Steve Hemingway

PAYE bureau

2010-08-19T09:36:00Z

I have used paybureau.co.uk. They are a splendid lot, lead by the incomparable Riff Heber-Percy.

Basically they handle all the paperwork associated with PAYE. You say how much the gross pay for your employees is, and they do the rest, up to, but not including, actually doing the funds transfers. They produce security-printed payslips to dish out, and, critically, do the year-end filings.

A great service, all for a tenner a month or so. I wouldn't know what to do without them. Of course, it took a small incentive for me to write this. They have offered a bottle of champagne for a referral. So if you want to split a bottle of champagne with me, contact them, open an account and tell them I sent you. That's all you have to do!

This works great for consultancies where you set up a company as a vehicle to use for invoicing and to avoid IR35 problems. The sort of thing that you might otherwise use an umbrella company for.

Connecting to the web via a Socks 5 proxy

2010-08-17T14:44:46Z

This is really quite straightforward and there are loads of pages out in the Interweb Thingy that explain how to do this, but I still screw it up whenever I try to do it from memory. The idea is explained here for Ubuntu and here for Windows+Putty ("Putty makes Windows usable").

The key things I forget are:

You mustn't use a port above 1024 unless you are root or sudo the ssh command
You don't use local host as the general http proxy, you set it as the socks 5 proxy (the last one in the list in Firefox)
You must connect as @ and enter the two passwords when you run ssh in a terminal - the first to switch user to root, the second to login to the remote host on the ssh session.

I posted a link on Delicious about this and tell everyone who is willing to listen (and some who are not) because I'm thrilled that something so simple can bypass the Chinese sysadmins who run the Great F1rewall of China.

Apart from being useful in China, this is useful in the UK too, for example to access services like Pandora, which are blocked to users from less developed countries. You probably don't want to stream audio if your web hosting company per byte of data. Much better to use Spotify or Last.fm. But you get the idea. If you want to get streaming content you may be able to use this technique that dispenses with a proxy server.

Someone was saying that actually the Chinese don't really care about their citizens reading subversive stuff on the web if it is in English: they just want the yokels to be kept in the dark about what democracy and free elections are all about.

Once again, if you read this, could you see if you can create a comment. If you can't then tell me. I tightened up the comment settings because I was getting spam, and now nobody every seems to leave a comment, even a spammy one.

Property buying in China

2010-08-12T20:01:29Z

I think this is read only by those of you who know me personally. I am going off to China again on around the 8th of September for a couple of weeks to select suitable properties and other investments to buy in China. I will be in the Pearl River Delta area (I have just created a new website where you can find out more about this extremely dynamic part of China).

There is a lot of detailed stuff that I should explain about how all this works, but basically if you are interested in buying, say, an villa in Guangzhou, or providing debt to a Chinese company restructuring, or buying an apartment in Macau or Zhuhai, then I can arrange this for you, either for you to buy individually, or as a joint venture with me.

Just drop me a line to steve.hemingway@gmail.com or ring me on 02033 558557 to find out more.

Why it's a bad idea to fix someone's computer for them

2010-07-02T10:42:01Z

This strip from Dilbert expresses a profound truth.

I am a huge fan of Ubuntu. I find it much easier to administer my system than I did when I had Windows. But I dare not install it on anyone else's computer because then I'd be offering an infinity of free support to them. And somehow, pretty soon, a problem would arise that I couldn't fix. And then I'd feel really, really bad.

George Hamilton IV

2010-04-22T16:37:10Z

Tony Byworth produced this article for the Knebworth Parish Magazine, which I reproduce with his permission. George will be performing in Knebworth on 18 May 2010. More details here.

George Hamilton IV, currently celebrating his sixth decade in the music business, enjoys his status as one of country music's foremost entertainers, both at home and internationally.

Although based in Nashville, Tennessee, both Canada and the British Isles could be equally "home" to him. But his travels have taken to far more distant areas and, back in the early 1970s, George IV set the pace by being the first entertainer to bring "live" country music to Moscow and Prague, locations known back then as behind the "Iron Curtain". It was such ground-breaking achievements that secured him the title International Ambassador of Country Music, an award bestowed upon him by the much respected trade publication, Billboard.

Further recognition of his globe trotting activities came in 2006 when the United States Ambassador to England, Robert H. Tuttle, gave a special reception in London to celebrate George IV's 50th Anniversary in music and his unique contributions to the globalization of Country Music.

Although he always had his sights set on a country music career, things didn't quite work out that way at the start. Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he first caught the public's attention when A Rose And A Baby Ruth jettisoned him into the Top Ten pop charts, launched him as a "teen idol" and swiftly put him on tour with such as Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby Darin, the Everly Brothers and other iconic rock 'n' rollers. This period of his life subsequently earned him induction into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 2006.

