Money Category
Money in the news and how you are going to pay and pay and pay
Fracking madness: In what way is a higher than normal tax rate a tax break?
I HAVE to admit that there are certain minds that I just cannot worm my way into. Just cannot grasp what is going on in the minds of people who say such stupid things:
George Osborne has infuriated environmentalists by announcing big tax breaks for the fracking industry
Has he? My word.
Lawrence Carter, a Greenpeace energy campaigner, said: “The chancellor is telling anyone who will listen that UK shale gas is set to be an economic miracle, yet he’s had to offer the industry sweetheart tax deals just to reassure them that fracking would be profitable.
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Apple’s still being complete bastards to the Chinese workers
APPLE’S being complete bastards to Chinese workers. Well, so says a new report out today from China Labor Watch: Apple’s still being entirely bastardly towards the workers in China that make so much of their kits. After all that stuff over the suicides at Foxconn a couple of years back, this new report insists that everything is still terrible at the new company, Pegatron, that Apple is using.
The heinous crimes against worker rights include:
For example, at AVY there are 10 showerheads for about 120 workers.
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Posted: 4th, August 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Facebook mobile results lead to stock soaring 17%
THE big thing no one was really sure about with Facebook was how it was going to deal with the move to mobile. The recent results give us some insight into that and the shares have risen 17% as a result.
On Wednesday, Facebook easily beat second-quarter profit and sale expectations, sending its shares up 17% in late trading. The company swung to a profit as its sales rose 53% to $1.81 billion from a year ago, boosted by a surge in mobile and local ad sales. The company booked a profit of $333 million, or 13 cents a share.
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Obama threatens a repeat of Trayvon Martin, Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian
BARACK Obama says that race relations are going to get worse in America unless… The White House Dossier reports:
President Obama said that if economic prescriptions of the type he supports to increase economic growth and reduce “income inequality” are not adopted, then race relations in the United State may deteriorate further.
“If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” Obama said in an interview published Sunday by the New York Times. “Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot. If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested, ” he said.
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Posted: 1st, August 2013 | In: Money, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
It goes down: that’s what the minimum wage is supposed to do you dimbulb idiot
DEAR Heaven above wouldn’t it be nice to be ruled by people of a slightly higher intellectual capacity than this? Here we’ve got the ex-head of the organisation that sets the minimum wage, The Low Pay Commission, complaining about the rate at which the minimum wage is being set.
The national minimum wage is no longer working because its value has fallen, one of its key architects said as a new study showed it could be worth less in 2017 than it was in 2004.
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The Bank of England keeping token women on banknotes is no victory
LIKE many people, I’m delighted with the news that the Bank of England will be keeping women on our banknotes. I made this cartoon in support of the campaign.
There’s a few things about the reaction to the news which have struck me, so I thought I’d jot my notes down.
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So what first attracted you to the multi-billionaire Eric Schmidt then?
THE Mail is reporting that Eric Schmidt, the multi-billionaire chairman of Google, has a penchant for shagging around a bit.
Yet today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that 58-year-old Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, does fiercely protect one thing: his own private life, which is as colourful and complex as the ever-changing ‘Google doodle’ which pops up each time the search engine is launched.
In the past few years, the unlikely sex symbol with thinning hair and pockmarked skin has embarked on a string of affairs with younger women, including a vivacious TV presenter who dubbed him ‘Dr Strangelove’, a leggy blonde public relations executive and a sexy Vietnamese concert pianist.
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Posted: 26th, July 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Thom Yorke and Johnny Lynch entirely misunderstand Spotify and online music
THIS is one of those newspaper pieces where you have to check that the people are still living on the same planet as the rest of us. They’re talking about whether Spotify is paying enough in royalties to the musicians who produce the work. Yet they manage to miss the most basic point about the whole subject:
Spotify is selling a lie, though. In this post-Napster world, the pressure is on for new independent artists to have their music sit alongside massive acts – but we’re not getting anything back. We are told that it’s good exposure, and will lead to increased album and ticket sales, but this simply isn’t the case.
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Posted: 26th, July 2013 | In: Key Posts, Money, Music, Technology | Comments (3)
An absurd story on Formula One tax dodges
THIS absurd tax story is brought to you by The Independent:
The standard rate of corporation tax in the UK is 24 per cent of a company’s profit. The F1 teams tend to avoid this because they spend all of the money they receive in a bid to boost their chances on track. Breaking even or making a loss means that they don’t need to pay tax as there is no profit for it to be charged on.
