Phone Box Library #66 Barton Stacey, Hampshire

By way of John Spooner on flickr we learn that in the small Hampshire village of Barton Stacey, the parish council have converted their BT phone box into the UK's 66th phone box book exchange.

After a few months of planning and carpentry its been in operation since January 2012.

Looks like solid three shelf job, with a large noticeboard for parish notices. About 70 books, a couple of DVDs and several audio books. They have the almost obligatory copy of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code

Much like Thruxton, the other phone box library in Hampshire, the nearest public library to Barton Stacey in Andover, about seven miles away, which has not been threatened by closure. Barton Stacey is also serviced by a mobile library which has not been threatened by cuts.

The Future of Blogging: A means to an end

I went to a London Bloggers Meetup last night. It was at the Fishburn Hedges offices on Kingsway, and was to have speeches about "The Future of Blogging".

It was the first meetup I've been to since August last year. It was a lively and busy affair, a fair few familiar faces but great crowds of new people I guess. It was good to catch up with Aref-Adib and Anthony Fresh Plastic.

I had an interesting conversation with a chap from The Narrow Leaf olive oil. It made in a village in northern Greece, the unique microclimate give the oil a distinctive taste, and depending on when in the season the olives are harvested you get a grassy or fruity taste, it a cool thing to know.

The various presentations on the Future of Blogging were interesting, but I think I was the wrong target for them. There was one phrase that I heard which kind of struck a jarring chord "Blogs are a means to an end".

Months ago I decided to reduce my immorality by getting a load of morals wholesale from classic philosophers, I've been reading up on Stoicism from Epictetus, Seneca, and Kant's Metaphysic of Morals. Whilst Kant's Categorical Imperitive is a fine way of life, I was intrigued by his account that men are ends to themselves rather than a means to an end. To get my head round this I guess a man's profession can be a means to an end, but the man himself is an end.

So back on blogging, I disagree that blogs are a means to an end, wordpress and blogger are a means, but a blog is an end unto itself. That's not a universal thing, marketing blogs or corporate blogs or travel blogs can be means, but for me and to a fair proportion of bloggers, blogs are ends unto themselves.

I don't blog because I'm trying to sell a product, or promote something, I blog because of an insatiable need to write and chart and graph and share interesting things.

Its what I find difficult when people ask me what I blog about. I used to have a few specific blogs that each dealt with a specific niche, live music, politicking, pigeons, sketches of nekkit wimmin, but now I just have one blog where the last two posts were about Glasgow City Council, and then before that were a load of posts about BT phone boxes which had been turn into libraries, and before that there were infographics about phone hacking and London rioters. Yeah, that's exactly what I blog about.*

My attention wandered from the presentations, so I engaged with bloggers, each with their own angles and interesting things to talk about.

So I'm wondering would it be awesome to have a London Bloggers Meetup where the format is more like an Ignite event where bloggers talk about their own thing for five minutes with presentation slides going on behind them changing every 20 seconds. It wouldn't necessarily sell anything, but it would be fun, interesting and engaging.

My attention was brought bacng back to the speakers when a lady said something along the lines of how she hoped that as more people took up blogging, they would learn how to blog better and the general quality of output would improve. That strikes me as a logic fail, a human nature fail and a gross violation of Sturgeon's Law, "Ninety percent of everything is crud" with more bloggers there would be a lot more good stuff, but even more crud out there to wade through. Speaking as a crudmonger myself, I know this to be true.

Anyhoo, as usual here's a chart showing how much engagement I had with people at the London Blogger's Meetup this time.

About the same as usual, I guess its my comfort zone.

*Actually, now I think about it, I've got a handful of blogs on the go right now, on blogger, posterous and wordpress. I might copy and paste all the posts into one new blog and backdate them to when I first posted them. That might cock up google's page ranking thing, but on reflection, if google can't keep up with me, that's google's weakness, what do I care? The blog is an end not a means.

Public Entertainment Licences in Scotland

There has now been a small pile of coverage in the blogsphere about the controversy of Public Entertainments Licences in Glasgow. Rays of light here and there.

