Don\’t these people know the meaning of free speech?
A Kuwaiti court sentenced a man to two years in prison on Monday for insulting the country\’s ruler on Twitter, his lawyer said, the second person to be jailed for the offence in as many days.
An outrage I say!
Environmental campaigners sparked a 9pc dive in the share price of Australian miner Whitehaven Coal after issuing a fake press release regarding a multi-million dollar funding facility.
The fake press release was issued by Frontline Action for Coal. Spokesman Jonathan Moylan said: “The future of our farmlands, our forests, our health, our climate – these are the biggest threats humanity faces and they are far more important than concerns over liability.”
The fall in Whitehaven’s share price wiped A$314m off its stock market valuation and brought a halt to trading in its shares.
The fall will do little to help the plight of Nathan Tinkler, the Australian mining magnate who is currently facing legal action over a slew of allegedly unpaid bills. Mr Tinkler owns a fifth of Whitehaven’s shares.
It is not known whether the campaigning group could be held liable for any losses suffered as a result of its action.
They should be though. And if there are any American shareholders in that company I can see a class action suit coming toot sweet.
If people have lost money as a result of someone lying then, however good the purported intentions of the liar, they do have recourse at law, no?
The second would extend the real estate investment trust regime to include all privately owned businesses, freeing them of corporation tax but paying taxable dividends to shareholders.
Abolish corporation tax and tax dividends at full marginal income tax rates.
What\’s not to like? Why not do it for all companies?
My Lord Archbishop,
I do hope that you have been misquoted in today\’s Daily Telegraph. On the off chance that you have not may I offer a small deal? One that should make both of us considerably more use to the rest of the population.
I promise not to spout nonsense about the Sky Fairy, a subject upon which I am less than well informed. In return, you will need to promise to keep silent on subjects where you are in possession of little knowledge.
I use as my example your statement upon inequality and happiness, a subset of that difficult subject, economics:
He argued that it is clear that the British is “not happy” and that “fairer” countries such as China, Japan and Netherlands also have more contented populations.
There is a significant error in that.
The Archbishop was drawing from “The Sprit Level” by Prof Richard Wilkinson and Prof Kate Pickett, which uses happiness indices from different countries to link social and health problems to inequality.
Yes, we know where the idea comes from.
“How many of you would like to be happy?” he asked his audience.
“You need to be a fairer society to be happy – at the moment, Britain is not happy.
“If you look at the figures globally, China is happiest, then Japan, then the Netherlands – because they are the most equal societies.
There are two problems with this statement of yours. The first is that your source, that book, is, how shall we put this, somewhat controversial. Using the word \”controversial\” here to mean political drivel of the highest order. But let us leave that aside, politics can indeed descend into a shouting match of one side against the other and the evidence be damned.
What is rather more worrying is that you seem not to have read the source you are quoting from, and if you did, you\’ve most certainly not understood it. This is not unsusual among those who do not know their economics when spouting about economics but one would hope that an Archbishop recalled Job 6:24 at least occassionally.
China is most definitely not one of the world\’s happiest countries. It is also most definitely not one of the most equal. Indeed, it\’s actually considerably more unequal than the US or the UK. About as much more unequal than those two as they are than Sweden and Denmark in fact.
So our little deal. I\’ll keep silence where I am ignorant. And where you are markedly ill informed you keep your gob shut too. Sound fair?
Yours from the ex-Papist side of the line,
Tim Worstall
The 35-year-old was jailed for seven years after pleading guilty to rape and two counts of sexual assault.
If it is rape well done. But is it rape?
Masquerading as a Russian woman called Marina, he struck up a friendship with the junior officer worker who is in her 20s.
The pair first chatted in October 2011 and after several online discussions, “Marina” confided that she needed help in exposing her cheating husband.
“Marina” asked his victim if she would come to his house while she was at work and sleep with her so-called philandering husband in order to catch him out.
She also asked her to film the encounter and then send him the tape.
Despite being engaged herself, the woman obliged, visiting Ritchie’s two-bedroomed home in Borrowash, Derbyshire, where he had lived with his wife, Susan, 40, before they separated.
However, she liked Ritchie and enjoyed his company and the pair subsequently embarked on a relationship and continued to see each other on a regular basis.
