Morning all. A few stories by way of confirmation that your favourite blogger is ahead of the times...and, a first for this blog, a bit of balance. This latter may be a disappointment and you may infer that I'm losing my touch but it relates also to my piece on fashion. Quite clearly, I have no time for balance for its own sake - perish the thought!
As we've started on this balance business let's continue. I write in response to the revelation that FTSE 100 head honcho salaries are up by 27%. Now in one or two cases, this might be justified but only one or two, as most shareholders will know only too painfully. These people are now paid spectacular amounts of money and like wages generally, as we have previously observed, their salaries are "sticky downwards"...i.e. they go up when times are good but rarely seem to fall when times are bad. And times have been very bad recently.
So how come? Well it's our old friend fashion. It's also the "what happens in the USA will one day happen in the UK" syndrome. It used to be the case that the grands frommages amongst our US cousins got paid way more than their UK equivalents whose salaries, whilst being much higher than those of their minions, were at least within the realms of the same universe. No longer. Sure enough, the massive US salary package phenomenon crossed the Atlantic (just like hallowe'en celebrations amongst other wacky ideas), some time in the late 1980s I would estimate and now our own fat cats are having to spend as much time worrying about their own finances (the tax must be terrible) as they do running their companies. And now it's the fashion to pay people so much, who wants to be out of fashion by trying to cut things down to size?
Before you think I've changed sides, this is nothing like so serious as the over inflated pay in the public sector for two obvious reasons. First, there's very few of these uber-salaried types in the private sector and second, you and I don't have to write the cheques. Let their shareholders worry about it.
In other news...I see that some council somewhere has spent zillions on laptops for the kiddies to play with but because of some administrative cock-up, they've never been used. Actually this is probably a good thing as getting the kids to use them just compounds the problem and it won't bring the money back.
There are still loads of people of my sort of age who don't know one end of a computer from another. The members of this group who hold the purse strings are so terrified by their own skills shortage that they have been determined to throw money at gadgets to atone for this. Chief among these was Tony Blair who was PM when this fashion (there's that word again) started. By all accounts, old Tone never went near a computer: he even had a minion print out emails for him to read. Thus started the trend for those who know least about IT to be the ones who spend the most on the stuff. Sadly there seems to be no sign of this fashion going away. The blind leading the partially-sighted.
Speaking of printing out emails and the consequent planet-damage that might ensue, I read that the organisation which kind of runs the climate change agenda (the ICCC or something, you know the ones) has said that they won't know for sure that man-made carbon emissions are harming the planet for about another 30 years. Great! So for a lot of us, we will be long gone before we can have any warm glow (metaphorically of course - don't turn up the heating) from our years of sorting rubbish into different coloured bins and for you younger readers, there's something for you to look forward to: by the time you are far too old to care, someone may announce that, surprise surprise, the sun is a lot more powerful than any of us and buying that shiny electric car, installing your own windmill, or voting for the Green Party (you wouldn't, would you?) made no difference to anything.
Alternatively, they may decide that, yes - it was our disgusting profligacy with the earth's resources that has caused the ice caps to thin out a bit but never mind, because the carbon savings made by us enlightened westerners have been cancelled out many hundreds of times over by the increase in emissions from places like China and India. (If you do still believe that your tiny actions can have a bearing on anything, just take a peek at the historical and predicted increases in emissions from these developing countries and your mind will be changed in a trice.)
Of course well before the 30 years are up, some nutter in Iran or Israel (there's more balance for you) will have pushed the button and blown us all into our very own little piles of carbon.
Please think of the planet before you print out this blog.
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