Foreign Perspectives

Things were going really well with the football coaching yesterday afternoon as with it being the week for the “FA Cup” the kids were all taking it really seriously.

One of the best players was a beefy kid who was unusual in being good both as a player and as a keeper. It was no surprise that his team were in the final two for the playoff.

And then it went to pieces. In a very fast paced match, the first goalkeeper let in four goals in a row and we saw the beefy kid first lie down on the floor then head off for his parents on the touch-line where the tears and wailing started. And kept going and then went on some more. In fact, he ended up wailing right through the rest of the match whilst another three goals were let in.

OK, not such a good game for his team, but the wailing seemed way over the top.

The web applications course threw up an interesting possibility for the adsense last week which looked potentially really profitable so I thought I’d try it out.

Basically the theory is that if the ads on your site are more visible then people will click on them more often and therefore increase the income. There are limits to this though as it’s easy to move from “more visible” to “too visible” and thereby lose visitors.

What the course showed me was a way of keeping the ads on-screen all the time but in a not overly annoying way. As the screen concerned is sometimes very long and the current ads were simply scrolling off it, this seemed like a sure-fire way to increase the income.

What it didn’t allow for is a quirk of adsense which has the effect that the highest paying adverts are inserted into the first adblock that adsense finds on the page. This meant that those ads went straight into the new adsense block. Not necessarily a disaster in itself but the snag was that the click-through for the new block was less than half that of the original block. Moreover, the clicks were split between the two of them. The net effect was that the income dropped somewhat.

Whilst you might think that this was a failed experiment, it wasn’t. What it showed me was that keeping the ads visible is, in principle, a good thing. However, what I need to do is to keep the big paying block on-screen rather than adding a new one so that the highest paying ads stay there rather than introducing a lower click-through ad that captures the higher paying ads.

I think a bit more thinking is required before the next experiment.

Although we’ve been at the Kip McGrath for a couple of months now, we’ve still not really gotten into the different way of operating it as a system.

So, for example when we found that one of the little guys was racing through a particular section of the homework we were thinking that they’d just up the number of sheets handed out which was the Kumon way of dealing with an easy section. However, in Kip McGrath it triggered a rethink about how best to deal with the issue for James.

What’s happening is that we’re trying him out for a couple of weeks on the spelling sheets a couple of levels above what he’s been doing and, for a week or two, been getting very bored with. Also, she’s had a run-through of a reading comprehension exercise with him with a view to maybe moving him on to that. She’s also starting to up the ante with the maths. Altogether, it’s a change that makes it more interesting for him which in turn should help his progress.

Interestingly, the course was basically changed to suit James rather than requiring him to plough on with work that he was finding boring. There’s also none of the sense of having to work outside the system as happened early on with James in Kumon as the Kip McGrath approach seems more aimed at getting the learning process working through whatever means are required and not getting too hung up on rigidly following “the system” as Kumon did.

Cash cards are much more limited in function than credit and debit cards but they have one really big advantage abroad: without the PIN, they’re useless and therefore they’re of much less interest to thieves.

Cash cards for international use come in only two versions which are Cirrus and Plus. Both are linked to your bank account although you can also get prepaid versions of both.

These cards can’t be used in shops to make purchases and are limited to withdrawing cash from ATMs. Some banks put these symbols on their cards without considering that it means the cards can be used overseas so the charging for overseas transactions is sometimes less than clear. Once or twice I’ve found banks who were so sure that their card couldn’t be used abroad that they had no provision for making additional charges in their terms and conditions (and didn’t in my case, but don’t rely on that).

Although it’s not always clear, you can use Cirrus cards in all Mastercard branded ATMs and Plus cards in all Visa branded ones. You need to check that the country you’re going to has ATMs (not all do!) as these cards can’t be used over the counter in banks. Also, check that it will be practical to use them eg in India I found that ATMs were not widely available and Rarotonga didn’t have any ATMs until quite recently.

Charges on these are made up of a transaction charge of around 2% with a minimum of £2/$2 plus a foreign currency conversion fee of around 3%. It’s therefore best to make withdrawals of £100/$100 at a time to minimise these charges.

Downsides are basically those charges and the fact that you can only use these cards in an ATM. For those living in the UK, some pre-paid cards eliminate all charges and if you’re in the American military a USAA card works in much the same way. If your bank is a member of the Global Alliance (Bank of America, Bank of Nova Scotia, Barclays, BNP, Deutschebank and Westpac) then you can withdraw cash from one of the other member banks ATMs without the transaction charge (you still get charged the foreign exchange fee).

I’m going to work my way through the various ways you can take money abroad over the next week or two in the travel money series. I’ve already covered cash, travellers cheques, credit cards/charge cards and debit cards and will be covering prepaid cards in the next episode.

The Daily Star probably summed up most clearly the public opinion of the Irish government in its headline the other day.

However, it’s not the doing of a single government that has driven Ireland to bankruptcy: it has taken years of nonsensical decisions to get them here and it will take years if not decades to get them out of this mess.

For many years now the key skill in Ireland seems to have been to screw as much as possible out of Europe (ie everyone else) to finance a massive growth in the Irish economy. Until recently signs were everywhere announcing that one project or another was 85% financed by one EU fund or another.

That worked well in the case of infrastructure projects like the Dublin to Belfast motorway which replaced a truly naff road from Dublin to the Irish border that existed before. The problem is that it was only those European financed projects that went ahead and at almost every other point on the border you notice that you’ve crossed the border when the quality of the road goes down dramatically. The snag with these projects is that 1) only the capital costs are financed so Ireland now has a whole lot of motorway that it needs to pay to maintain and 2) now that Ireland has been replaced as Region 1 country by all the new eastern bloc countries it is not only not getting finance for its own infrastructure projects but needs to pay for those elsewhere.

Then there was the fiasco of untold numbers of “tax breaks” (ie bribes) for, mainly, American multinationals to establish themselves in Ireland. When the restrictions on those “tax breaks” ran out, Dell relocated almost immediately to Poland. In effect this bribe money (for there is no other way to describe it) was used by those companies to pay the salaries of the employees ie the Irish governments were simply borrowing to pay themselves. Quite why they didn’t realise at the time that this was never going to be a workable long term strategy is beyond me.

And, of course, all the above stoking of the economy meant that salaries rose and so therefore did house prices. Massively. Thus the banks were drawn into this Ponzi scheme. Like all such schemes, it looked like a no-lose situation. Like all such schemes, the money ran out. And like all such schemes, it collapsed in quite a spectacular manner, the full extent of which has yet to be seen. With increasing house prices comes increasing confidence and that surely led to increased personal borrowing in Ireland.

Sadly, this is going to be a very, very hard time for the Irish. Cuts and asset sales will be the order of the day for many years. The banks will probably be the highest profile casualties with the breakup of the non-Irish empires of AIB and Bank of Ireland looking like the first of many sales to come (already Bank of Ireland (UK) has been separated out). Cuts in a range of social security benefits and of civil service salaries are certain as are the inevitable protests against them. Gone too is any semblance of sovereignty over their own affairs. Not only are Europe and the IMF taking control of key aspects of life in Ireland but so too is the British government.

Much as I wouldn’t want to live in a united Ireland, I do feel for our friends in Ireland on this last point and even though Britain is doing it for selfish reasons (no way could it cope with a mass exodus of Irish to the UK), I’m sure that there will be a feeling that depending on Britain is a massive step backwards.