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But, but, doesn’t everyopne want to live next door to George Monbiot?

A couple are offering a £1,000 ‘reward’ to anyone who helps them to sell their 116-year-old converted chapel through social media.

Eden and Lizzi Sutcliffe, who have lived in the property at Corris, near Machynlleth, mid Wales, for more than seven years, became frustrated when they received only one viewing after placing the £199,000 property in the hands of an estate agent last September.


Surely there
are hordes of Guardianistas who would like to live next to the Great Man?

Only a particularly demented Marxist could have written this

No courses at Yale troubled Yellen or myself with any analyses of how exploitation lies at the core of capitalist production. We were never taught that the majority of industrial workers produce more value for employers than what employers pay them.

The difference between the value created and what is paid to the workers is called “profit”.

You might need to be a Marxist to whine about it but you certainly don’t need to have studied any Marxist economics to know of its existence.

The Guardian doesn’t really seem to understand this country

Critics said his comments represent the “ugliest side of Ukip” and “overlap with the far-right”, in spite of the efforts of party leader Nigel Farage to create a disciplined election machine ahead of the European elections.

Asked on Tuesday about the charter, Batten told the Guardian he had written it with a friend, who is an Islamic scholar, and could not see why “any reasonable, normal person” would object to signing it.

Batten also repeated his view that some Muslim texts need updating, claiming some say “kill Jews wherever you find them and various things like that”.

“If that represents the thinking of modern people, there’s something wrong, in which case maybe they need to revise their thinking. If they say they can’t revise their thinking on those issues, then who’s got the problem – us or them?” he added.

Leave aside entirely whether you or I agree with the statement for a moment (I most certainly agree with the second part of it). Think instead for a moment about it as politics. Is this likely to gain votes or not?

And if it does indeed, as I think it will, gain votes then what on earth can be wrong with expressing such views in a democracy? Isn’t this rather the point of the whole democratic game? To ascertain the wishes, desires and opinions of the demos and then to appeal to them?

Plus ca change c’est la meme chose

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the Russian journalist, translator and poet who has died aged 77, was one of the most visible women in the Soviet human rights movement and came to the notice of the West in 1968 when she led a demonstration in Moscow in protest at the crushing of the Prague Spring.

For several days after Red Army tanks rolled into Prague on August 21 1968 there were no outward signs in Moscow of unrest. Workers in Soviet factories were made to gather at meetings to show their “support” for the invasion. The first sign the Soviet authorities had that not all their citizens were prepared to endorse the invasion came on August 25 when eight protesters unfurled banners in Red Square. Leading the way was Natalya Gorbanevskaya, pushing her three-month-old son in a pram. At noon precisely she reached into the pram and pulled out a Czechoslovak flag and banners reading “For Your Freedom and Ours” and “Hands Off Czechoslovakia”.

The demonstration ended in a matter of minutes when plainclothes KGB agents closed in. “As they ran up to us they shouted, ‘These are all dirty Jews!’ and ‘Beat the anti-Soviets!’” she recalled. “We sat quietly and offered no resistance.” The KGB men tore the banners out of their hands and beat up the men in the group before bundling them into cars. As they drove off towards a police station, another convoy of cars sped out of the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate. Among the passengers was Alexander Dubcek, the deposed Czechoslovak leader who had been flown to Moscow in handcuffs on the night of the invasion.

A very brave woman indeed.

On August 25 last year Natalya Gorbanevskaya returned to Red Square with nine other demonstrators to mark the 45th anniversary of her famous protest. They were arrested on charges of holding an unlicensed rally.

Sigh.

And now we have the true reason for the obesity crisis

A new study from scientists at Sydney University has found that placing volunteers in temperatures of less than 59F (15C) for around 10-15 minutes caused hormonal changes equivalent to an hour of moderate exercise.

Excellent. Given that the average UK home would have been below 15 oC a generation or two ago (outside that one room with the coal fire in it) and given that the average UK home is now above that temperature throughout we now have our cause of the obesity crisis.

So we can tell all those people bleating about sugar and fast food to bugger off, can’t we?

