Charles on… anything that comes along

Estate agents typically get about 2% of a house sale, don’t they? Hang on, it’s 1.5% + VAT. (They don’t get to keep the VAT, of course - it’s passed on to the government.)

OK. Now notice that mortgage lending rose by barely anything in August:

Mortgage lending rose by just £143 million last month, a mere two percent of what was advanced in August 2007 and the weakest growth since the series began in April 1993.

Of course, the mortgage won’t be the whole price of the house - but it’ll typically be quite a large slice. Let us, for the purposes of a vague argument, assume that in fact in those mortgages, a full 50% of the house sale price was actually covered by cash (from the sale of the previous property in the chain, say).

That means that estate agents got 1.5% of £286m. In other words, £4.29m, in August.

Not bad, you think? Except that that’s for every estate agent across Britain.

And a 2006 figure tells us…

According to latest statistics from UK Property Shop, publishers of the online National Directory of Estate Agents, the total number of offices of UK estate agents and letting agents now exceeds 17,800. There are over 14,700 offices providing estate agency services with property for sale, 10,000 offices providing letting agency services with property to rent and around 1,100 offices offering student accommodation.

OK, so they’ll have turned their hands to letting, and we’re ignoring commercial property lettings and sales (not that those are anything to cheer about, I hear), and closures since then. But if those figures have stayed anything like static, then the average estate agent in August brought in from house sales a grand total of…

£241.

And of course, that’s allowing (generously) for the mortgage being quite a small part of the house sale (50%). Rank it up higher - say, to 90% of the sale price - and you’re getting £133 per office. It hardly covers the bill for the electricity.

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• So how good is the CEBR at predicting things, given its prediction of a 3% shrinkage in 2009? (27 December 2008; score: 35.79%)
• Not required on voyage: an understanding of journalists (24 September 2004; score: 33.29%)
• Please, don't send me your Office-beta-created documents (26 July 2006; score: 30.93%)

Amidst all the back and forth about Steve Jobs’s health, and whether it matters, Dan Lyons - aka Fake Steve Jobs - has hit the nail totally on the head by pointing out (on his real blog) that calls like Jobs made to Joe Nocera of the New York Times aren’t accident. They’re totally planned. And for Jobs to demand that the conversation’s content should be off the record is more control:

How many times do you think Jobs rehearsed that opening line before he dialed (or had Katie Cotton [queen of Apple PR] dial for him)? I’d say he practiced it one hundred times. And I’d say Katie was definitely on the line with him, though she probably pretended not to be. Furthermore, I’d bet a signed dollar bill that Apple recorded the phone call, just in case Nocera decided to run the stuff that Steve gave him under their “off the record” agreement.

And more:

If down the road it turns out Steve was [purely hypothetically, you understand] lying and someone from the SEC or some lawyer in a civil suit wants to find out what was said in that conversation, they’ll have to subpoena Joe Nocera, and the New York Times will fight that request. Even if Joe Nocera wants to tell the world what Steve Jobs told him, he can’t. He made a deal. He went off the record. Even if Steve turns out to be lying, Joe Nocera is stuck.

Thus Steve Jobs gets to protect his stock price and give Wall Street the message that he wants them to hear, and should any of this turn out not to be true, well, Steve and Apple now have Joe Nocera and the legal department of the New York Times to act as their ally and firewall.

It’s really well-argued and to the point. He also asks: what would happen if Steve Ballmer were to do the same? He’d get roasted in the press. So why does Jobs get an easy ride? Because there are tons of unthinking Apple fans who will descend on any site that they think doesn’t accord their beloved company the vast amount of praise they think it deserves. And that can be a pain to deal with.

And John Gruber is, for once, totally wrong, because he’s not a professional journalist. Lyons is, and he knows the ins and outs. Gruber says:

Lyons is implying that if Jobs is actually fine, then there’s nothing he shouldn’t be willing to talk about on the record regarding his health. But that’s only true if the full story isn’t the least bit embarrassing or private. In Jobs’s case, it seems clear that whatever it is that’s been bothering him this year, it is related to his digestive and intestinal system. Even if he’s recovering fully from this problem, set to live a full life for decades to come, is it any wonder he might not want to speak on the record about digestive problems like, say, extreme diarrhea? diarrhea? Fuck that.

But that misses the point about why Jobs made the call at all, if he didn’t want to explain it. If you want to tell people, tell them. Don’t do it in this off-the-record sneaking about way.

Plus, you’re wondering how Jobs knew to call Nocera? Because Nocera had obviously been calling Apple asking for its response. Word filtered up. That was totally planned.

