Oops.

In my last post I mistakenly thought I'd reached 100 posts when in reality I'd not. However, in my defence I came to the 100 post conclusion as a result of the dashboard feature on blogger which also counts unpublished posts. So there you have it, I have posts in reserve! Or something.

In other news, I've noticed something a little odd of late in London. Our power keeps cutting out - when I say keeps I actually mean 3 times in the last month or so. It's quite irritating. I was sat last night collecting and inputting data for Nigerian sterling proportions from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, as you do at 1am, when the power in the flat suddenly went out and various alarms started blaring. It was out for about 5 minutes before coming on again for 5 minutes then going off for 30 seconds before coming back on again. You'd think in the world's largest city at a time of low consumption there wouldn't be an outage surely? To be fair it did only seem to be my street but even still. Couple this with our water being cut off twice in the last month and I'm beginning to see the value in Mitch's insistence that we keep spare water. Not quite sure how I would be able to see with the water when the power goes out but at least it keeps me from being thirsty!

Joking aside, I can see the sheer volume of planning and maintenance that goes into utilities for a metropolitan area to keep functioning so it puzzles me all the more when these things are handed over to private companies to try and wrest a profit out of them. Surely infrastructural necessities for the efficient functioning of society - water, electricity generation and so on - should be under the auspices of government, or at least subject to governmental action such as reserving the right to transfer the ownership of provision of these utilities in the event of pre-determined and agreed targets not being met say, in order to ensure quality of provision is continuously at a level which allows society to function at its optimum capacity? More than x amount of work hours lost due to a loss in provision of y utility means the license automatically goes up for renewal. If targets are continually met and surpassed then the company receives a reward, like a reduction in tax on profits for example. Call it performance related pay if you will. That'd work right?