Irish Economics Made Simple

I’m frequently (too frequently, some might say!) posting on Boards.ie, particularly these days in the Politics section, where you’ll find no end of interesting ideas on a) Ireland and the EU and b) Ireland’s economy. Although there are some notably intelligent and articulate posters with some very interesting ideas and facts to present, there are […]

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I’m frequently (too frequently, some might say!) posting on Boards.ie, particularly these days in the Politics section, where you’ll find no end of interesting ideas on a) Ireland and the EU and b) Ireland’s economy. Although there are some notably intelligent and articulate posters with some very interesting ideas and facts to present, there are also a sizeable group of people there who might be best described as baboons with basic Internet and computer usage skills. These are people who consider Ireland to be a proud and powerful nation, where the current recession (it’s actually starting to be referred to as The Recession, the capitalisation reflecting the realisation that it’s going to be sticking around for the best part of the next ten years or so) is just a small speed-bump on our accession to the throne of Rulers Of The Free World. With that goes ‘We don’t need the stinking EU’, ‘We should leave the Euro Zone’, ‘Immigrants Out’, ‘Germany owes us because without us the Euro is nothing’, ‘We have manufacturing up there with the best in the world, sure our butter is the best there is’ and of course that old chestnut ‘We’ll retake the North by force because it’s rightfully ours and we have the best army in the world, and it’ll employ people’. Hmm… Yes. Indeed.

Still, these things are a useful barometer by which you can judge the general mindset of people here. While the extremist views aren’t indicative, they give you an idea of where the general trend might be, and it seems that there’s still an incredible feeling of entitlement, of the idea that the rest of the world owes us, and the more we lose the more ‘they’ should all get a move on and give us what’s ours, which is generally lots more money, less working hours and whatever the hell else we want.

It’s not going to happen. Here’s why. In the general healthy scheme of things, in running your country’s economy when you are not totally self-sufficient, you would want a situation along the lines of the following:

I make half the food I eat. I buy the other half from you. Starvation! Except, I also make cars. I sell the cars to you at more than it costs me to make them. This pays for the other half of the food I need. In fact, if the value of the cars I sell to you is more than the food then in fact I’m working on a profit. At least, I can aim to break even.

Ireland isn’t terribly self-sufficient, and back in the 1980s was also very much in debt and had little in the way of native manufacturing. But we had an educated workforce which spoke English, and was willing to work hard:

I make half the food I eat. I buy the other half from you. Starvation! Except, I can work for you for very little, and I’ll let you build your factory in my garden, and turn a blind eye to what you do within that factory. This pays for the other half of the food I need. In fact, if you make enough stuff in my garden and give me enough work then in fact I’m working on a profit. At least, I can aim to break even.

But somehow that changed, probably because the profit part gave an illusion of self-sufficiency, which made costs rise and credit easier, and also the ‘turn a blind eye to what you do within that factory’ approach was applied to regulation within critical areas such as construction and finance. We have had a case here in recent years of:

I make half the food I eat. I buy the other half from you. Starvation! Except, I also make houses. I sell the houses to me at more than it cost me to make them, and I borrow to make up the difference, from you. This pays for the other half of the food I need. In fact, if the profit of the houses I sell to me is more than the food, then in fact it just makes my situation acutely worse, or if you decide to stop lending, or if I decide I can no longer afford my own houses. And I still need to get half of my food from you.

But this is what actually happened, and happened quickly:

You tell me to stop running my economy this way. I take my cock out and wave it at you. You stop lending to me. I stop buying my own houses, and my economy comes to a grinding halt. I decide on a strategy to pay you back, which is to be cleverer than you and sell you the difference in cleverness. Despite all the evidence to suggest the my situation is a symptom of an acute deficit of cleverness, and that you clearly believe at this point that I need to shut up and stand in a corner with a pointy hat until you’ve figured out what to do with me.

Oh, and the kids move to your place, which sort of gives you my cleverness for free. Starvation.

It would have been good for the ‘Germany should bail us out because we’re so special‘ thread on Boards.ie, a hilarious exploration of the Irish recessionary mind-set. I’ve over-simplified it a lot, I’ll admit, and I’ll be open to constructive amendments on this train of thought. It’s probably over-inspired by the ‘two cows‘ humour system (this has better actual examples. The previous one is a little… over-cooked).

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Curved corners, and why you should be able to see them

So I said I’d write something last night, and I didn’t. Instead, I decided I’d stick some curved corners onto the site here and there since that is a new trick which I got into at work very recently and which I was keen to give a spin. I think it fits the design, actually. […]

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So I said I’d write something last night, and I didn’t. Instead, I decided I’d stick some curved corners onto the site here and there since that is a new trick which I got into at work very recently and which I was keen to give a spin. I think it fits the design, actually. Anyway, the thing about stuff like this, the curved corners, is that on the web this is a ‘next generation’ feature, and so modern browsers can see it and it all looks good. Modern browsers.

