Fun Online Polls: Bank Holidays and Bail-outs

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

What do you call a week day on which most people don't go to work?

A Bank Holiday - 33%
A General Strike - 8%
Depends on the context - 18%
Comes to much the same thing, really - 34%
Other, please specify - 8%

So that was a pretty close result, but "Comes to much the same thing, really" just scraped through to the finish line. Which is my own view, as it happens. I mean - what would happen if the unions declared a General Strike for a certain day and the government then declared that day to be a Bank Holiday?

Pedant points to Bruce: "As the working population is less than half the population, that's every day of the week that most people don't go to work."
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What is most alarming about the Spanish bank bail out is that nobody is in the slightest bit surprised, they were hotly denying it until the end of last week and they hey presto, come Monday morning it was a done deal and the Spanish PM was hailing it a success for the Euro-zone. So the bankers get away with it yet again and are now presumably limbering up for the next bail out, I guess they'll "do" Italy next, seeing as they/the EU have already got one of their place men in charge.

For the record, following the Irish bail out, in a November 2010 poll our view was that Portugal would be next, followed by Spain. Portugal was duly bailed out five months later but Spain managed to hang on until now.

I (quite wrongly) didn't consider Greece to be a bail out candidate - in November 2011, I asked how long they'd manage to keep Greece in the Euro-zone. Only 18% thought longer than the end of 2011, so a retrospective 'well done' to them.

So who's next?

Cast your vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Bank Holidays & General Strikes

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

Will you attend a Jubilee-related event this weekend?

No, I've got better things to do - 43%
Which Jubilee? Have I missed something? - 22%
Yes, enthusiastically - 18%
No, I'm a republican - 9%
Yes, reluctantly - 7%

I was a "Yes, reluctantly" in case you're interested, and thanks to everybody who took part.
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This week's Fun Online Poll was inspired by The Stigler's musings on the topic.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: Superfoods and Superfoulups

I'm glad to see that nearly everybody else is as much in the dark on these as I am. The results to last week's Fun Online Poll are as follows:

Which is your favourite superfood?

Acai berries - 1%
Chia - 1%
Goji berries - 2%
Kombucha - 1%
Wheatgrass - 1%
Other, please specify - 18%
I've never of any heard of those, much less eaten one. - 75%

The most nominated superfood in the 'other' category was bacon (including Parma ham, same sort of principle). I have to agree with that.
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I normally start a new poll on a Monday, I'm a bit late this week because I wanted to see if there'd be any more Lib-Con superfoulups to add to this week's list, choose your favourite(s) Here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Is it just me..?

From the BBC:

A fire service spokesman said: "Her daughter asked her mum for petrol because she had run out. The [gas] cooker was on and the fumes ignited."

Station manager Lee Smith, whose Acomb crew attended the fire, said: "The people were cooking their tea and dispensing petrol from a container to a glass jug. The vapour then ignited, the jug was then spilt which obviously ignited as well and the person involved in the decanting was consumed by the flames. Her daughter phoned 999 and was obviously extremely distressed."

"VAT on pasties threat: No 10 denies causing panic"

From the BBC:

Downing Street has dismissed claims it caused "panic" over the threatened imposition of VAT on hot pasties by urging Greggs customers to make "contingency plans" such as filling up.

Labour described the comments as the "height of irresponsibility" for giving the impression people should panic buy. But No 10 said it had alerted customers to the consultation period in "a calm-headed and sensible way".

The civil contingencies committee Cobra* will meet later to discuss plans in the event of a strike by angy bakers.

* Sigh. 'Cobra' is the name of the room in which they meet (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A). The committee itself is just the 'Civil Contingencies Committee'.

Fun Online Polls: Last week's strike and Jeremy Clarkson (again)

A very high turnout for last week's poll, thanks for everybody who took part, results as follows:

Do you think the public sector strike on 30th November was justified?
No - 83%
Yes - 17%

As I suspected, the strike has back fired horribly as a PR measure. No doubt the government has done its own polling and come to the same conclusion, so if anything, the government's negotiating hand is now strengthened.
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It appears that The Righteous have are bored with pillorying Jeremy Clarkson for saying that public sector workers who went on strike should be shot, and have finally got round to criticising him for something else which he said on The One Show last week, which was to describe people who commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of/under a train as "selfish".

I'd completely agree, only I'd describe them as "wickedly inconsiderate" rather than "selfish". Those who suffer most are the train drivers themselves, followed by the poor sods who have to clear up the mangled limbs and blood afterwards, not to mention all the commuters whose trains are delayed.

Of course, there is such a thing as a Righteous Train Driver, who doesn't really know what to think :-)

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Are people who throw themselves under trains selfish?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Oops what have I said now, me and my big mouth, cont. page 94.

This is NOT satire (2)

Mitesh B Karia was out and about taking photographs of public sector strikers today, this one has that je ne sais quoi...

Fun Online Polls: Idiot commenters and public sector strikes

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll and left comments (none of them idiotic, I'm happy to say), results as follows:

What's the best way of responding to idiot commenters who post personal insults?

