There's always a bigger fish

I was sad to read about Kraft buying Cadbury. When I was young, my dad used to go down the Off-Licence and bring us back bars of chocolate. There was always something special about Cadbury's. It was like there was chocolate, and then there was Cadbury's chocolate and Cadbury's was real chocolate.

I've been through this too many times to genuinely mourn. My childhood was twenty years ago and the things which made it special are dying. That's just what happens.

What really made me think was a line in the BBC report:

Earlier, Cadbury workers had staged protests in London calling for government support to guarantee jobs.

There are two things wrong with that. The first I'll get to, but the second is that there's nothing unusual about that.

I have a friend who believes--passionately--in a version of free-market economics. He's never read a damned thing about the theory or history, but when he talks it's enough to convince almost anyone short of Karl Marx. His idea is of hundreds of businesses all competing for the same buck. The companies are small, dynamic and cut-throat. They form and disappear like bubbles in a glass of Pepsi. They respond to changing consumer and worker tastes like salmon swimming upstream.

It's a model which means you can't get too attached to your business because you may wake up one day and realise you need to change it beyond recognition. That means it's got to be cheap and easy to set up a business. It also means someone can go from being a CEO to a stock boy and back again in a week.

There's no fear keeping people in their jobs, so if you want to keep your employees you have to keep them happy. There's plenty of other places for customers to go, so you've got to keep them happy, too.

Who loses in this model? Prices will be higher, because bulk production suddenly becomes impossible. There'll be no more chain stores and each town with have it's own set of shops, so you'll have to learn each town's shopping ecosystem individually: There's none of that comfort which comes from being able to walk into a strange town and get a cup of your favourite coffee.

The big losers are the shareholders and the CEO's. Those guys who don't do any real work and get all the rewards. Those guys who decide to pay their workers the bare legal minimum and fire them for independent thinking. Everybody, everybody, will have to work for a living.

That's the way my friend talks about it, anyway.

The trouble we have with the system at the moment is that the power is in the hands of those shareholders and CEO's. Those people who never have to look their workers in the face and never have to watch the consequences of their actions, much less live through them.

Western history is a bloody, gruesome place. A lot of that blood and gore was splattered in attempts to give people some power in their lives. Free the serfs. Free the slaves. Establish a parliament accountable to its people. Give every man and woman--regardless of income--a vote. Now look what we've done with our hard-worn inheritance... The shareholders decide to sell, and thousands of peoples' lives are destroyed. Jobs are scraps flicked off the CEO's tables to keep their precious machines oiled. They'll flick them somewhere else, if they prefer. And there's nothing anyone can do to stop them.

I just think it's sad.

My Arbitrary Numbering System is Better than Yours

(I actually wrote this on Boxing Day, but didn't have access to the Internet to post it today...)

Jeff VanderMeer and his wife Ann are putting together an anthology of Steampunk short stories called Steampunk Reloaded. The catch is that all the stories have to have been previously published, which is kind of handy for me: The only 'Steampunk' story I have presentable is Of Mice and Journeymen. So, I sent it off for consideration. It'd be nice to be accepted, but my hopes aren't high. They say they want things outside of the of normal Victorian Gentlemen in steam-powered spaceships thing, but I think Journeymen is a bit too far out.

It's not long now before it's exactly a year before the decade of the noughties closes. Apart from three major terrorist attacks in the West, two wars, a world banking crises and a global recession, what the hell has happened this decade?

When I was growing up, my family didn't talk much about the past, about who they were or where they'd come from. There was this set of rules that our extended family worked within, which they never really explained and I never really picked up. (My brother managed to pick them up perfectly though, so I must have been doing something wrong.) Now we're all older, they're a bit more open and I'm a bit more emotionally sensitive.

I spent Christmas Day with my parents, my brother and his finance, and my aunt and uncle. Everyone apart from me, my mother and my aunt (her sister) went to see where my dad works (I'd seen it already), and my aunt started talking.

When they were young, both my maternal grandparents worked. Their children--my mum, my aunt and my uncle--were looked after by a friend a few doors down who had four kids of about the same ages. I'm reliably informed that chaos--and in a few cases, bloodshed--ensued. The children grew up, my mum became a party girl, my aunt became the party girl's older sister and my uncle got into cars. The kids down the road grew up, one joining the army at fifteen, one moving to Australia, the others going their own way too.

The one who joined the army had six weeks leave, and came to see his childhood playmates. Knowing what was what, my aunt kept making excuses and leaving the strapping young lad and my mother the party girl in the room, alone together. Boys, you see, always came around to see her.

It wasn't until my mother cornered her sister in the kitchen and told her that the strapping young army lad hadn't come all this way to be left in the room with the sister of the girl he was in love with that something clicked.

And the best part is that they were married and lived happily ever after, the army lad and my aunt.

Childhood playmates becoming life-long partners. Isn't that the kind of wonderful thing you don't expect to see outside of cheap TV shows? Apparently it happens in my family, too.

(My uncle's career in the army was far from life-long and happy. It's a bit of a shame I can't talk in depth with him about it because it could be a real light on my opinions on armed forces, but I'm not going to poke old, open wounds.)

I'm not going to use that story in anything I write, because I don't want to write cheap TV shows. It's a lovely story, though, perhaps all the better because I'm not going to annex it. It can just stay as it is, a little slice of my family history.