Aida Allen of Katy, Texas, you are the dumbest woman in America

I’ve had a gmail account pretty much since they started their beta in 2004, and am very proud that I managed to get the address I wanted since it was the early days and I really like the features over hotmail, not least the very powerful spam handling capabilities.

Anyway I was quite surprised when other friends also went onto Gmail that they were not getting the enormous spam volumes I seemed to be getting – maybe the odd one sent to a random address, not a massive onslaught of daily spam. For a while I coulnd’t figure out why.

Now as some of you probably know, there are numerous unscrupulous websites, including some running apps on Facebook and other social networking sites, that do sell on their harvested email addresses. We know that is the nature of those occasional sites you can’t use without signing up to somewhere. Anyway, I noticed something when I started browsing the mails.

Most of them – hundreds every month, appeared to be addressed to one “Aida Allen” of “44378 katie ct”, somewhere in rural Texas.

Take this:
“Dear Aida:

Currently with the estimated equity on 44378 katie ct, your current loan and credit history, you are looking at a potentially sizable cash out and payment reduction.

You can maximize your savings by locking in the low rates today.”

At this stage I’ve no shame in publishing this dumb woman’s full address, since she has caused my gmail inbox to be bombarded by thousands of spam mails over several years. Anyway, I finally managed to somehow spot one personal mail that appeared to have her correct email and mailed her telling her that she’d probably but the wrong email in somewhere, and I’ve been getting her stuff for years. Well you’d have thought the woman would be embarrassed and just fix it but no. I got a response telling me that “shoegirl@gmail.com” was her email address for years. I patiently explained that it couldn’t be, as she couldn’t possibly even log into it (I use the most intricate of passwords and change them regularly). Sure enough, within a day, there was the telltale password change requests as she’d obviously tried to logon to my account and failed.

So I mailed her patiently again, and explained that I had received password change notifications, and sorry, but this is my account. Then she tried to tell me she’d had this account for “years” and would Laura mind compromising?

At that point I just deleted her mail and ignored it, it was going nowhere. Anyway, the spam assault continues, and I seem to have acquired new dumbos who think they’ve got this account. About once every 2 months I get a password change email from one of these stupid girls who think they’ve an account they could never have. Google support has been ok – not great. They figure that the users may have at one point registered a similar address and forgotten the exact details, but there isn’t much they can do. I get facebook, linked in, other account opening details for these dumb women. I even get genuine online banking stuff (not spam) – which is rather scary as there is no way the adderss could have been confirmed – if somebody tries to open any account using my address my first response is always to shut it immediately – sorry but you can’t use my personal email account for your Facebook. Tough.

Lastly, my favourite one, was the lady who sent a sex shop order using my account. I really needed to know that Mrs Pat Bent of Evanston, IL, felt a need for a “cycber bunny” and a “cinammon cyber cock vibe.” Charming. But if you insist on putting somebody elses email address on your orders, well you get what you deserve (and I’ll get YEARS of your blasted spam). I’ve even received somebodies login for the LA Times, which I have to say might have been rather useful – I did actually mail them and say, look, this isn’t something I ordered, somebodies put their address in wrong.

Otherwise EVERYTHING is marked as spam or deleted.

What does worry me, however, is the risk that someday, some distant outsourced support person might unwittingly pass my password onto one of these dumb people and then I’m out of the picture. It is a real fear. Hence why I also buy an email address with one of my domains – now nobody can touch that.

VHI – the Great RipOff Continues

Of all the companies, state, semistate, public and private sector, few have been so persistent and determined in gouging the customer as the semistate VHI. Not happy with fleecing its own custmers while extorting record profits and more or less controlling the private healthcare industry with a vice-like grip, VHI engaged on years of blatant obstructionism in permitting and fair playing field for competition in health insurance, and battled competitiors challenges in courts as far as Europe in order to maintain its massive market share, a perception that it alone treated older customers well, and that its persistent overcharging of lower income customers in order to massively subsidise Fat Cats on its luxury plans D and E is in some way in the public interest. (It took many years for BUPA to successfully challenge the fact that subsidises provided to the state company under “risk equalisation” would in fact end up going to VHI’s fund to shore up its loss-making luxury plans – it took many years for the private sector to establish that cross subsidisation should only happen on a like-for-like basis, so that the poor sod who could only afford Bupa/Quinn Essential plan isn’t going to end up subsidising some banker fat cat on VHA Plan E).

Its unsurprising in the current climate of the return of the 1980s “Golden Circle” arrogantly still pushed to greater heights than ever before by cronisym and pally cross subsidization of the banking and development industry, while protecting higher civil servants on as much as 8 times the minimum wage from pay cuts whilst cutting disability rates by 8 euros a week, that this kind of protectionism continues to exist.

