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February 2016

Sigh

No, I don’t support this but still:

An upmarket steakhouse at an exclusive London hotel is being accused of topping up managers’ salaries by handing them tips intended for waiters.

Trade union Unite claims four senior managers at STK London in the ME London Hotel on the Strand had their pay boosted to around £50,000 a year.

It has calculated that nearly two thirds of the 15% service charge added to every bill was handed to managers rather than serving or kitchen staff. The union says the company also siphons off 6% of the service charge paid by customers as an “admin fee”.

Unite national officer Rhys McCarthy said: “Restaurants and bars were banned from using tips to top up staff wages to the legal national minimum back in 2009, but that clearly hasn’t stopped STK from finding a nifty loophole to subsidise managers’ wages above and beyond the national minimum wage.

“It is the ultimate kick in the teeth for customers and staff alike, if restaurants are allowed to dip into tips and the service charge without a shred of transparency of how the money is being used or who is benefiting from it. If managers are not prepared to reveal what portion of the service charge and tips they are pocketing, then they should leave them alone.”

The definitions here: tips belong to the staff, they’re legally their money.

The service charge belongs to the business, it’s legally the company’s money.

Yes, yes, yes, maybe it shouldn’t be this way but it is. That’s why tips do not pay VAT nor NI and a service charge pays VAT and the distribution of it pays both NIs.

Necessary to get this stuff right while complaining about it.

A useful guide to male motivation from Maurice White

As a boy, he sang in a church choir and was inspired to become a drummer by watching local marching bands. “I saw the guys in the band playing drums – they had on shiny suits and were getting all the attention from the girls,” he recalled. “So I decided: that’s what I want to do.”

That motivation explaining much of the world around us actually.

doesn’t matter very much what it is in your version of society that gets the girls’ attention, it’s the getting the attention that motivates.

As we’d sorta expect in a species that reproduces sexually.

Ahhhhh….

By 1966 he had joined the Ramsey Lewis Trio, replacing Isaac “Red” Holt on drums. Over the next three years he played on nine of the jazz trio’s albums, including Wade in the Water (1966). White described Lewis as his “mentor”.

That’s how Ramsey Lewis became involved in Earth End and Fire then…..and that piece in particular is a fine piece of drumming. Nothing flashy.

and then there’s this, the Jimmy Saville connection:

Again, nothing flashy, but nicely done.

And how about the teenage high school band with Booker T?

The UN And Assange’s Bail Conditions

It appears that the human rights part of the UN has a rather different version of the English language than the rest of us do.

In mid-2010, a Swedish Prosecutor commenced an investigation against Mr. Assange based on allegations of sexual misconduct. On 7 December 2010, pursuant to an international arrest warrant issued at the request of the Swedish Prosecutor, Mr. Assange was detained in Wandsworth Prison for 10 days in isolation. Thereafter, he was subjected to house arrest for 550 days. While under house arrest

The Working Group considered that Mr. Assange has been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and –

I’ve no idea whether he was held in solitary: sounds like something most unlikely unless it’s something that he requested for himself. But that house arrest. The actual conditions were:

When he sought asylum Assange was subject to bail conditions of living and sleeping each night at Ms Saunders home in Kent, report each day to a police station, and adhere to an electronically tagged curfew between 10pm and 8am.

That’s not house arrest. It’s an insistence that you lodge at a known address while on bail. And some address too, as above.

I think we can safely tell the UN to fuck off, can’t we?

Oh, and when we catch him, jug him good and hard. Because while it’s not quite on the books (aspects are, like perjury) there really is a punishable crime called taking the piss out of the legal system.

Amanduh recommends lesbianism as birth control

Under the circumstances, it seems the simpler, more straightforward public health message would be to encourage women who aren’t actively trying to get pregnant to always have a birth control plan in place, even if you are not having sex right now. (After all, tomorrow is another day, one that might have Mr. Right or at least Mr. Sexy in it.) It doesn’t have to be something as intense as the pill or the IUD. A package of condoms always in your dresser drawer or a commitment to lesbianism works.

I guess it would work too.

Not a redneck death

A father-of-three choked to death on a McDonald’s cheeseburger after trying to eat it in one mouthful, an inquest heard.

Cardiff Coroner’s Court was told Darren Bray, 29, told friends “Watch this,” before cramming the entire burger into his mouth last October.

He passed out at his friend’s house in Barry after a large ball of food became lodged in his airway, the court heard.

The inquest was told that, although Mr Bray had been drinking, it was not enough to impair his judgement.

