Things which came from space

1. Life

2. Gold nuggets

3. Everything else

FFS.

The whole of Planet Earth came from space, it's just a load of rocks and iron and stuff which was whizzing around in space and which clumped together over a period of millions or billions of years.

One of those rocks will have had "life" on it, and I'm not sure it's relevant which one. We can decide an arbitrary date for when the clump was big enough to count as Planet Earth, so whether life originated on Planet Earth or not depends entirely on whether that that date is after or before the time that the rock bearing life arrived here.

And I suppose the order in which things arrived is quite interesting, but they all came from space.

Home-Owner-Ism compared

While looking through some articles on the web, I came across this little paper; a conference submission from 2007 on: "HOUSING CONSUMPTION AND RISK SOCIETIES: HOMEOWNERSHIP AS A MEDIATOR OF RISK IN BRITAIN, JAPAN AND THE NETHERLANDS".

Not really that juicy, but the extract of some of the responses from the different countries speaks for itself:

6.2 GOOD INVESTMENT OR SECURE ASSET

I: Do you think this house has been a good investment?

M: I don’t think so at all. We knew at the time we bought this place that the prices were going down.

I don’t really expect them to recover too much either, but it is quite important to maximize the performance of this house. You might feel that it is better to own a house than renting even though the value has gone down
(Japan, home-owner, male, 37).

It all happened by chance, not that we thought beforehand that we could make a killing by selling. In fact, you weren’t at all sure whether buying the house on Parklaan was a good idea, or if the price we paid wasn’t too high. Looking back, it turned out to be a good decision, but that...

Not speculating at all. No, it all happened to pass off very well, not as we expected. We couldn’t have anticipated it. I didn’t realise that the market would...Well, it just exploded. We sold at the right time.
(The Netherlands, home-owner, male, 59)

I think it is the only possible way of making decent money in the long-term, there are no get-rich schemes, you can’t do that, the stock market is not worth investing in, pension schemes aren’t worth you putting your money...

And also you can buy properties with other people’s money, whereas if you invest in stocks or shares or in a pension scheme every single penny has to be your own money, but if you are buying an asset like property you can borrow up to 85% of the cost and in ten years time when it has doubled in value, that’s all yours, so your money is worth 11 times what it was worth 10 years ago...And in the meantime someone else services the debt.
(UK, home-owner, male, 33)

Listed Buildings

From the BBC

A yellow-roofed warehouse in Swindon that featured in a James Bond film has been given Grade II*-listed status.

The Spectrum building, Renault's former distribution centre, was designed by Lord Norman Foster and opened in 1982.

Featuring yellow steel "umbrella masts", the futuristic single-storey glass-walled building was also used as a backdrop in A View To A Kill in 1984.

Roger Bowdler, from English Heritage, said it was "one of the very finest examples of a hi-tech building".

Famous for his steel and glass designs, Lord Foster created the Gherkin and Millennium Bridge in London, rebuilt Berlin's Reichstag and also Hong Kong Airport.

...

The building saw the last of the car manufacturer's workers move out when Renault closed its operations there in 2001.

Since then, the 25,000 sq m building has housed a car seat manufacturer, a soft indoor play centre and a firm that produces DVDs.

... and a car dealership. Since 2001. Get the message?

One of the things about buildings is that they're often very hard to repurpose. Look at the Olympics - we're burning £100m+ on converting it from an athletics stadium to a football stadium. Sometimes, you can take a building and make it work for something else (like the EMI CD production building in Swindon that is now a car dealership), but it's often quite difficult. Which is why you need people to be able to either take large chunks out of them, or just knock them down and build something new in their place.

And one of the problems with buildings that could be classified as "modern wank" is that they're not only self-indulgent by the people creating and commissioning them, they're also not very practical. Even the early users often find them a bit crap, but repurposing them and maintaining them is even worse because of irregular use of materials and shapes. Once you list them, this is only going to get worse.

