The universal postal myth

I was listening the other today to someone from the Royal Mail moaning about competing services cherry picking and doing the lucrative postal deliveries inside London, while the poor old Royal Mail had to do all the difficult expensive stuff. And this had to be the case because of the need for a universal post, which 'everyone agrees' is essential.

Well, I don't think everyone does agree. I, for one, don't think it is essential.

Think about it. Would you expect to pay the same price for a bus into town and to get to Edinburgh? Hardly. Why should mail be any different? We understand we need to pay more to send a letter to, say, Hong Kong - why shouldn't it cost more to send it somewhere far distant and expensive to reach in the British Isles.

Yes, you might say, but what about the poor people who live at the furthest reaches of the UK? What indeed? They have every right to live there. But I'm not sure they have a right to expect me to subsidise their postal service every time I send something just down the road to Salisbury.

I think part of the problem with the universal post system is the lack of creativity applied to getting around the practical difficulties of doing anything different. At first sight you might imagine it would be a nightmare, having to work out how far it is to your destination. And it would be if you did this (although the railway manages to operate a fares system that copes - and so could the Post Office). But here are two easy-to-implement alternatives:

Simple banding. Anything to the same postcode letters is local, anything in the same country is country, anything to a different country within the UK is crossborder. Three bands, automatically detectable from the postcode. Easy peasy.
Receiver pays. This is the more interesting idea. Still have a universal price to send a letter anywhere in the UK. But if you live more than a certain distance from the nearest sorting office, you pay a premium to receive your post (or go and collect it for free). This would be fiddly to do on a per-item basis, but could be simply implemented monthly or annually through the council tax collection.

If we moved away from a universal pricing system, we could then get proper competition in the postal system and Royal Mail wouldn't be able to whinge about other companies cherrypicking as they would be adequately compensated for the difficult-to-get-to destinations and could provide a competitive base price for the local stuff. It would probably bring down the cost of many mail items.

It's not perfect - it's top of the head, 5 minutes thought stuff, I admit it. There would be extra complications. But the fact is that the idea of having a single price for a letter to anywhere in the UK is not sacrosanct, it is not written into the constitution (hardly surprising when we don't have a written constitution), and it's not necessarily the best way to go about things. It is at least worth thinking about the alternatives, rather than taking the usual stick-our-heads-in-the-sand approach.

Image from Wikipedia

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

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