We have an overpowerful executive. We don\’t have sufficient scrutiny of legislative proposals.
So Richard Reeves suggests we should move to a unicameral system.
Genius, absolute friggin\’ genius.
Please, somebody shoot either me or him.
From the latest, Pennsylvanian act of the world\’s longest Punch and Judy show, I draw this conclusion: whoever wins the presidential election in November, the world will be disappointed.
USians are electing the President of the United States of America. What the rest of the world thinks about it really doesn\’t matter.
You want a voice in it? Immigrate, pay your taxes and vote.
I wonder, I do you know:
Britain is to get its first disposable nappy recycling plant, which will convert the mountain of waste which goes into landfill every day into plastic, cladding and roof tiles. Knowaste, a Canadian company which recycles nappies and other products in the US, plans to invest more than £20m in the UK plant over five years.
The facility, earmarked for Tyseley, Birmingham, will enable the recycling of around 30,000 tonnes of nappies, about 4% of Britain\’s nappy waste a year, and aims to eventually recycle up to 13%.
So, what will be the extra CO2 emissions (and remember to take off the methane collected and used as those in landfill rot) created by this scheme?
Umm, the company doesn\’t actually tell us.
There is a collection cost, which will be charged by your waste collection company. In addition, Knowaste charges a ‘gate fee’ to use its recycling facility. The costs of recycling are cost competitive compared to taking nappy waste to landfill. The latter will mean a landfill gate fee and landfill taxes which are currently £24 per tonne and set to increase by £8 per tonne each year from April 2008 until at least 2010/11. By using the Knowaste process, local authorities will be able to avoid any penalties that may occur from not meeting the landfill diversion targets.
It appears that it\’s only cost competitive because of the landfill taxes imposed by hte European Union: those taxes which we know are wildly overblown in hte first place.
This is causing some confusion:
It denies that there is a conflict between meeting renewables targets and protecting wildlife. But this conflict keeps on happening. The biggest single source of renewable power in the UK would be the tidal barrage that is proposed across the Severn estuary – it could potentially generate 5% of the country\’s entire supply. But building it would have severe ecological consequences on the tidal mudflats, which host a panoply of aquatic life and
wading birds – and once again, the RSPB, this time supported by Friends of the Earth (FoE), is strongly in the anti camp. FoE has proposed an alternative system of tidal lagoons, but these would generate less power and might not be economically feasible. Jonathon Porritt\’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) last year proposed building the barrage but ensuring that compensatory habitats were established elsewhere for displaced wildlife – especially if these new habitats could help birds and other species adapt to rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change.What is clear is that all energy-generation technologies have an impact on the environment – and environmentalists are going to have to think more deeply about what their hierarchy of priorities is. For example, nuclear and hydro power were both anathema to environmentalists for decades but are slowly and reluctantly being accepted back into the fold due to their perceived potential for producing low-carbon energy. The nuclear option was recently considered by the SDC – and although it was still ruled out on cost and proliferation grounds, its report did have to concede that "nuclear is a low carbon technology", which "could generate large quantities of electricity, contribute to stabilising CO2 emissions and add to the diversity of the UK\’s energy supply". This is a world away from Greenpeace\’s flat refusal to even consider moving away from its outright and long-standing rejection of nuclear power. Similarly on biofuels, even as environmental campaign groups lobby against the new government-sponsored biofuels mandate (a reversal from their favourable position a few years ago), the Royal Society still insists that biofuels "have a potentially useful role in tackling the issues of climate change and energy supply".
Shock, Horror! There is no such thing as a free lunch!
Actions have consequences, you can\’t have everything, choices must be made!
Sheesh, we\’ve been trying to tell the greens this for decades.
OK, so now that the lesson is beginning to sink in, let\’s actually expand the question shall we? Should we mitigate? Or adapt? What combination of the two should we try for? What will it cost to do one or the other?
Now that we\’ve actually got everyone agreeing that there are both costs and benefits to any course of action, can we start calculating them correctly so that we can make informed decisions?
OK, the first part is obviously true:
Richard Lambert said the bonuses rewarded success but did not penalise failure, and that if bankers had been staking their own capital they might not have taken such big risks. The CBI chief also accused investment banks of being cavalier in their attitude towards risk.
He said: "At the heart of many of Wall Street\’s problems has been a serious misalignment between the interests of managers and shareholders. It\’s clear a number of investment banks overlooked basic risk controls in their drive to increase profits.
