Money Category
Money in the news and how you are going to pay and pay and pay
The TUC talks bollocks. Again
YES, it’s the TUC meeting again so obviously we’re going to have a report out or two that spout bollocks about what’s been happening to the economy. This year’s entry is a doozy though: the most charitable interpretation of it is that the TUC employs economists who really, really do not understand economics.
And no, I don’t mean all this neoliberal stuff about no regulation, or letting banking rip. Nor all tyhis social democracy stuff about redistribution and the value of free childcare. No, I mean as in not even understanding the basic numbers.
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Posted: 11th, September 2012 | In: Key Posts, Money | Comments (2)
The unfairness of life as a freelancer – a video
HOW unfair is it being a freelancer? Very. Especially if you have to deal with a crap editor. You want a column? You’ll be lucky get a fiver. Now hand your work into the intern on the door and stay in touch…
Spotter: Docracy
Lies and more lies on setting a minimum price for alcohol
DAMN, I do get pissed off with people trying to lie to us so that they can change the law. We’re supposed to be the people who decide how we’re ruled so they really do have to tell us the truth so we can decide.
The latest piece of bollocks is this:
Introducing a minimum price for alcohol of 50p per unit will prevent 50,000 pensioners dying of related health problems over the next decade, according to research commissioned by BBC Panorama.
So, 50,000 over a decade is 5,000 oldies a year not popping their clogs because someone’s raised the booze price and they can’t afford to get pissed any more.
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Posted: 8th, September 2012 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Democrats who wants to ban profits
DEMOCRATS who wants to ban profits:
Posted: 6th, September 2012 | In: Money, Politicians | Comment
The stupidity, it hurts – the mainstream media gets it wrong on food speculation
I FIND it to be actually physically painful when I see some ghastly lefty nonsense being picked up as the obvious truth across the political divide. We expect the comies to say that we should wipe out the bourgeoisie but it would be odd to see the Mail or Telegraph agreeing with them. I feel the same pain when obvious nonsense moves the other way, don’t worry. Seeing the vile racism of the right being reflected in the supposedly internationalist left’s sometimes attitudes to immigration for example.
Today’s example is this from the Torygraph:
Finally, there is the pernicious effect of speculation. About 80 per cent of the global food trade is now speculative, and firms such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank have spent billions gambling on the price of food, artificially driving up prices.
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Posted: 5th, September 2012 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Bribes are no longer tax deductible
BRIBES are no longer tax deductible. This is a bit of a change:
“Expenses incurred while committing legal violations, including providing bribes or kickbacks, are not recognized for the purposes of tax assessment,” the Ministry said in a statement posted on its website. Any official paying bribes will therefore have to pay the standard 20pc income tax, according to Russia’s Vedomosti newspaper. The clarification is relevant for for Russian arms exporters and commodity companies that have assets in the Third World, the paper cited tax officials as saying.
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Guardian’s Larry Elliott gets numbers wrong on meat eaters
YES, yes, of course we should all go off an become vegetarians. Far too many people about eating too much meat and the only way we can feed us all is with mung beans. And lentils.
This may or may not be true but what pisses me off is the numbers used to justify this. Larry Elliott in The Guardian this morning for example:
Meat consumption is rising in China, India and Brazil, and since it takes 7kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef (and 4kg to produce 1kg of pork), this is adding to global demand.
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Posted: 3rd, September 2012 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comments (4)
Apple’s suing Samsung: Yes, =again
WE’VE only just had the news that Apple has won big by suing Samsung over certain patents on mobile phones. What seems to have been missed is that there’s another case coming through the system. Yes, Apple v Samsung again. But over a different set of patents:
Last week’s resounding victory over Samsung in a patent trial in California mostly centered on hardware developed by the South Korean electronics maker, while including some features related to Google’s Android mobile software.
Another Apple suit, which the company filed in February, contends that all eight of the patents it is asserting are being infringed by features related to Android. They include features found in Android versions of popular Google apps like YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail as well as Google’s Quick Search Box that lets users search multiple types of data at the same time.
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Posted: 31st, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comments (2)
The LibDems have a bloody good idea: the accessions tax
WHO knew that they had it in them? The Lib Dems that is, being capable of offering up a good idea?
Replace inheritance tax with an “accessions tax” on beneficiaries of estates. A section on wealth taxes in a party consultation paper talks of “an accessions tax, where the tax liability would fall on the person receiving the income rather than the estate of the deceased. This would simplify the settling of the estate, making inheritance income more like employment and investment income.”
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Posted: 30th, August 2012 | In: Money | Comment (1)
How can we measure the result of privatising NHS England?
HOW surprising to see in The Guardian the usual moan about how flogging off the NHS is a very bad idea indeed. Which it might actually be but the really interesting question is how would we find out?
As for public accountability, there is none. Commercial contracts are redacted so that crucial financial information is not in the public domain. Government departments and companies refuse to release the necessary information on the grounds of commercial confidentiality and allow companies to sequester their profits in offshore tax havens. NHS staff transferred from the public to the private sector see their wages and benefits eroded. But all this is nothing compared with what is in store for patients.
