A new year, a new world. There are good things in it – looks like Pine Martens are building their ranks in England, after having been persecuted to extinction by the landowning aristocracy, which have a dreadful attitude to the entire mustelid family.
I collected £1500 from, Monevator’s Mogul’s tips, which pretty well covers the cost of entry. I had built up a pin-money stake in PSH sometime in May and June on the back of this tip article. Obvs Monevator disapproves of that, but reading ‘twixt the lines of his GFC era posts has served me well. I liquidated this holding not because I believe PSH is going titsup, but because it’s come to my attention that the main protagonist has a penchant for pursuing personal vendettas a la Elon Musk, and the Twitter share price is the cautionary tale. I don’t give a shit about the vendetta1 or the issues, it’s neither my circus nor my monkeys, but I don’t want to yoke a wagon to a horse with the emotional incontinence of a two year old, no matter how clever. Collecting a 25% uplift made the choice easier. I don’t generally have principles in investing, but when the lead has such a key influence then character matters, and emotional incontinence is not good. I’m happy to hold Tesla in VWRL, even if the CEO is sociopathic scum, but I don’t want to hold it explicitly due to CEO brain-fart risk.
Moguls can drift into Rich Kids of London territory in rarefied air these days. I read this broker article and thought to myself well, yes, I share the viewpoint that the FSCS £85k cap makes the guarantee not tremendously useful, but as for the tribulations of a family office, that is way above my pay grade 😉 Mind you, I didn’t know that Hargreaves Lansdown cap platform fees at £0 on a GIA if you avoid holding funds so I learned something new.
Like Monevator’s FIRE-side Jake I’m nominally better off than I was this time last year, though of course that has to be sat against double-digit inflation. I collected my £12k CGT in the GIA last year, and it will be easy enough to hit the 6k this year. After that, well, who knows what the rules will be. I’m not ideologically opposed to paying more tax if I get a Britain what works less badly than it does now, but I’m not going to volunteer for it 😉 The ISA continues to chunter away, the VWRL holding doing most of the work now, though my legacy HYP produces a useful amount of income should I need to go that way, though at the mo I reinvest that.
West Kennet Avenue. Avebury
New Years resolutions – January’s a terrible time to do that, all dark, and cold, and dreitch. I don’t get the Calvinist Dry January thing, surely it’s better to ease off on getting hammered in December rather than going bonkers and then running into the abstinence when you could really do with some cheer 😉 I see some poor souls going running on the cold roads, and I wonder if we would do well to heed the words of Paul Kingsnorth.
it has helped me to understand something about the world I grew up in: we wanted the feasts without the fasts.
In the original Christian traditions, the fast came before the feast. We have this all ass-backwards, fasting after the feast, to shake off the lard of the excess mince pies and booze. I wonder if those previous generations were wise and knew a thing or two about the human condition, and fasting before the feasting is better for the spirit, including the secular form of the term.
We took time to go to Avebury in the brisk and short January days. The car park was closed due to flooding, but I know the site reasonably well, so there were other ways. Punters were thin on the ground, and the skies, though leaden had an attractive character.
punters were thin on the ground. This is the closest section to the car park so usually well occupied
After a bracing walk into the site we stopped for a coffee and then lunch at the Red Lion. It’s a standard Chef & Brewer so not gastronomic excellence, but it served us well enough and the fire was welcome.
the Red Lion (left) was a welcoming sight on a cold day
Refreshed and renewed it was time to take on West Kennet Long Barrow. The winterbourne of Swallowhead Springs flooded the path at the start, I tested the quality of Grisport Exmoor walking shoes and can report they are up to the job.
We decided to use the end of the school holidays to visit East Anglia. A joy of getting the work monkey off your back is you can take time to travel, so we staged the journey, first stopping off at Worcester where we would leave the M6. We went into the city to have a look around, and I was pleasantly surprised – unlike some British urban areas which seem to be in steep decline, Worcester was jumping, the High Street was reasonably lively and there were very few closed shops in the main drag. Indeed, I have been generally reasonably pleased with urban parts around Britain’s second city.
Liverpool used to be larger, until Thatcher’s managed decline after the Toxteth riots. I did some work in some of Liverpool’s schools in the less well-heeled parts of the city in the early 2000s. Let’s just say the place was edgy – rows of terraced houses boarded up with steel, and the security around schools impressed me, though I have since realised that all schools are treated like high-security prisons all over the country, with high-rise steel fences and access management. When I was at school you could just walk in off the street 😉 Containerisation, Felixstowe and the fall of Empire probably all did their bit for Liverpool, so now Brum it is.
I have never been to Birmingham itself, but the surrounding regions seem to have jobs enough, even if the council is bankrupt.
Hostile forces observed…
Worcester was a pleasant walk along the river, somewhat intimidated by the flotilla of swans which were at least on the other side! Flooding still seems to be a problem in that part of the country.
Flooding is a problem
Wilko was the poster child for the cost of living crisis and closing down shops, the exception to the general rule
Wilko-tasticWilko-tastic – this High Street fight is lost
A general air of civic affluence otherwise.
Worcester GreyfriarsWorcesterthere was a somewhat Masonic feel to the Guildhall and some of the stained glass windows. I didn’t actually find Joachim and Boaz inscribed on the two pillars
The work conundrum
I lauded our Millenial overlords last time, who seem to have the right approach to work, and today it seems to be the time of the over 50s to join the ranks of the shirkers, while also being lauded for their great unretiring. I was surprised to read the diagnosis of “You have stress-related heart disease” in that writer – while I had observed it enough at The Firm it seems that it has now become A Thing in the ten years following my observations. I managed to dodge that bullet at work, but I saw it impair people’s quality of life and saw it take three people out before they reached three score years, never mind and ten. As the study showed, work becomes less important as they age and leave the workforce – seriously, you get paid to say that?
