Lockdown is a golden opportunity to realign the academic year with the calendar year

My daughter, who is in her first year of doing A-levels came up with this plan, which I thought was pretty good:

1. Schools and universities all start again in September with the syllabus they were supposed to cover in the summer term.

2. Pupils and students who should have taken exams this summer just take them in December instead, when everything is hopefully nearly back to normal.

3. The academic year now ends in December with a few weeks off for Xmas and New Year before the next academic year starts. Hooray, lazing around and partying without anything to revise and no homework to do!

4. Bonus #1 is that people will get real GSCEs or A-Levels in December 2020, instead of notional GSCEs or A-Levels awarded by their teachers. Surely a real B grade is better than a notional A grade?

5. Bonus #2 is that the anachronistic and nonsensically long summer holiday would be a thing of the past, each school just pencils in a few shorter holidays of two or three weeks* scattered through the year, which would reduce the price differential between 'summer season' and 'rest of year'.

* So they can have holidays to coincide with European Cup, World Cup, Olympics, Wimbledon (for the posh schools) etc and kids and teachers can enjoy them in full. A level pupils get a few weeks off during festival season. And so on.

I had more work done on my Toyota MR2 this weekend...

Review posted on his Facebook page.

It's a bit out of the way for us (we live on Essex), so we stopped off at Derwentwater for a fifty minute round trip on the lake on the way home.

Probably Apochryphal, but...

Mrs L copied me into an article on Facepage which tells a story about an old lady perpetually on a cruise ship because, for excellent 'care', it is far less costly than a care home on-shore.


So, what's the one cost that the care home has to pay that the ship doesn't?


And what is the way in which this could be adjusted?

Holiday photos

About twenty years ago, I decided that photograph albums were boring. Even worse is having to feign interest when somebody shows you theirs.

(Since the advent of electronic cameras and mobile phones with cameras it has got far worse, because people don't come back with one or two rolls or film, they come back with hundreds of pictures which you are supposed to view on a tiny screen.)

But I had to do something with our first holiday snaps. So I stripped it down to the bare essentials - a few photos of me and Her Indoors, the train tickets, the receipt from the hotel, the entry tickets to a museum, the front page from the a gallery brochure, a couple of postcards etc - and put it all in a 40cm x 50cm clip frame. The rest got junked.

And I have kept going ever since and now have nearly a whole wall covered in these collages:


This has three main advantages.

1. It fills the original purpose of "keeping those treasured memories alive". You can look at pictures of your kids when they were small and cute etc.

2. If anybody asks where we went on holiday, I can just take down the frame and present it. If the person asking was just doing it out of politeness, they can pretend to look at the collage for thirty seconds or so, say something like "Ooh, that looks lovely." and pass it back with no offence meant and none taken. If they are really interested, because perhaps they have been to the same place or are considering going there, we can have a proper chat.

3. It cuts down on arguments over things like which year we went where, how many times we have flown with EasyJet, how many aquariums we ever have visited, whether we went somewhere for a long weekend or a whole week etc. All you have to to is go over to the wall (standing on the sideboard if necessary) and look.

Fun Online Polls: Bank holiday weather; bombing raids on Iraq and Syria

Apologies for blogging hiatus, we went on a last minute holiday to Legoland Billund, all good fun and very interesting from a town planning/land value perspective, more anon.
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The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Is it more likely to rain on a Bank Holiday?

No - 3%
Probably not, but you notice it more - 69%
Definitely - 27%
Other, please specify - 2%

Derek neatly squared the circle with this: "In the UK April and May tend to be drier months; August, December and January tend to be wetter. Since more bank holidays fall in the wetter months, there's a greater chance of rain on a bank holiday than on other days of the year."
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The Independent reports a ComRes poll with the headline: "Majority of Britons opposed to bombing Isis in Iraq and Syria but David Cameron leaves the door to action open".

Ho hum, what ComRes actually reported was that opinions were evenly divided between attack; support anti-IS forces; leave well alone; and 'don't know'.

But let's do our own Fun Online Poll on the same topic anyway and see.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Michael Gove’s wife attacks Nick Clegg's wife for Spain trip while PM's wife is away"

From The Evening Standard:

Michael Gove's wife today accused Nick Clegg's wife of failing in her duty to help her husband do his Government duty by going on holiday at the same time as David Cameron's wife.

