Category Archives: Law

August 9, 2017 · 12:29

Automated Fraud Dangers

What a world we live in, not only is there the crime of fraud, there is now the option to automate it. Yes, the Guardian is giving us (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/fake-news-full-fact-software-immune-system-journalism-soros-omidyar), the automation against ‘fake news’. It is the subtitle that gets the blackberry pie in this. With ‘Full Fact software backed by George Soros and Pierre Omidyar fact-checks statements in parliament and news media in real time‘ we see the start of a series of events, and I am honestly not sure where they are trying to take it at present. The bias is intentional, because we all have this feeling, when a billionaire (or plural) support something, it will put them in a better position. It could be seen as unfair bias, yet bias is in the human core, which in light of what the media does more and more not the worst position to place yourself in.

To get there, we need to take a few steps. With fraud we need to see where that is at. We get “wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain“, so let’s take a gander into The Fraud Act 2006. This gives us three options.

The first being that with fraud by false representation we can go hilariously with ‘I really have an 11 inch dick‘, or better stated, in section 2 paragraph 2 it is all about:

A representation is false if: (a)it is untrue or misleading, and (b)the person making it knows that it is, or might be, untrue or misleading.

This issue as seen in the first part as it could be measured and acted on by the rulering (pun, innuendo and Full Fact challenge intended), yet the statement ‘I am the greatest lover in the world‘ is that fraud, being delusional of conviction of a personal ability through (or enabled by) the deceit of your own ego, so how to prove such subjectivity, against fraud? Now the important part here, which is not covered in lust (or perhaps it is) is seen in paragraph 3 with

(3) “Representation” means any representation as to fact or law, including a representation as to the state of mind of (a) the person making the representation, or (b) any other person.

and the important part that matters in his case is paragraph 5 which gives us “(5) For the purposes of this section a representation may be regarded as made if it (or anything implying it) is submitted in any form to any system or device designed to receive, convey or respond to communications (with or without human intervention)“, this puts tweets, social media and optionally this software solution in a similar weird new position.

Now this is part one and you can see where this is going, and there is no twist to this part of the tale, yet the other two are still important.

The second is fraud by failing to disclose information. Now in this case journalists get a free pass, because it is about the legal duty and that person is in breach of this section if he (or she)

(a)dishonestly fails to disclose to another person information which he is under a legal duty to disclose, and (b)intends, by failing to disclose the information

(i)to make a gain for himself or another, or
(ii)to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss.

so this tends to be professionally set to the makers of laws, accountants, those people with red or purple robes and wigs, you know the types, in this case doctors, and not to forget certain contractors working for governments, in this the military and intelligence community cannot be convicted or prosecuted as they have other sets of rules, like national security, military law and in some cases maritime law could leave a person not in breach of this, yet they would have their own set of rules that still sets clearly their responsibilities.

And last we get fraud by abuse of position. I am merely mentioning this almost for the completeness of the fraud as it is in common law. Yet with

(1) A person is in breach of this section if he (or she), (a) occupies a position in which he is expected to safeguard, or not to act against, the financial interests of another person,(b) dishonestly abuses that position, and (c)intends, by means of the abuse of that position

(i)to make a gain for himself or another, or
(ii)to cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss.

(2) A person may be regarded as having abused his position even though his conduct consisted of an omission rather than an act.

Actually, now that I think of it, the makers of the software program once called the “bullshit detector” in an early version of the system by its creators, is now set to be a virtual truth vaccine. I am in two set mind here, on one side I love the idea and on the other side there are a few hitches that would make it fall over for possibly a lot longer than anyone could consider. You see, when I think of fake news, I do not think merely of the actual fact misusers. The joke that Channel Nine became in the evening as they got the first lead on a shooting (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjkQSREjxH0), the lady now nationally known as the ‘chick chick boom girl’, gave an eye witness report and the journo just ate it all up. A sexy looking girl giving the news all the ‘facts‘ as she was allowed to report this in the limelight offered. The reporter felt so good and six days later the Age gives us “Within 24 hours of the footage first airing on Channel Nine, T-shirts emblazoned with “chk chk boom“, the phrase which Ms Werbeloff used to describe the gunshot, were being sold on a US website. There were also drink bottles with the slogan and a rap-music remix of her video, and in addition, the fact that the news was bogus, fake, not real and pretty well made up“, we now have two issues, she is not merely guilty of fraud, she possibly impeded an investigation into a shooting.

This is more than a funny story, even as we can admit that one comment in the YouTube states that it is still funny and to some extent I agree, merely because the gullible reporter basically got played. We can set in equal measure giggle to the smallest extent as KVTU reported that the names of the MH370 crew members were Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding Ow. The fact that the newsreader and the editor did not ‘seemingly realise‘ that this was fake is a failure on an entirely different level and no software on the planet will protect us from stupid people (or gullible politicians for that matter). So that in the back of my mind within a minute of the article in the Guardian had me pondering this ‘software solution‘. Now, I do believe that the software could be used to flag thousands of messages almost instantly, yet the claim we get from “The early version of the software scans the subtitles of live news programmes, broadcasts of parliament, the Hansard parliamentary record, and articles published by newspapers. It tracks millions of words sentence by sentence until it identifies a claim that appears to match a fact-check already in its database” is dangerous on a few levels, yet as the makers interestingly and validly point out: “Babakar is keen to stress the limitations of the system so far and believes the tool should only be used by journalists in the first instance rather than the general public“, I like that part, they admit that the software is nowhere near ready even when it initially launches.

So where is my issue?

There are a few sides, with ‘claim that appears to match a fact-check already in its database‘ we have to realise that the vetting process is a critical part in this, so how soon will we see clearances and cleared checks of miscommunications, the previous news cast from KVTU being a first example. This process would require internal political hands from whoever uses it and there is where the bias sets in. We might go biased and auto accept the facts from sources like the Washington Post, the Times, the Dutch NRC Handelsblad and the Swedish Dagens Nyheter, yet now we get the second part, we have all seen and under the best of conditions there is the danger of getting ‘lost in translation‘ (not the movie which was brilliant). So when we apply the lost in translation, we have the local versions (UK version of English) with the Sun giving us today: ‘1,200 killed by mental patients‘, so is this fake news? I would state so, but knowing the people behind the Sun, they will have some numbers that add up to 1200. Yet ‘today’ was October 2013, when it actually was ‘today’. So here we see the first application of lost in translation, the second side in that headline was seen when we go to the ‘actual’ news, were we see “It discovered 1,216 people were killed by patients with mental illness from 2001-2010 — an average of 122 deaths a year” (at https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/1052064/1200-killed-by-mental-patients/), so is this still fake news? That same article gives us “The study — the first of its kind in the UK — found 45 per cent of those with severe psychiatric problems were victims of crime in the previous year“, now giving weight to anything the Sun states is one thing, accepting the good looks of the lady on page three is another, yet in the end, were these stated ‘facts’ lies? I have had loads of issues with tabloids for the longest of times. Still, when we now look at fraud, where ‘A representation is false ifit is untrue or misleading, and the person making it knows that it is, or might be, untrue or misleading.‘ The additional ‘a representation may be regarded as made if it is submitted in any form to any system or device designed to receive, convey or respond to communications (with or without human intervention)‘. Here is the initial ballgame, you see, it is not merely about fake news, it now becomes about the interpretation of language. In its most basic terms, a grammar system designed to comprehend innuendo. When we know that loads of Journalists are incapable of comprehending sarcasm under even the most optimal conditions and in addition, when I state that sarcasm that backfires is merely irony, they are likely to become even more confused. So the heavens might love the simple minded, but here it becomes an issue on a much larger scale.

The article gives us “The fledgling system is not without its problems; sometimes it flags up a fact-check that isn’t relevant, for example. The challenge for the programmers is to get the software to understand the fuzzy logic and idiom used so often in speech” This actually barely scratches the surface. You see, there are a few other parts, how would the Metro front page ‘Brexit begins‘ be seen? Officially, the letter was delivered, yet the overwhelming ‘news’ is that Brexit has not started yet, could flag this news article. The truth is the interpretation of what constitutes the start of Brexit is also the issue. It’s not like having sex (yes the example matters, so do read on), that is the act and point in time, it is what happens after. So when is the baby seen as alive? When the conception has happened? When the child is capable of being born alive? In Australia it is seen after 28 weeks of pregnancy. Yet in separate Australian states, in this case Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia, the terminal points for abortions are 16, 24 and 20 weeks, so there is an issue on a few levels. In cases there is the Crimes Act 1900 (sections 82-84), whilst the ACT had abortions repealed as a criminal offense from the Crimes (Abolition of Offence of Abortion) Act 2002. So, one moment in time that on a national level already has 4 different assessment dates on one national calendar. In that mess on one ‘simple’ issue, we see a mess that becomes even messier when theology gets in the way of the subject of conversation and that is more than just a reference to separation of church and state. This shows part of the problem, also for the us where federal law can be a real mess for the non-legal people and that also has implications for the ‘fake news’ vetting system. So how could any article on illegal abortion be weighed correctly, especially when a politically or religiously tainted tabloid becomes the provider of that news?

Now, if they pull it off would be quite a feat, yet when we go back to the initial fraud part, if the system flags an article as possible fake, what happens when the news agency in light of thousands of items a day scraps that one item? Would the non-reported article by the journalist be seen as a matter for an aggrieved status? That is part of the problem these makers face, because in some nations the torts law is pretty strong and if there is a case of ‘redress of damage‘ the roll of the dice would be well worth it. There would be a direct and instant case of insurance companies, especially in any editorial status to not warrant any level of insurance when such software is used. Not now, possibly even not ever, although the latter part would be highly speculative by me and I hope to some extent that I am wrong, because pulling it off, getting software to be this able would be quite the achievement and the essential requirement for any evolving AI. This is because intelligence artificial or not would be about the ability to weigh information and facts to the proper value of innuendo and ascertainment of paraphrased facts. Weighing information is a skill that is almost never done correctly on the present day internet. A nice example is to compare the search engines Bing and Google, when you seek ‘UK torts‘ the search engine Bing gave me as a 4^th and several subsequent mentions ‘Tort law in Australia – Wikipedia‘ as well as a few other Australian references to Australian law. Was that what I had asked for? No, it was not (which is why Bing is my preferred source for not finding facts, yay Google).

All issues given that could be seen as fake news, or is that fake information, so when we see the flags, how long until the bias sets in? You see that is my largest issue with what could come, with bias I get what they want me to see, which I touched on in the very beginning, because automated or not, censoring is a dangerous principle under the most ideal situations. With software, no matter how good the intention we could see a dangerous curve towards what is automated assumed we wanted to see. You see, there are too many parts of the dimension of ‘fake news’. This has been the larger issue with media for a much longer time. In this, Mevan Babakar the project manager at Full Fact in London has his work cut out for him, I do not envy him, yet if this gets solved and if it works, the value of this software would be a lot larger than most people could realise, and it would be a technological software marvel to behold.

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Tagged as Channel Nine, Crimes (Abolition of Offence of Abortion) Act 2002, Crimes Act 1900, Dagens Nyheter, Full Fact, George Soros, Hansard parliamentary record, KVTU, Metro, Mevan Babakar, Ms Werbeloff, NRC Handelsblad, Pierre Omidyar, Tabloids, The Fraud Act 2006, the Guardian, the Sun, The Times, Torts Law, Washington Post, Youtube

August 8, 2017 · 14:06

The new Monopoly game

Do you remember playing monopoly? Did you ever play it? I grew up loving it. I am not some realtor, some real estate dreamer beyond the dream of having my own place. Most of us are like that. Just the time when I was young and the family played that game, or plying it with a couple of friends. I ended up having several versions, including the replica original with coins, in a wooden box, just a cool thing to have. So when we consider this game, as the prices of the streets were shown in those days; we knew that blue was the highest an always out of our reach. I lived in a green property for some time, so life felt good, yet today, Yellow, Red, Orange, Purple and light blue are no longer in my view of affordability, in the best case, I might be able to get one of the brown coloured properties. This is how the market changed in a mere 22 years. From an optional 80% of the map to a mere 2 out of 16, that is all that was left to me. So when I read ‘Total UK wealth tops £10tn thanks to City and property boom‘ by Larry Elliott (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/08/total-uk-wealth-city-property-homes-inequality-saving), I just had to laugh. I understand that he might be trying to have a sense of humour about it. Yet when we see “A booming City and rising house prices provided a double boost to Britons holding assets in 2016 as they pushed the nation’s wealth through the £10tn mark, according to a new survey“, the question becomes: ‘How much of that is NOT owned by foreign investors?‘ Is that a weird question or what? Even as we see “Since the better off held a greater proportion of these assets, 40% of the gains of rising share and bond prices went to the richest 5% of households“, is ‘households’ correct or should it read clients represented by British law and accountancy firms, representing foreign interests in the UK? With “The £3.9tn increase in the value of residential property and financial assets owned by UK residents represented a 59% rise, whereas prices rose by 39% and gross household income was up 37%“, we see again the ‘UK resident‘ part and when we take a look at the government (at http://www.ukimmigration.com/investor/uk_investor_visa.htm), we see that basically any person investing in any property (as the London bulk is well over £1 million, the threshold for foreign investors is reached), which beckons the call, when we start digging into UK residents versus UK citizens, how will this all end? Lloyds shows even more sense of humour with “Lloyds said its figure excluded non-residential property and assets held by charities and other non-profit institutions“, which clearly includes all the foreign investors and they are always in it for the profit. It is the final part that gives the new consideration “However, a continued low mortgage rate environment, combined with an ongoing shortage of properties for sale, should help continue to support house prices over the coming months“. This now gives the premise, have the current and previous governments been guilty of betraying the British people by setting the stage of ‘ongoing shortage of properties for sale‘, in this we see the historic part that former Prime minister Margaret Thatcher was the last of the prime ministers giving a rising and clear need for social housing. We see this in the 2015 article from the BBC (at http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-14380936) where the amount of social housing went up in the beginning of her ‘reign’ to the highest ever recorded surpassing 150,000 right-to-buy, it took a small dive and in 1987 it got back to around 140,000, after she was succeeded in 1990, social housing took a steep dive to below 50,000 and from there it just went down and down. At the end of the labour reign in 2010 it was at the lowest stage ever, only now is there a small increase visible in that graph. Yet in the BBC article we also see a problem, even as it compares to 1918 where owner occupied is a mere 23%, the 2012-2013 part where 65% is owner occupied is as I call it ‘misrepresented‘ at 65%, because how much of that is empty and what part is foreign invested? You see, plenty of places in London are not offered for rent, but for lease, so who is the owner in that case and where does this fit in that graph? If we add the privately rented, we see that socially rented is a mere 16% (way higher than 1918), yet as we see the Thatcher numbers, who got the people there and how were the people kept out of affordable housing by not making that available. In Australia it might be as bad as the valid people in NSW housing are on the lists for a time in excess of 6 years. So how is that a solution to solving housing issues? And let’s not forget, when the housing is set and forced to become a larger contributor to social (read affordable) housing, what then remains of this ‘£10tn UK wealth‘ housing side? The fact that both sides of the political isle have been in denial and remiss to get any of that solved and Jeremy Corbyn claims to have a solution by pushing the UK in even deeper debt, deeper by the better part of a trillion pounds. So how does that help anyone?