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Crystal Palace underground toilets are now a compact and bijou home (photo)
ARCHITECT Laura Jane Clark has transformed these ancient Crystal Palace Parade underground toilets (built: 1929; closed in the 1980s) into a 600 square foot home.
She bought he lavs for £20,000, invested £65,000 and now owns an underground home that boasts a few original fixtures and fittings, notably the public health warning sign for VD.
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Posted: 24th, July 2013 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comments (2)
The idiocy of gambling on dumb luck
THE seductive idiocy of gambling on dumb luck: Chris Dillow reviews:
Jordi Brandts and colleagues got a group of [fourth-year finance] students to predict a sequence of five coin tosses, and then selected the best and the worst predictor. They then asked other subjects to bet on whether the best and worst predictor could predict another five coin tosses. The subjects were told that they would bet on the worst predictor from the first round, unless they paid to switch to the best predictor.
82% of subjects paid to make the switch.
But of course, there is no such thing as an ability to predict the toss of a coin. Most subjects, then, saw skill where there was only luck. And, what’s more, they were willing to spend good money to back this daft opinion.
Wonder what the experts say..?
The Guardian makes a hash of biomass and gasoline use
THIS is really rather good in The Guardian. Further evidence that the people who produce it just don’t understand numbers.
There’s a piece cooing over a new method of producing hydrogen. Basically, if we boil up some plants then we can stop using that nasty petrol and Gaia will be saved. Which is great, if it’s true:
In 2011, the US consumed 134bn gallons (507bn litres) of gasoline, but “with our technology, just 700m pounds [317,500 tonnes] of biomass would be enough to replace the whole yearly [gasoline] production,” says Zhang. The last official assessments estimate the availability of crop residues for biomass in the US to be about 157m tonnes per year.
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Austin Mitchell’s tax rate is lower than that of the Prince of Wales
AUSTIN Mitchell’s Tax Rate Is Lower Than That Of The Prince Of Wales….
A fact which makes his comments in the Commons yesterday really rather interesting.
Mitchell announced that the Prince of Wales pays tax at a lower rate than the poor do. He reached this conclusion by doing something fairly interesting:
Austin Mitchell said that the Prince’s accounts show that he paid less direct and indirect taxes as a percentage of income that the “bottom quartile of households” in Britain.
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Posted: 18th, July 2013 | In: Money, Politicians, Royal Family | Comment
Spotify is overpaying Thom Yorke and The Bleaters
THE latest is the row about how the royalty streams from Spotify are too low turns up in The Guardian. As you might expect from that paper there’s a great deal of indignation and not a lot of light and sense.
As background, Thom Yorke has demanded that Spotify no longer play his songs as he thinks they offer a really bad deal to musicians. So, The G went out and found someone who agreed:
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Asiana Airlines sues Captain Sum Ting Wong with a ‘smile as beautiful as a wing with stripes’
ASIANA Airlines will sue the TV station that reported on the accident that saw three passengers killed (two have been named as Ye Mengyuan, 16, and Wang Linjia, 17) and scores more injured when one of it jets crashed into the tarmac at San Francisco airport.
Reports suggest that the 777 descended too fast, causing the tail of the airliner to strike a sea wall.
The pilot was Lee Kang Kuk.
Yoon Young Doo, Asiana’s CEO, said the crash was not down to mechanical failure.
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The streets are paved with gold – well, the platinum in your catalytic converters
OR, in this case, platinum and other valuable metals:
One of the country’s biggest street cleaning firms has announced it is to “mine” the sweepings it collects from roads and pavements, in search of gold and other precious metals.
Veolia Environmental Services believes it can find at least £1 million worth of materials like platinum, palladium and rhodium from the muck swept up from Britain’s streets each year.
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Girl-hating gamer boys: Quit thinking with the Smaller of Your Two Heads
ACCORDING to 1980s pop culture stereotypes, anyone who likes computers is compensating for being a socially clueless nerd who cannot get laid. Kudos to pop culture for evolving beyond that, but why the hell are today’s gamer boys trying so hard to revive old stereotypes?
For over a week now, male gamers have been freaking out over news that a woman— 19-year Microsoft veteran Julie Larson-Green — has been named the new head of the Xbox division. Not that the company is any feminist utopia (or dystopia, depending on your preference); it’s the same Xbox which, just last month, got called out by Anita Sarkeesian for introducing its new line of games and “revealing to us exactly zero games featuring a female protagonist for the next generation”.
