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Interesting, No?

However, in a statement, EDF Energy said: "As regards prices in France and the UK, the reason that French electricity bills are lower is nuclear power.

"Customers in France benefit from low-carbon electricity which is 80 per cent generated by nuclear power plants. Most of the rest is hydro power. By contrast, Britain is heavily reliant on fossil fuels for its electricity – 75 per cent of electricity generation in the UK is from coal or gas-fired plants.

"So, with nuclear, France is largely insulated from soaring fossil fuel prices for electricity while Britain is hugely exposed.

"As a result, a typical EDF customer in France pays £332.50 per annum for electricity while an EDF Energy customer in UK pays £442.07."

Yes, nuclear does have different costs, decomissioning for a start. It\’s also hugely subject to the rate of interest, given the large upfront costs.

Whether it is in fact cheaper or not is a little more difficult to divine though, given the huge State interventions (on both sides of the Channel).

John Edwards and Rielle Hunter

Yup, it was all true.

Well, maybe and maybe not. Now the two things are, is he the father of the child? Further, do we actually believe this about the payoffs?

He insisted he had "not been engaged in any activity of any description that requested, agreed to or supported payments of any kind to the woman or to the apparent father of the baby".

A televised confession by Mr Edwards taped by ABC News, which had been investigating the affair, was due to be broadcast late on Friday night.

Fred Baron, the chief fundraiser for Mr Edwards, indicated that money had been given to Ms Hunter and Andrew Young, the former Edwards aide, who is married with children, who has said he is the father.

"I decided independently to help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to conduct a normal life," said Mr Baron, a Dallas trial lawyer.

Up to you really.

One thing that is really going to grate amongst the more po-faced American journos is that once again it was the National Enquirer the broke the story while they all looked the other way as if someone had just farted at the dinner table.

Ummm

Dr Jessica Ringrose, a lecturer in the sociology of gender at London\’s Institute of Education, said…

Really? How interesting.

 

Excuse Me?

China has invested an extraordinary amount of emotional capital in the opening of the Olympic games in Beijing today. This is China\’s moment of national glory. The legitimacy the government will reap from the games will be worth more to it than the $43bn they have cost so far.

In a low wage country hosting the Games has cost (and we\’re not done yet) £21.5 billion pounds? And there are still people insisting that in a high wage country, with another four years inflation added on, that the Games here will cost us only £9 billion?

It is to laugh.

Tee Hee

In the new ad released by the Republicans, Clinton is shown saying: "I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House and Senator Obama has a speech that he gave in 2002."

These primary things do have a way of coming back to bite, don\’t they?

So it was a speculative bubble then

So says Martin Vader Weyer.

Just possibly, it means that what investors refer to in shorthand as the great "oil up" story has finally revealed itself not as the fundamental reflection of scarce supply that its adherents liked to claim, but as a simple, speculative bubble that was always going to burst.

Hmm. It\’s just a little odd that he then goes on to list a series of real (rather than purely speculative) reasons for the rise and now fall.

And meanwhile, five years of rising oil prices have provoked a wave of investment in new drilling and refinery capacity – including the opening up of inaccessible oil sources that no one wanted to tackle when prices were low. Whether it is deep under the Arctic ice-cap or soaked into the tar-sands of northern Alberta, there turns out to be quite a lot more oil waiting to be exploited before we really approach the peak-oil apocalypse. More than that, high oil prices have encouraged rapid development of such alternative energy sources as wind and solar power, and more efficient engine and heating technologies.

On the demand side, a shuddering deceleration in economic activity across the industrialised world is starting to take pressure away. Many economists think the downturn will be deep and painful, and Opec (whose predictions are naturally at the low end of the range) thinks demand for its output could be lower in the early part of the next decade than it was in 2006.

In the motor industry, the talk is of plunging sales of gas-guzzlers, as drivers on both sides of the Atlantic switch to smaller, fuel-efficient cars – or simply cut out non-essential mileage. Even in China, for all the Olympic razzamatazz, a fall-off in Western demand for cheap manufactured exports must soon lead to at least a tempering of growth in energy demand.

