It's not some weird self-pity or a first-world problem, it's a very real thing.
You don't want to talk about it because there is absolutely nothing interesting to say about it, but it feels a bit like this:
Just scaled down a bit.
The rear 'windows' on the MX5 ND (which aren't actually windows at all, they are purely decorative black panels) are the same shape as those on the 240Z.
The ND's front grille is also surprisingly large - the same as 240Z's front grille (noticeable if you remove the front bumper).
A coincidence? I think not.
The big difference is that the 240Z had a huge boot, the ND boot is a bit of a joke.
The fightback has begun. Landlords have spotted that empty offices will soon mean a glut of office space which will mean a fall in rents, so who better to turn to than their mates in government to force people back into those same offices, whether they want to or not? Sod this working from home lark, that's not going to fund their third house in the Bahamas, time to put all those contributions to the Conservative Party to good use and call in some favours.
From The Guardian:
Homeless people in three coastal towns in Dorset could be fined for sleeping in doorways or leaving bedding and belongings in the street under proposals Conservative councillors are trying to push through...
But at a meeting of the council’s overview and scrutiny board this week, Tory councillors claimed the measures did not go far enough. They argued that begging, loitering in a public place, causing an obstruction in shop doorways or car parks and leaving unattended personal belongings such as bedding or bags should also be included.
The Tory councillor Karen Rampton said strict rules were necessary. “We know that people leaving unattended belongings causes anxiety. Shopkeepers do not want people obstructing their doorways especially in these times of Covid.”
People who violate PSPOs are liable for £100 fines that, if left unpaid, can result in summary convictions and £1,000 penalties. Rampton said the idea of the PSPO was to counter antisocial behaviour rather than targeting a particular group.
A good summary in The Week.
To summarise their summary, the possible reasons, all of them disputed by experts and statisticians, are as follows:
1. More cases are among younger people, who are far less vulnerable. Or to put it more crudely, the most vulnerable died in the first wave.
2. The death rate = deaths ÷ diagnosed cases. The number of diagnosed cases depends on how many people are tested, so for a given number of deaths, the apparent death rate falls if there is more testing.*
3. Hospitals have got much better at treating the disease. Medicine is about trial and error, and learning from your mistakes.
4. The virus is getting less deadly. This has been observed with most viruses - a virus' best strategy is not to kill its hosts. Normally this takes years or decades, so it would be surprising if it happened in less than a year.
5. Smaller doses. An infectious person with a face mask spreads smaller doses, which are easier to fight off.
To sum up, nobody knows. Some experts even dispute that the death rate is going down at all.
* Best of luck trying to make any sense of the statistics, you can try comparing anything with anything for European countries and the coefficient of correlation is close to zero. The coefficient for number of cases-v-number of tests is about 0.2. The coefficient for death rate-v-tests per million population is also about 0.2.
Also, why is the number of deaths per million in Switzerland three times as high as in neighbouring Austria? Why is the number of deaths per million population in Belgium a hundred times as high as in Slovakia?
Why are the death rates lowest in the east (Slovakia, Latvia, Greece) and highest in the west (Belgium, Spain, UK)? Why is there also a slight gradient from north (fewer deaths) to south (more deaths)? The UK and Sweden are outliers in the north; Greece is an outlier in the south.
From the BBC:
A post-Brexit trade deal between the UK and the EU "seems unlikely" at this stage, the bloc's negotiator has said.
Speaking after the latest round of talks, Michel Barnier said he was "disappointed" and "concerned". His UK counterpart David Frost spoke of "little progress", amid differences on fisheries policy and state aid rules.
The EU never had any real interest in a trade deal with the UK, and certainly not one that was of benefit to the UK. The UK must suffer, and be seen to be suffer for daring to vote 'Leave', just to dissuade any other Member States from even thinking about it.
Sure, this will cost their economy as well, but the rest-of-EU economy is six times as big as the UK's. If the lost trade costs the EU 1% of their GDP, they can tolerate that, knowing it will cost the UK 6% of theirs.
The UK government is equally worthy of contempt of course.
They are grandstanding idiots who appear to have believed that they could negotiate some sort of mutually beneficial deal, or even that the EU was a reliable negotiating partner in the first place. Whatever the UK agrees with the EU's 'head office', each Member State and the EU Parliament still has a veto, so it's pointless.
The penny hasn't dropped yet, even after four years of time wasting and uncertainty.
If he'd been taking his duties as PM seriously, Cameron would have started organising our re-entry into EFTA and remaining in the EEA/Single Market long before the Referendum, just as back up in case Project Fear didn't work (it backfired spectacularly). And instead of flouncing off the day after the Referendum, he'd just have made a couple of 'phone calls and set the transition in motion.
EFTA/EEA - half-in, half-out. Most of the advantages of full EU membership (and there are many) with most of the advantages of not being a Member State (of which there are equally many). What's not to like?
One from the left this time. Richard Murphy is a big fan of wealth taxes.
In an earlier exchange, I pointed out that Land Value Tax was the best kind of wealth tax (land excl, buildings thereon being about half of marketable wealth in the UK, easy to assess, easy to enforce etc). The effective LVT rate could be much higher than the effective rate of Wealth Tax (even if Wealth Tax, had any merits, which it doesn't). A four percent tax on half of all wealth would raise more revenue than a half-a-percent tax on all wealth.
