As I was saying eleven years ago...

From Petapixel, 30/8/2022 "French Officials Use [Google] Satellite Photos and AI to Spot Unregistered Pools.

It appears that France, like Greece, taxes swimming pools. (Why?  Swimming pools are not inherently a bad thing. Tax the location value of land, or charge more for mains water and electricity, job done).

From my blog, 26/6/2011:

Officially, just over 300 Kifissia residents admitted to having a pool. The true figure is believed to be 20,000. There is even a boom in sales of tarpaulins to cover pools and make them invisible to the aerial tax inspectors. ‘The most popular and effective measure used by owners is to camouflage their pool with a khaki military mesh to make it look like natural undergrowth,’ says Vasilis Logothetis, director of a major swimming pool construction company. ‘That way, neither helicopters nor Google Earth can spot them.’(5)

My footnote 5) Most pictures on Google Earth are several years old, it's too late to try and camouflage your swimming pool now.

Or, I suppose, you could cover the bottom of the swimming pool with the same slabs as the surrounding patio, instead of having it pale blue, and turn off any underwater lights so it's not so bloody obvious from space. But Google has ten or twenty years' worth of old satellite photos to sift through pre-camouflage, and they could still get you on mains water usage, or tip-offs from neighbours.

Wolf news

From the BBC:

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of species disappeared from the Swiss Alps: the brown bear, the lynx and the wolf. The high mountain environment, so often regarded as pure and untouched, had been ravaged by one particular predator - humans.

Now all three species are back. The bears and the wolves returned naturally*, the lynx has been successfully reintroduced. But the dream of people and animals living harmoniously side by side has turned, for some alpine farming communities, into a bit of a nightmare.

No shit, Sherlock. Our ancestors had good reasons for wiping out wolves, it wasn't just a whim...

Just this month a sheep farmer close to the Swiss capital Bern woke to find seven of his 35 sheep dead, their throats ripped out by a wolf that had apparently jumped over the electric fence designed to protect the flock.

And inevitably...

Farmers are increasingly impatient. Last year they called a referendum demanding the law be changed to make it easier to hunt and kill problematic wolves. Swiss voters, most of whom live in cities, said no.

The French on the other hand seem to be taking a more robust approach. From The Daily Mail:

A zoo in southern France has been closed down temporarily by local authorities after a pack of wolves escaped from their enclosure and roamed around the site during visiting hours.

A total of nine wolves escaped from their enclosure last weekend at Trois Vallées Zoo in Montredon-Labessonnie, roughly 60 miles east of Toulouse. Four wolves were shot dead due to 'dangerous behaviour', before the five remaining animals were anaesthetised and returned to their enclosures by local officials who were called to the scene.

* The article says that wolves came up from Italy. Wiki says it has been strictly protected in Italy since the 1970s, so this is on them. The bears seem to have come from the east, via Austria.

With French like these, who needs enemies?

From The Evening Standard:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been warned that there can be no Brexit deal without the Irish backstop by one of Emmanuel Macron’s strongest allies. Former French EU minister Nathalie Loiseau sent the stark warning to Mr Johnson on Sunday morning, telling Sky News “we would not ratify the Withdrawal Agreement without a backstop”.

Ms Loiseau told Sky’s Sophie Ridge: “The way the UK wants to leave the EU, you have a choice – there is the Withdrawal Agreement which is on the table or there is no deal. Let me say this clearly, there is nothing in between. You have the British Parliament but we have the European Parliament and we would not ratify the Withdrawal Agreement without a backstop.”

Fair enough, that's what the EU wants; we don't and so we'll have to agree to disagree.

Asked what the EU would insist on before starting trade talks, she said: “There will not be – if there was to be a no-deal – any negotiation on the future relationship with the EU without having clarity for Ireland, without having clarity for due payments and without having clarity for protection of citizens.”

In other words, if we go for No Deal, then they want to impose the Withdrawal Agreement on us anyway, which we won't accept... and then what?

I guess there's only one way to find out.

Cargo Cult Improvement

From The Guardian

Just over a decade ago, Mulhouse, a town of 110,000 people near the German and Swiss borders, was a symbol of the death of the European high street. One of the poorest towns of its size in France, this former hub of the textile industry had long ago been clobbered by factory closures and industrial decline.

...

Today, Mulhouse is known for the staggering transformation of its thriving centre, bucking the national trend for high street closures.

The article goes into all the normal Guardian favourites like independent shops and god help me, f**king trams. These people think that gentrification is all about putting the independent shops there and that makes everyone richer and they spend money. In reality this is a by-product. You get the fancy, overpriced shops when you get the richer people.