So its of no surprise that VHI, despite massively haemorraging customers in the last year, instead of reducing subscriptions in order to win back old business and gain new business, is doing exactly the opposite in these deflationary times and raising rates by an average of 8%. It appears that they now wish to punish their loyal customer base for losing 120,000 customers last year, rather than make a bigger effort to maintain business and provide services to those who might have lost their jobs (which would assist greatly the lost customers, the majority of which are probably newly unemployed rather than switchers to the competition, who look increasingly attractive in context of continuous price gouging).

Its astonishing that the government has done little to try to stop this madness, given a commitment to reduce inflation and the cost of doing business in Ireland. A significant level of health insurers business is with corporate employee benefit programmes. These are massively transferring to the competition as VHI’s offerings are simply too expensive for corporate buyers. It would make huge business sense if VHI stopped using its muscle to manipulate pricing in the industry and instead tried to do a favour for all consumers.

Shopping

As I’ve been basically confined to indoors for the last 3 days due to a worsening bout of a chest cold, my siblings tell me they’ve never seen the local shops so desperately jammed with happy shoppers buying away to their hearts content. Is there a war on? Or a nuclear winter? The papers and radio keep telling me that things are terrible outside but after being surprised by a snowfall on top of the airport hill in Cork last Wednesday I am a little cynical about the roads – to be sure they could be either much worse or much better than I am being told by the media.

Of course, in the US, if a road becomes severely hazardous, never mind impassable, its closed immediately. While I can already hear echoes of “nanny state” you do have to wonder is this a good idea. In parts where roads are liable to snow, such as national parks on a high terrain, its actually illegal to travel without snow chains in the trunk. Although if you’ve got a 4×4 with tyres marked M+S they kind of leave you alone. In a sense, its not a bad idea.

Meanwhile banks are now likely to find themselves in a situation of real regulation. Its rather hard to stomach this one. There is a belief which I think is incorrect that assumes that there was massive amounts of irresponsible lending carried out on the basis on improbable property values. Lets be honest here. Lots of people couldn’t get mortgages big enough to buy the homes they’d like. Some of them got smaller mortgages for smaller or more remote homes. And although over 100,000 have lost jobs, there are many who’ve held on to their jobs, been pleased to see interest rates fall enough to give them some relief, and who manage.

I recall a friend going for a mortgage right at the peak of the boom in 06. Did she walk in and walk out with a mortgage? Certainly not. She was put through a myriad of stress tests, many of them off paper and unfair. And guess what, she also managed to get onto a variable rate deal after the initial fixed rate ran out, and while she’s not a millionaire, she’s working in a job that is ok for now, is able to make ends meet and loves her little house, although its in an area that I’d consider far from civillization. There must be thousands out there like that, people who will happily go out and vote for FF again, who really do believe the propoganda that Jimmy the councillor whose the brother in law of Kathleen pulled strings to get the lone parent daughter a house after 10 years on the waiting list (no doubt being bypassed by all the other people Jimmy beag was pulling strings for!)

The girls are seeing bags and bags of sale items, and not just Pennys or Lidl, but jewellers, designer labels, etc. And young people too, people who for now have been lucky. Lucky rather than clever. I know brilliant managers who are suddenly vulnerable after doing well for years because their contracts are at an end, and ultimately, everybody is dispensible. One manufacturing agent in one factory with identifical skills and qualifications to another might be dropped because of company policy, the other might continue with excellent prospects because they are in a slightly different sector. Likewise, some retail outlets are doing well – business has gone up in anything that sells itself as discounted, literally anything.

I think we’ve hit a real credibility issue with the current government: people who work in the public sector, who first saw effective flat rate tax increases through “levies” of 1% and then doubled to 2%, then another effective tax increase vie a 7% pension levy, and finally pay cuts of 5% upwards, are not going to run out and spend like wildfire. They will save their money, and also spend it carefully. This is hitting companies who depend on the domestic economy for survial at exactly the same time as high street banks are removing credit facilities from small businesses, crippling them with high surcharges in the process. There is no obligation anywhere in the NAMA legislation for the best interests of the economy to be taken into account. The bankers can do anything they like with the subsidies they receive, and they will most likely use it to buy their own equities back.

In reality, the entire monatrist system lies in tatters. Its being contained rather than resolved. The resistance to real resolution lies at the heart of the problem, and the real problem is not only the valuation of tangible assets, but intangilble ones also. Until both are tackled, there will be no real resolution to the problem, and the western world will hurtle towards massive impoverishment of minority groups and anarchy as doubt builds in the political system that artificially props up that financial empire.

