At the start of 2014, four years after they started a Retail Market Review, Ofgem forced UK energy suppliers to introduce a new tariff structure for retail customers. It was claimed to create a simpler and clearer market, removing confusing and complex tariffs to help rebuild consumer trust.
It was built around suppliers offering just four tariffs per customer for both electricity and gas and to help customers get the best deal.
It makes a great example of the law of unintended consequences.
Take my current well-known supplier as an example. If I forget to switch to their new tariff at the end of the one year period, instead of being put onto their new 'best for me' tariff, I automatically get switched onto their worst tariff.
That's about £350 per year worse than the previous tariff. Of course, they don't call it 'worst' tariff because that would alert me. No, they call it their 'standard' tariff, which somehow implies it is what they give to a lot of, well, standard people.
A well-organised person might arrange to pre-switch to the next best tariff, but I bet there's plenty of consumers who don't take any notice and through inertia (aka accidental loyalty) get moved to the lazy and expensive tariff. I calculate it charges about the equivalent of a Netflix plus a Spotify plus an Amazon Prime annual subscription extra, per annum.
The number of tariffs hasn't tracked to the number of years either. I notice we are already up to 16 variants of electricity and a further 16 variants of gas billing since the new rules came in back in January 2014.
The Ofgem principle was about 'Treating customers fairly and profit was not an entitlement'. Although Ofgem has taken some steps in the right direction, the utility suppliers have still been pretty good at playing the edges.
I notice in the 2015 Which report about energy companies that the most well-known names are all in the bottom half of the satisfaction survey. I'm not sure that 50% happy is anything to be proud of.
Some would say it it still early to be putting up the Christmas lights and hanging things from the tree.
Not us. We've already started our festive season. It's meant the annual trip to a couple of shops to get special fillers for party bags, accessory hats and enough miscellany for a pretty large pass the parcel.
Some years it's been Hamleys for the bits and pieces; I think it's the 4th floor that is particularly useful for small items to be used as stocking fillers. Another time it's been Harrods although they are not usually cheesy enough. My secret weapon for finding small spinning tops and tabletop basketball games is a combination of Tiger as well as Hawkin's Bazaar. Whether it's small neon monkey erasers, butterfly hair accessories, crystal tops, microphones for pretend karaoke or even clockwork swimming hippos and elephants (4 for £1.49) the two shops between them will always provide the answer.
Just stay clear *cough* of the rather dubious Secret Santa items...
The area has been successfully blockaded by roadworks originally planned for completion by November 2015. The new finish is now March 2016. I looked up the project plan and all the dates have been changed, so if you didn't remember the old date you might be none the wiser. Nicely done - although I'm bemused that the cost seems to have remained the same? I expect the newly constructed John Lewis and Waitrose which requires access from the incomplete road system will be delighted. They have managed to open their newly built store in time for the Christmas season, to now see that roads in the area have various 'please avoid' notices applied to them by highways england (Yes they do spell england with a lower case 'E').
Despite the road system being downgraded to single lane whilst they finish their half hamburger roundabout, the main shopping car park was still filled. Perhaps the cars are trapped inside?
I guess I've got spoilt by shopping outlets like Westfield, which have lanes with signs that tell you the way to the empty parking spaces and include counts of the number of spaces available.
Inside this centre's multi-level car park there is just a complex maze of largely unmarked routes, sometimes blockaded by those plastic barriers. I decided to try for an upper floor but they had even managed to hide the ramps to go upwards. Not a pleasant experience.
However, once I'd eventually found a place to park, I was able to burst out into the bustling mall, which had what I'd describe as a busy Saturday shoppers' profile. All ages, all buying.
I wondered if I somehow missed the memo about this week being an emergency shopping week?
Around by Bank station in central London there's a golden grasshopper which flies over the top of the Royal Exchange. It's one of those things that I've 'always' known although probably most people going about their business in that part of London are blissfully unaware. I like to think it talks to the golden dragon that flies half way along Cheapside.
I mention it by way of a reference to 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' which is inscribed on the reels of film in Amazon's TV series reinterpretation of Philip K. Dick's novel 'The Man in the High Castle'.
I've found it compelling and disturbing viewing and it feels more like watching a series of movies, rather than a typical TV show.
It describes an oppressive parallel version of 1962 in which the Nazis and the Japanese have won World War II and taken over much of the United States with a buffer zone running along the Rocky mountains.
