The Blogger Himself

But this place is very tempting. Spent a couple of years of childhood living just to the left of that first picture. In the background there is Capri, that lake in the foreground is one of the entrances to Hell – Hades, rather – Lake Avernus. Just behind where the camera is standing is the Roman tunnel through to the Sybilline grotto at Cumae.

Not quite sure how much the desire is that it really is a damn fine house in a lovely place and how much is that call of childhood…..

now corrected…..

On the road for the next few days so service might be intermittent….

Readers reply: what would be the most socially useful way to spend a billion dollars?

So?

A few years ago I wrote a book taking this idea and running with it. In How to Spend a Trillion Dollars I end up using most of the money on transitioning to a net zero society, and in restoring nature globally. With a billion dollars, I would set up a progressive thinktank funding climate-positive and nature-positive lobbyists to counter the malign, fossil-fuel funded influence of Tufton Street and the Heritage Foundation. Rowan Hooper, podcast editor, New Scientist

Every action creates its own reaction, so £1 billion into the lefit notthinkosphere means more money into the right think tank o’sphere. Thus my pay goes up.

Cool!

My maths is so bad that no, I can’t do this.

So, US Real GDP since 1929.

OK, what was the growth rate 1929 to 1938? What was the growth rate 1945 to 1980? The growth rate 1980 to today?

And, finally, what was the growth rate 1929 to today?

Just the average over those selected years. So, total growth rate over that period divided by number of years.

Anyone who can actually use a calculator care to do that for me?

Reconstruction work done….

Attacked! I say. Dunno why.

Lost the last few days posts and comments. Ho well. It’s the taking part, right?

Work is ongoing, as they say.

What I want seems to me to be one of those simple things. I am clearly simpler than that thing.

What I want is to get one of the Epstein emails into an Open Office file. Now, yes, that’s simple enough that even I can do that.

But what I want is to get it in the format of the Epstein emails. And that I cannot do. I want the fonts, the font sizes, the way it’s laid out, in my Open Office file. For, what I want to write is a few spoofs of such emails. From: Vo**@***********************ir.su apologising for proffering a bird who gave someone the clap. Say, and as an example. Hey, the amusements of your host, eh?

If I have just the one file of that layout then I’m sure that I can use it, save under a different file name and use the layout again. Further, cut and paste should allow me to extend the conversation if that’s what I desire to do at any time.

But. Here’s a .pdf of one such file.

Or: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01740165.pdf

Which, in .pdf, looks like this:

That’s what I want my Open Office file to look like. But when I cut and paste from the .pdf file to Open Office I get this:

Which isn’t what I want at all. So, how do I get what I want? How do I get a template file, which I can then adjust as to text, that looks like the Epstein emails?

As you all know, I’m so inept that I don’t even know whether this is possible, let alone simple. But how do I get there? If I do?

I came over to England Weds morning to come and see my ailin’ Mum. Who is ailin’ at about the speed expected, no better, no worse.

On my way here obviously I had to drive from the house to the airport. This involved driving, in that very first stage, the 9 km or so from Montes Velhas to Aljustrel. Which I did at 6 am or so. By 6.30 am this had happened:

Roads closed to traffic
⛔ Road that connects Aljustrel to Montes Velhos (EN 383).

For those fascinated by such things if you look at the map there’s the “Roxio” lake and dam at Ervidel. The former river and current overflow outlet for this is the one that runs from there west, down past the bottom of Sao Joao de Negrilhos/Montes Velhas, (and couple of hundred yards from the bottom of our garden, other side of the cemetary) and then under – normally under – that road in question. The Roxio lake – which feeds the local irrigation system, nowt else – is now really, really, full, they’re releasing water, what is normally a rivulet is now a raging torrent and the road is therefore flooded.

Gonna be fun getting home on Sunday.

The Portuguese, being sensible people, have not built the village on the water meadow/flood plain. The edge of the village is on the edge of the plateau above that – 50 feet or so of altitude there. Which is, really, what “Monte” means in Portuguese naming conventions. The bit that sticks out above the local plain and where you put the farmhouse. It is now often applied to a farmhouse so located – a “Monte”. So, if the dam bursts, sure, we might have problems. But controlled overflow hits the road and nothing else. Well, someone’s potatoes are getting wet perhaps as well.

From what I understand the road from Rio de Moinhos to Jungheiros is open – it’s a proper bridge over the river on that road, not culverts as on the direct one – so we’re not wholly cut off. Hopefully. Find out Sunday…..

Gonna have to check the accounts for an unexplained 75k….

On the regal Queen Square, minutes from the sights and smart boutiques of central Bath, the grand grade I listed Francis Hotel is a series of adjoining Regency townhouses undergoing a £14 million tarting up.

