Of mammals this time:
Animals that were picked off by new predators were rarely rediscovered, while those threatened by a loss of habitat or hunting by humans were more likely to be holding on in small colonies, she found.
It\’s the continental shake up of species that we\’ve been responsible for over the centuries which is more at fault than anything else it seems. Cats and rats especially, being distributed around by ships.
Hmm:
The remaining 4,000 species were assessed and the level or risk based on a combination of the absolute number of plants estimated in the wild, the known decline, and the total area in which they are thought to live.
Is this using the old method of how many species live in an area, if that area gets used then x % of the species will go extinct? That Edward O Wilson thing? That method that we\’re pretty much certain is wrong?
If 90% of the forest goes then 90% of the species do? When in fact, when we observe what does happen when 90% of the forests go (US SE, Brazil Atlantic forest), we find that 1% or 2% of the species go?
Hmm.
One of the most captivating political soap operas in Russia has come to an abrupt end with the sacking of Moscow\’s embattled mayor, Yuri Luzhkov.
OK, pretty pissed. But we can measure how pissed they are by what happens next:
They also attacked his property developer wife, Yelena Baturina, saying her $2.8bn fortune had been acquired thanks to her husband\’s job, a claim she denies.
If they go after that then they\’re really pissed.
Of course, the idea that such a fortune is entirely coincidental is entirely laughable. So, do they get to retire (or even shout and fight?) while keeping the dosh or does the loss of power mean the loss of the cash?
And agnostics and atheists seem to get better results.
And on the short version you can take yourself, this agnostic/atheist got 100%, aided by two things.
One, a lucky guess on the last question and two, well, try this:
When does the Jewish Sabbath begin?
Possible answers are Friday, Saturday or Sunday.
The correct answer is \”by whose calendar\”?
For the Jewish Sabbath is indeed the Saturday: but in the Jewish calendar which day is which is not defined by when is midnight or noon (both quite difficult things to ascertain with accuracy without watches, although sundials will do for one of them). Rather, as would be logical in a pastoral/nomadic society (when many of these rules were first set), by nightfall or dawn, rather more easily observed phenomena.
As it happens, Jewish tradition chose nightfall.
So, the precise answer to the beginning of the Sabbath is the nightfall before Saturday using our standard western calendar, that is, Friday night.
But in the Jewish calendar the Sabbath starts at the beginning of the day after Friday: that\’s why they\’re celebrating it on what \”we\” call Friday night because to them it is already the Sabbath, Saturday.
So we\’ve a question that (OK, but only by being pedantic, I admit), in this quiz, changes answer dependent upon whether you are Jewish or not.
BTW, no, I\’ll not tell you what the quiz thinks is the right answer. Work it out for yourselves.
I am intrigued by some early responses to ‘Making Pensions Work’ I have received on this blog and have read in some (typically abusive) commentary on the right wing blogosphere to which I do not link.
Without exception the commentary ducks the issue, which I find fascinating. The key issues that raises are:
OK, so, here\’s one of those \”right wing blogosphere\” things to which he will not link.
One quite gorgeous part:
c. I’m promoting a massive private equity bonanza. No I’m not. I’m promoting investment in new economic activity. The fact that those making this comment think this only arises through private equity venture capital investment is itself significant: they’re saying in effect that the larger quoted companies in the UK are actually unrelated in terms of their capital funding to the stock markets that supposedly serve their needs but which in reality act as casinos for speculation. And anyway, much of this money will go into government bonds and related products. So this is wrong.
No, really, having insisted that pensions must be invested only in the building of new productive capacity he\’s now saying that buying gilts to fund outreach diversity advisors qualifies.
Anyway, up to you, have a look at the two posts and see whether you think he\’s answered my \”typically abusive\” commentary.
Update: just spotted this as well.
b. The rate of return is not so bad. What? 1%
This in response to this:
This is simply nonsense.
As data published by the organisation promoting the City of London,
TheCityUK, showsxviii, the ten year rate of return on investment in UK stock markets was an average
loss of 2% per annum over the first decade of the twenty first century. This was also the global
average rate of return on shares in that decade.Yes, it’s the dividend yield. Which, at least at some points for FTSE has been 3%. You know, enough to take total returns to equity positive?
They refer (again) to here. Where those promoters of the City of London give us the index returns for the major stock markets. That is, they give us the capital return (or loss) on holding shares. So, what is not included in their number then?
