Quotulatiousness

March 26, 2013

Irish municipal workers fear for their jobs after fixing a pothole … without getting Health & Safety approval first

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:05

There are some stories which are just too silly for words:

THREE county council workers have been suspended from duty for attempting to fill in a pothole outside Carrigaline.

There has been outrage at the suspensions, which were imposed by the local authority after a health and safety inspector came across the workers carrying out unscheduled repairs to a road.

The outdoor crew were suspended on full pay pending an inquiry, and are now fearing for their jobs.
Council workers must pre-plan road works, fill in reports detailing the repairs to be carried out, and use the appropriate signage to alert the public.

It’s understood workers were on their way back to a council depot in Carrigaline when they spotted a large pothole on the road surface.

They decided to stop their vehicle to repair the pothole, even though it was not on their official list of jobs. They had earlier been carrying out scheduled repairs on the Carrigaline to Crosshaven road.

A health and safety inspector came across the workers carrying out the unofficial repairs and reported them to the local authority for a breach of health and safety guidelines.

March 17, 2013

Debunking St. Patrick

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

In Slate, David Plotz separates the myth from what is known about the real St. Patrick:

Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the Irishman who didn’t rid the land of snakes, didn’t compare the Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn’t even Irish. St. Patrick, who died 1,507, 1,539, or 1,540 years ago today — depending on which unreliable source you want to believe — has been adorned with centuries of Irish blarney. Innumerable folk tales recount how he faced down kings, negotiated with God, tricked and slaughtered Ireland’s reptiles.

The facts about St. Patrick are few. Most derive from the two documents he probably wrote, the autobiographical Confession and the indignant Letter to a slave-taking marauder named Coroticus. Patrick was born in Britain, probably in Wales, around 385 A.D. His father was a Roman official. When Patrick was 16, seafaring raiders captured him, carried him to Ireland, and sold him into slavery. The Christian Patrick spent six lonely years herding sheep and, according to him, praying 100 times a day. In a dream, God told him to escape. He returned home, where he had another vision in which the Irish people begged him to return and minister to them: “We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more,” he recalls in the Confession. He studied for the priesthood in France, then made his way back to Ireland.

He spent his last 30 years there, baptizing pagans, ordaining priests, and founding churches and monasteries. His persuasive powers must have been astounding: Ireland fully converted to Christianity within 200 years and was the only country in Europe to Christianize peacefully. Patrick’s Christian conversion ended slavery, human sacrifice, and most intertribal warfare in Ireland. (He did not banish the snakes: Ireland never had any. Scholars now consider snakes a metaphor for the serpent of paganism. Nor did he invent the Shamrock Trinity. That was an 18th-century fabrication.)

March 16, 2013

The Cyprus “rescue” includes nasty haircut for savings held in consumer banks

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:23

The BBC reports on the way Cypriot bank accounts are being levied as part of the “rescue”:

Cyprus may be one of the eurozone’s tiniest economies — its third smallest — but for the next 48 hours or so, it may be the single currency area’s most important.

The point is that there could be serious repercussions for other financially over-stretched economies, such as Spain’s and Italy’s, from the nature of Cyprus’s 10bn-euro (£8.7bn) bailout — which includes, for the first time in any eurozone rescue, losses imposed directly on depositors in banks.

These losses, running to almost 6bn euros, stem from an emergency levy of 9.9% on bank deposits over 100,000 euros (£86,600) and 6.75% below that.

The levy serves as a caution to lenders to banks that they should take care where they place their funds and avoid banks which overstretch themselves — as Cypriot banks did.

But precisely the same arguments — for what is known as a “bail-in” by private-sector creditors — were put by liberal-market purists at the peak of the banking crises in Ireland and Spain.

In the end, eurozone governments were terrified that if lenders to Spanish and Irish banks were punished, there would be a devastating domino effect of withdrawals of funds from banks in other weaker economies — a domino effect that would jeopardise the survival of the eurozone.

So, reckless lenders to Spanish and Irish banks were not punished.

