Thoughts

Greece is in finiancial trouble again and are looking to borrow even more money to pay their debts.  Hardly a sustainable system.  It is a beautiful country, good people, and they basically make more than they spend but they are crippled by debt and a widespread belief that the state owes them a living.  No-one… Continue reading Brexit

Sometimes I watch music channels on television and I see one derivative band after another. Sometimes there is something wonderful and fresh but mostly is just the music industry selling us more of what we have previously bought. I don’t doubt that there isn’t fresh new talent out there, doing their own interesting stuff but… Continue reading buying more of what we already bought

In the last year or so, I have noticed men, not women, continuously snapping their fingers as they walk along corridors.  This can be in an office, in a sports club but not on the street, only in corridors.  Why do they do this ?  Is it because their fingers have become accustomed to movement… Continue reading only men, never women

Many companies and organisations these days use what they call a culture of “challenging” or being “data driven”. They apply purportedly scientific methods which give managers the impression of being in control as they look at dashboards, cockpits, graphs of units sold, project timelines and so on. This culture of challenging things owes it’s origin… Continue reading Selfishness, Socrates and Sophism

Some American companies are getting some bad press about their culture of anonymous feedback and their system of performance review.  The word on the street has it that such systems, called Vitality Curves, where employees are forced annually onto a normal distribution with the bottom of the curve being fired, create a toxic work environment… Continue reading vitality

Yesterday on the crowded tram on the way home I sat opposite an old, well-dressed guy staring down into his shopping bag and muttering something which sounded like Easter Bunny. He was rustling around in the bag and comparing the contents to his receipt. Then he took out the items one by one checking them… Continue reading all too fast

I remember watching Steve Jobs presenting and astonishing people with new or updated products. I remember him showing a new iPod advert during one of these talks. A shadow figure wearing earphones and holding an iPod danced to some famous band, might have been U2. Happiness and enthusiastic enjoyment of life with your own personal… Continue reading eyedrops

There is much discussion about immigration of asylum seekers into Europe. The latest idea I heard is being pushed by Germany and is proposing the introduction of quotas with each European country being assigned a quota of immigrants who would then be relocated according to the agreed distribution across countries.My opinion is that this apparently… Continue reading fairness

Yesterday I overheard a conversation on the tram. An American guy was loudly talking “expertly” about weight training and exercise. He said you have to train such and such a way because this activated your metabolism in such an such a way promoting fat burning in the scientifically most efficient way. I felt like slapping… Continue reading obesity is genetic

I have been thinking a little about the difference between evolution and creationism. Science forms a hypothesis which ideally is testable, then a theory which generally has been tested to a certain extent and then this becomes a paradigm, which has been extensively tested. The idea is to arrive finally at a scientific fact. So… Continue reading The Paradigm of Evolution

I ready something interesting speculating about how the human mind has evolved.  The idea is that we have evolved to seek out scarcity – this makes sense for hunger, a type of scarcity, where we are driven to seek out food to the exclusion of much else.  Building on this concept, is the idea that… Continue reading scarcity

On an early morning train i watch the commuters in business casual, heads down tapping away furiously at their laptops as a stunning snowy mountain panorama passes by unseen. When did the world become like this ? Another speaks too loudly into a mobile phone issuing commands, perhaps to colleagues or maybe to Siri. Another… Continue reading Early Morning Train

Parkinson’s law, originally formulated in the 1950s, states that work expands to fill the time available. Workplaces are generally bureaucratic with workers essentially creating busywork for each other. This idea is validated by outbreaks of illness / holidays which usually needs knock out quite a large proportion of a workforce before production output is affected… Continue reading Busywork

An old woman was on the tram this morning excitedly ranting to the commuters about Switzerland, Bosnians, stalking gangs, rape and the SVP (the Swiss nationalist political party).  Her message was as fast as it was incoherent. Was she against immigration or against the SVP’s ant-immigration policies ?  No-one on the tram seemed to care.… Continue reading crazy old woman

We go to work and do things we don’t believe in. We pretend that it’s important. We tell ourselves that what we are doing is worthwhile. We are living a lie.  We say that we need the money. We say that we need the stability. We say that things will get better. We are living… Continue reading living a lie

I don’t know what surprises me more – that Black Sabbath are playing a reunion gig or that Ozzy Ozbourne outlived Ronnie James Dio.

Richard Dawkins talks fondly about atheism and his arguments are sound – science really is reliable and religion is false.  Atheism is right and religions are wrong.  However maybe atheism and reason is an appropriate way of moderating intelligent people’s behaviour but stupid people’s behaviour is more appropriately controlled by religion.

The surviving Boston bomber had been charged with use of weapons of mass destruction. Since when are terrorists’ home made bombs WMD’s? I saw a VoxPox on television asking people whether his rights should be read. Many replied that they should not but some said he waived his own rights when he bombed the marathon.… Continue reading assumption of guilt

I overheard two fat businessmen from a tobacco company walking to lunch, still discussing work. You shift two million units now, says one, you need to increase market penetration. Mass murderers in suits casually discussing how to kill more people as they walk to lunch.