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April 2023

Well, yes, suppose so

Britain’s earliest central heating boilers, installed between the 1960s and 1980s, typically ran at very high temperatures. This has set up an expectation that a well functioning heating system should be able to deliver strong blasts of heat on demand, Sowden says. By contrast, a heat pump gently maintains the ambient temperature of a room by using more efficient, lower-temperature top-ups through the day.

“People think a heating system isn’t ‘on’ if they touch a radiator and it doesn’t burn their hand,” he says. “But it doesn’t need to be belting out heat to keep a room at a comfortable temperature.”

So, what we’re being told is that in the European country with the most variable temperatures over the short term – which I think Britain probably is, recall George Mikes and the comment that the British talk about the weather because we’re the only people who have it, everyone else has climate – we should kill off a heating system that can deal with variable weather and adopt one best suited to climates?

What fucking joy, eh?

John Naughton really, really, doesn’t understand things, does he?

Which means that, no matter how depraved Twitter becomes under its reigning proprietor, you have to be there, even if he despises you.

Right.

Last October, the richest manchild in human history fell into the trap he had dug for himself. Elon Musk was forced to purchase Twitter at an absurd price. He had no clear idea of what to do with his new acquisition, other than realising a fatuous idea about “free speech”. It was like watching a monkey acquire a delicate clock: the new owner started thrashing wildly about, slashing the headcount (from 8,000 to about 1,500) – in the process losing many of the people who knew how the machine worked – and generally having tantrums while tweeting incontinently from the smallest room in the company’s San Francisco headquarters.

Therefore it’s going to work, isn’t it? Because the journalistic classes have to be here, so therefore so do the advertisers, therefore…..

Interesting here

More than 10,000 women escaping domestic abuse across England were refused safe housing last year, amid warnings that many could be left homeless or driven back to dangerous partners as a result of a “woeful” lack of safe accommodation.

OK, and?

“Sadly too many of those who are being housed are absolutely not in specialist safe, secure, supportive accommodation, but instead in unregulated sometimes dangerous accommodation.”

Ah, so what they’re saying – that unregulated bit – that merely renting someone a place when they need a place rented isn’t enough. It has to be state-run, state-staffed etc.

Now, this might even be true with women fleeing domestic violence. But it is a bit different from the headline claim:

Safe housing denied to 10,000 women in England fleeing domestic abuse
Lack of shelters may be forcing victims to return to their violent partners or leaving them homeless

Unconvinced about this

ChatGPT can beat the stock market, professor claims

Really unconvinced:

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots may be able to correctly predict the movement of stock prices by instantly analysing news headlines, research has claimed.

Experts from the University of Florida analysed the accuracy of ChatGPT, an AI algorithm, at guessing whether a news item would send the price of a share higher or lower.

The researchers found the bot was, in many cases, better at gauging whether a story might move the price than other “sentiment analysis” tools used by financial analysts.

The research, which has not been peer reviewed, compared ChatGPT’s answers about various headlines to real share price movements from historical data.

On historical data, maybe. But LLMs are only useful up to the end of their training period. So to work on current data that means the training period must be current…..

Rightie Ho then

There are days when the best way to stop thinking about political economy is to try to work out how to design and make the part I need to make a model work as I want.

ERR:

Equally certain is the fact that I won’t be able to make all of them work. I am not a terribly good modeller despite many years of practice.

We’ve noticed.

For example:

The show is evidence of the massive under-utilised talent in our economy. It is run by volunteers, whilst many of the most interesting products for sale will be created and made by decidedly part-time hobby business people, who sell their wares because they have found ways to solve problems other people might enjoy.

My point is that much of what is best about this show will happen because people are using abilities that, I suspect, are largely unrecognised in their working lives. They are doing something for little or no reward because it is simply worth doing. And what is more, they do it incredibly well.

The whole show does in that case pretty much shatter the myth of neoliberalism, which presumes that if something is not done for money then it is not worth doing at all.

Neoliberalism doesn’t say anything of the kind of course.

But standard neoclassical economics would note why much of this skilled work – greatly desired skilled work – is done outside the market and paid economy. Because government imposes too large a tax wedge, bureaucracy imposes too large a paperwork cost.

One of the actual canonical examples being the making of little copper boilers for miniature steam engines. Because the EU imposed the sort of regs appropriate for full scale boilers on the 1/100th scale ones. Therefore commercially made model boilers became a not for money home brew.

Man’s an unobservant twat.

All over the country, day in and day out, the evidence that this is not true stares us in the face. The economy, our lives, and our wellbeing often depend on that being true. But a tiny minority for whom only regulation matters have come to dominate economic thinking.

Err, no

Inflation is the consequence of rising real prices of good and services relative to the value of the goods and services provided.

Inflation is a decline in the value of money.

What has not caused inflation are quantitative easing, excess government spending

Rilly?

The government’s claim that it cannot afford public sector pay rises because they are inflationary is in that case a lie.

No.

Bak to basics. Running a deficit is stimulatory. Is there a deficit? Then there’s stimulus. And if stimulus hits real world barriers to increased production then stimulus produces inflation…..

This is fun

Chinese mining bosses are funding Nigerian militant groups in order to secure access to the country’s mineral reserves,

Well, maybe, Probably the other way around, the militias are charging rents to the Chinese in areas they control. But, you know. This:

In one pocket of Zamfara, researchers found, interaction with militants runs so deep that some serve as runners for Chinese miners who have spread throughout Nigeria, controlling digs for gold. The country has some of the largest gold reserves in the world.

Does it? Nigeria doesn’t even appear in the list of the top 19 countries by gold reserves.

What’s he on about?