What's really happened in the past decade is that a new shiny high speed LGV line was built linking Mulhouse to Dijon, cutting the time from something like 2:30 to more like 1:00, and onwards, Mulhouse to Lyon is down from 4:30 to 3:00. There's also a plan to have a branch going around Dijon to join up with a TGV to Paris, and to extend the line down to Lyon.

France not entirely daft - shock

from Ecommerce News Europe:

The French Minister of Finance told newspaper Le Parisien that the proposed tax is aimed at companies with worldwide digital revenue of at least 750 million euros and a French revenue of more than 25 million euros.

He wants to target commission-based online platforms, like Amazon or Booking.com. Companies that sell their products on their own websites, like French ecommerce company Darty, wouldn’t be targeted.

Good start - the point about these platform/intermediary companies is that their value is in network effects aka rent, and rent is the main thing that governments should be taxing. You have to be able to distinguish it from true earnings, which is why companies like Darty are exempted. People only use Facebook, Twitter etc because everybody else does.

In total, there are about 30 companies that would be affected if the tax plan gets greenlighted. These companies are mostly American, but also German, Spanish and British, as well as one French company (Criteo) and several companies that are originally from France but have been bought by foreign players.

According to Le Maire, a taxation system for the 21st century has to be built on what has value today. “And that’s data”, he said. The minister also added it’s a matter of fiscal justice, with these companies paying some 14 percentage points less tax than small- and medium sized enterprises in Europe.

He misses two points. It's not so much control and ownership of "data" in itself that indicates a rentier status (some companies store lots of their own data, and good luck to them, that's not rent, that's good record-keeping), it's "other people's data" aka network effect etc. And how much tax other companies pay is irrelevant, if they are earned profits in a competitive market, then they should be taxed at lower rates (or not at all). But never mind.

Nobody move or the French farmers get hurt!

From the BBC:

The head of France's main farmers' union has warned that a no-deal Brexit could have a severe impact on French agricultural exports. 

Christiane Lambert of the FNSEA union said French wine and spirits producers would be hit hardest, as their sector had a €1.3bn (£1.1bn; $1.5bn) annual surplus in trade with the UK. Dairy goods and fruit are also major French exports. A UK no-deal exit from the EU would bring new customs checks and rules.

Ms Lambert told broadcaster France Info that "the British are very fond of Camembert and Brie... Brie exported dairy products would come back to Europe and push prices down. Theapple sector would also be badly hit - France is the biggest supplier of apples to the UK - and then there are [French] vegetables and cereals."

She warned that the UK would revert to "third country" status with a no-deal Brexit, "and it could restrict imports - that's our fear".

So how is France preparing for a no-deal Brexit?

On Thursday France announced a contingency plan for a no-deal scenario, including nearly 600 extra customs inspectors to staff ports and airports. Calais - the main hub for trade with the UK - has started expanding its facilities to cope with possible delays and traffic queues.

That's called getting your retaliation in first!

Here's an idea: the EU and the UK enter into an agreement saying that there will be
a) mutual recognition of standards (seeing as UK regulations on Day One will be identical to EU standards and will only diverge slowly over time), and
b) no imposition of quotas or tariffs on trade between the EU and the UK.

Everyone's a winner! Over to you, France/EU!

Nobody move or the French tourism industry gets hurt!

From the Daily Mail:

Britons could need visas to visit France if the UK does crash out of the EU without a deal.

As Theresa May arrived in Brussels for a crunch summit, the French government ramped up its preparations for a no-deal Brexit and said Britons would become ‘nationals of third parties’ and would probably need travel permits to visit.

That's their unilateral decision, isn't it? You can't blame that on Brexit.

One step forward, one step back...

From The Independent:

Emmanuel Macron’s administration will propose a tax on luxury yachts, supercars and precious metals in France’s 2018 budget.

Lawmakers will propose amendments after critics attacked the President’s move to scrap the wealth tax in France. Mr Macron abolished the tax, which has been seen as a symbol of social justice for the left but blamed by others for driving thousands of millionaires abroad.

The wealth tax, introduced by the Socialists in the 1980s, was levied on individuals with assets above 1.3 million euros (£1.2 million). Initial plans were to replace it with a real estate tax but yachts, luxury cars and jewellery were supposed to escape.

"The idea of the wealth tax reform was that there should not be a brake on contributors to economic production, that we suppress taxes that deter investors," Richard Ferrand, leader of the Republic on the Move parliamentary group, told Ouest France. "Taxing real estate wealth is compatible with this, but goods such as yachts, luxury cars or precious metals do not contribute to the productive economy either."

