Who are You in Breaking Bad _

Unlike many other of the super-series, Breaking Bad comes to an end and I am prolonging the agony as the last series ricochets its way through the various end games post Fring departure stage centre.

I am as far as the unexpected (look away if you are not beyond the train heist) demise of Mike in series 5, the finale.

That episode is a kind of cruical crystalisation of the characterisation - their motivations are laid bare, their vulnerabilities all apparent and their fate's all driven by their personalities.

Who then do you identify with?

We are probably supposed to identify with one or other of the comic book characters we are presented with. The prissy Fring. The cool hand Mike. The young drop out with morals, Pinkman. The mother caught up in the mans ego.The Brother in law stuck with his obsessions and abrasive self defensive supersilious personality. Or of course the Heisenberg or the Walter Wimpy White duality.

The characters by in large are comic book and two dimensional.  Gus Fring has Tarrantino like overtures to being a little larger than life in his gentleman drug baron play. Mike and his neurotic social climbing wife. Skyler, the all american mom with absent love for her kids, on hold while the cameras roll. And Walter White, the guy who sold out for 5 grand and took the safe route to nothingness.

We middle aged men are supposed to either go then for one of the three = the protangonist Heisenberg and his two antagonists, Fring and his Brother in Law. Lets face it, the majority of folk our age are not successful, on a western basis even then. Hank and Fring are successful but both in their own stress missions , locked into lives which have risk, mundanity and inescapability. They have a plan to retire, but enjoy the game too much.

So we have Walter, who finally gets to be a big roller, like we all would want to be although we would not choose
to intoxicate the desert states with class A. He becomes Heisenberg, and that is clear from the first time he tells the amatuer cooks in the car lot to stay off his patch to when he takes over Mike's exit deal on the Methyl Amine.

A younger me may have had some time for Jesse, but the kid is too much of a paradox between his morals and ropues codes and his wild crystal meth days. He just does not have the credibility , middle class slackers turned drug addicts care no more than their next hit and the next party. You want to think you or anyone has a moral base. But not down crack alley bud'

Walter white is the only one who is in control of the next step, be that a series of blind critical path , tactical choices and everyone else dances to the tune he plays, not that he knows how they will dance, but he has a route to a quick win at every twist and turn of fortune or misadventure.

I started to identify most with Mike. He is a planner, and maticulous in his thinking., But he is also able to react to circumstances with a coolness and simple means of rationalising. It is called experience and maturity, both of which he has too much of. He should have been out of the game five years back, but like them all was banking on a bigger deal and a final pay off, a pension from his risky business.

Then I identified with Walt. He has played the nice family guy for what, 18 years of the best of his life. He has been a jerk for the voluptious embrace of Skyler, who is not near his intellectual equal. Then it all finally caves in on him, with the cancer. Nothing to lose, now play Mr Existentialist DeLuxe.

By 50 we truly have made it or not, ok you can say that 60 is the new 40 when Life Begins as a new cliche of realising one is not immortal. Smell the flowers, kick the asses. health issues. life's a bitch.

Hank then, is he more the you and the me of the day? his obsession which is the real deal, but he fails to keep everyone on board. He is a little of the round peg in the square DEA hole. He is probably the best actor with the performance of his life in this, he is perhaps least comic book and most believable all american asshole. He has success but it is always on the brink due to the risks of his job and his own neurosis and fear of being killed.

We are masters of our destiny and we rationalise away our failures and down size our ambitions, or realise our goals in life to find them to be hollow and we are not really where we want to be anyway, the journey was more interesting before we arrived at middle aged comfort zone..Are we like these characters? Just a mirror of us all, not quite reflecting the whole picture but catching a glimpse of ourselves from an uncomfortable angle.

The Rectuitment Consultancy Industry

Rectuitment consultants have a bit of a hard old time of it, and I am often too harsh if the truth be told. To me they are like a man offering a luxury umbrella on a dry day, while they are someone who suddenly doesnt have an umbrella and no, sorry you cant come inside out of the rain when you are unemployed.

