Saving Money is Easy.

Here's a bit of silliness that's just popped up on my FB feed: something called the 365 Day Penny Challenge.

Want to know the easiest way to save £667.95 in a year?
Then I’ve got the thing for you…
The 365 Day Penny Challenge.
All you need is:

• A jar 
• Pennies 
• Will Power

Day 1 (usually 1st January) put 1p in the jar, the next day (Day 2) put 2p in and so on and so forth. 

At the end of the 365 you will have save[d] £667.95! 

You're not doubling what you save; day 3 would involve putting in 3p, day 100 £1, and so on.

All groovy... except I doubt that it's sustainable.  A person could quite easily have, say, £3 in their pocket to put into the jar on day 300.  But that they'd have almost £3 on day 299, AND £3 on day 300, AND £3.01 on day 301, and so on looks to me to be more of a stretch.  (That'd amount to over £21 in loose change over the course of a week.)

If you do have that amount of loose change every day, I suspect it's because you're going to the bank and taking out £5 every day, some of which you spend on odds and sods.  But you're still taking out £5.  Banking the change - which is in effect what you're doing by putting the change in a jar - is not making a saving.  It's just a matter of not spending the change.

Genius.

People are sharing this and calling it a good idea.

Besides: who pays for everything with cash anyway?  The whole premise of this rests on the idea that you're going to be forced to take money out from the bank every day in fixed denominations greater than you would want to spend (unless you're withdrawing money just so that you can put it in your jar, which is ridiculous).  But Tesco and pubs all take plastic now.  Hell, even my milkman takes a direct debit.

In other words, the idea isn't just capitalising on people withdrawing cash in fixed denominations greater than they would want to spend; it requires it, in the face of there being much more efficient and secure ways to buy stuff.  The only people for whom this could conceivably work are in the cash-in-hand economy.  For people who aren't my window-cleaner or builder... it's a bit dim.

New for 2016: Shaming 7-Year-Olds

Salon is running a story about a video that has apparently gone viral.  (I only know about it because of the Salon piece; maybe its virality is self-fulfilling.  Maybe I've just not been paying enough attention to YouTube.  But I digress.)

The video is only a minute or so long, and it shows two little girls receiving the gift of a doll.  I'm not good at guessing people's ages, but I'd guess that they're somewhere around 7 or 8 years old.  The doll happens to be black; the girls are white.  One girl looks as though she's disappointed with the gift, but trying to be diplomatic about it; the other bursts into tears.

"Their reaction shows how much a doll can tell us about race", says the byline.  The article concludes that, "[t]hough obviously not an official social experiment, their reaction is a comment on just how early in life racial bias forms".

Well, it might.

Rhodes to Palmyra

There are many things that look to be superficially alike, but that careful examination shows to be very different.  Sharks and dolphins are both grey-ish aquatic predators with a prominent dorsal fin.  It is not wholly unreasonable for someone unfamiliar with them to suppose that they are closely related: a child, or - less plausibly - a marine biologist visiting from another planet might make that mistake.  But closer inspection would reveal significant differences; and one would hope that the child or alien biologist would move away from thinking them the same sort of thing.  One would hope that a tolerably well-informed adult would have stopped making that kind of mistake a long time before, and would not get a newspaper column asserting that dolphins and sharks are very similar indeed.

This serves as a sort of preamble to a rumination on a story that broke a couple of weeks ago: that Oriel, Oxford, was considering removing a statue of Cecil Rhodes after coming under pressure from student protestors.  These protests echo similar protests in South Africa.

The rationale for getting shot of the guy is straightforward enough: that he was racist, imperialist, and not the sort of person whom modern academia should be honouring if it's ever going to stand a chance of becoming the post-racist, post-imperial community to which it aspires.  I've a certain amount of sympathy for this view - particularly in respect of the South African protests; after all, the colonial and post-colonial history of that country has been particularly bitter for the majority of the population.  Having a monument to him at Oriel strikes me as being slightly morally different, though I can't put my finger on why - so maybe it isn't that different after all.

On the other hand, there are counterarguments.  Rhodes was a man of his time; it is naive to pretend that we can, or should, whitewash history; if we want to understand where we are and to control where we're going, it pays to remember whence we came; and, anyway, Rhodes' personal legacy has enabled students from all around the world, of all races, to study at Oxford.  His reputation may be tarnished, but it is not without burnished bits as well.

The point is that the arguments about whether Rhodes must fall are complex, and worth hearing from both sides.

Not everyone seems to think this.