Tim Worstall

I’m so far behind the technology curve it’s embarassing. Last century, really. I’ve just decided that since I’ve got two monitors, why not try having two monitors on one PC? Woo, cutting edge, eh? And so I go looking for a card that will let me do this. I obviously need to have a PCI [...]

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As has been pointed out, those of us who don’t trust the State to run libraries aren’t really the poster children for the idea that the State will successfully identify those who should be killed. But this argument ends up in stupidity: It is a similar picture for cop killers, the public understands that the [...]

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America’s going to default, Greece is in the shitter, Guido’s campaigning for the death penalty and the Murph is about to inflict a book upon us. Perhaps we shouldn’t forget that us roughly 1 billion rich world people are living higher on the hog than any group of human beings ever has done, that the [...]

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The ancient city of Petra is the highlight of any visit to Jordan. The great Nabatean city, with most buildings constructed between the 5th Century BC and 2nd Century AD, is a must-see. However the problem is the ticket price. Item in fixed supply and high demand is expensive. Whoddathunkit, eh?

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Our Beloved Leader, the politician par excellence, speaks out. Astonishingly, since our summit the cost of borrowing has increased again for a number of euro area countries. I say astonishingly, because all macro economic fundamentals point in the opposite direction. It cannot be stressed enough that Greece is in a unique situation, not comparable to [...]

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When David Cameron and Boris Johnson boasted that the Olympic venues had been delivered on time and “on budget”, international observers may have seen it as confirmation that the UK is good at big projects. Umm, no, actually, we’re not. The budget for the 2012 London Olympics has risen to £9.35bn, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell [...]

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China, as I once was memorably told by a group of lawyers in Beijing, is a volcano waiting to explode. It is difficult for those not familiar with the country to comprehend the scale of corruption, the waste of capital, the sheer inefficiency, the ubiquity of the party and the obeisance to hierarchy that is [...]

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OK, so the idea that extremely well paid luvvies need lottery money to remain extremely well paid is ludicrous in the first instance. But the way that the UK Film Council has been investing the money is insane. No, don’t look at the disasters they financed, look at the successes: Predictably, The King’s Speech, the [...]

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Europe’s leaders, including David Cameron, have been warned to adopt a more “cautious” approach when discussing multiculturalism. The Norwegian chairman of the Nobel peace prize committee has told them they risk inflaming far-right and anti-Muslim sentiment. Yes, I see. Some nutter goes postal therefore the politicians of an entire continent must not talk about things [...]

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Yes, I know, it’s a pity that London lost the Olympic bid to Paris*. However, now that it’s happening we’ll just have to do our best to make it an English event. Thus this blog’s support for Gordon the Supertramp. Everyone suddenly seems very optimistic about the Olympics, which isn’t very British. But there are [...]

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At the ASI. But that ignores the point that offshoring isn’t where most jobs go to die. It’s automation. If we push wages up over the cost of doing the same job by a machine then that job will be done by a machine and it’s got nothing at all to do with offshore or [...]

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Yes, and it’s Deborah Doane of the World Development Movement behind it again. Deborah Doane, director of anti-poverty campaign group World Development Movement, which has been a vocal critic of what it describes as opaque commodity markets, said: “The end result of trades like this is a volatile market that often has no connection to [...]

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At the ASI. Big government’s been bought: that’s why we need small government of course, so that no one will bother to try and buy it.

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The whole of the east coast and the rust belt are vast, shocking landscapes to which many Americans seem oblivious. Eh? OK, large parts of US Route 1 are not exactly easy on the eye but the entire 1,500 mile strip is some ecological armageddon? The Georgia or Carolinas coasts? Chesapeake Bay? Northern New Jersey [...]

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Nuclear advocates say that only nuclear can now provide the quantity of energy needed for the next 40 years. But its critics point to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and possibly Japan, which have turned their back on the much-disputed power source. Both can possibly be true: that some reject nuclear while nuclear is the only power [...]

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It has been a slow crawl for the doll. In the 50s and even the 70s – the 60s were a tentative audition for today – a size 12, with hips and breasts, could make it on to a billboard or into a movie. Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Ava Gardner – all had flesh and interesting [...]

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Collaboration, not competition, that’s what we need says Polly. Quite ignoring the fact that markets are the way that human being collaborate. Sigh. She uses as her example, as the way that collaboration works, the decline in deaths from heart attacks. But destructive fragmentation is what the new competition system will do, Boyle says. He [...]

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It’s one of the more stupid parts of the American political compromise. The CAFE standards that say what mileage cars must have. The new corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards will increase from 2017 at 5% annually for cars and 3.5% for light trucks through 2021, with an overall target of a fleetwide average of [...]

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The Department for Energy and Climate Change believes that if the gas price falls, green taxes will increase the electricity price by 29pc to 58pc as renewable energy will be more expensive in comparison to the fossil fuel over the next two decades. We were told that the total cost, all in, would be 1-2% [...]

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The BBC will follow the Olympic torch relay throughout its entire 70-day journey around Britain – with 80 to 90 per cent of the action to be broadcasted online, London 2012 director Roger Mosey has said.

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