Unusually for me, I praised Macron for replacing the general wealth tax with a land value tax; what the idiots have now done is reverse that for a complete non-reason: "goods such as yachts, luxury cars or precious metals do not contribute to the productive economy". Those things are very much part of the productive economy. People produce them, needs are satisfied, people get paid wages etc. There is no fundamental qualitative difference between inflatable dinghies and super-luxury yachts.

They also miss the point. Even if the idea is just want to "squeeze the rich", you can raise far more from a straight land value tax than from a general wealth tax because you can apply a high rate to land (which makes up the bulk of 'wealth' anyway) and collect it all (land is immobile). If you treat all 'wealth' equally and thus apply the same rate to all of it, then the revenue maximising rate has to be very low because it is too easy to evade/under declare/hide all the non-land 'wealth', or simply move abroad and take your non-land 'wealth' with you, as many have done. 3% of £80 is more than 0.5% of £100, if you see what I mean

There is no justification for a general wealth tax anyway, of course, but sod principles, it's about 'what works'. If something doesn't 'work', it's a clue that it was a bad idea.

I suppose this could be a clever move by the French Home-Owner-Ist fifth column to minimise the tax rate on their land by equating it with manufactured goods? Who knows?

President Macron has vaguely good idea - shock

From The Daily Mail:

France needs it's [sic] new lower tax on wealth in order to stem its exodus of millionaires, the country's Prime Minister has warned.

Edouard Philippe defended President Emmanuel Macrons' economic reforms, which have seen thousands take to the street this week, saying they are needed to make France attractive [to] the wealthy again... The annual millionaire's migration report by New World Wealth found that around 10,000 millionaires left France for other countries in 2015...

France's wealth tax currently applies to personal assets of more than 1.3 million euros, but as of Macron's new budget, it will only apply to real estate. Any other forms of wealth, such as shareholdings, will be exempt as of 2018, the government announced this week.

Bravo! An annual recurring 'wealth tax' which only applies to land and buildings is pretty damn' close to Land Value Tax. And a general 'wealth tax' is a stupid idea for various reasons, not least the practicalities of it.

Caveat: it ought to apply to all land and buildings in France, however much or little it is worth, whoever own it and wherever they are tax resident. They can make this look more like a 'wealth tax' by introducing a personal annual exempt allowance for French residents. Admittedly, that is probably against EU law, so residents of other EU member states would also have to get the personal allowance as well. I once did this for real, and the higher charge for a UK resident was waived in the end.

Top euphemising by the French

Emailed in by MBK from The Times:

A teenage girl was killed and four people were seriously injured when a man drove a car on to the terrace of a pizza restaurant near Paris last night.

Police said that it was a deliberate act but they did not suspect terrorism, adding that they believed the man was under the influence of drugs…

The driver of the grey BMW, a 32-year-old French national, was arrested at the scene in Sept-Sorts, 40 miles east of Paris… He told police he had weapons in the car, according to the radio station RTL.

Eric de Valroger, deputy regional prosecutor, said it was “highly probable” the driver was on drugs and deliberately rammed the car into those at the restaurant.

UPDATE Surprise, surprise, it appears that the driver was just a complete arsehole, rather than one with religious motives.

Fun Online Polls: The French presidential election & Bank Holiday Monday weather

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

If you were voting in the French presidential election:

Macron - the Europhile, Goldman Sachs-funded former Rothschilds banker and Socialist minister - 7%
LePen - the other one - 93%

I wasn't expecting the result to be nigh unanimous. Perhaps it's partly to do with how I phrased the question. Perhaps it wasn't value neutral enough?

It appears to me that Le Pen is rather more sympathetic towards Brexit, which is why I voted for her. Whether she will be better or worse for France (from the point of view of the French) than the Establishment candidate is not really my concern and I have no strong opinion either way.

A good turnout, thanks to all 129 who took part.
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When I was agreeing with Mrs W what to do over the Bank Holiday, she said we're not pencilling in any trips for Monday as it always rains on a Bank Holiday Monday.

Sure enough, it was lovely at the weekend (when we did our outdoor stuff)  and is now chucking it down here.


So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

"Is it fair to say that it normally rains on a Bank Holiday Monday?"

Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything.

The right way

From a London Assembly press release:

Recommendations include:

• The Mayor must take a visible lead in tackling FGM. The delivery of the Police and Crime Plan must demonstrate this commitment and drive a multi-agency response to FGM.

• A pan-London campaign to raise awareness of the real dangers of FGM, signposting women and girls to the support they require.

• Communities affected by FGM should be engaged to raise awareness, strengthen community-based prevention work and provide training for professionals.

