This is to write nonfiction books:
Our current standard rate is $13 USD per 1,000 words.
That’s thus perhaps $1,500 – with no royalties – to write an entire book.
Author Archives: Tim Worstall
Well, yes, they can
Yakou Méïté: ‘People think they can say what they want, even if it’s racist’
People do indeed get to say what they want even if its racist. It’s called free speech.
They also have to put up with the reaction to what they’ve said – say, being derided as racists – but that is the way the whole thing’s supposed to work.
Jeez, all adults know this
With blatant disregard for the public benefits of motivational idioms, researchers have concluded that practice does not, necessarily, make perfect.
A study of violinists found that merely good players practised as much as, if not more than, better players, leaving other factors such as quality of tuition, learning skills and perhaps natural talent to account for the difference.
The work is the latest blow to the 10,000-hour rule, the idea promoted in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book, Outliers, which has been taken to mean that enough practice will make an expert of anyone. In the book, Gladwell states that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness”.
Not that Gladwell actually said that. Rather, 10,000 hours is a necessary precondition.
The larger point though any and every adult knows. People just click with some things and not with others. This is true of doing music at all – I reached my plateau and wasn’t going to get any better at about Grade VII. Just didn’t have the innate understanding of music necessary to take it further. Algebra plateaued somewhere in between dy/dx and integration. Just never could get the brain around the latter. Sure, could work though a known equation, work to rule. But composing one? Nahhh.
Even within a subject – two years of cello led to no one wanting to put me in even for Grade I. Two terms of trumpet had me sailing through Grade IV. Grade V has to be worked at a little bit……
And the thing is, every adult does know this, every language has an equivalent of horses for courses…..
How many others feel this way?
The former chairman of the Remain campaign has dismissed calls for a second referendum, claiming that politicians should abide by the “democratic process” and “get on with it”.
Lord Rose of Monewden, who also previously served as executive chairman of Marks and Spencer, said that he believed the UK should have already left the European Union with an “agreed friendly divorce”.
Asked if he was now calling for another poll due to the increased prospect of no-deal, the former head of Britain Stronger in Europe said: “No, I’m not. I’m saying listen, we made our decision, it’s democratic decision, let’s go with it in the best possible way we can.
“I am a Remainer but I do believe in a democratic…
More importantly perhaps, how many others outside the Westminster Bubble think this way? We hear about how Leavers are dying off – but how many people are righteously pissed at Remoaners and their machinations?
Make ’em easy to round up I suppose
Extinction Rebellion founder urges mass ingestion of drugs in protest at criminalisation
Well, yes, but….
Famous friends rally to support Duke and Duchess of Sussex: ‘All they’re trying to do is make the world better’
Many have made that claim, even had that aim, and not quite managed it…..Uncle Joe, Adolf, even the people who imposed first generation biofuels upon us….
Elsewhere
This does not mean we should not tax property, or wealth; other arguments are available both in favour and against such. We do rather a lot of taxing of property already through rates, council tax and so on. The OECD records Britain as gaining 12.5 per cent of all tax revenue from property, well over twice the OECD countries’ average of 5.6 per cent. It is the taxation of property transactions that needs to go.
Part of the solution to our current housing woes is that those with more space than they need — empty nesters, say — downsize to make room for the next generation. A transactions tax actively militates against this. Perhaps Mr Javid would like to revive Nigel Lawson’s gleeful shooting of a tax each budget. If so, stamp duty should be the first up against the wall.
Snigger
Alphaville LLC is delighted to announce that its inaugural research report “Ice deal; US chief is interested in purchasing Greenland”, was quoted by prestigious British broadsheet the Guardian on Monday 19 August.
Phillip Inman, economics editor of the Observer and an economics writer for the Guardian, cited research analyst Jamie Powell’s $1.1tn price target for the arctic landmass in a piece this morning titled “Why does Donald Trump want to buy Greenland”.
The amusement being that the LLC is the spoof research organisation of the FT blog. Inman quoted it as being real……
Find and replace
Most concerning of all, however, to the Corporate Accountability Network is the fact that this change of heart by the leaders of American business, whilst welcome, includes no suggestion as to how these new priorities will be evidenced or how they will be reported upon. The Corporate Accountability Network believes that unless corporate accounting is reformed so that businesses must report to all their stakeholders then words such as these will be largely meaningless. Our aims is to ensure that the accounts of limited companies are available to all who want to view them, and in a format that might supply them with the information that they need to understand the activities that it undertakes from the user’s perspective as a stakeholder of the company.
Replace “CAN” and “Corporate Accountability Network” with “I, Spud!” – so also “our” and you’ve about got it.
