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June 2015

It’s called supply and demand dear

Where is the Taylor Swift of news? Not for glamour or youth, though lord knows the business could do with both, but someone with the singer’s ability to convince technology companies to pay for their work.

Within days of Swift asking Apple to pay musicians royalties during a trial of its streaming service, one of the world’s largest technology companies had succumbed to the youngest person to be included on Forbes’ most powerful women list.

There are so many reasons a letter starting “Dear Apple” and ending “love Rupert” would not have the same impact. Yet the entire news industry, and not just Rupert Murdoch, has allowed the idea of news as a no-value commodity to take hold – with a report from Syria or the Federal Reserve as interesting to advertisers as one of the 4m mentions of laundry posted on Facebook each day, or possibly less so.

There is only one Taylor Swift.

And there’s tens of thousands of people who can and do churn out news pieces. As Jane Martinson and, erm, Tim Worstall show. As any random perusal of Google News shows, there’s simply no shortage of people willing and able to churn out 500 words on whatever. Thus the ability to churn out 500 words on whatever is not highly valued.

It’s this supply and demand thing. It really does work you know.

So let’s turn this into a scandal

A la Daily Mail style if we were to be writing a hit piece.

A former British public schoolboy and promising classical musician faces years in a Chilean prison after bring caught dealing cocaine, marijuana and ecstasy.
Alexander Harrild, 29, who was educated at the £35,000-a-year Dulwich College, moved to the South American country to pursue his career as a French horn player but told a court in Santiago that he turned to a life of crime after a separate business venture struggled, according to The Mail on Sunday.

If we were hoping to beat up on Farage we might say something like “Farage sent his son to school with suspected drug dealer”.

If on Worstall, perhaps “Worstall’s brother in law taught suspected drug dealer” (for the music master at Dulwich is indeed my brother in law).

That none of us have any connection with him wouldn’t matter: it’s terribly easy to do those sorts of hit jobs.

This just has to be quoted in full

The failure to reach an agreement in Greece is because, from the start, the diagnosis has been wrong. So in the end, the patient got sicker – and now wants to stop being treated.

As Greece’s finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has been repeating from the beginning of this crisis, Greece did not have a liquidity crisis, but a solvency crisis. The latter was caused by a competitiveness crisis and made worse by the financial crisis. And this kind of crisis cannot be fixed by cuts and more cuts, but only by a serious investment strategy, accompanied by serious – not token – reforms (e.g. to how the state, and hence also taxation, is run) to bring back competitiveness.

The conditions of the bailout therefore should have been conditions that emulate the kind of public sector reform and investment strategy that characterises many of the competitive powerhouses of northern Europe – including Germany. Indeed, Greece should not do what Germany says it does (austerity), but what Germany actually does (invest).

Over the last decade, Germany has invested in all the key areas that not only increase productivity, but also create innovation-led growth. Companies like Siemens are the result of a dynamic public-private eco-system in Germany, with high government spending on science-industry links (Fraunhofer institutes), the existence of a large and strategic public bank (KfW) that provides patient, long-term, committed capital to German businesses, a long run-focused stakeholder type of corporate governance (rather than the short-termist shareholder Anglo-Saxon model that southern Europe has copied), an above-average R&D/GDP ratio (rather than the below average one in Greece, Portugal and Italy), investments in vocational training and human capital, and a mission-oriented ‘energiewende’ strategy focused on greening the entire economy.

Imagine the very different types of result we would have witnessed had the negotiations been about stuffing an investment strategy down Greece’s throat, rather than more cuts. “OK, we will bail you out, but reform your country, and kickstart public investments (of the type named above), so that you are ready for the 2020 innovation challenge.”

Instead, insisting on the status quo full of more austerity produced an increasingly weaker Greece, more unemployment and more loss of competitiveness. Now alone, the only hope is that Varoufakis’ insistence on a European-wide investment programme will at least find a national solution. Perhaps it can begin with Greece forming a development bank like the KfW, and use it to kickstart the kind of long-term investment strategy that should have been part of this ‘pact’ from the start. Oh, and Italy’s competitiveness is just as bad. So if Grexit now happens— and Europe does not finally get a proper doctor in the room – get ready for Itexit over the next year.

Yep, that’s Mariana Mazzucato.

Nothing quite like having just the one answer for everything, is there?

Even Danny Blanchflower manages to do better than this:

Greece also has deep structural problems, mostly in product markets with oligopolies in almost every industry, closed professions, administrative and bureaucratic impediments to entrepreneurship alongside barriers to trade and exporting, none of which have been addressed.

Compare that with Mazzucato’s:

a long run-focused stakeholder type of corporate governance (rather than the short-termist shareholder Anglo-Saxon model that southern Europe has copied),

The more I see of Mazzucato’s economics the more convinced I am that she’s a fascist economist (note, please, “fascist economist”, not “Fascist” who happens to be an economist, one who follows the economics of fascism, not someone who is about to invade Abyssinya).

