Rachael McKelvey

• Milton Keynes robot delivery service really delivers!
• Inflation & the price of cucumbers
• The El Niño effect & the price of everything
• If you’re unemployed, “don’t be a job snob”, know your ABC
• Rage against MFA

Milton Keynes robot delivery service really delivers!
Milton Keynes the ‘field of dreams’ 22 million trees, 5,000 acres of parkland, 15 lakes, 11 miles of canal, 130 roundabouts, more bridges than Venice, more shoreline than Jersey, concrete cows and a robot delivery service that has increased spending in the city’s restaurants by £10m a year, reduced annual emissions by 8% and saved the average household 72 minutes per week, all that and they are just super cute.

This week the MKCitizen shared some highlights from the research conducted by Oxford Analytica about the impact Starship Technologies is making to the City and just how much of an impact it could have nationwide with the appropriate legislation and regulation.

Milton Keynes really is the city of dreams when it comes to testing driverless technologies, with extensive testing of many variations of driverless vehicles around its miles of redway pathways that connect absolutely all of the city. Now we just need the government to support the sector for it to catch up with the rest of the world.

Nothing brings me greater joy than the tiny delivery robots of Milton Keynes, if they get stuck they ask for help and they thank you for your help, they are a brilliant addition to the green metropolis that I call home for half my week.

Inflation & the price of cucumbers
There have been a few stats worth checking in on this week, the analytics around certain submersible based words and even an increase in searches for “my heart will go on” but the other has been Cucumbers, beautifully articulated by Ed Conway on Twitter this week in a thread about why Britain is facing such high inflation and how the Bank of England have got it so wrong, illustrated through the price of cucumbers.

Inflation is a relatively simple concept, it’s a term used to describe rising prices, how quickly they rise is the rate of inflation. The UK measures that rate once a month based on the recording the costs of over 700 things that people regularly buy, the total of this basket of goods is then compared to the total of the basket of goods in the same month in the prior year, the change in the prices between years is inflation. Today it costs me more of the pounds I earn than it did the pounds I earnt last year to buy things. Especially cucumbers.

It’s a story of both economics and technology, the grab for market share means the price of cucumbers has been significantly depressed for the last decade or so. It has cost you less to buy them than it did to grow them, but at the same time technology has meant more can be grown with less, which has also reduced the cost of cucumber production. Brexit entered the chat and cheap labour isn’t as freely available as it was, the war in Ukraine then entered the chat and the price of fuel, that powers all the technological advantages, has now also gone up and now we have the overall cost of production increasing, if we are able to produce them ourselves (hint: we are not, we are importing more now than ever) so now the price of cucumber is 50% more than it was 12 months ago. Nice little throw back to the podcast recommendation here for Today in Focus – What the salad crisis says about Britain

Ed makes the point really nicely about how the Bank of England got it so wrong, considering it all now looks very predictable, but we have lived in decades where you can look top down at your numbers and assume a relatively consistent inflation rate % to get your forecast position. Now more than ever we need to look bottom up, cost your expenses for the year, what are they really going to cost this year, because last year +2% isn’t going to cut it. So when your friendly Finance Manager/Business Partner (Hi, it’s me) comes to the table asking for a bottom up on your numbers for next year, we really are just trying to make sure the targets you set yourself are realistic, that you won’t get to M1 in Q3 and be making opportunity cost decisions on your budget for the remainder of the year. Please be kind to us, we are just trying to help.

The El Niño effect & the price of everything
Nothing rarely ever starts with the money, (once money is involved, always follow the money), but most things start very simply with a change in something you probably wouldn’t think about. This month the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared the start of the El Niño event, which comes up in A-Level geography along with the outstanding revelation that the equator fluctuates between the tropics, why they gate keep this at GCSE geography I don’t know. El Niño is an interesting weather pattern involving a band of warm but nutrient poor ocean water along South America, it typically lasts for years and cycles over a decade. So what, who cares Rachael?

Well, coffee futures have hit a record high, with sugar and cocoa futures also gaining ground, futures contracts are basically agreements made now to buy/sell at a fixed price but the goods will be delivered and paid for later and are a way to hedge (reduce) risk, don’t tell me accounting is not cool. These mechanisms are really good tools to help predict the future, Del Monte this year came out and said that the El Niño events in 2016, 2017 an 2019 caused droughts in Kenya that impacted pineapple farms, which explains why Pineapples got a little bit more expensive. While natural phenomena are hard to price into the market, analysist are doing it already for prices we won’t be paying for a year or so yet, El Niño also increases the risk of flooding and drought, so you know insurances markets are also adjusting as I type.

If you’re unemployed, “don’t be a job snob”, know your ABC
(Permanent) Under Secretary of three departments in 2022, Mims Davies this week has said that “the unemployed cannot be job snobs” and that your true path in life is to just start with any job (A), then get a better job (B), then get a career (C) and while not you typical Tory, you’d be forgiven for thinking so given the rather Boomer Dad career advice given in the face of a 0.2 percentage point rise in unemployment to the heady (low) heights of 3.9%.