Nigeria’s gold reserves are a key factor in the nation’s economic health and strength. With an estimated gold reserves of 21.46 metric tons for 2022, Nigeria has one of the most abundant gold reserves in the world, accounting for about 5% of the global gold reserves.

Oooooh. But how much the central bank has down in the cellar has really nothing at all to do with how much is out there in the rocks now, does it?

This is terribly fun

Hungarians encouraged to report on neighbours raising trans children
New law lets people lodge a complaint against parents infringing their children’s right to “an identity appropriate to their sex at birth”

If parents are abusing a child then we want the neighbours to be telling on them. If parents are merely bringing up a child unconventionally but acceptably then we don’t.

So, at what point between Jimmy playing with dolls and chopping his knackers off do we move from unconventional to abuse?

It’s not really a shortage of water

People should avoid flushing the lavatory if they go for a pee in order to help save water, a senior water executive has said.

Cathryn Ross, the strategy and regulatory affairs director at Thames Water, also called for people to take shorter showers to cut down on their water use.

Water companies have targets to cut per capita consumption set by Ofwat, the regulator. Most, including Thames, failed to meet those targets in 2021-22.

The targets have already been set and people aren’t curbing their consumption to meet the targets.

Which tells us nothing at all about whether the targets are sensible or necessary. Just that we, the folk, are being naughty by not meeting the bureaucrats’ targets.

Blood on hands etc

Teenager took his own life after ‘losing hope over climate change’
Theo Khelfoune Ferreras, a film student from Walthamstow, grew increasingly despondent over the future of the environment, say his family

So, who is to blame for this?

The patriarchal capitalists who are so raping Gaia? Or those lying about the effects? Those insisting that we’ve an immediate disaster ahead of us instead of the reality, a chronic problem which is largely solved?

Nope

A Russian tank used in the assault on Ukraine has mysteriously appeared at a truck stop in the US.

The T-90 tank is thought to have been captured last September by Ukraine’s 92nd Separate Mechanised Brigade, after being used in fighting in the Kharkiv region of north west Ukraine.

The combat vehicle was left on a low loader in the parking lot of a restaurant in the state of Louisiana.

I have asked, no, it’s not my mate. You know, my mate the arms dealer, who buys Russian kit for the US Army….

Why is John Rawls coopted by progressives?

First, if we really didn’t know who we would be, we would want to protect our “basic liberties”, including personal freedoms such as freedom of speech, religion and sexuality, but also the political freedoms we need to play a genuinely equal part in collective decision-making.

Second, in addition to ensuring “fair equality of opportunity”, we would want to organise our economy so that the least well off are better off than under any alternative system (Rawls called this the “difference principle”). From this perspective, higher pay for some can be justified as an incentive to work, study or innovate, but only if this ultimately ends up benefiting those who have less – not just by a little, but as much as possible.

That’s therefore classical liberalism – Hayek and Friedman all over again. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just what the fuck is new with it?

Is it the standing on their heads that makes them mad?

Some type of political accord could help a lot here. Our two main parties reached one on housing density which looks set to drastically increase affordability in the years to come, as the public and private sectors can now rely on policy continuity. A new accord on transport investment seems incredibly unlikely.

So, political agreement on affordability. Great.

These cars come overwhelmingly from Japan. Japan has a huge domestic car market for right-hand drive cars (meaning the wheel is on the right, but you drive on the left). They are often eager to export old cars thanks to stringent and shifting regulations. Their cars are prized here for their reliability and value, usually arriving in a good state to run for another decade or so without serious issues.

This wouldn’t be much of an issue, except for the fact that Japan’s auto industry has massively stumbled on EVs. Japan’s largest carmaker, Toyota, bet big on hybrids and only just started to sell a fully electric car last year, which was subject to embarrassing supply chain issues and even a global recall. Mitsubishi recently made headlines trying to convince people that internal combustion engines were actually cleaner than EVs in many countries. (This is not the case almost anywhere.)

So the bloke wants everyone to stop buying cheap second hand Japanese – where, of course there are no embedded emissions because they’re not new – and instead move to very expensive and all new electric cars?

Cow

Emotions around infertility can be raw. Let’s talk about them with solidarity

I’ve just spent two years writing columns about pregnancy, baby and raw nipples. Now I’m going to empathise with the infertile.

Err, yes, yes……

Software updates delivered mid-flight to Typhoon fighter jets could see battlefield threats eliminated faster than ever before.

Given the average quality of first pass attempts a code that should eliminate Typhoons quite nicely. Good that, given the manner in which climate change is driving extreme weather events, no?

Do the ‘Tater, doo doo bee doo

Someone’s been listening to The Sage on pensions, haven’t they?

In a Labour press release, she said: “Someone starting out their career today would have to work until the year 2423 before they’d see a penny from the Tories’ tax giveaway to the top 1pc.

“At a time when families across the country face rising bills, higher taxes and frozen wages, this is the wrong priority at the wrong time.”

But these calculations were quickly debunked by pension experts who said the crude sums ignored the reality of how invested savings grow.

Jon Greer, of the wealth manager Quilter, said: “Labour’s calculations to reach this figure are rudimentary at best and crucially overlook the power of compound interest. This is not how saving works.”

A worker with a £107,000 pot, earning £35,000 and still contributing to their pension, would take around 40 years to hit the cap, Quilter said, just a tenth of Labour’s estimate.

But as Spud has so movingly explained, the stock market never does provide a return so how can saving through the stock market for a pension ever work?

Both Spud and Ms. Rayner missing that shares pay dividends, the dividends are reinvested and so that’s where the stock market return is.

And yes, this is where that original Finance for the Future paper with Colin Hines went wrong.They compared the returns of bonds with interest to the return of shares without dividends. No, really, they did. Which is why they were so fucking wrong of course.

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