So, give it a decade, this will be probably be like so many listed buildings - empty, with the owners praying for a fire to destroy it so they can put something useful in its place.

"Cyber-blackmailers abusing millions of UK taxpayers"

From the BBC:

British taxpayers are being blackmailed into funding the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), a quango which has threatened them with wildly exaggerated stories about children performing sex acts online.

It is almost impossible to prove that their urban myth about abusers posing online as children and talking victims into sexual acts or sharing of images, then threatening to send pictures to the child's family and friends, is a wild exaggeration at best and a outright fabrication at worst.

Ceop claimed that in 12 cases over two years, 424 children had been blackmailed in this way - 184 of them in the UK. Even if those figures are correct, that equates to about 0.001% of UK children who use the internet.

The only bit of hard evidence they have is the suicide of a 17-year-old in the UK, which might well have been internet-related. The other six suicides they refer to clearly happened outside the UK.

The quango then scraped the barrel by claiming that another seven seriously self-harmed, of whom six were from the UK.

With a complete lack of respect for his or his family's dignity, the quango is claiming that Daniel Perry, from Dunfermline, Fife, took his own life in the summer after blackmailers demanded thousands of pounds having tricked him into thinking he was chatting with a US girl.

NIMBYs Of The Week

Via Khards at HPC, from The Leamington Observer:

PROTESTERS in Southam have a "very good chance" of blocking the Holy Well housing development, according to town MP Jeremy Wright.

Mr Wright joined residents for a 'protest picnic' on the the field adjacent to the historic monument where Redrow Homes hope to build up to 85 homes.

Despite heavy rain, dozens turned out to show their support for the Save Holywell field campaign on Friday (August 16). At the gathering, Mr Wright said: "This is about setting and landscape. Make no mistake about it, if permission is given to build on this field, then these other fields around will also be in danger.

"An important part of Southam’s heritage, a place where people love to walk and sit by the river will be spoiled forever. I think we have got a very good chance of defending this land, but this protest is just the start.”

OK, here's that field marked on a map. The bits coloured green are fields (they go on for ever to the south) and the bit coloured grey labelled "Coventry" is the nearest large city:

Low tech valuation

Reading this post at Tim Worstall´s, and the first comment by Neil Craig:

Then add Heinein’s twist – that the owner gets to set the value of his land – on condition that anybody who wants can buy it t 3 times the owner’s valuation.

- got me thinking about the whole valuation thing.

MW reminds us often enough that it´s absolutely within the grasp of professionals to do reasonably good valuations. That´s fine. But let´s slip into utopia-mode, and devise a system where this can be done in a transparent way. Where rental value of land can be derived as a direct result of market transactions (preferably purchases), instead of a system of assessing the whole of market transactions/rents*, that can be "hidden":

• We want a system where the full value of the land can be collected, and the full value of improvements, as judged by willing sellers and buyers, to belong to those who own them.
• We, or I anyway, wouldn´t want a system where any landowner is obliged to sell anything, as opposed to some of the self-valuation schemes that people have proposed.
• Bids: can a correct price for both rental value of land, and capital value of improvements, be achieved in a system where both the improvements and the rental value of the land is bid for separately? How would such a system look like without a tendency to overbid one or the other? Or underbid for improvement values if land values is what wins out.

Just thinking out loud. Anyone with ideas/links for a conceptual scheme is welcome to put it out there.

* Obviously, for rental value on land to move on properties not "on the market", other market transactions would still have to affect those land values.

"Stephen Hawking 'nervous' about reaction to Shining sequel"

From The BBC:

Stephen Hawking has admitted he is nervous about the reaction to his forthcoming sequel to Stephen King's novel The Shining. The Cambridge physicist told the BBC he expects 95% of the reviews for Doctor Sleep to be a comparison with A Brief History Of Time.

"You are faced with that comparison and that has got to make you nervous", he said, "because there is a lot of water under the bridge. I'm a different man".

