Morally Taxing

Robots come in all shapes and sizes.  

From small shiny bins with a round, swivelly, antenna loaded, heads right through to large muscular and heavily accented Austrians. They have been imagined in every conceivable way. Sexy ones, ugly ones and ones which look like large buildings with spindly legs. Robots which go bleep, bloop in such a way you want to cuddle them and robots which are as murderous as they come. Male, female, dogs, cats, horses, knives, forks. Regardless of their shape or their intentions to you, me, mankind or a woman called Sarah Connor they all have one thing in common.

They are not real. They are all made up. They don’t actually, properly, in the real world, really exist.

Hard to believe I know but trust me on this one. They don’t.

The depressing reality is real world robots which do actually exist are rubbish and are a million miles away from what I would consider a proper robot. The oxford dictionary defines a robot as a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer. Real world robots barely scrape into this definition. 

Basically they come in two forms, they can either mow your lawn or hoover your carpet. Or both and that is it. Oh and they resemble a crap brown plastic plate on castors to boot. They can’t kill you, you can’t have sex with one, or at least I would strongly advise against it, they can’t break the code of a locked down force field/tractor beam and are bloody useless when it comes to telling jokes.

Why is this?

One of the core principles of physics is the universality of computation. Now I don’t profess to know much about physics, or anything much for that matter however even my simple brain understands this principle. Basically it states that if it is possible within the laws of physics then it is possible, given enough time & memory for a computer to replicate it in very fine detail. This law was postulated in the 19^th Century and was proved in the 1980s.

One of the implications of this is if the human body can do it then it is possible to build a computer to replicate it. Fact.

Why then, if it is proved to be possible, can’t we do it?

Let’s just assume for the sake of argument we can build one and assuming we can devise cogs and motors sensitive enough to move with appropriate fluidity would that be enough? Probably not.

A thought process is also required and herein lies the problem. The human brain is an ugly, spongy, grey, waterlogged bag of tricks so complex it would require one the size of mars to actually figure out how one actually works. The human brain is probably the smartest object in the world, not every brain but certainly a good proportion of them. It is the only object which actually knows there even is an Earth or understands the concept of self and existence, life, death and morality. The brain understands this and understands that replicating one must be possible following the universality of computation but still we can’t even build something simple enough to help me put together an IKEA flat pack shelving unit.

I don’t get it but then I don’t get a lot of things so this shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone.

We could build a robot to do our tax returns though.

This would be simple. In fact we have, they just don’t look like robots but the principles are fairly straightforward. If you earn this you pay that, if you do this then this happens. Taxation like a lot of rules and laws are fairly black and white, to the extent even a robot brain would get it. They are of course bourn out of societal judgements on what’s fair and what’s equitable but the rules are fairly binary in their nature.

With such a clear cut set of rules, people will invariably have issues with them, its natural. The richer folks among us complain that they pay too much and the less well off complain that the rich don’t pay enough. That’s understandable but if you are a good citizen, corporate or private, follow the rules and pay the tax you should be ok, right?

Not necessarily.

The phrase, it might be legal but isn’t morally right has surfaced a few times in recent months in relation to taxation and a bit like robots its something which is baffling me. Does this mean the existing tax laws are not moral? What exactly is a moral tax?

David Cameron described Jimmy Carr as morally wrong for using the infamous K2 scheme where he ended up paying a lot less tax than he otherwise would had he just declared his income like a normal, morally robust, citizen. Starbucks UK have come under the moral microscope recently as well for paying no corporation tax on its UK businesses even though it achieved £398M worth of sales.

The headlines are damning; £398M sales! No tax! Starbucks are making a mocha-ry of the exchequer (I made that up btw). In this age of austerity I can almost feel the seething rage and hear the grinding of teeth as the Sun or Mail’s headlines are read out on building sites, in housing benefit offices and teachers well used rest rooms across the country.

Tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is smart. It’s a controversial statement I accept but if every person in the country could pay 1% less tax than they do at the moment legally do you think they wouldn’t?

If it is morally wrong to pay money into a K2 scheme in the channel islands or structure a company in such a way that it pays tax in Lichtenstein then the answer is very simple. Change the laws to make it tax avoidance and I can guarantee Starbucks, Jimmy Carr and every other so called ‘fat cat’ would stop doing it immediately. Its not difficult really.

