Nice point
Asked last week by the BBC about these emails, King would say only that their leak and publication in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit had to be the work of some malign national agency (the CIA? The Russians?). Since we know that a Briton with Asperger’s syndrome, working on a domestic dial-up internet connection, managed to hack into the Pentagon’s most secret codes, King’s insistence that only a national agency could have hacked into a non-secure academic research unit’s emails seems as sensible as the assertion that we must all plan to settle in Antarctica.
Umm….
Google, the internet giant whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil”, did not pay any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenues in Britain last year.
The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary.
The arrangement allowed Google legally to avoid paying more than £450m in corporation tax to HM Revenue & Customs in 2008, The Sunday Times has established.
Umm, anyone want to tell me why an Irish company should be paying tax to the UK Treasury?
Didn\’t we stop all that in 1921?
Do note as well that this is all about the EU. Any person (meaning person or legal entity such as a company) can do business anywhere in the EU and pay tax where the brass plate is. Part of the free movement of goods, people and capital.
Not sure about this number
However, homosexuality is still considered taboo in many sports. Tatchell drew a comparison between rugby and football. \”It is interesting that a couple of rugby and ex-rugby players have come out in recent years but still not a single professional football player,\” Tatchell said. \”However, given there are 500 professional football players, statistically about 50 of them are probably gay or bisexual yet none have felt able to be open about their sexuality.
I know that this is an oft used number, that 10% of the male population is gay, but I\’m not sure that it\’s right.
Looking at actual evidence it seems to be much lower than that.
Somewhere between 3 and 5 % who have ever had a male (ie, same sex) sexual partner. And more like 2 or 3% who have had more than two (a reasonable enough distinction to make between experimentation and \”being gay or bisexual\”).
So where does the 10% number come from? Are we to assume that one in twnty men are so repressed that they\’ve never actually had the sex they desire? Or so repressed that they don\’t know? Or is the 10% number simply an attempt to big up the numbers so as to make it less of a minority sport?
Banker bashing
According to the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, \”approximately 80pc of the business conducted by financial services firms in the UK comprises of services offered to non-UK residents
That might be a little overstated for effect but still an interesting number.
Quite large exporters of financial services, aren\’t we? And are we really convinced that we want to shrink our largest net exporting sector? With our trade deficit?
And of course the vast majority of it isn\’t mortgage bankers who cocked up so badly….the London Metals Exchange, world centre of non-ferrous metals trading, the Baltic Exchange, world centre of shipping, the various options and futures exchanges and so on….
Jumping the shark
Might we now say that mainstream coverage of political blogs has now jumped the shark?
Greg Stone, a Liberal Democrat candidate, suggested Hazel Blears was \’on Botox\’ and criticised Theresa May\’s dress sense while writing under a pseudonym on the Guido Fawkes political website.
A whole scandal made up of comments left under a pesudonym?
Absolutely correct Polly
Politics is being weighed in the balance and found wanting.
There really are problems which politics will not and cannot solve.
It\’s not just this climate change thing either: there\’s a whole raft of things out there which people identify as problems (say, the gender pay gap) and which are simply not solvable by the political process (in the example of the gender pay gap because at least most if not nearly all of it is caused by the different decisions and desires of individual men and women) in anything even faintly resembling a free and liberal society.
Which is why, despite your best attempts, we do not use politics or the political process to decide and manage everything in life.
Thankfully.
Climate change, eh?
Around 2,000 passengers were trapped in the Channel Tunnel overnight as four Eurostar trains broke down amid freezing temperatures that have brought travel chaos to Britain.
Is this too much of it ot not enough?
Excellent
World leaders at the Copenhagen climate conference agreed an unprecedented last-minute deal to combat global warming but immediately conceded that the watered-down accord did not go far enough.
So they\’re not going to cause too much damage then.
As Richard Tol has pointed out, the EU is already too ambitious in its plans even if others are insufficiently so.
In praise of Ritchie
The winner was crusading accountant Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK.
Congratulations.
However, now that we know where his expertise lies, in accounting for corporate structures, might we be able to encourage him to remain in his specialty? Rather than trying to redesign both the financial markets and the entire economy (to say nothing of the tax system itself), areas where he clearly knows little?
Great research paper of the day
Conclusions Listening to Nellie the Elephant significantly increased the proportion of lay people delivering compression rates at close to 100 per minute. Unfortunately it also increased the proportion of compressions delivered at an inadequate depth. As current resuscitation guidelines give equal emphasis to correct rate and depth, listening to Nellie the Elephant as a learning aid during CPR training should be discontinued.
An extremely weird Compass report
Adam Lent (chief econ guy at the TUC and a buddy of Our Ritchie) has a report out.
And it\’s very weird indeed.
Looking at economic history, there\’s a pattern. When the huge world economy changing events come along (canals, trains and steam power, electricity, the internet and digital technology, roughly five of them since 1750) then finance capital goes into a frenzy chasing the potential profits. Then there\’s a crash in finance capital and it all moves over to production capital being where the action is.
One way of describing this would be first round chasing the returns from owning the new technology, the second after the crash from employing the new technology to do things.
Now so far, I\’m just fine with this (yes, like every model it\’s a model, it doesn\’t explain all of the world, just sheds light on a part of it).
Finance capital has in fact done its job, pouring money into the development of these new technologies (and it\’s noticeable how important VC money has been in the digital economy). And now, quite naturally, after the crash we\’ll move into a period when we\’re employing capital to exploit the uses of these technologies rather than the creation and ownership of them.
Hey, great! Markets work, things get ever better and it all happens quite naturally.
