Skip to content

2014

Ritchie on pensions again

But there’s a second reason why this is also guaranteed to fail. As the FT noted yesterday, stock markets are dire at picking out which investments to pick. Just over 10% of all active stock market managers beat the market in 2014 in the USA. Randomly you would expect half to do so. That has not happened since 2009. And that’s before paying for the costs of these managers who get their judgement on which intangible assets to invest in (because that’s what most company shares represent) so spectacularly wrong.

What is more, of the best 25% of fund managers in 2010 almost none remained in the top 25% in 2014. So getting this selection right once is no guarantee at all of doing it again.

In that case investing in intangible assets makes no sense at all for pension purposes.

Hmm.

But requiring pension funds to invest 25% of all their contributions in infrastructure that creates new jobs in exchange for the tax relief they get would not just be good for the economy – which would be beyond dispute as it would give a £20 billion boost each year – but would also be fantastic for the stability of pension fund returns whilst seriously cutting the costs of pension fund management. And it would also respect that fundamental pension contract between generations.

But the City will fight it tooth and nail. Which is why, no doubt, such a radical, and essential, pension reform is not on the political agenda right now. Feeding the myth of the City is more important, of course.

Pension funds do invest in infrastructure projects of course. And they also invest in bonds. And the interesting question is really, well, which of the three investments makes the most to pay those future pensions? The general result is, I believe, that bond funds offer greater security and lower returns than equity funds……which rather blows a hole in the analysis there, doesn’t it?

Vale Joe Cocker

Not bad for a lad from Sheffield. Not bad at all.

And I’ve always admired him for having a sense of humour too.

That’ll do Joe, that’ll do.

Bit over the top this though:

As Life magazine observed, he was “the voice of the blind criers and crazy beggars and maimed men who summon up the strength to bawl out their souls in the streets”.

??His brother, Victor, was chief executive of Severn Trent.

On that campus rape culture

You might have heard about this story, the one where the woman is dragging a mattress around campus until the bloke leaves campus. As part of her thesis, naturellement.

Here’s the gobsmacking thing about it:

If three separate complaints against the same man could not persuade the hearing panels, how could anyone believe that justice was served?

That there’s three complaints does not make any of them actually true. And the female students do actually agree that they only spoke up when they checked stories with each other.

Sexual assault cases can sometimes come down to a matter of perspective, but Mr. Nungesser’s accusers say there can be no ambiguity about what he did. “It’s not safe for him to be on this campus,” Ms. Sulkowicz said this month. The women he assaulted “are forever emotionally scarred and fragile because of what he’s done to them. And me.”

Mr. Nungesser is similarly absolute. “People were like, maybe this is a misunderstanding,” he said of Ms. Sulkowicz’s charges. “But the matter of the fact is it’s not a misunderstanding.” He insists they had completely consensual sex. “What was alleged was the most violent rape, and that did not happen.”

As for groping, he says he attended the party but never went upstairs. And intimate partner violence? “Outside of a forced marriage or kidnapping, it just seems very hard to believe that a person would over and over again put themselves in a situation where they could expect this kind of behavior to occur.”

False reports of rape are rare, many experts say, and the federal Education Department is investigating scores of colleges for possibly violating federal rules in handling the complaints that are filed.

Mr. Nungesser said the charges against him, all filed within days of one another, were the result of collusion. The three women said in interviews with The New York Times that they decided to take action when they heard about one another’s experiences.

The groping case was initially decided against him, with a largely symbolic punishment of “disciplinary probation,” but he appealed. By the time the case was heard again his accuser had graduated and was unable, she said, to participate in the process. The decision was overturned. The university dropped the intimate partner violence charge after that accuser, saying she was exhausted by the barrage of questions, stopped answering emails over summer vacation. And in Ms. Sulkowicz’s case, the hearing panel found that there was not enough evidence. Her request for an appeal was denied.

To Mr. Nungesser’s accusers, the refusal to punish him in any way — as well as the myriad procedural errors, delays, contradictions and humiliations, both small and large, to which the women said they were subjected — is proof that the system was biased against them. If three separate complaints against the same man could not persuade the hearing panels, how could anyone believe that justice was served?