Sarah Vine risked reigniting tensions between the Deputy Prime Minister's wife and herself with her criticism.

“Deputy PM Nick Clegg's wife has just one real job to do. Look after her husband while he looks after the country while the actual PM's wife is on hols watching her husband pointing at fish,” she wrote in her Daily Mail column. “And where has Cleggy's wife been all week? Spain. Great.”

Mrs Gove and Mrs Clegg have had a series of bust-ups over issues such as free school meals and who has the nicest handbags. They have sought to patch up relations several times but today’s comments are unlikely to help.

"Spain? "she continued, "Three days in Butlins, that's all we can afford now that Michael has lost his Secretary of State salary top-up. I know that she was behind that.

"The utter foreign bitch."

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From City AM:

[Re: Holidays cost more at peak times. The reason is basic economics, yesterday]

My argument is that companies don’t charge “extra” during school holidays. That’s the normal price. Instead, they offer discounts out of season.

Mark Wadsworth

I would have normally put a :-) at the end of that, but it didn't seem appropriate.

Fun Online Polls: Four day week & Ukraine

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

If your employer offered you a four-day week for the same pay, which day would you take off?

Monday - 40%
Tuesday - 2%
Wednesday - 22%
Thursday - 4%
Friday - 30%
Other, please specify - 2%

TBH came up with the most cunning 'other' answer: "I'd have it rolling each week - and then buy a weekly season ticket one day later every time - that way I'd collect 20% savings on rail fares."

I'd take Wednesday myself. Monday is always depressing, whether you're at work or at home, and Friday is always bearable, whether you're at work or at home, so that'd be day off wasted in either case.
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This week, between a rock and a hard place.

What's the less-bad option for Ukraine: remain a satellite of Russia or align itself with the EU?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: The cause of the floods & The Four Day Week

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

Who or what is to blame for the floods in England? Multiple answers allowed.

EU and Greenie nonsense - 94 votes
Not dredging rivers - 88 votes
Barbara Young (former EA chief) - 66 votes
Building on flood plains - 62 votes
Chris Smith (current EA chief) - 56 votes
Deforestation in uplands - 35 votes
Labour under-investment - 31 votes
Wrong type of rain - 27 votes
Gay marriage - 18 votes
Savage Tory cuts - 11 votes
Climate Change - 10 votes
Other, please specify - 15 votes

So now we know. Rather alarming that more people think gay marriage might be the cause than "Climate Change", which appears to the new name for "weather".

A few people mentioned "water", "the weather" and "the wettest January for 250 years" as possible other explanations, but those were covered by "Wrong type of rain" or "Climate Change"
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This week's Fun Online Poll is a something we chat about at work occasionally:

"If your employer offered you a four-day week for the same pay, which day would you take off?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Facebook 'praise' for term-time discounts sparks campaign"

From the BBC:

With about 250 friends on Facebook, childless Paul Cookson did not expect "praise" he posted to have much impact. He wrote that he was "delighted" to be offered "discounts" by tour operators who reduced their prices outside school holidays and other peak times.

A few friends agreed, and followed his request to "share this post if you have also taken advantage of term-time discounts". It soon went viral, and more than 143,000 people have shared it so far.

"It's more fun behaving like a big kid when there are no actual kids watching!"

Supporters also began signing an online petition calling for the government to recognise the industry's achievements in the New Year Honours List and this has now gone far beyond the 100,000 signatures needed for a possible debate in Parliament.

Mr Cookson's initial post, entitled "In praise of term-time discounts", noted that non-parents were "rewarded" for doing the right thing and not taking their holidays during the busy school holidays. It came about after he got a great deal on a holiday for him and his long term girlfriend, with whom he has no children.

"Term-time discounts and no screaming kids? What's not to like?"

He told the BBC he was stunned by the response on Facebook, with many people encouraging him to "carry it on and fight". So the 41-year-old set up a Facebook group called Term Time Discounts, in which many other childless people - young and old alike - have shared examples of great value getaways.

One of the group's members posted a link to the e-petition, which is entitled: "Thank holiday companies for giving us cheap breaks during off-season!"