Also following this logic if the legal schemes used by such people are morally wrong does this mean ISA’s or tax free pension scheme payments are also morally wrong? Are they not also legal mechanisms for individuals to reduce their overall tax liability?

The only way to make tax 100% morally equitable is to make everyone pay the same percentage. And by that I mean really everyone, whether you are a billionaire or a pauper you will pay the same % of your earnings. Another way to look at this, is it morally right to penalize someone more for working hard and being successful?

David Cameron making statements like he did are only there to pander to the restless natives reading the headlines. He knows there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. If he really felt that strongly about it he would task the Inland Revenue to jump all over it, close down the loophole and have them burn the participants at the stake.

Along with Klingons, warp speed and light sabers, R2D2 is not real and I can say with reasonable certainty he/she/it will never be real. I too am blessed with having one of those wonderfully amazing grey watery things sandwiched between my ears. And like most people I have my opinions and think these are correct. I do also recognise that I am probably not right, I have biases the same as everyone else and this is why just because I have an opinion it doesn’t make it right. It also probably means I shouldn’t be judging the moral rights and wrongs of a particular persons tax affairs.

Make the law then leave it to the lawn cutting, carpet hoovering robots and their bleep, bloop brains to police it free from bias.

Trust me, they will do a far better job than you or I ever will.

Free Sex. Free Money. Free Beer.

You want free sex?

You want free beer?

You want free money?

Having recently discovered the statistics function on my BlogSpot page this post is a test. It’s a test posting to prove or disprove my hypothesis that most people end up here by accident.

I know most of the people who read this regularly. I know the people who link up with me on the various social & professional networks end up here by being nosy but I think the bulk of traffic is accidental, random. This is not a pure guess, looking at the statistics function I can for example see which country you come from. I can see what operating system you use. I can see how you got here, I can see the search term you used to find this page and I can also see which posting you have read. 

After spending an extraordinary amount of time analysing these data I can conclude that there is a significant statistical correlation, for the sake of simplicity I will randomly call this r,  between the title of the post and the number of views it gets. Recently the bulk of traffic passing over this page comes from Google and the most popular search term which people find it through is Penoplasty.

Now I cannot think of a scenario whereby someone would type the words Mike Shanks and Penoplasty at the same time into Google and thus have to conclude its purely accidental.

Does this also mean the bulk of people reading my blog have small penises and probably can't type?

Regardless, to prove or disprove my theory I will upload this post and monitor the traffic. I am not sure what I will do with this information once I have it but I for one think it’s a very worthy exercise.

Its Saturday 8th September 2012, close to midnight and the current count on the blog is 2,474

Lets see.

Mute

I have tried hard.

I have.

I really have.

I have honestly given it my best shot but for some reason I just cannot get excited by the Paralympics.

Every time I turn on the television I find myself faced with a depressing autumn schedule bursting at the seams with lowest common denominator programming. In an attempt to avoid watching two annoying Geordies and the humiliation of dense people from a strata of the population I don’t recognise I find myself channel hopping and pretty soon I am sat watching the Paralympics. It’s packaged the same as the normal Olympics, it’s using the same locations as the normal Olympics, everything looks the same but it’s just isn’t. It isn’t otherwise I would watch as enthusiastically as I did a month ago.

The problem I find is pretty soon after tuning in I find my hand edging back towards the remote control. I get bored quickly and find myself trying to guess red or black along with the rest of the population with my brain resting in another room.

I really like sport, I love playing it and watching it so what is it about the Paralympics I just don’t get? Is it the various disabilities? Is it the need to classify and grade the disabilities to ensure a level playing field? Is it the implausible events ranging from the rather pedestrian sounding seated volleyball, through the improbable blind football right up to the laughable, whatever could go wrong, visually impaired javelin?

Honestly I don’t know why it is, it could be that if I am watching someone run 100meters I want to watch the best in the world, not the best of a particular segment of the population. I want to see the best, the fastest man on earth, the highest or longest jumper the best football players, the best swimmers, tennis players etc. I am simply not interested in the fastest man on earth with a particular disability or within a certain age bracket. Sporting endeavor is and should be Darwinism in its purest form.

