The cost of shit

The Count finds perverse interest in paddling through the effluent which politicians, lobbyists and corrupt scientists spew forth from their backsides (or wherever they talk from). On one paddle up yet another shitty creek, the Count wondered how much all this meadow mayonnaise might be worth.

Fortunately, help is at hand. The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs for Ontario has done a very precise estimate for the value of this shit. I will spare you the details. The answer looks like it is about £5 per acre of shit. The University of Minnesota has produced a long algorithm to help you work out how to maximise the value of your shit. It apparently depends on the type of shit, when you apply it and how much you have to handle it. Haven't they heard of peasants? Keep a good stock of peasants on your land and they will not only handle all the shit you can produce, they will eat it as well. Which is roughly what most citizens of modern democracies are forced to do every day: we are forced to eat the shit that all these politicians produce every day. "Hi. My name's Tony. I'm a pretty honest sort of guy. Iraq has WMD which will wipe us all out in a nano-second. So let's invade. Ya? Good Idea? OK!! Tough on honesty and tough on the sources of honesty, ya!"

The difference between hog shit and politician shit is that hog shit is at least useful; you can choose to buy it or not buy it; you can spread it where you want. Politician shit has negative value, and we have no choice about it: we are force fed the crap every day.

Where's that bloody vodka bottle gone?

The £100 billion theft of time

The Count has had a most unpleasant discussion with his bank manager. The bank manager was hoping to repossess what is left of the Kostov estate. Little does the bank manager realise that:
a) all that is left of the Kostov estate is a window box with a dead geranium in it and
b) there are about four other banks who have also had the same idea, not to mention my nemesis at the tax office HP Potts. Mr Potts labours under the illusion that Counts are obliged to pay tax. He should be horsewhipped for impertinence.

The real insult was not the discussion, but the waiting. The bank manager appeared to be looking at his emails in the vain hope that someone might be offering to teach his cat how to play the ukelele, while he kept the Count waiting. After horsewhipping Mr Potts, it will be the turn of the bank manager.

The waiting time, with a tepid cup of tea in a plastic cup, gave plenty of time for thinking about the cost of waiting. The Count proceeded to count the waiting time in the day.

Three minutes: turning computer on
Five minutes: rebooting computer when it freezes
Four minutes: waiting to get through to bank while they reassure me that they value my call so much they can not be arsed to answer it. They clearly value aristocratic time as less than that of a call centre operator in Bangalore on $3 a month. In this respect, they have common cause with the Countess who reckons the Count is worth much less than $3 a month.
Twenty two minutes trying to find, then wait for, the microsoft help desk.
Thirteen minutes waiting for the tube and getting delayed on it.
Nine minutes waiting for the Countess to decide whether her outfit will go with the colour scheme at Sainsbury.
Six minutes waiting to get to the front of the check out queue: Sainsbury have a system for punishing their most valuable customers. They let all their lowest value customers (with five items or less) go through a fast queue, while making all their most valuable customers wait in line. And they never have enough staff at check out: don't they even want to take our money? No wonder they are in so much shit.
Four minutes waiting at Sainsbury check out while the stupid cow in fronts waits for all her items to be scanned; only then does she look in a bag for her wallet, then in another bag, then back to the first bag, find the wallet, open the wallet, then look in her coat for the precise change, then offer a mix of coins and lithuanian luncheon vouchers as payment before finally offering up a credit card. Belatedly she offers a store loyalty card. After all this she starts packing her items and looks all shirty and pissed off when the Count's very refined shopping starts going through the till.

Twelve minutes waiting for the bank manager to turn up to his own meeting.
Five minutes waiting at the cashiers in the bank: two tills open. The other three were staffed but all the staff were drinking coffee and talking to each other about the stress of their jobs.
Two minutes waiting for the traffic lights to turn and wondering whether it is worth risking death anyway to cross the road. Death would be a merciful way out, but I fear I will be kept waiting for that as well.

By this stage the Count was going into a kamikaze zen like trance. The older you get, the less time there is to waste. The novelty of watching Tracey gift wrap the 60p bar of chocolate for the customer in front of you, and then hearing her take a phone call from the boyfriend wears off after a few decades. These time thieves are everywhere: unlike other sorts of theft, there is no chance of getting the stolen time back. It is mugging people of the only real resource we have: our time and our lives. So all the time thieves can join the queue for a good horse whipping, and rest assured that they will be kept waiting.

