Skip to content

May 2011

Polly, it\’s either or, not both

Sigh:

How hard it is to explain the banks\’ effortless escape from any painful punishment or real reform to prevent them crashing the world economy again. Today\’s Financial Times reported the banks have escaped the modest Basel III requirement to hold 7% reserves against their lending. Instead they use risky \”hybrid capital and other debt-like instruments\” as surety – and the casino plays on, destined to crash again. Meanwhile, the banks are failing to keep a modest pledge to foster growth by lending more to business.

The higher you make the capital requirements then the lower will be bank lending. That\’s what it actually means.

So lowering the capital requirements means that banks can lend more. Which is what you claim to want.

You cannot have both: higher capital requirements and more lending. For the one precludes the other.

Y u no get this?

This is also pretty good:

Steve Brittan, of BSA Machine Tools Ltd, runs the kind of business that needs to grow to rebalance the economy away from finance. He makes customised machine tools mostly for export, employing 30 people in Birmingham. Between contract and delivery can take six to 12 months, so he needs and always used to get, working capital to finance the time from deposit to final payment. This is bog standard, non-risky everyday lending. But he can\’t get it, nor the bank\’s letters of credit that were once no problem.

So, we need to expand the finance sector to move the economy away from a reliance upon finance. Yes, very good.

Not very green, no

So far, its two 24-gear rickshaws have carried 80,000 passengers within a three-mile radius of the city centre: a “driver” can expect to take home £100 for an evening’s work.

The firm also delivers for about 400 local businesses, carrying some 300,000 items a year on six cargo bikes. An international courier service uses it for the final stage of its deliveries, dropping off the packages at the depot for distribution to recipients by muscle power. The firm also does work for the local authority and NHS, and has carted off hundreds of tons of waste for, er, recycling.

The problem is that growing the food to power the humans that power the bicycles emits more CO2-e than simply firing up the petrol driven engine being replaced.

Stanley Fischer is a Mensch

He also has some quieter virtues: this is a man, after all, who just won a 70% pay hike at the Bank of Israel for his successor. He felt the higher pay was necessary to attract good future candidates for the job, but thought it would be bad form if he himself accepted it.

Why, Mr. Kettle, you grotty little fascist

Martin Kettle that is:

Morality and the rule of law should apply on the internet as elsewhere in human conduct.

This is absolutely true.

What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that Sarkozy is right about the principle. The internet cannot exist in some undiscussable and untouchable dimension of human activity. It is a human creation. It affects human lives in all sorts of increasing ways. Morality and the rule of law should apply on the internet as elsewhere in human conduct. As such, it is an absolutely proper subject for governments to consider, though naturally with sensitivity.

And when placed in its larger context, that there should indeed therefore be regulation of the internet, it becomes fascist, near totalitarian. No, not in the rhetorical sense, but in the true sense.

That morality is something to be regulated by the government.

This is something that we\’ve just spent an entire century getting away from. We\’ve rather changed why adultery is immoral, from a crime against God\’s Order to a crime against the partner betrayed, but we do still regard it as immoral. But at the same time we\’ve moved it from being something the law, government, should concern itself with to a position that what adults do with their gonads, consensually, is no concern of the law.

The same with Teh Gayers, with tipping the velvet, divorce, illegitimacy, porn, speech, religious observance and so on.

Morality has been privatised.

Thank goodness.

The law still exists of course: but in these areas we are closer to the classical liberal nirvana than we were, for even when something distinctly illiberal is suggested, it is couched in the language of liberalism. Smoking should be banned for the harm it does others, not the consenting adult. Porn should be controlled for the kiddies. Booze for the costs to society. However much these are fig leaves to cover those old Puritan desires, that people shoujld be stopped from doing what I disapprove of.

To retreat from this, to argue that government should regulate morality simply because it\’s something that exists and therefore government must regulate it is truly fascist. Franco and Salazar regulated \”their\” populations in such a manner. Ceauscescu did so banning both contraception and abortion: shagging should produce children.

Now, it may or may not be true that aspects of the internet need regulation: that is indeed something worthy of discussion. But what isn\’t is the reason you give: that the government should be regulating morality. That\’s something we\’ve just escaped from, not something we should be embracing.

