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June 2012

English oddities

Although the Cornish might not all themselves English:

The Isles of Scilly feature what is reportedly the smallest football league in the world, the Isles of Scilly Football League. The league\’s two clubs, Woolpack Wanderers and Garrison Gunners, play each other seventeen times a season and compete for two cups as well as the league title.

Stanton Glantz is a moron, isn\’t he?

Under proposition 29, the tax per pack would jump from 87 cents to $1.87.
The initiative\’s sponsors – the Cancer Society, the American Lung
Association and the American Heart Foundation – say it would raise
more than $750m for cancer research and stop 220,000 children from
taking up smoking.

\”Within five years the idea of smoking as a socially tolerated behaviour could simply collapse,\” said Glantz. \”This is a tremendously important fight. It could make California the first state where where the tobacco epidemic has been ended.\”

Currently a pack of cigarettes is $5.10 in California.

$6.22 in Ohio and $11.90 in New York.

Smoking has indeed been vanquished in Ohio and New York, hasn\’t it?

Not enough capitalist destruction

An interesting view, eh?

E&Y said that although companies are struggling, the number of administrations actually fell last year, despite a 42pc rise in profit warnings among listed companies. It said the mismatch could be explained by a change in attitude among the government and creditors, which have allowed more breathing space for businesses since the onset of the crisis. ……..E&Y argues that because lenders continue to fund these businesses, capital is not being recycled and reinvested as it should be. Although it said the number of zombie companies was difficult to estimate, R3, the business distress specialists, said around 30pc of companies are regularly reliant on their maximum overdraft facility – a good gauge of whether a company is viable.

Everyone loves the creative part of capitalism: few like the destructive part. But we do need both and we\’re not going to get the former unless we allow the latter and thus free up resources to be reallocated….

Hasn\’t England changed, eh?

It\’s been two years since the annual Gloucester cheese rolling competition was banned on health and safety grounds. But yesterday hundreds took to Cooper\’s Hill, at Brockworth for a rogue event.

Rogues…criminals….violators of the law…..for chasing a cheese downhill as their forefathers have done for centuries.

Hang the bureaucrats.

To answer a Guardian question

As the Queen celebrates her diamond jubilee, part of the country will be keener to commemorate the Sex Pistols\’ \’God Save the Queen\’, released at the height of the silver jubilee. Is Elizabeth\’s wave or Johnny Rotten\’s vocals more likely to bring out the patriot in you?

Perhaps as someone who has spent the majority of their adult life as an expat I\’m not quite the one to talk. But the great joy to me of Britishness (and I\’m really not quite sure how much of this is English and how much British) is in how the two coexist, however uneasily.

For example:

There has been a recent revival of a 1980s movement to have Lydon knighted for his achievements with the Sex Pistols. Q Magazine remarked that \”somehow he\’s assumed the status of national treasure.\”

Another way of putting this, and I know that it will come as a great shock to those who haven\’t spend substantial amounts of time In Foreign, is how incredibly tolerant the British/English are. Of political, social, racial, philosophic, whatever differences.

That we did indeed have \”God Save the Queen\” by the Sex Pistols as one of the most popular (did it actually reach No1?) beat combo productions at the time of the Silver Jubilee and we didn\’t as a result have riots, constitutional crises or, if truth be told, anything more than a rather large amount of sniggering about it, is one of the glories of the place and people who inhabit it.

Gary Younge thinks this is a bad thing

Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal, union membership has slumped since he banned automatic deduction of union dues from salaries. The WSJ reported that membership of the state\’s second largest public sector union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, fell by more than half in Walker\’s first year while the American Federation of Teachers lost more than a third of its members.

Not entirely sure I agree with him. An increase in freedom to pay or not to pay for union membership is a good thing, surely?

Err, no

Facebook under pressure as short-sellers pile in
Facebook shares will come under further pressure on Monday after speculators staked $1bn (£651m) on the company\’s market value continuing to spiral downward.

The downward pressure comes from people short selling the stock. Not from people having short sold the stock…..the effect is already in the share price therefore.

Surprise!

France, Italy and Spain are in favour of the introduction of so-called eurobonds, which would essentially pool the debt of all eurozone members, spreading risk, but Germany is strongly opposed to the idea.

We\’d all like someone rich to underwrite our debts and thus lower the interest paid on them.

The rich person taking the risk is often less interested….

Well, yes, I suppose so

The trio repeated their demands three times with mounting tension. Each time she answered no, first in English, and then in German for precision, according to details obtained by Italy\’s La Repubblica.

\”Germany does not want the fund to spend billions in exchange for collateral from ruined banks. I don\’t see why we should end up holding bits of bankrupt lenders,\” she reportedly told them.

All three warned that if Spain is forced to request a sovereign rescue – as Germany demands – it will be deemed insolvent by markets.

Given that it would be insolvent this would seem fair and logical.

Then there\’s this:

A key reason is the cancerous precedent of the Greek haircut deal, in which private investors were left with all the losses. Once the ESM starts lending to Spain, others creditors are instantly pushed down the ladder or \”subordinated\”.

Losses will be larger if Spain ultimately needs to restructure. Stuart Thomson from Ignis Asset Management says this may well happen. He predicts haircuts of up to 50pc for Spanish bondholders.

Which is a reasonable working definition of the result of insolvency. Whether Spain really is insolvent (I think so but….) or simp[ly illiquid doesn\’t make much difference if the end game is 50% haircuts, does it? People will act as if it is insolvent and thus it will be insolvent.

This is the weekend Britain would have left the euro

Just think back: Tony manages to push Gordo into joining the euro.

We\’d have been in at the beginning, have had much lower interest rates than we did and have had a property boom that would have put both Ireland and Spain to shame.

