Sleeping

There are times in life when you need to get up early the next morning. Luckily, doing a maths degree, these are infrequent. However when these nights come up, I suddenly find myself rubbish at getting to sleep, as if I have completely lost the rather important life skill. Life skill here meaning a skill necessary for my life to continue past a few days, as well as the more conventional definition of a skill learned in life.

My thoughts in these situations always follow a path which covers the same points as other, similar nights, though not always in the same order.

So I'll be lying there on my side (I always kind of sleep on my side) and the more I try to get to sleep, the more I'm actively thinking about going to sleep so the less sleepy I become. As time wears on I get more and more worried (that is the wrong word, but there is no word to fill this gap perfectly, maybe fraught?) about the impending dawn as it marches steadily forwards to greet me; and I suppose in a relativistic way, I march on to greet it.

Then I'll have the clock debate with myself. I'm aware that some amount of time has passed since I did the final look at the clock before turning the light off and trying to go to sleep. However, time perception, the fickle beast that it is, is horribly inconsistent, so whether it has been 10 minutes or a couple of hours is a complete mystery to the bed me. Do I look at the clock to see how screwed I am for getting up for the early event the next morning, but making me lose all the progress I've already made at trying to get to sleep by sitting upright? Or, do I actively avoid looking at the clock, causing me an irrational anxiousness that will keep me awake, much like the irrational stuff already going on to have kept me up to this time already?

I've got around this little debate by convincing myself of something I'm not sure is true. It is the only unfounded truth that I can think of that I am reluctant to look up in my life in general since it saves me sleepless minutes and it harms no one. I tell myself that when I look at the clock on one of these nights and it says 2:00 or so and I have been in bed since 12:30, that although I wasn't sleeping in that time, I was lying down trying to sleep; which is almost as good. So when you start to work out the dangerous sums of (time you have to get up)-(time now) if it isn't very much time left to sleep then you can bodge it by adding on some proportion of (time now)-(time you starting trying to go to sleep). The proportion you choose to add on is the variable you change to feel better about the whole situation. This is the lie to myself that I preform.

And it kind of works. If you can convince yourself that there is loads of time then it is easy to get to sleep, you only have to trick yourself and not think too hard about it all.

When a night gets somewhat worse, I have a different thought, which is what I originally wanted to write this entry about. Say it has now got to 4:00 or so. (On a side note, don't you agree 5am is the worst hour? I can imagine being on a late night out till 4am, or having to get up early for something at 6am, but nothing good will ever happen at 5.) The clock debate has propelled itself into unreasonable stretches of logic, you have changed which side of you that you are lying on dozens of times, sleep finally seems improbable. I start wondering about the amount we forget about our nights sleep by the next morning. Certainly we forget most of our dreams, but we also forget a lot of the going to sleep process. And I wonder, do I go through this every night, seven days a week? Is this lack of being able to go to sleep a nightly occurrence and I forget about it by the next morning almost all of the time? Maybe I go through this very line of reasoning every night? I certainly go through it every night that I remember finding it hard to go to sleep. I don't want to be applying some sort of precognitive bias on it by assuming that I don't.

Somehow I will always drift off to sleep, as the need to sleep overrides anything else. 

I've spent many of my Christmas Eves like this as a child; though not any more, since Christmas is no longer as exciting and I will usually have had many glasses of wine which will send me straight to sleep these years.

So whenever you know I have an exam or something to get up for in the next morning, you can reasonably predict I am lost somewhere in that scramble of thinking.

Goodnight. I'm off to bed.

My Introduction and the Scary Story of the PFI

First off, I confess I have not properly blogged before. However I did create a dozen or so long notes onto my Facebook notes which served as a sort of blog in the past. These slowly died down as the workload of the new year increased and as I lacked motivation for them, but no more! I am determined to keep this proper, fully function, I'm a grown up now, sort of blog alive.

I created this as a new start. I make no promises to update it at any regimented rate, a mistake which could have spelled disaster, I would have missed one deadline then just given up on the idea: much safer this way.

