Sunday, August 08, 2010
Plants
This morning decided to persist with plant identification and so flipped BH's 'The Tree & Shrub Expert' by the prolific Dr. D. G. Hessayon. Fairly rapidly tracked down the plant in question - common white jasmine aka Jasminum officinale. Which goes to show that flipping through a book is more effective than flipping through a web site - the catch being, of course, that one does have to have the book on one's shelf. Nevertheless, I think it will be a while before web site beats book at this kind of searching.
Armed with the latin name tried Mr. G. again who took me to a site called http://www.pfaf.org/user/default.aspx which was able to tell me about what twigs the flower buds grow on. To wit, both this year's growth and older wood. So at the least the question was reasonable.
I guess I had been put off the track by the rather different habit of our winter jasmine. Will climb up a trellis but does not have tendrils and has yellow flowers in the spring rather than white flowers in the summer. It seems that white jasmine has been a popular cottage garden plant for centuries. Now I need to get to grips with the 198 or so other versions of jasmine, a branch of the olive family.
Getting back onto serious matters, the DT ran stories for a few days recently about the terrible rake off taken by our financial services wizards - world beaters we are told by some - when they sell us investment products. Far more than their colleagues in Europe or the US. With the result that our pension pots are considerably smaller when we get around to wanting them than they might otherwise be. Which prompted me to take a peek at the investment products section of the business part of the DT and then onto the corresponding part of the JP Morgan web site.
Where I find that there are hundreds if not thousands of investment products out there, mostly variations on the unit trust theme. But they do much better than Heinz. Which prompts me to wonder, why are there so many products? If I was that interested in playing the investor wouldn't I get more fun out of taking a punt on some shares rather than one of these complicated products? And if I just want somewhere safe to put my savings, it would be good enough to have low risk, medium risk and high risk. I don't want to have to spend weeks poking the whole business around or employing some unemployed encyclopedia salesman to masquerade as my financial advisor.
So it strikes me that it is the same game as the mobile phone people and the banks (the former building societies) are playing. Blind the punter with variety and information. That way they just give up and take the first product on the list. Incidentally, well known as the way to manage troublesome trade union officials. Deluge them with stuff and they will soon retire hurt to the boozer and leave management alone.
# posted by Jim @ 3:31 AM 
