BT Helpline. The most useless helpline in the world?

I am having what may only be called a really bad day. I was signed in to my BT Yahoo email account this morning and in the process of reading and replying to my emails, when, without warning, I found myself signed out and a pop-up demanded I "verify my password." Guess what, the re-entered password got the Red Flag response and the message that either the User ID or Password were incorrect.

An attempt to retrieve the password or to reset it, met with a refusal to accept my CORRECT security information. So, next step, contact BT Yahoo. Oh, I don't have a UK Post Code any longer. Oh, I don't have a BT Telephone line either. Now there's a surprise! I live in Germany, BT claims to be Europe wide and "International." Are they? B*llsh*t.

OK, so I can still go online. Do an internet search, find the BT "Helpline" numbers. Talk to a computer. The computer wants my telephone number. I give it. "Sorry, that is not a recognised BT Number, our Technical support will be unable to assist you." CLICK. THis is the number given for contacting them when you have a problem with your email. Funny, my other email addresses on the same BT Account still work - only the main one has been killed off. OK, attempt number 2. Find the online contact and report a fault. Oh, must have a UK Post Code. Must have a BT Telephone number ...

Do another web search, try to find a number for BT which allows me to talk to a human being. I don't care where! Apparently BT is now run entirely by computers, presumably programmed to prevent anyone actually accessing anything useful. I am now running out of options. I am unable to access my BTYahoo email account and so, therefore, I am unable to read or respond to any email sent to that account. As it is also the email account on which all my other online activities are set up - I'm not at all sure what to do next.

Any suggestions will be most welcome. But please, send them to the email for this blog - it still works, probably no thanks at all to BT!

UPDATE:


Having finally discovered a means to gain access to the BT "Problem Solving Forum" I finally managed the get a real person to answer my complaint and he provided a new telephone number. A call to that number got me a real live person instead of a computer, and this young man listened to my problem, investigated it, and advised me that my email had been automatically shut down as it had been "compromised."

Great, I said, how about letting me know what has happened. Ah, its automatic you see, we don't know it's happened... OK, so how do we get it back? Ah, now you need to talk to Yahoo ...

Cutting to the chase, I have my email back. It has a new password and other security features have also been changed, but it is back. In fairness, I must say, that the young men and one lady who finally dealt with the problem, did so professionally and helpfully. It's just a pity it required such an effort and a lot of totally unnecessary stress to finally reach them. Their employer lets them down badly with this really poorly thought through and designed system which simply winds the already stressed out customer up as they attempt to reach someone, anyone, capable of assisting them.

Buyer or Producer?

I can commend to all thinking people a book by Arthur Seldon entitled "Capitalism." Or, if you can't face the full and long version, there is available a "condensed" version from the Institute of Economic Affairs. If considered with an open mind this book is a real eye-opener, especially to those of us raised since 1945 on the idea that "the State" is the best provider of all manner of social improvement programmes.

I had long understood that pre-1939 there was no general pension or welfare provision unless you were fortunate enough to have a generous employer. Nothing could be further from the truth, there existed a large number of "Friendly Societies" sponsored by those evil money grabbing capitalists and into which their employees paid literally a few pence a week or month. The "society" provided unemployment relief, health care and pensions. All of Britain's hospitals were privately funded and built, usually funded out of trusts set up again by those evil and uncaring "capitalists" with public subscription producing funds for specialist units and even sponsoring doctors to provide care for the "poor and indigent" who were neither permanently employed or could not make even the smallest contribution to a "friendly society."

All of this began to unravel in 1911, when a Liberal Government decided there were votes to be had by interfering directly and taking over responsibility for some, but not it must be noted, all of these provisions. Enter the greatest tax hoax ever, the "National Insurance Scheme." Not only was the money collected not invested, it wasn't "insurance" either. It killed the Friendly Societies by imposing a contribution on everyone in employment, a double whammy for those who already had the provisions the National Insurance was supposed to give, but which, in a majority of cases, actually gave less than they had enjoyed previously, and cost more.

This began the slide from a "market led" provision of the services the people wanted and could afford and opened up the way for the massive expansion of the bureaucratic take over of the entire voluntary sector. It also paved the way for the cherished socialist ideal of a "producer led" economy in which jobs are created by constantly generated goods and services without any reference to demand, cost or requirement. In a large part this is what has led to the mindset that burning down a building completely is good for the building trade - so don't provide fire protection, just make sure you don't kill anyone when the fire happens. It has fueling the idea that "equality" can be created by reducing everyone to a net consumer, dependent for everything on a "producer." Perhaps the starkest example of this is the NHS, in which the patient is forced to sit on waiting lists, or to accept drugs which aren't necessarily effective or the best available simply because the NHS Mandarins have decreed that is what you will have. This was brought home to me rather starkly this week when I put my back out badly. I went to our local GP (Germany doesn't have an NHS) and told him what I was normally treated with. His response was astonishment, then outright disbelief. The treatment he prescribed is more expensive, but it was 200 times more effective and one heck of a lot faster. The difference? Like all doctors here, they offer the patient a service which is not set by them, but by the patient's actual need.

