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October 2025

An endorsement of this blog!

I’ve learned more about economics reading your writing for the last c15 years than I did in five years at Uni (studying Economics, obvs). Specifically, about applying economics to actual real life situations.

I’ve given dozens of talks using ideas (and probably entire verbatim paragraphs) I first encountered on your blog. For example, last month I did sixty minutes on stage in Capetown in front of 250 VCs and assorted CEOs about ‘how incentives matter’. All of this commenced reading your columns at El Reg, and then the Blog. I’ve probably added about 500k to my earnings over the last decade and a bit as a result of stuff I picked up off you.

Which is pretty good, eh?

‘Mazin’, eh?

Pro-Palestinian campaigners have vowed to continue protesting, claiming the ceasefire agreement did not amount to a peace deal and branding “ceasefire” an “oppressor’s term”.

Several groups said the peace agreement brokered by President Trump last week was “not enough” and had done “little to change their demands”.

Who knew that it was really all about The Joos and not the kiddies, deaths nor starvations?

I’ve got your problem right ‘ere

Residents of cities, towns and villages across the UK complain their lives are blighted by the plague of potholes…..Announcing news of the repair, the parish council said on Facebook: “Good news! The filming company have been given permission by the DCC [Devon county council] highways to proceed with repairs…..Larger potholes, in excess of 4cm deep and 30cm wide, have to be reported to the county council.

Potholes are a fairly local problem. Which could/should be fixed locally. At, say, parish council level? But no, the bureaucratic mind reports them up to county which then decides – or not – to repair them.

It’s even possible to think that the bureaucratic overhead of the reporting system might cost more than just repairing the potholes.

Erm, surely we knew this?

Trees store carbon as they grow and release it when they decay and die. Overall, tropical forests are thought to be carbon sinks – absorbing more CO2 than they release – and uptake is assumed to increase amid rising atmospheric concentration.

But nearly 50 years of data collected from tropical forests across Queensland has revealed this crucial carbon sink could be under threat.

About 25 years ago, tree trunks and branches in those forests became a net emitter, with more trees dying and insufficient new growth, according to the research.

In fact I’m sure we – collectively – knew this. Forsts are carbon sinks as they grow or expand and sources if they retreat or shrink.

How else does anyone think it’s all going to work?

And the vast expansion of boreal, chapparal and other forests as humanity retreats from the wild is therefore having what effect? It being, as with Net Zero, the nett effect that matters, right?

So here’s the thing

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) pump out nearly five times more planet-heating pollution than official figures show, a report has found.

The cars, which can run on electric batteries as well as combustion engines, have been promoted by European carmakers as a way to cover long distances in a single drive – unlike fully electric cars – while still reducing emissions.

Data shows PHEVs emit just 19% less CO2 than petrol and diesel cars, an analysis by the non-profit advocacy group Transport and Environment found on Thursday. Under laboratory tests, they were assumed to be 75% less polluting.

I wouldn’t trust a test by T&E. Not just wouldn’t but don’t. Should I be that way is another matter…..

The actual finding is that the ICE motors are used more often than assumed. So, BAD! But then I’d ponder, if the ICE motors are used a lot then that shows that hybrids, with ICEs, are important, no?

This is madness

Economists love the idea of perfect competition. If you are now a professional economist, working in a university, and you want to get an academic paper published, you have to basically assume that the world runs on the basis of what economists call perfect competition.

How crazed is the man getting?

Ooooh! Really? Who then?

Police officers investigating the collapse of a betting syndicate led by Rory Campbell have made an arrest, The Times understands.

Gosh. I wonder.

The Times can reveal the force arrested a man from north London last month as part of the police’s investigation. He has been bailed, and cannot be named for legal reasons.

No, no speculation, legal reasons.

There was no austerity then

Further sins? Why was the chance missed to change course having opened the Treasury books on their first day and having found a genuinely shocking level of cheating? No funds existed to pay for 40 new hospitals and roads without budgets, and Labour claimed Jeremy Hunt’s national insurance tax cut was not financed, while every public service was burned out, with councils tipping into bankruptcy – not through fecklessness but through sabotage.

Because if taxes had been rising – they had – and yet there was no money then the Tories hadn;t been not spending, had they?

This is the thing about money. Wholly unsentimental

Thanks to a couple of arrests and threats of perpetrators being banned from games, dildo-flinging has now died down. However, women’s basketball is still attracting a lot of toxic attention. The latest indignity professional players are being forced to put up with? Period betting: gamblers are trying to figure out where a player is in her menstrual cycle and are predicting her athletic performance accordingly.

Does the menstrual cycle make a difference to female athletes. Yep. So, people will exploit that to try to make money.

