Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

We had lounge access included in our outboard flights to Iceland. This was my first experience with an airport lounge, so I was keen to see what it was like.

We had access to the Aspire lounge at Manchester. It was easy to find but there was some confusion on arrival. Everyone else had lounge passes, but as we had electronic tickets, we had not received any. It wasn’t clear on their system that our ticket included lounge access, but this was eventually cleared up by a senior member of staff.

The area itself was reasonably comfortable, with a variety of seats and tables. There were power sockets embedded in our table, but no view of any flight boards. The view was reasonable.

Food and drink

The food and drink is included. We ate our way through a pastry, two bowls of soup, four bags of crisps and a slice of cake. They also brought out a few sandwiches as we were leaving.

Alcohol is included, so if you are a heavy drinker you can probably reclaim your £20-30 entry fee in that.

Downsides

The wifi was awful.

The lounge has no toilets of its own, but shares communal ones. These were tiny. One of the things I like about airports is that they usually have large and airy toilets, but these were not.

The lounge was not too busy, but then neither was the airport. Assuming it scales up proportionally, I think you would find that at busy times, escaping the bustle of the airport would only bring you into the bustle of the lounge. Online reviews seem to agree.

Conclusion

If it’s included in your ticket, then it is worth taking advantage of lounge access. If not, I’m not sure. I need a bigger dataset before I can really make a recommendation.

Jamala wins Eurovision 2016. Photo credit: Thomas Hanses (EBU).

This will be the last post about Eurovision for a while. I promise. Probably. I want to address this issue though because a lot of people think Eurovision is a joke and there is no point us trying because we can never win. This isn’t the case.

We’re really good at Eurovision

Britain’s recent performances in Eurovision are not indicative of our past performance. A look at the all-time winners list puts it in perspective.

We are the third most successful country in Eurovision ever. It’s only Sweden’s two recent victories of Loreen in 2012 and MÃ¥ns Zelmerlöw last year that have pushed them ahead of us. The UK and Ireland between them have cleaned up. We’ve also hosted it a record number of times as we have helped out poorer countries by hosting it for them on several occasions.

Good music wins Eurovision

Here are some of our recent scores:

Note that when we are not dragging singers back from the grave, and put a popular band in, we do much better. Blue were already arguably has-beens by the time they entered, and the song was okay and look how much better thet did. Our performance in the votes is correlated to the quality of music we put in.

Sweden, who have been smashing it recently, start picking their song in November. They have a whole music festival to decide on it. They take it seriously: and they win.

Bloc voting isn’t that important

Bloc voting isn’t as important as you might think. The Radio Times have a good write-up of the situation. UCL even published a study showing that while bloc voting has an affect, it is not big enough to prevent a a song winning the contest. Lena’s “Satellite” winning for Germany in 2010 is a good example of this. Germany don’t have many friends, but they still triumphed.

Even if it is, we’re in a bloc

Some would argue that the bloc voting is actual just cultural voting. People like the music of their culture and as their neighbours probably have a similar culture, they are likely to get votes because they share the same music tastes. Whatever the reason, the UK benefits from this.

What country do we give the most points to? Ireland! And who gives us the most points? Yep, it’s Ireland. Our neighbours across the water, France and Belgium, are also some of our most generous donors and god bless Malta who gave this year’s song, that came third from bottom, a full 12 points.

Compared to other European countries, especially the Nordics, we start school very early. In the UK, children start school the year they turn five, with many starting while they are still four. In Sweden, it’s seven. The Nordics also have much longer summer holidays: three months in Finland.

All of this does not make much difference to educational outcomes. The Pearson Education Index ranks Finland as the best education system in Europe (1st globally in 2012, 5th in 2014). The UK scores 6th overall, 2nd in Europe. You can compare this to the intense schooling that countries such as Singapore and South Korea and by the time everyone reaches undergraduate level, we see no significant differences between intensive schooling and Finland’s “turn up for a bit in the winter, when you’re older”.

Given that, it then seems sensible to reduce the amount of schooling and allow children more time “to be children” (rather than whatever it is they are being when they are in school). How we would implement this is not clear though.