This in the same week Marks and Spenser, WH Smith and Argos alongside 199 other companies have been named and shamed for failing to pay minimum wage. Minimum wage. Facing a staggering £7m of penalties and the requirement to reimburse workers over the last decade. I can’t imagine why someone who is unemployed wouldn’t look and continue to look to seek their worth.

I was made redundant at the tail end of last year and I was in the privileged position to be funemployed for a period of time while I worked out my next move. I have a career the jury is still out whether it is the one most suited to my actuals skills and I was a little dissatisfied with the progress my “traditional career” has made in modernising itself and being inclusive…recently a colleague said we have some cool words for some obviously important stuff when I was talking with a member of my team in the office, to which I replied with the actual translation of the simple task we were talking about and had to explain that some old white dude just wanted to give it a fancy word to make it sound important, show me where the lie is? I took a while to find an organisation that aligned with my values, that looked like they would value me and that had the structures to support that and while there would have come a time where I would have had to work to earn money where I might have entertained “any job”, I just think this is terrible advice from the Under Secretary of State for DWP.

The traditional path is no longer the one most travelled, jobs aren’t for life, they are barely for seasons of your life anymore. They want more of you than ever before, get a job that values you or see your potential and can value you, then do that all over again and again and again and that will have been your career, as many times as it needs to be till you can retire, in as many different directions as it takes you. I feel its worth noting I might have been heavily influenced by listening to Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Kyle on The News Agents podcast this week and his unconventional career path because of the barriers in his way to access a career. Well worth a listen.

Rage against MFA
This week my mobile unexpectedly messed itself quite spectacularly shortly after my arrival at work on Tuesday, no worries who needs a phone anyway. I’d arrived safely at the office after driving 90 minutes cross country in biblical flooding where I encountered two nights and 5 minutes of day in that time but cool, I hadn’t died…to work it was.

Except it wasn’t, because MFA required me to generate a varying amount of numerical code that I could not access, but if I could access I then couldn’t deploy quick enough before they had changed and well this resulted in an increased workload for my colleagues. They could access what I needed, because I just asked them to download the various reports I required, which sort of defeats the entire object of zero trust policies – you can’t trust me, but I can use my power and influence to potentially abuse someone else who you do trust. Well played on making it an HR problem not a cyber security one.

As the week went on I became that guy with three phones, because what I could easily move over to my new phone was relatively painless but those that I couldn’t require me to use my old handset to access, if it wants to which depends on the way the wind is blowing. I’ve had to raise and IT ticket because no one seems to be able to tell me how to regenerate whatever needs to be regenerated in our bespoke systems. I’ve long thought the world would make more sense if it operated on a ‘my mate Kev’ vouching system, which even with all its faults would be better than carrying three phones round.

There has to be a better answer in the cyber security space than MFA surely? It’s 2023.

Current watch: Never Have I Ever – Created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher (love love love) a coming over age comedy drama based on Kaling own childhood, following the trials and tribulations of an Indian-American high school student following the sudden death of her father and making it through those tricky years of school. John McEnroe narrates 15 year old Devi Vishwakumar life, from her grief, to her first kiss, that awkward crush on the hottest boy in school, right through to that first term at college. I think the mix of character narrations and actual story telling makes this a really compelling watch and I do love it when the fourth wall gets broken. The show over the 4 series has come in for some critical acclaim as well as some critical response for its character representation, but I binge watched the final series in a few sittings and it felt like a really nice end to the show.

Current read:
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by David Ariely – This was a recommendation to get my ‘what next’ thought process going, the tag line is ‘Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? The answers will surprise you” and while yes, also no not really. I suspect this book may be wildly enlightening for those who travel through the world relatively unaware of the biases and influences that shape the offering available to them on the daily, but even a modicum of self-awareness would give you a clue about the likely outcome of the experiments. Ariely, a behavioural economist, clearly explains the basis of the experiment and the hypothesis that it’s looking to explore in a fun and intriguing way, what grates a little is the extrapolation of findings based on college kids to the greater world, the decisions I made at University are quite different to those I would make now and vice versa, so it feels a little too like sweeping statements in that sense. Taking it all a little less seriously it is witty, accessible and interesting and I am all up for all of those things as a jumping off point for anyone who thinks they could have an interest in something they’re not sure is there thing.

Most Impactful Listen: Changes with Annie Macmanus and Josh Widdicombe – I’ve grown up with Annie my entire life on Radio 1, she is a joy to watch live behind the decks and she is a advocate for positive and inclusive change, Changes is her podcasts where she chats with writers, artists and generally fascinating people about how they have navigated changes in lives, changes from childhood, changes as a grown up and changes they would like to see in the world. I was especially drawn to this weeks guest Josh Widdicombe, who I admire greatly, maybe slightly influenced by the comfort and support his book Watching Neighbours Twice a Day…: How ’90s TV (Almost) Prepared Me For Life gave me during a medical incident last year, where I was mostly alone in A&E, Minor Injuries and Plastics department of Stoke Mandeville hospital. It felt like listening to two of my friends meet each other for the first time, I see myself in Josh’s childhood completely. We could have been weird friends for sure, what most struck me was his change he’d like to see in the world that he is living now, 50 days no drinking that very day, I am currently exploring my sobriety mostly on health grounds, but this explanation rings very true for a period of life for sure.