Tim Worstall

A lost property office that finds lost items? Only in Switzerland As one wag once said: Switzerland is the only country which has actually been finished.

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Yes, I thought I’d see this name here. Engineers have developed the new £700 million “Skylon spaceplane”, which can travel at more than five times the speed of sound. Costing about £6.3 million per flight the 270 foot-long craft can carry up to 24 passengers into space. It could be available for commercial use within [...]

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We’re all up with the fact that the gender pay gap is actually a mothers’ pay gap. It’s the taking of time out of the labour force to have, wean and then tend for the ‘ickle darlin’s which leads to the disparity in pay, on average, between men and women. One part of that is [...]

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Sainsbury’s is to be taken to court for using too much packaging, the first time that a major retailer has been prosecuted under obscure environmental laws. We can get rid of the law for a start. But we’ll also be able to get rid of another swathe of council employed staff. A spokesman for the [...]

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see more Very Demotivational I say they’re Russian

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Does he really believe that one of the richest economies in the world has no duty to redistribute wealth because the market always reallocates it upwards… Markets always redistribute wealth upwards do they? Well, there goes the entire economic history of the last three centuries then. The poor are indeed poorer now than they were [...]

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Yes, it’s icky, capitalistic, so they’re going to ban naked short selling. Restrictions on ‘naked short-selling’. Traders will be required to show they have borrowed, or arranged to cover, an instrument before shorting it. And we get this news on the very day that a short seller has made pots of money out of discovering [...]

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But leaving the merits of scientific evidence aside

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It appears that eating less cures being a fat porker. Stunning what these science types can find out these days, eh?

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“A fair society is not one in which money is simply transferred by the central state from one group to another,” For that is a good description of what many social democrats do consider a fair society.

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Yes, I’m sorry, the double facepalm is indeed the appropriate response to this foolishness being promoted: We now see that demand-deposits are created out of thin air. Indeed, these are just ledger-entries from one bank customer to another. The creation of this credit causes a credit-induced boom that then becomes a bust. How can we [...]

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Lord Krebs said the need to adapt to climate change means metering must become more widespread. Ministers should introduce water meters with a sliding price scale, charging people more for water beyond a certain amount, he said. At the moment the average person uses 150 litres of water a day. The Government’s current water strategy [...]

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Richard, If you’re going to try and play in the sandpit of economic statistics please do try to understand that little sandpit of economic statistics. Now, yes, I agree that here you’ve taken the word of a Nobel Laureate in economics. However, I would suggest that when you do take such word you take his [...]

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Because I’d be able to hear Matthew Norman’s head go explodey from the thousand odd miles away that I am. I did in fact support Obama’s winning: not because I thought he’d be a good President because I didn’t. But because electing a half black (or African American, whatever phrase you wish to use) as [...]

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He of the comment that he would sacrifice his life for two brothers or eight cousins is inverted. Baglioni was a vicious man who had murdered cousins and nephews to secure the throne, and even slept with his sister. Murdering cousins (2 of 6 grandparents shared) and nephews (two of four grandparents shared) is obviously [...]

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In which we subcontract out our response to a reader via email: I can’t be arsed, but if you want to take the piss out of this: the claim that Cambridge is a “clone town” is spectacularly dumb. I mean, just go there. It’s full of 15th Century buildings, and unique churches, and libraries and [...]

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From John Hempton. There is a real value to short sellers you know….

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It would take a better statistician than I am to parse this from Ritchie. But purely by eyeballing it looks like the variance is so huge that I’m not sure there’s any statistical significance to the trend. BTW, if there’s an economics student out there, someone who can do the graph stuff with Excel etc, [...]

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From the TUC: the most savage cuts in our welfare and social infrastructure for generations. Hmm, so what cuts are those? What the coalition’s spending plans really amount to is a five-year, real terms freeze of current expenditure, combined with three years of significant falls in capital expenditure. The overall impact of that is a [...]

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Jonathan Freedland has problems with the Baltic States: Even if the authorities were rigorous in maintaining a balance, and telling both stories honestly, I would still reject this “double genocide”. For the symmetry here is false. No one wants to top the persecution league table, but nor can one accept that those who were “arrested, [...]

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