Something interesting from Belgium

No, really!

Inadvertently, the Region of Flanders in Belgium is positioning itself as a retirement haven for retired entrepreneurs from all over Europe.  In reaction to a decision of the European Court of Justice, Flanders has changed its inheritance tax legislation so that these businessmen can come and live in Flanders and save on inheritance tax on their estate.

This looks like it's going to be a scheme which is open to all but the smallest business owners, and once you're in, the rate of inheritance tax applied is Nil.

Toyota Prius

The Sunday Times assessed the economy of the greens favourite motor, the Toyota Prius, with an oil-burning BMW 5-Series.

And the BMW turned out to be more efficient than the gas guzzling Prius.

David Cameron, who found the Prius too small for his requirements, will be mightily relieved. 

(Via Lubos Motls) 

Government in miniature

Rumour reaches me of another government IT fiasco. Apparently the grandly-named Scottish Commission for the Regulation of Care (SCRC) has created a shambles with its system for carers to report on how they're getting on.

Back in the good old days, childminders had a simple business relationship with their customers. If you had to go out to work, you probably found a friend or relative who had children of their own to look after and came to a mutually acceptable arrangement to have them look after your kids too. Money changed hands, and the child went to the childminder for as long as both parties were happy with the arrangement.

In Labour's brave new world, this is not allowed. If someone is going to accept money for childminding, they have to register with the bureaucracy and do as they are told. They have to fill in lots (that's LOTS) of forms, which need to be processed by a whole new bureaucracy set up for the purpose. Another lot of parasites bureaucrats will demand access to the childminder's home to inspect whether it meets the bureaucracy's definition of "suitable" and "safe" or not. They can demand any changes they want. If the cost is too high, that's tough. You can't be a childminder. If the parent has a different opinion on what is suitable and safe, that's irrelevant too. The bureaucracy has spoken. You may not hold opinions different to those of the state.

Now remember that childminding is not a well-paid job. So the result of the government's actions is almost certainly that there will be fewer childminders - who is going to want to go through all that pain, paperwork and cost just to earn a few extra quid a week? This effect is made worse by the fact that the government limits the numbers of children that a childminder can care for at any one time. Again, you have to wonder why they think that parents and childminder aren't felt to be sufficiently grown-up to make these decisions between them.

But that's not all. Every year, SCRC requires childminders to make an annual return. This seems to involve having childminders complete a whole lot more paperwork (it would do, wouldn't it?). There's a self-assessment form to be filled in by the childminder, there's surveys of parents so that they can waste their time too, and there's a new website to negociate. Quite why I, as a parent, have to tell somebody else whether I'm happy with the childminding service is beyond me. If I wasn't happy, why the hell would I send my child there? This isn't being done for my benefit is it?

So cui bono? It goes without saying that there is a whole new bureaucracy to look after the annual returns too. So the chief beneficiaries would appear to be the SCRC themselves. What a bunch of parasites.

Anyway, because they're bang up to date with all the latest interwebby stuff, the SCRC has decided that annual returns can be completed via a whizzy new website. Except that (and we might have expected this) it isn't whizzy at all. It has apparently fallen over big time, with childminders having spent literally days preparing data which has disappeared, apparently without trace, into the bowels of the computer. Apparently some carers have been reduced to dictating their returns to SCRC staff over the phone. These are the lucky ones, because apparently the phones are being diverted to answering machines now.

So we have a set of procedures that are not needed and a bureaucracy that nobody wants, all supported by a computer system that doesn't work.

Government in miniature. 

Today's must read article

An alarming article at Spy Blog.

Danger ! Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill Part 6 tries to remove even the limited constitutional safeguards of the "destroy Parliament" Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006

Read the whole thing, and then weep.

New in the blogroll

This is the first addition to my blogroll for a while - Head of Legal, the blog of a barrister turned writer.

What are schools for?

Robert X Cringely writes a provocative piece on what schools are for in the age of Google. Or rather, he wonders whether there is actually a need for them at all. Well worth a look.

More recognition for Climate Audit

The environmental activists at Nature may refuse to link to Climate Audit but this sort of silliness is not universal. As a reader points out to me via email, the University College London Environmental Change Institute not only links to CA from its blogroll, but also carries the full blog as a feed direct to its own pages. Following Steve McIntyre's invitation to address faculty and students at Georgia Tech, this looks like further evidence that the right for sceptical views to be heard is being won.

This recognition is well-deserved, of course, and makes the Climate Audit denialist position of Nature look even sillier than it did before. This will not change their position, of course.

("Climate Audit denialism". I like that.)

H/T to Frederick Colbourne via email. 

Liberal Youth

According to this, the LibDem youth wing is to be relaunched as Liberal Youth. They were previously called Lib Dem Youth and Students.