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Posted: 13th, July 2013 | In: Key Posts, Money, Technology, The Consumer | Comment (1)
Estate agency writes the best property blurb ever – ‘Due to the owner’s hobby, we are unable to take internal photographs’
YOU looking to buy a 3-bed semi-detached house on Eastcroft Road, West Ewell, for £337,950? McCann’s estate agents, on Epsom High Street, has just the thing. Want to see inside?
Sorry. You can’t. Why? Well the estate agency says:
“Due to the owners hobby, we are unable to take internal photographs”
This is how you market a property. You create a mystery. Now we call want to look inside. Anyone know what’s there? Is “internal photographs” a clue?
Posted: 12th, July 2013 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comment
Don’t use the Internet if you want to keep secrets – Russian spies revert to paper economy
I ASSUME that we all actually know this by now, that you cannot keep things secret on the internet? At least, we should all have learnt it from the revelations by Edward Snowden I think, no? That the only truly secure computer is one that’s not connected to anything at all?
It would appear that the Russians have worked this out:
In the wake of the US surveillance scandal revealed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Russia is planning to adopt a foolproof means of avoiding global electronic snooping: by reverting to paper.
The Federal Guard Service (FSO), a powerful body tasked with protecting Russia’s highest-ranking officials, has recently put in an order for 20 Triumph Adler typewriters, the Izvestiya newspaper reported.
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Posted: 12th, July 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Apple conspired to keep e-book prices artifically high as libraries die
BOOKS are not just objects to buy and trade. The BBC reports on a ruling that Apple “conspired with publishers to fix the price of electronic books”.
And those are the electronic books that thanks to convoluted copyright rules you are not permitted to pass on to friends, as you can with an actual paper book.
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Posted: 10th, July 2013 | In: Books, Money, Technology | Comment
Fact v fear: nine scare stories that make mugs of the British
A SURVEY by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London looks at scare stories and the facts behind them.
These are the popular misperceptions:
Teenage pregnancy
Fear: 15% of girls under 16 get pregnant each year
Fact: 0.6% % do.
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The Wall Street Journal thinks Egypt needs a General Pinochet
THE Wall Street Journal thinks Egypt needs a General Pinochet
And this has predictably outraged just about everyone else:
Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took over power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.
What’s wrong with that of course is that Pinochet overthrew a democtratically elected President (Allende), tortued and murdered and then, when age caught up with him, brought back that democracy. Sorta.
What’s right with it is something more subtle and well expressed by Fraser Nelson here:
All this has been established by Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist who travelled to Egypt to investigate the causes of the Arab Spring. His team of researchers found that Bouazizi had inspired 60 similar cases of self-immolation, including five in Egypt, almost all of which had been overlooked by the press. The narrative of a 1989-style revolution in hope of regime change seemed so compelling to foreigners that there was little appetite for further explanation. But de Soto’s team tracked down those who survived their suicide attempts, and the bereaved families. Time and again, they found the same story: this was a protest for the basic freedom to own and acquire ras el mel, or capital.
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Posted: 8th, July 2013 | In: Money, Politicians | Comments (2)
Don’t panic: an extra minute in the shower will wash away that horrible Puritan spirit
HAVE we been taken over by some alien race of puritans or something? They’re telling us today that having a long shower is a “waste”. One that we should righteously avoid:
An average shower lasts seven-and-a-half minutes, yet cutting just a minute off that time would save British households £215 million on energy bills each year, the report said.
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Starbuck balls: they’re becoming insane over this corporate tax dodging
TWO stories that show quite how insane people are becoming over this corporate tax dodging stuff. Both, of course, from the Mail. The paper that can indeed read the zeitgeit but never quite get the details correct.
The first, about Starbucks:
Starbucks’ UK sales during the year rose 4 per cent to £413.4million – the biggest increase since 2008.
But the company made a loss of £30.4million – after paying £26.5million to overseas subsidiaries in ‘royalty payments’.
It also paid £1.8million to other Starbucks companies as interest payments on loans made between divisions.
Corporation Tax: Government hires contractor based in British Virgin Islands
YOU’VE got to hand it to the campaigners: they can get newspapers to print the most godawful rubbish these days. The latest complaint seems to be that a company is paying all the tax that is due. What Horrors!
Downing Street faces more flak over company tax arrangements after it emerged that a major Government contractor is funnelling profits into an offshore haven.
Telereal Trillium has a £3.2 billion contract to manage buildings such as job centres for the Department for Work and Pensions. It also manages property used by the DVLA.
While the company paid full UK corporation tax last year, it funnelled £163 million of its post-tax profits in the form of share dividends into a parent company based in the British Virgin Islands where there is a zero rate of income and corporation tax.