Finally, we have an admission from Ritchie that he\’s made an error. A silly one too, one which someone with any knowledge of finance would have spotted when it was first mentioned over a drink, let alone when written down.
And I am accused of ducking the issue?
(Do note that he\’s not had the time to alter the original document yet.)
BTW, anyone want to tell us what the real yield to maturity (we need to maturity because Richard is telling us that we really should be having those nasty second hand markets you know) on gilts has been for the last 10, 20, 30 years?
And they want to do this so that the burden of tax is shifted from capital – business profits in this case – to labour. And this is part of the process of reallocating wealth from the poorest to the richest in society.
So what Wolseley is doing is not a politically neutral act. And nor is it all it claims – a move against regulation. This is about shifting power. From people to capital. From countries to corporations. From poor to rich.
And to prevent this we have to assert the right to tax corporations.
Sigh.
It\’s this ignorance of basic economics which leads him into such errors.
1) Corporations don\’t pay taxes, people do. The question therefore is who actually carries the economic burden of these taxes which are nominally collected from corporations.
2) There are three groups who could be carrying this burden. It could be the shareholders (ie, capital) in the form of lower returns from their investments. It could be the workers in the form of lower wages (ie, labour) and finally it could be customers in the form of higher prices (ie consumers).
3) The general conclusion in economics (please note, not neo-liberal economics, not new classical, not Keynesian, neo-Keynesian, any of the various heterodoxies, but a basic point agreed by all such schools) is that who carries it depends. And in any particular economy it depends, crucially, on the mobility of capital. The more mobile the capital the less of the burden that capital (ie, the shareholders) will carry and the more that labour (ie, the workers) will. Very few think that consumers carry a significant portion of the burden in any of the reasonable flavours of the universe.
4) We are, as in fact are most economies, small and open (there are those which are large, like the US and thus slightly less affected, there are those which are closed, like North Korea and thus hardly affected at all) meaning that capital is highly mobile.
5) The CBO in the US estimates that some 70% of the economic burden of the US corporate income tax falls upon labour, the workers, in the form of lower wages. Joe Stiglitz (Nobel Laureate recall) has pointed out that it\’s entirely possible that the burden falling upon labour can be greater than 100% of the tax raised. Mike Deveraux has asserted that this is the case in the UK.
6) The long term effects will be greater than the medium term effects which themselves will be greater than the short term ones in this shifting of the economic burden from capital to labour.
Now none of the above is really arguable. It\’s really just the straight economics of taxation and we\’ve known about this for a long time.
The one part that is arguable is whether the various estimates of the effect are correct: the CBO, Stiglitz and Deveraux could indeed all be wrong. The effect we know is correct: it\’s the magnitude which is arguable.
Now, note Ritchie\’s dreadful error in his base assumptions. That the burden of corporate taxation is actually carried by capital. We know absolutely that this is not necessarily so. We have a number of estimates telling us that this is not so….and we don\’t, at least as far as I\’m aware we don\’t (and entirely willing to be corrected here), have estimates telling us that this is so.
Simply because Ritchie doesn\’t understand economics he\’s led into this dreadful error: that we must tax corporations because this is the taxation of capital.
But it ain\’t, is it?
Obama is arguing the executive has the power to execute American citizens without a trial, without even so much as an airing of the charges against them, and that it can do so in complete secrecy, with no oversight from any court, and that the families of the executed have no legal recourse.
Hmm.
So yeah. Tyranny. If there’s more tyrannical power a president could possibly claim than the power to execute the citizens of his country at his sole discretion, with no oversight, no due process, and no ability for anyone to question the execution even after the fact . . . I can’t think of it.
Not all that well, eh?
Large supermarket chains would benefit from a £700m windfall if minimum pricing for alcohol was introduced across the UK, new research indicated today.
Tesco, the UK\’s biggest supermarket, stands to reap the most rewards, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
The thinktank researched the likely impact of a 45p minimum unit price for alcohol – the controversial measure which had been proposed by the Scottish government but was recently rejected by opposition parties.
The IFS said such a policy would benefit retailers rather than the public purse, echoing an argument that critics of minimum pricing have used against the measure.
How could it be any different?
Currently some of the supermarkets use low booze prices as loss leaders. Ban them from doing so and they\’ll not be making such losses on such items.
