They should cap them at $100 and additional funding should be provided by the government.
Yes, the cap's sensible, but why does this always lead to the claim that State funding would be necessary? It's entirely based on the assumption that parties should continue to spend the riches of Croesus on campaigns, which become only about who has the biggest media buy, not who has the best ideas.
At current rate of change, it'll be some time in the next millennium when the numbers equalise.
I'm also not at all convinced that the boundaries benefited the Tories overall in the 80s and 90s (although there *were* a few interesting cases of boundaries moved that just *happened* to make marginal constituencies into thumping Tory majorities) - there just hasn't been that much change since 1997.
You're right, though, I don't think it's an active Jerrymander by Labour - as I said, the boundaries haven't changed much. But you can bet your bottom that this is a significant influence on the committment to Proportional Representation evapourating.
The House of Lords is not doing a "thoughtful" job - it's opposing the Labour Party because that's what the House of Lords always does.
You're perhaps thinking of the pre-reform House of Lords, actually, the pre-1960s one.
The House of Lord's love of liberty wasn't much in evidence during the Thatcher years - and Thatcher's attacks on liberty made Blair look like a libertarian.
Go on then, name them. And I bet you won't find *anything* to match 'indefinite house arrest without charge'.
For all her (many) evils, Thatch didn't try to:
* Abolish Habeus Corpus
* Abolish jury trials
* Ban jokes about religion
* Make telcos into wiretappers
* Require government access to encryption keys
* Lock people up without trial or charges for 90 days
* Place suspects under indefinite house arrest without trial or charges
* Derogate from Human Rights laws and other international treaties
...and that's just off the top of my head.
Back to the closed minds of Bloggers4Labour with you.
And it must always be noted that, in the end, the (elected) house of Commons can force a bill through Parliament (using the Parliament Act) regardless of what the Lords think.
Yes, sorry, you're right. I was thinking of course of the Salisbury Convention.
The House of Lords should remain, and should continue to be permitted Parliamentary scrutiny precisely because they act as checks-and-balances, because they are less susceptible to lobbying and the whips, aren't out to win cheap votes/laughs, and actually take the time to consider the ramifications of any bill, which most MPs don't have the time to do (as they have other constituency duties, which often require a lot of travelling).
If you're being generous... Frankly, I think it really is a case of lobby fodder in the Commons - principled objections are so rare as to be newsworthy. And if you live in the constituency of a member of the current ruling party, well, look at your MP's record. Mine has rebelled in less than 1% of divisions since 1997.
A case in point is the Identity Cards Bill Lords warn over ID cards scheme
To summarise the exchange:
* Commons originally set out a bill that makes ID cards mandatory (and that you have to pay for)
* Lords comes back with amendment making ID cards voluntary
* Commons counter with, yes they are voluntary, unless you want a passport...
Which is hardly voluntary, particularly if your job requires you to travel (mine does - where's my opt-out..?). And the manifesto commitment was to a voluntary scheme. If HMG believes it's so good and has such support in the country, why don't they allow people to choose it..?
It's worth noting that the ID card as proposed
* will set you back £93 (over US$150) if you want a 10-year passport
...if you believe the Home Office figures, which no-one not affiliated to HMG does. £300 is the current estimate. Oh, and that's just set-up costs, and doesn't count actually installing readers in every doctor's surgery, every hospital, every school, every local and central government office, every bank, every Post Office, every police car, every sensitive building, every employer and so on, which it'll need to achieve its stated benefits (which are also a pile of donkey droppings, but that's another discussion).
Reader: £3000-£5000 (each reader) PC for reader: £1000 (each reader) plus £21,000 for cabling at each location (derived from a estimate of £1 million for 47 airports and ports).
* Has your
o biometric data (incl. fingerprints and photo),
o a full record of all your addresses, ever,
o is linked to your NI number (think social security number),
o has your immigration details, work permit details, visa details, etc.
o is linked to both your passport number and driving licence number
* The data will all be stored on a central database
...which per the Bill (Clause 4(i)), may also contain:
Sure you don't need more than a pentium 500 to serve your website. However, if you have a few of these puppies, you can serve the website off a virtual linux box under VMWare.
