Review of Reviews

Giving ordinary people a voice is such an important part of recent developments. Being able to share with others your own experience of a product or a service is so liberating and genuinely useful. Using an online presence you really never know who or what you are dealing with. A schoolchild operating out of their parents garage can be indistinguishable from a multinational corporation. Equally a scam site using a cloned website can be difficult to spot even if you are unusually cautious. To benefit from online you have to be online, exposed. So other users experiences are a vital check. First off is the Site a scam or are products actually delivered, next what are customer services like, do they respond to complaints or throw up a defensive smokescreen then finally what is the delivered product or service like. Is it worth the money or just poorly conceived?

Other users experience are vital then in weeding out those Site just not worth bothering about. The downside is that people are quick to vent their spleen when their expectations are not lived upto, but slow to praise for a job well done and then are often not very objective. So each review site for a product, has a range of high praise with possibly more vehement condemnation. We the readers have to step through this and set aside the more extreme comments, in either direction, and try to arrive at a balanced view. It is usually becomes quickly clear if a product is poor or its customer services does not function.

As beneficiary of others postings, so I have tried to return the benefit. Under my penname of TonySomerset (of Taunton) I have been posting my own reviews for the things encountered. What has become increasingly clear is that not all review sites are equal. Yet another minefield for the unwary to step through. Several sites use customer feedback solely as a means to bolster their cashflow from the product supplier. User reviews are incidentals, to provide a cloak of acceptability, not the primary purpose. They take a rake off from the product supplier for each visit and/or link from their own pages. A vested interest. Beware then, Sites like TopTable, Sugarvine or Ciao are only interested in the cash stream from their client sites so will not post negatives reviews. Their reviews are totally biased, as only good favourable reviews get posted.

As users know full well nothing is perfect, mistake happen and the odd bad days occur. That is not the point. The point is how does the supplier respond and deal with the inevitable problems that do occur. How useful to you is it to know that everything is top quality and only a minor blemish might sneak through as comment. Utterly worthless. What you need to form your own judgement is a balanced picture, the good countered with the bad. You can then form a view, where were the problems and how were they responded to. If just a matter of taste or too high an expectation that can be disregarded. However if the bad reviews pinpoint towards a customer crash course then avoid like the plague. The skill of surviving in business is to leave the customer not dissatisfied. It requires tact and people skills to manage successfully. Not every customer will always be satisfied but if a supplier leaves a trail of them foaming at the mouth, frustrated in getting any response to even a minor point and wanting to vent their spleen, that supplier is heading for disaster. We do all need to know so we too can avoid. So do beware of the Review Site you are using, check it out. Do they only show the positive upbeat spin?

Bad Government

It is trivial and in the scale of things amounts to nothing. So why get all concerned about whether fluoride should be added (locally) to our national water supply or not? Self-evident, fluoride is scientifically proven to reduce the incident of tooth caries and adding to our water is the cheapest and most effective way to ensure everyone gets it. Right?

Why I am bothering to write is because it is indicative of a wrong totally misplaced attitude. Not the action in itself but the mind set that makes to so acceptable and right. Our social compact is, if we forego certain freedoms, we will be supplied with clean potable water. I would add in by the state and not a service sold off to a foreign commercial enterprise accountable only to its shareholders and not us, the English people. But that is another argument.

To return, to ensure the water is delivered in a healthy potable 'germfree' state we accept that it is dosed with chemicals.. We might even accept that to avoid the cost of replacing worn out pipework we accept that the distribution pipelines are lined with chemicals that will become 'inert' with use. The health of the nations people is important. So the next step to dosing the water with a chemical that is known to be good for the nations health is logical.

Every time a person in a position to know announces that miracle product 'X' is wonderful and has no known side effects, all credibility flies out of the window. Nothing on this earth has only positive good effects. Everything you can think of has good and bad effects. It is a question of balance, a human judgement prey to the fashion thinking of the times. What is a 'right' balance one year, one month, one day is wrong or even misguided the next. Fluoride is just another such substance, the scientists will be arguing, testing and exchanging data that will shift the balance back and forth.