There’s a strong possibility that savers in other European countries with weakened banking systems to draw the correct conclusion quickly … and start pulling their money out of the banking system. And also expect the EU to react with draconian currency restrictions. It’s a potential banking sauve qui peut.

January 3, 2013

Irish newspapers want to be paid when you link to them

Filed under: Business, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Ireland is an odd place, if this little brainstorm from their newspaper industry is any indication:

This is not a joke.

I have started with that clarification, because as you read this you will find yourself asking “Is this some kind of a joke?” I thought I would be helpful and put the answer right up at the start, so you can refer back to it as often as you require.

This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.

These assertions were not merely academic positions. The Newspaper Industry (all these newspapers) had its agent write out demanding money. They wrote to Women’s Aid, (amongst others) who became our clients when they received letters, emails and phone calls asserting that they needed to buy a licence because they had linked to articles in newspapers carrying positive stories about their fundraising efforts.

These are the prices for linking they were supplied with:

1 – 5 €300.00
6 – 10 €500.00
11 – 15 €700.00
16 – 25 €950.00
26 – 50 €1,350.00
50 + Negotiable

They were quite clear in their demands. They told Women’s Aid “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website.”

The rational response here is to honour their request … by pretending they’ve dropped off the internet altogether and never linking to any of the Irish newspaper websites.

November 23, 2012

Google the latest whipping boy in Australia over taxation

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Even if you scrupulously obey the multiple jurisdictional laws to legally minimize the amount of tax you pay, politicians can’t resist the opportunity to pillory you for not paying your “fair share”:

The Minister’s explanation of Google’s tax affairs is as follows:

    “While the day-to-day dealings of Australian firms advertising on Google might be with Google Australia, under the fine print of contracts Australian firms sign with Google, they are actually buying their advertising from an Irish subsidiary of Google.

    It is then argued that the source of this income — and therefore the taxing rights under our tax treaty — would be with Ireland rather than Australia. Despite Ireland’s relatively low company tax rate of 12.5 per cent, we have just started to build the sandwich.

    The next step is to route a royalty payment from the Irish operating subsidiary of Google to a Dutch subsidiary of Google, which is then paid back to a second Irish holding company subsidiary of Google that is controlled in Bermuda, which has no corporate tax.

    The first Irish subsidiary receives a tax deduction for the royalty payment to the Dutch subsidiary, substantially reducing the income subject to the 12.5 per cent Irish company tax rate.

    Under Dutch law, and because EU member countries do not charge withholding taxes on transfers within the EU, the transfers to and from the Netherlands are essentially tax free.

    And under Irish tax law, the second Irish resident subsidiary is not taxed on the royalty payment because it is controlled by managers elsewhere.

    The profits from the sale of advertising to an Australian firm then sit in a tax-free jurisdiction — possibly indefinitely.”

Tax lawyers — especially those who work on multinational levels — don’t create these situations out of whole cloth: it’s the politicians and revenue ministries that set up and maintain the tax rules. Corporations are legally required to pay taxes (as are individuals), but corporations are also legally required to conduct themselves in ways that maximize the profits for their shareholders. Finding ways to legally pay tax at a lower rate is a requirement. That companies like Apple and Google are big enough to take advantage of the “loopholes” deliberately created by the tax authorities is not a reason to bash Apple or Google. They can only take advantage of “loopholes” because this or that government tried to rig the system in a particular way. Changing or threatening to change the rules retrospectively is a really good way to indicate to foreign business that you really don’t want them operating in your territory.

Update: Snigger.

March 17, 2012

Happy (Biologist’s) St. Patrick’s Day

Filed under: Humour, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

I’m resurrecting this nerdy drinking song from last year… As many of you perceptive viewers noticed there were a couple alcohol-induced scientific errors in my last version of this song (gold star, perceptive viewers!) — so I thought this St. Patrick’s day would be a perfect time to correct them.

