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Easy to use or not.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Rather unexpectedly yesterday I found myself in an online debate on Linux versus Windows. This doesn’t usually happen to me for a couple of reasons:

  • I obey the law of avoiding 386 situations. Arguments which are futile are avoided. Linux versus Windows is futile. There are more fun ways to spend my time;
  • I am a mainframe programmer and past discussions on slashdot.org (wonder if that still even really exists) have taught me that a) mainframe programmers understand different tools are appropriate for different purposes and b) Linux enthusiasts tend to have the fervour of the average recent religious convert (more zealous than the founders themselves and c) too many elements of the argument are subjective anyway.

The argument/debate/online fistycuffs centred on which was easier to use, Linux or Windows. At this stage I have to declare the following interest: I use Windows machines both at work and at home when I’m not TE into a mainframe environment. It’s not that I have anything against open source – philosophically the idea fascinates me – but that various things for which I require a functional computer also require that I run Windows. I have never owned a Mac, although I’ve used them from time to time. So I can’t actually make a call on whether it’s easier to use Windows or Linux. However, pretty much everything I have read suggests that if you’re not a technically minded person, Linux is currently nowhere near out of the box enough.

You could argue that Windows isn’t either, but typically, I don’t have to do much or anything to the box when I buy it, I don’t have to set up anything other than a wireless connection and then it, over a bit of time, sets itself up to a greater or lesser extent. There’s no messing around with drivers, there’s no messing around trying to get different pieces of software to run, you don’t usually have to actually install the operating system, regardless of how easy it may be to someone to install Linux to an empty box.

The reason I got involved was that someone came up with the idea that computers were complicated machines and if they were complicated, then they shouldn’t be easy to use.

I can’t understand this rationale in anything other than the terms of a guild protecting its own interest and mysteries. Lots of things are complicated, but they are easy to use. My example was cars – you no longer have to manually turn the engine, and things rarely go wrong with them (at least in my experience). Compared to how things were in the 1900s when people were practically building their own cars, cars are easy out to function. Likewise refrigerators. There’s a fridge-freezer just five metres away and I don’t have to do anything. I have no idea how it converts warm external air to colder air to keep my cheese from going mouldy and tomorrow’s breakfast at an optimum temperature for summer.

Philosophically, I can’t understand the idea that because, underneath the hood of something is complicated, the end product has to be difficult to use.

I have no doubt that if someone provides you with a Linux box that is all nicely installed and has email and a browser running okay on it, and maybe Open Office, the likelihood is that you’ll be grand, in the way that it’s more or less grand when you go and collect a Windows machine from your nearest retailer. But given that this option is difficult to come by for two reasons a) the OEMs would have to choose a distro and this choice would probably be castigated by some within the community and b) Windows machines are ubiquitous and they typically work out of the box for most people then for most people, getting a Linux box running is just not as obvious or straightforward as getting their Windows box up and running.

A lot of technically minded people have no idea what it’s like not to be technically minded. They miss that people just want to be able to email their kids in America and their boyfriends in Sweden or whatever, they want to be able to read FaceBook and order books from Amazon. I can’t see how this needs to be complicated.

In the grand scheme of debates over Linux versus Windows versus the Volcano, the idea that computers should be difficult to use is one I just can’t buy.

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I’m googleplussed

Monday, July 4, 2011

Google released another product the other day, invite only. Limited invite only. More limited, for example, than Google Wave appeared to be and that didn’t quite go according to plan. This is called Google+ and if you read the media, the general deal is that this is Google’s make or break on the social media front. Because Buzz didn’t quite go according to plan either. Or Wave.

So if you were minded to say so, there’s quite a lot riding on Google+ because this has to be their FaceBook killer. I’m not sure it’s that simple – the world is big enough for a few social media platforms; what it is not big enough is for just one. I should probably nail my colours to the mast – I am no great fan of FaceBook.

There are a variety of reasons for this involving privacy, photography rights, the amount of tuning you have to do to get permissions to your choice, deleting your account isn’t easy and I’m not sure whether FaceBook thinks they own any data about me or whether I do. As a result, my activity on FaceBook is sporadic at best and I’d prefer an alternative that I can configure more easily, and that isn’t, when it boils down to it, FaceBook.

