Excellent work by Fairer Share

From The Sun:

RISHI Sunak is facing calls to scrap council tax and stamp duty. Households would pay a single property levy under the plan backed by nearly 100,000 people.

The change would benefit residents in the Chancellor’s Richmond, North Yorks, constituency by £650 a year, research by WPI Economics found. Charity Fairer Share, which came up with the plan, said one in four adults regularly borrowed to pay council tax...

The article is light on detail even though the suggestion is very simple. Unsually for The Sun, it is not totally negative. Inevitably, most of the comments are. For more details go to Fairer Share. Which is a community interest company and not a charity AFAIAA.

Fun with numbers - where does the sunshine go?

To try and put the numbers into perspective, I did some workings.

Step 1. Multiply up the amount of incoming solar radiation per second (in Watts/m2, i.e. Joules/second/m2) to find out the total number of Joules each m2 gets in a 12-hour day (= 20.6 million of 'em).

Step 2. Look up mass/kg and specific heat capacity (Joules/kg/1 K) for air, wet soil, and water.

Step 3. Adjust/tweak the main variables until you get 'sensible answers' in the last column. The main variables are:

a) how those 20.6 million are split between air/soil and air/water. (answer 80/20 and 20/80 respectively, partly due to albedo and partly to do with how good soil and water are at moving heat downwards or back up into the air again)

b) the height of the column of air which noticeably warms during the day (answer 800 metres*)

c) how far down from the surface the soil warms up (answer 4.5 inches)

d) how far down from the surface the oceans warm up (answer 39 inches).

The 'sensible answers' are that the soil surface/the air above it warms by 16K during the day; the ocean surface/the air above it warms by 4K during the day - which is why in the day time you tend to get onshore breezes and at night you get offshore breezes. The Earth is two-thirds covered in oceans and that averages out to 8K.

* Clearly, there's not a clear cut-off of 800 metres altitude. So for example, maybe the lowest layer above the land warms by 16K, 800 metres up it warms by 8K etc, and at 1.6 km (about 1 mile up), the air barely changes temperature from day to night. Same applies to soil and water, going downwards. If you are building a sand castle, you don't have to dig very far down before the sand is noticeably colder than at the surface. Go for a swim in the afternoon, the top few inches are pleasantly warm; stand chest deep further out and your feet get cold.

At night, the reverse happens, and the lapse rate flattens again. In extreme cases, the land cools so far and so fast that it drags down the temperature above it so far and so fast that you get a temperature inversion, i.e. warmer air over colder air, that's like a negative lapse rate.



Which is all good fun, but what is the relevance?

Firstly, that you don't need to worry about quite how or why energy/heat is absorbed, transferred or distributed (conduction, convection/down drafts, mixing or wind/currents, radiation, latent heat of evaporation/condensation). The sun sends us a certain amount of total energy and it warms stuff up, and we can reconcile/estimate how much stuff is warmed up by how many degrees K. Sometimes the obvious answers are the correct ones and need little further investigation.

Secondly, what it reminds us that is the daily variation, based on incoming solar radiation, is relatively small compared to the absolute temperature. At its coldest (just before dawn), the surface is (say) 284K and at its warmest (mid/late afternoon) it's 292K.

Which, as ever, makes me question the Consensus obsession with this chart. That particular one is gloriously mislabelled as "Earth's annual and global average energy budget". It's not! That's the global average energy budget per second! They don't even understand their own propaganda.

What the Consensus is trying to do is explain that you can and should work out how many people are in a shop by looking at how many go in or come out every second (or in their terms, the average difference between the number people going in and coming out, which must be zero anyway, hence meaningless). Sure, it gives you a guide, but you'd also have to know roughly how long each person remains in there. If ten customers enter and exit a corner shop every hour, there will only be one or two customers in there at any one time. If ten customers enter and exit a large car show room every hour, there might be about ten customers in the show room at any one time. (Ignoring the lock down rules).

The "customers entering and exiting" are like the sunshine that arrives every day, which is sufficient to warm the soil/ocean surface and the air above it by 8K on an average day; it cools down again by 8K on an average night. The infamous chart gives you no clue whatsoever as to what the baseline average temperature is ("the number of customers actually in the shop").

So why not just count the actual number of people in the shop (the baseline average minimum temperature)?