But over and above that I really never have understood these campaigners arguing for minimum prices. Are they really so bereft of the most basic economic knowledge that minimum prices will of course, inevitably, benefit the producers and retailers?
Heh, perhaps the whole thing has actually been cooked up by the producers and retailers? A million here and a million there to a few fake charities and that £700 million a year would be a nice return, wouldn\’t it?
This looks interesting:
The Panorama programme, widely trailed over the weekend in the run-up to its anticipated Monday evening slot, alleged Ashcroft had avoided more than £3m in tax through a financial manoeuvre that involved transferring shares in the Impellam Group worth £17m to a trust to benefit his children.
Sources close to the peer claimed the programme was pulled because journalists had misinterpreted a company document released by Impellam on 6 April 2010.
Some of the interviews for the programme were filmed before the general election. Lawyers for Ashcroft have been engaged in a year-long battle with the BBC over the investigation into the Tory peer.
The Impellam document said the company \”had been notified that, following a transfer of an indirect interest in the company, Lord Ashcroft no longer has a beneficial interest in 25,745,349 ordinary shares of 1p each in the company. These shares represented the whole of his beneficial interest in the company\”.
The BBC\’s investigators interpreted this to mean that Ashcroft had controlled the shares and subsequently moved them into a trust to benefit his children, according to a Conservative source. Ashcroft\’s lawyers, however, argued that the use of the phrase \”indirect interest\” showed that he did not own the shares.
Certainly, I, no tax accountant or lawyer I agree, would interpret \”indirect interest\” as to mean no direct interest or ownership.
Which would, again I insist I am no expert in such things, I assume mean that there was no direct tax liability arising from the change in ownership of the shares. No IHT in advance as alleged in that first para.
I wonder who was the forensic accountant, the respected tax expert, that the BBC was using on this programme?
In this day and age?
The man obtained a High Court ruling stating that his name and details of his alleged relationship with the woman should not be published, nor even the existence of the gagging order.
It can now be disclosed that the man sought the order because a woman had threatened to reveal her affair with him unless she was paid “very substantial sums”.
A judge has now agreed that the fact of the injunction can be reported, as the risk of it being leaked onto the internet can never be eliminated, but ruled that the identities of those involved must remain secret.
A Tim but not this Tim writes:
A report last week was covered across the press about the environmental benefits of Internet Shopping and working from home:-
Working from home and shopping online could create more carbon emissions than travelling to the office or a store, a study has found.
Consumers who buy online must order more than 25 items from one retailer, otherwise the impact on the environment is likely to be worse than traditional shopping, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) revealed.
The press release on the IET\’s website says the following:-
Shopping on the internet or working from home could be increasing carbon emissions rather than helping to reduce them, a new report claims today.
The research reveals that people who shop online must order more than 25 items otherwise the impact on the environment is likely to be worse than traditional shopping.
Buying goods online has been found to provide carbon savings, but only if the conditions are right. A study found that environmental savings can be achieved if online shopping replaces 3.5 shopping trips, if 25 orders are delivered at the same time or if travel distance is longer than 50km.
So, higher minimum wages for all!
Decent enough rallying cry: but of course we\’re all aware that the minimum wage can be too high. If it is too high (and is enforced) then all of those whose labour is worth less than that minimum wage will find themselves unemployed.
\”Too high\” therefore becomes a value judgement of those proposing the rate. As Mr. Dillow (pbuh) has repeatedly pointed out there are effects of the UK\’s minimum wage upon unemployment. They are however small.
Yet we can still argue that at some higher point that the effects will be large: and thus not worth the unemployment that comes along with higher incomes for those in employment.
Well, we could argue that but we do need to find ourselves an example of such.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative has several posts crunching through this and the empirical result seems to be that if the minimum wage is more than 45% the median wage then we\’re moving into the realms of lots of unemployment. Meaning that, perhaps at least, proponents of such a rise might rethink whether it\’s worth it.
So, do we have an example?
How about South Africa?
NEWCASTLE, South Africa — The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor — the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown — clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it.
“Why? Why?” shouted Nokuthula Masango, 25, after the authorities carted away bolts of gaily colored fabric.
She made just $36 a week, $21 less than the minimum wage, but needed the meager pay to help support a large extended family that includes her five unemployed siblings and their children.
