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February 2015

Is this woman stupid or what?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. What does it mean to us, as women, to be told that we’re worth less than we used to be? No man I know has ever been told that his powers, his allure, his charm have faded, and that he has to face up to that redundancy. Many women I know in their 50s talk about their invisibility in public places. I’m sure a case could be made for invisibility as a liberating force in a woman’s life, but I am not the woman to make it, not this week at least, when I’ve been dissed or else flatly ignored by all the men I’ve said hello to.

The key word is “fertility”.

Which is, in a species that reproduces sexually, really quite an important key word.

Not marking paid copy as paid copy

Tsk:

The Guardian is facing further questions over a section of its website sponsored by the Go Ultra Low Group, a group of vehicle manufacturers promoting low-emission vehicles.

The section includes 11 articles devoted to the benefits of low-emission cars, including one entitled “miles of smiles” and another “driving into tomorrow, today”.

At no point do the sections or the article disclose that the content has been sponsored by the Go Ultra Low Group, a £2.5 million campaign supported by seven international car manufacturers.

The Telegraph website also carries content produced in association with Go Ultra Low. However, it carries a statement indicating the relationship between its own articles and the car campaign at the top of the page.

The omission represents an apparent contradiction of The Guardian’s own editorial guidelines on sponsored content.

Blimey

Ritchie’s found two tables from HMRC. Then he says:

First, we are not being overtaxed at present. In fact, it is fairly obvious that the economy’s capacity to pay tax is not being exploited, despite the deficit.

Umm, yeah. Try adding the £150 billion or so (a further 33% of the amount HMRC collects, a further 10% of GDP) in tax that is raised by people other than HMRC before making that claim, maybe?

The plot to kill health care

Vastly over dramatised piece on the court case coming up about Obamacare. Rains of frogs and terrors descending. Then this:

And so it comes down to this: a legal challenge based on a technicality — specifically, four words. Should subsidies be available only to exchanges “established by the states”? Or were they designed to cover the entire nation, as is obvious in the intent of the law?

Umm, no, that’s not a technicality. The law says, and one of the people who crafted it has stated that it was also meant to say, that only those who get their Obamacare through a state run exchange can have subsidies. Not people who get it through a Federal exchange.

Is that an idiot thing to have put in the law? Maybe: but blame the idiots who put it there, not the people asking that the country be run according to the rule of law.

Tee hee

a tale about the ancient baroness in the House of Lords who was recently heard to say in the tea room, “The trouble with reaching my age is that all the men you slept with are dead”—only to be interrupted by a quavering voice from the other end of the table: “I’m not.”

What?

There is, of course, a third return which does equate to rent. This is the opportunity that the multinational company has to reduce its overall cost of capital by offering a composite risk to the investor rather than the specific risk that an individually focused activity can provide. The result is that the multinational company can fund its activities at a lower cost than individual entities can, providing it with another return that approximates to yield that is not so much earned as it is the consequence of exploitation, giving it the form of rent, yet again.

Lower financing costs as a result of lower risk through diversification is a rent now, is it?

Jeebus.

The parent company of the multinational group is, as such, an exercise in financial engineering that, like all such exercises, seeks to make its return by exploitation of artificial factors of production that are themselves inherently unproductive in the sense that they do not add to the overall net worth of human well-being. By definition, as a consequence, they extract reward, rather than add value.

Lowering risk through diversification is not adding value?

But, but, why are people willing to invest for a lower return if that lowering of risk is not adding value?

This is also why multinational companies are so dedicated to re-engineering their businesses to create debt as a consequence of their trading wherever it is possible. So, telephone companies wish to sell phones on contracts that disguise implicit high rates of interest. And retailers seek to provide credit cards whilst care manufacturers make most of their money from extending credit to their customers, and not by making the car. That’s because the excess rates of return on capital that the implicit interest rates in these transactions implies provides the rent that multinational companies are now seeking rather than from making the product itself.

Low margins on making cars having nothing to do with making cars being a competitive marketplace?

Cretin Alert!

