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May 2016

Ritchie must really hate himself

Some have suggested, on this blog and elsewhere, that I do not suffer fools gladly.

Yep:

The third is those who know but carry on with misrepresentations when they clearly know better.

Got to be a lot of self-loathing there.

Pretty much, yes

Labour’s Future, Why Labour Lost in 2015 and How it Can Win Again, to be published this week, says the party is losing socially conservative voters to Ukip in droves, while appealing most to metropolitan liberals who tend to be better off and to have been to university.

And metropolitan liberals do not a majority make….

Anyone want to do me a small favour?

Try looking at Forbes.

Just Forbes.com would be fine.

Is the site down? It is where I am and I don’t know whether it’s something in my computer, something between my computer and the server or whether the server really is down. so, if someone tests it from somewhere else then, well, I’ll have more information.

OK, ta, got this now. It’s really down.

Sounds rather fun

What if somebody offers you a trip to space in a balloon? The trip is exciting enough for the enthusiasts but can burn a hole in your pocket! Well, the piece of news is that a Chinese firm has developed the country’s very first space parachute suit as part of their business plan. The company offers to send people into space in a high-tech balloon. Don’t worry! They have arrangements to bring you back on Earth as well. A parachute will be used to let you return to your own planet. And guess what? This entire trip will cost you a whopping USD 77,000, which is not a big amount for the richie richs!

But I think I would prefer to be the 2004th person to do this rather than the first.

Opportunity cost is a pisser, isn’t it?

Satisfaction and happiness are not as clear cut as we think they are,’ University of Texas, Austin psychology researcher Daniel Conroy-Beam said in a recent press release.
‘We do not need ideal partners for relationship bliss. Instead, satisfaction appears to come, in part, from getting the best partner available to us.’

Now this actually is racist

While in the UK the student body has also become undoubtedly more diverse, the staff and therefore academic interests have remained overwhelmingly exclusive and white. Black British-born staff make up only 1% of full-time staff, representing just 85 out of the UK’s 18,510 university professors and face barriers to promotion once employed. The unfortunate reality is that black studies has not emerged sooner because there has not been a critical mass of staff who could teach the subject.

We at BCU are able to offer a high-quality black studies degree because our department has six full-time black academic members of staff who work in the discipline.

Only blacks can teach black studies apparently.

Interesting thought, isn’t it?

Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!

Ms. Penny:

When my book Unspeakable Things came out in 2014, a small horde of misogynistic trolls who’ve been following me around the web throwing peanuts since my early 20s immediately orchestrated a campaign to get it a poor rating on Amazon. The one-star reviews flooded in suspiciously quickly from people who appeared not to have read the book at all, since most of the criticism wasn’t about the ideas but about the sheer horror of a young woman writer having leftwing feminist ideas in public and getting away with it.

And maybe it just wasn’t a good book? And possibly the new Ghostbusters is just a shit movie?

Timmy is attacked!

Our old “friend” Tim Worstall is back at it on his occasionally almost nearly coherent Forbes blog. This time, he’s talking about the increased overtime threshold. As you may have expected, he thinks paying more overtime is a bad idea. Here Tim is being, if nothing else, consistent; he thinks a minimum wage is a bad idea, after all, so why wouldn’t he be against a policy like overtime that benefits workers?

But the truth about overtime is that Tim just doesn’t care all that much. No, really. He calls the new threshold “entirely trivial.” That’s a direct quote. In fact, he uses the word “trivial” twice to describe the effects of overtime and then he says he’s not even sure the White House estimates of what the overtime raise will pay out—”$1.2 billion a year over the next decade”—are worthy of the word “trivial,” they’re so insignificant.

What a bad boy I am. The new overtime rule will, apparently, increase wages by $1.2 billion a year. That’s 0.006% of the US economy. Whoopdidoo. It will affect some 12.5 million people. Under $100 a year per person therefore.

Yep, it’s trivial.

What a bad boy I am.

That website, Civic Skunk Works, is what the multi-billionaire Nick Hanauer, spends his money on. Odd really: for that sort of money you’d expect some competent criticism really…..

So Oxfam is a tax avoider then?

While it is commonly assumed that charities are exempt from tax, that is not actually the case. Although they are exempt from tax on certain types of income (from donations, rent or investments), the profits they make on business or “trading” operations are taxable, except in specific circumstances. By setting out the very limited circumstances in which trading profits are exempt (see section 524 of the Income Taxes Act 2007), Parliament made it very clear that it intends charities’ other business income to be taxable.
The reaction of Oxfam, and most of the other charities, has been to run their business operations through a separate company. That company would be taxable on its profits, but it donates all its profits to its parent charity through the “Gift Aid” scheme, which exempts them from tax.
This fits the standard definition of tax avoidance – an artificial structure (separating out some of the charity’s activities into a separate legal entity) that gives it a tax advantage.
Of course I do not think there is anything wrong with Oxfam doing this; like all good tax avoidance it is perfectly legal and it is an ingenious way to escape a tax liability. But should Oxfam really be criticising other businesses for avoiding taxes when it does just that with its own?

