"Australia ban nine players for not drinking before Ireland game"

From the BBC:

Australia have suspended nine players for one match for not drinking in midweek before Saturday's win over Ireland.

Wallabies coach Ewan McKenzie acted after "a group of players made the decision to go to bed early instead of consuming inappropriate levels of alcohol".

He said Australia's "manly conduct" standards had been compromised.

A further six players were given a verbal warning for downing a few swift pints and being back at the hotel before midnight.

UPDATE: Newsthump did much the same article the next day

The soaring cost of alcohol to society

The last time I updated this was back in June 2013, when we were told that alcohol costs our country £25 billion each year, which was up from £16.2 billion back in 2011.

Good news, chaps, somebody didn't read the memo and the new made-up figure is now a more modest £21 billion a year!

(On closer inspection it turns out that this is an old figure which Factcheck debunked last year).

Even more bizarre was today's FT which baldly stated that Britain's binge drinking epidemic costs the taxpayer £21bn a year.

Well whoopie doo. I could have told them that. A couple of years ago we were told that the government gets £14.6 bn a year from duty and VAT on alcohol, we can add on another half for PAYE and corporation tax paid by brewers, pubs etc, there's your £21 billion right there. That's exactly what it costs taxpayers.

In other news: Going to work costs employees (and employers) £234 billion a year.

Swiss to take on excessive executive pay at polls, again

From Expatica

In comparison to the UK, Switzerland is terrifyingly democratic, you cannot move for gigantic political posters, broadly all of which demand that the Federal Government does not interfere with the business of the various Cantons, adorning bus shelters and railway platforms. Getting a referendum requires only 100,000 signatures, something a few people might not mind having in good old Blighty.

So on 24 November  a radical proposal, dubbed 1:12 after the ratio it seeks to set between the highest and lowest salaries in a company, will be put up for a referendum. It was originally put forth two years ago, and received more than the 100,000 signatures needed to put any issue to a popular vote as part of the aforementioned ferocious direct democratic system. Unsurprisingly the initiative has also received widespread support from Swiss unions.

Although the Confederation Helvetica has largely dodged the implosion of various EU economies (just don't mention the UBS!) public anger has risen over what is considered abusive levels of pay and bonuses for top bosses.

Last March, nearly 70 percent of voters came out in support of a new law flat-out banning golden parachutes and excessive executive bonuses.

That vote came amid national outrage over a 72-million-Swiss-franc ($79-million, 58-million-euro) golden parachute deal for Daniel Vasella when he stepped down as chairman of pharmaceutical giant Novartis in February.

While top executives in the country on average made just six times the salaries of their lowest-paid employees in 1984, the gap swelled to 13 times more by 1998 and 43 times more in 2011, according to the Swiss transport union.

At food giant Nestle, for instance the top executive was reportedly making 73 times the salary of the person on the bottom rung two years ago, while the lowest-paid employee at Novartis in 2011 would have to work 266 years to make the highest earner's annual salary.

Last month polls were suggesting the vote on 1:12 rule could be close, but in recent days the no campaign – backed by the government and parliament – appears to have turned the tide. A survey for Swiss television released on Wednesday pointed to a 54% to 36% defeat for the proposal, with 10% so far undecided.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

Spotted by Carol W in the FT:

Sir, I cannot agree with Roger Fryatt’s suggestion of an even greater role for housing associations (Letters, November 9). Housing associations already benefit from cheap money and their role can be positively harmful. Like private landlords, housing associations exhibit mixed behaviours. Unlike elected local councils, which know their decisions will be considered by voters at regular intervals, the boards of housing associations have no accountability; they face no competition and have huge powers to decide who should, and who should not, receive a very selective benefit of cheaper rents.

The real problem is too few houses (or too many people). With a limited supply it’s especially important that what is built is what is needed. The housing market provides that. A decision by an unelected body does not. And with a limited supply, designating some housing as social simply increases the cost of free market housing. So the chosen few receive a very valuable benefit to the detriment of others, not chosen, but who are otherwise in almost the same position.

The answer is more houses, and one way to encourage that, as well as permitting more housing to be built, is a universal land tax – a tax on the value of all land, whatever it used for, based on the land value (reflecting planning consents and hope value but not buildings).

Jon Zigmond, Rosedale Abbey, North Yorks.

We'll have to mark him down for trotting out the misconception about "too few houses", that is a surprisingly small part of the solution, with a land value tax, we'd be using existing land and buildings much more efficiently/rationally, so the apparent supply shortages would largely melt away.

But well done for laying into the Housing Associations. I've long been saying this. They manage to combine the disadvantages of the private sector and the social sector.

The Age of Consent

I've pondered this question a bit. Here's Prof John Ashton's take on it:-

Leading public health expert Prof John Ashton has called for a national debate on lowering the age of consent, claiming society is sending out "confused" signals about when sex is permitted.

Prof Ashton said: "Countries that have a more open attitude towards teenage sexuality and in fact some of the countries that have lower ages of consent - the young people get involved in sex later and they also have much lower teenage pregnancy rates."

Before I get into what is a bit grey and about opinions, let's deal with some facts: The Netherlands has the same age of consent as the UK and much lower teenage pregnancies. Switzerland has the same age of consent as the UK and much lower teenage pregnancies.

And regarding having sex later, Austrians lose their virginity slightly earlier despite having a lower age of consent.

