Am I wealthy?
I have no savings really, so I already knew the answer was no. I wanted to find out how everyone else was doing though, so after trawling the ONS site for a couple of hours, I found this data set.
I think I’ve put it into a graph correctly, so if you want to see how wealthy you are compared to people in your age bracket in London, enjoy:
I was surprised by how high the wealth of the top 10% is. I’ve read that this is likely to be underestimated, I guess because the more money you have, the wiser the investment in a clever accountant to hide it.
It doesn’t look like the top decile is skewed as much as you might assume (from this article):
Inflation, it’s really rather dull
Today I decided to graph how much I get paid in an attempt to deduce how much I’ll be paid in five years (which is obviously massively flawed, but amusing none the less). Whilst trying to decide whether the trend line should be linear or exponential (and hoping that exponential will be closer to reality) I thought I’d use inflation as a guide. I’m not sure why, I guess I just went off on a tangent. Anyway, it turns out the internet is full of graphs of inflation, but none appear to be cumulative. Not this one:
The graph shows how the price of a pint (or anything which cost around 3 pence / 7d in 1948) would have changed if it was only affected by inflation. It isn’t exponential, as I had expected, but more the product of two linear plots. What the hell happened in the 70s?! The advent of neoliberalism, OPEC oil embargos and Margaret Thatcher apparently.
Source: ONS, via The Guardian.
The Biyearly Post
Totally irrelevant
I just realised that the last post lags after its predecessor by almost an entire year. That’s pretty damn poor. In the interest of skewing statistics everywhere, or at least one of those created on the fly in my head, here is another post. That’s like two posts a year. Could be worse.
Reebok EasyTone
Well, It’s that time again, I am bothering to write something. It took a lot this time, I’ve been awake for almost 36 hours straight and TV has taken me to a point where I am almost upset with it. Why TV, WHY? I guess I can’t stay mad for long. It’s not TV’s fault, of course, it’s these advertising people. They all have their pretty little jobs (I want one), they get to play with graphics and silly ideas all day (seriously, that’s my kind of thing), yet 90% of their “creations” are so bad. I realise making up statistics here is a little ironic.
Unfortunately, lack of sleep has left me with the memory of only one ad this fair day evening. Unfortunately for Reebok, theirs stuck in my mind. Don’t get me wrong, this is no achievement on their part, the ad was the last before I switched off (the TV, that is. Mentally I have been gone for a while now). However I don’t have much to say about it so I shall rant a little about what I can remember of the other adverts. I apologise for all the brackets and the lack of details, at least these words appear to make some sense, even though most are not my first choice (for some reason my brain has given up on the nice words I know exist and has left me relatively monosyllabic, apart from the word monosyllabic of course).
I need to get this off my chest. It has been bothering me for a while now, along with the question “If I am a product of my genetics and environment, what is my role in this”. Anyhoo, why must these things lie (ads)? I guess this is a daft question, the response seems obvious – to sell to all these guffawing idiots with little else to do other than stare at a screen all day, spending their dole money on Pot Noodles and copies of Nuts. Seriously though, I would have thought this kind of thing would be illegal. Can’t some law be passed to force adverts to state at least one provable fact? Obviously this would have to be defined to not include things such as “It makes you look 10 years younger¹”.
¹ – 15% of 28 people with a height less then 5’4″ questioned randomly in the street whilst being bribed with chocolate biscuit(s) agree.
If I see an advert and it contains speech, it always seems to be trying to lie to me. I don’t like this for several reasons. 1. I have been taught not to lie, why should anyone else have this unfair advantage? This is an argument similar to my theory that all roads would be much safer, quicker and more enjoyable if no one else was allowed on them. 2. I dislike being so blatantly deemed an idiot, and by people I have never met, who are probably not even geographically, or sentimentally, close to me. 3. I am being taunted with things I want, whilst knowing that the product won’t really provide them to me. 4. Last, not least, for the first 10 seconds, I sit there nodding whilst reaching for the phone, wondering why I hadn’t realised I needed this amazing, high quality, fashionable dog muzzle at such a low price, I mean it’s been discounted twice, it must be cheap, even though 50% and then 20% discount still only adds to 60% and the initial price these discounts are being applied to was probably just reversed engineered from some silly marketing tactic. Hold on…
Another solution would be to allow only the less irrational of us the privilege of ownership of toys such as television. This however feels worryingly like ethnic cleansing, something I find as hard to agree with as writing in English without a spell checker. I should perhaps point out that English is most certainly my native tongue, or at least a version thereof, and French roles in in second place with sufficient charm and wit to be thrown out of a third world country whilst offering free money. Well, I could probably get myself a beer. I can speak quite loudly when I want to, and I take immense pride in the slow tempo of my speech.
Please see below for a thirty second insight into something which appears to me to have a slight logical flaw.
My question is this. Why would I pay more for a trainer which makes it more difficult to walk? I apologise for engaging my brain when I should have been tilting my head to check out all that ‘booty’.