To be a redneck death “Watch this” and drinking are not enough. It must be “Hold my beer and watch this”.

Here’s a target to aim for

A recently-deceased 107-year-old Spanish attributed his long-life to drinking four bottles of wine each day and never drinking water.

Antonio Docampo García, who died last week in Vigo, northwestern Spain, said he only imbibed his own homemade red wine.

Mr Docampo would drink two bottles of red wine with his lunch and another two with dinner.

Pretty damn good actually but I have to say that I might prefer a life where I can remember more than just noon each day.

That coppery, scandiumy, metally feeling

And I am not alone in my concerns: and I suspect we will always have them whilst you are primarily funded by KPMG

The model if sponsored think tanks is, I am afraid too well known for us to not have such concerns

And someone sponsored by PCS should not be looked at askance?

Well, yes, quite

I have commented on the same theme, of course, recently, but Gillian takes the argument further, noting that in addition to the obvious advantage that taking cash out of the economy has in restricting the opportunity for crime it also helps enforce the negative interest rates that are almost bound to be a feature of the worldwide economy in coming years. She has a point, although I can still see a role for small denomination cash.

Nothing screams fascism more than the State only allowing us a bit of pocket money to spend without their vigilance, does it?

Quite apart from the fact that they’re getting this horribly wrong. They start from the true position that we have fiat currencies now. State created out of the aether. They then assume that if the state limited that currency then we’d all do whatever the state told us to. Which is entirely wrong: we use those fiat currencies because they’re useful to use. If they’re restricted then they will become less useful and we will go off an use something else. That fiat currencies exist is absolutely true, but the vast majority of human history did not contain them. And in their absence we’d all start using something else.

Whatever, gold, paintings, bags of heroin, mutual promises, reputation even.

It’s typical statism in fact. The thought that because we are using what the state makes then the state can direct, limit, what we use, even to the point that if the state does not provide then we will do without. We won’t. Money is simply too useful to us all for us to put up with the absence of it, we’ll just reinvent it.

What the hell is Murph talking about now?

Filings by Google’s UK subsidiary show that £33m of the funds paid to the Treasury followed a wrangle over share options handed to staff, which the US business had argued were exempt from UK tax.

The company’s accounts show that the government was only able to claw back less than £100m in corporation tax from Google for the 2005-2014 period, and not the £130m the chancellor claimed. MPs and foreign governments have criticised the deal for allowing Google to generate billions of pounds in profits from its UK business and pay little corporation tax.

Well, that’s The Guardian. And I very much doubt that anyone was trying to argue that share option grants are tax exempt. An allowable expense perhaps, but that’s something rather different. But here’s Murph:

Richard Murphy, a tax expert who advises the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, on economic policy, said most major US corporations had attempted to depress their tax bills by charging subsidiaries the cost of share options to staff, and that all had been ruled out by HMRC.

He said it was unclear why HMRC had failed until now to force Google to comply. “What was already a poor deal for the government is now looking even worse,” Murphy said. “And it looks like HMRC’s mess-up. I would say it clearly shows that HMRC is under-resourced and is struggling to cope in negotiations with major corporations.”

Can’t see how it would depress tax bills really. Because what is on offer is stock in the parent company. So it’s going to be an allowable expense at some point. If not in the subsidiary then at the parent level, no?

Someone here is confused and it might well be me but don’t think so.

Dem Froggies sure are strange

So, they’ve decided to change the language:

10 spellings that will change

Oignon becomes ognon (onion)

Nénuphar becomes nénufar (waterlily)

S’entraîner becomes s’entrainer (to train)

Maîtresse becomes maitresse (mistress or female teacher)

Coût becomes cout (cost)

Paraître becomes paraitre (to appear)

Week-end becomes weekend (weekend)

Mille-pattes becomes millepattes (centipedes)

Porte-monnaie becomes portemonnaie (wallet)

Des après-midi becomes des après-midis (afternoons)

In a normal country these are just things that happen over time. Language changes, spelling changes, and editors, dictionaries and just people in general get used to it as the years pass. It’s entirely possible to use archaic spellings (ize for example, while we think of it as American is really old English which has survived there) or the modern and it’s just a matter of usage.

France has an official body which decides these things. And that, of course, is why we don’t want to be in a socio-economic bear hug like the European Union with such people. Because we just don’t want to be in any form of union with fuckwits who believe it is any part of the State’s duty to insist upon the spelling of onion. For if we do then that traditional British ideal of very little law but what law there is being important about important things cannot survive, can it?

