Just wondering

Rather than follow condign  and bateleur  down the rabbit hole of specifics, here's an attempt to answer the big question Condign was asking in his tax rant. What's wrong with Philip Green's behaviour?

Let's start with a closed economy. You've got a government, a tax system and a population. The first two exist only by the sufferance of the third. And it is a ( Read more... )

Well, things have started with a bang this year. Ruben Peter Lloyd came into the world at 1:48 on the first of January, giving him the nice, easy to write birth date of 1/1/11. Nice to know he'll never be stuck for a conversation starter when filling in forms.


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Saudi's arrest vulture. Presumably to one up the Iranian pigeon arresters.

Once again, John Allison reminds me of all the great music I've missed this year.

Now with added YouTube's of each artist...

You might remember at the start of the recession there was a spate of stories about how renewable power was in trouble now the recession had hit. Well, growth has slowed in a lot of places, but there's still growth. Here, on the other hand, is what's happened to the US coal industry ( Read more... )

It's been drifting up for the last couple of months, and oil broke through $90 today. Perhaps worth noting that last time we had major price spikes there was all kinds of geo-political instability and not much oil coming out of Iraq. Now things are a lot calmer. This is, if you like, the 'natural' market price.

Electric cars launching again in the USA. I actually suspect they'll catch on quicker in Europe, where Project Better Place is busily trying to create country wide charging networks. That's hard to do in the USA where the distances involved are just so much bigger. Once those are in place corporate fleets will switch across very quickly for the ( Read more... )

Lots to worry about in this article. 50% of kids never play in the street? Really? I did. Loads. At least till we moved to live on a main road.

I would, however, like to say that the Dutch have got it right, just like it says. There are pitches everywhere, and not just for football - hockey is the other big sport. In Haarlem they tend to be big ( Read more... )

A report into the safety practices at the uranium mines in Niger was one of the last things I worked on in my climate change role. At the time it was clear that things were less than ideal, and now we learn that the waste pools are leaking.