Foreign Perspectives

At the end of next week I’m off to the biology residential in Nottingham so should be sort-of busy doing stuff in preparation for that and probably in preparation for the things that I’ll not be doing whilst I’m there or rather not here.

However, the unexpectedly easy astronomy assignment has left me somewhat at a loose end. Not entirely mind you as there are a heap of administration type things that there just wasn’t the time to move on with over the last month or so with all the end of school year things to be done. Still, it does mean a slight lull in activity on the OU front.

There’s a fair amount of reading that doesn’t have to be done before the residential but I’ll be aiming to at least skim over it over the next week or so.

At the moment it looks like the hardest pre-course task will be getting everything packed into one carry-on bag under 10kg. Well, under 9kg as they always come back with more stuff from a course than you arrived with. So far, I’ve a white coat, baby computer, calculator and massive lab book that need to be taken which is getting on for half of the baggage allowance!

By and large the UK regional governments have historically ploughed their own furrow largely in isolation from what’s been going on at the national level. Essentially they’ve aimed to make vote winning decisions as they’ve went along but that’s about to change in what looks like being quite a dramatic way.

Thus we have the national government saying that they will ring-fence health and, largely, education spending. A fine aim for sure, but both of those budgets are devolved to the regional governments which causes problems because those governments are financed by what’s called the block grant – essentially a big cheque to cover all of their bills.

The effect of this is that those block grants are what will be reduced (by anything from 25% to 40%) and it will be up to the regional governments to distribute those reductions amongst the areas within their responsibility. Taking Northern Ireland as an example we find that health and education take up around 60% of the total budget so if they are ringfenced by the regional government and the cut were 40% then all other departments would need to be closed down which is hardly a runner. Even at 25% that would mean a 60% cut in the other departments. Thus ringfencing health and education is hardly going to be possible, no matter how desirable it might be in principle.

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect some extremely difficult decisions from the regional governments in the coming months.

Whilst we all think that we’d like to live in interesting times, of course such times are interesting because they are filled with the unexpected which is usually a sign of trouble.

Thus over the last couple of years we’ve had by far the most interesting time in global economics for many decades. That interest came in the form of banks and economies around the world collapsing and with the corresponding knock-on effect on the real world in terms of jobs lost, businesses closing, houses being repossessed and taxes rising. And it’s not over yet.

Throughout all that global bad news there have been untold numbers of individuals receiving their own bad news ranging from job losses through to families finding themselves out on the street due to reasons outside their control.

I’m sure that many people would prefer to opt for living in really boring times these days.

For guys cosmetics are a major minefield and one that they simple don’t even think of venturing into except around the time of Christmas or birthday presents and even then unless they’re handed a note, chances are that they’ll come back with the wrong thing.

That’s even for relatively simple stuff too. What on earth is night cream for instance? Why should it be different from day cream? When you read the descriptions there seems to be no really good reason for there to be a difference at all.

Of course the real reason for such things is that it allows for more potential marketing to be done. Thus any brand you can name puts out a whole range of stuff with different names largely so that they can sell more stuff.

In case you haven’t notices, the post-war baby boom began to hit retirement age about five years ago and the retirees will continue to rise in numbers for another ten to fifteen years.

This group has been one of the largest target markets since the 1960s and drives much of the marketing and product development spend that you’ll have seen over the last fifty years or so. Thus today we see things like face wrinkle cream hitting the shelves in quantities that would have been unheard of only ten years ago and all because this group are getting to the point where they need such things.

What’ll happen over the next twenty years as they retire will be a shift in marketing towards a much older age group than hitherto we’ve been used to. The cosmetic industry will have a field day naturally but then so will all kinds of medical aids companies and, of course, the financial services people will move to produce products aimed at a more mature market. No more will the example customer be a 30 year old: think 60 year old these days.

All being well this massive shift will let me buy that immortality pill at some point 🙂