Two quotes

"Eagles soar, but weasels don't get sucked into aircraft engines..."

"I wish I could help you, but I don't want to."

Snippet

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences."

C.S. Lewis

Snippet - Shoogly Peg

A Scottish idiom. Shoogly means loose.

Usage - Your jacket is on a shoogly peg.

Literal meaning - your jacket is on a loose coat hook.

Actual meaning: your job is insecure.

Snippet

WHEN the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” asked John Maynard Keynes.

Snippet - the day you die

To paraphrase Samuel Beckett, the day you die will be like any other—only shorter.

Bells and hands

Sir Robert Walpole's comment on initial enthusiasm for ill-considered actions.

"Now they ring their bells; in a few weeks they'll be wringing their hands."

Quite an appropriate comment on our  involvement in Afghanistan; as is another Walpole quote "It was easier to conquer it than to know what to do with it.".

Some other quotes from Walpole

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.

History is a romance that is believed; romance, a history that is not believed.

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.

Serendipitous discoveries are made by chance, found without looking for them but possible only through a sharp vision and sagacity, ready to see the unexpected and never indulgent with the apparently unexplainable. [e.g. the discovery of penicillin]

Car burning - the next bad thing

A few years ago there were riots in the suburbs of Paris and press reports mentioned that the rioters were burning hundreds of cars a night. There was nothing in the press about how this was being done. It is not easy to set fire to a car. What were the rioters doing? Breaking windows and pouring in petrol? Lockable filler caps would surely prevent rags being stuffed in the tanks and set on fire.

Recently car burning has spread to Berlin and the Economist has had a couple of articles on the phenomenon.  

Economist 1

Economist 2

The Economist explains how it is being done. It is depressingly easy. The car burners just put a fire lighter against the tyre next to the petrol tank, strike a light and then walk away.  Very hard to stop or catch the culprit.

The UK's genetic residue do not appear to have discovered this yet, but they will.  Look forward to a big rise in insurance premiums when they do.

Newspapers, trees, electronic paper and the tipping point

Newspapers which are suffering from the effects of the internet may be saved by electronic paper. Instead of being in a long term death spiral it may be more accurate to view newspapers as living through a  period between the introduction of the internet and the adoption of the more benign technology of electronic paper. Only 15% of a newspaper's costs are for journalism. The need to handle paper [printing. distribution etc.] account for much of a papers non journalism costs.

The costs of newsprint

Each Sunday issue of the New York Times requires the newsprint from 75,000 trees.
That is 75000 x 52 = 3,900,000 trees per year for just the Sunday edition of one newspaper.

[BTW - That sounds a lot but at a planting density of 2,000 trees per acres it equates to 1,940 acres or just over 3 square miles of forest cleared per year. A forest area 10 miles square would provide enough wood pulp for the Sunday edition from now until 2042.]

Even if vast areas of land are not being clear felled handling all this wood and converting it to newsprint is a very expensive business.

"Readers expect a daily paper to be a certain size every day, and to arrive on their doorstep at a certain time every morning. Meeting those requirements involves a ton of infrastructure and personnel: typesetters, printing presses, delivery trucks, paper carriers, and so forth. To meet these infrastructure requirements, a paper has to have a minimum circulation, which in turn requires covering a wide geographical area. All of which means that as a daily paper's circulation falls below a certain threshold, it can lead to a death spiral where cost-cutting leads to lower quality, which leads to circulation declines and more cost-cutting."

Electronic paper

E-paper technology is advancing very rapidly. We already have e-readers like the Kindle and the iPad. I do not think it will be very long before we are able to buy A4 or even A3 size sheets of flexible e-paper.  We would then be able to use e-paper to read our newspapers [and lots of other stuff].

Newspapers are having a tough time at the moment as they are abandoned by readers and advertisers. However, in the long term they stand to save huge sums if journalism is read on e-paper rather than newsprint. Just think of the savings in newsprint, printing and physical distribution.

At the moment newspapers have to cater for readers who want a paper copy of their paper and those who are content to read on a screen. They cannot make money from either group and many are closing or cutting staff.

Eventually they will come to a tipping point where the number of e-readers equals the number of paper readers.  After that I suspect that buying a paper newspaper will become more expensive as newspapers try to move all their readers to e-paper.

Not only will delivery through e-paper greatly reduce newspaper's cost, it will also provide a charging mechanism. Though people are unwilling to pay for content on the internet they do seem ready to pay for it if it is delivered through a mobile device. Witness the sale of newspaper subscriptions on Amazon's Kindle and software on Apple's Apps Store.

Once the costs of printing disappear newspapers will have very different economics. The ones the survive these transition times may find themselves profitable again. Especially since some of their competitors will have disappeared and they will be able to sell their e-paper editions on a global scale in a way that was not possible with paper newspapers. They will probably also have to sell off office blocks and convert to virtual newsrooms, and rely more on occasional contributors. The end result will probably be something closer to the model of the Huffington Post than the current New York Times.

 Unwanted forests

There will be victims of the move from newsprint to e-paper.

During the First World War Britain ran very short of trees for pit props and trench supports. To prevent this problem arising again the government planted lots of quick growing evergreen trees. However, the Second World War was not a trench war and all over Britain there are these WW1 woods that do not have much economic value. I live near one.

If newspapers stop needing newsprint what will happen to all the forests that have been planted to provide trees for newsprint?  What will happen to all the small communities that depend on logging to survive? What will happen to those countries who export a lot of paper?

Snippet - Newspapers

In 1950 a British street of 100 houses could be relied on to buy 140 newspapers a day and 220 on Sunday.

In 2010 the same street bought just 40 papers a day, Monday to Sunday.