In the new world it will no longer be possible to measure coverage or fairness. Former NHS hospitals, free to generate half their income from private patients, will dedicate their staff and facilities to that end, making it impossible to monitor what is public and what people are paying for.
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Posted: 29th, August 2012 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Gay couple sue airline that taped dildo their luggage
LEGAL news: Christopher Bridgeman and Martin Borger are suing Continental Airlines. The couple claim they were humiliated when the dildo they’d packed into their luggage was removed by persons unknown, covered in a greasy substance and taped to the outside of their bag.
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Posted: 29th, August 2012 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comments (10)
There ain’t no such thing as a solution: only tradeoffs
THERE’S a point that the subject of economics really tries very hard to get across. There’s no such thing as a solution: there are only tradeoffs. These tradeoffs come in a series or more or less acceptable ones, true, but tradeoffs there always are.
Stepping entirely outside economics for a moment here’s an interesting example:
The production of France’s Roquefort cheese is being threatened by the return of the wolf to the country’s southern mountains.
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Both Apple and Samsung found guilty!
BOTH Apple and Samsung Guilty! Probably the best result possible in the ongoing patent wars between the two companies. They’re both very naughty little boys. Unfortunately this is the verdict in the South Korean case, not in the girt big one in California.
A South Korean court has fined both Apple and Samsung, ruling that each infringed the other’s patents in building their mobile devices and banning some of their products from sale in the country.
The Seoul central district court ordered Apple to remove the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 1 and iPad 2 from shelves in South Korea, citing they infringed two of Samsung’s telecommunications patents. The court also ruled that Samsung infringed one of Apple’s patents related to the screen’s bouncing back ability and banned sales of the Galaxy S2 and other products in South Korea.
Sales of devices recently released by Samsung and Apple including the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy S3 smartphones were not affected.
The basic problem is that so many damn patents are being issued on so many damn stupid things (Apple appears to have one on a rectangular shape with rounded corners for God’s Sake!) that it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to do anything in the high tech space without falling afoul of one patent or another.
The best hope of cutting through this mess is that more of the cases are decided as this court has. You’re all fucking up so you’ll all have to sit down and sort it out properly. Given that the politicians have no real clue about what is happening here it will have to be either that or the courts themselves imposing some sort of solution.
What is really annoying though is that government is for sorting out these sorts of things. And, as above, they’re clueless and can’t/won’t do anything. So we in hell do we have to pay for all this government which isn’t sorting out the problems which government is there to sort out?
Posted: 24th, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment (1)
Unholy nonsense about food speculation at Glencore
UNHOLY nonsense about food speculation at Glencore. In fact, not just nonsense, but drivel. Glencore has said that as there are droughts and food shortages then this is a good business opportunity for them:
Glencore’s director of agriculture trading, Chris Mahoney, sparked the controversy when he said: “The environment is a good one. High prices, lots of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities.
“We will be able to provide the world with solutions… and that should also be good for Glencore.“
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Posted: 23rd, August 2012 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Why bosses get paid more
WHY bosses are paid more. Or at least, why good bosses should get paid more. Interesting research from the real world:
Three findings stand out. First, the choice of boss matters. There is substantial variation in boss quality as measured by the effect on worker productivity. Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper 10% of boss quality increases a team’s total output by about the same amount as would adding one worker to a nine member team. Using a normalization, this implies that the average boss is about 1.75 times as productive as the average worker. Second, boss’s primary activity is teaching skills that persist. Third, efficient assignment allocates the better bosses to the better workers because good bosses increase the productivity of high quality workers by more than that of low quality workers.
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Posted: 22nd, August 2012 | In: Money | Comments (3)
How do you export electricity like Iceland? you don’t
YOU don’t export electricity. Or at least the country which is most successful at exporting electricity doesn’t in fact export electricity. Iceland has lots of luvverly cheap green ‘leccie. It’s also miles n’ miles from anywhere and trying to cable that stuff out would see most of it wasted before it could be used. So, Iceland exports electricity by not exporting electricity.
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Lord save us from newspaper fools: on the Thames Estuary airport and Severn Barrage
LORD save us form the newspaper fools. Especially the fools who write the editorials. Here’s the Daily Telegraph shouting that we must have lots more infrastructure spending:
It is little wonder that bold, longer term projects such as a Thames Estuary airport and a Severn barrage for power generation are struggling to be taken seriously – though it was encouraging to learn that David Cameron has now been briefed on the latter, even though the scheme was rejected on cost grounds by the Department for Energy last year.
It wasn’t rejected upon costs grounds. It was rejected on lack of benefit grounds.
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“I promise I am not smoking crack” declares Apple lawyer to judge
THIS Apple v Samsung patent fight is actually getting rather interesting at last. The judge asked one of Apple’s lawyers yesterday whether he was smoking crack, leading to distinguished counsel having to deny it.
