Complete genius

I wrote last month about a reprehensible Tory plan to restrict poor people's families joining them in the UK. Specifically, someone would have to earn 19k to bring their husband or wife into the UK, and more to bring kids in.

M and I were in a minicab a couple of days back, and somehow this topic came up. When Marie mentioned the 19k minimum earnings the minicab driver laughed, looked shifty, and replied:
"That just sounds like a bit of paperwork. No problem."
The paperwork, a scheme which he hastened to add he personally hadn't taken advantage of, goes like this:
Newly Married Man needs to earn 19k per year to bring his wife to the UK, but only earns 12k per year in a low wage job.
NMM goes to neighbourhood cafe, and cafe owner agrees to put NMM on cafe payroll, and report NMM as earning 8k per year.
NMM doesn't actually work in cafe, and doesn't actually get paid by cafe.
NMM pays tax on his imaginary 8k earnings, so pays approximately 2k real money to HMRC.


Net impact to cafe: zero
Net impact to NMM: -2k real money paid to HMRC, increase of tax assessed salary from 12k to 20k (due to 8k imaginary earnings). NMM can now bring his wife to the UK.
Net impact to the UK tax authorities: +2k tax collected. Tax authorities unlikely to look too closely.
Net impact to the UK Border agency: one wife brought to UK. Bahaha.


Completely brilliant. Who would think that people would defraud the UK authorities to pay more tax - that is what makes this scheme so ingenious. And because I think the original Tories' restrictions were so dastardly, I can't get myself worked up over the illegal overpaying of tax.
 

The Tories want to push through a bill which means tests the ability to bring a non-EU spouse and kids into the UK on a family visa. To bring over your wife you have to earn £18k, and to bring a wife plus three kids you will have to earn £27k. This even applies to British citizens born in the UK!

I can see the rationale for xenophobes targeting economic migrants who are seeking to bring their families over. I think such a rationale is despicable, and not just because I am an economic migrant, but at least I can follow the dots between the originating sentiment (‘They took our jobs!’) and misguided policy like the one above. But why target British citizens as well?

The only explanation I can think of is that the Tory party hates poor people. There is no other possible explanation for why they would introduce such a policy. Sure, the New Zealand national party might dislike poor people a little bit. Especially if they happen to be brown. Or yellow. But National are badgers on valium compared to the Tory party. Asset stripping tax cutting badgers on valium.

This Guardian column skewers the policy more wittily than I can. Which is to be expected, given it is by a comedian who happens to be the daughter of two migrants from Pakistan. An excerpt:

All my parents' relatives came here with nothing, with nowhere to live, let alone an £18,600 salary. Today most of them are millionaire businessmen in Birmingham and have contributed hugely to the economy by supplying kebabs to drunken people in the city centre on a Saturday night.

Friends don’t let friends vote Tory.

 

Letters of Note

I stumbled across Letters of Note today. Pretty much what it says in the title, a repository of letters by people who write good.

Imagine my delight at the following Bill Hicks letter, responding to an English priest's criticism of Hicks's Revelations TV special. That show is particularly profane, but the letter above is entirely clean, so please read the letter. And only look up the Revelations show if you are not easily offended.

5.02

I ran a marathon last weekend. My time of five hours isn’t particularly fast, and I was overtaken throughout by middle aged ladies who didn’t appear to be exerting much effort. But, I managed to run all the way. Hmm, that needs qualifying: I managed to run between water stations, and when I say run, after sixteen miles I had regressed to shuffling like a zombie on amphetamines. Brains!

There was a relay team of Indians called Sikhs in the City, which included a gentleman who is 101. Seriously impressive.

Things I learnt, which would be applicable if I chose to do this again (not entirely sure yet whether I can handle it again):
Try to keep your running style constant. If you need to slow down, continue to move your knees as per your faster running style so that your impact doesn’t change. If you start shuffling (which changes impact from a heel strike to a flat foot strike), this will give you sore soles after the race.
Apply sunblock. Even in Scotland.
Don’t pace yourself against someone who is running as part of a relay. Or against someone wearing a singlet from a different marathon. Even if they look old and frail, and you totally reckon you can take them. You can’t.
Don’t pour water down the front of your shirt, to cool yourself down. This water will collect in the groin area, and look like you have wet yourself.
Carb loading is an excuse to eat lots and lots of pasta. O for Awesome. And it works – I never felt low on energy.
Don’t pick a marathon immediately after a bunch of accounting exams. Whoops. I had to concentrate on my exams, and didn't run in the last two weeks before the race. On the bright side, this meant I was extremely relaxed on marathon day as I was no longer studying.