Couple of other interesting things: Lyons says that Apple was always completely closed off to him:

For what it’s worth, [John] Markoff [at the New York Times] may be one of the only hacks left that Apple PR can count on. A couple of the guys at Fortune used to be considered friendly until their colleague Peter Elkind produced a botched hatchet job on Steve Jobs earlier this year. It’s likely that Apple has now gone dark on everyone at Fortune as a result. Goatberg is friendly to Apple but he’s a gadget guy and doesn’t do news, and anyway the Journal went after Jobs on options backdating so they’re likely on the Katie Cotton shit list too. Forbes? Um, right. Even before I created Fake Steve, Apple wouldn’t let anyone at Forbes do any interviews with anyone at Apple. We had a whole bureau in the Valley, 30 miles from Cupertino, and for ten years we didn’t set foot inside Apple. They’d send us review units and that’s it.

Two things from that: how is Lyons going to fare reporting on technology - including Apple - at Newsweek, where he’s replacing Steven Levy, who used to get stuff ahead of time? Will Apple be able to hold its nose and give him the early interviews and time to play with the gadgets, or will he be stuck in the outer darkness like, I don’t know, the most-viewed online paper in the UK?

And secondly, I can imagine it could be pretty dispiriting being a journalist in San Francisco trying to get an interview with Apple. Imagine it just going on and on like that. It’s a company with serious PR issues - and the weird things is it thinks it’s doing just great.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Ooh, feel the anger: Fake Steve disses Lotus Notes (25 January 2008; score: 74.37%)
• My review of "iCon" - the latest biography of Steve Jobs (20 May 2005; score: 66.53%)
• Steve Jobs piece in The Independent magazine (29 October 2005; score: 56.09%)

If you’re ever in the market for stunning pictures, you could do worse than this one, which is sunset. On Mars. Get it from the page, or just click the image.

(Via Ed Bott)

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• "We should be on Mars by now" - but it's a good thing we aren't (5 October 2004; score: 42.43%)
• Gene Hunt *and* Facebook are dead. Blimey, it's bad. (12 February 2008; score: 34.95%)

The scary thing about the following is that it’s now an underestimate. So, start reading:

Imagine that we live in a world in which, owing to genetic mutation, income translates directly into height. The richer you are, the taller you are. Then imagine that the entire population of Britain marches past you, in the course of an hour, ranked in order of their income. What sort of procession would you see?

After three minutes the walkers would be 2ft tall. After a quarter of a hour they would still be dwarfs, of about 3ft; they would reach 4ft after 24 minutes. You would have to wait until 37 minutes before a person of average height, about 5ft 8in, walked by. In the final quarter of an hour, abnormally large people, more than 7ft in height, would start appearing.

With three minutes left, people of twice average height would be passing by. In the final minute, the figures would be giants 30 yards high. Yet even they would not be the biggest. In the hour’s closing seconds, a small number of super-earners would walk past: each would be earning pounds 1m a year or more - and thus each would be at least 235 yards tall. These freakish beings - top barristers, leading City analysts, a few chief executives as well as stars in the entertainment industries - are the products of a society that is increasingly organised in a new, freakish way.

This comes from “How fat cats rock the boat“, by Charles Leadbeater - when he was deputy editor at The Independent. Guess when it was written?

November, 1996. Since then, income inequality has got worse.

It’s one of the most insightful pieces I’ve ever read on how celebrity culture feeds on itself:

In theory competition should make it more difficult for a small elite to charge excessively high prices and make monopoly profits. Yet in fact more competition helps such elites. In highly competitive markets there is a premium on perceived value - on standing out from the competition by looking distinctive; after price, the biggest influence on consumer choice is brand. So those people and companies that are particularly good at marketing, advertising and self- promotion will tend to do better, everything else being equal. Success will breed success, celebrity will beget celebrity.

Thus, in television a handful of comedians have cornered the market in light entertainment, becoming a self-perpetuating elite. And, of course, celebrities like to deal with other celebrities; that is a symbol of their status.

If you are a film celebrity, you want your divorce handled by a celebrity divorce barrister, your hair done by a celebrity cutter, your home decorated by a celebrity designer and so on. As well as being more competitive, however, markets for many goods, whether they are computer games, books, films or legal services, are becoming more international. And larger markets mean larger rewards for the people who win. Being a winner in a purely local market - a school sports day - might bring you a small cup; winning in a global market - the Olympics - brings you vast rewards.

Remember, this was all before the rise of magazines like Heat. But it shows why they rose: because we focus on those at “the top” or near it, and that attention begets more attention. But it also has dramatic effects on income inequality.

