Your Tax Money At Work

Working lunches could be exempt from Covid lockdown restrictions after an apparent “loophole” emerged.

Meeting people inside pubs and restaurants in tier 2 and tier 3 areas such as London, York and Manchester is not allowed as part of efforts to try and contain the spread of coronavirus
But last night No 10 and local authorities suggested that such meetings were permitted so long as they are for work purposes.

There are undoubtedly professionals who use Tinder to set up working lunches. Expect those not actually professional to claim that the Tinder meets – and andless other kinds of non-professional meets – are in fact working lunches.

Incentives, they matter.

The NHS test and trace app cannot be downloaded by most over-sixties because their smartphones are too old, a new survey indicates.
A leading charity for older people has accused the government of failing to think through the needs of the group most vulnerable to the virus, after releasing findings that just 31 per cent of its members have installed the NHS Covid-19 app.
Of the majority who have not, nearly six in seven said it was because their mobile phone was too old to support the technology.
….
The app is available to download for free from the Android Market and Apple App Store. However, the technology only works on phones which have iOS 13.5 or above installed, or Android 5.0.
Android 5 was released six years ago, and most Android smartphones are compatible with the NHS app.
However, iOS 13.5 was only released in May 2020 so requires users to have a very up-to-date operating system.
In addition, iOS 13 is only compatible on the iPhone 6s and newer

People with feature phones are entirely out of luck of course. The market for feature phones still exists and, amazing, tends elderly. Because that’s how you make a phone with lovely great big buttons that are easy for elderly hands to find and elderly eyes to see.

Vry well done there.

‘Protect the NHS’ message led to 90 per cent drop in hospital admissions

If we can do without 90% of the NHS then we can do without 90% of the NHS then, right?

China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Cuba and Pakistan are set to win election to the United Nations human rights council today,

Sure, it’s happened before but that’s no excuse. Next up Brexunit….

How to gain a quango job in the progressive world:

Given that the party appointed a woman who does not believe in structural racism to the government commission on racial inequalities, the Tories’ investigation into their issues with race and Islam is unlikely to be a rigorous affair.

Only those who already believe might be allowed to consider what should be believed.

This Fujitsu/ICL system for post offices clearly had some major failing in it.

But does anyone know what it was? General journalism isn’t likely to tell us and the computer press might not go into the details of the accounting.

Post offices were being registered as collecting more cash than they had. That’s why post masters were said to owe the system money, or to have been skimming cash and all that.

OK, but what was the error of the cash counting system? What bit was it that went wrong? Was it doubling the amount that should be there for TV licences or something? What, exactly, was the accounting error?

Anyone know?

It occurs to me that this could be more expensive. I don’t know the figures and would be grateful to anyone who does. But think it through for a bit.

Under the old system there were some companies that needed subsidies. And others that coughed up for the privilege of running a franchise.

Under the new there will be a 2% of turnover fee for running something. There will be no payments into the Treasury for running a franchise. The subsidies will have to stay.

So, “profits” will disappear, there’s just the 2% of turnover to be had for the private companies. And whatever profits those cash flow positive franchises had will now go to the Treasury.

So, for this to be a financial net positive for the Treasury the profits flowing in – from people paid a flat percentage of turnover recall, so with no incentive to stamp upon costs – have to be greater than that 2% fee.

Who thinks that’s going to be true over time?

It examines a puzzle: why were vessels on this route, a monopoly of the Spanish crown, three times more likely to sink than those journeying between the Netherlands and East Asia?

Historians cite the weather as the main reason why one in eight ships, carrying incredibly valuable spices and silver between the Philippines and Mexico, sank. But the researchers pose a different possibility – that monopoly restrictions on ship numbers incentivised bribe-taking by galleon officials, undermining limits on cargo weight. Overloaded vessels have a tendency to sink, and one galleon, the San José, went down with cargo equivalent to almost 2% of the entire Spanish empire’s GDP.

