France faces 40pc house price slump
France faces a property slump of Anglo-Saxon proportions as the frothiest boom in French history finally tips over, threatening the country with an economic shock just as austerity hits.

The advice in such markets is tp pretty much ignore the investment aspects of housing and focus upon the consumptions aspects.

Find somewhere you want to live for whatever, 15, 20 years, then work out if the price of living there, assuming no capital gains or even a loss, is acceptable to you for living there over those years.

Don’t gear up, looking for a capital gain of course. But if that little manor house in a desirable village close to a decent airport is within budget then why the hell not?

Or even if that apartment in a decent arrondisement is…..

For someone who exists in an environment where their political views are in a minority, immersing themselves in an audience who are singing songs that articulate those views can be inspirational. To find yourself among other people in your town who share your views – people whose existence you may not have been aware of – offers a sense of social solidarity unavailable in internet chatrooms.

Agreed that the singing is different, that one is in physical proximity with those fellow believers.

But as Natalie Solent pointed out near a decade ago (not quite, but this has all been going on nearly that long) what the internet makes much, much, easier is:

find other people who share your views – people whose existence you may not have been aware of –

Whether we are talking about people who knit small animals to leave in urban locations or those who would discuss libertarian political ideas we can all find, much, much, more easily those who share our ideas on these here intertubes.

Creative people, especially writers, are a funny breed. We are the only profession I know of who work for free. No coal miner, nurse, shipyard worker, accountant, or any other person with bills to pay works for free. But, that is what writers are often being forced to do. And the consequences for creativity and democracy are dire.

If you count up the number of blogs there are some tens of millions of people who believe they can write and wish to write in the English language alone.

If you count up the income of all the places that could possibly employ writers in English it is some tend of billions of $. This isn’t entirely accurate but at a rough guess if we divided all the income (leaving out publication expenses etc) into all those willing and capable writers then everyone would get $1,000 a year each.

Or, as actually happens, we’ve a power law, with a few getting $500,000 a year each, 10 times that number on $50,000, ten times that on $5,000 and so on down to where most are working for near free or free.

The supply of writers at a living wage is rather higher than the demand for writers at a living wage is another way of putting it. And there’s nothing new about that either. Been generally true since the dawn of mass literacy.

I’ve slipped a disc again, and for extra fun I’ve managed to do something to the sciatic nerve so there’s pain in my leg that isn’t actually real (it’s referred pain from the nerve) and that doesn’t respond to things like heat patches.

Umm, expensive chairs: alleviate back pain or prevent back pain, which is the point?

The Stigler said…

Do you realise that your blog is showing ads for other furniture makers?
6:21 AM
SippicanCottage said…

Marilyn Monroe don’t mind standing next to fat chicks.
6:45 AM

That line is worth the purchase of a side table alone.

She was very old when that awful day christened Black Friday took her fortune, just like the famine had taken her family. Her son sat with her on the simple wooden settee she still favored, like a pew in her own church. “It has St. Patrick’s clover on it, and to put a cushion on it would be extravagance itself.” He told her, gently, that he had lost her money, all of it –over a million dollars — in one afternoon.

“What a blessing!” she said.

Her son, now grown grey himself, and ruined along with his mother, couldn’t comprehend.

The man’s got it, gotta say.

The tragedy of it is that while the other dolls have been updated to their modern forms, so the drunk plumber has a mobile phone, the Jew remains stuck as he would have appeared in 1940, there being now too few Jews left in Poland to update the stereotype.

Not just that one post but the whole blog.

But parodies of films and music aren’t allowed under UK copyright law, unless you have explicit permission of the copyright owner. I didn’t know this either until this week.

My response:

That’s because it’s not true.

You can parody anything you like. You just cannot include someone else’s copyright material in your parody.

Thus, for example, you can parody “Yesterday” by Paul McCartney, no problems. Change the key perhaps, make a minor adjustment to the notes (there are well known ways of doing this sort of thing, it’s done all the time by advertisers who want a soundtrack without having to pay royalties) then stick any words you like over it.

Oh, and make sure that you’re not actually using Sir Paul’s voice or playing on it.

At a guess the problem with the above video, quite apart from anything else, is the use of the Olympic rings and then 2012 logo. Whether they’re copyright or trademarks not sure, but they do indeed belong to someone.

Easy enough to get around. Slightly change the colours, the shades, of the rings and you’re not using someone else’s property any more.

This is all well known stuff. Just, apparently, not by the people who created this parody.

There are plenty of parodies of, say, Star Wars, out there done with Lego or Playmobil. No one needs George Lucas’ permission to do that. How do you think Spaceballs got made and shown in the UK if permssion to parody is required? Or Men in Tights, South Park, etc etc?

It’s not parody which you cannot do.

I wouldn’t say that I’m entirely convinced of that argument as we’re into in the streets and frightening the horses territory there.

As is of course this but then with this I entirely approve.

Yes, pompous little prat.

