The superstore bubble is about to pop

In today’s economic climate, does it make any sense to force your customers to burn litres of overpriced petrol to waste their afternoons visiting a store that’s sitting on acres of land that’s losing its value faster than your tills can rake it in? Superstores and out-of-town retail parks, yesterday was the tip of your boom.

Yesterday? Yesterday we had a panicky phone call from a friend who’d been stuck in gridlock for over an hour with two small children. Where exactly? In the exit lane of the Tesco car park.

It’s the inevitable result of turning a neighbourhood supermarket into a superstore that now attracts customers from a vast area of North London. Basically, since this Tesco extended its floorspace and somehow squashed in more parking spaces (against the wishes of the locals) it’s become too popular for its own good.

The planning is idiotic. As soon as the parking lot reaches critical capacity, the cars trying to get in cause a jam in the surrounding roads which makes it impossible for cars to get out. Finally, the tailback brings the North Circular motorway to a standstill, followed by more and more of the local roads as desperate motorists try to find a way around the blockage.

As neighbours go, Tesco is one who buys the house next to yours, crams a family into each bedroom, two more in the front room and then diverts their excess sewage onto your lawn.

But I don’t expect it to last.

How many times does anyone want to spend an hour or more trying to leave a car park? Any savings from Tesco’s “deals” are quickly negated by the petrol they waste. The locals already head in the opposite direction to do their shopping. I’m willing to bet that Tesco’s abomination will be a vast white elephant in a year’s time as people turn to smaller supermarkets and the corner store.

(Whoever sorts out an internet grocery shopping set-up that delivers your stuff to convenient always-open local sites will also clean up big time.)

101 uses for a dead Tesco, anyone?

Do I need a diagonal thinking cap?

My sister’s great at thinking literally, logically and systematically. I tend to think sideways in a jangling chaos of pictures, words and noises. Now the ad industry is trying to push “diagonal” thinking on us as the next big thing.

They all have their uses and we all end up, hopefully, doing the sorts of activities and work that make use of our thinking modes. Literal thinkers work with and within systems, lateral thinkers head for the creative world and diagonal thinkers tell us how wonderful they are.

All fine and dandy. Except occasionally I need to get literal for a few hours. Like when I’m doing my tax return, or I’m in a supermarket or sitting in a meeting with an anally retentive client.

I’ve also watched literal thinkers struggle to handle situations where they really need to just chuck their preconceptions in the bin. Handling little children, for instance, or getting a new piece of technology to work.

The diagonal thinkers never have a problem, of course, because they can “switch effortlessly” from one mode of thinking to another. Which may or may not explain all the puerile advertising we see on the box. Personally, I don’t have that ability and simply end up with rude letters from Her Majesty, all the wrong stuff in my trolly, or picturing my client with an axe buried in her head.

But I imagine that everyone’s brains are physically capable of thinking in any way, we just end up training our brains into one path or another over time (or having them forcibly retrained at school). So what we need is some way to “jolt” our brains from one mode to the other as the occasion demands. Nothing as invasive as an axe, hopefully, but probably a sort of hat with electrodes that stimulate different parts of the skull.

And preferably with the controls disguised so that my client can’t see me desperately stabbing the “ossified and constipated” setting five minutes into the meeting.

Could the credit crunch trigger a real global economy?

One of the problems of the world is the extreme concentration of highly educated, highly talented people in just a few major centres. It’s only obvious that spreading out the cream will be to the world’s benefit. And now it’s likely to happen.

In the USA and UK, there are still some derivative pigeons flying around aimlessly in the air. But the great big clouds of them that have already come home to roost will soon be kicking and pecking the rest of the economy to bits and pooing on the pieces.

A lot of short-sighted observers are proclaiming that the rest of the world will get off lightly. What a joke. The S&P 500 and the FTSE 100 are mostly global corporations. And most of the banks are global. So there’s going to be a big mess of horizontal dominoes fairly soon. But still, some economies will suffer less than others. Which will have a very interesting result.

Right now, London’s hottest newly unemployed bankers are heading off to Dubai. (Presumably the Arabs want their banks to go belly-up as well, I’m not sure.) And as sector after sector gets hit, more and more highly qualified people will jet off to wherever they can still scratch a living.

Back in 1929, there was no global economy to escape to. But this time around, hotshots who followed their natural career paths to New York, London, etcetera will end up all over the world map. Every age group, from middle-aged parents to young execs to grads. Because it’s a lot more fun to earn a living in some faraway place than it is to rot back home, waiting for your home to be repossessed or simply waiting in an unemployment office queue.

