We are all Icelanders now

Well, I've go to say I'm with Iceland on this one. The plucky Norse are going to have a referendum over whether to force their citizens to pay billions to the British and Dutch governments to compensate for failed banks.

Half of me wants to congratulate plucky little Iceland for its decision not to sign into law a bill to repay more than $5bn lost by savers in Britain and the Netherlands when the island’s banks collapsed. I’m an admirer of those who give the old two fingers to oppressive international pressure, and in this case in particular, Britain’s attempt to invoke anti-terrorist laws to get the money back was an absolute disgrace

[From Iceland's disgraceful decision not to pay up over stricken banks – Telegraph Blogs]

I agree. Remember how this all started?

The October 2008 collapse of one bank, Landsbanki Islands, triggered the trouble. Hundreds of thousands of British and Dutch depositors, wooed by high interest rates, had placed money with Landsbanki through an Internet arm operating in those countries called Icesave.

[From Iceland President Vetoes Icesave Compensation - WSJ.com]

But surely this must have come out the blue, and you can't blame people for leaving their money in these collapsing banks, since in October 2009 no-one could have foreseen their imminent default. Really? Then read this article from February 2008

That said, Kaupthing is fully covered by the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Under this, all your savings are guaranteed up to £35,000. If you have more than this with the bank, perhaps now is the time to pare your savings down and redistribute them among its high-interest paying rivals such as ICICI or Bradford & Bingley.

Of course, one of Kaupthing's main rivals is its Icelandic colleague Landsbanki, the origins of the popular Icesave account. You may also have concerns over Icesave at the moment, given the amount of print expressing concern over Iceland's banking system since the Moody's report three weeks ago

[From Could Kaupthing Edge be the next Northern Rock? | This is Money ]

Can you see the problem with compensating the people who put their money in these high interest accounts? It means that people like me who left their money in the Nationwide at 5% instead of moving it to the First Bank of the Vikings at 6% are being officially called dicks by the ruling elite. Everyone may as well take all of their money out of (for example) Barclays at 1% and put it in the Savings Bank of Upper Wazooristan at 2% and not give a shit about it because when it goes down the Swanee, poorer taxpayers will bail them out. This is madness and it was clear at the time that bailing the banksters out was wrong.

A full-scale bailout would undermine any sense of personal or corporate culpability for the risks that were taken that did not pay off. Doing so would almost guarantee repeat fiascos in the future.

[From Matthew Elliott: Taxpayers should not have to bail out banks | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk ]

Indeed. By all means go after the investment bankers, lawyers, financial advisers and executives involved with the failed institutions, but why should taxpayers have to fork out, whether Icelandic or British. The British government (ie, the British taxpayer) has just lost another TWENTY SIX BILLION POUNDS on LBG and RBS and there's plenty more to come. The people who made stupid decisions about how to run these banks have got off (in many cases literally) scot free.

Britain and the Netherlands stepped in to cover their own citizens, and then demanded the money back

[From Iceland President Vetoes Icesave Compensation - WSJ.com]

It was the British government that decided to exceed the deposit insurance, so I can't see what that has to do with the population of Iceland. Iceland has already agreed to honour the EU Deposit Guarantee which covers almost all retail depositors. If the British government wants to take legal action against the banks involved, it should go ahead and sue the banksters, not penalise the Icelandic public. If the Icelandic government is liable for regulating a bank that was run appallingly badly, then so is the British government, so why don't the Icelanders sue the FSA for allowing Kaupting to set up a retail operation in the UK a few months before it collapsed.

We can't send a gunboat because we haven't got any, they beat us in the last Cod War and if we send our aircraft carrier the Icelanders will just climb on board and claim asylum. One day, the saga of how they defeated Marxist lecturer Gordon Brown and Trotskyite solicitor Alastair Darling will be sung round the camp fires alongside the story of Hen-Thorir and others.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Catty

Here's a heartwarming story. Noted television presenter Cat Deeley, who earns $5 million per annum working Fridays and Saturdays in the UK and the rest of the week in Hollywood (ths burning up the carbon allowance of about a million Brazilians) was pestering hapless travellers to give cash to the BA "change for good" on a flight from Sao Paolo.