The answer to this is not particularly difficult: stuff warms up and then it cools down again. Basic physics. The smaller the surface area relative to the volume/mass, the slower it is to warm up or cool down. Warmth from the sun can't get very deep into the soil or the ocean, so for each 1 m2 of surface, there's a column of troposphere with a volume of +/- 11,000 m3, which can only lose heat to space (counting the stratosphere and higher layers as 'space') via the 1 m2 at the top.

Most of the energy (kinetic energy, potential energy or latent heat of evaporation/condensation) in the air and top bit of land and oceans (which is effectively part of the atmosphere for these purposes) is left over from the previous day; and most of what was left over from the previous day was left over from the day before that ad infinitum. Mathematically, this energy has a half life of about 24 days.
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These ramblings have now reached full circle. My guess is that the Earth's atmosphere is set up to radiate a certain % of its energy every 24 hours. The equilibrium temperature is therefore where the extra sunlight that comes in during the 12-hour day is equal to the amount lost during the subsequent 12-hour night. If Earth's surface is radiating 2.78% (relative) every 24-hours, and is receives 8K's worth (absolute) when the sun is shining on it, then the equilibrium is 8K ÷ 0.0278 = 288K. Something like that.

Sun spots

A

B

C

Why are we expected to believe that the correlation between "B" and "C" is causality, but the much closer correlation between "A" and "B" is merely coincidence?

Fun in The Sun

From The Sun:

Tenants suffer as rent prices soar following ban on fees

MORE tenants than ever before have been hit with rent rises following a ban on fees, claims new research. The number of letting agents who saw renters suffering increases rose to the highest figure on record last month at 55 per cent, up from 45 per cent in May.



So far, so rehash of ARLA press release. To my relief, the article pounces on the obvious weakness with the figures:

ARLA Propertymark didn't share how much it's seen rents increase by when contacted by The Sun. The figures should also be taken with a pinch of salt as they're based on a survey of 272 members out of a total of 9,500.

The article then continues to take apart the ARLA propaganda...

Independent property expert Henry Pryor told The Sun: "I simply don’t believe that rents are rising and where they are that it is down to the tenant fees ban.

"Landlord groups have cried wolf over tax changes, stamp duty changes, the banning of the high dubious practice of stuffing tenants for costs that the landlord should be paying and yet rents have risen at most by inflation.

"Whilst of course there will have been some increase in rents, this will have been offset for tenants by the reduction in the fees being forced upon them."

Georgie Laming, campaigns manager at Generation Rent, also said it hasn't had tenants saying that rents have gone up.

She said: "Some landlords might try to increase rent to cover loss of earnings from the tenant fees ban but this is much preferable to large upfront costs that put lots of families into debt at the start of a tenancy.

"Whilst landlords may now claim that rents are rising because it's now cheaper to move, tenants have more clout to negotiate with their landlord over things like repairs that need doing or rent increases. It's important to remember that rents can only rise to an amount that tenants can afford - so landlords raising their rents will find it harder to let in the long run."

The article then concludes with this:

Rents could rocket by 15 per cent over next five years as the number of properties "dries up", an industry expert warned a year ago. Yet the cost of renting fell for the first time in over a decade earlier this year.

Is Home-Owner-Ism reaching the high tide mark?

Spotted by DBC Reed in The Sun, "which regrettably these days is more on the ball than this blog which is too often down with the Beleavers on the beach worshipping the Brexit Cargo Cult.":

Back in the early 1990s, low and middle-income workers needed to save five per cent of their wages for three years, on average, to build up a deposit for a first-time property. Today, they need 24 years of such ­savings. That’s why home ownership has dropped sharply, particularly among youngsters.

As house prices spiral way ahead of wages, driven not only by a growing supply- demand chasm but also ultra-loose monetary policy, more and more youngsters from relatively affluent families are being priced out. The emergence of “generation rent” means the political geometry is shifting.

“If prices keep rising, home ownership will fall further and for the Conservative Party, with its base in home ownership, that’s disastrous,” says Alex Morton, who was Cameron’s housing expert in the Downing Street policy unit, “Tories want a society where if you work hard and do the right thing you can own your own home and get on, and that’s becoming ­increasingly difficult.”

More than half of first-time buyers in 2015 had assistance from “the bank of Mum and Dad”, rising to two-thirds in London and the South East. Such realities lay bare an uncomfort- able truth — the growing gulf between “property haves” and “property have-nots”.

There then follows a load of gibberish saying that high prices are due to lack of supply, it can be explained far more simply than that. Moving on...

Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary (who grew up above a shop in Rochdale in a two-bedroom flat with his four brothers), has come out fighting. Last month he used his speech at the Conservative conference to accuse the UK’s large house-builders of ­deliberately restricting supply to boost prices, and therefore profits.

