"Diana director 'devastated' by reviews"

From the BBC:

The director of 'Diana' says he has "no regrets", despite the film's poor reception in the UK.

Oliver Hirschbiegel told the BBC that the movie's critical mauling was "devastating, but when you make a film you don't think about the reactions".

The Telegraph described the film "a special class of awful", while the Mirror called it "cheap and cheerless". Hirschbiegel admitted the reviews had put off audiences, but he still hoped people would "make their own minds up".

Hirschbiegel, who previously made 'Downfall', a German-language film about the last days of Hitler, called his experiences with Diana "deja vu, because it has the same reactions in the UK as 'Downfall' had in Germany on release".

The article unfortunately does not mention him ordering all but four journalists to leave the room, throwing a handful of pencils down on a map or tell us what Naomi Watts whispers in the other woman's ear outside in the corridor while he is ranting and raving. You just have to imagine those bits for yourself.

Jury Rules AEG Live Executives Not Smooth Criminals

From Starpulse,

After three days of deliberations, the 12-person jury in the Michael Jackson wrongful death trial has ruled that executives of concert promoter AEG Live can Beat It.

While the jury ruled that the concert promoter did hire Dr. Conrad Murray to care for Jackson during his planned 50 show London concert residency in 2009, they also ruled that he wasn't "Dangerous".

Jackson's mother Katherine filed the suit on September 15, 2010, claiming that AEG Live were Bad when they hired Dr. Murray, who is currently serving time in prison on manslaughter charges for Blood on the Dance Floor.

Mrs. Jackson filed the lawsuit, naming Michael's three children, Prince, Paris and Prince Michael II (aka 'Blanket') as co-plaintiffs, and was seeking $40 billion in damages, and was not going to Stop Until She Got Enough.

Last month AEG executives Randy Phillips and Paul Gongaware were dismissed from the case after the judge determined that they hadn't Wanna Be Startin' Something.

During the trial, AEG execs maintained that Jackson was the Man in the Mirror for hiring Dr. Murray, who is set to be released from prison later this month after serving two years of his four year sentence.

LVT will sort it out.

This time, it's our personal debt mountain. See here

Whether large amounts of debt is bad in itself depends on what it's used to purchase. A new car, fair enough, why not? However, if it's on wholly unproductive assets like location, it's just money down the LMBH.

UK personal debt now stands at £1.42trn. Of this mortgages count for £1.26trn.

Of this, let’s say 2/3 is land value, giving us a figure of 840bn.

Given historical trends in UK property prices, we can expect this to go up by 100% in around 25 years time.

So in today’s money £1.68trn. With the value of improvements added,  £2.1trn

If LVT were introduced tomorrow, and site values fell to zero, all outstanding debt on land values would be retired in 25 years time (given that’s the length of the average mortgage)*.

This would mean, all else being equal, the level of UK personal debt (mortgage plus unsecured) would be £580bn instead of £2.26trn.

About a quarter in other words, and not to be sniffed at.

*Naturally, under LVT, people would have more disposable incomes. So in all likelihood, a mortgage could be paid off in 10 years rather than 25. So the bulk of the projected savings would moved forward substantially in time.

Scots Git defends defends "right to offend" in Miliband row

From the BBC:

Speccy four eyed Education Secretary Michael Gove has defended the "right to offend" and said nobody needs to apologise to him if they imply that his adoptive parents clearly brought him up wrong.

The Daily Mail has said using a photo of Ralph Miliband's grave had been an "error of judgement" but stood by its story claiming he had "hated Britain", which is a fine example of muddle headed propaganda whereby you conflate a whole country with the rent seekers at the top.

It can't be disputed that Miliband senior, as an armchair Communist "hated" large parts of The Establishment - the landowners, capitalists, Royal Family, bankers - but then so do a lot of otherwise patriotic British people.

Weedy Mr Gove, whose wife receives money for signing off whatever the Mail shove under her nose, said politicians should not "tell editors how to do their job".

Free speech was "raucous", he said, but he would not confirm or deny that a childhood of being bullied at school was the root cause of his now devoting all his waking hours of thinking up ways of bullying school teachers as a form of vicarious revenge. Gove then left to wash his hair in a toilet bowl, a habit he picked up from bigger boys at school.

It was suggested that Gove's deep-seated bitterness might have been influenced by the fact that he was given up for adoption at birth. Former Deputy Prime Minister Lord Heseltine said this was a bit "demeaning" before swinging off through the jungle.

