The Holy Trinity of blogging….

… a sinkhole, cow news and a car crashing into a house.

H/t, Dinero, from the BBC:

A dual carriageway is to remain shut after a huge sinkhole opened up as a result of a burst water main.

The northbound carriageway of the A249 between Key Street and Bobbing roundabouts, near Sittingbourne in Kent, has been closed for a week.

More than 1,000 homes and three schools on the Isle of Sheppey were affected by the burst main, with some without water for two days.

H/t James Higham, from The Des Moines Register:

Check out this video of a cow in Montana rolling a hay bale.

The National Agricultural Institute shared this video on their Facebook page last week and it has so far gained more than 10,000 likes.

From The Daily Mail:

It's a parking bay window! Vauxhall Corsa skids on ice and ends up embedded in someone's front room

Ex-Chancellor wants to block a tax loophole by creating another one.

From the BBC:

Former Conservative Chancellor Lord Lawson told the Telegraph: "It is profoundly unsatisfactory that corporation tax has to be collected from large multinational corporations by a series of ad hoc compromise deals, as we have once again seen with the Google affair.

"It is also grossly unfair on smaller businesses, who are unable to shift profits between tax jurisdictions and have to pay the full amount due under UK law."

Google's tax agreement came after years of criticism of it and other multinational firms over their tax arrangements in the UK and across Europe. The payment by Google, praised by Chancellor George Osborne as a "victory" for the government, covered money owed since 2005 and followed a six-year inquiry by HMRC.

Lord Lawson said the arrangement showed corporation tax should be replaced with "a much lesser tax, bolstered by a tax on corporate sales".

Duh.

Google are already actually minimising two separate taxes - VAT (a tax on sales) and corporation tax (a tax on net profits) - by booking the sales and the profits in low- or no-tax countries.

If the UK replaced corporation tax with a tax on corporate sales, they would discover that most of Google's sale to UK customers are from Ireland and have been for years, and that Google would pay even less tax than now.

So either Lawson is far stupider than I gave him credit for; he is working for Google et al; or he is just one of these Homeys/Faux Libs who would like to reduce corporation tax and increase VAT (the worst tax of all) accordingly because that benefits banks and landowners at the expense of the productive economy.

Clever scientist understands and explains agglomeration...

… but fails to draw the obvious conclusion.

From the NY Times, h/t Pablo:

In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations.

“If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

Having established what creates rental value, why not ask whom it belongs to? To say it belongs to landowners is like saying that fireplaces give off heat. They don't. It's the burning fuel that gives off heat.

As an aside, this further undermines the view that particularly high rents and prices in London are caused by shortage of supply. They are not. They are caused by the presence of large numbers of people and businesses (and the appropriate infrastructure to support it).

If you build more buildings, will you get more people and businesses or fewer..? Continuing the fireplace analogy, you can't cool down a fire by throwing more dry twigs on it.

Tories apply common sense to a funding issue...

… but only for the little people in 'the regions':

HOMEOWNERS* living in flood-hit areas could be forced to pay higher council tax adding insult to injury to thousands of homes devastated this winter by rising waters…

Environment Secretary Liz Truss said Somerset, where local authorities have been able to increase taxes 1.25 per cent to bolster defences, is a "very good" model" in evidence to MPs.

In total, six authorities are allowed to bump up council tax by 1.25 per cent above the cap of two per cent in 2016-17. But now it looks as though the scheme could be rolled out further.

When asked by MPs, Ms Truss said: "I think if you look at the structure for the Somerset Rivers Authority that now has the shadow precept so they are raising that funding locally and I think there's also a role for that as well. I think the Somerset Rivers Authority is a very good model."

… But Labour peer Lord Clark of Windermere said: "Flood defences are primarily a national responsibility and the Government shouldn't just pass the buck on to local authorities and in turn to local taxpayers."

Obviously, if it were a question of flood defences for London and the Home Counties, the Tories would probably see it as a "national responsibility", but there you go.

* Tenants pay Council Tax too, you know?

Agglomeration

Via @thomasforth, from Centre for Cities:

When it comes to productivity, size isn’t everything – at least not in the UK. Unlike the US and Germany, there is no clear relationship between city size (as measured by the number of residents) and productivity (as measured by the wage premium of each city once workforce characteristics are taken into account).

The three charts in the article plot relative productivity against major cities ranked by population in the UK, USA and Germany. The difference is huge in the USA (the trend line is steep), quite big in Germany and smaller in the UK (the trend line is nearly flat), if you ignore London which is well above the line.

Well duh. We could have guessed that...