It began that my first two real career moves in the 1990s involved employers trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the consultants and admittedly hedging their bets a little. Both jobs took a while to hear back from and I was in. some time after being in both jobs I either happened to be looking for a new job with the original agency I believed had landed the job for me, or they just phoned up a year into the job out of the blue. Naughty naughty, the recruiiter had not been told I had been employed, and hey presto they could now send a bill to the employer because there is a nice little clause in the contract about candidates presented are embargoed wares if given other jobs.

When changing from the second of those jobs, I did not see the point in going through rectuiters having learned this, and applied directly to a big ad agency and landed a good job. From that job in 1999 I took the slightly dodgey move into the internet consultancy and programming company world, but you know we did not have hindsight of how much a bubble this was- everyone needed web sites, and the emporer's new clothes need a complete shift each year.  Two recruiters and two failed companies later I lost my taste for the economics of agency land and how miserable bosses were becoming in not giving out company cars any more, while expecting bags of free overtime off our backs.  Then of course recruiters were just not interested, the internet bubble was burst, traditional advertising was in a long hang over  and the rush to "client side" was palpable.

Finally I managed after a year of doing very little but part time for my mate's small company, to get then a move into a real job and it proved to be very good. I took three or even four attempts, I had also made maybe five attempts to get into said largish company before, European HQ of a US company. This time there were two jobs and two rectuiters making everything seem like double the opportunity. Howevver I did not fit the bill for either recruitment company. I went direct and the director was delighted with my open application and actually rebudgeted a job specifically for me, minister without portfolio as it may have been, but tantamount to doing a paid for MBA due to it being a wall street listed company and all the reporting of actual sales, forecasts, marketing spends, sector growth and so on.

I emmigrated after just over two years there and that is when my real issues with consultants started. In ten years of being in Norway I have had one temp job doing B2B telesales in my home town, and very, very few interviews infront of employers. Recently I was enticed into a two hour drive and city centre parking prices to an agency who had promised to take me to an employer for a real life job opp'. Instead they apoligised, and then gave me the spanish inquisition on why I left my last job or actually lost it.  I felt very deflated and since then, they have not been answering my calls or e-mails either which is insult to injury.

The trouble is now with the internet and low price volume advertising on the main national web sites, agencies work differently. You tend to get into a bemanning company, outsourcing or what have you via a first advertisement, and then if that is just a temp position but you are a worthy character then you are high on the list for the next as a proven nice little earner. These companies then like Manpower seem to have their books filled with worthies and get hundreds of applicants when they advertise attractive jobs.

. The finders fee and head hunter branch proport to the employers that they have extensive databases of candidates and a business network. This means in fact that they have cheap advertising to the great self selecting database of the public with internet access, or they use Linked in to annoy people sitting in jobs.

Now my language skills have got a little ahead of me unfortunetly, I am able to think and babble on a little too much in Norsk than my previously nicely stalled brain to mouth interview sililoquys used to go. I just need to slow down a bit, but I wonder if now finally I will be able to use the agencies to get something temp now that I no longer want to be a self employed consultant or be sitting in a very boring admin job like my last one, on a permanent contract with no real excuse for leaving. I made a scene and got kind of fired, by mutual agreement but more me telling them nope, this was no good and you cant complain about me.

The key according to my employment services (outsoruced) advisor is that I should now just hassle them on a regular weekly basis for work because so many employers here are hedging their bets on their being a change in the law to enable them to basically take on all new employees they see fit to, on indefinite temp' contracts. Also in the oil industry I would be damned lucky given the oil prices.

However the industry is just going to have a correction in fact, where they will be actually able to rectruit engineers and staff willing to work outside the Norsk sector to right-size finally after many years of not having enough staff and relying on either over time, or actually slowing down contracts of refusing them out right. For me now as a skilled administrator, hey presto in fact those punters in jobs or with Stavanger mortgages do not in the name of hell want to shift now with all the uncertainty. So every cloud has its silver lining and that cant be bad after my last supposed silver lining contained a nasty thunder cloud followed by a bloody tornado of crap, firefighting project failures, tedious unrelated admin dumped on me, poor systems I was not allowed to redevelop and a hum dinger of a bitch as a departmental boss who has gone through about ten employees in three years.