Countries that have dabbled with Wealth Tax have never managed to get the rate much higher than half-a-percent, any higher than that and you get 'tax planning', lots of special pleading and exemptions and you see falling revenues.
Which is why for example Germany phased it out their Wealth tax in 1997. Total revenues were €5 billion, i.e. naff all. I once had to prepare one of these returns, all the adjustments and exemptions were bonkers, mathematically it was like an extra 1% income tax or something, so why not just do that? Murphy appears to have realised this by now, but back to the topic.
He did a diagonal comparison to explain why he preferred Wealth Tax to Land Value Tax. His example was Mr B, who owns a house worth £100,000 and nothing else and Mr C, who owns a house worth £500,000 and has £500,000 in his pension fund. Statistics back up this general picture, no arguments there. His logic was that Mr C would pay ten times as much Wealth Tax as Mr B, but only five times as much Land Value Tax. Therefore, Wealth Tax would be more progressive. Mathematically correct but meaningless and irrelevant in the bigger picture.
The five glaring errors here are, five KLN's for the price of one, each of which can be knocked down:
1. He missed of Mr A, Ms A and Mrs A, who have no assets whatsoever, and are nearly half the population, all the younger people and tenants. And he missed off Lord D, 0.1% of the population who owns dozens of homes and thousands of acres of farmland (and has no need to invest in anything else) and is banking negative LVT, i.e. farm subsidies and Housing Benefit.
If you now consider the whole population from the A's up to Lord D, LVT is clearly more progressive than Wealth Tax. The A's pay nothing either way and Lord D pays a lot more LVT than he would pay under Wealth Tax. Mr B and Mr C just fall into place somewhere along that continuum.
2. If LVT were done properly and based on site premiums, not selling prices, the chances are that Mr B would pay very little and Mr C would probably pay ten times as much as Mr B (thus knocking his basic objection out of the park).
3. Should you count pension funds as 'wealth' or is it deferred employment income? It's a bit of both, really, but before we worry about taxing the value of pension funds, wouldn't it be easier to simply reduce the generosity of the tax breaks (of which I am now a beneficiary, that's for a separate post, the maths of this is insane). Taxes are bad; subsidies are bad; worst of both worlds is taxing and subsidising the same thing (I could give you countless examples). Net the two off and either tax that thing at a lower rate (and scrap the subsidies) or subsidise that thing at a lower rate (and make them tax free).
4. The end game is not just taxing land (or wealth) for the sake of it; the end game is reducing taxes on output and employment, which are very regressive. LVT can raise *a lot more* revenue than a Wealth Tax, so would enable us to reduce these regressive taxes significantly. So the A's are all hugely better off; Mr B is a lot better off; Mr C would probably end up better off as well (but so what?); and Lord D would just be paying a shedload of LVT (he would not benefit from VAT or NIC reductions as he doesn't pay any).
5. As mentioned, Murphy has twigged that increasing income tax rates on investment income is mathematically similar to a Wealth Tax (at least, a Wealth Tax on income-generating assets). I'm a big fan of flat taxes, of course (and Murphy isn't, of course). If you taxed employment income and investment income at the same rate, employees would pay less tax and investor would pay more, that's all fine as far as it goes.
But his modified wealth tax would allow the value of owner-occupied housing (which is most of UK land by value) to completely slip through the net (no cash income to tax), and the effective rate on land and buildings which are rented out would be much lower than the effective rate on the assets held by productive businesses:
Example:
Mr E owns a house worth £1 million which he rents out for £40,000 a year. A 10% tax on his investment income = £4,000 = 0.4% of the value of the home.
Mr F has built up a proper business with assets of £1 million which pays him dividends of £100,000 a year. A 10% on his investment income = £10,000 = 1% of the value of the assets in the business. It stands to reason that the return on productive assets is higher than the return on land and buildings, as there is more risk and effort involved. In fact, a large part of Mr F's return might be his own efforts - what if his business has minimal assets but pays him a £100,000 dividend each year?
And of course, the extra income tax collected from investment income (once you factor in 'tax planning' and evasion) would be very little, so it would fails the same basic test as Wealth Tax.
My daughter knows the relative side lengths of 45-45-90 and 30-60-90 triangles (they are right angle triangles because there's a 90) off by heart (she needs them for maths competitions) and laughs at me when I forget them.
I stumbled across the 15-75-90 triangle by accident a couple of weeks ago and it had fairly easy-to-remember side lengths. But I couldn't remember what they were, how I did it or find my scribbled workings, so I Binged it (this is like 'Googling' something, but using Bing) and found an explanation at Robert Loves Pi.
That all seems a bit long-winded to me, so here is the shorter version:
1. Draw an equilateral triangle.
2. Draw an isosceles triangle with interior angles 30-75-75.
3. Divide the equilateral triangle vertically to give you a 30-60-90 triangle. The (relative) side lengths of the base B and hypotenuse A are 1 and 2, so the vertical C is √3. Colour this pale blue.