I may not feel this way when I have 250 friends on Google+.

Anyway, so far, I have to say I like Google+. The user interface is a lot nicer and less cluttered. To a great extent, font sizes are friendlier to look at, and because there are currently no ads and no irritating Zynga games and related ads for Zynga games, it’s altogether a lot more – dare I say it – grown up place to be. I find it easier to talk to people on it. I haven’t used Picasa for years but would be tempted to start using it now to interact with Google+. And because it’s Google and they’ve been involved in image hosting/sharing for years, I rather hope their ToS would involve some consideration for who owns the copyright on your photograph.

In terms of organising people you know on Google+, their Circles idea is nice and sweet. And very easy to use. I’m scratching my head trying to work out just why it is FaceBook is such a hassle to administer and I think it comes down to the user interface again. Google’s suits me. FaceBook’s doesn’t. I never did figure out how to arrange things so that my aging relatives didn’t get all the murky details of any given parties but it’s self evident with Google+. The block button is remarkably easy to find too.

The other thing I like about Google+ – so far – is Sparks. I’m not sure I would have called it that but it reminds me a little of Zite and Flipboard on the iPad. It basically feeds you news that matches up with your interests. Which you can define (in my case, kitesurfing, programming, crochet and a few more I haven’t added yet) and yes, there are interesting things there. This could have a massive impact on news delivery in the future.

All in all, on current acquaintance, I like Google+ more than FaceBook (but I have to admit that would not be so hard). From a feature set point of view, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be reasonably successful – the simple fact is FaceBook has some critical mass which it won’t lose overnight (I mean, MySpace is still there, despite it all). What worries me is that there is some idea out there that one of them has to win. I’m not sure it has to. I think that Google+ may attract a bunch of people for whom FaceBook is becoming a no-go area because it may be too social, too full of rubbish, not cool any more, or just completely unworkable. Because it has a reasonably decent user community already on Gmail, once they get rid of the limits on invites, it should have a decent readymade community.

I’m interested to see what their advertising plan for it is. One of the key reasons it’s so clean at the moment is that it doesn’t have any advertising. One of FB’s big cry outs earlier this year involved FaceBook email – Google already has this with Gmail and has for years so FaceBook is definitely in catch up mode there. Unlike the screaming for invites that Google+ seems to have engendered, I don’t see the same fascination with FaceBook email.

The issue with FaceBook is…for all that…there is a community of people just waiting for FaceBook to keel over and die. This means there are a lot of comments about how Google+ is Google’s last gap at social media, the only chance to face up to the behemoth which is FaceBook. I’m not sure it’s that simple because to be honest, one of the vibes I get about Google+ is that it may be more usable for collaboration purposes, in terms of setting up specific circles, for example. For the time being, I’m more interested in seeing how I can get Google+ to work better for me as I get more familiar with it, and, as more people get into the secret garden.

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listening…

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

I recently downloaded the latest Steven Levy book, “In the Plex” which is pretty much a history of Google. It’s now on my nice friendly iPad where Kindle software delivers me a lot of interesting things.

I use Google products on a daily basis. Their search is generally reliable apart from a blip last year when it was useless for a while. With personalisation/instant search it seems to be improving again. I use gmail because – by and large – it works and now it’s accessible on all my devices with relatively little hassle. But I didn’t know too much about the company other than it was founded by a couple of kids some time ago. Those kids are around my age now which is a bit odd when you think of it.

Anyway, one of the things that struck me about Google is just how creative they are on certain fronts. They need to save money? They ask their staff for ideas on how to do it. I’ve worked in quite a few companies. I have to say that for the lossmaking ones, I don’t think they ever entertained the idea that asking their staff for advice on where to cut waste was a good idea. Many old school companies just go for the wages and staff every time.

The other thing which they do that I think is highly interesting is their 20% idea. If you’re not familiar with this (and if you don’t work in tech, you probably wouldn’t be), the general gist is that Google employees can turn 20% of their work time over to a personal project that interests them – a lot of google products grew out of this. I think 3M may have done something not too different from whence we got post-it notes.

