Steve Hemingway

As I have previously blogged, I am the proud owner of a Motorola A1200 Ming smartphone.

It is not officially available in the UK and I had to import it from HK. My good friend Lua Meng brought one back with her when she returned from HK last time.

Without GPRS is it simply a phone with a touchscreen and no keypad. With GPRS it is pretty amazing. Notably it has:

• a version of MSN messenger
• a version of the Opera browser
• ability to download and run Java client apps, such as the Gmail mobile client (which worked first time!)

Here is the link to how the phone can be set up for GPRS. I would strongly urge you not to bother calling O2 as they are bound to refuse to help since this phone is not officially supported. In my case I cannot get technical support since the contract is in someone else's name (don't ask).

I am to marketing what Graham Norton is to Theoretical Physics. However I did manage to go along to an all-day workshop on the subject. The thesis of the person giving the seminar was that actually people buy things to solve a problem they have rather than for any benefit or constellation of benefits. They go into Tescos on the way home from work not because they think of the benefits of getting a nutritious ready-prepared meal but because they have a problem of getting food for themselves, of getting rid of hunger.

The tricky thing is to market a product without too much negativity. It seems an iron rule of advertising that adverts mustn't actually directly allude to the problem they are going to solve, but must subtly hint at the nature of the problem. In my youth there was a famous ad for some kind of insurance-based saving scheme which showed (supposedly) the same man over a series of decades worrying more and more about not having taken out that life policy when he was in his 20's and it was cheap.

It is not an original thought that men buy expensive cars to create the illusion of wealth. I had always assumed that Posches were bought by very rich people who had the sums required for purchase in their wallet, but it seems that a vast proportion of dealer-bought cars are purchased on expensive credit.

What is the primary motivation - to avoid the shame of being though unsuccessful in business, or to create the positive impression of great wealth?

The issue of grammar schools has such a power to damage political parties. Now Harriet Harman is running for Labour Deputy Leader the columnists are bringing out her decision to send her own son to a grammar school. We can smell hypocrisy from a long way off, and the behaviour of Tony & Cherie, Ruth Kelly, Diane Abbot and Harriet Harman stinks of it.

The fact that their party is so fanatically opposed to selection makes their hypocrisy more galling for me, a supporter of both the Labour Party and of choice in state schools (which I believe cannot exist without selection). The reality is that local comprehensive schools can be diabolically bad, or these Labour politicians would be happy to send their own kids to them. But rather than fix the schools they decide to opt out of the system. They would not opt to be treated at a private hospital, but they realise that the standard of education offered by our allegedly brilliant state schools is dire.

Every time I read this kind of article I want to resign from the Labour Party, but then I realise that all the mainstream parties are united in having absolutely no vision on education. About the only politician who ever has anything sensible to say on the subject is Boris Johnston, but I can't see how he can last much longer if he continues to state his mind.

Fiona Millar's article on why she will not be supporting Harriet Harman

I am not a great student of the Middle East. It is largely a mystery to me. It usually seems to get worse and worse, with all the participants behaving in an entirely irrational and dangerous fashion.

There seems to be a very big problem with the response of the EU to the election of Hamas by the Palestinians. It paid for elections, it monitored the elections, and then when the result of the democratic process was not the one that it wanted it just rejected it. Either democracy is a good thing and will solve the problem, or some external control must be applied. But it seems to me that the response to the election of Hamas will simply polarise the Arabs even more away from the West.

The Western-leaning 'quartet' - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and Jordan - seem increasingly marginal.

The West's long support for Iraq in its long war with Iran, and the generally terrible treatment Iran has received from the West is another unacceptable aspect of the West's behaviour. It seems now that it is almost inevitable that the USA will resort to bombing the Iranian's nuclear plant. This is a very bad development indeed.

If only someone in the White House could see sense. I war against Terrorism, like a war against any abstract noun is bound to fail. It is simply going to result in the religious alignments in the middle east being made even more important than they are now.

Media Group veteran. Lives in the Barbican. Worked for the Govt. and now works for Spectrum Strategy (any relation to Spectrum Capital?).

His page on the Spectrum website.

Also in Essex, I read.

The pictures are not very new - someone suggested 7 years old.

What first struck me about Knebworth is how many trees there were and how much of ground-level detail was obscured by them. I tried to follow my daily walk with my dog, Seth, but found that for most of it the path was hidden by the canopy of green leaves.

The Green Belt is an attractive thing, and living in an 'excluded village' (i.e. one in which development is permitted) is a privilege. Unfortunately there have been some extremely dense and out-of-character developments in the village lately that make some blocks reminiscent of inner-city living.

Found this very interesting:

Choices Acquisitions seminar review. I have talked to an outfit called ProBuy who are linked to Choices Acquisitions. I don't quite know how they fit together but this is interesting.

Alvin Rabushka was interviewed by Russ Roberts of Econtalk. I urge you to listen to this and keep going to the final 15% (or even maybe skip to the last section).

The idea of a flat tax was proposed by Rabushka (and I think several others) in the early 1980s. I was undoubtedly influenced by reading about it in Kay and King's book on the British Tax system. Most people seem to have no interest in tax as a mechanism. They seem to consider the tax code as a work of nature, not a work of man. They never seem to think about what its objectives are and how they could do achieve them better, or more efficiently. They do not, in short, look on this mechanism, institution whatever with an engineer's eye. People just seem to be incapable of looking at Parliament, democracy, the voting system, the education system etc. dispassionately.

One problem with Flat Taxes is how to get such a system introduced. For twenty years the idea of Flat Taxes seemed to have not a single intellectually coherent argument against it, but seemed as likely to be introduced as a law banning the use of private motor vehicles.

What has changed though is the creation of new nation states resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Baltic states have embraced a flat tax system with enthusiasm and have had, it seems, an entirely positive experience of them. Smaller countries with fewer vested interest groups seem to be adopting the idea constantly. In fact Russia and Ukraine, hardly minnows, have introduced flat tax systems. Italy and Spain are considering introducing such a tax. Who knows, in fifty to a hundred years' time it is not inconceivable that the UK and USA will be forced by lack of competitiveness to consider them.

I have listened to a few EconTalk podcasts now. My shining Ming a1200 does a great job of playing them back. I can see that I'll listen to a lot less radio from now on.

There is a petition on the 10 Downing St. website for a flat tax. The support is disappointing, not least because the proponents seem to have misunderstood the benefits of such a tax. You can sign the petition here.

References Page from which you can download the podcast.