Slovakia

Via an acquaintance, I come across a delightful Slovkian lady who has been living in the UK for the last decade. During that time she has been continuously employed, much to the benefit of this country. She rents a flat here and saved up enough money to buy a flat back in Slovakia (for approximately £20,000) which she currently rents out. She calculates that if she continues working for another couple of years then she will have saved enough to buy another. But, she tells me, she is now thinking of going back to Slovakia. Why? Because she doesn't want to be here "when the Bulgarians and Romanians arrive".

As an aside, she says she likes living in England and that English people are very nice and that she only goes back to Slovakia when she needs medical or dental treatment. Seriously. I was going to tell her that the National Health Service is the envy of the world, as I am so often told, but I'm not sure that I could convince her.

Having just paid my tax bill and been left penniless, I'm.wondering where on Earth the money has gone. NHS spending is now £109 billion per annum yet we have been unable to create a service good enough to persuade a Slovakian to use it. I think we're going to have to introduce some honesty into the discussions about the future of the NHS: we're never going to get anywhere propagating the mythical version.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Gyppy tummy

A friend of a friend tells an interesting story about his daughter's romantic trip to Egypt with her husband of a few months. They had, apparently, seen a last minute "winter warmer" break in Egypt advertised somewhere and decided to leave the grey misery of northern England for a week of sun, sea and sand.

Their problems started when they arrived at the airport in Egypt. A couple of gentlemen approached them and demanded to see their passports. The gentlemen looked through the passports and told the couple that they did not have a valid visa. The intrepid travellers didn't know anything about this, so when the two gentlemen charged them seventy quid each for a sticker to put on the back of the passport, they ate into their meagre holiday funds and paid up. It was all a scam, of course, as they found out when they got to the tour operator bus and compared notes with fellow, more seasoned holidaymakers. By that time, they'd already had to pay a fiver for each of their suitcases to be returned from the intimidating chaps who had snatched them from the baggage carousel before our heroes could get hold of them.

When they arrived at their "all inclusive" hotel, they were told that "all inclusive" applied only to regular meal times and that since they had missed dinner, they would have to order from room service. They had no idea how expensive this was until they got the bill when they checked out, naturally.

After an apparently relaxing day at the beach and a less-than-idyllic day relaxing by the pool (where they were pestered incessantly by the legions of hawkers around the hotel), they woke up on their third day with decidedly gyppy tummies. Unable to venture far from the bathroom, they resolved to write off the day and stay in bed. But by the afternoon, they were feeling really, really sick. So they called down to the desk and asked for medical help. Some time later a smartly-dressed local with limited English language skills arrived and examined them. He told them that they would need a least day to recover and came back and set up drips for them, which he told them there contained water and "antibodies" (which my friend's daughter took to mean "antibiotics"). So they stayed in bed on drips until the next morning when they were feeling a little better. The drips were removed and although their digestive systems remained fragile, they were able to enjoy another day of their holiday.

When they got back, they claimed on their travel insurance for the medical bill. The claim has been refused because the person who treated them wasn't a doctor. So, just a warning to newbie travellers: if you get gyppy tummy, don't just let some guy from the hotel who has seen one to many episodes of Holby examine you and put you on a drip of god-knows-what for a couple of days, not least because your insurance might not pay up...

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

How I avoided tax

I have a lot of air miles because I've been flying a lot for business. Air miles are supposed to be a compensation for your family, and reward to you, for being away from home so much. So I was excited when my family expressed an interest in a trip to visit relatives in the US, more so because I've been using my BA Amex card enough to earn a free companion flight, hurrah!

However… A round trip to the US city we wanted to go to on BA in economy class was £584. The "free" flight with BA Miles costs 50,000 miles plus £375. In other words, since Gordon Brown started jacking up the Air Passenger Duty (APD), this plus other overhead costs means that it will cost well over a grand to go an visit some relatives with our "free" flights. Hence we're not going.

Who does this benefit? The revenue raised from Gordon Brown's jacked up APD was, in this instance, £0. So the government wasn't better off. Nor was BA, because it makes their "Avios" even less attractive than they were before (I've just booked a flight on Air Austria, which illustrates that point - if Avios were more attractive then I'd have taken a slightly less convenient BA flight). Nor was Heathrow, since I won't be going there and spending any money.

I can understand why it might have been New Labour policy to reserve air travel for celebrities and oligarchs, but why are the coalition propagating this anti-striver levy? You can complain to your MP online here (I just did).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

We need a megachange

In "Megachange: The World in 2050" from The Economist, the authors interestingly (to me) say that they think that the gap between rich and poor will actually shrink. They cite two reasons for this: first of all, the reduction and means-testing of welfare benefits (which tend to subsidise the middle class anyway) will reduce state spending and therefore taxes and secondly those taxes will be spread more fairly because governments will target tax evasion. To my mind, there are two rather obvious ways to do this: start taxing wealth rather than income (which means non-evadable land-value taxes rather than direct taxes that the rich can evade with ease) and start replacing cash transactions with electronic ones so that people pay their fair share. One of the reasons why my tax is so high is that heading towards a third of economic activity is "black" and none of the participants are paying their share. So it falls to PAYE slaves like me to cough up for everything.
So will there be a megachange in the way taxes work? No. The people "in charge" of the economy haven't a clue what to do, and I'm certain that one of the reasons for this is their lack of real-world experience. Take a look at the example of our Chancellor, Baronet Osborne.

