Our language is changing all the time and is probably changing faster than at any time in its history. We now tweet things and Google them and have LOLs AFAIK.

In any event there are some things our language is stubborn about. It doesn’t like innovation deep in its operating system. We don’t have lots of basic words which we should have. The word ‘whose’ works for a person, but not, strictly speaking for a non-person. So you can say “that person whose property was stolen”. But not really “That company whose property was stolen” – though lots of people do say things like that. If you want a non gender specific pronoun for a person - because you don’t know their gender, you can’t say ‘it’ – or you can but it’s both strange and rude. There are lots and lots of examples, and I know you can’t wait to point to some in comments.

Sometimes when things get political we fix things like this – as we did with “Ms”. But it’s a pity we can’t fix the other stuff. Why can’t we? And what could be done about it? (Actually I know the answer to the second question – not much. But not the first.) So O Troppodillians what dost thou reckon?

As some readers may have noticed (assuming you can access us at all), the performance of Troppo is still distinctly dodgy despite Jacques shifting from his original choice of WordPress web host. Its name was WpEngine and it provided next to no service during the day in Australia (because it’s the middle of the night in America where they’re based).  Moreover its servers crashed for prolonged periods of time and repeatedly.

The current host (called Page.ly) apparently answers support requests although it doesn’t actually seem to solve problems.  Its servers don’t crash for hours on end, they just have intermittent outages every couple of minutes! It’s very irritating but ultimately Troppo is just a hobby blog, albeit one of which I am proud and wish it was actually hosted reliably (as it was for years by Jacques Chester before career pressures forced him recently to enlist the “services” of a commercial web host).

While Troppo is just a hobby, however, I’m in the process of creating a brand new law practice as part of a plan to flee the Tropics and migrate back to southern Australia in the next couple of years.  The venture is heavily dependent on a reliable web presence.  Hence this bleg.  Does anyone (either with an IT job or a small-medium business that is heavily web-reliant) know of a reliable and at least vaguely affordable web host that does a good job with WordPress-based sites? Our site will be based on a WordPress platform and will ultimately be fairly large in size and hopefully have significant traffic (although not at first obviously).

PS And Page.ly’s latest hijink is that in its latest crash a couple of minutes ago it has (yet again) deleted most of the sidebar images that I spent over an hour this afternoon reinstating.  What a truly marvellous service!!!

PPS No hang on, the images have returned now! Bizarre …

I just came across an impressive philanthropic venture that nevertheless felt the need to articulate its ‘values’. I won’t go into it at any length here, but the more I think of formal articulations of values the less impressed I am.

So many organisations do it that perhaps it’s worth doing, but the thing that concerns me is that values tend to be articulated in tension with each other. If one of my values is ‘honesty’ and another is ‘consideration for others’, the illuminating thing is not the fact that I rehearse them as values – most people would claim to support the values – but how they are traded off against each other. When does honesty give way to consideration, or vice versa. Statements of corporate values – to the best of my knowledge never tackle this at all.

Anyway there are firms that think all this stuff is so much hot air. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is one. And it’s a clear thinking, generally right doing outfit. No shortage of values, and no lack of clarity of values there.

Then I wondered about another impressive outfit. Platinum Capital about whom I’ve written before. I searched its website for its ‘mission’ and the word appears once in its entire website and all its newsletters. It’s on the first newsletter and appears as a simple statement – rather than up in lights as a Capital M ‘Mission Statement.

As this is the first letter to investors, it is appropriate to remind readers of our mission. We aim to add to your wealth by scouring the world for listed companies which we believe are trading at valuations below their intrinsic worth.

That’s it. I can’t find any reference to the word “vision” or the expression “our values” on its website. And while it says it doesn’t ignore ethics in its investment approach (I presume if things get egregious enough), it has no formal ‘ethical investment framework’ because it’s aware of how difficult it is to actually come up with one that isn’t riddled with paradoxes.

Anyway, here’s my bleg, do you know any other successful companies that haven’t been swept up in the ouija board nonsense of visions, missions and values.