As you all know I’ve that column in Bangladesh which ends up subsidising 1Tk meals for street kids etc (according to recent calculations, each column subsidised 77 such meals).
I will admit that I tend to rattle off those pieces. To some extent that works too, as carrying the one idea through 800 words can indeed work better at speed.
Anyway. This one. I don’t know what the Bangladeshis made of it but I think that’s a little piece I actually got right. In the sense that I’ve explained (as I’m supposed to do) a real piece of economics in a way that can be understood by someone who has no economic knowledge at all.
Well, I think so anyway.
There is also the non-monetary argument – how many lives will it cost to install this safety precaution?
These can be either through the deaths caused directly by side-effects or by the hours of life absorbed by doing nothing other than work on the safety precaution(there are 753,876 hours in the life of someone who dies on his/her 86th birthday).
But, on the whole, yes a good piece of explanation
So how do you get these basics hammered into the solid bones that passes for brains in Westminster?
Or even worse, Brussels?
How many people are going to be killed by an EU ban on Russian oil/gas, for example?
How many people will die because the UK isn’t fracking?
From 2030, how many people will die in gas explosions because their boiler cannot be replaced or (offically) repaired, so will be botched by someone/anyone?
How many people were killed by the lockdown?
And so on…
Decent piece, TW.
“a new braking system was approved for British railways on the basis that it would cost about £1.4m for each life saved.”
Given how approximate the £2m is, and how far the £1.4m cost will have overrun, I’m not persuaded that that was an economically sound investment. It wasn’t decided just before an election, was it?
Tim, it’s not that politicians can’t or won’t understand these cost/benefits. They understand them completely.
Yet still they do what they do, because they are operating according to self-serving political priorities.
If it’s 5 million in USA, 2 million in UK, what’s the price in Bangladesh? (And why does your bloody software signal “it’s” as a typo?)
Do you get feedback on humour clarity? I mean, if that was headed to an English-language German newspaper you might get an editor saying (in suitable Heir Flick accent), “surely it would be more sensible to push granny rather than her vheelchair in front of ze bus.”
. . . why does your bloody software signal “it’s” as a typo?
It’s no problem here, philip; I think the spell checking is done locally or is browser based. Mine gets excited about your decapitalised ID (and “decapitalised”).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCim90WO1-4
What price are soldiers prepared to accept for being killed? There must be tons of research.
American spellcheck.
Unless it’s for the Gov’t mandated, coerced, no jab no job poison jabs…then it’s £120,000 eventually, if your kin is lucky and can afford good lawyers
Shame economists, except AIER, hid behind sofa or endorsed lockdowns
eg ASI, IEA esp Chris Snowdon, NEF…
So I didn’t bother about a jab until my family nagged me into it.
Thus my life, to me, was not worth the bother of a jab.
Or making my family happy was worth the risk of death or maiming from a jab.
Nice work
Great work, Tim.
. . . why does your bloody software signal “it’s” as a typo?
There’s a forum I post on autocorrects d’ to the. Which makes it almost impossible to write in french. Strange, because it’s very much an international forum. What I can’t work out is why. Is it treating d’ as ð – eth? Although, usually in Scandinavian based languages (Old English) you don’t start words with ð. The would be þe – thorn+e (Hence the incorrect Ye Olde Teashoppe)
It also has problems with several other letter/apostrophe conjunctions & french is a language littered with apostrophes.
Any ideas?
BiS: is this autocorrect on the forum itself, or on your browser/phone? I get spelling warnings (color/colour) from all sorts of software but it’s only the phone that attempts to autocorrect (which is turnoffable). You can also set up all sorts of foreign language keyboards on Android – I even tried the Japanese one briefly when we went there.
No. It’s on the forum. Everything types OK into the message form. But if one posts or clicks ‘preview’ it changes the text. I presume it’s a facility in the forum software. The ultimate in bloody stupidity to be running an autocorrect on a international forum.
Since it’s US based, it’d be easy to be Septic critical & say they don’t realise other countries don’t speak english. Except I’ve known too many Yanks. Their bi-linguality is far higher than Brits. It’s pretty well the default. Not surprising. They’re almost all immigrants to some degree.
I haven’t seen that sort of auto-correct on forums, but I have seen auto-censor. My favorite is the forum for Turner Classic Movies, as they claim not to cut/censor the movies they show while still having no qualms about auto-censoring the forums.
Makes it hard to talk about legitimate old movies like Clark Gable’s Honky Tonk, or the old Boston Blackie movies.
I presume that technically it wouldn’t be difficult to go from auto-censor to auto-correct.
Autocorrect functions on devices I’m an expert at disabling. You try writing in english on a fone autocompletes in spanish.
@Ted
I have trouble with things like Le Coq d’Or which is a club near here. Comes out as LE Coq theare. Trouble is, if one doesn’t write it correctly, it’s un-Googleable.
@BiS
Not surprising. They’re almost all immigrants to some degree.
Neat sting in the tail
@asiaseen
Certainly not meant to be. Friend over in Brooklyn. Father Italian-American. Mother French. She’s fluent in five languages. Started with English/Italian (+ Sicilian)/French. Added Spanish & Russian. She also can get by in about another 5 including Chinese. About par for a New Yorker, I’d imagine. Although strictly speaking she’s NJ born. Real estate business.
A lot of fly-over US has German or Swedish as a second. West coast Spanish.
BiS: yes, one shit product. Presumably it still autocorrects stuff in quotes, which is really, really stupid if it does.
The oblivious comparison here is How many people will die FROM covid (explicitly not with covid so as to inflate the numbers)
vs
How many people were killed by the lockdown and have been / will be killed by the vax.
My betting is on the latter by at least a couple of orders of magnitude.