I have worked around recruiters here or been taken up by a dark horse recruiter having backed off from an initial one so unfrotunetly I am starting to meet recruiters who have moved agencies and remember me, and after a nice chat they never call me back. They have me down with hopefully just a mental note. I could still have dollars on my head, but more liklely I am risky to them as they have to land every contract they get so far with. So there is the straight approach to all the others, and there is then also finding out who the employer is and hearing directly with them.

In truth it looks like I will need to accept a bit of a mid paid admin job with a lot of boring stuff in it to keep my self going back into the real employment market, but it is ideal to go through an agency as I say in order to be more attractive to for employers with a good posiition for me, and eminently available. Finally at my grand old age I may have to make peace with the enemy and get on with ringing them incessently to get a foot in the door.

Economic Naivety

Several times  in my life I have exposed myself to absolute economic naivety, while also being occaisionally a bit coy and generally very conservative with 'leverage'.

First of all take school and the last refuge of social mobility. At school and university I followed what I was interested in, but that enthusiasm proved to be a little half hearted when compared to my competition- basically there is always someone with a PhD or an MBA ahead of me. Anyway, the bigger picture is that the three professions plus engineering and math driven chemistry are the only way to get a better lot for yourself, your head above water if you like, and have a better standard of lviing than your working class parents. If you are middle class, then you are on about evens to have as good a life as your rather well educated, well pensioned baby boomer parents.

Outside these proffessions really you are in the area of you-may-as-well have been a train driver or a plumber. You, like me, followed your vague interests and what you got A's in at school and ended up within some form of service industry such as business services or social services. I have by a little bit of design worked more  in industry and with technology so have had some pretty good pay and some really interesting jobs.

Naivety for me is that by in large, you cannot be really laid back about career and personal capital unless you have a base  of either being in one of the proffessions and fully qualified by age 32, or having rich parents. Career is about a risk-payoff investment of your time, and the truth is you have to grunt for a few years before you get your break to the career ladder propper. I have always jumped on short cuts and that means my CV is just anathematic to many recruiters and I need to go direct to decision makers to get decent contracts and now again jobs.

On the matter of risk, people take far higher financial risks on purchase-vanity and wander-lust than they actually do on building personal capital. In the UK the average age of first house purchase average age is 37, and likely rising. For me I just did not like the areas in which I could afford, and in fact if you do not let out the properties to multioccupancy getting over a grand a month for them, cheap and nasty areas are just that! But I did miss the boat of several areas, Aberdeen and Edinburgh where I could be standing on a pension fund of a hundred grand today! Same with my mother, could have used half her invesments on a flat for me at uni, covered half the mortgage renting the second room out and making on average over 20 years, 10% per year compound with a major capital gain in the late 90s which could have sprung me into my all time plan to 'get into property' as so many have.

Several pals have got on the subsidised gravy train of buying cheap for rental to basically housing benefit dependents. That is another story, but a typical advantage of capitalism being depedent on socialist policies and the tory reversal on council housing.

When getting then into your non big proffessions career,  the pay is mediocre and really has not kept pace with any form of middle class inflation since the mid 90s. The going rates for graduates and two year experienced are the same as they were in 1996. House prices and particularily rental prices have of course grown. Student debt has grown.

My naivety is then actually not taking enough risk in capital and leveraging my access to credit in order to get ahead, rather that my risk taking has been a lot to do with relationships to girl friends and to my home land, Scotland. Risk taking is as pointed out, as much emotional as it is black on white figures. Half of the loves of my life have been either poor or financial disaster areas. None have really shown any promise of improving my economic lot beyond what a usual DINKY mortgage set up could offer in the short term.

The other big change in the UK at least has been the perpetual move away from real wealth creation and into the realms of the mortgage, pension, life assurance and consumer credit driven business and the greater business of the financial markets in London and their satellites. So much has become funny money, with the high margin production goods being more and more tied into government spending or as in green energy, preferential taxation.