Helen Shaddock brings us the response for Nicola Sturgeon MSP including this:-

However, it is important to stress that the new law does not mean that local licensing authorities are required to insist on free-to-enter events having a Public Entertainment Licence. The discretion lies entirely with the local licensing authority - in this case Glasgow - to determine what types of events they licence. The public entertainment licence is a discretionary licence. It is for the local authority therefore to decide whether to licence public entertainment and if they do, what specific types of entertainment they wish to include.

As I understand it, there is nothing whatsoever in the law to prevent Glasgow from exempting all or certain categories of free to enter events from the requirement to have a public entertainment licence. Indeed they already have exemptions in place in relation to school halls, church halls, fetes and gala days and there is no reason why other events cannot be added to this list of exemptions.

Via For Pete's Sake we learn that Glasgow music scene heavy-weights Belle and Sebastian have weighed in on twitter with the jaw-dropping put-down:-

Not cool GlasgowCC [City Council], not cool at all.

Art Tokens wonders why there's no corresponding fuss about Edinburgh City Council who require exhibits to have licences, perhaps this is because their policy is for venues with paid entry. They don't seem to have changed their policy in line with the change in the law.

Linn Labour gets all political about it, having a go at Nicola Sturgeon MSP for clarifying the Scottish parliament's position in the face of Glasgow City Council's warning about the repercussion of the change in legislation. Somewhere along the line there was a miscommunication, a fine article on the subject in The Firm explains that

The licensing of public entertainment is an “optional” civic licence. This means it is a matter for each licensing authority to decide whether or not public entertainment events should require a licence, and secondly to decide what forms of entertainment are treated as “entertainment” for licensing purposes.

Thus bitch-slapping Glasgow City Council, bang, right in the chops.

There's a neat letter in The Herald pointing out

In this year of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, many people will be considering ways to publicly celebrate this event. How many organisers will be aware that free entry community events will now, according to the legislative briefing on Glasgow City Council's website, require a public entertainment licence?

Which is a rather neat angle, outwith art galleries and popup gigs.

The campaign is still going strong on Facebook, with useful titbits filtering through, Zara Gladman wrote to her MSP Bill Kidd, who's aide Alison wrote back, possibly having looked at my list of what other councils are doing:-

...The interpretation of this and decision on what scale of event requires a license is up to local authorities, It doesn't appear that other local authorities are taking the same approach as Glasgow, which would tend to suggest that the problems... ...are of [Glasgow City] Council's making. There is nothing in the Act which would automatically penalise small scale free events...

Yeah, take that GlasgowCC, in your face.

The latest actual news via The Herald

...a spokesman for the local authority said it will seek a temporary solution so that small art exhibitions will not require a licence.

The move – a redefinition of the term exhibition, the council said – will represent immediate steps which help to protect Glasgow's art scene.

Perhaps like what West Lothian council have already done, instead of the boilerplate use of 'Exhibition' in the list of events affected, they specify

Exhibition of persons or performing animals.

and don't refer to art galleries at all.

One thing that has been bugging me immensely throughout is the spelling of licence, license, licencing, licensing?

Another thing is the nagging suspicion that maybe its Glasgow City Council, The Highlands Council and West Lothian who are on the ball in changing their policies, and the other 29 councils will all be playing catch up in the coming months. What if the rest of Scotland still have this battle to face once the various councils's lawyers have finished reading the legislation and then decide to implement it all across the board to the letter.

The main angle of my charge is that Glasgow is being unique in its implementation, and all the other councils are well aware of the change in legislation, but have decided not to implement it, that they know its all optional and have opted not to do anything. But maybe I'm wrong, and the rest of Scotland's art scenes are in for a fight.

Public Entertainment Licences in Glasgow

All over my twitter stream and Facebook feed Glaswegians are up in arms about the council's implementation of a change in the Public Entertainment Licence laws whereby the Scottish Parliament has devolved power down to local authorities to decide whether or not free events need to pay for an Public Entertainment Licence. Originally the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 had the text:-

In this section, “place of public entertainment” means any place where, on payment of money or money’s worth, members of the public are admitted or may use any facilities
for the purposes of entertainment or recreation...

But now the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010 has removed the bit about payment of money. According to MSP Nicola Sturgeon, its up to local councils' discretion as to whether to charge free events and event modify which sorts of events are except, not the
Scottish parliament.

I think the idea behind it was to enable councils to clamp down on free 'raves', which is kind of twenty five years too late

Anyhoo, I'm a bit far away from the action, but with a a few spare minutes I went through the websites of all the unitary authorities in Scotland and put together this google docs spreadsheet indicating which only require events where the public has to pay to have entertainment licences and which ones require all events.