Misheard Lyrics

It would appear that failure to consume enough alcohol can damage your hearing and/or impair your cognitive functions:

From The Daily Mail:

Almost one in five songs in modern top tens contains a reference to booze (1) – twice as many as ten years ago and almost three times as many as 30 years ago...

The study attributes the rise of alcohol-related lyrics to an increase in the amount of U.S songs becoming popular in the UK. It uses Katy Perry's Last Friday Night, a still from the music video pictured, as an example and claims the song links drinking to confidence and success...

By 2011, the proportion of songs that glamorised alcohol by linking it to confidence, sociability or good looks clearly outweighed those that blamed it for hangovers and health problems.(2)

1) If you add up the number of pop songs which refer to booze, drugs, sex, violence or arson and/or include swearwords/smut then it probably adds up to about seven or eight out of five. So what?

Vague references to "doing it all night" (it always puzzles me what they are "doing all night". Worrying about a job interview? Revising for an exam?) would bring that to nine or ten out of five.

2) "Last Friday Night" is probably the worst example they could have chosen, it strikes me that the lyrics are all about the hangover:

There's a stranger in my bed
There's a pounding in my head
Glitter all over the room
Pink flamingos in the pool
I smell like a minibar
DJ's passed out in the yard
Barbie's on the barbecue
This a hickie or a bruise?
Pictures of last night
Ended up online
I'm screwed
Oh well
It's a blacked out blur
But I'm pretty sure it ruled
Damn...

And so on and so forth. We've all been there.

It's quite a well written song actually and includes an impossible saxophone solo. The verses are in the first person singular, present tense and the chorus in the first person plural, past tense. They could have given her credit for that at least.

"We will build a landlord of opportunity"

From The Daily Mail:

David Cameron says he is backing Britain as 'a landlord of opportunity' where 'rent seeking' and 'leveraged land speculation' are not 'dirty words'.

The Prime Minister will claim in his speech to the Conservative Party conference today that only the Tories will stand up for landowners, landlords and bankers who 'prise wages out of people's pockets and food off their tables'.

Attacking the 'anti-landowner' agenda laid out by Labour leader Ed Miliband last week, he will insist that higher rents and house prices, not a larger state, are the answer to Britain's economic woes.

He will also make his frankest admission of the weaknesses of the Coalition, saying it is clear Britain needs a strong majority Government 'with a clear mandate' that is 'accountable to its funders and backers'.

He will say the 'great Conservative mission' is to build a 'landlord of opportunity' and enable the Land Monopoly Black Hole to devour what little growth there is in the economy.

But attempts to focus on the improving economy were dealt a blow last night when Cabinet minister Kenneth Clarke said the 'ordinary landlord isn't feeling much benefit' because rents were increasing only slightly faster than earnings or general prices.

Random snippets

1. Reader's Letter Of The Day from The Metro (page 14):

If the unemployed are made to pick up rubbish, what will happen to those already employed as street cleaners?

Or are they also destined for the dole queue?

Trevor Beake, Kent.

2. The Homey-In-Chief Emeritus on top form:

IT is time for Americans to decide: do they want to be a social democracy, Eurozone style, with high levels of tax and public spending, or do they want to be a small state society, with low taxes and low levels of public spending?

That's the point.

"The Americans" have decided, and they decided long ago. By and large, taking federal, state and local government, US tax and spend levels are not wildly different from European levels.

Obama was re-elected recently and Obamacare (for all its faults) has been duly authorised, despite the desperate attempts of the US medical-industrial bloc to prevent it.

If you judge a policy by its detractors, then Obamacare looks like a good thing to me (although trying to make employers pay for it is stupid, they ought to pay for it out of general taxation or taxes on land values, or the government could just set up its own hospitals and provide free treatment).

And as Obama explained patiently yesterday (the first speech he ever gave which was intelligent and incredibly funny), the expenditure has already been authorised and tax levels have been agreed, so approving the "debt ceiling" is largely a formality (spending minus tax receipts = deficit, end of):

"Think about that. If you buy a car and you've got a car note, you do not save money by not paying your car note. You're just a deadbeat.

"If you buy a house, you don't save money by not authorizing yourself to pay the mortgage. You're just going to be foreclosed on your home. That's what this is about."

