Tim Worstall

In my playing around with blogs I’ve just found something interesting out about the Google algorithm. The old technique of google bombing, using anchor text and a link to boost results for a certain word or phrase no longer seems to work. Indeed, it seems to work in reverse. I won’t trouble you with what [...]

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They can lay low the best laid plans of mice and men: THE GOVERNMENT has paid out a record £450,000 for an end-of-terrace house in one of the Victorian streets being bulldozed across northern England to make way for modern housing developments. Why? Under the government’s so-called Pathfinder scheme – championed by former deputy prime [...]

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Yes, he’s as confused on this subject as he is on all the others. Instead of the profits being spread to the roots of the game and the communities in which the clubs are embedded, the Premier League has become the vehicle for financial engineering that makes private equity look honourable. In essence, clubs are [...]

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At the ASI. How to promote your business on Google.

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There’s more on they way in which elfn’safety rules mean that Plod is to walk past someone drowning: Rules for West Country officers are set out in a policy document headed Health and safety – water safety, which states: "Devon and Cornwall Constabulary do not expect or require any member of staff to enter water [...]

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Two quotes from CC Net: European leaders are getting a bit impatient, not on our own behalf but on behalf of the planet. China, India and the other industrializing countries will not do anything unless the U.S. is moving.     –Connie Hedegaard, Danish Environment Minister, Washington Post, 26 September 2007 Denmark’s CO2 emissions rose [...]

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Don’t you think? I write as a woman whose brother wears socks with the name of the day woven into the sole. Sometimes, he wears them on the wrong day, which I think is a sign of his renegade spirit.

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My, my: The Metropolitan Police told organisers of the Stop the War Coalition that no march would now be allowed “within one mile of Parliament” while MPs were in session. The organisers, who are expecting thousands of people to turn up for the protest march from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, said that this was [...]

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A tale from the past: "A lot of Englishmen have this thing about English schoolgirls… He took me to Marks & Spencer, and we went into the section where they sold school uniforms. We started play-acting and XXXX told the saleslady, ‘I have to buy this little girl a school uniform, she’s the daughter of [...]

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So we’re all revved up to worry about gambling addictions again then. The money lost by British gamblers will exceed £10bn annually next year – a rise of 50% in nine years, and the biggest jump since the 1960s. Looks terrible, doesn’t it? Hmmm. Inflation (RPI) was 25% or so over that period. So that’s [...]

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Aren’t we lucky to have such a wonderful and caring organisation looking after us: However, it is just such a fate that befell Jean Gambell when at the age of 15, in 1937, she was falsely accused of stealing 2s 6d (12.5p) from the doctor’s surgery where she worked as a cleaner. She was sectioned [...]

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That is, I believe, what we were promised a decade ago, isn’t it? So the first lines of two stories in The Telegraph today: Private schools could lose their multi-million pound tax-breaks unless they help state-educated pupils get into universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, it was disclosed yesterday. … The number of failing schools [...]

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I have some sympathy with this statement: "This analysis misleadingly claims to represent the average situation, but it is undermined by the carefully-selected assumptions on which it is based." What analysis? Smith & Williamson estimates that the total taxes paid by a typical family with two children, buying an ordinary terrace house, have soared from [...]

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Err two more. * and *

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No really, I do mean it. Thank the Lord for the existence of the European Union. For, as you will remember, they passed some laws a few months back that made roaming across international borders with your cell phone cheaper. Isn’t that lovely? Well, yes, indeed it is: One especially lucrative business, however, has somehow [...]

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Two at The Business. An excellent happening at The Spine and arguments to cut the tax funding of science.  

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* It’s looking like Hillary vs. Rudy. Consider this: Brad DeLong: "… I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life". [...]

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Ooooh, dear. The citizens of Brussels “reclaimed the streets” last Sunday when it was “Car Free Day”. Thousands and thousands of people enjoyed a warm and sunny day on their feet, bikes, skateboards or horses (!). We also enjoyed the silence and the improved air quality. We’re ruled by someone who thinks that horse transport [...]

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Jules breaks into James’ blog and points out that we might have a great deal to thank Christianity for. Faith, hope, love, and possibly even individuality.

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Ahem. Sorry, but I have a hard enough time getting laid as it is, even without bearded Canadian lunatics on my front.  

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