Great bit of satire in The Daily Mail

From The Daily Mail:

Women handball players in Spain are up in arms over a ‘sexist’ rule that stipulates that their midriffs must be exposed while playing on sand.

European Handball Federation regulations also insist that bikini tops and bottoms should have a maximum width of 10 centimetres. The rules for male players are far less rigorous, with players allowed to wear clothing that is ‘loose and long’...

“[It] infringes on principles of equality, it’s sexist and it puts the appearance of the players before their technical capabilities,” Izaskun Bilbao, Member of the European Parliament for the Basque Nationalist Party said.

The Basque Women’s Institute told the Spanish edition of Huffington Post that the rule seemed to be in place ‘so that girls’ bodies lure people to the sport’. Spain’s main sports council slammed the rules as ‘sexist’.

The row flared up after the Spanish Handball Federation was told last weekend that 21 of 22 women’s teams playing in a tournament in Cantabria were wearing team kits that covered up the body too much, according to The Leader.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro, page 18, short and sweet:

Linda, you ask why MPs aren't fussed about the privatisation of public services - they're on the boards of the companies that get given public services to run.

Vanessa, London.

I don't know why this is front page news, though:

Young women who copy the lavish spending of their celebrity idols are spiralling into uncontrollable debt at twice the rate of men their age.

High-spenders aged 18 to 24 mimicking the likes of twice-bankrupt Kerry Katona are most likely to live way beyond their means, official figures show.

BFI puts diversity at heart of funding decision-making

From Televisual:

The BFI has adopted a new ‘three ticks’ approach to film funding to ensure productions meet diversity targets.

The three ticks assessment means that applicants to the BFI Film Fund can only secure financial backing if they demonstrate commitment to diversity across three areas of their production, ranging from the make up of the workforce to the stories and characters on screen.

The new approach comes into force in September. At least one tick is needed in a minimum of two areas for a project to be eligible for BFI production funding:

1. The film features Jason Statham or someone like him driving fast cars around, kicking the crap out of bad guys. Or the film must feature someone with Statham-like properties of being a hard man, having a gravelly voice and being able to say lines like "By the powers vested in me, I now pronounce you man and knife." with a straight face.

2. The film features a bunch of women in bonnets talking about ways to marry their daughter into the landed gentry while walking around Georgian estates. Must be written by either Jane Austen or Julian Fellowes and features a beknighted actress, preferably Dame Judi Dench.

3. The film features a northern inventor and his intelligent dog going off on adventures.

The BFI is firing their current Diversity Expert because no-one outside of Guardian readers pays money to see stories about 1 legged lesbians living in tower blocks, but lots of people like Crank, Downton Abbey and Wallace and Gromit.

"Population of EU member states has soared by a quarter to 507 million..."

From The Daily Mail:

... since 1960"

FFS.

Stick it in Excel

=(507/407)^(1/53)-1

= 0.42% annual growth.

Jeez.

By world standards, that is actually stagnating at best.

Since 1960, the world population has gone up from 3 billion to 7 billion, so in 1960 EU member states were 14% of the world population and now they are only 7%. Which is as Henry George and great minds before and since have predicted/observed; once a country has reached a certain level of prosperity, fecundity drops off quite markedly.

In really rich countries (Germany, Japan), it goes negative, and the true picture is masked by increases in longevity [as Sackerson points out in the comments below] and net immigration. In the UK, for example, more of the one-third increase in population since 1960 is down to people living longer than is due to net immigration; it's probably more extreme in Japan (practically zero immigration) and less extreme in Germany.

Film Review: Rush

Many years ago, I was into F1 Grand Prix racing and got involved in crowd marshalling. And my memory of that is getting a headache because I forgot to put my earplugs in when marshalling next to the track as all those loud F1 cars came past.

Along with many other things, it's something that the film Rush gets really right - the sound of the cars. It also has two leads that do a very good job of playing Niki Lauda and James Hunt (Daniel Bruhl really gets Lauda right). The period detail is spot on. The racing sequences are brilliant - close-up racing shots, beautiful scenery shots - I could watch it again just for how great the film looks.

And while it does play up the rivalry more than what was really there, and Lauda's robot like manner, it does tell a really good story about rivalry and in the case of Niki Lauda, how far he was prepared to go to get back in a racing car to win.

It's available on Amazon Instant as well as Blu-Ray and DVD and I thoroughly recommend it. I don't think you even need to be an F1 fan.

Great! Now she knows what the do with the £300 a week she always seems to have left over...

No, it's never too late.

Emailed in by MBK from The Telegraph:

Glancing down the list, published on this website today, of the multifarious tax breaks afforded to buy-to-let landlords is rather startling. None of the information is new – it is just that reading all the concessions at once is an accosting reminder of their sheer breadth and generosity.

There were a few things missing off the list, which I added in the comments:

1. There is no National Insurance on rental income, so landlords actually pay half the tax rate which their tenants suffer on their salaries.

2. The 10% wear and tear deduction (which gets the effective rate down to 18% or 36%)

3. Over £10 billion of housing benefit payments go to "private" landlords, many of whom are renting out council housing sold at crass undervalue a couple a decades ago.

4. The fact that we tax incomes in the first place instead of just taxing land values.

Moving on…

The Intergenerational Foundation, a left of centre think tank which argues that wealth is unfairly concentrated among older property owners, estimated that private landlords claimed £13bn in allowable expenses last year. The value of tax sacrificed by the Exchequer was approximately £5bn, it believed.

No, the IGF is not left of centre, it is not left or right in the traditional sense.

Reducing the "unfair" appeal of buy-to-let, the argument follows, would rebalance power. It would create downward pressure on rents and hold back house price rises, allowing the young to climb on to a property ladder being steadily pulled out of reach in the south of England.