Ignore them, but allow their comments to stand - 34%
Delete their comments - 26%
Respond to their insults politely - 24%
Insult them back - 9%
Other, please specify - 6%

So there's no hard and fast rule. It seems to me that a simple warning or two and then subsequently deleting all comments from the idiot(s) concerned seems reasonable. Engaging in tit-for-tat insults is fun but pointless, and from bitter experience, trying to engage these idiots in serious debate is pointless as well, although they sometimes provide raw material for future posts :-)
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Public sector pensions, ho hum, big topic. All things considered, I'm with the government on this one. Public sector pensions aren't the biggest problem facing us - the UK government spends five times as much on corporate welfare - but it's still a problem that will have to be addressed sooner rather than later.

What particularly annoys me is that the government has gone out of its way to explain that only public sector employees currently paid £15,000 or more will have to make the additional 3% contributions (3% is nowhere near enough, but it's a start) but the trade unions keep saying exactly the opposite, that these changes will hit 'low paid hard working public servants especially women' etc etc, I suppose that's their version of the Poor Widow Bogey.

Perhaps this summary is accurate, i.e. that the £15,000 is annualised, so if you work half-hours and are paid more than £7,500, you'll have to pay 3% more for the privilege of your gold-plated, final salary, index linked pension, I don't know. If true, all that does is reduce the number of public sector employees not required to make the additional contributions, fair enough, if you ask me.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll, do you think today's strike was justified? It's a straight 'yes' or 'no' this week.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Winter of disco'n'tent

Ah well. At least the caricaturists aren't on strike...

Bob Crow

Bob Crow

Inspired by a reader's letter in The Times: Sir, Our railways cannot even run a strike on time. Michael Robinson, Portsmouth, Hants.

Fun Online Polls: Commute times & British Airways

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll. The responses to the question "How long does your journey to work take in the morning?" were as follows:

less than 15 minutes - 32%
15 to 30 minutes - 22%
30 to 60 minutes - 29%
60 to 120 minutes - 15%
more than 120 minutes - 3%

I foolishly forgot to include the option "I work from home", which (judging by the comments) would be about a third of the 32% who reported a journey time of less than 15 minutes.

There is no particular back story to this poll - I was just genuinely interested whether my assumption that the majority of people are prepared to tolerate a commute of 'about half an hour' was correct and what the spread about the mean (37 minutes) is.
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Staying with the travel theme, the British Airways versus Unite (the trade union) industrial dispute seems to me like one of those cases where you want both sides to lose.

As a privatised former public entity, BA was given enormously valuable landing slots at UK airports for free but inherited a hefty final salary pension scheme which it never bothered to fund properly. Even though it was privatised a quarter of a century ago, it never really shook off the public sector mentality - even now, salaries for BA staff are nearly twice what they are at other airlines (if they had taken lower salaries then the difference would have gone into the pension fund and all would be sweet and dandy).

The trade union is being completely daft - in economic terms (if you consolidate the airline and its pension fund into one entity), the employees already own about ninety per cent of their employer (or at least older members of the final salary pension scheme do). I am surprised that the union doesn't have an economist to quietly point this out.

Luckily, there is a way in which both sides can lose. All it needs is for passengers to stop booking with BA for a few weeks and the whole thing will simply collapse. All their slots can be auctioned off properly by the government (preferably on a leasehold rather than a freehold basis) and smaller competitors and new entrants can snap up the aircraft, infrastructure and most of the employees.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "Would you be bothered if British Airways goes bankrupt and is split up between smaller competitors?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Charlie Whelan

Worker-owned co-operatives

Many of the recent articles about the British Airways - whether about the Iberia merger, the proposed strike or the ensuing court case or - mention the BA pension funds deficit of £3.7 billion.

Relatively few articles mention the pension fund assets, which appear to be about £12 billion. Most of this is invested in shares in other plc's, and some will be invested in UK government bonds - which is a neat trick of the UK government to create a captive market for its bonds: "If you want the pension fund tax breaks, you have to invest x% in UK government bonds" - but I digress.

In round figures (they are to some extent plucked out of the air by actuaries and stock markets), the pension funds have assets of £12 billion and liabilities of £16 billion, net deficit £4 billion, which BA 'owes' them.

If we add BA's pension fund deficit of £4 billion to its current market capitalisation of £2 billion that gives BA an enterprise value of £6 billion. (To digress yet again, a large part of that enterprise value consists of the landing slots it was given for free and for which it should be paying a fair market price to avoid there being barriers to entry).

If we consider BA and its pension funds to be one economic unit, we end up with total assets of £18 billion and total liabilities to pension scheme members, i.e. employees, of £16 billion. If we didn't have these silly rules brought in after the Robert Maxwell shenanigans, BA could simply issue two new shares to its pension funds for every share in issue to settle the pension fund deficit.

That would probably focus the minds of the trade unions and employees on the fact that the BA economic unit is in fact a worker-owned investment fund with a majority stake in an airline - call it a co-operative if you will. They'd accept, in the short term, that people have to be laid off - but their redundancy pay is, to a large extent, being paid by the continuing employees, not some mythical group of shareholders, who are always seen as fair game for being plundered.