Jim Stewart's Blog

I won the lottery tonight. At least I won according to one of my friends methods. What he said was pick a set of numbers and then never play them. Then every time your numbers don’t come up you have won the price of a ticket.

The lottery costs £2 a ticket and there are 100 or so games a year, so you can only win £200 this way – but the big advantage is that you can play any number of times. The chances of winning any prize in the UK lottery is just over 10%, so actually you will win only £180 for each set of numbers.

There is a technique for roulette (best for wheels without a double zero) where you bet both odd and even. You double the bet on the one you lose. If you win then you go back to your initial stake. You are guaranteed to be able to win almost nothing and lose almost nothing. The only problem is that if you have a long losing streak then you need a lot of money.

But people don’t work that way. The people running the games depend on greed – we want that jackpot prize. Success for those running the games relies on one of the seven deadly sins.

I was thinking about the seven deadly sins. One of the interesting ones is envy. Apparently it is about feeling sad (about the success of others). Another is sloth, which might actually have meant depression originally – and many depressed people can find it hard to get motivated so you can see the link.

What it sounds to me is that the seven deadly sins as a concept included things we would now never think of as a sin.

Seeing depression as something people are doing wrong would be strange today. You don’t expect people to “choose” not to be depressed.

There was an Italian case (Forzano et al., 2010) where a judge accepted there was a genetic predisposition to murder. Will the future mean some of the crimes we believe in today will be seen as conditions in the future. I heard a talk by somebody recently that effectively said our lives are psychologically pre-determined when we are born.

There are a couple of songs I like. The first is John Mellencamp – Hotdogs and Hamburgers. A song about choosing right or wrong – and how that fits in to history. I hope we never see the near extermination of a people group as anything other than wrong.

The second is a song by Alice Cooper. He wrote it about the Columbine school shootings. Essentially it is the same message – we choose between good and bad. Many people have the same influences but react to them in different ways.

It may be old fashioned, and maybe the idea will become sneered at in the future, but for now I believe people can choose right or wrong.

But what if society moves on from that? Would it change how we treat a murderer? Well if somebody has a genetic predisposition to murder (or anything we currently see as wrong) then we have no hope of changing them – there is no rehabilitation possible. The only answer would be to exclude them from society for life.

And that is the other side of believing people can choose wrong – it means we can believe in redemption – that people can change.

This is one reason I find it hard to condemn people for text messages they sent 10 years ago. I don’t believe how you acted 10 years ago needs to have any relevance to who you are now. I mean, a jail term of up to 6 months for a crime means it is considered “spent” after 7 years (you don’t need to declare it), but a text message or a tweet seems never to be “spent”.

I cringe every time I see the operation room/control room/command centre bursting into cheers at the end of a film. You know the bit where they save the world, rescue the damsel in distress or whatever.

I’ve been in rooms like that and quite often things come to a slow end, there is no defining moment of success. But in the cases where I have seen a success moment it is often almost a downer. You have struggled to save the world/rescue the damsel in distress together. You have formed a bond. They are a sort of family of the moment and the family is sort of ending.

Tonight is a success night. I’m sitting in the Wales Online Community Awards waiting to hear about two of the Zacs Place family.

The first is Nurse Jan, who has been nominated for an award as the COVID-19 hero. You often hear about the mantra “no one left behind”. And you see that in Jan’s life – working through the pandemic to make sure the vulnerable of Swansea were cared for (and though the public face was about feeding folk there was so much more involved that people didn’t see).

Then there is the old man Sean, who has the vision that makes Zacs Place work. He is up for a lifetime achievement award. I think it makes around 30 years that he has been sharing his life with people from all walks of life.

I’m proud to see them both nominated (and we will see if they win later tonight). Tonight is a success story for the Zacs Place family.

I often see politicians saying “building houses is the answer” to the homeless. But life can be so much more complicated than twee political answers allow for. And the family at Zacs are a great example of how complicated life can be. So not every story in Zacs has a champagne ending with cheers and applause.

