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February 2016

I’ve always wondered about Kettle chips myself

Kettle Chips are being recalled amid fears packs might contain pieces of plastic that look similar to the crisps.

I think I may have had a few packets of those in fact. Or is it that the normal chip is not greatly distinguishable from plastic?

I’m pretty sure this won’t work

In fact, I’m certain that this won’t work:

The world’s biggest offshore wind farm is to be built 75 miles off the coast of Grimsby, at an estimated cost to energy bill-payers of at least £4.2 billion.
The giant Hornsea Project One wind farm will consist of 174 turbines, each 623ft tall – higher than the Gherkin building in London – and will span an area more than five times the size of Hull.

The certainty this won’t work is this:

The wind farm was handed a subsidy contract by former energy secretary Ed Davey in 2014 that will see it paid four times the current market price of power for every unit of electricity it generates for 15 years.

Consumers will be on the hook to pay subsidies to make up the difference between the market price of power – currently about £35 per megawatt-hour – and a guaranteed price, of £140/MWh.

It simply doesn’t work economically.

However, I also think (rather than know) that it won’t work in technical terms either. The think comes from a supposition about the marine environment. I just don’t see mechanical moving parts lasting a couple of decades in the North Sea. Perhaps Mr. Newman can tell us more about rigs n’stuff but I just don’t see it myself.

And one of the things that bolsters this view is that we do actually know why wave power is so damn hard to make functional, let alone economic. That marine environment is, over time, an extremely harsh one, there’s not many materials that outlast it without vast amounts of maintenance.

Now, of course, the engineers and financial charlatans will have taken all of this into account won’t they…….

We know this is bollocks so Mr. Snowden, why is it bollocks?

Heart attack rates in the UK have fallen by up to 42 per cent since the 2007 smoking ban, major research suggests.
A review of 77 studies found that reduced exposure to passive smoking has caused a “significant reduction” in heart problems across the population.

Entirely willing to accept that heart attack rates have fallen. As they have been for some decades now.

But the idea that 42% of heart attacks were being caused by passive smoking is just to ludicrous for words. So, we’ll wait for Chris Snowden to to give us the skinny on this, shall we?

So, The Times and Facebook’s tax: tax expert help needed.

Just let me check something here with you knowledgeable people.

The Times carries a story today (from one of their star reporters in fact, who has won a prize for his work on tax avoidance). He says:

Accounts filed in the US last week revealed that it accepted a $2.46 billion liability in respect of “uncertain tax positions” arising from investigations in countries including the US and Ireland. The liability is more than double the $1.19 billion set aside in 2014.

OK.

Last night politicians demanded that HMRC recoup a fair proportion of Facebook’s $2.4 billion fund. The company has for years been accused of legally avoiding tax in Britain by registering sales of digital advertising through Ireland as well as minimising taxable British profits by issuing share options to UK-based staff.

“It would be very worrying if yet another multinational technology company got an easy ride from the British taxman,” John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said. “Now we know that Facebook has set aside this money George Osborne must make sure Britain gets its fair share.”

Hmm. So, the 10k is here.

The $2.4 billion fund is actually this:

The components of other liabilities are as follows (in millions):

December 31, 2015 2014
Income tax payable
$2,458 $1,190

This is what he’s talking about. This is the super sekkrit fund: the standard provision for income tax liabilities.

Now, I’m tending toward the idea that this is outright fuckwittery but anyone care to tell me differently?

Something about drummers and divorce, eh?

How Phil Collins won back the ex-wife he never stopped loving… Even though she’d married another man and he’d paid her £25m divorce money

Well, OK, but there seems to be a rash of it among drummers:

He has made a successful career writing about the private lives of public figures including Tony Blair, Idi Amin, Richard Nixon and the Queen.
Now Peter Morgan, the 52-year-old scriptwriter behind films such as The Last King Of Scotland and Frost/Nixon, has found the spotlight turned on himself after splitting up with his aristocratic wife.
Morgan married Lila Schwarzenberg — born Princess Anna Carolina zu Schwarzenberg — in 1997. The couple have six children and divide their time between Vienna and London.
But Lila gave a revealing insight into the state of their fractious marriage in a series of highly personal columns for an Austrian society magazine. This included the occasion when Morgan, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2007 for his screenplay for The Queen and in 2009 for Frost/Nixon, was furious to be served a dinner of fish fingers.
‘Peter . . . always says you can gauge the state of our marriage on the number of fish fingers he gets served up in a week,’ she wrote in 2013. ‘And it appears I went too far once again with my culinary neglect towards Peter as . . . I served him the leftovers of the kids’ meal (guess what it was). He took one look and said: “I am neither five years old nor a f****** penguin.” He left the table and left the house in the search for a decent dinner, as he puts it.’
She also disclosed what she said were his efforts to seduce her with the help of the erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey during a holiday to Ibiza. She recorded her surprise that her ‘intellectually orientated husband . . . had bought me this “housewife porn” book.’
Before the birth of their fifth child in 2011, Morgan said of his marriage: ‘We are so wildly chalk and cheese . . . She’s sociable. She loves children . . . Lila’s idea of heaven is a noisy house, people running through it, and that goes some way to describing my idea of hell.’
A spokesman for Morgan tells me: ‘With regret and sadness, it can be confirmed that Peter and his wife have agreed on a separation. This was achieved on an entirely amicable basis. There is no discussion of a divorce, and there are no third parties involved on either side.’

D’ye think that his having been the not very good drummer in my and Gerry Keen’s not very good band might have had something to do with it?

