Author: The Information Badger

Saving, inflation, and a takeaway…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Banking, Life

The Bank of England is holding interest rates at 0.1% and forecasting that inflation will reach 5% by April 2022 (see here and here). They are also signalling that interest rates are destined to rise, with most pundits suggesting the rise will be to 0.25% sometime next year. With this continued huge gap between interest rates and inflation, it’s obvious that anyone who’s been thrifty and built even modest savings in a bank or building society account continues to be massively penalised for their prudence. There’s no point having savings in a bank anymore, and with shrill commentary  rampant  in politics, the media, and on social media about commodity prices, energy supply problems, labour shortages, computer chip shortages, and general supply chain woes, there seems little point in trusting that the future economy will be stable, or in believing that inflation will be limited to the 5% the BoE is predicting.

The Badger isn’t normally so gloomy, but there are a few signs that this decade could see the kind of inflation turmoil last experienced in the 1970s. Two particular things have influenced the Badger’s mindset, namely looking at a graph of UK Inflation since 1960, and purchasing a meal from a Chinese Takeaway in Crawley. Firstly, the graph shows that the UK inflation rate hasn’t been close to the BoE forecast of 5% for 30 years. With the world the way it is at present, the time seems right for a period of inflation turmoil akin to that of the 1970s. Secondly, the takeaway was 10% more expensive than the same meal two weeks ago. The outlet in question, one the Badger has used many times, has a notice in the window telling customers that 10% will be added to the prices on the menu to cover rising costs. Customers have complained, apparently, but as yet there’s been no drop in footfall. When the average person is already paying 10% more for their takeaway, 10% more to fuel their car, and likely much more to heat their home, then it’s not unreasonable to think that the BoE’s 5% inflation forecast, and thus the ceiling of the last 30 years, will be breached.

The derisory interest rates on savings and their large disparity with inflation look destined to continue for a long time yet. When money is guaranteed to massively lose its purchasing power, there’s little point in parents and grandparents encouraging thrift and prudence in kids. Encouraging them into the habit of saving is under considerable pressure and could be facing extinction, which would certainly be to the detriment of society.

The Badger’s wife, helping our grandson drop a few coins into their piggybank, says the Badger’s pessimistic outlook must be a reaction to his recent Covid booster jab. The Badger doubts it, but you never know…

Not another Smart Meter moan…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Smart Meters

Oh no, not another moan about Smart Meters! That was a friend’s disdainful response when told that this item relates to Smart Meters. The Badger chuckled at the reaction because his friend is, shall we say, a strident believer that the average householder will never tangibly benefit from the UK’s Smart Meter rollout programme. In today’s item, however, the Badger highlights something different, namely someone’s specific experience with an energy supplier’s handling of their Smart  Meter readings. Why focus on this? Because their experience illustrates that when a supplier’s own systems go awry when they shouldn’t, it’s always the blameless consumer who’s inconvenienced.

Two years ago, a hardworking millennial living on their own had Smart Meters installed in their home. Being very tech-savvy with a time-poor lifestyle, they’d decided it was a sensible thing to do and would reduce the administrative overhead of routine life. The installation went smoothly, and they’ve worked without any problems with the same energy supplier ever since. Arriving home after a long and tiring day at work a few weeks ago, however, there was a card on the door mat indicating that someone from the energy supplier had visited to read the meters but had been unable to gain access to do so. The youngster quickly checked their Smart Meters and their monthly energy payments and found they were fine and fully up to date, respectively. The card on the doormat was thus ignored and immediately consigned to the recycling bin.

 A week later the youngster wondered if they were caught in Groundhog Day because the same thing happened again. This time the card asked them to contact the energy supplier to make an appointment because the meters needed to be read to avoid an estimated bill. Disgruntled, the weary youngster decided they had more pressing  priorities than putting themselves out, especially as one of the selling points of Smart Meters was  ‘no more manual meter readings’, and the meters had been functioning smoothly with the same supplier for two years.  The card was crumpled up and again consigned to the recycling.

Last weekend, the intrigued youngster logged into their online account with the supplier and found, after some ferreting around, that recent meter readings had been erroneously recorded against the old manual meters which were replaced two years ago. Something had clearly gone wrong with the energy suppliers systems and the youngster decided that life’s too short to concern themselves with problems of their supplier’s own making, especially as with modern technology it’s something the supplier should be able to detect and resolve themselves. The youngster logged out and got on with their weekend.

What happened next? Nothing, as yet. But woe betide if a meter reader happens to turn up on the doorstep when the youngster’s actually at home. It’ll be a short conversation.

