Strangled at birth

Rather unwittingly the last spendthrift Labour government thew the middle classes a nice little bone in their bid to be all green and cuddly. This was something called the Feed In Tarrif (FIT) which basically meant that if you generated your own electricity from a solar photovoltaic array on your roof you would get paid to do so and at a very generous rate of 43p per kWh as well. That's guaranteed for 25 years and index linked.

Oh and as there's no way to actually measure how much you generate gets back into the grid, you get 3p per 0.5kWh on top of that.

And you get to use all the electricity you generate too, so a household bill like mine of around £800 a year would come down to around £200 a year.

So with a 4kW array costing around £14k to install it works out that over the 25 years you'll make around 10 to 12% return and break even around the 8 year mark. And with my current investments making 2 or 3% at best its an absolute no-brainer. So last month some men crawled over my roof and I now have my own little power station that's  generated over 100kWh of nice clean energy and enriched me to the best part of fifty quid in the couple of weeks its been running.

What's that Mr Government? Middle class people with disposable income making a profit? Oh no, that will never do, never never never! You're there Mr Middleclass to pay your taxes that we will spend on services you'll never use and give your money away to those poor developing nations with space programmes and nuclear weapons like India and China. We can't have you doing that, you're supposed to be installing solar because you can afford it and to make us in government look all green and answer the problem of Warble Gloaming! You're not actually supposed to treat this as an investment!

So in six weeks time the coalition are going to cut the FIT to 22p, and that's only if you've got a "C" energy rated house already (which is nigh on impossible to get if your house is more than 20 years old) . I did a quick back on an Excel spreadsheet calculation and the ROI on a 4kW rig like mine drops to around 2% and the payoff period almost triples to 21 years.

Now a small but significant industry has grown up in this country over the last 2 years to service the demand for Solar PV; it's estimated that it employs around 25,000 people. This is not to mention the ancillary services it supports like the team of scaffolders who shoved a load of metal poles round my house (and then took 2 weeks to come and take them down again!) - I was chatting to Mr Scaffolder and he said solar PV was around half their work these days.

Well Mr Scaffold is probably going to have to lay off some of his staff and there's going to be 25000 people heading for the dole office come December because nobody is going to want Solar PV now. A new industry, supporting thousands of people has been strangled at birth because oh my god we can't have people making money out of Eco-Wibble can we. Those people on the social are going to cost way fecking more than the feed in tarrif money ever would.

Sure, the high rate was to kick start the solar business in the UK and it was unsustainable at 43p but why the hell didn't you cut it back slowly and on the dates you promised? All the hoons in Whitehall have done by cutting the FIT in half is to strangle one of the very private enterprises that was supposed to hoover up all these public sector jobs at birth.

Fucking idiots.

Jaded

I wander back to my desk this afternoon having made myself a cup of tea to find the team leader of the mob across the corridor from us (let's call him Berk for now) excitedly chatting to my project manager.

What is the cause of all this excitement.

Well it turns out that Berk has had this brilliant idea (that he's nicked from Failbook - so you know this isn't going to end well) to get a team together to deliver some application to our users in one 24 hour period, that is starting first thing in the morning, working all day and then pulling an all nighter.

I was just about to say "what the fuck have you been snorting Berk" when I see my PM nodding his head faster that the Churchill Insurance dog on crystal meth. "Wow yeah, it's great, we can really show what we can deliver."

What you will deliver if you go ahead with this is a pile of cack built of compromise, quick hacks, hard coded "variables" and so many fudges you could open a branch of Thorntons; further more said "product" will perform like a mastodon on quaaludes and have all the grace and functionality of a 1960's era Trabant. And this abomination you are going to put onto a trader's desktop 24 hours after the project starts and expect them to use it live??? Jesus this just has "EPIC FAIL" written all over it in eight foot high neon pink letters.

I just could not believe sane IT Professionals were seriously going to go ahead with this - this fuckup in the making already has a venue booked where the 8 "volunteers" will be doing the coding - but there they were, thinking this is the greatest thing since the invention of the database. Bert has even got the head IT manager to stump up for the pizzas and coke.

I think they could tell by my expression that I wasn't really buying into this plan so Bert tried "Well we'll be strictly using Extreme Programming techniques! Paired programming! Test driven development!" - Yeah cut your hands on keyboards by 50% before you even start, why not handicap the team even further by paying someone to come round and kick them in the goolies every hour whilst you're at it. "Oh and I'm going to be making a time lapse film of the 24 hours" Hey and why not put that Benny Hill "Yakety Sax" music over the top of it, that'll make us all look like the highly trained and experienced artisans we are won't it.

Anyway after a while my PM started to realise that I wasn't going to stop making my "If Berk says one more fucking word he's getting a dose of the breath weapon set to 'Heart of the Sun'" face and decides to save Berk from immolation and goes "Oh maybe this would be a good thing for our graduate coder of all of 2 years experience". I nod and project passive-aggressive body language making it clear that everybody better leave my workspace right now and leave the grumpy dragon to his tea.

I don't know, maybe I've been too long in this gig and I'm just jaded. I just cannot see this being anything other than a stupid stunt to raise Bert's profile which will end up being a complete train wreck and will take a hell of a lot longer than 24 hours and more than 8 people to put right. Maybe when I was younger this might have seemed interesting to do but at my age there is no way on this little ball of mud and rock that at my age I am going to voluntarily put in a 24 hour shift, certainly not for a day off in lieu and a "bonus" of a 50 quid M&S voucher and a mention in some "What IT did this week" bit of the company website nobody reads anyway.

When Christmas Decorations Attack

Just for the record I absolutely fucking hate Christmas (but then again I fucking hate everything) and I utterly, utterly loathe those people who festoon their house in sodding light bulbs sometime in November in what they think is a marvellous son et lumiere tribute to the Son Of Man but in reality is a LED shitstorm of cheap tackyness.

However over on The Paramedic's Diary I read a wonderful story of one chavtastic disfunctional family who probably won't be draining the National Grid with their blinking cack next year...

Then a 2am call came in for an 18 year-old who’d fallen thirteen floors after an argument with his mother... I could see the ambulance inside a small courtyard below a very tall block of flats. It was eerily quiet as I approached the figures standing around the crew... They were looking down at the body of a young man - he lay like a starfish, arms outstretched, on the concrete. Blood had gathered in a think dark pool under his head. His eyes were shut and he was very still.

So what had caused this tragedy?

The boy had argued with his mother about a trivial matter. He had a habit of climbing over the balcony of the flat and standing on a thin ledge on the other side, holding onto the balcony itself. From there he would threaten to jump. It was emotional nonsense and he never carried out his threat, so when he did it again tonight, nobody in the flat took him seriously.

His fatal mistake was to hold onto the Christmas lights that were wound round the balcony on the outside. He used the tubular light strip for support but it came away in his hands and he simply slipped down it, like he’d grabbed a greasy rope. I looked over the balcony and the light strip was waving about in the wind, flashing happily away. Far below it was the body of the boy who’d used it to threaten his loved ones.

Awesome! Truly world class fuckwittery! This guy surely is a shoo-in for The Darwin Awards. I do love it when twats like this do themselves in as it saves me having to breathe on the fuckers. I nearly pissed myself laughing.

The only downside to this is I feel sorry for the poor bastards who had to scrape him up off the pavement. If I were in charge Stuart and his colleagues would have been able to chuck him in the bins round the back of the flats.

Do go and read the whole thing - I defy you to keep a straight face.

And don't eat too many nuts. See you in the new year.