So you have to choose your education, your career route, your spending  vs investment and even your choice of partner carefully if you want to have even the same standard of living as your middle class/skilled blue collar parents and making the right choices if you do not make it in the professions is a matter of taking an acceptable level of risk and investing in your own ability to make money in jobs and return on investment. 

A Fact of USA Life Coming UK Way - The Middle Class Are Skint

A Fact of USA Life Coming UK Way - The Middle Class Are Skint

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/personal-finance/7-things-the-middle-class-cant-afford-anymore.html/2/?ref=OB

This sums the lot up of the median income middle class in the USA. Sound familiar?

With the thankful exception of healthcare you could transatlantocate much of this to the UK at least, probably Ireland and some other countries too where the middle class are not really making their middle ends meet.

A crushing statistic for the USA is that the former largest employer , GM, payed an inflation adjusted $50 USD per hour to their 1950s workforce. Today's largest single employer in the US is Wallmart who pay $8. Hardly middle class, but the economic principle behind this affects the middle class. For one wages have not kept up with the real inflationary pressures of life, and they have not therefore kept up with the expectationary spends and savings of people. For the other, the great working class are  no longer feeding the pyramids of insurance, the coffers of savings plans or the local hardware store on saturday mornings. They instead have split into pour subsiders and a new class, the skilled self employed blue collar workers who have a ballsy attitude to risk and loans and are the winners both sides of the Atlantic.

What has far outstripped wages growth for my generation both sides of the Pond is consumer debt ie non capital item debt. Also there is the new insidious perennial debt- student loans which get deferred to interest only payments and installment 'holidays' and worse, never ending house debt and no real capital and often negative equity or inflation neutralised equity. You have to down size a long way to catch the wave of house price rises, and in the US, that means threatening to loose your health care just at the time when you need to secure a long term plan most.

My generation in the UK and probably this is reflected across the EU/EFTA, was not huge on consumer debt and had a cautious attitude to debt when it concerned all things apart from bricks and mortar, where we went quite bonkers, pouring flames on the 1990s and 2000s market which should have actually been declining in line with slow wage growth. Industry colluded, with 5 times salary, interest only , 110% mortgages which were basically sub prime in all but the state meddeling them. In fact the very laisez faire approach meant that people could simply lie about their income when applying for a mortgage, and cross fingers hope to die that interest rates did not go up, while equity did so they could climb the ladder further.  Some like me spotted this big time, and avoided buying houses in the slightly shadey areas they could afford, which have indeed proven the worst for negative equity and maintaince costs, and slow resale over time.

Read the artiicles, all 8 pages, and I will be back!!! The big con and the white russian hoards will be blogged on again.

Politicians and UFO Hunters Have a Lot in Common

What do UFO-ologists and Politicians have in common?

Conflation!

I have been thinking a lot about belief this week, and the difference between religious and political belief and the belief that science is not a belief.

The truth is out there. More so in politics than in UFO and mysteriology. In the world we have various systems but generally two diametrically opposed beliefs today -democracy and oligarchy``````````. Either you get to decide somethings about your environment, family life and working conditions or someone else does. That applies equally to both views, the ultimate socialist view point and the ultimate capitalist vis a vis oligarchist view point.

In the UK and to some extent the USA, after the 2008 melt down of the international financial loans and invesment system(s) the left got the blame for the woes of the country. This was a conflation: juxtaposing two unrelated phenomena so as to build credibility for the arguement. They couldnt pull it off in the USA, because Obama was not on the scene long enough to be blamed, but they did try, by saying of course he was making things worse.

Leaping to a conclusion, attributing cause away from the real root, over looking contrary evidence. This is very much the connection which bonds politicians to UFO-ologists. Sound bites actually become little packets of belief carried and amplified by the media.