One of the things which I have noticed that stifles innovation in a lot of companies – not internet search companies – is that ideas are often top down. Another thing is obviously when an idea comes from bottom up is that there is a cat fight over who gets credit for it. This isn’t really in the interest of the company when you think about it. If you brought about a situation whereby anyone who had an idea could fight for it and also be given appropriate credit for it, you might find a lot more interesting innovation coming from your staff. With it, that will bring a lot more employee involvement beyond merely the salary. Just the feeling of having made an unexpected difference.

Google hasn’t a massively hierarchical management structure for a company of its size which may make it easier to implement slightly left of centre ideas like this. But I don’t see any real reason why it couldn’t work in a hierarchically managed company either. A key component of why Google is where it is now is that it was a company that fostered ideas. A lot of mainstream companies – regardless of size – don’t do this any more. They are not looking at ideas really; they are looking at money and how to get it.

Yet every company everywhere started with an idea. I think ultimately that those ideas are currency, and because of the culture in many companies – where communication is very often a one way route – ideas get lost, or delayed.

It’s something to think about. I have another blog on this site which I use as an ideas whiteboard. There isn’t a whole lot there now but it’s a creative space where I think it would be useful to be able to look at things and reason out how they could work.

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LinkedIn penetration – What’s it worth really?

Monday, May 2, 2011

Last week, ComScore issued a press release highlighting the penetration rates for Twitter and LinkedIn in a number of different companies. The Netherlands came out top. What was interesting – and hence rather more widely reported than you’d expect normally – was that Ireland came second in the table for LinkedIn. I was a little surprised. The press release is here. It concentrates mainly on the Netherlands use of social networking media but there is that table of penetration for LinkedIn and that’s what I want to talk about.

It caught my interest because at the same time, an online forum which I frequent was running a discussion on how to find jobs in IT in Ireland. Networking via LinkedIn featured as a key component of something people should be doing; and how they should manage their profile, for example. It interested me because it strikes me that LinkedIn is working more or less as a lot of people feel FaceBook should be – a connection building exercise. I’m not sure FaceBook really works that way.

Given that Ireland is behind a lot of other countries in terms of penetration of FaceBook and Twitter, I’m intrigued to know why we score highly on LinkedIn. It’s possible that this penetration is as a result of:

  • high number of IT professionals;
  • high number of professionals intermingling with the US market;
  • high levels of staff turnover in the IT sector.

LinkedIn is a little interesting on the financial front too as it is due to IPO sometime this year. The expected flotation figure is – comparatively speaking (according to Mashable by the way), not all that high. This is important because the figures being bandied about for FaceBook are rather stratospheric, despite a complete absence of useful financial information. LinkedIn’s IPO documentation offers a lot more clarity.

The recruitment process in Ireland has changed a lot over the last 10 years. I was direct-hired to my current company having done battle with the recruitment agencies which, from what I can see, are really not all that trusted. LinkedIn cites job vacancies as one of their main income streams and anecdotally, I know people who have been headhunted via LinkedIn. I wonder if a key contribution to LinkedIn’s position in Ireland relates to recruitment specifically and I’d be interested in finding a way of figuring it out.

LinkedIn is an interesting way of finding a job; however. If you have any colleagues (or direct line reporting) within your network, it may be difficult to hide the fact that you are interested in moving which may or may not be a good thing depending on a number of matters such as workplace atmosphere and hierarchy, remuneration issues and workplace culture.

One of the things that struck me most about LinkedIn at the time I registered by the way was how structured it was in terms of describing your background, experience. A key complaint I have about the online form application modusfindanewjobus is that it is can be very difficult to fit that around your actual life and experience. I particularly found this with an IBM form lately.

While that makes it easier for HR staff, it may not – and almost certainly isn’t – necessarily in the interest of either an employer or a potential candidate. For that reason – I think there will always be an interest in a well designed and informative CV. LinkedIn allow you to upload these which is helpful.

Declaration of interest – my linkedin profile is here.