George's country music ambitions became a reality when he moved his family to Nashville in 1959 and, a year later, became a member of the Grand Ole Opry (the weekly radio show that had initially fuelled his musical ambitions as a youngster and, as a member, he celebrated his 50^th anniversary this past February) and signed with RCA Records. His breakthrough song came with Before This Day Ends and, in 1962, scored number one with Abilene, a recording that quickly became his trademark song. Fort Worth, Dallas Or Houston, another high chart success, quickly followed alongside such as Truck Driving Man and Break My Mind. In the late 1970s his recordings took on a more decidedly "folksy" approach and Steel Rail Blues, Early Morning Rain, Urge For Going and Canadian Pacific secured him the role as leader of Nashville's "Folk-Country" movement.

He made his first visit to Britain in 1967 and quickly built up a loyal following through record releases, several television series, concert tours and, for many years, handling host duties at the annual Wembley Country Music Festivals. He starred in a London West End musical, Patsy (the story of the legendary Patsy Cline), which later went on lengthy tours throughout the UK and Ireland.

George IV has found equal public support for his religious appearances, which commenced as a frequent musical guest of Dr. Billy Graham, and won him the Gospel Music Association's Dove Award in 1988.

With over a half century in the entertainment business, and a stack of awards to his credit, George Hamilton IV has matched hectic tour schedules with an equally vast amount of recordings - over 120 albums to date. And his stage persona is genuine: he really is as nice a person offstage as he appears onstage, always finding time to chat with his audiences. The chance to find out comes when he visits Knebworth, an area he knows from a previous visit, and presents a very special evening of songs and stories at the Village Hall on Tuesday, May 18.

You can read more about George on Wikipedia.

Calvert's Castration Strategy - Donate Now!

2010-04-19T12:26:22Z

Andrew Calvert wants to kick Balls out of his constituency.

David vs the Great Clunking Fist

2010-04-13T14:35:28Z

Ubervu allows comparison of mentions of a pair of terms on social media sites. You can see the comparison of Gordon Brown and David Cameron here. I'm not sure what it tells anyone.

David and Gordon seem to be level pegging on Twitter, but all but invisible on Facebook in comparison, whereas discussions about Gordon dominate the pair on intensedebate which seems to be a YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site).

On the whole, I don't think that people often blog or twitter lines to the effect of "What a brilliant job David Cameron is making of presenting the Conservative Party's policies" (except by people who are paid to do so), so I would guess that on balance David has won the war of the social media sites so far.

'Inhaling the Web'

2010-04-13T14:22:09Z

I don't know whether Adobe's new news aggregator, Addictomatic.com was named with Bill Clinton in mind ('I smoked pot, but I didn't inhale') but it is not a bad service. It does hoover up references from lots of social media and vaguely interactive bits of the web in one place, avoiding the Google Search fault of giving a strong bias to old stories and web pages.

Here are a couple of pages of the leading contenders for Stevenage:

Not rocket science, but a worthwhile contribution to browsing convenience.

The Debt Clock

2010-04-12T16:48:03Z

Another widget from the TPA (aka 'debt clock'):

How much do you pay in green taxes?

2010-04-12T16:41:44Z

I'm too lazy to write anything, so I cribbed this from the Taxpayers Alliance site.

National Insurance - a tax on workers

2010-04-09T14:30:31Z

The Tories are having a go at the other lot for putting up NICs, again. The other lot point out that the Tories did it when they had a chance. They also point out that unemployment does not seem to go up when the tax is levied.

As Chris Dillow points out, both sides are being characteristically economical with the truth about NICs: because in fact, the incidence of this tax, like all the others, is not born by the intermediaries. Obviously there are questions of whether or not employers can pass on costs, and whether this is in the long run or the short run, but basically corporates do not pay taxes themselves: they pass them on to shareholders, or employees, or suppliers, or someone else. After all, a company is just a formalized scheme of arrangement between various classes of creditor.

Is this the time to cash in your defined benefit pension entitlements?

2010-04-09T11:43:21Z

Gilts are now falling in value. Gilt yields are going up. Annuities are getting cheaper. If you are naturally long of annuities (e.g. you have a defined benefit pension scheme) you should think about crystallizing its value now. You can do this by transferring to a SIPP or a SSAS.

Of course you should take professional financial advice before doing something like this, but you should at least think through the implications of remaining in a defined benefit scheme. It is quite likely that inflation will increase in the next five to ten years. Certainly the drop in gilt yields is telling us that the market expects this. This means that if you have left the employment that the pension is related to, you will lose out, as your pension will be based on your nominal salary at the time of leaving, which you can expect to go down even more rapidly than usual in times of high inflation.

As you might guess, I am involved in doing a transfer of this kind but I find that the actuaries who run the scheme in question have an inexplicable technical problem in providing the transfer value. How convenient that this should occur just at the time that the this transfer value is in steep decline. Of course, without the transfer valuation, no transfer is possible.

Understanding the world of work

2010-03-26T11:27:55Z

I have been in love with Dilbert for a long time. It's funny how popular he is, because it presumably means that lots of people understand the underlying message of the strip, which is that bad decisions happen all the time in real businesses because of perverse incentives experienced by everyone, but particularly by management.