Is there any significance in the party dropping the "Dem" bit from the party name. Are they to be liberals, pure and simple, and not just another more-than-usually-woolly social democrat party?  If you look at their policy documents they still seem to be the old orgy of tax and spend that have characterised the party's platform of recent years. There is, however a suggestion that the whole range of policies will be revamped following the relauch. Let's hope so, but let's not hold our breath either, shall we?

Women's studies

Via Croziervision, this story at Laban Tall's:

Women's Studies as a distinct undergraduate discipline will disappear this October, when the last institution offering first degrees, London Metropolitan University (formerly Hoxton Working Men's Club) stops taking undergrads. According to this Today report (RealAudio, 15 mins in) it's down to lack of demand.

There are very few things that the government have got right in the last ten years. Independence for the Bank of England was one. The other (and I can only think of the two) was the imposition of fees for university education. Suddenly, doing the student bit is no longer a matter of "an amusingly tipsy way of spending three years" or "a lifestyle choice", but a matter of finding a way to do something that is useful to society - which is to say, something that people are willing to pay for. It's small wonder that people are now avoiding mickey mouse degrees in favour of something which might actually give them a living at the end of it.

The counter-argument to my hypothesis is that a university education is not vocational - it's about interacting with clever people, broadening ones mind, having the time to think, blah, blah, rhubarb. To which I would respond that we've got the internet now.  You want mind broadening? Find a decent chatroom.

Another global warming sceptic

Professor Laurence I Gould, a physicist from the University of Hartford writes an opinion piece of the newsletter of the New England section of the American Physical Society:

The world has been inundated with claims about dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Such claims continue to be advocated by a number of scientists, believed by frightened citizens, prominently featured in the mass media, urged to be acted on by many politicians, held to be true by a variety of business people, and spread through educational institutions. As a result, there has emerged a predominant AGWA [my acronym for AGW Alarmist (or Alarmism)] point of view. That point of view probably stems from a confluence of interactions explained through sociology, psychology, philosophy, politics, economics, the media, and science. Only a few of those issues can be treated here — and then, only briefly.

I think it urgent that members of the scientific community should know about some of the issues being propagated. It is urgent because of the dangers to physics in particular, and to science and, consequently, to civilization (depending so heavily as it does on science) in general.

The global warming enthusiasts have been known to call, from time to time, for sceptics ("denialists") to be tried for crimes against humanity. Those of us on the other side of the debate might wonder what steps the scientific community will take against those who have promoted the scam with such vehemence, once the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

Via Greenie Watch. 

I enjoyed this

I'm not desperately inspired at the moment. So instead of writing something useful here's some things that other people have written. I enjoyed this post from Brian Micklethwait's Education Blog

I am more than ever convinced that if the entire state education system were to drop dead tomorrow morning, that would be a great improvement for some people immediately, for many people in a few weeks, for most people in a few months, and for almost everyone in a few years.  After a decade, the results would be miraculous.

And also this rather amusing primer on the US Sub-prime mortgage debacle, which I found on the Volokh Conspiracy. You need to click the screen to go through the slides.

One side of the story

The BBC is trumpeting a UN report on the loss of ice from glaciers.

The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, new data says.

Which begs the question of what has happened to the others. Has the rate more than halved? Or are they in fact growing. Helpfully, Biased BBC points out that Arctic Sea ice is back to normal and the world has endured its coldest winter for decades, so it's probably fair to say that global catastrophe is not yet upon us.

Ah, but the UN are talking about glaciers, not icecaps, I hear you say. Well, take a look at this report from the Washington Post back in 1922 (H/T Anthony Watts).

 

Here's the text in more legible form:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

 Perspective is a wonderful thing.

Your tax money at work

It's probably too much to hope that heads might roll over this.

(Via Samizdata). 

Coal

Thought for the day:

Greens are calling for a moratorium on new coal fired power stations. Would they have still been making these demands if we still had a mining industry? 

Homework is rubbish

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, a trade union, has called for homework to be scrapped.

The cynics among us would probably assume that they just didn't want to do the marking. The extremely cynical might point out that they don't anyway. 

I'm cynical on many things, but actually this is not such a bad idea. Certainly the baby Bishops are knackered when they get home from school and we tend to have great crises over getting anything done. I'd rather they were out playing in the garden.

Interestingly, one book I've seen on helping children with their studies said quite plainly that homework was a waste of time and that you should just do it for them. I certainly can't see much point in "make up a sentence including the word "today" (or "yesterday" or "birthday"). Is this useful?

The downside I would see in the plan would be that I would have absolutely no way of gauging my children's progress. Seeing their homework is as much information as I get. But I'd certainly be willing to trade regular reports for no homework.