Tim Worstall

There has to be an easy way of moving a file of email addresses from one gmail account to another. There must be. Using “export” in gmail (with Firefox) leads to the creation of “google.csv” which is terribly exciting but no damn use as the computer then says that file does not exist. No, you [...]

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see more Fail Blog

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Isn’t this what we call kicking a man when he’s down? Or aiming at the easy target?

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But it was liberal prescribing on the part of doctors that drove our evolving heroin problem in the 1950s and 1960s. Jeebus.

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All this spend! spend! spend! Fiscal stimulus! Please, could all those now arguing for such stimulus at least own up to the fact that they missed the other part of Keyesianism? That Brown vastly overspent at the top of the boom? That if you’re going to argue for fiscal stimulus in a slump you also [...]

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Oh dear lord. Given the problems with false positives (as Alex has been trying to tell us for years) I’m not sure there’s enough computing power in the entire world to do this.

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Jersey‘s compliance with international financial regulation and supervision rules is rated ahead of the UK, according to a detailed study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Jersey, which has earned notoriety as a tax haven, complies with 44 of 49 anti-money laundering and financial crime busting recommendations compared with only 36 by the UK. Snigger.

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So, can people reverse a payment made to my Paypal account? In more detail: someone offered to pay me for something. Great. Deal done, they pay me. They pay me twice. Then they email to ask for the overpayment back. Hmm…now this starts to smell a little of a standard scam. Ask for the overpayment [...]

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Ritchie and his friends are insistent that there’s a huge amount of tax fraud going on as a result of transfer pricing. There are others who regard it all as a problem pretty much under control but that’s not the point here. Here’s a suggestion from Ritchie and friends as to how to prevent such [...]

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This has made the papers. Along with the pictures, the patient, who identifies himself only at ‘Traction Man’ provides a daily review of the dishes he is served. You can play along here.

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Richard Murphy seems to be rather full of himself as a result of his presenting a paper at the World Bank this week. Reacting to a fairly mild criticism of his views on the efficient markets hypothesis he tells me the following: Tim Talk, talk, talk I do action Very different It’s irrelevant that the [...]

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Simon Barnes, in the Daily Mail? Writing about postal unions? This isn’t the same Simon Barnes who has been doing sport and nature stuff for the Times for a decade or more is it?

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An execution in Ohio was delayed for a week last night after prison technicians failed to find veins suitable for a lethal injection in the arms of a convicted child killer. Romell Broom, sentenced to death for raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl in 1984, was due to die yesterday afternoon at Lucasville prison in [...]

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Music piracy is having a dangerous effect on British music, but some rich and successful artists such as Nick Mason, of Pink Floyd, and Ed O’Brien, of Radiohead, don’t think so. Last week, they told The Times that file sharing is fine. It probably is for them. They do sell-out arena tours and have the [...]

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Asks the Telegraph. No. Next question? The reason why not is actually all of the reasons advanced as to why it is. Industrial demand, catalytic converters, mismatch, depressed car industry, PEM fuels cells etc etc etc. That means that he’s arguing that the platinum price is driven by commercial demand, for the desire to make [...]

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The leaders of some of Britain’s biggest unions saw their pay and perks rocket by up to 30 per cent last year, despite the impact of the recession on their members. Official figures reveal that some union barons have fared far better in the downturn than the ‘fat cat’ company directors they criticise, whose pay [...]

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Politicians can’t do all the heavy lifting on difficult questions where there is no easy line between absurd officiousness and negligence. Yesterday Martin Narey of Barnardo’s spoke out in strong support for the new register. “Calm down,” he rightly admonished the ranters. The NSPCC added its support. All the charities for children, the mentally ill, [...]

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There’s this for example, looking at the new proposed measures about how we measure the quality of life rather than using GDP. It’s for The Examiner site but they’ve asked me to look at UK matters as well as the US celebrity fluff that I’ve been doing. What will be turning up there are the [...]

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Very interesting indeed for aficionados of such things. Most interesting even. Not a single mention of how many raptors get chewed up in windmills, nope, not a sausage.

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Have to admit, I didn’t know this: For example, while GDP is supposed to measure the value of output of goods and services, in one key sector – government – we typically have no way of doing it, so we often measure the output simply by the inputs. If government spends more – even if [...]

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