August 2009
Dear Lord Almighty
How did this spaz ever get to be chairman of the FSA?
\”I think some of it is socially useless activity,\” he said, referring to the complex financial instruments that have largely been blamed for triggering the biggest global financial crisis in decades.
I think Big Brother on TV is socially useless but that doesn\’t mean I advocate higher taxes upon those who produce it or partake of it.
Absolutely everyone thinks that some activity or other is socially useless but the definition of a free society is one where we tolerate people doing things which we regard as such. The moment we discriminate between activities on the basis of what we \”think\” about them we lose that essence of being a free society.
Or as the Daily Mash puts it:
ACROSS the UK the search has begun for a business that is socially useful.
Teddy Goldsmith
A both odd and endearing figure. It\’s worth reading \”A Blueprint for Survival\” (it\’s out there on the net if you cannot find a paperback version).
Yes, lots of it is wrong but it was one of the first places (outside of the academic literature like Pigou etc) where we see the essential point: that externalities have to be put into market prices. He described it as people must pay the true cost of their actions, but it\’s the same point.
Monbiot has been hugely influenced by him and at the heart of both of their view of the world is this point:
I realised that the root problem was economic development.
That this is crazed lunacy still doesn\’t mean that Teddy didn\’t make some interesting points as well.
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D\’ye think it might? The day after his death? The two phrases he would have desperately hoped would not be his epitaph?
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Quote of the day
\”I\’ve not been to a same sex civil wedding before but it certainly ended with a bang bigger than the average weddings.\”
Wedding guest after the bride at a wedding used her stiletto to attack the bouncer.
On the boycott of Glenn Beck
Hey, lefties, boycott away.
You are, after all, only making your preferences known by the way that you spend your money. You know, that market shtick thing, the thing which we froth-mouthed righties insist we should all enjoy all the time.
Maybe you\’d like to return the favour sometime? You know, let us make our preferences known in the way that we spend our money in a free market?
However:
Beck\’s grotesque description of Obama is hardly out of character. We\’ve all seen the YouTube video of Beck talking about the president against a backdrop of goose-stepping Nazis. Earlier this year, in a too-nice New York Times profile, those of us who are not regular viewers (that is, just about everyone who is reading this commentary) learned Beck was passing along rumours that Obama was building concentration camps. Then, too, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America has been documenting Beck\’s outrages for years, going back to his days of denying global warming on CNN Headline News.
A tad over the top don\’t you think?
Climate change denialism is the same as accusing the President of being a Nazi?
Eh?
Why the surprise?
The Midlands might be undergoing something of a minor cultural renaissance – with Sven-Goran Eriksson taking over at Notts County, three local teams in the Premier League and even the Coventry band the Specials touring again to loud acclaim. But for local people, it seems that this is not enough to command their loyalty. Given half a chance, three-quarters of the population would leave tomorrow.
I mean, seriously, have you ever been there?
Further, it\’s happened before. Where do you think all those troglodytes in the mining villages of South Wales come from?
Excellent news
The statistics from Moneyfacts show that the average two-year fixed rate mortgage climbed to 5.18 per cent while swap rates – which lenders use to help price their fixed rate mortgages – stood at 2.04 per cent on Tuesday.
It brings the margin between the cost of bank lending and average fixed rates to 3.14 per cent, the widest since Moneyfacts\’ records began in 1988.
Excellent on two counts.
1) A newspaper is finally using the correct rates to talk about the rates on fixed rate mortgages. What base is matters not: it\’s the cost of two year money which underpins the cost of a two year fixed rate mortgage.
2) Bank profits are rising. We like this, for we most certainly do not like it when they\’re not making profits and are falling over like ninepins.
Indeed, the only way that we\’re going to get back however many trillions it was is if the banks do indeed make good profits and thus have the cash to pay back those trillions.
Yes, I\’ve been in shops like this too
Sexy shop assistants a turn-off
An awkward two ton prehistoric beast that grew to the size of a small car had a secret weapon – a spiked club tail that it could use like a medieval mace to kill predators.
Telegraph front page online.
Tee hee
We\’re ruled by incompetents:
People selling adult videos, including pornography, to children are to escape prosecution after the discovery of a Whitehall blunder that means that the 1984 law regulating the video industry was never enacted.
The disclosure that for 25 years the Act governing the classification and sale of videos, video games and now DVDs was never brought into force is a big embarrassment to both Conservative and Labour governments.
One very important question though:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said that it had received legal advice that people who had previously been prosecuted and convicted would be unable to overturn their convictions or seek compensation.
Why?
If the law was not in effect then such prosecutions were illegal. Of course convictions must be overturned and compensation paid.
Sure, proffering money to people who sold hard core porn to little kiddies sticks in the throat but it\’s nowhere near as shaming as punishing the innocent.
Precisely because we do have rulers who are incompetent we have to insist upon the rule of law.