Embarrassment facilitates learning…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Learning

The Badger, engrossed in his laptop, heard a knock at the front door. It was a couple of his wife’s friends arriving for a gossip over coffee and cake. The Badger let them in and returned to his laptop. A little later, when the coffee was ready and their conversation centred on one of the friend’s teenage daughters who’s in her final year at college, the Badger was pestered to join them. The teenager had been highly embarrassed in a recent class after acquiescing to a boy becoming leader of her group because he demanded that ‘he knew best.’  The teacher had dismantled the boy’s credibility in front of the whole class causing embarrassment in the group by association. As the Badger sipped his coffee, he was asked if he’d experienced anything similar during his career and, if so, what he’d learned from it.

The Badger, a little taken aback, described an occasion from early in his IT career, namely the first time he worked on a competitive bid during a gap between project assignments. The bid was of modest value to a new client in a new market area for the company. The compact team was led by a slippery, self-obsessed salesman who claimed to be well-connected with the client. Once the bid was submitted, there were formal presentations to the client from the different companies competing for the work. The Badger and others were tasked to attend the presentation with the salesman.

On the day, the salesman, brimming with confidence, did all the presenting, made unapproved promises, and came across as a slippery deal junkie focused solely on the client’s procurement lead who was one of the four key client people in the front row of the audience. The salesman answered all the questions himself, directing them to procurement lead and not the person who asked the question. He was oblivious to his colleagues discomfort and the clever dismantling of his credibility by the questioners. We didn’t win the work.

It was a debacle. The Badger was highly embarrassed but learned three things from the experience. Firstly, that focusing on the decision maker and their key influencers is crucial. Other than the procurement lead, the salesman had never engaged with any of the key client people in the front row. Secondly, women in business are equals and just as astute, capable, and ruthlessly direct as men. The decision maker and key influencers in the front row were women who rightly felt ignored by the salesman’s focus on the male procurement lead. Thirdly, it’s okay to feel embarrassed. It forces you to learn, change, become resilient, and develop a confidence to speak up when something’s not right.

The Badger had obviously said something that struck a chord with his wife and her friends, because their faces lit up and he was offered more coffee and cake…

Transformation with chaos…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Change, Life

After a morning browsing High Street shops, the Badger and his wife popped into a well-known pizza chain for lunch. The number of empty shops and limited footfall meant that our shopping experience had been a sombre one with little atmosphere. As we waited for our pizzas, it was impossible not to listen to the amusing, interesting, and thought-provoking conversation of a spirited group of 30-somethings at an adjacent table. Their conversation seemed to centre on the importance of social media to free speech given Microsoft’s withdrawal of LinkedIn from China, the forthcoming COP26 climate conference, and transformation of the world! The Badger found himself silently oscillating between admiration at their optimism and idealism and dismay at their simplistic view of our globalised world.    

Three things in their conversation grated. The first was a belief that social media is a bastion of free speech. It isn’t. Free speech has existed in societies long before the advent of social media. Yes, social media is a modern channel for sharing information, but it’ll never be a bastion of free speech when people and organisations with nefarious characteristics or intent cannot be held to account. What keeps most people attached to social media, the Badger feels, is simply FOMO – the Fear of Missing Out – not free speech.

The second thing which grated was the view that it’s the UK government’s responsibility to ‘save the planet’ via COP26. It isn’t. The uncomfortable truth is that the UK can facilitate and be an exemplar on dealing with climate issues, but ‘saving the planet’ is more in the hands of the USA, China, Russia, and India than this tiny island. The final thing that grated was a view that the COVID pandemic has shown that our online tech has already transformed the world and that a green, tech-centric, utopia is just around the corner. That’s not the case! The pandemic has, in fact, highlighted that we’re entering an unruly extended period of global transformation which will affect every facet of our lives. Transformation with chaos will be a feature of the years to come!

Transformations succeed when everyone aligns and commits to common goals, plans, budgets, and so on. There’s little real evidence for such alignment and commitment amongst the major powers. The US, EU, China, Russia, and India all have their own economic and internal pressures. US relations with China show little sign of improvement, countries and companies are re-evaluating the strategic wisdom of extensive globalised supply chains, and the move away from carbon creates different tensions as demand for old commodities declines and demand for different ones rises. With this backdrop it’s foolish to think a green, tech-centric utopia is just around the corner.