Now, we might accept and understand that life in London is never affordable ever again, yet the political isles must equally accept that this change could constitute an infrastructure collapse. This gets us to some old news. In August 2014 we saw (at https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/07/london-gets-24-times-as-much-infrastructure-north-east-england) the mention ‘London gets 24 times as much spent on infrastructure per resident than north-east England‘ which is a nice title, yet the dangers are shown soon thereafter. With “more than half of that total was down to the decommissioning of the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria – necessary, doubtless, but hardly an infrastructure ‘improvement’ as most people would understand it” we see only part of the danger. The quote “New analysis of public infrastructure spending by IPPR North lays bare the gap between how much capital expenditure there is in the capital than the rest of England” shows another part, yet the actual issue is not what is spent, but what is required to get something done. When we paraphrase it into “analysis of public infrastructure spending by IPPR North lays bare the gap between how much is required for the same amount of work in London compared to the rest of England” we see the dangers, when the infrastructure maintenance is 2400% of the rest of the UK, there is a danger, yet is it the correct one? In February this year, we see a partial repetition of the old Guardian article, yet with updated numbers it shows (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/20/more-than-half-uk-investment-in-transport-is-in-london-says-study) that London requires 50% of all the funds. In all this we are not given any reliable numbers, because in all this I do not see the comparison of £ per mile of rail serviced. Consider that London has 20 times the amounts of rail that most places have and he London rail when stretched can get a person from Waterloo station to Glasgow five times over (OK, slight exaggeration). Yet the message should be clear. As the infrastructure has less options with in addition less people being anywhere near it, the city of London is facing all levels of collapse. Another part was shown on July 17^th in the Independent. The title ‘More than half a million social homes in England do not meet basic health and safety standards‘ is the first indication that social housing and infrastructure are beyond collapsing. With quotes like ‘almost one in seven of all social homes in England‘ are below standards, we see a dangerous escalation. So in this we see a mention of 224,000 houses where the most dangerous safety hazards (category one) is seen. It includes “exposed wiring, overloaded electricity sockets, dangerous boilers, leaking roofs, vermin infestations or inadequate security“, yes, the right and proper place to get your partner pregnant and start a family, would you not agree?

Even as we now see that the Grenfell disaster is a first step in looking into cladding, they all seem to forget that the cladding was done to appease the houses around Grenfell, in addition, the other failures and dangers are basically the non-cladding issues, so the mess is a lot bigger. when we consider the quote “Local authorities have a legal duty to act if a category one hazard is discovered, but hundreds of thousands are going unreported or ignored” we see a much clearer situation where government and city council members could be held accountable towards the transgression of ‘reckless endangerment‘ of lives, so in all this, what is the CPS doing? Has the Crown Prosecution Services made any start on taking a look at this, because these 244,000 houses would in theory represent 300,000 people working to some degree for the London Infrastructure, being it the underground, busses or other civil offices, if even 10% falls away, what happens then? How much pressure, increased costs and non-functional infrastructure remains for London at that point? It seems that the City of London has no way of dealing with such dangerous terms. As I see it, Lord Mayor Sadiq Khan has his work cut out for him. We should all agree that he did not cause this, but he can equally agree that it is on his plate at present and his success will be weighed against his ability to lower that danger and remove the hazards within his largely leased London city.

So as we look at the wealth boom, how exactly is it benefiting the UK and specifically London? As London becomes less and less affordable, as its ‘status’ as premium investment location continues, we might soon see a London that even the tourists can no longer afford. This is not a danger at present with the dropping pound against the Euro, so London is a great place to visit for Europeans. Yet the reality is that this benefit is merely short term, the dangers as the UK turns its economy around, which they will for certain, gives dangers that the dangers I predict are merely 5 years away. When that happens the tourism part will drop, not by a small part, but by a phenomenal amount (In my speculative view well over 20%), so whoever is investing now needs to get that part back in 4 years, they might be facing deadly competition for the few remaining tourists after that. The Time in 2015 talked about the tourism bubble and set it to greed, I think that it is not merely greed; in all this the infrastructure that is dangerously close to a collapse would be a much larger contributing item in all this. So as we see that the infrastructure is in a dangerous place, we need to wonder how the UK government will be addressing this. It is not like it is not a clearly visible issue. It is merely one of several critical issues that the UK faces. Yet in this, the housing part is also the contributing factor for other sides of infrastructure as well. We saw 3 weeks ago that the NHS has 86,000 posts vacant. Not only can they not be filled, even if there was a person available, the reality is that for nurses life in London has become largely unaffordable, which hits social housing as well as infrastructure, a clear visible item known for the better part of 3 years. As a conservative I would be willing to blame my political party, yet the BBC chart clearly shows that as the conservatives came back into office the social housing curve was moving back up (to the smallest degree). Now, there is part that was done by the previous labour government, but only to an even smaller degree. In this I will end with an article that the Business insider has in 2015, in it we see the minimum income per area, when we take a look is that only the cheapest place was affordable for NHS nurses, 54 miles from the hospital, anything nearer would require double the income they presently have, some places are forever out of their reach. Even whilst I know of some places in Swiss Cottage, Southwark and West Brompton, it is shy of the 86,000 places, it will not even give aid to 1%, or 860 places to live in. So, as some people are shrugging at the £10tn wealth value, or the imaginative issue that the NHS problem will solve itself. We need to realise that a few of these issues were interconnected and have been for many years. In this Labour and Conservatives are both to blame, they achieved nothing in stopping, or decently reducing the danger. So when you look at the Monopoly board consider the 22 places and which of these streets you cannot afford a place to live in. So how was this UK wealth any help in resolving the quality of life for those not in the top 5% wealth part, which amounts 98.85% of the UK population, foreign investors excluded.

Consider that side when the next rent is due, and more important, even as all the papers are shouting about rent drops, in the end, the rental price is merely increasing slower for now. With the rent being on average set to £1,500, the 12 month increase is set between £22 and £35 a month depending on your condition, so when you consider that if these people are lucky, their pay increase ended up being up to £61 a month, we see that the increase only takes care of the rent, it will not hold water to take care of the increased price of groceries or heating, so the outlook for the British tenant will be gloomy this Christmas. And before you start blaming Brexit, it would not have mattered one bit. If anyone tells you different, as I personally see it, they would be lying to you.

The people in Britain are seeing a new Monopoly board. Where you start with £800 and passing start gets you a mere £100, in addition add 15% to every street in the first 5 turns and add another 15% for the rest of the game. The final changes are 40% more due for any station and set utilities to 15 times rolled, regardless if it is one or both owned. Now we get a slightly more realistic version of the game as we live it today, so how far would you get in that version of the game? I might want to add that we would need to add 4 pubs, one for each side and treat them like the stations, yet the amount due is 10 times the rolled dice. It seems that our childhood monopoly is the one we still think we live at times, even as we never had any ambitions to own hotels, we always expected to get one house in one street sometimes in our lives; the reality is that this is no longer an expected reality. The reality is now that whomever owns and keeps a place, leaving that to the children is the only guarantee that they have any future at all in the UK, a reality that was not due to Brexit, but due to a government having other commitments, one that was to spending too much whilst not having any backup in place, it is the reality all in the UK face until well over 2040. I still believe that the conservative path to diminish the debt is the only way out and when we consider the news about the £40 billion divorce bill, that is not too weird, because at present Mario Draghi is spending 150% of that every month and getting out now seems to be a lot safer than being around when that collapses, or is that explodes into the faces of EU citizens? Most disagree with me on that, loads of them with economic degrees and that is fine. As I see it, the people all over are in denial of previous debts made and seem to imply that it is not for them to solve, so at your banks when you borrow £2500 every month to pay for things like rent, do you think that you will not have to pay any of it back? Do you think that financial institutions are that philanthropically minded? So as City AM announced on July 17^th “Eurozone inflation fell in June, the European Commission today confirmed, easing pressure on the European Central Bank (ECB) to start tightening monetary policy at its next announcement on Thursday”, yet a week later we see “Draghi struck a dovish tone at the meeting in Frankfurt, with no firm date given to an announcement on the future of the quantitative easing programme, but investors were not convinced”, which we got on Friday July 21^st. So as the spenders are all in denial on several levels, we see that their impact could be a disaster for London when that hits, I have stated in personal belief that getting out of that mess sooner would be essential for the UK. A mere week ago we saw (at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-03/big-investors-losing-faith-in-europe-s-ecb-fuelled-junk-rally). Now we see the first mention, not of QE, but the mentioning of ‘ECB-Fuelled Junk Rally’, Bloomberg is now speaking almost the same parts that I have advocated against for many months. With the quote “Deutsche Asset Management has reduced holdings of European junk bonds in its 100 billion euro ($106 billion) multi-asset portfolios and JPMorgan Asset Management says investors should brace for a tough second half. BlackRock Inc. says risks for European credit are tilted to the downside and Nataxis SA recommends dialing back high-yield debt exposure” the large players seem to accept (read: come to the conclusion) the dangers I warned for, for many months, this is a dangers that Brexit should avoid. So, as some players are trying to delay it all, so that the UK gets part of that additional 2 trillion (as I see it).

These matters are connected, you see, when those players try to escape the sewers they will seek other parts that give rise to returns on investment that avoids their downfall, this is where the Monopoly game comes in. Because the reality is that this mentioned UK wealth of £10tn could be the escape hatch they need, yet in that the dangers to the infrastructure would only increase, I might be wrong in that view, yet it is merely my view. So feel free to disagree, providing you do not cry when I am proven correct yet again.

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Tagged as BBC, bloomberg, Brexit, City AM, CPS, Crown Prosecuting Services, Cumbria, Deutsche Asset Management, ECB, European Central Bank, Grenfell, housing, Jeremy Corbyn, JPMorgan Asset Management, Lloyds, Lloyds Banking Group, Lord Mayor Sadiq Khan, Margaret Thatcher, Mario Draghi, Monopoly, Nataxis SA, Natixis SA, NHS, Parker brothers, reuters, Sadiq Khan, social housing london, Southwark, Swiss Cottage, the Guardian, The Times, UK, UK Immigration, UK Wealth, West Brompton

August 7, 2017 · 15:30

A legislative system shock

Today the Guardian brings us the news regarding the new legislation on personal data. The interesting starts with the image of Google and not Microsoft, which is a first item in all this. I will get back to this. The info we get with ‘New legislation will give people right to force online traders and social media to delete personal data and will comply with EU data protection‘ is actually something of a joke, but I will get back to that too. You see, the quote it is the caption with the image that should have been at the top of all this. With “New legislation will be even tougher than the ‘right to be forgotten’ allowing people to ask search engines to take down links to news items about their lives“, we get to ask the question who the protection is actually for?

the newspapers gives us this: “However, the measures appear to have been toughened since then, as the legislation will give people the right to have all their personal data deleted by companies, not just social media content relating to the time before they turned 18“, yet the reality is that this merely enables new facilitation for data providers to have a backup in a third party sense of data. As I personally see it, the people in all this will merely be chasing a phantom wave.

We see the self-assured Matt Hancock standing there in the image and in all this; I see no reason to claim that these laws will be the most robust set of data laws at all. They might be more pronounced, yet in all this, I question how facilitation is dealt with. With “Elizabeth Denham, the information commissioner, said data handlers would be made more accountable for the data “with the priority on personal privacy rights” under the new laws“, you see the viewer will always respond in the aftermath, meaning that the data is already created.

We can laugh at the statement “The definition of “personal data” will also be expanded to include IP addresses, internet cookies and DNA, while there will also be new criminal offences to stop companies intentionally or recklessly allowing people to be identified from anonymous personal data“, it is laughable because it merely opens up venues for data farms in the US and Asia, whilst diminishing the value of UK and European data farms. The mention of ‘include IP addresses‘ is funny as the bulk of the people on the internet are all on dynamic IP addresses. It is a protection for large corporations that are on static addresses. the mention of ‘stop companies intentionally or recklessly allowing people to be identified from anonymous personal data‘ is an issue as intent must be shown and proven, recklessly is something that needs to be proven as well and not on the balance of it, but beyond all reasonable doubt, so good luck with that idea!

As I read “The main aim of the legislation will be to ensure that data can continue to flow freely between the UK and EU countries after Brexit, when Britain will be classed as a third-party country. Under the EU’s data protection framework, personal data can only be transferred to a third country where an adequate level of protection is guaranteed“, is this another twist in anti-Brexit? You see none of this shows a clear ‘adequate level of protection‘, which tends to stem from technology, not from legislation, the fact that all this legislation is all about ‘after the event‘ gives rise to all this. So as I see it, the gem is at the end, when we see “the EU committee of the House of Lords has warned that there will need to be transitional arrangements covering personal information to secure uninterrupted flows of data“, it makes me wonder what those ‘actual transitional arrangements‘ are and how come that the new legislation is covering policy on this.

You see, to dig a little deeper we need to look at Nielsen. There was an article last year (at http://www.nielsen.com/au/en/insights/news/2016/uncommon-sense-the-big-data-warehouse.html), here we see: “just as it reached maturity, the enterprise data warehouse died, laid low by a combination of big data and the cloud“, you might not realise this, but it is actually a little more important than most realise. It is partially seen in the statement “Enterprise decision-making is increasingly reliant on data from outside the enterprise: both from traditional partners and “born in the cloud” companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as brokers of cloud-hosted utility datasets, such as weather and econometrics. Meanwhile, businesses are migrating their own internal systems and data to cloud services“.

