Tim Worstall

Now of course, on this matter I am highly partisan. My office used to be just across a narrow street from theirs and I’ve puffed many a fag and shot the breeze on the pavement with them. However, this is really a tad odd. A campaign group which claims to represent the interests of ordinary [...]

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At the ASI. A nice little example of why government doesn’t work.

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Saw in one of the local English language rags here that RyanAir has just agreed a €400 million investment in making Faro one of it’s regional bases. They don’t fly out of Faro at present. From what I understand RyanAir turning up at the local airport (50km away) leads to something of a boom in [...]

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Tagged by the Devil to do this write a letter to myself at 16 thing. Dear Tim, Could you please go and buy some decent running shoes. My left knee has been giving me gyp for 15 years now and it’s all because you insisted on going out for a trot every afternoon (yes, I [...]

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At the ASI. Sweden’s a lot more capitalist than it looks you know.

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Asked last week by the BBC about these emails, King would say only that their leak and publication in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit had to be the work of some malign national agency (the CIA? The Russians?). Since we know that a Briton with Asperger’s syndrome, working on a domestic dial-up internet connection, [...]

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Google, the internet giant whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil”, did not pay any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenues in Britain last year. The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary. The arrangement allowed Google legally to [...]

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However, homosexuality is still considered taboo in many sports. Tatchell drew a comparison between rugby and football. “It is interesting that a couple of rugby and ex-rugby players have come out in recent years but still not a single professional football player,” Tatchell said. “However, given there are 500 professional football players, statistically about 50 [...]

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According to the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, “approximately 80pc of the business conducted by financial services firms in the UK comprises of services offered to non-UK residents That might be a little overstated for effect but still an interesting number. Quite large exporters of financial services, aren’t we? And are we really convinced [...]

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Might we now say that mainstream coverage of political blogs has now jumped the shark? Greg Stone, a Liberal Democrat candidate, suggested Hazel Blears was ‘on Botox’ and criticised Theresa May’s dress sense while writing under a pseudonym on the Guido Fawkes political website. A whole scandal made up of comments left under a pesudonym?

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Politics is being weighed in the balance and found wanting. There really are problems which politics will not and cannot solve. It’s not just this climate change thing either: there’s a whole raft of things out there which people identify as problems (say, the gender pay gap) and which are simply not solvable by the [...]

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Around 2,000 passengers were trapped in the Channel Tunnel overnight as four Eurostar trains broke down amid freezing temperatures that have brought travel chaos to Britain. Is this too much of it ot not enough?

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World leaders at the Copenhagen climate conference agreed an unprecedented last-minute deal to combat global warming but immediately conceded that the watered-down accord did not go far enough. So they’re not going to cause too much damage then. As Richard Tol has pointed out, the EU is already too ambitious in its plans even if [...]

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Fair play: The winner was crusading accountant Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK. Congratulations. However, now that we know where his expertise lies, in accounting for corporate structures, might we be able to encourage him to remain in his specialty? Rather than trying to redesign both the financial markets and the entire economy (to say [...]

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Conclusions Listening to Nellie the Elephant significantly increased the proportion of lay people delivering compression rates at close to 100 per minute. Unfortunately it also increased the proportion of compressions delivered at an inadequate depth. As current resuscitation guidelines give equal emphasis to correct rate and depth, listening to Nellie the Elephant as a learning [...]

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Adam Lent (chief econ guy at the TUC and a buddy of Our Ritchie) has a report out. And it’s very weird indeed. Looking at economic history, there’s a pattern. When the huge world economy changing events come along (canals, trains and steam power, electricity, the internet and digital technology, roughly five of them since [...]

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PUSSYCAT DOLLS star Nicole Scherzinger says sex is not important to her

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Interesting little thought: “I recognise, however, that even this measure cannot guarantee that we stay within the two-degree limit. Eventual global temperatures will be set by the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The best scientific estimate is that we can afford to burn a maximum of 60% of the carbon stored in the [...]

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The world should be investing far more heavily in green technology: just $10 billion a year is spent on it globally, a pathetically small amount. Where do people get these incredibly strange figures from? Or rather, why do they only ever include the money doled out by governments as “investment ” and completely ignore the [...]

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Clearly exhausted after more than 12 meetings in 24 hours and waiting over 20 hours for one group of nations to assemble, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary admitted he was “frustrated” with the talks. He said the problem was not the targets on greenhouse gases or even the amount of money at stake but [...]

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