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Role of education in Ireland

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

I wound up in a twitter discussion with Marc Coleman today because he is running for election to the Seanad and he got into some sort of a tiff with Brian Lucey, an academic in Trinity, this week. As I follow both of them, the argument caught my attention and I ended up contributing. I believe the roots of the debate were in an article which Marc wrote for the Sunday Independent, link here, and which left me somewhat cold as far as writing style was concerned.

With respect to the debate on twitter, however, it reminded me that a key issue in Ireland is that the debate on education seems to be very fragmented. No one ever seems to clearly answer the question “What do we want of our education system?” Ultimately, our commentators and politicians spend time arguing on micro issues without first of all even assessing the purpose of our education system. As such, we wind up with letter writing campaigns to the newspapers about such esoteric matters as:

  • the place of Irish in the curriculum
  • teachers’ holidays being too long
  • the dumbing down of the maths syllabus
  • how few people are doing higher level course which would lead them on to research and development
  • how badly we do at languages (and how we should kill off Irish language teaching to deal with this)
  • classroom buildings/facilities
  • class sizes.

Marc Coleman appears to be unhappy at how we measure academic productivity. He latched onto academic lecture contact hours and used personal anecdote as a stick to beat Irish academics with. I’m not going to argue against the simple fact that compared to other countries, many of our academics are relatively well paid; only that if you want to bring about a way of measuring their worth to us, a little more detail is called for.

I don’t work in academia. I came close, about 10 years ago, to applying for a lectureship but the position in question was part time and held not enough promise in terms of research options. Marc Coleman wants us to only hire the good people, but has not yet answered me the simple question of How do we identify them. Nor can he tell me how we develop them. You don’t really buy good academic off academic trees; they need to be nurtured and their research funded.

I’m not happy with certain aspects of education in Ireland. I think our primary and secondary school cycles could do with being modernised. Having spoken to a number of teachers, I’m aware that where we have failing schools, we have ploughed lots of money and have failed to get parental engagement. I’m not enough of an expert on the social sciences front to figure out how we address that. I did volunteer to give grinds to kids in a disadvantaged comprehensive when I was a student myself – I’m not sure if the program is still running – but this anecdote is nowhere near adequate to make me an expert in dealing with some of the problems our education system faces at the coalface.

I’m not in the mood for picking over the carcass of whether researcher/lecturer A should be earning more or less than random person B doing a similar job somewhere because it’s a meaningless debate if you don’t actually first of all decide what you want the education system to achieve. For example, I’m not sure it is to our benefit collectively that it brought about a situation whereby the points race causes most of our brightest to direct themselves towards law, for example. Or that perceived economic benefit dictates trends in demand for third level courses. This does not exploit our collective ability to the best.

If I were a Seanad election candidate, I wouldn’t be focussing initially on what we pay our academics in terms of whether they represent value for money. I would be asking people what they want from education. It’s a very, very important question that would enable us to better identify value for money from the system. What is the required outcome? Arguing over contact hours is not going to answer that question.

While we currently do not charge tuition fees for undergraduate students, it’s worth noting that the UK is moving to a fee based system (and the implementation of that in England is causing ructions with respect to access being dictated by access to money), and the US has had a fee based system for years. The merit of that system is being questioned, given the debts that are imposed on young people going to college and the disconnect between those debts and the likelihood that their jobs will ever enable them to pay of those fees. Put simply, if you cause every job to require a college degree but then do not produce salaries that will enable people to pay off the cost of getting said degrees, you have a problem.

Because we have had a policy of trying to enable as many people to get into third level colleges as possible, we have diluted the value of basic university degrees such that postgraduate qualifications are near mandatory if you want to get a job. I’m not sure that this is to the benefit of the wider economy, particularly in a country which currently has abotu 15% unemployment.

I’d prefer it if our Seanad candidates considered wider questions like this rather than running into the cost of bits of the whole system.

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Upping the ante in maths.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

It’s August, so we have had the school leaving exam results and as is typical, there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about maths. Put simply, we’re not good enough at it.

Collectively, I mean. There are some individuals doing nicely. Anyway, one of the options being suggested to improve interest in maths is bribery, I mean, bonus points for mathematics.

