World's tiniest violin

From The Telegraph:

"Coronavirus means I'm losing £4,100 per month" (1): how landlords' businesses are under threat

Coronavirus means some tenants are breaking contracts (2), cutting landlords' cash flow and leaving them with empty properties they can't fill

For Jamie Moodie, a landlord in south-west London, the fallout from corona virus has hit hard.

His monthly income from his portfolio of 23 properties (3) has dropped by £4,100 since lock down began.(1)

Some of Moodie's European tenants left the country before lock down (4), leaving two properties empty (5). He has little hope of getting back the lost rent, as currently he “can’t fill those properties, I can’t show them to anyone”. Some of his tenants have also lost their jobs and are no longer paying rent. (6)

He is one of many landlords feeling new pressure. The outbreak is set to cause lasting damage to the sector that could mean disastrous problems for renters further down the line (7).

1) Not clear, is he actually making a loss of £4,100 a month, or has his income fallen by £4,100?

2) The landlord is no longer providing what was agreed, i.e. a home close to well-paying jobs, a nice local park, a good local school. So the contract has no substance.

3) He expects sympathy?

4) Sensible thing to do, you can't fault them for that.

5) If he doesn't like owning empty homes, he can just sell them. It's a free world.

6) But who cares about somebody losing their job? Pfft! The landlord is not collecting rent, that's the tragedy here!

7) Our old friend, the Missing Homes Conundrum makes a late appearance.

And landlords aren't businesses, they just own too many homes. The homes are not "under threat", whatever happens, they will still be there when this is all over.

Best of luck with that, you insufferable twats.

From The Telegraph:

A landlord is taking legal action to shut down Pizza Express over unpaid debts, sparking new fears for the future of the ailing chain.

Grainrent has filed a winding-up petition against the business in the courts as high street tensions grow amid a collapse in business during the lockdown.

Unless Pizza Express pays back what it owes, this process would normally lead to a hearing on whether to liquidate the company - putting as many as 14,000 jobs at risk in 627 restaurants.

Gainrent's parent firm London and Cambridge Properties said it remains open to compromise with the chain.

The legal action began on Friday ahead of new rules that came into effect on Monday banning the use of winding-up petitions if a company cannot pay rent bills due to coronavirus.

Killer Arguments Against Citizen's Income, Not (27)

From The Independent:

51 per cent of the public also support a universal basic income, "where the government makes sure everyone has an income, without a means test or requirement to work". Just 24 per cent are unsupportive of the idea, with 9 per cent saying they do not know how they feel.

The idea a basic income has been backed by dozens of MPs from across the political spectrum as a solution to workers falling through the cracks of the current government support scheme - including the self-employed. Former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has however criticised the idea, suggesting it would be a disincentive to work during the crisis (1) and would be badly targeted (2).

Christ on a crutch.

1) The whole point of the lock down is to disincentivise people from working! If you are furloughed, you are forbidden to do work for your employer. (Note: I got talking to a builder recently who is on furlough from a large construction project; he's now working part time for his dad instead. Good for him). The majority of adults are still in paid work; receiving a state pension; or are already on some state benefit or other. They clearly wouldn't get anything extra.

2) Compare the UBI with the Furlough Scheme, which his own government introduced. The cost to the taxpayer of a furloughed worker on an average wage is £1,260 per month - the more that person was earning beforehand, the more they get now - a kind of negative means-testing. Means-testing is bad enough, but negative means-testing is worse. That's really badly targeted. A sensible UBI would be in the region of £300 - £400 per month, just enough to live off, assuming there is a rent/mortgage freeze, i.e. very well targeted. It does the job at minimum cost.

The sound of a dentist's drill

Most people find this sound unpleasant, the usual explanation is "because you associate it with something unpleasant - having your teeth drilled".

I think it is more fundamental than that. Humans, and presumably most mammals, have an evolutionary and instinctive dislike of mosquitoes and midges. When you hear one, it really puts you on edge; you can't relax until you've killed it or it's gone away. It's hardly surprising that a dentist's drill has the effect.

The same goes for garden strimmers. Lawnmover, power drills etc are annoying simply because they are loud and monotonous. But they don't annoy me half as much as the sound of a much higher pitched strimmer.

Good news from Australia...

From The Daily Mail:

The Victorian Government is reportedly considering scrapping stamp duty in favour of annual land tax payments. Often considered a growth-killer by economists, [stamp duty] is paid to Australian state governments when a home-buyer purchases a property.

But with a huge decline in the housing market, Premier Daniel Andrews is examining new ways to stimulate the state's real estate sector. While the price of the tax varies in different states and cities, in Melbourne where the median residential home is $819,611, the cost of stamp duty is $46,383.36, according to Core Logic data.

But since the coronavirus crisis began the state's property market has plummeted, leaving a massive hole in their annual $6billion cash cow... Even before the coronavirus derailed the property sector a report by the Productivity Commission in 2019 urged Scott Morrison to ditch the 'inefficient' tax in favour of an annual homeowners' tax.

"Shifting from stamp duties to a broad-based property tax could leave New South Wales up to $5 billion a year better off, while also improving housing affordability," the report said.