None of this changes the fact that he's a contemptible manipulative lying prat with little or no respect for civil liberties or international law - but apparently that is what the majority of the British voters want as their political leader.
Go back and look at those results again. The Labour Party gained a shade over 25% of the eligible electorate, and 35% of the actual vote. Because of the biased way that the seat boundaries are drawn, it takes far fewer people to elect a Labour MP than one from other parties, this translated into 55% of the seats - a working majority in the Commons.
You see, the thing is, the Lords (at the moment) have a birth right to be there. They can say whatever they want without fear of parliamentary whips putting pressure on them to to stop conflicting with the current party's views, without fear of being kicked out, and without fear of losing their next election. That's why they're a good thing, because they have the chance to oppose laws even when the majority of parliament is for them.
*blink* What the.... fuck
*stares at user24 like the museum piece he/she apparently is*
If you want a proper house of review (and you should) then you bloody well elect one.
Arguably so, but at the moment, only a small proportion of the Lords are hereditaries (parent is forgetting the Lords reform over the last few parliaments). The rest are appointed, and not a few after having given large sums of cash to the Labour Party - but that's another discussion.
The balance of power, however, is held by approx 160 independent Lords - no party alignment. And by and large, they do a very good job, and refuse to be treated as lobby fodder by the Government with its powers of appointment to powerful ministries.
It's some comment on the current state of affairs that an unelected body with a proportion there by heriditary right is doing a better, more transparent, more thoughtful job than the elected one...
This wasn't snuck in, it's been around for quite some time now. It actually serves a valid purpose as well. Basically, the part that this article refers to allows a government to bypass the House of Lords (an unelected body) after a certain number of tries in a certain time period when trying to pass a bill.
To separate out the two issues you're conflating:
The Parliament Act is there to prevent the unelected Lords from blocking legislation which the elected Commons has a mandate to implement. By convention this means the content of the goverment's election manifesto.
Now the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill means that not only will the Lords not be able to oppose Government policy (in the manifesto or not), this will be extended to the Commons.
Or, to put it in constitutional speak: the Executive usurps the power of the Legislature, and neuters the capacity of the Judiciary.
Yes, our freedom-loving government is plainly tired of all that mucking around attending Parliament, and persuading MPs to support its bright ideas.
In future (so goes the vision), our beloved, trusted ministers will be able to amend, replace and repeal legislation by fiat. The only restrictions are that ministers can't impose new taxes (but can introduce new fees. Po-tay-to/Po-tah-to), or introduce prison sentences longer than 2 years.
So could HMG decide to make ID Cards entirely compulsory? Could they require all public services to be disposed of to PFI? Could they abolish the Scottish Parliament? Yes, Yes and Yes (they couldn't impose laws in devolved matters, but they could abolish the whole thing).
And the checks and balances on ministerial absolutism? Erm... none. The minister merely has to consider a vaguely written checklist and be personally satisfied that's it's a Good Idea overall. Because ministers are of course entirely impartial judges of their own proposals. It's already being called The Abolition of Parliament Act as Parliament simply won't be able to scrutinise legislation in advance or block it. But it's also an Abolition of The Judiciary Act as the courts can't challenge Ministerial Orders after the fact on the basis of being disproportionate or removing freedoms and protections from the citizenry as long as the Minister can show that he/she has thought long and hard about it. Presumably the fact that Ministers are genetically incapable of thinking like this won't help...
Separation of Powers? We've Heard of It
Anything that goes through the parliament act will generate enough publicity for the public to kick up a fuss about it if they don't like it anyway.
Which, as the Executive can impose what the hell it likes without the checks and balances of an adversarial Parliament, can be entirely ignored except for the 3 months before an election.
Interestingly, consumer razor manufacturers could very, very easily make sharper blades. But then, all the time you saved getting that close shave would be wasted in tedious blood mopping. You (assuming you're part of the shaving population) don't want sharper razor blades.
What you do want is blades that keep their designed sharpness longer. And much as it pains the mfrs to have your buying cycle extended, customer loyalty is more important, so this is what you get with your diamond-tip what-nots.
And of course, you want less shaving time/effort - the multiple blades do that for you.