I saw an interesting critique of why jobs have been becoming more shit as I went through my career. Obviously part of it is the increasing push to efficiency, which drives out some of the wrinkles that were more fun to explore, some of it is that globalisation means you are now in competition with the whole world which was not the case when I started work. But that piece drew out the specific case that if you have more opportunity to exercise judgement and/or the task is more varied this makes the job better in and of itself. Matthew Crawford picked that up a decade ago in Shop Class as Soulcraft, the case for working with your hands.
The trend towards outsourcing inherently tends toward defining the job via a prescriptive service level agreement, combining with the metrics and crap makes work more shit in and of itself. Still, if you think that’s bad, wait until you see what AI in the form of Microsoft Copilot can do for you at work
generative A.I. tools that make attending meetings, writing emails, scheduling travel, and catching up on projects vastly easier.
Am I the only one to think this is Not A Good Thing? White collar work is going to end up as some sort of expensive tournament between jousting AIs as people use the tools to raise their profile. I suspect a lot of meetings are performance art, but this will raise it to a whole new level. Given that AI has show a respect for the truth that put Donald Trump in the same veracity class as the apocryphal hatchet-wielding George Washington, our companies will seize up with duelling AI bullshit. Maybe we will need a new layer of humans to adjudicate the battle. It doesn’t sound like an obvious recipe for efficiency. The answer to too many meetings is to shoot the incentives that make people call too many, rather than skimming an AI enabled higher level of excess noise trying to parse it for a signal.
There’s a case to be made that AI will be the greatest cartoonist of the human condition ever, showing us a disastrous pastiche of our excesses. I don’t have Skynet fears about AI, it’s what it will do to people that I have a bad feeling about. Driven by the profit motive AI will pollute the information space of the world with so much shit that we’ll be unable to tell which way is up.
Rupert Murdoch hung up his boots at just the wrong time. He clearly got a terrific rush from bringing out our darkest desires, and AI is the chance to weaponise that – truly a boot stamping on a human face, forever. I am sure that his son will be able to carry on the good fight of feeding the darkness of the human soul with new! improved! AI! edge!
Newton’s Apple Tree
the manor house where Isaac Newton was born and did some of his work in the year of discovery
The dog days of summer drag on, we had the rioting in a minor way last month. Strangely muted compare to the summer of discontent ten years ago, Blackberry Messenger was a more effective spreader of sedition compared with TikTok, or perhaps we just got lucky this time. The greens of some of the leaves are turning brown, but this septic isle seems not to be a happy place, despite the sunlit uplands promised a few years ago and a late summer of, er, summery weather.
Compared with the mendacious clown and the mad cow dear Rish! seems to try hard, but I’ll leave it to the irascible Dominic Cummings to summarise the result – cascading clusterfucks. The air traffic control screw-up, apparently a failure to sanitise user input, the concrete lumps falling off public buildings which has been known about for decades, the inability to stop small boats while claiming the plan is working – in the words of Our Dom government is broken because the people aren’t up to it. I think he means the people in government, Dom’s not always charitable to the masses, despite his shtick.
Dom’s a nutter, but the Tory Lord Aschroft’s latest State of the union address says the same thing in a different way
After 13 years of Conservative government, things were not supposed to look like this. Strikes, inflation, record NHS waiting lists, a sluggish Economy…
Let’s hear it from another Tory minister, from when we saw this movie last time, hello Norman ‘green shoots’ Lamont in his valedictory transmission on the 9th June 1993
There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. […] We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours’ publicity. Yes, we are politicians as well as policy-makers ; but we are also the trustees of the nation. I believe that in politics one should decide what is right and then decide the presentation, not the other way round. Unless this approach is changed, the Government will not survive, and will not deserve to survive.
Ouch. That was thirty years ago, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
This is how Tory governments die, strangled by self-serving and internal inconsistencies. It’s really hard to conceive of one of the current crew saying
we are also the trustees of the nation
because populism destroys character. We should, however, fear the strength of character that follows, as the force is harnessed by those more competent who watched and learned from the failures of the first generation of populists. Perhaps there’s just something about the thirties of a century and bad moons rising. Something is rotten in the Kingdom.
We visited the city of Bath, to observe a Great British export in full flow. Mrs Ermine is more of a city person than I am, but I was quite taken with the hipster nature of it, not quite full on waxed beards and vegetarian kefir, but getting that way. I favour it over the much larger metropolis of Bristol, spirit of Samuel Johnson be damned.
I had a carmageddon experience of Bath years ago, approaching from the east along the A4. It had been some five hours running leaving Ipswich, and in the evening rush-hour I discover Bath hosted only one place to cross the river to join the A36 headed south. The whole world also wanted to do that 😦 The place hasn’t become any easier since then.
We parked at Odd Down, and befouled their clean air with a diesel bus instead, presumably First Bus pay the £6 and amortise this over a few hundred passengers. I’m generally with Thatcher on finding myself on a bus over the age of 25, but made an exception. Beats me why these things aren’t electrified if Bathonians as so damn precious about their air quality. Funny old world, your great grandfathers managed to run their double-deckers on electricity back in the day, but it seems the art is lost. A short, predictable run with plenty of real-estate at one end would seem an obvious win to swap all that ugly wiring for modern Lithium-Ion batteries. Indeed the form-factor of a double-decker bus could even facilitate swapping battery packs underneath rather than recharging in situ.
Your great-grandfathers electric buses By Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link
Bath is a high-context place, no real directions for gormless outsiders, bar the helpful street maps, but it has the advantage of being compact and bounded by a river, so it’s hard to get seriously lost. The upside of Bath’s automotive hostility is that the pedestrianised bits don’t seem to allow cars in the daytime. Many British cities say pedestrian zone but let delivery trucks through anyway, which must be unsettling to European tourists who are used to pedestrian areas without vehicles. Bath just stops cars going down otherwise normal looking roads, without sharing the fact with pedestrians 😉
obliviously marching down the King’s Highway
There was nothing to actually say that it was OK to march down the middle of the King’s Highway, but this lot got away with it.