As our pizzas arrived, the Badger’s wife said ‘There’s a generation whose entire lives will witness perpetual transformation and chaos’.  The Badger simply responded with ‘That’s life’…

Nothing lasts forever…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Opinion, social media

Facebook Inc and Mr Zuckerberg, Founder, Chairman, and CEO  and largest shareholder by far,  haven’t had a good few weeks.  The recent outage of its platforms irritated users globally and it seriously embarrassed the company, especially when it emerged that its internal systems were impacted too. A sizeable chunk of 3 billion users were affected leading to much press comment on what happened – see here, for example. In addition, a whistle-blower interviewed on US TV, by the Wall Street Journal, and questioned by a US congressional committee  provided an insight to the company that was both damaging and a reinforcement of the widespread perception that the company’s  overwhelming focus is on capturing users and monetising their data over anything else.

At two o’clock in the morning recently, the Badger found himself cogitating on Facebook’s woes while listening in the dark to an unrelated BBC World Service programme during which a professor frequently made the point that ‘nothing lasts forever’.  The professor’s truism struck a chord that felt relevant to the social media giant whose dominance has grown progressively since it floated publicly in 2012.    Now, just a decade since it floated and with recent events reinforcing concerns about its power, the clamour for regulation and even break-up is gaining real momentum in politicians of all persuasions. It feels like Facebook is now truly facing ‘nothing is forever’ headwinds. As pointed out here, it’s not technology that’s at the root of the company’s problems and negative perceptions, it’s the business model.  

Cogitations in the dark about the outage and whistle-blower claims crystalised into raised eyebrows that Facebook could have internal and external facing systems impacted by the same single point of failure, and ambivalence about the whistle-blower’s assertions given that truth is rarely as purported by one party in an argument.  Thoughts moved on to how the Badger’s use of the company’s social media platforms has significantly waned over the years as a greater appreciation of how the company uses and monetises content developed. Then there was a moment of clarity in the darkness. ‘Nothing lasts forever’ applies directly to Mr Zuckerberg’s roles as Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive too!

Mr Zuckerberg holds both the Chairman and CEO roles, which many will argue provides a clear line of command through the whole company. However, it places a disproportionate authority in the hands of one individual.  The two roles are different, and the best corporate governance principles hold that they shouldn’t be held by the same individual. Facebook floated almost 10 years ago and so perhaps it’s time for Mr Zuckerberg to realise that ‘nothing lasts forever’ and that the time is right for him to step back and let others navigate the choppy waters of the company’s future?  With this thought in mind, the Badger turned the radio off and went to sleep.  

Time for a new microwave oven…

Posted on by The Information Badger in IT Project Management, Root Cause Analysis, Technology

A long time ago in the galaxy of life, far, far away, a system development project involving 50 people regularly experienced a problem with its development and test computer. In those days – when remote datacentres were just a peripheral blip on the innovation radar – computers were often collocated with the team but in a dedicated, air-conditioned room. Responsibility for the equipment, and for interfacing with its supplier to get proprietary software and hardware fixed when problems arose, rested with the team itself. The regular problem experienced by this particular team was simply that after months of functioning impeccably, they returned one Monday morning to find their computer powered up but unusable. Recovering it to a usable state took all morning causing frustration and loss of productivity. Thereafter, the same thing happened every Monday morning for the next 6 weeks.  

The computer supplier sent their experts to diagnose whether the root cause lay with either a software problem in the operating system, or an intermittent hardware or power supply issue, but nothing significant came to light.  Then, late one Friday night when only the development team leader remained working late, there was a breakthrough. The cleaners arrived to perform their nightly duties.  Once a week on a Friday night, however, a cleaner would vacuum the computer room’s floor.  The development team leader noticed that a few seconds after the cleaner entered the computer room, the terminal on their desk froze because the computer had crashed. They quickly realised what the root cause of the recent problems was.

 The cleaner was plugging her equipment into a switchless socket in the computer room and throwing the nearest switch in the mistaken belief that it controlled power to the socket. It didn’t; it controlled power to the computer! Throwing the switch caused an immediate, disruptive, uncontrolled shut down. When cleaning was complete, the cleaner always returned the switch to its original position and the computer would reboot into the nebulous state that the team found it on Monday mornings. It transpired that the cleaner was new and had taken over cleaning the computer room some 6 weeks previously without a proper handover from a colleague.

This is a salutary reminder that the root cause of a problem that manifests itself in computing equipment doesn’t always mean there’s a fault with the equipment itself. As the Badger has found, for example, when your laptop seems to have regular difficulty accessing the internet using Wi-Fi every Sunday lunchtime, one shouldn’t immediately assume it has a technical problem. First check if an older microwave oven is being used to prepare lunch and then check if things run tickety-boo between times. If the answer’s yes to this then, as the Badger’s found, it’s time to buy a new microwave oven…

Technology has redefined normal life…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Electric cars, Life, Smart & New Technology, Technology, Uncategorized

A century ago, the world started emerging from the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed World War 1. After years of turmoil people wanted change, and the 1920s certainly provided it.  A century later we’re emerging from another pandemic, and the 2020s looks destined to be transformational too. History might repeat itself!  For most people, of course, life today is very different to that in the 1920s. Scientific and engineering advances, and especially the internet and information revolution of recent decades, have put technology at our fingertips and redefined what constitutes normal life for most of us.  