Stable door bolting

Germany will soon require all clients of prostitutes to use condoms, according to a draft law approved by the government Tuesday.

Blimey, anyone at all using the ladies of negotiable affection and not using a condom? Any of the ladies allowing them not to?

Or should we take this as the legislation coming along a decade or two after the societal change?

Jeebus people, we do germline editing every time we fuck for a child

Or at least every time we do the horizontal tango in an attempt to have a child, rather than just for fun, we are germline editing. Which makes all of this simply pabulum:

Future generations, however, are not able to consent to germline editing that will manipulate their welfare in ways that we cannot yet predict or alter if things go wrong. Looking back, our descendants might or might not accept our decision as legitimate, but they will have no way of changing it. It might look obvious that they would welcome a future free of genetic disability, but even if there were no unintended or unforeseen adverse consequences – which is extremely unlikely – they might not. There have been cases in which deaf parents using IVF techniques selected an embryo with congenital deafness; they did not regard deafness as a disability and felt that a deaf child would integrate more readily in their community.

Proponents of modifying the human germline often say that we make decisions for our children all the time – about their education, for example – but there is a major flaw in this argument. As a consequence of our actions, the descendants we’re talking about will still be having decisions made for them even when they are adults: education doesn’t permanently alter a child’s genome, nor affect the genes it will pass on to its own children. Moreover, gene editing is not the only way to eliminate adverse or fatal genetic conditions in embryos: we can already use conventional embryo screening and detection procedures, such as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

One sorta assumes that Professor Dickenson at least considered the genetics of fucking whoever it was to create Anders and Pip Lustgarten, no? After all, other than the accidents of the backseat fumble most women do think a bit about whose children they are going to have. Darwin was quite emphatic on the point.

Universal credit: better but not good enough

The Government’s flagship welfare system will make work pay while reducing benefit payments to more than 2million households, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said.
The think tank said that Universal Credit will “strengthen incentives” for people who go into work by ensuring that they keep more of the money they earn.
The scheme is being introduced to help ensure people are not deterred from going into work because they lose extra money they earn from the withdrawal of benefits and additional taxes.
The IFS said that 600,000 people who currently keep just 10p of every extra pound they earn will keep 23p under the scheme.

Yes, that’s better but really, not good enough. How in buggery did we end up with a system where marginal tax rates of “only” 77 % on the poor was regarded as a victory?

The actual answer, of course, is to raise the personal allowance for both tax and both types of NI to the minimum wage.

And would someone shoot the Telegraph subs please?

It also said that the number of people losing two thirds of their income if they go into work will fall from 2.1million to 700,000 under the system.

It’s two thirds of the “extra” income.

I do love, I do

Do as I do, think about cancer before you have a glass of wine, says chief medical officer
Dame Sally Davies urges the public to follow her example, and think about the risks of cancer before deciding whether a glass of wine is worth it

Like most 50ish males I’m odds on to get some form of cancer before I snuff it, even if it’s mild prostate and I snuff of something else.

A glass or two of wine helps to come to terms with the human condition.

Just disgusting, terrible!

No candidate running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination has publically accepted the theory of evolution. Their views on the subject—from the imbecilic observations of neurosurgeon Ben Carson to the disingenuous position of Jeb Bush—are calculated to attract evangelical voters.

Will you look at that. No, seriously, will. you. look. at. that.

Politicians pander to voters at election time. Who would have thought it?

Woo! Nice tits love

Just lovely:

The NAACP’s mission of political correctness and equality careened off the rails this week when a local president complimented a TV reporters breasts during an interview.

Don Harris, the president of the Maricopa County Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had just finished an event at Tempe Union High School District to discuss an incident at the school in which several girls wore black t-shirts bearing the letters “N-I-*-*-E-R” on them.

Umm, yes:

But after the meeting, while participants were speaking with the media, he was caught on camera saying Channel 12 reporter Monique Griego had “nice tits.”

Perhaps not quite le mot juste in that situation. Even if true…..

Sadly, he didn’t in fact go the whole hog. Because while he did say “I fucked up” for the complete perfection of this story we should have had “I fucked up talking about her nice tits while protesting over the use of the word nigger”.

We need Ron Burgundy to go that far, right?

The proof that feminism has failed

The trend to hold up these women as feminist role models because they’ve succeeded in their careers is worrying. It’s also a worrying distraction. I wrote Lean Out to counter the move towards focusing on an individualist approach to feminism, which considers successes by particular women as intrinsically feminist, to the detriment of women’s economic and social position in society more widely.

That talented, lucky and hard working women succeed, just as to succeed men need to be talented, lucky and hard working, is absolute proof that feminism has failed.

Oh yes. And don’t you dare use your logic on me you cis-sexist patriarchal pig!

Polly Toynbee jailed for housing overconsumption

Yes! Victory!

What else could this story be about?

A day in court showed me the misery of Britain’s housing policy
Polly Toynbee

Inhabiting, as she does, a vast South London Georgian, what with the country estate in Umbria, it is only right that now the children are grown and out of the family home that she should be jugged for her gross overconsumption of that limited resource, housing.

So, well done to the law there then.

Hmm, what? Yes, OK, joyous thought that would be, the reality is rather funnier:

Failing to claim, along with benefit delays and errors, lay at the heart of almost every case that day. That’s usual, says the solicitor. These are not scroungers, not the ones TV’s Benefits Street seeks out, but those who fall into debt through not claiming, out of ignorance or pride.

So, the actual problem is not that the State is not generous enough, that the poor have no welfare state to fall back upon. It’s that some do not fall back upon what is available, and the State is incompetent to boot.

Not exactly an argument for more State, is it?