What is at issue is that the government should not put us into a position where we are not allowed to make our own choice, to go with the perceived balance or not. There are no absolutes in judgement, it all depends. With dosing the water for purity, there really are no options other than supplying water that might be contaminated. Pragmatically there is little option. It happens in my local area we have a water collecting topography, so could have access to pure clean water even if untreated. Except for national conformity, and to enable our water to be distributed around I suspect, it is treated. Another aside. Chemically lining the pipes to save costs? Well I was not asked, do not like it, but it is a democracy and making harsh decisions against competing costs issues is part of the game. Adding fluoride is something else.

The Government is not appointed in loco parentis for each of us. It is simply not for them to decide. There are heaps of issues where it would be nice if only they could decide, to save our health, to make looking after us so much cheaper and easier. Except that is not the contract we have with them. We are to be left to make our own choices and decisions about things that affect us as individuals, as far as possible. Even if we are wrong, pigheaded or plain stubborn.

I love it as an idea, if the Government could stop obese people, no let us go the whole hog, all people eating beefburgers. Plainly bad for our nations health and very little food value that could not be better supplied another way. Except of course it is plainly wrong as would be the banning of say, alcohol. Some things are just down to the individual. It gets muckier when it is a collective issue. When we forgo an individual freedom for the greater good of the wider community. All milk should be pasteurised as only then can you be sure it is safe to drink. When it comes to Class A or B or C Drugs I get less and less sure. Much as I have huge reservations about drug taking, it seems DoGoody Government wants to decide for me. I know the social implications are enormous but it is always better if people can come to their own conclusion than having a Government decide for them.

Genes to fight for

Nature is ruthless and dispassionate, only the strongest and fittest get to live to breed another day. The weak, the sickly, those not best suited to the environmental conditions of the day, if they are not abandon by their hard pressed parents, will most likely fall by the wayside. Pushed aside by their pier group who are stronger and more suited.

What genes we get to inherit is a lottery, a random cut and shuffle, a bit from her and bit from him and perhaps some oddity due to a mistranslation. That is what you are dealt. Whether or how you survive depends on this initial hand dealt, how you manage to fend off predators, find sufficient to eat and win out on the right to breed.

Then along comes religion and science. Now every born person must be spared and all of our skills and resources are funnelled into saving this soul for as long as humanly possible. No matter the underlying cause or defect that put their life in jeopardy in the first place. In all humanity, it is everyones entitlement, it is their birthright to have a chance to survive, succeed and to reproduce. When societies were ravaged by disease, famine or more often war, it was a imperative that became translated into a moral code, preserve all life at all costs.

Natures way ensured only the carriers of the strongest and fittest gene mix were likely to reproduce and thus pass on their award winning combination of genes to the next lottery drum draw. Our moralistic intervention now ensures all gene combinations, the weak and flawed are preserved together with the strong and resilient, both equally contributing to the next generation. There is no way left to discard those gene combinations that are weak, self-destructive and or reduce our fitness to survive natures changing patterns.

Worse still, through economic success and science our populations now exceed the worlds capacity to sustain an equilibrium. To support all of those now born and grant them a right to breed requires that the worlds resources will diminish below their natural replacement level. We could argue the pros and cons on this, but let us just settle on this one aspect. Current world population, if they only bred at a replacement level, would still be challenged to find sufficient resources to sustain them. But the population currently will increase well beyond mere replacement levels. We just have too many surviving people for the good of the world we inhabit. Unlike any other time in our history we can afford to be relaxed or conservative about the need to procreate.

A weak gene, take for example colour blindness, can propagate through the male population at fast rate. We are beginning to discover a number of such genetically related defects which threaten the longevity of us as a people. The much greater mixing up of the gene pool has many advantages, spreading good strong gene characteristics around. But as we spread the strong we are also spreading the weak and defective gene. There is no weak gene kill off option left within our kingdom. There is a real risk that we will continue to weaken our gene pool putting our long term survival in jeopardy. There is of course no god standard of what constitutes a good strong gene. Woe betides us if we go back over the Aryan dream again. That should not stop us thinking about the issues of the propagation of self-evidently harmful destructive genes. As a first step we should short-list gene traits that are set to spread rapidly and quantify their harmful long term effects. Whilst we might adapt and be content to live with wide-spread colour blindness we would not respond the same way to sickle cell disease.

Our continued success as people ultimately depends on the strength of our gene pool and its vitality to adapt to the extremes that our over-population is already forcing on our environment. We as a people are going to have to devise ways to ensure certain weak genes do not get the chance to propagate, even if that is at the cost that certain individuals do not automatically get the right to reproduce.