We outsource our office cleaning. If we're not happy with the service then we switch supplier. How does whether the cleaners care about the success of OUR company come into it? It's their jobs that are on the line if they don't perform.
You're using an example that doesn't really matter to the bottom line. My wife was telling me about a company they outsourced to in Washington DC to set up their trade show booth in order to save the cost of her flying out there. She sent signs and pamphlets to be set up around the table. The only thing set up when her co-worker arrived at the trade show was the table. Then, the outsourced company charged for receiving the extra materials, even though they did nothing with them.
"Not mattering to the bottom line" isn't actually the be-all and end-all, but you're close. It's "Not being the core thing that your company does" is. So HR services matter massively to a large company's bottom line. But they're not the core activity - better to outsource it to a company that can do it better and cheaper.
If you're a fund management company, managing investments is the core thing you do; providing a customer contact centre (which is the subject of what we're talking about...) to answer customer questions and operate simple transactions isn't. That is very often very successfully outsourced, because running a good contact centre providing really great customer services is hard and very, very expensive in setup costs.
To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service.
If this were true, Dell would not be the number one mfg of computers after losing 75% of their base. How many people here have called tech support and gotten someone with a thick Indian accent named "Steve"?
You missed the critical bit: of pension providers. Customer service is a significantly more important factor in customer retention in Financial Services compared to other sectors.
Don't know about the film location, but the *actual* intended location is in Edinburgh, just off Ferry Road. All of the book is set in Edinburgh, mostly around Leith (the title is from the chapter "Trainspotting at Leith Station").
But then, the Embra slums have been cleaned up a bit better than the Glasgow ones since the time the book was set (mid 80s; the film put it back nearly a decade), so the only Embra location in the film is the Princes St one in the opening sequence.
That markup is probably about right - in the !Apple ecosystem, it's split between mfr, retailer (which are the same for direct sales OEMs like Dell) and OS vendor(s).
Oh, plus of course, Apple's strategy is to be high margin, low volume. Do we really need to haul out the auto brands metaphor again, or can we work it out without for once?
Really folks, in launching the original iMac, Apple very smartly realised that in the PC market, no mfr can consistently compete on price - you'll always be beaten. Same for performance - there's always a better one coming out from competitors. So the only way to continually make good margin is to compete somewhere *else*. Which if you're selling machines running the same software as everyone else is *very* hard to do. Only Sony has had the remotest clue about this - the Vaio range were entirely built as a high status, cool brand. And Jobs is on record as wanting Apple to be very Sony-like.
Apple differentiate by cool branding, like Sony. But because they have much greater control over hardware & software, they can also differentiate through ease of use, demonstrated not only in software, but also in build design (every tried to open an apple desktop tower? One button: pop. And the inside is all perfectly laid out, neatly and tidily).
Did you really think that the "Think Different" slogan was chosen on a whim?
Apple have a history of using basically meaningless measures of performance in their marketing literature and this should concern us.
Ah, I understand now. This is in contrast to the entirely meaningful performance measure of clock speed used elsewhere in the industry, of course. Thankyou so much for clearing that up for me.
Parent is spot on and needs moderating up as insightful and informative.
I just wanted to expand on one point:
*plus* a big X-factor we'll call "profit".
In case anyone's (mistakenly) thinking that this is pure profit that can go to the stockholders/SJ's turtle neck suppliers, please consider: this is only gross profit.
Out of that has to come contribution to:
Cost of retail - Applestores don't run on air, and 3rd party retailers need (quite a lot of) margin to justify the shelf-space
Cost of marketing - yes they've got a lot of free publicity from the keynote, but expos cost money, advertising costs money etc. Besides, of the real-world media (print & TV) coverage I've seen since last night, it's all be significantly wrong in one element or other
Cost of hardware R&D - significantly more than cost of manufacture, and it's a fixed cost: you're paying it no matter how many you sell
Cost of software R&D - as well as ongoing development of OSX and all bundled applications, there's a huge one-off investment in the Intel migration. You're also paying for all those projects that don't make it to market.
General Business Overheads - payroll/HR, legal, accounting/audit, internal communications
After all that, you come out with Net Earnings Before Taxes (NEBT) aka Pre-Tax Income (PTI). Pay your taxes, and *then* you have Profit.