The “big developers” have “a stranglehold on ­supply”, said Javid, and are “sitting on land banks”, while “delaying build-out”.

The idea of “land-banking” — with the biggest house-builders remaining on go-slow to up their profit on each unit — used to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. In recent months, that has changed. A quarter of all new homes in the UK are built by the biggest three providers and more than half are ­provided by the top eight.

There’s increasing evidence, though, that while the ­planning system remains cumbersome, more and more permissions are being given. Yet the homes are not being made. Internal government figures show that in the past three years, while there was a 46,600 rise in building units granted permission, there was a 94,300 rise in such units remaining unbuilt — with the entire increase in planning permission being absorbed by increased “land-banking”...

Fired by such evidence, the Government is set to publish a white paper on housing next month, with fines on building delays being touted and developers possibly being charged council tax on unbuilt units after a certain period. “There will be carrots and sticks,” says Javid.

It's not exactly LVT, but it's a start.

It was the Sun what won it!..... by backing both sides

Fantastic double think from the Sun.

Suffolk Sunrise

Some truth in this

From NewsThump

Supermarkets across the country have reported plummeting sales of toilet paper after The Sun newspaper posted a free edition through every letterbox in the country.

Concerned executives from Andrex, Velvet and Cushelle have been attending hastily convened management meetings to discuss their market’s new entrant, and the threat it poses to their businesses.

Our briefly-skimmed copy (no tits except James Corden) got put in the bottom of a guinea pig cage.

"Phone-hacking defendant: 'It was a terrible misunderstanding on my part'"

From the BBC:

News International's head of security has told the phone-hacking trial that items he removed for safekeeping contained pornography belonging to another defendant, Charlie Brooks.

Mark Hanna told the jury at the Old Bailey in London that it seemed "obvious" to him that Mr Brooks did not mind if the police or his wife found out about it, and he even assumed that his wife, Rebekah, shared her husband's interest in the material.

Giving evidence for a second day, Mr Hanna said Mr Brooks had asked him to look after a brown leather bag left in his car and later handed him a padded bag and a laptop for safekeeping too.

"He explained it was his own personal property and that it was pornography," said Mr Hanna.

"I was under the mistaken impression that like most married blokes, he would have introduced his wife to porn at the very start of their marriage and that like most married women she'd also enjoy having a quick flick through when he was out of the house.

"Like most men in a relationship, he had never deleted his browser history or anything. It was a great surprise when he later told me that he had never informed his wife and did not want it to get into the hands of the police."

Red sky at night...

An article in The Daily Mail featuring photographs of some polar bears watching the sky turn red as the sun sets reminds me of something else which has been bugging me recently.

We know that the explanation for red sunsets is down to the scattering of light by molecules and particles in the atmosphere, blue and UV light is scattered more and red and yellow light is scattered less, see e.g. Science Daily.

One of those TV scientists (Coxy, I think) demonstrated this by filling a long fish tank with very diluted milk and shining a white light in at one end. The milk solution at that end appeared blue-ish and at the other end appeared orangey-yellow.

So that's all perfectly plausible - but this explanation suggests that the sun/sky would be the same red-orange colour at sunrise as it is at sunset.

I'm no early riser, and have seen far fewer sunrises than sunsets in my life, but by and large, I have seldom noticed that red-orange effect in the morning, it's much more noticeable at sunset.

Have I missed something or does everybody else have the same impression?

(I can think up a perfectly plausible explanation for this, which might or might not be nonsense - during the day, more particles are emitted, more dust is thrown up etc, and as the sun warms the atmosphere, it creates convection currents which stir it all up, so at sunset, the sun is shining through the muck it has spent all day churning up.

During the night, the atmosphere cools and settles, and most of the particles and dust sinks back to the ground, so in the morning the sun is shining through relatively clean air again, so there is less scattering of the blue and UV light.)

Gloriously Irreverent Headline Of The Day

The Soaraway Sun's headline(s) above the story about Cornish people worrying about getting their feet wet:

Land's End of world as we know it
Ooh Arr-pocalypse* Now... Cornish tsunami fears

* The headline in the paper version was "Ooh Arr-mageddon", which I thought was better.

UPDATE: Mark in Mayenne submits "Ooh arr-mageddon my feet wet" and wins this round.