He admitted visiting literary websites to see what fans were saying about the book ahead of its publication. Now aged 71, the veteran cosmologist said he thinks the quality of his writing has improved since he wrote A Brief History Of Time at the age of 45.

"What a lot of people are saying is, 'Well okay, I will probably read this book but it cannot be as good as either A Brief History Of Time or The Shining'. But I am obviously an optimist and I want them to say when they get done with it, that it was as good. But what I really want them to say is that it is better than both."

Veteran American author, Stephen King, now 65, is currently finalising A Beginner's Guide To Gravitational Singularity Theorems. As usual, there's a scary bit right at the end when the whole of time and space collapses into a black void, taking all of humanity with it.

OK, here's a plan everybody can understand

Prompted by Ben W, and bearing in mind political considerations i.e. the fact that people consider income tax to be a worse tax than VAT or NIC and pensioners do pay some income tax but little or nothing in the way of VAT or NIC, how about this for a tax shift:

1. Reintroduce Domestic Rates/Land Value Tax at 100%-ish of site premiums (i.e. rental value minus running costs and amortisation of improvements) = would raise £200 billion (this means approx. 3.5% on current selling prices).

With this extra money, we do the following (approx. static revenue "cost"/tax cut in parentheses):

2. Get rid of the usual list - Council Tax/Council Tax Benefit (£20 billion net) and all the other crappy little ones: Stamp Duty Land Tax, Stamp Duty (on shares etc), Inheritance Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Insurance Premium Tax and the TV licence fee (total £52 billion).

3. Increase the personal allowance for income tax to £50,000 per annum (£89 billion), so only the top tenth or earners pay income tax (i.e. at flat 40%).

4. Reduce standard rate of VAT from 20% to 15%. The EU won't allow you to have a lower standard rate than this, which is unfortunate (£19 billion after adjusting for corporation tax).

5. Replace Employer's Class 1 and 1A NIC (currently 0%/13.8%) with a flat 5% on all wages with no lower threshold (£19 billion after adjusting for corporation tax).

6. Replace Employee's Class 1 (0%/12%/2%), self-employed Class 4 NIC (0%/9%/2%) and Class 2 (£2.50 per week) with a flat 5% on all earnings up to £50,000 with no lower threshold (£19 billion).

So doing the monthly PAYE calculations will be a doddle, it's just be 10% of the total wage bill, half deducted from headline wages and the rest "paid" by the employer.

7. I've cross referenced it all to HMRC's tables 1.5, 1.6, 3.4 etc available from here. I won't bore you with the workings, but it all stacks up - and that is ignoring all the dynamic benefits that would flow (higher employment, more profitable businesses, much better GDP growth etc, which is the whole point of the exercise).

8. Doing the valuations is easy, it's barely trickier than the revaluations for Council Tax which would - by the Morbidly Obese One's own admission - cost less than £10 per home as a one-off cost.

9. Clearly, the biggest winners would be young families who have recently bought a home (they have the smallest homes relative to their incomes i.e. they have the largest income relative to the value of their homes), on the whole they would be £5,000 - £10,000 a year better off.

10. Most people in the middle will break even. The "hard working" will benefit, the "not so hard working" won't. Tenants will tend to win out slightly and landlords will tend to lose out. Parents with working adult children at home will be laughing, the children can pay the Domestic Rates for them instead of rent and they all live effectively tax free.

11. That just leaves us with Poor Widows In Mansions.

a. Pensioners' main residences are about one-fifth of all housing by value, so their potential bill is around £40 billion a year.

b. Total pensioner income in the UK is at least £165 billion a year (State pensions and Pensions Credit £92 billion, private/funded/employer pensions £72 billion, plus bits and pieces).

c. Seeing as nearly all of this would now be income tax free (only one or two per cent of pensioners have income over £50,000), £40 billion in Domestic Rates doesn't seem unaffordable, does it?

d. Fact is, pensioners currently pay £13 billion in income tax and about £14 billion in Council Tax and all the crappy little ones listed in para 1. So in theory, their total tax bill under this system would not actually be much higher (£40 billion instead of £27 billion).

e. As a compromise, we could cap their Domestic Rates payments at 12% of their income or something, and allow them to roll up and defer the rest.. 12% x £170 billion = £20 billion. So pensioners would pay £20 billion annually, slightly less tax than at present, and the other half would be collected on future death/sale (instead of the heirs having to pay Inheritance Tax/Stamp Duty Land Tax).
-------------------------------
To keep things simple and reduce distortions further, we can do the same for companies/commercial land.

