stealth wealth

If I were ever to be wealthy, I would like to be stealthily wealthy.

I don't want to wear flashy clothes that draw attention to me, or drive a big car. I want to travel standard class and not get annoyed with the other passengers.

I don't want to go on expensive holidays, or have a big house. I just want to know what the best films are and have a chance to see them.

I don't want a big heavy gold watch, or all the latest gadgets. I want a Mac laptop, or two, that connect to the internet and work fine most of the time.

I don't want to mix with all the best people, and be seen dining out. I want to keep up with old friends and meet some new people.

I would like enough money to invest, that I did not need to work too hard, and had enough to look after my family. And when I am all gone, it can buy some land to plant trees on.

geek gifts for Christmas

some early gift suggestions for the geek in your life,

bagpipe wii controller - use the miracles of our tartan bluetooth to play the Scottish pipes on your Scotch wii along with all your favourite bagpipe stars, features many popular classics. Does not function as a bagpipe. Not for use by children under 36 months. Ear defenders are advisable but are not provided.

wax cylinder usb convertor - is your house full of old wax cylinders that you would love to listen to on your iPod, or MP3 player, then buy the wax cylinder usb convertor, connect it to your Unix computer using the scsi cable provided, and then load up the handy punched cards into the attractively styled punch card convertor which easily connects to your Mac or Windows PC by usb. Does not work on OS versions above Mac 7.1 or Windows XP. An ideal Christmas gift. Not available for export or suitable for children due to high lead content.

wifi powered humping dog - use the free power provided by wifi, to power this amusing plastic humping dog model, on a warm day may provide nearly enough power to work. Has been known produce freestyle microwaves so not to be used in close proximity to women of child bearing age, or near groin areas.

the death of meritocracy

There was an interesting piece recently by Douglas Coupland predicting the death of the middle class.

http://boingboing.net/2010/10/09/douglas-couplands-de.html

There is certainly something happening, though I am not sure that it is exactly the death of the middle class. I suspect that it might be the death of the meritocracy. Because we broadly live in a meritocratic society, we tend to assume that things have always been meritocratic and will always be meritocratic. But look back a few hundred years and you were born to your station in life, and there was virtually no potential for social mobility. Those 'middle class' type jobs that might exist for those not born to the landed gentry, required substantial capital and expertise. The sheer amount of very specific and expensive equipment required to be a printer or a miller put those occupations beyond anyone not borne to it.

There were very substantial barriers to entry for these occupations.

I grew up in an era when if you were bright enough and did well at school you could go to university and about 10% of the school did. In theory with a degree you were capable of one of the more skilled but not highly specific jobs that existed and with luck you could obtain one. Now about 50% of the school go to university, accumulate a significant debt, but the chances of obtaining a job have diminished significantly. Currently 17 teaching students are chasing every job, in a profession where the supply and demand are pretty much entirely controlled by the government.

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Talent-39being-wasted39-as-17.6550905.jp

A lot of formerly graduate level jobs that required intelligence and flexibility are now disappearing. IT is allowing processes to be streamlined, Amazon replaces thousands of stores, algorithms replace expertise, banks don't really need 'bank managers' anymore.

There is a gap opening up between the superstar jobs that require brains, and the generic jobs that are not difficult to fill, the call centres and salespeople.

We need to think carefully about what sort of society we actually want to live in and figure out how to get there. By merely blundering on we risk returning to a very unequal society with no social mobility.

rambling blog entry

Just an assorted mish-mash of things that have caught my eye lately.

Interesting article in The Times yesterday about Generation Zero, young people who are trying to reduce down their physical possessions to the bare minimum.

A few thoughts arising,

this makes most sense if you do not own a house, once you own a house you rapidly start to accumulate vast volumes of stuff. I think a lot of this stuff really belongs to the house, rather than to you as an individual.

this makes more sense now that you can live a lot of your life online, you don't need to keep letters when you have emails, you don't have to keep physical photos when they are on your hard drive, ...

this makes more sense if you have gone digital with your media, so a downloaded album does not count as a possession it is just more bits on your hard drive.

just because you do not have a lot of physical possesions does not mean that you are living some ascetic life. You could be living in Starbucks, downloading material from iTunes in bulk, running an expensive mobile phone and subscribing to any number of online cloud services.

It does all rather paint a picture of someone with a laptop in one hand, an iPhone in the other, living in rented accomodation ready to move on at the drop of a hat but more at home in the online world.