Worstall has appeared occasionally on the Zelo Street radar as he has cheered on Nigel “Thirsty” Farage and UKIP, denounced Warren Buffet as a “liar” for being of inconvenient opinion, and told how the CP, which operates train services in his adopted country of Portugal, has sent its rolling stock to the UK for refurbishment, which it has not.

Erm, I’m a member of UKIP, I stood for them in the Euro-Parliament elections and in the run up to that election I was one of the press officers for the party.

What the fuck am I supposed to do, not cheer on the Leader of the party I’m a member of, standing for and working for? Not cheer on the party I’m a member of, standing for and working for?

We’re not all like the Labour Party you know, where the only reason for standing in front of someone is so that they can be knifed in the back.

As to Buffett, no, I said he was either mistaken, badly informed, or not telling quite the whole and true story (you do not, in any US media outlet, get to call Buffett a liar). Which he was, one at least of the three, as he ignored the effect of the corporate income tax on his tax rate.

As to sending rolling stock to the UK: I’d be amazed if I did claim that to be honest although with several million words of mine out there I can’t prove that I didn’t. What I do recall saying is that they had contracted out some of the refurb work on some rolling stock to a UK company. Which they did, for I would quite often have a pint with the bloke running the programme. I even went down to the works where they were doing it, had a look round and helped them dispose of some copper/silver/cadmium scrap from that refurb work.

So I think we’ll be taking Mr. Fenton’s views on “facts” as being variable, shall we?

As to this:

Forbes gives what are no more than op-ed pieces the grand title of “reports”, and so Worstall’s is given a gravitas it does not merit:

There’s a hint on the Forbes site actually. The link to the stories, the URL in fact:

http://blogs.forbes.com/timworstall/

It’s a blog matey, a blog.

He also confuses Laurie Penny’s Comment is Free (CiF) piece with Guardian news reporting: “the direct allegation that the Guardian published yesterday” being his actual words.

CiF is not Guardian editorial. Or perhaps Worstall would like to explain the presence there of folks like Norman Tebbit?

Or, indeed, the occasional presence of Tim Worstall on CiF. Pieces which are indeed published by The Guardian. And paid for by them as well.

None of which means “Guardian published” and “Guardian news reporting” are the same thing.

So, other than someone living in a place famous for being where people change trains but do not visit, who is this Tim Fenton?

Mr Sumner’s blog not only revealed his market monetarism to the world at large (“I cannot go anywhere in the world of economics…without hearing his name,” says Mr Cowen). It also drew together like-minded economists, many of them at small schools some distance from the centre of the economic universe, who did not realise there were other people thinking the same way they did. They had no institutional home, no critical mass. The blogs provided one.

Ms. Solent made the observation some 6 or 7 years ago. Nice to see that The Economist has caught up.

As an aside about the magazine itself. I used to read it religiously, cover to cover. Up until, hmm, about 2007, 2008. For before that it was an excellent wide ranging review of what was happening in odd parts of the world, often a very good guide to what was going to happen.

Since then it’s been rather a non-interesting roundup of what I’ve already read that week. Perhaps not of the actual pieces I’ve already read (although you can sometimes spot exactly where an idea has come from) but of the general news I’ve already seen online.

Just to make clear, this harrumph about the magazine is nothing to do with Ryan Avent getting Megan McArdle’s job blogging for them even though I tried out for it (and not even never being told sweet FA by the editor about whether or why I hadn’t got the job, very bad form that).

Nope, nothing at all……

He then tells us that:

show that right-wing ‘ideas’ on growth only involve attack workers wages

So let’s just walk out way through this timeline, shall we?

So we see a drop in the workers’ wages under Callaghan (Labour) then the workers’ wages start to rise under Thatcher I….and she was a horrible righty, wasn’t she? And under Thatcher II, then Thatcher III the worker’s wages are still rising. Then we have even more Bastard Tories in the shape of Major I and Major II and the workers’ wages just keep on rising.

And when does this top out? Just at the point that Gordon Brown (Labour, you will recall) started writing his own budgets. For they promised to follow the Tory (Bastard Right Wingers whose policies only involve attacks on the workers’ wages!) for the first couple of years.

The joy of this is of course that Sunny doesn’t in fact realise all of this. Tories oppress the workers, of course they do. Even his posting a graph which actually detailsthe opposite can’t make him change his mind on that. The cognitive dissonance associated with finding out that capitalism really does increase wages and social democracy doesn’t just cannot be accomodated.

The narrative across much of the Westminster media, who know little about economics

…..

The Minimum Income Standard found that:

basic out-of-work benefits provide well under half of the minimum income (net of rent and council tax) required for an adult with no children, and somewhat less than two-thirds for families with children.

If the government goes ahead with this, the number of children in poverty – already due to rise 200,000 by the time of the next election – will rise even further. I hope the government will decide that forcing children into poverty is as politically risky as doing the same to pensioners.

If anyone doubts what this could mean, it’s worth looking at this story from yesterday’s Coventry Telegraph: an ex-serviceman and his wife, who have committed suicide after being denied benefits.

Sigh.

Whatever the level of benefits is or should be has no effect on someone denied benefits.