We are all of us enlightened

Anyone who has discovered or re-interpreted something in such a way that it is their genuine belief that it is of unselfish benefit to humankind will have a link direct to the text of it from their FB page (if they have one) and not to a site charging upfront for downloadable copies of it.

A person who says they will make you feel better about yourself but who implies your guilt for the deeds of others or uses unpleasant or upsetting imagery as a tool in any part of their process is a manipulative git, not a guru.

And, of course, no sage worth their salt goes around quoting other people.

So, please, do not go looking for spiritual advice from anyone who either derives or intends to derive income [or elevated status] from giving it. 

The longer they can keep you from discovering that you already have what you seek, and that it is only the looking for it that is preventing you from finding it, the more they earn.

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We are all of us enlightened

Unless we let some body

Convince us otherwise.

(© John Barrow (Po))

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Goodmoney CIC - Part Two (FB 11th June 2015)

A question arose. I researched and concluded thus:

It is my opinion that Goodmoney Community Interest Company (Goodmoney CIC) is only good by name and their Goodmoney Voucher business is profoundly detrimental to any local economy that engages with it. I cannot advise anyone to buy Goodmoney Vouchers or to accept them as payment.

Part two – Statements and Sums (fewer words but loads more numbers)

For Goodmoney CIC, Goodmoney Vouchers is a low risk business model with high return potential over a short to medium trading period. No loss will be suffered by Goodmoney CIC when the scheme burns out.

For givers, Goodmoney Vouchers are a stupidly expensive way to give spendable gifts.

For suppliers of goods or services, Goodmoney Vouchers are a stupidly expensive way to receive payments, being both short of sales value and delayed from the date of sale, adversely impacting profit margins, cashflow and VAT accounts. A retailer achieving modest margins on cash and card sales could have their business collapsed by this scheme if they accepted too many of these vouchers over a busy Christmas period.

Interestingly, buried deep in Goodmoney CIC’s T&C is a clear acknowledgement that operating their once-a-month payment run is detrimental to a business’s cashflow.

Is the Goodmoney Voucher scheme illegal? Not as a business but the way it is promoted might be and its qualification for CIC status might be questionable if viewed very closely

Is the Goodmoney Voucher scheme ethical? I don’t think so.

Would the Goodmoney Voucher scheme benefit the community or boost the local economy? No.

As it is both the Givers of the gifts and the Sellers of the goods who make up The Community and both groups lose out compared to giving the same gift value in cash the scheme is clearly not a boost to the economy of The Community. The scheme appears designed to do the opposite and to siphon cash out of the economy of The Community
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If you want some arithmetical proof of the above, read on.

I use the giving of a single Voucher with a “£20” face value in this example:

To buy a Goodmoney Voucher with a face value of £20.00 will cost £23.75 if you include in your order the £1.00 for a gift card and envelope and the £2.75 for signed-for delivery of the voucher to you.

The current standard price of 1st Class Signed-For Delivery by Royal Mail of a 100g letter is £1.73 and if a business can’t buy gift cards with envelopes for less than 50 pence a time they should replace their buyer.

At first glance, this appears as if Royal mail have earned £1.73, the gift card supplier has earned 50p and Goodmoney CIC have made 50p on the card and £1.02 on the delivery to you of the voucher, a profit of £1.52 from your purchase of a “£20” Goodmoney Voucher.

For those who really enjoy figures, 6.4% of your outlay has gone straight to Goodmoney CIC.

There will be some costs incurred in processing the Voucher orders but if we assume success for Goodmoney CIC such that 1000 sales of “£20” vouchers to have taken place in a period their gross profit from the sale of the Vouchers in this same period will have been £1520 and I would expect their net profit to still exceed £1000 if they are running their business efficiently.

Goodmoney CIC would suggest this additional cost to you is worthwhile to ensure your present is spent locally and benefits local businesses. If you believe them you will buy into their scheme and the £20 worth of goods the recipient of your gift buys will have cost you £23.75, 18% more than it would have cost you to give cash.

When you are mulling this over in your head, you will probably be thinking that the £20 worth of goods the person you gave the Voucher to spends it on represents £20 worth of revenue for the local business supplying the goods and that’s that, but it doesn’t.

The local business supplying the goods only receives £19 when they redeem the “£20” Voucher, even though they have handed over the full £20 worth of goods and still have to pay a VAT bill as if they had received the full £20. The missing £1 stays with Goodmoney CIC as their 5% fee to businesses.
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I’ll come back to the effects on businesses in a moment. For now I will stick to the transaction as viewed by the buyers of the Vouchers, for it is only their money that funds the scheme.