It was time to fortify ourselves with lunch, at the Scallop Shell. The prices on the sample menu are there to scare the impoverished, but I can’t argue with the meal deal, at £25 for the two of us – Mrs Ermine had the mussels and I have the fish and chips, both washed down with a mug of tea, top grub and ready to take a wander round the baths which give the place its name.
open-air Roman Great Bath
The Rough Guide tells us this was condemned in 1978 for bathing due to the pigeon shit which is presumably responsible for the bilious green algae colour , the thermal spa is elsewhere. The Romans, bright sparks that they were, kept the pigeons out with a roof over the whole thing. The tour is interesting, you get to see the sacred spring from whence the waters issue, which looks a little bit like a hellmouth with sulphurous whiff and yellow staining
The Ermine household favours holidays outside of school holidays, because I don’t want to have the pleasure of the company of your delightful rugrats, and I guess they don’t want curmudgeonly mustelids littering the landscape too. I also find even Blighty too hot in midsummer 😉 To me the obvious time to go to Spain is in the winter, I have never been there in the summer but it sounds like purgatory to me, whereas I recall it was T-shirt weather going to the bars in Madrid after a work trip in November…
We visited the north Cornwall coast near Boscastle. You have to be careful with northern coasts in the south of the country – presumably in the past all the toffs headed for the south coast, leaving some northern coasts to the less well off. That shows around Minehead, and particularly shows on the north Wales coast.
View over the coast from Boscastle
The bit of the north Cornwall coast around Boscastle is an exception to that, although Tintagel has a certain element of kiss-me-quick with a paganish influence. However, I hadn’t seen the site ever since English Heritage built the bridge across to the headland. From the picture I had imagined this to go all the way from the town to the peak of the headland, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it wasn’t the ghastly Disney creation of my imagination
view of Tintagel bridge from the castle ruins headland
but altogether more discreet.
I had been to Boscastle years ago, before the devastating 2004 flood and it seems to have recovered in the decades since. The cause of the problems were the very steep valleys, and the Valency valley was a pleasant but steep woodland walk from our cottage to the town without running the gauntlet of the B3263 main road into the village. Mrs Ermine had researched dining opportunities, and had discovered the Rocket Store
The Rocket Store, Boscastle
before the Guardian listed it. We booked inside, because there is an increasing pestilence corrupting the restaurant scene, which is people’s lockdown dogs. Once upon a time we were generally aware that dogs were foul critters that didn’t belong anywhere near where food was being served to people due to their occasional predilection to roll in shit, but in Wiltshire recently I have been treated to watching a bunch of mouth-breathers actually feeding their dog at table with snippets of what they were eating, which I at least wasn’t having at the time. That’s just something you can’t unsee, so if a place is dog-friendly I consider it Ermine-unfriendly.
Thankfully the Rocket Store doesn’t permit hounds inside, which is quite bijou
inside the Rocket Store
You can see the kitchen and the cuisine is a sequence of many small dishes, so you get a great variety – there was the lobster at the start
half Lobster
And a sequence of courses that you could select from the menu
one of the sequence of about seven items, cooked fresh as they were served
Boscastle Farm shop was a fine place for breakfast, and has good access to the South West coast path
South West Coast Path near Boscastle
It also has the same enlightened policy to muttage indoors 😉
Tintagel was pretty rammed, though the price of getting to the castle thinned people out somewhat. It was still quite popular, I had to wait a quarter of an hour to get a gap in the throng of posers at the sculpture
Tintagel, sculpture and random tourist for scale
I did see a lot more of what was on the headland this time, probably because I wasn’t knackered from the descent to sea level and then the ascent. The headland has stunning views. If you want to visit Merlin’s Cave at sea level, however, you need to attend to the tide level, which we didn’t, but I was grateful for the excuse not to have to take the full descent, one for another time 😉
On the way back to Boscastle there is the charming St Nectan’s Glen, most of which you can visit for free, well apart from being rushed for parking. Sometimes you can park in the layby near the descent to Rocky Valley, but we sucked it up, as well as the charge to see the waterfall
St Nectan’s Glen
which is right at the end of the valley.
We went in the week when Glastonbury Festival was on, and it’s worth noting that a few shops, attractions, and restaurants were closed for that week. I don’t know if the locals just choose that week to get their R&R before the hectic summer school holidays, or if the festival sucks out a lot of tourism from the south-west in general, but if you are into attractions then it’s something to watch out for in the SW.
One of the things I discovered on leaving work was that international travel wasn’t as attractive to me as I thought it would be, and most of the problem has been the enshittification of air travel. I am old enough to remember air travel in the 1990s, and I would much rather pay more and have less aggravation.
As such I am not horrified by the Torygraph’s rabble-rousing net zero time bomb that will make holidays more expensive. Air travel should be a lot dearer than it is, because of all the externalities. And reducing the amount of it by 50% would also go a long way to making it less crap as an experience. Bring it on.
Flying is not the only way, of course, but everything I have read about sleeper trains (and experienced on the London to Scotland route) doesn’t fill me with a good feeling. I am somewhat heartened by Mortgage Advisor on FiRE’s description of joining a cruise ship to Norway.
Boarding a ship is much less stress than navigating an airport
I have never been on a cruise ship but perhaps an increasing intolerance of flying is why old gits tend to favour that, though it sounds like Princess Lines is one to avoid from Mortgage Advisor On FIRE’s experience 😉 I would have a much shorter journey to Southampton than Mortgage Advisor. With that job title I’d guess there’s a guy who really needs a holiday now, though perhaps not quite as much as his customer base. That sounds like a tough gig at the mo. As the valedictory sentence says
As always, if you are struggling financially contact your bank, mortgage lender, or an organisation like Step Change.