Places like New Zealand and Tasmania and Argentina and Chile and Tunisia and Panama and I don’t know, all kinds of places that ambitious people totally overlooked before can now expect huge injections of professional talent and can-do willingness to succeed. Even the less developed places will gain – anywhere where’s there’s enough people to constitute a market will be attractive: Vietnam, the Philippines, Cuba, Peru.

Many, many years, Scottish engineers sailed away from their home and kick-started all kinds of progress in unlikely places. Now it could happen again, but across every kind of economic endeavour. Most will have never lived abroad before. Others will actually be returning home to countries they left after school or graduation. Sure there’ll be plenty of failure along the way, but in ten years’ time, the global economy could just become a lot more level.

It’s the talent and knowledge diaspora that the international development quangos could have only dreamed about.

Nudity: the only answer to sweatshops

Mass-produced clothes are such an ethical minefield. The only way we can be absolutely sure about the conditions under which they‘re produced is if they actually have a label saying “Produced by under-aged pre-teens working 12 hours a day for a plate of gruel.”

So in the end we just kind of buy what we can afford and hope for the best. OK, I know that American Apparel is made in LA (I’ve seen the factory) and Xara is made in Spain but if the newspapers told us tomorrow that the stuff was being sneaked in the back door of the factory from containers imported from an underground child labour camp in Birmingham, we’d probably just shrug, sigh and reach for our Fairtrade cups of coffee which we’re pretty sure come from real hill farmers but may just be channeled through a hill farmer who’s really a front for a multinational drugs gang.

One way to get around the clothing guilt thing is to buy second hand clothes, which is fine except someone’s got to buy the stuff first hand to make it second hand for us ethical types. It’s really just a matter of deferring the guilt. Besides, what about the people in the developing world who’re getting most of the second hand clothing now? If the stuff stayed in our wardrobes or just ended up at the neighbours, what would they wear and what would all the middlemen around the globe who deal in second hand clothing do for a living?

(Well, there is the chance that all the textile companies that were forced to close down when their markets were swamped by the West’s discarded clothing could start up again, but it’s probably a bit late for that.)

No, the answer is to wear nothing. No guilt, no shame. Just the flesh you were born with. And if you’re arrested, your defence would be that of the environmental activitists who were acquitted from damaging the Kingsnorth power station in Kent: “I admit my crime but I committed it purely to prevent a greater crime.”

Coming soon to a news channel near you.

Get ready for a new world language

Given the enormous adaptability, flexibility and learnability of English, it seems unlikely that it won’t remain the lingua franca of the world. But that expression ‘lingua franca’ must be a big red flashing clue. French used to be the leading language in Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific and parts of America. Today? It’s fallen down the international language list - behind English, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese. (I’ve arbitrarily decided that Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali and Russian are regional rather than international languages, OK?)

Sure, French lost its place because, one, the French Empire disappeared and, two, there’s a whole bureaucracy devoted to keeping the language ‘pure’, meaning it simply can’t adapt to the modern world of gigabytes, tacoburgers and collateralized debt obligations.

With English, the political empire has disappeared but the British/American cultural empire is still supreme, led by Hollywood, Wall Street, Harry Potter, pop music and the internet. And English is utterly remarkable for the speed at which it adds new words and expressions, as well as new meanings and uses for existing words. Three noteworthy examples from the last few months would be ‘credit crunch’, ‘deleverage’ and ‘skiing’ (spending the kids’ inheritance - the logical result of the first two examples.)

So why would such a useful language lose its top dog position?

Well, just take a look at how fast new slang (‘epic fail’ for example) spreads on the internet. Check out Lolcats (at icanhascheezburger.com) to see how freely grammar is being subverted purely for the hell of it. Up to now the ‘establishment’ has always been strong enough to drop a wet blanket on such deviance, or assimilate it if necessary. (No matter how people talk on the street, the mainstream media and bank statement speak tend to keep us toeing the line in business environments and at dinner parties. This is also why none of the synthetic languages like Esperanto or, er, Klingon, have got very far.)

But one day the latest slang may just get completely out of hand and set off on its own uncharted course, diverging further and further from the mother tongue. Especially as the ‘establishment’ is becoming more and more distant in terms of age from the people pioneering new language use.