Free, as in childcare

As a parent-to-be, I like the idea that by the time my child hits five, the state will provide me with free daycare for the next thirteen years of their life. It’s not that I don’t want to be a parent, but that I do have to have a job. And then spend most of my money on daycare. That is super-expensive for one child, let alone more. If you had to pay for child care until each of your kids was seven, well, you literally couldn’t. You can easily be looking at £600+ per month, per child. If you have two children, you are spending over 50% of your take-home pay on childcare even if you earn the average UK salary (and 50% of the population earns less!).

In Finland, this isn’t a problem. The state is mandated to provide childcare and it is on an means tested system. If you don’t earn enough you pay nothing, and the amount you might pay is capped, so even if you are a millionaire your childcare will be cheaper than the UK. It’s a great idea, and the UK has now followed suit, offering free childcare for three year olds.

However, note that Finland does not have a system where children stay at home and receive more parenting, they just go somewhere other than school.

Letting children be children

Given that most Finnish children go to daycare, the system is actually remarkably like the English one. You can argue that daycare is fundamentally different than school, because it is more relaxed and allows children to learn through play. However, I think this is being unfair to our schooling system.

While some structured learning does go on in reception, a large element of the learning takes place through learning through play as well. I don’t remember doing that much work in reception. I mostly did fun stuff.

There are advantages too

One possible advantage of having some structured learning in these years, is that it may help level the playing field across socioeconomic backgrounds. In the UK, everyone will go to reception the year they turn five and start doing some reading and writing.

This is not the case in the Nordics. If you are not attending school until you are six or seven, your learning will only start if it starts at home. For example, Elina could already read when she started attending school. This gave her an advantage over other children, who may not have even picked up a book before the age of seven.

Learning foreign languages is a big thing these days. As we grow into a globalised society, children are being taught other languages from an earlier and earlier age. When I was at school I did French and German at high school. Now, you would typically start learning another language in primary school. This is in the UK, where we are far behind our European neighbours, who often speak several languages.

In Finland for example, you cannot earn a degree without speaking Swedish. So even when you go to university, you continue to take classes in Finnish, Swedish, and often English as well. In Luxembourg, you learn French, German and Luxembourgish (yes, they have their own language and it is taught in their schools).

However, all of this this focus on languages misses one quite important point: teaching children languages simply doesn’t work.

The failure of bilingualism

I remember very little of my French. In fact, the things I do know I probably re-learned last time I was there, rather than remembering. My German is poor too. Even my mum, who enjoys languages, speaks enough French to get by when they go there on holiday every year, would struggle to hold a conversation about anything meaningful.

It is not just us Brits however.

Have you ever spoken to a Canadian from the English-speaking regions? My money is on them having no French skills. They learn it in school: it’s an official language. In reality though, they forget it all as soon as they walk out the door.

Even Finland, greatest education system in the world, and with a dire need to learn another language because only 95% of their own population speak native Finnish (let alone other countries) has not been successful. English is strong in urban areas where they get to practice it, but my in-laws don’t speak English. Elina constantly bangs on about how poor her Swedish is. In Finnish Saturday school. I sit next to a Finland-Swedish woman, who’s Finnish is about as good as mine.

Of course many people are bilingual. However, this is primarly a result of them getting the opportunity to use and develop their skills in society: by living in a country and speaking the language. People who learn a language in an educational system do not develop those skills.

But what about the other benefits?

Learning a language does not provide the direct benefit of being able to speak that language, as discussed about. But what about the other benefits? Are there any? The answer is yes. Though what they are and how much benefit they provide is not always clear.

For example, being able to think in another language is highly beneficial because a language provides a construct for thinking. Therefore, by thinking in another language you are taking a different approach and that will improve your problem solving skills. However, this only works if you can think in that other language. As Elina found, you need to live in that language for years before you start thinking in it, rather than translating thoughts back to your native language.

Learning a language may also improve your cognitive skills, help keep your brain active through learning, help you understand your own language better and develop your multitasking abilities.

These are all genuine benefits and very worthwhile having.

However, if we accept that people don’t actually get the language skills out of the learning, they just get these benefits as a bi-product, we are essentially just using language classes as a proxy for these benefits.