I recall that feeling from many years ago in the 1990s. Back then it was “stick your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye” 😦
there’s something rotten in the state of finance
First they came for the bond markets, then they came for your mortgage interest rates and your house prices, and now they are coming for the stock market. A foetid stench is rising from the financial system, that’s all the trash that has been buried ever since the GFC in 2007-2009, and covered over with low interest rates. It’s kind of bonkers to think that this situation has persisted longer than half of my working life. All this trash was stirred up and given a good kicking by the measures taken over the pandemic, so it’s rising to the surface. Now the zombies and the monsters from the Id are rising from the ground, and they’re after your brains and your soul. For perspective, the hullabaloo is about interest rates reaching 6.5%, which is about the historical long run rate of interest for the UK, pre the GFC. I paid that or more for 95% of my mortgage payment career, barring the very end when I only carried £1k for a while as I reflected on clear it or not. The more recent decade-plus of low interest rates is the anomaly, and possibly kneecapped the ability of capitalism to allocate value. If money is free, not only do dead men keep walking, but there’s less reason to prioritise where you do spend it. A return to historical norms has been on the cards for some time. A maladjustment that has built up over a long time tends to be a Big One, though I should put the counterfactual view from a better investor than I
It could well be that we’re still early into this great rate rout, for all that it feels late in the day.
A mustelid snout twitches, and scents that perhaps opportunity may come to pass over the next little while, because the smell of decay improves valuations. I feel less bad about the rather too much cash I have been carrying, which has been hammered by inflation, because with a bit of luck stocks will be hammered by more than that. The FTSE100 has given up all its gains from this year. VWRL, not so much, particularly for Brits’ banana-republic currency. VMID has sunk almost to the level of Trussonomics1.
Infrastructure trusts have gone down the bog, although some of my holdings like HICL are so old Quicken doesn’t agree yet. I have bought modest amounts of that, at lower and lower prices.
You have to start somewhere, even though it will probably keep on going down, deeper and down. Like so many things, you can only see That Was a Bear Market, rather than The End of The World as We Know it, when you look in the rear view mirror many months/years from now and see the bend in the road moving the other way.
Investors of all stripes have been carried out on their shields.
Yet for those with the appetite – and the dry powder – to sally forth once more, all this carnage also makes for opportunities.
I got dry powder to some extent, though it’s been burned by a year and a half of 10% inflation, and I had to pay tax on the so-called ‘interest’ offsetting that, so who am I trying to kid. This is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.
Maybe Dear Liz was just a few months ahead of her time, Patrick Minford, who inspired her, was of the opinion interest rates should go up to 7%. How that squared with borrowing a shitload of money to fund the giveaways the record doesn’t say ↩
Mrs Ermine went to London to see the David Hockney exhibition with a friend, after we visited some friends in Suffolk. I carried on to Strumpshaw in Norfolk, to watch hawks. Marsh harrier, incoming, 12 o’clock.
I have no taste in the arts. I was considering going to see this at the Tate, but when both the Guardian and the Telegraph came to the same conclusion that this was shallow cheesy shite I figured the hawks would probably be a better use of my time than feeding the eternal sunshine of the spotless absence of artistic taste.
Mrs Ermine sent me this snap of a Tube ad as an insight into Millennial life. I don’t think it’s a subliminal message 😉
Ode to London Life: Realising you’re not dead inside
I haven’t got anything against Tinder, but it seemed an example of the disenchantment of the world that seems to be speeding up. As a genre the dating agency has a long history – there were ads for Dateline in magazines when I was a kid. I was surprised to see that the Big G tells be this still exists.
Back in the day using that sort of thing was viewed as a little bit desperate, for people who couldn’t meet up in the ‘normal’ way of social interactions. The world has obviously changed, so though I’ve never personally used that sort of service it appears people don’t meet through friends of friends and perhaps it’s infra dig to hit on other people at watering holes. Life and style and customs change over time, which is as it should be.
The punchline is pretty straight between the eyes, though. And it set off a messy train of thought, along the lines that what late-stage capitalism is really, really good at is disenchantment of the the world.
Weber concluded that this involved a loss of something essential to the human spirit. I am not clever enough to deconstruct the implication that the “irrationality that had been squelched by enlightened reason returned in the form of violence and barbarism.” When I look at social media in general and and the remarkable success of populist bullshit I am tempted to agree, but the yellow press has always been with us, it wasn’t invented by Fox News.
If Weber was right, and something essential to man’s search for meaning has been suppressed, then we are in trouble, because what is suppressed will out, and if it won’t rise through the conscious mind, the shadows will be projected in uncontrollable ways through the unconscious. That doesn’t tend to end well. There is magical thinking in many so-called rational areas – the Singularity, the fond hope of otherwise clever people that the mute matter cryogenics preserves enables reincarnation even though the head/brain/mind has lost all dynamic state. Personally I’d rather take my chance with Buddhism, you get a new body and if it doesn’t work at least you save the Immortalist Society premium 😉 Humans may be able to live forever, but they really gotta avoid dying first. Continue reading “the harvest that matters”
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass
Monevator had a deconstruction of the potential of Jeremy Hunt’s new pension freedoms to knock £360,000 of the aggregate tax in a dynastic bequest. As a virtuoso performance of creative tax planning there was nothing wrong with it, but I venture the title was either provocative or ill-chosen, because the virtuoso performance was drowned out somewhat by the car-crash of multiple readers losing contact with the narrative. Because this was titled Pensions, the LTA, and IHT: how a middle-class couple can bag £360,000 for free and this crew were earning £160k each.
And that wasn’t how most readers defined middle-class, nor indeed how the dictionary defines it. I am at the end of my working life, so my definition of this was probably set two generations ago, and matches the dictionary version. For a more modern take on this let’s take a leaf from FireVLondon’s taxonomy of London salaries and apply a 30k p.a. malus to their £160k salaries to make it 2015 again.
Even in the rarefied air of London salaries they are almost one percenters. There is vigorous support for Monevator’s impoverished middle-class strivers, however, from the Torygraph which is right behind these poor strugglers.