Please don’t misunderstand, it’s not the disability which turns me off, I feel the same about watching ‘senior’ competitions, the over 40s or 50s or for that matter the under 21 competitions. Frankly I don’t care about them either. Why not go the whole inclusive hog and have a tournament for people with a BMI of >30?

In fact I would probably tune in and watch that, but just because it would be laugh.

I’m not against it, far from it, good for them for competing but I for one am going to watch Ant and Dec eat rhino turds in the jungle instead.

So why is it that I uncomfortable about the above?

A good friend of mine is a huge cricket fan and I have no issue whatsoever stating the obvious to him that cricket is a seriously dull game played at the speed of a koala on weed by a bunch of fannies in stupid clothes. That fine and he normally just nods in an accepting way without taking offence, as he should, because it’s true. But if I was to say for example, the Paralympics are shite the reaction I would receive might not be quite so accepting.

Maybe I should keep my opinions on such matters to myself to be on the safe side. In future when asked did I see the S2 dwarf hurdles last night I should respond with ‘yes, wasn’t it fantastic?’ and hope the conversations quickly shifts to I’m on X-Factor get me out of here.

But it does feel like I cannot say what I think or worse what I think or feel is horribly inappropriate and out of touch.

Bad sexual etiquette was George Galloway’s way of describing Julian Assange’s alleged rape charges recently and of course the reaction to his statement was predictably vitriolic. If some people could have their way he would be hung by the neck from the nearest lamppost and Mr Galloway himself knew this would be the reaction. He did it because he enjoys the infamy and the publicity this type of outburst gives him.

Regardless of his motivation though is he so wide of the mark to justify such a strong response? I would argue not, it’s more the subject matter which has become almost unmentionable. Opinions on the subject are so strong that most politicians of a serious bent steer the hell clear. Don’t touch it, it’s a minefield and you are guaranteed to piss one section of the population off if you do. Ken Clarke fell into the trap a couple of years ago and was castigated for suggesting there should be different degrees of rape, i.e. a 16 year old boy having consensual sex with a 15 year old girl is very different to the violent type of rape. I accept the age limit is there to ensure consent is given with a mature mind but it is different no matter how you look at it. In the same way that Julian Assange’s alleged crimes are different.

So what is so wrong with saying so?

What is wrong is there seems to be a culture where people cannot speak their mind, even if it is just to bring a healthy dose of common sense into the discussion.

Race and religion are another two topics which are untouchable and we have seen some ridiculous cases recently where applying a bit of common sense would have resolved the issues before they even became an issue and probably saved millions to boot.

It is almost as we continue to pursue our insatiable desire to protect people’s religious, sexual or racial freedoms we are losing our ability or the inclination to speak our minds on such subjects. We are too scared. We are losing the freedom to say what we think and I would counter this is something much more dangerous and definitely worth protecting.

If we lose sight of this we could very easily find ourselves sat at a mad hatter’s tea party, mute.

Anyway, enough of the soapbox.

I don’t like the Paralympics and that’s ok.

Citius, Altius, Fortius

I have couch sores all over my back and a remote control button shaped dent in my thumb. My skin is the colour of grey milk and I have reached gold status on loyalty points at Mustapha’s kebab emporium. 

Why? I hear you ask.

What cataclysmic event has occurred which has lead me down the hazardous path of becoming lazy, fat or a little bit Greek? What has happened to me to precipitate a tornado of doing nada? A maelstrom of doing knack all has taken over and I need to move, I need to eat something green but most of all I need to stand up.

And I will in two weeks.

Personally I blame the BBC, ITV, SF1, some dodgy Albanian streaming websites and the various sporting bodies across the world for my extreme, and temporary, state of health.

They decided in their infinite wisdom to schedule a bonanza of televised sport this year and it seems there has been hardly time to catch breath, go to the toilet or wash between the conclusion of one and the start of another. Aussie Open Tennis, football league, champions league, French Open, Euro 2012, Wimbledon and now the Olympics. All have arrived with a flurry of flags and expectation and some have even lived up to their pre-tournament hype.

The finale this year is the Olympics and so far it seems to be going to plan, the French are winning nothing, the Americans and Chinese are battling for first place, we have some doping and for the first time, after the appearance of a female swimmer with huge hands and feet, the mention of genetic manipulation.

It’s impossible to tell if her size 20 flippers and webbed snow shovel hands are natural or the result of some form of genetic jiggery pokery as science stands today but I have heard she does a cool slithering party trick if you throw her at a window so make of that what you will.