Just how much normal life in the UK has changed since the 1920s can be illustrated, for example, by reflecting on the motor car. In the early 1920s when the UK population was ~40 million, there were only 383,525 cars .  By 1930 the number of cars had risen to 1 million with ~ 7,300 annual road deaths. Today the UK population is ~67 million, and there are 33 million registered cars and around 1800 annual road deaths.  The first traffic light on a road appeared in the mid-1920s, and driving tests became law in the mid-1930s. Cars of the 1920s were ostensibly fuelled mechanical devices owned by a tiny minority of households, whereas today they are essentially fuelled electronic devices with mechanical components which are owned by nearly every household.  Roads are also vastly different, and its amusing to think that any concept of a ‘Smart Motorway’ suggested in the 1920s would have been considered as the ramblings of a lunatic.   

The car and it’s embedded technology has become an essential in the average UK person’s life in less than a century. It’s not only changed the landscape and infrastructure of our country, but also become a fundamental part of our personal freedoms. The 2020s will see cars become powered by electricity, filled with ever more technology to control our driving habits, and become taxed differently to compensate for the reduction in the £28 billion annual revenues currently generated fuel duty on petrol and diesel.  The car as a metaphor for technology has redefined what constitutes normal life over the last 100 years, and that redefinition will continue throughout the 2020s.   

However, there’s something that hasn’t changed since the 1920s, namely primeval human behaviour.  Today’s global connectivity and social media platforms readily bring the most unattractive aspects of this to the fore for all to see. That’s a worry, because the end of the 1920s saw the Great Depression, and if history repeats itself then we could see some similar crisis at the end of this decade, triggered perhaps by a serious failure in the world’s technology infrastructure. If this were to happen, then primeval human instincts will take over and the ensuing anarchy might highlight that life without cars and modern technology is actually survivable, just as it was in the 1920s a century ago

Has tech lost its association with ‘fun’ as a result of the pandemic?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Change, Life, Technology

The Badger recently witnessed a young mother struggling to deal with the noisy, stamping feet tantrum of her infant son at the school gates. The reason for the boy’s tantrum became clear on walking past; his mother had confiscated his mobile phone!  The Badger felt rather sad that such a young child had and was so attached to a mobile phone. It was also sad to see the lad’s mum making as much noise as her son by deploying shouting from the arsenal of parenting skills. My, how the world’s changed.

Should infants have their own mobile phones? Has modern tech infiltrated our lives to such an extent that it’s become unhealthily addictive for infants, children, and adults? Will society descend into anarchy if the internet suffers a catastrophic outage, for example, as a result of a solar superstorm? When tech has become such an important tool in our day to day lives then the answers to such questions are not as straightforward as Yes or No.  Tech was a boon during the pandemic, but the Badger senses that the more we used it the more we’ve come to appreciate that a) it’s a tool and not a lifestyle or ideology, b) it can be corrosive to well-being if used unwisely, and c) that we need real rather than virtual social interactions in our lives because they’re more important to our holistic well-being.  The use of tech during the pandemic has opened the eyes of adults, parents, and children to the downsides of letting it dominate our lives.   

One opinion expressed in The Register’s recent weekly debate on the motion ‘Technology widens the education divide’  was that ‘‘tech’ has massively overreached the point where it’s helpful, and is now obstinately wedged into every single corner of our lives, to the detriment of our ability to think and act as independent human beings’.  Harsh, but it’s a growing sentiment. Another interesting contribution to the debate came from Maria Russell, an early-years teacher in North London, who observed that when her young pupils returned to school, their attitudes had changed due to mixed experiences with technology during the pandemic.  Technology has lost its association with ‘fun’ and become less compelling for her pupils who now crave completely different things like climbing, playing with their friends, reading physical books, and having stories read to them.   

Does this mean we might see infants with mobile phones as the exception rather than the norm in the future? Who knows, but when early-years school children don’t consider tech as much ‘fun’ as they used to pre-pandemic, then a seed of change is germinating that could blossom into significant shifts in attitudes towards the tech in our lives as this generation grows up. Time, as they say, will tell.

