Tim Worstall

Tomorrow, volcanos permitting, I shall be in London: Title: A plague on all their houses? Speakers: Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes’ blog Tim Worstall of It is all obvious or trivial except… Perry de Havilland of samizdata.net Date: 29th April 2010 Title: 6.30pm to 8.30pm Location: 23 Great Smith Street, London, SW1P 3BL RSVP: events@adamsmith.org [...]

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I’ve been having a quick look around Google and it doesn’t seem that anyone has already prepared this information. What I’d like to be told is that I’m wrong, and that someone has prepared this information. And, err, where that prepared information is….. What I’m looking for is information about the rare earth metals. Sc, [...]

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So what’s stopping us? Partly cost, says Wolff. Hovering at around 10-20 US cents per kilowatt hour, CSP “looks a little bit on the expensive side”, compared with gas at about 5 cents. But this is likely to change when the volumes increase, he says. Indeed, three studies carried out by the German aerospace industry [...]

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It’s just one short step from Clegg to chlamydia

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A 33pc rise that easily outstrips the 20pc average for the semi-conductor industry. Who says we don’t make things anymore? Almost 98pc of mobile phones now have an Arm chip inside them, with most phones having more than one. Drop that expensive iPhone, for example, and you will find at least five Arm chips inside. [...]

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It’s not easy feeling sorry for Lloyd Blankfein but I do here: Lloyd Blankfein has admitted that he believes Goldman Sachs has no moral obligation to tell clients it is betting against a product it is asking them to buy. The very act of selling something to someone is a bet against that product. If [...]

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I’ve seen 18% mentioned as well. Fork time. Default.

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The downgrade put Greece on par with Romania and below Kazakhstan, Hungary and Iceland, the last of which rocked global markets when its main banks imploded at the start of the global financial crisis. S&P also assigned a recovery rating of ’4′ to Greece’s debt issues, indicating its expectation of “average” (30-50 percent) recovery for [...]

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You would be able to listen to me on “The Rutherford Show” at 5.30 pm today. If you’re not, you probably won’t be able to.

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The Times looks at some claim about trade and jobs. And they seem to have fallen foul of a corollary of Muphry’s Law. Perhaps we might call it Worstall’s Corollary to Muphry’s Law: any piece of fact checking will contain an error even more glaring and nonsensical than the original claim being fact checked. last [...]

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Your perspective, though, gets a bit skewed. Strangely, whereas all the best blogs in Britain veer towards the Right, all the most entertaining people on Twitter seem to veer towards the Left. I don’t think it’s just the people I follow. Left-wing blogs become dreary and earnest, but right-wing tweets (aaaagh) are functional and dull. [...]

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I’ve only just heard of John Mayer (yeah, I know, really up to date I am) and I was really rather surprised. He did a version of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Lenny”: Here’s a live version of the original. Now is it just me being picky or does Mayer not quite manage to carry it off? [...]

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Just a thought: The taxpayer is sitting on a profit of close to £10bn on its stakes in Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group after a surprise surge in their share prices. You know, all these people who have been saying that banks must be taxed more to pay back what they’ve cost [...]

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Via, here. Jen McCreight, a self-described atheist, feminist and geek “trapped in Indiana,” took issue with Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi’s message during Friday prayers in Tehran, the Iranian capital. The hard-line cleric, who was standing in for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, said women who dress provocatively – thereby tempting men – are to blame for the [...]

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Quite marvellous. So, our favourite retired accountant notes that crime is increasing in the Cayman Islands. OK. To Ritchie this is clearly to do with the fact that the whole place is simply a bunch of gangsters, Vampire Squids sticking a straw into the bloodstream of the global economy. Only occasionally, but persistently none the less, [...]

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We’re often told that people don’t understand quite what average incomes are and so on. However, it seems that people do have a pretty good idea: THE average Briton would need a home worth £500,000 and a salary of £42,000 before considering themselves “well-off”, a study revealed yesterday. They would also need two foreign holidays [...]

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Some stories do leak — such as the 2005 memorandum of our Ambassador in Poland, Charles Crawford, who suggested that Tony Blair, concerned about attacks from the “scary new teenage” Tory Opposition, should start a forthcoming EU negotiation by putting a “large naff children’s alarm clock” on the table to make it clear that time [...]

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According to the IMF, G20 rich countries have experienced an average 40 per cent decrease in their overall GDP since the beginning of the crisis. Eh? 4% would be closer (if a little low)….or have we just had a second Great Depression and no one bothered to tell me?

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In fact, he wants to raise taxes on everyone. In his “accountant’s manifesto” we have: Deny tax reliefs of more than £5,000 a year to any person to prevent wasteful tax planning The personal allowance is a tax relief. The personal allowance is currently £6,475 a year. Therefore not only will that have to be [...]

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At the ASI. Economic Whiggism.

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