The toiletry arms race
It seems every product on the shelves is in a never ending attempt to better itself and its peers. Everyone must have seen this, razors being a fine, although obvious example. How many blades would you like? Okay, I can understand ditching the cut-throat (there must be plenty of dead people who wish this had happened sooner). I can perhaps understand the need for more than one blade. However, five seems a little excessive. Also, what’s with that spare one on the back of my fusion? I’m really not sure I need it.
Unfortunately I also have the inexplicable desire to buy that new Gillette. I don’t like that I need it, but in the same way as a crack addict tends to want more crack, I want that razor. Maybe that’s a slight hyperbole. I get this strange sense of excitement when I come home from the supermarket with some new type of liquid, implement or paste that i can some way use to lengthen the amount of time I spend in the bathroom. Invariably, the sense of joy wears off after a couple of days as I discover that this new, sparklingly packaged, unnecessary object is almost exactly the same, and does exactly the same job, as that it replaced.
Unfortunately for Aquafresh, I do not want to buy their silly new toothpaste. For those who don’t spend as much time in front of the TV as me (a commendable, but easily accomplished task), this new wonder toothpaste foams. Yes, I realise most toothpaste foams, but this one looks like it’s a cross between shaving gel and toothpaste that could at any time envelop your mouth in a sticky bubbly mess of whiteness. There are several reasons this does not appeal to me.
- I do not want to be mistaken to be infected with rabies
- I have it on good authority that the only effect of the foam we currently have is to make orange juice taste horrible
- It looks expensive
- I have been brainwashed into a seriously good understanding of the fact that I am unable to reach about 40% of my mouth with a toothbrush (I’m not sure if this allows vomiting or where the mouth technically ends) to the point where I no longer care
- The advert irritates me
So STFU Aquafresh.
Again, for those who care, a video follows. Unfortunately the only people with enough time on their hands to upload an ad to YouTube were French. If you speak french, unlucky. You will have the unfortunate ability to understand their idiocy.
P.S. I swear in the French version it says something about anti-freeze. May add this to above list.
For the truly bored, http://aquafreshisoactive.com.
More single mums than marriages…
Here’s one for you:
THE number of young women having children has for the first time exceeded the number getting married, official figures revealed yesterday.
A survey of those in Britain aged 25 to 29 found that 24 per cent had tied the knot before 25, while 30 per cent had at least one child.
But of women in their mid-to-late 30s, 45 per cent were married before 25, while only a third were mums. The survey was conducted between 2001 and 2003.
The figures were from the Office for National Statistics in its annual Social Trends study of how Britain is changing.
What a load of balls…
There’s a load of statistics that actually mean didly squat. Why can’t laws be introduced to only allow these things to be used in context with enough data to make them of some use? I guess the Suns article wouldn’t be quite as eye catching with standard deviations thrown in.
Dove Pro Age
Want to see some old naked people? Here you go:
This ad was too naked for America and got itself banned. Sad.
Fortunately, over here in the UK, Dove have started airing similar adverts aimed at getting our old people looking good. Well, that’s bollocks, it’s just not going to happen. The ad claims to make your skin all nice and youthful by getting rid of dead skin. Fine, that seems kind of reasonable. Then, like all other adverts of this genre, the ad attempts some science. This is only brief, and is a reference to some miracle substance “AHA”. It doesn’t say what AHA is, it just claims it has lots of it. That’s good to know. Stupid science… Stupid adverts… Stupid world…
HERBASHINE!
Yes, another hair advert… You may have seen it, you may not. It goes a little like this:
Got sh*t hair?
Want shiny hair?
Think bamboo extract will help?
Able to get over the term “herbashine”?
Buy this.
If anyone could mistake this for science then it is probably a good argument for capital punishment. I just have these questions:
How can bamboo help anything (unless you’re a panda)?
Which eejit thought up the word herbashine?
Can I come to the next product meeting?
Here’s an Italian youtube video about it, for those who care. It would seem no one has felt the need to put the English version up.
Over and out.
Hair adverts
Has anyone seen a hair advert where it is claimed that the product will make your hair 100% more shiny? They just make me laugh every time. How ridiculous, how can anyone measure the shininess of hair, and even if you can, what does this statement actually mean to anyone who sees the ad? As far as I know, there is not a scale for hair shininess.
The Beginning
So, I spend a lot of time reading things, or watching the news thinking how ridiculous the statistics used are. The only use of statistics appears to be to make the public think whatever the media like, statistics are handy because they can be interpreted however you like. Yeah, the media seems to enjoy this to the extent that it is almost comic.
Most irritating, for some reason, are hair adverts. Do they think that women can not work out how stupid these things are, or perhaps they can’t.
So, anyhoo, that’s what you are going to find here. Inane ramblings about the stupidity of statistics, or perhaps just the general public who are fooled by them.