In the UK we have a severe lack of housing. In Ireland it’s the opposite though to adapt a line from Eric Morecambe, it may be a case of all the right houses but not necessarily in the right places. They may be about to demolish some of the 600 ghost estates built during the Celtic Tiger boom years.

Council proposes £25 fee to empty your green bin – Local – Stamford Mercury.

South Kesteven district council (Conservative) in Lincolnshire, UK  is proposing a £25 annual charge to households in order for their garden waste bin to be emptied. This charge, they claim, will help keep the council tax at it’s current rate by making green waste collection an optional extra charge.

Can we envisage a time when similar services are broken down by individual costs? Those that can’t or won’t pay won’t get the service.

This proposed green wast charge is not as high as East Northamptonshire council who contracted out their service to a private contractor which charges £14.40 to join the collection service with a £58.20 annual charge.

The thin end of a very sharp wedge? Very probably. But local authorities are having to question what are the core services that can be funded by ever smaller budgets and what they can now only offer as optional chargeable extras.

Image adapted from an original by harry harris under this creative commons licence

The Canadian tax payers association has described this as a “rip off on a massive scale”. Now who do Canadian need to turn to in order to get this state of affairs changed? Oh it’s their respective MP. Oh dear.

MP pensions ‘a ripoff on a massive scale’
JEFF DAVIS
Ottawa Citizen
19 Jan 2012

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation says it’s high time MPS stopped making Canadians pick up the tab for their “gold-plated” pension plan. “This is a ripoff on a massive scale,” the advocacy group’s federal director, Gregory Thomas, said at a news…read more…

Source-ABC Melbourne

The news that Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US is sad news but I personally take issue with the many armchair pundits who are declaring that Kodak failed to see digital coming. They invented the first working digital camera. OK it looked more like a slide projector and recorded images onto audio cassette tape but they didn’t ignore it.They just failed to transition to a new environment well enough.

From my own deckchair perspective Kodak developed an image (!) problem in the transition to digital. They also faced a different and more diverse degree of competition which challenged the status they enjoyed in the world of analogue film production. Though Kodak did make hardware they had been used to making money from what went in the hardware rather than the hardware itself. This meant that the other big names of the film world; Canon, Olympus, Nikon etc transitioned to a different type of hardware whilst competing with the emerging far east electronics manufacturers whilst Kodak management hung on to film formats with a last ditch attempt to re-invent film in the domestic market with the curious APS camera format when perhaps they would have been better to partner with a hardware manufacture for digital cameras or hybrid film and digital products.

ln recent years they tried to replicate what they had achieved with film by trying to carve a niche with printers , packaging,ink and software.They just weren’t as successful at diversifying as their main competitor, Fuji.They probably arrogantly exploited legacy brand loyalty and familiarity beyond the point where the consumer was rewarded enough for that loyalty.

Finally Kodak most recently resorted to the last resort of pursuing their competitors in the courts with claims for a number of key technologies used in digital imaging.

I’ve used many Kodak products over the years. From Cine film to,126 instamatic, 35mm and medium format film.I still have transparencies preserved on the legendary Kodachrome, a film formulation that finally  ceased production just a couple of years ago.I owned a Photo CD player in the 90′s and still have film work preserved on Gold Photo CD’s (a format aimed at photographers to bridge the film and digital worlds which no longer exists). My first digital camera was a Kodak and the most recent Kodak product I owned was a Kodak digital camera which was among the first models to offer high definition video alongside the usual digital stills.

Failure to compete often lies with bad and even arrogant management but sometimes the environment changes so much that you just get swamped and the benefits of legacy become a millstone around the corporate neck.

I wish Kodak well and hope the bankruptcy protection focusses their minds on a meaningful restructure but part of me just sees the worst posible outcome where core technologies are sold off to pay debts and the Kodak brand is purchased by another company as a way of temporarily up-branding poor quality products.

Here’s to the Kodak moments I’ve enjoyed.Thank-you Kodak.

Image by batara under this creative commons licence

Not an easy decision I’m sure but the fact that she’s leaving television to concentrate on the charity she set up to help women deal with discrimination in the workplace could partly be seen to underline the fact that often discrimination and bullying  win because not playing fair gives people a very strong advantage indeed.

I wish Miriam and her charity well.

What was I saying about the high price of Nostalgia? Still at least the money is going to a some good causes.No expiry dates you’ll notice.

Huge deposits were required to obtain a mortgage and shoppers were encouraged to put items they could not afford on ‘lay by’ (where an item is reserved and payments made weekly or monthly towards it. Only when these payments were completed did the consumer obtain the item from the store) rather than the ‘buy now, worry about paying for it later’ culture that took hold in the UK and in parts of Europe.

Europe had it coming, says PM
Peter Martin and Matt O’sullivan
The Sydney Morning Herald
16 Jan 2012

THE Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has rubbed salt into the wounds of European nations reeling from weekend credit downgrades, declaring they had it coming for avoiding tough decisions. Speaking after Standard & Poor’s stripped France and Austria of…read more…

I’m eternally fascinated by the nostalgia fuelled lure of the vintage and dunfunkt. This applies especially to vintage electronics which command a sometimes incredulous level of monetary worth due to their scarcity. Take Sony’s long defunct Betamax video tape recorders. A working model at auction can fetch anything up to £300. And that’s in a world where the analogue TV tuner would no longer work, fresh blank tape a scarcity and the sacrilege of actually using the item to play old tapes may invite a breakdown that couldn’t always be repaired. What price a connection to the past?

If Sony were to suddenly restart the Betamax production line and issue limited edition premium priced video tape recorders  I doubt they’d be a runaway success even as a premium priced niche product. It’ the lure of a world lost I presume.

A similar experience happened with the Dubreq stylophone, the stylus driven electronic organ beloved of Rolf Harris in the 60′s. For years old working models fetched premium prices and then somebody decided to remanufacture them. They’re no longer a premium priced product.They’re readily available Just a retro novelty. Supply and demand I suppose.

Image by metromoxie under this creative commons licence

Care to imagine the price of a rail ticket by the time HS2 eventuates (15 years hence)? We’ll be selling our body parts just to afford a return ticket.