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.
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?
This might be better? One eighth of the price, for a start.
Near Braga, which means close to Porto airport for the in and out. Would need – at least – the purchase price spent again. That’s new roof to new foundations territory. You’d also want to cut most of those trees back – be v gloomy without that. Weather up there is – well, think Southern Ireland. Never cold but then not all that often dry either.
But closer to the desires for Schloss BiG, yes?
Someone on WhatsApp is using my name to sscam people. For the avoidance of doubt no, I do not run an investment group. Not on WhatsApp, not anywhere. This is an attempt to steal your money.
So, got the well cleaned out. Bought a sprinkler. The grass is looking a lot better. If I can track down the guy who installed the full sprinkler system and get him to correct it it’ll be great!
Except the well isn’t producing that much water. Hmm.
Finally I bother to think about it. The sprinkler has a number of different settings – different shaped holes etc. Gives a table of how much it delivers, in litres of water per m2, over how much area, for each shaped hole. So I finally start to think about that. Bit of mental maths. Major setting is 10something litres per m2 per hour over 100 m2. That’s, umm, a cubic metre of water an hour. So I’ve been running this for 90 minutes. Well’s 1 metre diameter. Forget circles and cylinders ‘n’ stuff, that’s 1.5 metres depth in the well.
Ah, no wonder it’s running out of water. OK, with Pir2 it’s less than that but still. Call it a metre among friends. -Ish.
It’s not the well, is it? That’s doing just fine.
A twitter thread – just a snarl at someone really – goes past 500k interactions or whatever it is. So, hmm, buy a blue tick, get ad money?
Back of envelop. Ah, to make a few hundred $ a month I would need to have one of these 500k threads *every day*.
Erm, no.
According to the code monkey – but that was when this blog moved to this domain and wordpress. It started on Typepad in, oooh, 2004 sometime?
Anyway, legal to have a drink now under either US or UK rulz……
The baby’s birthday can be contributed to here
Around here we’ve had 180% of our annual rainfall already and it’s only mid-May. They’re actually opening dams to let the excess out.
What you should have had we did – really, storms that should have hit you went further south and then hung about over us instead.
Just thought you’d like to know that as your hosepipe bans are imminent….
But for an increasing number of people, the financial gains are not worth the problems that are being thrown up. Canadian professor Kathy Nolan, who is head of mathematics at the University of Regina and also works on social justice and equality issues, has been researching this topic for nearly a decade and wrote a paper called Moving beyond child sponsorship.
“Child sponsorship is simply another legacy of colonialism,” she says. “We feel we know what is best for these children, but we don’t.”
Nolan is uncomfortable with the practice on a number of levels. “It makes people feel good and therefore they feel let off the hook and can continue with their privileged lives. What we don’t realise is that many of the benefits we have in the global north are due to structural issues that have caused the children these people are sponsoring to be suffering.”
Better that we all struggle against capitalist patriarchy than that we feed the hungry child.
Or, alternatively, Professor Nolan is a cunt who can go fuck herself.
As I’ve mentioned occasionally I write a column for a paper in Dhaka. The weekly cash from which (£25 or so) goes to a feed the street kiddies charity. About 20 pence into the charity ends up as a gut busting bowl of rice, veggies and eggs fed to a hungry child.
Best paid piece of work I’ve ever had and I see not a penny of it.
To remind, Professor Nolan is a cunt who can go fuck herself
So, I took a car off to a garage to get it fixed. 3 months back. Kept calling, asking for it back. Oh, I’m in hospital, I’m ill, I’ll bring it around etc.
Finally go to the police. No, not really reporting it stolen, not yet, but I’d like some help getting it back. Some back and forth (my Portuguese, their English, we got there) and why not, say, the police phone the bloke who has it and mutter something about really, time to return it.
So, they ask a bit more and I say it’s this fat Indian bloke, with a beard.
Ah, him! He’s living in a car behind Cafe P. We know him.
Cafe P is 1 km from my house. But in a little back street, you’d not see it without knowing what you’re looking for.
So, the Indian mechanic (he used to work for the garage I’d used before, the garage closed) had been living in my car for three months. While fobbing me off.
Ho well, there’s a lesson for Timmy. As it happens a bloke I know around here, vaguely, saw this going on, came over to chat. Drove me off to another local garage where we organised that the repair work will be done, the MoT etc. Drove me back, we picked up the key from the police who had got it from the Indian, flat battery. Another bloke raced off, got leads, came back, started the car up. Off we drove to the garage, dropped the car off, first bloke then dropped me home.
OK, etc, etc. Low trust society – the Indian. High trust, the local P.
Interesting little lesson.
Anyway, the last bit, and I swear blind I am not making this up. As I’m leaving the Indian leans over and says “If you need more work done on your car just let me know.”
No fucking shame about it at all.
No, not me actually in Iran. But as I might have mentioned before the only one of my books that has ever gone to a second printing was a translation into Farsi. This was done for the Tehran equivalent of The Economist – ish, -ish – for a little conference they did.
They caught me late on a Sunday night and asked for something immediately….
So, anyway, that’s what I sound like in Farsi.
