Jim Stewart's Blog

Finally I managed to get the data on the effect of BREXIT on my work. Because of the way work is structured I effectively lose only 2.5% of my earnings. Bigger companies lose less. Not bad really, I could have lost a lot more.

The more we separate into little groups the more it costs.

There has been a lot of talk about handling things locally recently and yes it might be better at a local level in some ways. But it costs more.

This is the big challenge – how big should government be? Bigger means cheaper, but less personal. This isn’t just about the economy of scale though – it is about the cost of borders.

Borders cost.

I see there is going to be a trial of UBI in Wales some time. It will be interesting seeing how it manages the border issue. I like the idea of UBI, but my suspicion is that it might mean a much tougher border policy.

I like a nice lunchtime walk. Refreshing myself mid-day. I forgot yesterday that indoors was opening. I was really interested to see how many people had decided to meet up for coffee indoors.

What surprised me more was that there were a lot more people inside than outside. The weather was fantastic. Why were they inside? I can only guess it had something to do with a desire to get back to normal.

I can remember when I was young having a snack at a folding table at the side of the road. No indoors at a service station. And the food was simpler (and probably a lot healthier). The gas cooker was there to make a nice cup of tea.

On my driving trips through France, Austria and across the USA I was able to pull over at nice stopping places with tables where I made my coffee and had a snack. Not so in Germany or the UK. It strikes me that this must be a design issue.

When did we design ourselves into boxes? I guess nice stopping places don’t make as much money. And now it becomes abnormal to sit outside in the fresh air.

Maybe a beach visit tomorrow.

I see a lot of people are signing up to see Nigel Farage in the USA. Quite a cool idea – set up a series of events with free tickets. Design the event to attract a specific target group. Hey presto – you have harvested all of their email addresses (and other information) with their permission.

Now I am not saying that is what is going on here – but it could be. In this case it would be names, emails and telephone (all required for the booking).

I recently had to update my email account. That meant changing details on accounts. When I went through the list there were a number of dead accounts that I didn’t use, several with different email addresses – but I counted over 100 accounts in total. And I think I limit the number of accounts I have.

I think the worst I came across were the old BT email accounts that people used to have – for some reason they never deleted address books when the accounts were closed. A spammers paradise.

I’ve started to wonder where we are heading. How are we going to secure all of these accounts but keep them all safe? How many different security questions can we have? My feeling is that everything that makes life easier seems to open up another vulnerability.

You go buy a book on Amazon – or you go buy a book at your local bookstore. One is easier to hack than the other. But it isn’t the one that is the most sociable, or the one that takes the most effort.

I’m not sure if I will become a luddite in the future, but I do wonder whether the easy life is the most rewarding. Browsing a bookshop is so much better than browsing a web page.

James Michael Aloysius Bradford – not a name you might recognise. Stage name Jimmy Nail – best known as Oz in Auf Wiedersehen Pet. It has been repeated on Saturdays recently. The final Cuban episode was shown this weekend.

One scene shows Oz ending a relationship with the woman he loves to help his friend. The editing was really good – particularly the audio. A mixture of Swan Lake, a Man U match and a guinea pig race and probably a couple of other things I couldn’t separate out. I like the deeper comedies like this where it isn’t just all laughs. I think it is partly because of the valleys that you appreciate the mountains.

I watched all of the re-runs so far. I often get surprised by it – something about one of the actors looked familiar the other week and I was amazed to read his bio – including things like A clockwork orange and Conan.

One of the things that I picked up on was the intro every week “contains outdated attitudes and language”. I always wonder about that – was there a message before “Killing Eve” that warns us about unacceptable behaviours?

One part of the last series of AWP involved a homophobic Oz meeting up with his son that turned out to be gay. Some of the language was choice. But it was a valley/mountain moment in the series. Oz struggles to deal with the internal conflict between his prejudice and his love for his son. Sadly they even cut some of the scenes, the most non-PC language was cut out. They filled in the valley, so the mountain didn’t stand out as much.

Sometimes people seem to be very superficial in their approach – focusing on acceptability individual words rather than the message behind them.

I saw it in a cartoon a long time ago – people grow to look like their dogs. It made me look. I’ve always been surprised how similar a lot of dog owners are to their dogs. Of course what is probably going on is that dog owners pick dogs that haver features resembling their own – not the other way round.

When it comes to newspapers we have a tendency to read the ones that are written from a perspective that we agree with.

We surround ourselves with a world that looks and thinks like us. One thing I notice is the way radical has become a normal – it can be hard to find a voice that challenges anything outside of the radical norm.