4. Put the pale blue 30-60-90 triangle on top of the isosceles triangle. Then do the numbers. The angle at the bottom left is still 75°. The angle at the bottom right is 75° - 60° = 15°. The base of the smaller triangle (side D) is 2-√3 (side A minus side C) and the other known side (side B) is 1. Add the squares of those two and take the square root of the answer, which simplifies down to 2√(2- √3)*.
Click to enlarge:
* Jason Tyler in the comments at Robert Loves Pi says "If you don’t like nested radicals, you can express 2√(2-√3) as √6 – √2"
How did he do this?
Start again with the sum of the squares of 1 and 2-√3
= 8 - 4√3.
= 6 - 4√3 + 2
= 6 - 2√12 + 2
Remember that √12 = √6 x √2...
= (√6 - √2)(√6 - √2)
so the square root of '8 - 4√3' = √6 - √2.
This is a neat trick, but only seems to work in some circumstances, where you can put the first expression into the form 'A +/- 2√AB + B'.
From Forbes:
In the long-term, 'blue' hydrogen is seen as an intermediate step towards the cleanest form of H2, 'green' hydrogen — so called because its production emits little or even zero carbon.
'Green' hydrogen can be produced by separating hydrogen from water via electrolysis, though other technologies are emerging. When the electricity used to perform the process comes from renewable sources, green hydrogen becomes truly zero carbon.
It will surely be far more efficient to use the electricity (whether from renewables or not) to power things directly than to use the electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen first and then power things by burning hydrogen again. And a lot less dangerous.
And there are plenty of other ways of storing electricity (particularly important if you intend to rely on 'renewables') which are a lot cheaper and safer. Like pumping water uphill or pressurising air.
So who is behind this nonsense?
Last month, the EU set out a renewable hydrogen strategy, sketching a roadmap for how the world’s largest trading bloc intends to develop hydrogen production and usage through 2050. Also last month, the German government announced it would invest €9 billion ($10.7 billion) in its own national hydrogen strategy.
Now, the U.K.’s Hydrogen Taskforce, a coalition of companies and industry bodies, has called on the government to recognize hydrogen as a key component for a “green recovery” from Britain’s historic recession.
The usual corporatists, in other words.
The only evidence they have for the existence of Dark Matter (Neil DeGrasse Tyson hedges his bets on this and refers to it as 'Dark Gravity') seems to be this, which I'm sure you've all seen dozens of times:
Thanks to Dinero, who reminded me a while ago about Shell Theorem, which makes doing the calculations a lot easier. I assume that the same logic applies to disk galaxies as it does to spheres, (maybe I should check with the Flat Earth Society).
So I set up the spreadsheet with approx. figures for our own galaxy (radius, thickness, number of stars), dividing it up into a centre with radius 10,000 light years and nine concentric rings each 10,000 light years across (total radius 100,000 light years).
There is one variable you have to guess - by how much the density of stars goes down in each ring as you move out from the centre. The output is relative speed of the stars in each ring.
Here are the results:
This is just a test run to illustrate that because of Shell Theorem, gravity increases and speeds increase as you go out, and is not intended to model anything real.
If you guess that star density goes down by 15% for each ring, you get a reasonably accurate picture of the speeds which are observed (the top curve in the first chart). The density of stars at the edge is about one-fifth of the density in the centre. Because density is per unit volume, the stars at the edge would only be about twice as far apart as in the centre, which is not at all what the galaxy in the first chart looks like:
If you guess that star density goes down by 50% for each ring, you get a reasonably accurate picture of relative densities and the speed changes are what Vera Rubin et al expected to see (the bottom curve in the first chart). The density of stars at the edge is about 0.2% of the density in the centre. This is a massive drop, and means that stars at the edge are about ten times as far apart as in the centre (looks about right):
In the 15% version, you end up with about seven times as many stars in the galaxy as in the 50% version.
So, say the Dark Matterati, we can only see one-seventh of the mass we need, the rest must be Dark Matter, i.e. six units of Dark Matter for each unit of visible matter (a star). Fair enough, most people seem to accept that.
My niggle with all this is, why is there more and more Dark Matter as you go out? To get it to balance, each star in the centre has no units of Dark Matter, as you go further and further out, each star has more and more units of Dark Matter, until at the outside edge, each star has about one hundred units of Dark Matter. Seems a bit convenient to me, like inventing an invisible planet to explain the precession of Mercury.
Which is why I reckon either they've simply miscounted the stars*; or it's gravitational lensing of gravity; or it's MOND; or it's whatever it is that Stacy McGaugh (Dark Matter sceptic) is trying to explain on the basis of observations of low surface brightness galaxies, the Fischer-Tully relation and so on (I don't claim to understand it, but he's very entertaining and seems very plausible).
* The problem here is, they think there are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy, but no more than 400 billion, so the accepted most likely number is 250 billion with a huge margin of error. If you divide the volume of the galaxy by 250 billion, stars should be about 5 light years apart on average. The Sun is about one-third of the way out and is a bit less than 5 light years from the next nearest star, which seems to support the 15% version. The argument in favour of the 50% version is "just look at a galaxy!"