Osborne's first job was entering the names of people who had died in London into a National Health Service computer. He also briefly worked for Selfridges, re-folding towels. He originally intended to pursue a career in journalism, but instead got a job at Conservative Central Office.
[From George Osborne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

So, astonishing as it might seem, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has never had a real job. If we were to ever have a constitution, this should be against it. It should be a rule that to assume any ministerial office with any power over taxation or regulation of business, a candidate should not only be more than 40 years old but should have had a real job in the private sector (not some make-work with Central Office or a Trade Union) and, preferably, been responsible for paying someone else wages for some time. You shouldn't be allowed to make decisions about spending public money until you've made some of it.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Age concerns

I read in one of today's newspapers a complaint that elderly homeowners may have to downsize in order to fund their care bills. This is ludicrous. It is not the function of the state to maximise the value of landowners' legacies. Given that two-thirds of our already unaffordable welfare spending goes on pensions and that a substantial proportion of health spending goes on the care of the elderly, we have to get realistic about the new age. The ridiculous pronouncements about pensions and pensioners by people without a rudimentary grasps of economics, demographics and arithmetic (e.g., MPs) must stop.

The pain that quantitative easing has caused pensioners and savers should be offset by government compensation, a report by MPs has said.

[From Compensate pensioners for savings lost to QE, say MPs | Money | The Guardian]

This twaddle comes from the same Treasury Select Committee that went medieval on the Payments Council for suggesting that they might end cheque clearing in a decade. A decade! So now we're all going to have to pay so that Joan Bakewell can carrying on writing cheques to her gardener instead of sending the money online like everyone else.

The reason for this reactionary nonsense from MPs is clear. Amongst the catastrophic impacts of universal suffrage is the age time-bomb. Old people have all the money and old people vote. So of course they mobilise against the young. The ring-fencing of elderly welfare means massive cuts in other areas. This is why the age riots of 2025 will make the Watts riots look like a picnic.

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

Proof that the UN is a complete joke

There's a fun game out there on the interweb, stimulated by the Chinese media's inability to distinguish satire from news, called "Real or Onion".

Quiz: Are These 2012 Headlines Real Or From “The Onion”?

[From Quiz: Are These 2012 Headlines Real Or From "The Onion"?]

Fun game. Sadly, it won't work in Britain because our degraded society is so far beyond satire than it cannot even see it in the rear-view mirror. I cano no longer distinguish between "The Thick of It" and "Today". We're through the looking glass, people. If you don't believe, try and convince yourself that the following headline is satire.

Gordon Brown has been appointed the new United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education.

[From Gordon Brown takes on UN education role - Telegraph]

It isn't. In common with every other ludicrous and ridiculous and absurd action of the UN, this is an appointment that no rational person could hear about without laughing. Under the Blair/Brown junta, Britain's edukashun system collapsed.

Our blistering debut was the OECD survey of 2000, when we ranked 8th for maths, 7th for literacy and 4th for science in the thinktank's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa).

England's difficult second album was Pisa 2006, when we fell to 24th for maths, 17th for reading and 14th for science.

And when the results of the 2009 survey came in, we risked parting ways with our record label. England's 15-year-olds ranked 28th for maths, 25th for reading and 16th for science.

[From Top of the flops: has England really tumbled down school league tables? | Education | guardian.co.uk]

Let's hope Gordon can weave the magic on countries such as South Korea. Unless we can make them stupider really quickly, we're never going to catch up.

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

Yes, democracy, but...

I've often wondered why democracy works the way it does in the UK. If we accept that, to deploy the old maxim, that it's the least-worst way of running things, that doesn't then mean that our particular current version of it is the Platonic ideal. The discussions about voting for the devolution options in Scotland have once again led into the absurd situation where the votes of 16-years olds are going to count. I think this is ridiculous. But, then again, why is the franchise restricted to 18+? Why not 16 indeed? Or 13+? Why have any age restrictions? And if there are going to be age restrictions, why is there no upper limit? Why not cut it off at 75? Maybe age shouldn't be the determinant: perhaps the qualification for the franchise shouldn't be age, or property or anything else, but the ability to understand any of the issues and make a rational decision?

Does every citizen really deserve to vote? If so, why? This issue has been explored by Jennifer L. Hochschild, Professor of Government at Harvard. In 2010, she published a study entitled If democracies need informed voters, how can they thrive while expanding enfranchisement?, which suggests that “as democracies become more democratic [by giving the vote to disenfranchised groups], their decision-making processes become of lower quality in terms of cognitive processing of issues and candidate choice”.

[From Why should all citizens be allowed the vote? – Telegraph Blogs]

The is self-evidently true and hardly worth academic discourse. A fifth of the British population is functionally illiterate. Why on earth should they be allowed to make the choice as to how the country and, more particularly, my family should be governed?

Apparently some people in Britain think that Buzz Lightyear was the first man on the moon. What is the moral imperative behind allowing them any influence over public policy on anything? I’m outraged that these people are allowed to vote

[From Grumpy old reactionary | 15Mb: yet another blog from Dave Birch]

There is no ethical edge to this at all in my mind. It's not even close to being an ethical debate. There is no reason at all to continue the universal franchise with the current model. It's time for a re-think, and I'm pretty sure that I know what the outline of the new franchise should be.

According to Jason Brennan, a professor of political philosophy at Brown University and author of The Ethics of Voting, it would be better for society if the ill-informed do not vote.

[From Why should all citizens be allowed the vote? – Telegraph Blogs]

I have consistently argued this, and even come up with a simple 2-out-of-3 system to make it work.

make voting machines that are bit like the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” machines in the pub. Voters come in to the booth and have to answer three questions (they get one 50:50 and one “phone a friend” — it doesn’t make sense to ask the audience in this context) randomly selected from categories such as politics, economics, history, that sort of thing. “Who’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer”, for example.

[From Votonomics | 15Mb: yet another blog from Dave Birch]

This could work pretty well, as it would give the election night studios some extra graphics to play with and a terrific new statistic for the subhead in the morning papers: "And this is what the result would have been had the stupid votes been counted".

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