You see, the actual dangers in all that personal data, is not the ‘privacy’ part, it is the utilities in our daily lives that are under attack. Insurances, health protection, they are all set to premiums and econometrics. These data farms are all about finding the right margins and the more they know, the less you get to work with and they (read: their data) will happily move to where ever the cloud takes them. In all this, the strong legislation merely transports data. You see the cloud has transformed data in one other way, the part Cisco could not cover. The cloud has the ability to move and work with ‘data in motion’; a concept that legislation has no way of coping with. The power (read: 8 figure value of a data utility) is about being able to do that and the parties needing that data and personalised are willing to pay through the nose for it, it is the holy grail of any secure cloud environment. I was actually relieved that it was not merely me looking at that part; another blog (at https://digitalguardian.com/blog/data-protection-data-in-transit-vs-data-at-rest) gives us the story from Nate Lord. He gives us a few definitions that are really nice to read, yet the part that he did not touch on to the degree I hoped for is that the new grail, the analyses of data in transit (read: in motion) is cutting edge application, it is what the pentagon wants, it is what the industry wants and it is what the facilitators want. It is a different approach to real time analyses, and with analyses in transit those people get an edge, an edge we all want.

Let’s give you another clear example that shows the value (and the futility of legislation). Traders get profit by being the first, which is the start of real wealth. So whoever has the fastest connection is the one getting the cream of the trade, which is why trade houses pay millions upon millions to get the best of the best. The difference between 5ms and 3ms results in billions of profit. Everyone in that industry knows that. So every firm has a Bloomberg terminal (at $27,000 per terminal), now consider the option that they could get you that data a millisecond faster and the automated scripts could therefor beat the wave of sales, giving them a much better price, how much are they willing to pay suddenly? This is a different level of armistice, it is weaponised data. The issue is not merely the speed; it is the cutting edge of being able to do it at all.

So how does this relate?

I am taking you back to the quote “it would amount to a “right to be forgotten” by companies, which will no longer be able to get limitless use of people’s data simply through default “tick boxes” online” as well as “the legislation will give people the right to have all their personal data deleted by companies“. The issue here is not to be forgotten, or to be deleted. It is about the data not being stored and data in motion is not stored, which now shows the futility of the legislation to some extent. You might think that this is BS, consider the quote by IBM (at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/5things/entry/5_things_to_know_about_big_data_in_motion?lang=en), it comes from 2013, IBM was already looking at matters in different areas close to 5 years ago, as were all the large players like Google and Microsoft. With: “data in motion is the process of analysing data on the fly without storing it. Some big data sources feed data unceasingly in real time. Systems to analyse this data include IBM Streams “, here we get part of it. Now consider: “IBM Streams is installed on nearly every continent in the world. Here are just a few of the locations of IBM Streams, and more are being added each year“. In 2010 there were 90 streams on 6 continents, and IBM stream is not the only solution. As you read that IBM article, you also read that Real-time Analytic Processing (RTAP) is a real thing, it already was then and the legislation that we now read about does not take care of this form of data processing, what the legislation does in my view is not give you any protection, it merely limits the players in the field. It only lets the really big boys play with your details. So when you see the reference to the Bloomberg terminal, do you actually think that you are not part in the data, or ever forgotten? EVERY large newspaper and news outlet would be willing to pay well over $127,000 a year to get that data on their monitors. Let’s call them Reuter Analytic Systems (read: my speculated name for it), which gets them a true representation of all personalised analytical and reportable data in motion. So when they type the name they need, they will get every detail. In this, the events that were given 3 weeks ago with the ITPRO side (at http://www.itpro.co.uk/strategy/29082/ecj-may-extend-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling-outside-the-eu) sounds nice, yet the quote “Now, as reported by the Guardian, the ECJ will be asked to be more specific with its initial ruling and state whether sites have to delete links only in the country that requests it, or whether it’s in the EU or globally” sounds like it is the real deal, yet this is about data in rest, the links are all at rest, so the data itself will remain and as soon as HTML6 comes we might see the beginning of the change. There have been requests on that with “This is the single-page app web design pattern. Everyone’s into it because the responsiveness is so much better than loading a full page – 10-50ms with a clean API load vs. 300-1500ms for a full HTML page load. My goal would be a high-speed responsive web experience without having to load JavaScript“, as well as “having the browser internally load the data into a new data structure, and the browser then replaces DOM elements with whatever data that was loaded as needed“, it is not mere speed, it would allow for dynamic data (data in motion) to be shown. So when I read ‘UK citizens to get more rights over personal data under new laws‘, I just laughed. The article is 15 hours old and I considered instantly the issues I shown you today. I will have to wait until the legislation is released, yet I am willing to bet a quality bottle of XO Cognac that data in motion is not part of this, better stated, it will be about stored data. All this whilst the new data norm is still shifting and with G5 mobile technologies, stored data might actually phase out to be a much smaller dimension of data. The larger players knew this and have been preparing for this for several years now. This is also an initial new need for the AI that Google wants desperately, because such a system could ascertain and give weight to all data in motion, something IBM is currently not able to do to the extent they need to.

The system is about to get shocked into a largely new format, that has always been the case with evolution. It is just that actual data evolution is a rare thing. It merely shows to me how much legislation is behind on all this, perhaps I will be proven wrong after the summer recess. It would be a really interesting surprise if that were the case, but I doubt that will happen. You can see (read about that) for yourself after the recess.

I will follow up on this, whether I was right or wrong!

I’ll let you speculate which of the two I am, as history has proven me right on technology matters every single time (a small final statement to boost my own ego).

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Tagged as AI, Alphabet, Asia, Cisco, Data, Data in motion, data in transit, Data warehouse, datafarms, google, IBM, ITPRO, Microsoft, Nate Lord, Nielsen, reuters, the Guardian, USA

August 4, 2017 · 12:16

Mouseketeers are Go(ne)!

Yes, we are today looking at the four small people who seemingly form the three musketeers thunderbirds style. The article (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/03/four-men-given-life-sentences-for-plotting-lee-rigby-style-terrorist-attack) gives us a few items and it is interesting how the article does not mention certain items. They are Tahir Aziz, 38, Naweed Ali, 29, Mohibur Rahman, 33, and Khobaib Hussain, 25. Yet, ever as we see that they are from ‘the Midlands‘, yet we see no mention of any nationality. Is that not an interesting oversight? We see that two have met with Anjem Choudary, who is all about serving the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Yet here the Guardian remains down to the ground with a mere mention of Islamic State. The Daily Mail and the Stoke Sentinel are even less useful with their mention of ‘bought £20 samurai sword from Hanley sex shop‘, for the record, a samurai sword cannot be bought for £20 and the fact that a sex shop sold it is even more irrelevant. Here we ‘suddenly’ see ‘details’. The massive lack of facts is upsetting to me. The media is slowly becoming an increasing joke; in this even the Guardian needs to get scolded here! It is interesting as it was in equal measure that the opinion piece in the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/07/anjem-choudary-hate-media-al-muhajiroun-london-bridge-terror-attack) gave voice to the issues with this certain social activist. It is the subtitle that gave us ‘Long before the attention-seeking al-Muhajiroun leader was linked to the London Bridge attack, Muslims despaired at the platform he was given‘. It is the start of the article that gives the goods that is one of many articles that tend to give the Guardian its value. With: “He wasn’t the infamous preacher of hate the media wanted him to be. He was a scrappy street agitator. Or, he was, until he got his big break“, we see that many see the difference, of what is truly an activist and what is merely a shouting bag of hot air. So as we see the four names with no nationality information, we see not merely the first issue, we see a collected set of facts not given to us, which in light of escalations in the middle east is important. For days we get the he said in Qatar versus they said in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt. These four might not even be any of those, they might be of Iranian or Pakistani origin, it is so interesting how the press suddenly forgot the catchphrase on people and the right to know. So even as “The UK Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, the Daily Star and the Mail Online, tabloids prone to fits of sexism with some regularity. They all ran stills of Whittaker either naked or topless in earlier roles“, we see that according to what some laughingly refer to a journalistic integrity seem to regard the breasts of Dr. Jodie Who as ‘important facts‘ yet the full nationality (or nationalities) of the 4 with serious intent to blow people up, that part is not a given need, how revolting is that?

With the BBC giving us at least “They had attempted to join an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan in 2011“, we might imply (speculative) that they were Pakistani. Yet are they merely Pakistani with UK residency, or with Citizenship. These details matter! They matter because it gives light towards and weight into the issues of home grown terrorism. With their not so bright approaches we might not see them as actual dangers as assumed to be Lone wolf terrorists, but with the fact that plans were underway, there is a clear case. It is nice to see that MI5 was on the ball and prevented it all (which is always good to read), yet the issue remains that certain ‘unknowns’ should never be so. As for the upcoming political excuse that they might have been trying to protect ‘innocent Pakistani’s’ is not entirely invalid, but the people need to know where the dangers are coming from. Now in the end, there is not a lot that the people could have done, yet when we watch the news and we are confronted with the nations banned by the Trump administration, and in succession, when we learn that the many terrorists who made it to their intended nations of target are not from those nations at all. Pakistan was not on that list, was it? Neither is Egypt who still has their fair share of Muslim Brotherhood extremists and in equal measure the few people in Jordan who are now starting to embrace Islamic State? They have options to move to America, not getting banned at all. All this we see and none of it makes the news. I know it is important to see that the bulk of Pakistani’s are not extremists or have terrorist tendency. The issue is that the press is keeping us in the dark too often and they are losing both integrity and are no longer regarded as reliable when it comes to the news. In all this the politicians have their part to play as well and are directly responsible for some of it. If they had the balls to actually stop the tabloid from being GST exempt because they should not be regarded as ‘newspapers’ we might have seen an increase of reported quality of events and as such would have had a dampening effect on the levels of fake news and innuendo in their version of reported events (the version the tabloids give us).

The media has let the people down on a global scale and that has to stop!

At present several media sites are giving us more and more information on the fact that Islamic State is now trying to increase pressures by attacking the Iraqi borders with both Syria and Jordan, meaning that we all have additional responsibilities. As Jordan was one of the first and in addition has grown into one of the largest support pillars for Syrian refugees, we can no longer sit idle. According to the United Nations, the total number of Syrian refugees in Jordan has surpassed 5 million. The immediate danger is not merely disease, hunger and lack of basic needs to survive; it is the dangers that those joining Islamic State for merely a meal could topple the Jordan government in several ways. The moment that this happens Islamic State will be at the borders of both Israel and Egypt, whilst Israel will be required to send part of its army to the farthest region of Israel to protect Eilat, which would also place two basis of the MFO in direct danger. The Italian contingent who patrols the waters there could become a target as well as SCC4 a mere 8Km from Eilat could be changed into an Islamic State staging post, one that has a large radio at its disposal, so there are certain dangers to be reconsidered as I personally see it.

How realistic is all this?

That is the issue with the speculation I bring. As the news of Islamic State gaining strength in Jordan grows, that threat would be very realistic. So the direct need for the UN to step in and set a lot of goods to these refugees becomes increasingly immediate. In addition, the Jordanians have been under increased pressure to deal with the refugees (feeding them mostly), as well as the impact on their own storage of mainly water. It is high summer there now and water has always been scarce in Jordan. It is driving local tension up by a lot. Now, for those not in the know (a perfect valid situation) water was always a scarce item in Jordan, so the opening of the first desalinisation plant in Aqaba was a relief for the Jordanians, especially as the Jordanian population was set at 9.5 million, now add 50% to that population (the refugees) and you’ll see that water shortage becomes an almost immediate issue in Jordan. The UN has been trying to assign $4.6 billion for support to Jordan in January this year, that whilst some parties know that it is a mere 70% of what they need. In the end, I am not sure how much has been achieved, yet as the news made no report of any success, we can assume that to some extent there has been no success for now and to the larger extent, we see that there has been no achievements at all, which is an immediate issue. So it is not the worst idea to send 250 containers and fill them to the brink with C-rations. Now we have all heard the news on that history and I actually lived on those C-Rations for a few days (I enjoyed them). The issue is that there is no food (read: actually there is a large shortage); there is real hunger, so I would think that sending food that will not go bad immediately would be at least a first step to lower tensions to some degree. Now, I agree we can all do better, but at present NOTHING is achieved and instead of having the conversation again and again is merely a joke, something needs to be sent, it needs to be done now. In addition, getting 50 bladder tanks with water over there whilst we seek longer term solutions is also a requirement. All these actions show the refugees that even if not perfect, things are getting done (to some effect), which leaves the people with hope and that diffuses the Islamic State recruitment drive, which is what this was about. So as we see that the NY Times is stating that Climate change and the Islamic State are the greatest threats, one of them can actually be dealt with to some extent in the short term, so in this I now claim that I made an initial step to solve 50% of the World’s Largest Threats. I also designed the concept of a new video game, but that seems a little over the top after solving a threat the world apparently fears.

So even as the India West reported 2 weeks ago “Shivam Patel, a Hindu sympathizer of the Islamic State, has been arrested on charges of making false statements on his application to join the U.S. military. The Indian American told FBI undercover agents he wanted to do “something bigger, better, and more purposeful,” including “dying in the cause of Allah” to support the terrorist organization“, I found a simple way to deprive Islamic State from gaining a thousand of more recruits. In finality to get it actually done, some governments need to actually act on certain needs!

All this by being direct, outspoken and precise, all things that the articles regarding the 4 arrested terrorists is not being done by the media. As we see the list of newspapers grow whilst they all merely mention things like ‘UK Court Sentences 4 Men to Life Imprisonment Over Preparing Terror Attack‘, in one case I see “plotting “Lee Rigby-style” attack on police or military, referring to the murder of a UK fusilier, who was stabbed to death in London by two Islamist terrorists of Nigerian descent in 2013“, we see no such descent on the 4 perpetrators. Is that not a nice oversight, the fact that they ALL did it, whilst the verdict has been given, and the rest of their details are missing is a larger matter of concern.

You see, it is not merely about the ‘musketeers’ in all this. Like common cyber sense, people need to start evolving observational skills. You see, the need here is actually a double edged sword in more ways than one. For this I need to quote from the Israel Institute of Technology. With the course sharpening observation skills we see “Skill at discovering new ideas, and delivering them, may be one of the most important practical job skills, in today’s and tomorrow’s job market. Creativity is an acquired skill, one that improves with practice. This course aims to empower individuals who believe they have lost their innate creativity, because they, their employers or teachers prefer the three R’s: replication, repetition and rote, to innovation” we see that there is a need to become more creative all over the UK, whilst the skills would also be the way where we start noticing the things around us that do not make sense. The UK government is relying on https://www.gov.uk/terrorism-national-emergency/reporting-suspected-terrorism to get there, but there is a larger flaw in the path currently in place. Too often the people are not aware because they were kept in the dark. Now, this path will means that it comes with leagues of incorrect reports, but in equality reports would be coming from places that were previously not flagged by the Police and/or MI5. As I see it there is a growing need that students as early as Year 12 where they start to be taught the observational skills that could lead to unforeseen innovation, it is the one need the UK has an actual dire shortage of. I have always and will always believe that the true innovator is merely around the corner as he/she did not consider something. When we see people like Jack Ma, David H. Murdock and Richard Branson, none of them ended up with any A-levels, but they had an idea, they noticed a need and as such they got cracking and are now on top of the world. These are three extreme, there are thousands more who got to a much higher point than most of us (including surpassing me) because they were observant to the need of those around themselves. It is this skill that is actually not taught at all (or at times incorrectly), often because it is not a business subject, yet the art of observing is in the foundation of resolving issues on EVERY level. It is a skill that should be harnessed for the upcoming generations, because it is the first one that gets the bacon and the niche market. It is that growth that we need and as such, it is equally a skill that helps prevent the larger harm to others becoming a success by all the unknown upcoming musketeers that are currently still at large.

