Idiot question of the day

Angela Rayner is wrong to target towns and villages in her quest to build 1.5m extra houses, an influential think tank has said.

The Resolution Foundation said building more properties in expensive areas that were not near particularly productive jobs would do little to help the Government boost growth.

The think tank highlighted Cromer and Sheringham on the Norfolk coast, or Kingsbridge and Dartmouth in Devon, as examples of areas targeted for development that it thought were misguided.

Lord Willetts, who has helped to oversee the report, branded the Government’s building targets “perverse”.

Ms Rayner, the Housing Secretary, should instead target cities such as Manchester and Birmingham for new homes, he said. It is urban hubs like these where properties are actually needed to house workers and boost growth.

We’ve already got a system telling us where people want houses built – prices. Higher prices mean folk want more housing in that location.

To start mithering about “productive jobs” is to go back to having that national planning system that’s worked so well this past 77 years. So, use prices.

With the added bonus that if we do just use prices then we’ve not got to have any planning atall. The market unadorned will deal very well if given its head because, you know, prices and markets, see?

Hello,
Stop wasting money on expensive lead databases and email software.
We are better.

Find unlimited verified professionals’ contact information and send them personalized cold emails with automated follow-ups.
Get access to more than 15M+ companies & 575M+ professionals across the world.

All for FREE, we offer a 14 day trial (no credit card required)!

Sounds interesting?

Via email. So, if you’re sending me spam then how good is your base?

So, what’s a useful temperature inside in winter?

We’ve spent a couple of decades without central heating – log fires. And years before that were spent in the Russian system where you don’t get to choose, Comrade.

Now we’ve got central heating. Air pump summat thingie and pipes under the floor with heat conducting liquid in them. We’re about to gain a thermostat as well. The Portugee seem to like very warm houses and we’re going to gain a control system other than the on off switch.

OK, so what temperature to set it at? Looking around peeps seem to think a UK house should be 21 oC. That’s when asking peeps. Energy Saving Trust type people seem to think 18. And I have to admit to finding many UK houses too hot. But I wouldn’t trust EST types to worm the dog let alone tell me the correct temperature.

So, what do folks think is right? Martin, I know, I know. So, folks other than Martin perhaps.

I’m used to, happy with the idea of, winter being when you wear a woollie as well as a shirt. But no one wants to freeze getting out of the shower either.

Ken, you’re the bloke around here who knows where all the economics statistics are buried.

So, this idea that in the 70s (and to make it fun, let’s add the 50s, 60s and 80s to it) people could live a full life and raise a family on just the one income.

It occurs that there’s a way to test this. In order to calculate inflation ONS (and if we can find it, Commerce Dept in the US) monitors a bundle of consumer goods. That bundle changes over time as the things which people buy changes over time.

Thus we can use this the other way around. We can examine the consumer bundle for a year in order to get an idea of what the typical lifestyle bought.

For example, at some point between the 50s and 90s ONS will have added a foreign holiday to that standard bundle of prices they monitor. At some point turnips (maybe, depends upon the level of detail, but the weighting of root vegetables will have changed at least) will have dropped off.

So, is there some place where we can see what is in the consumer bundle being monitored in any one year? Easily that is?

Living near a Waitrose ‘puts £38k on value of your home’
Study by Lloyds Bank finds proximity to upmarket supermarket branch can signifcantly add to property’s value, but living next to an Aldi can take off almost £6,000

Causality runs the other way. Waitrose puts its shops where houses are expensive….

The Big Question: why has the UK so far been unable to find the suspected British Islamic State killer and the group’s hostages?

Because the world is a large place. It may be in the unfashionable western spiral arm, we may all be so deluded we still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea, but it’s still a pretty big place.

Inspired from here.

So, we\’ve rather a large number of people in this country who keep telling us that community, local interaction, webs of social exchange rather than global markets, make us all much richer in a truly real sense (hey, pick your favourite idiot that does in fact argue this) than these mere physical belongings which filthy lucre brings us. You know, food, shelter, clothing and the like.

We\’re also told, by those very same people often enough, that people living in those African villages have the \”community, local interaction, webs of social exchange rather than global markets\” coming out of their ears and that they are, in a truly real sense, much richer than we are.

So, why are we sending them aid instead of they sending it to us?