Chokes

Cars used to have chokes, didn't they? The existence of such things I had completely forgotten about until about an hour ago. More revelations from my cycle ride in later.

Hot tea is cancerous

Apparently adding milk saves us.

I'm still learning...

Ceci n'est pas l'actualités

Is this man for real?

“This sinks Brown below the waterline,” said Bill Jones, professor of politics at Liverpool Hope University. Brown’s “whole strategy is based on borrowing and now he can’t get anyone to buy his gilts. This means the prospect of going cap in hand to the IMF hovers increasingly into view.”

To my surprise Liverpool Hope University does exist. But does Bill Jones? The quote is hardly what you would expect from a real professor of politics? "Cap in hand"? And what does he mean by "can't get anyone to buy his gilts?".

Google suggests his homepage would be here, but I'm not authorised. The cache has something but not much.

It wasn't worth what you paid for it

Many countries seem to be realising that when they exchanged their shiny new manufactures for lovely US dollars (or in fact euros, pounds and so on), they got a bit swizzled, and the dollars weren't worth what they paid for them. Now they're a tad angry, and propose a new system.

Well hang on. The £6.99 I paid for a set of PC speakers from Mikomi (Taiwan) wasn't well spent either. Neither was the cycle helmet, £8.99, the set of knives, £0.99, the shredder, £Free. In fact I have a very long position in all manner of manufactured junk that seemed cheap, and turned out cheaper.

This works both ways. In fact perhaps the legacy of the last 20 years will turn out to be that economic growth was artificially boosted by the simple technique of pretending everything was worth more than it actually was - dollars, cheap tat, houses, equities, Mercedes Benzs, so on and so on. Perhaps Laban et al are right, if not quite for the right reasons.

Taxation

Edmund Conway suggests that the government should list how it spends taxes.

Take the average taxpayer on a salary in the mid £20,000s, who pays around £5,000 in taxes. He or she would probably be shocked to hear ...that £890 is spent on the National Health Service, but that a paltry £289 is spent on defence, and £169 on transport.

Would they really be that shocked? Healthcare is expensive, everyone knows that. In Britain for many years it has been rather cheaper than in most other countries. For a while in the early part of this decade I worked out more was spent on health administration in the US than all of the UK's health budget.

Aside from being more expensive for small businesses, it would be relatively simple to implement. There's probably a website that already does it.

Inflation

Laban said...

Paul - if the RPI is saying 0.1%, the RPI is being fiddled - just like the CPI was. I just don't trust our government any more.

Now, Laban's a big conspiracist, but this is quite a common view. Last year when the CPI was lower than the RPI the RPI was the 'true' indicator because it included more representative items and the CPI didn't, now the CPI is higher than the RPI the CPI is seen as the better measure I suspect.

One problem in this argument is that inflation figures feature in all aspect of economic statistics, as they convert nominal pounds into real pounds. I remember one commentator (don't remember the name) claiming that UK inflation had been 10% for a decade or more. If that is true then he presumably believes the GDP deflator has been that high too, and in which case our GDP per head is in fact lower than Hungary's.

But of course then the pound would be massively overvalued, so it must be the case that all countries fiddle their inflation figures, and this raises the possibility that there has been no economic growth in the last 20 years in any developed country. This might explain a few things.

Peter Cuthbertson joined the group No Knighthood For Ted Kennedy. -

An horrendous act of lese majeste. God Save The Queen.

[No link, it's Facebook if you can't guess]

ps On that issue, it's not right to celebrate someone's death but apparently it's OK (post and comments) to look forward to someone's. What a ghastly collection of individuals (the comments and post, not Peter's group).

Ok, you didn't like the Orwell piece

How about the Sen one?

Orwell

Quite a good article on Orwell by Julian Barnes.

Romanian banknotes

are really cool. They're made of plastic and have a see-through bit so you can wear it as a mask. Or something like that.

How will you spend yours?

The Bank said it would expand the amount of money in the system by £75bn

That's £1,500 per adult, oh goody. I think I will spend mine on a nice holiday, or wine.

RBS in Bucharest

28022009228
Originally uploaded by mjtphotos

Appears they have some room to spare