Hmm, what\’s that minimum wage? $57 x 52 / 12 gives us $247 a month, or 1,720 rand or so.
Not a fortune by anyone\’s calculations, wouldn\’t want to live on that alone, let alone support an extended family.
So what\’s the average wage: As The Guardian tells us (hey, we take our sources where we can):
Among the black population, who make up by far the majority at matches, the monthly average wage is 1,620 rand.
Yes, I know, average and median aren\’t the same thing and yes, this is also of the black population not the entire one.
However, we would, using our supposition above about the relationship between minimum wages and unemployment, predict that there would be some unemployment problems, no?
For over a decade, the jobless rate has been among the highest in the world, fueling crime, inequality and social unrest in the continent’s richest nation. The global economic downturn has made the problem much worse, wiping out more than a million jobs. Over a third of South Africa’s workforce is now idle.
And there are such problems.
No, we haven\’t proven the contention: but we\’ve not disproved it either.
Which leads us to an interesting domestic political issue.
UK median (full time) wage is currently £489 a week (2009 figures, ONS). At 37.5 hours a week that\’s £13.04 an hour.
Current minimum wage is £5.91 an hour. That\’s 45% of median wage.
Then we have the living wage enthusiasts, those who would insist that wages should come up to the £7.60 an hour which constitutes the pre-tax income needed to live not in poverty as defined by the public through the Joseph Rowntree Trust. That\’s 58% of median wage.
Now, I\’ve long contended that there\’s a trick being missed here. The difference between £5.91 an hour and having a personal allowance for tax and NI of £12,000 and £7.60 an hour under the current tax system is, for post tax income, if I remember my calculations properly, something like 3 pence an hour. So we can achieve our (joint, yes, I desire it too) desire of taking the working poor out of poverty simply by not taxing them so damn much.
However, there are those who disagree and insist that, no, we must raise pre tax wages instead.
OK, *shrug*.
Which leaves us with the following: maybe WCI is correct, that moving minimum wages above 45% of median is what takes us along that road towards the South African situation? Perhaps we have, by luck, arrived at the highest minimum wage we can have without having lots of that unemployment caused by a minimum wage too high?
You know, maybe the economists who have studied this are right?
All of which means that the living wage peeps are taking something of a gamble, aren\’t they?
To which the correct question is, just how lucky you feelin\’ punk?
Bonus point for sceptics: median wage in the US is just $13.40 an hour or so. Minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
Yup, 54%.
Looked at your unemployment rate recently?
It was a decision point. I had to find out if the bacteria could really affect a healthy person and cause gastritis. I\’d been working very hard in the previous 12 months on piglets, but I have to tell you that piglets aren\’t piglets for very long. They just about grow before your eyes, so after six months I had nearly full-sized pigs in our offices and I was wrestling with them and it was chaos. And you can\’t infect pigs very easily, it turns out, so that failed rather miserably.
It does help if you\’re right of course.
Apologies to Richard and sundry others.
But I simply don\’t see what spending £100,000 to clean the chandeliers at Buckingham Palace has to do with the Queen.
Are we saying that if we were a Republic, with a President, that the chandeliers would not get cleaned (Elysee anyone?)? That we would tear Buck House to the ground? That a Peoples\’ Commissar would not live in luxurious surroundings (Kremlin anyone?)?
The £100,000 bill is a function of the existence of the house with chandeliers in it, not of the form of State that we inhabit.
Here\’s an example of what they\’re saying they ought to be saying.
For what it’s worth – I’d favour sticking to a four year blue print, emphasising the flexibility in our approach and moving towards a 50/50 split between tax rises and spending cuts.
Barring extreme events the next election is in about 4 years time.
Just a thought, but shouldn\’t an economic policy be \”what we will do\” not \”what we would have done if you bastards had voted for us\”?
Another way of putting the same thought. In four years time the deficit will be reduced, in which case thisd policy is irrelevant, or in four yeasr time the deficit will not have been reduced in which case you still need a forward looking policy to deal with it.
My entirely speculative rumination is that the Labour Party still hasn\’t quite realised that it is out of power. They\’re having arguments about what is the correct policy to implement now. But they don\’t get to implement policy now.
What they need to develop is policies which they might implement if they do gain power at some point in hte future: and not policies which will be irrelevant by their next chance to do so.
