Spotter: Omar Oakes

THIS is an interesting little piece of news from Marks and Spencer:

Marks & Spencer is to stop opening new general stores in the UK amid a shift to internet shopping.

The company will build four new large outlets over the next three years, but then call a halt to 129 years of bricks and mortar expansion.

Bosses believe that the popularity of ‘click and collect’ means people will be buying more online and either collecting from its existing stores or getting home deliveries.

THE Mail’s got itself all in a tither about a find of African money off the coast of Australia. Apparently this means that the entire history of the place has to be rewritten. Err, no, it doesn’t: it’s an interesting little find, to be sure, but it doesn’t change the history of Oz in any appreciable manner at all.

Five copper coins found in northern Australia could rewrite the country’s history.

The coins are thought to date back as early as the 900s and are believed to have originated in Africa.

Written history of Australia only dates back to 1606, when Dutch explorers landed in the region, and researchers from Indiana University want to find out how the thousand-year-old copper coins ended up on the other side of the Indian Ocean six centuries earlier.

The coins were originally struck in a Muslim Sultanate off the coast of Tanzania. They’re old, to be sure, but Muslim Sultanates off Tanzania aren’t entirely unknown: the entire island of Zanzibar was one until the 1960s. The Arabs have long been known to have been trading up and down the African coast for slaves, gold and ivory. So the existence of the coins isn’t a great mystery at all.

Similarly, it’s long been known that the same Arabs had extensive maritime trade with India and then further east into the Spice Islands (what is now Indonesia). Whether it was Indonesia to India, India to Arabia, or one trip all the way though isn’t quite known: the former probably. But we know very well the trade carried on: it’s how Europe got its pepper for example.

That coins from one extreme of the trade route world, the southern African coast, might be found at the other end of the same trading world, the Spice Islands, is interesting but not wildly surprising. And as I say, we do know that the trade went on: there is a reason why much of Indonesia is Muslim.

Finally, the coins were found on an island off Australia….but we also know that there has long been a trade route from Indonesia down into Oz. A very rarely travelled one to be sure: but we do know there was at least occasional contact way up north at Cape York and the like: the islands where the coins were found isn’t far off that route.

So we don’t have to rewrite the history of the place at all. Just add one very tiny story to it, that’s all.

SO we’ve yet another bright idea from the idiots in Westminster:

Private landlords will be legally responsible for ensuring that they only let properties to people allowed to be in Britain under immigration laws announced in the Queen’s Speech.

Yep, now millions of landlords will have to try and find out the immigration status of their tenants. Who might present forged documents, you never know. This idea that people who do one thing illegally, immigrate, might do another, lie, is a fairly strong one really.

And is there any system by which landlords can actually check that immigration status? Some online database they can look up? Is there buggery. This will make millions of people (and yes, there are millions of landlords) into both narks and necessarily experts in immigration documentation.

Which is of course absurd: that’s what the Border Agency is for. And if government cannot run that why the fuck should millions of people have to, unpaid, step into the breach? And guess what: if you’re a Briton without a British passport (which is similarly true of millions) then you’ve actually got no method of proving that you’re allowed to be in the country.

At which point we’ve got to ask why is anyone doing something so damn stupid?  Because the cunts are going to try for it again.

Yup. There will be an outcry. There’s no one piece of paper that proves you have the right to live in Britain. So, we’d better create on hadn’t we?

And thus we get fucking ID cards again. Mark my words, it’ll only be a couple of weeks before some nonce suggests this.

THERE’S a lovely little scam operating over in the US at the moment. Somewhere between ort of legal and foul and disgusting but sorta legal.

What they do is look around for someone using Bit Torrent or similar services to download movies n’stuff. Then they check whether they’ve downloaded various porn films. If they have downloaded one that the law firm owns the copyright to (and they’ve gone out and bought many copyrights, which are pretty cheap these days for porn films) then they sue them for copyright infringement.

This is all quite legal of course. If you own the copyright to something then you can sue people who steal your property.