And there’s more than just the occasional rumour, entirely unfounded of course, that Oxfam actually does real tax evasion too.

Environmentalist twats

With the emphasis on mentalist:

BOMBAY BEACH, CA — The lake is drying up, uncounted dead fish line the shore, and the desert town is losing people.
It could be the plot of a post-apocalyptic movie set in the future, but this is actually happening here and it has been going on for years. It wasn’t always like this, of course. There was a time when this town was booming. There was a time when the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, was the “French Riviera” of the state, and the pride and joy of Imperial County. But that was decades ago, during the Sea’s heydays of the 1950s and 1960s. Back when this area had luxury resorts, piers, yachts, and thousands of visitors, including stars like Frank Sinatra — who owned a house in nearby Palm Springs and would come down to see Guy Lombardo sail his speedboat.

Historically:

The Salton Sea is a shallow, saline, endorheic rift lake located directly on the San Andreas Fault, predominantly in California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys.

The lake occupies the lowest elevations of the Salton Sink in the Colorado Desert of Imperial and Riverside counties in Southern California. Its surface is 234.0 ft (71.3 m)[1] below sea level. The deepest point of the sea is 5 ft (1.5 m) higher than the lowest point of Death Valley. The sea is fed by the New, Whitewater, and Alamo rivers, as well as agricultural runoff, drainage systems, and creeks.

Over millions of years the Colorado River has flowed into the Imperial Valley and deposited soil (creating fertile farmland) and building up the terrain constantly changing the course of the river. For the next thousands of years the river has flowed into and out of the valley alternately creating a freshwater lake, an increasingly saline lake, and a dry desert basin, depending on river flows and the balance between inflow and evaporative loss. The cycle of filling has been about every 400–500 years and has repeated itself many times. The latest natural cycle occurred around 1600–1700 as remembered by Native Americans who talked with the first settlers. Fish traps still exist at many locations and it is evident that the Native Americans would move the traps depending upon the cycle.

The most recent inflow of water from the now heavily controlled Colorado River was accidentally created by the engineers of the California Development Company in 1905. In an effort to increase water flow into the area for farming, irrigation canals were dug from the Colorado River into the valley. Due to fears of silt buildup, a cut was made in the bank of the Colorado River to further increase the water flow. The resulting outflow overwhelmed the engineered canal, and the river flowed into the Salton Basin for two years, filling the historic dry lake bed and creating the modern sea, before repairs were completed.

Twats.

Well done Ritchie!

What, precisely, fair taxation might be is a question often asked, and not always well answered.

We could always start with the idea that the amount of tax due is the amount the law says is due of course.

That debate could address issues about the tax base. Issues such as horizontal equity are relevant. Why is it that we now have a situation where income from capital is taxed so much less than income from work?

Because optimal tax theory says it should be.

And why are companies taxed less than the self employed?

They aren’t.

Trump’s disgusting crime

A former Miss Venezuela and Miss Universe has told how Donald Trump called her ‘Miss Piggy’ and an ‘eating machine’ after she gained weight.
Alicia Machado, who was also the first winner of Miss Universe to model for Playboy, was just 19 when she won the crown in 1996, shortly after Trump took over the competition.
But when Machado gained 40lbs after taking the crown she says Trump began bullying her and invited media outlets to watch her work out without telling her they would be there.

Quite, quite, disgusting. Telling a fat bird she’s fat.

Obviously can’t be President now, can he? Have to go with the wife of the rapist instead.

The Mail today

Portrait of a perfect marriage: 11 years after Elton proposed to David, the intimate story of their loving relationship – in their own words

Four Canutes of British justice: Supreme Court bans naming of threesome star in ruling that opens the gates to a flood of gagging orders for the rich and famous

Larry Elliott’s quite right here

Why? Because, although Britain is likely to stay in the EU, Brexit will remain a live issue unless the eurozone can sort itself out. That means either admitting that the euro has been a terrible mistake, or going the whole hog and integrating further, with a single banking system, a Europe-wide treasury, and a democratically elected finance minister with the power to raise money in Germany and spend it in Greece.

That is actually the problem. To make the euro, the eurozone, work it will be necessary to do what no one will actually do.

Mad consumerist extravaganza

Had the teeth fiddled with again this morning and driven by the excess of the resultant cocaine in the bloodstream exploded into a consumerist frenzy. The local second hand clothes shop, where all the stuff that Oxfam and the rest can’t sell in the UK comes to, was having a sale. Six pairs of trousers, a t-shirt and a kagoulish type jacket later I am down 80 Ks. And at least half the haul is M&S in good condition.

80 Ks being about £2.50, £2.60 maybe.

Now the question is how do I get the wife to think that this is in indeed a consumerist frenzy and that she can go and spend £2.50 on clothes any time she likes?