The UK government has announced that businesses will no longer be able to insist that employees retire at 65. At the moment, an employer is required to discuss retirement with the individual six months before their 65th birthday and while they can continue to work past that date with mutual agreement, the employer can insist that the employee retire.
While it is good news that people are more in control of their working life and how they choose to move on from it, it raises other problems which the government and the pressure groups have not been keen to address. Firstly, a workforce working longer means that younger people coming onto the jobs market have less jobs to choose from. Secondly, there is a probability that ill-health will become more of a factor in a persons life and there must be a framework in place whereby a persons employment can be terminated if ill-health results in unacceptable absence levels. You can argue that this falls within existing employment law but experience has told me that it is no easy matter to end the employment of someone through long-term or repeated absence. Such a decision requires critical attention to procedure and with an older employee may result in claims for discrimination on the grounds of both age and disability.
It’s good news for the individual, but a potential minefield for the employer.
According to this article today, if you want to pay by card for London Olympic tickets and merchandise or withdraw cash from machines at Olympic venues, you will only be able to do so with a VISA branded credit/debit card! This is part of the sponsorship agreement between the London 2012 and VISA whereby VISA paying a load of their money stomps all over the concepts of legal tender for the public! It’s shocking to what extent the Olympics has completely abandoned all principles in recent years in order to sell their soul to large corporations.
I particularly like this statement: “Visa points out that non-Visa card holders can buy a pre-pay card for the duration of the Games”. Why the hell should we?!
The Office of Fair Trading is looking into the agreement which in my opinion should be branded illegal.
One of our companies is a reasonably heavy user of Sage Line 50 and I’m amazed how much it has slowed down in the last year and the key seems to be it’s database back-end. I don’t know what Sage use but I wrote a Management Information System for the company to give salesmen a history of a quotes, orders and invoices which accesses the Sage files through Sage’s own ODBC connector. When I first installed the system at the beginning of last year, it took 2-3 seconds to load a customer’s history. It now takes over 20s!
Having exhausted any straight-forward ways to speed Sage up, such as excluding it’s files from Anti-Virus scans and so on, I decided that I would take a snapshot of the Sage data twice a day into a MySQL database since the MIS doesn’t need live data, a few hours old is absolutely fine. The performance against the MySQL database is at least 100 times quicker than against the Sage data. The difference is staggering! Both Sage and the MySQL server on are the same physical machine and they are operating through the same network infrastructure yet MySQL stamps all over Sage in performance terms.
Anyone know what Sage’s database back-end is? Is it bespoke or just carefully disguised? Either way, it’s performance is pretty poor.
According to todays news, drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline are announcing over 6000 job losses. If you believed the spin, including the BBCs report, it’s all tied in with other job losses resulting from the current recession. It is clear beyon the spin, however that this is due to increased competition and would be happening anyway. It seems that the the recession is a great cover for getting rid of staff in order to “cut costs and boost profits”!
According to some people, the UK economy is “finished”. These opinions are mainly from the US and none more vocally than Jim Rogers, one of those uber-investors who have done very well for themselves and are now somehow given authority to comment on the world stage. You can see an interview with Jim Rogers here in which he says that the UK’s financial system is finished and sterling will fall further and the UK is not worth investing in. However when asked why, if he’s so sure of his opinion, that he’s not making money out of the fall in sterling he stutters and fumbles and them claims he “missed the boat”.
You all know my opinion on analysts and commentators like Jim Rogers, they have no idea what’s happening and to what degree it will continue. The situation is so vast and has so many variables that it cannot be predicted and forecasted. I’m sick of the lot of them!
I have one simple, blunt response to this man’s opinion on the UK: Fuck You!! This entire problem started in the US with dodgy mortgages sold around the world. The US financial system sent a toxic wave through ours. US manufacturing is utterly inefficient and their flagship companies including Ford, GM and Chrysler have been trading insolvently for years with no-one brave enough to let them collapse because of the fallout which would occur in their “great” economy.
Blind patriotism will not get the US and world economies out of their hole. I’ve maintained all along that what is needed is optimism, drive and simple level-headedness, a view shared by a few commentators. Turnover at one of my companies is currently less than 25% of what it was a year ago and we’re not going anywhere. We’ll still be here when all this is over and it infuriates me when the media concentrates on the “doom” of a retailer’s sales falling 3% when it doesn’t really matter. Get a grip and start looking to the future!