Timmy elsewhere

At the ASI:

Yes, some regulation is clearly necessary but could we have whatever it is going to be a little more efficiently please?

Could Ms. Coppola please report for economics re-education?

Sigh:

It is often stated that the State is unable to assess risk properly or make rational investment decisions, and that therefore any investments the State makes are likely to be inefficient relative to private sector investments. Frankly I think this is questionable: after all, the State uses the same management consultancies to advise it on investment projects as the private sector does, engages the same contractors as the private sector uses and recruits people from the private sector. Admittedly, bureaucracy can have a deadening effect, but the same is true of large organisations in the private sector. Bureaucratic inefficiency is certainly not a public sector specialism.

Rule number one in economics: incentives matter.

And politicians and bureaucracies face different incentives than profit mad capitalist bastards.

Thus decisions will be different and so will outcomes.

To take just one obvious example. We can all see various politicians insisting that their plans will “create jobs”. Whether it’s the insulating of every house in the country with the aid of a lentil knitten yurt or the building of a fast railway through areas of great natural beauty. All of these plans are touted as being good because they will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Well paid jobs at that.

I, profit mad capitalist bastard that I am, know that jobs are in fact a cost of whatever it is that we’re going to try and do. Thus we try to minimise the number of people that we employ to do anything: the aim is not to maximise jobs but to minimise the amount of human labour that has to go into the production of anything at all.

Further, we’d all prefer whatever labour used to be low paid labour, not well paid, for this again minimises the cost of whatever it is that we’re doing.

As at the top: politicians and bureaucracies face different incentives than the profit mad capitalist bastards and incentives matter. Therefore decisions and outcomes will be different dependent upon who you get to do whatever it is.

The European Union is fucking mad you know

Reading, as you do, an EU report on critical minerals I found this:

Graphite
– EU is up to 95% dependent on imports, mainly from China
– recycling is very limited while the abundance of graphite on the world market
inhibits increased recycling efforts

That is, there’s so much of the damn stuff around that we don’t need to recycle it which makes recycling it very difficult.

The rest of the report is whining about the fact that Europe doesn’t produce a certain set of minerals and therefore has to rely upon trade.

Can we hang them all please?

Hmmm

But, the bottom line is can we – and should we – be making laws against cancer? In my opinion, given the clear upwards trajectory of cancer worldwide, it is the hallmark of an informed and caring society that we do.

It’s my opinion that a liberal and free society would tell prodnoses like this to fuck off.

This is most amusing from Autonomy

OK, so you need a bit of background here. Autonomy was bought by HP and then HP wrote down the value of what it had bought by some massive percentage of that purchase price. 80% or so, around and about there.

HP is saying that the write downs came because Autonomy had been fiddling the books. And, well, no comment. A more general market view is simply that HP massively overpaid.

So, HP has now submitted revised accounts in the UK for the UK section of Autonomy. And the old owners of Autonomy have come out swinging:

“Other causes of the change including explicitly stated changes in accounting policy. We note that a majority of the change in numbers is due to transfer pricing between jurisdictions, a mechanism which often reduces a company’s tax bill in the UK. We hope the UK government will take a robust position in rebuffing HP’s attempts to deprive it of over £38m in tax revenue.”

HP has filed a £38.4m rebate claim for taxes Autonomy paid in 2009 and 2010, arguing the bill was inflated by overstated profits. HMRC has not yet agreed to repay any sum.

Tee hee.

My own, entirely personal, view and one that is not well informed in any manner is that both sides have something to answer for here. This is driven by the fact that I could never really understand what Autonomy’s software did: and nor did some reasonably large number of the people who bought it. It was quite famous in the industry for this. And HP at the time was most certainly run by people who would massively overpay for anything that looked “strategic”. A bit like that crew that took GEC down a decade ago.

Corruption really is very rare in the UK

The readership of this blog does skew to those who have good experience of the rest of the world so most of us already know this. Britain is a remarkably uncorrupt place:

Less than one per cent of Britons, five people out of the 1,115 surveyed by the commission, reported that they had been asked for a bribe, the “best result in Europe”.