And *this* has to come out at a sufficiently high rate, or potential stockholders will find better returns from putting the money in other investments (say, a savings account...). *That's* the point at which it becomes worthwhile doing.
Current client
No Wifi (security reasons and all their hardware estate has ethernet)
No external party access to their ethernet so I can't plug my laptop in to their infrastructure and VPN
Current hotel near the client
No WiFi - expected some time in the next couple of months.
Nearby public WiFi (McDonalds for some reason): Hideously Expensive.
Result
Client has installed the only analogue line in the building for our dialup use. Now if only it were close to our desks...
23mm? Ultra Wide?
Not even close. Call me when you get below 15mm. My 18mm is just about wide enough for normal use as a wide-angle (albeit on a Canon D10, which has the usual DSLR 'small CCD' problem, so lenses get a wee telephoto boost, so it's about the same as a 23mm lens with on a film body)
But guys, could you pick the right target, yeah? It's the Government, stupid... businesses wouldn't want to touch it with a stick as it's government mandated extra costs with no business benefit.
It's an interesting theoretical use case, but doesn't even begin to stack up as a business case.
If I'm the hypothetical Pizza Company, I would use CRM to help me sell more pizzas (or the same number of more profitable pizzas). If I'm a hypothetical insurance company strong arm *pretending* to be a pizza company, sure, but then, Occam's Razor.
So, of the data elements in that use case:
Name
May be useful to greet customers - Salutation probably more useful. But using unprompted scares off customers - I wouldn't even expect family members to open a call with "hi martin" unless I knew they had caller ID. And I wouldn't rely on an incoming phone number to guarantee who I'm talking to anyway (mobile number slightly better)
National ID number
Nope, doesn't help me sell pizzas. Quoting it in the call opening would scare 'em off, so even if i had it, I wouldn't use it.
Home/Office addresses
Useful as a convenience to save taking address details from existing customers - this one's about right, but handled crassly by the company
Date of Birth
No, not useful unless I'm selling age-restricted items (alcohol for example).
Health details
No, not useful. Why would I want to levy non-pizza charges on my customers? At this point, I'm not a pizza company, I'm a strong-arm for the insurance industry, putting people off eating my product... Why on earth would I ever do that? Actually, I can *maybe* think of one useful thing to do with health details: to recommend (say) a low carb alternative (you know that even Nestlé are doing low carb confectionary?) But only if I have knowledge that that's a customer preference, either through explicit request (best option) or inferred through purchase history. But all the "we'll force you to pay huge surcharges or eat scum tasting food" is reductio ad absurdem scaremongering
Crime details
Possibly useful to assess risk, but tbh, most delivery companies already know this through knowing their area, rather than low level data. And many pizza companies already refuse to deliver in those areas. Which would you rather? A total refusal, or an option to pay a surcharge? More choice is good, right?
Financial details, including CC transactions and limit
For low-value purchases like pizza, entirely useless. For high value purchases, including rental agreements, hey, you're credit scored already, and reasonably so. But the details are never given out to the phone staff, just the decision.
Library loans
Pointless. Even if you're hoaxing borrowing the Little Re(a)d Book
Clothing purchases
Pointless. Although anyone buying 'pleather' needs to be on a national fashion offenders registry...
Family magazine subscriptions
Doesn't help me sell pizza. Although if I'm a local pizza shop trying to keep friendly with hundreds of regular customers, remembering customers' family members could be useful. After all, you don't want to be saying "anything for the kids?" to someone who's just got divorced and had their family move out...
So the summary is, if you want to stop this from happening, do nothing. It won't. It's not good business, so businesses won't do it.
Oh, and for the record, I work with companies to design and implement CRM systems. When I see something that would cost money for no business benefit, I know clients just won't do it. Believe me, I've tried often enough:-)
Integrated it may be. CRM it ain't. I call scaremongering bullshit. Better the ACLU spends time and money on realistic threats.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno, but I expect you'd have to Stand and Deliver to the Kings of the Wild Frontier...
...I'll get me coat.