There is a way of combining these two of course: Old Adam pointed it out in 1776.

Speculators anticipate (at least those going long do) higher prices. By their purchasing actions they create those higher prices which then lead us to economise now (and produce more), not in the future when the shortage occurs, leading to there being less of a shortage at that future point.

That is then, that speculators perform the very task that we would wish performed: by attempting to profit from a coming shortage, they reduce that coming shortage.

Good system, innit?

Not a surprise really.

The TaxPayers\’ Alliance claimed the RDAs had contributed "nothing" since they were established in 1999 but had cost almost £600 per household over the past nine years.

The analysis claims that gross value added rose faster before the RDAs were created than after. Given that this is the government\’s preferred measure of success, they seem to have a point.

But then, handing over oodles of cash to civil servants in order to develop business….who really thought that would work?

Sure, business does require some things from the State: an infrastructure, a legal system, there would certainly be benefits from a decent education system if we actually had one. But beyond these the best thing for the State to do is bugger off.

And no, having people who know nothing about business fire-hosing tax money around doesn\’t help.

Organic Ain\’t Better

Or at least, organic fruits and vegetables do not have more vitamins and minerals in them than conventionally grown.

Shoppers can pay up to a third more for organic produce, but the researchers said that with no more nutrients, it was a "lifestyle choice".

Dr Susanne Bugel and a team at the University of Copenhagen\’s Department of Human Nutrition, studied fruit and vegetables on most families\’ shopping lists, including carrots, peas, apples and potatoes.

The team found no clear evidence of any difference in the vitamin and mineral content between the organically and the chemically grown crops.

Their findings are published in the Society of Chemical Industry\’s Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

In fact, given those higher prices, organics are one third worse for your nutrition per pound spent on food.

As a lifestyle choice, for the taste, by all means: but the health bit seems to be a con.

I\’m not sure about this

British households are having their "pockets picked" by foreign energy firms to subsidise customers in their own countries, the Government’s new consumer champion has said.

I\’ve no doubt that they would like to (any firm would like to pick the pockets of its customers) but I\’m not sure that I can see the mechanism by which they can.

Britain’s energy bills have risen more quickly than on the Continent, where governments have manipulated markets to protect customers.

OK, but I still can\’t see how this affects us.

Mr Mayo said households were suffering because foreign companies — often owned by the state — faced no competition at home.

"Closed and protectionist European energy markets end up picking the pockets of consumers in this country," he said.

I\’ve no doubt that both those things are true as well….that some companies have no or little competition at home and that rigidities in the markets do cost our own consumers dear.

But it\’s that first bit that I\’ve got the problem with. Just how are these companies charging us more to subsidise their home consumers? In the UK they are in a competitive market so they cannot just charge what they wish.

So how does this mysterious process work, anyone know?

 

Ritchie Babbie!

Everyone\’s favourite retired accountant tells us about Dell, their taxation and the notes to their accounts concerning it. He asks the important question.

5) If the company you were investing in reported lower taxes because of the mix of jurisdictions in which income was generated, but you knew that its home state rate would eventually have to be paid if you as a stockholder were to catch sight of that income as a dividend what would you think of its intention to make payment to you as an investor?

Not a lot actually. Dell doesn\’t pay a dividend.

Spoling Changes

Given that English often spells identical sounds in several ways, it is little wonder that English-speaking adults always come near the bottom in international studies on literacy, he says.

The ee-sound, for example can be spelt as in: seem, team, convene, sardine, protein, fiend, people, he, key, ski, debris and quay. Yet there are no rules for deciding when to use which, so why not just spell the ee-sound simply as “ee”? To ease the switch from current spelling to a more phonetic system, the Spelling Society advocates a period of transition in which traditional and new forms are used together.

One reason why we don\’t do this could be that team and teem, while pronounced the same way and, in this new method, spelt the same way, actually mean rather different things.

Yes, Inglish Spolling is difficult, weird even, but it does allow us to be precise in our meanings.

Guardian Corrections

Our obituary of Alekandr Solzhenitsyn (page 30, August 5), said that after the mid-1960s his works were never republished while the Soviet regime remained in power. In fact in the perestroika period several were republished, including The Gulag Archipelago.