It’s under enough pressure as it is without being yoked to The French.

Amazingly, England works on English law

Julian Assange will demand on Friday that Sweden and the UK lift any threat of arrest to allow him to walk free from Ecuador’s embassy in London, after a United Nations panel found that his three-and-a-half year confinement at the embassy in London amounted to “arbitrary detention”.

As the police have said, if he walks out he will be arrested. And not for anything to do with Sweden either. He skipped bail. When found and available he will be arrested.

So Germans can be arch too

In 2014 Artur Fischer received the European Inventor Award for lifetime achievement. The scale and range of his output prompted some admirers to describe him as the Thomas Edison of his day – though Fischer himself rejected the comparison, pointing out that Edison had lifted many of his ideas from other people.

So let’s look at what Ritchie said then

There is no evidence that profits are disappearing from the UK, as a proportion of UK GDP.

Well, actually, yes there is. Or alternatively, no there isn’t:

Therefore, we are in a situation in which we not losing the profits; what we are losing is the ability to capture those profits in corporation tax, which is something quite different.

Our evidence of the profits in the UK economy is the UK GDP figures. And those Google (and whoever else) profits being booked in Ireland simply are not part of UK GDP. They’re part of Irish. Profits which are part of UK GDP are well captured by our current method of corporation tax.

So, great, he starts out by not understanding GDP accounting.

actually, higher‑tax societies flourish better.

They do? Evidence of that would be nice.

Things like the Fair Tax Mark to which FTSE 100 companies have signed up—and I should declare an interest, as I am a director—are indicating a new temperament in taxation.

Three companies and a teapot mark a sea change in opinion do they?

Richard Murphy: Tangible assets, real assets that create wealth, not intangible assets, which are legal fictions, are what we are looking for.

That’s brave. IP has no value now, eh?

If a company decides that it is better to have a call centre in Delhi, then it should clearly be making a tax contribution to India, for the fact that India is supplying it with trained people. That is perfectly fair.

Corporation tax is a rental payment to the State for its slaves now, is it?

Anyone else want to have ago?

Well, no, one shouldn’t laugh, however

A disturbing video purporting to show a prostitute still attached at the genitals to an elderly man who died while having sex has emerged online.
The bizarre footage shows paramedics transporting the alleged dead body with the woman still on top out of a building on a hospital stretcher.
The pair are hidden under a blanket, but the woman does seem to be moving, as a crowd of people stand around and watch in horror.

It’s penis captivus.

No, no, we really shouldn’t laugh. And as is usually pointed out every time these deaths in flagrante occur, the unhappy ending almost always occurs before the happy ending. Still, worse ways, eh?

The British Club

What are British values? You asked Google – here’s the answer
David Shariatmadari

The secret about the British Club is that you don’t talk about the British Club.

We know that we have won first prize in the lottery of life by being born British and foreigners either envy us for that or are too stupid to realise it. At which point we do not sing Rule Britannia or any other such ghastly symptom of superiority or even glee at our position. We simply know and that’s enough.

Idiot fuckin’ tosser

As world leaders meet in London to confront the biggest humanitarian crisis since the end of the second world war, perhaps the answer we need – and the bold plan we want – can be found 70 years in the past. For only an initiative as ambitious as the postwar Marshall plan can address the chaos of 12 million Syrians displaced from their homes.

The Marshall Plan was, as is noted there, “postwar”.

Same will apply here. Get the war over with then resettle.

That Swedish paradise

The Swedish state has a dark history of persecuting the Sami, banning the Sami languages from schools, while Sweden’s National Institute for Race Biology from 1922 spearheaded a sterilisation programme which saw many Sami women rendered infertile.

Well, yes, Stalin faced much the same problem. How are you going to make happy little government campers of people who camp without government?

Those who would have an ordered society do tend to try to wipe out the nomads.

Your flatulent tosspottery of the day

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., declined to comment on the U.K. deal. The U.K. tax authority, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, said the successful conclusion of the agency’s inquiries “secured a substantial result, which means that Google will pay the full tax due in law on profits that belong in the U.K.”

“We honestly have no idea if this is a reasonable amount of payment,” said Alex Cobham, director of research for the Tax Justice Network. “It’s further proof of the need for transparency.”

Well done Alex. HMRC spends a decade combing the books and you, from your position of admitted ignorance, despite those who have actually done the work insisting that all tax is being paid, want to question it.

Yes, well done.