Sure, the whole story seems to have been a pack of lies but where\’s the rape? At least the way this is written she seemed to consent.
Or have we now reached the stage that consent must be \”fully informed consent\”….that lying a woman into bed is now rape?
Det Con Claudia Musson, the officer in charge of the case, warned chat room users that it was easy to be lulled into a false sense of security.
\”Ritchie preyed on a vulnerable young woman and deceived her at every turn,” she said.
\”She was left deeply traumatised by what he did but she showed great courage in coming forward and speaking to police.
\”Although seven years is a pleasing sentence, it doesn\’t compensate for what he did.
\”I just hope his victim can now try to move on with her life in the knowledge that he has been jailed.
\”I would urge people to be careful when talking to people online.
\”When forming relationships via the internet, you can easily be lulled into a false sense of security, which in turn can leave you very vulnerable.\”
All of that is absolutely true. But I\’m unconvinced that it amounts to rape.
Someone please tell me, what am I missing?
Perhaps there\’s some part of this story that we\’re not being told. But the way I\’m reading what we are being told I just don\’t see it.
For example, it would appear that telling some bird that you\’re a travelling, single, secret agent to get her into bed, something to which she agrees to as a result of the story, would amount to rape if instead you were in fact a married travelling scandium salesman.
And is that where the law is actually at these days? Deception in seduction is now rape?
No, this doesn\’t mean that I can chase the young ladies. Not that they look very interested nor that I am.
Rather, being back around the \’ore mountains \’untin slags, I am cooking for myself again. And no, I\’m not one of the world\’s great cooks. Nor do I really care all that much either.
\’S\’long as there\’s a few decent meals a week them much of it can be just fuel. Most unjayrayner.
And I sorta know how to do this in various different countries. Certainly in the UK I do. I can read the ingredients, work out the cooking instructions, know how to hang around the bargain bin for when that filet mignon gets sold off cheap.
I can do it in Italian, French, Portuguese, too. Not the great meals you understand, but the fuel that ain\’t bad. Heck, a little bit of practice and I\’ll be able to do it again in Russian.
Czech is a whole different cuisine. And the language is sufficiently different to Russian that it\’s, well, different. I spent the day travelling across Europe. I\’m having comfort food tonight.
Nothing at all fancy: some form of sausage (frankfurterish) with beans, bread and onion rings. I know, I know….but what the hell, all major food groups and there might well be a vitamin in there somewhere too.
Which is where this idea that in foreign is like the past comes in. They do things differently there.
I get the idea that you take the plastic packet off the frankfurters. But who knew that in some parts of the world you are supposed to peel the actual sausage itself as well? At least I assume you are for this second attempt does taste rather better. Still not \”good food\” but rather better comfort food without the plastic casing…..
I think the finger can be unambiguously pointed at micro-economists. Because this breed has over the last 60 or so years become obsessed with seeking to solve all problems mathematically they have to make massive simplifying assumptions about the true nature of human (and so corporate) behaviour to reduce life to terms that they can handle in their equations. One of those massive assumptions is that companies have a duty to maximise profits. If they did not make this assumption they could not otherwise mathematically model corporate behaviour in the abstract, as they do, rather than look at its reality, which they don’t.
But the fact that there is a fundamental flaw at the heart of conventional microeconomics because it is built on an assumption that is not only wrong,because as a matter of fact companies do not only not maximise profit but would have no clue what to do if instructed to do so, does not make that false assumption right. It should just instead lead us to doubt the advice of those who offer suggestion on the basis of such falsehoods.
And nor does an economist’s false assumption create law that does not exist.
Great, isn\’t it? Someone who prodly tells us that he never paid a whit of attention to his economics classes at univerwsity, that he\’s figured it all out for himself, now tells us that everyone else is just wrong. All those very clever people who have worked on this for well over a century: nope, ignorant nobodies. A Retired Accountant From Wandsworth has the one true and valid scheme!
BTW, economists do not claim that companies have a duty to maximise profits. They claim that companies attempt to maximise profits. Even, that the purpose of a company is to attempt to maximise profits.
Reading the papers at 4 pm. Obviously I didn\’t get up early enough, lazy bastard etc etc.
That I\’ve been training and planing and caring to get to the \’ore mountains to \’unt for slags is no excuse….
