Tim Worstall

No, not really

Children’s television makers have said that distinctly British programmes for young viewers could vanish from screens and be replaced with imported shows, after ministers quietly closed a £44m fund designed to support the sector.

The Young Audiences Content Fund had been intended to help British broadcasters compete with the globalised children’s output available on YouTube and cartoons on US streaming services such as Netflix.

It was set up after the prodnoses stopped people advertising burgers to kiddies. The correct answer being to allow the burger ads, collect the money, then make programmes.

Seems reasonable

Dementia patients who see the same GP every time have lower rates of health complications, fewer emergency hospital visits and a better overall quality of life, according to a new study.

One of the two knowing why the meeting is taking place seems a sensible enough set up.

It’s an idiot suggestion alright

Could reparations be the strategic tool for Europe to remove China’s hold on the Caribbean, and for these islands to throw off the shackles of poor governance, underdevelopment and inequality once and for all? It could be pure genius

Hmm.

However, in the ex-British territories of the West Indies this is not a popcorn moment. Similar scenes of state capture unfold in these islands and, to be honest, it is just not cricket. Very few politicians here play with a straight bat and even when caught out, the umpire is seemingly blind. Spectators are leaving in droves: a massive brain drain has weakened Caribbean economies significantly over the past five decades, alongside cronyism, state capture and procurement fraud. The politicians left behind to run these countries are the most unqualified and unscrupulous one can find, a state referred to as a kakistocracy.

Places that are shittily ruled by shits. We should send them lots of money. Oh Aye?

The gross exploitation!

Isn’t this a terror?

Workers paid less than minimum wage to pick berries allegedly sold in UK supermarkets
Exclusive: Workers in Portugal picking berries ending up on the shelves of Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Tesco allege exploitative conditions

Exploitation!

The legal minimum wage for agricultural workers in the region in 2021 was €680 (£570) a month, but the Guardian has seen 14 payslips dated from May onwards which appear to show workers earning the general Portuguese national minimum wage for 2021 of €665 a month.

Seems pretty marginal exploitation to be honest. Then there’s this:

One employee worked more than 300 extra hours a month, according to their payslips, far above the 60 hours a week allowed in Odemira by Portuguese law.

That’s pretty much got to be garbled. Not sure there are actually enough hours of daylight to do 300 extra hours in a month. But journos and numbers….

More fun

So, I’ve been published in Sri Lanka for the first time now:

Or as we, who have read our economic textbooks, can point out, you can fix the price of something but not the quantity, or the quantity but not the price. If you try to fix both, then you’ll get none at any price.

You can only have a foreign exchange shortage if you’re trying to fix the price of that foreign exchange.

A little testy

Peter Doocy, the right-wing television network’s White House correspondent, asked Mr Biden: “Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?” as he was ushered out of a press conference on Monday with other members of the media.

Mr Biden’s response was picked up by a microphone: “It’s a great asset – more inflation. What a stupid son of a b—-,” the US President said.

But one warms to the reporter:

Speaking in a later interview on Fox, Mr Doocy shrugged off Mr Biden’s comment.

“Yeah nobody has fact-checked him yet and said it’s not true,” he said of the insult, laughing.

Yes, obviously, clearly so

Interviews with dozens of witnesses for a new documentary series has forced a fresh reassessment of Hefner and his empire, suggesting that while the magazine magnate tried to present himself as a champion women’s rights in reality he was a “vampire” who manipulated and coerced young women.

That hundreds, if not thousands, of young women bettered themselves economically by getting their tits oot fer the lads must mean that Hefner was exploiting them. Can’t be anything else, can it?

Holly Madison, a model who dated Hefner for eight years, also told how he refused to use protection during sex and how the Playboy Bunny lifestyle even led her to consider suicide.

8 years of sex without a condom is just terrible punishment for an adult woman, isn’t it?

This is actually the point

Have you got yourself an “offence adviser” yet? This new breed of professionals are trained like sniffer dogs to detect even the faintest whiff of explosively un-woke material in anything that might be publicly shared, from company reports and social media posts to university lectures, early drafts of books, songs, screenplays and art works.

To create jobs for those doing the complaining.

My favourite example is a bloke who campaigned for certain paperwork restrictions on mining in certain countries. Big global charity campaign, success, into law!¬ At a cost of $4 billion in year one and to no great effect on the problem being addressed.

The bloke who thought up, designed and ran the campaign resigned to set up a consultancy aiding folk in filling out the paperwork.

Creating nice indoor jobs, no heavy lifting, that’s what this grift is all about.

Actually, the man’s even more of an idiot

The government assumes this effect is low. Research shows that they regularly underestimate it. In many cases the multiplier is big enough for the entire cost of government spending to be recovered by additional tax paid whilst along the way many lives are transformed.

The multiplier effect created by helping people afford the cost of living when in the case of most recipients of state support their wages are insufficient to make ends meet is a case of putting money to work to deliver what is good. And yet governments hate doing it.
…
What I do know is that if we are to live in a fairer society the tax subsidies to saving and the reduced rates of tax on income from wealth have to end and we have to instead spend money in ways that supports real lives.

In summary, we have to stop subsidising dead money and put money to life transforming lives instead. The world would be a very different place if we did.

The more you put money to life then the higher the velocity of circulation of money. For they’re the same thing. Which means you can do less money creation before you hit that inflation limit.

Man really is an idiot.

Yep, man’s an idiot

For example, savings in bank deposit accounts aren’t needed by banks to make loans, because as even the Bank of England now admits, banks create new money when they lend. They do not lend out savers’ deposits. That’s just a myth.

