Civilised discussion

To my mind, here is how civilised discussions should work, the rules apply to the pub, the dinner table, the blogosphere, anywhere.

One person, the bloghost, kicks things off by writing a post, reporting what he believes to be the facts, giving examples, linking to a couple of sources etc.

Other people then either agree; or disagree by giving counter-examples where the facts are different, linking to other sources; or ask the first person for clarification on certain matters etc.

Then the bloghost has the opportunity to say, oh yes, you are right, my original assumption was wrong. Or it's up to him to present more evidence or to explain why the counter-examples are invalid etc.

There is a fairly large sub-set of time wasters and idiots don't understand this and think that debating is all about trying to refute the original claims by insulting the bloghost (or other commenters); by taking his explanation ad absurdum; by claiming he has no expertise or experience - but without ever stating their opinion or  answering a direct question.

Let me give you an example of civilised discussion:

Bloghost: "I think most politicians are quite tall. Look at Tony Blair and David Cameron." He adds a link to a newspaper article, Wiki page or academic study on the matter.

In civilised debate, commenters will either agree ("I met John Major once, he is surprisingly tall"); or disagree ("I met Nigel Farage once, he's medium height at best"); or point out that Churchill and Hollande were quite small, possibly linking to some academic study saying that successful politicians tend to be small - or at least giving their honestly held opinion that on the whole, politicians are of average height.

The bloghost then has the opportunity to withdraw his first claim in the light of better evidence; give more examples; or decide that he his original statement was in fact correct and damn the doubters. If he is asked for clarification then he will give it. If he ignores all the comments listing small politicians and academic studies saying that politicians tend to be small, then so be it, let the court of public opinion judge the matter.

Let me now give you an example of full blown time wasting twats who have no concept of civilised discussion

Bloghost: "I think most successful politicians are quite tall. Look at Tony Blair and David Cameron." He adds a link to a newspaper article, Wiki page or scientific study on the matter.

Comments left by time wasting twats will be along the following lines:

"Tony Blair and David Cameron are actually very short."

"I bet you've never met any politicians."

"The source you link to is unreliable."

"If that's true, and the tallest people are basket ball players, how many basket ball players can you name who became president or Prime Minister?"

"I bet you're a short arse yourself. You're using this to excuse for failing in politics."

"I bet you're quite tall yourself and think that this gives you a God-given right to be a political leader."

"Why is this important? What has it got to do with Land Value Tax?"

"What qualifies you to speak? Are you a geneticist?"

"Prove it!"

"Are you saying that small people shouldn't be allowed in politics? Women tend to be shorter. This is a myth put about by sexists who want to disqualify women from politicos. I suppose you think women should just stay at home doing the housework? Typical UKIP voter!

"Define tall! In the middle ages, 5'6" counted as very tall.

"Not according to this link" (which turns out to be totally irrelevant and hundreds of pages long).

If the bloghost makes the mistake of trying to engage in serious discussion by asking any of them "Go on then, you are rubbishing my theory, can you give me any examples of small politicians?" or "What exactly do you mean by that?" or "I am judging 'tall' by modern standards, i.e. at least six foot and a bit. Why does it matter how big people were in the middle ages?" the commenters will flatly refuse to respond.

If the bloghost is lucky they will at least acknowledge that a question has been asked and admit that they cannot or will not answer it, but the chances are they will ignore it or say things like "That is irrelevant." or "Don't think you can change the topic, your original claim is bollocks." or worse, they will answer a completely different question or repeat the assertion on which the bloghost was seeking clarification.

It does not matter than the bloghost's question is very simple and very relevant and that he wants to establish what the twat commenter is actually trying to say, the key is to ignore it.

So in response to the unfounded claim that Tony Blair and David Cameron are short, the bloghost might add links to some photos of summit meetings showing that Tony Blair or David Cameron were among the tallest in the photo, and ask the first twat commenter "Do you really think that they are small? Do you have any evidence for that?".

The twat commenter will probably refuse to answer the question and will not submit any evidence that they are short. At best, he will say "Photos can be misleading. The ones where they appear tall are photoshopped."

