Economics on billpg industries™

The Short History of a Very Confused Plant Pot

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:25:39 +0000

Years ago, I was watching a feel‑good segment on the local news about a garden centre that had launched a recycling scheme for their used plastic plant pots. Customers were encouraged to bring back the empties once they’d transplanted their new purchases into the garden. A wholesome little initiative, I thought.

My warm glow lasted about thirty seconds.

In my head, those pots were being returned to the supplier, washed, de‑labelled, and stacked up ready for another round of seedlings. A simple loop. A sensible loop.

Let's All Burn Our Waste Paper!

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:31:40 +0000

In these environmentally conscious times, we are constantly exhorted to recycle. This is a tedious ritual involving coloured bins, soggy cardboard and the faint smell of moral superiority. Yet I submit that recycling is, in fact, the least responsible thing we could do with our waste paper.

Instead, I propose a bold, innovative, and unquestionably sustainable alternative.

Burn it. All of it. Immediately. Preferably with gusto.

"He's kinda sexy and mysterious about it. Hot eyes, all my judgement is clouded. I'm in your city, can you show me round it? You can put your money right where my mouth is."

“But burning paper releases CO₂!” you cry. But here is the true genius of the plan.

Rufus - An Adventure in Downloading

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 07:17:17 +0000

I needed to make a bootable USB. Simple task, right? My aging Windows 10 machine couldn’t upgrade to 11 and Ubuntu seemed like the obvious next step.

Downloading Rufus, the tiny tool everyone recommends, turned out to be less of a utility and more of a trust exercise. Between misleading ads, ambiguous signatures and the creeping dread of running an EXE as administrator, I found myself wondering how something so basic became so fraught?

What's a kWh? (And other money-saving tips)

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 19:21:30 +0000

When I was at school, they taught us how electricity works only as part of science lessons. It was something future engineers might need, yet we all use electricity at home every day.

The problem with electricity is we’re a little bit separated from its cost. With cars, we fill up the car with fuel and pay for it right there and then. With electricity, we use many different appliances which all add up to an eye-watering bill at the end of the month.

What's a gallon?

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 23:16:00 +0000

A little while ago, I wrote a post on Facebook complaining that my new car’s fuel efficiency gauge was expressed in miles per gallon. “What’s a gallon?” I asked.

Over here in England, fuel has been sold by the litre for decades. Gallons are an archaic unit which no-one under 40 has ever had to deal with.

Unitary council

Two friends very helpfully commented with conversion rates. “3.78 litres in a gallon” said one friend. “4.54 litres in a gallon” said another. While both answers were significantly different, both my friends were equally quite correct.

Digital photography is not rocket science. It just seems that way.

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 21:03:00 +0000

Here’s a TV advert for a camera touting the benefits of film cameras over digital cameras. I’m almost inclined to wonder if this advert is a parody, but even so, it has a point. Let’s watch…

Photography for technophobes. I’m reminded of when I was lending my digital camera to a friend some time ago. She knew how to use a film camera, but the technological revolution had, alas, left her behind. She had no problem with the LCD display on the back. This was why she wanted to borrow my camera in the first place after she saw me using it. Taking a picture while holding the camera at arms length is a lot easier than holding it up to the eye. Showing her how to browse old pictures took a bit of teaching but she soon picked it up. It helped a lot that this camera had a big switch with only two settings; taking-pictures or looking-at-pictures. The big stumbling point was when I showed her how to use memory cards. I tried to explain how it stores pictures, but I got a lot of blank looks. I finally said “This card is like the film.” There was a sudden look of understanding on her face. The analogy to traditional film cameras worked perfectly. I told her that the photo shops will develop (print) her pictures, produce negatives (make a CD copy) and clean the film off to be reused again. If she needed more film, she could buy some by asking for a “128 MB SD” at the shops (which might tell you when this story took place). Embrace the metaphor! Film cameras are devices that direct photon particles in order to induce chemical reactions in silver halide particles mounted on sheets of cellulose acetate. Somehow, the camera industry managed to sell us cameras without having to give us chemistry lessons first. And yet, we all need computer science lessons to use digital cameras. People never really cared about the chemical processes of film photography and we shouldn’t have to care about bits, megabytes and other pieces of jargon that can be abstracted away. So, here are my suggestions for the digital camera industry. 1. Standardise! Why are there so many memory card formats? As far as I can tell, they’re all flash memory chips contained in differently shaped blobs of plastic. The industry needs to pick one shape of blob and stick with it. No inventing new blobs unless there’s a really good reason to. 2. Call memory cards, ‘digital film’. Embrace all the metaphors. If the world already has a name for something, don’t come up with a different name for it. 3. Tell me how many pictures it can store, not how many gigabytes. This one will be tricky, as the size of a picture depends on the number of pixels. So while I don’t think we could realistically get rid of the “GB”, cameras need to help the user by telling us how many pictures are in a “GB” at that particular time. 4. Cameras should come with a reasonably sized card as standard. How would you feel if you bought a camera, but later found the lens was extra? Digital film (getting used to the phrase yet?) is reusable and will probably last as long as the camera itself. So why not bundle it with the camera and save your customers the hassle. 5. Photo printing shops to provide archival DVDs as a standard part of the service. People using film cameras expected their negatives as part of the service. Copying a few gigabytes full of pictures to a DVD should be cheap enough that it could be offered free to anyone who wants to print a vacation’s worth of snaps. Hang on, did that advert just say two cameras for ten dollars? Forget everything I just wrote, that’s a bargain!

Paying for Power

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:31:00 +0000

Being an evil genius, I’m obsessed with getting as much power as possible. If only I could get power for nothing, but alas, I have to pay for it.

In England, and most of the western world, we have a well established system of sending electricity from the power stations to me and sending money in the opposite direction. It works, but I think we can improve on it.