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Interesting article the other day about Google doing a survey that reckoned that the online economy was now seven percent (I've not checked, this could be rubbish) of the total economy. Not sure that this is entirely credible, I suspect that it must include some mobile phone stuff etc that you would not really think of as internet, and that not much of the big money is actually being earned by UK companies, but interesting nonetheless. All part of the gradual process of people stopping seeing physical shopping as a passtime and using online for more and more of their shopping.

At the moment my online shopping is getting a bit annoying, a few orders still not arrived after over a week. Maybe the internet commerce is reaching another of those step change moments where capacity needs to ratchet up by a significant amount in order to meet demand.

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In terms of growing my investments I think I need to work to orders of magnitude, so that once I have reached one milestone in terms of orders of magnitude the next target is to aim for the next order of magnitude, even it it is something that is going to take years. Once you have got to 100, getting to 200 is less of a challenge. Probably something that might apply to growing a business too, otherwise you make the mistake of just thinking in terms of too many little baby steps, rather than really growing the business.

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My Amazon reviewer ranking has now leapt to 5997, though rising through the ranks is increasingly more mysterious, a few additional reviews make no difference to the rankings, and then suddenly I have rising a big chunk up the ratings.

Normally I think that there is no point to hundreds of reviews of the same product, but I actually found myself browsing through the reviews for the iPod Classic, and I was appreciative of the large number of reviews just to guage how much of a problem hard drive reliability actually was. Obviously for a book or a film, there remains little point to hundreds of reviews.

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Blogs are getting a bit tired, but I am not sure what there is to replace them, just where is the cutting edge at these days?

Amazon New Reviewer ranking 7104

I've not been doing much blogging of late. However I have been distracted by writing Amazon reviews. In a fine piece of social engineering Amazon ranks their reviewers. I tend to rely on Amazon reviews for making purchasing decisions, so in the past where there have not been many reviews online, I've posted the odd review. A few longstanding reviews attracted helpful votes over the years and I had a reviewer ranking of around 11,000.

Intrigued and feeling competitive, I decided to try and up my ranking. Simply by posting reviews of recent purchases, it was relatively easy to get above 10,000. It took a more concerted effort to advance beyond that. Posting a batch of reviews over a weekend initially managed to raise me a thousand points in the rankings, but lately I seem to be sticking in the seven thousand range. Posting additional reviews now does not seem to make a huge difference.

Amazon has secret algorithms for ranking purposes. To be honest I suspect that calling them 'secret' probably covers for the fact that they get changed around from time to time, and are not applied in a terribly systematic fashion.

I suppose the variables that apply to rankings could be
number of reviews - more better
helpful votes - more better
unhelpful votes - less better
product ratings offered - higher better
date of posting - more recent better

also possible factors, other Amazon activity, number of people viewing your reviews, tracking of those who vote, etc

In terms of devising a strategy, it would appear that 'you would be a fool not to...'
post reviews regularly and often
post reviews likely to get favourable votes,
review items that do not have a lot of reviews
review items that attract a lot of viewers
obviously the above two are difficult to meet at the same time, plenty of obscure products have no reviews, few popular products have no reviews
look at those in the rankings to see whether they are doing something that you are not

Logically, getting up the rankings will get harder, the higher ranked you are. That said, the more reviews you have out there, the more you are likely to be attracting positive votes. It is interesting to note where you are on the rankings and the relevant statitistics for those around you. Presumably if you are posting more reviews than them, then you should eventually rise above them.

Amazon re-ranks people every 24 hours, but from observation the higher you rise up the rankings, the less dramatic any changes will be.

Amazon has introduced a Vine programme, whereby highly ranked reviewers can be offered free material for review. I suppose if you were on the Vine programme, you could always sell off stuff that you had got for nothing. That said, the number one reviewer, Peter Durward Harris has been unemployed for some time, so a high ranking is not the passport to riches and fame.

Personally, I like the idea of reviewing products as a way of promoting things that I think are good, and hopefully drawing people's attention to things that they will like, but might not have been aware of. I tend to review things I know about, so as my tastes are not mainstream, I will never be getting thousands of helpful votes for anything. However, hopefully my reviews are helpful to people.

An awful lot of people say that they want to write to reach out to people, and in its way writing reviews for Amazon does this in a very direct way, albeit limited to how they might choose to spend their money.

Reviewers tend to be helpful and positive about products, although Amazon does have some quirks, you cannot mention prices or cite external weblinks, they don't mind publishing damning reviews. To be honest I don't suppose anyone at Amazon head office ever reads most of them. My reviews are mostly posted instantly, a handful appear the next day, and where I have fallen foul of the rules they are not published at all.