And that is the amazing thing about the family at Zacs – the story of success necessarily includes those bitter moments. And the greater the success the more bitter moments we see. In the words of Jesus,

Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?

So here is a drink to the Zacs family, especially to Sean who won the award, even if today the contents of the cup have that bitter taste again.

Bank holiday this Monday- and the rain forecast makes a jump up on Sunday night. So why is it that it is always bank holidays that it rains. It has been so dry for weeks up to now.

Why is it that things always go wrong? Why is it that toast always lands butter side down? Why is it that when people forget to play the lottery one week their numbers come up?

Actually it is a lot to do with how we see the world.

I used to walk along a country lane to work. I arrived early and there were never any cars driving past (good thing – there were sharp bends and no footpath). One day I walked along a little later and the lane had quite a few cars.

It struck me that I could easily have concluded, based on my normal time, that the lane hardly ever had traffic. But if I had normally walked a little later I could have concluded the lane was busy.

What would the lane look like if I watched it over a whole day? What would I conclude if I watched it for a month? Or maybe for 10 years?

I imagine it must have been difficult to plot the movement of the planets when people thought they all rotated around the earth (we were the centre of the universe). Once we realised all the planets circled the sun it would make things easier for us.

To get the right view of the world we need to choose the right viewpoint.

Sometimes we have odd ideas about the past, like the idea that people were not naughty at all. But when you spot the term “irregular marriage” in your ancestry research it helps you realise that isn’t the case. And then there is the DNA checks that points out that people with unrelated family trees are actually related to you.

One of my relatives paid a half guinea to the poor and apologised to the congregation for having an irregular marriage. But when you think about how life happened in the past you can start to see our ideas can be wrong. In some communities they would not see a minister for long periods at a time. There was no way to book a church for a wedding on-line.

And that is pretty recent history – only 200 or so years ago.

The idea of the “good old days” is an odd idea. People want the past, but in so many ways the past is much worse than the present.

My take is that what people hanker after is not the lifestyle but is the feelings and emotions they had at the time.

The question is – how do you create those feelings in today’s society? Maybe to some extent you can’t. And certainly you will not do it by reading the press. But maybe we can capture some of it through simple things, like recreating some of the simple meals we had. And I do wonder if simplicity is at the heart of our desire for the past. Is that what we really all want?

Have you seen the advert? The leg pillow. How on earth are you surviving without one? Do you still remember those cave men pictures showing them sleeping with a boulder between their legs?

And don’t forget the eggsitter cushion, or the walkmaxx shoes. Amazing how the human race has survived with ordinary chairs and plain old vibram soles in their walking boots.

It is interesting how many attempts I see to make me understand that I am missing something that has never existed before.

It would be easy to point the finger at the advertisers. But I got to thinking about why they try these techniques. What is it about us as a species that makes us want to collect more? Why do people hoard? And yet we often realise that living a simple life can make us happier.

There are a few self help de-cluttering books, you know – the books that tell you to put all your clothes on the bed (or are the books just more clutter we want to get).

I wondered if it is best treated as an addiction, something that could be addressed by a 12 step programme. And then I spotted it – clutterers anonymous. Yes – somebody has recognised that this might be a trait best dealt with in the same way as you would deal with alcoholism. Interesting concept. What would happen if, when we shared our new purchases with each other, instead of positive reinforcement of buying we got support with that addiction?

I tried a new way of getting music video playlists tonight and one of the songs that came up was Me and Bobby McGee by Kris Kristofferson. It isn’t in my top ten songs, but certainly gets in my top 100.

I think the poetry of the lyrics in songs is what I like.

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free

And I’d trade all of my tomorrows
For one single yesterday

Great lines. But if you click on the “watch on youtube” button there is something interesting. There are over 700 thumbs down. Even though I really like the song I have not clicked the thumbs up button. But what would it take for me to click the thumbs down?