Where it all becomes dodgy is that they offer to settle the case for a few thousand dollars. Which is only just a little less than it would cost to fighjt the case if you were inncocent of doing the downloading. And, here’s the crucuial point: in the US you have to pay your own legal bills whether you win or lose. So, the real offer here is lose $5,000 by fighting the case and winning or $4,000 by just coughing up.

A great little scam it is too. Except even this doesn’t seem to be enough for them:

“The purpose of this step is to gather evidence about who used your Internet account to steal from our client. The list of possible suspects includes you, members of your household, your neighbors (if you maintain an open wi-fi connection) and anyone who might have visited your house. In the coming days we will contact these individuals to investigate whether they have any knowledge of the acts described in my client’s prior letter.”

They’ll tell everyone in your family, and your neighbours too, that you’ve been downloading porn. Hand over the $4k or else.

Fortunately it’s not really possible to operate this way in the UK. Because the loser pays both sets of legal fees: so, if people started fighting back here then the company doing the suing would quickly go bust.

But it’s amazing how inventive people can be in working out ways to make money, isn’t it?

WHAT if James Dean had lived? Allan Gray Investment bired King James agency to chew over that quesiton.

Allan Gray is a South African investment management company.

Our purpose is to help our investors build wealth over the long term and we seek to earn the trust of our clients by providing superior long-term investment performance, outstanding client service and holding ourselves to the highest ethical standards.

Alistair King, Executive Creative Director at King James says:

“You just take it for granted that James Dean is so iconic, so to go and mess with him and replan his life, if it doesn’t work its like you’re desecrating his memory.”

It’s what he would have wanted:

The number of people dying from unbearable heat in big cities could almost double because of climate change, according to new research.

A study in Manhattan found the number of fatalities caused by global warming will far outstrip the reductions in those perishing from the cold.

It follows a report last year by the Health Protection Agency that warned heat related deaths in the UK will increase by more than 10,000 annually – a fivefold rise.

It’s undoubtedly true that if and when global warming happens then more people will die of the heat than happens now. So the finding isn’t all that odd.

But the standard answer to this has always been that yes, OK, but at the moment many more people die of cold than die of heat. Therefore, if the world warms up a little, then we’d expect fewer people in total to die from temperature. 20% fewer cold deaths is more people than 20% more heat deaths sorta thing. The *net* effect is what is important and that net effect seems like a good thing.

Enter this study. We’ve studied this in Manhattan and actually, we know know that there will be more heat deaths than cold deaths saved. Thus global warming is a very bad thing.

And here’s the catch to the finding. In Manhattan heat deaths are already larger than cold deaths: or at least higher than they are out in the boonies. Out in the countryside cold kills many more than heat does. Therefore, studying what happens in Manhattan, an already exceptional place, does not tell us what is going to happen everywhere. But it will be taken as such: this study will be used to show that heat will kill more than cold does now. A result which is specific and unusual to Manhattan, not to the whole country or world.

Myself I’m pretty much onboard with the idea that climate change is happening, we’re causing it, it’s a problem and we should do something about it. But I do still despise the way that specific results are (by both sides and all) generalised in a manner which isn’t or shouldn’t be permissible. Even if it is all true, we’re still being lied to again and again.

Few of the traders’ names – including Glencore, Cargill, Gunvor and Trafigura – are known to consumers outside the oil industry, but their effect on Britain’s 33million motorists and the wider economy is profound.

They buy huge quantities of petroleum on the open market and store it until the price goes high enough to make them a handsome profit, at which point they sell.

The homeless man, as seen in a Reddit thread, bears a sign that says: “Which religion cares the most about the homeless?” There are nine begging bowls in front of him, each with money in them.

Each bowl is placed on top of a piece of paper bearing the words ‘Muslim’, ‘Atheist’, ‘Jewish’, ‘Buddhist’, ‘Spiritual’, ‘Agnostic’, ‘Pagan’, and ‘Christian’.

And who is donating the most money? Why, it happens to be the Atheists!

It is worth pointing out that the Buddhists seem to be rather generous too, but the Christians, Muslims and Hindus come out of the experiment very poorly indeed.