Around 90% of the runners in my pace cohort were running for charity. I don’t understand the English predilection for raising money for a third party charity via physical activity.
You want to run a marathon, as a private challenge to the limits of your physical endurance? Fine. You're a bit mental, but whatever. So why do people link this to fundraising for charity? If you want to contribute to a given charity, I can think of less painful and more productive ways than running 26.2 miles.
If you are primarily focused on the charity, why not cut out the activity, avoid the hours of training, and give a wad of cash to the charity directly?
Maybe I am ignoring people’s desire to socially affirm each other. Thus if I run a marathon and you donate money to a charity as a result of my run, you are publicly acknowledging my effort. This in turn requires acknowledgement by me of your donation, so everyone gets to feel socially affirmed. If you can’t earn social capital by raising money for charity, you can earn social capital by donating money to charity. And it gets even more circular when two people running a marathon donate to each other’s designated charity.
There could be social cues within English culture, as I haven’t encountered this phenomenon to the same degree in New Zealand. Whatever the cause, I don’t get the overall link between private activity and public fundraising.

Joe Biden: US Vice President on Grief

You may not be aware of who Joe Biden is, if you don't follow American politics. I do because I find the personality clashes are more polarised than those in NZ politics, but not everyone is that much of a political nerd.
Joe Biden is the current US Vice President. When Obama passed a form of universal health coverage, Joe Biden was heard on microphones saying to Obama "this is a big fucking deal." Awesome.
Anyway: The following clip is him talking to an audience of military widows and widowers, about his own personal experiences of grief and loss. It is twenty minutes, but well worth a look. I'm not a good enough writer to add anything to what he says, so all I can say again is just watch him. Seriously guy. I will post some humorous basketball clips later on, but for now just watch this...

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

One of the 'joys' of working in a government department is absolute pillaging of the English language on a regular basis, by people who have enough education that they should know better.
When a halfwit such as Sarah Palin mangles the English language, that is regrettable.
When someone with a postgrad level arts degree mangles the English language, that is a tragedy.

The main transgression is use of a noun as a verb. I might not have studied English for a while, but I still think it is important to identify whether a word is a naming word or a doing word. Some nouns have transitioned (my personal standard bearer of all that is unholy) into common usage as verbs to the point they can no longer be resisted, but I think the list below is still worthy of scorn:

Message. As a verb.
Cf: “this consultation process presents many opportunities to message stakeholders”.

Client. As a verb.
Cf: “we need to embrace clienting with Alstom [a train manufacturer].”

Alliance. As a verb.
Cf: “we need to explore alliancing options between the train operator and Network Rail.”

Dialogue. As a verb.
Cf: “we need to dialogue with Network Rail about this.”

Decision. As a verb.
Cf: “we need to decision the platform extensions.”
And in related crimes, decisionable as an adjective.

Sweet Mohammed on a unicorn, this makes my ears bleed. The worst offenders aren’t the finance professionals I interact with, and you might expect us bean counters not to know how words work. No, the worst offenders are consistently policy types, who don’t do anything but words.

Fact versus Perception: "They took our jobs!"

Fact
For the year to September 2011, approximately 10k migrants entered the UK on a general skilled migrant visa, versus a cap of 21k on general skilled migrants per annum. That is, not all the potential skilled migrant visas were issued.
Note that this 10k of migrants doesn’t include any of the following:
1) Non-skilled migrants, for example New Zealanders who temporarily migrate to the UK under the latest iteration of the Working Holiday visa
2) Intra EU migration, so migrants from countries which have recently joined the EU,
3) Migrants who have moved to the UK under family reunification schemes to join family members who have already settled here, and
4) Migrants who have moved to the UK under Intra Company Transfer schemes. Ie, you join BHP Billiton in their Sydney office, and then BHP Billiton transfer you to their London office.