At this point I have to defer to DigDog, my butler, to provide the sophisticated mathematical calculations which may or may not make sense of this. He assures me that the following is true
a) I am bankrupt, so he would rather be paid in cash thank you very much sir. I will add him to the extensive horse whipping queue in good time.
b) I am typically wasting 90 minutes a day in queues: the Countess is tartly observing that I waste the other 22.5 hours a day quite successfully without any help from time thieves.
c) 40 million working hours are being lost every day in the UK to queues and time thieves, which is £400 million a year or £100 billion a year.

A calculation like this would normally qualify as pure meadow mayonnaise if it came from some dodgy, self-interested lobby group. But this comes from the Count, so it must be objective and there is no self interest in here at all. Clearly, something needs to be done about this disaster for British productivity: all that is needed is a small grant of, say, £1 billion to research the problem properly. As it happens, the Count has the perfect research forum for this effort: CATTI (Campaign Against Time Thieves Institute). You may rest assured that the £1 billion will be well spent as, by pure coincidence, the sole proprietor of CATTI is the Count himself. Please forward your cheques in some haste as the bank manager and Mr Potts grow more insolent by the day.

The cost of reading this is $759 billion

Each time I start to doubt our American cousins and masters, they suddenly serve up the blinis.

They have gone and figured that the time wasted at work costs America $759 billion a year. So if you are bunking off work, not finishing that tedious report and instead focusing on the serious business of getting acquainted with Count Kostov, you are costing the nation a cool $759 billion.

Normally, this sort of number would qualify for a gold star meadow mayonnaise moment. But in this case, the the Count relents. $759 billion is probably an underestimate. If nothing else, time wasting is a sport at which the Brits can whip those Yankee asses. Ever since they threw the tea in the water, they have forgotten the true tea sipping art of wasting time, as practiced by those world champions of time wasting: the British Civil Service. It is thus called because it is rarely civil, never gives a service and is decreasingly British.

The Americans http://www.salary.com/careers/layoutscripts/crel_display.asp?tab=cre&cat=nocat&ser=Ser374&part=Par555 figured that the average American wastes 2.09 hours a day at work doing important things like:
the internet (44% of time wasted)
socialising (23.8%)
conducting personal business (6.8%) - which shows true entrepreneurial spirit
and then a lot of other stuff like applying for other jobs (1.8%). Most reassuringly "spacing out" accounts for 3.9% of time wasted, which augurs well for the health of the drugs trade in America.

Reading the survey carefully it would appear that no American ever goes to the toilet or drinks tea. These strategies, carefully deployed, could double the amount of time wasted, especially as frequent tea drinking leads to frequent pee making.

They also figured out that the champion slackers are from laid back Missouri (a heroic 3.2 hours a day wasted) and in the public sector at a more modest 2.4 hours a day wasted.

Clearly, here is something the Brits can beat the Yanks at. If the good folk of Missouri (where the hell is Missouri?) can waste 3.2 hours a day without going for tea or a pee, then the average British civil servant should be able to waste at least 4 hours a day. On a 35 hour week, that reduces their working time to 15 hours a week, which is nearly as much as the Count works in a month. Put the other way round, the civil servants should be wetting their badly tailored pants at the prospect of the 35 hour working week being fully implemented. The legislation calls for a "working" week, not a "being present at the office and drinking tea" week. Given they waste four out of every seven hours in the office, to actually work 35 hours they would have to be present in the office for about 80 hours a week.

At this point I have to defer to the infinite knowldege and mathematical capability of Digdog, my butler. He assures me that with 28 million peopel claiming to work in the UK, if they were all wasting as much time as the average citizen of Missouri, then it follows that:
- the average Brit wastes 690 hours or £6,900 a year of their employers money
- in total we are wasting £193 billion a year.


Of course, all of this begs the question: is time spent reading Count Kostov really wasted time? In general, the answer has to be No. In the case of Civil Servants, time wasting should be positively promoted as a far better alternative to working. The last thing we all need is to have civil servants causing us more trouble with their policies, initiatives, regulations and taxes which are all designed to make themselves feel important and useful, when in truth they are far better when they admit they are irrelevant and useless.

Only a government could do this....

For the last three hundred years or so, the Count's family has had a tenuous grip on mental and financial health. But there were a few things we figured out. If we needed to get our money back from an impecunious peasant or a thieving merchant, we would send our bailiffs round to do the necessary. In the good old days that resulted in merchants without noses and peasants without homes, but it certainly ensured that debts got paid. Unless, of course, the Kostovs were the ones in debt.

If the bailiff did his job properly, we gave him a few kopecks out of every rouble he collected. 10% would be more than enough to keep the bailiff happy, especially as most of the bailiffs took the trouble to steal another 20% for themselves anyway.

