- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial director, Global Gypsum Magazine
How much debt is the right amount? My guess is that everyone reading this column will have a slightly different answer. Some might say, 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be,' or words to that effect, suggesting that their level of debt is zero. Some will no doubt have too much debt - where the repayments are not affordable. Most readers will have some level of debt (on a mortgage, car payments, credit cards etc) and will find that the level of repayments is currently affordable. Hopefully no readers are subject to the depradations of usury: the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender1.
- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial director, Global Gypsum Magazine
What would you do if the doctor said to you that you had six months to live?
- Written by Peter Edwards, Editor, Global Gysum Magazine
Four years’ ago, the Olympic Games came to Global Cement’s home town of London. The event generated much excitement and a sense of pride in the city, even before the Games had started. At the time I was lucky enough to be living just yards from the route of the cycling road races - could Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish really be cycling on the same road that I commuted up every morning? Yes they could!
- Written by Robert McCaffrey Editorial Director, Global Gypsum Magazine
Friends in cement, the UK has decided to leave the EU. We at Global Cement were ‘Remainers,’ hoping for future reform of the EU. A slim majority of the British people saw it the other way and decided that there was no hope of reform, and that they did not want further integration. Jean Claude Juncker (president of the European Commission) himself had said in the week before the referendum that there was no possibility of further reform, no possibility of further renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Perhaps his comments clinched the final result in the referendum. With 33 million votes cast, 17,410,742 (51.9%) were for an EU exit, while 16,141,241 (48.1%) were for remaining. Only 634,750 people would have had to have changed their minds for the result to be a tie.
- Written by Robert McCaffrey, Editorial Director, Global Gypsum Magazine
I originally trained as a geologist, and gained a PhD in mineralogy and geochemistry (studying lignites in Northern Ireland) a long time ago. It’s been useful in many ways, not least to give me some insight into the relative magnitudes of things, be they time scales (3.8 billion years since life first evolved), physical scales (the difference between a microgram and a milligram) or the severity of earthquakes. The Richter Scale1 of earthquake intensity is logarithmic, meaning that for each increase in scale of one, the shaking, in short, will be ten times bigger. A Richter scale nine earthquake is 100 times ‘bigger’ than a Richter scale seven earthquake (which is already considered a major earthquake).