3. From the FT:

Some of Britain's leading mortgage lenders have expressed misgivings about the government's latest "Help to Buy" initiative, leaving the state-backed banks Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds as the only pair to have endorsed the scheme.(1)

Help to Buy, launched in April, was originally designed as a government loan scheme to support buyers of new-build houses. But the second phase of the scheme, fast-forwarded to this week from its original launch date of next year,(2) offers a government guarantee for higher-risk mortgages on any kind of home.

Many bankers are wary of the uncertain capital treatment that will be applied to the mortgages and the risks that will be created by low deposits and high loan-to-value ratios.(3)

1) Is it a coincidence that only the two banks directly controlled by the UK government* are joining in the fun?

* As opposed to the UK government, which is indirectly controlled by the banks.

2) They are starting to panic, this must be a good sign. But going by the success of all the fancy schemes which both Labour and Lib-Con governments introduced over the last five years, it won't be.

3) If only they'd thought like this ten or fifteen years ago, when the bubble was just starting. Query whether they actually think like this now, or whether this is just a plea for more generous handouts?

Global Citizen's Dividend calculator

This is something I'm working on for JJS and I'm posting it here to see if it works:

Shuffling the Deck Chairs

From the BBC

David Cameron says he wants to offer more patients the chance to visit a GP in the evening or at weekends.

Under a scheme to be piloted in nine areas of England, surgeries will be able to bid for funding to open from 8am to 8pm seven days a week. The prime minister said the £50m project would mean doctors "fit in with work and family life"...

He told the BBC: "Many hard working people find it difficult to take time off to get that GP appointment, so having these pilot schemes... is, I think, a very positive step forward.

"It also links to the problems we have seen in our accident and emergency departments because the number of people going to A&E departments is up by four million since the changes to the GP contract that Labour put in in 2004.

"What we need to do is enable the right people with the right ailments, as it were, to either go to a GP or to accident and emergency."

So, here's the multi-million dollar question: what's the problem with people going to A&E outside of hours instead of a GP?

OK, I know the answer to that is that A&E gets crowded and waiting times go up. But then, you can deal with that by simply putting more resources into A&E. After all, this plan is going to mean more GP resources, and fundamentally, you're dealing with the same skillset.

It's not like if you have 12 hours of A&E that you're going to get to see your GP. They can't work 12 hours - it's going to mean some sort of split-shift, so there's a reasonable chance you're going to see another GP, so any personal connection value of a GP isn't being added.

The other downside of 12 hour GP surgeries is that you're going to end up with a lot of GP time spent sitting around doing nothing, because even now, many GP surgeries are quiet at certain times of day. And you can't go moving GPs from a busy surgery to a non-busy surgery just for odd lulls. That means losing GP resources.

Look at it this way: if lots of small offices worked so well, why did we ditch town centre insurance brokers for vast call centres that you could fit an Star Destroyer in? Answer: because it's more efficient. Because you can make it that no-one is sat around waiting for customers. Because you can improve the use of specialists. You get some scale, like 1000 people working in a call centre and it's worthwhile employing a team of a dozen geeks just to work out how to improve the efficiency.

So, you build models to work out how many people to put on there at certain times, you computerise all the crap (like sending letters) to free up people, you stick a load of stuff on the net so people can do it themselves. All of this reduces the cost of the call centre, and as a result, the cost to customers. But you can only do all of that with scale, and having 2 GPs isn't going to do it.

That's not to say that there isn't a place for GPs - sometimes people need that personal connection. A woman suffering from post-natal depression probably needs that connection. But she's not going to want to see an anonymous GP any more than seeing someone at A&E. And I'm pretty sure that she'd find time in the day for something like that.

Fun Online Polls: Help To Buy, Fergie, Prince Andrew

The result in last week's Fun Online Poll was as follows:

If housing were affordable, there would be neither need nor excuse for Help To Buy.

Agree - 89%
Disagree - 4%
Other, please specify - 7%

A good turnout, over a hundred took part and I'm in the clear majority on that one.
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For a bit of light relief, according to the always reliable and scrupulously accurate Daily Mail*, Fergie and Prince Andrew are going to get married again. Possibly. Hedging their bets nicely there.

Ah bless! I'm neither hard core monarchist nor romantic, but stories about people "finding each other again after xxx years apart" always give me a warm fuzzy glow.

What does the equally well informed readership think?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

* I'm not joking, while the Mail has a pretty clear and predictable editorial policy, when it comes to rehashing statistics or press releases, they usually include all the important facts and figures, albeit sometimes relegated to the very end of the article when they contradict the actual headline.