I would offer as a thought that if the data offered by the news and other sources can no longer be regarded as reliable; we will need to learn to find the truth, the data and the insight ourselves. This thought is merely a thought, yet it needs to be taken a lot more serious than you think. In finality that evidence is seen through the Bloomberg article (at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-25/u-k-s-terror-insurer-says-new-threats-create-gaps-in-coverage), you see, as I see it, the foundation of a stable life is becoming more expensive. With ‘U.K. Insurers Told to Adapt to Lone-Wolf Terrorism‘ we see “the view of Julian Enoizi of Pool Reinsurance Co., the U.K. government-linked body that backstops insurers against terror-related payouts. The spate of recent attacks in the nation’s capital and the suicide bombing of a Manchester pop concert in May highlighted shortcomings in coverage that need to be addressed, he said” it partially makes sense, yet I remember that in my policy there is no payout due to damage from unlawful combatants (or a nuclear explosion for that matter). The quote “Broadening cover would mean higher reinsurance premiums for Pool Re’s members, which include the local units of every major non-life insurer from Allianz SE and Aviva Plc to Zurich Insurance Group AG” gives rise to issues like premium rises, because as there would be payouts to lost earnings whilst there is no damage is one that insurance companies are dealing with and in fairness it has in impact on them. So as we see that insurances are evolving, e ourselves need to bolster new skills, not in the least to alert the right parties to take action and prevent serious losses to ourselves. Is that not fair too? You see let others solve it all is fine, yet if you remains ignorant to the largest degree is your anticipation of safety through ignorance valid? It might have been in 1969 where the greatest danger for a man in a park was a confrontation with a woman seeking love and sexual satisfaction whilst sharing a joint, those days of innocence are definitely gone, yet to us, we have not been asked and educated to step up to the plate. Many merely limited to be trained for a workforce of deadlines and the facilitation of greed. Now we see that the removal of creativity and the contemplation on the paths of innovation come with a much larger deficit. We can no longer meet the changed need and we move into the blame game. We see people blaming the police, because it happened, they blame MI5 because there were signals, whilst the people tend to ignore the optional part whether Jeremy Corbyn could be a larger threat to the UK than Salman Abedi was. In the end, it will be for others to decide. Yet if the people had better observational skills, is there a decent chance that the police would have been better alerted to the danger that Salman Abedi became? If the UK is valued at 68 million people, should the thwarted danger be merely dependent on 127,000 police officers and the 4,000 members of MI5? Or is the increasing need of properly informing the 68 million people and teaching them how to spot danger a much better solution as the years pass us by? If the world becomes more and more polarised in the application of terror and mass casualty methodology, is depriving options not a much better solution? Consider the simplicity of fighting fire. You do that by removing the fuel (flammable objects), depriving growth by not allowing it to breathe freely (replace oxygen with CO2) or covering the danger (powder extinguisher), lowering temperature is also an option (drowning with water). There are plenty of options yet it requires a clear mind and a trained mind to act. As we get Jordan the water it desperately needs we lower the temperature and the stresses that come with it, as we make sure there is food, the flames of hunger remain absent and as we are trained to spot things we allow for the actions to come earlier and prevent the damage to us and what is ours (generically speaking). Yet trained to spot things is also at times dependant on getting all the information and getting properly informed, so now consider the newspaper title I mentioned earlier. The mention of ‘bought £20 samurai sword from Hanley sex shop‘, has a few more implications. When you consider the BBC (at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7331099.stm), the press did not inform us that any people from the shop were arrested, especially in light of “Legislation against selling, making, hiring or importing samurai swords in England and Wales has come into force. Those breaking the law face six months in jail and a £5,000 fine“, so as we assume that the sex shop did not have a receipt informing us that they sold Tahir Aziz a 24 inch Japanese steel dildo, can we assume more arrests will be made in the very near future?

I am merely posing this question for your consideration, have a great weekend all!

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Tagged as al-Muhajiroun, Allianz SE, Anjem Choudary, Aqaba, Aviva Plc, Bahrain and Egypt, BBC, David H. Murdock, Eilat, Hanley sex shop, Iraq, IS, Islamic State, Islamic State of Iraq, Israel, Israel Institute of Technology, Italy, Jack Ma, Jordan, Julian Enoizi, Khobaib Hussain, Lee Rigby, London Bridge attack, Mail Online, MFO, MI5, Mohibur Rahman, Muslim Brotherhood, Naweed Ali, NY Times, Pakistan, Pool Reinsurance Co., Qatar, refugees, Richard Branson, Salman Abedi, Saudi Arabia, Shivam Patel, Stoke Sentinel, Syria, Tahir Aziz, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the daily Mirror, the Daily Star, the Guardian, the UAE, The UK Sun, Trump administration, UK Metropolitanpolice, UN, United Nations, Zurich Insurance Group AG

August 2, 2017 · 12:13

A big tree in the desert

It started a little while ago, 4 nations got angry at Qatar, I wrote about it earlier. There were issues on both sides and there were intelligence considerations as well. In this Germany intelligence decided to shed light on the matter by investigating certain sources. A path I reckon that until now has not been too successful. A path that was equally a given not to be too successful, yet what was not expected was the issue shown a few days later when on July 16^th The Washington Post (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/uae-hacked-qatari-government-sites-sparking-regional-upheaval-according-to-us-intelligence-officials/2017/07/16/00c46e54-698f-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html), the issue shown with “The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials“, in addition there is “In a statement released in Washington by its ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE said the Post article was “false.”“, which is to be expected. Finally we get “Qatar has repeatedly charged that its sites were hacked, but it has not released the results of its investigation. Intelligence officials said their working theory since the Qatar hacks has been that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt or some combination of those countries were involved. It remains unclear whether the others also participated in the plan“, which is an equal truth. In addition, we need to realise that this is not some fake news site, this is the Washington Post, America’s answer to The Times, and its high ethics in journalism have been established for the longest of times, so when we see a mere 2 hours ago (at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/qatar-diplomatic-crisis-latest-updates-170605105550769.html) the update “Foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt say they are ready for dialogue with Qatar if it shows willingness to fight ‘terrorism’” a quote given after we see the headline ‘The latest news after some of the Gulf states and Egypt cut ties with Qatar and imposed a land, sea and air blockade‘, yet in light of the found hack(s), how valid are these blockades? In addition we see in regarding the Hajj pilgrimage that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are in a he said versus he said situation, a side we would not have expected from these two evolved nations. There is a larger drawback in all this, as Turkey is trying to ‘ingratiate’ their own agenda, they are now becoming a stronger middleman for anything Iran has in mind, whilst not being connected to the action and in addition to that, the pressures at present are also enabling abilities in Palestine. There is no clear intelligence that is in the open that should be regarded as reliable, yet the ‘watercooler chats‘ seem to imply that calls between the PSS and Hezbollah wave allegedly been happening with some ‘regularity’ in the last 4 weeks, if that is so, than additional pressures on Israel cannot be far away.

Back to Qatar, the latest news gives that according to Rex Tillerson, the US Secretary of State that Qatar has met with the commitments that they were promising, there is a given that when Saudi Arabia, in conjunction with three allies that are not the smallest, any nation under pressure would be willing to comply with any reasonable demand that does not impede national pride to get in the way. Yet, what has the opposition offered at present? In my view the German promise seems unlikely to result to be any form of a working tactic to get some kind of resolution in play. You see, if there was any actual support being given, it would not be registered. I hope that the Americans learned that part when they found Osama Bin Laden a mere one mile from an elite Pakistani military academy. In my view there is no way that those involved with the security there had no knowledge of EVERY building within two miles of the academy. In that same air, you might think that Qatar is aware of any terrorist involvement, that is not the case, but there is ample proof on a few levels that it is utterly impossible that no one knew. The issue becomes how high does it go?

In that same light we need to look at another source. In this case I am looking at a piece by Sami Moubayed. The title ‘Qatar PR blitz is fooling no one‘ (at http://gulfnews.com/opinion/thinkers/qatar-pr-blitz-is-fooling-no-one-1.2067427) is not the part that matters. We might wonder why he focusses on the amounts like $150,000 a month for ‘research, government relations, and strategic consulting services‘, which might also include ‘communications with members of Congress and Congressional staff, executive branch officials, the media, and other individuals‘, the second cost at $2.5 million for former US Attorney General John Ashcroft who would be auditing Qatari efforts at halting terrorism funding. It is interesting how he is going to achieve that as the scope of monitoring and verification is close to impossible when we consider the rogue spears we have seen in Iran in the past, a mere general was able to give the largest level of materials and support towards the enemies of Israel. In this I saw that over that they missed out on options to increase visibility of close to 75% for a mere $10,000 a month (excluding my commission mind you), in light of the mentioned $138,000 not the greatest expense. Yet the important truth is given soon thereafter in “This is where the problem started and where serious work needs to be done to rebrand the country’s political orientation. No PR firm can do the job — it can be done by one person only, being Shaikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani“, which is only partially true. They still need a facilitator to give a wider voice, or better spoken a channel to transfer the words of Shaikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani to a much wider audience.

Sami is right when he states “Only he has the power to change his country’s image in the eyes of its neighbours“, and in this I am not even mentioning his valid reason of “All Qatar needs to do is walk away from Hamas and Yousuf Al Qaradawi“, which would have been a good idea any day of the week. Qatar has a few more options, options that they did not even realise that they had. There is a case to be made to revamp Al Jazeera TV’s editorial policy. Yet as it is speaking to the hearts and minds of Muslims (to a larger extent), I would not be able to give proper advice in that place, what does matter is that non-Muslims know what Al-Jazeera is, yet in reality those people do not know what EXACTLY Al-Jazeera is and that could be a small task, easier rectified and it starts on their own website. Not the flaccid minute under the heading of ‘about us‘. That current part of 200 words with the ‘Who we are‘ is so minute, so none telling that is overlooked with the mere blink of an eye. The words there “Launched in 1996, Al Jazeera Arabic was the first independent news channel in the Arab world dedicated to providing comprehensive news and live debate“, is laughter incarnate in my personal opinion! I am willing to bet a building on the fact that their 1996 was a challenge worthy of a small novel to say the least, so why not properly introduce Al-Jazeera to Muslims and non-Muslims alike? If Al-Jazeera is truly in 100 countries, the cheapest of solutions (read: SAP Dashboard) could add visibility to what is being offered, the network could grow through offering visibility using a mere BI consultant, which in all likelihood is already walking around in at least one of their 100 offices. In similar visibility they are presently (as their website indicates) not in France or the Netherlands, and perhaps at least in one office in one of the Scandinavian countries with the ability to offer local language support to thousands of Muslims. To the extent that this is PR that is massively cheaper than some PR offices offer and that is something Qatar would have in their own hands, working a social network with localisation. Interesting that that was not mentioned anywhere.

My ideas are directly reflective of the words of Sami Moubayed as he states “Somebody needs to whisper in the ear of the emir — and senior management at Al Jazeera — that they need to do a better job to polish their image; rather than spend millions on agencies in London and Washington, it’s far more urgent — and less costly — to do the job at home“, yet he does it in absence of directness or direct ideas on how to do it. I reckon that is fair enough, the man is a historian; he mostly lives in the past, not in the tomorrow. That is not an accusation; it is merely a factual realisation.

In this, the strongest point he makes is seen with “After a wave of agony swept the Arab World since 2011, this doesn’t sell any longer throughout the region. In fact, it sounds and reads as cheap, cliché, and very outdated“, this is exactly why the entire dashboard is such a step forward, I noticed a few more issues. There would be a fair debate whether this is laziness, or mere editorial policy. A case could be made for either side, yet the issue remains.

As we say goodbye to the Al-Jazeera side, we need to embrace one more part in the article by Sami. When we revisit the title ‘Qatar PR blitz is fooling no one‘, I will argue that there is no fooling going on, the article reads nice, but it is not an ‘or’ situation, Qatar is in a ‘and’ situation, where they need to visit issues on inclusion and finding more options to visit, not choosing from some selection and there is a need to be clever about it because the cost and effect of $150,000 a month needs to be examined as how it was spend and what was gained. The question on rebranding politics is also up for grabs, is it about branding or making sure that the visibility is correctly vetted? These elements are not the same and the cause and effect here is also implicitly seen as we see the reactions from the 4 neighbours currently not happy with Qatar. In this, there is an additional part for me set in the issues from Saudi Arabia. I have not read the original reports (and my knowledge of the Arabian language can be rounded upwards towards 0%), yet the press on a near global scale have never given proper item by item view of all the elements, more important towards the evidence as the other 3 (minus the hacking UAE) have offered them with shown source intelligence. It would be so embarrassing if the other three plaintiffs are all depending on one and the same source (an unknown part and speculative from my side). I believe that open clear communication is a first step to resolve it. the fact that my glasses got initially tainted because Al-Jazeera was kind enough to start that day with voicing anti-Semitism through broadcasting sermons by the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, that was not a good day for Al-Jazeera in light of the stresses in Doha that day. This is exactly why reforming, or better stated editing the ‘powers to be’ within Al-Jazeera sooner rather than later.

For me, I have always been a fan of oversimplifying any issue, so when I look at the grievances now in play, if there could be talks and the three nations can name one item that would show the good intentions of Qatar, what would it be and could Qatar comply with these three items? You see, it might sound oversimplified, but the reality is that all large achievements start small, one step at a time. In that way, we are not enabling either Iran or Turkey (there are issues with some of their decisions), there is an open view of the matter at hand and there is movement in a stress reducing direction. If those three items would stop the blockades, there would be a first step in resolution and more important, as I personally see it, the risk of escalation, as two nations miscommunicate between two optional dinghies and send missiles in the wrong direction is definitely a good element to prevent. Consider the implications, if we see the choice from King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. Would the biggest issue of his kingdom be with the dissidents or with the Iranian connections?