Amazon is really in the information business, it tracks what you look at, what you buy, it is not just when we post reviews that Amazon is benefitting from our opinions, decisions and clicks. It could be argued that reviewers are working for nothing, and that it would be nice to get some recognition.

Part of the appeal of doing reviews is that it is the ultimate flexible work, do it if you want, don't if you don't. It does not take a lot of effort for the most part, unless you are only reading a book so that you can review it!

I think that paying reviewers opens up a can of worms, most reviews have clearly been dashed off, no print publication would ever publish them. We understand the transparency of a freely offered review, we can discern what sort of person wrote it and why.

Frequent reviewers could be offered minor discounts, but I think that anything beyond that gets into difficult territory. It is the old argument about mixing apples and oranges. If most reviews are freely offered opinions, and some have been paid for, can you trust any of them.

The upside for Amazon is that they have designed the site so that you will keep on getting offered something else to buy, or to look at, so that you are in effect bound to get something. You will never leave Amazon saying, I just didn't see anything I wanted.

In a few years there will probably be textbooks setting out all this stuff in turgid detail, until then we will just have to try and figure out for ourselves how the modern world works.

At time of writing I am
Amazon New Reviewer ranking 7104
Classic Reviewer ranking 44233
helpful votes 89% (39/44)
with 35 customer reviews

courgettes

In the news this week, a woman has defended herself from a marauding bear with the aid of one of her pet dogs, the other two pet dogs more sensibly scarpering, and a well aimed courgette.

Thankfully there seems to be no end to the uses to which a courgette can be put. Our half dozen courgette plants are still producing, I have harvested another three decent sized courgettes today, with more flowers and baby courgettes still there. I suspect that come the first decent frost they will be gone, but they are still going strong.

I have been taking surplus courgettes in to work for weeks now, and managing to keep half the office amply supplied with courgettes.

Finally, last weekend I did go out looking for wild bears heavily armed with a courgette and with my trusty dog.

shifting produce

Jamesfield Farm Shop and Restaurant - between Abernethy and Newburgh, Fife

Anyone who has ever tried their hand at growing fruit and vegetables will have observed that although getting the stuff to grow is challenging, getting it all eaten afterwards can be near impossible.

One year I grew garlic, but in my ignorance I did not realise that what you actually planted for growing on was the little clove inside each, so instead of having a single dozen garlic plants to harvest, I ended up with several dozen. I like garlic, but no one likes garlic quite that much.

Of course even when we know what we are doing, the retailers will confound us. If you buy a packet of courgette seeds you might get thirty seeds. Unless you are running a farm this is far too many to grow. Growing courgettes this year I have six plants actually in the ground and they are cropping a couple of decent courgettes a day!! Every day!!!

When it comes ready it all comes at once. You might like what you have planted, but most crops require to be used fairly briskly. You can only really store perfect specimens, if it is a bit bashed about you really need to use immediately. A lot of crops won't store at all.

The art of effective gardening is getting round all these problems. For example, effective storage, making jams and chutneys, or finding ways to shift produce.

For our six courgette plants, I have bought my wife a courgette recipe book, and started taking in courgettes for my colleagues at work. It is better to see them eaten than left to wither. In fact it is actually quite satisfying to see folk all excited about the odd free courgette.

We do have a Damson tree, a stocky little fellow, that currently boasts a personal best crop of two damsons. However I do have great expectations, there are quite a few damsons growing round here, so it should eventually get to the stage of cropping away happily.

My wife is a keen jam maker and Damson Jams is a perennial favourite. You can pick up damsons in the shops now and again, and with a little bit of chapping on doors it would probably be possible to source some informally. However this year we got our ration of Damsons at the Newburgh Orchard Group Plum Market. This is a wonderful scheme to record and use the vast number of fruit trees in a quiet Fife village. These apparently date back to the local Benedictine Monastry which supplied the royal court at nearby Falkland Palace. Obviously not terribly recently, the Abbey is now a ruin. But as is the nature of these things, a fruit orchard is a long term thing.

So we fired up the Satnav and headed up to Newburgh, which does not seem to have changed much in the last thirty years. One of those places that progress seems to have forgotten about. It also seems to have a thriving community spirit with plenty of places to stop and chat and a host of voluntary societies. There were a few trestle tables with Damsons, plums, various apples and pears. My wife quickly stocked up on plenty of produce and compared notes with fellow jam making enthusiasts.

Also worth mentioning a fabulous garden centre come coffee shop just along the road at the Jamesfield Farm, the home of the Bellfield Organic Box Scheme.

Finding a home for your surplus crop can involve dipping into the wider community, but surely it is through sharing that we deepen and better our communities.