Things I learned today at the swimming pool.

1. The little lass invented a wonderful new game: two or more people put their heads underwater and then one of them shouts as loud as they can. It is just about possible to understand what that person is saying if you are only a few inches away from him or her. I wouldn't describe it as 'hours of fun' but it's certainly 'seconds of fun'.

2. There is a solemn black and white notice next to the ticket desk, which says something like: "For your privacy and security, photography is not allowed in the swimming pool area. If you wish to take photographs, please speak to a member of staff to arrange a suitable time. All unauthorised photographic equipment will be confiscated."

Right above that is a big yellow sign which says something like: "For your comfort and security, the swimming pool area is under CCTV surveillance"

Does not compute

From The Daily Mail:

After five years in training, Mrs Cobell had just been crowned the slowest person to cross the Channel under her own steam. In a remarkable marathon of grit and determination, she had struggled valiantly through changing tides that swept her first one way, then the other. It turned the 21-mile crossing into a gruelling, 65-mile slog... soon after leaving Dover a strong tide dragged her south instead of east. Then it took her north... south again... northeast... south-west... and, eventually, subsided to allow her to carry on eastwards.

The article is accompanied by a chart plotting her 65-mile swim, and the captions suggest that she actually swam 65 miles:


Nonsense.

Imagine you are trying to cross a particular long and wide escalator from the left handrail to the right handrail (representing the English and French coasts). Does it make much difference to you whether the escalator is moving up, is moving down, or is stationary (representing the tides, which move up and down the English Channel), if all you care about is getting from the left to the right?

Nope.

Furthermore, if she really had swum 65 miles in 28 hours, then that would be an absolutely heroic 2.3 miles per hour average speed. For comparison, an ironman triathlon event starts off with a brisk 2.4 mile swim, for which they are allowed a maximum of 2.2 hours, so even at this stupendous level of fitness they are 'only' expected to be able to swim at 1.1 miles per hour (and Mrs Cobell managed at least 0.75 miles an hour on average, probably a bit more, so she must be pretty damned good).

But never mind all that... Jackie Cobell, you rock!

Out of the swimming pool, into the fire ...

Thanks to everybody who voted here.

To summarise, sixty-eight per cent of us learned to swim doing doggy-paddle or breaststroke (which is what I'd have expected from the readers of a middle-aged 'blog such as this) and only eleven per cent learned front crawl first. I know for a fact that my Dad taught me and my sisters to swim using breast stroke (oh come off it, no sniggering at the back) on holiday in 1973, and swimming lessons at school seemed to revolve around this (with or without floats). Front crawl was just for the show-offs and athletic kids. But we dutifully take our two young kids to swimming lessons on Sunday morning and they focus on front crawl, which seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, seeing as it pre-supposes confidence, strength and actually knowing what you're doing. Ah well.

This week's Fun Online Poll: "What weighs more heavily on the next generation - £1 trillion-plius of public sector debt or £1 trillion-plus of mortgage debt?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Everything's going swimmingly!

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:
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Which tax do you think is more damaging to the UK economy?

Outright winner, with 80% of the votes: A tax on the gross margins of half of businesses, before deducting salaries, which raises £80 bn p.a.

Distant runner up, with 20% of the votes: A tax on the net profits of all businesses, after deducting all expenses, which raises £40 bn p.a.
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In case you're wondering what on Earth I was talking about, the 'tax on gross margins' is Value Added Tax, which the politicians and less-well-informed commentators palm off as a 'consumption tax' (thus glossing over the fact that one man's consumption is another man's production) but which is, mathematically and economically, either a tax on turnover or a tax on gross margins (depending on how you argue it).

In real life, on £100 of gross margin, the business pays £13.04 VAT (£100 x 15/115). Let's assume it pays out eighty percent of the remaining gross margin as salaries (under The Pareto Rule Of Thumb), so it keeps £17.39 net profit, on which it pays another £4.87 in corporation tax (£86.96 x 28% corporation tax), which gives us roughly the ratio four-to-one which we observe in real life.

It seems to me to be blindingly obvious that the £13.04 VAT payment* must hurt a VAT-registered businesses a lot more than the £4.87 corporation tax payment, bearing in mind that in bad times, it still has to pay the VAT but pays no corporation tax at all (possibly even gets a refund).

Non-VATable businesses on the other hand (primarily banks and residential construction companies) just pay £5.60 corporation tax on £100 gross margin before salaries, and that's the end of that. So not only does VAT contribute to a relatively high tax burden (A Bad Thing in and of itself), it also encourages investment in banking and residential construction (i.e. land speculation) rather than in properly wealth-creating activities (yet another Bad Thing). The least we can hope for is a level playing field, i.e. scrap VAT (once we've left the EU) and just let all businesses pay corporation tax at the same flat rate (the lower the better, that's a different topic).

* Sure, you could argue that the VAT burden is shared between employer and employee, in which employees of a VAT-registered business have an overall tax rate of 46.8%, once you net out VAT, Employer's NIC, Employee's NIC and PAYE/income tax, in which case VAT is a tax on and a barrier to full employment, one's as bad as t'other as far as I am concerned.
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This week's Fun Online Poll - "Which style of swimming did you learn first?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Which may seem a tad off-the-wall, it's just that I can remember that when I was a lad we started off by learning one particular type of stroke, but nowadays if you take your kids to swimming lessons, they teach them a completely different one. I was just wondering whether my experience was unusual or whether this is just a sign of the times.