Marriage Equality and the new LGBT Priviligism

It was with some delight that I read Kate Bornstein’s open letter to LGBT activists in the US about the push for “marriage equality.” For the very few of you who don’t know, the path to adequate recognition of non hetero relationships in the US was for years stymied by the DOMA (the Defence of Marriage Act), which established in the US legal code that “marriage” was a state that could exist only between two persons of the opposite biological gender, and that states were not obliged to recognise anything otherwise that had been carried out in another juristriction. A nasty, hateful, spiteful and vicious piece of legislation which has done nothing but cause pain to LGBT folk and encourage the bile of the far right in the US.

Its no irony that even in Europe, the vast, vast majority of states which now recognise what the LGBT recognise as “full equality” – which basically means that they are either regarded as having equal status in law, or permitted equal rights in the areas of finance, welfare, parenting and health – in almost every single case initially had piecemeal legislation bringing in some kind of civil partnership arrangement. The reasons for this were simple (and now almost entirely ignored by LGBT activists) – until about a decade ago, a significant chunk of marriages worldwide took place in faith based environments. If ever there was tyranny of the majority, this is it. The problem with such laws isn’t just that they violate the rights of minorities or the principle of federalism, its that they have not just split into a tit-for-tat populist push towards ever more restrictive laws against the gay community on the basis of relationships, but they effectively have validated and vindicated the kind of bigotry and hate which ultimately ends up as violence against the gay community or those even perceived as gay.

What is ever more chilling is how the overspill of funding is now coming to Europe and is already inflicting a powerful negative influence over developing countries such as Uganda.

On the other hand, as I think Bornstein tries to make out, so much resources are being pumped into the battle for civil unions that other parts of the battle for proper legal rights are being sidelined. For example, the Matthew Sheppard Act in October of this year. A far, far, far more important law with much far reaching consequences for the minority communities, not just LGBT elites, yet it and other laws are far less publicised, despite having greater impact.

I am continuously stunned by the vast hypocrisy of the LGBT elite in Ireland who accuse greying groups like GLEN of selling out. Where were they 5 years ago when a call for submissions by the Dept of Justice on the issue resulted in about 1000 submissions, almost all of them by right wing fundamentalists opposed to marriage? Where were they 10 years ago when the 2 old lobby groups initially started bringing up the issue in the context of death and healthcare issues? Where were they when other groups were taking a lead on demanding a response to the attempted murder of Robert Drake? Something which they’ve totally forgotten about – not one Irish paper looks back on this – something which I am utterly ashamed to admit to my journalist friends in LA, friends and ex collagues of Roberts. Yet the Philly Reporter hasn’t forgotten and there are occasional reminders in the US press.

But Ireland – yeah we’ve conveniently forgotten all about that. We’ve forgotten about the people who can’t meet anybody because they are isolated in rural areas, excluded from mainstream communities, or living in fear of discovery despite working in a company which preaches diversity but allows its employees to maintain a hostility towards anybody different. Just like our brothers and sisters in the US who live the priv life, dance at white parties and don’t have to think twice, we’ve forgotten all about the folks who have the shit kicked out of them in major cities because they look gay, we ignore the interests of children caught between warring parents, not to mention the ongoing discrimination against lone parent families, who gain nothing from this either way. Worst of all, groups like Marriage Equality and Noise routinely ignore the comments I’ve made regarding a failure by either group to correctly address the implicit desire for “property ownership” style parenting rights, perceived as “equality” with married heteros who are already deeply uncomfortable enough in the context of the Baby Leane case, to put an end to the appalling discrimination there is against children of hetero marriages whose parents are untouchables because of constitutional “protection” for the family. It seems like we are a bit pissed because we too cannot just “own” our children like we own a Porshe or a holiday home in West Cork. Only Suzy Byrne has bravely stood alone in objecting to the glorification of the two-parent families and thus reiterating existing injustices, rather than showing real support for childrens rights and lone parent families.

I’m pretty stunned that there has been so little commentary on this anomaly, even within the community. I’ve posted numerous comments on forums, websites, blogs etc, to no avail. Does this silence mean that LGBT folk agree that childrens right should be secondary to parenting rights? Also I don’t see any support coming from the LGBT community for the proposed Childrens Rights referendum, which if it passes, could work in our favour. Nor a single comment about the revisions to the Adoption laws, which don’t work in our favour at all. But what I find most worrying is that wider issues of concern to the LGBT community are met with a defeaning silence: for example, the discrmination at work (the most serious issue in the context of the “Burning Issues” study which LGBT organizations are busy ignoring) may be more of a problem given the funding pull for the Equality Authority. Likewise housing and debt – serious issues, given that there appears to be a particular difficulty with LGBT folk to access stable and good quality housing and all kinds of issues that heteros don’t have to worry about.