“To me he seems like a predator who attacks women, who does not ask for consent and does not know the line,” said the student who accused Mr. Nungesser of groping her, and who asked not to be publicly identified, as did the third accuser.
Continue reading the main story

To Mr. Nungesser, the facts that campus hearings have a lower burden of proof than criminal trials and that he was not allowed to bring up communications between himself and Ms. Sulkowicz after the night in question were proof that the process was biased against him. If despite those odds, the hearings were resolved in his favor, how could anyone doubt that justice was served?

The campus system operates on the balance of evidence, as the feminists desire. Not all reasonable doubt, as the criminal law requires. And all three cases were found, at the very least, not proven on the basis of that balance of evidence.

It’s hard to see that the bloke should be punished for something that the system quite clearly doesn’t think he did, given the process and the evidence.

Two major problems here

I am attacked:

Tim Worstall asks:

And what the fuck’s wrong with voluntary collective action rather than State enforced collective action?

Answer: charity presupposes a condition in which some people have stuff which they can do without, and some people lack stuff that they really need. This inequality (which, like all inequalities, is morally objectionable on the face of it) is only sustained by the actions of the capitalist state in enforcing property rights through its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In a more just world, there would be no need for charity because you would not have a situation in which some people have, whilst others need.

Aside from this obvious point, I honestly don’t see any moral difference between a spontaneous, voluntary urge to do good on the part of certain individuals, and a reflective, truly collective urge to do good as manifest in a legal requirement to provide support to those in need through the existing system of taxation and welfare.

There is however, a practical difference, in the sense that the former option has more failure modes than the latter. If we, as a community of individuals, choose to rely on charity as the means to ensure that those in need do not starve, then there is a greater chance that certain unfortunates will slip through the system, or be denied what they need because they’re ugly, or smell bad, or are for whatever reason thought to be undeserving by the ‘charitable’ individuals left to dispense their support.

Our two problems?

1) The food bank movement is driven by filling in the gaps created by the incompetence (or malevolence, your choice) of that State. So shouting that the State should be doing it all ain’t gonna work, is it?

2) That state doing the charity thing doesn’t change that basic inequality, does it? We’ve still got to go and tax the richer people to provide the funds to feed the poorer. It’s just a different mechanism of taking from those with lots to give to those with little.

Honestly, some people, can’t see the heart of their own arguments.

On that McAlpine mess

Just spotted this in the comments:

If any bookie would take the bet I’d put money that this one is going to turn out like the MacAlpine mess,

Yes, well. There’s more to that mess than is generally known. Given the death of Lord McAlpine one can actually point it out now too.

It was really an allegation about “a” McAlpine. Not about “the” McAlpine. Raedwald was very amusing about this before the libel writs started flying.

The allegations morphed into being about “the” which is why Sally, rightly, ended coughing up that cash.

Zero truth to the allegation that everyone knows about. But…..

That’s some school trip

Seven girls aged between 13 and 14 have fallen pregnant after going on a school trip in Bosnia.

Furious parents are demanding to know why there was such a lack of teacher supervision when the girls, from the town of Banja Luka, returned from a five-day trip to the capital city.

The school had taken 28 girls on the educational outing to Sarajevo to visit museums and other historical sitess, but since returning the girls have now reportedly dropped out of lessons.

On the incidence of paedophilia

So here’s a thing:

Police are investigating claims that up to five paedophile rings operated at the heart of Westminster with the involvement of “highly influential” politicians.

A Labour MP who has handed a dossier of evidence to Scotland Yard said he now believed the complexity of child abuse networks at the heart of government in the Seventies and Eighties had been seriously underestimated.

I have absolutely no idea what anyone thinks the incidence of paedophilia is. And note here that we’re talking about “stranger” rather than inter-familial (and thus more akin to “rape rape” as Whoopi said).

Apparently the claim is that 22 people who were either MPs or Lords were involved in a two decade period. It’s a bit of a floating population so, say, 2,000 people? 11 in 1,000 are stranger paedophiles?

Is the claim that politicians are uniquely awful or that this is the general number in the population?

I have no idea at all: does anyone else?

All sounds logical enough

Fewer than a third of British people believe in the humanitarian principle that we have a duty to help everyone in distress, regardless of circumstances, according to a new survey conducted by the Charities Aid Foundation.

The research revealed that, beneath the generosity that people show in giving to charity, there is also a judgment – which means that people give far less money to help innocent people caught up in war or conflict than to people who suffer as a result of “natural” disasters, such as earthquakes or floods.