I have just noted what David Cameron had to say yesterday on tax avoidance by multinational companies.
I’m delighted he has said he will tackle this issue, and on the scale that he has indicated. But let’s be clear what precisely he has to do to achieve his stated goals. At a minimum:
I wonder what he\’s going to say, eh?
1) He has to abandon his government’s policy of territorial taxation since this is a tax avoider’s licence to abuse this country
That\’s fun, isn\’t it? By taxing only profits made in the UK this gives people the opportunity to not pay UK taxes on profits not made in the UK.
Quite why this is abuse of the UK tax system I\’m not sure. Aren\’t profits supposed, in a Courageous State, to be taxed where they are made?
2) He has to invest heavily in HMRC to give it the resources it needs to really tackle tax avoidance and tax evasion
Not really a surprise from one sucking from the tax mans\’ union teat.
3) He has to change the law and OECD tax treaty standards on company residence and change all UK double tax treaties to comply
He\’s got to change every international tax agreement we\’ve got plus the entire standard of international taxation that everyone else has agreed to.
I have to admit I think that\’s a rather ambitious thing for a British Prime Minister to try to do really.
5) He has to move to unitary taxation
Under EU law that\’s not something we can do unilaterally. You\’d have to change EU law which is again rather ambitious for a British Prime Minister to attempt.
6) He has to pesuade the OECD to abandon arm’s length transfer pricing
Bit ambitious: change the laws that the 30 richest nations on the planet have agreed amongst themselves.
7) The EU has to change many tax directives and potentially allow tax withholding at source on inter-EU payments
That over turns the basis of the Single Market. The root and heart of the entire EU project in economic terms. And political too really. Those tax withholdings for example: they are specifically and exactly declared to be illegal (for royalties and interest payments for example) under those very Single Market rules.
So Ritchie\’s solution demands that the entire heart of the EU project be ripped out. Which I agree with of course, but it does sound rather ambitious.
8 ) He has to re-establish the controlled foreign company rules he has just been dismantling
Cameron hasn\’t killed the CFC rules. The EU did that, in Cadbury. This just isn\’t something that is in the power of the British Government to change.
9) He requires a proper General Anti-Tax Avoidance Principle Bill
As I\’ve said before I\’m all in favour of Michael Meacher\’s bill. So badly written that it relaxes, massively, the controls against tax avoidance.
10) He needs to tackle the UK’s tax havens as the starting point of a demand for global transparency, automatic information exchange and proper recording of the beneficial ownership of companies
Meh. Ritchie seems to have forgotten that colonialism is somewhat out of style these days. Dusky foreigners are allowed to go their own ways these days, not subject to dictats by white peeps in England.
11) He needs to ensure companies are properly regulated in the UK, which is far from the case now, if he is to get any more than 34% of UK companies to pay corporation tax, which is the number that do so now.
Quite why companies that don\’t trade, or that don\’t make a profit, should pay corporation tax I\’m not sure.
12) He will, of course, need to adopt country-by-country reporting
Entirely unneccessary if we\’ve unitary taxation. For cbyc supposedly will tell us where the profits are made. But if we\’ve a formulary approach to apportionment then we don\’t need to know where the profits are made: we\’ve a formula, see?
Ritchie simply cannot see that his latest obsession makes redundant his own invention.
13) He needs to re-appraise the tax gap and the way HMRC measure it – which currently excludes all the tax avoidance he finds so repugnant
But the tax gap is tax that should be paid but isn\’t. And if people have legally structured themselves so as to owe no tax then it\’s not part of the tax gap, is it?
What\’s really so fun about this is that Our Retired Accountant From Wandsworth is not in fact calling for some clean up of the UK\’s corporate taxation system. He\’s calling for a wholesale rewrite of the entire international system. Including the abolishment of the EU\’s Single Market. And every single one of our bilateral tax treaties. Note, do, that bilateral means the other peeps have to agree as well.
Can\’t fault him for ambition but that\’s all rather out of the power of the UK Prime Minister, isn\’t it?
And then there\’s this of course:
14) He needs to get some proper advice from people outside the FTSE 100 and the 100 Group of Finance directors funded Oxford Centre for Business Taxation on just what an appropriate tax policy for the UK might be
15) He has to replace those people who are heading H M Revenue & Customs who have had ties with tax avoidance and whose influence may explain HMRC’s lax attitude to the issue.