They do?

Most self-employed dream of turning up at an office and putting a jacket over a chair, knowing that jacket will be picking up a tidy sum just by saying that you’re there.

Nice bit of projection there.

I assume that’s why The Guardian has so many staffers and so few freelances then?

The Guardian and numbers

Sainsbury’s Like Tesco, Sainsbury’s also offers a main, snack and a drink for £3, but the discerning shopper can get better value. A New Yorker sandwich (£2.80), along with a bottle of flavoured water (£1.40) and a slice of carrot cake (£1), adds up to £5.20. The £2.20 meal-deal saving – or 73% – is a substantial reduction on buying the items individually.

Eh?

73%?

It’s obvious what they’ve done, calculated the saving against the price paid, not he saving against the original price.

But if Sainsbury’s actually advertised that as a 73% savings then they’d be trying to put someone in jail for having done so.

Think through it for a moment. If something is £10 normally and I offer it for £5 in a sale, am I allowed to advertise a 50% saving or a 100% saving?

The Guardian and numbers, eh?

The Co-operative The Co-op’s deal across its 2,800 stores follows the same lines as its rivals, with a main, snack and drink for £3.25. A deep-fill egg and bacon sandwich (£2.75), a 475ml can of Red Bull (£2.39), and a chicken satay snack with dip (£1.19) come in at £6.33 when priced individually. Under the meal deal this gives a saving of £3.08 – almost the same price as the deal itself.

Would that be a near 50% saving or a near 100% one?

They don’t make them like this any more

On leaving the Wrens, Rozelle Pierrepont became a deck hand on a 100-ton Bermudan cutter, and on her 21st birthday was given a converted ship’s lifeboat in which she explored the coasts of France, Belgium and Holland. On her first solo journey across the channel the rudder snapped, so she sawed up the engine casing with a bread knife and fashioned a new one, lashed up with her suspender belt.

And so Greece leaves the euro

In the report about the referendum and so on:

Greece’s Alpha Bank stopped all online transactions according to its website on Friday night.

At very best the bank is illiquid as a result of the run. Almost certainly insolvent. And there’s not enough euros around, even with a deal, to recapitalise those banks (I assume the others will follow soon enough).

Buh bye!

Umm, yeah

We had packed schedule of fantastic contributions ranging from NGOs to FTSE 100 companies. With so many headline acts, it was no wonder Paul Monaghan of Fair Tax kicked off proceedings by dubbing the day ‘the Glastonbury of tax’ – we even had a true tax rock-star on stage, Margaret Hodge, MP.

Rock star…..

The veteran tax campaigner delivered a barnstorming speech about her time as the head of the Public Accounts Committee, recounting the way in which she took on giants such as Amazon, Google and Starbucks and forced them to reveal how they avoided paying billions in corporation tax.

All of them were shown to be paying exactly what the law demanded of them. So not sure what was being avoided.

Whut?

Palmer had worked at the prison in Dannemora for more than 27 years and had a base salary of $72,644. He had known Sweat and Matt for at least five years.

That’s a serious amount of money. Upstate, rural New York, and he’s getting 150% of the US median wage? And for 27 years……should know what is what.

PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. — A prison guard charged in connection with the escape of two killers admitted providing them with tools, paint, frozen hamburger and even access to a catwalk electrical box, but claims he never knew they planned to bust out, authorities say.

Err, yeah.

Quite a high pay rate for someone quite that dim, no? Unions, dontcha’ love ’em?

How terribly, terribly, weird

George Monbiot is criticising Malthus? But but….his entire worldview is based on the idea that Malthus is right, that we just keep on breeding until we run out of everything.

Sigh.

Far from undermining employment, poor relief sustained rural workers during the winter months, ensuring that they remained available for hire when they were needed by farms in the spring and summer. By contrast to the loss of agricultural productivity that Malthus predicted and the commission reported, between 1790 and 1834 wheat production more than doubled.

As Block and Somers point out, the rise in unemployment and extreme poverty in the 1820s and 1830s represented the first great failure of Ricardian, laissez-faire economics.

Fuck all laissez faire about the corn laws, was there? And then we abolished those, getting more laissez faire, and things improved…..

This is bollocks about Amazon

As in previous years, the UK accounts make clear Amazon.co.uk Limited claims not to sell to British online shoppers: instead the group’s Luxembourg arm fulfils that role. Amazon.co.uk Limited’s much more modest turnover of £679m comes from providing “fulfilment and corporate support services” to Luxembourg.

The Amazon group’s total UK sales of £5.3bn – representing 9.4% of its global sales – were taken through its Luxembourg company Amazon EU Sarl, which has a much smaller number of employees. Amazon EU Sarl also took billions from Germany, France and other major European economies.

That’s all entirely true.

It was not subject to tax on any resulting profits in those markets.