One of the best conflational stories was that of the UFO ology 'church', the seekers, who were lead to believe by their leader, that the world would soon meet its end in destruction by aliens. A date was chosen, in the 1960s sometime, when the event would happen and the group made ready to meet the aliens with prayers and chants. It was either midnight or sunrise or whatever time, but on a hill top in a circle with perhaps hands held in a chain, the seekers fell silent awaiting the second of the apocalypse. It passed. Some more time passed. The charismatic leader and founder of the "religion" took some time and then announced : " Ah, our faith was strong, the aliens heard our chant and we have spared the earth !!!"  Putting the con in conflation.

The same happens today all the time with on the one side politicians and on the other UFO ologists. The funniest example is probably the Dark Knight Alien Satellite . What is funny strange and ridiculous is the way the image of an unidentified orbital object, photographed by the US during a space mission, is juxtaposed immediately with the claim that this is a 13000 old object known to be omitting radio signals. There is then presented a whole chain of mysterious radio observations, merely loosely connectable and never substantiated or previously connected to the object and then just the presentation of fiction as fact or a belief system we should follow, because we are being mislead by the authorities. The fact that strange  claims and undocumented, uncorroborated observations go unchallenged by governance, and do not warrant official denial, means that of course via conflation a tautology is created which some people choose to follow.

What is lacking in our education systems which means that we do not as a huge majority of sane middel intelligent, rational beings just see through the false logic?  Well it is just rude for governments and institutions to go round dneying these things, and a waste of time. There is some serious research into phenomenii such as the Hessdal Energy Emission Lights (there I just made my own little conflation for my own purposes!!) However we as the public are left uninhindered to believe these things as long as they do not do us harm, or that our belief does others harm. You can see where I am going with this. Radical godless "islam", fundamentalist nazistic zionism, Christian fascist conservatism. See three more confaltions slipped into three massively damaging total systems of conflation.

Governments cannot go against the logic of conflations otherwise they threaten not only to incurr the wrath of religion, but also to avoid them losing the biggest party and political movement tool of basically juxtaposing some economic facts, or environmental facts with a cause or with an outcome which are only tentatively linked. But they sound good together. They sound chain of events, cause and effect.

Teaching greater use of logic and enabling individuals to think critically is the reserve of the university system and outside the command economies of the east, that is a tiny proportion of global society. School tends to avoid metaphysics and logic. Critical thought and expression is tallied to language and literature, and that just exacerbates the potential for conflations to be presented to others and promoted in the media as fact and likelihood.  Science of course touches on basically the concept of the 'rigourous scepticism' from Hume and Descartes. The binding theory of the Null Hypothesis and the need for observation and experiment as a series of small steps. It is boring, it changes the world slowly, the atom took 40 years to split. But it makes planes fly and iPads work.

Politicians it can be asserted, make an environment in which planes can be designed to fly, and iPads designed and built to work, and they believe that environment must be built on belief, because science does not build confidence. It answers most often with more questions. Economics, sociology and even accounting are most often taught at traditional universities in the colleges of arts. Belief builds investor and consumer confidence, and that does to some extent build economic growth.

In fact the belief in the need for economic growth, the top line industrial output, exports, price and volume harvest and so on is so paramount as to be suspiscious, like the birth of jesus on the 25th of December. It is a blunt weapon, growth is a simple cause and effect parallel to build investor confidence on.It is a big day one economic mega-digm which is based on a massive string of conflations and juxtapositions. Perhaps it is just belief which floats it as being so important and so 'effective' in creating well being. Inflation is the enemy, but also a consequence of growth. So in fuelling growth and value multiplication in the western world where we are still de industrialising, the sub prime vehicle emerges as the angel of terror, the unicorn in the mist whcih shows the folley of the whole system. Bang.

Teaching logic and the rigourous scepticism in state schools is dangerous in the west. Perhaps though in China you can see that the combination of a huge history of a hierarchical mega bureacracy and also the grand scale destruction of religion by the cultural revolution. Now they play at command capitalism, but in many other aspects of building a society, and industry and other structures of a new mega power, they are at a huge advantage. There is a rational chain of command and corresponding chain of events, cause and cascade of effects.Perhaps they are better poised not only to tackle the challenges of their own existence as a giga state, but also the challenges of the world.

