Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Jokes already made on Twitter, slight return
OK, please somebody tell me if this gets tedious, but I am in general a big fan of repurposing, reworking and repackaging material.
- I now very much hope that Rand Paul runs for President in 2012, picking as his running mate the Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. If elected, I would immediately demand that the Paul/Daniels administration make a state visit to Chad, where they would meet President Idriss Déby, in a marquee.
- The basic problem for the Times' online subscriptions (summary; 105k, v weak) is that they have not yet found an online equivalent of their successful offline sales model, which relies on people picking up a copy in Starbucks and then not realising it isn't free. Thinking about it, this is basically the iPad free trial, isn't it?
- With the victories of Harry Reid (vs Sharron Angle) and Christopher Coons (vs Christine O'Donnell), it looks increasingly to me as if the Republican Party has missed out on control of the Senate specifically because of the personal negative vote of inexperienced female Tea Party candidates in winnable seats. This is surely not great news for Palin '12?
- This was a bit of a throwaway joke, but the more I think about it, the more I like it; Windsor & Maidenhead council are barking up the wrong tree trying to bring crappy supermarket vouchers into it. What they ought to be giving everyone is a "Single Social Behaviour Allowance", unifying the ASBO and Big Society regimes, rather as tax credits are integrated into the benefits system.
This would work on the basis of scoring various activities with positive and negative points (ie, visiting old people in hospital: +50 points, serving as a school governor: +25 points, noise nuisance: -10 points, gross indecency on Clapham Common: -30 points), and setting a per capita budget for how many positive points you required citizens to contribute (or, if there was a subsidy from central government, how many per capita negative points you could tolerate). The basic idea being similar to the trusty system in prisons; that if you were a good upstanding and well-behaved citizen, you could be permitted a few liberties not allowed to the masses.
I am not sure that I would push this as far as they did in 1950s Ireland (where, as far as I can tell, it was at least tacitly accepted that if you were a good parish priest, this could excuse quite serious crimes), but the underlying idea is quite horribly attractive in a glib thinktankish way. And of course, it paves the way for the real agenda, which would be to integrate the Single Social Budget into the actual income tax system and to thereby formalise the arrangement of there being one law for the rich and another for the poor (or at least, for those among the poor who didn't do sufficient supererogatory duties subsidising the social care system).
this item posted by the management 11/03/2010 01:05:00 AM
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