Tim Worstall

Ho hum, it’s not just the stringing together of the buzzwords, it’s not just the ignorance, it’s the simple failure of logic. We may be deluded enough to think that successful manufacturing is still about making things, and that growth is about making more of them more profitably, but in fact for the last decade [...]

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Four card players were astonished to pick up identical straight run hands in a bizarre fluke calculated as a 61 billion-to-one chance. So what are the odds of that happening then? Actually, about one in two or thereabouts. It’s one of these little things I like about probabilities. Sure, the likelihood of any individual being [...]

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What? Who? Are the piscines taking over from the bovines? Buy me beer to find out.

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I’m Scott Brown, I’m from Wrentham, I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours. Pretty effective too….

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He doesn’t fail us yet again. So, man calls for tax on banks. Or bonuses. Or, well, just make the bastards pay more money, right? Tax levied. Man complains that tax is not actually being paid by banks or bankers. Nope, it’s our pension plans which are paying this tax. Remember, this is the man [...]

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Its the profit motive thats destroying this country today. We need to adopt a planned economy that is there for the workers just as they had in the Soviet Union. Yes, I do think that’s a serious comment.

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Well, yes, this is indeed a good thing. The chief executive of the world’s second biggest pharmaceutical company will today announce that he is putting into the public domain thousands of potential drugs that might cure malaria. Andrew Witty, the British boss of Glaxo-SmithKline, will say in a major speech that multinational drug companies have [...]

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However, he said that the mistake, included in its 2007 assessment global warming, did not alter the broad picture of man-made climate change. He told the BBC: “I don’t see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report. “Some people will attempt to use it to damage the [...]

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President Barack Obama is facing the biggest crisis of his presidency after Scott Brown, a little known Republican, took the senate seat of the late Senator Edward Kennedy Gurgle, gurgle. Brown’s got his fair share of odd and objetionable views but there’s alwaysw room for giving the ruling party a right old kick in the [...]

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A voice of your childhood dies. Bill McLaren. Vale.

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Yes, a recommendation, not an ad. Try out GoThisPlace. A database of all (or nearly all, 11,000 in total) the attractions in the UK with a natural language search engine on hte front end. “Castles near Bath” gives me most of the ones I remember: although not Sham Castle but perhaps that’s fair enough, as [...]

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What the heck, the Democrats can’t spell it either. I’m simply going to laugh like a drain if Brown beats Coakley. Gurgle gurgle, that’ll be me. The one part of the country that has actually had health care insurance reform along the lines now proposed nationally being the one place that elects the bloke who [...]

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Yes, excellent, let’s do it, eh? Finnish schools are the inspiration behind some of the Conservatives’ planned education reforms to raise the qualifications and status of teaching in England, turning it in David Cameron’s words into a “noble profession”. So, what are the distinctive bits of the Finnish school structure? Education after primary school is [...]

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Fiona Millar says something that rather blows my mind. OK, she’s talking about Boy Dave’s silliness about teacher qualifications but this does still shock at tad: With its explicit condemnation of non-academic courses taken in non-Russell Group universities, What in buggery is any university, that epitome of academia, doing teaching non-academic subjects? That’s the whole [...]

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Billy Bragg: I had told her that I am withholding my tax until the chancellor of the exchequer acts to curb the bonus payments to investment bankers at RBS. Mr. Murphy: Since property rights are inseparable from the duty to pay tax – both coming from the same source and being indivisible -  the right [...]

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Yet there are no experimental controls (study areas in which one or both methods are not being tried), so there is no means of telling which of the two measures is working, or whether changes in the incidence of the disease have anything to do with the experiment. There’s a scientific term for a study [...]

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Dean Baker has a stab at it but not sure it really works. Such a tax would also make the financial sector more efficient by reducing the volume of short-term trading that serves no productive purpose. The share of the private sector that is devoted to investment banking and commodities trading has nearly quadrupled in [...]

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Whatever the state of marriage, family still ties; blood binds thicker than glue in all surveys. But do politicians really value those ties? Fate is all but sealed by birth, so politicians strive to make those at the bottom “aspire” out of the milieu of their closest bonds. All parties prefer “social mobility” to creating [...]

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Complaining about the contracts here. The oil contracts are structured so that price risk lies primarily with the state, while the private companies are virtually guaranteed a healthy return even if the market slumps. As the oil price rises, investors will make a higher and unlimited profit, taking close to one quarter of oil revenues, [...]

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Measures to combat cheap drink offers and after hours nuisance will be unveiled by the two main parties, signalling an end to inappropriate promotions whatever the general election result. Who defines “inappropriate”? There are, quite seriously, those out there who insist that serving a third pint of an evening to someone is “inappropriate”. Do they [...]

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