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August 2016

And life imitates art once again

NEEDHAM, Mass. — A Massachusetts McDonald’s worker with Down syndrome is finally retiring after more than three decades at the restaurant, according to WBZ-TV.

After 32 years working at the fry station, Freia David’s face is a familiar one for many of the customers.

“She is one of the most beautiful and upbeat people you could ever hope to know and I know,” wrote loyal patron Christopher Sheehan on Facebook — Sheehan grew up with David and the two are still close.

His post inspired a stream of memories in the comment section from other Needham residents who met David over the years.

“Freia served me the last burger I ever ate at McD’s,” wrote Julia Frevold. “When I told her I was cutting them out of my diet she was excited to be the person to give me my special last burger from “her” restaurant. I won’t forget her smile as I told her I thought the name of a goddess suited her well.”
………..

In addition to his usual lunch-rush duties–making sure the dining area, condiment island, and restrooms are clean and stocked–Ehrman spent 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday voluntarily sweeping and mopping the floor in the prep area, helping an elderly customer find her purse, and throwing salt on the icy walk outside the restaurant.

During the same two-hour stretch, 20-year-old Jenna Sanders, Ehrman’s direct supervisor, incorrectly prepared three orders, spilled a jug of oil in the kitchen, and had a 25-minute conversation about the band Slipknot with coworker Debi Price.

“[Sanders] double-charged me for a BK Big Fish Value Meal,” customer Terry Unger said. “Then she got my order completely wrong. I was about to storm out of there and never come back again when this retarded kid, all smiles, comes up and asks if I need help. Sixty seconds later, he hands me the correct order and change, and apologizes for the trouble. Finally, someone who understands how to treat a customer.”

Unger added that in addition to having the only clean uniform in the store, Ehrman seemed to be the sole employee with basic interpersonal skills.

“Maybe they teach it in the special-ed classes or something, but he’s the only one who actually speaks in sentences as opposed to grunts,” Unger said. “And when I asked for extra ketchup packets, he handed them to me and said, ‘Here you go,’ instead of rolling his eyes.”

Ouch!

Investigations are under way after someone replaced lube with acid in a dispenser at a gay club.

A 62-year-old man was arrested in Sydney, Australia, after going to Aarows, Rydalmere, and poured hydrochloric acid into the dispenser.

And of course all those stories about Teh Gayers being promiscuous are entirely untrue.

Lube? For use on the premises presumably?

So here’s a question about Facebook

Apparently there’s something on Facebook called the news feed. With trending topics.

I can find the news feed, of course. That gives me things “friends” are saying. But what I can’t find is some more generalised news feed with trending topics. That is, stuff which is popular over the network. Where is that?

Who could he mean?

I’d made a film for Newsnight about what the Labour Party needs to do to reconnect with voters, and at first I was pleasantly surprised. The producer of the film was brilliant. But then they showed it on the programme and afterwards made me debate against a semi-literate lump of cretinous rage who just jabbered meaningless idiocies that had nothing to do with anything I’d said or even the questions a bemused Kirsty Wark tried to ask her. Like a Chatty Cathy doll programmed by an educationally subnormal friend of Stalin’s: pull the cord and out it all comes, a succession of furious non-sequiturs. “Never again,” I told the idiot of a programme producer, afterwards, very solemnly.

That medical technology thing

Comment at The Observer:

Nonsense:

“But the exciting new possibilities offered by genetic technology will be expensive and available only to elites. So the long century in which medicine had a “levelling up” effect on human populations, bringing good healthcare within the reach of most people, has come to an end. Even today, rich people live longer and healthier lives. In a couple of decades, that gap will widen into a chasm.”

As old Joe Schumpeter pointed out:

“The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses. . . . It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls. “

Mobile phones first became available, what, 35 years ago? £3,000 and a £ a minute or something? Now they’re £10 and maybe £20 for a month’s airtime? There’s also been some inflation in there. From, say two months average income to three hours, in one generation at most?

The truly astonishing thing about capitalism is how it makes these new things cheap for the masses. And how fast it makes them cheap for the masses. Medical technology is and will be no different to stockings and phones. How long did it take penicillin to go from priceless to cheap as chips? How long did Viagra’s patent last – 20 years from application date, of course.

There could be a bolus of inequality that moves through the system, true, as a pig through a python. But all of our experience is that new and expensive technologies become mass market ones within a generation.