If you wanted someone to be able to buy £20 worth of goods in a local shop and you gave them a £20 note that they then spent in a local shop, you would be down £20, the person you gave the cash to would have £20 worth of goods from the shop and the shop would have £20.

Introducing a Goodmoney Voucher into the transaction doesn’t affect the person who received the gift from you as a Voucher instead of cash, they still get £20 worth of goods from the shop, but this time you are down by £23.75 and the shop only gets £19, the other £1 having being retained by Goodmoney CIC. The shop also has to wait until Goodmoney CIC’s monthly pay run before they get their £19 which leaves them out of pocket in the meanwhile.

Updating the model now you have seen the second part of the transaction, Goodmoney CIC actually take another £1.00 to add the £1.52 of net profit you already knew they were taking. Goodmoney CIC now has £2.52 of your £23.75 and the shop you thought you were supporting has not done as well as you imagined they would. In which case you have been misled.

In the end, 10.6% of what you gave to Goodmoney CIC would stay with Goodmoney CIC, not just the 6.4% of it that showed up originally.
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Wind this up to the 1000 customer model:

Giving Cash.
Gift givers give £20k, gift receivers get £20k worth of goods and the businesses supplying them get £20k of revenue to pop in the bank straight away to pay their bills.

Giving Goodmoney Vouchers.
Gift givers pay out £23.75k, gift receivers get £20k worth of goods but the businesses supplying them get only £19k of revenue and they have to wait up to a month before they can use it to pay any bills.

I can’t be sure about the detail but I would be very surprised if Goodmoney CIC hadn’t managed to hang on to at least £2.5k of your investment by the end of it, to which they would add the interest accrued on the £19k that sat in a bank from the moment the Vouchers were purchased until they were redeemed.

The sale of all subsequently lost or otherwise unspent vouchers would still earn immediate profit at the time of sale and ongoing interest on their redemption value indefinitely for Goodmoney CIC while never contributing to other business turnover locally.

[Radio debate from Goddamn Radio 8th June 2015 

https://www.spreaker.com/user/countessofbrightonandhackney/better-money-for-brighton ]

Goodmoney CIC - Part One (FB 11th June 2015)

A question arose. I researched and concluded thus:

It is my opinion that Goodmoney Community Interest Company (Goodmoney CIC) is only good by name and their Goodmoney Voucher business is profoundly detrimental to any local economy that engages with it. I cannot advise anyone to buy Goodmoney Vouchers or to accept them as payment.

If you want to see my professional background find me on LinkedIn, just drop the Po when you search.

I would, of course, be very interested to hear from anyone who thinks they can explain how a scheme that removes money from the collective economy of any local community at the rate of £4.75 per "£20" Gift Voucher transaction is beneficial to that community's economy.

Perhaps Dr Caroline Lucas MP, a Director of Goodmoney CIC, might like to have a go.

Part one – The Narrative (loads of words and fewer numbers)

On Monday I was involved in a debate that was broadcast live on the internet and can still be listened to via the www.goddammnradio.comwebsite. Proposed as a debate about alternative currency models, it became apparent quite soon that the visitors to the studio were simply using the current mood of general distrust in banks to promote a commercial gift voucher scheme as if it were a fledgling alternative currency that would benefit the local economy.

I was somewhat surprised when, before we went live, Matthew Slater, a self-titled "Community Currency Engineer", picked up an unused toothbrush that was among the art and music bits n bobs in the studio and asked if he could have it. He was promptly and firmly told, No.

I had read Matthew's website in preparation for the debate and was interested to discuss his philosophy of "Radical giving" with him as it seemed to involve everyone else giving their stuff away while he lived on gifts from everyone else, his only return contribution being the apparently priceless advice that giving stuff away so you own as little as possible is in some way spiritually beneficial.

Even having read his page and understanding him to be content to freeload off other people, I wasn't expecting Matthew Slater to be a straightforward beggar, I wasn't expecting him to ask to be given stuff as he saw it and wanted it.

Following the toothbrush incident I was not surprised when, after the broadcast was over and I was on the way outside for a smoke, Mathew wanted a free cigarette from me.

"Give me a cigarette." He said, with a tone suggesting it was my duty to provide one for him.
I told him, "No. You can buy your own."
To which he shot back, "I don't smoke." as if to give an illogical response was in some way clever. Moments later, he came outside rolling a cigarette he had more successfully blagged from someone on his own team.