On the internet, a ten year old’s user generated content is as valid as anyone else’s. You no longer need a PhD to sound off on what’s right and wrong. And remember, going against the grain is an end in itself for the young.

Add to that the fact that the centre of gravity of the internet is moving Eastwards. Eastern Europeans and Asians are all adding their voices – and words. And that the developing world has an enormous ‘youth bubble’ reaching the age of defiance.

They’ll be holding the keys to the world economy soon – and may just assert their power with a new language. 

Open source democracy, anyone?

So now we know that uncontrolled capitalism ends in tears. And you can be sure that leaders of less democratic countries like China, Iran and Venezuela will offer the opinion that it’s really Western-style liberal democracy that’s to blame, and really, the State has to control every walk of life to protect citizens from regular mass financial suicide.

And let’s be honest, democracy as it’s been practised lately hasn’t really worked. While it’s left the economy alone to boom out of control, we’ve somehow ended up with more and more state control of everything else anyway.

There’ll be a lot of pressure now to extend state control: firstly to the economy, and then to everything else too, particularly immigration, imports and protection of resources.

But the opposite is also quite feasible. A move towards an even more democratic system, made possible via the internet.

In the UK we’ve already seen a prototype version with the rise of e-petitions, whereby if enough people support a proposal, the government is forced to respond. So far it’s killed off the notion of government being allowed to satellite-track our car journeys, but Jeremy Clarkson still hasn’t emerged as a serious contender to Gordon Brown’s premiership, and we haven’t introduced cannabis laws in a “simular mannor” to Amsterdam.

But the basic idea is wonderful. Members of parliament are a waste of time and money: they simply follow their leaders like hungry dogs. When a bill of real importance comes up for voting, most of them have no better understanding of its implications than the man in the street and just vote as they’re told, if they bother to vote at all. In the UK, the upper house is often the only voice of reason, and they’re not even democratically constituted.

With e-democracy, e-mocracy, or wikiocracy, or whatever it might be called, everyone gets to vote on everything. Of course, to prevent a situation where only an organized elite bothers to vote, there would need to be economic incentives to vote – units in a national savings scheme would be sufficient. (And if that doesn’t particularly incentivise the rich, so much the better. They have far too much incentive to fund our politicians at the moment.)

Bills could be proposed by anyone, and others could second them or propose amendments wiki fashion. Perhaps a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote isn’t sufficient: one version of a bill might be worth a ‘7 out of 10’ and another only worth a ‘5’. People could comment on the bills online, just as they comment on news stories and washing machines at the moment, and others could rate the value of their comments. After all, it’s nothing we’re not doing already on hundreds of different websites.

There would also have to be security safeguards to stop other people from hijacking your vote, or from exposing how you voted. Some would say that’s impossible: but the fact is that real e-security is an absolute priority right now anyway to prevent Russian gangsters from destroying what’s left of our economy.

The fact that so many people still aren’t connected to the internet isn’t a big problem either: people could phone or text in their votes once the security problem is licked.

Then we could dissolve parliament, except for an upper house of some kind to act as a counterbalance in the event of some mass media-driven hysteria leading us to ban alcohol or something, and see how real democracy works.

GM, A.I. and my daughter's birthday

I’ve just ordered a unicorn foal to give to my daughter for her sixth birthday. Not one of those nasty bodge jobs where they graft on an ibex horn in the middle of a horse’s forehead, this is the real thing, gene spliced to perfection.

I can’t wait to see my little girl’s face. Especially when the baby unicorn speaks to her in its cute little voice. OK, the unicorn won’t actually have a proper voice box, it would need a human brain as well to do real speech and I’m not sure I’d want that even if it was legal, which, as we all know, it isn’t.

So they’re installing the latest voice synthesizer plus voice-recognition and speech AI into a jewel-like casing and implanting that on the forehead below the horn. It’ll have wi-fi functionality so the AI and voice can be upgraded as my daughter gets older.

Also, if the AI starts talking complete nonsense, it can be rebooted – I can even send it things to say, which could work out brilliantly if my daughter’s having a hissy fit about having a bath or doing her homework or whatever. Imagine. “I eat grass, you should eat your broccoli.”

There’s a power supply built in somehow, works off the horse’s, sorry, unicorn’s, body heat in some ingenious way.

OK, so it’s all costing me an arm and a leg but it’s going to be worth it when the neighbours see it strutting by. It’ll knock their griffin right off its perch. The stupid thing hasn’t even learnt how to fly, gets a broken leg every time they give it a go.