By John | February 10, 2010
If global warming hasn’t frightened your socks off yet, then take a look at these two news items:
1. The UK is likely to run out of soil in the next 60 years. Other countries are similarly affected:
An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the [...]
By John | January 21, 2010
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, gave a speech at the University of Exeter this week. He uses an example of “Sudoku for Economists” (pdf file, 47 kB) to illustrate why the mess the world economy is in is unlikely to get any better. He produces a small 9-celled “sudoku table”, to [...]
By John | January 18, 2010
I noticed an article in the Daily Mail today about what Spanish air traffic controllers earn (here). I thought that must be typical exaggeration by the popular press, but decided to see if I find out what they “really” earn. It turns out that the figures are probably accurate – here’s an article in El [...]
By John | December 12, 2009
Wal-Mart gave up trying to compete in Germany in 2006, unable to compete effectively against Aldi and Lidl.
Nonetheless, I was surprised to read in the latest Harvard Business Review (link to a summary of the article), that six German “hard discounters” (their term for discounters like Aldi and Lidl) are in the top [...]
Also posted in Germany, Management |
By John | December 8, 2009
Given the effort the music industry puts into chasing file downloaders for lost revenue, you would think that they would be punctilious about setting a good example to their customers. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The Canadian Recording Industry Association is currently being sued for not paying copyright on some 300 000 songs, which [...]
By John | September 19, 2009
There’s an article in ars technica about “big content”:
Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are lobbying Congress to legislate the payment of performance fees into downloaded music. If music publishers get their way, they’ll be able to extract additional licensing fees from music downloads, movies, and TV shows containing their music, and even 30-second previews…
The people [...]
By John | September 10, 2009
I wouldn’t have thought you need to have a degree from the LSE to realise that the most effective way to reduce global CO2 emissions is to reduce the population. However that is what they have just stated in a new report (Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost):
It’s always been obvious that total emissions depend [...]
Today’s El País contains a cartoon, of a minister saying:
Ampliaremos la edad de jubilación a los setenta, pero no os preocupeis, a partir le los cuarenta ya no os contrataremos
(“We’ll raise the retirement age to 70, but don’t worry, we won’t hire anyone over 40.”)
Which is reflects perfectly the current thinking of nearly all [...]
Also posted in Management, Politics |
There’s a good, short piece by Maurice Saatchi in today’s Times on how the property bubble crept up on us without being noticed. It criticizes the focus – at least in the UK – on the consumer price index, which measures the rate of inflation on the weekly shopping basket, but doesn’t take account [...]
It annoys me that governments in many countries charge you an involuntary license fee for public service TV, whether you actually watch it or not. This might have been a good idea many decades ago, when the infrastructure for TV broadcasting needed to be built up. But these days, when public TV largely duplicates programming [...]
Also posted in Europe, On the web |
