Aehso’s Output

Part II : Credit Institutions (Financial Support) Bill 2008

I believe the national government is obliged to intervene to stabilize key sectors of the economy. However, I think we’ve gone about this the wrong way.

The Irish economy is only a small part of the larger European economy (we contribute a minuscule 1.2% of EU GDP) which has no restrictions on flow of capital. Our cute hoor politicians have burned a bridges with Europe in passing this legislation. If the EU/ECB do produce rescue packages to preserve the larger EU economy in the near future how high do we think the Irish state will be in the receiving order?

Rushing this legislation may end up destroying trust in the credit rating of the Irish state. May is not a satisfactory qualifier given the amount of money involved and the potential long term damage this would do to future moves to pull this country out of the recession that it is already in. The state would possibly have to borrow for capital expenditure (to kick start the economy) at much higher interest rates while also servicing a much larger existing national debt.

I don’t buy the ‘it’s only a guarantee’ party line. Equivalent guarantees are implicitly provided by the governments of most western economies and in recent weeks we have seen a slew of nationalizations and forced mergers. Making the guarantee explicit via national law draws clear lines in the market that can be manipulated by vested interests (bankers, & investors).

I don’t buy the ‘this won’t cost the taxpayers’ party line. The banks that being protected are constantly revising their bad debt provisions upward and independent analysts believe they are currently understating their positions.

The legislation was drafted with the participation of the chief executives of AIB & BOI. Shouldn’t the Central Bank be advising the government on these matters rather than having PLCs directly bend the ear of the government in private meetings?

At least two of these banks (AIB & BOI) are still planning on paying out dividends to their shareholders this year. AIB raised their interim dividend last summer in a bid to bluff the market. Firstly, does it make any sense to be paying out cash to investors at a time when a liquidity crisis is threatening your ability to survive as a going concern? Secondly, given bluffs like the above, what other ‘risks’ are the senior management of the banks taking in their negotiations with our government?

Incidentally, this legislation effectively allows practically insolvent property developers to continue to negotiate with their existing banks rather than face the music with a bank liquidator. Given the economy is in recession and house/property prices will continue to fall for the foreseeable future, I wonder did the threat of having a sharp implosion of our over-bloated construction sector weigh heavily on the governments thinking?

Is it really worth exposing the Irish state to this risk in order to drag out the inevitable equalization of the Irish construction sector?

Bank Of Ireland’s lost laptop ‘addendum’.

This story just gets worse - now BOI admit they have lost over 31k records. BOI need to answer a few more hard questions openly and honestly in order to stop me from closing my last remaining account with them:

• Is/was it routine for bank employees to bring laptops containing unencrypted data off bank property? Can you guarantee me that your employees never copied data off your laptops onto another machine at home or emailed it via SMTP servers in unencrypted email messages? I don’t really care what official bank policy (meaningless) is, I just want to know if your employees technically could do this.
• If the above is routine, how do they know that only 31k records were lost? After all, you don’t actually have the laptops so how would you know what is on them? Right now trust is gone out the window and you don’t have to give so much information that you would potentially compromise the security of live systems. Technical details on the auditing capabilities of your laptop/mainframe data synchronization tools would be great - just to give me that warm fuzzy feeling.
• If the above is routine, how many of your employees recently sold, dumped or gave away PCs that they might, at one stage, have been editing bank data on while working at home?
• When was the last group hardware audit completed and are any other laptops unaccounted for? Not necessary stolen, just not where they are supposed to be

Lastly, and this question stands, even if I do close that last account. According to the above referenced news story

In the unlikely event of a fraud arising as a direct result of the theft of these laptops, the customer will be fully compensated.

(also stated here though I can’t find an official statement)

What will BOI do if my credit history is destroyed by someone who steals my identity via the data you so kindly made available to them? What if that person is never caught and therefore I can never prove that their data source was the hard drives in those laptops? What was that? Did you say ‘nothing’ or was that ‘prove it’? I thought so.

Data is such a genie in a bottle isn’t it.

