Educational Maintenance Allowance

According to the BBC:

Chancellor George Osborne announced plans to axe the scheme, which was designed to keep students coming to class, saying it had very high "dead weight costs". The Department for Education has highlighted research that suggests many of the grants' recipients would attend college or school whether they received the money or not.

Not sure what he means by 'dead weight costs', but apparently "Staying-on rates improved, according to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Loughborough University. Overall, they were up 5.9 percentage points among those who were eligible for the grants."

For the sake of this discussion, let us assume that staying on at school is An Unalloyed Good and that this is the sole purpose of the EMA; that two-thirds of children are eligible (parents not over income threshold); that without the scheme, two-thirds of eligible children would stay on; and with the scheme an extra 5.9% stay on. So without it, 66.7% of eligible children stay on and with it, 70.6% stay on. There are (round figures) 2,000,000 eligible children (three age cohorts x two-thirds), so that means there are an extra 79,000 children at school.

According to the first BBC article, "EMA was an expensive programme, costing over £560m a year with administration costs amounting to £36m". So every additional pupil-year costs a princely £7,500 (£596 million ÷ 79,000), which is in addition to the marginal costs of teaching a marginal pupil, so George may have a point there.
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Direct.gov no longer explains the means-testing, so let's go by what Wiki says:

£30 per week for those whose household income is under £20,817 p.a.;
£20 per week for those whose household income is between £20,818 and £25,521 p.a.;
£10 per week for those whose household income is between £25,522 and £30,810 p.a.

So let's imagine a couple with two kids aged 16-19, and one parent was earning £20,813 a year who were receiving £3,120 per year EMA (plus loads of Working Tax Credits and so on). If the other parent decided it was time to go back to work (so that their teenage kids can stay on) and got a job offer for £10,000 a year, was there any point taking it?

Not really. They'd lose all that £3,120 a year EMA as well as up to 39% x £10,000 Working Tax Credits (£3,900), and there'd be £1,176 PAYE deducted, so total benefits lost + tax paid = £8,196, so what's left over out of £10,000 was not even enough to cover that parent's bus fare, really. So we can add that to the dead weight costs as well.
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Where the Lib-Cons get a big minus point is that with one hand, they are taking away money from lower income parents in order to save a few quid and with the other hand they are taking away Child Benefit from a random selection of higher earning families, which will cost as much in extra administration and hassle as it saves in money paid out (not to mention discouraging marriage and increasing the marginal interest rate on certain people).

The sensible way of doing all this is of course to scrap Child Tax Credits and the EMA, add it to the total amount paid out as Child Benefit and dish it out as a higher flat rate universal Child Benefit (this would work out at about £35 per child per week, assuming we restrict it to the first three children), but it's not like they listen to me.

Even better, they'd shut down state provision of education and give every parent Education Vouchers instead, separate topic.

"Pensioner dies after being crushed by cow"

Spotted by Hugh Miller. From the Belfast Telegraph:

A pensioner died after she was crushed to death by a cow on the farm where she lived. Violet Breen (67), an office worker from Fermanagh, was killed during an agricultural accident as she was tending to the animal near her home on Monday.

While exact details of her death are not known it is understood Mrs Breen was calving the cow when the incident occurred. The Health and Safety Executive has launched an investigation to establish the circumstances of her death...

Crikey! Are not even office workers safe any more?

Vested Interest Fun

Nice to see a whole shed load of Vested Interest groups sticking their oars in at the BBC:

The UK government should put a moratorium on shale gas operations until the environmental implications are fully understood, a report says.

Inevitably, the article kicks off with a 'should'.

"We are aware that there have been reports from US of issues linked to some shale gas projects," a spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) told BBC News, "However, we understand that these are only in a few cases and that Cuadrilla (the firm testing for shale gas in Lancashire) has made it clear that there is no likelihood of environmental damage and that it is applying technical expertise and exercising the utmost care as it takes drilling and testing forward."

Regulator takes regulated's word for it. Nice.

The Tyndall report also expresses concern that the exploitation of shale gas is bringing new greenhouse gas sources into play. It says: "This will further reduce any slim possibility of maintaining global temperature changes at or below 2C (3.6F) and thereby increase the risk of entering a period of 'dangerous climate change'."

All things being equal, the amount of 'greenhouse gases' and other pollutants created per unit of energy consumed in a building is probably lower with domestic shale gas than e.g. importing gas from Russia or the Middle East.

... there have been reports of problems with the technology in the US, such as cattle dying after drinking water from the fracturing process that found its way to the surface.

Possibly true, that all depends on whether cattle drink water which has recently fallen as rain or which trickles out of rocks. But the overall safety record of European oil and gas producers is vastly better than in the USA, so I'm not sure that's relevant.

In Pennsylvania, some residents can now set fire to their drinking water after methane leaked into wells. They are blaming shale gas extraction.

Possibly true. Safety tip: if you turn on your water tap and smell gas*, then open a couple of windows and leave the tap running until the gas dissipates, and most importantly, don't hold a lighted match under a running tap.

The Tyndall report says that gas drilling in Lancashire will give rise to a range of local concerns including noise pollution, high levels of truck movements and land use demands.

Ah... the NIMBYs making a late guest appearance. As a rule of thumb, where there's a Greenie there's a NIMBY not far behind.

The Decc spokesman said: "We support industry's endeavours in pursuing energy sources (like shale gas), provided that tapping of such resources proves to be economically, commercially and environmentally viable...

If it weren't 'economically viable', then no private company would want to do it, short of there being massive subsidies. The reason why we can't rule out the government subsidising this is hinted at earlier in the article: "Experts say the technological breakthrough increases energy security worldwide and reduces the diplomatic power of gas-rich nations, such as Russia."