There's several main plot lines underpinned with the central one about a series of films depicting another version of the future. The future shown on the films appears to be reportage footage of the version of events that we, the audience, know.
The tv show depicts America under German and Japanese rule as consequence of losing World War II after the Germans dropped an H-Bomb on Washington. A subsequent US civil war led to their surrender to the Axis forces. The Germans have ruthlessly eradicated everyone they don't agree with including much of the African subcontinent. They've subjugated many to slavery whilst keeping a veneer of normality towards those they consider to be Arians.
The Japanese have established a strong-arm rule over the Americans on the West Coast, but are fearful of the larger German presence in the east and the more advanced industrialisation of the Germans with their Heisenberg bomb and rockets. It's another form of Cold War, with the Americans as losers squashed between two grimly dark superpowers.
The highly sought cans of film represent some form of resistance token - its not completely clear how they achieve this, but I'll live with the artifice.
They are a difference from the original Philip K. Dick novel, which used a book whose story about the grasshopper showed the possibilities of an alternative future and was itself rooted in aspects of I Ching. The reels of film present a more definitive view of the alternative future based upon the footage.
In the novel, many of the central characters had copies of the easier to reproduce (though illegal to own) book, whereas the rare film's content is only slowly released. Resistance people in the east and west are trying to track down these reels of film although most don't know what they contain.
As well as I Ching there's also a '12.5' in the mix. Is it a time check? No, it's that bit of Ecclesiastes that references fear of heights, terrors in the road, the blossom of an almond tree, a grasshopper dragging itself along and desire failing. Kind of gloomy references to the fleeting actions of man, and a proper theme in the Philip K. Dick novel.
I'll say that some of the novel's plot elements survive into this TV-show retelling, but although we see the Japanese Trade Minister uses his yarrow sticks to create hexagrams, the I Ching is not so overtly linked into the TV adaptation. If we see the Trade Minister making notes from his readings he draws three straight lines for the outer trigram (force and heaven), but we never see them combined to create a full hexagram and I Ching meaning. I guess it would all get rather complicated to explain in tv narrative? Having said that, I believe I glimpsed a few complete trigrams scattered on walls, so maybe there is some attempt to use them more indirectly?
That's where the novel and a tv show have to take different paths. The novel is altogether more cerebral than a popular tv show can present. I'll happily live with both.
There's been plenty of styling in the tv series. The chilling versions of the alternative reality are convincing. Some parts of this 1962 languish in the 1940s whilst monorails and supersonic jets appear like artefacts from Tomorrowland. There's rockets too, but they don't seem to go to Mars in the tv version. And no Elvis Presley, obviously. Some of the uses of German abbreviations and iconography looked wrong to me, but I guess that's movie shorthand at work.
There's extremely Bladerunner-esque scenes included, and other sections that reflect straightforward 40s noir. A whole character turns up looking like a hat-tip to the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive and there's a direct reference to a character named Deckard. That's just a smattering of the movie references to spot as the series runs along.
The lead characters are mainly strong, with some clever and sharp dialogue which I guess comes from the original novel. Occasionally it fades and I'm guessing that it is an effect of taking the original story and chopping it into episodes where there are occasional commercial needs (like well-timed cliffhangers).
There's also several different stories to watch. Want resistance stories? check. How about a spy? check. Art forgeries? check. A political power struggle? check. An assassination plot? check. And mainly it doesn't get too soapy and includes enough jump cuts around to keep up the interest without losing continuity. No mean feat with something so complex. Oh yes, in this tv version the main women get purposeful roles too.
The scripting works well and assists the creation of monsters like the family-man Obergruppenführer John Smith (played by Rufus Sewell) who demonstrates a particularly advanced form of passive aggressive behaviour. The normalisation of ruthless traits in him and others applied to this parallel world sends cold shivers down the spine. In many movie tropes there are parts where you'd be expected to feel sorry for him. Not me. And then when we meet his boss Oberst-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (one of the most despicable men in real modern history) we see the same type of behaviour again, only even more pronounced.
We also get various cultural clashes, some of which work and others seem odd. What does come through is a horrendous matter-of-factness to some the terrible practices which are allowed to persist in this new parallel world. On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of Germans and even amongst themselves there is still a kind of formality which didn't quite come through in some of the screenplay American interactions. I could partly understand if the Americans had won and the German culture was being subjugated, but this is the other way around yet we have American informality.