Yes, the cap's sensible, but why does this always lead to the claim that State funding would be necessary? It's entirely based on the assumption that parties should continue to spend the riches of Croesus on campaigns, which become only about who has the biggest media buy, not who has the best ideas.
At current rate of change, it'll be some time in the next millennium when the numbers equalise.
I'm also not at all convinced that the boundaries benefited the Tories overall in the 80s and 90s (although there *were* a few interesting cases of boundaries moved that just *happened* to make marginal constituencies into thumping Tory majorities) - there just hasn't been that much change since 1997.
You're right, though, I don't think it's an active Jerrymander by Labour - as I said, the boundaries haven't changed much. But you can bet your bottom that this is a significant influence on the committment to Proportional Representation evapourating.
Go on then, name them. And I bet you won't find *anything* to match 'indefinite house arrest without charge'.
...and that's just off the top of my head.
Back to the closed minds of Bloggers4Labour with you.Yes, sorry, you're right. I was thinking of course of the Salisbury Convention.
If you're being generous... Frankly, I think it really is a case of lobby fodder in the Commons - principled objections are so rare as to be newsworthy. And if you live in the constituency of a member of the current ruling party, well, look at your MP's record. Mine has rebelled in less than 1% of divisions since 1997.
Which is hardly voluntary, particularly if your job requires you to travel (mine does - where's my opt-out..?). And the manifesto commitment was to a voluntary scheme. If HMG believes it's so good and has such support in the country, why don't they allow people to choose it..?
...if you believe the Home Office figures, which no-one not affiliated to HMG does. £300 is the current estimate. Oh, and that's just set-up costs, and doesn't count actually installing readers in every doctor's surgery, every hospital, every school, every local and central government office, every bank, every Post Office, every police car, every sensitive building, every employer and so on, which it'll need to achieve its stated benefits (which are also a pile of donkey droppings, but that's another discussion).
Costs for this (per the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill Regulatory Impact Assessment (Annex A, page 42) which uses the same setup):
Reader: £3000-£5000 (each reader)
PC for reader: £1000 (each reader)
plus £21,000 for cabling at each location (derived from a estimate of £1 million for 47 airports and ports).
Or move up another step and use LPARs on a iSeries/AS400 or pSeries.
(Disclosure - I work for IBM, but not in the Server division)
Go back and look at those results again. The Labour Party gained a shade over 25% of the eligible electorate, and 35% of the actual vote. Because of the biased way that the seat boundaries are drawn, it takes far fewer people to elect a Labour MP than one from other parties, this translated into 55% of the seats - a working majority in the Commons.
Not *exactly* a ringing endorsement...
Arguably so, but at the moment, only a small proportion of the Lords are hereditaries (parent is forgetting the Lords reform over the last few parliaments). The rest are appointed, and not a few after having given large sums of cash to the Labour Party - but that's another discussion.
The balance of power, however, is held by approx 160 independent Lords - no party alignment. And by and large, they do a very good job, and refuse to be treated as lobby fodder by the Government with its powers of appointment to powerful ministries.
It's some comment on the current state of affairs that an unelected body with a proportion there by heriditary right is doing a better, more transparent, more thoughtful job than the elected one...
To separate out the two issues you're conflating:
The Parliament Act is there to prevent the unelected Lords from blocking legislation which the elected Commons has a mandate to implement. By convention this means the content of the goverment's election manifesto.
Now the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill means that not only will the Lords not be able to oppose Government policy (in the manifesto or not), this will be extended to the Commons.
Or, to put it in constitutional speak: the Executive usurps the power of the Legislature, and neuters the capacity of the Judiciary.
Yes, our freedom-loving government is plainly tired of all that mucking around attending Parliament, and persuading MPs to support its bright ideas. In future (so goes the vision), our beloved, trusted ministers will be able to amend, replace and repeal legislation by fiat. The only restrictions are that ministers can't impose new taxes (but can introduce new fees. Po-tay-to/Po-tah-to), or introduce prison sentences longer than 2 years.
So could HMG decide to make ID Cards entirely compulsory? Could they require all public services to be disposed of to PFI? Could they abolish the Scottish Parliament? Yes, Yes and Yes (they couldn't impose laws in devolved matters, but they could abolish the whole thing).
