Double Bubble

9th October 2013
He said: "I can tell you, first of all, that energy prices doubled under Labour, electricity prices went up by 50 per cent. And let me say this to you - there is one thing governments can't control and that is the international wholesale price of gas.

21st October 2013
David Cameron hailed the nuclear project as "brilliant news" for Britain, calling it a "landmark in our economic growth plan".

But the Government has come under fire for guaranteeing to pay £92.50 per megawatt hour of electricity produced - a so-called "strike price" double the current market rate.

Attractive Adult Woman accuses Dead Adult Man of Trying it On, Breaking No Law

From the Daily Mail:

Amanda Holden has revealed how Jimmy Savile made lewd comments suggesting he wanted to 'give her one' when she was a teenager being treated in hospital.

The TV personality, 42, was just 19 when she met Savile at Leeds General Infirmary while she was being treated for a cut finger.

She told how the shamed Top Of The Pops presenter made a string of 'lame' jokes before offering to give her a gynaecological problem.

Ian B on Tim Worstall's blog comments is convinced that there's a campaign to raise the age of consent to 18, and it's journalists saying "just 19" that's part of that. You push the idea that 19 is a vulnerable age, and well, of course 17 is ridiculous.

But I have to wonder... when did we start infantilising young adults, and why?

When I was a lad, I had a shop job at 15. You now have to have staff CRB checked if you have such a staff member. I was learning to drive at 17, which various groups seem to want to change. We're going to have even more kids at school until they're 18, even though it's a waste of time. No-one took the drinking age too seriously - we certainly didn't have ID card schemes in pubs, which meant that 16 year olds got served.

Fun Online Polls: Harry Potter films & Plebgate

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll, on an unsurprisingly low turnout were as follows:

Which is your favourite Harry Potter film?

Philosopher's Stone 9%
Chamber of Secrets 4%
Prisoner of Azkaban 11%
Goblet of Fire 0%
Order of The Phoenix 0%
Half Blood Prince 0%
Deathly Hallows - Part 1 4%
Deathly Hallows - Part 2 5%
I've never seen any of them 68%

By a slim margin, people liked "Prisoner of Azkaban" best, which also happens to be my favourite, it's the best-made film in terms of conveying the story from the book with a lot of background colour without getting too distracted by sub-plots or random scenes.

It's also interesting that the first three films got the most votes, I suppose people got bored after that apart from a small hard core who saw it through to the bitter end and then liked those best.
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The Plebgate affair drags on, without anybody caring any more:

A transcript of the meeting showed that, while he admitted swearing, Mr Mitchell denied using the word "pleb" or insulting the police.

I'm not sure if it's possibly to swear at somebody without insulting them, I've never got away with it.

But on the basis of no information whatsoever, let's settle the matter with a Trial By Internet.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"How the railways will tear up rural England"

From The Telegraph, 20 July 1813:

More than 1,000 of Britain’s most important wildlife habitats and dozens of ancient woodlands will be directly affected by the proposals to lay down 8,000 miles of track between England's towns and cities.

Official documents also disclose that tens of thousands of acres of valuable farm land - already scarred beyond recognition with canals and cart tracks - will be lost and more than 1,000 buildings are to be demolished.

Conservationists and other campaigners reacted angrily to the figures, which were buried in a mass of Railway Acts passed without fanfare by Parliament.

They are the fullest assessment of the environmental impact of the newfangled 'steam locomotives'. Until now only the impact of the first railway using these contraptions, from Pen-y-darren ironworks to Abercynon, had been fully detailed.

The railways are backed by both Houses of Parliament, with Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, and other senior Cabinet ministers arguing that railways suitable for steam locomotives will transform Britain’s “economic geography”.

Friday Night Gearchanges

Aretha Franklin, "Think" (from the film "The Blue Jasmine Brothers"), up a semi-tone at 1 min 2 seconds and 2 min 4 seconds:

"Mixed communities"

Let's take another glimpse into the swirling maelstrom of Homey platitudes and identify a few more which cancel each other out.

From some official DCLG research:

... the rationale for mixed communities is that substantial diversification of housing type and tenure, combined with improvements to facilities, services and opportunities will both improve life chances for disadvantaged residents and attract new wealthier residents.

This will lead to a new dynamic including increased land values and a better-functioning housing market, reducing overall concentrations of deprivation.

