Up Your Street

Have you ever put your postcode into www.upmystreet.com? I did it for the street where I grew up. Seems quite accurate. Apart from the mining bit.

Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be home owning families living in terraces. These are known as type 42 in the ACORN classification and 2.94% of the UK’s population live in this type.

Neighbourhoods fitting this profile are largely found in former mining, industrial and manufacturing areas of Wales and northern England. Examples include Merthyr Tydfil, Rhonda, Burnley, Barrow in Furness and Halifax. Here is an overview of the likely preferences and features of your neighbourhood:

Family income	Low
Interest in current affairs	Low
Housing – with mortgage	Medium
Educated – to degree	Low
Couples with children	Medium
Have satellite TV	Medium

Young families with two children under 10, living in small terraced housing, characterise this type of postcode. Adults tend to be in the 20-40 age group with fewer older people and retired. There are some single parent households.

This is the ACORN type with the highest incidence of terraced housing. The houses tend to be small, with two or sometimes three bedrooms, and at the lower end of the house price scale. 70% of households are owner occupiers, with most buying on a mortgage. Most of the rest are renting from private landlords, with a smaller proportion renting from the local authority.

Generally, employment is in blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, mining and other manual occupations, with shopworkers also common. There is some unemployment, and long term illness is above the national average. As might be expected, educational qualification levels are generally low.

Car ownership is below the national average, and many people travel to work on foot or cycle.

Incomes are on the low side so there is little scope for investments and savings. Use of credit cards is below average.

Leisure interests include camping, angling, bingo, horseracing and rugby, as well as watching cable TV and going to the pub.

Popular newspapers include the Daily Mirror, Daily Sport and their Sunday equivalents, as well as the Daily Star.

Reconfigurable Computing Skills

I’ve updated my research page, and I’ve added a new page on skills a reconfigurable computing engineer requires. I figure I’m going to expand this until it actually resembles something useful, with sub-sections and the like. I’m still trying to flesh out ideas so that when the time comes I can work on my thesis again.

Oh, and if anyone is reading this and thinks they have those skills and wants a job, give me a shout.

Answer to a Question

I was asked a question by email that I think I’ll blog for whoever’s interested:

I have a question [] – this seems to be affecting everyone, but surely there must be somebody out there doing well out of all this? Who is it?

Group of people A (the people that lend to banks) lent money to group of people B (banks) to foolishly invest.

Group B squander group A’s money by lending it to group C (people with stupid ideas for spending money). Instead of letting group A take responsibility for the foolish use of their money, a lot of noise is made about the terrible consequences if group B go bankrupt. (The terrible consequences being that group A wouldn’t get their money back). So you make a lot of noise about how the only way to save the economy is for the government (group D) to borrow money from international bond investors (group E) which will be paid back by taxpayers (group F). They then give this money to group B, who in turn give it back to group A (not before paying their own salaries and bonuses of course).

So at the end of the day, group A get every penny they were owed by group B (with interest of course) from group F. They make as much money as they would have done if their money had been wisely invested in enterprises that led to a new golden age for humanity, instead of the shitstorm we’re facing. As you can imagine, it doesn’t exactly incentivise them to wisely invest in future, does it?

Sterling is Dying

Gordon Brown says that experts agree the “fiscal stimulus” plan is a good idea. They do not. This isn’t a complex idea, and basic logic shows it’s a stupid idea. There are two things wrong with it.

Firstly, the government has to borrow money from other nations to get the money for the “stimulus”. The government borrows money twice a week these days, a few billion each week. They do it on Thursdays, and sometimes on Tuesdays. They put their cap out, and foreign nations, companies, individuals and the National Savings come along and buy “gilts” (IOUs from the government). It’s all very interesting and you can actually see the results of the process in the reports here. The problem is that all the foreign nations and companies are finding themselves fairly short of cash these days, and it’s going to be a struggle to continue to borrow money at even last year’s rate. Worse, the government is now vastly increasing the amount of money it borrows via these auctions in order to pay for the “fiscal stimulus”. It makes it tremendously likely that the foreign nations will soon say “Well, actually we’re not going to lend you any more money, you can just pay us back the money you already owe us”. This event would be called a “gilt strike”. It last happened in 1976, and it was a very big deal. We had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund, and it led to the famous Winter of Discontent. If the Gilt Strike happened (and I believe it shall) then we would struggle to pay off our debt to the other nations. At present some of the money we borrow goes to pay off the countries we already owe money to. If we couldn’t borrow money we would have two choices, both of them horrific. One would be to literally print money to pay off the debts. This would make the pound fall in value. Dramatically. Most likely it would result in the kind of hyper-inflationary spiral that has taken Zimbabwe from being one of the most developed nations in Africa to being a land of horrors. It was also the setup for the emergence of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany.

The other option is “Sovereign Default”. We basically just refuse to pay the debt. To put this into perspective, the last time the country defaulted on its sovereign debt was in the 14th Century, when Edward III defaulted on his debt to the Peruzzis of Florence. The resulting geopolitical fallout from that one ended in the Hundred Years’ War with France.

Assuming for a moment then that we could somehow borrow all of the money the government proposes to borrow without destroying our currency and our reputation in the eyes of the world, there remains another problem: The fiscal stimulus has the potential to twist our country out of all recognition with the perverse incentives it introduces. Remember always that every penny spent now has to be paid back in future, with interest, by those who work. The government is proposing taking money from people who work, and doing a range of stupid things with it. They want to give it to banks who have already shown they don’t know how to manage risk. They want to give it people who bought houses they can’t afford. They want to build bridges, roads and runways without planning them properly. They want to encourage people to buy things they can’t afford and don’t need. This money will need paid back in the future, that must be remembered. There will be hardworking people who can’t afford rent and necessities in the future, so that the irresponsible can pay mortgages and have luxuries now.

The government can’t seem to see past today’s headlines about mortgage availability, house prices and high street bankrupticies. These are nothing in comparison to the fallout the gilt strike and subsequent sovereign debt crisis will bring. This situation becomes increasingly likely every day that passes with the government borrowing more money than it can afford to pay back

I believe that our Prime Minister is deluding himself about the scale of the problem and about his ability to control it. Yesterday in the House of Commons he accidently said that he and his government had “saved the world”. I don’t think this is funny. I think it’s a Freudian slip that shows his true state of mind.