So Adam Lent\’s proposal is that we must intervene in this process and manage it.
WTF?
George\’s speech for Obama
Interesting little thought:
\”I recognise, however, that even this measure cannot guarantee that we stay within the two-degree limit. Eventual global temperatures will be set by the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The best scientific estimate is that we can afford to burn a maximum of 60% of the carbon stored in the world\’s current reserves of fossil fuels. A safer proportion would be 40%.
\”When I arrive home I will commission a taskforce to identify which of the fossil fuel reserves of the United States will be left in the ground.
George seems not to understand the US Constitution.
If you\’ve got identified fossil fuels under your land then this is property which you own (and if you\’ve got a licence or permit to get them out then even more so). If the government takes your property from you then this is \”a taking\” for which fair market price must be paid by said government.
So George Monbiot is committing the US President to paying, today, at fair market prices, for 60% of the entire reserves of fossil fuels in the US.
Y\’know, somehow I really don\’t thank that that is the cheapest way of dealing with climate change, really, I don\’t.
Absolute bloody bollocks
The world should be investing far more heavily in green technology: just $10 billion a year is spent on it globally, a pathetically small amount.
Where do people get these incredibly strange figures from?
Or rather, why do they only ever include the money doled out by governments as \”investment \” and completely ignore the much larger amounts raised and spent in the private sector?
We could start from the entirely trivial amounts that I myself have spent: £800 to a scientist looking at one of the myriad ways to make fuel cells by providing him with materials to play with.
$20,000 to some Greeks looking at new ways to extract the materials needed to make one of those myriad different types of fuel cells.
Sure, I expect my bread to come back after being cast upon the waters (no, I don\’t own any patents on anything found and interesting things we did find in both projects) but these are investments in green technologies.
Or the projects which I\’ve not funded but which I have been paid for supplying materials to: a decade long project at Airbus for new materials for wing surfaces to reduce fuel use. Or another at the same place to lighten fuselages by 10% for the same reason. These are big money projects and are not included in that $10 billion figure.
And it\’s no good saying but this isn\’t basic research: yes, all four of them very much are basic research. Peer reviewed papers and patents have followed from them.
Now, I\’m just one businessman in a three man company and that\’s only part of what I\’ve been involved with in creating these new green technologies. Multiply that up by some measure of the size of the private economy and you\’ll end up with a vastly larger number than $10 piddling billion.
It simply is not true that government spending upon green stuff, just like it isn\’t government spending upon anything else at all, which is the total spending on that stuff.
Quelle Surprise
Clearly exhausted after more than 12 meetings in 24 hours and waiting over 20 hours for one group of nations to assemble, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary admitted he was “frustrated” with the talks.
He said the problem was not the targets on greenhouse gases or even the amount of money at stake but “procedural wrangling” over the form an agreement will take.
Well, whadda ya expect if you try to save the world through bureaucracy?
Second near random Paul Samuelson anecdote of the day
Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson was once challenged by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam to “name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.”
Samuelson’s answer? Comparative advantage.
“That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.”
From whence we derive this blog\’s tagline of course.
Near random Paul Samuelson anecdote of the day
A number of years ago, more than I really care to remember, I was gearing up to try and take the Cambridge University entrance exams (which I failed, dismally and quite naturally) by taking A- Level economics again*.
I\’d been out of school for a couple of years and thus needed to get back into some sort of academic something or other. I went part time at work and paid my way through a crammer for a few months to gear up for both exams. Not one of my best ideas ever it has to be said.
My revision for the A Level was to plough through Samuelson (note to American readers: A Levels are the end of high school rather than the US undergraduate courses at which Samuelson was aimed) end to end, page by page.
And in Samuelson I found what I considered to be an error. He had a throw away line about how people kept wines for them to mature but no one ever did that for beer, not over lengthy periods of time at least.
Aha! But I am a West Country boy and so I knew of Eldridge Pope\’s \”Hardy\’s Ale\”.
The refurbishment of the Trumpet Major pub in Dorchester was the catalyst for the fledgling Thomas Hardy\’s Ale. 1968 was the 40th anniversary of the authors\’ death and what better way to commemorate it than by attempting to bring fiction to life and creating the brew that Hardy imagined.
This was to be no ordinary ale. Matured in oak sherry casks for nine months and corked in decorative pint and half pint bottles. The strength was a whopping 12% and it was bottle conditioned. Thus the legend began and bottles were laid down with the expectation of improvement as the beer matured.
So I wrote and told Professor Samuelson that I, a lowly not even undergraduate yet, had found an error in his famous textbook! Yes, as the child is father to the man snotty git I was then and am now.
He wrote back a short but entirely polite letter thanking me for informing him of this new information, for having told him something he didn\’t know.
It\’s the only letter I\’ve ever had from a Nobel Prize winner and the only one I\’m ever likely to get as well. But I do think well of him for that.
* You want to know the results, don\’t you? 2 E\’s and 2 F\’s at Cambridge. An A at A level. Sorta shows you where my intellectual powers top out really.
My Lord Joffe\’s argument
So when the DPP assesses the responses to the consultation, he should be aware that many will come from the relatively small minority who base their views on their faith, and have been encouraged by their religious leaders to write to him. Meanwhile, most of the silent majority who support assisted dying and, it can be assumed, would also support the policy, either do not know of the consultation or have not had the same kind of face-to-face encouragement to respond.
Those who actually make their views known are wrong and we should assume that everyone who does not respond supports me!
On this basis of course none of the above has won every election for the past century. Afraid it doesn\’t quite work like that Sirrah.