Bonus points for mathematics is not new. When I did my leaving certificate oooooh, exactly 20 years ago now, they existed. Since then, they don’t exist, the maths syllabus has been streamlined at least once, if not twice and foundation maths was invented. And all told, things do not seem to be getting better.

So the solution is Project maths;

Mrs Coughlan said the new Project Maths – a pilot scheme in 24 schools – would be rolled out across the country.

“I believe from the very tentative results that we have seen thus far that it is the most appropriate way in which we can encourage more young people to take higher level mathematics,” she said.

Helpful. Mrs Coughlan, for the benefit of posterity is the Education Minister of the time. 24 schools are the basis on which we will make this decision. I’m not certain that’s a good idea.

The problem – which is not unique to higher level mathematics – is that the attitude to education has changed. We don’t sell it correctly to teenagers, and they expect to be sold things. I do not know why – I don’t have children, so much of what I believe is pure and idle speculation. We do have a number of youngsters who do not necessarily understand the effort/reward set up of exams. And that the reward may not necessarily be just passing the exams, but more interesting things in the future.

When I was at school, I was taught maths by a man who took the occasional week off the syllabus to teach us how it was useful for economics and computer programming, neither of which were taught in my school. Some people worked hard in his class because they were scared of him. Others worked hard because in some way, he was inspirational. Maths was a tool for other things apart from being an end in itself.

Much of the educational curriculum is often written off with “I’ll never need to “… prove another theorem in my life. We have a generation of people who dismiss aspects of the education system as being a waste of time, without recognising how those aspects might fit into other things they want to do. For example, I do honestly believe we should be teaching kids to do some sort of programming at second level anyway, but there isn’t a hope in hell any of them will be able to do that without some reasonable grounding in maths, for example.

There’s too much emphasis – I think – on immediate usefulness of various aspects of parts of the curriculum – eg, computer courses tend to consist of the ECDL which is handy enough but it’s hardly taxing to learn how to use a wordprocessor if you can read – but apart from training an army of teenage mutant ninja hackers, a lot of people can’t see the point in kids learning to write their own programs, because, sure they can buy them.

Education is about a way of thinking. I think we’ve lost sight of that. And until we learn to show teenagers how things that they’ve convinced themselves are a waste of time (eg maths) are not a waste of time (eg don’t you want to write computer games), we probably won’t be able to up the ante in maths in the short term.

Part of this means we need to look at how we teach these things. Not necessarily curriculum content. Only that – in all honesty – there are probably a lot of people teaching mathematics who should perhaps not be teaching mathematics.

For the long term, I think we need to look at the education cycle in Ireland anyway. I think the primary/secondary split and move to specialisation in the timetable is too late. However, that is an argument for another day. In the meantime, a look at Professor Stewart’s various maths curiosities reveals that however belatedly, people are interested in maths.

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Coding without comments

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Via Robert the Grey and Jesse Liberty, I have been thinking about code comments and how necessary they are, and I have come to the conclusion that some people have just never really written assembler.

Jesse’s argument for his project is as follows:

  • Comments rust faster than code, even when you’re careful
  • Well written code can be read, and comments are annoying footnotes
  • Comments make for lazy coding

Comments rust faster than code not because you’re not careful, but because you’re lazy. And if you are lazy about commenting, how do I know you’re not lazy about coding?

I realise that sometimes the logic behind a piece of code can be less than clear; no matter how well you construct your variable and procedure names, that problem does not go away.

According to Robert:

  • Stating the bleedin’ obvious (I’m looking at you Method Arguments)
  • Put there because you’re too lazy to refactor the code as demonstrated in Jesse’s article and the comments
  • Enforced by stupid corporate coding standard mandates that are still stuck in the 90s
  • Stale (and sometimes actively harmful) by the next check-in or 6 months later

I think that this is a lazy approach. It says “I cannot be bothered to document things properly so it’s someone else’s fault if they do not/cannot read my wonderfully elegant code that is self-evident because I have designed it to be so”.

It’s also my experience that well written code tends to be accompanied by well-written comments, and that poorly commented code is rarely wonderful and easy to extract some meaning from.