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• The %! curse of overusing percentages (21 August 2006; score: 30.53%)
• At the Guardian: the Tech Weekly podcast (13 February 2008; score: 25.56%)

One of the topics that I feel strongly about (even though I’ve only used FOI very briefly) is Freedom of Information - and in particular the FOI Act. And now the government’s stupid idea of effectively lowering the ceiling of enquiries that can be made by putting a higher price on civil servants’ time.

But the charity Public Concern at Work has calculated that bringing in those changes will cost at least £12 million:

Using figures published by the Government which suggest that it costs officials between £1 and £2 to read a single page, the charity calculates that it will cost £7.2m for one official in each of the 100,000 public bodies to read the new rules and guidance restricting FOI requests and a further £5m for them to think about them.

Their response to the suggested new regulations is worth a read:

In particular, when looking at the benefits it is important to recognise that freedom of information requests bring real and substantial savings to the public purse. This is because they deter waste, inefficiency and fraud across the public sector. One example from the wider public sector mentioned in Don Touhig’s Commons debate on 7 February was the Yorkshire Post’s story about a shower for the Chief Constable that cost £28,000

Great stuff. Perhaps an FOI request to find out who came up with the new regulations and whether they did a cost-effectiveness study on it?

And I like the cut of PCAW’s jib. I wonder if they’d look at the case for freeing our data?

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• A very brief word on George Bush: why "freedom" but not "democracy"? (20 January 2005; score: 45.27%)
• How the House of Commons made it harder to work out how much MPs have cost: by using PDFs (21 October 2004; score: 36.72%)
• Your search for "information farmer" yielded no results but your own, you egotist (29 August 2006; score: 35.86%)

So, with the budget having somehow quadrupled, what does Hugh Muir in (I blush) the Guardian suggest?

And so to money. Is there anyone who doesn’t think we submitted a bid with figures massaged to impress the IOC, or that the IOC didn’t know that?

Er, me, actually, and pretty much everyone who last year on the TV and so on was burbling about the £2 billion cost of the Games.

A meaningful budget is now being drawn up

Oh well, that’s helpful, isn’t it? Will this one include VAT?

and when it is unveiled politicians and the media will scrutinise it. So they should. But let’s be mature about it. Staging the games will be messy, costly and turbulent, but isn’t that a price worth paying if it means that shamefully neglected communities will have better infrastructure and life chances than they have had for generations?

As the comments after the article say - no, it flipping isn’t. If you want regeneration, why not just pay for it because you think the area deserves regeneration - not using some idiotic flatulent games in the wrong place. Flipping heck, Manchester would have been the perfect place for it. Always assuming they’d got rid of the bollards from hell. Watch them in action:

And then Ken Livingstone weighs in. Nobody thought the congestion charge would work, he says. (I did, actually, Ken. It seemed an obvious and brilliant way to apply road charging.) Everyone still asks: why not just regenerate the place? And nobody answers.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• London wins Olympics: and now interviewers start saying "Yes, but.." (6 July 2005; score: 42.03%)
• Words fail me. And them, apparently. (11 July 2005; score: 36.54%)
• Ever wondered why you don't see any ads against the Olympics? (17 June 2005; score: 35.45%)

Last year, I wrote some unkind things in mid-2005 about the Olympics: making points such as

• how weird it was that nobody asked the “Yes, but” questions before the Olympic bid (July 6 2005):
  

  is it just me or is it weird to be listening to the 1 O’Clock News and hear the interviewer start asking questions to the MP for Newham, such as “Won’t you be left with a lot of white elephant stadiums afterwards? I mean that’s what has happened at all the other places..” and to get interviewees saying “I’m not really sure that’s the best use of £2.4 billion…”

  Where were all these people before? Steamrollered into submission, told to keep a lid on it until the bid was over?

• that ads in its favour were from vested interests like airlines and construction companies (June 17 2005):
  

  If London is cursed by winning the Olympics, those companies will get pots of money - travellers coming here, and of course all those stadia that will have to be built on the recently-levelled spaces where people used to live but have been rehoused. (Has anyone mentioned this? No?)

  So you know why the companies are in favour of the Olympics: whoever loses, they win. Hence, they advertise, and urge people who haven’t heard any sides of the argument to “Back the Bid” and text their “backing” to some daft number. No number to text your opposition to, you’ll notice.

  And about the losers: ah yes, that would be all the people who live in London. Because if Seb Coe succeeds, then they’ll all get higher council taxes to pay for the “regeneration” (more like, to line the construction companies’ pockets). And that’s about it. Given that they don’t really want the stadia, though they’d like better rail and public transport services, Londoners don’t really have any reason to like this bid, in my opinion.

