Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
Does anyone have any idea what might be done about the pointless blob of white space above this paragraph? It seems to be resistant to all my efforts. Update haha, it succumbed.
Friday, July 03, 2009
The Seals Of Dimblebore
Here's an evening's slightly masochistic amusement for people who are no longer of an age and constitution to play the Withnail and I drinking game. Sit down and watch "Question Time" on the BBC, and try to applaud every time the audience does, for an equal length of time and with equal intensity. I guarantee that you will end the show with a pair of hands looking like two lumps of Sainsbury's "Value Pack" rump steak. Why does that audience applaud so much, often at quite transparently idiotic points? The Max Atkinson politicians' trick bag can only explain part of it. I think that as a nation, we're just getting more clappy.
I tell you what though, playing that game introduced me to an entirely new experience - that of being glad that Harriet Harman was speaking.
posted by the management 7/03/2009 01:48:00 PM
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Real exchange rates
This story (via) reminds me of one of the first ever posts on D-Squared Digest, on the subject of the astonishing cheapness of British public officials and MPs, relative to the price of buying one in the USA.
As you can see, the going rate is $25,000 to have dinner at the publisher's house with 20 people, including "business leaders" (who might also have paid to be there), "opinion formers" (I think this means journos), "Congress members" (but presumably not important committee members or they'd have said, "advocacy leaders" (NGO types) and "other select minds" (presumably family members of the person hosting the thing).
Right, $25,000 is roughly fifteen grand sterling; can we do this? I've got a dining table with extension bits - twenty people would be a bit of a squeeze but doable. I bet I could get the catering done for under a thou, surely? So, what's the cost of eighteen great and goods (I'm assuming that clients will realise that when I say 20 guests, me and the missus are a gimme).
Hacks are surely still available for a free dinner and a crate of light ale - Ozdiller stores is doing slabs of Tyskie for £15, but I suspect that I would be pushing it too far if I got more than three or four of them to my "Salon". So say £100 for four journalists - three @ £15, plus £55 for a decent mixed half-case from Majestic to bring in someone at more of the senior editorial columnist level. I might push the boat out substantially more for a Max Hastings or Simon Jenkins figure, but if I did, it would substitute for some of the higher-ticket attendees further down the bill.
"Advocacy leaders" sound like they'd come a bit more expensive as you have to have someone who's more recognisably in charge of something in order to make it clear that your person from Oxfam isn't the manager of a charity shop. But on the other hand, they're quite poorly paid and I think I could gather a brace for no more than £150 a head, so £300 cash outlay.
Now it starts getting a bit more expensive. "Staffers" means Special Advisors in the British context - most of these people are either slumming academics or hacks with ideas above their station, but lots of them have developed expensive tastes I think that we're talking case of decent champers money. And you probably need at least four of them to make the event look like it's got the movers and shakers. I don't see myself filling out the SpAd ranks for less than three grand.
and then we need MPs and "business leaders", and the "business leaders" are going to have to look at least reasonably respectable. On the other hand, of course, the sponsors paying for the thing will consider themselves to be "business leaders" and there's an obvious opportunity to double-dip here. So I get maybe two business leaders at zero cost, and shell out perhaps a grand's worth of bribery to get a solid FTSE350 CEO along. Be conservative, say £1500 budget for three business leaders.
Now, elected representatives don't come super cheap, but they're not wildly expensive and I think I can get away with presenting a decidedly mixed bag in terms of quality. Say one PPS, one former minister has-been, one cheeky chappie backbencher with a media profile and one callow young no-mark. Average cost, what, £1500 a body? £4500 for four MPs strikes me as reasonable.
That leaves two spots to fill with "other select minds", who might be random friends and family available for zip, but just to be sure I'll assume this means after dinner speakers. Two from the cheaper end of this price list means a final £3k.
