Tim Worstall

Woes

But the film’s production team has drawn criticism from Southeast Asian viewers for casting East Asian actors in many of its most important roles, rather than Southeast Asian actors.

They are, umm, actors, you know, doing pretend and made up stuff?

It’s also a cartoon, meaning that slanty eyes and all that aren’t all that important.

An interesting question – at what level of granularity is this supposed to work? If a Korean (as here) should not play a Malay then, well, should it be OK for a Cockney to play a Mummerset? A Bronxite a Brooklynite?

The claim here is that East Asian and South East Asian is too high a level of that granularity to be acceptabl;e substitution. So, what’s the acceptable level?

And no, some level of “culture” isn’t enough. Given the differences in such that would mean no prole could ever play a bourgeois given the cultural differences….

Sigh, no

Greensill specialised in a form of supply chain finance called invoice discounting,

Greensill did reverse invoice financing.

In invoice financing you contract to speed up payment of your sales ledger. In the reverse form you contract to speed up payment of your purchase ledger – while, obviously, delaying you having to actually pay it. It’s about money out, not money in.

The danger is that an invoice discounting operation spreads the credit risk across all those different buyers. A reverse book concentrates the risk into the purchase ledger of just the one company, the client.

The finance firm turned invoices from Gupta’s businesses into hard cash. When a customer bought from his Liberty Steel, the invoice was forwarded to Greensill. That IOU was classed as a receivable with a value close to cash. The finance firm assumed responsibility for the debt and handed the cash to Liberty — instead of making the steel-maker wait for anything from 30 to 180 days, as would normally be the case for payment from buyers.

No, that’s invoice discounting, Greensill specialised in reverse invoice discounting. When Liberty bought something Greensill advanced payment for it and waited to collect from Liberty.

Greensill provided Gupta with huge sums to buy assets from companies including Tata, Arcelor Mittal and Rio via invoice discounting, where it advanced cash to Gupta and took on its customers’ IOUs.

Sigh.

Wikipedia being helpful

Saw the word “arras” being used and didn’t quite know what it meant. Bit of a castle fortification or something? Turns out it’s a big tapestry hung on a wall. OK. But in looking it up get told this by Wikipedia:

Arras-class aviso, a class of thirty French avisos

Umm, yes, and no doubt when “aviso” is looked up it is defined as one of the 30 that make up the French arras class?

Horrors, eh?

Hedge fund chaired by GB News investor shorting ITV
Marshall Wace has taken a 0.68pc short position on the broadcaster which has suffered from the pandemic-induced downturn

So, at worst this is bloke who thinks it worth competing with ITV thinks ITV will suffer from being competed with.

But it’s possible to use the boogieman phrase “short seller” so why not umm, say summat or other?

So, Nigel’s retired from politics then

So he tells the Telegraph. But the one big thing did get done, as Matt Ridley reminds us:

Not now, not after the vaccine fiasco; now it is easy to explain Brexit. Britain signed up early to buy the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine and approved it swiftly. The EU’s leaders: first, accused us of cutting corners on safety, thus encouraging anti-vax nonsense; second, found themselves at the back of the queue after incompetently negotiating a bad deal; third, took an age to approve it in a display of astounding bureaucratic lethargy; fourth, castigated AstraZeneca for failing to give in to pressure to allow them to jump the queue; and fifth, tried to impose a hard border in Ireland just to stop the Northern Irish getting vaccines. These are not the actions of an ally and friend.

In part two, despite wanting the vaccine so badly they were prepared to tear up contracts and treaties, in a fit of pique at the fact that it was British, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel started speculating falsely that the Oxford vaccine was ineffective in the elderly, thus putting their population off it so much that millions of doses accumulated unused. And now Mario Draghi stops exports of this supposedly unsafe and ineffective vaccine. Has there ever been a more petty – and contradictory – display of populist isolationism? Donald Trump must be open-mouthed with envy.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that we’ll mess things up on our own. But it was right that we left that nonsense.

Quite so, quite so

What we’re living through is a trans panic akin to the satanic panic of the ’80s and ’90s, when parents and police were convinced there were devil-worshipping cults infiltrating every facet of society. It is not logical.

The question is who is doing the panic bit?

After all, the social transmission mechanisms look the same but again, which side?

Shoot the headline writer

A “swarm” of over 20,000 earthquakes has rocked Iceland in the past 10 days — and it could spark a volcanic eruption

No.

Southwest Iceland is currently experiencing a “swarm” of seismic activity, with more than 20,000 earthquakes recorded since February 24, according to the the Icelandic Meteorological Office. The office said magma movements are likely the cause of the current surge on the Reykjanes Peninsula, raising fears of a volcanic eruption.

The earthquakes do not spark or cause a volcano. The movements of the magma – which may or may not lead to a volcano – cause the earthquakes.

The opening paragraph gets this right, the headline writer manages to get it wrong. Shoot them.

Pump and dump isn’t actually illegal

The latest charges were filed in the Manhattan federal court in New York. The pair are accused of buying the cryptocurrency assets before promoting them on Twitter, where Mr McAfee has more than one million followers.

They would then sell the assets as soon as Mr McAfee’s endorsements saw prices rise, according to the US justice department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Might be nasty and all that but buying something, talking about it then selling just isn’t illegal.