Don\’t forget, Mr. Kettle is the grotty little shit who claimed that a Cabinet Minister possibly attempting to pervert the course of justice was no biggie, something that it would be disproportionate to investigate.

Oligopolies and free markets

It\’s often difficult to tell which is which, for the behaviour of firms in either will often be the same.

The Cartel Office found no evidence of deliberate collusion but said the companies were quickly following each other in raising prices above the level they should be.

Everyone raising their prices at the same time would be what you would indeed expect from an oligopoly.

But it\’s also what you would expect in a completely free market. So the evidence that everyone is moving prices in concert doesn\’t actually tell you that they are acting in concert.

There might be some truth in this

Yes, it\’s anecdotal, from an aggrieved relative.

However:

Her daughter, whose complaint prompted a damning report by the health watchdog on Thursday, believes the problem was the attitude of nurses who do not want to provide basic support to frail pensioners who need help eating, drinking, washing or going to the lavatory.

“What they’ve got to do is have a new system of monitoring and training, and appoint lower-level nurses.”

Angela Lawrence, a retired BBC journalist, said: “Because nurses are educated to degree level, they are contemptuous of low-level care. They think it’s beneath them.

If everyone is indeed now a degreed professional, who is doing the nursing?

No, Ghadaffi\’s not paranoid

Diplomatic sources last night disclosed that recent intelligence suggested the Libyan dictator was “paranoid” and “on the run” from Nato’s escalating attacks on his regime.

For there really are the Air Forces of several nations attempting to blow him into small pieces.

Being worried about this, taking action to avoid it, is not paranoia. It\’s plain common bloody sense.

Quote of the day

But you simply cannot call yourself \”pro-choice\” and then bar people who do not agree with you from expressing their opposing view. It\’s an oxymoronic position. People who defend such regressive behaviour, simply mirror that of the dictatorial hardliners they supposedly stand against. Then they wonder why they get called \”feminazis\”.

Quite.

Towel Day was yesterday

90% of the world will have no idea what peeps are going on about. The other 10% will, as in the comments here, be serving up some of the best comic scenes ever written.

The radio show was better than the TV one and possibly better than the novels. As for the movie…..yurk.

On the effects of high marginal tax rates

As The Guardian tells us:

Now, I love Adele. But that doesn\’t exactly endear you to her, does it? Let\’s look at it again.

\”I\’m mortified to have to pay 50%!\” The Beatles had to pay 95% – as did all the highest earners under two successive governments (Wilson and Heath) in the mid-60s. George Harrison wrote a song about it, can\’t remember what it\’s called, sorry.

Erm, yes, but I\’m pretty sure the top income tax rate never went above 83%. The 95% comes from the lyrics to the song, not reality.

However, the more important point is, well, what actually happened to all those rock type people who should have been paying those tax rates? The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, Elton John and so on: they all buggered off didn\’t they? Mansions in France and Ireland and……

No point in hanging around to collect some pittance so they didn\’t.

There really is a Laffer Curve you know?

John Edwards is going down

Hooh Hah!

The justice department is to accuse Edwards, once a rising star of the Democratic party as its 2004 vice-presidential candidate, of accepting substantial donations to his 2008 campaign from two wealthy supporters in order to cover up the relationship with his campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, and the fact that they had a child together.

The charges come out of a grand jury investigation which heard from more than a dozen witnesses including Edwards\’s former chief aide, Andrew Young, who at one time covered up for his boss by falsely claiming paternity of the child and then writing a book about it.

Last year, Young discovered a video tape of Edwards having sex with Hunter among a box of personal possessions left at his home by his former boss\’s mistress. A judge ordered the tape to be turned over to the court as part of an investigation into whether cash given to Hunter by Edwards was in effect hush money.

Edwards is to be accused of using the campaign donations to support and seclude Hunter.

Edwards now faces the choice of attempting to reach a plea bargain which would result in him being struck off as a lawyer or taking his chances on a trial and the prospect of prison time.

Couldn\’t happen to a nicer man.

So it\’s men who are rude about womens\’ looks then, eh?

