Dear Virgin Media – It’s your own fault: first you upgraded my broadband, that broke the cable modem, thanks for the new one. It’s working now. The you advertised the fact that your cable bundles are on your website.

Yes I checked, and they are far cheaper than what we pay, for more. you see we’ve been with you for years, so we don’t have a bundle, we have everything separate, and we pay a premium for being loyal.

So I gave you a call, and you said, “that package isn’t  availible for you, you could pay £8 more”, so I hung up, and checked Sky, they would give me the same for less.

So I rang you back to tell you – then surprisingly there are packages I can have! and thank you for upgrading my phone package, and reducing my bill by £20 a month. that’s very kind of you  - it does means you’ve been ripping me off for months, but that’s partly my fault.

it's doomed

If you’ve been following the blog, you might have noticed, that I’ve started to pay attention as to how the world economy actually works, and it’s scared me a bit. It’s not because we personally are in trouble, or if we are we haven’t noticed; after all we’ve just gone a bought a car. it’s because once you see any of this information you can’t but fail to see how the global economy appears to be built on a fundamentally flawed ideal, that we will never run out of stuff.

Well today I’ve fulled my paranoia even more, I’ve been reading New Scientist, and their special report on how our economy is killing the earth. so of the articles are available on line, but it you’ve got access to it, I recommend you read the New Scientist this week. 

for those of you with no time/inclination/regard for the fate of the world, here is my summary. 

“we’re doomed”

and here’s my more detailed, thoughts;

We’re all doomed, because the way the entire planet works is based on the fact we are never expecting to run out of resources. Just to make that clear, when we run out of oil, or fish, or water, or coal – the free market will collapse, because it’s all driven by the fact that it needs to grow to feed itself. 

stop the economy - buy this!

Saving the planet while the economy is like it is, is a waste of time, because we need to reduce our carbon emissions world wide by a factor of 5 by 2050.. if you neglect the effect of a growth based economy, if the economy meats it’s target growths over the next 25 years then we need to reduce carbon emissions to 0.2% of the current levels. in short we need to make the economy sustainable, or we can’t save the planet. ¹

some of the ideas to solve these problems are a bit Utopian, but we do need to do something, persuading people to forgo material riches, and start placing values on society isn’t going to be an easy thing. I’m not even sure there are any real individual things you can do today (short of starting a revolution) to change this. everyone in any position of power has so much vested in the system they’re not going to change easily.

so I’m all depressed now. I’m considering my options

1. move to a croft in Scotland, and stock up
2. start a political party and overthrow the world
3. moan about it for a bit, then bury my head in the sand, hope if goes away

¹http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg20026786.100-special-report-why-politicians-dare-not-limit-economic-growth.html

and he is now sporting a nice pair of size 4G shoes, not that he’s to enamored with it all. he can’t now pull his socks off; he screamed the Clark’s in Cheshire oaks down – but now it’s done.

Oh and we bought a new car.

We have just bought a Mazda 5 thing; We are now officially members of the people carrier club, yes we have a car with 7 seats, because we have two children. I am told this is so we can have other people in the car along side the family, and not because we would be having any more children. 

A Mazda, it's not silver

Ruth’s friend has just got one of these so despite test driving the blue one we’ve bought a different colour one, Ruth says it’s duck-egg; although the piece of paper says it’s silver. We’ve managed to swap our rather old,  poorly tricked out skoda, for something much newer and more feature rich car, without doing much to how much we are paying per month. Although the fact we are going from Diesel to Petrol may have an effect. 

We do the swap next Saturday, when we will almost certainly go for a drive somewhere, and show off our car which has at least 9 cup-holders!

that video about where money comes from has got me spooked – money really is just made up, by banks, because they can. 

So we are currently here:

1. in the UK there is only about £20bn of cash in circulation, that’s actual notes and coins. 
2. the bank of England only has 400 tonnes of gold – in today’s market that’s £6.6bn – selling that much gold would be done by auction and probably sell for less.
3. UK National (i.e government) debt is currently £650bn
4. personal debt in the UK is £1,448bn (1.4trillion) – £232bn of that is unsecured debt [credit action]
5. in the UK we pay £259m in interest each day.
6. The housing stock in the UK is currently worth around £4trillion