Perception
Even bearing all of the caveats above, the fact that not all the potential skilled migrant visas were issued is surprising in light of the general UK sentiment toward migrants. If you rely on the red tops for your news (and a lot of people do), there is a flood of migration – both legal and illegal - which is “stealing British jobs from British people”. To quote the immortal South Park episode on migration: “They took our jobs!”

Sigh. It shouldn’t to be this way, and seems like a classic bait and switch. Decimate the UK manufacturing sector, concentrate returns in London financial services, and then blame Johnny (or more likely Ahmed) Foreigner.

I am mildly addicted to the TV show UK Border Patrol, which shows both the lengths illegal migrants will go to in order to enter the UK and the crappy jobs they are willing to endure once they get to the UK. For example, men leave skilled jobs in Afghanistan to work in car washes in the UK earning a measly few quid an hour.
Yes, I know that this happens in New Zealand as well (for example the doctor from Somalia who stacked Woolworths shelves alongside Marie many many moons ago), but I would like to think that in New Zealand these migrants are able to work legally, so get a smattering of protections such as minimum wage.
Yes, part of the reason NZ doesn’t have UK levels of illegal migration is that it is an isolated island, so it is easier to physically seal the borders.

Even bearing these points in mind, I would still like to think that New Zealand is more humane toward migrants than the UK. The level of fury toward migrants over here is ugly to behold, and so many of the half truths which get trotted out are blatantly untrue. Just taking the ‘burden of migrants on the state’ argument:
Rather than being a burden to the state, (economic) migrants offer a net benefit to the state. People are heavier users of state services either when very young or very old. If you are of working age you are subsidising children and retirees – this is the implicit basis of the state social contract, so is a very good thing – so an influx of economic migrants of working age will subsidise indigenous children and retirees. Yes, this point does get a little diluted when migrants either bring family members with them or settle and produce a family, but I think my basic point stands.
Sure, non-economic migrants such as refugees may be a burden to the state. You can bring moral arguments into play for refugees, so a compassionate state should be obligated to accept asylum seekers as it would be immoral not to accept them. And to be flippant, if you don’t accept refugees then you miss out on throngs of new and exciting restaurants. The strip of Vietnamese Restaurants near my place grew from the Vietnamese community centre in Englefield Road, which in turn grew out of the waves of boat people migration from the Mekong Delta in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Turning to the “They took our jobs!” argument, which also manifests itself as “British jobs for British people”**:
One of my reasons for rejecting this (a reason I acknowledge is intellectually lazy, as racists do on occasion make valid arguments) is the calibre of people who make this argument. When various forms of this argument pop up in the election manifestos of racist and fascist parties such as BNP and UKIP, my gut response is to stop listening.
Re unskilled labour, the jobs which unskilled migrants take are often overlooked by indigenous workers as they are unpleasant. So if an unskilled British labourer doesn’t want to pick strawberries because the work is arduous, why is it a bad thing if a migrant worker fills this role, thus enabling British consumers to purchase cheap strawberries.
Re skilled labour, there are very few cases where indigenous skilled workers will be replaced by migrant skilled workers. If you have a skill which is in demand, you should be able to get work without getting displaced by a migrant worker, as the demand for skilled labour should rise in response to an increased supply of skilled labour. I can’t back up my argument here, other than some waffle about inelastic supply curves.
An issue arises when a company moves offshore, for example outsourcing a factory from Britain to India to take advantage of cheaper labour costs. Here, the closed factory will result in a large number of indigenous skilled workers becoming unemployed, and holding skills for which there may be no demand. And if you have a skill for which there is no demand, you suddenly have to look for unskilled work which is horribly depressing after a skilled career. But in this situation crying “They took our jobs!” doesn’t really apply, and “They outsourced my job to a location to which I was not willing to move for a wage I was not willing to accept!” isn’t quite as punchy a slogan.