More than a third of people (39%) believed governments of crisis-hit countries should deal with their problems on their own, rather than be helped through humanitarian aid. Just a quarter of us think we should ignore the political or cultural context and help where help is needed.

Altruism is in human nature, sure it is. But it’s a qualified altruism (as so much about humans is qualified).

We’re more generous to those where we can and do think “There but for the Grace of God go I” and less generous where we think there’s human agency in the fuck up and less generous again when we think that the agent of the fuck up is the one suffering it.

Perhaps, morally, it shouldn’t be so: but it seems that it is so for some majority of us.

And note, this is still all about humanitarian aid, this isn’t even touching on development aid.

D’ye remember Ritchie’s pension calcuation?

The Murphmonster and Colin Hines put together their pensions proposal. Insisting that the stock market had made people nothing and therefore bonds were the way to go.

You might also recall that they didn’t include dividends in their returns to stock but they did include interest in their returns to bonds. It does rather make a difference:

The FTSE 100, inflated by this irrational exuberance, was perched at a peak of 6930 just two days before the Millennium New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Those buying into the stock market will have been horrified to glimpse the future and see that today it stands at 6466 – 7pc lower. It would have turned £10,000 into £9,137.

But that’s before dividends are included, as data collated by Hargreaves Lansdown shows. If you bought the right type of fund (accumulation rather than income – more is explained here) then £10,000 would have grown to £15,213.

It’s a paltry compounded annual return of 2.8pc, according to our sums. But add in inflation, based on the retail prices index, and the return disappears altogether. In fact, you would have lost £138 in real terms.

Anyone care to tell us what the inflation adjusted bond return was over the 15 years? Given the fall in long term interest rates it could be quite good for a fund that was in long bonds before that fall. But I rather doubt that it’s quite as good as against stocks as Ritchie and Colin told us.

I know which way I think here

And I know most will disagree with me.

The 36-year-old woman from Milan suffered a massive brain haemorrhage in October, during her 23rd week of pregnancy.

After being taken to hospital, she was pronounced clinically dead and there were fears for her unborn child.

But doctors at San Raffaele hospital in Milan managed to keep her on life support, feeding the developing foetus through a tube inserted in the mother’s stomach.

Against all the odds, the baby boy was born on Thursday by Caesarean operation, in the woman’s 32nd week of pregnancy.

And:

Immediately after the birth, the woman’s relatives gave doctors permission to remove her organs and for them to be donated for transplants.

“While we are very happy that the baby has been born we cannot forgot the pain that the family is feeling over the loss of this young woman,” doctors said in a statement.

A similar case in Ireland, also involving a pregnant woman who is on life support, has caused intense controversy.

Relatives of the woman want her life support systems turned off but doctors are refusing to do that because they say they are bound by a law which obliges them to defend the right to life of her 16-week-old foetus and keep it alive until it can be delivered.

The case is now to be decided in court, with the High Court in Dublin expected to make a ruling next week.

It’s an interesting twist on that being tied to the famous violinist thought experiment, isn’t it? There the argument is that the woman cannot be hooked up to said violinist in order to save the violinist’s life. Because that would be to compromise the woman’s rights. And thus said same woman cannot be forced to carry to term a baby, on the grounds that forcing her to support another with her organs is a breach of her rights.

But here that same logic runs the other way. There is no person, no mother, there any more. Brain dead. All that is left is a possible life support system for the baby. And in that Italian case they were very clear about it: as soon as the baby’s safe whisk those organs off to save other lives. There’s nothing but a life support system there and the only question is who gets first dibs on it.

Wonder if they’ll accept the same logic in the Irish case? There’s no extant rights to the corpse so who does get first dibs on that life support system?

The Guardian does seem to have it differently:

In Ireland, a woman who is clinically dead but 17 weeks pregnant is being kept alive against her family’s will. At this painful time, her relatives must go to court to stop the Irish state treating their loved one’s body as a cadaveric incubator.

Well, why not? She’s dead isn’t she?

Be angry that a dead woman’s body is being used as an incubator.

Why? Why not use it to save (create, to taste) a life before throwing it away? That is, after all, entirely the logic of cadaveric organ transplantation, that bits we no longer need because we’re dead enable others to carry on living.

And think through that cadaveric transplantation again. There’s very definitely a movement out there insisting that it should all be opt out. That without our expressed insistence that it not happen that our organs should be made available to save or improve the lives of others after our death. And the difference here is?

