The Oxford English Dictionary picks a word of the year every year.  This year it has chosen “post- truth”, defined as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which the objective facts are less influential  in shaping public opinion than appeals to the emotions and personal beliefs”.  This obviously relates to Brexit and the American election.  Usually the dictionary teams in the UK and the USA pick different words, but this year they both chose the same word.

Sad, isn’t it?  We were (are) bombarded with stuff that is blatantly misleading, derogatory and untrue, and people believe it because they are ready and willing to believe it, such is the division and anger stalking both countries.

A recent surrvey by Action for Rail in the UK found that a commute into London by rail costs an average of 13 % of average monthly pay. Travelling the same distance into Rome costs only 2% of an Italian salary. Even in costly Paris a commute is 30% less than the equivalent British cost.
British price rises are pegged to the retail prices index, rather than the consumer price index, which results in higher rises. Thus, privatisation has left the country with sky high ticket costs, overcrowded trains and an aging infrastructure.  And now Southern Railway, which brings tens of thousands of commuters into London every working day, is on strike, as I understand it, because the company want to dispense with the train guards, thus making even more profit.  The government, they that originally privatised a public utility) stands – by – doing – no- thing.

In every privatised industry you find the same thing, with the possible exception of airlines. the traveller is left paying for the profits of private companies and the exorbitant salaries of the CEO’s, and are worse off than ever before. I don’t like accusing people of scams; however,the beneficiaries of this purely political privatising are friends and contributors to a particular party. As they say in the army, “no names, no pack drill”.

Were Epicurus alive today he would spot corruption in an instant. Corruption is un-Epicurean because there is no level playing field and the ordinary citizen pays the price.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child . For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? “(Cicero, Orator, 46 BC)

Having a bad night’s sleep leads people to consume, on average, an extra 385 calories – equivalent to about four slices of bread – the following day, scientists at King’s College London have discovered. The study, a re-analysis of previous research into the effects of poor sleep, defined a bad night as one with less than five-and-a-half hours’ sleep, and a normal night as seven or more hours. The researchers suspect that sleep deprivation affects the body’s ability to regulate the production of hormones such as ghrelin and leptin, which control feelings of hunger and fullness respectively. “If long-term sleep deprivation continues to result in an increased calorie intake of this magnitude, it may contribute to weight gain,” said senior study author Dr Gerda Pot. (reported in The Week).

So the answer seems to be, yes it can make you fat.  The way to combat sleep deprivation, not to mention weight gain, is exercise – in Epicurean moderation, of course.   After sleepless nights a visit to the gym, for instance, is a good way of surviving the day feeling reasonably normal.  With no strenuous exercise one can feel weary and out of it all day.  I know of no scientific studies into the effects of exercise on sleep deprivation, but can attest to this myself.

Glen’s Garden Market is an upscale grocery shop in Washington, paying above the minimum wage in DC.  Then DC put the minimum wage up from $8.25 to  $11.50 an hour, the rate Glen’s were already paying entry-level workers (the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour).  So owner Danielle Vogel boosted hourly wages another dollar, to $12.50. With that action, Glen’s launched a real-time experiment on the impact of higher minimum wages on a small business as well as a test of how much consumers are willing to pay to guarantee a “living wage” for cashiers, baristas and others who wait on them.

D.C. Chamber of Commerce, not surprisingly, said that such a big jump in the minimum wage, with another hike to $15.00 an hour due by 2020,  would hurt businesses and ultimately raise the cost of living in the city. Margaret Singleton, then-interim president of the D.C. Chamber, likened a minimum wage increase earlier this year to a tax passed on to customers.   “The proposed legislation, as did the last minimum wage increase law, will increase the cost of housing, food and consumer products,” she testified before a D.C. Council committee. “Equally likely, employers would reduce fringe benefits and restructure their workforces or reduce future hiring because, after all, a minimum wage increase is a tax on employers that must be addressed in overhead and/or the product.”The chamber also argues the hike could mean residents of Virginia, where the minimum wage is $7.25, would apply for District jobs in greater numbers, hurting low-income D.C. employees.

The counter-argument is that businesses that put employees first see increased loyalty and productivity.  Vogel said the wage increase would cost her about $200,000 this year, but added that higher wages would make for happier and more loyal employees. She said it’s too early to know whether a recent dip in sales is the result of higher prices or factors such as the election and holiday season.  “We wouldn’t have done this if it were going to drive us out of business,”   Vogel said. “It’s just going to make us have a hard couple of months as we adjust.” (Washington Post, December 2nd)

Some customers are going to be less willing to purchase some higher price items.  But in this overwhelmingly Democrat city with a large population of young people, when it is explained that the higher prices are owing to a rise in wages of the worst-off employees, I think most people will pay up willingly.  I don’t know this grocery store, but my wife and I intend to go over there and support of it.

Washington is a very expensive city.  Even at $12.50 an hour it is difficult to see how people survive with health costs soaring.  How can you afford a house, or children?  How do you save anything? What do you do about a pension?  When you can call a minimum wage a “tax” on employers it reveals a mindset that is rather shocking and un- Epicurean.

In 2013, Trump signed a 60-year lease for the the headquarters of the U.S. Post Office, and began a $200 million renovation to turn it into an upscale hotel, called the Trump International Hotel, with the help of loans from Deutsche Bank, a large German bank.  Trump’s financial disclosure reports, show he currently owes Deutsche Bank roughly $365 million in loans for the Washington hotel, along with another one in Chicago and a Florida golf course.

However, Deutche Bank itself is currently the subject of a fine by the Justice Department that could be worth $14 billion, or more, for creating and selling mortgage-backed securities that were the cause of the 2008 crash.  Wow!  When Trump takes office, he will be overseeing the Justice Department.

Then,  were foreign diplomats to stay at the Trump International Hotel at the expense of their governments it would be illegal under the emoluments clause of the Constitution.  Apparently Trump’s lease of the old Post office building, now the hotel, specifically says that no elected official of the United States government shall be party to, share in or benefit from the contract.  This ought to mean that the contract should be terminated before Trump becomes President.  Will it be?  It would be a huge hit to Trump, who says he intends to address conflicts of interest like this.  Here is a man who is detail-challenged – he should have thought this out long ago.  (commentary based on an NPR website article, December 1st)

“In Britain there is a sharp rise in self- employed workers, whose ranks are swelling while their incomes are shrinking. They account for more than one in seven of the workforce, but earn less on average than they did in 1995. It cannot be right that an ever-larger slice of the labour market lives without holiday pay or maternity leave”. ( The Guardian Weekly, 4 November 2016)

And you can add other benefits these self-employed people don’t get: sick pay, a fair and reasonable benefit . Nor do the the self- employed get a pension contribution from their employer. In the old days most employers contributed towards pensions.  At the remuneration levels we are now talking about no one can hope to save enough money to have a secure old age.

What are we doing to the working population, and in what form will it come back to bight us? I can foresee in 40 or 50 years hordes of indigent old people, trying to live on a privatised social “security” pension, struggling with a privatised medical system, the successor of the National Health, with no affordable housing and insufficient food? This will be the legacy of so- called free market conservatism, where all that matters is cutting government borrowing and reducing the contribution to society from the rich.

What is the point of life if all that matters is money and where you bully down the earnings, security and self- esteem of the workers – until they rebel. Rebel is what the Trump and Bernie voters have done; the trouble is that the ultra- conservatives may well interpret this rebellion as justifying the imposition of extreme conservative ideology, instead of a plea to actually help them.