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro:

Last week, the Sutherland family were prosecuted for taking their children out of school for a week's holiday. Now, 16-year-old Lewis Clarke has reached the South Pole (Metro, Mon) and presumably missed several weeks of education.

His school, QEH in Bristol, is independent. I assume the Sutherlands' isn't, and there different rules apply.

But should the principles be the same? Should Clarke's parents also be prosecuted? Perhaps the school could if it chose to but has evidently given its approval.

Adham Fisher, Leicester.

A Brief History Of Mallorca

From The Rough Guide to Mallorca and Menorca:

Southern Mallorca

Most of Southern Mallorca comprises the island's central plain, Es Pla, a fertile tract surrounded to the west by the mountainous Serra de Tramuntana and to the east by the hilly range that shadows the coast, the Serra de Llevant.

... although it may seem like a sleepy backwater, it was Es Pla that pretty much defined Mallorca until the twentieth century: the majority of the island's inhabitants lived here, it produced enough food to meet almost every domestic requirement, and Palma's gentry were reliant on Es Pla estates for their income...

This situation persisted until the 1960s, when the tourist boom stodd everything on its head and the developers simply bypassed Es Pla to focus on the picturesque coves of the east coast.

Inca and around

In medieval times, one of the few ways to escape the clutches of the island's landowners was to practise a craft and then join the appropriate guild. As early as the fifteenth century, Inca had attracted enough shoemakers to be become the centre of a flourishing shoemaking industry - and so it remains today with Camper's HQ and main factory-warehouse firmly ensconced here.

"Coach in the water"

From azlyrics.com and 20min.ch:

We all came out to Montreux
On the Lake Geneva shoreline
Sight seeing in our mobile
We didn't have much time
All the tourists with their cameras
Were at the best place around
Driver forgot the hand brake
And the bus kept rolling down...
Coach in the water, driver in the shite

They dived in and they pulled it out
It died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out
Helping them winch it back onto the ground
When it all was over
We had to find another place
But Swiss time was running out
It seemed that we would lose the race
Coach in the water, driver in the shite

We ended up at the Grand Hotel
It was empty cold and bare
But we did a roll call just outside
And had our picnic there
With a table cloth and a few old chairs
We made a place to sit
No matter what we get out of this
I know we'll never forget
Coach in the water, driver in the shite

Puerile... but fanny

Horseshit

Life copies satire

Hot on the heels of my post about Michael Gove criticising the short working hours and long holidays at Westminster in the education system, BobE spotted this in The Guardian:

MPs risk accusations of laziness and poor value for money because the number of hours they work in Westminster appear to be shrinking, according to the senior MP responsible for scrutinising public spending.

Margaret Hodge, who chairs the public accounts committee, said the coalition should lengthen the parliamentary calendar because MPs were spending less time in Westminster scrutinising policy.

In an interview with the Guardian, Hodge warned of a growing "democratic vacuum" and said that parliamentary sessions were so short "it feels as if we are hardly working".

Bruges' answer to Manneken Pis

We asked our hotel for a wake-up call.

So this morning at eight o'clock, the receptionist rang us to say that malaria kills a million people every year.

Top tips if you're thinking of going on a sailing cruise

You can pay £1,000s for this:

Plague ship passengers return home to describe hell of 'vomit-strewn corridors' and how the sick were 'treated like animals' - but Oriana sets off on new cruise TONIGHT

Or just pop down to your local town centre on Friday evening.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (285)

James James has submitted this bit of Faux Lib nonsense:

George was right that other taxes may have stronger disincentives, but economists now recognize that the single land tax is not innocent, either. Site values are created, not intrinsic. Why else would land in Tokyo be worth so much more than land in Mississippi? A tax on the value of a site is really a tax on productive potential, which is a result of improvements to land in the area. Henry George's proposed tax on one piece of land is, in effect, based on the improvements made to the neighboring land...

Broadly agreed so far. Apart from the fact that the 'neighbour's improvements' are only a small part of what drives land values: you need to have those improvements in the right place at the right time (for counter-example see Humber Bridge or all those spare airports in Spain), and you need people and businesses to take advantage of them; that creates the wealth that goes partly to those same people and businesses; partly to pay for the improvements; and the remainder accrues to the ultimate monopoly, the rental value of land.