In contrast between six to 29 per cent of people in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece said they had been expected to pay a bribe.

I’ve said it before and entirely happy to point it out again: I’ve paid bribes before now. Hefty ones too. On the basis that at the time that’s just how you did it in foreign.

I’ve also never even thought about paying or asking for a bribe in the UK. I wouldn’t even know how to raise the subject itself. It’s just not one of the things that you think about as a viable tactic.

This doesn’t stop the EU having a go though:

Britain was among countries criticised for failing to clean up and regulate the financing of political parties, a problem that the commission defined as a major factor in corruption.

In non-binding recommendations, the UK was asked to “cap donations to political parties, impose limits on electoral campaign spending and ensure proactive monitoring and prosecution of potential violations”.

So we’re the least, or near the least, corrupt place on the planet so we should bring in the rules that exist in more corrupt places so as to….what, increase the opportunities for corruption?

Germany’s going to invade France again

And all because the English would like to rule themselves:

The rise of Eurosceptic groups such as the UK Independence Party hampers the cooperation that has kept the continent at peace for decades, Germany’s foreign minister said.

Which is a fairly odd thing for anyone to state really.

Whether the Wermacht makes a move on Paris or not is a decision that would be made by those who run the Wermacht. You know, German politicians? Why they would want to invade France again is unclear, and why the trigger for their doing so should be that we English tell the corpulent fuckers in Brussels to bugger off is quite beyond me.

Beyond any possible reason in fact.

Mr Chakrabortty the historian on economics

Well, first, any semblance of a strong local economy must be killed. Blame whoever you like for the demise of manufacturing – dopey bosses not checking their rearviews for the foreign competition, the three recessions of Thatcher and Major, New Labour writing off industry to chase the mirage of a “knowledge economy” – the outcome has been a manmade disaster.

But the thing is we’ve not actually had a demise of manufacturing.

manufacturing_graph_550p

What we have had is a demise of manufacturing employment: which is a terribly different thing. It’s also something that has happened globally. Yes, even with China, there are now fewer manufacturing workers than there used to be. Because productivity in manufacturing has risen, is rising and is going to keep doing so. Automation doncha’no’.

The Guardian’s senior economics commentator

It’s a fairly large problem for the paper that its senior economic commentator is simply ignorant of recent economic history, isn’t it?

Especially what with him actually being an historian.

The Guardian’s found another one

eleanor-robertson

Quote:

“A couple of years spent spectating on people’s CrossFit obsessions instead of doing something useful with my life has led me to believe that CrossFit has a lot to tell us about life in late western capitalism.”

Err, yes
:

Eleanor Robertson is a writer and feminist living in Sydney.

Is there some factory somewhere producing these people?

Yes, this is fairly obvious

Usually, men’s sexual activity is limited by how often women will consent to sex – but there is a natural experiment that shows what would happen if it was limited by how often men consent. That natural experiment is, of course, the lifestyles of gay men. “If you look at gay men and women,” says Fleischman, “you’ll see that gay men have a lot more partners than gay women do.” Having to gain consent from a man is a far lower bar to clear, she says, than gaining consent from a woman.

I wonder, is there anyone who wouldn’t agree with this observation?

No, no, we really don’t want to do this

Companies and banks that fail to prevent financial crime by their staff could face vast fines and be blacklisted from European contracts under a change to the Bribery Act being considered by the Government.

A proposed amendment put forward by David Green, head of the Serious Fraud Office, would give Britain’s fraud-busting agency wider powers to take direct action against corporates, enabling it to levy US-style fines and brand them with the stigma of abetting bribery.

We absolutely do not want a bureaucracy to be the investigator, prosecutor and collector of the fines.

Perfectly happy with the idea that more might be done to counter bribery. Entirely happy with the idea that there might be more prosecutions. But it has to go to court: and the money from fines must not, cannot, go to the SFO. It must become general revenue for the Treasury.

You’ve only got to look at what’s happening in the US with drug money confiscations to see that we really do not want any law enforcement agency building its budget out of the confiscations from those it accuses.

No, this is an extraordinarily bad idea.