Of course, the man may be begging in an area where there are very few Christians and Muslims, or indeed, Atheists are suckers for showing off in the face of religion.

Either way, this isn’t exactly looking good for those with spiritual guidance.

HS2 is, as you know, this idea that we should build a great big train set to go through the middle of England. Politicians love train sets so all the politicians are in favour of it.

Unfortunately they’ve been lying about the numbers. Yes, lying is the correct word here. The problem is that they’ve been using 1960s figures not 00′s figures to justify it. And many people have told them that what they’re doing is wrong, misleading, lying. But they’ve carried on regardless:

The Labour MP added that transport bosses had ‘belatedly identified errors in their calculations that have wiped £12billion off the expected benefits’ and left themselves ‘no room for mistakes’.

DO you recall a year or so back when we were all having a lovely time shouting at the BBC stars who were all avoiding tax by being paid into companies? And the BBC promised to do something about it?

It’s a year later and not a lot has been done. For the terribly difficult question is, well, what should be done?

BBC plans to force freelance presenters back on to the employment books to end suspicions of tax avoidance have descended into chaos, it emerged last night,

Stars are being made to sign short-term contracts because the BBC has been unable to thrash out an acceptable way of paying them on a full time basis.

The corporation decided to act following concerns from MPs about the corporation’s use of so-called personal service companies as a way of channelling stars’ earnings.

THE French have decided it would be a good idea to tax all the smartphones, TVs, tablets and the rest in order to subsidise the creation of French movies n’ stuff that people can watch on their smartphones, tablets and TVs. This is truly insane:

The French government is considering creating a new tax on smartphones and tablets in a bid to raise millions to support the creation of digital cultural content inside France.

The proposal, handed to President Francois Hollande today, outlines a one per cent tax on the sale of Internet-compatible devices, targeting companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon.

The tax would yield about 86 million euros per year. The revenue would help cultural industries create French content such as music, images and videos.

There’s several problems with this of course. The first being who in hell wants to subsidise more French output? Don’t we have enough movies in which nothing ever happens already?

The second is a little more picky: placing a tax on something made by Google or Apple doesn’t mean that it’s Google or Apple paying the tax. It’s fat more likely that it will be the French buyers of these things that end up paying the tax. And, if they wanted more movies in which nothing ever happened presumably they’d go and see them at the theatres anyway.

But the really insane thing about this is that this is hypothecation of tax revenues. And that really is insane.

It might well be that you want to tax shiny shiny tech. You’ve got to get the money you need from somewhere. It might well be that you want to subsidise the making of bad movies. But there’s absolutely no relationship at all between the amount that you can raise in tax from shiny shiny and the amount that you need or want to spend on subsidising Jules et Jim.

Maybe you can get 90 odd million a year from this tax: but maybe people will buy a lot more stuff and the tax will raise 150 million. Do the French movies need 150 million? Or maybe they will buy a lot less: raising only 40 million. Do the movies now need the money any less because fewer people are buying phones?

No, of course not: there really is no relationship at all between how much you can raise in tax on something and how much you need or desire to subsidise something else. Which is why you shouldn’t have hypothecated taxes. Raise the cash where you can, spend it where you must.

Britain is the world’s leading exporter of power generators, as they are seen as manufacturers of the “best quality and are the most reliable”, according to latest research.

Superb eh? And doesn’t that just put the lie to the idea that Maggie Thatcher killed of all our manufacturing?

The UK currently has a fifth of the electric generator export market globally, marginally ahead of its nearest rival China.

Diesel or bi-fuel generating-sets are often used as backup or emergency power when the mains system fails, or to provide energy in remote areas off-grid.

The only slight problem we’ve got is that off course we’re going to have to stop exporting these things pretty soon. As all that greenery of windmills and solar cells means we’re going to start getting power cuts in a couple of years.

Still, nice to know that we can manufacture our own solutions to this problem. Although I do have a slight worry: are we absolutely certain that replacing efficient coal and gas power plants with derv driven generators does in fact save carbon emissions?

