-vaunted ‘fiskalunion’ and this in turn reveals the essentially undemocratic nature of the European project. Greece and France alike, she avers, must keep to the agreements they signed. But what when the national governments that signed those agreements are booted out? Either the electorate is allowed its say, and a government can renege on an agreement to which they weren’t signatories, or the EU can simply insist that its will overrides that of the people. No surprise which course ex-Communist Merkel seems to favour. I must have missed the bit where Merkel was enthusiastically endorsed by plebiscites in Greece and France.

Pulling back to the wider picture, slowly but surely (and, to give them their due, the powers-that-be have kept the plates spinning for far longer than I imagined possible) the multiple crises developing across not just Europe but the whole world are reaching a head.

Hollande’s program of decouplement from the fiskalunion is likely to be timed with a true Greek default. If no government prepared to agree to the terms of the fiskalunion can be formed in Athens by June, the country effectively runs out of money and Greece will be forced out the Euro. In turn, this will give the Greeks the opportunity to revert to the Drachma and default on their Euro liabilities. Lest we forget, the primary victim of a Greek default will be France (see here)

If this runs its course, France herself hits a perfect storm sometime in July of market flight (already, spreads on French bonds are rising as the markets take fright at Hollande’s rhetoric) and Greek default – leaving the French banking sector in shreds more or less overnight. How does that play out? Probably not very well.

Meanwhile, overt currency wars have broken out. The dollar has been the reserve currency of the world since pretty much the end of WWII – and thus has been the centrepiece of US foreign power (oil trading, for example, is exclusively in dollars). But since the Fed turned on the taps and started printing dollars by the trillion, that picture is changing. Quietly, various countries have started looking at alternatives. Since 2009, India pays for Iranian oil with gold, for example and China is reported to have started using the Yuan for transactions with Iran.

What does this mean? Well it tells us that the era of US dominance is more or less ended. By debasing their currency so thoroughly, the Fed has guaranteed that US dollars carry less weight than they once did. By corollary, Iran’s geopolitical importance thus grows ever greater as trade in Iranian oil becomes the poster child for those who want to see an end to the dollar’s cherished status and therefore an end to American power.

Obama may still be feted by the nearsighted, but he has if anything accelerated the stupidities begun under Bush II. Across the Western world, governments remain addicted to the crack pipe of deficit spending which, for all the talk of ‘austerity’, is actually the true picture.

As an aside, ponder this: Greece spends a greater percentage of its GDP on the military than either the UK, France and even Russia (remember: this is an economy in freefall, and entirely supported by ECB loans). So on the edge of Europe – bordered by the troubled Balkan states which have seen much warfare over the last 2 decades, we have an excessively militarised country which is increasingly turning to the political extremes

 

 

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Some Thoughts on the NHS

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Carps

Having spent a bit of time up close and personal with the NHS recently, it’s given me some time to reflect on its nature.

Firstly, most people’s perceptions of it are I suspect coloured by their personal experience. Anecdote looms large whenever talk turns to doctors and hospitals – how could it not? I was seen, diagnosed and operated on within the space of a month. I was diagnosed by a top neurologist in a huge, clean, modern hospital and operated on by a team using groundbreaking ‘gamma knife’ technology in the same ward where Richard Hammond was treated following his near-fatal crash, despite having neither great wealth or fame. I’ve paid my dues through the tax system and been handsomely treated by a service blind to status or personal background.

But yet.

But yet. My story is just that: a story. In the bed next to me was David B of Pontefract. For 7 years he struggled to find treatment for leg pains that left him unable to walk – and therefore unable to work. So knowledgeable was he about his own condition after long years of pain that he had to correct the nurses’ medication charts for himself. Despite his erudition and knowledge and despite his articulacy it had taken 7 years to negotiate the system and get onto a neurology ward. His own brand of gallows humour certainly had a different colour to my own and when I left he remained undiagnosed, marking time on a cocktail of pain killers.

You pays your money, you choose your anecdote. On this basis the NHS could be either miracle or nightmare.