“Very often high earners will be working in highly unequal environments where the people they network with earn about as much or more than they do, so they are likely to think their income is about average.
“People on £125,000 are relatively close to the top 1pc of earners (those on around £180,000 a year) in their workplaces and social networks, but the rungs ahead of them are further and further apart, so they don’t feel especially high up the ladder.
Diddums. For some reason the obsidian Ermine heart fails to bleed… There’s more love from the Torygraph for these dear folk who can find solace in a forthcoming book Uncomfortably Off. Having read the rubric on Amazon I have the feeling that our tragic Rich Kids of London might feel a tad out of place at the book launch in May, and possibly feel that they are surrounded by lefty snowflakes failing to genuflect to their desperate plight.
The Telegraph really ought to hire more competent interns. OTOH if the the byline writer Harry Brennan gets ChatGPT to write his articles then they only have themselves to blame. Or maybe they will spike the article before the end of May 😉
It’s January. The nights are long, and it is cold, and rainy. It’s about this time of year that they always run the articles abut Blue Monday when it’s the most miserable time of the year, because we are done with the Christmas debauchery and it still doesn’t feel light even though the Sun is rising earlier. They are still wittering about the economically inactive. The BBC have at least identified there’s not much chance of getting you FI/RE lot to do your patriotic duty for the economy.
Almost nobody who has retired early says they want to return to work.
A new year, new start
I am old enough to have determined new years resolutions don’t work. I don’t do gyms anyway, but the best way to avoid that sort of resolution is not to pig out to excess extendedly. It’s OK to eat and drink to excess a couple of times in the Christmas period, but debauchery and gluttony are to be avoided in excess.
One thing I am experimenting with is to reduce screens/online. Interesting that Weenie is taking up jigsawing to go in this direction, is it a zeitgeist thing or great minds…
I have already taken step through the end of last year to reduce news consumption. I still remain informed, it’s the time/attention thief I am trying to reduce, rather than to do the full Walden Pond thing. One way is to to act more like it were 1998 on dial-up. As long ago as work I got a win on this with email by not running it all the time, once in the morning and once in the mid-afternoon. I have forgotten what office-worker’s guru put me onto that but it worked. For a wider win I aim to concentrate interwebs in bursts, like it were before the Millennium. GenZ has taken this battle to the enemy with customary panache, at the cost of never clocking off. I wonder if that Zuckerberg isn’t barking up the wrong tree trying to create the metaverse. It’s already here, just unevenly distributed. Poor old Zuck he’s pushing forty, and his younger self called the problem out
Young people are just smarter
I get to listen to a lot more music. Which is more reflective than using t’internet, although when I stream it is from a NAS rather than the likes of Spotify or Apple. I did consider using Tidal but I still can’t bring myself to do subscriptions. It is possible to buy downloads from Qobuz but it’s usually cheaper to get the CD s/h. I listen to music through the electric, instead of on their phones.
In her Happiness Project book Gretchen Rubin said that the days are long but the years are short, and so it has seemed for this year, a lot happened. There has been much noise and hum in 2022. It has been a collection of unforced errors in leadership, not just in the UK though we punched above our weight in mouth-breathing incompetence. I have a suspicion that we are getting the foothills of peak oil and the decline in living standards one would expect from that – the world is getting a larger place again, it is not so much slowbalisation as degobalisation of many things.
Capitalism hates resilience with a vengeance, driving it out across the board in the name of efficiency, but there is an assumed precondition of low geopolitical and natural volatility. 2022 was not the lifestyle that capitalism ordered in the Goldilocks period.
As a general rule resilience is inversely proportional to complexity and decreases with time. In the 1960s British houses had coal bunkers and didn’t depend on Russian gas (and if they did use gas it was coal gas locally produced). Before we get too dewy-eyed people only heated one room, and an open fire drew a hoolie through the single-glazed sash windows so everywhere else was freezing. People had bronchitis all the time – I haven’t had bronchitis since I was a student 😉 But they had the edge on resilience.
I await with interest if the power cuts happen in the first two weeks of January which seem to be the highest risk. Will our towns fill with zombies when they can’t plug into the social media hive mind with their smartphones. Smartphones are not resilient, and the base stations are good for an hour or so without power. It is of course a logical conclusion that the Internet will always be there despite its overweening complexity, so we don’t need to bother with broadcasting after 2030. Yet another piece resilience from a distant analogue world gets its marching orders, pah, who needs it…
In Britain the crew that delivered Brexit seems to have problems unleashing the heady promises of Britannia Unchained, with an exceptional rush of blood to the head in October that raised the price of people’s mortgages.
Everybody is grousing about energy prices. I am not sure all this can be laid at Putin’s door. Optimists will say that the solution to high energy prices is high energy prices, and perhaps this will capitalise the Energiewende that should have happened a few years ago.
In some ways that’s true – UK consumers have reduced their power consumption by 10-15%. Mind you, we also have a Warm Spaces network… I’m not saying that in itself is a bad thing, but it’s a symptom of a bad thing.
I investigated power drain in August, when all this was being floated. Being a cynical cost-focused running-dog I observe all the green crap is loaded on electricity, so I ignored space heating entirely and targeted electrical power drain, on the grounds I don’t want to subsidise other people’s insulation any more than I have to. I was able to reduce electricity usage by about a third, which is worth having, and the results are now in, and they are sustainable –
power drain over the year
It wasn’t cost-free – I had to shut down some test equipment, replace the CCTV DVR and ice several static loads and consolidate many others. I have probably saved about £180 due to that activity so far, so I am still short because the capex was more. But unless power costs dramatically less soon I will probably break even over the next year.