Judge Lucy Koh has grown increasingly irritated with lawyers on both sides of the ongoing lawsuit between Apple and Samsung, but she hit a new boiling point on Thursday when Apple presented her a 75-page list of potential rebuttal witnesses for the four hours it has remaining in the trial.
“This is ridiculous,” the San Jose Mercury News reports Koh as saying. “Unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called.”
The judge has ruled this trial with an iron fist, allowing each side only a limited amount of time to present evidence to the jury. One reason being that if Apple could drag the trial out over months and months then they would have won: Samsung currently isn’t allowed to sell some of its products in the US and won’t unless they win this case.
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Posted: 17th, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
If our companies are going bust because of China’s subsidies, what should we do?
A NICE little conundrum: if all our solar panel companies are going bust because of Chinese competition then what should we be doing about it? And our solar companies, the US and the European ones, are all going bust. And they are going bust because of competition from Chinese companies, those slant eyed devils getting lots of support, lots of subsidy, from the Chinese taxpayer.
So, clearly, we must protect our boys by raising tariffs against the dastardly and wily orientals, and subsidise our boys to help then survive, right?
If the Chinese want to subsidize the production of solar panels, far be it from me to stop them. Consumers around the world can benefit from China’s beneficence-and stupidity. There is no reason for us to imitate it.
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Posted: 16th, August 2012 | In: Money | Comments (5)
An entirely astonishing observation on cheap flights from the Daily Mail
DID you read the news in the Daily Mail? No, amazingly it’s not that cancer causing immigrants damage house prices. Nor even that immigrants raising house prices cure cancer. Rather, it’s that markets work:
Holiday money firms are setting sneaky traps as part of a £720 million racket in rip-off fees for families going abroad, Money Mail has found.
The tricks are set to catch out hundreds of thousands jetting off on a post-Olympics break and, in particular, will shock many who took out pre-paid cards in the belief they were a cheaper alternative to expensive bank cards.
Firms are also making bigger profits by charging poorer exchange rates to travellers who live outside London or travel from cheap-flight airports.
The thing about cheap flight airports is that they are small airports. They’re not the vast retail emporiums that Heathrow or Gatwick are. And the thing about not London in this here UK is that they’re all smaller towns. With fewer shops in them.
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Posted: 15th, August 2012 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comments (2)
How not to use Twitter
THIS is how not to use twitter. Let’s say that you’re a very rich person indeed. Billions of $ worth of rich. And in fact you’re so rich that lots and lots of money is spent on your security each year. Maybe, like $2.7 million is spent on keeping you safe from attack and or kidnapping each year.
Or perhaps you’re the teenage daughter in a family like that. So this is how not to use Twitter:
Alexa Dell’s overenthusiastic social networking habits were curbed after she unintentionally disclosed details about her father’s whereabouts. His security team is understoof to have considered the posts compromising.
The 18-year-old was a keen user of Twitter and the photo-sharing website Tumblr, ostensibly using it like any other teenage girl to update her friends and followers on the minutiae of her daily life.
But many of her posts were stamped with a GPS location, showing exactly from where it was sent. Her posts also included the exact dates she and her family were arriving and departing certain cities and the location she was shopping.
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Posted: 14th, August 2012 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Adrian and Gillian Bayford win £148m on the Lottery – Nigeria celebrates
ADRIAN Bayford, 41, and his wife Gillian, 40, of Haverhill in Suffolk , won £148m on the EuroMillions lottery.
Mrs Bayford tells media (and if she want to buy some, she can take her pick of titles):
“I looked up and he [Adrian] was a bit pale.. I checked the numbers on my iPhone, the TV and the internet. We just looked at each other and giggled.”
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Now we get the bollocks about the Olympics being a blueprint for the economy
NOW that the actual Olympics Games themselves are over all we’ve got left are the vacuous claiming them as support for their fat headed plans. Will Hutton, of course, did this in yesterday’s Observer. But a much more interesting example was in the Telegraph, from the head of the CBI.
We all revelled in outstanding performances where selection and nurturing of identified talent in specific sectors ensured a small country could more than punch its weight when pitted against competition that measures population in billions of people and growing wealth in trillions of dollars.
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Is The Daily Mail insane?
IS the Daily Mail insane? This headline is simply unbelievable:
Record number of buy-to-let mortgages worth more than £160bn drives up rent bills
In what universe does an increase in the number of houses for rent push up the rent of houses?
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Forget that rooftop windmill: David Cameron and New Yorkers should
I THINK we all remember that David Cameron put a nice little windmill on his roof just to show that he really was green? And that there was a little bit of controversy about whether it would ever in fact generate any electricity at all? After you’d subtracted the energy needed to make it in the first place?
We’ve now got some real numbers from an experiment in the US.
In the 15 months since the turbine was installed, though, it has delivered less than 4 kWh—enough only to power a 12,000 btu window air conditioner for one afternoon.
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Posted: 9th, August 2012 | In: Money | Comments (2)