The startling fact is, once one begins to dig into these things, that governments are probably the worst possible providers of the vast majority of services, from health care to 'welfare.' One of the main reasons is simply the costs they incur (and ignore or simply pass on the taxpayers) and the other is that central planners, remote from the end user are without question the worst possible arbiters of what is needed. Worse, whenever a government attempts to intervene in pursuit of some ideological objective in any aspect of service motives become confused. Firstly, if everyone is dependent on the "benevolence" of the "State" all power over the lives of the "beneficiaries" is subsumed to the faceless bureaucrats and politicians. There is no such thing as a "benevolent" bureaucracy, they are all fueled by power, hierarchy and the desire to control "the masses."

It has taken me a while to read Seldon's book. It has taken even longer to dig around and verify what he says and the examples the IEA has identified. It has been an eye-opener. It is time more people started to challenge the media-political agenda of the "welfare state" and the "socialist dream" of the literati - most of whom where wealthy academics drawn, surprise, surprise, from the same political classes currently feeding us this entire load of codswallop about "equality" through the "State."

Read the book, I think you'll end up weeping in anger and frustration at how we've all been taken for a ride ...

A vision of government ...

This came to me from a friend in a country where the politicians have managed to go from average wealth to mega wealth in just under 18 years while those they supposedly represent haven't managed to get out of the shanties they occupied under the previous regime.

It struck me, as I considered it, that it actually encapsulates the problem with all governments at present. AS they have taken over more and more "services" they actually deliver less and less while taking more and more from those they purport to serve. You don't have to look far to see what I mean, the wealth of the political classes continues to rise exponentially, while they preside over ever more 'welfare' dependency and even more diminishing opportunities for the very people they claim they are "redistributing" wealth to.

Orwell's Animal Farm, as I quoted a couple of days ago, sums it up. Some animals are more equal than others. Especially the political animals ...

There are definitely times ...

When my body takes it upon itself to remind me in the most unpleasant ways that I am no longer 25 ...

Yesterday I re-laid some paving slabs in our front garden, by lunchtime it was obvious my back had taken exception to the exercise. This morning I couldn't stand up and so I have spent the day mostly horizontal, full of pain killers and hoping it will all settle down again by tomorrow.

Hopefully ...

Thankfully Mausi has been able to take care of a whole range of things my back currently forbids even attempting. A major change from the last time this happened!

Evil Capitalist?

That is certainly the picture always painted by the news media, especially the 'public service' broadcaster and media. Over the last sixty or seventy years in particular we have been fed a constant diet of negative imagery of the entire concept of individuals competing in a free market allowing them to choose goods, services and even employment is always painted as 'bad' or 'selfish' and 'corrupt.' But the alternative is to have everything planned, managed and provided with complete disregard of individual needs or ambitions. Socialists set themselves up as the arbiters of 'fair' distributuion and provision of everything from health care, through housing and education, to employment. One of the tennets of any socialist society is 'jobs for all.' What no one seems to ask, is this. Where is there a single example of a socialist system which is "fair" and treats everyone equally? Where is there a socialist state that has succeeded in "redistributing wealth? Where is there a socialist state that has succeeded economically?

The excuse is always that they cannot be expected to succeed unless all "Capitalists" are compelled to give up their "greed" and "acquisitive activity" and surrender it to the faceless bureaucrats and politicians who will decide who gets what and when. Or, to put it in the words penned by George Orwell in "Animal Farm," which animals are more equal than the rest.

It is often said now, that in the days of the nasty industrialists and capitalist rule of the 19th Century,  there was no provision for worker housing or welfare. That isn't actually true. There are more examples of factory owners making provision for good quality housing, health care and even pensions for their workers than there are of the 'Scrooges' Dickens wrote of. Look around at the rural housing, as long as a farmer employed large numbers of workers, he also provided housing. So did most of the "great estates" with housing for the married staff, access to health care and pensions and housing when they reached retirement. All of this is a matter of record, but it is seldom mentioned in the school "history" lessons today, which seem to be more about promoting socialist ideas than acknowledging the best examples of the alternative system.

