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!


Saturday, April 28, 2012

 
Penny wise, million dollar foolish

 Via Felix, a heartening tale of vulture funds[1] being told to fuck off by a judge. With bonus hilarity that they would probably have had a case to make that the Irish government had lost its sovereign immunity by doing business transactions in the USA ... except that the fund it was doing business with was registered in the Cayman Islands!

 Personally I think there should be a lot more of this; the commercial common law of England and Wales is a piece of intellectual property which is owned by British taxpayers (and mutatis mutandis the law of New York and Delaware), and if you want to licence that piece of IP, you ought to be paying taxes. I wouldn't put a blanket ban on the use of the courts by offshore entities, but people ought to be made more aware that one of the benefits of having straightforward tax affairs is that you can count on the legal system being there when you want it.

[1] Probably a nonstandard definition, but in my book if you lose money in the market then try to get it back in the courts, you're a vulture mate.
1 comments this item posted by the management 4/28/2012 09:32:00 AM

Friday, April 27, 2012

 
Skills-biased technological change?

Here's an example. Time was when it simply wasn't possible to make a career out of being an expert on what sizes of bags it was possible to zip yourself up in. But these days, a demand has been created for all sorts of niche skills.

The dead guy came from down the road from me, and his family are getting increasingly pissed off at the British defence/intelligence establishment's absurd denial of the obvious. I doubt this will calm them down much - the guy apparently tried and failed a hundred times to zip himself up in a holdall, but testified that "it isn't necessarily impossible".

Well, dream big, little sparrow but surely there has to come a point at which you have to face up to reality and admit that it can't be done? I am picturing a Hill Street Blues style boss-cop pounding the table and saying "I'm taking you off the case, Pulowski!". While the yoga expert waves with his one hand still sticking out of the bag, and you hear a muffled cry of "just give me twenty four hours boss!".

Bottom line - if there is a guy in a bag, then either he zipped himself up in it, or someone else zipped him up in it.  If it's a dead spy in the bag and a weirdly clean DNA-free environment, then one of the top candidates for the zipping role is "another spy". If anyone tries to tell me that the Occam's Razor solution is that he did it himself, I am seriously going to question their judgement.

Update: thanks, oh New Google Template, for getting rid of my line breaks and half the text.  Perhaps for your next task you could fuck up the search engine?  That seems to have got off lightly from the treatment meted out to Reader, Blogger, Mail and now Groups.  So far.
11 comments this item posted by the management 4/27/2012 06:54:00 AM


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