Lyrics:
In the year of our lord eighteen hundred and eleven
On March the seventeenth day
I will raise up a beer and I’ll raise up a cheer
For Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Here’s to brewers yeast, that humblest of all beasts
Producing carbon gas reducing acetaldehyde
But my friends that isn’t all — it makes ethyl alcohol
That is what the yeast excretes and that’s what we imbibe

Anaerobic isolation
Alcoholic fermentation
NADH oxidation
Give me a beer

[CHORUS]

My intestinal wall absorbs that ethanol
And soon it passes through my blood-brain barrier
There’s a girl in the next seat who I didn’t think that sweet
But after a few drinks I want to marry her
I guess it’s not surprising, my dopamine is rising
And my glutamate receptors are all shot
I’d surely be bemoaning all the extra serotonin
But my judgment is impaired and my confidence is not

Allosteric modulation
No Long Term Potentiation
Hastens my inebriation
Give me a beer

[CHORUS]

When ethanol is in me, some shows up in my kidneys
And inhibits vasopressin by degrees
A decrease in aquaporins hinders water re-absorption
And pretty soon I really have to pee
Well my liver breaks it down so my body can rebound
By my store of glycogen is soon depleted
And tomorrow when I’m sober I will also be hungover
Cause I flushed electrolytes that my nerves and muscles needed

Diuretic activation
Urination urination
Urination dehydration
Give me a beer

H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.

February 29, 2012

Ireland introduces the doomsday scenario: allowing voters to have a say on the Euro

Filed under: Europe, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

The EU is not a democratic institution, and is actively hostile to any attempt to consult the people as it tries to become a super-state. Ireland just tossed a medium-sized spanner into the works:

Premier Enda Kenny said Dublin was acting on legal advice from Ireland’s attorney-general that “on balance” the fiscal compact requires a vote under the country’s constitution. “It gives the Irish people the opportunity to reaffirm Ireland’s commitment to membership of the euro,” he told ashen-faced members of the Dail.

All three major parties back the treaty but analysts say there is a high risk of rejection by angry voters in the current fractious mood. The compact gives the EU intrusive powers to police the budgets of debtor states, and has been denounced as feudal bondage by Sinn Fein and Ireland’s vociferous eurosceptics. The Irish voted “No” to both the Nice and Lisbon treaties before being made to vote again. Dublin has ruled out a second vote this time.

The Taoiseach’s announcement sent the euro into sharp dive against the dollar, though it rebounded later. Europe’s leaders thought they had tweaked the wording of the text just enough to avoid an Irish vote.

Note that last sentence closely. Avoiding consulting the very people who’ll be most affected is standard practice in the EU. Good for Ireland that they aren’t willing to be steamrolled yet again.

January 30, 2012

Irish bishop accused of hate speech

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Blogger “Archbishop Cranmer” is calling for an “I’m Spartacus” response to this pending prosecution of Bishop Philip Boyce:

The Most Reverend Dr Philip Boyce is the Catholic Lord Bishop of Raphoe. He preached a homily on 20th August 2011, entitled ‘To Trust in God’. His Grace reproduces it in its entirety, for the two sentences highlighted in bold have landed the Bishop in a bit of hot water.

Apparently, they constitute an incitement to hatred, at least according to ‘leading humanist’ John Colgan. And so the Gardai have thoroughly investigated the complaint and compiled a file which they have handed to the Republic’s Director of Public Prosecutions.

So what horrible things did the Bishop utter in his “incitement to hatred” that has John Colgan so upset?

The moment of history we live through in Ireland at present is certainly a testing one for the Church and for all of us. Attacked from the outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture: rocked from the inside by the sins and crimes of priests and consecrated people, we all feel the temptation to lose confidence. Yet, our trust is displayed and deepened above all when we are in troubled and stormy waters. It is easier to be confident when we ride on the crest of a wave, when the tide is coming in. Not so easy, however, yet every bit as necessary, when what is proclaimed by the Church namely the truth of faith with its daily practice and influence on behaviour, is under severe pressure.

[. . .]

Indeed unless we trust in a higher power, in God himself, what hope can we have? St. Paul told his converts at Ephesus that before they came to know Christ, they were “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). We need the radiance of a hope that looks beyond the horizons of space and time, one as Pope Benedict teaches “that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance” (Spe Salvi No. 35). For the distinguishing mark of Christian believers is “the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness…. To come to know God — the true God — means to receive hope” (Ibid, No. 2.3). We thank God for the faith, that enables us to trust in Him.