I believe that certain actions are becoming increasingly important, not merely because of the pressures and stresses, the short term issue is seen as we read “The boycotting countries have previously told the WTO that they would cite national security to justify their actions against Qatar, using a controversial and almost unprecedented exemption allowed under the WTO rules” (at http://www.trtworld.com/mea/qatar-crisis-latest-developments-413572), the problem here is that if this element is accepted, the WTO is not merely a cannel of facilitation, it would leave Qatar with very little to work with, it would in addition leave Turkey with holding the bag as the shops are showing in big signs ‘From Turkey by air – New products‘, if those remain Turkey itself ends up in deep hot waters with all the repercussions that follow. As my Law classes included all matters Wise, Terrible and Obvious, the words as given in Forbes (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/03/01/trump-admins-yugely-terrible-trade-idea-to-ignore-wto-rulings-america-doesnt-like/#7edfa5103a9f)

With: “Not obeying WTO rules allows countries to close their markets to your exports, it doesn’t force them to open them up“, that would be a stage with issues on several levels we really don’t want to end up at.

This also gets me to the article for another reason. The March 1^st article shows more than you expected. You see with “The Trump administration sent shockwaves through the world of trade yesterday when the Financial Times reported that it was looking for ways to bypass the World Trade Organization, the 22-year-old oversight body that adjudicates trade disputes, and which Trump has called a “disaster.”” we now get a second consideration, is the Trump administration using the Qatar strategy to try to thwart the WTO in another way, trying to take away the equality and fairness that the WTO had in the past to set a different set of rules. Did the White House legal team brief the four non-Qatari minded players to use this to put more pressure on Qatar? It might be a valid tactic, yet the US could have had other reasons for pushing the WTO, the question is whether that is equally in play here, if that is so (speculative from my side) than it is the US that has done more than increase pressures on Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the UAE. It is trying to change the global setting of trade in what I expect to be the most selfish of reasons, under those conditions, we might soon see that being a member of the EU is no longer a benefit, as it would become the anchor holding the other EU nations back in trade, merely for the reason that they cannot simply change trade rules for the EU.

So if Doha means Big Tree, we have to wonder what the board looks like at present, it seems that certain actions have been put into motion to set a season of drought for this big tree. We can argue that they did part of it to themselves, yet when we see that other players have had certain personal needs, who is actually trying to resolve the situation with a total absence of personal selfish needs? As I see it not the PR firms, in equal measure there are certain steps that Al-Jazeera could have put into place months ago, yet that too has not been achieved, so who on the side of Qatar is actually thinking of Qatar? I know it is not Turkey or Iran. I do not know who is, but as we see other sources state that “In a study by David Andrew Weinberg that was published in January by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) titled “Qatar and Terror Finance: Part II: Private Funders of [al-Qaida] in Syria,” he wrote: “Based on these cases, there is no persuasive proof that Qatar has stopped letting certain terror financiers off the hook.”” (source: Jerusalem Post), we see that Qatar needs to start considering what is important to Qatar, because in the end Hamas will not care, they merely continue with their path of hatred against that state of Israel with whatever funds they can lay their fingers on. With all the considerations we would want to give to Qatar, it is the actions of Qatar, shown by too many sources that they themselves are becoming (read: have become) their own worst enemy. The one question that Sami Moubayed leaves us with is any of this done (read: facilitated) with the clear approval of His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar? That is the part that matters the most and that path also shows the path of least resistance in hopefully finding a solution to the matter for all the players involved.

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Tagged as Al Jazeera, Bahrain, David Andrew Weinberg, Doha, Egypt, Emir of the State of Qatar, FDD, Forbes, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Gulf News, Hajj, Hajj pilgramige, Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel, Jerusalem Post, Muslim Brotherhood, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistani military academy, Palestine, PSS, Qatar, Qatar and Terror Finance: Part II: Private Funders of [al-Qaida] in Syria, Rex Tillerson, Sami Moubayed, Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, TRT World, Trump, Turkey, UAE, US Attorney General John Ashcroft, US Secretary of State, World Trade Organization, WTO, Yousef al-Otaiba, Yousuf Al Qaradawi

July 29, 2017 · 14:49

French Grape juice and a shipyard

There are issues stirring in the land of grapes and cheese. In France things are becoming slightly restless. Now, I have had my doubts about Emmanuel Macron for several reasons, but not on this. The Express (at http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/834196/France-Emmanuel-Macron-en-march-crisis-polls-fall-French-president) gives us “Several members of French ruling party En Marche! have accused President Emmanuel Macron and party directors of going against the root values of the movement by trying to change the internal guidelines regulating the candidates’ selection process“, which gives my initial response ‘And?‘, you see, being in a new party, being in front and shouting the loudest does not automatically grant the rights to wield a multibillion wallet for defence or healthcare. In the end, the selected party needs to place the right people in the right places, those with knowledge and the ability to push a nation forward. This would have been the one nightmare for Nigel Farage if he had won the elections the last time around. No matter how we feel about UKIP, it is not really seeded with senior cabinet quality fuel. The same can be stated for En Marche! That view is well phrased in “French politics expert Ariane Bogane from Northumbria University told France 24 that the party had justified its decision to change key elements of the movement, such as internal election, by saying that it was in order to avoid “personal ambition,” “rivalry” and “in-fighting”“. So what is going on, is it merely the infighting, or the disillusion of those who did work hard and expected to become part of the French government? Those bragging on the post they are considered for and having to go home realising that the carefully phrased ‘we are considering‘, becomes, ‘we were forced to find the person with the ability much more suiting the expertise required‘? Politics is all about finding the pushing forward party, within the party it will almost never be about to compromise.

Yet the title gives another image. With ‘‘Oligarchy is coming!’ Macron faces nightmare political CLASHES as he PLUMMETS in polls‘ we are confronted with two part. As the express hid in the dictionary trying to tell us that a small group of people is in control in France is not new. Those who keep their eyes open are aware of that, for example, Natixis is surpassing a trillion euro value before the end of 2018, and its 15 members of the board have a large say for well over 20% of France, which is one hell of an impact. I am not referring that they have something to say, like for example Mark Carney as Governor of the British bank, no these 15 can lay down the law in unspoken ways. Actually, one of them had a (large) setback as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 with “Henri Proglio’s contract as chief executive of Electricité de France SA, sidelining a powerful businessman who has been close to the country’s center-right political camp“, yet there are several indications that this was merely a resignation on political grounds as some equally powerful players got to feel the heat of more than the mere risk of the Hinkley Point C nuclear project (yet, we will remain silent on those accusers, won’t we Credit Agricole SA?); in all this, the players have a point as the costs at one point was expected to surpass over 10% and on £18 billion it starts to add up fast. This is merely part one, in part two we need to look at the plummeting and so on. Yet overall, why becomes the question. I think it is more than that the current president is a mere former banker. In this the Independent (at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-popularity-rating-plummets-french-president-worst-in-20-years-july-ifop-budget-cuts-a7856986.html) gives us “Results come after the 39-year-old former banker unveiled key budget cuts in public spending and military finances – a move which has been heavily criticised“, which might be a valid reason for some to nag, yet what they forgot is that the previous administrations left France with a minus €2.1 trillion on the French governmental credit card and their economy is nowhere near the English one. In addition, France has a mere 64 million people, do that equation as debt per person bites in equality. The money is gone! The UK has been in this mode for well over half a decade and the French better wizen up fast, because the people now complaining had not as much as a hard time because harsh changes were required as early as 2010, nothing in that regard was seriously done. Another quote is “Mr Macron ended up overruling his own prime minister by vowing to go ahead with tax cuts in 2018, and plans to cut housing benefits were received unfavourably“, which everyone sneers at (the decision that is), yet perhaps you remember the French actor Gérard Depardieu who moved to Russia of all places because of outlandish taxation. When we consider some of the French numbers, we see the quote “less than 50% of inhabitants in France pay any income tax at all; only around 14% pay at the rate of 30%, and less than 1% pay at the rate of 45%” (source French Property). Under those conditions, we might expect that plenty have to complain about housing benefits, it might well be those not paying income tax at all. So when we see housing benefits, whilst the French are down well over 2 trillion, we have to consider how valid the polls are, perhaps better stated how fair they are one Emmanuel Macron. We all knew that the promises made by Emmanuel Macron would be hard to keep, yet not impossible. As a banker he knows that if the tax hike works and the hike become thousands of jobs, he has a start, the one thing about the French is that they are proud, yet those who are part of this Oligarchy tend to invest nationally as that is where their power and influence are.

For this we make a small sidestep to the dictionary. You see there are difference (which is also odd)

In the Cambridge dictionary we see “A type of government by powerful people in a small group is called oligarchy“, Merriam-Webster gives us “A small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes in a type of government” and Oxford states “Oligarchy is a type of government controlled by a small group of people” so as we see the En Marche group cry in a Merriam-Webster style, whilst the reality is that the reality is merely the Oxford/Cambridge application of the issue. None of them invoke a social governing and even as the En Marche people are now moving towards Fascism accusations (none have been formally made at present), we need to realise that none of it matter if the French economy does not make a decent step forward. The social structures have drained the French nation too much. France has seen strike after strike; the French labour unions are a debilitating power, a fact even acknowledged by many French citizens. Now, I have never been against labour unions, yet they have to realise that their time as they perceive themselves to be is over, if the French have to default even once, their existence stops, the money flow stops and that will change the game forever in France. There are other parts and there is an issue whether a blame game applies. We have heard for some time on labour reforms, and even as we see the validity due to massive French debts, in this Bloomberg offers (at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-24/macron-s-uphill-battle-against-france-s-labor-law-quicktake-q-a) questions and answers that I now can avoid. We know that there are issues, yet it comes from a civil law system, with the French labour code set in over 3000 pages, as such reform now becomes essential. We see reports like “French unions say making it easier to fire people won’t create jobs, and that unemployment results from the tight budget policies forced by EU-imposed austerity“, this is not an invalid response (read: consideration), yet in equal measure we see that there is little space for short term jobs and as such, backpackers all over Europe get to take some of the economic cream from the top of the revenue, something that might be valid work for the French, yet some of them are not going near any short term jobs in hear of long term consequences. The Bloomberg quote “His three immediate predecessors all viewed France’s labour laws as too restrictive. In 2003 and 2005, Jacques Chirac managed to loosen the 35-hour cap on the working week, making it easier and cheaper for companies to add extra hours. In 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy cut taxes on overtime work and made it simpler for individual workers to negotiate their own departures. And Francois Hollande’s reforms of 2013 and 2016 made it easier to justify layoffs due to a downturn in business” is the clearest one, you see three administrations have seen the folly of the labour restrictions. Whether the unions are in fear of the power they wield, and the fear of how they become obsolete, that is how I see it, four administrations realise that companies with 49 have growth limits, pushing themselves into foreign ground through partnerships when it becomes an option, slicing the French economy at least twice in a negative way.

The second issue is less on the things he does and more about how it is done. The New Statesman is referring to ‘the Macron Con‘, the Evening standard is all about ‘shedding the banker image‘ and some have even less nice things to say, yet some is of his own volition, with ‘My thoughts are ‘too complex’ for journalists, says Emmanuel Macron‘ the Telegraph paraphrases “An Elysée official told Le Monde newspaper that the 39-year-old centrist leader’s “complex thought process lends itself badly to the game of question-and-answer with journalists” that is held every year on the July 14 national holiday“, it is not a good way to make friends in that area of people who still at times laughingly refer to themselves as ‘journalists‘. It now becomes the question how they will see and report on the STX France nationalisation. In this there is validity to at least some degree. There is no guarantee that the Italians will keep it as is, there is no guarantee that there will not be a ‘transfer’ of grounds towards very different applicable destinations. When we consider USA Today as a source with: “STX France is the only shipyard in France big enough to build big warships. It’s also a significant employer in France“, if so, can anyone explain to me how handing it to the Italians was a clever move to begin with? If the EU will builds its force on EU ground, than France would fare a lot better keeping the one place where they could be build French property, that is merely good business. In addition, as it is still doing jobs, which are unlikely to be completed before the end of 2018, how is changing hands of the shipyard a good idea?

There is no doubt that the STX war is not over and I am not even going to speculate how this will turn out at present, you see being pre-emptive is one thing, the danger is that some shareholders will offer what they have in different ways to get the most out of their shares and greed can make a shareholder creative in getting the coin they expected. Yet, Trikkles (at http://trikkles.com/2017/07/28/french-government-to-nationalize-stx-france-economy.html), gives us “President Macron jettisoned his pro-business agenda and threatened to nationalise France’s leading shipyard to prevent its takeover by Fincantieri“, is that true? Keeping STX French might be very pro-business indeed. If it becomes Fincantieri property, there would be consequences. The Higher echelons could end up being replaced by Italians, so that is a chunk of funds not remaining in France, in addition, with procurement scandals first in Taipei in 2000 and now in India 2016, there are other considerations to make, so there are issues beyond the ship that is to be build. The interesting part is that in the entire emission control solution, I would have thought that they would focus on bringing jobs to the US, not ending up with a French place and getting loads of Americans and Italians to Normandy, let’s face it, it is no longer 1944.

In all this Emmanuel Macron seems to be getting a rough time. As the newspapers focussed on the largest drop, it seems that they are all in denial that both the UK and France are merely two players who have an astronomical deficit to deal with. In all this the Financial Times gives us another view (at https://www.ft.com/content/c826f982-7383-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9), as they state “Macron’s pro-EU stand is tested by Italy on the waterfront“, some will call it ‘betrayal’, yet who voice that and for what reasons? Here we also see the quote from Pier Carlo Padoan as he accused Mr Macron of abandoning his professed “pro-Europeanism and liberal values” by his decision to take STX France. So is it non-liberal or an essential step not to endanger the Normandy economy in the longer run? As we realise that STX is one of the few places in Europe where building an aircraft carrier is possible, as well as the fact that the largest cruise ship in history is getting build here, why leave it to the Italians? In this, the quote “Fincantieri had pledged to keep jobs and orders in France for five years” reads like a hollow joke, it merely not mentions that after 2022 syphoning the French economy towards Italy would be a given and with the French economy being a mere 1%, that syphoning could potentially kill the French options. So when I see the additional hollow quote “and Italian ministers rightly point out that Mr Macron’s demand to renegotiate suggests a lack of trust“, would that be a lack of trust, or a lack of Italian consideration when the clock strikes August 1^st 2022?

In this there is one part that the complaining French seem to fail to grasp, if STX is only the first of a few reallocations to foreign owners, how deep in unemployment could France get? I have in the past never professed to be any kind of consideration to bankers like Emmanuel Macron, yet in equality I have been for the most always been on the side of giving all a fair chance, it seems that the French are not giving that to Emmanuel Macron, which as French citizens is their right (freedom of speech and so on). I merely hope that these people are looking further forward than the issues due next week, because in the long run France will need to adjust to a larger degree, the question becomes how and that is the issue that the previous 3 administrations have fought over for the longest time of their administration.

