They own land! Give them money!

Spotted by TBH in the Epoch Times:

California authorities announced Monday the state plans to pay off 100 percent of unpaid rent accumulated during the pandemic, with the money to come from some $5.2 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote in a tweet Monday that, “California is planning rent forgiveness on a scale never seen before in the United States,” attributing the post to a report by the New York Times, which noted that state lawmakers were putting the final touches on the program.

While eligibility criteria for the newly proposed program are still unclear, reports indicate that the measure would both give renters in arrears a clean slate and make landlords whole.

Possibly one of the worst abuses of "COVID-19 relief funds" in recent history. Are they mental? Let's imagine that a developed country send a struggling country £1 billion in aid payments to help them get over Covid-19... and they just hand it all over to landowners.

The Glastonbury 2019 clean up - I call bullshit.

An article in (at? I'm never sure) Somerset Live contrasts the almost pristine state of the field after this year's festival with the amount of tents and rubbish left behind last year, and explains the difference thusly:

Climate change and the environment has been a central theme for this year's event, with organisers urging people to bring sturdy tents that they take home, and it appears that the message has been getting through.

The Love the Farm, Leave no Trace pledge, which launched in 2016, is believed to have resulted in an 81 per cent reduction in tents left at Glastonbury in 2017.

Nope.

Those pop-up tents are easy to pop up, but very fiddly to fold up and put back in the bag. If you are tired, cold, muddy and dying to go home and your tent is covered in mud (and possibly sewage), you won't be in the mood to struggle with it for ten minutes and are likely to abandon it. Having spent £200 on a ticket and £50 on travel, and having got used to paying £8 for a can of warm lager, who cares about the £40 you spent on a pop-up tent?

If, as happened this year, you and your tent are dry and the weather's still nice, you're happy to faff about for ten minutes, work out how to pack up your tent and take it with you.

The same goes for all the plastic rubbish. Most people won't be willing to gather up plastic bottles embedded in mud (and possibly sewage) while it's pouring down. If it's nice weather, filling up a couple of bin liners with loose plastic items is no great sacrifice, if you're doing it with a few like-minded, it can even be quite satisfying.

Let's see what happens to people's new-found environmental awareness next time it's been raining.

Lock 'em up and throw away the key...

From the BBC:

The NHS fraud squad is investigating GPs in England amid suspicions they are claiming for non-existent patients.

Doctors get an average of £150 a year for each patient on their list, but records show there were 3.6 million more patients in the system last year than there were people in England.

The discrepancy prompted NHS England to employ [Crapita] to start chasing up these so-called ghost patients.

The NHS Counter Fraud Authority is now launching its own investigation.

... in the following order

1. Whoever thought it was a good idea to pay each GP a quarter of a million quid a year in the first place. From the article:

The average GP has around 1,700 patients on their list so the payments make up a significant chunk of their income.

1,700 x £150 = £255,000, and that's just a 'significant chunk'. How much more do the buggers get?

2. Whoever thought it was a good idea to pay GP's on this basis (rather than work actually done).

3. Whoever let things slide for so long rather than crunching the numbers every year as a matter of routine.

4. Whoever thought it was a good idea to throw money at Crapita for doing something which the NHS Fraud Authority is (or should) be doing.

5. A few GPs and their chief receptionists who must have been complicit in the whole scam, pour encourager les autres.

How office twats 'stay hydrated'

Prompted by this fine Daily Mash article...

Where I work, a lot of people carry round those poncey re-fillable water bottles. Twattishness of the highest order, but it's still an improvement on people buying disposable bottles all the time.

Somebody in our office didn't get that memo though. Instead of filling his bottle at one the water coolers which our employer so generously provides, he took a fresh plastic bottle from the fridge, decanted the contents into his refillable bottle, crumpled up the plastic bottle and threw it in the bin.

"Unregistered schools given council funding"

The BBC at its PC best.

You can guess pretty well what this is about just from the headline, but you have to slog two-thirds of the way through the article before they come out and actually say it.