He’s going to work up a fair old sweat doing that

Jeremy Corbyn ‘would build 1m new homes’ in five years of Labour

And this is almost Ritchie like, isn’t it?

A Labour government run by Jeremy Corbyn would borrow £15bn a year to build houses across the country – half of them council homes – as part of a £500bn programme of public investment, new policy papers have revealed.

It would aim to build one million homes during a five-year parliament and guarantee housing tenants – especially those in the private sector – new safeguards, including secure three-year contracts and protection from “unreasonable rent increases”.

Despite the huge sums, Corbyn’s team insists that government borrowing will be “highly efficient” and a good deal for taxpayers because of the boost to the economy from construction, job creation and rental income.

The documents, released by the Corbyn campaign as it seeks to fend off the challenge to his leadership by Owen Smith, say that the net cost to the public sector will be £10bn a year, because two thirds of the construction bill would be labour costs, meaning extra tax revenues for the Treasury.

Govt spends £100 billion a year, net cost £10 billion a year. So, err, marginal tax rates on labour are 90% these days, are they?

If anyone can find this document it would be interesting to see how they’re going to do this in more detail.

Michael Meacher, tribune of the people, not rich at all

Veteran Labour politician Michael Meacher left a fortune of £5.2 million – but debts of more than £1 million, the probate office has revealed.

After his outstanding affairs were settled, he left £4,181,811 on trust for his wife Lucianne Meacher and the four children of his first marriage.

Meacher, 75, died on October 20 last year after a career in the House of Commons spanning 45 years, serving under six party leaders.

Looks like it was all made on the taxpayer’s dime too, doesn’t it? Anyone know of him having another job than “public service”?

And does “in trust” mean no inheritance tax?

Idiot stupidity

The current controversy about a gay culture at Maynooth is misplaced and the church authorities should be focusing on why so few young people are seeking to join the priesthood rather than seeking to make seminaries gay-unfriendly places, according to former president Mary McAleese.
Dr McAleese said that she found the focus on whether there is a gay culture at Maynooth worrying but she traced it to the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality with which she profoundly disagreed and which did nothing to make gay people feel welcome within the church.
“We have the phenomenon of men in the priesthood who are both heterosexual and homosexual but the church hasn’t been able to come to terms with the fact that there are going to be homosexuals in the priesthood, homosexuals who are fine priests,” said Dr McAleese

The Catholic Church doesn’t actually care whether you prefer men or women. As a priest it cares that you keep it all in your own pants.

Which is what the laddies at Maynooth were suspected of not doing.

Is this going to be like the housing benefit cap?

Think back a few years to when housing benefit was capped. At first there was outrage as £400? £400! You can’t get a rabbit hutch for that! rang out across the land.

Then it was gently explained that this was £400 a week, not £400 a month. At which point the outrage rang out across the land. Who the fuck has been able to claim £1,600 a month for rent?!Burn ’em!?!

And so we come to the benefits cap:

Nearly a quarter of a million children from poor families will be hit by the extended household benefit cap due to be introduced this autumn, according to the government’s latest analysis of the impact of the policy.

The new cap will take an average of £60 a week out of the incomes of affected households, almost certainly pushing them deeper into poverty. About 61% of those affected will be female lone parents.

Anti-poverty campaigners said the cap would damage the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children, and force already poor families to drastically cut back on the amount they spend on food, fuel and clothing.

The new cap restricts the total amount an individual household can receive in benefits to £23,000 a year in London (£442 a week) and £20,000 in the rest of the UK (£385 a week). It replaces the existing cap level of £26,000.

Now obviously £20,000 a year isn’t great riches by British standards. It’s also in the top 2% of all global incomes. And there’re plenty of people out there who make less than £20k from a full time job.

So which way will this go? We’re obviously going to get, from The Guardian and points left, wails and articles about how awful this is. about people struggling on this sum. But what is going to be the general response? Yes, that’s a shameful amount? Or, come on, that’s a fair whack from the rest of us get on with it yourselves for more?

At some number the first would predominate. £5k for a family say. At £40 k for a family the second would. But what’s going to be interesting is where the dividing line is. My suspicion, and it is only a suspicion, is that £20k will still allow the “that’s a fair whack” brigade to predominate.

Largely because it is, it’s not far off median household income for the country.

Sounds about right

Theresa May will not hold a parliamentary vote on Brexit before opening negotiations to formally trigger Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, The Telegraph has learned.

