Visited yet another hospital (Ashford) with convalescing relative today. Encountered absolute torrents of rain on the way home.
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I've now mastered share dealing with the Halifax and it looks easy. When I was with a competitor I used their telephone dealing service which was OK (but not quite up to their telephone banking); with Halifax I've gone for the online service so I can't really compare the two.
Apart from the fact that the previous service made one middling serious mistake with my account (they shut down an ISA without me requesting it) my main quibble with them was their newsletter. Parts of this were interesting but its chief purpose seemed to be to encourage customers to deal more often than can be in most people's interests.
A few days ago fellow blogger asked me if I saw myself as a trader or an investor and these are the reasons I gave for being the latter:
1) if you trade too frequently you can end up spending quite a lot on dealing fees.
2) stock market investing works best if you're in it for the long term and not worrying too much the day-to-day ups and downs. I think if you try to make a quick killing you end up constantly thinking about the share's price. Having said that you could be invested for the long term and still have backed the wrong shares (investing in the UK car industry or textile industry in, say, the early Seventies wouldn't have been a good idea, for example).
3) Thinking globally, so to speak, wealth increases little by little and (in my better moments) I believe that having a share in the gradual increase should be enough for me. I have a sneaking feeling that money easily come by disappears just as quickly (I guess that's a folk memory and a rather puritanical one at that).
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I've been thinking about an item I heard on the radio this morning about the lowering of the age at which kids can get a criminal record a few years ago. It was reduced to 10 and now people want to increase it to 14 again. Apparently, the argument all hinges on different ideas about the age at which people can tell right from wrong. This gave me pause for thought as I think I had the idea that our ideas of right and wrong were innate.
In fact, I still think we always have an idea of right or wrong but I'd allow people can have wrong ideas about right and wrong (and maybe children are especially likely to have ideas like this).
It seems to me that the really important factors to consider if children get the wrong side of the law are, firstly, did anyone make them do what they did (by, say, threatening them or threatening their security if they didn't) and, secondly, did they truly understand the practical consequences of their actions.
I also think that there are circumstances in which people can have more freedom than they can handle. In the case of adults there's not a lot we can do about it without undermining civil liberties but the situation is quite different where kids are concerned - and rightly so. I don't think it's unduly cynical to see education as a kind of restraint on young people; surely the amount of 'useful in later life' instruction could be concertina'd into a much shorter space of time. But, for a variety of reasons, some children find themselves with more freedom than they know what to do with and disastrous consequences follow. Surely, measures taken with kids in trouble should take into account how much unsupervised time they've had relative to the amount that someone of their age group can cope with.
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Which leads on to John Reid and his suggestion that the parents of young muslims should be on the look out for fanatical tendencies and take action if they see them. I think the Home Secretary has a point but he probably wasn't the right person to make it. Maybe selecting just religious fanaticism for his remarks was his mistake; if he lumped it together with internet chat rooms, knife culture, joy riding, exam fever etc. it would have gone down better.
What I'd like to understand is how Muslims validate their interpretations of Islam relative to one another. How do you argue for one school of thought over another?