There were a couple of tantalising clues along the way. They've removed the reference to the school which taught "English and Arabic" as that would have been too obvious, just leaving this to keep you going...

... inspectors said that many children were still being taught in this "murky world", with the biggest number in London and the West Midlands.

A bit like the Daily Mail articles where they don't mention the house price until the very end.

"Don’t ban plastics – ban littering"

A very sensible article in City AM.

Test your recycling knowledge.

OTOH upped the ante in the comments here:

Pre-sorting your waste is no biggie... to more-or-less try to get it right for adults, but my council puts bossy warning stickers on the bin if you get it wrong. My children try. e.g. Pringles seem cardboard to them, but it has silver foil on the inside and is unrecyclable. For many things I am supposed to peel off the thin plastic film on the top to throw away, but recycle the plastic tray. Other things say 'refer to the recycling policy in your area.'

So either the recycling policy is not very strict, which makes the 'product' unusable other than for burning so this is all just virtue signalling, or the council policy is very strict, which certainly makes the obligation a "biggie"

Test your knowledge

Recycling cardboard - should you remove all the sticky tape?

Cooking oil - do you pour your cooking oil into a plastic bottle and place it in your food caddy, or absorb it in newspaper and dispose of in your caddy?

Wrapping paper - recyclable?

Unused tissues - recyclable?

Black plastic plant pot - recyclable?

There are 50 types of plastic, but only 6 are labelled. Which of those labelled 1-6 can be recycled?

Can triggers can be left on cleaning product bottles and pumps on soap bottles?

Knowing full well that I'll get most of these wrong, I will venture:
- Yes
- Neither. Take the bottle of oil to the recycling centre and dispose of there.
- Yes
- Yes
- I take them back to the garden centre if I can, if not I chuck them in the plastic.
(I've a nasty feeling they're not recyclable, going by the question).
- Not the foggiest
- I remove the metal bits and put them in the metal.

Spiteful!

From the BBC:

Controversial four-weekly bin collections will be rolled out across a county on Monday - the first area in England and Wales to make the move...

It has been met with controversy, with residents and councillors calling it "unfair" and claiming the trial brought more rats, seagulls and flies. Conwy council said it had addressed concerns and it could save £390,000.

Many parts of the UK are now moving towards three-weekly bin collections in a bid to cut down on residual waste and increase recycling.

Conwy County Borough has 116,550 residents, so about 50,000 households.

Divide £390,000 (let's assume this is an annual figure) by 50,000, that's £7.80 per household, or about 1% of their Council Tax bills. Not clear if they are moving from two- or from three-weekly collection to four-weekly, but it works out at 60p or £2 per bin collection.

So clearly, cost savings are not the motivation:

Conwy County Borough say:

A year-long trial showed that putting recycling at the heart of the service has really paid off, with residents’ recycling more than ever since their refuse collection went to 4 weekly...

The service change will mean that all Conwy residents will have:
* a weekly collection for food waste;
* a weekly collection for paper, card, Tetra Paks, cans, aerosols, foil, glass bottles and jars, plastic bottles, tubs and trays and batteries;
* a fortnightly collection for green waste, textiles and small electrical waste;
* a refuse collection every four weeks; and
* a weekly nappy or incontinence products collection for those who need it.

So in defence of the council, you should only be putting "stuff that doesn't rot" into your four-weekly bin anyway. Where I live, they empty the green bin (food and garden waste) weekly and alternate between the recycling and the black bin (general waste), so the black bin is emptied once a fortnight.. Our black bin is hardly ever more than half full, and probably never more than half full two fortnights on the trot, so in theory, four-weekly is just about do-able (depending how big the bins are).

Going against the council is the fact that they are already spending all that extra money (rightly or wrongly) doing all the weekly collections. Ultimately, they are relying on people's public spiritedness to put the right stuff in the right bin and not in the general waste; only picking up general waste once every four weeks has a purely punitive aspect to it.

That is the spiteful bit. It's not just the naughty people who put food waste in the general waste bin who are being punished, their immediate neighbours suffer too.

