Tim Worstall

At least it will if this fathead at the European Court of Justice gets her way. Kokott advised the Court to declare invalid the provisions allowing for the taking into account of statistical differences between the risks of insuring men and women when setting premiums. She said it was incompatible with the principle of equal [...]

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According to Labour party rules at least 6 women have to be elected to the shadow cabinet…….There are 13 women on the list……Of these – Yvette Cooper is a shoo-in. Caroline Flint and Tessa Jowell also very likely. I wonder if Diane Abbott and Emily Thornberry will split Labour MPs on the left. I don’t [...]

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As that lady from IBM once said, never run the .0 version of any operating system. Wave is the first handset to run the exciting new Samsung Bada operating system and the fun, simple TouchWiz 3.0 interface. But maybe the manufacturers have also learnt this now?

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Via, this. From the above problematic modern texts deduce that intersystemic trade is economically beneficial to all concerned (and harmful to none) if, and only if, the laborers of each system specialize in the production of that commodity for which the “relative cost,” given in the commodity-exchange ratios of the respective closed systems, is more [...]

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Here’s a court that seems to have it right: An Ontario court has struck down several key provisions in Canada’s anti-prostitution laws, saying they are dangerous to sex-trade workers. A ruling by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said the laws against keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living [...]

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A married TV star has won a court gagging order to prevent details of his private life being published. The celebrity, who has a huge public profile, has obtained an injunction stopping his ex-wife writing about their relationship and claims that they had a sexual affair after he remarried. Neither the married man nor his [...]

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Advertisers could have invented this constituency: and they need it now, more than ever, since as businesses become more global, ever more complex ways must be devised to discover the specificity of each market – or, more simply, who they’re supposed to be selling to. If nobody operates locally, there will be things about customers [...]

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Erm: As a result, we face the prospect of a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition determined to use the financial crisis to smash the postwar consensus on public services, and make the poor pay for the greed and incompetence of the rich. Actually, no. These “once in a generation cuts” aren’t going to get even close to [...]

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Human impact on world’s rivers ‘threatens water security of 5 billion’ Study on effect of all human intervention on water supplies finds water security and biodiversity severely damaged OK, fully willing to believe it, then I read the article underneath. They’re saying, in part, that the things we do to improve water security (dams etc) [...]

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So, great picture got by photographer is celebrated at The Guardian. He brought us to see a young woman, Lina. She was 28 – although she looked older – and very beautiful. She told us about her husband, who was murdered. She wouldn’t tell us why he was killed; we got the impression it was over money [...]

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the 55-year-old sail maker who served in the Navy at Trafalgar and the Army at Waterloo, Blimey.

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Turkey’s government has seized the one-time state yacht of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, following media reports that a vice ring had used the vessel to throw sex parties with prostitutes. Two reactions, slightly contradictory. 1) Isn’t that what yachts are for? To have bevvies of birds aboard? 2) Why prostitutes? Everyone else [...]

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At Foreign Policy. About rare earths and Chinese export bans. It’s also a good example of how the US style of sub editing is, umm, complicated. It’s only a blog post, they asked for and received it last week. But we’ve been back and forth over edits they wanted since. And the edits made, by [...]

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Our very own version of Basement Cat….well, I say “our” but of course he regarded us as his…shuffled off this mortal coil this morning. A jet black tom he enjoyed the outside life and the female cats down the end of the road (and to get to them he had to get past his own [...]

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Fun opening line. About the author Richard Murphy is a chartered accountant and graduate economist. It’s an interesting use of the word “graduate” there, isn’t it? For it can indeed be used to say “graduated from a course in economics” as Ritchie did, from Southampton University in accounting and economics. As I did at about [...]

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And he followed up by saying that if the three premises of economics are wrong – there is imperfect information, high transaction costs and irrationality – But the three premises of economics are not that there is perfect information, low transaction costs and rationality. There are certain models which assume one or all of these [...]

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So, Arnold Kling is asked why companies don’t just up sticks and bugger off if government gets to greedy/intrusive. In fact, the threat of exit does get used and it does work. “If you do X, then this financial market will move to London” was a threat that was often used to talk Washington out [...]

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Something which I absolutely do not understand from Dani Rodrik: The main message of the scatter plot can be summarized easily. Labor has moved from tradable sectors (agriculture and manufacturing) where labor productivity growth has been rapid to non-tradables, especially wholesale and retail trade, where productivity growth has been negative. This is the explanation for [...]

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Pete Doherty The Duke of Westminster Is there something we should be told Your Grace?

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