Now let's see how our super efficient government manages to collect debts. The pinnacle of its wonderful machine is the CSA: child support agency. This has the general role of duffing up fathers who probably don't even know they are fathers until a letter with the results of a DNA test from a long forgotten fling turns up on the doorstep.

For every pound that the CSA collects, it needs to spend something on its collection efforts. How much am I bid:

10p - 2op- 30p or 40p?

Anyone think that they could spend 50p in the pound on administration?

If you think they spend 50p in the pound on administration, you are a wishful thinker. The cretins at the CSA manage to spend £1.85 on administration for every pound they collect.

This is so mind numbingly incompetent that the Count is going to have to resort to the Vodka and pray that a gun and a CSA cretin are not nearby: the results would be messy.

Essentially, the world in general and the taxpayer in particular, would be far better off if the CSA cretins did not exist. Their lives are 100% useless: they are costing money instead of making money. If they all went home and farted for 24 hours a day in front of the TV, they would be making a better contribution to society than they are at the moment.

I can't go on...this is too depressing...find me some vodka. Fast

A super sized $192 billion

The Count is back from his Xmas pudding by way of the Sahara and New York. A little local difficulty with some gentlemen who took exception to an earlier blog made it advisable for the Count to make himself scarce for a while. Searching for the safest place on earth, he decided to entrust himself to the tender care of the Tuare. They have a noble heritage of plundering anything that moved across the Sahara, in a tradition that any true Cossack would admire. This, more than any specious complaints about the lack of water, may explain why the Sahara was so difficult to cross for so many millenia. Besides entrusting himself to cut throats, the Count decided that Colonel Gadaffi is just the sort of person who would ensure a country is safe for Russian Counts. True to form, all the locals smiled happily. Anyone who fails to smile in this glorious revolutionary republic is duly put in prison.

Returning to the grey grey English winter via New York was perhaps a mistake. The Count made several discoveries. First, US immigration officials do not have a sense of humour. Second, they are convinced that anyone coming from Gadaffi's hideout must be a nuclear terrorist. Third, the US is pretty useless at law and order. They have far too much democracy for that: they need a little revloutionary dictatorship, like the good Colonel in Tripoli. Or if they must have their democracy, then a little democratic dictatorship like President Putin would not go amiss. In any event, the Count discovered the Bronx is significantly more risky than the Sahara. He was relieved to get out of the Bronx having been relieved of his wallet and not his life. It was not the mugger's lucky day: he should have realised that all true aristocrats do not carry cash. This is to maintain the illusion that we have servants to deal with grubby money matters, when in reality we are constantly fending off impertinent bank managers who think we are obliged to repay the modest overdrafts we contrive to live on.

In any event, the Americans were up in arms about diabetes. Apparently about 128% of all Americans aged under 100 are going to have diabetes within fifteen years, if current trends continue. If current trends continue, the Count will go as mad as his Uncle Vanya after he bit a rabid dog. A cursury examination of the eating habits of the natives shows why this is going to happen. At the diner, the waffles and pancakes and muffins are sold by the storey. The food is piled so high on the dish that it is not clear whether you are meant to climb it or eat it. And then there are the vast gunk buckets of fizzy drinks which would be large enough for a swimming pool in most countries. It is mandatory for New Yorkers to carry these gunk buckets with them in the street, in case they should die of dehydration from the exertion of walking from the deli store to MacDonalds and back again.

In any event, they were all in a stink about diabetes which will cost them $192 billion a year by 2020.

At first sight, this looks like a classic meadow mayonnaise moment. Especially as this highly impartial estimate was produced by the American Diabetes Association, which has a wholly altruistic interest in drumming up as much money as possible to spend on giving its staff offices, nice salaries, a retirement fund and as many gunk buckets and food mountains as possible.

Look a little closer and you in fact spot that the Americans are losing it. The champions of super sizing everything have failed to super size the costs of being super sized and getting diabetes. They have failed to include the cost of undiagnosed diabetes: any attorney worth his salt would show that already at least 100% of Americans must be suffering from undiagnosed diabetes. Have you ever felt tired and listless? It must be diabetes: pass the compensation claim and make me rich please. They have also failed to cost in the "pain and suffering" of diabetes victims (that must be worth a few billion per person with a decent lawyer) and the cost of informal care and support by friends and family. The cost should be in the trillions. What is happening to America? Can't they supersize a half decent legal claim any more?

The Count began to yearn for the muddling incompetence of Britain in a cold, grey winter.