I would be so happy in particular if the lobby could stop bickering among themselves and start to build bridges based on what we have in common. The fragmented and limited nature of the lobbies is weakening our case enormously. Its also critical we work with non LGBT groups with similar interests, such as that for lone parents and womens rights. It seems we’ve lost our way in a mindset mired in luxury and privilige and to simply blame GLEN for this is nonsense as every one of the groups is largely the same.

The Cork Water Crisis

As a resident of the city, I’m not unsympathetic to the unusual circumstances which have produced the worst ever flooding to the city or even the shutoff of the water services for up to a horrifying 9 days.

What I am very angry about is the misinformation and inadequacy of services supplied to people by the emergency services. For those of you who might not know, there was and is no emergency out of hours water services hotline in the city. This exists in the north county and south county areas, but not in the city. A call to the FIRE BRIGADE was required in the city area, presumably so the council workers can go home at 5pm and sleep soundly in their beds. (Similar anomalies occur for example with clamping – you can be clamped at any time up until 3.30pm on a Saturday, but the phoneline to get declamped shuts down, so you can’t be declamped, unlike in Dublin where there is a 24 by 7 service and 1 hour maxmimum wait time to get unclamped again).

For example certain local councillors (well intentioned no doubt) have been telling people that if they had not already lost their water service, they were unlikely to. However, the Sydney Park area only got cut off on Saturday afternoon (mysteriously within half an hour of a notification that the Lower Blackpool and city island areas were “reconnected” – or was the remaining services in the northside cut off to divert to these areas instead?) Montenotte and other areas in the north eastern side of the city were similarly cut off over Saturday and Sunday. This morning pockets of the north side not already affected lost their services. Yet the council insists that people who are already unimpacted will continue to remain so. This most definitely is not the case.

A secondary issue was the non provision of water tankers or hydrants to the city region, in particularly the relatively impoverished north city area fanning out from MacCurtain St. It took THREE WHOLE DAYS between the first loss of service to this area and the provision of emergency water – some people lost water here on Friday but emergency water only started on Monday morning – the typical “screw you” hurricane Katrina mentality that exists towards this very run down area of potluck Slumlords and heavily overcrowded HMOs. As of the weekend, anybody needing water was facing a 30 minute walk (and more) to one of the areas.

Lastly, the issue of the non provision of containers for water. Every DIY store in the city sold out of containers over the weekend, and no effort was made to source suitable containers, so I saw people bringing domestic bins to the tankers in the absence of nothing being made available. Apparently every camping shop in the city sold out quickly.

Quite frankly since I didn’t see the army anywhere I cannot comment on whether their services were good or not – I just didn’t see them in the emergency tankers I visited. The guys working were doing ok but in all honesty the response has been shocking. People have pretty much been left to their own devices and anybody without a car is frankly, quite royally fucked. Another key problem is that there is a tacit assumption that people will just rely on friends and family. Fine, unless you are one of many families who all live on the northside and so are all in the same position. Or you’re a migrant whose friends are similarly effected. Even in my own case, most people I know are in the same position themselves. The few who are not are already overwhelmed with their own families – what must it be like to be a migrant who doesn’t know many people? No wonder UCC just sent their 800 newly homeless students home. They knew that they couldn’t assume that resources would be available to such a huge number overnight with so many others affected.

In all honesty, I think there needs to be some kind of reliable, honest, apolitical and accurate information source – giving people the information they need and confirmations of areas that are at risk of losing water. That would be appreciated.

Don’t be dumb: get the jab

Its astonishing how many people are ignoring the sound advice to take advantage of the H1N1 vaccine currently rolling out in Ireland. While many people think there is unnecessary panic, we have a few issues in Ireland that make this more dangerous – high levels of undiagnosed diabetes and very poor levels of good management for asthmatics. The former is due to a lack of screening, and the latter is due to the obscene costs of management (easily up to 1000 euros a year for medication plus GP fees). While a lot of people scoff at the fact that asthmatics are “overtreated” I can tell you that the reality for us is that you are basically stuck on the medication – for life. Losing 5 stone, getting fit and cutting out the fags didn’t cure me, it made it possible to reduce my medication by about 50% (and the annual bill is now about 400 to 500 – still utterly obscene by any standards, the equivalent of a weeks wages for many people). So a lot of people tend to take their chances and just use reliever medication until it just stops being effective, which is sadly, what does tend to happen.

