England to win the world cup.....

Great news.

According to JP Morgan's quantitive analysis team, after a complex mathematical multi-variate modelling they have predicted that England will beat Spain in the 2010 final.

The model demonstrates that although Brasil followed by Spain are the strongest teams, there are factors including fixture schedules that count negatively therefore giving England the edge in the final.

As we know, financial analysts are never wrong, so good luck to England.

A rather extreme solution

After the worldwide turmoil in the finance markets the North Koreans seemed to have found a conclusive way of dealing with one of the contributors.

The 77 year old finance minister Pak Nam-gi was allegedly put to death by firing squad for his part in screwing up the economy.

Obviously while one could not condone this level of violence, perhaps some of our public representatives around the world, more interested in fiddling their expenses to buy free flights for the family or duck houses etc. might have a touch more focus on their priorities.

Who knows if there was some sort of punishment for failure there performance might be a littl improved.

Eat your heart out Susan Boyle

The Russians never like to be outdone so here they are with their local talent show. The funniest thing is the predictability of the whole thing.

So what does it all mean?

If we need reminding of the pace that life is moving at, take a quick look at this video.

It certainly conjours up some interesting questions. If there are 31 billion searches on Google per month, what did people do for answers in the world BG (before Google)?

During the just under 5 minute duration of the film there are 67 babies being born in the United States, 274 in China and 395 in India whilst there were 694,000 songs downloaded illegally.

So I guess I´ll have a BBQ tomorrow and pop to the beach on Sunday, somethings don´t change.

Why look after your customers?

Another interesting David vs. Goliath story as Dave (not David) Carroll gets his own back on what seems to be the easiest industry to have a stab at these days, represented here by United Airlines.

He was travelling with his band when they saw the ground crew throwing their guitars accross the tarmac through the window of the plane. On arrival his guitar was in pieces and United refused to admit responsibility or pay for repairs even though he tried speaking to a number of people during a year of complaints.

What better way to exert revenge than to write a song, "United break guitars" which has become the 20th downloaded music on iTunes (presumably the first 19 are all Michael Jackson songs)

So now, Dave is rich from selling the songs and United has lost 10% of it´s share value around $180 million, they have now offered to pay for a guitar, post song, but been told to donate the money to charity. Tailor the guitar makers are giving Dave a new guitar so he can use them in his next 2 songs about United.

Forget casual Friday

How do you get your numbers up? Naked Friday.

Well this company in Newcastle had been suffering with the recession and hired a consultant to give them some ideas of how to pull the team together and get them back on a winning track.
The solution was to all go to work with no clothes for the day.

Apparently this breaks down barriers between people and departments and leads to a much better working relationship, which in this case has apparently turned the company´s fortunes around.

A few of the staff were a bit shy, but there was an introduction process leading up to Friday including photocopying body parts one day and sketching a nude model on another.

Perhaps we should think about implementing this strategy, although maybe we could wait for warmer weather and one or two changes to the headcount might be wise.

People we trust the least

Having just participated in a recent poll I found the results interesting, predictable and worth sharing.
A leading newspaper (not the sensacionalist rag I normally peruse) has managed to break away from Susan Boyle and is addressing one of the crucial and timely questions.

Who do we least trust; politicians, bankers or journalists?

Obviously the bankers have been in for a lot of stick recently, particularly Fred "shredder" Goodwin from RBS, who have been seen by many as responsible for most of our current problems - world crash, unemployment, poverty, global warming and the recent cold spell etc. - but in an anonymous poll that doesn´t seem to be the case.

The bankers came in 3rd place with 21.4% of the mistrust vote closely followed by journalists in 2nd at 30.7%, no surprises to see that politicians are there with 47.8% of mistrust.

One of the comments I found most interesting was the conspiration theory (there always seem to be people who credit government with the intelligence and organization to implement clever but naughty stuff) that politicians and journalists have colluded to make the most of the current situation to sort out their finances.

So the theory goes that with the credit problems, governments have been able to take over financial institutions for a fraction of their true worth in order to make a large killing when share prices rise again. Not being much of a believer in conspirations, I always think these things are caused by random luck and coincidence, however this could be a golden lining to the cloud we seem to be in at the moment.

This takes me on to another half baked theory I have been working on after seeing a bunch of companies backed by their national governments buying up other companies.
I am now of the opinion that the US led capitalist bubble has burst and that we will see companies such as Fiat etc. helped by their governments in order to grab share of world commerce.
Seems to make sense that when the world is "on sale" now is the time to extend your boundaries, most empires have historically fallen under similar circumstances.