"Walsall Council plans to install street skips to tackle fly-tipping"

From the BBC:

Skips could be placed on streets in a bid to tackle repeated fly-tipping, a council has announced.

Last year, there were more than 4,000 reports of illegally discarded waste across Walsall, with 2,000 tonnes of rubbish removed from the borough.

The local authority has now proposed putting a skip in each of its 20 wards every Saturday*. Clearing up fly-tipping cost the council more than £400,000 last year, bosses said.

And why on earth wouldn't they?

1. The cost of collecting rubbish is about 1% - 2% of the selling price of new goods sold, and so anybody who wants to chuck something away has paid for the cost of having it collected ten or twenty times over via VAT.

We take our larger items to a council recycling centre; they have signs up saying "Household refuse only". I really don't see why they draw this distinction, businesses have paid VAT just like anybody else and have the same entitlement to dump their rubbish.

2. The test of whether something is a good idea is to imagine the opposite situation, i.e. there are plenty of skips dotted around for people to dump larger items in, and let's assume most people do the decent thing and use them. Would any sane council announce that it intends to save a few quid by withdrawing the service? You'd hope not.

* I don't quite understand that sentence. Will the skips be there on Saturdays, or will they be emptied on Saturdays?

... let's fund the NHS instead

Meme kindly created by Jeremy L:

Your taxpayers' money, hard at work.

From the BBC:

The NHS in England is to get an extra £20bn a year by 2023 as a 70th "birthday present", Theresa May says. It means the £114bn budget will rise by an average of 3.4% annually - but that is still less than the 3.7% average rise the NHS has had since 1948...

The five-year funding settlement covers just front-line budgets overseen by NHS England. About a 10th of the overall health budget is held by other bodies for things such as training and healthy lifestyle programmes, including stop smoking services and obesity prevention programmes. The BBC understands these will be protected, but beyond that it is unclear what will happen to them.

?!? One-tenth of £114 bn is £11.4 bn, which is approx equal to our net contributions to the EU budget.

Would anybody like to chip in for a battle bus, with "We spend £220 million a week on stop smoking services and obesity prevention programmes. Let's fund the NHS instead." written on the sides?

Money for nothing...

From the BBC:

Rudi Klein, head of Specialist Engineering Contractor, an umbrella group representing suppliers to the construction industry, said Carillion outsourced virtually all its work.

He said the government knew of Carillion's reliance on sub-contractors, but continued to award the company lucrative work despite growing concerns about its finances.

"It's that supply chain who is going to bear the massive loss," he said. "There could be a large number of firms that will experience substantial financial distress."

... and presumably their chicks for free, although that is not expressly stated.

Conscious UN-coupling

Ryan Bourne in yesterday's City AM:

According to the UN, Britain is ranked 156th out of 165 participating countries for “kids’ rights”. If you think this is a genuine reflection of the welfare and rights of children here relative to other countries – including Venezuela and Saudi Arabia – who are ranked higher than us, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Then again, what are we to expect from an organisation whose Human Rights Council recently appointed a representative from Saudi Arabia to its 2018-2022 “Commission on the Status of Women”, which is “exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality”? In Saudi Arabia, women are still banned from driving.

But no doubt we can look forward to that Commission criticising Britain’s so-called “gender pay gap”, as representatives from Sudan and Algeria did in our 2012 Universal Review. This featured other delights, such as Russia criticising “police brutality” in the UK, Vietnam denouncing our “austerity”, Cuba urging us to protect economic and social rights, and China discussing the freedom to protest...

Why are British taxpayers funding this nonsense?

It's a good question and I don't know the answer. I'd ask the same about our membership of NATO.

Your taxpayers' money, hard at work.

Spotted by Lola in The Telegraph:

Inflation is officially back, and by the end of this year is expected to hit 2.3pc, above the Bank of England’s 2pc target. In a world of rising prices, investors need exposure to assets that can keep pace.

Investing in infrastructure projects – such as motorways, schools or hospitals – that are inflation-linked is one way to protect the value of capital. These projects also produce a reliable income, with the trust currently yielding 5.1pc...