So that makes ... what ... £1000 catering, £100 hacks, £300 advocates, £3000 SpAds, £1500 businessmen, £4500 MPs, £3000 jokers - £13,400. So that's £1600 for my profit - to be honest, this seems rather crappy return, particularly as it has to cover the cost of getting my carpet cleaned once they've all effed off. I bet that the Washington Post is hoping to get at least a 20% gross margin on this one, clearing $50k for the series of ten.
On the basis of this calculation, I therefore conclude that British opinion-formers are too expensive relative to American ones, and that therefore the pound is overvalued.
Update: Ajay, in comments, suggests plausibly that the double-dipping is fundamental to this wheeze. Selling the first one covers the costs, but selling the same "Salon" (oh god, cringe) to a second "sponsor" is pure profit. That clearly changes the economics of the whole thing and makes the exchange rate call a little more complicated. So scratch that one.
posted by the management 7/02/2009 07:23:00 AM
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Swells, shrivels
I was just looking around to see what Steven Wells thought about the USA vs Spain game, and found he's gone and died on us. What a fucking shame. He was probably the first journalist who I actually recognised as being a distinct entity, having previously more or less assumed that the stuff in the NME and the papers was produced by an undifferentiated blob of miscellaneous employees. I knew he'd been sick because he quite famously wrote about it:
And suddenly it hits me. I'm poleaxed, sobbing uncontrollably. I feel very vulnerable and very, very scared. This is followed by 24 tedious hours of horribly gothic adolescent introspection during which almost every conscious line of thought concludes with, "But what's the point if you're going to die anyway?"
Who'd have thought that post-traumatic shock would have so much in common with being a Radiohead fan?
Swells was utterly reprehensible in many ways; self-obsessed, totally wrongheaded on most important issues, often quite callous and with a pretty juvenile tendency toward provocation for its own sake. But at least he wasn't fucking boring; at the end of the day this will also presumably be Julie Burchill's defence when she faces the Great Scorer. RIP.
posted by the management 6/25/2009 06:42:00 AM
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Oh nukemen, will you never change?
Felix hops down to a sandwich show, at which apparently great big swigs of industry Kool-Aid were served to wash down the Pret a Manger. Apparently, the presiding GE nukeman:
was there, talking about nuclear power, and specifically what he calls a PRISM reactor — a fourth-generation nuclear power station which runs on the nuclear waste generated by all the previous generations of nuclear power stations.
Wow! That sounds fantastic, safe, carbon-neutral and most importantly cheap! So, tell me more about this "Integral Fast Reactor", of which you speak:
They’re super-safe: if they fail they just stop working, they don’t melt down. And they can even literally replace coal power stations:
This sounds even better than the old breeder reactors, the last miracle technology to come out of the nuke industry that was going to solve all our energy needs without any of that nasty "radioactive" (wiggles fingers) stuff. And you say that this runs on waste material?
Fast reactors also solve at a stroke the problem of what to do with the vast amounts of nuclear waste which are being stockpiled unhappily around the world.
So, you can just take that nasty toxic waste and basically shovel it into your new IFR reactor and it works!
... (tumbleweeds, crickets)
The answer is unfortunately no. You have to reprocess the waste before it can be used in the IFR. Specifically, you have to reprocess a hell of a lot of it, via a process that has never been made to work on a commercial scale[1] before you can even get started. That's why the only country that's ever had a serious look at this technology (France) decided that this was a technology way too expensive and speculative even for them.
Ahhh, nukemen.
[1] See past nukemen posts. Lots and lots of things work in labs but can't be scaled, basically because the size and number of blemishes and cracks in an item scales roughly as a power of its size, while the size of atoms doesn't. Very big things, made to very high tolerances, are very expensive.
posted by the management 6/24/2009 09:00:00 AM
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
If this is analysis of Anti-Semitic tropes in contemporary media, I want my £20,000 back
Back in March, Denis MacShane (who is a privy councillor[1]) took office as Chairman of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism. In the press release announcing his appointment, the EISCA proudly announced that the report on antisemitic discourse that was commissioned from it last March would finally be published "this spring".