Charming the Club World cabin (‘Come on, guys, the flat beds can wait’) before making her way to the back of the plane where one man has found a £50 note (‘Oh we love you, sir’). By the time Cat has finished her walkabout, flight 246 has coughed up £404, which Cat pledges to match. Mission accomplished.

[From Cat Deeley in Brazil: the TV presenter swaps the Hollywood Hills for the slums of Sao Paulo | Mail Online]

If I was sitting at the back of that plane, I wouldn't have been charmed but I would have told her to thank her tax accountant for the donation 0.0005% of her after-tax salary and that I would be happy to match that percentage. That's how generous I am (actually, I'm being ungenerous: I have actually given foreign coins to the Change for Good programme). But what was she doing in Sao Paolo? She was there as an ambassador for UNICEF, which says on its web site that

Urgent action now to reduce carbon emissions and invest in climate change solutions will move the world to be cleaner, healthier and more equitable.

[From UNICEF UK Blog ]

Perhaps they could take immediate action and stop Cat Deeley from flying across the Atlantic twice every week? No, of course not. When celebs call for action, they mean from peasants like us who annoy them by clogging up the the airports and heating our homes: Emma Thompson, to choose one example, probably goes to Hollywood by some form of yacht or other wind-powered transport. Anyway, back to Cat.

Aside from her TV work, Cat admits that her biggest passion is fashion

[From Showbiz - News - Ten Things You Never Knew About Cat Deeley - Digital Spy]

I don't share her passion and I certainly don't have an important job like looking good in front of a TV camera, but I agree with her diagnosis of the nation's ills.

“In Britain, it’s almost as if we’re ashamed of having ambition and drive.”

[From Television star Cat Deeley hits out at unambitious Britons - Telegraph]

How ungrateful. In what other country could you become one of the super-rich and ensure that neither you nor any of your dependents will ever have to work again simply by being attractive enough to be a model on Kilroy?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Genetic engineering

I was reading New Scientist this week and found an article about why women have sex with men who have Porsches. Or at least that was my interpretation. It turns out that a series of psychology experiments have determined that quite a wide range of ladies from young to old will drop them for a man who shows off wealth rather than a man who may have more money but does not show it off. If a dreary, balding, grey-haired, overweight, middle-aged man (eg, me) turns up in a Volvo having invested the balance of his disposable income in a variety of savings instruments directed at long term security, the knickers stay on. On the other hand, if I were to ditch the Volvo and the Schroeders Capital Growth fund and use the proceeds to buy even the dullest of Porsches, they would literally fly off. But why? Are women generally stupid and unable to make calculations as to the long-term best investments to support offspring (as I had thought that natural selection would have demanded)?

Well, it transpires that women of childbearing age will do the Porsche guy not because they think he is a rich and can therefore provide for them and their offspring in the future, but because their hormones mistakenly assume that the Porsche signals good genes (experiments show that the long-term cashflow is heavily discounted). This is clearly a throwback to our pre-civilised past, when the possession of (say) a dead wildebeast probably did signal that the owner was stronger, faster, smarter and therefore had a better genetic makeup. Possession of a Porsche signals no such thing, and yet the ovaries still throb at the display.

Some women will be reassured to know that the experiments demonstrate that men display no such behaviour, because they will have sex with absolutely anyone under any absolutely any circumstances and, even better, will spend their every last penny to do so:

In short, men who saw attractive women became much more motivated to get whatever money they could in the short term, presumably so they could spend it on conspicuous consumption to attract mates

[From Sex and shopping – it's a guy thing - life - 01 January 2010 - New Scientist]

Nature or nurture?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Deserve got nuttin' to do wiv it

Having replaced the merciless dance marathons of the great depression with the merciless karaoke-to-the-death X-Factor of this one, Simon Cowell is well on course to be the richest person in TV (if I heard the Today programme correctly). This is surely the final incontrovertible piece of evidence for atheism that Richard Dawkins has been lokking for. In a universe designed by an intelligent creator, this could not possibly happen. My hatred for the X-Factor may be the only opinion I have about anything that is shared with Elton John, but who are we against so many. Anyway, envy aside, good luck to Cowell and the money he wrings from a credulous public. He deserves it, doesn't he?