• The Mayor must support the provision of bespoke training for London’s frontline practitioners.

• Support should be given to the police, health, social care and education services, voluntary organisations and communities.

The wrong way

From Sky News:

Mandatory checks are already law in France, which has had far greater success prosecuting FGM cases. Although it has been illegal in the UK since 1987, there have been no successful prosecutions.

Ms Parker said: "All these measures to combat this despicable crime are already law in France, a country that has a far, far better record than us on FGM. Not only have they proven effective both in protecting girls in France from FGM, they also help provide essential evidence to mount prosecutions where FGM has taken place. It is time the United Kingdom caught up."

Fun Online Polls: North Korea; The French presidential election

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How would you prefer Donald Trump to deal with North Korea?

Stop ramping up the rhetoric and just ignore them - 28%
Try and persuade PR China to withdraw support - 44%
Continue with gunboat diplomacy - 6%
Drop a nuke on Pyongyang - 13%
Launch a full-on invasion - 2%
Other, please specify - 7%

Good, I voted for one of the first two (I think the second one), having read around, that does seem like the most sensible option.
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This week's Fun Online Poll, before it's superseded by events:

If you were voting in the French presidential election:

Macron - the Europhile former Rothschilds banker and Socialist minister, whose campaign was apparently funded by Goldman Sachs.

LePen - the other one..

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Northern ports tempt shippers away from Dover after migrant crisis"

Emailed in by Physiocrat, from the FT:

Ports outside the south-east have benefited from disruption at Dover, helping them to win a greater share of Britain’s growing container and vehicle trade. Northern ports have been selling the benefits of avoiding the congested roads of the south-east and investing in infrastructure just as some hauliers sought alternatives to Dover, hit by the migrant crisis.

The cross-channel route has been declared secure a month after the demolition of the “Jungle” refugee camp and freight traffic is growing again. But government figures for the first half of the year show a drop at Dover as traffic was displaced. Harwich and Felixstowe, the big south-east container ports, also lost traffic to London Gateway, which is expanding fast...

That's only half the story of course. The problem with Dover is not with Dover, but the fact that the traffic there arrives from Calais/France. So this is a golden opportunity for Belgian and Dutch ports as well.

Fun Online Polls - Applying for UK asylum in France, Boyle's Law Gay-Lussac's Law and Greenhouse gases

The results to last fortnight's poll were as follows:

The French want to allow 'refugees' seeking asylum in the UK to lodge their claim while still in France.

Good idea (we can reject them out of hand and they remain France's problem) - 73%
Bad idea - 27%

That is of course on the assumption that their claims are processed by British officials, and not simply rubber stamped by French officials keen to get rid of them.
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So China and the USA signed up to this Paris Agreement on restricting CO2 emissions last week.

Which made me think, unless they are just doing this for presentational reasons, maybe I'm wrong and there is something in this global warming stuff.

So I re-read a standard explanation, all just about plausible until this bit:

Without this natural greenhouse effect, primarily owing to water vapor and carbon dioxide, Earth’s mean surface temperature would be a freezing -1°F, instead of the habitable 59°F we currently enjoy. Despite their small amounts, then, the greenhouse gases strongly affect Earth’s temperature. Increasing their concentration augments the natural greenhouse effect.

That is, I am afraid, complete bollocks and if that's all they've got as evidence then I am still not buying it.

The real reason why the surface is approx. 30C warmer than it 'should' be, bearing in mind distance from the sun and albedo is because of Boyle's Law.

UPDATE: I conferred with VFTS, the more appropriate gas law is one of Gay-Lussac's Laws:

The pressure of a gas of fixed mass and fixed volume is directly proportional to the gas's absolute temperature… This law holds true because temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a substance; as the kinetic energy of a gas increases, its particles collide with the container walls more rapidly, thereby exerting increased pressure.

So higher pressure = higher temperature and higher temperature = higher pressure and vice versa. The top half of the atmosphere pushes the bottom half down (compresses it) ; and the bottom half pulls the top half down (expands it). The bottom half is warmer than it 'should' be and the top half is colder than it 'should' be. On average, it is the right temperature, the -1F referred to in the first excerpt.

The atmosphere works like a giant heat pump - the upper atmosphere is colder than it should be and the lower atmosphere is warmer than it should be. The actual temperature half way up by volume i.e. 5.6 km is approx. 30C cooler than the surface and is in fact exactly what you would predict, bearing in mind distance from the sun.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Personne se bouge! Ou...

… or something or other.