I suspect something similar would apply with the female American white face working at the Nippon Embassy - formality and prejudice which is somehow reduced in the television mix. I guess this is all very sensitive. Even Amazon's New York subway wraps advertising the show had to be pulled - I guess even this small taste of what it could be like is too much in real life.
But my detail comments are really me nit-picking.
Overall I've enjoyed and been terrified by this thought-provoking series - which I will watch again to extract more from some of the scenes. I'm intrigued at where it has left off too, because it seems to be going along a different path to my hazy recollection of the original novel. I like the idea that the tv show is now playing with the parallel futures and maybe introducing yet another one.
I've just ordered it the novel again on Kindle - as well as a separate PKD omnibus of short stories which was on sale for 47p.
Sometimes when I watch a movie, I can't help having that 'been there' thing play in my mind. It was the case with a recent mafia-style movie which is set mainly in the toe bit of southern Italy.
We'd been on a road trip holiday which had somehow ended up deep down in Italy at an agro-tourism farmhouse. Vines and olives, that kind of thing. Multi national guests, sharing evenings with farmhouse food. The last few kilometres to the farmhouse and its converted barns were along one of those Italian white roads, which kick up dust and rightly give the impression of being in the middle of nowhere.
Our nearest village was similarly remote, up on a hill and with people who could have lived there for many generations. They'd be out sitting in groups on the pavements and the older folk chattered to one another with a kind of genial familiarity that could have gone right back to their schooldays.
My recollection of our time in the southern part was of sunshine, although this movie mainly reserves the sun for the north of Italy, with the southern home village giving a pervasive tone of darkness.
In Black Souls, the movie settings show sleek glassy business blocks in an opulent version of Milan. That's where the practicing gangsters operate. Then down south to the goatherding part of the same family in their small Calabrian hometown.
There's three brothers in this ‘Ndrangheta family. A mafia family, two of the brothers are involved with Columbian cocaine trafficking and the movie starts with them in Amsterdam doing a drug deal with a Spanish smuggler. There's the leather-jacketed action man hoodlum brother and the well-dressed crime syndicate book-keeper brother.
Hundreds of kilometres south in Calabria, it is rural to the extent that it's difficult to see how any of the crime money would have found its way back to the village. Indeed, the third brother has got out of the life and instead tends goats. Okay, he could buy half of the adjacent mountainside, but what would he want it for? He'll get along with this simple life.
His 20-year old son doesn't agree and wants to go north and get into the main family business. He'll need a suit and a scrub-up to impress in Milan.
Before he leaves the village he shoots up the signs on a bar close to home. It belongs to a rival family where a balance of peace exists but the machismo vandalism can only mean an old feud will reawaken.
There will be trouble.
The real ‘Ndrangheta is big business. Nowadays they reckon it turns over around 3% of Italy's GDP. It is reckoned to be bigger than McDonalds if its books were visible. As a part of the wider mafia, it probably represents around 1/3 of their circa €160bn annual turnover.
So, to lighten the tone a little, here's a piece by Andrea di Marco, explaining the background to that particular branch of the well-known crime syndicate.
I'll keep on until the end of the year although I know December can be somewhat troublesome.
In miles it would get me across all of Europe, most of North Africa, as far as Riyadh, Saudi Arabia maybe to Perm in Russia or to Hammerfest at the top of Norway. Except there's more gradients than I've actually covered.
Or I could fly to the edge places in about 6.5 hours. I'll keep on cycling though.
I commented the other day about talking to my car and it generally getting the directions right.
It's the same with the dictation that I've tried for the NaNoWriMo this time. I'm up around 65,000 words at the moment and I'd honestly say that my spoken sections have better typing than the pieces I've tapped in manually. I've not been so good on rendering all the punctuation in my speaking version, but it's still made a decent job of finishing sentences and so on.
Less so when I've talked to Cortana in Windows 10. The party tricks all work fine and the Cortana Susan voice sings a mean 'man on the flying trapeze' as well as a few other out of copyright tunes and answers questions about Siri with aplomb. It even works with "what's the time?" and "what's the temperature?" type quizzing. But I've decided Cortana doesn't know about Essex. I've asked it things like 'How to get to Newcastle by road' and it will return maps and timings.