1. The population of a city is just one indicator or factor. Just as important are links to other cities or indeed the rest of the world. The more other places you can get to, and the quicker/cheaper you can get there, then better. So the smaller the country and the quicker/cheaper the journeys, the lower the differential between smaller and larger cities. Or consider two similar sized cities, but one has an airport with flights to other business centres - the one with the airport will be more productive.

2. How do you define a city? Are Birmingham and Coventry separate cities for these purposes? No of course not. Bracknell and Wokingham, smallish towns in themselves, are well above the line (i.e. very productive). But they are just part of the M4 corridor, which is everything from Reading to Slough to Heathrow. Once you are on the M4, all these towns and the airport are within easy reach, in economic terms, they are one city.

3. Similarly, London and the M4 corridor and large chunks of the south east reinforce each other; good transport links, close together and three major airports etc. London is shown as having a population of 12.5 million on that chart, which is probably accurate if you include the whole hinterland and commuter belt.

4. This is why Berlin is so far below the line. It's the largest city in Germany with 3.4 million people, but it's stuck in the middle of nowhere (surrounded by ex-DDR). A couple of my cousins live and work there and they confirm that it is no great shakes, there are just lots of small businesses with negligible agglomeration effects.

5. The charts do not show absolute productivity, they show relative productivity between small and large cities. So the charts do not necessarily indicate that large UK cities fail to tap in to agglomeration benefits; they could just as easily be taken to indicate that small cities in the USA (or Germany) do particularly badly (especially if they are miles from anywhere).

6. If you look closely, they have messed with the horizontal axis. The horizontal axis on the UK chart is from 50,000 to 12.8 million. The one for Germany is from 50,000 to 3.2 million. This means that the trend line for the UK is actually even flatter than it appears, and if you removed London, probably would be completely horizontal.

And so on and so forth.

I've been Predicting this for a few years

From The BBC:

Apple has reported the slowest growth in iPhone sales since the product's 2007 launch and warned sales will fall for the first time later this year.

The US tech giant sold 74.8 million iPhones in its fiscal first quarter, compared with 74.5 million a year ago.

Apple said revenue for the next quarter would be between $50bn (£34bn; €46bn) and $53bn, below the $58bn it reported for the same period a year ago.

This would mark Apple's first fall in revenues since it launched the iPhone.

The smartphone is pretty much done. I've got a HTC One that is nearly 2 years old, and there's nothing compelling about any upgrades to it. So, the phones are pretty much a mature tech, like PCs and cars and bicycles. Yes, they'll be minor improvements, but the big changes are done. It's like how cars are a bit more efficient over where they were in the 80s, but that's nothing like the leap from the 1950s.

It also means that there's a ton of cheap, capable phones now. The Moto X is a great phone for £200. OK, not as good as an iPhone 6, but for most people they'd see what it does and declare it good enough. Can Apple keep on selling £500 phones if the £200 ones are good enough?

They own land! Give them money!

Excellent number crunching by Joe Sarling:

If a new Starter Home has a discounted value of £450,000 or less and [is bought by an] FTB is under the age of 40, all three policies (20% Starter Home discount; £3,000 government ISA bonus; 40% government loan) could be used in conjunction (Figure 1).

When this happens, the Government effectively funds 53% of the home.

For "government" read "taxpayer" of course, I find that helps to clarify things.

She's Certainly elegant and stylish...

....but why did her parents name her after a carburettor?

Great Film (and free, sortof)

If you've got BBC iPlayer, there's a terrific film on there at the moment, a Norwegian film called Headhunters. It's about a recruitment headhunter who is also an art thief in his spare time. It's based on a Jo Nesbo novel, which makes me think I should read more of his stuff.

It's a brilliantly written thriller. Absolutely chuffing brilliant. I don't want to say too much - it's a thriller and wouldn't want to give away anything about it, but I will say that it's probably an 18 rating, so not for the little kids. And yes, it's got subtitles, but please don't let that put you off. I can get fed up with subtitles, but I wasn't bored for a second with this.

Is it my favourite Scandanavian movie? It'd definitely a close run thing with Let the Right One In.

Ice Cream Shrinkage

From the BBC

Unilever, the multinational firm behind brands including Magnum and Cornetto, is to make all its ice creams aimed at adults smaller.
Ben & Jerry's tubs and Feast ice creams are among those whose portion size will shrink, according to a report in trade journal The Grocer.
Unilever said the move was to help consumers "make healthier choices."

Hahaha. I hope whoever thought that up gets a promotion. You won't hear a peep out of the government or MSM about them ripping people off.