THE skill with which the EU has been managing the wider economy is shown delightfully in these new figures from Greece:

Overall unemployment has risen to an all-time high of 27 per cent, data showed on Thursday, while joblessness in the 15-to-24 age group jumped to 64.2 per cent in February from 59.3 per cent in January.

A 27% unemployment rate is higher than the United States had at the worst level of the Great Depression. And a 64% youth unemployment rate: that’s more like some godawful shanty town in the wilds of sub-Saharan Africa than anything else.

So how did this actually happen?

Essentially, because the politicians ignored all the economists. Yes, Germany, France, war, never again, continent of peace. But when they first started to discuss the euro the economists did point out (Robert Mundell and Milton Friedman among them) that it would only work if it was an “optimal currency area”. In this case, perhaps Germany, Austria and Benelux. Trying to add in places like Greece and Spain etc just wasn’t going to work.

The reason being that an optimal currency are reacts pretty much the same way to some external change in the economy. Doesn’t really matter what that change is: a change in the price of oil, in interest rates, whatever. For example, a country that lives by exporting wheat will have a different reaction to a change in hte price of wheat than one that lives by importing wheat.

Going a little further, what you want is, when countries do not make up such an optimal currency area, some way of making the necessary adjustments easy. That’s what individual currencies do. Take away that easy method of adjustment and you’re left with the difficult one: what’s called internal devaluation or austerity.

Which is exactly what is happening in Greece. Without the euro, if they still had the Drachma, the Greek economy just wouldn’t be as shafted as it is now. The exchange rate would change instead of the unemployment rate. What we’re seeing in Greece is not some unfortunate side effect of the euro: this is the inevitable consequence of it.

So, well done to the politicians in the European Union then. It may well be that you want to ignore economics in favour of politics. But that doesn’t mean that economics is going to ignore you.

Nor those 27% of Greeks unemployed.

Photo: A Greek presidential guard stands as he seen through the remains of a European Union flag half-burnt by protesters in Athens, on Wednesday, May 1, 2013. About 8,000 people took part in subdued demonstrations in Athens as austerity-weary unions held a strike for May Day. The country’s main labor unions protested soaring unemployment, which is the highest in the 27-country European Union, and the austerity measures the conservative-led government is enacting in return for crucial bailout loans. 

MUHAMMAD Yunus has done some pretty good things in his life: the founding of the Grameen Bank led to a Nobel Prize for example. Yet this really does have to be a silly idea: the idea of having an international minimum wage:

I propose that foreign buyers jointly fix a minimum international wage for the industry. This might be about 50 cents an hour, twice the level typically found in Bangladesh.

Sigh.

If we actually have an international minimum wage of 50 cents an hour then everyone whose output is worth less than that loses their job. And there are plenty of places poorer than Bangladesh where 50 cents an hour would be a very attractive sum indeed and significantly above what people are earning already.

Or, if the intention is to do it the other way, that this wage should take account of various national conditions, then it’s not an international wage, is it?

The third alternative explanation of this is too stupid to even think about: that people who work for international export should get this wage but people who work in the domestic economy should not. Why on Earth should anyone distinguish among Bangladeshis on those grounds?

Which might even be true in fact. However, the problem is that you can’t actually regulate the banking system just by regulating the bankers. Because there are all sorts of companies out there that have money and which can and will step in to do business when we prevent banks from doing it.

Hedge funds using debt-trading strategies honed on Wall Street are expanding at a record pace as they profit from risks big banks are no longer taking.

In this case it’s the hedge funds: they’re building up what is called a shadow banking system. One that mimics what the banks do but isn’t subject to the same rules and regulations. Which is something of a problem of course.

If all this banking is now taking place off outside the banks then the people who regulate banking aren’t actually regulating banking. They’re only regulating that part of banking that is taking place in the banks.

I’m afraid that there’s no real solution to all of this either. We could regulate the entire economy but as generations of trying to do so (from the Ottoman Empire through to the socialist idiocies of Eastern Europe) show us that’s likely to make us all much poorer than we need be. And of course we do indeed need some regulation: but it might be better to keep the regulation light so that banking does exist in the banks that we are regulating.