When I look at the regimes built on "socialist principles" and supposedly on "equality" and "democracy" what comes to light is economies controlled with no regard to supply and demand, little, if any actual understanding of value, and, as Orwell noted, members of the ruling elites being "more equal" than anyone else. I also see, in state owned and run industries, massive wastage, inefficiency and a complete contempt for the end user of whatever is produced. There lies the second part of the problem, where personal ownership exists, there is an incentive to maintain it and develop it, keeping it up to date and efficient. Where the "state" owns it, there is no "ownership" by the occupier/user. The "state" never makes provision for renewal or modernisation and the result is stagnation, decay and eventually failure. Those who have worked in service delivery of statutory training at a centre that was once the envy of the world, will recognise what I am describing. There are plenty more examples I could give, including British Rail, state "owned" for over 40 years and still using the trains it inherited when it was finally broken up and sold off. As someone who "enjoyed" commuting on a "slam door" train daily for four and a half years, I can tell you they hadn't spent anything on maintaining them either!

Capitalism does have its abuses, but then, show me a system that doesn't. What it does do is allow the "buyer" a freedom of choice that socialism doesn't. I can work all the hours in the day to amass more of the trappings of wealth, and I can pass those on to my heirs. In a socialist system I can't. In a capitalist system, I have to compete, I have to deliver what I have contracted to do and I can expect a share of the rewards, but in a socialist system, I can coast along and share the rewards of everyone else's labour - except, of course, when everyone else is doing the same thing. After all, what incentive is there to do better?

I think a part of this problem lies in the fact that as Capitalism has to follow the market or go out of business, it necessarily requires flexibility in the workforce. It also means that we cannot all expect the salary drawn by the CEO, but we can and should expect a reasonable return for our efforts. I can sympathise with the labourers in the parable of the owner of the vineyard who hires labourers at different times of the day - and at the end of it pays all of them exactly the same, whether they works the full day or just the last hour. That is classic socialism.

One thing I am fairly sure of, is this. Socialism stifles economies, it breeds envy of those with either more accumen or a slightly better lifestyle. Capitalism has its problems, but it at least offers a wider choice to work for a reward - or not. But the choice is up to the individual, and not in the hands of some faceless bureaucrat or down to the patronage of some venal politicians.

Wealth ...

'Wealth' is a relative term in my opinion, and so is 'poverty.' For the majority of us there are people who are 'wealthier' than we are, and others who are 'poorer.' I have, in common I suspect with a lot of others, often wished I could have a little more 'wealth' so I could buy some luxury without having to save up, or help out a member of the family without having to cut into my own, often tight, budget. Studying a bit of history suggests that there is, in fact, some sort of balance in that the major portion of 'wealth' in the world is actually controlled by a rather small number of people, though it is spread, at least in the west, rather more widely than we suppose.

Listening to the current media led storm about 'Captitalist' greed one could be excused for thinking that it was a new phenomenon they were railing against, but it is, in fact, merely the latest manifestation of a 'wealth distribution' that goes all the way back, I suspect, to the dawn of civilisation. As the Bible says, and other religious writings confirm the same patter, "the poor we have always with us." But how do you, in any given society, measure 'wealth' or 'poverty?'

I am often infuriated by the current trend among Fabianist left-leaning charities to impose such measurements as the possession of a range of over-priced 'name brand' toys and luxuries. It tends to reinforce the expectation that the better off somehow are 'stealing' these luxuries from the poor. Or, at the very least, depriving them of something they have a 'right' to possess. Moving outside of the 'western' democracies we would have to adjust this view and drop the expectations down the Maslow Hierarchy and the measure of 'poverty' would have to be whether or not the individual had food to eat and shelter. For the vast majority of the world's population I would suggest that is the real test of whether an individual is 'poor' or 'wealthy.'

Capitalism has been around a long time. So long, in fact, I'd venture top suggest that it is the 'natural' form of economics. Wealth is directly linked to productivity. The value of coinage is no longer linked to the value or rarity of a precious metal, though many still think of it that way. In fact the British Bank notes still bear the legend "I promise to pay the bearer on demand, the sum of ..." whatever the face value of the note is. In fact, very few coins these days actually have a metal value equal to their "face" value. The "wealth" of a nation these days is determined by a balance between its commercial activity, productivity in manufacturing and agriculture and the numbers of people productively employed (and therefore taxable) and the government's borrowing levels to cover the gap between tax income and government spending. It's quite a basket of things to balance, but it wasn't always this way.

Ever wonder why the British £ was called 'Sterling?' It goes back to the Saxon Kingdoms, when it was a pound weight of sterling silver. You could strike 240 silver pennies from a single pound of silver, which became the the basis of a "£ Sterling" with 12 'pennies' to a shilling, again, originally 12 'pennyweight' of silver. and twenty such shillings, made up a pound. That held good for centuries, but gradually it became necessary to debase the silver, and that began the slide into 'inflation.' But, this still only represents a small proportion of the 'real' wealth of the world. It does not represent the value of fixed assets such as mineral resources, property holdings or the ability of the people of any given area or land to convert these into things which can be traded for 'money' or accumulated as 'wealth.' This is why the sometimes niavely expressed desire to 'redistribute wealth' is a pipedream.