Tomorrow is Midsummer's Day, a point at which I think we can declare spring to be officially over on anybody's definition, and no report. In between times, MacShane's main activity as Chairman appears to have been deleting the EISCA blog and breaking all old links to it (I think that most of the material is still there in the "archives" of the main EISCA website but I can't tell and it's impossible to check). MacShane himself has been busy, obviously, telling Zimbabwegians that everything's OK now and they should go home and campaigning against other people being paid more than Denis MacShane, but EISCA itself appears to have produced precisely zero in the first hundred days of MacShane's appointment. It is also overdue on its Companies House return which was due on 3 April. Update: ach, apparently Companies House webcheck won't let you link directly to searches; EISCA's Company No. is 06140653 if you want to see for yourself. Note as well that the entire purpose of the annual return is to keep CH up to date with important changes like, say, a new chairman, and also that it's actually a criminal offence to be 28 days late. I've sent what I hoep will be taken as a friendly heads-up to Stephen Pollard, as I suspect that although he's no longer Chairman, it will be him in the frame as far as CH are concerned.)
This is too bad, in my opinion. I am slightly annoyed about the twenty thousand quid - I am now beginning to believe that no publishable report was ever delivered, and the DCLG's continued failure to so much as reply to my inquiries gives me no confidence whatsoever in this regard. But I'm much more concerned with the general practice of people accepting appointments to "thinktanks" which don't seem to produce any "think". Stephen Pollard and now Denis MacShane have both added a small but measurable amount of gravitas to their political views by claiming chairmanship of EISCA, which is out of any reasonable proportion to what the institute has actually achieved. And I only happen to know about EISCA because it was started up by Pollard, who is one of the journalists I have on my watchlist - as I've said before, how many other such "Institutes" are there out there, doing nothing but gild the CVs of policy entrepreneurs?
Quite apart from anything else, MacShane ought to be worried about the potential reputational exposure to himself, given that he is already the subject of one controversy regarding a thinktank. A semi-attached floating corporate vehicle which doesn't carry out an activity is always a potential source of problems, which is why a wise man thinks two or three times about the directorships he accepts.
(Note that both the European Policy Institute, which is not the same thing as EPIN, and EISCA, which is not the same thing as the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, have names which are easy to confuse with similar and much more substantial operations. This confusion must be irritating to EPIN and the Roth Institute, and reflects an additional cost of the proliferation of Potemkin thinktanks).
[1] I know! Privy cleaner, now that I could have believed.
Update: A bit of internet digging reveals that although MacShane typically lists on his CV that he was "Director of the European Policy Institute, 1992-94", what actually happened according to this oration on his taking a job at Birkbeck College is that he founded it himself in 1992, and ceased to be its director when he became an MP; he was an "Associate Director" according to the register of members' interests until 2002. I don't think this is consistent with the statement in the Mail story that "The EPI was set up 20 years ago by a network of people on the Left working in Europe and the US"; it is true that it published things in the 1990s, like this pamphlet; it even had a subsidiary called "Epic Books. But I can't see any evidence of anything it's done in the last ten years, and it's apparently now "administrated" by MacShane's brother, who is a poet and playwright with no easily available history of policy involvement. In my opinion as the Chairman-Designate of the soon-to-be-launched British Institute of Urology[2], this is taking the piss.
[2] A joke. Actually, it would be highly unlikely that I'd be allowed to register this as a company limited by guarantee like EISCA, as both "British" and "Institute" are reserved words, and the right to call something the "Institute of Urology" is the exclusive property of University College London under the UCL Act 1988.
posted by the management 6/23/2009 03:18:00 AM
Covering the issues that matter!
In the early days of blogging, a particular comments moderation policy was independently invented by a number of us, specifically that "if something would earn you a punch in the face if you said it to someone in a pub, you're not allowed to write it in a blog comments section".
It appears that a new generation has come up, who need to be reminded of the corollary - that "if a phrase would be banned from your blog comments section, it's probably not a good idea to say it out loud to a gang of angry lads outside a nightclub".
posted by the management 6/23/2009 12:44:00 AM
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