And so on.

"Despite Brexit fears" weekly round up

On a lighter note, here area few outings for that tired old journalistic cliché from the past week:

City hiring holds up despite banks’ Brexit fears

Kamel Mennour to Open London Gallery Despite Brexit Fears

Experts say Brexit will not cause a recession despite Project Fear scaremongering from Osborne before the EU referendum

How Yorkshire has remained strong despite post-Brexit fears

More than two-thirds of Britain’s smallest firms expect to see growth over next six months despite concerns over Brexit, research finds

UK ECONOMY RESURGENT DESPITE BREXIT FEARS

SMEs ‘to generate £16 billion a year despite Brexit fears’

London house prices: Fears of dip after Brexit defied as prices continue to rise

CORPORATE EUROPE REMAINS UPBEAT DESPITE BREXIT SHOCK

And so on, ad infinitum. It would be just as easy to find the same number of headlines reporting poor economic news, which is promptly blamed on Brexit Fears.

Whether the final terms of Brexit will be good or bad for the UK economy - which depends very much on your point of view* - is unknown, but big picture wise it will probably make bugger all difference.

* House prices being a prime example, there are millions of people who would gain enormously if they fell, as opposed to a few hundred thousand who would lose out. But in a Homey society, higher house prices counts as A Good Thing and we have to look at the world through their twisted perspective. Or we could take immigration from poorer European countries; that's good for UK employers and landowners; not so good for low skilled UK workers or the countries they leave.

Fun Online Polls - Applying for UK asylum in France, Boyle's Law Gay-Lussac's Law and Greenhouse gases

The results to last fortnight's poll were as follows:

The French want to allow 'refugees' seeking asylum in the UK to lodge their claim while still in France.

Good idea (we can reject them out of hand and they remain France's problem) - 73%
Bad idea - 27%

That is of course on the assumption that their claims are processed by British officials, and not simply rubber stamped by French officials keen to get rid of them.
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So China and the USA signed up to this Paris Agreement on restricting CO2 emissions last week.

Which made me think, unless they are just doing this for presentational reasons, maybe I'm wrong and there is something in this global warming stuff.

So I re-read a standard explanation, all just about plausible until this bit:

Without this natural greenhouse effect, primarily owing to water vapor and carbon dioxide, Earth’s mean surface temperature would be a freezing -1°F, instead of the habitable 59°F we currently enjoy. Despite their small amounts, then, the greenhouse gases strongly affect Earth’s temperature. Increasing their concentration augments the natural greenhouse effect.

That is, I am afraid, complete bollocks and if that's all they've got as evidence then I am still not buying it.

The real reason why the surface is approx. 30C warmer than it 'should' be, bearing in mind distance from the sun and albedo is because of Boyle's Law.

UPDATE: I conferred with VFTS, the more appropriate gas law is one of Gay-Lussac's Laws:

The pressure of a gas of fixed mass and fixed volume is directly proportional to the gas's absolute temperature… This law holds true because temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a substance; as the kinetic energy of a gas increases, its particles collide with the container walls more rapidly, thereby exerting increased pressure.

So higher pressure = higher temperature and higher temperature = higher pressure and vice versa. The top half of the atmosphere pushes the bottom half down (compresses it) ; and the bottom half pulls the top half down (expands it). The bottom half is warmer than it 'should' be and the top half is colder than it 'should' be. On average, it is the right temperature, the -1F referred to in the first excerpt.

The atmosphere works like a giant heat pump - the upper atmosphere is colder than it should be and the lower atmosphere is warmer than it should be. The actual temperature half way up by volume i.e. 5.6 km is approx. 30C cooler than the surface and is in fact exactly what you would predict, bearing in mind distance from the sun.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Off Balance Sheet Government Debt

I treated myself to a new (well ex-demonstrator) car recently.  Oh OK.  Since you ask.  One of these:

In amongst all the negotiations I was offered a PCP deal.  Looking at the numbers (and the depreciation curve from Autocar and Whatcar) got me thinking about what exactly you are financing.