Company/business profits would increase by about £50 billion, of which £10 billion would go in additional corporation tax at 20% (currently), bringing on-shore corp tax receipts to about £40 billion a year. Business Rates (pretty close to LVT) are currently just under £30 billion a year, so total tax paid would be £70 billion.

Higher rents/rental values would soak up (say) half of the additional company profits. So we can replace existing Business Rates (a low tax on total rental values) with new LVT-style Business Rates (a 100% tax on the location value only), which would bring in (say) £50 billion and we can halve corporation tax to 10% (same as two layers on NI on wages) which would bring in £20, total revenues stay constant at £70 billion.

Sorted.

F1 Film Rush: Call to Show the Truth about the 70s

From FASH:

Rush – the new film about the 1970’s Formula One rivalry between drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda – is a sharp reminder of how the polyester industry used sport to recruit new young wearers. The drivers are plastered in polyester clothing, while flares are commonplace both indoors and out throughout the film.

To counter the inevitable platform heel and sheepskin coat imagery shown in the film, taste campaigners in the UK are calling for warning ads about the impact of bad style to be shown in advance of the film.

Rush will remind older viewers of how the sideburn industry dominated hair until they were outlawed in 1979. Younger viewers will be surprised at the extent to which they were splashed on the sides of the drivers’ heads. Today, bugger grips only exist on the faces of ironic hipsters - something that would end if its prohibition were introduced by law.

The film shows how far we have come since the days when Fabergé shamelessly promoted their brands through sport. The sub-text of the companies’ near monopoly of Henry Cooper sponsorship was that their brands were as alluring and exciting as the sport itself.

And it worked. Evidence shows that children were more likely to start wearing Brut 33 after being exposed to Henry Cooper through advertising and sponsorship. There is also good evidence to show that adverts for cheap aftershave in films encourages young people to start a lifetime habit.

FASH acknowledges that felt hats were a major part of fashion in the 1970s and therefore it is not surprising that such appears in the film. However, FASH is also calling on the film industry to require the showing of anti-garish advertisements to be shown in advance of any film containing felt hats or flares, as there is evidence to show that this will help inoculate young people against the harmful effects of 70s fashion in films.

"Rush"

From imdb.com and Wiki:

Set against the sexy, glamorous golden age of Formula 1 progressive rock in the 1970s, the film is based on the true story of a great musical rivalry between handsome English playboy guitarist James Hunt (Allex Lifeson), and his methodical, brilliant opponent, Austrian bass player Niki Lauda (Geddy Lee).

The story follows their distinctly different personal styles on and off the sixteen-track, their loves and the astonishing 1976 season in which both retreated to the United Kingdom to record "A Farewell to Kings" at Rockfield Studios in Wales.

They are willing to risk everything to become world champion in a sport with no margin for error: if you introduce synthesizers, lengthy songs reminiscent of miniature concept albums and highly dynamic playing featuring complex time signature changes, you die.

Following mixed reviews, their album “2112” crashes badly at the Nürburgring in 1976 and Lauda loses his hearing in one ear. Hunt sacks his entire pit crew after they mistakently tune his engine in the key of F but finally becomes World Champion when the rain-soaked Japanese Grand Prix has to be abandoned because of fans running on to the track shouting “Wally!” during the quiet bits.

The JPS-Lotus team's druumer Mario Andretti (Neil Peart) makes a late cameo appearance during the closing credits, explaining that he has just finished packing up his 83-piece drum kit and loading it into the truck.