Idiotarians

The ancient city of Petra is the highlight of any visit to Jordan. The great Nabatean city, with most buildings constructed between the 5th Century BC and 2nd Century AD, is a must-see. However the problem is the ticket price.

Item in fixed supply and high demand is expensive.

Whoddathunkit, eh?

Defence charities have snubbed the News of the World by refusing to accept millions of pounds in donations in protest at the alleged hacking of dead soldiers’ families’ phones.

Pecunia non olet.

Actually, worse than fools.

Some limbless squaddies will now not get their bionic limbs because the non-injured middle class twats who run the charities have been able to buff up their moral credentials by refusing such \”tainted\” money.

There must be a word which encapsulates \”you suffer for my moral prejudices\” even if I don\’t know what it is.

\”I certainly have seen the benefits that can come from [oil] royalties. Schools are better. There are swimming pools, gymnasium, cars – and jobs – all the result of billions of dollars.\”

Patricia Cochran, a former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council from Alaska, expresses the view of many indigenous people on industrial development in the Arctic. Vast oil and mineral wealth have brought huge benefits to some communities.

But her own conflicted feelings about development neatly sum up the dilemma that indigenous leaders in the region face. In Barrow – Alaska\’s oil capital – there are also high rates of suicide and depression, while offshore drilling is a threat to subsistence whaling and the hunting of seals and walrus, she points out. So despite the benefits, Cochran is personally quite negative about industrial development and questions the wider benefit to society.

…..

But even there, local leaders of indigenous people have mixed views about who is really benefiting. And overall the \”community\” representing indigenous people is split down the middle over the issue.

As I say, entirely cynical.

Traditional leaders are going to be against any change. When you\’re at the top of a society you know damn well that change might topple you from that position. And yes, there are those who would rather be top than to be middle or bottom in a much richer society.

Yer average Guardian reader would understand this instinctively about the British aristocracy or the Bullingdon Boys. But they never seem to make the connection with the same thing happening in other societies.

David Hillman, spokesman for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, said: \”The British government should wake up and smell the coffee. Other governments are moving ahead with a bank tax, while we are letting our financial sector off the hook.

\”A Robin Hood tax on the banks would be the most popular tax in history.\”

A tax which just taxed the banks would indeed be an extremely popular tax.

But as both you, your confreres and fellow campaigners, and I know a Robin Hood Tax would not be a tax on the banks. Nor even upon the banksters.

It would be a tax on all consumers of the products of the financial sector. Which, given that all of us take part in the modern economy which consumes the products of the financial sector would mean all of us.

Now you know this, it\’s been pointed out to you by myself (and one of your colleagues, Owen Tudor, will no doubt have brought my snarls to your attention ) but more importantly it\’s been pointed out to you by the OECD and the IMF. The incidence of a financial transactions tax will be upon consumers, as pointed out by the Nobel Laureates Sir James Mirrless and Peter Diamond. Further, the burden upon consumers is likely to be greater than the revenue raised, as pointed out by the Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz.

You know this, your campaign knows this, yet still you market your idea as if it is only the banks which will bear the burden. You are playing off the ignorance of the general public about tax incidence.

Which makes you David Hillman, Owen Tudor, the Robin Hood Tax campaign as a whole, lying scumbags, doesn\’t it?

Laurie of course being the Germaine Greer de nos jours.

Also, we are dealing here with literature in translation, but all the judges are anglophone, which is ridiculous.

The prize is for literature translated into English: being a native English speaker is therefore something of an advantage.

Right now, I don’t know. I don’t read fiction – it’s a waste of time.

It\’s a prize for fiction, so perhaps not quite the right judge then Germaine.

By and large, English novels don’t impress the Australian Greer. “The English don’t even write the best novels,” she said. “It’s the French who are the best writers.”

And somewhere the ghost of Jane Austen titters in embarassment……

Nobody would think that it is OK to deny someone a job as a result of their sex, race or age, and the same should stand for disabled people, too.

We do deny people jobs because of their age: 14 year olds do not get hired as delivery drivers. We do deny people jobs on the basis of their sex: there are no male wet nurses. As to race: there aren\’t that many black models being used to advertise tanning salons.

Disabled means differently abled. We don\’t hire the blind to be delivery drivers, the deaf as piano tuners nor the dyslexic as subeditors.

Yes we do, and should, deny people a job on the basis of disability. You know, the inability to do the job in question?

\”The scale of the land deals being struck is shocking\”, said Mittal. \”The conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.

Growing more food through investing in growing more food is going to drive up food prices how?

In contrast, the real wages of top professionals such as doctors and lawyers has more than doubled. The pay of many relatively unskilled and semi-skilled workers (including bakers, forklift-truck drivers, packers and bottlers) has actually fallen in real terms since the 1970s.

Yes, that\’s what happens in an economy.

As technology changes the demands for the labour to perform certain tasks changes. Wages then change to reflect the differences in supply and demand for those certain skills.

Since the 1970s baking has become ever more mechanised: pallets reduced the need for forklift drivers. Similarly with packers and bottlers, we\’ve mechanised more of the task.

We just don\’t need as many of them as we once did.

In any and every economy with any form of dynamism technological change will change the wages of some forms of labour. To complain about this is to be Canute, or as the Norwegians misspelled his name, a Cnut.

Money.

It\’s icky, innit?

Sign now to defend media diversity and independence. Say no to Fox News in the UK.

Eh? Banning a TV channel is defending media diversity?

As food prices reach record highs, how much is the speculation in agricultural commodites to blame?

Zero. Nada. Zilch.

Next question?

And that\’s not the only stupidity in this piece by Ms. Lawrence.

After intense lobbying, banks won deregulation of commodities markets in the US in 2000, allowing them to develop these new products.