Chicken or Egg?

Take what media you like, newspaper, magazine, TV or, we should now add in, YouTube and they all make the same defensive claim, they only serve what their consumers want. If the consumer did not repeat view their product they would not be in business. They simply just reflect the public taste at large as exercised by their consumers. Cant argue with that.

The consumer of course can only choose from the range of diets presented as an all-in package and has to accept all the sleaze and distasteful alongside with those items that more closely aligned with their own taste. If only life was black and white, then consumer choice alone would be able to shift the media diet to the wider more desirable topics. But it is not black and white. The various forms of media are all mega industries with huge investments to recoup so have invested heavily into the triggers of impulse interest that push their format to the fore. They have to connect with the buying public to stay alive and are certainly more savvy than the consumer as to what ticks theirs boxes. It is not a level playing field in many regards.

We the consumer have our vulnerabilities. We do seem attracted to the saucy, the salacious, the risqué, the hint of scandal, the banana slip as well as the more worthy heroics, compassionate or daring-do. These almost subconscious predilections are exploited to the full. Backed up no doubt with serial focus groups to dissect and redefine the expected targeted response to each new item so to better sharpen the attack the next time round. So collective weaknesses are examined and exploited but we collectively do not think or wonder about those same weaknesses so exploited. So what if the bumps and grinds, the show and tells of every day life have a disproportionate exposure and collective awareness than they really deserve?

Gone are the mutual musings and levelling of the village pub or extended family gatherings. It is the soap storyline and morality, the simplified banner headline, the isolated gratuitous image clip that now forms and shapes our collective id, that consensual value of what is our idea of the norm or acceptable. The media is the main if not the only tool shaping how we see life, our expectations of what might happen and our setting the bar for our hopes for future achievement. Insidiously, life choices are preselected, simplified and promoted with the range of content within the media outlet consumed. Not a one off single shot but a grapeshot broadside scattered wide, diffused from the advert content, editorial direction all the way through to the sappy snappy prime attention grabber focus.

The winning morality and life style thus promoted is simplistic, confrontational divisive, you are either with us or against simplicity. Anything else leads to dialogue, doubt and debate and these self-evidently are not attention grabbers. To promote themselves the media simplify real life down to easily digestible sound bites with quick easy direct emotional or sentimental appeal. There simply is no scope for complexities or alternate possibilities that real life is seeped in. Thus the media have taken over and now control the direction of social development. There is no alternative dialogue, they hold the keys to all the channels of expression.

These keys that determine our societies future direction are held by one man with regard to newspapers, or just a few individuals on governing boards with regard to TV, films or magazines. Each is referential, looking to the other for signs of a new approach or direction to copy that might quicken interest. It is not just that all of our morality and political agendas are being set by just a small group of not necessarily representative individuals, as if that was in itself acceptable. But they are setting the very tenure of our society. Our very democratic political systems has coalesced so as to be better presented and advantaged by the way the media chooses to present it. What? Adversarial sells better than complimentary but nuances of differences. The more extreme they can position the parties the easier they are to differentiate and label as good or evil. This in the long term serves our political system badly. The coalition is uncomfortable in the hands of the media so they look and promote dissent. Equally they could promote successful collaboration but that would not sell copy.

Every government announcement has to be in terms of right or wrong there is no middle ground of maybes and it depends. Ministers are either liars or the good guys without a flaw. A decision is right or else it is a gigantic cockup. Watch out if a Prime Minster was to say, "I have not yet decided which way to go"! But this not the reality of the political processes, it is full of uncertainty, full of balancing conflicting interest, full of lack of precise information and clear judgements. That is why we have politics, personal moral judgement at its finest. Except of course the media cannot sell complexity so we have adversarial politics. Contrary to the real issues, whenever a major policy comes to public notice it has to be couched in for or against terms. In the past when you may have had twenty conflicting opinions written up in the same newspaper even, you the reader were exposed to a width and range of views and you could sense out the issues that seemed right to you. Not now. With just a few hands controlling the output direction there is now just one focused opinion represented in a range of ways. No choice.

What we need desperately as a society is information about the facts, the conflicts and the choices and then wide ranging debate. Only then we as a society will grow up and begin to come to terms with all the complexities our modern society challenges us with. Chicken or egg. Ultimately we each choose which media we take up. We all need to make more careful choices and to be more articulate about what we do not like. We can actually change the shape and nature of our society. If we choose. It is up to us. Each and everyone of us.

