Miscellaneous blogging
In the 1960s, the top rate of income tax in the UK was 90%. Alec Issigonis had designed the Mini; the fastest bike on the road was built in Stevenage; the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were in full flow.
Today, the top rate of income tax is 45%. The Mini is built by BMW; the fastest bike on the road is Italian; Coldplay release a new album tomorrow.
Take-home message: firing people is very cheap.
It is claimed now and again that making it easier to fire people makes it easier to hire them. The logic is that employers do not hire staff because they are worried about the cost of laying them off if business does not go as well as they expect. So an employer’s reasoning is that they would like to expand their business by hiring more people, but the possible costs associated with `making them redundant’ (actually, `dismissing by reason of redundancy’) put them off.
It is easy enough to find out what it costs to dismiss someone by reason of redundancy in the UK. If someone has worked for an employer for less than two years, they have no right to a redundancy payment. After two years service, they have a right to a redundancy payment of one week’s pay per full year worked which is halved for each year worked under age 22. That `week’s pay’ is capped at £464.
So if business has not gone as well as expected and you have to fire someone less than two years after you hired them, it costs nothing.
If business has gone well for a bit, and you have to fire minimum wage staff who have worked for just over two years, it costs £495.20 for the adults, and £201.20 for the under twenties.
In other words, you can fire someone at no cost whatsoever in the first two years. After that, it can cost the same as filling the tank of a big car twice.
In Darran Anderson’s words, this seems to be a Ponzi scheme of some sort, but Kirsty McCluskey has passed me the black spot, so here are my answers to the questions.
What am I working on?
Right now, I am working on an article for the Honest Ulsterman on the politics of Irish memory of the First World War, overlapping with some ideas from an article to appear there on why Italian Fascists have a thing about Bobby Sands; a major overhaul of a set of notes for a course on Turbulence and Noise; a paper on fast methods of computing noise over large areas.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
In acoustics (science of) as a genre, my work fits into a certain niche between numerical analysis (using computers to get answers to hard problems) and applied mathematics (pencil and paper). When I write for students, I try to produce coherent narratives rather than a simple set of notes, and introduce the cultural and social context of the technology, through examples (Nazis in space), and encourage wider reading (Tom Wolfe, Jed Mercurio, Yeats and MacNeice in notes on aircraft control).
In my non-scientific writing, I have brought science and technology to fora where they might not otherwise appear, and a particular technical background to historical and political issues.
Why do I write what I do?
Science: because I’ll be fired if I don’t. Also, it’s only science, or scholarship, when it is published so that other people can read it, contest it, and use it.
Non science: I think I have something different to say about some familiar issues, and something common to say about unfamiliar ones.
How does my writing process work?
In both cases, I write randomly, throwing down fragments, ranging in size from bullet points, as aides memoire, to full paragraphs. When I have something like a first draft, I print it out, delete the electronic original, and write it again. If needs be, rinse and repeat. The first pass lets me generate the material, and identify gaps in the argument, without being constrained by a need to produce good prose. The subsequent passes let me form a coherent argument, without worrying about the content.