Andrew Charlesworth, manager of the £1.2bn John Laing Infrastructure trust, says that investors should not worry about buying at a premium, and explains how he made 36pc on a London hospital and his role in President Donald Trump’s plans.

The only way to make such super-profits is if the government overpaid in the first place; one man's super-profits is the flip side of shit value for the long suffering taxpayer.

Economic Myths: "We all hate wasting food"

Quite clearly we don't, or we wouldn't do it, but people keep bringing up the topic, so here goes...

For example, they have posters up at my local Tesco saying Love Food Hate Waste. They had a segment on a recent Food Unwrapped programme (which are very interesting programmes on the whole) where one of them was interviewing a farmer who employs people to sort carrots for the supermarkets. About a third of them are not 'supermarket quality' i.e. long, straight and easy to peel and these are chucked on a huge pile and sold for animal feed etc.

The presenter then got on his Righteous Horse, bagged up some of the odd-shaped ones and got permission to sell them in a supermarket for half the price of the long, straight ones. "They taste just as good as the long straight ones", he explained breathlessly to a few Righteous Shoppers who bought them.

1. Well of course they taste the same, that's not the issue here - they just aren't as easy to peel and chop. Peeling and chopping carrots is a chore and you want to get it done as quick as poss, so people who value their own time are quite happy to pay double for fairly uniform, long, straight ones.

2. It's like pre-washed lettuce. If we were given bags of unsorted carrots, assuming that people value their own time, it would make economic sense to buy more than you need, peel and chop the easy ones and chuck the rest in the compost. There is simply no point faffing about for ten minutes rescuing ten pence worth of carrots.

3. Farmers are businesses like anybody else, and of course there are unwanted by-products. They are quite happy to throw away all the carrot leaves, the odd-shaped carrots are just a by-product, the same as the leaves.

4. In theory, farmers could reduce their carrot production by one-third, see a corresponding fall in income and use the spare land for growing something else. We have to assume that markets have sorted that out and that growing more carrots (even if a third end up being sold for pennies) gives them the most extra income compared to growing more of something else. So in economic terms, this is not waste - they are maximising the value of their output.

"Watch out for the latest scam: Fake clothing recycling bins"

Says a press release from businesswaste.co.uk that somehow landed in my inbox:

Local and national charities are being cheated out of income by ambitious criminal who have started leaving fake clothes banks in towns and cities...

According to BusinessWaste.co.uk, it’s got to the point where local authorities are impounding dishonestly-placed “charity” bins which only exist to make crooks richer.

“The people are a blight on decent society,” says BusinessWaste.co.uk spokesperson Mark Hall, “They prey on people’s charitable instincts just for personal profit.”

It's another job for Land Value Tax Man isn't it?

The council can just rent out pitches for recycling banks to the highest bidder and spend the proceeds on 'charitable purposes' (or give local charities a discount on the rent). The highest bidder gets a little placard to attach to his clothes bank to make it easier to spot the fraudsters/non-payers, whose banks are repossessed and rented out to a winning bidder.

If businesses can recycle more efficiently than charities, the super-profits arising from favourably located clothes banks will go to charity. If businesses can't recycle more efficiently, then charities will outbid them, and all the rent they pay ends back in their hands anyway.

Evil climate sceptics bashing solar power as per usual...

... or maybe not?

Emailed in by Ben Jamin' and Physiocrat, article by Euan Mearns

A new study by Ferroni and Hopkirk [1] estimates the ERoEI of temperate latitude solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to be 0.83. If correct, that means more energy is used to make the PV panels than will ever be recovered from them during their 25 year lifetime. A PV panel will produce more CO2 than if coal were simply used directly to make electricity.

Worse than that, all the CO2 from PV production is in the atmosphere today, while burning coal to make electricity, the emissions would be spread over the 25 year period. The image shows the true green credentials of solar PV where industrial wastelands have been created in China so that Europeans can make believe they are reducing CO2 emissions.

Please note, the article refers to solar panels at temperate latitudes such as Europe. Solar panels might well be net energy generators in very sunny areas - the question is, how far from the Equator is the break-even point at which the return turns negative?