Calm down dears, it's only a T-shirt

While I don't approve of politicians interfering with the press and I don't find the pictures on Page 3 of The Sun in any way objectionable, it strikes me that the politician(s) who told Caroline Lucas to "comply with Westminster's dress code" after she pulled this harmless little stunt are complete pompous arseholes. Similarly, if a female politician had gone topless to make a point for or against Page 3 girls, that would have been perfectly reasonable under the circumstances as well.

I mean, it's not like she started a war in Iraq or gave the bankers hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money or anything, FFS.

And BBC, take note, this was not a Commons debate, it was some sort of committee, surely?

Bloody foreigners! Coming over here, taking our... subsidies!

MBK emailed me a fine article in The Soaraway Sun blasting the "Help to buy" land price subsidy scheme. Not because it is a lunatic risky use of taxpayers' money that will merely push up land prices and burden people with much larger debts, no sirree...

FOREIGNERS can cash in on a taxpayer-funded scheme to help hard-up families buy new homes, it was revealed last night.

They will be able to claim thousands of pounds in subsidies for a deposit.

It emerged that non-UK residents from Europe and the rest of the world will be able to buy their first pad here worth up to £600,000 using £130 billion of public money.

One furious critic branded the scheme “absurd”, and others warned it would boost the “pull factor” which has lured millions of immigrants to Britain.
The Help to Buy scheme — announced in the Budget — allows families to put down just five per cent on a newly built home. A further 20 per cent comes from a five-year interest-free Government loan.

Mortgage brokers are already advising hundreds of foreigners who want to take advantage.

Sir Andrew Green, of MigrationWatch UK, said: “This is utterly absurd. We are trying to tackle mass immigration, yet at every point we roll out the red carpet.”

In other news:

FOREIGNERS can use taxpayer-funded public transport designed to help hard-up families get to work, it was revealed last night.

FOREIGNERS can call the taxpayer-funded police if they are victims of crime, it was revealed last night.

"Criminal inanity"

TODAY The Sun reveals the shocking figure that nearly one in five of all rape or murder suspects is a professional footballer.

The sheer scale of crimes committed by footballers is astonishing. Confront politicians with an embarrassing statistic and they try to get off the hook by talking about "context". So here's some context for that crime figure.

A report published today shows that, because of a loophole in the immigration rules, more than 20,000 footballers and their families from outside the EU come to live here every year. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the two figures might be connected.

The more footballers who live here, the more likely it is that crimes will be committed by footballers. The Government is trying to get a grip on immigration. The numbers overall are down. But crime figures like this show just how vital it is that loopholes are closed and sanity is restored to immigration.

"Now listen up Ed, me old Not Red pal, the boy on your side that is clearly leading the way back into government

is that well clever geezer and Iain Duncan Smith tribute act Liam Byrne.   He knows that the only way you can convince the electorate to put you into Number 10 is to promise to be even more of a means testing fixated bunch,  to promise to tax the incomes of the lower paid even more severely - you can bring in a "living wage" so the party can be seen to be looking after 'the ordinary working man' but if you do you must make sure that anyone getting it is subjected to having so much of it taken away that they'll be even worse off than they were before it came in - and you really must make it absolutely clear all the time that unemployment is all the fault, and only the fault, of the unemployed themselves, ***the lazy, shirking buggers.   Oh and Ed, when you are in Number 10, just remember, "it was the Sun wot done it" ok?"

Update : there's now some documented proof that Liam, with a little help from Iain (or vice versa) has already done some sterling groundwork, and the message is definitely getting across ...

No. None of us, actually.

From The Sun

TODAY Lady Thatcher will be laid to rest after a magnificent funeral of the sort few of us get to see in a lifetime.
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The Daily Express is on top form as well. Their front page is emblazoned with the headline

4,000 POLICE GUARD MAGGIE COFFIN

And next to it is a photo of MADDIE:

"Keep bare boobs in The Sun" urge Scouts

From the BBC:

The half-million strong Boyscouting movement has added its voice to a campaign to persuade the Sun newspaper to keep its Page Three topless pin-up. It has signed a petition urging Sun editor Dominic Mohan "to man up and keep bare boobs in The Sun". Boyscouting UK signed the Keep Page Three petition after a poll of members.

"I don't think it is wrong for ambitious young lasses to flash their breasts in a family newspaper," said Scout Keith Wormald, 17, whose idea the vote was. The online poll of more than 2,000 scouts aged between 16 and 25 took place last month. Some 88% said they believed the Sun should retain Page Three. The Scouts have now adopted the campaign to keep Page Three as official policy.

