Timmy Elsewhere
The Business.
Idiocy from Ofsted again and the most amazing rendition of Stairway to Heaven.
Hang Them, Hang Them All
Those responsible for burdening us all with this monstrous mountain of bumpf.
We are due a visit from it shortly. We had the early years person round to check all was in order. She looked through it all, nodded her approval, paused. “But you haven\’t,” she said, “got a Going Out For a Walk Policy.” No kidding.
Gibbets to the fore lads, hempen to hand.
Why We Zig Zag
The comment on this seems appropriate:
Why do scientists get paid for researching into the blindingly obvious? How much did this research cost the taxpayer?
Excellent News
The Government may retreat from its commitment to make all drivers use an increasing proportion of biofuel in their fuel tanks.
Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, announced a study into the impact that the production of biofuels has on the environment. The Department for Transport (DfT) said that it would not support a European plan to increase the proportion of biofuel in petrol and diesel to 10 per cent by 2020 unless it could be proved that it reduced overall greenhouse gas emissions.
The DfT will maintain its Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation, which requires all forecourts to provide 2.5 per cent of their fuel from biofuel sources from April 15.
Ms Kelly said: “We are not prepared to go beyond current UK target levels for biofuels until we are satisfied it can be done sustainably.”
The study will be completed by the summer and, if it finds that the effects on the environment are negative, the plan for forecourts to supply 5 per cent of their fuel from biofuel sources by 2010 could be abandoned.
When the facts change, changing one\’s mind is a useful thing to do. Government, by it\’s nature, finds this very hard to do but at least we\’ve got something sensible here.
Ooooh, Polly?
The CBI claims 250,000 jobs would be lost – but service jobs always need doing.
Umm, you\’ve never hard of substituting capital for labour? Being a counter clerk in a bank is a service job. We\’ve a lot fewer of them than we would if we didn\’t have ATMs.
You\’ve failed to understand the most basic point. If agency workers become more expensive (which the application of permanent employment rights would do) then there will be fewer jobs available to agency workers. Might take a litle time to work through the system, but it\’ll definitely happen.
There\’s an Answer to This
There is in short a systemic problem – a roadblock on the route to meritocracy. Roughly 7% of children are educated at private schools, but these pupils take up 45% of Oxbridge places and a disproportionate amount at other top universities. When so many prizes are still going to a narrow, self-selecting pool of expensively coached talent, this makes a mockery of New Labour\’s protracted silence on the subject.
Recognising this is in 2008 the crucial first-order priority; ways of reducing the unfair premium can then be devised. I am not (unlike Alan Bennett) advocating abolition of private schools. Parents are perfectly entitled to spend their money on giving their children a first-class education. What they are not entitled to is the present assumption that that education almost automatically confers major socio-economic advantages.
Make all schools private. Slap a voucher on the back of every ankle biter and let the market sort them out.
Well Said Sir Simon
Lovely piece: Jean Monnet and all the rest are just following in the footsteps of Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Charles V, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon and Hitler. Doomed to failure:
Europe has never tolerated being led. It is a continent of cats, not dogs. Diversity is its glory, cantankerousness its defence. It is not a family or a community but a marketplace, a cultural entrepôt. Those who have sought its unity, even as a political metaphor, have come to grief.
ID Systems
The summary said: "It should be noted that risk can only be managed, not eliminated, and therefore there will always be a risk of data security incidents occurring."
As with the children\’s database, so with the National Identity one. It can never be fully secure: thus we shouldn\’t have it.
Euro MPs
There does seem to be something of a disconnect here, doesn\’t there?
But the parliament said yesterday that it saw no need for an investigation.
"As the internal auditor\’s report has not revealed any individual cases of fraud, he has not recommended referring his findings to the EU anti-fraud agency OLAF," it said in a statement.
EU and Parliament officials have tried to play down the internal audit of parliamentary assistance allowances as a dull and complicated "systems analysis".
In some countries the reaction to the point "MEPs are fiddling the expenses" will be, of course they are, they are politicians. In others it will be a little angrier, in some it will be outrage. Something of a pity that the Parliament seems to be run by those with the first attitude.