I think I\’ve said something like this myself recently
But what does it matter to those who died what Stalinism developed into? What does it matter to the dead and their families whether they were starved for being kulaks, shot for writing \”nationalist\” literature, thus impeding inevitable progress to socialist utopia, or killed for being Slavs and resisting the Nazis, thus making way for a perfect racial empire? It is surely less important why people were killed, than that they were killed. The fact that the apparent aim of Stalin\’s terrors – the socialist utopia – seems nobler to some than Hitler\’s vision of racial perfection, can offer no solace to those terrorised.
The joy today of course is reading such sentiments in The Guardian.
So here\’s a business idea
Ambrose E-P tells us that China is going to restrict its exports of rare earth metals.
A draft report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.
China mines over 95pc of the world’s rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.
Hmmm….
The Mountain View mine in California will reopen but from memory it only contains the light rare earths, not the heavy. However, there\’s one error:
The rare earth family are hard to find, and harder to extract.
No, the thing about rare earths is that they are not in fact rare nor are they all that difficult to extract. Certainly far easier than gold or platinum.
Wait, but there\’s more! For your humble Timmy knows where to find all of these rare earths. He\’s even paid to have one version of an extraction technology developed. And no, it\’s not some hole in the ground in some dodgy area of the world. It\’s in processing the waste from another industrial process. In fact, clean up the waste from an industrial process, save the producers of that waste pots of money and get the rare earths as a by-product.
Anyone got a spare £10 million or so? Err, yes, this is in fact at least mildly serious. It really is possible to produce these metals, at the right price, from what is currently thrown away at some 35 different sites around the world. Money requirements would be around $500,000 or so to do proof of technology, $5 million or so to build and operate first plant (very rough numbers) and while I know about The City intellectually, I have no idea of real world workings.
For, if we cannot get lutetium from China, how are we going to make MRI machines?
Professor Tim Lang
Professor Tim Lang is one of our own government\’s advisors on food security.
Here\’s what he had to say about Britons farming parts of the Ukraine.
\”I feel sorry for Ukraine, here it is, it was colonised by the Russians, it was the grain basket for many, many years, it went downhill and now it is being asset stripped again by the West,\” he says.
\”You could say that it is good for the Ukraine, that it is getting inside investment from rich countries, that its productivity will go up, that since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has not had the requisite investment, that at least under Stalinism there was a huge amount of that sort of investment – you can paint that picture – but I\’m not convinced by that.\”
I feel rather faint after that. Before I retire to come all over Obnoxio or DK, I\’ll just point out that this fool thinks that \”huge amount of that sort of investment\” means cordoning off the country and starving 8 million of the population to death.
For that is what Stalin did….
Goldman Sachs, the bastards
Jeez (from WSJ front page).
Critics say Goldman Sachs gives key trading tips only to its own traders and favored clients, hurting others who aren\’t given the opportunity to profit from the information.
Aren\’t Goldman Sachs just such complete bastards?
You know, using proprietary information in a proprietory manner?
Err, quite
JANET STREET-PORTER: A glass ceiling? It\’s reinforced b****y concrete!
So says a woman who has risen to the very tippy toppy of our society without any noticeable talent or skill….
Although, to be fair, she did shag for a time one of Sigue Sigue Sputnik which has to count for something or other.
Not much, but something.
Cretins
Staff at the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission have been advised to use \’miserable day\’ instead of \’black day\’. The Commission claims that certain words carry a \’hierarchical valuation of skin colour\’.
Jesus Maddy, get a grip would you?
The Mahdi has just discovered that humans are collaborative, social beings.
Heigh ho….
So after this trembling step in the right direction she manages to fall over, flat on her face:
Are human beings self-interested creatures or are they collaborative? The right\’s argument for market capitalism is rooted in the former but the research on the social brain supports the latter.
The argument for markets (leave aside capitalism for another day) is that, yes, of course humans are collaborative. That\’s what markets are, the way in which humans collaborate.
Jesus Maddy, what is so fucking difficult about this concept? It predates the existence of Homo Sapiens, let alone the existence of our own species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
\”Hey, Ugg!\”
\”Urgh?\”
\”Give me some of that mammoth meat before it goes off and next time I kill a mammoth I\’ll give you some meat….if I do kill a mammoth in the future.\”
\”Cool Dude! There you go!\”.
\”Maybe we should swap some meat for the berries the birds have found?\”
\”Good idea: maybe we\’ll get hubba hubba too!\”.
\”Good thinking, Ugg.\”
(Note that not only have we just described a market exchange, we\’ve managed to include a future and an option as well, along with uncertainty as to the outcome….no, perfect knowledge of the future is not required.)
Surprisingly, modern research shows that you\’re more likely to get laid if you offer your date a steak dinner rather than tofu (this does not work on k d laing for a number of obvious reasons).
We can also see in the fossil record evidence of trading networks: flints heavily worked, by what can only be described as experts, found hundreds of miles from the stone\’s origins. So we\’ve division of and specialisation of labour too.
The argument in favour of markets is not that human beings are self-interested (although, to an extent, they are). The argument for markets is that human beings are collaborative in their own self-interest and markets are the way that they collaborate.
You do this, I\’ll do that and we\’ll swap the production.
That\’s a fucking market you dim bulb time waster!
Jesu Christe on a unicycle, haven\’t you bothered to read any Adam Smith?
The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men…..