"Stamp duties are among the most inefficient and inequitable taxes available to the states and territories. In contrast, property taxes – which are levied on the value of property holdings – are the most efficient taxes available to the states and territories."

Fingers crossed!

Well, I thought it was funny

COVID-19 is a leaky exhaust?

This theory appeared recently on Facebook in the form of an open letter to the Australian prime minister. At least I think it did, because Facebook deleted it, it seems, because they are deleting all posts about COVID-19 except official ones. Certainly all of the "I am a medic and this is what you need to know about COVID-19" posts that were so common in the early days of he pandemic have disappeared.

Regardless of Facebook's censorship, the idea that the virus makes us poison ourselves with carbon monoxide is an interesting one. It is not as if anyone else has come up with a mechanism by which the symptoms of the virus arise and CO poisoning has such similar symptoms to COVID-19 that websites of keeping safe from CO describe the symptoms of poisoning as "like COVID-19".

Whilst looking for the censored post, I came across this which is also interesting. It's dated December 2016 and I don't know how far the scientists have got with their cure for CO poisoning, but if COVID-19 kills by CO poisoning and there's a cure for that, then there's a cure for COVID-19.

That is, of course, if it doesn't end up in the "Not Invented Here" black hole.

Herd immunity - it looks like we are half-way there.

From the BBC:

In the study, published in a letter to The Lancet , staff at two hospitals in Newcastle were offered tests, with results returned in two days. Local GPs and paramedics were also eligible.

The staff fell into three groups:
- those dealing directly with patients (nurses, doctors, porters)
- staff who did not see patients but might be at greater risk of hospital infection (cleaners, lab staff)
- non-clinical staff (clerical, admin, IT)

Researchers at Newcastle University and Newcastle Hospitals found no evidence of a significant difference between the three groups, with rates of infection of 15% in the first group, 16% in the second, and 18% in the third.

Making some assumptions (and using my simple S-I-R spreadsheet):
- that the number of those currently infected has been increasing at a constant rate for the past four months;
- that people are infected for, and recover* after, 2 weeks
- these figures are the same in the general population (OK, they might be lower among the slackers working from home or on furlough).

Then the number of people who've had it and recovered is in the same ballpark as the number who are currently infected, i.e. somewhere between 10% and 30%.

After another few weeks (given the weird 'ballistic' way the numbers change), 50% or 60% will have it and/or have had it, which gives us low level herd immunity. This doesn't mean we've all had it and are all immune, or that there will be no new cases. It means that the new infections rate drops markedly - there are simply fewer 'susceptibles' for the infectious to infect. So instead of each infectious person infecting more than one 'susceptible' they'll be infecting less than one, so the number of new cases will fall and the disease will fade into the background, aka 'flattening the curve'.

* Apart from the handful who have died. 118 NHS staff have died with it. If you strip out those over retirement age who should have been politely but firmly told to stay at home, this is not materially higher than deaths for working age adults generally.

"Climate change: 2019 was Europe's warmest year on record"

From the BBC:

Europe is heating faster than the global average as new data indicates that last year was the warmest on record.

While globally the year was the second warmest, a series of heatwaves helped push the region to a new high mark. Over the past five years, global temperatures were, on average, just over 1C warmer than at the end of the 19th century.



Because as is well known, there are no European temperature records from before 1979. The Central England Temperature record going back to 1659 is an urban myth.

Jeez.

If only the NHS had employed a few people like this...

From The Independent:

A dystopian novel about a deadly pandemic wreaking havoc across the world that was rejected 15 years ago has finally been published after reality once more proved itself stranger than fiction.

Scottish author Peter May, 68, a former journalist and BBC screenwriter, wrote Lockdown in 2005, imagining London as the epicentre of a global outbreak, only to see his manuscript turned away by publishers, who deemed its subject matter “extremely unrealistic and unreasonable”.

“At the time I wrote the book, scientists were predicting that bird flu was going to be the next major world pandemic,” Mr May told CNN. “It was a very, very scary thing and it was a real possibility, so I put a lot of research into it and came up with the idea, what if this pandemic began in London? What could happen if a city like that was completely locked down?”

His novel centres around a police detective investigating the murder of a child after their bones are discovered at the site of a makeshift hospital, an idea anticipating the opening of the NHS Nightingale at the capital’s ExCeL Centre this week.

As far-fetched as this scenario might have seemed at the time (and still does), it was never beyond the bounds of probability, and you'd think that - like South Korea - health services/governments would at least have some plans in place for a recurrence of Spanish Flu, Hong Kong flu, SARS, swine flu, MERS, bird flu. Not to mention Ebola. There have been five of these outbreaks in the last two decades, and just because we were lucky each time, that was all it was - pure luck.

Even if the NHS didn't stockpile the necessary stuff (they wouldn't have known exactly what to stock pile and how much; they wouldn't know which age groups would be worst affected; you can't develop a test for a virus you don't know about yet etc), they could at least have had contracts in place with the manufacturers and laboratories to churn out however many million bits of kit at short notice; and some plans on what to do if it affects children, pregnant women, younger adults or older people worst etc.