From the BBC:

Mr Macron told Le Monde: "Leaving the EU would mean the 'Guernseyfication' of the UK, which would then be a little country on the world scale. It would isolate itself and become a trading post and arbitration place at Europe's border."


And he said the European Council would have to deliver an ultimatum to the UK about its intentions and that France's President Hollande would be very clear.

"If the UK wants a treaty of commercial access to the European market, the British will have to contribute to the European budget like the Norwegians or the Swiss. If London doesn't want that, then the exit will have to be total."

It's not clear whether he's just insulting us, making predictions or making threats, either way, it makes me even more determined to vote Brexit.

Personne ne bouge ou vos éleveurs de bovins l'obtiendront!

Emailed in by MBL from The Daily Mail:

Mr Lamy, a Frenchman who headed the World Trade Organisation between 2005 and 2013, said that the rest of the EU would drive a 'hard bargain' in the event of Brexit...

"My own country will probably be among the hardest to negotiate with. Imagine how eager French farmers will be not to have your beef or lamb on our supermarket shelves. And no one will show any love for the City of London.

"If it fails to get a deal, there is a real risk that the UK would have to fall back on WTO rules. Some in the Leave campaign have said this would not be a bad option. As the former head of the WTO, let me be clear: this would be a terrible replacement for access to the EU single market.

"Though tariffs have fallen, they are still high enough to hurt businesses and therefore jobs: 10 per cent for cars, 12 per cent on clothes, 70 per cent on some beef products.

So, a bit like during the period 1996 - 2006, then? Distressing for British beef farmers (who do a very good job) but hardly a disaster for the economy. We'll just have to eat more of the stuff ourselves and we'll be able to go to McDonalds with the warm glow of having fulfilled our patriotic duty.

Lost in translation?

From the BBC:

The agreement between France and the UK that allows the UK to conduct border controls on the French side of the Channel is a bilateral treaty that is not connected to Britain's EU membership.

It is meant to stop people from travelling across the Channel without their immigration status being checked - but has led to the establishment of the so-called Jungle camp in Calais, where about 4,000 migrants are thought to be waiting to cross...

France could opt to end the border treaty any time - but the country's interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said to do so would be "foolhardy" and cause "a humanitarian disaster".

His colleague, economy minister Emmanuel Macron, gave a different view in his FT interview, saying of Britain's EU membership: "The day this relationship unravels, migrants will no longer be in Calais."

Say what?

To summarise: if we vote to leave, on the next day, the French will do something which they themselves describe as 'foolhardy' and which would cause 'a humanitarian disaster'?

Go for it lads, go for it.

It's a bit like Cameron's volte face:

November 2015:

The Prime Minister told an audience at the Confederation of British Industry that the EU referendum debate was not about whether exit from the bloc was possible.

“Some people seem to say that really Britain couldn’t survive, couldn’t do okay outside the European Union. I don’t think that is true. Let’s be frank, Britain is an amazing country. We’ve got the fifth biggest economy in the world. We’re a top ten manufacturer. We’ve got incredibly strong financial services. The world wants to come and do business here.

“Look at the record of inward investment. Look at the leaders beating the path to our door to come and see what’s happening with this great country’s economy. The argument isn’t whether Britain could survive outside the EU. Of course it could.”

February 2016:

The Prime Minister said he believes Britain will be "stronger, safer and better off" in a reformed EU.

He also warned of the security challenges facing the West and said it was no time for division.

"The challenges facing the West today are genuinely threatening," Mr Cameron said. "Putin’s aggression in the east, Islamist extremism to the south. In my view this is no time to divide the west."

What a load of alarmist nonsense

Here

If lots of illegal immigrants without adequate papers are allowed on cross channel ferries by lax French border officials and end up at Dover, from what I recall, international law is quite clear they can and will be sent back on the next boat.

Of course the French could mischievously issue said immigrants with French papers, but this would be easy to spot and deal with.

French police are decent blokes: shock

From The Telegraph:

... the pair decided to scale the Eiffel Tower from the outside. Kingston describes the first moments of the escapade:

"We started the climb at 1am, narrowly avoiding the patrolling security – who seemed more like the French army as they were in full camo and had massive guns. We then wormed our way through what seemed like endless CCTV cameras. But once we reached about 20 metres up the side of the tower it appeared we'd made it through what would normally be the riskiest part of any climb..."

After a brief period of jumping from strut to strut as the sun came up, Kingston and his partner returned to the ground, where they were promptly arrested.

"We were handcuffed and taken to the local police station," says Kingston, "where we were held and questioned for around 6 hours before being released without any charges. so had to promise them I wouldn't climb it again for 3 yearst I can now officially tick the Eiffel Tower off my list."