As an aside, under Tory lizard scum proposals skilled migrants may lose the right to settle in the UK if they don’t earn enough(!).
Money quote from a think tank at the link above:

"Ministers accept that our economy needs skilled migrants to come and work at levels below £35,000 a year, but have decided that even if they work hard, pay their taxes, and play by the rules, they will be forced to go home after five years."

The more the UK tightens the strings on migration, the greater the imperative for me to have (hypothetical) progeny in the UK, to give them dual UK / NZ citizenship. Said progeny would automatically get a UK passport if born here, as I have a UK passport. I couldn’t pass down my passport if they were born in NZ, as I was born in NZ and only get my UK passport because Dad was born here.


**This begs the question: what is British? This in turn opens the can of worms of ethnicity versus nationality, which reared its partially evolved head in NZ with the recent brouhaha of people wanting to fill in the census ethnicity box as ‘New Zealander’ due to some objection to ticking ‘New Zealand Pakeha’. Never mind that within NZ ‘New Zealander’ is completely meaningless as an ethnicity, as in this location this will be your nationality. It is only outside NZ that you can label your ethnicity as ‘New Zealander’.
For me, I hold British and NZ nationalities, but I don’t feel my ethnicity to be ‘British White’. Rather, my ethnicity switches depending on who is asking, from ‘White Other’ on UK forms to ‘New Zealand Pakeha’ on NZ forms. Indeed, this switch will be inevitable as the respective data gatherers (UK / NZ censuses) will have different criteria as to what the most relevant ethnicities are for their purposes. Imagine the relevance of a NZ form offering ‘British Caribbean’ as an ethnicity, and you get an idea of why different data gatherers must present different ethnicity options.

Meat and cashflows

Lately I have found myself unable to think about much beyond meat and cashflows (the joys of accounting study), and nearly forgot my thirty – *cough* birthday last week.

I was extremely happy when Stef remembered my birthday and gave me a hand mincer. O for Awesome.
This means that I can now mince my own meat, no longer have to rely on butchers, and can devise my own mince mixes. There are a few examples out there of different cuts contributing different textures / taste to the end product, so should be fun to explore. This in turn raises a conundrum:
a) Butcher A on Essex Road with meat from high quality animals doesn’t stock the more exotic cuts of animal (ie beef cheek, pig head).
b) Butcher B on Theobalds Road with the more exotic cuts of animal doesn’t get his meat from animals which are of as high quality. I am extrapolating from the fact that the Theobalds Road meat is around 60% the cost of the Essex Road meat, but it is still well above supermarket grade so all is well.

Now for my experiments in mince, do I go with
a) high quality meat from a limited cross section of sources, or
b) slightly lesser quality of meat from a wide array of sources?

To frame it another way: mince is usually used as a base, with a bunch of other flavours thrown on top. (One exception I can think of is steak tartare, and that is the only occasion I would mince expensive cuts of meat.) If I am using cheap cuts under lots of other flavours, will I be able to taste the difference between chuck steak and an array of cuts from a lesser butcher, or should I just go for plain chuck steak from the best butcher I can find?

Oh so many experiments to concoct, and lessons to learn about mincing. I have read that with burger patties it helps to chill the mincer components beforehand, so that the meat isn’t warmed as it is minced, and I am sure there is other stuff I need to know which I will find out through trial and error.
And this is not just limited to beef - I have noticed that some butchers put a little pork into their beef mince mix. Bearing food safety guidelines in mind, inter-species mincing is on the cards if the mince is going to be simmered for a long time. Not quite as advisable for 200gm medium rare burger patties. Delicious half pound monster patties.

Man Cooking: Rilettes

I thought for the next iteration of man cooking I would choose something much less challenging, as brawn nearly broke me. Hence, rilettes.