There’s definitely a problem associated with size. I think regardless of the source of funding – whether you’re a fully signed-up Tractor Production Operative straight outta 1940s Ukraine or a foaming Friedmanite free market fundamentalist – any organisation with 1.6 million employees and over 60 million ‘customers’ can’t be efficient.

Returning to anecdotes, I have sat through probably 12 – 15 different mini interviews with various medical personnel over the last few months. Every single one, without exception, asked me about allergies or existing medical conditions. Without exception every single one diligently noted my allergies (Penicillin, peanuts, cats) and medical conditions (asthma, recurrent oesaphageal bolus). I’ve been telling NHS personnel this for decades – shit, they diagnosed these things – and yet on every visit their collective memory is blank. Maybe Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith turn up after I leave with a little memory-wiping light pen.

Where does this paper go? How come, in 2011, with all the wonders of technology and the sheer ubiquity of database systems does this information not follow me around with my NHS number?

It’s a small thing in my case, but returning to Dave B of Pontefract for a second the details of his daily medication were wrong. 3 different nurses did the rounds to deliver his pills. 3 times he patiently explained to each of them that their notes were wrong and that the 50mg dosage on their charts was insufficient. The information couldn’t even survive the end of a shift, much less the passage of years.

Another, less trivial anecdote. As I lay in my bed, near the nurse station, the ward sister/matron/overlord was engaged in a frantic paperchase with another ward. A 73 year old stroke patient had been sent from the Neurology ward to a different department for a scan. He never returned. Instead, this department had discharged him. Literally sent him out of the building: 73 years old, undiagnosed, suffering the after-effects of a stroke, onto the streets. Responsibility, communication and responsive action seemed notable by their absence – despite the best efforts of the person on the end of the phone.

So, you can read the runes of the anecdotes any way you like. But pull out to the wider picture, and the NHS fails by many measurable metrics. On the huge scale of things, the matter becomes one of aggregated statistics. And there the truth comes out. Survival rates for cancer are pitiably low – down there with the likes the Poland, despite the almost incalculable extra billions spent. For heart disease, witness our 20% greater death rate than nearby Germany. We have fewer hospital beds per head of population than poor, bankrupt Greece – despite spending 25% more per head of population.

The NHS is also deeply politicised – and this is because of the way it is funded. Some elements of the medical profession are militant. One of my nurses was on her last couple of days and was very vocal about leaving the NHS because of the changes coming up. The stupid, sci-fi dystopia TV screens attached by mechanical arms to the beds had Andrew Lansley’s stupid mug playing on rotation. All the nurses seemed to see him as some kind of Voldemort figure. Maybe he is. I don’t know. But politics have no place at the bedside.

Likewise, a friend of mine – a nurse – sprays her Facebook wall daily with polemic about ‘cuts’ and union activism. She is a believer in the NHS. It is often said that the NHS is the closest thing to a religion left in the country and this is both true and unpalatable. The goal of any health system is to save lives – not waste them in the name of “equality of access”.

Instead of looking rationally at what systems deliver the best health outcomes, we’ve spent 60 years exploring a cul-de-sac with apparently scarcely a glance at a map book.

Of course if any politician dares to speak of ‘reform’ the land trembles to the sound of marching feet and the refrain of “we don’t want to end up like America!” as if there were only a binary choice between our system and theirs.

Now I’m no expert in the provision of healthcare, but it seems pretty obvious that Specsavers do a better job of eye care than the NHS did or could manage on its own. I get regular, cheap eye tests and have dabbled with various styles of glasses and contact lenses down the years – always at friendly price points and with a convenience it’s hard to imagine anyone a GP ever delivering.

It also seems pretty clear that with even relatively small subscription fees that schemes like the Leeds Hospital Fund (now sadly subsumed into some conglomerate in the modish fashion of the age) have managed to offer superior levels of service than the NHS can by itself.

The answer would appear therefore to lie in the model adopted by most of the world: compulsory health insurance, with a minimum guaranteed contribution by the state and top-ups according to each individuals needs, wants and financial circumstances. That such a suggestion is beyond the pale in polite conversation tells you what you need to know about the mythic status of the NHS. In its current form, it has been a heroic failure.

 

 

Posted in Random Crap | 6 Comments