The real danger right now is if lots of people “take their chance” on getting H1N1, its more likely to spread to people who might be in at risk groups (who, I’m sorry, if you are in an at risk group and haven’t been vaccinated, you are just extraordinarily dumb and have a death wish – there is a real danger of pneumonia). At risk groups need to act NOW and take advantage of the vaccination programme. People with small children need to follow suit as soon as possible, as should people living and working around people in at-risk groups. Remember that the vaccine is only 70-90% effective, so its really important as many people as possible take advantage of this before its too late, maybe for somebody else who hasn’t the good fortune of health like yours.

Dell: the "skilled" myth dissipates – part 1

I was quite surprised whilst reading this article about the holdup regarding the grants to Dell workers for retraining, this very surprising and very contradictory statement:

Some of the workers were very low skilled and would need more basic retraining than others so it was essential to include crafts, he said.

Read more: http://www.examiner.ie/ireland/dell-workers-to-get-euro9k-grants-for-retraining-104263.html#ixzz0V9aCUBU6

Whatever happened to the idea that huge multinationals were simply flocking to Ireland for our amazingly skilled, amazingly educated workers?

It seems that the figures don’t add up. And I would suspect also, the parallel myth, that TNCs coming to Ireland pay spectacular wages and create an elite tier of workers with great pay, competitive conditions and of course, no need at all for union representation, because they are just SOOOO much better off than you poor Irish neanderthals working in Irish companies with unions and “traditional” work practices.

Actually there is, within the sector itself, a two tier sector – the first, a large and relatively open segment, made up largely of either manufacturing or call centre sectors, with lots and lots of entry level, unskilled posts, a small minority of higher skilled (and slightly higher paid) positions, and a smaller, very high skilled sector, with highly restricted entry due to high levels of specialisation and a strong expectation of preconditions including specific experience and qualifications. The rewards for the latter will be generous conditions and pay rates, the former modest pay but potentially good experience and a shot at training or promotions. However, the reality in the case of the latter is that many of the more senior positions will be restricted again to preskilled and experienced workers, so a large proportion of entry level workers will find themselves up against heavy competition for a small pool of better opportunities.

Its really difficult to pin down the reasons for the degeneration of the sector – was it always like this? Its necessary to go back 10, 15 years to answer this questions and perhaps explain why, if it wasn’t always quite like this, the sector degenerated into a low skill, low pay and thus easily transferable sector. The problems are twofold – firstly changes that happened within the sectors themselves and secondly changes in Ireland that exacerbated changes within these sectors.

First of all, lets put to death the “high skilled” myth. By standards of even the UK and EU, Irish workers are questionably “high skilled.” For a start, we have very low take up levels of maths at higher level, a language take up that overemphasizes French, and only happens in the last 5/6 years of the 2nd level cycle, and even at that, a large proportion of low to average achievers in comparison to our continental cousins. The math issue has two particularly serious issues – firstly, a very low level of high achievers insofar as very few students actually take higher level Maths and at the other end of the spectrum, worryingly high failure rates at the lower levels. To add to this, the levels of students taking physics and chemistry are not only low, but falling further. Much of this is due to a combination of low availability and perceptions that biology is “easier” and thus higher to gain valuable points for college places via.

A secondary issue is how industries have changed. 10 years ago, IT skills were often relatively low in administrative workers. Your average admin worker could use a pc for data input and search purposes, but probably little else. With a proliferation of PC use in the home and internet use in particular, skill levels hugely improved. I know of several secretaries with a level of IT skills commensurate to the skill level I’d expect from a data centre operator – they know a little about hardware, some basic OS stuff, can search for anything on the internet. A significant part of this is down to the fact that the technology itself has developed. In 1997-1999 I tried desperately to no avail to get an old version of Slackware Linux up and running on a home PC. It was simply quite “technical” and difficult even for a seasoned pc user. Even a simple operating system installation often included the need to setup boot disks, extract dos drivers, fiddle with bios settings, before you even stuck a disk in the pc. Make one mistake and you easily found a pc that wouldn’t boot or wouldn’t display correctly.

Nowadays, even the most advanced server offerings install quickly, with little need for intervention, or sometimes any interaction from the installer. Configuring mass deployments are a doddle compared to 9 years ago. The only thing that hasn’t changed much is networking – this, interestingly, remains as pithy and complex as 10 years ago, partly due to a strangehold of Cisco over the sector and lack of development of simple-to-configure solutions. VPNs and firewalls indeed are a lot simpler to manage, but base networking knowledge is as valuable now as it was 10 years ago. Indeed, anybody who developed skills or certifications in server technologies without developing networking skills would now find themselves well behind the possé. Storage skills likewise, although iSCSI is increasingly popular as a cheap alternative, and as I discovered last week, not especially difficult to configure. For basic use anyway. When somebody comes up with a strong solution for masking LUNs in the same way a normal FC based SAN does it, iSCSI is likely to reign supreme. OK, that and when it passes the gigabit limitation. Again though, we are back to networking (and actually some networking configuration could probably provide an equivalent to LUN masking at vlan level).