The article concludes:

"All onshore oil and gas projects, including shale gas exploration and development, are subject to a series of checks, including local planning permission before they are able to move ahead with drilling activities."

Not going to happen then, is it, short of energy companies merrily greasing a few palms. So it's in the interests of local politicians to stoke up Greenie and NIMBY opposition because that enhances the amount of bribes they can demand.

*The problem being that apparently you can't smell natural gas, but hey. More to the point, UK water companies are very much geared up to separating out methane from water pumped into the system, that's what sewage works are for.

It can't be rocket science to separate a heavy liquid (like water) from a light gas (like methane). From here: "Methane can also migrate from coal seams into sandstone aquifers. If methane is present in an aquifer, it will likely exist as a dissolved gas in the water. When the well is pumped, the water level is drawn down. The draw down will lower the pressure in the well and allow more gas to be released from the water. Methane will readily move from the water phase to the gas phase when water pressure is reduced to atmospheric pressure at the ground surface."

Guns, Germs and Steel (2)

As recommended (yes you), I ordered this book, which arrived on Friday and I have now finished reading. It's all very interesting, or least useful background info, and for a modest £6 or something at Amazon the sort of book which everybody ought to have read.

It does make me wonder what possessed people from south east Asia (via New Guinea) to island hop all the way as far as Hawaii in little canoes, presumably by trial and error without even knowing whether there was a destination, let alone in which direction it might be. For every single person who made it to Hawaii, how many just ran out of food/water at some random place in the Pacific? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? According to the book populating "virtually every habitable scrap of land in the Pacific" only took about two thousand years from start to finish

And in the epilogue, he says what I have always said: that history is a science like anything else, in that if you look at the grander sweep of things you can recognise definite patterns; and if you can recognise patterns you can predict future events. (Isn't that what economists do all the time? The problem being that economists are on the whole so stupid (or corrupt) that they can't recognise what's going right now, e.g. few of them called the land price or credit bubbles).

Isaac Asimov referred to this as 'psychohistory' in the Foundation Trilogy - ignore the later additions, they were crap. When I read the original trilogy, I assumed that The Foundation was an allegory for Japan (very developed scientifically, but on a distant planet with very few raw materials so that the tides of history would force them to become a successful and hence powerful trading planet), only it turned out that the books were written in the early 1950s, long before Gen Douglas MacArthur's Georgist reforms had turned Japan into the success it was for a few decades (until they turned their back on Georgism again, of course).

Really good caricatures

I was searching for something else and stumbled across Sharrock's Blog. I don't know if he does them professionally (the style is not familiar to me), but they knock my caricatures into a cocked hat.

I suppose my only consolation is that I do mine in usually less than ten minutes and I bet he slaves over his for ages.

Lazer mayhem

The Lad had his belated birthday party today here.

It was quite good fun I suppose, and I survived more than half of about eight different 'battles' without being 'killed' by simply finding the best hiding place and just sniping intermittently. Rather bizarrely, standing behind a tree worked best - but remember to keep your head and your 'gun', both of which are targets out of view.

But the constant squatting down behind [oil barrel, haystack etc], then jumping up for a second and squatting down again before somebody shoots you is quite tiring; it was awfully muddy in places; and we learn yet again that ten year old boys have no concept of tactics or co-ordination and it was only in one round that they/we exhibited some sort of team work. We 'won' that round hands down, which was rather gratifying.

Rihanna

Fox Shoots Man

Spotted by Captain Ranty (at Yahoo News):

A wounded fox shot its would be killer in Belarus by pulling the trigger on the hunter's gun as the pair scuffled after the man tried to finish the animal off with the butt of the rifle, media said Thursday.

The unnamed hunter, who had approached the fox after wounding it from a distance, was in hospital with a leg wound, while the fox made its escape, media said, citing prosecutors from the Grodno region.

"The animal fiercely resisted and in the struggle accidentally pulled the trigger with its paw," one prosecutor was quoted as saying.

Having built up to this linguistic crescendo (of course "the animal resisted", it was about to be killed; who says it was "accidental"; and with which appendage other than its paw would the animal pull the trigger?), the article concludes with possibly the most exquisite sentence to grace an animal-attacks-human story:

Fox-hunting is popular in the picturesque farming region of northwestern Belarus which borders Poland.

And the audience said...

Is gazundering fair game?
Yes: 86%
No: 13%
Other, please specify: 1%

Originally posted at HPC

What is child porn?

From The Daily Mail:

A former lawyer who attempted to blackmail his ex-wife with nude pictures taken of her sister when she was just 16 will today hear if an appeal against his conviction has been granted. Gary Peel had taken the images during an affair with the girl in 1974 and kept them for three decades...

There's a sliding scale here. Some are clearly child pornography (as defined) but surely not all of them:

i. An adult takes a 'sexual' (as defined) picture of somebody else's child.

ii. A parent takes a 'sexual' picture of his or her own child (to be sold or passed on to others).

iii. A parent takes a picture of his or her baby or child when they are naked, i.e. on the beach, in the bath etc, but entirely innocently and purely for family album. In the hands of that family = not child porn; if stolen or used by others for sexual stimulation = child porn.

iv. Teenager takes sexy photo of other teenager for mutual amusement.

v. Teenagers (inevitably) split up and one threatens to or actually publishes sexy photos of other without their permission (or with, for that matter).

vi. Decades later, the teenage photographer is now an adult and threatens to publish these old sexy photos without the permission of the other person (who is also now an adult). This covers the actual offence committed here.

vii. Same as vi. but the other person is quite happy for them to be published.

viii. Here's the kicker: an adult owns 'sexual' photographs of him- or herself taken when he or she was a baby or a child, and publishes them him or herself. Can you violate your own right to privacy? Would it be possible for a Court to convict you of the crime of exploiting a version of yourself that existed decades ago?