The change that is very obviously needed is that a company must be considered resident where the economic substance of its management is located. And yes, that can be determined. It’s where a majority of the board and their senior management team work day in day out.
OK. So, say, BP, board and management all work in London (just as an example). So, BP is UK resident.
OK. Clearly, it should be paying tax where it is resident. OK.
So, err, BP shouldn\’t be paying tax in Angola, should it? BP\’s management and board aren\’t in Angola, so the company isn\’t resident in Angloa so BP shouldn\’t be taxed in Angola.
Which leaves your country by country reporting crusade looking a little threadbare, doesn\’t it?
However it emerged this year that Ashcroft had not become a permanent resident when he took up his peerage. Instead he had persuaded officials to allow him to acquire a different status – as a long-term resident – meaning that the peer, who has a large business empire in the Caribbean and US, had not been paying tax on his income from abroad and the Treasury had not been receiving large cheques from him. Last week, Ashcroft told the Telegraph: \”The negotiations [in 2000] with the government for me to join the House of Lords did not include any commitment on my part to be taxed on my worldwide income.\”
OK, this is a semantic thing but there\’s a difference between \”income from abroad\” and \”worldwide income\”.
Money which came to the UK from abroad (ie, income from abroad) paid full UK tax. Money which was earned abroad and did not come to the UK (ie, worldwide income) did not pay UK tax.
And to be honest with you that\’s a (fine) distinction that I\’m just fine with.
After all, the claim is that you should pay tax where the economic substance of an activity is….abroad is abroad….where you enjoy the protection of the government in either earning or enjoying that money made….abroad is indeed abroad….and finally, that taxing the rich reduces inequality….and money that stays abroad doesn\’t contribute to UK inequality, does it?
But it has emerged that Sir Edward Elgar, the composer of Land of Hope and Glory, penned the world\’s first football chant.
Titled \”He Banged The Leather for Goal\”, the theme was written more than 100 years ago in honour of his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers.
And of course in Terry Pratchett\’s recent Unseen Academicals there is a running joke of a classical composer trying to create football chants.
No one knows whether the tune was ever played during his lifetime but yesterday it got its first-ever known public performance at a charity concert in the city.
The choirs of St Peter’s Collegiate Church, under the baton of Wolverhampton Symphony Orchestra conductor Peter Morris, belted out the chant at a concert to raise money for the church’s organ restoration fund.
Sung by the Unseen University choir.
This sounds a little unlikely though:
The Pomp And Circumstance composer would cycle from Malvern to Wolverhampton to accompany her to Molineux,
Yes, I know, our forefathers were tougher than us and all that. But expedia tells me that is 41 miles which seems rather a long way to go on a bicycle circa 1900 for a middle aged man.
Here.
Yes, he probably should be fired and go to jail for it though.
These maps are interesting:
Detroit was shown to have the most starkly segregated metropolitan area with a clear dividing line between black and white residents along 8 Mile Road, which runs across the northern edge of the city.
Mr Fischer, 37, started with Washington DC where the results showed a clear divide between predominantly white areas in the west, and black areas in the east.
The maps were created by Eric Fischer, a California computer programmer, using data from the 2000 Census of America.
He plotted one dot for each 25 people and gave colours according to how people were described in the census.
White people were represented by a red dot, black people by a blue dot, Asians by green, and Hispanics by orange.
But they\’re not really all that surprising.
The explanation (OK, a possible explanation but one which convinces me) is that such segregation will come about from only very small amounts of personal prejudice (no, not even prejudice as hatred for the other, can be just mild preference for the same) rather than requiring some overpowering institution or institutional racism.
In 1969, he published a widely cited article dealing with racial dynamics called \”Models of Segregation\”[7]. In this paper he showed that a small preference for one\’s neighbors to be of the same color could lead to total segregation. He used coins on graph paper to demonstrate his theory by placing pennies and nickels in different patterns on the \”board\” and then moving them one by one if they were in an \”unhappy\” situation. The positive feedback cycle of segregation – prejudice – in-group preference[clarification needed] can be found in most human populations, with great variation in what are regarded as meaningful differences – gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, religion, etc. Once a cycle of separation-prejudice-discrimination-separation has begun, it has a self-sustaining momentum.
The best description I\’ve read of this (ie, one that I can understand, without the maths) is in Paul Ormerod\’s \”Why Most Things Fail\” but then of course all of you have already read that, right?