I am on the list for a stake in a windfarm to defray electricity usage. This is progressing at a snails pace – strategy not tactics. To take it up I will need to get a smart meter and probably join Octopus. I have many reservations about smart meters, not only can They remotely cut you off with a clickety-clack at a remote NOC, as opposed to sending hairy-arsed grunts out to gain entry and pull the main service fuse, but there is the general surveillance and control aspect of it all, which is a feature of smart anything. Ida Auken’s Welcome to a 2030, I own nothing post of renting everything is a pointer of where that leads. It’s not hard to deduce when you go out from a 30min sample of your power usage, and experience has generally shown that the best way to keep your data secure is not to transmit it to third parties every half hour.
However, smart metering is probably an inherent requirement for power systems with a high proportion of renewables, along with the implied big stick of load shedding, which is terrifically easy to implement using smart meters, both in the we will cut this area off to save the rest, or perhaps encourager les autres as well as the more subtle we will only allocate you x kWh per day. Quite a gift to hostile state hackers, too.
It was precisely to avoid the smart meter that I implemented this solution myself, and efergy does of course send the data over the network, as well as being more ratty than I would like. But you don’t have to say who you are, or rather cleave to the truth in the same way as Boris Johnson does. Data snoopers can infer your district from the GeoIP range but not much closer than that. And efergy can’t cut me off 😉
A smart electricity network that can constructively use renewables with minimum storage will be a remarkable achievement. It will be much more complex that what we had. It will be far more hackable because of the larger attack surface, It will, probably be more efficient. But in no earthly way will it be be more reliable. I expect to see far more outages and also power restrictions, where your smart meter says you can only use x kWh today else we will cut high loads off.
This was the year the stock market died, but we Brits didn’t notice because our money died faster than the stock market – 10% off on the start of the year relative to the USD, and a similar amount to gold. So while I can compare January’s iWeb statement with today’s and conclude I am 3% down in marked to market that is actually ~13% down when measured in Real Things of Value Not GBP, like gold or US dollars. Personally I go meh to that, I don’t have steam coming from my ears like American index investors who are looking at this.
Performance of the S&P500 year to date, along with the associated dire headlines
I have been selling gold in the ISA and buying shares through this year, largely VWRL, and rebuying the gold in a GIA. Vanguard tell me in this year’s ISA I have £20366, a whopping 3.25% rate of return. Less, of course 10%, so no cigar. This is from starting to top this up in May once I had cleared out all last year’s Vanguard ISA into HL. Talking of which
When is VWRL not VWRL? When you transfer it to Hargreaves Lansdown in specie
Nobody gets fired for buying VWRL. It’s a boring index stock from a boring index provider. I hold a lot of it, largely on the back of this article. I am not a good little passive index investor, you can see that in my sick purchasing mode on Vanguard which is not regular in any way.
VWRL purchasing this ISA year
I managed to make a minor profit on this in GBP over the year, because I also vary the amount purchased as well as the time of purchase, I buy more if it is lower, so while it looks like I am a rotten shot the weighting helped me, I am very slightly up on VWRL for the year. I had to stop in October because I am all out of ammo, I have spaffed my £20k ISA allowance.
I transferred last year’s load of this this to HL. In specie, because that’s the whole point of accumulating in Vanguard (no transaction fees, but percentage platform fees) and dumping to HL (usurous £12 transaction fees, but a capped cost of carry at £45 if you eschew funds). You don’t currently pay either party to transfer in-specie, which means say to HL transfer my holding of x VWRL into HL from Vanguard as shares.
But you’d like x to turn up as VWRL, no? I was first warmed up to a strange smell when I opened the HL ISA, the cash came through first I think and I decided I wanted to buy VWRL. For some reason I couldn’t do that, computer said no. I could only buy VWRD or VHYL. Indeedably has a whole post about why VHYL is a terrible idea. However, since I was doing this after the meltdown of SMT I figured a value tilt wasn’t so bad, so I did it anyway. Although I haven’t drawn from any ISA yet, when I do I would hate to sell units to get cash.
It was a slight niggle, WTF is with this, how can they not sell me this common as muck ETF? Really? Monevator has many posts by Lars saying pretty much just go buy VWRL regularly and then do something else with your time. VWRL is USD 8.9billion AUM. I don’t know if that’s US Bn or British Billion, but it doesn’t really matter. World + Dog owns this, in spades. HL should have seen that ETF before 😉
I observe my transfer shows up as VWRD, and leave it be. Many freebie listings show the dollar variant of an ETF because there are more American investors than Brits. Time passes I then get this missive from the HL corporation
We’re getting in touch about your holding(s) in the investments listed below. The type of investment(s) you hold are non-GBP and as we only settle investments in GBP we’ve made the decision to no longer offer this type of investment. However, as there is a GBP denominated version of this investment, you will still be able to purchase and hold investments in this security.
What this means for non-GBP investments
You can continue to hold the investment and sell at any time but from 28 October you cannot buy any more units. Any further purchases will need to be made into the equivalent GBP version. We’ve listed your investments below and, on the right, you’ll see the equivalent GBP version of the stock.
If you don’t want to hold the non-GBP stock you can sell your holding at any time as normal but if you wish to make further purchases, you’ll need to transfer to another provider. We don’t want to encourage our clients to move investments from our platform, but we understand if this is the right choice for you. If you choose to sell, normal dealing charges apply, and you’ll need to consider any loss or gains you’ve made on the stock since buying it.
And I think to myself WTF is this line you are feeding me? I bought this stock from Vanguard in GBP, quoted in GBP. This is your bad, Mr HL, not mine. Over the years I have bought £75k worth of it in iWeb with nary a hitch. I don’t want to pay £11.95 twice plus the turn to rectify your balls-up. There was a price discrepancy and I considered for a moment whether this would be in my favour enough to be worth the turn but came to the conclusion that Thoreau was right, a man is rich in the number of things he can leave alone.
