Tim Worstall

Cheap snack offers in shops and food outlets are as dangerous as happy hour drink giveaways, health campaigners claimed yesterday. Desperate retailers are bombarding customers with cut-price chocolate, crisps, cakes and fizzy drinks to boost profits. Nutritionist and obesity campaigner Zoe Harcombe said: “The supermarkets pounce on us at every opportunity and feed the obesity [...]

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City authorities in Moscow have announced a ban on the sale of spirits between 10pm and 10am, in the most recent of a series of measures designed to break the country’s drinking habit. Yeeessssss Russia has since increased excise on beer, raised the minimum price of a bottle of vodka to 89 roubles (£1.87) and [...]

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Gaaah, I thought we’d managed to put these lying bastards back in their box: Despite four decades of equal pay legislation, Britain has one of the worst gender gaps in Europe. Women in the UK are paid 79% of male rates, while across the 27 countries of the European Union the figure is 82%, according [...]

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In Britain, that’s an average of 12.7 heterosexual partners over a lifetime, compared with just 6.5 for women. Except that it is logistically impossible for the average man to have more partners than the average woman. Depends which average we’re talking about: entirely possible for 1% of women to have hundreds or even thousands of [...]

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China’s manufacturing wages have vaulted from around $1,000 annually 10 years ago, to $3,900 last year. Pay in the industrial hubs of the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas are much higher and likely to rise further after a wave of industrial disputes at Foxconn, Honda, Toyota, and Omron. Wages in China are low, this [...]

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Crazed, Glorious Scot. The War Office had banned pipers from leading soldiers into battle after losses in the Great War had proved too great. “Ah, but that’s the English War Office,” Lovat told Millin. “You and I are both Scottish and that doesn’t apply.” On D-Day, Millin was the only piper.

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Relationships ‘good for health’ Bride in Corfu honeymoon plunge Bit of a shame the Telegraph ran them one after the other….

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You’re wrong Tax is the price for living in a democracy The services are free Even by the standards of our favourite retired accountant that’s bizzare. So a US citizen living in England does not have the vote, is not part of the Demos, therefore they don’t have to pay taxes. But they get to [...]

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Wowee! Union which represents civil servants thinks there should be more civil servants. Now that is a turn up for the books.

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One of the things we’re told about the recent financial troubles is that all of this securitisation was one of the causes of it. People made loans and then flogged them off as bonds instead of hanging on to said loans until maturity. However, there’s one thing that rather militates against this story. No, not [...]

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“My niche is that not only can I show British culture in an unfamiliar way, but I can do the same with the language. I can show how absurd English idioms sound to the Italian ear.” These include “Bob’s your uncle”, which apparently derives from the nepotistic practices of 1880s PM Robert Cecil. Palmieri proposes an [...]

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Well, one bit anyway. But as if to show that they haven’t really thought this through, they’ve decided to supplement the ETS belt with braces and suspenders: as well as creating a functioning emissions trading system, they intend to maintain feed-in tariffs and the renewables obligation system. This could be an insurance policy, in case [...]

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Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor, has been found guilty of just one of 24 political corruption charges. Well sorta, except he wasn’t aqctually found guilty of any political corruption charges: Blagojevich was found guilty of lying to the FBI and faces up to five years in jail. That’s one of those catch all charges [...]

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Noodling around about something else I found out what the national income tax rates are in Denmark. For such a highly taxed country they seem just fine really. After the personal allowance (about £5k) the national income tax is 3.76%. Yes, that’s 3.76%, not 37.6%. Over around £40,000 that national income tax rate goes all [...]

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On the subject of Barclay’s being fined for handling transactions with people/countries on the US no trade list: Does banking have any ethics at all? Hmmm Barclays is understood to have voluntarily disclosed information on the dealings to the authorities after it became aware it might have broken sanctions. As well as co-operating with the [...]

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No, really, much better than I would have guessed. They did actually manage to provide orange juice….

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A couple of years ago I got a short-lived, but reasonably lucrative gig writing jokes for a mobile phone company. I know this sounds amazingly glamorous, but in reality meant a lot of staring out of windows, eating biscuits and creating puns so bad they physically hurt to put into words on the screen. The [...]

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Yes, number two economy now. However, the important number is not the aggregate one, but the per capita one. And yes, we should also adjust for PPP, as whjat we really are interested in is living standards and things do cost different amounts in different places (as a trivial example, and iPod costs roughly the [...]

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Well: And so to a question that vexes every vicar addressing a congregation under a leaky church roof, all community groups peering into a long dark tunnel of grant cuts: how do you get the sods to give? To reach into those bulging pockets and hand over their shrapnel? There’s more to this problem than [...]

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I’m sure this will be all over the papers today: During their childhood one in every 27 children – fewer than the average class size – will be reported as killed or injured in a road accident, the report said. There’s nothing actually wrong with the report itself. However, it’s only when you get to [...]

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