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Tagged as Ariane Bogane, bloomberg, Cambridge dictionary, Civil Law, Credit Agricole SA, Electricité de France SA, Emmanuel Macron, en marche, Financial Times, Fincantieri, François Hollande, France, France 24, Gerard Depardieu, Governor of the British Bank, Henri Proglio, Hinkley Point C nuclear project, Jacques Chirac, Le Monde, Mark Carney, Merriam-Webster, Nationalisation, Natixis, Nicolas Sarkozy, Nigel Farage, Northumbria University, Pier Carlo Padoan, President Emmanuel Macron, Ship yard, STX, STX France, the Evening standard, the Express, The Independent, The New Statesman, Trikkles, Wall Street Journal

July 28, 2017 · 14:38

Rulers of London

The times are changing, that has always been known, yet the events made me remember some political satire Newspaper comic. In it you see two Arabs, one stated “Did you get anything nice today”, and the other Arab stated smiling “I bought Bond Street, Regent Street and Piccadilly“. The image was clear, the Arabs had loads of cash and they were spending. That image remained for the longest of times and as oil went to $147 per barrel in 2008, the cash was good, because the US needed millions of barrels per day. Yet now the sands have shifted, the stage is set to what I personally call a very nice building has been sold to the Chinese. The controversial Walkie Talkie Tower has been acquired for £1.3 billion. It was purchased by the Lee Kum Kee condiment company, makers of Oyster sauce. (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/27/walkie-talkie-tower-stark-reminder-of-forces-that-rule-the-city) we can read all about it and about the infamous architect who brought Star Wars to London as the building had the ability to send a sun based death ray to the streets, and as quoted “succeeded in melting the bumper of a Jaguar, blistering painted shop fronts and singeing carpets“. Yes, the building became a little too futuristic. In opposition to Feargus O’Sullivan, I do not consider it to be the ‘the ugliest British structure‘, it is actually ‘very Apple‘. I would love to see the new Apple G6 Tower to look like that (preferably as a RISC system of course). Yet in his article (on https://www.citylab.com/design/2015/09/londons-worst-building/403684/), I see that there is no reason not to admire the Victorian buildings in the foreground. Weirdly enough, the photo he added to the article (by Frank Augstein), shows that there is place for the old and the new. It shows clearly that as residential shortages grow that there will be a transfer to different styles of buildings. I would never want to see the Victorian buildings leave the face of London, in opposite directions, we can look at the Battersea Power Station and see how this evolves, yet there is a side not reckoned with, for several reasons there needs to be the evolution and growth of social housing. I like the blend as an offering for developers, yet as the Malaysian consortium pulled a fast one to maximise profits and diminish the amount of social apartments, changes will need to be made.

We can wonder whether the current approach is the best one, or should we examine the options? There is another option that works for developers and the London city council. A company called Nearmap (at https://go.nearmap.com/desktop-assessment-empowers-appraisers), has a ‘Desktop Property Assessment that Empowers Appraisers‘, yet as I looked at the paper and some of the presentations, I figured out that it had other abilities too. In metropolitan areas, when you change the scope and add a dimension, you can do something entirely unexpected. The idea came with the quote by Mal Harrison, project manager at Zinfra. The quote was “Nearmap’s accurate photo imagery is extremely helpful when risk workshopping remote from site as well as reducing site visits required to plan the works“, this is a well stated compliment to the makers of Nearmap. I figured they missed something else, another larger player as a potential client. Not to their disadvantage mind you, but they missed a range of tycoons that could have been looking at as well (for the price of a 7 figure number per seat). You see, consider the current planning settings in London, now consider the Nearmap solution, not just with the London area mapped, with in addition, the roads, infrastructure and ‘plumbing’. Now consider that a developer would want to set up a new high-rise, the options are Poplar, Beckton and Rotherhithe. Now consider the elements, Nearmap could have the ability to ascertain risks that usually are done in person, with proper parameters set the data might reveal options not considered before. You see, most people will shy away from Beckton because it is by the airport, yet new buildings have the options of superior sound cancellations. In addition, when considering that housing prices fluctuate between £2200 and £11500 per meter, the risk factor becomes a more intense issue. Yes, we know that everyone wants to be a developer in Chelsea or Kensington, yet when the option is offered (as an example) as the building in either Beckton of Rotherhithe would get a profit close to £2100 per square meter, yet Poplar offers £2700 per square meter profit, yet when looking at the elements, the risk factor for Poplar might be up by 17%, in the long term, how will development costs and delays impact the choice? When the profit margins change, so does the risk to some extent, an expert can make all the calculations, yet with additional solutions, the risk could be anticipated in advance by a much better degree. That premise holds equal ground for councils, when they can see the evolution of risk, they can in equal measure take steps to lower the risk and become more appealing for the developers to approach them.

Good business is where you find it.

That becomes more and more of a slogan for London. It is no longer just, because it is London, it will become increasingly where the margins are. Even as we see that the Battersea location had hit snags and there was suddenly the twisting arms of local councils to concede in retrenching of 25% of the social housing offer, or else… Councils will soon no longer have that option to merely give in, there will be long term repercussions and they will count sooner rather than later. The rich don’t care and the councils can ill afford the consequences they would be confronted with. There is the chance that certain places like Los Angeles, Tokyo and Kolkata would get the effect of ghost towns and London is not that far away from that. It is so nice that a place like Kolkota has luxurious places like Rajahat new town, South Kolkota and Alipore, yet when the sun goes down, we will see that the infrastructure not merely flows away, it is reduced to zero. That seems peaceful, yet it is in actuality very dangerous. As the travel times increases, these people will more and more eagerly take any job that is closer to home and takes away elements in the cost of living (fuel and travel time). As the infrastructure remains absent, the value of these places will drop like a stone. In addition there would be an increasing chance of crime rise as the area remains empty at night. As people are pushed more and more away as we see in London, there is an increasing risk that not only the businesses go away, as these places are more and more settled with high end owners who are there less than 30% of the time, those remaining will find it harder to get the things they really like to have at a moment’s notice.

How real is that risk?

Well, at present it is really an unrealistic stretch to call London an upcoming Ghost town (read: Ghost Council), yet some areas are already too empty like Kensington, where an astounding amount of places are unused. They will not turn London into a ghost town, yet as the drop continues, having a house there seems fine, yet when you become dependent on businesses from Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush, taking a walk to get a few things becomes a much less rewarding event (at £10880 per square meter). Plenty of people do not feel that way, which is fair enough, but the changes will also change the vibe of a city, which has dangerous consequences in the long term, that is an issue for ANY city. That is also a real main reason to not decrease but to increase the social housing percentage in places like that. Those are the people who bring in the need for Pizza, for groceries on the corner, which brings in the restaurant getting the good stuff from shops like that. Growing the micro economies of life goods is what brings life and traffic to places like that, soon thereafter not the outrageous mega night clubs, the a few smaller bars, the places London was always famous for will re-erect themselves and soon a large complex becomes the magnet for a growing infrastructure. As long term empty houses (read: unsold places) have risen by 25% and in Newham (by London City Airport) has fallen 55%, we see another diminished risk of choosing Beckton. All this would be possible to set when we see this implemented as factors in mapping solutions like Nearmap.

It is a given that houses in transit with short terms become increasingly important to developers, and as such they will need to ascertain risk in different ways. there is a consideration that the Battersea Power House will be the last of the truly large development projects in London for some time to come, so the need to diversify and select something unexpected. Some state that Aldwych Station could become the premise for underground cycling, which also implies that as an underground place for student studios, it could be a place to revitalise the area. The idea of a path clear to Holborn, with apartments, studios and 1 bedroom places on 1.5 floors, could give rise to a lot more than merely revitalise the area. The fact that it is next to King’s College and halls of Justice as well as Inns of Court is almost weird that no one had moved into that area sooner.

Yet we digress, it started with the good businesses in London and the impact that foreign investors have on the place. As we see the increasing number of Asians who struck it rich move into London we also see a changing dynamic of London itself. A first connection here takes us back to 1999 (at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1369585/1/LDPREPSUM%2026.11.99.pdf), when Sir Peter Hall and Michael Edwards of Bartlett School, University College London gave us the works with a slightly altered view of London’s spatial economy. In this the introduction gives us “The issues have been discussed in a practical way to help explore how far the proposals could be taken forward by the new London Government as real contributions to improving the working of the London economy, helping to provide more and better jobs, and to making transport more efficient“, which had traction and a level of importance in those years as the wild growth of London as Financial services brought billions to London, an issue partially ignored after the meltdowns of 2004 and 2008, both affecting the UK (read: London) economy, the plans have not (as far as I am aware) been picked up to the degree it should have. In addition, as the development game changed with foreign investors as we see it, the plan is not completely up to scrap to the degree the councils would need them to be. An element discussed in the ‘old’ paper is “PPG6 policies should restrict further Out of Town Centre growth in and around London. Within the framework of these policies there is scope – and an urgent need – to innovate ways which will give centres and local shops a new lease of life and reduce Londoners’ needs to travel“, yet (at https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/the_london_plan_2016_jan_2017_fix.pdf), which seems counterproductive to the need of London city, they are no longer actually valid, and more of a guideline, yet (at https://www.sepa.org.uk/media/60125/ppg-6-working-at-construction-and-demolition-sites.pdf), you will wonder on how it relates. We see with not merely the changing dynamics, but with the need to know the risks which starts at step 1 of their ‘presentation‘, with “Identify surface waters and groundwater on, under or adjacent to your site. This also includes any small (dry) ditches capable of transporting water” and “Find out if the groundwater is in a protected zone as you may need to take extra steps to prevent pollution“. Now, the consultants would know things like that, yet when were they last mapped? And this is merely one city, a solution like Nearmap has the ability to list the level of risks on several levels. the document from Sir Peter Hall (and others) gives us “The main questions here concern the spatial fields Market, where Life have dropped a major proposal after transferring from open outcry to electronic trading, and the very large Bishops gate Goods Yard site which is currently the subject of an architectural competition organised by the Architecture Foundation. The latter in particular suffers from poor accessibility, located half a mile north of Liverpool Street station although close to the present Shoreditch terminus of the East London Line“, yet it is merely one of close to 30 elements that could have been mapped and weighted as a risk in one mapping solution. In all this, the time that developers need to ascertain their possible margins of profit could be negated in one clear updated solution that moves the discussion from ‘possible margin‘ elements to ‘optional margin‘ available. That is quite the change of venue and with the capitalist Chinese population growing, attracting them To London to see if the social housing could be resolved to a better degree requires developers and councils to have a much better grasp of the risks. The nice part is that the Chinese have always been in favour of good business, as that also reflects the better margins of personal (read: family) gain. Even now as we see people write excellent materials on a Dynamic London, based on open data, we see in addition that most are not looking at the margins of risk and the additional risk of margins as they are impacted by this so called dynamic London, in this is see that there are additional paths of data requirement, not merely in mapping, but in the need for a predictive risk path, because it is not merely what is known today that matters, it is the need for considering the risk over the next 10 years that gives rise to the profitability of other new projects, or even more optionally rewarding are the options for the discarded and abandoned places that are in locations where new options will not come, on what the options are for those places.

Now we might be happy that there are foreign investors in the UK, yet the part we seem to ignore is that the Saudi investments alone was set to be worth £60 billion in 2016. That is just the Saudi side and that is not including the Qatari’s with massive contributions in Mayfair and other places. Now we see a growing Asian population investing and in all this the London Councils might have to consider that when £100 billion is invested, these people expect to get well above £150 out of that, that is how investments work so as such to keep the money flowing the councils would needed to consider some time ago where growth is optional and how to offer it, not merely in spoken work, but in the facilitation of solutions. Because no matter how sexy London seems to them (for now), the moment that Paris offers a much better deal, these people will take their billions 283 miles in a SSE (read: South South East) direction.

In this, no matter who the non elected ‘rulers’ of London are, if the profit moves, so do they and they will do it in a heartbeat!

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Tagged as Aldwych Station, Alipor, Alipore, Asian investors, Bartlett School, Beckton, Bond Street, Chelsea, Feargus O'Sullivan, Frank Augstein, investors, Kensington, King's College, Kolkota, Lee Kum Kee condiment company, London, London council, Mal Harrison, Michael Edwards, Nearmap, Newham, Piccadilly, Poplar, PPG6 policies, Rajahat, Real estate, Regent Street, Rotherhithe, Saudi investors, Sir Peter Hall, South Kolkota, the Architecture Foundation, UK, University College London, Walkie Talkie building, Zinfra

July 27, 2017 · 15:30

Mere consideration

An article was given today in the Guardian. We can argue in many ways, there is no ‘Yay’ or ‘Nea’, there is no setting that gives rise to anything wrongfully reported (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/27/cassie-sainsbury-to-serve-six-years-in-colombian-jail-after-judge-accepts-plea-deal). The question that formed in my mind was all about the previous part, all about the part ignored. The Daily Telegraph (at http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/cassie-sainsbury-worked-as-a-prostitute-former-colleague-says-shes-a-compulsive-liar/news-story/e3897bc910b3c4d5d7f97d6b8eb406bc) states “the 22-year-old was a former sex worker who spent months working in a Western Sydney brothel in the lead up to her ill-fated Colombian trip“, another source gives us that she worked for Club 220. It does not make an impact, what does give us the goods is that this 22 year old went to Columbia of all places. I have nothing against Columbia, I worked with the Colombian presidential guards in 1982, all dedicated to their nation, a little fanatic, but all believing in what they did. Yet as a tourist, Colombia would never be on my list. Rio might (not too likely), yet Buenos Aires definitely would be on my list. Still from Australia that is not the most affordable trip. The cheapest was $2400 return whilst Buenos Aires is offered at $1750, all this whilst Jakarta is merely $270 away. Now, she might not like Indonesia, that’s fair. Yet in all this, Colombia is not the actual most desired place to go to. Some, especially those with connections would feel different and that is fair too. In all this there has been very little reporting on the reasoning of the 22 year old and her choice of travel. So as the Sydney Morning Herald reports “The plea bargain was then explained: if the deal was accepted by the prosecutor, the defence and the judge, Ms Sainsbury would be sentenced to 6 years of prison instead of the potential 30 year sentence if she was found guilty” sounds nice, yet in all this, the deciding players behind this, the elements do not add up. How long until we get scores flying to Bogota, because the coffee is just so much fresher in the place where the beans are plucked. We need not wonder on the validity of choice, merely accept the freedom to choose. It is a point of view we can agree with to some extent, yet questions still rise.