I do hope this discussion continues
Richard Murphy says:
August 20 2019 at 10:20 am
The UK has reasonable residence rules now: I have to say that as I helped shape themWe simply do not need domicile to be fair to those arriving or temporary residents : tho0se issues are covered without alternation being required
There is no base cost to entry for people now and there would not be from the change
Reply
Laurence Parry says:
August 20 2019 at 10:34 am
I also helped draft the residence rules (apart from the split year treatment, which is rubbish)Richard Murphy says:
August 20 2019 at 11:02 am
I do not recall your involvement
Jeez, this is getting ridiculous about trans
In The Guardian, a reminder:
On the issue of gender bias, Oliver cited numerous studies in which women were statistically misdiagnosed; a 2017 study found that women were less likely than men to be referred for knee replacements; another found that women over 50 and critically ill were less likely to receive life-saving interventions. This can be attributed, Oliver said, in part to dismissal of women’s pain as hormonal emotions, and a long history of studying male (as in assigned male at birth) bodies as a stand-in for all bodies.
Sigh.
How’s Alberto’s life insurance looking?
Argentines were stunned in mid-August when the centre-left candidate Alberto Fernández won the national primary elections for the presidency, surpassing all predictions with a whopping 15-point lead over the incumbent Mauricio Macri. The primaries, known as the “PASO”, serve to winnow down the number of presidential candidates, with a 1.5% vote share required to progress to the general elections on October 27.
Fernández’s victory on August 11 came just three months after Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s shock announcement that she would run as his vice-president, having asked him to lead her electoral ticket.
Tee Hee
We know this already
Morgan-Richards said the research presented several avenues for further study – including why sex remained useful for species at all, when from an evolutionary perspective females save time and energy by reproducing alone.
Because variation is important over the longer term.
Jeez, we’ve got evolution pretty much sorted out, we don’t need to wonder and ponder on such basics any more.
Entirely possible
An Indian minister has claimed that Indian scholars discovered gravity centuries before Issac Newton’s famous encounter with an apple, and called on the country’s scientists to promote more homegrown theories.
Sure*, why not? Wouldn’t surprise if some very clever people had worked out reality.
Charaka was a scholar who developed the concept of Ayurvedic medicine and learning around 300 BC, while Aryabhata was a 5th century mathematician and astronomer.
Show us the texts and we can have a look, eh?
*Telegraph apparently has this story on the wrong URL…..
Hmmmm
Social worker suspended after telling female colleague ‘I like a nice set of baps’ while looking through her shopping basket
“He spoke to her about watching pornography of women of her size, saying that it turned him on and he had been having a good time.
“Colleague A was embarrassed and raised her hands to indicate that he should stop talking like that.
Perhaps he advice should be don’t lift your chat up lines from those sorts of movies?
Who, exactly, was marking the paper?
A student was disqualified from her GCSE exam after she was accused of making “obscene racial comments” by criticising halal meat.
Abigail Ward, 16, a strict vegetarian, wrote during a Religious Studies exam in June that she found the idea of halal meat “absolutely disgusting”.
The exam board OCR later disqualified Miss Ward from the exam, accusing her of making “obscene racial comments”.
And if Grandpa Death had been marking it, would the same comment applied to kosher have got an A*?
Getting recycling wrong
During the second world war, scrap metal was made into tanks and women’s nylons into parachutes.
You don’t make parachutes out of nylon. You might out of silk. And you could cut up the parachutes to make silk stockings, but not really dew them up the other way around.
The absurdity of the Visiting Professor
It is almost absurd that when we face a global heating crisis what is of concern in the UK energy market is the fate of small companies trying to make a buck out of a failed system of energy privatisation that has very largely led to consumer rip off, limited real energy supply transformation, and a system so lacking in co-ordination that it can be claimed that when these companies fail people are left without energy suppliers when glaringly obviously the supply to their properties still exists.
If we are to get serious about tackling global heating the nineteen-eighties obsession with energy market reforms needs to be replaced with energy policy intended to deliver zero net carbon as the only issue of real priority.
And in the process we should also have single, fair, tariffs for all so that the age of rip-off ends forever.
This is what the Green New Deal requires. And we need it now.
One single price for all electricity taken from the network. So, no cheaper electricity when there’s lots of it about. Meaning no load balancing when the sun shines and the wind blows. We can throw out all those smart meters then, the entire plan to deal with intermittentcy.
Or if that’s not what he means, tariffs allowing for different prices at different times, it’s still remarkable, isn’t it? A supposed economist arguing that competition doesn’t increase efficiency over time….
Oooh, this is fun
Re Ghislaine:
In adulthood she had no power without Epstein, who held all the purse strings. He had been embroiled financially with her father and it may be that Epstein bought her the fancy $5m townhouse in New York with Robert Maxwell’s own money, squirrelled away in anticipation of his looming bankruptcy.
If true – far fetched, obviously, so emphasis on the if there – then that means all her money belongs to that bankruptcy trustee.