The bust, would, of course have been vastly worse than it was or is in either of those two countries. Greece or worse to be honest.

And this is a four day weekend. This is when we would have left.

So when does Nick Cohen join UKIP?

In the eurozone, there is no \”we\” capable of exercising control. The absence of a \”demos\”, of a legitimate political community able to act collectively, explains why the richest, most educated region on the planet is paralysed – to the undisguised amazement of the rest of the world. The walls of the prison in which the eurozone has incarcerated southern Europe and Ireland have been described often enough. National governments can no longer tell central banks to print money to pay off debt. They have no control over interest rates or exchange rates. Their currencies are as fixed as if they were in the gold standard and set at a permanent competitive disadvantage against Germany. Decisions are taken by the IMF, Brussels and Germany rather than sovereign electorates. As we know, power has passed beyond national control.

The European elite\’s bovine response can still generate incredulity, however. \”I can say the medicine is beginning to work,\” announced José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, last month, as youth unemployment in Spain passed 50% and the Greek and Spanish banking systems careered towards a crash.

I knew he was moving right but when do we need to get out the purple bunting?

Willy Huttonbollocks

The last time the British government could sell government bonds at interest rates as low as today\’s was in the early 1700s.

Gargling fucking nonsense.

The leading economic commentator on one of the leading national newspapers is ignorant of the difference between nominal (ie, unimportant) and real (important) interest rates?

Current real interest rates on gilts are negative: as they have been many a time before.

This is also quite excellent:

Overstretched banks have become more cautious about lending new cash; and even strong banks are caught up in the backwash because if they step into the breach they could fall into a vortex of falling property prices and declining economic activity, becoming weak in turn. So as banks stand aside from their crucial function of generating credit, governments and central banks must step in to generate the demand that has now disappeared.

OK, let\’s increase credit creation by the banks somehow.

There is also a case for a financial transactions tax – both to raise crucial revenue and to cap the growth and frenetic speed of financial transactions.

We\’ll do that by taxing transactions and thus reducing the creation of credit.

Lovely.

Not the cleverest idea I\’ve ever seen

The SMF has proposed a national childcare loan scheme in which parents earning more than £12,000 a year could request a lump sum to be repaid monthly through the tax system over an extended period and at a low interest rate.

An SMF report gives the example of a family paying £7,800 for childcare over three years. Under the scheme, their repayments would fall from £50 a week over three years to £14 a week over 11 years.

A mortgage to pay for child care.

No, really, I just don\’t see it somehow.

Small scale hydro

According to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, England and Wales have up to 248 megawatts of unexploited hydro potential at around 1,692 sites (a 100kW scheme could power 50 houses).

248 x 10 x 50 equals 124,000 houses.

Out of some 21 million households in the country. Excellent, we\’ve just powered 0.6% of the country. Without industry or transport.

After five years\’ work, Woodman created a 3kW scheme that powers his house.

At vast and huge cost in human labour.

It\’s all very fun and you can rummage around on Welsh hillsides if you like but it\’s not actually a solution to anything, is it?

All hail an ignorant fuckwit

So, women on the pill peeing into the sewers kills fish. We must clean this up.

To reduce dangers posed by these concentrations, the EU proposed in January that it would set a level of 0.035ppt for ethinyl estradiol in water in Europe. Achieving that target will not be easy, as Owen and Jobling point out in a recent issue of Nature. They calculate that, for a town of about 250,000 people, it would cost about £6m to install a system that uses granular activated carbon to cut EE2 levels, with a further £600,000 being needed to operate the system each year. To upgrade the 1,400 sewage waterworks in England and Wales would cost a total of more than £30bn, they add. \”The question we have to ask ourselves is straightforward,\” said Owen, a former head of environment and health at the UK Environment Agency. \”Are we willing to pay up or would we rather settle for environmental damage associated with flexible fertility?\”

Leave aside any concerns over the science for a moment and accept it as true. Then we do indeed face this particular problem.

But then we get into the relams of pure and entire fuckwittery:

Nor is it necessary that the public should pick up the tab, added Owen. \”The pharmaceutical industry makes billions out of the drugs and treatments it sells. If these pollute the environment, what is wrong with making them pay to have it cleaned up?\”

Now they say that there are some 2.5 million women on the various flavours of pill. Sounds a little low to me but we\’ll run with it.

Leave aside the capital cost of installing this necessary equipment and look just at the running costs. Some 10% of the £30 billion capital, or £3 billion a year, spread over (just to make it easy) 3 million women.

£1,000 per woman per year.

Cost to the NHS of the pill for a year for a woman? Looks like £50 or less to me.

So, Big Pharma is making profits of £950 a year more than they are actually charging are they? For that\’s what they would have to be doing in order to be making the profit that could be confiscated to pay for the damages.

And we used to employ this Owen chappie at the Environment Agency? Seriously, our tax money went on someone as fuckwitted as this?

The truth is of course that the benefit of the pill goes to those who are able to control their fertility through the use of it. This is not unusual, that the social benefit of a product goes to those who use it, not those who sell it.

But, of course, if the recipients of that social benefit are causing a social damage as well then we\’re in the realm of Pigou Taxes, aren\’t we? Thus the logical answer to this is that women who take the pill should be charged an extra £1,000 a year in tax for the privilege of taking that pill which causes such damage.

I do, really I do, look forward to the Green Party campaign on the basis that the polluter should pay.

Sniggers in Spain

Mariano Rajoy, the Spanish prime minister, has called for the eurozone to have “centralised control” over the budgets of all the countries using the euro.

Tee Hee.

One of the problems in Spain being that they have devolved administrations who run their own budgets and which are therefore not under the control of Madrid.

This problem would not, in any manner at all, repeat if 17 national administrations were \”run\” fromBrussels.

Nope, not at all, Couldn\’t ever happen.