And the checks and balances on ministerial absolutism? Erm... none. The minister merely has to consider a vaguely written checklist and be personally satisfied that's it's a Good Idea overall. Because ministers are of course entirely impartial judges of their own proposals. It's already being called The Abolition of Parliament Act as Parliament simply won't be able to scrutinise legislation in advance or block it. But it's also an Abolition of The Judiciary Act as the courts can't challenge Ministerial Orders after the fact on the basis of being disproportionate or removing freedoms and protections from the citizenry as long as the Minister can show that he/she has thought long and hard about it. Presumably the fact that Ministers are genetically incapable of thinking like this won't help...
Separation of Powers? We've Heard of It
Which, as the Executive can impose what the hell it likes without the checks and balances of an adversarial Parliament, can be entirely ignored except for the 3 months before an election.
No, you don't like unions because you've seen one example, and have committed a schoolboy logical error in assuming that that is universally true.
Aye, because too many long term deals have been reneged on by employers looking for short term and long term gains.
Interestingly, consumer razor manufacturers could very, very easily make sharper blades. But then, all the time you saved getting that close shave would be wasted in tedious blood mopping. You (assuming you're part of the shaving population) don't want sharper razor blades.
What you do want is blades that keep their designed sharpness longer. And much as it pains the mfrs to have your buying cycle extended, customer loyalty is more important, so this is what you get with your diamond-tip what-nots.
And of course, you want less shaving time/effort - the multiple blades do that for you.
"Not mattering to the bottom line" isn't actually the be-all and end-all, but you're close. It's "Not being the core thing that your company does" is. So HR services matter massively to a large company's bottom line. But they're not the core activity - better to outsource it to a company that can do it better and cheaper.
If you're a fund management company, managing investments is the core thing you do; providing a customer contact centre (which is the subject of what we're talking about...) to answer customer questions and operate simple transactions isn't. That is very often very successfully outsourced, because running a good contact centre providing really great customer services is hard and very, very expensive in setup costs.
You missed the critical bit: of pension providers. Customer service is a significantly more important factor in customer retention in Financial Services compared to other sectors.
Don't know about the film location, but the *actual* intended location is in Edinburgh, just off Ferry Road. All of the book is set in Edinburgh, mostly around Leith (the title is from the chapter "Trainspotting at Leith Station").
But then, the Embra slums have been cleaned up a bit better than the Glasgow ones since the time the book was set (mid 80s; the film put it back nearly a decade), so the only Embra location in the film is the Princes St one in the opening sequence.
Isla y , dammit.
It's be interesting fitting this into a 70cl bottle, not a double bottle...
That markup is probably about right - in the !Apple ecosystem, it's split between mfr, retailer (which are the same for direct sales OEMs like Dell) and OS vendor(s).
Oh, plus of course, Apple's strategy is to be high margin, low volume. Do we really need to haul out the auto brands metaphor again, or can we work it out without for once?
Really folks, in launching the original iMac, Apple very smartly realised that in the PC market, no mfr can consistently compete on price - you'll always be beaten. Same for performance - there's always a better one coming out from competitors. So the only way to continually make good margin is to compete somewhere *else*. Which if you're selling machines running the same software as everyone else is *very* hard to do. Only Sony has had the remotest clue about this - the Vaio range were entirely built as a high status, cool brand. And Jobs is on record as wanting Apple to be very Sony-like.
Apple differentiate by cool branding, like Sony. But because they have much greater control over hardware & software, they can also differentiate through ease of use, demonstrated not only in software, but also in build design (every tried to open an apple desktop tower? One button: pop. And the inside is all perfectly laid out, neatly and tidily).
Did you really think that the "Think Different" slogan was chosen on a whim?
Ah, I understand now. This is in contrast to the entirely meaningful performance measure of clock speed used elsewhere in the industry, of course. Thankyou so much for clearing that up for me.
Nearly forgot to link to my own article on the subject:
What is Profit?
Parent is spot on and needs moderating up as insightful and informative.
I just wanted to expand on one point:
In case anyone's (mistakenly) thinking that this is pure profit that can go to the stockholders/SJ's turtle neck suppliers, please consider: this is only gross profit.