O2’s iPhone Paddy Tax

Pat Phelan: Irish taken as fools as O2 Ireland iPhone package comes with attached “Paddy Tax”

Irish company Cubic Telecom today blasted the prices that people will have to pay for the iPhone when it’s introduced in Ireland on March 14th. Cubic Telecom CEO Pat Phelan, speaking on the packages said:
“There is no excuse for paying such high prices and getting so little in return. The minutes, the text bundles and the data package are completely inappropriate for Irish people and the massive difference in what Irish and UK and Northern people get for the same price suggests that they’ll throw any old scraps at the stupid Paddys. ”

Phelan is calling for a boycott of the phone until o2 rethinks their charges. “It’s time for us Irish to tell O2 we’re not going to accept this. We have Apple’s European HQ here in Ireland, the iPhone itself is fantastic but there’s no way we should buy this phone until O2 cops on and looks after their very loyal customers here. We should get the equivalent package they’re getting in the UK and Northern Ireland

Too fucking right. I don’t even want an iPhone - I just want affordable mobile internet access. Irish consumers are and have been gouged by a mobile network oligopoly in this country for years. It is the giant elephant in the room that everyone knows is there but nobody in power has the balls to do anything about. O2’s latest ‘product’ is yet another “up yours” to us stupid Paddies, our inept government and communications regulator. Hey, we’ve put up with with it for so long, why would anything change now?

A boycott of high end packages like the iPhone plans or broadband dongles won’t work. You’d need to get every soul in the country to stop sending SMS messages in order to get attention of these boyos.

Events this Week and CreativeCamp Kilkenny 2008

Ken McGuire and Keith Bohanna are amongst the organizers of an upcoming barcamp event called CreativeCamp in Kilkenny on Saturday March 8th. From the Facebook Event page:

A free one day gathering of people interested in how to blend technology and creativity for use in their businesses, organisations or to promote their creative work.

There are lots of interesting talks are already lined up, one of which is on Building and working in a distributed startup which I’ll be giving/leading based on the ‘process’ (if that isn’t too scary a word to use) we use inside nooked. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more added on the day in true barcamp “user generated conference” style.

If you are around, come along, it’ll no doubt be a nice desert after the veritable breakfast, lunch and dinner of events that are on this week in Dublin - IWTC - shaping up to be a big event, the ISA Annual Conference, xCellerate 2008 and of course the Irish Blog Awards. I’ll be popping in and out of both the IWTC and ISA events, if you wanna meet up give me a shout.

Iarnród Éireann Seat Reservations In Practice.

It would seem I spoke too soon about Iarnród Éireann’s internet seat booking system. In practice you can reserve seats using this system but when you get onto the train there may be no indication to other passengers that the seats are reserved. This happened to us coming back from Galway to Dublin last Sunday and rather than arguing with the hen party that was already encamped in our seats we just moved to the next available seats.

We had the luxury of doing this because we were pretty early. Of course the seats we ended up in were probably reserved too so there were some very puzzled looks when later passengers arrived. The only explanation we could offer was that everyone else seemed to be sitting where they pleased. BTW, this wasn’t a one off - the last time we got a train back from Galway to Dublin the station we had also reserved seats but the staff instructed us to ‘just sit anywhere’.

Meanwhile, most of the station staff were busy loitering on the platform not caring less about the confusion and frustration throughout the train. Well done lads, great job, very helpful.

Iarnród Éireann jump from the 19th to 21st century.

Welcome to the 21st century Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail). I have no idea how much tax money they have spent on developing their new seat reservation system but it is a welcome departure from queuing for an hour in Heuston Station in order to get a seat on an intercity train.

in fairness to them it now rivals most online airline check-in systems. Now if they could just find a few more trains or drop their charges a bit they might be able to complete their apparent aspirations to run a budget airline type business model. Oh, and they’ll also have to deal with those pesky unions.

Mahon Tribunal - Laugh Of The Day 12-02-08

From this article on Sean Gilbride’s performance at the Mahon Tribunal yesterday

A former Fianna Fail councillor, who was on developer Owen O’Callaghan’s payroll during critical Quarryvale rezoning votes, never told other councillors he was being paid the equivalent of his teacher’s salary for almost a year.
…
He said he had always been supportive of Quarryvale. The fact he was being paid by Mr O’Callaghan had nothing to do with it.