We spend a lot of time worrying about the negative impact of monopolies in raising prices. But we need to take a wider view of their damage, which can include lower wages for workers and, it turns out, being lost at sea.

Large numbers of people will be refused coronavirus tests even if they have symptoms under Government plans to ration testing if the crisis deepens,

You’ve had 6 months to get testing sorted out. It’s possible to do basic tests – basic note – for £1 a piece with reagent dosed paper hankies.

No, it wouldn’t be any better if Jezza had been in charge. But seriously, why do we give, or have taken from us, 35% of everything to a structure that can’t even manage this?

In an earlier discussion, many pointing out that the benefits system benefits the employer.

Well, sorta.

Benefits that you get whether you work or not – child benefit, housing benefit – and are either fixed or dependent upon income do not benefit the employer. Because they’re not reliant upon you being in work or not.

Benefits dependent upon your being in work could benefit the employer. Say, working tax credits from Gordon Brown. They’re based upon the EITC in the US and the usual thought is that about 30% benefits the employer – they can pay lower wages as a result – and the other 70% benefits the employee.

I’ll never forget trying to feed myself and my son on £10 a week. I was a single mum, absolutely skint and living hand to mouth, even after I started working as a trainee reporter for the Southend Echo, following 18 long months of looking for a job.

In all the stories about Jack Monroe I never did work out why the father of the child wasn’t chipping in.

It is still a legal requirement that he do so, isn’t it?

Then there’s this which is just stupid:

most benefits are paid to people in work, which means our taxes are bailing out the poverty-level wages paid by corporations who dole their profits out to shareholders rather than their staff

If they’re paid to staff then they’re not profits, are they?

EIGHT gold bars which were seized by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) from a suspected criminal at Manchester Airport went under the hammer today for almost £780,000 in a first of its kind auction.

There’s a known price and a liquid market. Why use an auction, which is a form of price discovery? An expensive form of price discovery too?

Exclusive: BBC’s new boss threatens to axe Left-wing comedy shows

They don’t have any to axe. Not funny ones at least, which is the usual definition of comedy. They can, of course, stop making left wing prejudice shows but will they?

Who in buggery are these people?

How do we know it was bad to begin with? That information comes from studies such as the one conducted by the Intergenerational Foundation, a charity that funds research into the growing divide between the generations, which found that the social wellbeing of Britain’s twentysomethings declined by 70% between 1991 and 2017-18, the period for which the latest data is available.

Looking around I find that Danny Dorling is involved.

So, it’s complete bollocks then. A useful shortcut that.

“I don’t understand why Blackpool has so much poverty. Everyone should be pulling together as a community.” She said that to level up the differences “there should be more funding from the government”.

She was forced had to take out loans to cope with rising bills and is now struggling with debts.

“I’m worried about that, I’m a single mum and will not be working until she starts school.

The New Yorker recently reported that Biden has been reading How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Good start. Now he needs to read Stephanie Kelton on The Deficit Myth. Or better yet, appoint her to head OMB.

Of course, Ritchie would immediately claim he’d invented it all…

Care homes were asked by NHS managers and GPs to place blanket ‘Do not resuscitate’ (DNR) orders on all their residents at the height of the coronavirus pandemic to keep hospital beds free, a new report has found….

Quite possibly moving over the edge from brutal triage to we must die to preserve the NHS.

Hospitals in England carried out almost 180 operations a day on children and teenagers last year to remove rotting teeth, costing the NHS more than £40m.

The NHS being there to service the health needs of the population, right?

After all, it would be entirely ridiculous to suggest that we the population are there to serve the NHS.

Under the now-doomed 1947 Town and Country Planning Act,

Huzzah etc.

MacKenzie Scott is donating her billions much faster than her ex Jeff Bezos

The person who made the money might give it away a little more slowly – knowing how difficult it was to make in the first place.

That difference between private spending and that from taxation…..