UPDATE: Bayard in the comments:

"A PV panel will produce more CO2 than if coal were simply used directly to make electricity."

but only if no renewable energy was used to make the PV panel. While that is probably true, it ain't necessarily so."

I didn't bother with that scenario because that would be an equally stupid thing to do - using up 1 unit of PV energy to generate another 0.83...

Peak stuff

From The Daily Mail:

The amount of stuff Britain consumes has fallen by around a third in just over a decade as the world became increasingly digitised, new statistics have revealed.

The figures, from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), show that the average Britain used just over ten tonnes of stuff in 2013, compared to 15 tonnes of material in 2001. The measure, which includes food, fuels, metals and building materials, shows that Britain may have passed 'peak stuff', a term relating to how much material people use.

Just goes to show, doesn't it? I have no idea whether it really is true, but it seems perfectly plausible.

That ban on taxpayer-funded charities lobbying the government...

… is not so much loopholes as a gate without a fence.

From the BBC:

Organisations given UK government grants will be banned from using the money to try to persuade ministers to change the law or increase spending.

A new clause will be added into all new and renewed grant agreements to ensure funds are spent on good causes, rather than on political campaigns. Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock said "the farce of government lobbying government" had to stop.

Voluntary groups said the rules could threaten their freedom to speak out. Critics also said the restrictions, which come into effect in May and will only apply to grants from central UK government departments, could be hard to enforce.

Many people, including lawyers, somehow believe that money can be earmarked, streamed and traced. It can't*.

For example, 'charities' which are ninety per cent taxpayer funded can still use the other ten per cent of their income to pay for lobbying and spend the ninety per cent on whatever the government asks them to spend it on. So this measure achieves nothing, apart from perhaps restricting the amount that such charities can spend on lobbying slightly - the question is, as usual, was the measure supposed to achieve anything or is the loophole intentional?

And how do you define lobbying? If a 'charity' pays for advertising to sway public opinion, knowing that politicians will bow with the wind, is that still 'lobbying' in the narrow sense?

The only solution is to prevent charities in receipt of a single penny of public money whatsoever from doing any 'awareness raising' or advertising whatsoever. Unless of course 'raising awareness' is the whole point, like for example road safety campaigns (reminding kids to look left and right, warning against the dangers of drink driving etc). But these things are so basic, the government can do it themselves without resorting to an overpriced quango.

* It riles me for example when somebody wins a few quid on the lottery or something, and people ask them "What are you going to spend it on?". That lottery money just goes into the pot. Instead of giving the usual answer "Buy a house/buy a car/go on holiday" it would be just as correct to answer "I will spend it on normal household expenditure and then save up my normal salary to buy a house/buy a car/go on holiday"

Fun Online Polls: Charity spending & Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award

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

How much of their income do major UK charities actually spend on charitable causes?

Next to nothing - 21%
A quarter - 41%
Half - 25%
Three quarters - 8%
Nearly all - 5%

It appears that taking major UK 'charities' as a whole, 'about half' is the correct answer, some do worse, some do better.

I think there are two separate issues here. The people at the top - an army of trustees, directors, advisors, auditors and lawyers - just help themselves.

And then there is the issue of fund raising. See my earlier post. A charity ends up as a profit maximising organisation, so if they can spend £9 on fund raising to generate £10 in donations, they will do so. Little wonder that some charities spend most of their 'income' on fund raising.
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This week's Fun Online Poll...

It appears to me that most of the candidates in the BBC's list of finalists have not done anything remarkable this year and/or have a distinct lack of personality i.e. they will do or say nothing to upset their sponsors or The Establishment i.e. the BBC.

So let's do the decent thing and have a Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award. Please vote for the candidate who has achieved least in the last twelve months; does not appear to utter anything apart from platitudes; and/or who appears most often in advertisements. Failing that, just vote for somebody you've never heard of (half of them, in my case).

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar. Just to lighten things up, you are allowed one vote per day if you feel that more than one person meets all those criteria.