"This pattern of behaviour has been exacerbated by a remuneration structure which has encouraged some employees to take spectacular short-term risks, confident that if things work out well they will reap huge rewards, and that if they don\’t they won\’t be around to pay the price. If it had been their own equity at risk, things might have played out differently."
That\’s the principal agent problem at play and no one is really all that sure how you solve it. Various attempts have been made of course, but there\’s no one size fits all solution.
The bonus culture has turned thousands of relatively mediocre performers in the banking industry into multi-millionaires, while top performers have earned vast sums. The head of Barclays investment banking, Bob Diamond, was paid £36m last year even though Barclays took a £1.6bn hit from the US sub-prime crisis.
Although somehave tried, of course. A significant part of Diamond\’s bonus was paid in restricted stock (ie, shares that he has to hold for a number of years) and he took a £25 million loss on such stock awarded in previous years. That\’s at least part of the way to solving the principal agent problem.
Lambert\’s view of the damage created by the City bonus culture came in his speech yesterday at the British Venture Capital Association\’s 25th anniversary summit. He said the economic climate would also show whether private equity groups operate a better business model than traditional listed companies, or whether they have just generated wealth from the cheap debt and rising asset prices of recent years. He said private equity firms now needed to show that their business model worked "without the easy access to credit and rising prices of assets".
And of course that\’s another way of solving said problem: make the principals and the agents the same people. And we will indeed see whether it\’s a total solution or not.
But to complain both about the banking model and the private equity one in the same speech does look a tad confused.
Yesterday I suggested that those responsible for having to pay the £100,000 to Morrisons might be forced to pay it themselves, rather than us taxpayers picking up the bill.
It was business as usual yesterday at the Office of Fair Trading. A badly drafted, inaccurate and sensationalist press release may have cost us taxpayers £100,000 and forced the OFT to apologise to Wm Morrison, but the regulator, it seems, concluded it would be unfair to discipline any individuals.
In the real world, the debacle would have cost someone – anyone – their job. Former management consultant Sean Williams, the "director of markets and projects" whose name adorned the press release, would have been the favourite for the chop. But life, it seems, is very different at the OFT.
Sadly, that\’s not the way it works: not even any falling on swords pour encourager les autres.
Happy Taxpayer, eh?
But any of you readers know how I could go about purchasing a put option on the price of crude oil?
1) Needs to be an option, not a future. Hey, I\’m a private investor.
2) Reasonably long term: 12 months or more if possible.
3) Well out of the money….like $70 a barrel stuff.
OK, so I\’m pretty certain that the financial markets are sophisticated enough to be able to deal with all of the above. However, I have a feeling that they might only be for "professional" investors, ie, dealing in sums far larger than the £1k-£1,500 I might be willing to lay out on such a bet.
So, anyone actually know?
A cuddle from mother is a natural painkiller for babies, according to a new report.
Premature newborns suffered less if they experienced skin-to-skin contact with their mother as they underwent a painful medical procedure, their study found.
A cuddle also appeared to help babies recover from pain more quickly.
Anyone else entirely unsurprised by this?
One thing it might lead to though is something of an explanation for why things like Reiki massage and so on do inded work in reducing pain. The theory that these Woo Woo things are based on is of course entirely Woo Woo, except for the fact that someone is paying attention, taking time with the patient and that skin on skin contact. We\’re primed to like all three of thoe things, even if supported by mumbo jumbo.
The B.
Obligatory Olivier fo St George\’s Day. Also, praise where praise is due, getting aviation taxation right.
Guido thinks that closing Grangemouth for two days will make the country run out of fuel.
No, I don\’t know either.
I also don\’t know whether this is true or whether it\’s an urban legend. My guess is that it\’s true.
The storage capacity of the fuel tanks of all the cars and lorries on the road is greater than the storage capacity of the entire supply system. We don\’t actually need to have an interruption of supply: we just need everyone to try and top off their tanks at the same time.
I understand CV, Curriculum Vitae, means \’course of life\’ so I put in everything from my advanced birth channel escape techniques to my current birth channel entry requests.
The way I put it is that lessons learned at th cost of hundreds of billions of dollars tend to stay learned. But Jamie Whyte, as usual, says it better:
And now that everybody knows about the risk, regulation is redundant. The same goes for liquidity risk in mortgage- backed bonds. When no one knew about it, regulating it was impossible. Now that everyone knows about it, regulating it is pointless; the market will now price it in.