We can even run this the other way around. Does betting on cycles make money? Therefore the cycle makes a difference to female athletes.

Which is the value of money’s unsentimentality. Even, absence of manners. Because we find out whatever people might think about the thing we’re finding out…..

Lesbian bed death is a real thing!

My wife and I have been together for more than 10 years and married for four. We have small children. I love her deeply, but our marriage is essentially empty of sex and physical intimacy, and she refuses to talk about it beyond acknowledging there is a problem. I am a woman who values physical intimacy and I am deeply attracted to her. I want to feel more desired and alive. But lovemaking is extremely rare, always initiated by me and follows the same pattern. She does not focus on giving me pleasure. The rest of the time I am rebuffed, leaving me feeling ashamed and unattractive. Even the mildest of playful or suggestive messages I send are met with silence. So I bother less and less.

On the other hand, it’s not unknown for heterosexual sex to be in short suply with small children in the house…..

This is not an interesting thesis

Economics, like physics before Einstein, has long believed the world behaves according to simple, linear rules. It assumes equilibrium, perfect information, and frictionless exchange.

For economics assumes none of those three things.

There are models where one, two or even all three are assumed in order to be able to look at some other influence, sure.

But, say, frictionless exchange. This was 50% of a Nobel:

The theorem states that if the provision of a good or service results in an externality and trade in that good or service is possible, then bargaining will lead to a Pareto efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property. A key condition for this outcome is that there are sufficiently low transaction costs in the bargaining and exchange process. This ‘theorem’ is commonly attributed to Nobel Prize laureate Ronald Coase.

In practice, numerous complications, including imperfect information and poorly defined property rights, can prevent this optimal Coasean bargaining solution. In his 1960 paper,[1] Coase specified the ideal conditions under which the theorem could hold and then also argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining. Hence, the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality but is a useful tool in predicting possible economic outcomes.

A Nobel awarded for pointing out that frictions exist in exchange means that the subject assumes frictionless exchange.

Ho Well.

But what if they really mean this?

It is often difficult for people in India to remember life before Aadhaar. The digital biometric ID, allegedly available for every Indian citizen, was only introduced 15 years ago but its presence in daily life is ubiquitous.

Indians now need an Aadhaar number to buy a house, get a job, open a bank account, pay their tax, receive benefits, buy a car, get a sim card, book priority train tickets and admit children into school. Babies can be given Aadhaar numbers almost immediately after they are born. While it is not mandatory, not having Aadhaar de facto means the state does not recognise you exist, digital rights activists say.

You do not exist. Therefore we’re not going to tax you? I can think of workable ways around those restrictions in return for 45% of everything.

Of course, you’d need a non id number id number so that people knew not to charge you VAT…..

What fun

A political candidate in the New York City suburbs went for a night swim in the Atlantic Ocean this past spring and never returned.

Petros Krommidas’s phone, keys and clothes were found on the sands at Long Beach on Long Island. The 29-year-old former Ivy League rower, who was training for a triathlon, had parked his car just off the picturesque wooden boardwalk.

As the months passed, local Democrats attempted to field a replacement to run for the seat in the Nassau County legislature.

But two Republican voters took them to court and won: a state judge recently ordered Krommidas’s name to remain on the November ballot, ruling that he’s still considered missing and not officially deceased.

Well, not the missing presumed drowned part, that’s not fun. But that he still might win the election.

So I’ve started a GoFundMe

No, this is not a call for you all to go and dump £10 in. Tjhat’s not, not ereally, ht point.

Sure, sure, it would be lovely if someone did put up the £1 million. But even that’s not wholly the point. There’re vast sums being thrown around in panic right now and npo bugger is listening to me. Bastards, eh? And this is one – very cheap in the scheme of things – of the things that really should be done.

No one is paying attention to the possibility of leapfrogging the Chinese state of tech. But that’s exactly what we should be paying attention to.

So, the GoFundMe is here.

I’m Tim Worstall here to work on beating China at the rare earths game. Not to beat them entirely, not on £1 million, but to take a big bite out of one specific problem. Or at least attempt to.

What we need to do is test “vacuum distillation of lanthanide halides” which is something that will make sense to about three people.

That’s something that really should be done. Whether it’s me that does it I don’t particularly worry about.

So, you know, spread the wpord….

How much of a difference is there?

Away from trade policy, the White House continues to pursue unfunded tax cuts and trash the economic institutions usually considered the cornerstones of credibility – including the Federal Reserve.

Over time, that must surely undermine market confidence, including in US Treasuries (government bonds)

As far as bond markets are concerned unfunded spending is unfunded spending. However it arrices it increases the volume of bond issuance. It arriving via unfunded tax cuts or unfunded spending committment doesn’t make much difference now, does it?

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