Don\’t listen to them, people who disagree with my plans, listen to ME! Oh, and head of HMRC will do nicely thank you.
I\’m almost tempted to recommend him for Dave Hartnett\’s old job. Would be most fun when the EU, the OECD and 120 or so sovereign nations tell him to fuck off.
So what? There are no votes in this issue. Few care. Yet this is one of the fastest-growing components of the British workforce. More than 11% of thirtysomethings hold some form of postgraduate degree, increasingly imperative if you want to build a career in anything from the media through medicine to hi-tech business. There is proper and enormous focus on widening access to university for disadvantaged minorities for first degrees, but first degrees are no longer the passport to economic and social mobility that they used to be. The knowledge intensity and cognitive demands of a growing number of jobs today require intense intellectual training and the growth of postgraduate degrees reflects that reality.
Hmm.
Certainly possible to look at it all as credentialism. Now that 50% go to uni for a first degree, we need some other method of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Thus the rush to postgraduate degrees as in the US.
To which the obvious solution is to cut back first degrees to 10-15% of the population and we\’re done.
The rest of it is how much more government money should be spent on this vital university sector.
Will Hutton is principal of Hertford College, Oxford
Fancy that, Willy Hutton is calling for subsidy for Willy Hutton. I am shocked.
The Church of England has decreed that gay clergy in civil partnerships can become bishops but only if they are celibate. Is this a long-lost Monty Python sketch?
No, it\’s the entirely natural development of the underlying theology. You most certainly don\’t have to agree with that theology, I don\’t, but you do have to understand it.
Sex outside a heterosexual marriage is immoral. That\’s the founding stone of it all.
There is nothing at all immoral about not wanting to be in a heterosexual marriage. Nor about fancying others of the same sex, your mother, horses or children.Even the thought of using loveplugs or adult toys is not considered immoral. The immorality is in acting upon those desires.
Recall, please, this is not Worstall thundering from the pulpit. This is what the Church has been teaching for a thousand years or so.
That Church has split, as we know. The Catholic, Roman, part of it still teaches exactly that. Sex inside a heterosexual marriage is one of God\’s great gifts to mankind. Sex outside it is immoral and sinful.
The Church of England has got into one of its usual muddles and largely says that sex outside marriage isn\’t quite as good as sex inside it in moral terms. But it\’s a valid lifestyle, we\’re all God\’s Little Creatures etc. But here they\’ve not quite managed to let go of that idea that there\’s still something not quite 100% ticketty boo about sex outside that heterosexual marriage. Thus Bishops, those who represent the Church, should be held to stricter standards of morality than the clergy and the laity.
As I say, you don\’t have to agree with any of this. You can most certainly call for either a change in that logic, for new churches with other logics, for a strangling of them all with their own intestines. But if you\’re not willing to expend the effort to understand why these things are done and said then you\’re never going to understand what is being done or said.
The objection is not to gay sex, to homosexuality. It\’s to sex outside marriage which is defined as heterosexual marriage. And for the Romans, a little further than that too. Sex must be open to the possibility of conception for it to be moral as well*. Indeed, there are similarities in certain Judaic and Islamic strands of thought too.
Leading to some fairly wild rulings: a couple, (married of course) one of whom is HIV positive, may indeed use a condom to prevent infection. But only if it has a hole in it: as Il Papa has pointed out, this leaves open the possibility of conception. Anal, oral, whatever you want, go for it: but not to the point of ejaculation, that must be vaginal to preserve that possibility. Coitus interruptus ditto.
They\’ve had at least a millennium to think all this through. One might (and act as if) their basic precept is wrong in itself, that only sex within marriage with the possibility of conception is moral.
But if you don\’t understand that that is where they\’re coming from you\’re just not going to understand all the rest of it.
*Undoubtedly someone will bring up the aged, post-menopausal. Or the congenitally infertile. At which point that \”possibility\” becomes important. For we\’ve Biblical evidence (somewhere in Genesis….Sarah?) that God can overcome these if he chooses. Again, you don\’t have to believe it. But you should at least try to understand what they do believe.
