"Cow rampage in Harrogate"

Spotted by MacHeath and James Higham in The Daily Mail:

Residents on a quiet cul-de-sac must have thought they were still dreaming when they woke up to this dramatic scene in their front garden.

Home owners (1) were left lost for words when they opened their curtains to find 30-strong herd of cows stampeding through their gardens at 6am on Sunday morning after escaping from a nearby field. And one quick-thinking home owner in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, managed to captured the whole thing on camera.(2)



1) It's the Daily Mail. Tenants don't exist and even if they do, whether they were lost for words of not is of no f-ing concern to the Daily Mail.

2) Not true. The video shows the cows tramping left to right, but if this street is indeed a cul-de-sac, the "whole thing" would include the herd tramping back right to left again, which would make the whole thing even funnier (reminiscent of the relevant scene in Life of Brian).

Fun Online Polls: How much is your house worth & A Eurocrat scorned

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What's the current value of the home you live in divided by your household's annual gross income (excl. rental income)?
Less than ten - 63%
More than ten - 37%

In the general spirit of asking leading questions, I set it up so that the results showed up as follows:

Would you be better off if we taxed land rents instead of earned income?
Yes - 63%
No - 37%

Because, ignoring any sort of wider moral or economic questions, it is quite simply the case that most people have relatively little rental income (which is currently lightly taxed and heavily subsidised) compared to their earned income (which is very heavily taxed), and they would all be better off from Day One. The multiple of "ten" just happens to be the mathematical cut-off point between those who would be better off from Day One and those who might have to trade down or get a proper job.

In the long run of course, because of Laffer effects, compound growth, better social cohesion, better town planning etc, everybody would be better off, but people are very short-termist in what they vote for (hence and why Labour is currently ahead in the opinion polls). By analogy, after slavery was abolished, even the former slave owners ended up better off.
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In the comments to a post of a couple of days ago, Bayard asked:

... do the advantages of leaving the EU outweigh the disadvantages of staying? The advantages of leaving a marriage are not the same as the disadvantages of entering into one, as, in the former case, you are likely to have a spiteful and revenge-seeking ex-spouse to deal with.

Hell will hold no fury like a Eurocrat scorned; we should expect the maximum of petty obstruction in all out future dealings with the EU, should we decide to leave.

Fair point, but do we have any examples of countries leaving supra-national organisations to fall back on to try and guess what might happen thereafter? I think we do. Even within living memory: plenty of countries left various empires after the Second World War (most British or Dutch colonies; The Philippines, Vietnam a little later); France left NATO and rejoined (or something or other); plenty of countries left the Warsaw Pact or ceded from the USSR; Czechoslovakia split into two countries; Hong Kong was nominally under British control until 1997; Greenland obtained autonomy from Denmark (and hence the EU) and so on and so forth.

Most of these countries appear to have reconciled post-split, don't they?

The USA and Cuba is a counter-example, that is one stupid spat that they have kept up for fifty years after its sell-by date; as is the India-Pakistan nastiness (but that is largely because of the 'bloody shoulders of Islam', there's no evidence to suggest that there'd be no problems if India as was were still a British colony); South Korea's attitude to North Korea is a shining counter-example. And so on.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "How long would it take relations between the UK and other EU Member States to re-normalise if the UK left the EU?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Giant sinkhole of the week

From the BBC:

Oh, this isn't an accident waiting to happen, is it?

Spotted by Julia M in The Daily Mail:

A dairy farm has come up with a new form of farming technology - putting QR codes on to cows. [Literally - the cows have giant QR codes sprayed on them].

The idea behind the digital bar-codes at Southfields farm in Somerby, Leicestershire, is to give consumers more information about their cows’ lives. Passers-by can scan the QR code using an app on a smartphone and get quick access to a website which contains information about the farm’s 100-strong herd of dairy cows...

She said: "We run a lot of farm visits and we’re always keen to try new things to help people get close to the cows and see first-hand what dairy farming is about. Everyone seems to have a smartphone nowadays, so we had the idea of letting Shamrock ‘speak’ to visitors who want to find out more."

The cows don't need fancy Smartphones to communicate with visitors, of course, they can use their hooves and horns to get their opinions across.

Why maths is useful

From the various articles about G4S's contract with/at the Olympics, a few facts stand out:

* They have to provide 10,000 people to work at the Olympics
* They will be paid about £250 million for this, and
* The Olympics will run for about three weeks.

I find it helpful if we use "division" with "big number" scenarios like this, so let's "divide" £250 million by 10,000 people = £25,000 per person. Then let's divide £25,000 per person by three weeks = £8,000 per person per week.

I don't know how much G4S will pay the people it employs per week, but I would expect it to be in the region of £500 - £1,000, lets call it £1,000.

We can then use another clever maths trick called "subtraction". G4S were due to receive £8,000 per person working at the Olympics per week and they were due to pay each of them £1,000 per week. We can "subtract" £1,000 from £8,000 = £7,000, which is the amount of money G4S gets to keep for each person who does security work at the Olympics.

Things which are not surprising at all and are not really proof of anything one way or another

The TPA are wailing on about the council pensions timebomb again:

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) can today reveal for the first time a substantial rise in the number of former council staff drawing pensions compared to the number in work and paying into the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).

That's excellent news, it means that in future, there will be fewer ex-council employees claiming pensions than are claiming now. So these pensions will become more affordable for the taxpayer.