Yes, that's the general idea.

Regardless of whether you approve of buy-to-let, or its tax breaks, this is surely an unlikely solution to Britain's housing crisis. The radical reform needed to make buy-to-let unappealing would alienate a large section of the electorate, thought to be more than a million people, and so is politically unpalatable – certainly for a Conservative or centrist government.

OK, so one million vote against it, but about three or four million working tenant households would welcome it, because...

And even if it was [sic] a vote-winner, the consequence of tens of thousands of buy-to-let landlords selling up might be grave. Just who is expected to buy these houses? With ever-stricter controls on mortgage lending and the difficulties young people face in growing savings, a rush of property sales could severely damage the housing market and, consequently, Britain's economy.

Duh. We know what would happen if we partly reinstated the old system which enabled the Baby Boomers to "get on the property ladder" so young and so cheaply.

Prices would of course come down, and most working tenant households would be able to afford to buy. More owner-occupiers, less mortgage debt, isn't that what they always say they want?

If there were more sales, then that is good for the housing market, the more liquid it is, the better and the more efficient the price discovery system (transaction taxes like Stamp Duty or Capital Gains Tax go against the grain, they are bad taxes). Don't these people always say that lots of people moving home is good for the economy because of the knock-on boost to furniture, carpet, bathroom and kitchen shops/fitters?

The alternative might be a mass renationalisation of housing by local councils, returning the country to the post-war days that preceded Mrs Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme. That would be inordinately expensive for the state, which would have to raise taxes, borrow or print money to fund the project.

Why would it be "expensive"? If BTL landlords can make a profit i.e. cover their interest costs, then the government or local councils would do twice as well out of it as they can borrow at virtually zero cost - especially if the government or the council were buying at the new lower prices. And if banks have to write down some of the mortgage debt of people who bought at the old higher prices, the government can reimburse them out of the rental profits.

Just as with record low interest rates, which will be kept low to support profligate borrowers, the Government has allowed policy to drift to a place from which there appears no return.

Ah, the ultimate Homey argument, "we can't turn back now, it's too late - while we accept that further house price rises would be bad, price falls are worse; while we accept that stealing the wealth of savers is bad, making mortgage borrowers pay a bit more would be worse" etc etc.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From the Evening Standard (8 July 2014, page 44):

Tony Travers is absolutely right (July 7) - London's land wealth could easily generate the revenue to fund all local services.

Rents are hugely in excess of building costs so councils could grant planning permission for built-to-let in exchange for [an] equity stake in each project, a common arrangement in parts of the EU.

Raising council tax to make London self-sufficient would also end the injustice of making the working poor in the rest of the UK subsidise Tube travel and (via housing benefit) rental receipts of the country's wealthiest landowners.

Joe Momberg, Young People's Party.

3D Printers and Dildos

From the Spectator

Anyway, if I owned a dildo factory in Shenzhen, I’d be a worried man by now. And, totemic as they are, it’s not just dildos: all aspects of our complicated global supply chains are threatened by the 3D printing revolution. The implications of this – of being able to cut out the middleman in consumer products, as we’ve already done in services like buying books, watching films and ordering taxis – ought to temper Western assumptions that economic power will only keep shifting eastwards. And, in turn, there are less obvious social and cultural implications: the ‘two worlds’ Gill identified as ‘absolutely distinct’ can at last become one again, as artists utilise modern computer-aided design and production techniques to deindustrialise manufacturing and create cottage industries in both new and traditional crafts.

I don't know if anyone is a fan of The Big Bang Theory, but there's an episode (The Cooper/Kripke Inversion) which rather skewers the problem of 3D printers. In the episode, two of the characters realise they can make better plastic models of themselves than the ones they bought, if they go out and buy a 3D printer, and that they can make as many as they like. But this also leads to a showdown with one of the character's wives when she realises they spent $5,000 on a machine to build 3 tiny model toys.

And in this case, you might well be able to get all the dildos you want for free, but you've got to spend £1200 for the dildo-making machine. And as Lovehoney sell dildos for £10, that means making 120 dildos just to break even. You've also got to store it somewhere and maintain it. Might as well just go online, click and get a dildo sent in 48 hours.

Look at reality - an ice cream maker is about £40. It makes ice cream that's slightly cheaper than the likes of Ben and Jerry's and is better. So, why don't people own ice cream makers? Because it's a lot more hassle than sticking a tub of Ben and Jerry's in the trolley at Tesco's (even people who buy them generally end up sticking them in the back of a cupboard shortly after purchase).

I think we may see more custom manufacturing in future, where you can go online and buy goods and each good gets made differently. We currently do this with cars and laptops and Timberlake do it with some boots. But that'll still be running on machines in Shenzen or Sheffield doing it in large numbers and sending the goods out to people.

Boot on the Other Foot

From the Telegraph:

Colin Hart, chief executive of the Christian Institute, said: “This is a sign of things to come exactly as we predicted.

“The Government repeatedly failed to listen to members of the public, lawyers, constitutional experts even its own MPs when they called for safeguards to protect those who back traditional marriage, especially those who work in the public sector.

“Now this nonsense, more usually associated with the public sector, is being applied to the private sector."

I don't remember Christians protesting when the state intervened in the private sector when it came to Sunday opening or cinemas showing Life of Brian. Oh, that's right, the whole reason that those laws existed was because of Christians. Or if you want to go back further, the persecution of Jews, the stoning of adulterers and the burning of heretics.

And maybe, just maybe, if Christians hadn't been at the forefront of the persecution of homosexuals for 400 years and had just said that if men are adults and do it in private then that's their business, we wouldn't now have the pendulum swinging a little way back in the other direction and trampling on the rights of Christian businesses.