Tim Worstall

Dick Olver, who was speaking to The Daily Telegraph at an event designed to boost children’s interest science and engineering, said: “We need more of the very good engineering graduates to go into engineering rather than the financial services.” .
There’s a simple answer to [...]

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There’s a PR Agency just hugging themselves with glee today. Ugg Boots have got themselves a bargain:
HEALTH experts have blasted cheap Ugg boots as disastrous and warn they are harming the feet of a generation of young women.
Hey, it may even be true but what a glorious thing to get into the newspapers.
Don’t [...]

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is responsible for car safety in the US, said it was reviewing complaints about the steering of 2009 and 2010 Corollas, which are not on sale in the UK. More than 80 complaints have been lodged about the Corolla, [...]

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Owners of Toyotas around the world were thrown into panic as the US Government appeared to warn them not to drive their cars amid safety fears.
Now I know that there is a real problem here.
However, the US Govt owns in part if not in full, two of Toyota’s main competitors, GM and Chrysler.
Interesting possible conflict [...]

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Ho hum, it’s not just the stringing together of the buzzwords, it’s not just the ignorance, it’s the simple failure of logic.
We may be deluded enough to think that successful manufacturing is still about making things, and that growth is about making more of them more profitably, but in fact for the last decade “growth” [...]

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From David Friedman.

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The creatives themselves are experimenting to find new revenue models. What they want is government policy that encourages such innovation. Because if, say, a “freemium” revenue model is found to work for a UK start-up such as Playfish — which gives away online games but successfully charges for pixellated extras — [...]

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GM:
In an article for Fortune magazine, Rattner offered a savage verdict on the leadership culture at the industrial giants, singling out GM’s former boss Rick Wagoner for his “friendly arrogance”, and top executives’ reluctance to mix with workers.
“Everyone knew Detroit’s reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures,” he said. “Even by that low standard, I was shocked [...]

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There will now be no compulsory redundancies among Vauxhall’s 5,000 UK workers. Magna, which is in talks to buy Vauxhall and Opel from General Motors, has been accused of being biased towards Germany, which is providing €4.5bn (£4.2bn) to support the acquisition.
The deal – which was driven by Lord Mandelson and Unite, the trade union [...]

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Or, is it time to get into dog farming in Taiwan?
City officials in Taichung, which has a population of one million, said on Wednesday the environmental protection bureau would give vouchers worth 100 Taiwan dollars ($3) for every kilo of dog poo collected. In areas of the city especially affected, the reward will be for [...]

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Something I don’t know and wondering whether anyone does.
Executives at Britain’s top companies saw their basic salaries leap 10% last year, despite the onset of the worst global recession in decades, in which their companies lost almost a third of their value amid a record decline in the FTSE.
This rise in pay: is it including [...]

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Anyone help with this?
For the past couple of days it’s been difficult to load a page. Keep getting “Connection reset” page.
“connection reset while this page was loading”.
Is this something on my machine? Or further down the line at my ISP?
Hitting “try again” four or five times usually loads the page.
Any ideas?
Update: All fixed now. Something [...]

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The Johnnie Walker brand makes Diageo £1bn per year.
Hmm.
Guinness brewer Diageo today revealed its profits took a minor fall as it admitted entering a challenging period.
Profits before tax for the last 12 months stood at £2.093 billion, down £2 million on the previous year.
Gosh.
The Johnnie Walker brand makes half of the company’s profits, does it?
Or [...]

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As some will know, I spent some years working in Russia. One of the things I noted was that the way they named a company was pretty straightforward. If you were the Nabrezny Chelny Ferroconcrete Plant (to use a completely made up name, it’s actually Kamaz in that town) then as like as not your [...]

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Providing social mobility the capitalist way:
Nine out of ten of our restaurant management staff started out as hourly-paid crew members

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Economists have long argued for this flexibility in pay over the economic cycle – remuneration going down when times are hard and going up when times are good. Pay takes the strain rather than jobs. The difficulty has been persuading workers to accept that cuts in their pay are fair.
What you do is split pay [...]

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Is that when you’ve got another mineral that you need foreign capital and technology to extract, there’s no one willing to offer you the technology and capital you need:
“But there is a problem. Bolivia’s socialist government has a habit of clashing with foreign multinationals in other sectors and has not clinched a deal – and, [...]

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Or, umm, Scaletrx? Scale…..no, I don’t know how to spell it either.
Anyway, those of who were indeed boys at one point will remember the joy of being the junior petrolhead. The placing together of the track, the creation of impossible hairpin bends and the like.
And. of course, those who weren’t those boys and junior petrolheads [...]

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Academics rediscover the Peter Principle:

‘Our research finds that the mental health of managers typically deteriorates after a job promotion, and in a way that goes beyond merely short-term change.
‘Just because people in managerial positions find themselves to be healthier does not necessarily mean this is as a direct result of their occupational positions.
‘These findings suggest [...]

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Finally, some sense:

In his speech, Obama appeared to prepare the ground for bankruptcy, saying that a chapter 11 filing for either GM or Chrysler would "make it easier to clear away old debts weighing them down," and that it need not involve years of court procedures.

Yes, that´s the way to go and it has been [...]

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