Around 1997 to 2000, when IT skills shortages really hit the industry hard, the businesses responded in 2 ways. Firstly, they hiked wages a little. Not hugely so, but enough to make an entry level position a lot more attractive. Sure, it still fell short in many cases of then average salaries, but suddenly, companies with a requirement for IT workers found their pool of potential candidates widened. With Windows in particular both simplifying and wiping out other technologies, it seemed to make sense. The second response for many companies was to take unskilled and uncertified workers and train them up. This, I believe, did lasting damage to the industry.

On one hand, th intention was to find people with potential who could be trained up to a level that they were useful. But instead of initially picking off transferable skillsets and taking people with good skills in other business areas and essentially retraining them, they opened their doors to all CVs, trusting recruitment agencies, and took in a lot of dead wood. The 2nd problem was that while the basic training level was adequate for helpdesk and basic remote support, often the skill levels fell over massively in areas such as advanced networking, complex enterprise solutions, etc. For example some places willingly training up people to have really high level hardware skills, and placed them in 2nd/3rd level support positions on enterprise client bases, but with no networking skills. Or else they had netware or other dying technologies that would prove useless as tcp/ip based networking wiped the floor.

And these guys, now on paper, had experience under their belt. The illusion of high skills was then exacerbated by a carrot/stick approach to get employees to certify. When I worked in Dell around 2000/2001, most of those who got MCPs did so by memorizing “braindumps” – massive bodies of questions pulled in violation of exam policies and often sold outright on the internet. As a result, the REAL skill level of those in more senior roles often was far short of their paper skills, but since most of the skills at use day to day were based on hardware knowledge, this didn’t matter. However it became a nightmare for anybody hiring from the poor of ex-employees of the big OEMs, when it became obvious, that many of their quite senior ex employees, who by then were turning around jobs at rapid rates, were far less skilled than they appeared to be on paper.

I noticed this in 2002, when an employer of mine mishired about a dozen “level 2″ helpdesk staff. Probably about 75% of them had skill levels that really only matched basic entry level. They however, had the arrogance, ego and self-importance to bullshit their way into any post from desktop support to CIO. The disease started to spread across the industry, assisted by high levels of demand and poor skills assessments. Ironically, the OEMs must have been well aware of the shortcomings of many of their own staff – by 2001 the large ones were hiring even their assistant supervisors not from their own staff pools, but externally, from non technical positions. They must have been aware that their own internal demands were not meeting any but the most basic needs. To worsen this, employees were forced to follow knowledge management tools that switched off any sort of decision making. A small group of more experienced techs were enabled to sign off anything that would cost money (repairs, dispatch of parts or technicians). This led to a myopia about skilling employees at all.

Employees, however, were unhappy. Deluded into believing they were “highly skilled” and deserving of high wages, the turnover rates shot up to 80-90% in 12 months. They bullshitted their way across Ireland, often into relatively senior roles. With weak skill levels already, they were useless at peer training in smaller companies and many of those who entered IT in leaner times from 2003 onwards ended up leaving in frustration, shut out of senior positions due to a lack of training, lack of respect for high-level qualifications such as diplomas or degrees and a severe lack of ability of the industry to accurately reward good workers while eliminating poor ones.

Employers response to this was a knee jerk return to demanding high level skill certifications – diplomas and degrees regained currency. But students found themselves working for “lucky bastards” who’d left school with a pass leaving cert (and sometimes a lot less) and a lot of ego, who looked down on “academics” and often vindictively punished entry level employees with qualifications who they viewed as a long term threat. One by one, the IT companies stopped hiring in Ireland and started offshoring. Major employers, sometimes regarded as the best in the business, started closing, slowly.

When Gateway 2000 shut its doors in 2001, the government responded with a complacency that was breathtaking. Although the majority of employees found employment elsewhere, the key factors that led to the closure not only remained unsolved, the entire surrounding infrastucture was allowed to fracture. 8 years later, its main building, where once 3000 workers were employed, remains an empty shell, surrounded by dozens of empty offices. Once thriving, this area is now in almost total industrial collapse. Ireland’s meltdown is as much to do with a lack of real, verifiable skills as it is to do with the global downturn.

The myth of "safe" drunken driving

2 dead, 2 badly injured. 1 man fleeing the scene. A 3am crash on a bank holiday weekend marked out by a drinking festival masquerading itself as a music festival. And lots and lots of extraordinarily dumb people, including the dumbest public representatives in Ireland, coming out with bullshit such as a suggestion that a couple of drinks “help” “nervous” drivers according to one knuckle dragger in Tipp, who to be honest, should simply be passed to his nearest psychiatric unit, and left there until he can distinguish between reality and the fantasy world in which he lives.