\”We have virtually abandoned living in traditional societies,\” explains Diamond when we meet. \”But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.\”
One of those methods of dealing with the elderly:
The Kaulong people of New Britain used to have an extreme way of dealing with families in mourning. Until the 1950s, newly widowed women on the island off New Guinea were strangled by their husband\’s brothers or, in their absence, by one of their own sons. Custom dictated no other course of action. Failure to comply meant dishonour, and widows would make a point of demanding strangulation as soon as their husbands had expired.
We\’ve lost so much of value with this civilisation shit, haven\’t we?
Other habits have included infanticide and outbreaks of war between neighbours, though these are balanced with many cases of care and compassion, particularly for the elderly, and a concern for the environment that shames the west.
\”Concern for the environment\” eh? It is hunter gatherer societies that ravage it more than any other when population pressure rises. Vide the extinction of all of the edible megafauna where ever mankind emigrated to.
What advice would you give a teenager who wants a career in science? Select a subject that interests you and make an effort to become an expert in that field. I promise you, if you make the effort, and you become an expert, you will have a wonderful career.
It doesn\’t apply just to science. The same is true in any walk of life.
Become, say, The City\’s expert in the field of charitable trust law and you\’ve a nice 30 years ahead of you of changing the names on the standard document. At £500 an hour (I know someone who really did this).
Or spend two decades as the expert on the scandium market.
Being an expert allows you to extract rents: or if you prefer, your knowledge is a definite value add.
It will get competed away over time. And obviously, the extraction of rents isn\’t quite what we preach as being good for the whole economy. But it is darn good for your own income.
And of course if you\’re adding sufficient value that people will happily pay your rent then there\’s no harm in it at all: that comes when you manipulate the system (legally, politically) to protect yourself against that nascent competition.
But as career advice: believe me, being paid to be the expert is a whole lot better than having to earn by the sweat of your brow.
An anti-corruption drive in China has netted suspects that include ….. a provincial official with 47 mistresses
Almost Biblical in it\’s excess in fact.
Although \”mistress\” as the name for someone who might get shagged once every two months doesn\’t sound quite right really.
Definitely conspicuous consumption there, Veblen Goods, not sex.
At the ASI.
Why is it that Compass, the NEF, Ritchie etc, all want us to have the Spanish banking system?
Our pragmatist Prime Minister David Cameron is set on winning a full term in No 10 so he can see through policies, not out of some crazed will to power
He has neither policies nor a crazed will to power. David Cameron\’s motivation is quite simply that the country ought to be run by people like David Cameron.
Doesn\’t matter in what direction, how well or how badly, just that the right people are running the place.
He\’s very like the Twin Eds in this.
Throughout keep in mind that 99% of all historic cycles have been “real business cycles,
It may even be that Keynesianism is true. But only in certain circumstances, like, you know, 1% of the time?
So, the adventure of \’untin\’ slags in the \’ore mountains is on again.
2012 was spent surveying, organising, finding.
2013 is to be spent, as of Monday, actually processing one specific pile that was found. Money has been raised, a lease is being written, companies will be founded, workers employed etc.
And the first stage was to have two meetings next week. One with the old GDR state monopoly, now privatised, on mineral processing. The idea being that, instead of hiring people ourselves, directly, maybe these guys would be able to do the job better? After all, as history has shown you can force Germans into being communists but you can\’t force them to be bad engineers.
The second was to meet up with our Czech mining engineers. We\’re applying for the license to an old mine and I need to run through the paperwork with them. Also to discuss whether a Czech mine dump, well, should we be looking for a partner who wants one of the by-products or should we just process it directly ourselves then look for said partner? Do the economics work without selling that by-product?
So, that\’s the tasks for week one. And I give them the opportunity to set when the meets should be. When and where in fact.
To which the response is, 10 am Friday in Prague and 11.30 am Friday in Freiberg. Either is entirely possible, being based in Usti nad Labem as I am (ie, 90 km and 60 km away respectively, and 15 – 40 km from the mines themselves). But both is a little tricky…..
Ho hum.
One other thing: do I have any readers in the Northern part of the Czech Republic?
Viola Richter works in the Emmendinger Altenpflegeheim (care home) in southern Germany, near the country’s border with Poland.
A map of Germany shows that the Polish border is in the NE. From, roughly, Dresden to Rostock. Which just ain\’t \”southern\”.