Inspecting the (badly sketched) graph above I have made a stab at plotting the depreciation. I have based the three year number on the quoted balloon payment.

The 'depreciation' has two components. (1) VAT (2) 'Depreciation'.  In regards to the latter with any new car you generally get all servicing thrown in for at least three years. (Mine included 5 years servicing). You'll get first years RFL. You'll get a guarantee - typically unlimited or perhaps 60K miles. All these have a cost to the maker but to you it means peace of mind (and that lovely new car smell). But all these benefits have 'run out' by year three ish.

However, you get nothing for the VAT.  Or rather the government gets 20% VAT that you have financed. You've borrowed money to pay tax.  Or rather again a bank has credited some money it has just made to your account so you can finance the VAT.   As I understand it 80% of new cars are bought on PCP deals. This is an awful lot of 'off balance sheet financing' for the government.

About 2m new cars are sold each year.  Say average of £17,500.  That's £7.0Bn per year in VAT financed by the Great Car Buying Public.

If that analysis is correct, someone should be told. Or have I missed something?

(Oh, I didn't use a PCP deal.  I put down a hefty chunk and financed the balance at a stupidly low rate as I can better use that money in my business.)

Classic roadster design

Let's start with the first identifiably modern roadster, the Jaguar E-type, which is a front engined 'cigar' shape.


From the other side of the pond came the slightly more 'geometric' Corvette.


Put those together and scale them down to affordable, flatten the boot, revert to round headlights and you end up with a Triumph Spitfire.


A Mazda MX5 Mk2 is a Triumph Spitfire but more 'cigar' shaped and with a hint of 'wedge' (the boot is higher than the bonnet). The Mk1 was even wedgier.


Starting from the other end, the first affordable rear engined 'wedge' shaped roadster was the Fiat X19.


The Porsche Boxster is a rear engined 'cigar' shape.


Scale down a Boxster to Fiat X19 dimensions (basically by chopping off the front and rear boots), pitch it somewhere between 'cigar' and 'wedge' and you get a Toyota MR2 roadster.


By overlapping the outlines of all of the above in Excel as far as possible; drawing the line of best fit; scaling it down to affordable; and improvising a bit, I ended up with this. I know the quarter-glass is old fashioned, but it leaves you more room for a 9" door speaker. The front end is a bit blunt, this is to give you space for a number plate above the air intake rather than having a more elegant line which is then ruined when you add the number plate


Edit, two years later: an update.

"Nation states" - not perfect but can anybody can come up with anything better?

Two people with whom I usually agree tweeted recently as follows:

Paul from Fintona @paulfmuldoon
"I can't wait for the concept of the nation state to be relegated to the pages of history where it belongs"

Duncan Stott @DuncanStott
"Guy Verhofstadt: 'We are suffering from having invented nation states and the nationalism that goes with them in the 18th Century'"

That's all well and good, nobody says they are perfect, any more than democracy is. They just appear to be the end result of lots of other forces, the desire to 'belong' (on the part of the masses), the desire to expand the area under their control (on the part of the ruling class - people like Guy Verhofstadt, for example) and the desire to feel 'sovereign' on the part of both masses and ruling class.

I don't see any realistic alternative, anarchy doesn't work; micro-states work but only if they are surrounded by larger countries; empires always collapse, even if they worked in the first place; most people resist the idea of supra-national government (UN, EU, TTIP etc).

As has been said before, democracy only works if there is a sense of a single national identity (however artificial, it cannot be denied there is such a thing) and tends to flourish more in economically developed countries.

Wiki says:

A nation state is a type of state that conjoins the political entity of a state to the cultural entity of a nation, from which it aims to derive its political legitimacy to rule and potentially its status as a sovereign state…

A state is specifically a political and geopolitical entity, whilst a nation is a cultural and ethnic one. The term "nation state" implies that the two coincide, in that a state has chosen to adopt and endorse a specific cultural group as associated with it. "Nation state" formation can take place at different times in different parts of the world.