Lower income residents will benefit from increased resources and social interaction with better-off residents. Neighbourhoods will thus be less reliant on repeated 'regeneration'.

That's the theory (the research goes on to say that there is no actual real life evidence of such results being achieved), and this is one of the reasons/excuses given for flogging off the council housing at undervalue to those who could afford it:

The 'mixed tenure' policy with greatest impact on individuals and neighbourhoods to date has been the Right to Buy, with two million homes sold, against fewer than 100,000 for all the other low cost home ownership initiatives combined.

The Homeys continue to ignore real life evidence that the policy does not achieve its stated aim and they insist that the "mixed community" is a good concept with good outcomes and hence justification for flogging off council houses. Quite how we jumped from "mixed community" to "mixed tenure" is another topic.

Now, in two ever so slightly different contexts, Homeys oppose "mixed communities" with absolute venom:

1. When higher earners, particularly a middle class hate figure like Bob Crow, continue to rent a council house

They are, allegedly, stealing from the taxpayer, depriving low earners of affordable housing etc.

But surely they are is still making that council estate more "mixed" by living there, which is A Good Thing, isn't it? Serving as a positive role model and all that?

Why is it that on Planet Homey, if higher earners bought their council houses and are now living there rent-free, i.e. contributing less back to the taxpayer, then they are not stealing from the taxpayer, they are not depriving a low earner of affordable housing - and they are serving as positive role models as a bonus - but not if they are still renting?

2. When it comes to new construction

The "mixed community" model says that in an area, there should be affordable rented housing for low earners (i.e. council housing) and there should be more expensive privately owned housing for middle and high earners to buy.

But if the council says that x% of a new development has to be affordable housing, or, Heaven forfend, the council just gets on with it and builds some social housing near privately owned housing, then the NIMBYs (the radical wing of the Homey movement) scream blue murder. There is no room at our inn, they shriek, there's no need for it, and we don't want chavscum round our way dragging down the neighbourhood and our lovely house prices.

Conclusion

Thus we can safely say that Homeys do not believe in "mixed communities" except when it suits them (i.e. they don') and in any event, on the facts, the policy does not work.

"Land rents don't exist"

The strange thing is that it is not just the Homeys and Faux Libs who deny that land rents exist, the Commies do it as well.

From the comments in a leftie blog:

Marx is not so much deploying the Smith/Ricardo LVT as criticizing it: abstract average socially necessary labor time is not so much embodied in commodities as extracted/abstracted from them through the system of market exchanges.

But at the same time, surplus-value is generated from the hiring of commodity-labor at "fair" wages, as determined by reproduction costs, and it is the need to reproduce surplus-value to maintain the valorization of capital stocks that is the key dynamic driver of the whole system.

At the same time, neither natural resources lying in the ground, nor capital goods can accrue any value unless activated by labor processes. (Land rents don't exist except within some system of production that deploys labor and capital).

Splendid state of denial there!

Wages are a very high share of any business' total income, usually about four-fifths, the rest is return on capital used in the business, first-mover profits etc. For sure, you can argue that some people are underpaid, no doubt they are, but other people are overpaid, exploiting their own monopoly power etc. There is no such share with land rents - all land rents go to the owner.

It strikes me as pretty hard to envisage a "system of production" that doesn't "deploy labour and capital". That's what "production" is, it's the deployment of labour and capital, and with a bit of luck, the value of the outputs is more than the cost/value of the inputs.

(Even if it is value-detroying, it is still "production" i.e. British Leyland were "producing" cars right up to the bitter end.)

And as soon as you have a system of production, you have land rents.

Whether that system of production is hunter-gathering or sitting in a swanky city centre office making important sounding phone calls and shoving paper round, it all requires land, so that land has value and that value is rent.

Sucker Bets

I'm a bit of a math geek, and especially a probability geek, so this sort of story interests me:-

I was going to say that nothing is left to chance. But chance is now contemplated, considered and factored. You might be aware of Peter Edwards of Denbighshire, who proudly watched his grandson, Harry Wilson, come on to play for Wales against Belgium in the 87th minute on Tuesday night, thereby winning Edwards £125,000 on the £50 bet he placed when Harry was 18 months old. Finely romantic; old-fashioned, almost. But there are other, increasingly popular parental bets that are more calculating, principally betting on children to do well at A-levels or university.