A final conflation, With Freedom comes Responsibility. You could say that this idiom is just that, a nice bit of wishful thinking.

Facebook Becomes the Inevitable Spam Book!

Well it had to happen at some point. Judging by my own newsfeed, facebook has finally crossed into being a big source of spam, like your first hotmail account, it has gone over the level. Today i counted well over half the entries served up  in my newsfeed were commercial. Facebook has evolved into Spambook.

The odd thing is It is not Zuckerberg who is actually to blame!! The management of facebook get blamed by the flamers. In fact all they have done is make the environment for a profitable company whose stock value represents better now their ability to earn money and expand. The tweaks a couple of years ago and the opening of mobile devices to advertisements allowed for the worst exposure to commerciality from a body of capitalist minded people - we the users.

First of course we liked too many sources which soon started spamming through their posts. We unlike, hide, report but we keep on Liking new causes, comedy stores, personalities and sports clubs. Worse we keep on joining groups who spam us. Our likes have now become shared in a neat little banner section which does appear frequently but less frequently than the old system of Likes with algorythms that maybe presented you something you may too like. Hmm, I am on ignore by about 95% of my 'book I feel, mostly because of an excessive period of liking a couple of things a day, and being on long threads.

Now we get to the darker places of CGM - consumer generated media - where we actually torture each other. Some groups were started to actually sell stuff to each other. Community markets took off here about two years ago, no doubt they have always been a feature of the 'Book in the USA as much as Craig List and Ebay. Now there are endless beigey brown puffa jackets, cathode tube TVs, cracked iPads and the chip board detritus of divorces and upgrading in useless furniture.

Yet do we clear out this spam? The Like Banner of what freinds are liking is the best thing on FB for ages. Manages spam for us. Gives us something to look at while we wait for a plane. Why then do we not just put everything on ignore? Well the consumer generated community markets we have a kind of fondness for, and the eternal hope of a bargain within easy driving distance, or perhaps helping someone out we know are on hard times, or saving the enviornment by recycling. The Spam rolls on, people still want an iPhone 5 half price, there are all the duller colours of last years utility clothes on sale in the sizes that our kids have just grown out of.

Neither do we bother to vote with our feet when out favourite sports personality starts spamming with over 50% posts being commercial ?  We plug on, it is only the odd ad'. Sites you may like are wildly innaccurate, I have never had anything more than the usual insurance, dating, holidays mass marketing trawl. Never once anything to do with my hobbies. Instead that type of marketing has now gone word-of-keyboard by what my freinds liking likely to be likey by me. Never more true, we flock together, we like consumer referral, it makes us feel empowered. Advertising is seen as a lie all too often..

"Truth Well Told" was McCann Eriksons motto,, and we shyed away from the traditional media and creative, interesting adverts.  Now we expose our selves to the absolute most dangerous types of scam and phishing via that good old consumer generated Face Book. Unfeasably cheap Oakleys and Raybans are just that, it is a scam. Yet we see our friends Likes for these, and these seem to be paid to appear in their own Liked box.  We link out to god knows what with a demand to access our facebook and suddenly we have some dodgey folk trying to freind us or our accounts Fraped.

I find that my pals of my oldie generation are now posting far less often, yet often on more important news. Facebook has become an obsessive compulsive disorder for us as we seek some distraction in our recreational time, and that time therefore gets spread thinner as we waste time in the offiice on social media nano holidays, thus needing to work later at night, thus having social media up in the back ground, complaining about needing to work late, replying to answers, thanking for Likes....... we have a self induced Facebook Fatigue and we seem powerless to do anything about it, finding the pinging sound of alerts more attention grabbing than a child's subtle or obtuse reach for comfort. Little candies of social media, falling from the stars, we feel important and connected. We disconnect and become inconsequent to steadily more people on our facebook list who put us on ignore.

What consumer generated media most of all teaches us is that in fact we generate a lot of crap and the quality content comes from people who are still payed and have a degree of talent and professionalism in their content and channel.   If you have read this far, in what I hope was a high quality amateur blog, then you are in a tiny minority of people who came from the web here, and in a minority of those who read further.