• that we needed (and got) a Stop The Bid site (Jan 22 2005), much good it did us:
  

  I don’t want London put into hock and the lives of millions of ordinary people upset for a reality TV event involving celebrities and micro-celebrities and non-celebrities who may or may not have taken drugs, in order eventually to provide a load of training facilities that will be in the wrong part of the country for the majority of athletes

• that getting the Olympics will destroy Hackney Marshes (Jan 5 2005), where the marvellous Blur-soundtracked Nike football ad was filmed (can I get a YouTube link? Can I?):
  

  It’ll leave the city hugely indebted (the Games always do), and won’t really provide the sort of facilities that allow up-and-coming athletes need - which is a wide variety of sports facilities. The really good will soon excel and can then be picked to compete and train at a higher level, at better facilities which don’t have to be in London. Plus what about the adults? Aren’t we trying to keep them fit, to avoid the Evil Of Obesity?

Since then, what has happened? The alleged costs have ballooned, by at least 17.5% - oh, yeah, sorry, VAT, must have forgotten, silly me! Still now you’ve signed the contract, sorry, for cash, what? - towards £8 billion (shall we say that again? Quadruple what was being said 18 months ago)and finally, some commentators are starting to pick up on it. Andrew Rawnsley suggests it will be another Dome:

Who in their right mind is going to want to holiday in London in the congestion and security hell that will be the capital city in the August of 2012?

Just as with the dome, supporters of the Olympics say they will regenerate part of London. I’m all for the regeneration of the East End, but you didn’t need to do it by bringing this overblown, ludicrously expensive spectacle to town.

Thanks, Andrew (via John Naughton); I feel like you’re channeling me. What makes me so silently angry on behalf of Londoners is the fact that they were never consulted; nobody told them the costs; nobody made the case publicly. It was imposed, by a quango of people looking to benefit in their own way from the money-go-round, not truly improving the daily life of poeple who live in this giant city. No wonder that Roy Greenslade said of a recent speech by Seb, sorry, Sir Seb coe that

Sebastian Coe, chairman of the 2012 Olympics organisation, spoke without imparting a single intelligent thought. I tried to take notes but he said nothing of any consequence whatsoever, and he said it several times over. It was unrelieved by wit or wisdom and was heard in total silence by a now disbelieving crowd…

Could it be because there’s nothing to say? Even if the Olympic Games pass off successfully (though you know the papers will be full of tales of incomplete stadia and things not done; they are at every Games, and we excel here at finding fault with the tiniest thing), their aftermath will be judged as a pain. Will they make more athletes? Will they make better athletes? What are the Games meant to do for us as a nation? Apart from move our urban furniture around to places we didn’t want it so the kids could try to get around the room without touching the floor?

Don’t get me wrong: I love sport, and exercise. But this behemoth that we can’t back out of is going to make a lot of people very, very unhappy. Trouble is, there’s no exit strategy for the Olympics. You just have to wait for them to end. Maybe I’ll start a “countdown until it’s over” clock in the sidebar.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• London wins Olympics: and now interviewers start saying "Yes, but.." (6 July 2005; score: 42.03%)
• Ever wondered why you don't see any ads against the Olympics? (17 June 2005; score: 40.07%)
• Save Hackney Marshes! London must not get the Olympics! (5 January 2005; score: 35.43%)

• Prize For Stupidity

  Somewhere in the depths of North London, a young man falls over and injures his leg. He thinks it might be broken. He hobbles to the telephone and dials the number of his local taxi firm. Yes, that’s a real taxi, not one of our Big White ones. He then limps outside to wait for the taxi. Ten minutes later, it arrives, and he eases himself into the back seat.

  “Where to?” asks the cab driver, starting the engine and pulling off.

  “North Middlesex Hospital, please,” says the man. “The A+E department. I think I’ve broken my leg!”

  “Oh my god!” says the taxi driver. “You can’t be getting in taxis with a broken leg. Hold on a minute!”

  The consistently enjoyable NeeNaw (say it out loud) blog. The really scary thing is that this is true. The only amazing thing is that it didn’t happen in south London - I’d have found that easier to believe. (Seen at Nee Naw)

• The Derivative Myth
  

  Has the level of self-regard in the blogosphere really reached such dizzying heights that it can’t acknowledge the work that traditional media does on behalf of the rest of us? Yes, the newspaper business isn’t as lucrative as it once was (although it’s still pretty lucrative). And it doesn’t seem as exciting and relevant as it once was. But newspapers continue to perform an incredibly important function as informational gatekeepers—a function, as far as I can tell, that grows more important with time, not less. Between them, for instance, the Times and the Post have literally hundreds of trained professionals whose only job it is to sift through the mountains of information that come out of the various levels of government and find what is of value and of importance to the rest of us. Why Where would we be without them? We’d be lost.