Welcome to the metaverse…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Climate & Environment, Life, Smart & New Technology, social media, Technology

As the Badger walked to the local High Street to meet friends, the heavens opened dumping lots of rain on anyone without a coat or an umbrella. Luckily, the local train station was just along the road and a quick sprint for its shelter meant a complete soaking was avoided. Sheltering with others in the station’s ticket hall, the Badger messaged his friends to say he’d be late, and then browsed his smartphone’s news feeds until the rain stopped. Everyone in the ticket hall was doing something similar. In fact, the bedraggled crowd looked like something from a zombie apocalypse, but without any blood.  

A news item entitled ‘PC, internet, smartphone: what’s the next big technological epoch?’ caught the Badger’s eye. Its content answered the question by building on a core 2014 suggestion that the tech/IT industry has evolved through three ‘epochs’, each defined by a core technology and a killer app. The three epochs, in time order, were the advent of the PC, the internet, and mobile computing now epitomised by today’s smartphone. If this last epoch is now peaking, then what’s the next epoch technology for the industry? One possibility suggested is metaverses, a term covering a range of virtual realities covering the workplace, entertainment, and community platforms.  Facebook, apparently, wants to become an online metaverse, but that, in itself, is enough to be wary about a metaverse future.   

As the rain eased, the Badger decided it’s unlikely that metaverses, a word that sounds like marketing technobabble, are the next epoch technology. If they are, then we will have to let companies use even more of our data and also accept a further erosion of personal privacy. Many of us will be reticent about doing this given experiences with social media over the last decade. It also seems unlikely that most of us would want to live our personal and professional lives in virtual worlds when, as the pandemic has shown, we crave the touch, smells, textures, physical interactions with friends and colleagues, and the normal rhythms of the real world that we inhabit.   

The rain stopped, and the Badger resumed his journey, walking briskly and dodging the puddles. Just as the destination came into sight, the heavens opened again.  With mother nature exercising its power with another climate change cloudburst, wondering about the next big epoch in the tech industry felt like an irrelevance. A damp Badger finally arrived and chatted with his friends over coffee. None of them are in the least bit interested in metaverses. One, who’s proud of being ‘a digital native and a digital dinosaur’, pointed out that real life is about much, much, more than bits and bytes manipulated by clever hardware and software. They are so right. It’s very hard to see how metaverses can be an epoch technology that will make real life much better.  

Indelible memories of 9/11…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Life, Psychology, social media, Technology

Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the atrocity that killed thousands of innocent people at the World Trade Centre in New York.  If you weren’t there then it’s almost certain that you watched the harrowing event play out on television screens on that fateful Tuesday, 11th September 2001. It was a heinous crime, horrifying to watch on TV in a different country, and it left people with indelible memories wherever they were in the world on that day. These memories are often specific and deeply personal, and two of the Badger’s, for example, are as follows.

The first is of how the Badger became aware of the tragedy at work in a building outside London, some 3,500 miles from New York. Sitting in his office pouring over project documents relating to a 200-strong development team resident in the same building, the Badger was oblivious to the unfolding horror until his concentration was broken by a telephone call from his teenage son. In a voice dripping with concern, his son’s first words were ‘Where are you? Are you okay and somewhere safe? Have you seen the news?’.  The Badger was surprised by his son’s unexpected, anxiety-laden, words. It quickly transpired that he thought his father was in London and that ‘London would be the next target’. The profound relief of his son when the Badger answered reassuringly has proved unforgettable. After the call, the Badger went to a news website, saw a picture of a blazing tower, and knew that the world would be changing.   

The second is of a meeting the following day in London. It involved two people from the company’s Lexington-based subsidiary, 10 miles from downtown Boston. The pallor, demeanour, and body language of two shocked people who had travelled to London the previous Sunday for a week of business meetings with UK-based leaders was unforgettable.  The Badger’s boss, who chaired the meeting, set the original agenda aside to concentrate on their well-being and needs. They were grateful because all they really wanted to do was get back to Boston as quickly as possible to be with their families.  Their professionalism and patriotism while highly stressed, emotionally vulnerable, stuck in a foreign country due to the grounding of planes, and concerned for their loved ones, was hauntingly memorable.   

We should remember that at the time of 9/11 the internet was pedestrian by today’s standards.  It didn’t dominate our lives then, and the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iPhones, Android phones, and tablet computers didn’t exist.  If today’s smartphones, social media platforms, and streaming had existed in 2001 then the trauma and immediate personal suffering of those caught up inside the towers would have been horrifyingly at our fingertips in real-time. Today’s tech means life is different to 20 years ago, but we should perhaps be thankful that it didn’t exist at the time of 9/11 because the trauma experienced by everyone everywhere would have been worse by orders of magnitude.