Tim Worstall

The work was carried out at five disused landfill sites in Bristol; Swindon, Wiltshire; Hatfield, Hertfordshire; Ely, Cambridgeshire; and Skelmersdale, in Lancashire. Poplar, alder, cherry, whitebeam, ash, oaks and Corsican pine trees were planted at the sites and all thrived when provided with enough rainfall. It was conducted by the Campaign to Protect Rural England [...]

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There’s a problem here, at least for me. Living in East Dorset gives you the best chance of growing into old age, with almost eight in ten residents expected to reach 75. That problem is encapsulated in a saying from a few decades ago. Retired Indian Army colonels go to Cheltenham to die and when [...]

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Allow me to sum up the European Union for you. We’ll note that the septics and the Brits have developed interesting technologies. Say, social betworking ones like Facebook and Bebo. Then we’ll decide that these can be useful in our own endeavours. So far, this is actually pretty good, look around the world and see [...]

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We’ve all heard the stories about how the Soviet planning targets were reached…..if they said 10,000 tonnes of shoes then you got one large concrete one. Slightly less exaggerated is this true story….at least, the person who told it to me, Richard Layard, insists it was true and as he was working on statistics in [...]

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A reporter fired from the Washington Post leaves a message in the first letter of each paragraph. (via) James May did something similar years ago. But this is called doing a (Stephen) Pollard for this magnificent version here. It was immediately after the Daily Express had been bought by Richard Desmond. Leader column, Daily Express, [...]

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The problem with capitalism, as any fool know, is that it is an insatiable system that relies on satiable institutions and individuals. Umm, the usual assumption is that while individual individual desires are indeed satiable (it is, much to the surprise of many, entirely possible to eat too much chocolate) the sum of individual desires [...]

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Margot calls for more women in the higher reaches of the EU. Fine, I’ll back that, on one condition. That Margot agrees to reject any such post if it is offered to her. Nothing against a woman or women more generally helping to run our society. I’ve a great deal against that particular woman having [...]

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News from an old buddy. In the world’s single-largest investment in solar technology, the oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi announced Wednesday it will spend $2 billion to jumpstart a home-grown photovoltaics industry. The cash will fund what is undoubtedly the planet’s best-financed startup, Masdar PV, which will build manufacturing facilities in Germany and Abu Dhabi [...]

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Kill them, kill them all! Good advice here: Firstly you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own regarding their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil. (BTW, what [...]

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Take it away Alex.

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Far from showing how swiftly the world is advancing, the Phoenix mission is another dispiriting reminder of how the pace of change in the world is regressing. It’s 2008, for Pete’s sake. Weren’t we supposed to be taking holidays on Mars by 2008? When we watched Star Trek as children, didn’t we assume that by [...]

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A handful of speakers leapt to the board’s defence. One investor, Ron Johnson, said his Exxon shares had risen 28-fold in value since he bought them in 1979 and had helped to fund his two children through college. "Some of our distinguished shareholder colleagues seem to have lost sight of why we hired you," he [...]

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Of course Guido has been going on about this all month but nice to see it hitting the mainstream: Senior officials in the Labour party, including Gordon Brown, could become personally liable for millions of pounds in debt unless new donors can be found within weeks, the Guardian has learned. The party has five weeks [...]

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At the B. Praising supermarkets and oil and Laffer Curves.

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Looking at those funds which are speculating in the oil futures, Ambrose E-P has this to say: It is unclear whether the US Commodity Futures and Trading Commission would resort to such methods if oil keeps rising. The key players these days are pension funds and investors building up positions in long-term futures contracts through [...]

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We like our flat taxes around here, we do indeed. Take it away Dan.  

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At the GI. The intersection of public choice economics and international bureaucracies.

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Is it actually worth reading more of this? The Shock Doctrine is a book I’ve long admired, and what came across on sharing a stage with Naomi Klein for the first time was what a stunning researcher and writer she is: an immensely impressive speaker with an incredible command of facts. Klein? Command of facts? [...]

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I’ve no doubt at all that this is being abused but I’m really not sure about this logic: A separate study published this week by US watchdog group International Rivers argues that nearly three quarters of all registered CDM projects were complete at the time of approval, suggesting that CDM money was not needed to [...]

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At the GI. The largest reduction of poverty in history.

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