Tough problem to which, as I say, there’s almost certainly no easy answer and there might not even be a reasonable one.

MONACO is, like Dubai, a country suffering from small-man syndrome. It wants to be bigger. It’s wearing the flashy gold watch, driving a sports car and attracting celebrity friends but it remains small. Monaco is further damaged by being a very small version of France, that venue for scholastic exchanges, romance, booze cruises, burning sheep and car-b-cues. Monaco’s a foreigner’s view of an al fresco French drawing room, a gilded, gaudy, snooty, ultra-conservative bastion of monied minds, opulence, esoteric watch brands and tackiness.

Maybe it can improve if it can grow? The country is taking bids for a six-hectare (14-acre) development project of land drained of the sea. You have until 23 July to design a new district for Monaco’s new district by 2024.

New Monaco will be environmentally friendly and favour pedestrians and cyclists. Residences will be blocks of flats. Can it be that New Monaco will look like an old Russian slum, the locals all emigres recapturing the mood of Stalin’s Steppes, their heads swaddled in Dr Nip ‘n’ Tuck’s scarves as they affect a look of a housewife taking a Siberian winter full in the face – at  least until the stitches mend?

Monaco is seeping into the Med like a sewage outlet of greed. It’s good for the little men, of course.

Come on in, the water’s shallow…

WE all know, or at least we should all know, that the browsing and sluicing of MPs is subsidised by the rest of us. Costs us about £5 million a year to provide cheap food and booze for them in Westminster.

However, that’s just the headline number of what we actually spend. There’s also a concept (very important in economics) called opportunity cost. This is the amount that we would have if we put whatever it is to a different use rather than doing whatever it is with it right now.

In relation to MPs’ guts and livers, this is that the bars and restaurants in the Palace of Westminster do not pay rent, do not pay rates and do not have to pay utility charges (water, ‘leccie and so on, these are just for the whole Palace). Given the location in central London these would be pretty large fees as well. This is money that we could have, if they all paid full whack, but we don’t have because they don’t.

And the greedy swine are actually claiming that because the bars don’t pay these numbers therefore the booze should be even cheaper!

MPs want taxpayers to subsidise the cost of their drinks in the bars of Parliament.

Prices at the four Palace of Westminster bars are already cheap, especially for central London, as they are linked to those in a nearby Wetherspoons pub.

But some MPs, who have a salary of £65,738, feel the £2.60 they pay for a pint of John Smith’s bitter, or £3.20 for premium Becks lager, is too much.

Senior MPs have even suggested prices should be tied to a cheaper venue outside of the centre of the capital.

The Sun claims to have seen a record of the Administration Committee’s meeting that states: ‘Several Members suggested that the House should not benchmark against central London pubs: those had to pay Central London rent, rates and utility charges, which House services did not pay.’

See? Because the bars should pay, but don’t, these charges and taxes, the MPs are demanding an even higher subsidy from us!

Well, fair’s fair. So we’ll tie the prices to those of a pub in Bootle shall we? The only quid pro quo we’ll ask for is that they also tie their rent and expenses claims to the prices in Bootle as well.

I AGREE that global warming is a real problem, that it’s one we might want to do something about as well. But that doesn’t stop people from taking the arguments in favour of doing something a little too far. Like this recent bill introduced into the US Congress. Apparently we should fight global warming because more women will become prostitutes:

A group of American politicians has introduced a resolution into Congress saying that climate change (among many other bad things it does) forces women into prostitution, and that as a result the USA should use “gender sensitive frameworks” in battling the scourge of global warming.

Whereas women will disproportionately face harmful impacts from climate change …

… insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health …

That is, I submit, really rather pathetic.

But this does leave us with a difficult question that needs answering: in the face of this, should we be for global warming or against it? If it gets warmer and then there are more women prostituting themselves then presumably, given the increase in supply, that transactional sex will become cheaper. This is clearly good for those men that avail themselves of such services. So should we thus in fact be encouraging global warming to the benefit of those men?