In fact, once risks are known, regulating them is worse than useless. It can only move the price of risk away from, and usually above, the market price. That is a recipe not only for inefficiency but for future calamities. It encourages financiers and investors to seek profit in areas where the regulators are not imposing their burdens – namely, those where the risks are poorly understood.
Labour\’s three consecutive election victories have been based on a bedrock of English votes.
The bedrock is the Celts: the English votes are the swing ones, surely?
Reading Martin Jacques this morning I find this.
The east Asian countries have never subscribed to the neoliberal economic agenda, eschewing sweeping privatisation, a minimalist role for the state and wholesale market liberalisation. At the centre of Chinese policy remains a highly interventionist state and state-owned firms. Lin himself has written that the government is the most important institution, determining whether development is successful, and argues that privatisation is neither necessary nor sufficient for making Chinese state-owned enterprises more efficient. Imagine such sentiments being expressed by the Bush or Clinton administrations, or Gordon Brown for that matter.
It looked a little odd, as the way in which the Chinese have grown th economy over the decades is to freeze the State owned companies and allow private sector ones to grow up around them. The faster growth rate of those private companies has meant that the percentage of GDP controlled by the State has been declining.
Fortunately, in comments, there\’s this:
Ummm, no. Actually. It is true that neo-liberal economics is not uniform across the East Asian region. Japan is still highly regulated although a lot less than it used to be. South Korea is less so and becoming even less so with time. But both have seen massive privatisations including Japan National Rail in 1987 which I believe was the biggest privatisation in the history of the world. Japan Telegraph and Telephone was privatised in 1985. Japanese Highways were privatised. I believe that Japanese Post is about to be.
Nor China is not a highly interventionist state. There have been massive privatisations in China as well – more so than in Britain. The American government spend more on health care than China does. The Chinese State own enterprises are all but dead in the economy. It is true that China\’s big manufacturer Haier is part owned by the State but probably not for long. Essentially all growth in China is the result of the private sector – which is more or less unregulated. The Chinese state simply does not have a clue what is going on in the Chinese economy.
All the states in this region remain reasonably minimalist in terms of their share of GDP. Japan is the lowest among the Developed nations. China\’s is under 15 percent of GDP.
So given that first claim is utterly factually incorrect, what is the point of the rest of the article?
Glory be for the division of labour and specialisation: I don\’t need to repeat that demolition of the basic suppositions of Jacques\’ piece, I can simply copy it.
In order to rail against he over-fertilisation of lawns, the excessive use of pesticides, Ted Steinberg makes this mindboggling statement:
While some of the company\’s claims for the environmental benefits of grass are reasonable – lawns do indeed cool the surrounding air, at least relative to, say, asphalt – others are just plain silly. Exhibit A: Scotts says 2,500 square feet of lawn produces enough oxygen for a family of four. Hello? The world is faced with many ecological problems, but a shortage of oxygen is just not one of them.
Can you spot the error?
Excellent, for of course the shortage of free oxygen (ie, O2 moelcules in the atmosphere) is in fact the largest ecological problem we face. You know, the IPCC, Kyoto, climate change, boiling Gaia and Aieeeeee! we\’re all gonna die!
The entire problem is based around the fact that much too much of that lovely O2 is in fact in another molecule, CO2, and floating around the globe, leading to Greenland melting, Bangladesh sinking below the waves and the last humans will end up barbequeing Flipper in the coming end times. All of this is predicated upon the fact that we\’re putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than the current ability of extant vegetation to fix it, by taking in the CO2 as food and releasing O2 as the by product. This is why people advocate growing forests and the like, as they so often do.
It\’s true that a lawn doesn\’t add all that much to this process, but every little helps, right?
At CiF Dave Hill asks:
Why do Britons thrill when the dollar takes a nosedive, but get downhearted when sterling drops in value?
Answer in the comments:
Why do zebra thrill when they get a meal, but get down-hearted when a lion does?
Well done that man.
The Office of Fair Trading has issued an embarrassing apology to supermarket chain Wm Morrison and has agreed to pay the retailer £100,000 to settle a defamation action linked to the regulators long running probe into milk-price fixing.
…
The regulator is also to pay the supermarket chain\’s costs.
Excellent. Now all we have to do is get the actual people, rather than us taxpayers, to pay these fees and we\’ll have our incentives nicely lined up in a row.