Its thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Of the 32 unitary authorities, only three make reference to the change in legislation, 19 of them only require a licence for events where the public has to pay.

As a side note, quite a few of them use EUGO the European Union point of single contact to administer Public Entertainment Licences.

And also a great chunk of the councils have just cut and pasted the text from the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, as can be seen from the use of the phrase "on payment of money or money’s worth", but some change it to "monies" which is incorrect and a minor point of pedantry. A swath of the one's which use EUGO have copied and pasted the text from EU website "If your premises are used as..."

The BBC reports that:-

The outlook for jobs has worsened with a survey of 2,100 employers finding that four out of five had no plans to hire workers in the next three months.
The survey by Manpower found that hiring expectations were at their lowest level for three years.

But the Reed job index for November reports:-

November figures: Job opportunities rise to 23 month high
Figures released for November show a steep rise in employer demand for new UK workers, with the Reed Job Index reaching a new record of 133.
New job opportunities rose to their highest level for nearly two years in November, with a four point rise across the UK compared to October.
Overall, demand has risen 33 per cent since December 2009, when the Reed Job Index baseline was set at 100.

So, what is it?

I don't approve of war

I don't approve of war

Stocks, shares, morals and ethics

I have given some thought to my own morality and how this corresponds with how I would buy stocks and shares, I shall try to share these thoughts with you, but its around 4am when I'm writing this, so it could be a bit woo.

I used to have morals and stuff, or I thought I did, within my own smartie tube. Moral justification for my actions even when I was being a bit of cunt. But some time around 2003 it all got a bit blurry and I didn't give much thought to such things. But now I'm grasping around for some moral framework. Kropotkin and his mutual aid seems to be a bit unjudgemental, too evolutionary to be a moral framework. I feel more at home with Epictetus and his stoicism, "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them”, by not giving a shit, a shit is not given, or something.

Right now I'm reading Kant, his categorial imperitive sounds cool "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.".

I'm not sure how it corresponds but I'm quite ambivalent about tax avoidance, its legal but certain quarters frown on it. Tax evasion is illegal, down with that sort of thing. One of UKUncut's things about tax avoidance is that whilst its okay for individuals to have ISA to avoid paying personal taxes, when multi-national corporations do it for hundreds of millions of pounds, then its not okay. The categorical imperitive dictates that this is invalid, tax avoidance is either univerally okay or universally not okay. Maybe its a continuum fallacy, I dunno, I don't care either.

So just to err on the side of caution, I'm going to give the tax avoiding benefits of ISAs a miss and pay full tax on any savings, and be damned. Its the sort of thing that The Man Who Hates Fun would do.

However, that still leaves me trying find something to do with the great piles of wealth I have accumulating around me. So on to stocks and shares.

After reading some Guardian artical on ethical investing, I don't think I trust other people's judgement on what's an ethical investment or not. Is investing in guns and nuclear power bad, but investing in tax avoiding companies good? Is investing in human trafficing bad, but in RyanAir good? I'm not sure.

However, whilst I'm uncertain about investing ethically, I'm absolutely certain that in terms of spending my ethics are the greatest, I know how to spend my money better than anyone else, the more money I have to spend, the better the world will be, on my terms, by my own morals whatever they be. Other people could disagree with that, but then, that's just them saying their morality is superior to mine.

Anyhoo, given that ethically the more money I have to spend, the better, then the return on investment of my investments is more important than the morality of the companies I invest in.

For example, if I buy shares in British American Tobacco, who've been steadily delivering 25% year on year for the past ten years then that is a morally good investment. BATS make their money from willing customers willingly buying their tobacco products, they don't make money out of me buying their shares, I make money out of them. Other people could own their shares, but then other people would be getting that 25% year on year and then possibly spending it in ways that aren't as ethical as me.

On the other hand, shares in QinetiQ, the global defence company, who make weapons that kill people, have given a relatively crap return on investment over the past five years, in fact their price is 40% down over five years. Regardless of whether they sell weapons, they are a morally bad investment.

Of course, all of this is hopelessly naive. I know little about morals, or the difference between morals and ethics. And also, I'm not too good at stocks and shares.