Thoughts from PaySimplers—who aspire to make the world better one small business at a time.

'South Korean companies are sending employees on "fake funeral" courses to help prevent suicide. The "well-dying craze" has become an integral part of training at Samsung, which has built its own fake funeral centre'

Thanks to Meltdown III stalwart Jon Amsden for finding and introducing this impressionistic but telling survey of what a dollar free-falling towards worthlessness ('Monopoly money', anyone?) means in terms of everyday survival in some parts of the world.

For those who may wish to take a break from the lofty abstractions of financial skullduggery and dollar decline, here's how it looks on the fishmarket floor and in other places where the dollar was once the basic currency of international trade but is now losing its former luster.

Private Eye looks back at the birth of PFI and makes a not-so-surprising discovery.

A reader alerts the Eye to a 1940s history of Benito Mussolini, uncovered by a US think tank, and makes an unkind comparison with Gordon Brown's current favourite policy.  
   

From Private Eye, the otherwise barely-reported story of the recent Treasury paper underlying the UK government's renewed commitment to more! bigger! better! PFI, which draws on the 'analysis' of PFI fee-farmers PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG etc.

    It has screwed scores of hospital budgets, snarled up the school building process and lumbered taxpayers with billions of pounds of hidden debts, yet the private finance initiative continues to thrive.  Why?

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity w

On March 26 a Financial Times 'Lex' columnist wrote: