Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

but then why should the rest of us be punished (and punished we will be, yea unto the next generation) for the fuck ups by those departments?

jhnbrssndn in response to my paragraph:

And I have to admit that I agree with that system. Why should you be punished for a fuck-up that someone else in an entirely different department made? You performed well enough to merit a bonus, even if they didn’t…

Not to say that we’re being punished outright, but punishment’s a pretty good word for the debt burden which is going to take many years to pay off. It’ll be a yoke around the neck of the current young generation, that’s for sure.

But I wouldn’t blame the banks entirely for it. They were merely acting within the rules set out by the various governments of the last thirty years. Its our fault as a voting population that we didn’t kick up more fuss about the light-touch regulation which became de rigeur under 80s Thatcherism and was then extended under New Labour.

Unfortunately, our politicians were much more in thrall to big business than by thinking of the consequences. And it’s relatively easy to see why: the Tories are generally in favour of business and the free market, so excessive legislation and restrictions would hinder that free market.

Labour, on the other hand, is historically more in favour of regulation. But their sticking point was the requirement of massive amounts of taxes to fund their expansion plans for the general social welfare state, such as hospitals, schools, and so on. They couldn’t raise income tax too far without losing power, so an easy source was businesses. And to attract businesses to London (for that is where most of them came), light-touch regulation was required.

So yes, the banks were unnecessarily greedy, but the pursuit of profit is generally held not to be a bad thing in modern society. The banks were aided, however, by governments that seemed to rule more for business than for the people.

And we, the voting electorate, must take some of the blame for not realising this and calling for more regulation. Well, not until the horse had bolted from the stable, that is. We were too busy worrying about things like Maddie, brown people and David Beckham’s latest haircut.

Maybe this recession and the various political crises recently (MPs expenses, bank nationalisations/failures, incessant spinning, etc) will awaken today’s British youth to politics in the same way that eight years of Bush finally brought about a massive ground-swelling of political grassroots activity amongst our American contemporaries over the last 18 months.

Here’s hoping.

I was in the shop this morning, grabbing a couple of pastries for breakfast, when I noticed an Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce section on one of the shelves. I’d not seen this before, although I knew Ocean Spray from their range of juices.

It got me wondering about what percentage of cranberry production worldwide goes into Ocean Spray products. It occurred to me that cranberries were as close to a one-corporation natural food as I could think of. Other fruits/vegetables aren’t dominated by one manufacturer to the extent that Ocean Spray does in cranberries, to my knowledge.

A little bit of googling later, and it turns out that their share actually dropped from when the company was founded to the present day. It stood at 95% in 1930, but by 2000 had fallen to 65%. My source [PDF] is a presentation by Coriolis Research, with the relevant graph on page 44.

I’m actually slightly shocked. I thought it had gone the other way, becoming an all-encompassing cranberry superpower. Reading through the presentation, it seems that the price guaranteed by Ocean Spray to its suppliers caused other farmers to switch to growing cranberries, saturating the market and deflating prices overall.

The things you know…

I hope that the German parliament’s decision to privatise a quarter of its rail network won’t be as bad a decision as the similar one here in the UK a few years back.

Admittedly, we privatised the entire network, from passenger services through the ownership of rolling stock down to the actual rails themselves, whereas Germany is only selling its rail services.

But the British rail network is now a mishmash of competing private and semi-private interests, which has led to escalating ticket prices without any real improvement in services, both in quality and frequency.

In many cases, the opposite has happened: unprofitable but necessary routes have been cancelled altogether; non-commuter routes have seen the frequency of service greatly reduced; fares on commuter routes at rush hours have skyrocketed; and punctuality has become a four-letter word.

On a personal level, I use the train every day to get to work, and don’t have too many problems with it. Thankfully, I get on near the start of the route, so get a seat about 99% of the time, but I pity the people who get on 2-3 stations later and then have to stand for 25-30 minutes. Every day too!

But my experiences with trains (and public transport in general, it has to be said) while I was living in Germany and each time I’ve been back has been much, much better. Everything just seems more efficient, cleaner, more punctual and just organised in a more passenger-oriented manner.

I hope that this isn’t a mistake by the Bundestag.