Previous TPA research has found that the equivalent of £1 of every £5 of Council Tax goes on pensions...

So what? Pensions are just a kind of deferred salary. If it turned out that councils were spending nearly all their income on salaries, that is in itself neither good nor bad; it all depends on what its employees are doing. If they're all teachers, coppers, lollipop ladies, dustbin men, social workers etc, then great. If they're all five-a-day climate change awareness group directors on six-figure salaries, then hiss boo.

And given the level of pension they are promised compared to their salaries, we would expect councils to be spending about a quarter as much on pensions or pension contributions as they do on salaries. So this "£1 in every £5" figure is also meaningless; as we'd have to know how much of the other £4 goes on salaries and much more importantly than that, what the council's employees are actually doing.
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Dan Hannan asks

What will William Hague's audit [of the costs and benefits of EU membership] show? That depends partly on who conducts it, obviously...

That's the problem, isn't it? I try to be as objective as possible as most things and I am quite convinced that the disadvantages of full EU membership outweigh the advantages. So if I did the audit, the result would probably support this. And people would say "Ah yes, but you're against EU membership, you were going to say that anyway."

You can be part of a free market in Europe without being a full member of the customs union. It's true that you then 'have no say' over how the regulations of the single market are set, but this doesn't bother the Swiss, whose exports to the EU, in per capita terms, are 450 per cent of ours.

He's used that 450 per cent figure before to say "Look how successful the Swiss are outside the EU, they export far more to the EU than we do; therefore we should leave as we'd export more to the EU than now!" but the statistic is arrant nonsense and doesn't support any such conclusion.

The point is, the smaller the unit (i.e. a country) you are looking at, the higher are imports and exports as a share of that unit's GDP. If Eastbourne became an independent state, we'd find that its imports and exports from "rest of EU" would be far higher as a share of Eastbourne's GDP, or per capita for Eastbourne residents than they are for Switzerland.

That is not an argument for the newly created state of Eastbourne to leave the EU and more than it is to create that state in the first place.

Friday Night Gear Change

The Ramones, "The KKK took my baby away", up a full tone after 1 min 36 seconds. Spotter's Badge With Merit & Bar to James Higham.

Arguments FOR Land Value Tax (just for a change)

I've never really bothered compiling my own list of pro's (because they all seem so blindingly obvious and it's more fun demolishing arguments against).

But James James is now compiling a list; you are cordially invited to add your favourite pro's over at his.

"Heavily subsidised private sector enterprise essential to ending recession says exasperated CBI Chief"

Spotted by Bob E in The Guardian:

Bewildered CBI chief John Cridland today bemoaned how the government's austerity programme is going too far too fast by creating severe bottle-necks in the usual orderly transfer of public funds to private industry and warns Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne that their flagship private sector jobs for former public sector workers programme is at risk because of lack of government funds coming forward to private sector to meet the costs of running it.

"We in the CBI are fully behind the austerity measures in principle" he said, adding "the principle being that the austerity measures shouldn' affect the flow of public money into our coffers.

"We for our part continue to fully endorse the line expounded by successive governments as explained to them by us that private industry is always much more cost effective than the public sector.  Which is why we deserve increasing, not decreasing, amounts of public sector funding. 

"The more public funding that we receive, directly in the form of being gifted control of publicly developed assets under privatisation measures, or simply hard cash in the form of grants, enterprise allowances or contracts etc. or indirectly in the form of additional taxpayer subsidies like working tax credits which allow us to hold down wages, the better off the taxpayer is, that is a well established fact. 

"And our members are all large taxpaying corporations - so the more money we get, the more money the government gets. But this government risks flying in the face of these facts and unless it quickly comes to its senses and removes the bottle-necks that are stifling the flow of taxpayer funds our way or arranges means by which we can access other sources of funding at negative interest rates and under taxpayer underwritten risk arrangements, well, our member's natural entrepreneurship will continue to be stifled.  And that wouldn't be good for CBI members and so won't be good for anyone. 

"Give us the money. You know it makes sense."

Get with the programme!

Apparently Chris Grayling gave a speech at the Welfare to Work Convention at Birmingham ICC yesterday. I wonder who else attended? You can download the programme here and gaze in wonderment at the number of government departments, fakecharities, lobbyists and kleptocrat companies who sent delegates or speakers.

Here's a list of bodies concerned from the first page, there are another three pages after that, with links to some of the choicer "About us" pages:

Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion
Department for Work and Pensions
Jobcentre Plus
Online Centres Foundation
Portsmouth City Council
Accession Social Enterprise
London Borough of Ealing
West London Mental Health Trust
Cforward
Centre for Responsible Credit
Institute of Employability Professionals
Avanta
Working Links
EDI
ESG Group
Ingeus
University of Melbourne
Carley Consult
Gloucestershire and West of England Jobcentre Plus District
Bristol City Council
UK Sailing Academy
Royal British Legion Industries/Sorted
Regular Forces Employment Association
Ubique Partnerships Ltd
Business Enterprise Support
Inspire 2 Independence
ACEVO
Private Equity Foundation
The Manchester Cathedral Volunteer/Employment Programme
InclusionNW
Tranmere Rovers Football Club
JCA Occupational Psychologists
Curved Thinking
Newhaven Community Development Association