We just cannot afford to pretend that there is no relationship between consuming alcohol late at night and horrific crashes that occur late at night and at weekends. It simply is no coincidence. We know this because in each and every other country – which by now means most of the civillised world, which parts of Cork especially seem unwilling to want to join, instead to remain in their fantasy world, a reduction in alcohol limits for drivers was accompanied by steady and permanent decreases in the level of road deaths as a result of increasing step ups in policing. Quite simply, most people value their right to drive over their right to go out and enjoy themselves. And it appears, that its only by twisting arms very hard, that the message gets through that it is simply unacceptable to expect to be able to go out and get ossified and then get behind a car wheel. Or even to drink at all.

All the evidence that exists everywhere has historically shown a strong link between increased policing, reduced limits and better road safety records. While there may be individual exceptions, there is powerful scientific evidence that driving disimproves with almost every amount of alcohol consumed, no matter how small. The converse therefore is, that driving will be better and road safety will improve if we can force people to leave the car at home when drinking.

Now the sad reality was put plain, especially for whose who tried to make out last week that it “doesn’t happen here in Cork.” Because it has, not only with horrific tragic consequences, but also with far too great frequency. Just like those who tried to make out that limiting the right to drive unaccompanied had no relationship to road deaths made before the horrific results of August 5th 2007, its quite likely that in a couple of years time we will be reading about more recent events and see a connection to drunken driving.

We simply cannot continue to pretend that having a higher than average tolerance for limits is doing anything other than creating an atmostphere of tolerance and even pity for those who break the law. We simply cannot pretend that lives will not be saved if these are tightened to the same levels as the rest of the world. And it really is high time that people in positions of influence stop burying their heads in the sand and get out of their own alcohol soaked lifestyles enough to realise that alcohol can and does create real harm in modern life and that we are entitled to, if not obliged to, create laws that as far as is humanly possible try to protect other people against the abuse of alcohol by others.

Why MakeRoom are Wrong on rent subsidy cuts

It was interesting to hear the “news” about a number of different housing NGOs creating a “new” coalition called MakeRoom. Actually it transpires that this has been quietly going for a while. One thing I have consistently foud problematic about NGOs such as Threshold, is while they largely emphasize services for the homeless community, who in Ireland make up a figure of anything between 4500 and far more. In reality the true figure isn’t really known, and it doesn’t include a massive community of people “at risk” or in genuinely substandard housing (which probably includes the vast majority of people living in Victorian conversions, which are especially notorious for extraordinarily low housing standards). This figure I think runs into tens of thousands. Then the proportion of people on low incomes paying more than 30% of their after tax income in rent. And finally, a large group, currently managing ok, who would not qualify for rent subsidy in the event of loss of employment, because their current rent exceeds rates payable.

In fact it turns out that MakeRoom has existed since 2001. (Strange we’re only hearing about it after 8 years). Their current campaign is to stop the policy of reducing rent supplement limits to welfare recipient tenants (who are subsidised) and I presume also, increasing the level of contribution from the tenant, which has also gone up.

The real problem is, however, that even now, a single person whose only realistic employment option in the event of getting a job is a low paid minimum wage job, is entitled by law, to a subsidy of up to 115 euros per week towards rent. This effectively means that the cumulative value of rent subsidy plus dole payment of 295 euros per week (as well as entitlement to a full medical card). If the same person gets a 37.5 hour job on the minimum wage, they take home the princely sum of €302.02 per week. What this effectively means, is that rent subsidies either a) inflate welfare tenants “package” to above that of a full time worker and more critically b) it also inflates the value of the package to a level they may have real difficulty in achieving in the world of work. To top it off, it effectively “entitles” single people to a type of living they realistically in most cases will not be able to afford unless they remain on welfare in perpetuity. This is not a welfare trap, its giving people a package that is not necessary and not based on real needs.

Because the reality is, that the vast majority of low earners bringing home the modest sub 17k a year earnings that the minimum wage will bring home, will not see themselves as able to afford a place on their own. They will share a place until their income increases to such an extent that they can either afford to buy or rent a better place. They do not see an entitlement to individual living. And in reality there is huge evidence to suggest that entitling vulnerable and often transitory people to single units is not only harming those people themselves in terms of societal alienation, its condemning them to slum households, with little or no supports.