From April, all Scottish health boards (bar one, NHS Lothian) will ban the use of e-cigarettes on NHS premises. The move makes perfect sense, and falls firmly into line with current NHS policies relating to other nicotine-laden items.

Gross, idiot, stupidity.

By banning both cigarettes and e-cigarettes from hospital grounds, they claim, NHS boards are removing a critical incentive for nicotine addicts to switch over to “less harmful” e-cigs. But should we really be encouraging smokers to make that switch?

Yes.

One of the most dangerous aspects of your typical, run-of-the-mill cigarette is the tar-filled smoke you’re inhaling with each puff. That tar may contain up to 7,000 different toxins, which are otherwise found in everything from rat poison to nail polish. E-cigs, on the other hand, produce a light, tar-free vapour. But this doesn’t necessarily make them any safer.

Complete, total, utter, cuntery.

No matter how you choose to dress it up, nicotine is nicotine, and public health is public health. Let’s not confuse the two.

Hang the bastard.

Happily, the comments section seems to agree with me.

On the subject of Sarah Palin

Here is a quick refresher on Sarah Palin’s greatest hits, for those who may have forgotten: she opposes abortion in every circumstance – even rape and incest – unless the mother’s life is in danger, in which case she concedes that an adult woman might qualify as a human being.

How inconvenient this must be. An anti-abortion politician carries to term a Down’s Syndrome child. What the hell doers she mean actually living by the principles she espouses?

Snigger

A major supplier of electronic surveillance equipment for monitoring suspected jihadists embarrassed the French government on Thursday by claiming it is owed €8 million (nearly £6 million) in unpaid bills.

In an open letter to the prime minister, the head of Elektron questioned how the government could fulfil its promises of heightened security and increased surveillance in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks last month given that it has failed to pay for earlier wire-tapping and bugging operations.

Goose, gander

The FT is full of comment this morning that Tesco now has a board with little or no experience of food retailing.

I am not sure what the surprise is about. It’s long been obvious that what happens at board level in most companies has little or nothing to do with what actually happens within the entity itself.

The business may (let’s be generous) be about meeting customer need and providing a valuable service.

The board is about extracting rents from that process by reshuffling the pack of entities that make up the whole, re-jigging the finance and minimising the tax bill.

These activities have remarkably little to do with each other. One is about business and what capitalism was (and should be) really about.

The other is about rent seeking and what the so called modern entrepreneur really thinks capitalism should now be about, which is extracting value from others.

Tesco has chosen a board of experienced rent seekers.

This is from the guy who sputtered in rage at the demand that the Co Op Bank board should include a person or two who knew anything about banking.

Ho hum.

At The Guardian

The paper asks:

Why, whether figures are good or bad, are economists and City analysts always taken by surprise?

I respond:

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.

Niels Bohr

More seriously, the bits of economics that we’ve pretty much got right are in microeconomics. Rent control is a bad idea, demand curves slope downwards, that sort of thing. Macroeconomics well, there might not actually be any one single macroeconomic model that you could get everyone to agree upon. You can and do find Nobel Laureates vehemently insisting that the signature idea of another one is simply wrong.

And finally, think through what people are actually trying to do when predicting these sorts of numbers. Take, for example, unemployment. Roughly speaking 10% of all jobs are destroyed in the economy each year (so, 3 million of the 30 million total). Again, roughly speaking, 10% of all jobs are created anew each year. Again, roughly 3 million. The unemployment level, the one we’re trying to predict each month or quarter, is the balance of those two processes.

And what usually happens in a recession is not that more jobs are destroyed but that fewer are created, making that balance rise. So we’ve two flows, of some 3 million each way a year, and we’re trying to tell what the balance is going to be at any one point in time to 0.01% of the total number.

That’s just not easy. Thus the people who try to predict are often surprised.

Finally, it’s worth noting how weak many predictions are. Take the US job creation numbers. Last few months these have been 200,000, to 250,000 a month. But the error bar is enormous. They’re really saying that job creation has been between 100,000 and 350,000 (for the error bar is 100,000 either way). And no one is at all surprised by job creation being in that range.