You can listen for yourself how well he fared in the "debate" if you wish but I wouldn't advise taking any kind of financial advice at any time from any guru who apparently can't afford a toothbrush and who relies on handouts from disciples to get by from day to day.
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Before he started telling people to give their stuff away, Matthew made his living writing software. One of his programs, he told us, sits behind the Goodmoney CIC gift voucher scheme. CIC stands for Community Interest Company, a form of Limited Company that must be run as a profitable enterprise and its activity must benefit the community. A CIC is not a Charity and cannot be run as "not for profit" or at a loss.

Having spoken in echo of Matthew's emotive terms of the evil of banks and that money as we know it should be replaced with something better, Dr Mick Taylor, a Director representing Goodmoney CIC, introduced his company's scheme as if it were a fledgling alternative local currency that would boost the local economy. At least, that's how it came across to me. Listen for yourself if you wish.

When quizzed, Dr Taylor, a mathematician whose PHD is in Network Science, had to concede the scheme is not a currency at all and never could become one. It is nothing more than a pre-paid gift voucher for local use with participating local traders. Dr Taylor was careful to describe the 5% fee deducted from the face value of the vouchers when redeemed by a business as an admin fee for inclusion in an online directory of participating businesses.

As he is a mathematician and on the Board of Directors of Goodmoney CIC, I was very surprised that Dr Taylor claimed not to know, when asked the question directly, what would happen to the interest on all the money that would sit in Goodmoney CIC's bank account in the period between any voucher being purchased and it being redeemed.

The debate on alternative currencies / gift voucher pitch drew to a close after its allotted broadcast hour and continued for a short while outside in the sun on the back deck until the Goodmoney sales team went off into the afternoon and I went home for a kip, my usual nocturnal routine having been interrupted by another engagement earlier in the day.

Perhaps energised by the debate, I didn't sleep straight away. Instead, I started doing sums and reading the Terms & Conditions published across a number of pages on the Goodmoney CIC website. If the T&C were outsourced I suggest someone asks for their money back. I was not impressed to find inconsistencies between similar terms on different pages, typos, use of incorrect words and reference to a non-existent Act.

I read Goodmoney CIC's T&C from start to finish, because I am like that. I would have looked at their accounts but the company is too new to have published any so I looked at the legislation covering CICs. All this is standard practice for anyone properly evaluating any contract and is what I have been paid to do for years.

Though in this instance I am giving my advice free of charge it is exactly the same advice as I would give were I commissioned as a professional consultant.

I cannot see how such a plainly parasitic business can call itself a Community Interest Company in any sense other than by Goodmoney CIC's registered office being in New England House, an address within the community. Everyone else in the community who interacts with it seems to lose out by doing so. I note Goodmoney CIC requests volunteer help with its commercial operation.
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My considered advice to anyone wanting to give someone else £20 to spend locally is to make your gift of £20 in cash and hang on to the extra £3.75 it would have cost you to add a gift card, envelope and delivery to the purchase of a "£20" Goodmoney Voucher.

Most people spend cash locally in shops and pubs anyway and you can spend locally the £3.75 you have saved, too. How about supporting your local pub or café with a drink or a bun to celebrate being smarter than Goodmoney CIC and actually supporting your local traders and businesses without going through a middleman?

My considered advice to traders and businesses is to not participate in this voucher scheme unless you have fully understood the detrimental effect it would have on your cashflow, your profit margins and your VAT account when compared to equivalent cash sales.

Accepting payment in the form of a credit voucher still leaves you liable to pay VAT as if you had received the full sale value at the time of the sale even though by redeeming the voucher you will receive less than the full sale value and will receive the reduced sum at a later date, according to whenever Goodmoney CIC programme their monthly payment run.

It would be less damaging to your business to offer a 5% discount to local customers who pay there and then by cash than to accept a voucher under this scheme.

The 5% of face value retained by Goodmoney on redemption of vouchers was described to me during the debate as a fee for inclusion in an online directory. That all sales resulting from this directory in the fashion intended by the publishers of the directory will be of less benefit to your business than any other sales should be seriously considered before signing up for inclusion.

Signing up also gives away more intellectual property rights than seems necessary, especially as these rights are to be given over to Goodmoney CIC for all time and for any purpose and for everything submitted to their website. This would include their use of your logo without your further permission even if you left the scheme.

My advice to Goodmoney CIC is to stop promoting yourself under a banner of proclamation that the existing monetary and banking system is evil and stop claiming that your scheme is a fledgling alternative when your business model seemingly relies upon earning bank interest on sums held as security against unredeemed gift vouchers and taking a cut from "both ends" of the local transaction.