That’s bollocks. If Amazon as a whole makes profits and those profits are in the US to be paid to shareholders then it pays US corporation tax on those profits.

If Amazon as a whole doesn’t make profits (as it generally doesn’t) then of course there are no profits to tax.

This is worth killing half the population for

Prof Tombs, speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival in Wiltshire, said: “Terrible though it is to say, the Black Death actually had some rather good effects. This was a good time to be alive.
“This was when the English pub was invented and people started drinking lots of beer and playing football and so on. That was in a way due to, or at least a consequence of, and wouldn’t have been possible without, the Black Death.”
Explaining why the century afterwards could be seen as a good time to live, Prof Tombs said: “The population was getting too great, becoming a strain on resources in agricultural society.
“And after the Black Death, things started to look up. People got better off. There was more land to go around. Resources were not so stretched. What was later called the feudal system largely disappeared.
“Serfs became free because they could simply say to their lords, ‘Ok, if you won’t give me my freedom I’ll go somewhere else’.
“And they did. So if lords wanted their fields to be tilled, they had to give their peasants or vassals what they wanted, which was essentially freedom and a better life.
“The standard of living people reached in the 15th century was not exceeded until the 1880s after the Industrial Revolution. And the amount of leisure they took was not equalled until the 1960s.”

I don’t say that I actually agree with his numbers. But the invention of the pub is indeed worth the slaughter of half the population through pestilence, of course it is.

I’ve long disagreed with this standard view that working hours increased at the time of the industrial revolution though. Entirely agreed that the plague made the survivors richer. But when I look in detail at the working hours claimed it’s the hours spent working for the Lord which are measured. Essentially, what people were doing in the monetary economy. And that just ain’t the total workload. There’s their own work upon their own lands, then there’s all the household work as well. For example, the standard story (Juliet Schorr) says that the peasants got 70 days holiday a year. Sure, there were 70 holy days, but animal owning peasants don’t get 70 days holiday, not from the care of their animals.

So, willing to believe that 1360s etc saw a substantial rise in living standards, some of which would be taken as increased leisure time, but not that leisure equalled that of the 1960s. Not once household production hours were added in.

Do we really want to be in a political union with cretins like this?

A regulator in Germany has ruled that websites must only offer downloads of sexually explicit ebooks between 10pm and 6am.

Essentially, the euro nation’s Youth Protection Authority has said 2002-era rules on protecting kids from blue movies on TV now cover digital books, publishing trade mag Boersenblatt reports. Telly stations in Germany can only broadcast X-rated stuff between 10pm and 6am; that now applies to raunchy ebook downloads, too, weirdly enough.

No, no, we don’t, do we?

Pretty much right

None of which means that we don’t care about the power wielded by that amorphous, grey, unelected and undemocratic officious mass in Brussels. We may not be able to identify or differentiate them, or tell what they do individually, or understand the pompous titles and spurious offices with which they reward each-other, but by Golly we don’t want to give up our own democratic power to them. They may be fine running places such as Luxembourg or Belgium, countries that don’t matter, but you wouldn’t trust them with the UK, would you?

Or as I’ve been known to put it, we just don’t want to be ruled by those fuckers.

Way to get it wrong Aditya

Nearly every discussion of the Greek fiasco is based on a morality play. Call it Naughty Greece versus Noble Europe. Those troublesome Greeks never belonged in the euro, runs this story. Once inside, they got themselves into a big fat mess – and now it’s up to Europe to sort it all out.

Those are the basics all Wise Folk agree on. Then those on the right go on to say feckless Greece must either accept Europe’s deal or get out of the single currency.

The people who have actually been right all along are the euro sceptics (as opposed to the eurosceptics). The people who were saying that the eurozone simply was not an optimal currency area and thus would not work.

You know, people like me, who were saying this on this ‘ere internet when you were still at Oxford studying history. Given that we’ve been proven right would be nice to be acknowledged.

They just don’t stop, do they?

Climate change threatens to undermine the last 50 years of advances in medical health, scientists have warned as they published a major report outlining the threat of global warming.
The authors from University College London and the University of Cambridge called for major policy changes to cut pollution including phasing out coal-fired plants and investing in green cities, energy and transport.
Without major change they say climate change could be ‘sufficient to trigger a discontinuity in the long-term progression of humanity.’

WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE, AIEEE!

Politicians should also bring in carbon pricing to push up the price of high carbon goods and services to make people change their behaviour, while reducing the cost of other taxes such as VAT, boosting investment or cutting the price of low-carbon technology.
This could mean the cost of flying going up, perhaps with a hike in air passenger duty for flights after the first flight a person takes in a year, pushing up the prices of the “short hop, short-term, leisure travel, stag-parties in Barcelona”.
Professor Paul Ekins, director of the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London, said: “That sort of thing could become quite a bit more expensive, such that people would think twice about doing that.”

Fucking idiots. APD more than covers the social cost of emissions.