That said, those who control industry and commerce also know that their activities are extremely portable. It matters not at all to a banker where his activities are based, what matters to him (or her) is access to the financial markets and the restrictions they may have placed upon their activities. Once, this was relatively easy to manage, the trade was largely physical, in coin or ingots and the local authority knew where the merchant banker was and where he kept the goods. Gradually this changed, coin and ingots were replaced by Bills of Exchange and Banker's Notes. So far so good, but now fraud, always a possibility even with precious metals and gemstones (think of Archimedes solution to checking whether or not the king's crown was pure gold, necessary because debasing the gold meant a bigger profit for someone), but once 'paper' transfers came into play, fraudsters could really come into their own.

In the 18th Century the government's of Europe were compelled to adopt a new form of financing for their operations. In previous centuries, they'd taxed and spent and when the tax take didn't cover the costs, they either raised new taxes or borrowed 'treasure' from someone like the Templars. Of course, occassionally, they borrowed too much, a problem the French King Philip IV faced in 1307. He accused the Templars of 'heresy' and seized their assets. Problem solved, his books balanced and the 'banker' wasn't in a position to argue, but it did create a problem elsewhere in Europe. Henry VIII of England had the same problem, he'd borrowed heavily from the monasteries in England and had reached the point of defaulting on his repayments. Simple solution? Link it to the argument over his divorce, and grab the assets of the monasteries. This option didn't exist in the reign of Queen Anne, so her successors had to find a new way to do it. Enter the concept of Government Bonds and 'Deficit Budgeting.'

The idea of buying and selling stocks and shares in various commercial activities was already in place, so this was simply extended by government to 'trade' promissary notes to raise money to support their spending. Initially these 'Bonds' where balanced against expected tax income. As long as the money advanced didn't exceed income, there was no problem. Inevitably though, the borrowing soon exceeded incomes, not just in England, but right across Europe the same problem was developing. It reached a climax in the 20th Century. It should be no surprise to anyone, to learn that Britain was as good as bankrupt in 1945. Nor was she alone, but now there was no single lender who could be accused of something heinous and the debts cancelled. So the next step was to set up an 'international' fund as a 'bankers banker' and lender of first resort to governments.

The balancing of the books in this manner has been facilitated, of course, by the explosion of technology in the latter half of the century. But now a further factor entered the lists. Hugely expensive social security programmes entered into in many countries post 1945 meant that tax incomes had to be supplemented in some way. This meant borrowing more money ...

It has become fashionable to blame the bankers for taking advantage of the deregulation of their industry, and for the fraud which has brought the entire western economic system to its knees. Ironically those who believe the 'wealth' of the world can be 'redistributed' through punitive taxes, social security schemes and aid programmes to 'developing nations' now want confiscation and punitive restrictions on the banks - but the problem lies in a much wider arc and includes the governments who persist in promising programmes they can't afford without impoverishing the very people they depend upon for their income. As history shows, once a government becomes too demanding or too restrictive, the nation's 'wealth' departs rather swiftly.

The truth is that now, with modern systems, it can be gone in nano-seconds. What is perhaps worse, is, as a recent scam set up by a pair of teenagers in Britain has showed, is it has never been easier for a single rogue trader to destroy a national economy, strip people of their savings, their pension funds, their jobs and their homes. Much is made of the supposed 1% of the world population who are wealthy, but this is a misleading number and it takes no account of the real distribution of the assets of 'wealth.' The 'West' has dominated the economic agenda for centuries, but there have always been others of vast wealth who are not in the western economic zone. It is in the West that the wealth distribution curve is widest - but most of us wouldn't consider ourselves 'wealthy.'

Perhaps that's where the real irony lies ...  

Elections ...

One of my current favourite comic strips is a strip titled "Shoe." It is, like most such strips, a cross between humour and social commentary and is often right on the money. In the strip there are all the usual "characters' including Shoe, editor and proprietor of the Treetops newspaper. All the characters are avian and represent a cross section of any small community.

Presently their local "Senator" is running a campaign to be elected President ... Senator Batson D Belfry (the strip for yesterday 20 April, 2012 is a prime example) has to be the lushest, most inept and corrupt politician on the planet. He's so bad I think I'd vote for him on the grounds his utter incompetence would ensure he didn't actually do anything to either worsen the world situation or change it.

Yep, perfect candidate I think. At least you know exactly what you're getting with him!