Perhaps I’m just particularly dense but the bold sentences above are apparently the “hate speech” nuggets in question. I don’t see it myself…

John Colgan said of these two sentences: “I believe statements of this kind are an incitement to hatred of dissidents, outsiders, secularists, within the meaning of the (Incitement to Hatred) Act, who are perfectly good citizens within the meaning of the civil law. The statements exemplify the chronic antipathy towards secularists, humanists etc, which has manifested itself in the ostracising of otherwise perfectly good Irish citizens, who do not share the aims of the Vatican’s Irish Mission Church.”

January 26, 2012

Ireland’s septic protest

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Elizabeth sent me a link to this Independent.ie article which allowed Lise Hand to dig deep into the Irish septic tank issue while managing not to get too potty-mouthed:

These doughty lads of the West weren’t messing about with a bit of chanting and poster-waving in the manner of an, ahem, bog-standard protest outside Leinster House. Not a bit of it, having driven since dawn in buses up from the corners of Galway, the attitude was, when we’re out, we’re out.

And so the Charge of the Septic Tank Brigade to the gates of Leinster was a colourful affair. They had brought a toilet with them and all, as a pertinent prop to illustrate their admanatine opposition to the introduction of a €50 septic-tank registration charge — a charge which affects rural Ireland, as it’s being imposed on almost half a million households who are not part of a public-sewage scheme.

What’s more, if any tanks fail an inspection, householders will be obliged to upgrade or replace them, which could cost thousands of euro.

And so, the several hundred men (and a few women) from the West were in fighting form on Kildare Street yesterday afternoon. And along with the toilet — which proved a handy seat for the protest’s organiser, Padraig ‘An Tailliura’ O’Conghaola from Rossaveal who was minding the megaphone and trying to keep a bit of order on proceedings.

There was an impressive array of giant paintings on black banners, tastefully depicting images such as sunsets and sailboats and a puzzled-looking lassie sitting on a toilet.

And there was quite a smorgasbord of slogans being waved about: from Winston Churchill’s observation, “We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle”; to more earthy exhortations, such as: “Septic Tank Charges are A Pain in the Hole”; and the bi-lingual “‘Cac’ Hogan RIP — Ireland’s Saddam Hussein”; to the pithy enjoinder, “Get A Grip — Stand Up to Europe”.

July 24, 2011

Bank of Ireland “suffered a restructuring credit event”

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

I’m not fluent in banker . . . does this Reuters report really say that the Bank of Ireland is in default?

The ISDA said a restructuring credit event occurred after Bank of Ireland closed an offer to buy back about 2.6 billion euros of Tier 1 and Tier 2 subordinated debt at a discount of up to 90 percent earlier this month.

A credit event is financial industry jargon for default on payment, breach of bond covenants or other event that casts doubt on an issuer’s ability to service its debt.

If it does mean the bank is in default, how come it hasn’t received much attention in the media? (Aside from the focus being on Norway right now for other reasons, of course.)

H/T to Karl Denninger for the link.

July 14, 2011

The Eurozone crises

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:30

That’s right, crises, not crisis. There are three interlinked crises, not just one:

The crisis in the Eurozone has been lurching from one country to another over the past year or so. After bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and with a second bailout for Greece in the offing, the financial markets this week turned their attention to Italy, a far larger economy than those previously affected. Spain, another country struggling to pay its way, has also been hit by austerity measures and political turmoil. But while it is easy to get caught up in the specifics of each new stage of the crisis, it is worth taking a step back to understand what is going on and the possibilities for the future.

The Euro crisis, like just about every other economic story these days, has a three-fold character. It is not, in fact, a single crisis; it has three inter-related elements: financial, economic and political.

Of the three, the financial crisis is, paradoxically, the least significant, even though it is the most prominent of the three and the one which threatens to spin out of control with serious broader consequences. Alongside the financial, the economic aspect is the most entrenched and material of the three, while the political crisis — that is, the failure of the political elites to get on top of the other two challenges — is the most critical, as it is, or should have been, the key to the resolution of the other two. The shift in focus to Italy, the Eurozone’s third largest economy, indicates that time may have run out for effective containment. The Euro genie is probably out of the bottle.