If either Jesse  or Robert want to carry out thought experiments like this, it’s entirely up to them. But in the real world, code standards should include checks for adequate documentation so that people, other people, have a fighting chance of dealing with other people’s elegant code. Just because you think you’ve written good code and it is self-evident what it is doing does not mean you actually succeeded in doing so.

I’ve no objection against the new generation languages. Anything that makes programming more accessible to other people is a good thing. Anything, however, that allows you to break down some discipline, is not a good thing.

If you’re disciplined enough to write good code, I honestly don’t see an argument for not being disciplined enough to write good documentation for said code. If you can’t then, in my view, it is lazy.

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Failed personal projects – NowILiveHere.com

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

One of the hardest things you have to do sometimes is reflect on projects which fail for whatever reason. For me, the key one is just occasionally, an idea comes along and I cannot give it the time it requires to make it work. We have only got a limited amount of time, it seems.

For me, the one that I really regret was the NowILiveHere.com idea. I’ve completely abandoned it for now because with the benefit of hindsight, the idea was nice, but making it happen turned out to be difficult in light of the amount of time I had to devote to it.

The idea was simple enough. NowILiveHere.com was to be a directory of all the activities you could get up to no matter where in Ireland you lived. The key objective of it was to make it community content driven – that meant people could sign up and plot their town and their local clubs and activities on it – so that if A N Stranger arrived in the town, family in tow, for a new exciting job and start in their lives, they had somewhere to look other than the local newspaper to find out about things that they could get involved in.

I believed this mattered because on the surface, most of Ireland appears to have GAA and the odd football team. I am willing to bet, however, that the top rugby players in small towns in Cork are completely unaware that the North Cork Lacemaking Guild is one of the best in Europe if not the world, or where the local judo club meets.

Part of this is rooted in my own youth. When I was a teenager, the choice of activities seemed to be limited to some of the more obvious (GAA) sports. I was fortunate that my parents were good enough to get me to a swimming pool every Sunday morning during the winter because I had zero interest in the local camogie club. Part of this is also rooted in a conviction I have that very often, things are going on that we just don’t know about. Things like knitting clubs, volunteer organisations building things. The media would have you believe that all the weekend is about is partying and sleeping in on Sunday morning. But I pass through towns, small towns, and realise that they have karate clubs, yoga classes and I thought that a central site where you could just go “okay, I’m living in Portlaois for the next year or so, what’s going on there?” rather than spend weeks asking at libraries, looking at notices in supermarkets.

When I built it – and I built it twice -  I set it up on Mediawiki because it struck me as possibly the handiest CMS for a project like that. I had grand plans involving linking into Google maps as well. Typically, however, on both occasions, it got heavily attacked by spam and I didn’t have the time to do any of the wider customisation and development I had in mind for it. Sometimes, the tools we give something are just the wrong fit.

I’ve been thinking about the whole idea again lately and am still tempted to try and figure out a way of making it happen. I might not necessarily go with Mediawiki – having looked at that again lately for other reasons, I’ve concluded that it doesn’t fit the needs of that project any more; that in fact, building something straight onto a Google or Bing map might even be a better fit altogether rather than trying to build anything more elaborate.

I’m still interested in making it community driven; I look at how boards.ie has developed into something highly useful (although occasionally monumentally diversionary) for a lot of people, particularly in specialist areas (I have an interest in the photography and commuting and transport fora there). It’s just, something like that can be hugely open to abuse, and the question is how you go about policing it. On the flipside, I really have no idea what people do in their spare time in the way of clubs and societies and classes in every town in Ireland. I need to crowdsource that information.

On balance, though, it matters that people who have ideas look at trying to implement them, and learning from the failure.

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So our reg system is a problem, is it?

Friday, May 28, 2010

The Irish Times published this article about how we were selling more cars this year like it’s a good thing. I’ve mixed feelings about how good it is because frankly, a significant majority of the motor industry in Ireland is retail sales based on imports. I don’t think we have anything more than a few components factories in the country and certainly no major league auto assembly.