Sometimes it can be good to listen to voices we disagree with – maybe even detest – because they exist in the world just as much as our voice and views do.

I have a copy of Mein Kampf. Not because I agree with it, but because it opens a window on how race hatred like antisemitism can grow in a person. To me hatred of “the others”, whoever they may be, is a growing scourge.

Maybe next time get a dog that you don’t like the look of.

The flags are waving about our climate emergency. It needs to be top priority – focus on it. But sustainable development covers much more than that. Have a look at this map. This shows the areas of the UK where extraction of coal has led to problems with surface stability.

We have all heard about the problems with houses cracking as the ground gives way. This is as a result of extraction.

It looks like a big problem with all the areas covered. But if you think that is bad then have a look at Mexico City. The city is sinking at a rate of about 50cm a year. This is despite the water extraction stopping 50 years ago. Part of the reason for the sinking is the weight of building, but this is only as significant because of the historical water removal.

We have probably passed the tipping point for the city. That is a city about one and a half times the size of London. And not one bit of that problem is related to Carbon emissions.

We need to avoid getting sucked in to too narrow a definition of sustainability. It isn’t just about climate change.

Well, there is a downer. I had my second vaccine three and a half days ago. Today I got my antibody test. Negative. That means (if it is correct) that I have no protection even after the vaccination.

Thankfully the test is not that accurate. But it does make me think – how many of us will not have protection after the vaccination? There will be some of us. It certainly makes me think about what life could be like for the unprotectable.

Will I return to normal? Not as fast as I would have done without this test. I guess I need to get used to my four walls a bit more.

I spotted a flaw in the plan – if we don’t allow singing then the fat lady will be quiet.

Locally the infection rates are doubling every four days. This is as bad as it was in December in terms of getting out of control. A local school, a pub, a swimming pool – all of them centres of infection. And here is the problem – we live such interconnected lives that a small local infection rate can become a big local infection rate very rapidly.

Despite the vaccination success there is still some way to go with this pandemic – and anybody that tells you the government needs to relax quicker really has not looked at places like here. I have no doubt now that a full relaxation in mid June would result in another wave – because of the lack of control we exert on ourselves.

My personal feeling is that it will be closer to the end of August before we get in a position where we can relax most of the rules without raising infections – unless we can show some self restraint.

There has been a lot of talk of levelling up recently. Unfortunately the old grey suits are also talking about getting back to the office. Yes, yes, I know there are some good reasons for being together, but let me witter on before complaining.

When I worked setting up international meetings i sort of bent the rules and started to set up on-line meetings. I found a mixture of real time and personal time worked really well. In other words you meet on line and talk, go away for the rest of the day, then meet the next day and so on.

The meetings I was holding were open to all countries, but were traditionally held in Europe. As soon as we went online we saw countries attending that had never attended in person. They could afford to participating online – it gave them a voice and it gave use an incredible extra resource. It was a dramatic example of levelling up. It worked straight away.

One thing we did discover was that a face to face physical meeting really helped the online meetings to work. And that is the equivalent of having to get back to the office. Yes, we do need to keep that face to face contact, but we can do with a lot less of it.

So I have been wondering about an idea for the future. We have the idea of serviced offices where you can rent a desk, rent admin. But what if we could rent a manager as well? I would really like to have a researcher working for me in Boston Spa, but I can’t manage them there. To level up we need to find a way for London based countries to train young people up north.

The latest leaflet that was handed out with my vaccination got me thinking. According to the leaflet two doses reduces the chance of death by a factor of 20. If you look back at the peaks we had that would still mean more than 50 deaths a day (about 20,000 a year) if we had widespread infection. Still quite high. The key protection is actually keeping the infection rate low.

This is why the other figure in the leaflet is so important – the risk of catching and passing on the infection. The leaflet says one dose gives about 2/3 reduction. Remember that R0 that was estimated to be about 3 – well that means if we have 100% vaccination rates with one jab we will just about reduce transmission to a level that doesn’t increase or decrease much. But we know that we are not going to get 100% of people vaccinated. So a single jab does not allow total freedom to be restored.

Two doses would reduce the chance of passing on an infection by 85% apparently. That would mean we need to get a 75% vaccination rate to get the underlying reproduction rate low enough. Where are we at the minute? Well a simplistic model would suggest out current basic R value is around 1.5 (half where it used to be).

So my protection will be mainly as a result of enough people having a full vaccination. And enough people having a vaccination depends on each of us – on me. So I get vaccinated to protect you from infection, and the fact we are all vaccinated protects me from infection.