March 26, 2011

Cheap flights (with subtitles)

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

H/T to Roger Henry for the link.

February 24, 2011

The core of the Irish financial crisis

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:13

Theodore Dalrymple explains the underlying reason for Ireland’s financial woes:

If you want to study the economic crisis of the last few years, go to Ireland, where you will find it in its purest form. Ireland is a small country, with a population of just 4.4 million, and the connection between clientelistic politics, bankers’ cupidity, and the mass psychology of bubble markets is easiest to comprehend there.

Dotted around the country, outside of almost every town and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, are housing estates — completed, half-completed, and never-to-be-completed — which are unsaleable, will almost certainly never be inhabited, and are destined to fall into graceless ruins. Some 300,000 new dwellings now stand empty in the Irish Republic, a number whose equivalent in the United States would be approximately 21 million.

[. . .]

A house in Shrewsbury Road, Dublin, sold for $80 million in 2005 but, now standing empty, is on the way to dereliction, and no house on the road — a millionaires’ row — has sold for the last two years, despite a fall in prices of at least 66 percent. During the boom, taxi drivers and shop assistants would tell you about the third or fourth house they had bought — on borrowed money, of course — and of their apartments in Europe, from Malaga to Budapest to the Black Sea Coast of Bulgaria. It was not so much a boom as a gold rush, or a modern reenactment of the Tulipomania.

February 3, 2011

How bad is Ireland’s banking situation? Try “spectacularly bad” and you’re close

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:28

Michael Lewis tries to provide some idea of the scale of the problem to American readers:

It had been two years since a handful of Irish politicians and bankers decided to guarantee all the debts of the country’s biggest banks, but the people were only now getting their minds around what that meant for them. The numbers were breathtaking. A single bank, Anglo Irish, which, two years before, the Irish government had claimed was merely suffering from a “liquidity problem,” faced losses of up to 34 billion euros. To get some sense of how “34 billion euros” sounds to Irish ears, an American thinking in dollars needs to multiply it by roughly one hundred: $3.4 trillion. And that was for a single bank. As the sum total of loans made by Anglo Irish, most of it to Irish property developers, was only 72 billion euros, the bank had lost nearly half of every dollar it invested.

That’s one of the three big banks the Irish government had to help. The other two may be in worse shape. You could say Ireland’s banks are awful:

Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism, the Irish bankers set some kind of record for destruction. Theo Phanos, a London hedge-fund manager with interests in Ireland, says that “Anglo Irish was probably the world’s worst bank. Even worse than the Icelandic banks.”

Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. But while Icelandic males used foreign money to conquer foreign places — trophy companies in Britain, chunks of Scandinavia — the Irish male used foreign money to conquer Ireland. Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From one another. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10 trillion.) At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.

As mentioned in this post yesterday, the Irish who can do so are starting to head to greener pastures. A thousand a week in net emigration over the last year and a half.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

February 2, 2011

Thousands are sailing flying

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

Patricia Treble reports on the new wave of Irish emigration:

With their economy in a tailspin and bad financial news piling up, the Irish people are voting with their feet—they’re leaving the Emerald Isle at the rate of 1,000 a week. Last Thursday, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) published a grim forecast: net outward migration will reach 100,000 in the two years ending in April 2012.

Packing up and leaving in dire times is nothing new for Ireland. In the 1800s, millions fled the island’s famines and disease for the chance of a better life in countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia. Even recently, there have been waves of emigration. The last time the emigration numbers were as high as they are now was in 1989, when 44,000 fled the economically depressed nation. Soon after, Ireland cut taxes, attracted massive foreign investment and transformed itself into a Celtic Tiger. Property prices soared along with personal wealth.

It’s always a good time for some Pogues music:

Older Posts »
« « A tribute (of sorts) to Wiarton Willie| Tools for protest marchers: anti-kettling app » »

Powered by WordPress