Olympic Coins

I don't really mind the 9 year old's drawing. It's that it also has that bastard pile of shit fucking logo on it.

Can we do this?

From The Daily Mash:

THE row over MPs' expenses escalated last night as voters across Britain agreed to hire Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas.

With MPs threatening to claim expenses for legal action over their expenses claims, voters said they would now bring in the New York-based consultant to recover their money through a series of intensive, face-to-face meetings.

Heffer on Expenses

I sometimes think that Heffer is off the mark, but he's quite brilliant here on MPs expenses. But one passage got me thinking:-

Of course, if you don't want to stand again, you can tell Sir Thomas where to put his repayment demand. He probably wouldn't have any legal recourse if you do; and you won't care that the public thinks you a crook, because you don't need their votes any more.

Is this going to give us some more data on how bad the Labour defeat will be next year? Any MP that refuses probably know that their seat is sunk already, so see no reason to pay it back

Trafigura

To be sung to the Toreador song from Carmen...

Trafigura, Tra-fi-gu-ra
Tra-fi-gura, Tra-fi-gura,
Traaaaaa-fi-gura, Traaa-fi-gura
Tra-a-a-figura
Trafigu-r-a-a-
Trafigura
Tra-a-a-a-a-aaaaaaa-figura

(bet you wish you hadn't slapped that injunction on now that everyone in the world has heard about it, eh, Carter-Fuck)

Fingernails Down Blackboards Moment

From Janice Turner in The Times:-

I decided to check out Sainsbury’s booze aisles in the mode of someone with great thirst and little cash. Excitingly, my own under-age teenage fave Babycham — “the happiest drink in the world” — is still a snip at £3.18 but, at only 6 per cent proof, it would take more than four dainty bottles to make you feel like smashing up a bus shelter. Special Brew (two litres for £6 at 9 per cent proof) seemed worthy of Chris Grayling’s opprobrium until I spied this week’s soaraway offer: £7 for two bottles of nice Chilean chardonnay, 11.5 per cent proof. Neck that outside the community centre and you’d be in pole position for an ASBO.
But really there is only one winner, endorsed by maudlin Russians and Scandinavian suicides for centuries: vodka. Just £6 a litre and EU regulations dictate that it must be 37.5 per cent proof minimum. Mr Grayling insisted that he would root out shopkeepers selling alcohol below cost price. But the point of vodka is that, as it is little more than distilled potato juice, it costs pennies to produce.

 Actually, it's a great piece, but one of my Things I Would Do If Made PM is to have people birched for using "proof" when they mean "ABV". Everyone, EVERYONE gets this wrong. We dropped "proof" about 2 decades ago in the UK. Get with it...

Public/Private Partnership

From John Redwood's Blog

On Wednesday at conference I attended a meeting organised by private providers of health care who work for the NHS.
Their presentation was well crafted and interesting. They stressed that they were wholly committed to the values of the NHS. They supported as fully as most voters the idea that health care should be delivered free at the point of treatment, regardless of means but based on needs. They agreed that the bills should be paid for out of taxation.

I'm not sure quite why John is telling us this, because a brief answer is "Well, yes. Of course they would". The last thing you want as a businessman is trading with millions of little customers who care about getting good value because they really want to have some money to spend on getting their car fixed.

No, the thing that any sane businessman wants is to trade with a lazy, incompetent bureaucrat who will agree to a terrible contract in your favour, and barely enforce it.

It's where people get so mixed up between business and markets. There is no incompatibility between business and big government. Business frequently likes government (especially if they're a blessed supplier). It's not pro-business we want, it's pro-market.

Why I'm Never Giving To Kiva Again

This

Waiting for a load of donors to give may well be "inefficient", but the fact is that telling people they're giving to one person and not another is, in my opinion, fraud.

I lent to someone through Kiva precisely because he worked in a particular industry in a particular country which I believed in supporting. Me. Not some Gap Year NGO worker or in a bureaucracy.

If the person I wanted to help had already got my money, that therefore means that someone else who might have been doing something that I wouldn't want to support got my money instead.

I'd already been warned off "sponsor a child" programmes which don't sponsor a child, but instead sponsor the village of the child (where spending then gets decided by Gap Year NGO workers), but I'd assumed Kiva was different.

Obviously not. My money will go elsewhere now.