It seems common sense regarding media frenzy over the downturn may at last be prevailing. Two of the UK’s largest mortgage lenders, Halifax and Nationwide have announced that they will not be making further predictions of house prices throughout 2009 because “things are changing so rapidly in the market, which makes it very difficult to forecast.”
And they finally admitted that “One consideration for the industry is that predictions of further big falls may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, undermining the confidence of potential buyers who might be afraid of a fall in the value of their homes.”
Now if only some of the other crystal-ball gazers would follow suite we might make some progress.
Yes this is a shameless plug, but it has some interesting technical and business aspects to it as well. The owner of the companies I work for has this year embarked on a personal business to buy and rent out cotswolds cottages for holiday lets. It is common to book holiday accommodation through an agent website or office which takes a commission from the rental fee. He wants to own, control and deal with the bookings for the cottages himself via his own website, www.parkluxurycottages.com under the name Park Cottages.
The website was developed by Cardiff-based developers Beanlogic with design input from Mark Boulton, who was recently tasked with the redesign of drupal.org
The site is up and running and has completed a number of satisfied bookings. We’re now working on search engine optimisation (SEO), visibility and a feedback system. SEO still seems like quite a black art to me, trying to second guess what algorithms Google uses to rank sites and use it to your advantage without getting penalised in the process. It is surprising how competitive search terms like “cotswold cottage” and “costwolds accommodation” are!
Another day, another Vista incompatibility. This time I found that Sage Accounts 2007 has an issue when running on Vista. It’s not a terminal issue but it’s certainly an annoyance. When you have the customer or supplier list loaded, you can normally doubl-click on an account to open it’s details or select an account and click ‘Record’. On Vista this will only give you a blank form instead of the account details.
Our Version of Sage 2007 is 13.02.17.0126
Sage article 15117 acknowledges the problem and reports that the only workaround is, when the details form is loaded, either type in the account number or select it again from the drop-down list. If you have a lot of accounts, the drop-down list does not show enough entries to be very efficient so the best way is to type in the account number.
The Sage article does not mention which version you need to upgrade to to fix the problem. I have asked Sage if their is a fix available and am awaiting their response.
Update: The answer from Sage is that it is fixed in Sage Accounts 2008 so it’s upgrade or put up with it!
I had money in the now collapsed Icesave bank and so did my mother. Not huge amounts but enough to be concerned about. It took a few weeks for the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme to get things organised but we now both have our money in our bank accounts and the procedure has been smooth and effective. All we are waiting for now is an ISA certificate in the post which we are assured will be received within two weeks.
In these unprecedented times, the FSCS is to be commended. I’m sure their communication systems were put under sever pressure from worried investors but I never felt the need to contact them, relying instead on their website announcements and online news sites. Has everyone else’s experience with the FSCS been positive or have we just been fortunate?
Update: ISA certificate arrived in the post 11th December.
In the news almost daily now we have some analyst or think-tank or self-indulgent quango spouting their theory on how bad the UK and world recession will be and how long it will last. Growth figures are thrown around and the UK gets ranked against other countries based on how it will cope with the recession. Apparently the UK economy will shrink all the way through 2009 and will be hit harder than most other countries by the world recession.
I have a message for all of these analysts: You know nothing! In every one of your statements you make a short disclaimer somewhere to the effect that because of the unprecedented nature of this downturn it is very hard to make predictions and yet you still make them and you make them sound so accurate as well!
We have spent years studying the weather and we have vast supercomputers constantly analysing it. We can measure and record what weather systems are around and where they are heading. Yet if you look out of your window on a daily basis and compare it with the weather prediction, how often is it actually accurate?
The analysts and market commentators seem to think that they can predict the duration and nature of a global recession which is based on that most unpredictable facet of human nature, fear. How can they possibly attempt to judge the reaction of billions of people in thousands of cultures. The truth is that they can’t and by making alarming predictions of a severe downturn lasting throughout 2009 they are simply compounding the fear which people already have following the troubles in the banking industry.
I say shut the hell up and let’s see how quickly the fear dissapates.
Recent Comments