Though it could be said there is a bit of smoke and mirrors stuff going on here, the key to clearing it away is to ignore the person who receives the Voucher with a face value of "£20" and who gets £20 worth of goods from the local trader.

If someone were fool enough to buy a "£20" Goodmoney Voucher with gift card and delivery and the voucher got spent in their own shop they would have laid out £23.75 to enable them to claim back only £19.00, representing a straight cash loss to that someone of £4.75 having resulted directly from the involvement of Goodmoney CIC as middlemen in the transaction rather than dealing in cash.

It follows that:

If a member of the community buys a "£20" Goodmoney Voucher.... that gets spent in a shop in the community .... a straight cash loss to the community of £4.75 …. directly from the involvement of Goodmoney CIC in the transaction rather than dealing in cash.

If 1000 members of the community each buy "£20" Goodmoney Vouchers and they are spent in the community the community suffers a straight cash loss of £4750. Additional losses would also be incurred by businesses not being paid by Goodmoney CIC until their once-monthly payment run.

As I said at the beginning, I would be very interested to hear from anyone who thinks they can explain how any scheme that removes money from the collective economy of any local community at the rate of £4.75 per "£20" Gift Voucher transaction is supposed to be beneficial to that community's economy.

[Radio debate from Goddamn Radio 8th June 2015 

https://www.spreaker.com/user/countessofbrightonandhackney/better-money-for-brighton ]

I feel I am watching the world as it goes mad (FB 8th September 2015)

Scammers, con artists, rip-off merchants or whatever else you choose to call them are having a field day, fleecing shedloads of cash from compassionate folk via the internet.

Anyone can set up a donation page, post a picture they copied from a news site, write something to inspire guilt-driven giving based around others being less fortunate and then sit back and watch the pounds roll in. It's hardly genius.

If your particular cause isn't photogenic enough you can always pick a photograph of something that will tug at more heart strings and use that instead, use an award winning aerial shot of an overcrowded boat on the sun-drenched Mediterranean, for example, to raise money for some people camping in a field near Calais.

Even the best intentioned of these knee-jerk operations are amateur and downright wasteful of donations, seemingly more concerned to be seen to be making the effort to travel to France themselves than to be efficient with what they get and to feed in locally to the existing and well established supply chain.

Be very careful where you donate. Just because an individual, group or organisation is requesting donations and what they state they intend to do with them is a charitable act does not make them a charity. You could just be buying someone a booze cruise or subsidising their ego with the cash you electronically hand over.
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Until last week most people in the UK had been turning a blind eye to the plight of refugees from war-torn or otherwise less salubrious areas of the world wishing to settle in Europe.

No matter how many times they had heard or read reports of boatloads of migrants drowning or of people being found dead or dying in the backs of lorries they did nothing until they saw a photograph of a drowned child.

Suddenly there were public outpourings of anger, not at the traffickers who provided an unsuitable craft for the crossing or at the father who let his family board it but, quite bizarrely, at the governments of the land they were setting out to visit.
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It is more than fifteen-hundred miles from the Turkish coast where the boy drowned to the migrant camps near Calais in northern France. Fifteen-hundred miles is far enough to make them separate circumstances.
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Assuming one to be a genuine refugee, to achieve refugee status in Europe one has to reach Europe and apply for it. It might take a few weeks to come through but that's only because there's lots to check and every application deserves to be considered properly and individually. Oh, yes, and there's a bit of a rush on.

Alan, the boy whose photograph seems to have shaken people from their rose-tinted torpor, died at sea on his way to Europe. The inhabitants of the camps are already in Europe and have been for some long while. Sitting in a field they are not at risk of drowning. They are in no imminent danger except from themselves.
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Assuming one to be a genuine refugee, the quickest way to a decent life in the UK really is to apply for asylum as soon as entry is made to the EU. If someone failed to apply at the point of entry, their quickest way to a decent life in the UK is to apply right now, wherever in the EU they happen to be.

Had the people camped at Calais applied for asylum even when they arrived there some of them might by now have been in a position to cross the channel by conventional means instead of risking their lives jumping trucks.

Had they applied when they first entered the EU, wherever that was, their applications would have been in days or weeks earlier and the relevant decisions would be made that much sooner, too.

Is it not strange then that so many people choose to stay in a squalid camp with no end to their ordeal in sight rather than signing up for the first step towards what they all say they want, a decent life in the UK, for which they will need the appropriate paperwork?

I suspect their real motive for not signing in is that they know they do not qualify for asylum in the EU under the rules. So I have to ask, how humane are they themselves being by jumping trucks in the hope they can break the rules to enter the UK and to take a job on the sly that might otherwise have been offered to someone who genuinely was a refugee?