Even as we seem to focus on: “the judge asked Ms Sainsbury if she had been coerced into taking the plea deal“, I wonder how a plea deal is coerced, is a plea deal not the best option she could have hoped for? Was the option to stay in prison for 6 years, or be forced into 30 years? It would be the other way round and as such, how much arm twisting would be required? When we see “Ms Sainsbury was caught at Bogota’s international airport in April, trying to smuggle 5.8 kilograms of cocaine inside 18 separate packages of headphones“, so how was this any good idea? To become an exporter of headphones, whilst JB-Hifi sells quality Sony headsets for $34 (and JBL for $50)? How was any of this a good idea? We know that according to urban folk tales that criminals tend to be not too intelligent, but this dim? Nope, I am not buying it! In addition adding 330 grams to a headset package; something like that gets noticed and real fast too!

In all this, the Daily Telegraph now becomes in addition a worry for Cassie Sainsbury in other ways too. We see this in the two quotes “a former colleague of Sainsbury, who told Nine News she worked with her at brothel Club 220 near Penrith, has accused her of being a compulsive liar who once pretended her mother had died from MS” and “The former colleague said she had donated money to Sainsbury to cover her mother’s funeral costs and was horrified to see images of her mother alive and well on television“. Another claim given is “According to the colleague, Sainsbury went under the name of “Claudia” and listed herself online as “19 years old … classy, fun and ready to please”“, which get us to the situation that if the reliability of the accused is found to be non-existing, there is the chance that the judge throws out the option of plea bargain as the defence of the accused was “she was “threatened” into becoming a mule by an international drugs syndicate“, if there was no threat, she becomes the instigator of smuggling for large profits and that sets her on that 30 year train ride to nowhere.

I found the quote “Sainsbury’s fiancé Scott Broadbridge maintained his partner was innocent during an interview with Seven’s Sunday Night program. He said she was employed by a mystery couple who paid her $1800 a week to travel the world to work for their cleaning business“, it is interesting as it is a better income than most people at ASIS get, and they get into a lot more hot water, being in better shape and having a near Olympian constitution and well above decent looks too, which applies to both the boys and the girls working there. All elements Cassie lacked (as well as other shortcomings in education and degrees), so which cleaning business is hiring people at almost $10K a month?

There is a level of befuddlement within me as parts of all these given items are accepted by media, the courts and apparently the gullible audience. In all this, the Sydney Morning Herald gives one additional Gem that the AAP seems to have missed. When we consider “Given that any amount over 5 kilos is considered “aggravated circumstances” and draws a higher penalty, Ms Sainsbury could be facing 30 years in Colombian prison“, so no matter who was involved, the issue of this element which could have been diminished by trying to smuggle 4.9 Kg instead of the 5.8Kg is showing to be an element, especially as the 18 headsets were already a joke, the difference of 50 grams per headset would still have been noticed, but overall, on the two elements (apart from the mindlessness of trying to personally export 18 headsets whilst you are competing against players you have no chance against), we see that there is an element of stupid greed coming in. When drug tourism relied on the elements of stupid and gullible (added with two tits and a vagina to make the package even more appealing), whomever was linked in all this, going for the lower threshold of staying below 5000 grams might have had another (read: better) impact.

This is not merely the limitations of a system, this is a different circus. The Australian Daily Telegraph is also giving us “Bogota hotel manager describes man whom accused drug mule says tricked her into smuggling cocaine“, in addition; the quotes given give additional light on the less factually given job with $1800 a week. The quote “Ms Hernandez saying she stood out at her hotel because she arrived without a reservation and paid for her accommodation only two days at a time“, would a ‘business‘ trip not be prearranged? How would the ‘cleaning business‘ continue without a clear itinerary as well as clear invoices? In addition to that, the quote which is seen in news.com.au “Earlier it was revealed the US Drug Enforcement Agency reportedly alerted Colombian authorities to their suspicions about Ms Sainsbury. “We found her because of an alert from the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency],” Bogota airport’s narcotics chief, Commander Rodrigo Soler, told News Corp Australia” the entire mess gets another image entirely. If the given is true, not only is the entire mess as I personally speculate it to be a farce, there is every consideration that she was a 5.8Kg decoy for other parties to get out without a hitch. Consider the facts. She got into the hotel on April 3^rd, left April 12^th and got arrested on the airport. So in 9 days, she got approached, likely after a few days the ‘coercion‘ was made so in less than 7 days, a infiltrated drug ring got data to the DEA, the name and details forwarded to other parties so she could be arrested. So someone gave up $20,650 in goods (Colombian value of Cocaine), which in Australia would be $1.74 million. Is that what really happened, or was the actual catch to send two additional models (or a couple) each with 2,450 grams of cocaine (total value $1.45 million), whilst the total venture costed $35.5K and three plane tickets. It could just be me, yet when we hear screaming of a high profile drug dealer being caught on boarding the flight those getting of the plane in Sydney might have a lot more smooth sailing.

In the end, there is a chance that she was merely the patsy in this endeavour, whether it was a willing one or a coerced one is hard to tell, however the evidence is not in her favour at present. In light of all this, when we go back to Chapelle Corby who had a bag and a boogie board and decided to add more than the weight of a boogie board in Marijuana in a place that hates drugs with a passion, now we see equally less intelligent acts by a person nicknamed in the papers as ‘Ccocaine Cassie‘, yes, if all hedge funds managers were only that stupid the economy would have been in a much better place.

In my view, we cannot oppose the fact that the bulk of papers are merely reporting on what the AAP is giving them (read: reporting should be copy and paste), yet the ‘articles’ left me with merely common sense issues on nearly every level. In all this I wonder if the court and prosecutor had done their due diligence in addition to all this. Should we have expected more from the Australian Associated Press? They report themselves to be the “AAP is the media company that businesses turn to for news, information and publishing solutions. With breaking news firmly at our core, our vast range of products and services help clients connect with and engage their audiences. AAP is your integrated, simple solution“, yet the AAP made no mention of the 5Kg threshold and what is the verdict on both sides of that isle. In addition, something that was not on the list is the question on how many trips Cassie had been on since she turned 18? I would love to know how she got to decide on Bogota without knowing where else she had been, as that stands to the character of the accused. In addition, considering that the weight of a headset is around 200 grams, replacing that with in excess of 150% weight in cocaine seems even less intelligent. When we get an overdose of details on the lingerie of Kim Kardashian and a lack of facts and evidence in a reported drug hearing, the lack of questions asked all over the place is a little too deafening to my liking.

In all that, the valid words of immigration minister, Peter Dutton as we hear “People need to abide by the laws of that country. If not, they will face serious consequences,” might be well, but it falls on the ears of those stating ‘who the fuck cares?‘

This directly relates to the lack of visibility we see given to the defence lawyer of Cassie, in this as I see it, only the International Business Times gave any level of visibility to Orlando Herran. Here we see what was given to 60 minutes. With “someone on Craigslist offering a loan and a trip to London, she jumped at the opportunity. However, the itinerary was allegedly changed to Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Bogota“, how was that missed and changed to merely ‘a global cleaning service‘? Does this impede the reliability of the statements of the accused even further? That would be for the court to decide, but overall there has been a level of skipping that is just way too weird. In this the evidence also not reported on was who paid for the flight? Was it in cash (where was it paid) or credit card? All evidence not shown to the audience by the media either.

In the mere consideration here I see a failing on several sides and in all this there would be the required additional forensic digital investigation regarding the Craigslist as well, as it could be useful evidence. This entire event has too many holes and several unlooked places, especially when you consider that the DEA had its own role to play in all this.

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Tagged as 60 minutes, AAP, ASIS, Australian Associated Press, Bogota, Bogota international airport, Buenos Aires, Cassie Sainsbury, Chapelle Corby, Club 220, Cocaine, Cocaine Cassie, Commander Rodrigo Soler, Craigslist, DEA, Hong Kong, International Business Times, Jakarta, Kim Kardashian, Los Angeles, Narcotics, News Corp Australia, Nine News, Orlando Herran, Scott Broadbridge, Seven’s Sunday Night program, Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, US Drug Enforcement Agency

July 25, 2017 · 14:11

A shaky Farce Majeure

I got confronted with two news items today, the weirdest part is that the source is the Daily Mail (at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4717082/Chaos-British-holidaymakers-killer-earthquake.html), which is upsetting to some degree. The news started with the earthquake on Kos last week, a shaking that extended all the way to Crete. Now, as the building laws are on Crete, the news of the earthquake was not one that shook me, the people there know it, yet the strength was stronger than usually dealt with. OK, so far no biggie as news goes. Yet, the initially not highly regarded headline became ‘Thomson REFUSES to refund terrified holidaymaker and his family as they try to cancel their trip to Kos amid earthquake chaos‘, which woke me up. This is not the first time that travel agencies are frowned upon, so I decided to take another look. Justin Curtis who wrote this is pounding on a few items that are actually bigger news than most realise.

Now apart from the news you are about to see, there is a few matters that we need to consider, and I will get to them shortly. First we see “Brits due to go to region say they are being told they cannot have a refund“, I’ll tell you another one, they are still offering these trips online, so I could fly out Saturday at £3275 for a fortnight, by the way a comparable trip with a 5 star hotel booked in the Netherlands is €1048 (£937), which is a totally absurd difference (it included the flight, so ordering the trip in the Netherlands, or book it online and take an additional Euro trip train could save you £2300 (minus the two train tickets), so in light of the prices Thomson is pretty ridiculous. In addition, Thomson proclaims to be an ABTA member (shown on their website), With ABTA we see “Clients’ Options on Cancellation 3B) If they are Principals who cancel previously confirmed Travel Arrangements, inform Agents and direct Clients without delay and offer Clients the choice of: i) alternative Travel Arrangements if available; or ii) a full refund of all monies paid. Such refunds shall be sent to Agents and direct Clients without delay. ”

Now, this is only one part, in addition we see:

“3D) Not make a significant alteration to Travel Arrangements less than 14 days before the departure date of the Travel Arrangements unless it is necessary to do so as a result of Force Majeure.”

I think that we can agree that an Earthquake is as Force Majeure as it gets.

There are rules of compensation for part, in case it was not a Force Majeure. So in light of what I see, Thomson might be in a lot more trouble than they think they are.

It was merely a first part, the fact that Thomson kept the lines open for flights this coming Saturday indicates just how insensitive they are to their clients. If the Daily Mail is to be believed, we should also consider their website. When we see: “We’re part of TUI Group – one of the world’s leading travel companies. And all of our holidays are designed to help you Discover Your Smile.” You have to wonder how they will address the issues as given with “Some laid down on the grass after they were denied entry to the airport, with staff limiting the number of people allowed inside due to its small size“, which for safety reasons makes perfect sense, in addition we see “I said I wanted my money back but they told me no and that it was safe. But Kos is not going to be rebuilt in a week and I asked if they could guarantee me the buildings there and my hotel were structurally sound and they couldn’t“, from a torts point of view, Thomson now might have an expensive legal issue evolving at their front door, one that they cannot defer under ABTA, This case could get us to Donoghue v Stevenson. Ms Donoghue claimed compensation for illness, after she consumed a ginger beer containing a decomposed snail, in a public house in Paisley, Scotland. This is the first case of Torts, as Thomson is now quoted to have stated that Kos is Safe, if any mishap comes from the trip, the family could sue as there is news and evidence on the dangers. Kathmiri, the Greek news source gives that dozens of buildings are at present unsafe with dozens more not yet investigated, so Thomson was THIS negligent? The question becomes why Thomson has become this negligent whilst the ABTA code of conduct is pretty clear in section 3 on those who have booked, yet not yet travelled. They could have faced praise and clientele as they bended over backwards by offering and working towards alternative solutions for scores of travellers, now they could get into a lot of hot water. The diverted Ferry service is only a small issue, the reason why it was diverted is the real danger as some quays are actually ripped from the road, making for unsafe conditions. This issue goes beyond the Tsunami that came, yet in all this the complications from electricity, sewage and heat will go up and could potentially create additional hazards for some time, we cannot state how long or how realistic these dangers would be, but they will be there. If essential parts are fixed within a month it would be a small miracle, a given that no one should bank on. For Kos, this could not have happened at a worst time, the summer is the height of their annual tourism income flow. July-September is essential to the people on Kos and Crete; as such Kos might get a big blow in a time when the Greek economy could afford it the least. So back to Torts, we have basically shown a Duty of Care and now we get to Breach of Duty, so as we get to the ‘reasonable man‘ test, would a reasonable man send another person into an earthquake stricken place for a family holiday (or any holiday?), if we consider a reasonable safe environment (especially) for children, Thomson could be seen as the reckless endangering element to the health of these children on that vacation. As such, they might state, the people could have decided not to go. In this a step towards criminal law is that the vacation is a product (or service), so as we see product liability we get “Anyone who is harmed by an unsafe product could sue. They can begin their court case up to three years from the date of the injury. In some cases, they can even sue up to ten years after the product was sold“, it is a thin line, yet with these bulk vacations, the minimum amount of people for a class action should be easily reached, especially when there are torts exploiters (they do exist). Consider that the vacation is a product that is offered, in such we could go towards the ‘Guide to the Consumer Protection Act 1987‘, where we see “In the past those injured had to prove a manufacturer negligent before they could successfully sue for damages. The Consumer Protection Act 1987 removes the need to prove negligence. A customer can already sue a supplier, without proof of negligence, under the sale of goods law. The Act provides the same rights to anyone injured by a defective product, whether or not the product was sold to them“, in addition, there is “Liability under the Act extends to components and raw materials. If a finished product contains a defect in a particular component, both the manufacturer of the finished product and the component manufacturer may be liable“, which is interesting, so any item on the package sold to the tourist might be up for instigating the damage compensation track, so not merely the hotel, any excursion sold to the tourist could start liability at this stage. So how defective is this product?

Well the act gives us “A defective product is defined as one where the safety of the product is not such as persons generally are entitled to expect” and according to the Daily Mail, the people at Thomson proclaimed that Kos was safe, so in light of damaged quays, collapsed buildings with rubble all over the street, when the light goes a little low, spraining an ankle would be the easiest part in the entire equation and the elements to sue have been met, after which the liability track could commence. All because Thomson stated according to the Daily Mail source: “Gary Taylor, left, is due to fly to Kos with wife Katy and daughter Summer, pictured, next week but said he wanted to cancel due to safety fears, only to be told by Thomson he ‘could not have the £2,800 cost refunded due to terms and conditions’ of the deal“, yet this is opposed by ABTA code of conduct section 3b and 3d. And ABTA went one step further by giving within the definition of a Force Majeure as “circumstances where performance and/or prompt performance of the contract is prevented by reasons of unusual and unforeseeable circumstances beyond the control of the Principal, the consequences of which could not have been avoided even if all due care had been exercised“. Such circumstances include a natural disaster, so when were earthquakes and Tsunamis not natural disasters? If the Daily Mail is correct, this Force Majeure is making Thomson look like a Farce Majeure, the one place where booking a holiday might not be the best idea, not just for the prices stated.