All I wanted was the same as I bought from Vanguard, what part of in-specie transfer do you not understand, HL? So I send them a secure message along the general lines of sort your shit out, guys, with a screenshot of what Vanguard sell me this as., along with the PDF from Vanguard. In all fairness, HL did rectify it, at no cost to me, though the reason for the balls-up is arcane
Both the VWRL denominated line and the VWRD denominated line have the same ISIN but a different SEDOL. As your transfer came through electronically, it seems the system pulled through the wrong SEDOL.
We have now amended your 107 Vanguard Fund plc shares that was transferred to our management from the VWRD denominated line to the VWRL denominated and you should see the correct line of stock reflected in your HL Stocks & Shares ISA.
Which broadly looks like a mea culpa on their part. I didn’t expect to have grief with a big world tracker ETF. Not only that, but they can’t guarantee it won’t happen again when I rinse, repeat in April, so I have to send them another secure message ‘Oi, VWRL coming your way again, that’s VWRL not VWRD, geddit?’
a year when it was time to pay the dues
All in all a messy year, and very seriously shit for many, sadly. One where a lot of chickens seem to be coming home to roost, and a lot of untruths seems to be revealed. Some charlatans were defenestrated, while channeling the Terminator. We discovered that supply-side economics works terribly well if you don’t need to convince other people to lend you money to do the easy tax-cutting part before the hard cost-cutting part. Unfortunately that wasn’t an option for Liz Truss and everybody’s mortgage went up by the moron premium. She probably still believes she was right. Maniacs always do.
All you FIRE lot are causing fear and loathing due to the increasing exit of over 50s from the workplace. It seems to be confuzzling TPTB. I really don’t understand why the Big Cheeses don’t get it. Hell, the ONS managed to identify this pull-quote
I no longer had any job satisfaction, and felt physically and mentally exhausted, with many stress-related physical manifestations
Well, yes. For the last thirty years, companies have been making the world of work for stressful, more shit and more penny-pinching. Is it really such a surprise that people give this the middle finger at the earliest opportunity? I was that guy, and nothing I have heard about the world of corporate work has told me this has gotten better. Unless you are in the C-suite, in which case you are doing absolutely fine.
Normally we would have regarded this loss of our old gits as a great opportunity for our young pups to move up a rung or two, but that has no meaning in a gig economy. You’re going to have to pay people more or actually invest in your businesses, UK firms, arguably this is a wider issue. Perhaps returning to the time-honoured tradition of actually training people, rather than endlessly whining that you can’t buy your skills requirements off the shelf might be an idea?
There seems to be a hellacious level of long-term sickness in the UK if it is really 2.5M of working age. Perhaps that’s what you get from a laissez-faire approach to the food industry – I walk along whole aisles of supermarkets not recognizing the products as the category ‘food’, particularly along the snacks and family packs of crisps. Its also somewhat to be expected as a large rump of the population gets older. Talking of health
2022 is also probably the year the NHS died. Unsurprisingly it’s the Tories wot dunnit, though an ageing population, Brexit and Covid are accessories to the crime. In their current headless chicken mode there is not enough leadership to plot a route forward. Let us hope it is the European insurance model rather than the pathological American model that is chosen. In the meantime basically don’t get ill. Which is not an entirely peaceable thought – both of my parents had health issues at my age.
Here’s to a better 2023. Here’s hoping for less stupid crap and fewer unforced errors. No more Bozza, though my crystal ball says that is probably in our future, a man of the people despite being a lying bastard incapable of complying with his own laws FFS. One last roll of the dice. On the plus side, the American market is a lot better value now. It can, of course, continue to get better value, but at some time the worm will turn. I survived OK on the markets, and have firepower to go. The accumulated value throws off a useful enough amount, though my plans of using the 2k tax-free dividend allowance will need to reduce in ambition next year, I am £1350 of the way there, which will be OTT after April.
In other areas I want to know more about the part of the world I live in. I want to walk more in it. I joined iNaturalist so I can make more sense of what I see here, and not just the birds. I am getting old – I was tickled by this woman’s ambition to walk all the footpaths near her home. Sure, it’s fundamentally pointless in a way, but it’s curiously in the moment.
The Ermine household ventured to Weston-Super-Mare, where the Mendip Hills surrender to the sea in the Bristol Channel. There was a free public spectacle, part of the Festival UK scratch that, Festival of Brexit no, it’s definitely not called that, Unboxed 2022. Sounds like the sort of thing that people do on YouTube when they get a new gadget, but it’s all about mind-blowing creativity happening now across the UK
Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not a Festival of Brexit
Round these parts the mind-blowing creativity is a whacking great big oil rig on the beach. It’s one of the more accessible of the exhibits. The Ermine is on the philistine end of the spectrum when it comes to the arts. Not as far as reaching for a Browning when I hear culture, but not a luvvie. I was middle-aged before Mrs Ermine educated me that you don’t qualify art by whether you like it but whether it makes you see the world in a different way. It’s always easy to carp on arts funding, but I will leave that to others
I’m not sure that it made me see the world in a different arty way, but I certainly saw WSM in a different way physically – some of the faded grandeur of the beachfront hotels from a height.
Weston-Super-Mare faded Victorian grandeur from 30m. Unboxed saved me the price of a camera drone
I’ve never had the opportunity to be on an oil rig before – it was surprisingly small. They didn’t have the workers’ accommodation or much of the functional plant. I was trying to place the guys from Tabitha Lasley’s book Sea State on it. Even getting a helicopter onto the helipad must be a serious challenge in high winds. I got a useful amount of exercise climbing 30m of steps, but I missed the entire renewables theme, I had to look at Wikipedia to get that. Even the seemonster website left me confuzzled.
the garden. You will be pleasantly surprised that the plants will be moved to community projects ratherthan binned. I thought they could use some water
Weston-Super-Mare has seen better days, like so many British seaside town. If you are in the area, go north to Clevedon for a classier experience, or south to Burnham-on-Sea for a less tacky experience on a smaller scale. WSM hosted Banksy’s Dismaland in 2015, so it has form on public arts projects. As far as bringing money into the town, that’s a maybe. It certainly gives employment – they have people everywhere on all levels because I would imagine the temptation for kids to climb over the guards rails could be a bit much, the water this thing stands in is only three feet deep, not enough to break a fall from 30m. And we did have a full English of industrial sausages, white fried bread and instant coffee at a local caff, because sometimes you have to rough it. You can get a better breakfast in Clevedon and Burnham-on-sea, though whatever you do don’t carry on to Bridgwater, because the guys building Hinkley Point power station need good honest grub at low prices, rather than poncey ‘elf food and the town is set up for that.