What is it that makes people want to tell the world that this isn’t their kind on music in an anonymous way?

I know people have suggested that Facebook needs a thumbs down, but I have started to wonder. Do we need that thumbs down, or should we just move on and let people that enjoy the video enjoy it?

Why do we always need the negative waves?

I’m not trying to be an apologist for the government. But something in the recent reports just doesn’t add up.

Take the story about Matt Hancock having shares in a company with links to the NHS. The best description I heard was that he had shares in his sisters company. The company had the right to apply for NHS contracts but didn’t. Put this is other terms – the police stop you in a 30 mph area for driving at 30 mph – and say “but your car could drive faster”. Maybe there is something more behind the scenes, but why go for a story with so little meat on it?

Then there is the story about David Cameron texting. He got turned down. Gosh. I always remember a famous cricketer talking about being prosecuted for smoking pot. He said it didn’t affect anybody else so why should he be prosecuted. I always thought “if it doesn’t affect others then nobody could prosecute you because nobody would know”. The only way these text messages are being talked about is because they were not secret private communications – they were shared.

Now DC has said Boris didn’t go ahead with an illegal plan to get Downing Street redecorated. Interesting when you really think about it – this wasn’t a bung for favours – this would have been a private company saving the taxpayers money (but still against the rules).

When you look at it you can believe one story getting traction – but there are so many non-stories one after another that you have to think this may not be a coincidence.

It made me think back to the way Jeremy Corbyn was treated. There seem to be a lot of similarities in the technique used.

Who is manipulating these smear campaigns? I dislike the attitude behind them more than I dislike the people they are aimed at.

Yes, today is earth day so I really should say something about it. One big change recently has been in France where they have banned flights where there is a train connection of less than two and a half hours. I’m not sure why anybody would want to fly if a rail journey only took two and a half hours – but then the two and a half hours was supposed to be four hours originally. But then we have learned we can live without travel a lot of the time in the last year.

I remember a lot of people living by candlelight on previous earth days – and of course that resulted in a carbon release many times greater than incandescent bulbs. With LED lights these days it is even worse.

Just a year or so ago we were encouraged to use the calculator on our computers rather than asking Google to do the calculation – because of the carbon footprint. Today Google claims to be carbon neutral – how many home computers are?

Things are changing quickly these days, we need to learn to adapt to new realities. And that makes things hard to plan for.

For example, are electric cars the way forward, or maybe hydrogen cars (I think not – mainly because it is a gas). But what if the Formula 1 fuel actually becomes more than a test? Their goal is to have carbon neutral fuel (like the stuff you currently put in your car) in the very near future – that would mean we would not need a new charging infrastructure, or a new type of car – it would mean we could all go carbon neutral without changing anything.

And what about heating systems – should we go for heat pumps (I remember they were being called the future when I was at university)? Or maybe we should hold out for hydrogen?

The hard thing is that a lot of these decisions involve significant changes in infrastructure. My take has always been that there is a large core of people that simply don’t have any interest in getting greener. To me it seems better to opt for the solution that makes life easier for the end user. Maybe, just maybe, that new electric car will become a white elephant (see – white can be used as a negative term).

My treadmill started in Japanese today. It turns out it was a system update – but not being fluent in Japanese it wasn’t obvious to me. Updates happen all the time, and it seems they can take a long time.

It struck me that my treadmill has the operating system and half a dozen apps (like youtube) that will all require updating. Then we start to build the “internet of things” and we are going to find 90% of our internet download being updates.

But think about it. Recently Karcher launched an app connected pressure washer. Just imagine every electronic item in your house needing to update itself on a regular basis (at least once a week). Is this viable?

Do you remember 2015 when the Jeep Cherokee was hacked?

I wonder if having all this equipment which depends on security you can’t control – you need to rely on the developer – is like leaving the windows in your house open.