Actually, the publication of Gulag in the perestroika years was the first (non-samizdat) publication in the Soviet Union.

Do they run a corrections to the corrections page page?

At Least They Know Their Place

Isn\’t there something delighfully feudal about this?

I remember sitting in a campaign meeting during the Newbury bypass protests and marvelling at the weirdness of our coalition. In the front row sat the local squirearchy: brigadiers in tweeds and enormous moustaches, titled women in twin sets and headscarves. In the middle were local burghers of all shapes and sizes. At the back sat the scuzziest collection of grunge-skunks I have ever laid eyes on.

The old order seems to re-establish itself in the most unexpected places.

That Klein Thesis

Yes, I know that Naomi wrote a book on how the evil marketeers and neocons (a bizarre conjoining in itself) use crisis to advance the right wing agenda.

It\’s just that while many pay lip service to the book, no one actually believes the main thesis.

Capitalist crisis usually spells opportunity for progressives – their moment to point out errors and suggest remedies.

Sex Advice

I do wonder sometimes. Here\’s a piece on sex and childbirth.

OK, the set up is that the woman has gone off sex a bit after having the child. Nothing unusual there at all. The bloke\’s a bit miffed by this, nothing unusual there at all either.

The advice? Get him to care for the baby a bit.

Eh?

Look, \’e\’s not miffed because there\’s now three of them, he\’s miffed because he\’s not getting any. Why not tell her to lie back and think of England occasionally to keep him happy?

After all, we all do things in a relationship that we\’re not all that keen on, just to keep the relationship going, don\’t we? I\’ve been clothes shopping for example…..

Invest in Aluminium?

Here\’s the pitch. Energy prices are way up, the bulk of the cost of aluminium is energy in production, so shouldn\’t aluminium rise in price?

We were all rocked by the news that British Gas had imposed a whopping 35 per cent increase on energy bills – and its rivals will undoubtedly follow suit in the coming weeks. This is a huge blow to households already wilting under higher mortgage costs, higher food costs and higher petrol prices. An aluminium exchange traded fund, which tracks an aluminium index, could be a route to profiting from the sky-high energy costs.

The manufacture of aluminium uses immense amounts of energy: it takes 15,000kWh to make a tonne of aluminium, compared with 67kWh for lead. Again, supply is constrained yet the metal is used by the automobile industry and in consumer durables, mobile phones, LCD televisions, MP3 players, cans and foil. Again, experts argue that the growth of China will fuel the demand, which they reckon will outstrip that for any other metal.

Well, mebbe. Except the aluminium companies know the energy cost of Al of course. So the plants are deliberately put in places where there\’s lots of cheap energy. Indeed, lots of energy that cannot be used in other ways. Like hydro projects in the wilds of Quebec, or Iceland for example.

Sure, there\’s some effect (it\’s been known in times of high energy prices on the West Coast for Al companies to turn off their pots and make more money selling the electricity they buy on long term fixed price contracts from hydro plants than bothering to use it to make Al) but a great deal of the industry relies upon power that can\’t be used any other way. Deliberately so. Indeed, many dams have been built specifically to feed Al plants….rather than build the dam and then set up hundreds of miles of high voltage cable to export the leccie (with all the associated transmission losses) it\’s cheaper by far to import the alumina and export the Al and the electricity embedded into it.

This doesn\’t mean that Al won\’t rise in price….just that it\’s not a bet that I would take on this basis.

 

Yes, We Knew This

Putting up a small wind turbine on the roof of a suburban home may be a waste of time, according to a new report.

It may not generate enough renewable energy even to make up for the carbon emissions produced when it was made.

They\’re a fashion statement, nothing more, and one that is counter-productiove.

Our Glorious Education System!

Many undergraduates misspell basic words such as "their", "speech" or even "Wednesday" in essays, it is claimed.

First year students are the worst offenders, despite already spending at least 13 years in the education system.

Pretty good result for that £90 grand odd spent on the little darlings over the years, innit?

My, the intense joys of the government provision of services.