As Felicia "Snoop" Pearson notes in the greatest-ever television drama, The Wire, the universe is an uncaring arbiter. People don't get what they deserve. But what do they deserve?

Take me, for example. I’m smart and hard-working. I don’t know if it’s because of my genes, or because my parents brought me up right. But whatever the cause, I didn’t do anything to become smart or hard-working.

[From Do Smart, Hard-Working People Deserve to Make More Money? « The Baseline Scenario]

That's a really good point. This why when people on radio phone-ins talk about nurses "deserving" more than bankers or policemen "deserving" more than TV presenters, they are barking up the wrong tree. By starting off with a category error, then you find yourself in a system that cannot resolve even the most basic questions. Why should David Beckham get paid more than me just because of his parents (they were the ones who gave him the genes for being good at football)? Why should Zac Goldsmith have more capital than me because of this parents (who were very rich)? Why should Marcus Brigstocke get on Question Time just because of his parents (who sent him to a 25 grand per year public school) when I am right about most political and economic issues and he is wrong?

Perhaps no-one gets what they deserve, and Simon Cowell is no different. By the way, Simon Cowell got his break because of his parents. His father, who was an EMI executive, got him a job in the A&R department there. Snoop was right.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Anthropology, Woking-style

I happened to be wandering through Woking town centre when I came across a group of welfare heffers grazing peacefully at a food court. No men were visible. There were a number of infants strapped into various kinds of pushchairs distributed through the herd, and a number of hatchet-faced crones (who I took to be mothers and grandmothers of herd members) circling the group. I was shocked at my own revulsion, but it was nevertheless real. I'm decidedly overweight, but couldn't help but reflect that many of these girls -- still teenagers -- were absolutely huge.

How does this happen? Eleven years of compulsory edukashun has left most of them pretty thick, for sure, but they must be at least vaguely aware of the connection between food and obesity (even if they don't seem aware of the connection between sex and pregnancy). I wonder if the Green Party should make more of an effort to target this group: they are consuming far more than their share of the world's resources and they are causing problems for the overcrowded world of the future by continually having children that they rely on the rest of the world to support.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Titled

It's competition time (just for fun, don't phone in). One of these is a real person and the other is made up.

Poo Bah, First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buckhounds, Groom of the Back Stairs, Archbishop of Titipu, Lord Mayor, both acting and elect, and Lord High Everything Else.

Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council and Church Commissioner.

Difficult isn't it? Especially when I tell you that one of them is planning sacrifice economic growth to a few content oligarchs via a draconian and expensive scheme that will never actually work.

Well, as was covered on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, Poo Bah is a made-up character from Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado, whereas Lord Mandelson is, sadly, real.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The doormen of perception

In a sane society, you don't have the right to show "fire" in a crowded theatre and nor do you have the right to force (for example) airlines to respect your view that the world is flat. Developed countries live with a post-renaissance notion of scientific progress that rests on evidence and argument, not emotion and belief. However, here in Gordon Brown's Looking Glass Britain (the Land of Perverse Incentives), the institutionalising of stupidity of all forms has substituted for more traditional notions of progress.

A police worker who was sacked because he believed psychics can help solve criminal investigations is to go to court today to defend his right to legal protection from religious discrimination.

[From Man sacked for belief in psychics backed by judge (but, of course, he knew that would happen) - Home News, UK - The Independent]

You can see his thinking -- even without extra-sensory powers -- with absolute clarity. Nowhere does the inviolable law of unintended consequences exert such vengance as in the strange world of equality legislation, where hard cases make very bad law indeed. It's difficult to fault his logic, though: since you're not allowed to sack me for stupidity, because stupidity is my religion, I deserve recompense. It's only a matter of time before a burglar is able to demonstrate that his attraction to your property is a sacrament and therefore obtain similar legal protection.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]