"Despite decades of Page Three Girls, children don't grow up thinking that this is the norm. Young girls don't grow up thinking that they will achieve more by being sexually objectified," added Keith. "Also it is one of the few examples of the celebration of womanhood in our society. So what's the harm?"

Mr Wormald is one of Boyscouting's Advocates, a group of Scouts who help the movement decide how best to give young men - and ambitious young women - a voice on issues affecting their lives.

In a letter emailed to Mr Mohan on Monday the group writes: "We know that the Sun is a family newspaper. Anyone can pick it up and turn to page three for a sly peek and suddenly be struck by how faintly bizarre it is for young women to get their kit off for the benefit of complete strangers and have a random quote on the day's events attributed to them."

"Three men jailed for selling information to the Sun"

From the BBC:

A former prison worker and two ex-policemen have been jailed for selling information to newspapers.

Richard Trunkfield, 31, who worked at Woodhill prison near Milton Keynes, was jailed for 16 months for passing on details about one of James Bulger's killers, Jon Venables.

Ex-Surrey PC Alan Tierney, 40, received 10 months for selling details about two cases linked to high-profile people.

A second unnamed ex-officer was sentenced to two years for misconduct. He cannot be named for legal reasons.

By force of habit as much as anything, journalists from The Sun newspaper spent all afternoon on the phone to their narks in the courts and prison services to try and find out which one of their bent coppers has been banged up and are already going through possible puns on the man's name on which to base the headline on tomorrow's front page.

Fun Online Polls: Over at The Sun

I was going to cut and paste the following Prohibitionist diatribe from today's Sun, by Tory MP Philip Davies...

I DON’T want any relaxation of the laws.

So much crime is fuelled by people getting addicted to drugs, so the idea that you’ll solve that by legalising everything is for the birds. Reputable retailers are not going to start selling hard drugs, so this would have the effect of legitimising some very unpleasant people.

Drugs cause so much misery, not so much to the people taking them, but to their families and the victims of crime. It’s naive to think that by liberalising the market you will solve the problem.

(For some reason, proper libertarian Dick Puddlecote still seems to hold Mr P Davies in high regard, f- knows why on the basis of outpourings like this.)

... when their Fun Online Poll caught my eye: so far, over 20,000 votes have been cast and 85% are in favour of legalising cannabis, despite the Sun newspaper being, on the face of it at least, very anti-legalisation (but the way they manipulate public opinion is so subtle and so clever, that they might be deliberately putting the case for Prohibition so badly as to drive people the other way, who knows?).

Which I thought was not only chucklesome but also rather heartening.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (251)

The Sun Says:

Axe, not tax

The Tories will be playing with fire if they bump up council tax to keep Nick Clegg happy. Council tax is already crippling.(1) And the Lib Dem argument for an increase is deeply flawed.(2)

Higher property valuation bands would hammer many working families (3) and retired people (4) who do not see their ordinary semis and terraced houses in the South as mansions.(5) Instead of raising taxes, let the Government cut overseas aid, reduce Whitehall overmanning and axe quangos.(6)

Who cares about keeping the idiot Clegg happy anyway? The Sun doesn’t.(7)

1) Outright lie. The total taxes raised from the productive economy are about £400 billion a year, borne mainly by fewer than 20 million working households; the overall effective tax rate on earnings is at least fifty per cent. Council Tax raises £25 billion-odd from 27 million households and is not income-related so does not discourage people from working (although Council Tax benefit probably does). No business has ever shut down because its customers or employees paid higher council tax - or are you more likely to get made redundant if you get a promotion and move into a nicer house in a higher council band?

2) No it's not. Their argument is quite sensible: "You can't take land abroad or hide it from the taxman."

3) Outright lie, see (1).

4) The interests of working age are completely at odds with the interests of retired people. If you're on the side of Poor Widows In Mansions, then you are quite maliciously acting against the interests of working age people. And the interests of landowners and bankers in 'the South' are diametrically opposed to the interests of the rest of the country anyway.

5) So what? The Queen probably thinks that Balmoral is a modest holiday cottage. A tax on rental values is a tax on rental values; for these purposes, a home on a large plot in a cheap area is equivalent to a home on a small plot in an expensive one. Market prices and market rents tell us this.

6) True but irrelevant. That's the spending side, not the tax raising side. It's like a school pupil going to the careers advisor and asking him whether he should spend his future earnings on cars or holidays.

7) Neither do I, but occasionally even Nick Clegg is right.