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When I started this blogging lark, I chose Blogger mainly as a way of getting a blog up quickly with as little effort and learning as possible in order to support Chris Huhne for Lib Dem party leader. I'd always intended when possible to move my blog to my own URL here at www.jockcoats.org.uk and my own server and software I could play with.

Since I went and bought another server, and set up a personal site using www.jockcoats.org.uk when I was running for election as university governor (which I've won, by the way thank you for asking, but more on that later no doubt) and since my Blogspot address got hijcaked rather embarrassingly by someone redirecting to a pretty explicit gay porn website at the weekend, I've decided to carry out that move now.

So I grabbed back my Blogspot address and redirect it to here, but if you are reading this and link to my blog at http://jockcoats.blogspot.com/ in your blogrolls and so on, maybe you could change that over to http://www.jockcoats.org.uk/ as soon as you can be bothered. I'm still getting used to the software, so things will probably change quite a lot over the next few days. For information, I'm using Drupal, and its blogapi module to allow me to continue posting through ecto.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Guardian Unlimited Money | News_ | Study reveals financial crisis of the 18-40s:

Patrick Collinson
Tuesday March 28, 2006
The Guardian

An official government study into Britain's personal finances reveals a lost generation of 18- to 40-year-olds unable to cope with debts and soaring house prices, with alarmingly low levels of savings and little hope of building a decent pension.

The study, by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and Bristol University, published today, is the biggest of its kind undertaken in Britain. It paints a picture of a generational divide fuelled by higher education costs and the collapse of company pension schemes - with 42% of adults now with no pension and 70% with no meaningful savings.

The FSA will call today for a new national strategy to improve Britain's financial capability, including workplace-based financial seminars targeted at 4 million employees; making personal finance more prominent in the national curriculum from 2008; and "money doctor" packs which will be sent to 1.5 million new and prospective parents each year.

What a typical and completely ineffectual response. A few leaflets and seminars to tell people to do better. Whilst it is still important to ensure that those who have worked all their lives now have a decent quality of life in retirement, we need to radically rethink our economic and fiscal policies to address this looming generation of have-nots, including me!

All of this bullshit about us being better off than we ever have been and so on is worth nothing if that better off means that we slave longer and harder for it. The monetary system has created a similar problem to the feudal systems that preceded mass home ownership, only this time there is little way out because people just do not have the capability to build up that same asset backing as previous generations had.

Forbes reported recently that:

Making a billion just isn't what it used to be. In our inaugural ranking of the world’s richest people 20 years ago, we uncovered some 140 billionaires. Just three years ago we found 476. This year the list is a record 793. They’re worth a combined $2.6 trillion, up 18% since last March. Their average net worth: $3.3 billion.

India's quota, 23 people worth between them $99bn compares with per capita GDP of just $3,400. Lakshmi Mittal's fortune increased in one year by the equivalent of SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND UK median incomes. Now don't get me wrong, I do not believe in a zero sum wealth game. I'm not some rabid trot that thinks they only get rich because others are poor. They get rich because money attracts money, because of the system that they are so good at playing. Because assets are transferred from poor to rich through landlordism (check out how many of Britain's rich list as rich because they own large tracts of our common wealth, the land of the UK itself that the rest of us need to pay them to occupy) and debt money.

This is not a call for some kind of punitive taxation - what's the point if, like Philip and Cynthia Green you can go through a year paying something of the order of five figures only in tax anyway, but for a new predistributive system that allows us all to share in our birthright, this planet, equitably and gives people a chance.

Courtesy of the OED:

[< Anglo-Norman and Middle French mortgage, mort gage (1283 in Old French; also as gage mort (1267); French mort-gage (now arch.)) < mort MORT a. + gage GAGE n.1, after post-classical Latin mortuum vadium (from 12th cent. in British sources) < mortuum, accusative of mortuus dead (see MORT a.) + vadium pledge (see INVADIATE v.). Middle French mort gage {goesto} post-classical Latin morgagium (from 14th cent. in British sources), mortgagium (a1564 in a British source).
Extended use (sense 1) is found slightly earlier in English than the technical legal sense (2); such extended use is app. not found in French, but may perh. have been developed in English directly from the legal use in Anglo-Norman and Middle French.
For the explanation of the etymological meaning of the term current among 17th-cent. lawyers, cf. the following:
1628 E. COKE First Pt. Inst. Lawes Eng. 205 It seemeth that the cause why it is called mortgage is, for that it is doubtful whether the Feoffor will pay at the day limited such summe or not, & if he doth not pay, then the Land which is put in pledge vpon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for euer, and so dead to him vpon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the Tenant, &c.]

Parents to pass on mortgage debt:

A new mortgage allows parents to leave to their children not only their homes but their home loans as well.

Grip of Death, right enough.

In the Oxford Times today Reg Little write of demands from district councils in the county to Build Compost Plant

"Oxfordshire could build itself a giant modern 'in vessel' composter similar to this one in Somerset
A food recycling centre is being proposed to help Oxfordshire deal with its mounting waste crisis.

"District councils say weekly household collections of food and kitchen waste could help usher in a new era of recycling in the county.

"They are pressing Oxfordshire County Council to invest £1m to build a modern 'in vessel' recycling plant which could turn waste food into compost. Such plants are already in use in Somerset, Cambridgeshire, Devon and Dorset."

Actually, Oxfordshire already has a decent sized similar thing and has had for fourteen or more years. A farm I lived on near Cassington built one to recycle food processing waste - taking orange skins from the old orange juice plant at Kidlington and eggs and things from other commercial suppliers around the county.

I know, I worked on it briefly in a (nearly) former life in order to pay the rent at the farm cottage. And I suggested this idea before I left the council in 2002 as a way to get rid of the city's organic waste collections. At the time I did a little research and I think found out that there were legal issues with it - that there was some prohibition on collecting peoples' kitchen waste and turning it into compost because you never could be sure quite what was in it. Presumably such problems have been overcome now somehow and the idea is "de rigeur".

Or perhaps they should just have elected such a visionary as myself executive mayor while they had the chance...:)

1916: U.S. Supreme Court finds the income tax is constitutional.