Social Media sites and mechanisms like Twitter, are  now fragmenting again as with the whole thing about the Model T ford, we all want on to begin with and then we all realise we are individuals and one size does not fit all. The current move is off facebook for the younger generation, and although they arent shouting about it, FB are probably struggeling acquire and maintain up time from under 22 year olds. This generation are growing up with mobile internet and wifi 90% uptime, with the SMS fast becoming a thing of the past for social interaction. We like twitter because we have a degree of interaction with our searches and Twitter have taken up on the best of the TweetDecks and evolved a decent GUI. Facebook has become channel 1, it is on because we think the news will maybe have something for us, but its interactivity is reduced to an extent where as I say, we have more commercial spam in our news feed than stories from friends. Just as with terrestrial, analogue TV we grew bored with and migrated away from, a trickle of lead consumers at first, then a torrent of the masses will leave the chewing-gum-for-the-eyes internet 'channels'. 

Facebook was for a very long time too good to be true. Tiny little side banner ads we never ever clicked on, opt outs for all forms of potential spamming, rich content when we all bothered to put good stories up and we then gave a damn about catching up with each other, which I found very cool, but maybe the people I found did not share that side of the experience of linking up with me and my spamming.

Conservative Party Shops for Growth With Consumer Spending Yet Again

I listened with interest, as I often do, to radio 4's business round up today. It contained two or three very contrasting views on the economy and the concept of responsible citizens.

Firstly, not content with the concept of small , weak government, now the Tories are gambling with all people's futures on making pensions effectively a mid term ISA. You will not only be able to manage you own anuity upon a pensions plan's maturement, you will also be able to take out money earlier to not only sensible alternative investments, but also to CASH.

This reeks of anarchy, and irresponsibility. What have we learned from Black Monday 1987 and Darker September 2008? That consumer credit and a liberal attitude to liquidity personal and institutional is irresponsible. For liberal you can often read just anarchic, or to my mind "trickle up".

The problem with this scheme is caused by same class myopia as the conservatives have always had in the UK, which is shown most prominently in Scotland where they are almost a political irrelevancy, so out of touch with the classes.  Their own 'people' are conservatives with a small "C" and those others are just folk who see that lower taxes or higher defence and police spend will suit them just fine. The problem is in the second group, in that the masses are really not responsible enough nor will they ever become responsible enough to manage their own pensions. They will all too often take-to-cash and have a live now, sod being old approach to that big pot of cash at the end of life's long monochrome rainbow that is working life for most of us.

This actually affects mostly the richer top half of society anyway, because the lower third have rather poor pension provision so far., often like me having had several employers and disjointed pensions which would have been better served by state PAYE. This also plays into the more dynamic sectors of the finance industry and the stock market, where of course the biggest losses were made after 2008 collapse.

In essence these policies are very anti pension company, which are by nature small c conservatives and have made historically boring investments. Freed partly from "with profits" pensions it means that they can now cut off more of the pie from those boring investments for their profits instead of actually taking responsibility for furbishing inflation busting pension funds.  They claimed that it would enable higher returns from more balanced risk taking, rather than the need to "bank" high growth into pensions, but from my analysis this does not benefit the small guy like me.

Nigel Wilson of legal and general. one of the UK's largest domestic investors,  no doubt will have some comments on this. However here is the next conflict in that more lumps of money in the economy will benefit London first, and not the regions. More people seeking get-rich-quick with lumps of cash taken out their pension pots into high risk city invesments is not good for his company, and not good for the regions.

http://www.legalandgeneral.com/your-life/nigels-blog/2014/The-Beginning-Not-the-End-of-Devolution.html

Nigel sees that devolution to the regions brealks the hunger of London for power and its mypoia on spending. This is of course epitomised by HS2, which so far is planned to be built SOUTH -NORTH. I would propose a North-south, starting in fact in York such that the NE-NW can get a benefit. His company stand on a strategic cross roads where the divergence of commercial property prices between the great metropolis and the regional cities could be stark and in fact there is a risk for negative equity if the regions continue to be dominated by post industrialisation, and low wage, low tax return jobs.