And what if you are your "neighbor"? What if you buy a large expanse of land and raise the value of one portion of it by improving the surrounding land. Then you are taxed based on your improvements. This is not far-fetched. It is precisely what the Disney Corporation did in Florida. Disney bought up large amounts of land around the area where it planned to build Disney World, and then made this surrounding land more valuable by building Disney World. Had George's single tax on land been in existence, Disney might never have made the investment. So, contrary to George's reasoning, even a tax on unimproved land reduces incentives.
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Without any background knowledge we can say this: any theme park's profits and the wages of their employees are all currently taxed at the rate of 40% - 50%. We don't know how much of their total income relates to the rental value of land, but it's maybe a tenth of the total - the bulk of what visitors are paying for are services, be that entertainers, creatives, maintenance men, cooks, chambermaids or car park attendants.

So instead of paying 40% - 50% on all their income, the theme park as a whole (lumping together the land owner, the employees and the shareholders/finance providers) would be paying tax on one tenth of its income at a much higher rate.

Not only does that look like a decent tax cut to me, the incentive to make a profit by providing more and better 'services' using labour (new rides, more entertainers, better menus, whatever) would be nearly doubled. For sure, some of this additional profit might, just might, flow through into higher rental values, but this is still no particular disincentive to continuing to provide them if it turns our that they have paid off. And it they don't pay off in this way, well at least there's no tax on that income.
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However, Disneyworld Florida is probably the worst example he could have chosen. If you take the time and trouble to read the most interesting Wiki entry, you learn this:

In 1959, Walt Disney Productions began looking for land for a second park to supplement Disneyland, which opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955. Market surveys revealed that only 5% of Disneyland's visitors came from east of the Mississippi River, where 75% of the population of the United States lived.

Additionally, Walt Disney disliked the businesses that had sprung up around Disneyland and wanted control of a much larger area of land for the new project.

Walt Disney flew over the Orlando site (one of many) in November 1963. Seeing the well-developed network of roads, including the planned Interstate 4 and Florida's Turnpike, with McCoy Air Force Base (later Orlando International Airport) to the east, Disney selected a centrally-located site near Bay Lake.

So there's your rental income right there: the extra income which Disney can earn by being closer to its customers; by being easily accessible by road/air; by having its theme park in the 'Sunshine State' (they could be even closer to even more people if they'd sited it in Pennsylvania, but the weather isn't as nice up there).

And Disney was wise to the spillover effect, that their parks increase the rental value of surrounding land. Of course this is what has happened anyway; all the major theme parks are now in Florida as well, it's called 'agglomeration'. But these other theme parks are not taking business from Disney, they are driving customers to them - people now go to Florida with the sole intention of visiting theme parks, and Disneyworld is always near the top of their list.
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If you read on, you learn that Disneyworld is effectively its own city-state. Remember: the total tax paid less benefit received by an entire state is of course $nil: it all nets off. So with one hand, Disney (the landowning corporation) would be paying tax (and it does pay US property taxes anyway, as a matter of real-life fact), but all its employees would be receiving their Citizen's LVT Rebate and Disney (as the quasi-government) would be receiving 'public' money to spend on improving roads and airports, public schools for the children of its employees etc.

Disney know what they are doing, they'd always reinvest the spare cash they receive as the quasi-government in doing stuff which further enhances rental values in a virtuous circle; if they make sure that schools in their precinct have a good reputation, then it will be easier to attract staff, so all things being equal they can pay lower wages, and so on.

The only small net amount of $ tax money which would leave that city-state is the extra value it receives from being sited close to its customers in a state with nice weather, which is exactly where we started (and it pays property taxes to the county and state anyway). All the internally-generated wealth would stay in the city-state.
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Or we can summarise the Faux Lib argument thusly:

"We accept the logic for making small landowners pay LVT rather than broad based income tax, but large landowners should be exempt", which is surely complete bollocks?

In any event, while Disneyworld is huge (39 square miles), that is still tiny compared to the surface area of the whole USA (3.7 million square miles). Those 3.7 million square miles and the three hundred million potential visitors who live on it are Disney's hinterland, so to speak, if they'd built their theme park on an island in the middle of the Pacific, how successful would it have been?