Finding the Fraud

The hardest bias to eliminate in proving a scientific theory is that of prior expectation. The researcher, knowing what he expects to see, will find it within the data, when another unbiased person would not. It skews the results, unfavourably. No proof is certain until another, remote uninvolved, institute has replicated it. All very pragmatic, detached and objective way of assessing and limiting the errors of our human vulnerabilities.

How come then when we have a need to overhaul the disability financial support allowances, it is prefaced with that statement that twenty percent savings are to be achieved in the process! If you are starting out on a major policy procedural revue, the last thing you want to do is to cloud your starting point with prejudiced presumptions based on nothing more than speculation, hearsay and the roar of the crowd. Any manager worth their salt would say first off, sort out your facts, know your starting position and be very clear what your goal is, keep it clear and simple.

But then it does not matter about being rigorous in our approach because these are only disabled people with no clout or large well of support. It does not matter then if the threat of yet another fraud seeking investigation puts each and every one on suspicion; each has yet again to go through the humiliating hoop of proving the self-evident that they are unable to cope as well as a 'normal' person; suffer the indignities of some disinterested investigator putting them through meaningless tests that might never in a million years expose the real handicaps they have to struggle and cope with which may actually take insight and compassion to begin to understand and, to cap it off, have there noses rubbed in the social smear yet again that they are dependant on support and help and they are not free agents to do what they want, when they want it.

The justification for all this is there is blatant fraud going on and our country needs to make huge savings inorder to survive let alone recover from the brink of financial ruin. Surely everyone would willingly want to play their part. If only we were all of equal stature.

Rather than harangue the claimants for their suspected misuse of the rules and forms prescribed for them to follow, equally the blame could be placed at the feet of the managers. Let us investigate these lax managers that allow frauds or false claims to be made, unchallenged and do not tighten up procedures or guidance to minimise the scope for abuse of the systems. Lets sack the managers with high claim records and make all the savings that way!.

This is where the heart of the problem lays. It is yet another example of the systematic failings of centralised control, remote form the actual interface, that just cannot devise questions, rules and procedures capable of coping or defining the infinitely wide range of human responses and conditions out there across the whole spectrum of humanity. Even if the impossible was achievable it would then only become the next target to prove that the defined is well short of limits of human ingenuity. What we expect as our social right is rough justice. Not exactly equal to everyone, nor exactly equal wherever or however, just lumped together, across the board, a rough parity can be seen. This requires a human commonsense interface, flexible, adjustable, empowered to apply discretion, compassionate and above all accountable.

Our national effort and technology should put its muscle here where it can be really useful. To provide comparators, to example best practice or to alert to weakness and excesses. Provide good, robust and understandable on demand support but leaving the human agents to make those thousand and one incomparable comparisons, applying their skills to balance the dissimilarities. That is what our brains are good at. The bottom line is what rule, question or procedure can define just how much personal effort is necessary to overcome a weakness. None, it is a piece of string exercise and only the human interface can judge when enough is enough and some help will go a long way.

Who ever signed off on this initiative deserves to be taken out into the street and shot in front of the cameras, no trial, no judge, no jury just let presumption, prejudice and sentiment decide.

Elistists or celebrities or whatever

It seems to be a human condition, the need to stand out from the crowd, male or female we need it, but just go about it by different routes. Once apon a time it was just sufficient to be extremely good at what you did, craftsman, sportsman, juggler, gladiator, seductress, just to be the best in your patch. Unless of course you had access to infinite money, when all you had to do was accrete around you land, property, desirable objects, countless minions and then display all, for your piers to revere your undoubted wealth.

No problem with all any of that. We should all respect the long hours of application and subjugation required to become skilled at whatever. We may choose not to rate say gladiatorial skills but surely must acknowledge the physique, adroitness and mastery of weaponry need to be good at it. A fitting reward for those endless hours of practice and perfecting needed to become better than good but to excel within your patch. Likewise to assemble wealth, invest shrewdly to maximise the display of it and to put it in a best setting, all takes tenacity, a preception to see a need and a touch to understand the marketplace. My only problem I have here is the manner of wealth accumulation. Too often it is achieved by crimes against the less well off, less able to defend their limited means. Whether from land grabs off small farmers, or holding people in virtual slavedom or to selling totally bogus and inflated goods or services that just don't deliver. Lets pretend for this blog that all wealthy people acquired it from inventing some life enriching thing, paperclip or biro or whatever and made piles of money selling it at a realistic price, filling a much hole in loads of peoples lives. We can pretend.