More Northern Crock Nonsense
A tiny charity based in a modest Newcastle semi, which is supposed to be the beneficiary of a £45 billion offshore fund set up by Northern Rock, has not received a penny from the bank, and may never do so.
Around half the assets of the state-owned bank are owned by Granite, a Jersey-based organisation which gets tax breaks because it is set up as a charitable trust.
It names Down\’s Syndrome North East (DSNE) as its beneficiary. However, until recently, the small charity was unaware of Granite\’s existence and, while the off-shore trust made billions through its links to Northern Rock, DSNE, which is run by parent volunteers from their homes, raised just £76,000 in 2006.
Yes, OK, so if when Granite is wound up there is a profit in there, ten the DSNE will get it. If there\’s a loss they won\’t get hit with it. In the interim, while we wait to find out,. it makes no damn difference to them. So?
You know, I have a feeling that this whole thing is based upon the sayings of this man. The last couple of days of very dodgy reporting across all of the papers about Granite, what it means, the risks to taxpayers (none) and so on.
Something of a pity that the whole country is dancing to the tune of a man who appears to have his head firmly inserted fundamentally.
Hmm
Thousands of lives a year could be saved by a small rise in alcohol prices, doctors\’ leaders said yesterday as they put more pressure on Gordon Brown to tackle Britain\’s binge-drinking "epidemic".
More than a quarter of all drink-related deaths could be prevented by a 10 per cent rise in taxes on beer, wine and spirits, the British Medical Association (BMA) claimed.
You know, that really would be rather surprising.
Sir Charles George, the chairman of the BMA science and education board, said a 10 per cent rise would prevent 29 per cent of alcohol-related deaths in men and 27 per cent in women.
Are we to assume there that a 10% rise in tax (say, a 6 or 7 % rise in final price) will cut consumption by some 28%? That would make alcohol demand amazingly responsive to changes in price. An extremely elastic response.
Does anyone actually know what the elasticity of demand of alcohol is? Have there been any economic studies on this? Or is the BMA talking out of its arse?
Update: Looking here:
For example, a price elasticity of alcohol demand of -0.5 means that a 1-percent increase in price would reduce alcohol consumption by 0.5 percent (or a 10-percent increase in price would reduce consumption by 5 percent). An extensive review of the economic literature on alcohol demand concluded that based on studies using aggregate data (i.e., data that report the amount of alcohol consumed by large groups of people), the price elasticities of demand for beer, wine, and distilled spirits are -0.3, -1.0, and -1.5, respectively
So a 10% rise in price would reduce consumption of beer by 3%, wine by 10% and spirits by 15%. Is that enough to reduce the medical impact by 28%?
Or here, more specifically the elasticity of demand amongst young people:
The finding that drinking by young adults can be considered an addictive behavior has important implications for the effects of price on alcohol consumption. For example, when Grossman and colleagues (1998) used models that ignored the addictive aspects of alcohol consumption to analyze their data, they estimated an average price elasticity of alcohol demand of -0.29.
That is, a 10% rise in prices will reduce consumption in the age group by 2.9%….you don\’t think the BMA has got a little confused do you? Multiplied the effect by 10? Or forgotten to tell us that it\’s a 100% rise in tax that will reduce the effects by 28%?
Or Table 2.1 here. A meta-study of the research.
A summary of the own price elasticity, qp η , information — reported in absolute value
form — is presented in Table 2.1. Estimates are reported for 18 countries, and there are 46 beer
own-price elasticity estimates, bb η , 54 wine own price elasticity estimates, ww η , and 50 spirits
own-price elasticity estimates, ss η . The bb η estimates ranged from highly inelastic (0.09) to
elastic (1.20), with a mean bb η of 0.38. For the ww η the range of estimated values was slightly
greater; (0.05) to (1.80), ww η = 0.77. While the ss η estimates showed the greatest variation,
ranging from; (0.10) to (2.00), ss η = 0.70. The ww η estimate and the ss η estimate appear quite
similar, and statistical tests — details of which are given in Appendix II — indicate the ww η and
the ss η are not statistically different. Using the same approach, it is possible to conclude the
bb η is statistically different to both the ww η and the ss η .