Actually, the eastern end is post-war reconstruction. The Germans bombed it out in the Baedeker Raids.

But, you know….

An unexpected connection on LinkedIn. An offer of work from a headhunter, most likely a young woman, based in China. The chance to earn perhaps £20,000 part-time writing a handful of geopolitical reports for a Chinese company peppered with “non-public” or “insider” insights. Payment in cryptocurrency or cash preferred.

It may seem obvious, on this telling, that something about this approach would be amiss. Nevertheless, China’s powerful ministry of state security (MSS) still considers it worthwhile to deploy recruitment consultants to try it – leading MI5 to warn repeatedly about their activity online.

I am offended

In 2023, the MI5 chief, Ken McCallum, said Chinese agents were approaching Britons on LinkedIn on an extraordinary scale, 10,000 over the preceding two and a half years, seeking political, industrial, military and technological secrets.

Guess that shows that I’m not considered one of the top 10k then.

Sigh. As with earlier when in Russia etc. No one ever did try a honeytrap…..insignificant little mouse that I am.

A British woman has died after Storm Claudia tore through a Portuguese holiday camp while a major incident was declared in south Wales after “severe and widespread flooding”.

The unnamed 85-year-old was found dead in the wreckage of a campsite in Albufeira, in the southern Algarve region, on Saturday morning.

Officials said 28 people were injured, two seriously, at the campsite and a nearby hotel. Those injured were British, Portuguese and Spanish and aged between 6 and 85 years old.

We used to drive past that camp often enough – main road out of Albufeira. It’s also in the old riverbed which might not be quite the place in a storm. And boy, was it a storm – the airport closed for 90 minutes. I’d actually done though to the bus to the ‘plane and we were all called back.

Ho Hum.

Chesterton’s Fence is, at heart, the observation that until we know why the past did the things they did we should not change those things the past did. Because if we don’t understand why they did them then we’ll not be able to know whether we should still be doing them.

Seems a fair piece of logic to us.

Which brings us to transport systems. No one has to look far to see those insisting we must have many more railways, much more cycling, recreate tram systems and so on. Because, you know, the car is just so, well, yuck, see?

Which is the thing that needs to be Chesterton’s Fence’d. The car is a later technology than those three – and many more, the horse, canal boat and so on. The car, when left alone to get on with it, largely but not completely replaced those three – and the others, canal boat, horse, carriage and so on. So, why? For if we don’t know why then we cannot know why the car did outcompete. Nor can we know whether that reason still avails or has itself been surpassed?

With the footnote:

This point revealed to us by the former keyboard player in Billy Ocean’s touring band. Just to remind of how far we go in our research into interesting points which illuminate.

One of the joys of public writing is that the audience, readership, usually knows more than the writer.

A request from the CM…

Portugal seizes ‘narco-submarine’ carrying 1.7 tonnes of cocaine

There was going to be a party yuou were all invited to but sadly it’s now off. Just can’t get the supplies, d’ye see?

The Guardian is agin:

As recently as the buildup to May’s local elections, Reform was pledging to raise the threshold at which people start paying income tax from £12,570 to £20,000, bringing many thousands out of tax but costing the exchequer more than £40bn a year.

Amid increasing scrutiny about how or if this could be paid for, Farage has rolled back. Quizzed after the speech on whether the policy still stood, he said he would “want” a £20,000 threshold but this was an eventual aspiration.

It was, he said, impossible to know what state the economy would be in by the time of the next election, meaning most firm promises would need to wait for now. There was one exception – Farage said he would reverse Labour’s changes to inheritance tax on farms.

Whatever Labour achieves over the rest of the parliament there will be a difficult inheritance. But raising the tax threshold is difficult to justify when it mainly benefits richer taxpayers who can earn more before they hit the 40p tax rate.

The actual truth of raising the personal allowance:

As Tim Worstall and the Adam Smith Institute has long pointed out, the
difference between the Minimum Wage and the Minimum Income Standard
/ Living Wage is almost entirely due to the taxes charged by government on
work. The most straight forward way to ensure every full time worker
earned a Living Income would be to align the Income Tax and National
Insurance thresholds at the annual equivalent of the Minimum Wage. This
would in effect convert the current Minimum Wage into a Living Income.

Fuck off, Guardianistas.

Don’t know why.

So that’s another day of commentary you’re missing….

Sigh

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?

If there are – like a couple have said that certain eamil addys don’t get recognised – please put them in the comments to this post. Then we’ll have them all in one place for the code monkey to have a look at.

There’s this one, just around the corner. Facade is onto a street (very not busy street) and then the long courtyard to the back entreance on the road around the edge of the village (also v not busy). No real garden but. Also, common walls both sides. But 5 bedrooms for under a quarter mil? 90 minutes (an agreesive 90 minutes, to be fair) to Faro Airport?