Remember, there is no woman left here who has rights. There’s only the fetus subject to a kill it/don’t kill it decision. Why are people arguing for the kill it one?

Gotta admire the chutzpah here

Thousands of retired British pensioners living in France have been “cheated” out of their winter fuel payments by ministers who used French territories in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean to argue that France is too hot to qualify for the benefits.

Well, France does insist that those places really are part of France.

On Russell Brand and tax abuse

But, not for the first time, Brand has left himself open to accusations of hypocrisy after it emerged the film company he set up is largely funded by City investors – including a former RBS banker.

Brand raised almost £1 million by issuing shares in Mayfair Film Partnership Ltd, the production company making his next film, a documentary called Brand which will explore his ideas on the redistribution of wealth.

At least 11 of the 21 main investors in the company are current or former employees of banks or other financial institutions, while a 12th is a pension fund.

They were all able to claim tax relief by offsetting the money they invested in the shares against their income tax, as part of a government scheme to attract investment in high risk start-up companies.

This is under the EIS and yes, the Lord High Tax Denouncer has indeed said that this is tax abuse.

This regulation worries me

Landlords who rent out properties built in the Victorian era and early part of the twentieth century may be forced to make upgrades to make them more energy efficient, under government proposals.

Ministers are consulting on a change that would mean owners of properties which fall under the lowest energy efficiency categories would be forced to make upgrades from 2018.

All eligible properties will have to be improved to a minimum energy efficiency standard before being let to tenants within four years, except where certain exemptions apply. The homes hit are those which have the lowest F or G rating in the Energy Performance Certificate efficiency scale.

Because I own a flat in a Georgian building which would be absolutely impossible to bring up to such a standard. For example, it would be illegal to install double glazing…..,.

God Bless the British

Tony Callaghan, owner of Harry’s Bar, said: “The work experience lad was tasked with providing 24 competition pies, but mixed up the order and sent them to a divorce party up the road. By the time we realised, it was too late.”

He added: “We had to go ahead. It was a bit like Andy Murray replacing Roger Federer for a show game at the tennis finals in the O2, but everyone took it in their stride and demonstrated the professionalism of pie-eating at this level.

“It was a shame, because these lads practise long and often: you can see how seriously they take it, practising pie-eating late into the night on every street corner in Wigan town centre.”

The cooked dimensions of the official competition pie should be a diameter of 12cm and a depth of 3.5cm, with a pie wall angle from base to top of between zero and 15 degrees.

Twitter doesn’t have to do anything here

Luciana Berger, the shadow Minister for Public Health, has expressed her disappointment with the social media site’s handling of abuse and called for it to ban racist words such as ‘kike’, (a derogatory term for Jews) “which can never be used in a positive way”.

Talking for the first time since she was the target of thousands of online messages attacking her for being Jewish, Miss Berger told Telegraph Wonder Women: “At the height of the abuse, the police said I was the subject of 2,500 hate messages in the space of three days using the hashtag: #filfthyjewbitch.

“Online hate needs to be taken as seriously as offline hate – but it isn’t. Twitter’s response isn’t good enough. It has a responsibility to do more to protect its users. The site is letting me and many others down who have been the subject of lots of hate… It could start by proactively banning racist words which aren’t allowed to printed in newspapers or broadcast on TV that could never be used in a positive way – such as kike – a derogative and anti-Semitic term for describing a Jew.”

Agreed that such abuse is abuse, vile, ungentlemanly and not something we want to see more of. But that’s entirely different from the question of what duty Twitter has to do anything about it. The answer to that question is “nothing”.

It is a private company offering a service that you can opt into or out of. Don’t like what happens there then don’t go there. It is not state provided, is not a utility, the only laws that can and do cover it are those of libel and incitement to violence. Twitter does state pretty clearly that they’re very libertarian about these sorts of things. Free speech absolutists.

The central part of that viewpoint being that sure, lots of people are pretty vile. Racists abound for example: but free speech does mean that racists have free speech as well as those other people that we approve of have free speech.

Can you help support The Blog? If you can spare a few pounds you can donate to our fundraising campaign below. All donations are greatly appreciated and go towards our server, security and software costs. 25,000 people per day read our sites and every penny goes towards our fight against for independent journalism. We don't take a wage and do what we do because we enjoy it and hope our readers enjoy it too.