So there’s this. If we skip the nitpicking feeling I have that this is an extremely poorly written article from a stylistic point of view and move on to the actual content, I’m a bit worried about it. I have to wonder how much reality it actually reflects.

The scorn that some drivers received on the roads last year simply because of the number plates on their cars raises an issue that now needs further consideration.

I’m really confused by this. I know we didn’t sell a whole lot of cars last year nationwide, but still I find it difficult to believe that people were made to feel guilty about it. I don’t inhabit that kind of world, admittedly but was there really that much ill-feeling on the highways and byeways if you dared to display a 09 on your registration plate?

In simple terms, I really don’t believe it happened.

If we are to help the long-term survival of the motor industry and the thousand it employs we need to reassess our number plate system. There remains far too much focus on start of year sales, driven largely by a registration system that gives such prominence to the year of registration. It creates an unnecessary social status issue, that means dealerships are over-run at the start of the year and virtually idle from the autumn period.

Removing the year from the registration plate seems a sensible approach. The industry can do their bit as well: ensuring that trade-in prices take account of the months of ownership rather than simply valuing all cars for a single year under the same price bracket. There are many suggestions for an alternative to the current year system. It’s time to open the debate.

The current registration plate system was introduced in 1987 and is delightfully simple, consisting of the year, a region identifier and a rolling counter. It has little to do with with how healthy we want the auto industry to be.

Purely economically, new cars bought in Ireland are imported. They contribute to our balance of trade and not necessarily in a positive way. Certainly they contribute a certain amount of tax take via VRT; however, from an economic and environmental point of view, it is not really viable to continue buying and selling the volume of cars we were selling between 2000 and 2006, for example. If nothing else, that level of new car purchase causes major over supply and storage issues on the second hand front.

I can’t see, either, how changing the registration number system will change the actual number of cars bought or sold; and if you are in a cyclical business with specific seasons, surely this factors into how you manage your business. It may balance it across the year somewhat – although I doubt it based on experience in other countries where new year sales spurts were all too common also – but it will not increase your turnover too much. The market only buys what it can bear. And with the best will in the world, not too many people trust the second hand car market to be honest and up front. I wouldn’t be dependent on them playing their part as described in the quote above.

We need to face up to the fact that the glory days of the early 2000s are gone. The personal transportation market is going to change; will have changed forced on it by environmental factors. Messing around with the reg system will not address that reality; and to be honest, I see little or no evidence that the motor industry recognises that it’s not really all that important to Ireland anyway. We can probably survive on fewer dealers than we have now, that’s for sure.

In short, I think this thesis is superficial and ill thought out.

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Matt Cooper and the increasing cries for a NAMA for the public.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Disclosure.

I do not own a house. I do not own a house because between 2000 and 2006 the price of property rose significantly faster than my salary and I flatly refused to borrow money I couldn’t pay back to buy a house or an apartment. For this, I took quite a lot of criticism from people who informed me in 2004 that I had to get on my foot on the ladder. Despite the fact that the least expensive property within 20 minutes of where I worked was 10 times my then salary. Despite the fact that if I were to buy a house I could afford, I would be spending 2-3 hours in my car commuting every day, living in a town I’d never spent more than 5 minutes in before, where I knew no-one and offered me no facilities in terms of what it is I do with my spare time. Not that I’d have much spare time anyway given the amount of time I’d spend at work and the amount of time I would spend commuting.

In the meantime, lots of other people did by property. Lots of it. At 8-10 times their salary. In places they didn’t want to live. Under the impression that property always went up. Many of these people also bought investment properties. Not all, but many. Many of them bought property on 100-120% mortgages. A significant number of people in Ireland are in negative equity; a growing number of them in difficulties with their mortgages. Many of the investment mortgages were interest only for a fixed period. These mortgages are now about to reset. A lot of people in Ireland are insolvent. It used to be that they were asset rich and cash poor but now, their assets don’t cover their debts even if they could liquidate them.

Five years ago  forecast that the property market in Ireland would crash spectacularly. It did. And now, we are where we are.