Opponents of Brexit claim that because the EU referendum result is advisory it must be approved by a vote in the Commons before Article 50 – the formal mechanism to leave the EU – is triggered.

However, in a move which will cheer Eurosceptics, The Telegraph has learned that Mrs May will invoke Article 50 without a vote in Parliament

We’ve an elective dictatorship more than anything else. The executive probably does have such power. The Commons will have to vote on the new treaty of course, or at least rescind the old one, but that’s at the other end of the negotiations.

Err, yes?

In 2014, UK consumers paid 6 times more tax on petrol, excluding VAT, than the North Sea oil and gas industry paid on all taxes related to production.

And the problem is? British smokers paid very much more in tax than cigarette companies paid in profits taxes too.

And?

And then there’s a whole report about “tax free dividends” and the like. Entirely ignoring the fact that said “tax free dividends” would be paying the US corporate income tax. Of 35%.

Twats.

And as Tim Newman says:

“He appears to be wondering why oil companies are not paying a profit tax on crude production in a notoriously high-cost region following the collapse of the oil price.”

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard – what larks!

Amber Heard has demanded that her ex-husband Johnny Depp double the amount that is paid to charity following their divorce settlement.
She recently pledged to donate the $7m (£5.3m) settlement to two charities for abused women and ill children.
But he has begun to donate the money directly in her name, instead of giving it to her first, leading her to accuse him of trying to reduce his total bill.
She said he must now “honour the full amount by donating $14m to charity”.
On Thursday, the Pirates of the Caribbean star revealed he had paid the first instalments of the original $7m sum to the charities “in the name of Amber Heard”.

So, Johnny’s claiming the charitable donation tax credit then.

Which is very fun because it means that Amber Heard cannot.

An interesting question – is a divorce settlement a taxable event? If it isn’t then this would be the sort of thing to drive Heard into an absolute rage.

Imagine, that it isn’t taxable to her, that $7 million. So, she gets all the kudos of donating it all to charity. And then gets a $7 million write off against her own taxes which, in CA would be about 50% of total income.

She don’t get this credit now. Johnny does. She’s what, $3.5 million worse off because he’s donating directly? Woman scorned and all that.

All does depend on whether a divorce settlement is taxable of course. Dunno. Dennis?

The good and the bad

This is a multi-university project. I will from 1 November be working on this for half my time, paid by City. It will not involve me in any new teaching obligations.

If, as we expect, another EU funded project is approved shortly then I will be working full time at City from that date: I will provide more information on this project when the paperwork is all concluded. Whatever happens I will find my self predominantly engaged in an employment for the first time in 32 years.

Now we’re stuck with paying his wages.

Now he’s going to have to pay income tax properly.

Well, assuming he doesn’t just go back to using a personal services company…..

So Danny Dorling believes in the efficient markets hypothesis then

This week, exactly two months after the vote for Brexit, I spent an hour on the property site Zoopla looking at the latest housing sale data available. Anyone can do this at the click of a button. Unlike the rise in stamp duty in April, which was well anticipated, the vote to leave the EU was not. And all markets react most strongly to the unanticipated.

Known information is already in prices, it is unknowns which become known which change prices.

Of course, if you actually asked Danny Dorling about the EMH he’d say it is nonsense. Because it’s neoliberal, you know.

But he does still believe in it.

I wonder if Ritchie knows this?

Nor is there, fifthly, any sign in here that the US is going to get to grips with the fact that states like Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming produce secret corporations available for tax abuse behind total veils of secrecy on such an industrial scale that it makes the British Virgin Islands like like a bunch of amateurs. The contribution to tax abuse that these US states makes is enormous.

Those corporations are subject to the US tax system of course, the Federal one. They’re useful for dodging state tax systems, something which doesn’t really concern non-Americans.

There’s a different issue with partnerships …….but that’s partnerships, not corporations.

Err, what?

And this is a new currency so de facto someone is responsible for regulating it: the blockchain is not going to do that in a regulated finacial environment that must be audited (all if which you ignore) and that’s the equivalent of mining

Richard Murphy says:
August 25 2016 at 2:15 pm
And when the transaction cannot be audited because it is locked in an encrypted ledger how many staff will be needed to work out what happened?

Oh dear God.

Rather the point of the blockchain is that anyone can read it.

Richard Murphy says:
August 25 2016 at 6:54 pm
Except you show that you know nothing about the real nature of money or tax when making such comments