What we have now is just banal exhibitionism, anything to gain attention for that moment. At its crudest most devoid of content we have stripping off the shirt to show the tits or its male equivalent dropping the trousers and mooning. All the better if caught on camera and fame has arrived if taken up by YouTube. Really? The media fuels this drive with its endless parade of talentless wannabies that shoot to public notoriety for that brief spark of notice only to sink back to well-deserved oblivion. What is on parade is not talent or skills but just novelty and in the ever escalating pressure to win attention, the more there is a underlying suggestion of ridicule, stupidity, voyeurism, farce or even cruelty so much the better, anything, it really does seem that anything will do, so long as it attracts that all desired attention. It matter not whether it is talent or product or service set out for display, the same attitude prevails

Sad. This endless display and flaunting of mediocrity debases all of our experiences of what should be the appreciation of the heroes of our societies. It dulls and desensitises all of us so we lose the will and interest to spot the real skill or talent emerging, drowned in all this over-hyped noise from those wannabies. The noise is so shrill and insistent it is almost impossible to ignore the clamour of see me, watch me, I bet you have never seen this before. Really? Are our sense and experiences so dull and so limited that we have never encountered any of humans rich palate before but only done or presented better? I do doubt that.

We each have the choice and must make it to ignore the clamour and reserve our praise and attention to those who really do deserve it, who are able to contribute something significant and outstanding examples for us all to aspire to. Lets not look to the gutter but to the heights of human achievement.

Off with his head

As a matter of course none of us condone acts of violence or destruction of property, it is the code we all choose to live by. Equally none of us should condone the Police's control, barricading and kettling of the protester's march. In a civilised society you do not attack your citizens with an militarised and organised force nor bludgeon the head of your citizens with a truncheon. Yes it is very irritating, inconvenient and a highly volatile situation when groups of our citizens get together to protest against some perceived miscarriage of justice. What would you rather have? That anyone with a contrary view and opinion is stifled, given no voice, prevented from joining up with like minded people to discuss the grievances as seen? Suppress all non-conforming opinion? No of course not, the majority is not always right and certainly those given power do not as a matter of course exercise it wisely. There has to be a vital, lively vehicles for dissent.

The problem is that when there are no channels for voicing and debating what to one side seems self-evident wrong ideas then frustration build up. Supporters gather around that frustration and when, as is the norm now, they are denied access to the places and the people that count in making those wrong decision, our elected representatives after all, no some magical remote elite, then understandably frustration can well up into violent reaction. The Police have to take responsibility for this outcome. Since that woman used the Police as an armed force to break the Union Movement they have lost touch of their true role. To be our elected force to police conduct between ourselves, not an arm of the government to ensure the establishments will over its populace. So by brandishing its total control, by denying access, dictating terms and limits, by bottling up groups so they can control and retain dominance, all this just adds fuel to the fire of frustration. There is a wrong that is not being addressed. There has to be an outlet, a safety valve to express the passion and quantum of the dissent. A protest march is one of the few vehicles left to the populace but even this the authorities want to control and dictate form to.

Of course in any democratic society there is always dissent, by definition not everyone can be pleased and satisfied. But that never was the objective. The objective remains as always that all opinions are seen by all to have been fairly considered and weighted and a resolution arrived at that acknowledges contrary concerns, puts them into a context and a rationale offered for why the majority have chosen a contradictory position. The common goodsense of the country will then see and understand why the dissidents are nothing more than trouble makers and can be safely ignored. Gagging dissent, railroading perceived minorities and attempting to demonise any group that does not agree with your agenda is only going to exacerbate a grumbling disbelief and lead to ever more and more violent protests to break out of the increasing authoritarian chains trying to contain them. Reasoned discussion, even passionate argument is the only viable answer.

So when the occupants of that stretched chav display vehicle, the Royal car, are picked on, it is only fitting. They of all people represent the affluent, self-indulgent, smug, disproportionately influential members of society indifferent to and remote from the harsh economic realities that everyday citizens actually experience and struggle to cope with on a day by day basis. What a more fitting accolade than to call for, symbolically, his head.


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