EU Cultural Diversity
From our Swindon Correspondent: From The Guardian Under the EU’s audiovisual media services directive, a majority of airtime must be given to such European content on terrestrial television and it must make up at least 30% of the number of titles on video on demand (VOD) platforms such as Netflix and Amazon. Countries such as France have…
The Bureaucracy As An Hereditary Caste
Donald Trump brought in the kiddies as advisors in the White House. Jack Kennedy did so with the cabinet. Well, you know, times change and all that. What is actually far worse than that is when we end up with the bureaucracy being an hereditary caste. These people, because they are the righteous children of those who did the job before, are…
Unbelievable, I Know, But This Man Used To Teach Economics In A British University
We have an interesting little example of what’s wrong with academia here. Someone who doesn’t in fact know their subject has been teaching it. The example is, as you might have guessed, Richard Murphy who has held no fewer than four professorships at British universities. Specifically, here, he’s arguing that the effects…
Incentives Matter, Yea Even For Refugees And Asylum Seekers
This is not a point about refugees. Nor is it one about asylum seekers, economic immigrants. It is instead one about that base point that economics tries to dun into all too many unlistening heads – incentives matter: So far this year, more than 18,000 migrants and refugees have landed in Italy after crossing the Mediterranean from…
Rail Cuts
From our Swindon Correspondent: From the Guardian Train operators, Network Rail and unions have agreed to talks over cutting rail services and axing thousands of jobs to save the industry up to £2bn a year as it plans for a post-Covid future of fewer passengers. Under a framework agreement signed by the four main transport unions and rail…
Government Debt – So Far So Good
When rich people feel overtaxed, they often find ways to avoid paying tax. As a result, governments get less, despite having demanded more. So governments try to avoid making rich people feel overtaxed. The most amount of plucking, with the least amount of hissing. If governments want to keep spending past the Laffer Peak, they need to…
The EFF Horribly Misunderstands Patent Trolls
The purpose of a patent is to provide an income to those who produce public goods like knowledge. ~The argument being that without the invention of this form of property then public goods like knowledge will be underproduced. Someone who insists upon being paid for a patent is not, therefore, a patent troll. They are, instead, someone using…
Sex Crimes In South Korea
Human Rights Watch has a terrifying report on the rise in digital sex crimes in South Korea. Truly terrifying. The evidence comes from: The report, based on 38 interviews My word, that is a truly stupendous evidence base. and an online survey involving hundreds of women Ah, that’s alright then. Add in a bit of online self-selection of…
WHO Wishes To Abolish Pregnancy
This might not be quite what they’re saying but in many a society this is what would happen: Women of childbearing age should not drink alcohol, the World Health Organisation has said. WHO officials were accused of being “sexist and paternalistic” after issuing the global advice, covering billions of women regardless of…
Dynastic Wealth – Horrendous Statistics From IPS
The Guardian tells us that the richest families have been getting ever richer. This should not happen – therefore abolish capitalism: Self-made billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk made huge profits during the Covid-19 pandemic but a new report shows there’s no beating family money when it comes to getting – and staying –…
Our Word, Isn’t Nick Dearden A Little Toad
A reasonable description of someone playing politics with hundreds of millions of lives would be toad. Even, little toad. Which is the observation we might want to make about Nick Dearden, of Global Justice Now, here: The charity Global Justice Now called the UK’s donations “a PR gimmick” that will allow the G7 to ignore the structural…
Understanding Opera
From our Swindon Correspondent: From The Telegraph South Bank Show Awards Panel stands by its nomination of critically acclaimed show despite claims of ‘yellow washing’ In opera, yes, “yellowface” has always existed. Puccini’s premiere of Madam Butterfly was entirely Italian rather than Japanese, but this…