I also do not promise to keep the number of semicolons down, I realise I use them far too often, but y'know; it's my bloody blog.

Anyway, on with the show.

For my first blog, I thought I'd post about a political issue. It's hardly a snappy one to write about, no flashy fireworks here to start off my blog in style and get the readers in, but it is an issue I care about. This blog is primarily for my own amusement, so in a rather induction way, because I care about what I care about, I'm going to write about it.

What is PFI? The Private Finance Initiative (in Britain) was set up under Thatcher's rule and is still going today. It is a government scheme to allow and encourage private businesses to do expensive bits of the governments work such as building schools, hospitals and motorways but to delay most of the payback until a later time, typically small payments made over 20-30 years and at the cost of high interest rates on the governments part.

This rate of interest is very high. For instance the Edinburgh Infirmary hospital would have cost the government £180 million straight up to build. However, they chose to use the PFI; costing them only £30 million a year, but for 30 years. That's a markup of £720 million at our expense.

The good news for the government on these schemes, is that they do not have to declare the debt to these companies under this scheme as public debt. This means that they can neatly sweep these money problems under the rug when it comes to saying how well they are keeping up the economy if anyone ever challenges a parties economic policy.

The other main reason the controlling party wants to use the PFI, is that while the debt of paying for a new public building or service would normally come out of their own budget, they can put the debt into the future. When you could only be around for the next 4 or 5 years, this could be an attractive prospect. Ah short term viewing. One generation can get a free ride while piling on the debt for the children.

There are plenty of examples of PFI in use, but it seems pointless for me to list them all here; I would just be copying the stats over from over from other blogs and newspaper columns. But they are all quite similar in style, such as the three planned hospitals on the Paddington Basin. They would have cost £380 million, but with the PFI they are nearly £900. Overall, on 12 hospital schemes, the value for money for the government was only 58%.

The schemes are also critised for the amount of control these companies have over the supposedly socialist healthcare and education buildings. I'll leave this point out for the most part though, because I know there are a handful of you Anarcho-Capitalists out there reading this. I will mention one example though, since it is a Worcester thing. The Worcestershire Royal Hospital is in £15 million debt and only opened in March 2002. But because it was set up under a PFI with a company called Catalyst, it is subject to financial penalties for a range of issues at Catalyst's will. For instance, the hospital was fined £200,000 for having the bed occupancy rise by 90%. They got fined because they were treating more people. This sort of thing will go on until the hospital is fully owned by the taxpayer again.

Back in the early days of PFI it was heavily critised by the Labour government. Of course, this line of argument was quickly dropped so that the issue would become forgotten when Labour got into government and so could benefit from it too.

Of course, this sort of disregard for the future can't last forever. To quote Wikipedia, "As of October 2007 the total capital value of PFI contracts signed throughout the UK was £68bn. However, this figure pales into insignificance compared with the commitment of central and local government to pay a further £267bn over the lifetime of these contracts." The healthcare system is struggling under the repayments, they will peak at £10 billion in 2017, so it is set to get worse. If the government spending on healthcare falls, the hospitals may become insolvent.

Another critisism of the PFI is that what the government originally wants for a project, is changed for what corporations will want to pay for.  As one piece in the Guardian put it: "this is how the £30m public scheme to refurbish Coventry's two hospitals became a £410m private scheme to knock them both down and rebuild one of them – containing fewer beds and fewer doctors and nurses. The old scheme was too cheap to attract private money."

I first heard about PFI back in the days of the MP expenses scandal. From a quick snoop around the internet, it seems to be accepted that while the MP expenses caused an outrage, they cost the country only around 11 million. The PFI scandal on the other hand, while costing us over a thousand times that and being every bit as corrupt, goes unchallenged. This is the most scary thing about the whole story, nobody cares. This is a complicated issue, so it won't sell papers like the MP expenses. 15 years on the government is every bit as happy to buy into this initiative, a scheme which is outrageously exploiting our economy.