There was no deregulation in 2000.

There was simply a clarification of the pre-existing law. It was confirmed by legislation what the Common Law (or common practice) already allowed.

CME argues that the volume of speculation is not a problem, because the overall composition of the agricultural commodities market has not changed; the increase in activity by index funds has been matched by an increase in trading by those who are commercial participants, that is those who have a direct interest in the physical goods.

Quite, for each and every long position there must be an equal and opposite short one. That\’s simply true, by definition, of any derivatives market.

\”That\’s an indefensible position,\” Chicago–based hedge fund manager Mark Newell of Quiddity retorted. He and another hedge fund manager, Mike Masters, prepared testimony to the US Senate when it was looking into the effect of speculation on food prices in 2008.

\”When billions of dollars of capital is put to work in small markets like agricultural commodities, it inevitably increases volatility and amplifies prices – and if financial flows amplify prices of food stuffs and energy, it\’s not like real estate and stocks. When food prices double, people starve ,\” Masters said.

I really wouldn\’t want one quite so ignorant of basic economics managing my money.

If you go off and speculate in something, and if your speculation increases price volatility, then you will be losing money. The aim is to buy low and sell high, recall? So when you buy low you\’re reducing the price volatility at the bottom of the cycle. When you sell high you\’re reducing price volatility at the top of the cycle. You\’re taking in over-supply at one point, increasing supply at the other.

The only way you can be increasing price volatility is if you\’re buying high and selling low. Which means we don\’t really have to worry about you too much as you\’re not going to be in the market all that long, you\’ll be bust.

Speculation can move high prices from the future to the present, sure, but that in itself reduces long term price volatility (Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter V, start at para 40).

Can we please get this straight? Speculation can change prices, yes. Can increase them or reduce them. But it does not increase price volatility, it does the opposite, it reduces it.

That Oxfam report into the food industry insisted that poor farmers need better transport links, better seeds, acess to better inputs. Plus better ways to get their outputs to market.

The same report also attacked the major commodity traders.

The way-markers today are grain silos, agricultural hangars for harvesting machines, and banner adverts across nearly every field for agrochemicals and genetically modified soya seed.

Occasionally, the green and orange logo of Monsanto\’s Roundup glyphosphate herbicide gives way to an election poster for the Perónist president, Cristina Kirchner, or to a rival chemical or seed company\’s billboard. But there\’s no question who dominates the landscape here.

Less visible at first, and strangely unfamiliar to consumers in the UK, are the big four transnational exporters that dominate the other half of the soya complex, the so-called ABCD group of companies: ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus.

Between them, these firms account for 75-90% of the global grain trade, according to some estimates. They provide the fertiliser for the soya, and here, as elsewhere, dominate the processing industry that divides the beans into oil for food manufacturing and protein meal for animal feed. When you reach the ports of Rosario and San Lorenzo-San Martín, they are unmissable, however, with their dozens of crushing plants, biodiesel refineries, grain terminals and elevators towering above the river.

This is where about 55m tonnes of soya a year, worth $24bn (£14.7bn), starts a journey through the docks to the importers – China, India and Europe.

They\’re complete cretins, aren\’t they?

It\’s the very commodity traders who are providing the access to inputs, the storage, the transport to export, that those farmers need and Oxfam desires.

How did the lunatics gain the keys to the asylum?

Yesterday, in the wake of the Oxfam report, Felicity Lawrence told us that food was going to get much more expensive and we\’d better do something about growing more.

Today Felicity Lawrence tells us that China investing lots of money in growing lots more food is a bad idea.

Eh?

Very bizarre piece.

How anyone can write on the point without at least mentioning Smith and Hayek is beyond me.

These works are mostly public buildings, built by local authorities, and by a kind of civic confidence going back to Victorian times that, it would turn out, was in its death throes. They are also socialist. They tend not to maximise the commercial efficiency of their sites, preferring a generosity of space that now makes them vulnerable to property developers who can multiply their profit-making area by factors of two, three, four and more.

No, not just the word \”socialist\”.

So, knocking down these monstrosities will allow a three or four fold increase increase in the value that can be created from the underlying land.  Land is indeed a scarce resource: they\’re not making any more of it for a start. Further, we keep being told that the ever onwards march of concrete across our green and pleasant land has to be stopped. We must use brownfield, not greenfield, sites for our urban architecture.

So, by knocking them down and replacing with higher value buildings, we are moving an asset from a low to a higher value use. This is the very definition of wealth creation.

Perhaps the best way of defending, of perserving, Brutalist architecture is not to point out that we\’ll all be richer by knocking them down.

Workers in the rural employment program aren\’t allowed to use machines, for example, and have to dig instead with pick axes and shovels. The idea is to create as many jobs as possible for unskilled workers.

This is one area at least where Marx certainly knew what he was talking about. In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Japan\’s harbours threatening military force if Japan did not open its borders to free trade

Yes, yes, I know Mark is supposed to have been some sort of prophet but the communist Manifesto was written in 1848 you twat, 6 years before Perry turned up to shout at the sons of Nippon.

As ever, a \”community group\” is trying to shake down one of the supermarkets.

In this case it\’s one in DC, trying to extort from WalMart. Worth reading the whole list but these three stood out for me:

Provide free shuttle transportation to and from the nearest Metro station to each D.C. store every 10 minutes.

Commit to traffic alleviation studies.

Provide up to 2.5 free or low-priced parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of building space.

Umm,what sort of idiot demands free parking and traffic alleviation?

Cretins, I tell ya\’

The Guardian prints an article saying that not everything is peachy in Cuba.

And of course, we all count down, 3…2…1…..to see how quickly the comments section starts to slag it off.