Apologies, just couldn’t resist trying to get something sensible into at least one part of that paper, even if it’s only the comments.

So, I found a couple of kittens

Outside an abandoned church when walking the dogs. Obviously human raised and then abandoned themselves. So, picked up, looked after for a few weeks as we tried to find a home.

Belgian/Dutch couple took them to round out their family of new puppies.

poeskes 0091 (1024x768)

Seems to be working, eh?

If you want to know why fertility has fallen

Death suffered its worst setbacks in the arena of child mortality. Until the twentieth century, between a quarter and a third of the children of agricultural societies never reached adulthood. Most succumbed to childhood diseases such as diphtheria, measles and smallpox. In seventeenth-century England, 150 out of every 1,000 newborns died during their first year, and a third of all children were dead before they reached fifteen. Today, only five out of 1,000 English babies die during their first year, and only seven out of 1,000 die before age fifteen.

We can better grasp the full impact of these figures by setting aside statistics and telling some stories. A good example is the family of King Edward I of England (1237–1307) and his wife, Queen Eleanor (1241–90). Their children enjoyed the best conditions and the most nurturing surroundings that could be provided in medieval Europe. They lived in palaces, ate as much food as they liked, had plenty of warm clothing, well-stocked fireplaces, the cleanest water available, an army of servants and the best doctors. The sources mention sixteen children that Queen Eleanor bore between 1255 and 1284:

1. An anonymous daughter, born in 1255, died at birth.

2. A daughter, Catherine, died either at age one or age three.

3. A daughter, Joan, died at six months.

4. A son, John, died at age five.

5. A son, Henry, died at age six.

6. A daughter, Eleanor, died at age twenty-nine.

7. An anonymous daughter died at five months.

8. A daughter, Joan, died at age thirty-five.

9. A son, Alphonso, died at age ten.

10. A daughter, Margaret, died at age fifty-eight.

11. A daughter, Berengeria, died at age two.

12. An anonymous daughter died shortly after birth.

13. A daughter, Mary, died at age fifty-three.

14. An anonymous son died shortly after birth.

15. A daughter, Elizabeth, died at age thirty-four.

16. A son, Edward.

The youngest, Edward, was the first of the boys to survive the dangerous years of childhood, and at his father’s death he ascended the English throne as King Edward II. In other words, it took Eleanor sixteen tries to carry out the most fundamental mission of an English queen – to provide her husband with a male heir. Edward II’s mother must have been a woman of exceptional patience and fortitude. Not so the woman Edward chose for his wife, Isabella of France. She had him murdered when he was forty-three.

To the best of our knowledge, Eleanor and Edward I were a healthy couple and passed no fatal hereditary illnesses on to their children. Nevertheless, ten out of the sixteen – 62 per cent – died during childhood. Only six managed to live beyond the age of eleven, and only three – just 18 per cent – lived beyond the age of forty. In addition to these births, Eleanor most likely had a number of pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. On average, Edward and Eleanor lost a child every three years, ten children one after another. It’s nearly impossible for a parent today to imagine such loss.

Idiot

I think Phillip has got that right: the message here is clear and is that bailing out the bankers who lent to Greece (for this is what the bail out actually does) is more important than democracy, the people of Greece and the dashed hopes of a nation.

I am not for a minute saying Greece did not have a price to pay and reforms to deliver: Syriza accepts that too. But the message from the Eurozone is blunt. It is that democracy does not matter and bankers do.

The options left to Syriza are limited. Exit seems very likely indeed. And with it there will be massive uncertainty for Greece, bit also a chance to be a nation.

The European dream will have been sacrificed to bankers.

The consequences are not clear. But in history this refusal by the Eurozone may look to have been a pivotal point when instability was chosen over the chance to hold Europe together.

Damn all of that money is owed to bankers. It’s owed to the taxpayers of the other eurozone nations (at least 60% of it, directly). Other than the Greek banking system there’s near no private sector holding of Greek debt. ECB, IMF, eurozone governments, that’s the vast majority of it.