If deposits aren’t needed to fund loans then no bank can ever suffer a run nor go bust as a result of one. As banks can and do suffer runs and go bust then the original statement cannot be true, can it?

What the P³ has done – again – is take the technical detail – banks fund loans with deposits *after* the lending decision – to make a stupidly wrong more general statement.

Knowledge, eh, knowledge

Politico reports this morning that overnight:

Boris Johnson has ordered a Cabinet Office inquiry into allegations by Conservative MP Nus Ghani that she was fired from her job as a minister because she is Muslim.

I find that sentence utterly surreal. If there is one thing that the Prime Minister has to do it is cabinet reshuffles.

She wasn’t in the cabinet……

Don’t forget, it’s government which did this

UK taxpayers could have to pay as much as £1bn in compensation to former Post Office workers wrongly convicted of theft due to the defective Horizon IT system.

The system, which was installed by the Post Office and supplied by Fujitsu, falsely suggested there were cash shortfalls, leading to 736 unsafe convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting in what is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

The Post Office has said it cannot afford to foot the huge cleanup bill for the scandal and last month the government, the service’s only shareholder, confirmed the taxpayer would step in.

Imagine how much worse they’d be if they ran even more of the economy…..

Dear Lord almighty, the stupidity

How co-operative housing gave me the peace of mind I thought I’d never find
Rosie Collington
Denmark’s system offers tenants a chance to escape grasping landlords and own an affordable stake in a community

Well, OK, what is this new solution then? Or old solution even?

Then, in July 2021, I moved with my Danish partner into one of Copenhagen’s many andelsboliger, a co-operatively owned block of flats where we neither have a landlord nor pay rent, and which is not subject to market prices. Today, about 7% of the Danish population live in a form of co-operatively owned housing – and it accounts for one-third of the housing stock in Copenhagen. It soon became clear to me that there’s a lot that other countries could learn.

Rather than buy an apartment, people who live in andelsboliger purchase a share in an association that owns the apartment building, equal to the value of the apartment.

OK, so that’s exactly the same as – do note, exactly, exactly, the same as – the standard management company set up of a British set of flats. It is indeed the obvious solution to joining ownership of a building but also individual ownership of a part of it.

It also has absolutely fuck all to do with the price of each unit.

Well, quite

Brown bears switch habitats in the spring so they can hunt reindeer and moose calves, research suggests.

After emerging from hibernation, the animals embark on an active hunting strategy to take full advantage of the calving period.

One of the bears studied killed 38 newborn reindeer in one month and 18 young moose the next.

Predators predate where the prey is….

I think it’s unlikely

Romanian sex traffickers are grooming girls as young as 10 in school playgrounds and forcing them into prostitution in the UK, according to a shocking new documentary.

Using the so-called “lover boy method”, recruiters target vulnerable youngsters convincing them they are in a relationship before then exploiting them.

Oh, the convincing, sure.

What I don’t believe is British punters eagerly picking up 10 and 13 year olds. Or rather, I will believe there are paedos out there who might, but not that the average British sex punter is going to.

Lashings of ginger beer all ’round

I know, I know, this is just an ego trip. And yet even after 20 years of doing this stuff there’s still a certain thrill to knowing that this happens. Well, sometimes it does.

A piece I did for the Dhaka Tribune (that gig that feeds the feed the hungry programme in the Dhaka slums) about Sri Lanka’s problems gains a certain approval from a Sri Lankan. Actually, a Sri Lankan who used to be Deputy-Gov (I think?) of the Sri Lankan central bank.

The thrill isn’t quite as much as it used to be of course. That first day that someone – and it sorta repeated as the someone who printed rose in quality, from local alternative paper in California, or weird econ mag in Russia, up to national newspaper – printed me did produce that surge of endorphins. And, still does even on a declining wave form sorta idea.

I do actually understand that idea of imposter syndrome. Because that reaction isn’t “Ha! Cower before my importance” at all, it’s “Whut, me?”

Or so I keep telling myself at least.

Heresy, I know

Foreign trawlers are dumping fish in the Channel as the Government refuses to take action to curb the practice.

Footage obtained by The Telegraph shows a Dutch fly-shooter dumping thousands of fish last month by cutting open a net.

There are strict limits on bass because of depleted numbers, but fly-shooters catch them accidentally while fishing for other species and must then return them to the sea, following UK Government rules.

Fly-shooters fish by dragging weighted ropes along the seabed with a long thin net in between, designed to capture entire shoals of fish.

Given my normal level headedness on matters environmental and economic I think I might be ready for truly radical action on fishing and trawling. Within the UK economic waters, simply ban trawling and nets at all.

Yes, an absurdity, not reasonable at all. And yet, umm, I do at least edge towards it. Our basic fisheries problem is that commons one and as long as we do have it on a hunter gatherer basis then we’re going to drive those fishies the way of the moa and the giant sloth. Humans turn up and eated them all.

You can fish with rod and line but not with a net. Nope, tough, shut up, that’s it. Here is our Navy to ensure this.

I agree entirely, insane. And yet…..

Well, it does sorta depend

Some headlines are saying she was sacked because she is a Muslim. Hmm, no, that’s not on. This is a different claim though:

Tory MP says she was sacked as minister because her Muslim faith ‘made colleagues uncomfortable’

Depends which part of that faith really. If having a different view on flavour of Sky Fairy then that’s the sort of thing we’ve all agreed not to discriminate upon. If it’s that apostates should indeed be killed then that’s a belief that we’d hope someone does get sacked as a Tory Minister over.

And yes, to be completist, we can indeed find similar examples in all the other flavours of Sky Fairy consideration to make the same point about.