Genetically developed freak or not the question of genetic doping as it is known will become more and more prevalent in the future and the governing bodies really need to start developing tests before we start seeing mermaids lining up for Fiji in the 200M backstroke.

For the most part though the athletes appear to be living up to the Olympic ideals of fair play and good competition and as I sit on my couch watching these athletes in prime physical condition battle it out I marvel at their single minded determination. They have trained every day for 4 years for this moment, they are totally obsessed with their goal. They have sacrificed everything, they get up at 3.30am to train, eat raw eggs and rabbit food all day, every day. They haven’t seen their families for years and have to lift heavy logs in the snow, probably.

As I munch on my Mustapha spicy special I find myself wanting to be one of them. If I am being honest, I am a little jealous.

I too want to be an Olympian.

I too want to compete at the pinnacle of my chosen discipline.

I too want to walk proudly around a stadium carrying a flag.

I too want to cry live on telly like a little girl.

I want all this, I want to be an Olympian but as the old guy out of the Indiana Jones movie, the one with Sean Connery and that weird Nazi lady said, I need to choose wisely. My discipline that is. I wont age horribly and explode into dust if I choose poorly but if I was to opt for the 100M sprint or marathon I might find it a bit of a struggle.

So choosing my discipline is important but there are other variables other than fitness, age or ability to wear spandex which I can use to increase my chances of success. I will use my 42 years of acquired wisdom and cheat.

Great Britain has a population of approx 70M people, most of them are far from Olympic standard but with a population this big, the competition for places is going to be fierce. To increase my chances I am going to take citizenship elsewhere and after using the power of Google to help me, I have determined my new adopted country will be the Vatican city (pop 1000).

The application form was in Latin and had some odd questions like How did Mary get pregnant? and St Peter? Discuss? but these are minor obstacles in my quest. And once I have my passport it doesn’t really matter what discipline I choose, surely I will be able to run, jump, ping pong, horse ride or shoot things better than a bunch of holy drunk old guys?

As an aside I did actually Google ‘how to become an Olympian’ and hit upon a website called fabjobs.com. Their advice is a ten-step guide to becoming an Olympian starting with ‘Choose your sport’ and ending with ‘Qualify for the Olympics’.

Thanks fabjobs! Yes, it really had that sentence; Qualify for the Olympics.

So my sport doesn’t really matter, my country is chosen, what next?

Fabjobs have another good suggestion, a couple bullet points down from choosing your sport, they advise me to ‘Get really good at your chosen sport’

I am feeling positive now, I can almost see myself entering the stadium carrying a flag.

I have four years to do this.

I will do this

I will become an Olympian.

The motto of the 2012 Olympics is ‘Inspire a Generation’ and I for one am inspired.

My training regime will be brutal, I will have to give up everything I love in life if I am to walk tall in the stadium. I will have to sweat blood and will cry a lot. I imagine myself doing it to stirring music, running through city streets, over mountains, straining as I struggle to lift random heavy objects, a park bench, a letter box, a homeless person. I will fail of course but as my training increases, as my strength and stamina grow, the bench will become less and less of a challenge until eventually, the day before the opening ceremony I will hold it aloft as the orchestra reaches its crescendo.

I will do all of this.

Starting in two weeks.

1970

I’m 42 today.

I might not be 42 today when this blog actually makes it to the blogspot page but as I write this it is still my birthday. So it’s my birthday blog.

So 42, and as I sit here thinking about it I am wondering what words of wisdom, what key golden nuggets of advice I could offer, in essence what the hell have I learned in 2,184 weeks? You would think in 15,288 days one would have learned a lot of lessons, good and bad?
366,912 hours is a lot of time to learn something useful other than how to divide numbers on a calculator.

Actually I have learned a lot.

I have a lot of strong opinions on most things, I know a lot of useless facts, can name some pretty obscure capital cities and could if I tried hard bullshit my way through a few specific disciplines without embarrassing myself horribly. I am also old enough to have no issues with stealing other people’s ideas or opinions if they are better than mine (and there are quite a few) and repackaging them as my own.

Most of the things I have learned though if I think about it I could have figured out a long time ago. Its not like I have learned how to split an atom or find the lost Arc of the Covenant or anything. Mostly its common sense.