  Malcolm Gladwell - not normally a person one thinks of with a green eyeshade on - making the point about where blogs find their food. (Seen at gladwell.com)

• Dude, Kyle’s Not Here
  

  There are some really strange data, particularly in the search terms with which people find my site.

  I mean, sure, lots of people google, say, etrade (6.73% of all visitors on Friday, which means that they really, REALLY shouldn’t have screwed with me), and often people will just google wil+shipley (3.85%) instead of remembering my non-mnemonic url (wilshipley.com).

  But, how about the guy who was looking for custom+pimp+puppets? My first thought was, why’d this link to my site? And then, “What’s a pimp puppet? Is it just a puppet of a pimp? If so, why the hell does someone want one?” (Unless it’s named Frank.) The really bizarre part is the person didn’t find what he wanted, so he followed up by googling custom+made+pimp+puppets. Vive la diffrence!

  Wil Shipley (of Delicious Library) with a stellar runthrough of the weird Google searches that bring people to his site. BTW, does Kyle Orton like drinking? And where can I find naked women pirates? Wil knows. (Seen at Call Me Fishmeal.)

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• Better cochlear implants; the power law of homelessness and pollution (13 February 2006; score: 67.76%)
• Blimey, how many people did Newsnight try before they got to me? (4 February 2008; score: 59.2%)
• The Spartacus approach to beating comment spam (9 November 2004; score: 52.04%)

Beirut Apple reseller facing difficult times
The lone authorised Apple Centre in Beirut, Lebanon, has been forced to shut its doors since the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah ignited a week ago.

Understatement of the week, one would think. iPod to protect your hearing, sir? (Seen at Macworld UK)


Looking for Mac Eudora 7
Our apologies for the longer than expected delay in the release of Eudora 7 for Mac. We are reworking Eudora to make the most of Apple’s MacOSX Tiger environment, and are incorporating the new features of SpotLight and WebKit HTML display/authoring.

The plan for Universal Binary is also on the agenda for the Mac Eudora 7 release. However, Eudora’s current performance is as good on the Intel-based Macs as on Power PC based Macs.

It’s not clear from this whether Eudora 7 is being rewritten in Cocoa (as was rumoured) or not, but at least it’s an official statement. Even if it’s a dull official statement. (Then again, when did you last hear an exciting official statement?) Eudora 7 might be my next upgrade; I’ve not seen anything in Eudora 6 worth paying for, so I’m still back on 5.

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• Eudora to go open source, but not as it was (11 October 2006; score: 54.84%)

• Pretty vacant
  

  When I look around MySpace I don’t see much that’s “strange and wonderful” - or “deeply disturbing,” either. I wish I did. What I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts. Everything feels secondhand: the pimps-and-hos poses before the cameraphone, the ham-fisted, cliche-choked blog-prose. It’s sad to see so much effort put into self-expression with so little to express. Humanity in the raw? No, this is humanity boiled to blandness in the tin pot of personalization.

  Another thoughtful post from Nicholas Carr (actually, he doesn’t do any other sort). Journalists have long experience that writing stuff is hard; that people find repetition easier than innovation. Why do you think cliches get such wide use? Because people don’t make up their own. As he says, what scares him about MySpace is “not how dangerous it is, but how safe”. (Seen at Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog)

• Sucking less, on a budget: Audiophile MIDI!??!?
  

  So I went to my local music store looking for a cheap MIDI cable. At said music store, they told me they only carry the expensive cables from their supplier because the people who buy MIDI cables demand audiophile quality sound reproduction. WHAT?!?!?!?! Wait….WHAT?!?!?!?

  Ok, let’s back up for a second. We’re talking about MIDI; only control signals go over the wire. There is no audio signal transmitted, period. The MIDI notes either get there, or they don’t. The punk behind the counter is just another moron, and I wasn’t about to pay $20 each for a cable.

  Following Ben Goldacre’s (not completed I think) examination of “audiophile” power supplies - not signal cables, but mains cables - is there a whole category to be written about the cables sold as “audiophile” which have no useful signal to be deployed over them?

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• Turn your computer into a manual typewriter (some code needed), and audiophile USB leads (15 May 2006; score: 30.25%)