Sunday 22 February 2009

The people united

Last week saw a shareholders' meeting at Precision Handling. The employee and stakeholder enabling scheme means that those of us on the sharp end can turn up and discuss matters of the moment. What's absorbing the attention of those with nothing better to do (Sarkozy comes to mind, god he's annoying) is the need for a mechanism for appointing a new chairman, given that the queen is too busy, what with those corgis to feed and ruling a country that doesn't have an economy any more. It was a slow Saturday, so I went along.

The obvious thing would be to have candidates and a vote. But no, nobody good enough would wish to be seen to want the job (?) and the straightforward democratic option would be divisive (??). So we're going to have a committee. The committee will conduct secret ballots to see what people want, and then ignore the result.

Brilliant. Enver Hoxha would have been proud.

Friday 13 February 2009

New horizons

I had to review an application coming from a student in Peking. His romanization, not mine: the official address is "Peking University, Beijing." Go figure. 

He had a detailed record of the courses he'd taken, and the scores he'd got (all very high, he looked really impressive).  But one of the courses (along with Marxist-Leninist thought and dialectical materialism) was in plutonomy.

WTF? I'm not making it up.