Which is fine, they’re good benefits, but why not just teach a class in that? It might be that learning a language is the most effective way to do that. I doubt it though. Teaching a class specifically to develop these skills would intuitively seem the best way to develop these skills, rather than proxying it through another subject.

Summary

Teaching foreign languages develops important skills and those skills are certainly worthwhile having. However, given the lack of success in developing language skills, it may be that there is a more effective way to do this. Therefore, teaching languages may not be as important as is often claimed.

At TED2013, Dan Pallotta made the case that we think about charities the wrong way. We judge them by what percentage of our donation goes to the ‘end cause’, and not on results. This prevents them from competing with for-profit business because they cannot spend big on hiring the best people, marketing and fundraising.

A number of these points resonate with me.

First, I choose to work in the private sector, rather than the third sector. I suspect I might enjoy working for a charity more than I enjoy my current job. However, just like Pallotta points out, it is simply far more profitable for me to do it this way round. By earning a good salary in the private sector I am able to feed my family and have enough left over to fund my foundation.

Second, in my time being involved in CWF, I know I have had thoughts, and probably conversations, along the lines of “how will that affect our charitable spending?” This means we have a great spending ratio, 93.8% in our last financial year, but essentially means that we could well have made some bad decisions in order to keep this number high.

I sit on the leadership or organising teams for a lot of different community groups, and have done so for many different organisations over the years. Regularly, someone suggests that what we really need to do, is get some nice flyers printed. In fact, often this person is me. This is a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ post.

The truth is, you will bin most of those flyers. Here is why:

Flyers are relatively easy to produce. You find someone who can use a graphic design tool, they knock together a flyer, and you send it off to a printer. Quite easily you get a really professional glossy flyer that you are sure will attract people to your group.

Then the delivery turns up. A massive A4 square size box containing thousands of flyers. These then sit in your house for years. If you are proactive, the box will be almost entirely undistributed. Otherwise, it will be entirely undisturbed.

The problem is that printing flyers is super easy. Distributing them however, is not. Sure, people say they will do it. At the meeting when someone suggested getting some flyers, everyone said they would give some out. But they won’t. First, you need to give them some. The box is really heavily, so you can only take a handful at a time. Ditto, they can only take a handful at a time. Second, they don’t know where to put them. If you live in a block of flats, you can probably put one through people’s mailbox. That is about it.

Unless you work as an events promoter, you probably don’t know where to take the flyers. You might see somewhere when you are at your local fish and chip shop, or community education centre. However, you can bet good money that you will have forgotten to bring flyers on that occasion. And by the time you remember the flyers, you will have forgotten where you were going to take them. It’s fine saying “we will just go round the blocks of flats and try and get buzzed in”, but nobody actually wants to do this in practice because it is awkward and embarrassing and you feel guilty for posting junk through innocent people’s mailboxes.

Third, people don’t want to commit the time, because it’s a waste of time. Purposely going somewhere to take some flyers might be a 30-minute round trip. That is big a chunk out of your day. For flyers that probably nobody will look at. The response rate might be one in a thousand. Is that a good use of your time? You might think so, but chances are that the other people volunteering at your group don’t feel the same way: especially when it comes to actually getting up and doing it.

So your lovely flyers just sit in the box until you feel its time for a clear-out and reluctantly bin them.

You will be binning a lot of them. Economies of scale are at fault here. Most of the cost is in the setup of the print job, not in the printing. This means that it basically costs the same to print 5,000 as it does to print 100. So you will get the 5,000 because it seems to make sense. Even though there is no hope of giving more than 100 out.

There are scenarios when flyers can work. The Anxiety Leeds flyers are actually one of the success stories of my flyering history. We posted piles of them to GPs surgeries, and this turned out to be a cost and time-effective way of distributing them. Even then though it has problems: finding volunteers to post them out (listing surgeries, envelope stuffing, writing the envelopes, taking them to the post office), securing grant money to pay for postage, still having too many flyers, flyers becoming out-of-date and needing re-printing.

In summary, think very carefully before you get any flyers printed. How many can you actually distribute? How are you going to distribute them? Will people follow through on their promises to distribute them? How long will they be relevant for? If you cannot answer these questions satisfactorily, printing flyers may be a waste of time and money.