So in the same way as land-ownership and the state are synonymous, I suppose we just have to accept that democracy, the nation-state and capitalism go hand in hand and are the least bad ways of organising things. Nothing which LVT and a Citizen's Income won't sort out.

Unless somebody has any better ideas?

They own land! Give them money!

From The Evening Standard:

Housing benefit would be increased for tens of thousands of people in London under Liberal Democrat proposals.

Lib-Dems are proposing to link local housing allowance, which private renters on housing benefit can receive, to average rents locally "so that the benefit reflects the actual cost of renting. LHA is currently capped and linked to the lowest rental costs in an area.

This would mean huge rises in housing benefit for many people who live in high-rent areas such as Westminster, Chelsea, Kensington, Fulham, Islington and Richmond.

The Lib-Dems estimate the housing benefit reform would cost about £3 billion a year by 2020-21.

Or more accurately:

Housing benefit would be increased for thousands of landlords in London under Liberal Democrat proposals.

Lib-Dems are proposing to link local housing allowance, which private landlords whose tenants are on housing benefit can receive, to average rents locally "so that the benefit maximises the value they can extract from society". LHA is currently capped and linked to the lowest rental costs in an area.

This would mean huge rises in housing benefit receipts for those who own several homes in high-rent areas such as Westminster, Chelsea, Kensington, Fulham, Islington and Richmond.

The Lib-Dems estimate the housing benefit reform would benefit the Duke of Westminster by about £3 billion a year by 2020-21.

"Stalins benefits underestimated, review says"

From the BBC:

The benefits of mass murdering megalomaniac dictators are underestimated and the harms exaggerated, a major review suggests.

Published in the Lancet and backed by a number of major health organisations, it says Stalins lower heart attack and stroke risk. The review also suggests side effects such as surveillance and punishment without trial do occur, although in relatively few people.

But critics say healthy people are unnecessarily being subjected to forced labour camps and widespread hunger.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (405)

Googling around for raw material to this epic series, I stumbled a good recent summary at Another Angry Voice (as did Bayard and BenJamin', it's a small world).

The first KLN was a half hearted "But the government will just have LVT on top of existing taxes" which was batted away.

The second KLN was:

Lydia Conwell

I'm not convinced it would work. Taxing land ownership would give people the incentive to own no land and instead rent. Wouldn't the tax the landlords have to pay be then transferred to the tenant through increases in rent?

Also you may not be able to move vast amounts of land to tax havens but you can position a company in a tax haven and that company can own the land, can't it?

The first one is clearly circular logic. In real life, most people choose whatever is probably going to be cheaper over their chosen time frame - 'buying/paying a large mortgage' or 'renting'. So by and large, the cost difference is negligible. What usually swings it is how long people intend to stay in that home/that area.

It will be exactly the same when people have to choose between 'buying/paying LVT/paying a smaller mortgage' or 'renting'. The two will end up costing much the same over a foreseeable medium term.

Further, if there the incentive to own no land and instead rent, doesn't the same apply to landlords? What they will own is the buildings, so spend £100,000 on the building and collect £5,000 a year rent net of LVT. It's the same for a new entrant; pay £100,000 up front, have the simple pleasure of decorating the home the way you like it and save yourself the £5,000 rent.

But I couldn't be bothered with that and dealt with the easy one:

Mark Wadsworth @ Lydia Conwell

Lydia, the UK has quasi LVT on commercial land (Business Rates), much of it owned by foreigners and the collection rate is still 98%, higher than any other tax.

Lydia Conwell @ Mark Wadsworth

That's a good point.

Which was a bit of a disappointment, I was expecting "Yes... but that is because the occupant is liable for Business Rates not the owner", which I would have countered with "In the event of non-payment, the council will take control of the building and collect the rent until the arrears are paid off", fully expecting "But what about vacant buildings?" and so on.

Where's the fun if people just read and understand what you have written?

Each side of this building is in a different postcode district*

* Or more accurately, the west side is in WC2, the north side is in W1, the east side is in WC2 (again) and the south side is in SW1.