The recipe which Brendan and I followed was an adaptation of Anthony Bourdain’s recipe (I know I know, I have difficulty following recipes), and goes something like this:
Remove skin from a large bit of pork belly.
Chop pork belly into inch cubes
Put the pork belly and a rabbit into a low oven, with a bit of liquid in the bottom of the dishes. My butcher was kind enough to joint my rabbit for me, which makes the subsequent stripping of meat easier.
The display on my oven has worn off so my temperatures are approximate, but mine was on about 80 degrees with the fan on.
Roast for at least five hours. I did it for six, because that is how I roll.
Go for a walk around the neighbourhood, but pop home to flip the meat intermittently.
Remove meat from oven.
Reserve liquid from dishes, and separate (AND KEEP!) the fat from the cooking liquid.
Allow meat to cool until you can handle it and shred a little. Be aware that the meat fibres will soften when stored, so err on the side of shredding roughly. Using two forks works quite well. Make sure the mixture is moist enough, adding a tiny amount of cooking liquid as required. We added a bit much, and ended up squeezing liquid out.
Pack into sterile storage containers, leaving a centimetre of headroom in the top of the containers, and refrigerate.
Once meat is cold (after half of an hour or so), heat up fat, and top up containers with warmed fat to cover. The reason you chill the meat before adding the fat is so that the fat remains on top of the meat to form a seal, and doesn’t permeate through the meat.
Allow the flavours to meld for at least three days before eating. This is the hardest part of the recipe.
If the meat is sealed properly it will keep in the fridge for a couple of months.

To serve, just scoop out and serve with toast. I like toasted brown bread, as that provides a nice contrast in texture. You could add sliced gherkin / capers / chutney if you wanted to get fancy, but to be honest why bother.

Overall impressions: 8/10, very favourable. It tastes really good, it is really easy to make, and it is easy to clean up afterward.

There is no way my rilettes is lasting two months in the fridge. We made more than we could fit into a dozen sealed containers, so I had a few unsealed containers as well. I scoffed these over the New Year period (with other people, what do you take me for?), and they were delicious. I shouldn’t eat any of the sealed containers just yet, because after the pig head incident I want to show Marie that man cooking can taste good.

What I might do differently next time:

Rather than roast for six hours, simmer for the same time period. There are recipes out there for both cooking techniques, and the roasting didn’t seem to add much.

Rather than adding rabbit to the pork belly, add a different meat for the following reasons: a) the rabbit was more expensive (£11) than the pork belly (£8), and b) the rabbit meat was quite fiddly to strip from the bones. Pheasant might be one option – the meat has a good flavour to it, the meat comes off the bone easily and they can be quite cheap – ie £2.50 per bird in high season in London, less in Scotland. If I were to add pheasant I wouldn’t cook for the full six hours with the pork belly, I would probably take this out after a couple of hours. Other game birds are more pricey once you look at how much meat they yield.

Next time I will definitely buy additional fat (we didn’t), rather than relying on the renderings from the pork belly. Most of the recipes suggest 200gm of pork fat to seal, and our belly gave out nowhere near that. I had to adulterate the renderings with some chicken fat and duck fat I had to hand. Not that this fat from multiple animals really matters, all you want is a sealing agent (you don’t need to eat this), and pork fat is infinitely cheaper than duck fat.

Flying without baggage

M is in the States for work at the moment, and I am flying over to meet her in New York for three nights. Yes, as I said in my previous post, my life is pretty sweet right now.

I could easily get away with packing only my passport and my wallet. Bear with me while I explain: I know M has bought me a number of undergarments in NZ which are superior to those at a similar price point in the UK. Gold top socks, looking at you.
New York is going to be pretty cold (ie below freezing), so I will just be wearing the same outer casing of coat / scarf / gloves / jeans / boots all the time.
The only garments which I need to pack are three tee shirts. For the comedic value of flying without any baggage (ie no checked in bags + no carry on bags) I would be willing to purchase three tee shirts from a department store once I hit New York.
For toiletries, I can use Marie's moisturiser and deodorant for three days.

I am not sure if this would trump our mate Glen's backpacking around South America for nine months with carry on baggage only, that is < seven kilos. Clue: he weighed every item he took, including shaving products.
But, it would definitely come close.

And yet, I think I will take a hold all, just to avoid the attention of the airport security staff. I like to think I am reasonably open minded toward new experiences, but antagonising non-medical personnel who can legally fondle my prostate is skating on thin ice.

Travelling to New York today sir?
Yes.
How many bags to check in?
Zero.
Carry on bags.
Nada.
Any baggage at all?
Zip.
Please step this way, sir.