Matt Cooper is the presenter of a radio show on Today FM, a national radio station, at evening drive time. Largely it covers news events, politics, business and economics. He also occasionally writes for the Irish Examiner, and has done some television work. Included in that television work was a piece for a series called Aftershock. In it, he called for a rescue package for homeowners in negative equity. The call for support for home owners in difficulty is getting louder.

Today he wrote this in the Irish Examiner. The title, if you are in negative equity, is clearly seductive.

We rescued the banks, now we must rescue the public from negative equity

I have problems with this. That we rescued the banks – and they are not out of the woods yet – is not a reason to rescue the public from negative equity. The problem is that anyone in negative equity walked in there. The banks have been stupid – this is true. But I advised many people not to buy property over the past few years, and yet I still know half a dozen people who bought in 2006; the very, very height of the market. Because they wanted to own their own place.

The country did an awful lot to enable people to own their own place because that’s what the population demanded at the time. Reduced stamp duty for first time buyers; mortgage interest relief. Affordable housing schemes that were valid if you were earning over 50KE.

This happened because people didn’t want to face the reality. Property in Ireland was – then – as now – too expensive. Instead of taking the obvious route to reducing the cost of property, they wanted the money to pay more.

Matt Cooper talks about an unfair millstone around the neck of a generation. It is true that they have a millstone; it is equally true that they willingly took that millstone on when they could convince themselves that “we’re in it in the long haul”. The long haul was always going to involve severe negative equity. People who didn’t take that route took their chances with the tenancy legislation.

I realise there are mortgages that will probably never, ever get paid back because it just isn’t feasible for the sums lent on property to be paid back over the lifestyle of the mortgage without severe inflation. People like me are about to be screwed wholesale if there is a bail out or if there is inflation.

Matt Cooper recognises that it is perhaps not fair that people who do not need support because they avoided the pitfall should be asked to pay for those who did; but that the social need makes it an imperative. I think he’s wrong. I think that there is scope for fixing things by improving bankruptcy legislation so that people can exit more easily than is now the case. However, there absolutely has to be a cost to the key beneficiary – the person being rescued. Without that cost, we are not talking about any sort of social justice.

He seems to think that it comes at some sort of a cost; but the cost is basically invisible to the beneficiary. Already they don’t have full control over their house because it is subject to a mortgage. This changes nothing very much other than perhaps reduce their repayments.

WHAT I’ve suggested – a swap of debt for equity – is common to rescuing companies that get into difficulty, to stop them going bust. It is not pain free for the borrower, as they would lose part ownership of their home but it would make their repayments more manageable.

This is viable for some companies because those companies may well turn out to be profitable. Houses/homes, in a normal market, are not. For this to work, we need houseprice inflation to come back. For the future of this country, and increase competitiveness in the face of a global labour market – and Ireland is a small open economy – we still need major reductions in the cost of housing. There are estimates that suggest that the Irish property market is still somewhat 40% overvalued in terms of asking prices. Matt’s solution is too simple and too damaging to be applied.

What is insulting is this.

But we cannot dismiss people, the citizens of this state, lightly because the public finances and the banks take precedence or because those who have are unwilling to share the pain with those who do not.

I am a citizen of this state. I am already sharing a lot of pain courtesy of this. I have increased taxes to pay with reduced public services. I never got much of the gains; I was never a paper millionaire because I never bought a house which is now the unfair millstone around the neck of many citizens of this state.

There are more citizens in this state than the ones who borrowed too much to buy houses that they claimed they were in for the long term but whose attraction has worn off as their value fell.

Negative equity is a problem. But if you can service your mortgage you are not really in the zone of demanding support and a bail out just because the banks did.

A more sensible approach would be to do the following:

  1. Reform bankruptcy legislation and allow those in serious trouble to exit more easily than is now the case. This by definition includes the loss of whatever property was concerned, via a short sale.
  2. Tighten up tenancy legislation so that those renting enjoy better protection than is now the case.

This is a more effective way of dealing with the required debt destruction. Matt Cooper’s solution will have no positive benefit for the economy as a whole other than to pile on the weight of repairing this mess on the shoulders of people who didn’t cause it in the first place.

There is no justice – absolutely none – in that.

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