Frequency distributions for the bb η , the ww η , and the ss η are presented in Figures 2.1,
2.2, and 2.3 and the plots clearly show the majority of estimates to be less than one. In
particular, 93 percent of the bb η estimates, 69 percent of the ww η estimates, and 80 percent of
the ss η estimates are less than one. Based on this result, it might seem reasonable to generalise
and conclude: The demand for all alcoholic beverages is inelastic, and beer is the most
inelastic beverage category.
If the price elasticity of alcohol is less than one, ie inelastic, then the BMA results are higly improbable (ie, what I really mean to say is that they\’re speaking out of their arses). A 10% rise in taxation, a 6 or 7 % rise in total price, will lead to a less than 6 or 7% drop in consumption, meaning that, well, at least I think it means that, there\’s no way that there can be a 28% drop in the medical effects of it.
What\’s Wrong With American Newspapers
This John McCain thing, he and the lobbyist. Read this in The New Republic if you\’d like to know what\’s wrong with the American newspaper industry.
Layer upon layer of bureaucracy, months of dithering about whether to publish a story or not.
At the end of it, after all of this carefulness, we still don\’t know either whether he boffed the bird or even whether the reporters think he boffed the bird.
C\’mon guys, get with the program. A little more news and a little less navel gazing please?
I thought this was superb:
She had spent just six months at the Times and recorded only four bylines before accepting an offer to return to her former employer as an editor overseeing the Post\’s accountability coverage of money and politics.
Writing four pieces in 6 months is the workload? Shit, sign me up for that!
Makes me think that there is money to be made in the US newspaper industry. Hack the number of hacks back to something more reasonable, where those employed to deploy words do so, ooooh, now let\’s not be too harsh, say every other day? Better than having someone employed , the justification for said employment being their ability to make words on the screen, putting said words on the screen once every 6 weeks, no?
Emigration Logic
Hmmm.
One thing will be mentioned more than any other: that unchecked immigration over the past decade is creating a country many Britons no longer feel comfortable in.
I don\’t like living where it is 10% foreigners so I\’ll go and live where it\’s 95 % foreigners.
Not really compelling logic, is it?
Granite?
Eh?
Gordon Brown was last night accused of losing control of Northern Rock after it emerged that the bank\’s best mortgages have been sold on to a little-known offshore company based in the Channel Islands.
Under an agreement entered into by the previous Rock board, control over more than £47 billion of the bank\’s prime mortgages was passed to Granite, a separate offshore company backed by City investors.
The Granite securitisation has been public knowledge for months and common knowledge in the City all along.
MEP Expenses
"We want reform but we cannot make this report available to the public if we want people to vote in the European elections next year," said a source close to the decision.
Only Euro-MPs on the parliament\’s budget control committee are allowed to see the report.
To do so, they must apply to enter a "secret room", protected by biometric locks and security guards. They may not take notes and must sign a confidentiality agreement.
Last night, after an emergency meeting of senior officials including Mr Rømer and Mr Pöttering, triggered by The Daily Telegraph\’s investigation, a spokesman for the parliament denied a cover-up.
"The document is not secret. It is confidential," he said. "It can be read by Euro-MPs on the budget control committee, in the secret room but not generally. That is not the same as a secret document nobody can read."
Let me translate that first sentence for you. We cannot allow this report to be available to the public if we want people to vote for us in the European elections next year.
UKIP. you know it makes sense.
What a Surprise!
Britain\’s biggest supermarket is urging the Government o introduce new laws to ban the sale of cut-price alcohol amid growing concern over the level of drink-fuelled crime and disorder.
Bollocks. Alcohol is used as a loss-leader. Stop people from competing on the price of alcohol and supermarket profits will go up: and consumerbenefits go down. This is a markedly pro-capitalist and anti-consumer measure.