Out of that has to come contribution to:
After all that, you come out with Net Earnings Before Taxes (NEBT) aka Pre-Tax Income (PTI). Pay your taxes, and *then* you have Profit.
And *this* has to come out at a sufficiently high rate, or potential stockholders will find better returns from putting the money in other investments (say, a savings account...). *That's* the point at which it becomes worthwhile doing.
Once more, with login and Karma...
Hahahahaha
Let me see:
Current client No Wifi (security reasons and all their hardware estate has ethernet) No external party access to their ethernet so I can't plug my laptop in to their infrastructure and VPN Current hotel near the client No WiFi - expected some time in the next couple of months. Nearby public WiFi (McDonalds for some reason): Hideously Expensive. Result Client has installed the only analogue line in the building for our dialup use. Now if only it were close to our desks...23mm? Ultra Wide? Not even close. Call me when you get below 15mm. My 18mm is just about wide enough for normal use as a wide-angle (albeit on a Canon D10, which has the usual DSLR 'small CCD' problem, so lenses get a wee telephoto boost, so it's about the same as a 23mm lens with on a film body)
Looking at the linked campaign, I'm extremely supportive (having been against the UK equivalent for quite a while now).
But guys, could you pick the right target, yeah? It's the Government, stupid... businesses wouldn't want to touch it with a stick as it's government mandated extra costs with no business benefit.
It's an interesting theoretical use case, but doesn't even begin to stack up as a business case.
If I'm the hypothetical Pizza Company, I would use CRM to help me sell more pizzas (or the same number of more profitable pizzas). If I'm a hypothetical insurance company strong arm *pretending* to be a pizza company, sure, but then, Occam's Razor.
So, of the data elements in that use case:
Name May be useful to greet customers - Salutation probably more useful. But using unprompted scares off customers - I wouldn't even expect family members to open a call with "hi martin" unless I knew they had caller ID. And I wouldn't rely on an incoming phone number to guarantee who I'm talking to anyway (mobile number slightly better) National ID number Nope, doesn't help me sell pizzas. Quoting it in the call opening would scare 'em off, so even if i had it, I wouldn't use it. Home/Office addresses Useful as a convenience to save taking address details from existing customers - this one's about right, but handled crassly by the company Date of Birth No, not useful unless I'm selling age-restricted items (alcohol for example). Health details No, not useful. Why would I want to levy non-pizza charges on my customers? At this point, I'm not a pizza company, I'm a strong-arm for the insurance industry, putting people off eating my product... Why on earth would I ever do that? Actually, I can *maybe* think of one useful thing to do with health details: to recommend (say) a low carb alternative (you know that even Nestlé are doing low carb confectionary?) But only if I have knowledge that that's a customer preference, either through explicit request (best option) or inferred through purchase history. But all the "we'll force you to pay huge surcharges or eat scum tasting food" is reductio ad absurdem scaremongering Crime details Possibly useful to assess risk, but tbh, most delivery companies already know this through knowing their area, rather than low level data. And many pizza companies already refuse to deliver in those areas. Which would you rather? A total refusal, or an option to pay a surcharge? More choice is good, right? Financial details, including CC transactions and limit For low-value purchases like pizza, entirely useless. For high value purchases, including rental agreements, hey, you're credit scored already, and reasonably so. But the details are never given out to the phone staff, just the decision. Library loans Pointless. Even if you're hoaxing borrowing the Little Re(a)d Book Clothing purchases Pointless. Although anyone buying 'pleather' needs to be on a national fashion offenders registry... Family magazine subscriptions Doesn't help me sell pizza. Although if I'm a local pizza shop trying to keep friendly with hundreds of regular customers, remembering customers' family members could be useful. After all, you don't want to be saying "anything for the kids?" to someone who's just got divorced and had their family move out...So the summary is, if you want to stop this from happening, do nothing. It won't. It's not good business, so businesses won't do it.
Oh, and for the record, I work with companies to design and implement CRM systems. When I see something that would cost money for no business benefit, I know clients just won't do it. Believe me, I've tried often enough :-)
Integrated it may be. CRM it ain't. I call scaremongering bullshit. Better the ACLU spends time and money on realistic threats.