\"\"So we get this description of Ms. Trimingham:

All changed when Vicky learned that her husband was having an affair with Carina Trimingham, his sometime press aide and a Doc-Martens-wearing former lesbian. Oh, Chris, Chris. Hell is a rather cosy, cheerful place compared to the wrath of a wife whose man runs off with a bisexual woman twice her size. Plus the unfortunate Ms Trimingham looks like the love child of Tommy Cooper and Bernard Bresslaw.

More than a tad ungallant, eh? And certainly more wounding than all that frothing about Pippa Middleton having a gawkable derriere.

This comes of course from the fragrant Allison Pearson.

\"\"That\’s right my dear, past a certain age always make sure to be photographed while looking up. Helps to hide the wattles and jowls, doesn\’t it?

The effects of gravity upon the porky are such a bitch.

WTF? Don\’t horses have higher CO2-e emissions than lorries?

Suez Environnement, the owner of Sita UK, is trying out the new horse-drawn bin lorries in cities across France – saving petrol money and therefore carbon dioxide emissions.

Anyone actually have access to a decent calculation on this?

My starting assumption would be that 1 horsepower from a horse very definitely emits more CO2-e than 1 horsepower from an ICE.

I would go on an assume that picking up trash using a horse emits more than doing so with an ICE…..but that\’s the bit that I hope someone would be able to check?

I\’m equally sure that as emissions are currently reported a horse emits less. For we don\’t count emissions from the horse, from the land used to grow food for the horse, from the fertiliser used on that land and so on.

So my assumption (and as I asay, it\’s an assumption which I\’d love to have tested) is that this system will lead to higher emissions while recording lower emissions.

Making people think they\’re aiding in solving the problem while actually making it worse.

The Vatican and condoms

Expect the usual outrage here:

The Vatican has renewed its criticism of the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, saying they made the problem worse by promoting a false sense of security.

But do note that they are actually on to something.

Written by Matthew Hanley, a US public health expert who has worked on HIV prevention programmes in Africa, it warns of the emergence of phenomenon of \”risk compensation\” in which people who used condoms had more casual sexual encounters with more partners than those who did not.

It says that statistics show that AIDS continues to spread in the condom-using group because, even with \”perfect\” use, the failure rate means that some 12,000 infections are expected from every million people.

The infection rate is in reality much higher, however, because people frequently use condoms either imperfectly or inconsistently, says the report, The Catholic Church and the Global Aids Crisis, which will be published by the London-based Catholic Truth Society next month.

Yes, yes, we know, the Church is using this to bolster its argument that monogamy within marriage and abstinence outside it is the only way to go.

But they are still on to something.

The accident rate for cyclists wearing helmets is higher than that for those who do not. The accident rate for drivers wearing seatbelts is higher than that for those who don\’t. Protection from the consequences of aggressive actions does seem to increase the number of aggressive actions taken.

We can compare it by analogy to Jevons\’ Paradox, where making energy use more efficient can actually increase the use of energy: because we\’ve just made energy costs a much smaller part of the value added.

What amuses slightly is that those very people who insist that Jevons is absolutely correct about energy (and thus that lower consumption of everything is the only possible solution) and resource use are likely to be those who absolutely insist that the Vatican must be wrong about condoms.

Ian Mearns MP thinks his consitutuents are all drunken slappers

That\’s the conclusion to be drawn from this report

The controversial Girls Gone Wild franchise – in which young women, often intoxicated, are encouraged to strip and perform sex acts on camera – is planning to hit Britain and it is feared the party loving North East is firmly in its sights.

So concerned are a group of local MPs that they have now asked the Home Office to intervene to prevent the programme makers being allowed to operate in Britain.

OK, Girls Gone Wild. Modus operandi, take the cameras out, find some drunk totty and film it. Give \’em a t-shirt and make millions selling the DVDs.

Perhaps not the most intellectual of occupations but it seems to keep large numbers of people happy.

But a group of MPs led by Ian Mearns from Gateshead have lodged an Early Day Motion calling on the Home Secretary to ban the film makers from operating in this country.

It is not clear whether an itinerary has been agreed, but Mr Mearns said he was sure that Newcastle – with its reputation as a party city – would be on the list.

So, MP worried about the filming of drunken slappers insists that of course the first drunken slappers to be filmed will be in his area.

Conclusion: he thinks his peeps are drunken slappers.

Not the most delicate of things to say about those you represent, is it?