I knew a guy who was, and possibly still is, in a senior management role who was a fan. I always thought of him as a bit pointy-haired, but he clearly admired the strip. Maybe he just saw the funny side of his own position.

The above strip (sorry if it doesn't fit properly in my narrow content column - just click on the image to see the whole thing on Scott Adam's site, is the first in a series about how the latest CEO drags along a series of cronies with him and puts them in senior positions for which they are ill suited. The joke is how management knows nothing about what the company actually does, but it's OK because they know about important things like negotiation and marketing, and tax planning, and mission statements.

I tend, as regular readers will have noticed, to try to understand what happens in the world of commerce using the tools of economics. I think that when it comes to companies and society, the tools of anthropology probably are as relevant. Dilbert is about inter-tribal conflict: the engineers against the managers, the senior managers against the workers, the engineers against the support staff, the engineers against the sales staff, and so on. We need to belong to a tribe, and we want to support other members of our tribe. Managers are not in the same tribe as shareholders, or ordinary workers and so are happy to screw both of them. The board at Goldman Sachs are, plausibly, in the same tribe as the workers, and, although they have pretty daunting initiation rituals, they do not treat them as badly as, say, the board of an engineering company treats the shop-floor workers.

I have to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Flip Chart Fairy Tales for this insight into the idea of how tribalism is more important in setting worker compensation than anything strictly to do with added value and merit or even supply and demand for workers with the relevant skills. It seems that Barbara Wootton understood this and wrote about it in her 1955 book "Social Foundations of Wages Policy", which, unusually, seems difficult to get hold of.

Gillian Tett has said that her training in social anthropology was hugely helpful in understanding how the credit crunch developed. She studied for a PhD on the subject. I'd like a simple primer to get me started on understanding the basic principles of this obscure discipline. Anyone got any suggestions?

Local campaigning

2010-03-25T10:39:52Z

Grant Shapps is the MP for the constituency immediately to the south of Knebworth. It's interesting to see how this is put together. Note that there is plent of coverage of hospital (preventing the closure of), post offices (ditto), ethnic minorities (showing interaction with), public services and homelessness. There is even a little 'Dave' magic dust sprinkled on the video, and the MP looking authoritative. Sadly there is no mention of deficits, taxes, planning, bad public services, or the private sector (apart from retail). This, like all recent elections, is one fought on Labour's home turf.

The budget

2010-03-25T09:35:04Z

Darling's budget was the usual politics-as-theatre show that so damages politics as a means of deciding about things in a grown-up way. As usual it comes down to individual bloggers like Wat Tyler and independent pressure groups like the Taxpayers Alliance to make sense of what is happening.

The major problem is that we, like Greece, cannot run up debts indefinitely without suffering the consequences. That is, we, the taxpayers, cannot dodge the consequences, but of course the politicians can, with their 'resettlement allowances' and consultancy fees.

Amazingly the BBC put a lot of emphasis on the fact that the deficit for this year will actually come in slightly below the forecast £178 billion. No mention, naturally, was made of the off-balance-sheet liabilities that mean that the public sector debt of £1.4 trillion is actually only around half of the true figure. Yes, we are talking about £2.8 billion here. Just to put that in context, that means around £47,000 for every man woman and child in the UK. According to the ONS there are 22.76 million people employed in the private sector, which means that out of their taxes, and the taxes of their private-sector children they are going to have to come up with a sum of £120,000 each.

But it's actually a lot worse than that, because before long interest payments on the national debt alone will be costing 10% of GDP. The unfunded liabilities held off the balance sheet will also be growing at some inflationary rate, so will increase the burden just as much as the on-balance sheet liabilities. The end result is a huge, utterly huge, burden of debt for the country for a generation or two.

I know that Gids rambles on about how serious the deficit is, but I think that most voters just think 'yeah, yeah, yeah, but we can just introduce a caviar tax, or stamp duty on Rolexes and everything will be fine'. I suppose this is a rational response to the fact that there are around 40 million people in the UK who are either not working, or working in the public sector. Of these, approx 14 million are under 18, leaving 26 million voters who may well be dependent on the generosity of the government (i.e. the taxpayer) for their income. Obviously there will be some non-working spouses and people with private income in there somewhere. However, what we are left with is around twenty six million out of a total of 48 million voters who, on balance, will prefer to see taxes go up than go down. This is about 54%. No wonder all parties are being economical with the truth.

I have heard a theory that, actually, David Cameron would prefer to see Gordon Brown win the next election, on the basis that the pain and suffering that is going to be inflicted on the population, through 'cuts' and increased taxes is going to be so severe that whichever government is in power when this is happening will be then unelectable for a generation: the so-called 'poisoned chalice election' theory.

There is, of course, an alternative to all this pain. We look to that master of economic theory, Robert Mugabe, and let the pound take the strain, stitching up those nice Chinese lenders, but, as an unfortunate side effect, wiping out the savings and pensions of a vast swathe of the population through rampant inflation. Currently the gilts markets don't buy into this theory, but Bill Gross, who has made more than his fair share of good calls on government bond markets in his long career is not so convinced.