Alternatively, if global warming means more women charging for it, would global cooling mean more women giving it away for free? Which would presumably benefit rather more men rather more?

It’s difficult to know which way to argue really, isn’t it?

SOME people are thundering bozos and will do anything to get noticed. Take for example, the gasping simpleton that works for a New York real estate agency called Rapid Realty. RR are offering their staff a pay rise if they get a tattoo of the company logo. (On your arse? – ed)

In exchange for carrying a logo of a corporation, you get a 15% wage increase. Astonishingly, 40 members of staff have already taken up the offer.

One member of staff says it isn’t about the money. Robert Trezza says:

“I think it’s a good opportunity to show commitment to a company that makes going to work fun every day.”

Fellow employee Joseph Tighe added:

“My wife was a little concerned but I said, you know what, it was the best commitment I could think of.”

Just wait ’til one of these branded gitwits get fired.

Each Rapid Realty tattoo costs around $300 (£195) and the company don’t mind where you get the tattoo (someone should totally get one on their arsehole, for future mocking purposes).

Obviously, manager Lolli hasn’t got a company tattoo himself, as he clearly prefers to mock his underlings by making them pledge allegiance to him and his awful ideas of loyalty.

Have a look at this video and cry all the water out of your body.

As is par for the course, the financial media is telling a story about a major US company from the perspective of the investing classes, rather than the broader public.

The poster child is the New York Times’ Dealbook, in a story titled “To Satisfy Its Investors, Cash-Rich Apple Borrows Money.” It third paragraph reads:

Apple’s return to the debt markets raises a riddle: Why would a company with so much cash even bother to issue debt?

A full seven paragraphs later, the article gets around to the last, and arguably the most important reason:

By raising cheap debt for the shareholder payout, Apple also avoids a potentially big tax hit. About two-thirds of Apple’s cash — about $102 billion — sits overseas in lower-tax jurisdictions. If it returned some of that cash to the United States to reward its investors, it could have significant tax consequences for the company. In some ways, the bond issue is a response to that tax situation.

So says the Mail:

The Waitrose effect: How upmarket supermarket can add 50% to the value of your home

And given that it is the Mail of course they get it wrong. The truth lies in this qualification:

Miss Chick admitted there was ‘no real answer’ to whether Waitrose ‘gentrifies’ areas or if the chain only opens in areas which are already upmarket and so more expensive.

Waitrose is an expensive supermarket that sell over-priced goodies to hte middle and upper middle classes. They therefore put their stores where there’s likely to be a good supply of middle and upper middle class people who would like to purchase their over-priced stuff.

It is not that having a Waitrose in the area raises house prices: it is that Waitrose builds stores where house prices are high because that’s where the people who will use Waitrose live.

For exactly the same reasons you put a Co Op or a Lidl near the housing estates and Harrods is on one of the most expensive roads in the entire world. And a cocktail bar in Mayfair and a spit and sawdust pub on Tyneside.

Blimey, this is just the very essence of retailing: stick your store where your customers are likely to be. Even the people who advertise in the Mail (even if not those who write it) know this. There’s a significant shortage of ads in the paper for socialist unity meetings and an awful lot for the sorts of things that appeal to the female middle class. Because, you know, that’s what the readership is all about.

SOMETHING from the other side of the pond to consider today. Obamacare is of course the great hope of the progressive movement in the US. How glorious that finally everyone will be able to have affordable health care insurance!

Do note, it’s health care insurance that it deals with, not anything as simple as actual health care. Further note that it’s a right dog’s dinner of a project: I know several US professors, impeccably right wing even libertarian ones, who insist that Obamacare is just about the only thing worse than simply having the government pay for everything. The nightmare of rules and regulations already seem to be killing full time jobs in service industries for example. Because a company doesn’t have to pay for part time workers so therefore many companies are making all their waitresses etc into part time workers.

But here’s the real signal that something’s seriously wrong with it:

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.