However, there is a common browser out there, widely in use, which isn’t modern, and which isn’t good. It is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (Version 6, I’m looking at you. Step forward, boy!), which is still installed and actively in use on many systems (which are almost entirely Windows XP, with a few old Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems thrown in. It doesn’t run on anything that isn’t Windows). Once upon a time, many years ago, it was a reasonable browser but it long outstayed it’s welcome and now it is one of the things holding the Internet back. If you got a pop-up on the screen telling you to get a newer browser, then you have Internet Explorer and you should get a better browser.

If you are using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, please, do yourself a huge favour, do the Internet a favour, and replace your browser of choice. Here are some contenders:

Firefox: It’s been the gold-standard of browsers for a few years now, the benchmark against which browser progress is measured. It used to be Internet Explorer, but the browser ‘market’ is now measured in how Firefox’s share is progressing relative to Internet Explorer’s loss. It has been improving steadily over the last few years, always adding useful new features, it’s never the fastest but it does have a fantastic ‘add-on’ system to allow customisation of the browser (which has made it a powerful web development tool all by itself, helping enormously in displacing Internet Explorer). It’s a solid browser. Try this first, and judge other browsers relative to this.

Somewhat ironically, it’s based on the codebase that came from Netscape Navigator, the browser that was crushed many years ago by Microsoft in it’s attempts to control the Internet. Not crushed enough, apparently.

Safari: Apple’s browser, which not so long ago went cross-platform, based on an open-source browser platform. It was created to fulfil the need on the Mac for a good, fast browser, and it delivers in spades, making the PC version good too. The basic strategy for this browser is to get as much raw performance as possible, and it generally delivers.

Chrome: Google’s recent surprise entry to the market. A cut-down, spartan, high-performance browser. It’s an acquired taste, but definitely very, very fast, and stable. It shares underlying technology with Apple’s Safari, and a similar dedication to raw speed.

Opera: Meh. Apparently a good browser, but to be honest it has become very much a niche browser. It’s a standards-pusher, a browser at the forefront of where web standards are created, but in a tiny niche of usage. Still, some people swear by it, so it must have something going for it.

Oh, and last but not quite least:
Internet Explorer 8
: The byline of this browser is probably ‘not as rubbish as the old versions’. I can’t install it myself because I have to keep installations of the old Internet Explorer versions for web development, although I’ll make the effort soon and try it out. By all accounts it has successfully caught up to the other browsers. Two years ago. So it still hasn’t gotten any of the newer features that the other browsers have, but it’s not as crap with dealing with the older features. I think I’ve just damned it with faint praise right there.

For the more technical among you that might, possibly, be reading this, I say this: yes, I’m playing fast and loose here, this isn’t aimed at the technically-minded reader. I know better, since I work with this stuff on a daily basis, for a living. But I hope it helps at least one Internet Explorer 6 or 7 user to do the right thing.

(Edited for punctuation)

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New web hosting

If you’re reading this, you’ll see nothing unusual (other than me posting, which is rare enough). That’s good. I switched hosts over the weekend, moving from an old, overpriced legacy account at Hosting365 to Blacknight. Blacknight seem to attract love and hate in equal measure but I want to keep my hosting in Ireland, and […]

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If you’re reading this, you’ll see nothing unusual (other than me posting, which is rare enough). That’s good. I switched hosts over the weekend, moving from an old, overpriced legacy account at Hosting365 to Blacknight. Blacknight seem to attract love and hate in equal measure but I want to keep my hosting in Ireland, and there’s no harm in trying them out for a bit. The other choice was Register365 which used to be part of Hosting365 but are now UK-owned, and big and bland.

Let’s see how this works out. If you came here from Facebook, hi, how are you, this is where the good stuff used to happen, have a good look around.

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Down and back up

This weekend I was without the site, since Friday morning, and aside from the inconvenience of not having my email accounts (I handle most of my email through my own domains, andcurve.com and andagile.com) I realised that I just don’t make any use of my andcurve site, at all. Every few months I upgrade it […]

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This weekend I was without the site, since Friday morning, and aside from the inconvenience of not having my email accounts (I handle most of my email through my own domains, andcurve.com and andagile.com) I realised that I just don’t make any use of my andcurve site, at all. Every few months I upgrade it for no particularly good reason, post once about something inconsequential and that’s it. It’s a genuinely useful resource which I’m squandering.

Actually, that’s not to say that all has been quiet; my vitriol and wit gets it’s outings on Facebook, Boards.ie and (of all things) IRC. I’ll keep trying though. Tonight I’ll hopefully finish the threaded comments upgrade, so that if anyone’s still checking here, you can argue with yourselves while I think of my next inane post…

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Hoarding

I’m not a huge fan of sticking videos on blogs (or at least, on my blog). But this is different, because I’ve decided so. It’s about hoarding, the keeping of every little thing, which is something I do because I attach memories to physical objects, making discarding them very difficult (which is not to say […]

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I’m not a huge fan of sticking videos on blogs (or at least, on my blog). But this is different, because I’ve decided so. It’s about hoarding, the keeping of every little thing, which is something I do because I attach memories to physical objects, making discarding them very difficult (which is not to say that I don’t see that these things should be thrown away). Mind you, I should throw them away.

So Oana sent me a link to this. I haven’t actually watched more than a couple of minutes because it loads tediously slowly on our genuinely fairly fast connection, so help me out and watch it. Sit through it and tell me what it’s about.


POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

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