It might even be against the rules of certain recognised exchanges and so on but that’s private, not general, law. However:

They allegedly made a further $11m (£8m) in payments from cryptocurrency start-ups for promoting their assets on Twitter, payments which were not disclosed to investors who bought them.

Now that however…..and this explains a lot:

McAfee was born in Cinderford, in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom….

All that weirdness now makes sense.

This is interesting

Now we health workers know how empty Boris Johnson’s ‘clap for heroes’ really was
Rachel Clarke

We’ve had a traumatic year and lost patients and colleagues. But all he offers us is a derisory 1% pay offer

So money does matter then?

Hmmm

The Great Celebrity Bake Off lineup hailed as ‘best ever’
Series will raise money for Stand Up To Cancer and features Daisy Ridley, Rob Beckett, Alexandra Burke and Tom Allen

I think I’ve heard of two of them. A minor thespian and the bird who massacred the Leonard Cohen song. Other than that…..

How glorious!

Musk, who lost his briefly held title of the world’s richest person last month, has seen his paper fortune drop by $7.5bn so far this year to an estimated $162bn.

America is now a better place, right? Because it is inequality that makes it a bad one, less inequality makes it a better…..

Won’t the needs keep changing?

Menopausal women could get new workplace protections as part of a comprehensive government review of female health and wellbeing.

Ministers are appealing for women from all backgrounds to complete a simple questionnaire detailing how NHS services and employment practices could be improved to meet their specific needs.

Umm, yeah

The hearing, taking place before Lord Justice Holroyde and Mr Justice Swift, was told that there were 125 trans prisoners in 2017, 60 of whom were serving sentences for sexual offences. Of those 60, 27 were serving a prison sentence for rape.

That’s the ones that have been put into women’s prisons that is….

Today’s P³

Today’s intellectual contortion is that nurses aren’t getting a 12.5% pay rise because we’re not taxing the rich enough. Which would seem to indicate that – contrary to repeated assertion – tax pays for spending.

He then wibbles off into misunderstanding his own MMT. Finally, he admits that financing government through money printing is inflationary. Therefore we have to tax money back. OK, not the way I’d do it but that is at least reasonable economics. Monetisation of fiscal policy is prone to inflation.

Then he says that therefore we need to tax the rich.

But that’s in conflict with what is true on odd days of the week which is that rich folks don’t spend all their money. They just save it. Not invest it, they just Scrooge McDuck it. At which point of course taxing them doesn;t reduce inflation, does it?

Inflation being the result of more money chasing goods and services and Scrooge McDucked savings don’t do that. So, either his precepts about taxation are wrong or his precepts about savings are.

By his own logic if we are to tax to prevent MMT induced inflation then we need to tax the money people might use for consumption. That means poorer people who do spend all their cash. As he’s also pointed out, taxing richer people doesn’t – or might not – change consumption because they’ll just run down the, Scrooge McDucked, savings in order to maintain consumption.

We end up with MMT having to insist that inflation is prevented by taxing the poor. Which is most, most, progressive I think you’ll agree.

Ah…..yes…..

His 30-plus books include the novel Nicely Nurdled, Sir!, a homage to his lifelong love of cricket, and From the Sea End, a history of Sussex County Cricket Club, as well as The Bath Detective, a whodunnit trilogy.

He got a certain aspect of Bath right, certain characters even. Not necessarily people you understand, but ways in which corners of the place worked, characters being a hole for a person to exist in if you get me.

As whodunnits not that great to be honest.

Oh aye?

Kinnair said that if the review body accepted the department’s advice, “a pay award as poor as this would amount to only an extra £3.50 per week take-home pay for an experienced nurse. Nobody would think that is fair in the middle of a pandemic. Nursing staff would feel they are being punished and made to pay for the cost of the pandemic. Nursing deserves a 12.5% increase.”

We’re trying to recover from the worst recession in 300 years and nurses should get a 12.5% pay rise?

Fuck off matey

Reading between the lines

It is exactly what women want to hear in the age of #MeToo, yet Sturgeon also made a revealing admission. Denying Salmond’s claim that she offered to intervene on his behalf, she acknowledged that he might have been left with the contrary impression: “I was perhaps trying to let a longstanding friend and colleague down gently, and maybe I did it too gently.” This is absolutely stereotypical feminine behaviour, a woman taking responsibility for a man’s feelings, and it happens frequently in unequal relationships.

Given that it’s Joan Smith writing here we have to ponder whether Dennis MacShane was really that masculinely awful….

A fairly simple explanation here

Mums are boring. Mums are nags. They spend the first decade of your life screwing shoes on to your reluctant feet and chasing you round the playground with a spreadeagled coat in their hands, like needy bullfighters. After that, they switch into “let’s talk” mode, clipping on a rictus smile and pretending to understand about sexting. Of course mums don’t get the whole transgender thing! Mums are as cautious as cats about anything new, in case it proves dangerous to their young. Which only serves to make the new thing more appealing.

The purpose of being a Mum is to be that intermediate stage toward winning life, being a grandparent.

Mums are therefore likely to be against the cutting knackers thing off as it reduces the chance of grandchildren.