I might have to start posting a series of these.

Aside, did you know that the Mahon Tribunal has been running since Nov 4th, 1997?

The Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis Explained

The arrival of the inevitable Irish housing market slump/slowdown has coincided with a massive global credit crunch caused by a “sub-prime mortgage crisis” in the US. There’s been lots written in the Irish press about the credit crunch and the effects on the domestic housing market but understanding why the crisis developed in the first place is best explained by this eye-opening BBC article. One amazing nugget in this article relates to the collapse of the housing market Cleveland. The graphs are amazing but the mere fact that “Deutsche Bank Trust, acting on behalf of bondholders, was the largest property owner in the city.” is amazing.

I wonder will the guys at DaftWatch or The Property Pin start doing heat maps of repossessions in Ireland.

Vodafone Ireland Live!/Mobile Internet and ISP data charges.

A while back I posted about Vodafone Ireland offering 500Mb for EUR9.99 per month. Some interesting comments on that post prompted me to followup with Vodafone to clarify a few things. Unfortunately I can’t print their response (it was ‘private’). However, I can clarify a few facts:

• The package can only be used to access Vodafone Live! content (i.e. data to/from the live.vodafone.ie gateway.)
• The package does not apply to use of your mobile phone as a modem (i.e. data to/from the isp.vodafone.ie gateway.)

With this package Vodafone charge an effective rate of €0.02 per Mb to download data from their Live service gateway up to 50Mb per day. If you go over 50Mb per day they start charging €5.00 per Mb.

With their “Modest” or “Medium” data service packages (see Vodafone pay monthly charges) they charge between €0.48 per Mb(€12/25) or €0.30 per Mb (€15/50) to transmit data via their ISP gateway (NOT the Live! gateway).

If you have not signed up for their “Modest” or “Medium” package then the data rate charge is €12.80 for the first Mb and €5.12 per subsequent Mb. (2c/KB up to 512 kbs and 0.5c/kb for any usage over 512kbs).

So Vodafone data rates vary from a minimum of €0.02/Mb (Live! data rate) to a maximum of €12.80 per Mb (general data rate) - incredible! If they had phone call charges like these the regulator would be all over them.

So mobile data via Vodafone remains potentially exhorbently expensive and confusing. The confusion is compounded by Vodafone’s use of the label “Mobile Internet” for this service. With this package a user can get access to reformatted versions of certain WWW sites. Calling that Mobile Internet is like calling a bicycle a supercar. The Internet, as in that series of interconnected tubes through which the worlds computers communicate over protocols based on Internet Protocol(IP), is completely out of bounds.

This service should be called the “Vodafone Network”. However there is nobody to regulate this type of thing, is there?

Vodafone do offer a 3G/GPRS broadband modem as an alternative but a) I need a service that allows me to use my existing 3G handset as a modem (so that my N800 can connect via bluetooth) and b) I don’t want to pay €30 per month for a service I’ll only use in bursts when on the road. They also offer a business email push service but this doesn’t cater for my ssh and http protocol access requirements.

So, we remain in the dark ages.

The FAI.

The FAI (not the national team or their manager) are a disaster, in denial and accountable to nobody it seems. They have turned me off Irish international football games to the extent that I now have no interest in paying anything (tickets or tv) to watch the national team play anymore.  It really is impossible to support a national institution like the Irish football team when they are governed by an organization that crows about earning 10million in TV rights for a single game but refuse to admit that their whole approach to managing the national team is wrong.

Screw this ‘rebuilding for future tournaments’ guff.  Reality check: professional footballers are payed by and contracted to clubs, not their countries.  Therefore international football associations should hire managers that have a proven ability to

1. manage resources that are only available on an short term basis.
2. choose systems and tactics that utilizes the available players on a game by game basis.

Neither of these are skills that one will learn ‘on-the-job’ in what is in effect a part time position.  The future of our national game looks bleak while the existing policy remains in effect.

P.S. Software geeks out there could relate this to the waterfall vs agile development models - I think that’s pretty appropriate.  Speaking of the waterfall model, here’s another good read from Alex…