London Myopia, City Self Importance, South East Over Heat. London forgets very quickly that it is in all likelhood a wealth and tax vacuum from the rest of the country. It demonstrates that there is no such thing as trickle down, rather it is all about trickle-up. The privatised utilities and railways got a City centric, soft cushion which limited competition and subsidised the edges of areas the private sector did not want to take responsibility for. Now these deliver profits to the city based on above base line cost growth and Retail price inflation. Then there is of course the property market, where growth in house prices and commercial property sites across the UK has fuelled London while in fact since 2008 and before that too, the market has been failing the new generration of adults born in the late 70s through to the 90s.

If you take London then and all its institutions and departments, its public transport and its civil service, and then add the South East, from Cambridge and Oxford down and towards Dover, then it probably is a net importer of income taxes, and in terms of operating companies which create value, the most taxes are generated outside London but reported on the LSE or Companies' House.

Pensions and the future of the country are much more sensibly managed in Norway where I live now, from many perspectives. We have the same employer contribution private pension and a revised yet still generous PAYE state pension. But of course Norway has as a country put money aside from its large oil economy into inward and international investments. Also Norway has a common agreement that its people will all share in the oil boom by having high salaries, that there will be relatively high taxation on those salaries and that people will get good public services. Further common sense with the cut backs in some public budgets being called in relation to running the multi billion dollarr 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Democracy killed that idea, cocktails with the King and Queen for the IOC Aside.

Now we come back to my little nippy pet animal in the cage, Scottish Independence.  The BBC and the rest of the partisan, traditional media had decided for themselves that this would be the decisive vote for the whole generation, that it will take 30 years for the next one. Well what has happened is that the runway is opened up more by there being more transparency on wealth creation in Scotland, in that more powers are coming to Holyrood regardless, and that Labour may be marginalised from UK power even more by the West Lothian Question being answered as is discussed in parliament today. Labours only chance in the UK is then to go the Proportional Representation route in a first coalition government, and then sit in an eternity of PR coalitions as we have in Scandinavia, for better and for worse.  With UKIP now in full nationalistic sabre rattling flight, with their latest  MP trying to sound like Socrates or King George the sixth, they cover a lot of flag waving, xenophobic bases, while the Scots have never voted against the EU in any numbers rather supporting by around 70% and more parties and policies which are pro EU.

Where do UKIP want to go? Renegotiating with an EU who will be pleased to be rid of their constant need for special exemptions and some amount of fillibustring of policy. The EU will want to keep the UK in an uncertain place such as to attract the major investment banks over the waters to EU countries. That is a once in a lifetime, perhaps once in a century possibility to gain more share of inward investment for the continent and weaken the LSE and the City.
Do they want to try and stand against America, where the billionaires can decide what is in their interests in dealing with the UK on what will be a very minor, assymetric trade deal, especially with the Continental stock exchanges becoming more interesting for investors. Or do they want to turn to BRICS, with all the wierdness of dealing with Brasil and China thinking of the UK as a tiny, silly little island who lost their empire and ability to be a power long ago?   Or of course then the EU through the cosey back door of EFTA?  Well Norway and Iceland would not want a right wing, London City Centric partner. Whereas Scotland with her common maritime and sub sea interests would be a happy bed fellow in EFTA, the UK as a whole would be an elephant on the matress, demanding a huge amount of room by simply the act of getting into bed.

In all this there is the basic common sense of putting by for tommorrow, spending within your limits of income and mortgage, and building a stronger house and mind for the future. The march towards this is for me, the Scandinavian model and Scottish Independence, the march away from this is the isolationist, London Centric tax haven UKIP and back bench conservative view. Wealth creation is vital, and not just the funny-money, but also wealth retention is vital to the regions, which means private investment, private wage levels in what is taken out from the region, and of course government mediated wealth distribution via education, infrastructure and good public services.