Then when I tried "Hey Cortana, How do I get to Upminster, Essex" it decided to go bonkers. Nothing useful although it was prepared to show me some American football games. I decided to try the near neighbourhood of Romford. Similar problems. When I just asked for "Essex" it gave me a route to a fishing tackle shop on the Suffolk border. No, I fear that piece of technology has a way to go.
What about Apple TV? I've given up on the voice controls at the moment. Even Skip Forward and Skip Backward jump it out of the movie and back to the iTunes Store. Perhaps I'm not buying enough.
I've also got one of those Amazon Fire systems. Slightly better luck if I'm hunting for movies, but it will still go all desperate on me and list a bunch of unrelated stuff if it's not sure. And that's even when it has managed to decode my speech properly.
At least the Amazon Fire aggregates the better versions of Amazon, Netflix, iPlayer, ITV Hub, UKTV, Curzon Home Cinema and even Plex. It still needs a proper version of Spotify and at that point it will be a pretty complete viewer.
Maybe I'll practice some more with the voice control although I'm not convinced that the Apple and Amazon boxes have any heuristics to improve their recognition.
Still, I've reprogrammed both of their nifty little handsets to work instead from the Logitech Harmony. Harmony seems to be the strong silent type.
I like this little picture of the evolving desktop, although it raised a few questions (some might say points of view) as well.
It somehow reminds me of that Beatles Yellow Submarine/Nowhere Man sequence and lyric as the desktop reduces. With increasing miniaturisation I suppose the desktop ends virtually in the cloud. Blackburn potholes anyone?
When working with big planning spreadsheets there is a fairly well known scenario along the lines of: "Big Chief needs to make a speech and show some efficiencies. What can we do?"
A related modelling spreadsheet technique boils down to 'slide to the right, change the gradient and backload the numbers'. I've picked a random graph related to the universal credit rollout which illustrates the principle.
It's also fairly intuitive to graph readers. Things get delayed - in this model we see something yielding a lower result after an approximately five year slip, which occurs at the rate of around a one year slip per year, generally introduced in two phases.
There's a similar technique used on the OBR (Office of Budget Responsibility) report ahead of George Osborne's Spending Review on Wednesday.
The new OBR chart shows it will all come level in five years' time, although with some dramatic stuff happening in 2017-18 when there's a big tax hike as well as increased spending on RDEL and CDEL (Resource and Capital Department Expenditure Limits). That's all just far enough away for the government to have time make something up. It also means that some of the future difficult actions don't have to be revealed at present.
The planned outcome in all of this is that the numbers are still shown to come right by the end of the graph. It's like pushing the lump along under the carpet and hoping that there's somewhere for it to go without anyone noticing. The OBR don't do this, of course. They are reporting on what appears to be happening rather than actually dictating policy.
I'm guessing that someone had to have a 'Big Chief' conversation before the Spending Review. The apparent spreadsheet result has given Osborne some theoretical money to play with, magicked out of revised planning assumptions. That's where another spreadsheet technique comes into play.
I'll call it 'smudging' and it's the effect when producing graphs of numbers that look similar enough but can be used to tell a different story. In the above example we see that tiny smudge width which is the difference between the July and November OBR forecast. The value of the gap between the lines is around £27bn, so not bad for a smudge.
Osborne hasn't really mentioned that the gap is an aggregate (i.e. it is the 5 year aggregate, not a one year figure). It means the figure of £27bn being bandied around in Osborne's Spending Review needs to be treated with some caution.
There's a further subtlety, that although he's dropped the tax credit cuts, the Universal Credit system will eventually have a similar effect. It's described in the OBR chart 1.1 above - The scale of the yellow area represents the dramatic increases in taxation that tapers at first and then dramatically steps in.
Hidden behind all of this are the much bigger spreadsheets that don't just show the £27 billion delta. Instead they show the underlying debt of nowadays around £1.6 trillion. That's £1.6E12 - yes it's large enough to refer to with scientific notation, because it won't all fit onto some calculators. And strangely enough, the steepest increases have been over the last few years...
In Osborne's post-speech interviews he said he wasn't gambling with the money. The OBR fan charts in the same report hint at otherwise.
I know these figures are really to protect the OBR's own forecasting, but they illustrate the potential volatility based upon use of high level modelling charts. The fan shows potential variance, banded with 20% probabilities. The message is that there's plenty of potential for things to change - risks one could say. The OBR is polite about some of the headline ones:
economic risks, including UK productivity growth and the implications of lower growth in China
uncertainties with the delivery of reforms to disability benefits and universal credit;
the implications of the decision to reclassify housing associations from the private sector to the public sector;
ongoing uncertainties around the large financial asset sales that are planned to take place over this Parliament; and
the Government has set out a number of ambitions that have not yet been confirmed as firm policy decisions.