In 1966, the Daily Mirror sold 5.1m copies a day, the Daily Express 4m and the Daily Telegraph 1.4m. Last month, those titles had circulations of 1.2m, 631,000 and 635,000 respectively.

I used to buy a daily newspaper Monday to Saturday and two on Sunday.  Five or six years ago I stopped buying any and saved £400-500 per year.  By reading online with RSS I got the information I wanted, not what some newspaper proprietor wanted to sell me. I also got my information from a range of sources, not just one.

Snippet

"Farmyard animals are not being yoked together to pull cars but the fat in their bodies is being converted into biodiesel to drive fleets of the future.

The fat, or tallow, from one poor deceased sheep will produce about eight litres of biodiesel.

That's about 6 1/2 sheep to fill the tank of Astra diesel hatchback, meaning you'll get about 105km out of one animal on Holden's published fuel economy figures.

Pigs are better for travelling longer distances, with one unfortunate beast giving Astra drivers about 140km. One cow will keep the engine running for almost 450km.

Chooks, however, will barely get you to the corner, with one chicken worth just 600m."

Hourly productivity - EU v USA

"Leading the way are the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), which outperform the US based on gross domestic product per hours worked each year. According to the OECD, Belgium and the Netherlands, which mandate 30 and 28 annual vacation days, respectively, are almost 2 percent more productive than the US. And Luxembourg, with its highly competitive financial services industry and 32-day yearly vacation allowance, is a staggering 27 percent more efficient.


Even France proves it can compete with America's world-leading economic productivity. By focusing on high-value manufacturing, France is a mere 2 percent less productive than the U.S., based on the OECD's analysis of GDP per hours worked. That comes despite the French taking 40 days off a year, and working, on average, 37 hours a week. And in Germany, Europe's largest economy, productivity is only 7 percent behind that of America, predominantly because of the country's export-oriented manufacturing sector. The Germans also work five fewer hours per week than their US counterparts, take five more days vacation each year, and have an unemployment rate almost two percentage points lower than the comparable US figure.


Article

Eddie Sawyer and Ricky Jay

As a fan of the 'Deadwood' TV series I was familiar with the character of Eddie Sawyer [he was the card sharp in the Bella Union Saloon] and had assumed he was played by an actor who was feigning dexterity..

Then I read this 'New Yorker' story about Ricky Jay.

"Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”

Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.

“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”
“The three of hearts.”
“Look inside the bottle.”

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately."

How we liberated the French

Antony Beever's book on D-Day.

"Altogether, 15,000 French people were killed by the bombing of early 1944 with which the Allies softened up Normandy before D-Day. After the landings, 19,890 French civilians were killed during the battle for Normandy. In the département of Calvados alone, 76,000 people lost their homes in the fighting.

More French people died in aerial bombardment by the Allies in the second world war than British people died in aerial bombardment by the Germans."

Link

Third ATM non-dispense in less than a year

An ATM non-dispense occurs when you put your card and pin into an ATM and the withdrawal is charged to your bank account, but the machine does not give you any cash. They can also occur if you abort a transaction before any money is dispensed.

I have just had my third one in less than a year. All with the same bank. I have never had any at all before the current run.

Ken Clarke regrets speed bumps

I have sometimes wondered which idiot politician  introduced speed bumps to the UK. Now I know.

"The one regret I will admit to is taking through the legislation to introduce speed humps on roads. It was never my intention we should have thousands of the damn things."

Ken Clark, Conservative politician.

Thanks Ken. The road safety zealots have put the damn things everywhere.

Snippet - weapons of mass destruction found

From an article in the NYT

"As one banker remarked to me: “We finally found the W.M.D.” They were buried in our own backyard — subprime mortgages and all the derivatives attached to them."

In other words, the real enemy turned out to be bankers and not Saddam Hussein.

Eventually Americans will also realise that their other enemies are not foreign terrorists but the American capitalists  who have been busy transferring the country's jobs, technologies and industries to China. That their real enemy is not the guy in the burnoose but someone in a business suit who is getting rich by selling out his country. 

Snippet

"The US is spending about $10 billion a month on Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of this year, the total funds appropriated will be nearly $600 billion – approaching the amount spent on the Vietnam or Korean wars, when adjusted for inflation.

However, the actual impact of the war on the economy is different than in the past, largely because the US economy is so much bigger now. During World War II, some analysts calculate that the US spent as much as 30 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on the war effort. The Korean War, at its spending peak in 1953, represented 14 percent of GDP; Vietnam was about 9 percent. The current war, however, is less than 1 percent of America's annual $13 trillion GDP."

Article

Snippet

"The rephotographs demonstrate the unsurprising fact that the passage of time, the tragedies of history, and the pressures of population and development have not been kind to the Great Wall. A section photographed by the archaeologist Aurel Stein in Gansu Province around 1910 was then unbroken for seven miles, but Lindesay found that it is now crossed by "two rail lines, 17 power lines, the west to east gas line, 15 dirt roads, one main road, an abandoned main road and the G-312 expressway — which is actually routed under the Wall."

Article

Snippet

"During a railway expansion in Egypt in the 19th century, construction companies unearthed so many mummies that they used them as fuel for locomotives."

I think I remember reading that mummies were also used as fuel for the mechanical excavators used to dig the Suez Canal.

On a final macabre note I remember once reading that, in the 19th century, bone china tea sets were made from the ground up bones of soldiers killed at the battle of Waterloo. I have never been able to confirm this. Does anyone know if the story is true?

Snippet

Every year, more than 10,000 shipping containers fall overboard and spill their cargo into the ocean. Storms are often to blame.

An 8-foot by 40-foot container, which can carry up to 58,000 pounds of cargo, might hold 10,000 shoes; 17,000 hockey gloves or a million Legos.