It really doesn't make sense on so many levels that so many people in the UK fail to see the difference between someone desperate to reach Europe to claim asylum and get on with their life as we live it here and someone who is happy to turn a piece of northern France into a replica of the slum they snuck thousands of miles to escape from.

If you want to send supplies to Nigerians, Eritreans or whomever living in shanty towns send them to the parts of Nigeria, Eritrea or wherever where shanty towns are as good as it gets. It is ridiculous to perpetuate the existence of a shanty town near Calais, especially one populated entirely by people who insist upon living other than in accordance with the laws, customs and accepted standards of those they purport to wish to assimilate with.

Just because someone used to live somewhere dangerous does not entitle them to ignore the laws of Europe, the very same laws we are expected to follow, and it certainly shouldn't entitle them to mollycoddling while they do.

If British idiots stopped making life unnaturally comfortable for people choosing to camp in a field in France the people in the field might just make an effort to accord with the rules, to play fair and to either sign in or fuck off. I thought we were supposed to stand-up for fairness here, not to support those who cheat.

If people in the camps in Calais don't qualify for asylum in Europe they should take the oft referred to "drive and determination" they displayed in coming thousands of miles to shit in a French field back to their own home countries and make life better for their families, friends and neighbours that way.
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There are hundreds of thousands of genuine refugees currently in or heading for Europe. It is a massive headache for everyone concerned, an unprecedented situation but, if you prioritise the saving of life, the most immediate need is to stop people putting themselves at risk.

The real urgency is stop people being overcrowded onto boats in Libya, Turkey and elsewhere and to stop people gathering near Calais in the hope they might jump a truck to England. Yes there will be queues building up while we work out how to deal with everyone but no one will be dying at sea, suffocating in or dangling off lorries.
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It is not compassion fatigue or an initial lack of it it is common sense. Anyone who calms down enough to look at things clearly will see that to perpetuate the camps as they are at Calais brings no solution any nearer. If you can't see why that is and you still want to perpetuate the camps at Calais you should do it in a cost effective fashion.

If you want to make a cash donation choose a proper charity that has some experience and expertise in the field. If you want to be a more direct part of helping you can always volunteer to assist with an established charity's work. They will know how best to deploy your skills or resources and will work with complementary charities in developing long term and sustainable support strategies.

Or, if you live in Brighton, you could wander outside and probably find someone homeless to help within minutes of your front door. You wouldn't need to waste money on a van or a ferry ticket or anything if you did that. You could be cash efficient and green, too.

Of course, if you were helping homeless people in Brighton you wouldn't be able to use an award winning picture of an overloaded boat on the Mediterranean to encourage donations to fund a weekend away like you can if you help homeless people in Calais.

Safe Giving - Avoid scams and other rip-offs carried out under the guise of a charitable cause.

If you give money directly to a registered charity they can claim back the tax you paid on the money when you earned it, increasing the value of your donation to their cause.

If you donate to any small charitable fund though a crowdfunding site a proportion of your outlay will be diverted from the cause to the operators of the site. It is unlikely this will be the most efficient method of funding disaster or crisis relief efforts where established charities are already operating with similar aims. Larger operations benefit from economies of scale, reducing costs and maximising the effectiveness of your cash support.
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The regulations being flouted by a surprising number of pop-up independent charitable fundraising campaigns currently surfing the wave of compassion triggered by the recent publication of a photograph are there to protect the donations made to the fund and to ensure they are used properly and only for the purpose for which they were made.

For small charitable public fundraising campaigns the requirements are far from onerous. For successful campaigns that raise in excess of £5000 a year there is a requirement to register as a charity, which is also not onerous and is quite reasonable an expectation to make of any group or individual entrusted with that amount.
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If it is not clear *before* you make your charitable donation exactly whom you are giving your money to, by which I mean such that you could easily identify and locate them if they were to misuse or lose it, consider why they would feel the need to keep this detail secret when the law requires transparency.

Also check it is clear *before* you make your charitable donation to a particular cause what will happen to unspent monies when a campaign is closed. Your money should not, for example, be at risk of loss in the event of the organiser losing interest in the cause or being incapacitated through illness or death and should not be spent on anything you would not wish to contribute to.
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The above advice applies to any charitable giving and is provided free of charge and for the benefit of all. Whether I personally support any cause or not is irrelevant as to whether I wish those who do support that cause to have confidence their cash donation to it is efficiently achieving what they intended it to.

This is about safe giving. It is not about politics.