The benefits of a multiracial society are many and varied.
Multicultural society, not so much.
And that’s because when people come to your country in pursuit of a dream, they integrate. Because they want to. Immigrants used to go to America to pursue the American Dream – to become American, and drive a big car and own their own home and eat apple pie and play baseball and send their kids to college to be an astronaut.…
See MoreSomething I hadn’t realised is that the reconstructions of who had what wealth in the past are based upon wills and probate. Which is, of course, going to be a not all that useful source of information over time. For, what is one of the grand changes over that past century or so? That wealth as listed upon wills and probate became subject to inheritance tax.
So, obviously, people are going to move money around so that it doesn’t sit upon wills and get tied up in probate where it can be taxed.…
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A thought occurs about the Fair Tax Mark and their complaint that big tech isn’t paying enough in tax.
Recall how they do their calculation. Here’s the reported tax for the period. Here’s the reported tax paid in that period. Obviously that’s already going to be wrong because of timing issues. But it’s also wildly wrong for a different reason.
The tech companies pay their staff in shares and stock. And they’ve not adjusted for the tax implications of that.…
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It really has to be seen to be believed this complaint about Amazon’s taxes:
… See MoreJon Nordmark, founder of consultancy Iterate.ai, said Jeff Bezos’s empire was different. Amazon last year, he said, put nearly $30bn (£22.8bn) into R&D — twice as much as Apple, and almost triple Facebook’s outlay. That investment — Amazon said the $29bn it puts into “technology and content” is far broader than R&D — has gobbled up virtually all its $28bn in earnings before interest and expenses, Nordmark said.
We can – should even – test these claims of government competence to run the electricity companies by looking at their ability to run the ones they do run:
… See MoreJeremy Corbyn’s electricity supplier has sparked financial deadlock for the council behind it, amid mounting industry anger over state involvement in the energy market.
Robin Hood Energy, Britain’s first council-owned energy supplier, which counts the Labour leader as its most famous customer, has caused a delay of three months to the publication of Nottingham City Council’s accounts.
The Telegraph reports that:
Rape victims are eight times more likely to get justice in some police force areas than others in England and Wales, Home Office figures reveal.
North Yorkshire police force is the most successful with one in seven (14.2 per cent) rapes resulting in the sex attacker being charged, according to the data for 2018/19.
This isn’t how it works, no. Rape is an oddity as far as the existence of the crime itself is concerned.…
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This is a wondrous entry into the annals of political stupidity. Sadiq Khan is insisting that HS2 should run more slowly in order to reduce the cost of HS2. The stupid part being that the only point of HS2 is to run fast. If it doesn’t run fast then there’s no point in building it at all:
… See MoreSadiq Khan is lobbying for the speed of HS2 trains to be reduced in order to cut the costs of building the line.
Some peeps just don’t like our brave new world. Indeed, some even have the temerity to vote against that ideal of the European Union itself! Who are these people?
As it turns out, the people who vote against the EU are those in areas and places in relative industrial and social decline. That is, the people being shafted by the current order are those who vote against it. My word, a surprise, eh?
The geography of EU discontent
Lewis Dijkstra, Hugo Poelman, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose 07 December 2019
Support for Eurosceptic parties and the rise of populism threaten not only European integration, but peace and prosperity on the continent more broadly.…
See MoreIt’s possible to test some pretty odd things if you go far enough. For example, we know very well that the modern world is very much less violent than that of the past – Stephen Pinker showed that. But how much less violent? One of the things about truly violent times being that not many people were writing down stuff before they themselves got hoicked. So, we must look for a proxy.
The one being used here is that if the elite of the society could count then it wasn’t all that violent.…
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It could be that Brexit will blow the British economy entirely off course into us being just some third rate offshore islanders peering over at the wealth and riches of the continentals. However, it will be true that uncertainty about what will happen will damage our prospects.
At some point – arguable about when, certainly – the damage from the uncertainty will be larger, because it is cumulative, than any damage from the actual process itself.…
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