As a hippie leftie, my newspaper of choice is usually The Guardian. With its engaging content and unofficial mission to counteract the hate spewed out by the Murdock empire, it, along with the BBC, makes an excellent choice for me to consume the little news I read.

There is one area however, where I read The Telegraph. That, is a Telegraph Men.

The problem with being on the left these days is that as a straight white cis male, I am basically the enemy. My boat automatically rises high on the sea of privilege that propels it up towards the heavens. I don’t dispute this. I think the evidence shows that being a white man actually does grant me privilege. Whether it compares to the privilege differences between classes remains to be seen, but there is definitely a benefit.

Given that this benefit does exist, the left, committed to empowering everyone, cannot tolerate any further benefit coming my way. Again, I am not even going to suggest this is a bad thing. When International Men’s Day rolls around, there is a backlash from the left, insisting that it is a stupid idea. The arguments are long. “What if it was men’s health day?” sympathetic advocates say. The idea that we should be able to talk about men being three times more likely to kill themselves is a touchy subject.

Once again, I want to state that, in this post, I am not complaining about this. Perhaps it is fair to take that point of view.

The end result of this seems to be that the idea of devoting column inches to men seems unpalatable to Guardian readers. They have a men’s health section. Of which, at time of writing, the second story on the page is:

My husband has turned into a fitness fanatic. What can I do?

I’m not interested in this. It does not appeal to me.

Telegraph Men on the other hand, has no such problems. They write engaging content that does appeal to me as a liberal progressive modern-man. They write about men taking shared parental leave, men who choose a career in midwifery and whether veganism is a good dietary choice. It is both interesting and relevant to me to read about a father writing about raising an autistic son.

Nor does it take itself too seriously. Amusing articles about photoshopping and a Twitter account description that reads…

Advice, opinions, expertise and experiences. For men. And women. But mostly men.

…shows an playful sense of humour. I am not sure you could do this in a left-leaning media outlet. The idea that as a straight white man I might have something to contribute to the gender equality debate is not a welcome opinion. The idea that you could do any of this without a completely serious look on your face is even more out there.

Therefore, ironically perhaps, it is the right-leaning media, without such gender-political baggage, that can write about being a stay-at-home dad or breaking down stereotypes in traditionally female careers.

Of course, I am fully aware that I am reading The Torygraph. The paper that was fined £30,000 for telling people to vote Conservative. My own charity work has been the victim of their right-wing attacks.

However, in Telegraph Men, I have found interesting, engaging and relevant content that the media of the left does not seem to be able to replicate. As a father-to-be who aspires to a more liberal, equal and open society, it is, surprisingly, The Telegraph, that is leading the way.

At the end of last month, I paid off my student loan. Sort of. I haven’t actually sent the money or anything practical like that, but the amount I have accrued in student loan tax is now enough to cover the remaining balance. So once I get my tax bill, it will be sorted. Just in time for me to start paying George Osborne’s increased tax on small business owners.

This gave me a moment for reflection. I am 29 years old. I graduated at 21, so eight years seems pretty good going. Most people, however, will not have the opportunity to repay their loan anywhere near as fast as me.

First, my loan was quite small. When I went to university, tuition fees were £1,000 a year. Most of my loan was made up of maintenance loan, the money they lend you to live on. This was about £3,500 in my day but is probably more now. The year after I started at university the fees went up to £3,000. More recently, they have risen to £9,000. Living costs are probably rising too, so let’s say you need £5,000 a year maintenance loan now.

In total that makes for £16,000 a year. Assuming you get your degree in three years (not everyone does), that means you will have built up £48,000 of debt by the time you leave university: almost four times the amount that I left with.

Second, I am a software consultant, which is a well-paid industry. Many people will never earn the amount of money I earn. If you are a teacher, for example, only senior management will have pay higher than a software engineer who is a senior but still very much in the trenches of everyday code writing.

According to the Official of National Statistics, as reported by the BBC, the average earnings for people with a degree are £29,900 per year. This compares with £17,800 for people without a degree.

Let’s say you are earning £29,900 as a graduate. £17,335 if that is below the threshold. That leaves you £12,565 that is taxable for student loan. This is taxed at 9%, so that means you would be paying back £1,130 per year. With a loan of £48,000, that means you will be paying back the loan for 42 years.