The reality is that rent subsidies are nothing but a sticking plaster for the real problems of housing needs. A large proportion of the homesless community are effectively unhousable outside of sheltered accomodation due to addiction problems or mental health issues. In the US, the Nation suggests that there is a large correlation between “off grid” living and homelessness as a means to evade legal detection, often for relatively minor infractions. As a result, rent subsidies are not going to people who might otherwise be homeless. Indeed, until a few years ago there was no requirement to have no other housing options to qualify, and this was not checked, with the result that people who could have easily lived with family who had plenty of space were given housing subsidy, and many will still be in the system. This was changed in 2002 in response to escalating rents. Only at that point did “needs” requirements come into place. But people already getting the subsidy continued to receive it regardless of whether or not they would have qualified under the new arrangements.

Secondly, there is no reason why an adult without dependants should automatically qualify for a whole unit. If this entitlement was removed (and back checked, so that those currently getting this without a proven need would be forced to move to shared accomodation within a reasonable timeframe), the amount of individual units freed up would force massive drops in rents and force these units to the standard requirements of the open market in order to compete.

Because this is the fundamental problem with rent subsidies. They have effectively acted as an artifical floor for rents since the end of the 1990s. Landlords who accept it automatically charge the highest possible rent payable in order to maximise their profit, as they can always be sure of getting a desperate tenant, regardless of how much of a slum the place actually is. The unintended consequences for this is not only much higher rents for everybody, but especially those who can least afford it, but total statis in rent falls in this sector and appalling substandard levels in this segment.

This is why the payable levels are being cut – there is real evidence that this subsidy has massive helped inflate market rents. And it has caused far greater levels of hardship amongst working tenants, who are as a result often on much lower real incomes due to credit obligations and the costs of working. It has also created a ludicrous situation where a large proportion of the population are better off on welfare than working. This has diminished real choice for large segments of the population.

The only other time in history when rents have fallen historically was 2002.

Why was this?

That was the year in which rent subsidies were frozen, the qualification requirements restricted and real needs taken into account. Of course the anti poverty industry cried out in anger, but there has been little evidence since of massive increases in homelessness directly related to this.

That year, rents, which had been escalating at a rent of 200% every 3 years, suddenly stayed level.

They started increasing a year later.

Why?

Because the government stupidly started increasing rents “in line with inflation” again. Landlords responded by taking the extras for themselves. And continued to do so every increase since.

Now there is a real problem at stake. The big issue is that the “arrangement” is not between the state and landlord, its between state and tenant. So the sudden decreases in subsidy and increased payments are directly hit at the tenant. They can ask landlords for reductions, but many will be on leases and not entitled to it, and landlords are perfectly within their rights to refuse them (knowing full well that they may not leave).

On the other hand, a lot of landlords who previously refused welfare tenants as a high risk (rather than as a way of evading detection for not declaring taxable rental income) are suddenly accepting welfare tenants, however reluctantly. It would be very interesting to see how this pans out.

I would suggest the following:

A real commitment to proper sheltered facilities for current homeless who in reality are in many cases in need of supported living
An end to using rent subsidies as a sticking plaster solution – restrict time on it to 12 months and serious reviews in place after that to assess if the tenant is genuinely seeking work
Housing for disabled and those with mental illnesses (no not depression, thats generally a scam) to be a priority, especially for families
Long term leases of vacant unsold properties currently under the NAMA remit for public housing – this would hugely reduce waiting lists
Better standards for existing properties in the social housing system – these are shockingly grim at present
Here’s a good one – end entitlement for non disabled single tenants to subsidy on a single unit – but compensate for this by increasing the maximum rent for sharers
In order to facilitate this, make section 50 properties available also to people on rent subsidy – increasing potential tenant pools and more choice for tenants, not to mention way better standards
Encourage the formation of housing co-ops for low to middle income tenants who are shut out of home ownership
Prioritize housing for vulnerable groups such as lone parents, with appropriate supports such as access to education and childcare
Regular assessment of needs in line with changes in circumstances, but please don’t even think of the appalling idea in the McCarthy report of removing social tenants just because they got a job – better living standards for tenants will lift the standards of the entire area

How shameless can you get?

It was in reading this account from RTE of the funeral of Stephen Gately. Aside from the obvious strangeness of a traditional catholic ceremony for a chap who was living in a state of what the church describes as an “intrinsic disorder” and a “moral evil.” Does the church really need the “business” that badly and are those around the late singer so unwilling to stand up to the powers of “tradition” and provide an end more appropriate for somebody who in all honestly, is hugely unlikely to have had much of a “catholic” life. (Before you get on your moral high horse, I’ve seen some wonderful non-theist send-offs for people who did not force a catholic or christian or other format onto the late persons life, one of the best being a gentle and completely non-religious ceremony for a TCD lecturer of whom nobody actually knew what his beliefs were – this is true dignity).

But it was the last line that really made me want to vomit:
450 invited guests are attending a funeral party in the Four Seasons Hotel, Ballsbridge.

Says it all, really.