In planning terms it might be prudent to start looking at which of these risks can be turned into contributory factors for the next series of 'adjustments'.
I've been asked a few times recently to go through that KYC process - "Know Your Customer" - the one where you have to identify yourself formally with a passport, driving licence and utility bill. It wasn't for mobile phone contracts, although that is a typical usage example.
It seems to be another creeping part of security measures. Formally it's part of the 'Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering" processes from the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 and the related European Joint Money Laundering Steering Group recommendations. I suppose that if the process separates me from drug barons and mafioso then fair enough.
I suspect this process, as well as being KYC, is increasingly becoming a CYA (Cover your a***) manoeuvre, and no doubt one that can generate a new form of fee income based upon the taking of a couple of photocopies. I notice that the 'automated check' alternative seems to run at about £18 per use.
It's ironic that in these times of increased checks the same organisations are taking other steps to NKYC (Not Know Your Customer). That's my term and as the name suggests, it's all about trying to not get too cosy with an individual customer.
Around the turn of the millennium, a popular practice was to create loyalty cards and systems that allowed better apparent knowledge of a customer.
Behind the scenes the data crunchers worked to identify the customer lifecycle and the trigger points when new things might happen. Simplistically it was "Hey, the new dads buy the Pampers, let's put a stack of beer at the end of the nappy aisle." And apparently it worked, dads bought the beer and sometimes remembered the nappies as well.
Another aspect of lifecycle was prediction and segmentation. This could also deselect the people that were no longer desirable in the profile. Either offer them something 'more appropriate' or freeze their services until they go elsewhere. Financial services have been known to refer to this as private financial services vs bucket bank.
Alongside all of this was the slightly unintended consequence of customers actually wanting to contact the organisations with which they had these longer-term relationships. Insurance, banking, that type of thing. We all know how that has gone, with often dodgy script-based call-centres (in fairness, my current bank is fantastic).
And in amongst it has been hidden a special truth. The NKYC element and the related inertia selling of the product. I've heard people running things say to me that they want the customer to sign up and then to never hear from them again.
I get it. JKTTM (Just Keep Taking Their Money).
This is great for some forms of insurance, most utility bills and other forms of regular service contract.
The thing that's changed is the UCFRC (Up Charges for Regular Customers) manoeuvre. Sometimes people say 'Usual' instead of 'Regular" but that's the rude version.
The approach is simple enough. Have a regular customer?
Don't offer them more. No, no, offer them less.
Keep them on moribund tariffs, create a new increase that's higher than everyone else. Keep it JBTST (Just Below The Switching Trigger).
Of course, there's all of the brokerage organisations with friendly cuddly toy gifts to help manage this, if you have the time to rummage through comparison lists and reset everything.
Frost today, for the first time this year. I'm guessing it has arrived pretty late. It cleared by mid-morning although the outdoor temperature has been hovering around 5C.
That's absolutely the end of the cycling shorts for another year. Still, only 121 miles to reach my annual 'Gold' target.
I may just try for 22 miles today so I'll be down into double digits. Update
Today's target accomplished, despite the bike being very cold at the start. 89 miles to go.
It wasn't Abigail or even Barney that started the real temperature cool down around our way this year.
But before getting to that, who came up with the names? They said it was from voting.
I can go with Abigail as a possible choice. But Barney? Didn't anyone vote for the 'B's? or is there a special rule that the names can't be so well known? The only Barneys I can think of are Fred Flintstone's best friend and that colourful dinosaur. Maybe Brian wouldn't be a tough enough sounding name for a storm, and presumably Boris is a reserved word at the moment. I'll wait to see if we get Derek when it gets to D.
It was a day or so after Barney I first noticed the razor chill. Admittedly I was wearing a tee-shirt but the weather was properly cold.
The previous smell of autumn had suddenly changed. Instead of November's damp leaves and earth there was a smell that I can only really associate with coldness. It somehow just felt as if winter was beginning to scrape around the brickwork looking for the window panes.
Today it's different, like the seasonal change has somehow backed out again. Its supposed to be colder, but I've once again got that autumnal aroma of leaves, at least for a few more days.
