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Revisiting an earlier version of our language

The Hindu
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LIVE – Gulbarg Society massacre: quantum of sentence to be pronounced today
The Hindu – ‎48 minutes ago‎
A special SIT court, which convicted 24 accused in the 2002 post-Godhra Gulbarg society massacre case, is expected to pronounce the quantum of sentence on Monday.
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They’re all using it so “quantum” really is a local word for “quantity”. As it used to be here.

A ubi is a good idea but

Not this one perhaps:

However, the authors, economists Howard Reed and Stewart Lansley, argue that a transitional system could be created at an annual cost of £8bn, which would leave many means-tested benefits in place. The tax-free personal allowance, currently worth £11,000, would be abolished, and tax rates would rise; but every adult would receive a payment of £71 a week – or £51 for pensioners – and £59 for children. They say such a system would cut child poverty by 45%, and 60% of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution would gain more than 20%.

That’s actually plunging us all further into the state maw, not reducing its power over us.

The Great Jessica Valenti Subway Flasher Story Explained!

In The Guardian it was people masturbating at her all the time on the subway. In the NYT:

I grew up in Queens, taking the subway to junior high and high school. My commute became a time when it wasn’t unusual for a man to grope or flash me. It happened on at least a dozen occasions.

Six years of schooling, 200 days a year of school, there and back, 2,400 journeys and 12 instances. An instance of 0.5%. Or, if we consider that a journey on the subway in New York will involve passing by some hundreds of men in each and every journey, 0.0005% maybe?

This is not unusual?

The Wonder of the World it is

More than 60,000 Britons are condemned to an early death every year because of failings by the NHS and other public health bodies, a damning new report reveals.
The shocking findings show that the UK performs worse than almost every other nation in Western Europe – and even former Soviet states such as Slovenia – at keeping alive patients aged under 75.
Just over a third of the 185,500 Britons in that age group who died in 2013 did so needlessly, according to a report comparing all 28 nations in the European Union.

These 63,442 deaths ‘could have been avoided in the light of medical knowledge and technology’, according to experts at Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU. In France, just under a quarter of deaths before the age of 75 were ‘avoidable’.

Sure, it’s free at the point of use, equitable and all sorts of lovely things. It’s just not very good at the actual health care.

Ritchie says we should all invest in bonds for our retirement

He’s made this case many a time. Forget the stock market, bonds are the thing:

The stark findings by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will be presented in a report this week that highlights the impact of ultra-low interest rates on global retirement incomes.

It shows that a person buying an annuity today who saved 10pc of their wages into a pension for 40 years can expect just over half the earnings of someone who saved the same amount but retired 15 years ago.

Bonds just aren’t great things to have in a low interest rate environment.

I do wish people would get this Google tax stuff right

The investigation centres on Google’s claim that its operations in France do not represent a permanent establishment but a mere satellite of its Irish business. It routes billions in annual advertising sales via Dublin, taking advantage of low corporation tax in the Republic and avoiding France’s 33pc rate.

Google used a similar scheme in the UK until a clampdown and a deal to pay HMRC £130m earlier this year. France’s finance minister has ruled a similar settlement, however. The company says it complies with French tax law.

The UK tax thing was just absolutely nothing at all to do with Google Ireland Ltd selling advertising in the UK.

Just nothing at all.

It was to do with the transfer pricing for the engineering and support services that Google UK offered to Google Ireland.

The French aren’t even pursuing a point even tangentially related to what the UK did.

Hell, I’d vote for this if I could

It’s 2026. Ten years have passed since the British voted to pull out of the European Union. In London, the Ukip prime minister has organised ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the “sovereignty referendum”. What does the world look like? How have Britain and Europe fared?

The EU has unravelled. Most of Europe is now part of China’s One Belt New Silk Road, which includes infrastructure projects across Eurasia. But that doesn’t mean Europe is stable. It has become a space of geopolitical rivalries. Russia has entrenched its influence in many countries and is secretly worried about China’s growing clout. Greece has joined Russia’s recently launched Orthodox Union, a project described as a “cultural and spiritual civilisation” – as has Bulgaria.

French president Marine Le Pen is preparing to run for re-election. She came to power in 2022 on an anti-globalisation and anti-immigration platform. She rapidly organised a “Frexit” referendum, which put an immediate end to the European project, launched in 1957. Without France, there simply could not be a union of any sort. Le Pen had the slogan: “If the British can do it, so can we”.

After France’s departure, the remaining members convened a Brussels summit to rescind EU treaties and sign a “peace and fraternity agreement”, but no one was certain what that meant, or how it would be enforced. On television Jean-Claude Juncker, a former president of the commission, burst into tears.

Making Juncker cry would be worth pretty much anything, no?

To explain this finding

Do you have a beer belly? Men with large waists and high body mass index (BMI) have greater risks of developing aggressive prostate cancer and dying from it than their counterparts, new research in Europe suggests.

More ejaculations reduces risk of prostate cancer. Fat blokes get laid less often.

Sorted

This is Betteridge’s

Will the Syrian regime ever ease the suffering of its people?

Al-Arabiya – ‎1 hour ago‎
The United Nations has reportedly confirmed it is highly unlikely to support or facilitate air drops of humanitarian aid to areas besieged by Bashar al-Assad’s criminal regime without the regime’s approval

Not Betteridge’s but….

Japan: Father ‘ very sorry’ as son found after week’s disappearance
CNN International – ‎20 hours ago‎
Tokyo (CNN) A missing 7-year-old boy, who was left on a mountain roadside by his parents for misbehaving, was found unharmed after searchers spent nearly a week combing dense forest on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, officials said Friday.

Still not quite right as a headline, is it?

Creating chitties isn’t creating capital.

Third, our understanding of economics is changing. We now, for the first time, really understand money. We can therefore newly understand public finances and the integration of monetary and fiscal policy that I outline in my book, using QE, at least in part. And by integrating that understanding with a willingness to let the state produce, costlessly, the capital to put the economy (public and private: this is not a state only revolution by a very long way, but a state partnered one) to work the process of change can begin.

He really just doesn’t get it, does he?

If we print lots of chitties in the basement of the Bank of England then we’ve unlimited capital to do whatever we want!

He’s still not grasped that money isn’t capital. Capital is that labour, machinery, technology, that is deployed. Money is, quite seriously, just the chitties to get it moved around. We’ve not created any more labour, no more machinery, not changed technology, by printing more money.

Which is, of course, why sending more chitties off after the same resources is inflationary.