That figure is far lower than it would be in real life, however, because it does not factor in the interest on your loan. That will add a large amount on to your debt, especially as £29,900 is the average earning over your career, not what you will be earning at the start. Initially, you will be lucky just to pay the interest off.

This is irrelevant however as your loan is cancelled after 30 years.

What this means in practice is that if you go the university now, you can expect never to pay off your student loan. What you can expect to pay is an additional 3-4% tax for the 30 years after you start your first graduate job.

Is student loan a good idea?

I have written before about the difficultly of arguing against tuition fees, though there are some points that seem to hold up.

However, with the new system, the sheer nonsense of it all seems to work against the tuition fee system. We have a series of ‘loans’ that we never expect to be paid back. We’re not saving the entire cost of tuition because most people are never going pay it all back.

We are saving some money, of course, an additional 3-4% tax on graduates for most of their working lives is a considerable amount of money. However, given we could just tax everyone more, and then provide everyone with a free at the point of access education, without having to subject people to the choice of lumbering themselves voluntarily with the additional tax, you can make a good case for abolishing tuition fees.

Going to university is still worth it

Even with the current system in place, the best choice is still clear. As graduated out-earn non-graduates by an average of £12,100 per year, even with the additional tax of £1,130, you are still almost £11,000 better off with a degree.

There was no #JeSuisPakistan hash tag. People did not pray for them. The media did not cover the story. Nobody cared, because the victims of the bombing were brown. The event was simply ignored.

Other than it being the lead story on BBC News of course.

What we did get to experience, was a torrent of people talking about how nobody carried about Pakistan. There was outrage. “How dare people not change their profile pictures to the Pakistani flag. How dare the media not demand that everyone change their profile picture to the Pakistani flag. No, we don’t care that the Metro published a guide on how to do it” yelled the mob, “people are ignoring this tragedy!”

This isn’t the first time such comments have been made. I regularly see items appearing in my news feed comparing the attention that news items in the West get vs news items in the East. It is a constant series of points scoring against each other as to who can be seen to care the most.

I suspect that the truth is that many people in Britain, including myself, do care more about a bombing in Paris than a bombing in Lahore. There are good reasons why:

• A bombing in Paris is a lot closer to me. If they can bomb Paris, they can bomb Leeds. Many of the people I care about most in the world are in Leeds.
• Paris is close by. I have visited it and I have friends that visit it. It is far more likely that a bombing in Paris will affect someone I know.
• The attack on Charlie Hebdo was a direct attack on values that that I care deeply about and am actively involved with.

I do not think that that lives of the people I love and care about the most are objectively more important than the lives of people in Lahore. However, like all human beings, I do care more about my friends and relatives than I do about people I do not know.

I did not add a French flag to my profile picture last year. I have no plans to add a Pakistani flag to my profile picture this year. If you are doing both, then great, I am glad some awareness of both of these tragedies is being maintained. However, surely we all have better, more productive things to do than score points off each other as to who is demonstrating their outrage in correctly proportioned amounts.

Dock 29 is a bar at Leeds Dock. They recently ran a competition where they gave away 29 sets of breakfasts at no cost to people working at the Sky office. It was a competition that most people won. I felt a bit bad for the select few who didn’t.

It was very nice of them, and a good way to promote their breakfast delivery service.

I am dubious about their business model however. The sandwiches are £4.50 each. For this you get your choice of sauce, bacon or egg, which s a vegetable topping and a sauce. Or you can have the whole lot for £7.50. Ideally I think the system would be more flexible.

£4.50 for a bacon sandwich is a lot of money. Even in Harrogate I Was paying significantly less than that. That might be okay if it was an especially large and tasty sandwich, but the one I had was neither of those.

The other problem is that you have to order a minimum of five items. That means convincing four friends that they also want to spend £4.50, putting a minimum spend of £22.50 for breakfast. Not only is that a lot of money, but that is a lot of effort. You have to self-organise into teams of five to get your sandwich and you have to do all of this by a deadline of 9:30am.

Why I would do this when I could simply pop in to Greg’s on the way to work and save myself significant time/hassle and money seems a bit of a mystery to me.