On the age thing, here's my take:

The age of consent isn't about telling young people when sex is permitted. You aren't going to stop a 15 year old from shagging his 15 year old girlfriend if she wants it. Something like 1/3rd of people lose their virginity before they're 16, so as a deterrent it clearly doesn't work.

What the age of consent is really about is stopping girls (and let's be honest, it's generally this way around) from being taken advantage of by older men who can easily impress them and are also far more experienced at seduction. You let them get to an age of emotional maturity, they're going to make a reasonable decision.

I'm not even sure that 16 is right or whether it should be 17. I remember going out with 16 year olds when I was that age, and that when I went out with 17 year olds they seemed to be considerably more mature, more likely to have cast off the age of listening to Duran Duran and Wham and listening to something more grown up.

We probably should also have something codified about the 17 year old who shags his 15 year old girlfriend that we really don't want to prosecute (and we don't now, but the law should be clearly stated).

Thoughts?

"There are more people living in this circle than outside it"

The Daily Mail published a load of fascinating maps this week.

My favourite was this one:

Included in the article is another map showing the average age at which people say (whether they are telling the truth or not) they first have sex; the average age is far higher in exactly that very populous region. Cause, effect, who knows?

Musing #2, the Philippines typhoon was a tragedy and 10,000 people died. Using the figures from here, about 6,000 babies are born every day in the Philippines.

Musing #3, a far worse natural town planning disaster was the Boxing Day tsunami which killed/drowned about 200,000 people in Indonesia. According to the UN, about 12,000 babies are born every day in Indonesia, which means that the population would have replenished itself within two or three weeks.

Lost in translation (lazy headline writers)

From the Evening Standard:

London’s men spend 42 days a year commuting

Men from [sic] London in their early 40s spend more time on jam-packed trains and roads than anyone in the UK - 42 days a year.

The shocking figure - more time than most people get in annual leave - is revealed in research published today. The study shows the average commute for a male Londoner in his early 40s takes 84 minutes every day.

It also showed that teens in the capital spend far more time travelling to and from work than other young people around the country.

The actual research they reference is all good stuff, and the TUC have produced a handy table showing typical commute times by age, gender and region.

That 84 minutes figure (42 minutes each way) looks about right to me, so I did a quick check: 1.4 hours times x 230 working days a year = 322 hours = 13.4 days. Which doesn't sound too terrible, actually.

Let's read on:

Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the TUC which undertook the analysis, called for firms to help workers use time more productively.

She said: “Men from London in the early 40s spend a whopping 84 minutes on their daily commute.

"That’s 42 working days a year in cramped trains or traffic-choked roads.

“With the cost of commuting set to rise again in the new year as wage-busting rail fares come into effect, businesses must do more to help staff avoid rush-hour travelling time.”

Aha, she's dividing 322 hours by 7.66 hours to arrive at 42 working days per year, that's why. So at least she was accurate and precise.

(But this is still a fairly meaningless figure, it's like saying that in your lifetime you spend twenty years sleeping or ten months on the toilet or something. So what?)

Unlikely land taxers: Bank for International Settlements

Via Carol W via rwer, from the Bank for International Settlements:

Can non-interest rate policies stabilise housing markets? Evidence from a panel of 57 economies

by Kenneth N Kuttner and Ilhyock Shim
Working Papers No 433
November 2013

Using data from 57 countries spanning more than three decades, this paper investigates the effectiveness of nine non-interest rate policy tools, including macroprudential measures, in stabilising house prices and housing credit.

In conventional panel regressions, housing credit growth is significantly affected by changes in the maximum debt-service-to-income (DSTI) ratio, the maximum loan-to-value ratio, limits on exposure to the housing sector and housing-related taxes. But only the DSTI ratio limit has a significant effect on housing credit growth when we use mean group and panel event study methods.

Among the policies considered, a change in housing-related taxes is the only policy tool with a discernible impact on house price appreciation.

"Northern Ireland: Cameron urges leaders to bring country together"

From the BBC:

David Cameron has said his symbolic visit to Northern Ireland has "drawn attention to the plight" of the Protestant minority in the country.

The Unionists' treatment at the end of the country's Troubles dominated the run-up to the Commonwealth summit, which opened in the capital Belfast earlier.

The UK prime minister has defied calls for him to boycott the event in protest against alleged human rights abuses. He urged the authorities in both halves of the divided island to show "generosity" to all Irish.

Mr Cameron has insisted there should be a proper investigation into alleged IRA crimes in the final months of the conflict which largely ground to a halt in 1998, saying a process of "truth-telling" was essential for reconciliation.

In a historic move, Mr Cameron travelled to the north of the country in early 2013 to open a visitor centre at Giant's Causeway - the first UK Prime Minister to do so since his predecessor Gordon Brown did so in 2009.

"China reforms: One-child policy to be relaxed"

From the BBC:

China is to relax its policy of restricting most couples to having only a single child, state media say.

In future, families will be allowed to have one and a half children if one parent is an only child or has no more than half a sibling, the Xinhua news agency said…

The latest announcements are contained in a 22,000-word document released three days after the Third Plenum meeting of the Communist leadership in Beijing…

The one-child policy would be "adjusted and improved step by step to promote 'long-term balanced development of the population in China'", Xinhua said.

China introduced its one-child policy at the end of the 1970s to curb rapid population growth. During the 1980s this was tightened and replaced with a "0.8-child policy" but this proved to be unworkable.

Reformers have argued for the limit to be increased to 1.8 children but hard liners argued that this was "too far too fast" and the results of the new "1.5-children policy" will be monitored carefully before further relaxations are considered.