Graham Sharpe, of William Hill, who paid out on Wilson, says it is now taking around a dozen or so bets like these every week. Ladbrokes says hundreds of parents have bet with it. Algorithms are involved. Odds, for example, on a student with three Bs at A-level getting a first in media studies at Leeds University are 5-1. Be warned, though: Sharpe will want to know some history, following the first bet he ever took, when the boy's headmaster rang up the next day and asked if could put a bet on, too.

I could understand placing a couple of quid on a grandson. Something where the bet is a bit of fun to have with your son. But £50?

Let's break it down: the population of Wales is 3m. So, 1.5m of those are boys. Of those, you'll get maybe 10 new players in a squad each year. So, over the possible playing career, say 150 people will get picked. So, the realistic odds are 10,000/1, and he got 2,500/1. It's already a bad bet, if you're doing it for money. The bookie is already taking 75% of that money. Plus, he tied up £50 for over a decade.

But it gets worse when you consider how many Englishmen who aren't good enough to play for England will fly the daffodil of convenience when it suits them so they can play international football.

"Betting on your kids degree" is even worse. If someone's got to look at your kids A-level results, that actuarial work is going to get factored into the bookie's costs, and therefore your odds.

You really can't beat the bookies. They work out the risk, then factor a margin on for costs and profit. The sports pundit Angus Loughran, aka Statto was declared bankrupt a few years ago, owing debts to a bookie. And he knew far more than most of the population about football betting.

Global warming vs Global cooling

I watch a lot of documentaries on the telly about all sorts of things in an eclectic/dilletantish, history, archaeology, science, architecture, engineering, religion, statistics, natural disasters, geology etc, and of course I always look for patterns in these things.

(It's what they say inadvertently which is the most interesting, so programmes about economics ignore land values completely, but in the programmes about new transport infrastructure they always mention increases in land values.)

It is also the rule nowadays that wherever possible, a documentary has to mention "climate change" and they usually sneak it in towards the end, saying "Well, this is a lovely coral reef but it won't be hear any more in a few years because the ocean is become more acidic because of man-made climate change" or some such guff (the oceans are becoming less alkaline and not more acidic, for example).

Now, we all know that since the dawn of mankind, there have been temperature fluctuations of quite a few degrees up and down.

We were actually quite well established during the last Ice Age (which ended on 19 July about 10,000 years ago).

For example, the North Sea was so shallow that the bit between Great Britain and the Netherlands was actually dry land and people lived there quite happily. Once things warmed up and the ice started melting, the North Sea filled up quite quickly again and they all scarpered and set up camp somewhere else. Others took the opportunity to head up to Siberia and cross over into Alaska.

The periods when temperatures fell abruptly are primarily after large volcano eruptions (or that meteor which hit the Gulf of Mexico) because of all the dust in the atmosphere blocking the sun, but the cause is not so important. And it is in these sudden cold periods that everything goes horribly wrong, crops fail, diseases spread, lots of people die etc. Or there are mass extinctions after extreme events.

To sum up, humans are quite good at adapting to quite sudden rises in temperature, this has always been the case and there's no reason to assume that this won't hold in future. But we are rubbish at adapting to sudden falls in temperature.

Ergo, even if the Warmenist predictions are correct (and they aren't), then this is not really a problem, what we ought to be more wary of and be working out contingency plans for are sudden falls in temperature.

Just sayin', is all.

"British Gas urges customers to ditch David Cameron after he hikes taxes by more than 10%"

From The Evening Standard:

Struggling London families were dealt a huge blow two years ago when the Conservative-led government increased taxes on output and employment by 10.6 per cent.

The bombshell from Britain's biggest government reduced disposable incomes of an average household by nearly £1,000 and sent their annual total tax bill spiralling to a record £20,000 a year...

The VAT and National Insurance rises, which came into force in 2010, did not trigger a storm of protest and consumer groups did not accuse the Liberal-Conservative coalition of delivering a "big, nasty" shock to taxpayers that will force thousands to make a "heat or eat" choice over the winter.

British Gas chairman Sir Roger Carr today said the tax rises were "disappointing" and urged people to try to save money by switching governments.

Shadow energy secretary Caroline Flint said: "People are too feeble to stand up to the government. Britain's tax and welfare system is not working for ordinary families and businesses.

"Heck knows how we keep getting away with it."