An echo out of time, before Covid and the Brexit dividend showed its face
Once upon a time, four years and three prime ministers ago, a Remainer who didn’t really believe in Brexit proposed an arty celebration of all things British, to be funded with the lolly on the side of the bus we were going to save leaving the EU. There was going to be so much the NHS wouldn’t need it all.
conceived once upon a time, before the cake was a lie
To be fair, that was Theresa May in Oct 2018 so nobody had heard of Covid-19 She called it Festival UK, but the temptation was always there to rename it as a Festival of Brexit, and Jakey boy took the opportunity to change the label, despite asserting we have to wait half a century to see the economic benefits. Put the champers and the festival on the National Debt, then, JR-M, or on the tax rises? The varmint is from Somerset though thankfully not my local MP.
See Monster from the beach
There was something dismal about a Remainer trying to implement Brexit, in the end if you are going to implement a car crash you really need someone who is going to put the pedal to the metal and go out with a bang rather than try to survive the experience. Think Vanishing Point rather than The Italian Job, so well done Bozza for Getting Brexit Done. Covid gave you enough time to pretend the fail wasn’t too much Brexit but that’s starting to wear a little bit thin now. Well done you on making it not your problem now, mate.
Brexit seems to have a voracious appetite for Tory PMs, chowing down four and countin’. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. You can get Brexit Done but you’ll never make Brexit Work Well until you learn to talk civilly with our nearest neighbours, even if you don’t want to be in their club, I curse you and the horse you rode in on always offends.
As for our talents at striking dynamic alternative trade deals, there seems a lack of bovine reciprocity in the Aussie-UK trade deal brokers by Liz Truss – as in importing Aussie beef is dandy but importing British beef is still verboten Down Under. They must’ve cracked a few tinnies on getting that past La Truss. The Aussies keep the Ashes then, and it’s about time Britain learned that negotiating against self-inflicted deadlines gives the other side the upper hand. Them 2 Us Nil if you add in the Article 50 fracas. There’s a whole field of Game Theory, and even Harvard geeks yattering on about BATNA but, well, experts, schmexperts, we don’t need no steeking expertise round here, eh, Mikey? Cynics might say it shows, Gove my boy, sure shows…
Curious how selecting True Believers seems to have selected against Basic Competence. Still, we have a couple of years of tax rises and spending cuts to look forward to as a lovely Brexit dividend. Paris is now the largest European stock market by capitalisation as London fades. Just as well that the major age group that voted for it don’t need to earn a living any more, eh? Curious how Truss and Crazy Kwazy missed the most obvious way to get a bit more growth, selling more shit to rich neighbours. Even the rabidly Brexity Daily Express is flying a kite for better dialogue under the guise of monstering Nicola Sturgeon
Instead of Boris Johnson’s “oven-ready deal”, Rishi Sunak’s Government could “consider a much more softer version of Brexit – for example joining the Single Market.
“If they did that, a lot of the powerful messages for an independence referendum would go out of the way, or would be reduced.”
I do wonder if the subeditor who allowed this heresy through has actually thought what that implies for the desires of their more rabidly xenophobic readership cohort. They could do well to remind themselves of what the single market is. Maybe they feel more strongly about the Union than not hearing Polish spoken on the High Street? The power of analytical thought is not strong in Brexity cakeists.
the cake is a lie
Still, we did our bit for this echo from a distant world, before the uneaten cake/eaten cake wavefunction had collapsed into the cake is a lie, and the Festival of Brexit the Great Unboxing was celebrating the success of the idea of the cake still existing after it had been eaten. Original attendance numbers for the whole shebang were projected at 66 million. The outcome is somewhat lower at about a quarter mill. Some bugger’s quaffing all the champagne as per Jake R-M’s edict, but it wasn’t us, guv.
Googly eyes. Mebbe See Monster’s quaffed all the champers. Let’s hope the guerilla sand artists didn’t drive there and heat their homes with wood rather than nasty fossil fuels, eh?
See Monster is only open for five more days until the 20 November 2022, but you can see a VR tour on the website. FWIW I did appreciate not being charged, and even the bogs were free.
One thing you must not do, BTW, is swim in the sea in Weston. I don’t indulge, personally, but Mrs Ermine did on a previous occasion. And got to wonder why there was a smell of shit after getting out. Well, before Liz Truss ruined the UK economy even more by starving it of money, she ruined the Environment Agency by starving it of money. Fortunately everyone was OK apart from having to run boil wash afterwards. But the shit in the sea can apparently get up your arse and put you in hospital. You wouldn’t want to do that, because a different part of the Tory party has been starving the NHS of money in the hope of selling bits off.
Shit in the water seems to be a widespread problem. I tried paddleboarding in the summer, in the Avon. I am a weak swimmer, but drowning wasn’t the problem. It had been raining a couple of days before, which apparently is when the shit gets into the river when the rainwater overtops the capacity of the sewers. I fell in, as you do as a tyro. After a couple of days I felt sick, achey and weak to the exent of only being able to crawl to the head. After about three days of that it went away, so I got off a lot more lightly than the 22 year old swimmer. But I am going to avoid open water in the UK in future, because I didn’t realize that sort of thing could put you in hospital, I thought it would just give you bellyache and the shits if you were unlucky. I never liked swimming that much anyway…
Simple Living In Somerset 