Yet in the sidelines we also read “Thomson is offering alternative holidays for those due to travel to Kos or Bodrum should they no longer wish to“, which is one offer that ABTA clearly allows for, yet when we see at the Code of Conduct at 3B.ii “a full refund of all monies paid. Such refunds shall be sent to Agents and direct Clients without delay“, the issue of asking a few more questions to the top of Thomson seems a warranted issue to pursue.

The final part that rocked me is that there is at present no ombudsman for travels, something I actually never considered not existing, when we see that a trip per person could be in advance of £2500 and there are 8,000 UK travellers stranded on Kos, is it not weird that one event, representing £20m is not properly protected? Not merely for the traveller, to some extent to protect the travel agency as well? Is such a voluntary code legally enforceable? Well, that is actually the issue, I am not certain in the UK law settings, in Australia, the case in the Victorian Supreme Court named National Australia Bank Ltd v Rose [2016] VSCA 169 gives us “The Voluntary Banking Code in question stated that NAB had to give Mr Rose “prominent notice of various matters” before taking a guarantee from him. Chief Justice Marilyn Warren and Justice Stephen McLeish of the Victorian Court of Appeal dismissed NAB’s appeal of the original case: “We would respectfully agree with the trial judge’s conclusion that those clauses of the Banking Code had contractual force as terms of the guarantee at issue.”“, I reckon that the UK might find against Thomson travel agency if it gets sued, there is a decent chance that the judges will see the voluntary code of conduct, which seems to be used at times as a marketing presentation on the travellers rights as a mandatory setting regarding the terms of guarantee, or as a Terms of Service, in equal measure, in light of what I have found so far Thomson made a few blunders, several on the same day as their terms of service are seen. I also reckon that Thomson might be the only one visible now, but this issue could hit any agency that has some mention of ABTA in their sales prospectus or website and not offer a decent alternative or a full refund.

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Tagged as ABTA, Chief Justice Marilyn Warren, Code of Conduct, Crete, Daily Mail, Donoghue v Stevenson, Earthquake, Force Majeure, Greece, Justice Stephen McLeish, Kathmiri, Kos, Liability, NAB, National Australia Bank Ltd v Rose [2016] VSCA 169, negligence, The Consumer Protection Act 1987, Thomson, Thomson Travel Agency, Torts, Tsunami, UK Law, Victorian Court of Appeal, voluntary contract law

July 24, 2017 · 13:20

How to pay for it?

Yesterday’s news is not new. We have all heard the options, the opposition and the recrimination. Yet the article (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/23/uk-arms-sales-to-saudis-continued-after-airstrike-on-yemen-funeral) gives out more to ask of those who are on the moral ethical high ground and as such we need to make considerations, from within ourselves and towards others choosing for us.

You see, I am not stating that they are wrong, or that there isn’t an issue. We need to ask ourselves whether we should take blame of responsibility of the actions of other governments. So consider the £283m. When we consider the 2017 spring budget, that one sale takes care of the Education and health bill for spring 2017 and potentially leaves us with enough to pay the Debt interest for that quarter. So, what will these campaigners do when they are opted for one (the deal) or the other which would be no health or education money? I always love campaigners who in a downed economy make demands and have no clue or no solution on how to pay for it all. It is a really lovely group of non-deciders in most of the events.

What would I do?

I would happily go to Riyadh with my new BAE business card and sell them whatever systems they need to keep their nation safe. You see, it is the right of any nation to defend their nation. The application of the weapons purchased is up to them. Guns do not kill people, people kill people, it is basic and as I see it the correct dimensionality of a situation.

So when I read “the UK trade secretary, Liam Fox, delayed signing a set of export licences and his officials prepared for sales to Saudi Arabia to be suspended. However, documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, advised him that the sales should continue, as he judged there was no clear risk that British weapons would be used for serious breaches of international humanitarian law“, like Boris Johnson, I see no real issue. The fact that he added: ‘serious breaches of international humanitarian law‘ as a condition was politically fair enough and perhaps a definite essential condition. It seems a little cowardly, but at what point would there be a serious consideration there? Even Iran might not fall into that category, leaving us with only North Korea, Al-Qaeda and ISIS as actual risk factors and we do not deal with these three anyway.

When someone states that I am wrong and there is a clear risk with Saudi Arabia transgressing there, my question would be: ‘Show me that evidence‘. After which I get a lot of speculative mumbo jumbo and no evidence at all. In this day and age we need to consider the choices to select which is fair enough, yet to give rise to campaigners on speculative events whilst they are willing to give silence in the case of Javier Martin-Artajo, Julien Grout and Bruno Iksil, willing to shrug the shoulders and walk away without anger or indignation. Such persons are all about feigned morality because there was no blood. So how many people lost their quality of life for a long time whilst JP Morgan Chase & Co lost £4.7 billion? You think that this was merely printed money, people lost all levels of hard worked gains, pensions, savings and other losses were endured. So as we read in that case “the Department of Justice said it “no longer believes that it can rely on the testimony” of Bruno Iksil, the trader dubbed the London Whale, based on recent statements and writings he made that hurt the case” (source: the Guardian), I feel like this was an orchestrated event. First get the accusations out, make a final thrust for your own acquittal and then write a little more making it all unreliable? Consider not what he lost (stated at 80%), but that he got to keep 20% of some $6m a year (paid more than one year), in addition, whatever the DoJ agreed to in 2013, which might be his house and a few other things. So he got to keep an amount that is exceedingly more than whatever I have made or will make for my entire life, a mere 2 years of his. So as we see about extradition issues, we now see that all three walk away.

This relates to the arms deal as the consequences of that part are merely speculative and it pays for a chunk of the government budget, so I will take a job there willingly any day of the week, presenting the technological marvels of the F-35 JSF missile which can be set to the bulk of the Saudi Arabian fighters. I will gladly take the reduced 1% commission and sell 5,000-10,000 missiles, after which I fly to Egypt and sell a few more. If that gets education and health funded in the UK for the entire year, so much the better! I will sleep like a baby knowing that education and health care are safe and set in stone to be funded. My presentations would be the best stellar presentations of them all. So F.U. (sorry for this instance of Post Enhousiastic Sales Drama) to both Raytheon and Northrop Grumman!

As we can imagine at times we need to take heed (read: listen to) campaigners, when the going was good (20 years ago) and we had several options to take a high moral stance, yet at present with a collapsing NHS, with politicians showing less and less backbone against large corporations on taxation issues, the United Kingdom has a responsibility towards its citizens, not just to keep them safe, but to offer some level of any future. Those campaigners seem to think that money grows on trees and have no idea on how to get things funded; in the UK the UK Labour party is perhaps the most striking evidence of all. As Jeremy Corbyn is now in denial on student debt issues, as he was intentionally vague during the election race. Of course apart from not winning (thank god for that), the realisation that he has no options, no methods and no way to get any level of budget done without raising the current debt by at least 50% and initially projected at 80%, the question becomes, how it would have ever been paid for as people like this, and campaigners against certain paths (read: perhaps for the right ideological reasons) have no way to deal with the national issues. Leaving people with much harsher debts, increased taxation and less social security as it can no longer be paid for.

I am not against ideology, I do not believe that dedicated pacifism is a cowardly stance; it is often quite a brave stance. Yet, it is equally often not a realistic one. We can all go to Hacksaw Ridge and be amazed of the events Andrew Garfield’s character went through, showing us some of what the real Desmond Doss went through, and we can admire his stance and his courage. Yet in the end, without the thousands armed forces in the 77^th Infantry division, the battle would have been lost. It does not diminish the actions of this one highly decorated person, I am merely stating that the 77^th held its ground and was victorious in the end, yet we should never forget that it is still regarded as the bloodiest battle in the history of WW2, with 50,000 allied lives lost and well over 100,000 Japanese casualties.

We make choices in war and in peace. I believe that every sovereign nation has its rights for defence, we cannot vouch for the articles of war in offense and that is not our responsibility. It is not for the salesperson of equipment to say and even the campaigner for peace needs to realise that there is a stance to take, even if it is a valid choice to oppose offensive actions, we must realise that any self-governing nation can deal with its enemies in the way they seem fit, when it becomes too unacceptable we need to accept that places like the United Nations will take the appropriate actions.

So how is this different?

It should not be, but it is. Ask yourself how you would act. We can always act holier than thou when we can afford it, yet when we are confronted with being hungry or to some degree making a questionable deal that is not criminal, and it is perfectly legal, but we cannot foresee the consequence. Is it still wrong to do it? Consider that we cannot predict the future and this is not merely a legal ‘more likely than not‘. It is about legally acting correct and morally acting optionally questionable, because that is where the stance is. Should we interfere with the right of Saudi Arabia to defend itself and act, or become judging and act towards denying them that right? This is the view I think that the campaigners are not taking correctly, too hastily and in judgement of ‘some’ moral principle. Now, I am not stating that they cannot do that, it is their right and their expression of free will, but in all this, they must also than accept the setting that they will have to voice: ‘We have decided to stop all NHS healthcare and education for the upcoming Autumn 2017, as we stopped the revenue that would have guaranteed it‘, that must then be in equal measure their acceptance in this. I wonder how the doctors, nurses and teachers feel at that point.

In this we now see another part grow. Even as we agree to some extent with the quote of “The terrible funeral bombing should have been a time for reflection and for the UK to reconsider its uncritical political and military support for Saudi Arabia“, we accept that ideologically Andrew Smith, spokesman for Campaign Against Arms Trade has a right and perhaps even a valid point, yet does he?

When we see “‘Incorrect information’ meant hall in Sana’a was mistaken for military target, leading to 140 deaths, says US-backed mission” (source: the Guardian) we need to know a lot more, the actual Intel, the raw data and the decision tree. When we also see “The air operation centre in Yemen, it added, directed a “close air support mission” to target the site without approval from the coalition’s command“, we can argue and question a few issue, yet in all, who authorised the action? How was the coalition command set up? If there was an approval at any level it takes the pilot out of the equation (read: likely he was never a consideration in the first place), so even as we see questions on the actions, even when we read “Dozens of citizens fell as martyrs or were wounded in this attack by planes of the Saudi-American aggression“, whilst the actions of the Houthi rebels are left in silence by too many, including the indiscriminate shelling of places. Any war is a place where it took two to tango, which does not absolve any side of considerations, yet in all I see often a complete lack of complete information, or better stated more precise and more complete information to the extent that was possible. Even now as Yemen is using ballistic missiles attacking a Saudi Oil refinery, as Mines are killing Saudi Soldiers, we see that Yemen remains active, shooting missiles close to 600 miles into Saudi Arabia, so as such, I think that the time of recriminations are over, they have been over for some time. Even now, merely 5 hours ago, we see that Nayef al-Qaysi, governor of the central province of al-Bayda was removed from office because of his ties with Al-Qaeda. Now, the source here is the Miami Herald, and others are voicing pretty much the same article. I cannot state one or the other, yet when we see these events unfold, giving rise to one or the other without proper visible intelligence is not a given. Yet in all this, when we take the original title and make this: ‘UK approved £283m of arms sales to Saudis to fight Al-Qaeda‘ (read: personal merging of different timed facts), at that point how many campaigners would we hear? Can we agree that if Nayef al-Qaysi has ties to Al-Qaeda, they would have been there for some time?

A piece of intelligence that I and perhaps many others would not have had last October, so should I not have sold these weapons to Saudi Arabia? I do not think that I had any valid opposition to not sell and whenever we campaign (even for the best and most valid of reasons) is always a loaded gun and that loaded gun is always aimed at the victims of these actions. In my presented case it would have been the people in need of NHS treatments and students. Any person proclaiming that they have the whole picture is usually lying to you, apart from the General of the Saudi armed forces there would be almost no other person in possessions of all the facts and even then we can state with a certain level of certainty that this person did not have ALL the facts. This is what makes the opposition to any debatable act a dangerous path. We can at best hope for acting in a non-illegal manner and that is exactly what happened in this case. It was a legal transaction, one that was essential for the coffers of the United Kingdom.

We need to learn how to compartmentalise. It is in our best interest to do what is correct and to do what our bosses want of us. When we try to grow beyond that cubicle we tend to speculate on what is best and even if we agree that thinking things through is never a bad thing, unless it is our responsibility we have to act according to our better angels, which means no in opposition of law. Is it not interesting that when that happens, more often than not these actions were greed based and those transgressors should be prosecuted by law, which in the case of hedge funds traders is almost 0%, so if we want ideology, it should be on the evolution of legislation to stop economic exploitation. Yet at that point, how many campaigners remain? I reckon that list slims down a lot, because economic transgressions are not sexy enough, or it is like a happy lottery ticket that nearly everyone wants and in case of Bruno Iksil when it amounts to 20% of many millions, I would love to get that lottery ticket as well, I saw a nice place in Cognac, where I would happily retire to. A mere €850K, which would leave me well over €100K a year to live off for the rest of my life, whilst the house (read: villa) had been paid for. I admit it is a lifestyle I would embrace if it was limited to one questionable, non-illegal act. It will not make me a criminal, merely a person not hiding behind some hypocrite high moral code of conduct.

Until campaigners get in the stage of life on how to pay for their daily meal and proceed on that moral high ground, that is the first step in filtering the actual ideologists from the hypocrites, an essential first step, yet in the end, they too need to accept that some sides of life need to get paid for and they cannot vote to make thousands abstain from essential needs. It is not fair and not pretty but that is the place that deep debts have pushed us all into, the mere acceptance of our to the smallest degree of changed options in upholding any quality of life.

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Tagged as 77th Infantry division, al-Bayda, Al-Qaeda, Andrew Smith, BAE Systems, Boris Johnson, Brian Garfield, Bruno Iksil, Campaign Against Arms Trade, Cognac, Department of Justice, Desmond Doss, DoJ, Egypt, F-35 JSF missile, Hacksaw Ridge, Houthi rebels, Iran, ISIS, Javier Martin-Artajo, Jeremy Corbyn, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Julien Grou, Liam Fox, Mimi Herald, Nayef al-Qaysi, NHS, North-Korea, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, reuters, Saudi Arabia, the Guardian, UK, UK Labour Party, UK trade secretary, Yemen

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