Tim Worstall

Yes, various parts of the country do indeed get radon building up in the basement as a result of the radioactive decay of uranium (umm, U to radium, radium to radon maybe?) naturally present in the soil. Yes, it’s easily dealt with by simply pumping it out into the atmosphere…..ie, diluting it. Radon is measured [...]

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So, winning £1.5 million on a £2 bet, eh? Mr Whiteley, a heating engineer who only goes to the races twice a year, put his money on the Tote Jackpot, which requires punters to pick every winning horse in six races. Yesterday, 363,000 tickets picked the winner in the first leg, but just 9,076 tickets [...]

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Well done to Mr. Portato for noting this: From today’s column: Studying ourselves is something the British do exceptionally well. Social scientists, geneticists, psychologists, demographers, medical researchers and epidemiologists flock here from all over the world, seeking answers to fundamental questions from our unique series of birth cohort studies. No one else has anything like [...]

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It used to be that people who had never been convicted of any crime but that certain people in the government considered dangerous were called “free men.”

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The poor are getting rich. Wages more than double in only 4 years. Great, innit?

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Grant Search Results Your search for all grants awarded to Richard Murphyunder all programmes returned the following results. Please be aware that a red programme name indicates that the programme is no longer running. Organisation Programme Amount Awarded Period Richard Murphy Power and Responsibility £70,000 Jul 2010 24 months Personal award for defining a new [...]

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…and you’ll here a typical interview by a BBC employee in the Channel Islands – they’re always, without exception, on the side of the tax abuser, excusing that abuse is legiitmniate use of loopholes and so on. It’s not questioning – they put it as fact. Hmm. What does “legitmate” mean? le·git·i·mate (l-jt-mt)adj. 1. Being in [...]

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An old idea raises its head in The Guardian again. Fortunately, someone has already written the piece for The Guardian explaining why windfall taxes on oil producers are a bad idea. Here.

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On the economic miracle which is Mauritius, our Nobel Laureate has this to say: Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transport for school children and free healthcare – including heart surgery – for all. You might suspect that such a country is [...]

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By contrast, next to no one knows that productivity has increased by almost 10% since the start of the recession. Well, quite a lot of people do actually, for we always expect productivity to rise in a recession. The other reason that workers have not seen much benefit from the 10% rise in productivity over [...]

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Studying ourselves is something the British do exceptionally well. Social scientists, geneticists, psychologists, demographers, medical researchers and epidemiologists flock here from all over the world, seeking answers to fundamental questions from our unique series of birth cohort studies. No one else has anything like them. Thousands of babies born within a few months have been [...]

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A nurse worked as an escort while on paid sick leave from an NHS hospital, a disciplinary hearing was told yesterday. Certainly never worked like that when I were a lad and all the student nurses were lodging out along Combe Park and Cedric Road. It’s the having to pay for sex with a nurse [...]

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Good. Pensioners are to receive a flat-rate universal retirement payment of £140 a week that will end the injustice of working mothers being penalised for taking a break to raise children, under reforms to be signalled by Iain Duncan Smith today. Forget the effect on women and look at what the really great prize is. [...]

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Emdadur Choudhury, 26, a member of Muslims Against Crusades (MAC), was convicted of public disorder after burning two poppies during the two-minute silence on November 11 last year. He added: “I get more when I get a parking ticket.” Judge Howard Riddle imposed the low fine despite saying Choudhury was guilty of a “calculated and [...]

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I’ve read this paper for 23 years and I hate the bloody pretension. You can be left-wing and socialist – possibly even clever – without being a preening, righteous fool. If only more of them were, eh?

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That their health system is stuck in the 1930s? Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the BMA’s hospital consultant committee, said……. Dr Porter said in an interview with The Guardian: “Very deliberately the government wishes to turn back the clock to the 1930s and 1940s, when there were private, charitable and co-operative providers of healthcare. “But [...]

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I get a rather nice review of the book in the Galveston “Daily News”. Many of Worstall’s conclusions are contrary to the conventional wisdom, but Worstall arrives at them by starting with the positions presented by major environmentalists. He then pares away the demonstrably wrong. Next, he starts with the solutions postulated by environmentalists and [...]

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Looks like you cannot do the joined up bit: with a commensurate reduction in the income tax and national insurance paid by people with low earnings. Yes, absolutely, a proposal orginally from the Adam Smith Institute and one then taken up by UKIP. It is indeed appalling that those on, for example, the minimum wage [...]

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I think the Brits were both immoral and very smart to shift the Puritans off to the colonies. And is said in response: Unfortunately we didn’t get rid of them all, and failed to load the boat such that the plimsol line would have been well submerged, thus they disastrously made it across the Atlantic. [...]

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At the ASI. Do we have too many supermarkets? Or other places too few?

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