If I had thought about it, for example, when I was 20 what’s the correct response when a guy in a bar asks me what I am looking at it probably wouldn’t have been ‘your missus’s tits you monkey-arse-faced twat’. If I had actually given it some thought at the time that is.

Problem is at the age of 20 phrases like monkey-arse-faced twat just run off the tongue faster than the thought process which should normally precede them.

So a quick list of things I have learned, purely off the top of my head would run something like:

• Do what you say you will.
• Only take the bus if you really have to.
• Don’t spill red wine on the bride.
• Do travel, a lot.
• Don’t care what other people think.
• Be nosy.
• Double check after using Google translate.
• If you are a man, don’t have long hair.
• Don’t be a gay.
• Don’t wear pink, Lycra or shave your legs; male specific again.
• Don’t write things in sms speak, ever.
• Avoid wankers, they are.
• Don’t stray from the path if you are starring in An American Werewolf in London.
• Give it a go.
• Don’t cycle drunk on the motorway then tell someone about it.
• Befriend spiders; the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
• If you are unhappy with it, don’t whine about it, change it.
• Don’t bullet point lists.

If I was to write this list tomorrow, it would probably be different so I guess this isn’t really a list of the wisdom learned over 40 years its more like a whimsical list of things which I can think of just now.

I have little regrets, plenty of mistakes but regrets no. I do have a tattoo, not that I regret it, its just there, not a lot I can do about it now anyhow and it was this which got me thinking about this blog in the first place.

To be clear my tattoo isn’t an embarrassing one, it’s not a cool one either, its one which I am neither proud of nor embarrassed about it, it just is. It was needled into my upper arm 25 years ago when I was 17, alcohol was involved and also the strange rule which used to exist in England which had pubs closing for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Something to do with WW1 I am lead to believe so I won’t complain too loudly about it, its so low on collateral impact from that conflict it would be obscene to even consider drawing a cause and effect line.

Youth, alcohol, time to kill and a plethora of tattoo parlours were, and probably still are, a bad combination. I ended up with a small colourful smudge on my upper arm and found myself in the shower the following morning trying to rub it off.

That was 1987 and since then tattoos seem to have increased in popularity exponentially. In 1987 tattoos were the sole preserve of rock stars, African tribe members or drunken 17-year-old sailors. Now everyone has a tattoo and I was thinking about that, I have an excuse of sorts, what’s yours?

I don’t know what you think, but I can tell you what I think.

I think if you are Latino, muscular (male) or deliciously curvacious (female) then an appropriate tattoo looks good, you should have one. If you are an African tribe member with a plate in your lip and a neck stretched like a giraffe then a tattoo is the least of your aesthetic worries so you might as well. If you are a German skinhead it’s expected and equally so if you are a porn star.

Tramp Stamp according to the Urban Dictionary (yes I do research my topic thoroughly before posting) is the name for the horizontal tattoo normally found just above a woman’s backside and of all the tattoos I have come across I dislike these the most.

I am, of course, discounting here the really stupid facial tattoos or the badly drawn lines of the homemade variety.

As a brief aside I knew a man once who had a penis, with wings on his forearm and Scotland written above the flying member. I had and still have no idea why, nor the significance of the penis. I don’t know if it was a demonstration of patriotism (he was Scottish) or the exact opposite. In any event I remember him being a dense man of few syllables so it probably was a misguided attempt at the former.

Yes, tramp stamp, when I see one, and strangely the women who have them seem to want to show them off a lot, I am not sure if I should mention it and compliment her on her arse art or simply ignore it.

It not like a nice dress or something where you can get away with ‘you look fantastic’, it’s a specific thing and I think a sexual specific thing so I tend to opt for the ignoring it reaction.

Art works well on a nice canvas. When its painted onto a bulging, bloated, pasty skinned canvas with a fag sticking out of a hairy lip its not going to look good regardless of the talent or the design employed.

I see them everywhere and shudder, if you look this bad now what on earth are you going to look like in 40 years from now?

Anyway, who am I to criticise, I already have at tattoo and it’s their body to do with as they wish.

So after 42 years of living I have a number of things to be proud of, a head full of mostly useless knowledge, a few lines on my face, the odd mark and a piece of body art which wont wash off.

That’s ok isn’t it?

I think so - Happy Birthday to me.