Witterings from within

Public Sector pension strikes - will they attract public support?

The difference between the median level of full-time earnings in the public sector (£554 per week) and the private sector (£473 per week) widened over the year to April 2010, following annual increases of 3.0 per cent and 2.0 per cent respectively.

I’ve seen lots of stuff about how public sector/private sector aren’t comparable.

“Would you want a nurse working at 65?” and so on.

The answer is, perhaps “Would you like the privately employed cleaner in the ward working at 65?”

People are living longer. Our finances are in a mess

Funding the pensions *is* expensive says the Guardian in an article exploding the myths about public sector pensions.

Private sector employees who have also seen pay squeezes, and had their pensions frozen, closed or reduced in the same sort of way aren’t likely to be overly sympathetic.

As an aside, as indicated most public sector pensions *aren’t* funded, and between 1999 and 2011 the public sector payroll increased from 5.4 million people to 6.2 million people.[ONS]

I’d like to see the *sensible* suggestions as to how we tackle this. Not many coming from the Opposition, nor the leaders of the public sector unions.

I don’t think striking is going to help the case of the public sector much, nor indeed the Labour Party.

Conservative Party deputy chairman Michael Fallon said: “Ed Balls’ Plan B of increased spending and unfunded tax cuts at a time when we have a similar deficit to Greece and Portugal looks like a plan for bankruptcy. “Our deficit reduction plan is backed by international organisations including the IMF, the CBI, the OECD and the Obama administration. Ed Balls’ plan isn’t even backed by Ed Miliband.

BBC News - Ed Balls urges emergency tax cut to boost economy

These people have absolutely zero credibility, whether they admit mistakes or not.
Gordon Brown was a laughing stock in the City from day 1, because he claimed repeatedly, over many years, to have somehow miraculously ended the business cycle - his mantra was “an end to boom & bust”. To the financially savvy this was the most ridiculous thing imaginable. It’s like me telling you that I’ve abolished the Moon, just because it’s daylight & you can’t see it. Brown’s only job outside of Politics was as a sports journalist, yet he was held up as being some kind of economic guru. And he sucked up to the bankers, telling them how clever they were in 2007, just as the whole system was beginning to collapse, after a 10-year orgy of credit-fuelled asset booms. Brown was, at best, asleep at the controls for 10 years. Tax receipts soared in the Noughties, from this artificial credit boom, and Brown spent every penny of it, and more! He increased public spending by 5% p.a. compound, from 2001 onwards, creating a bloated & inefficient public sector, and somehow managed to still run spending deficits in the boom years. As the tide went out with the banking crisis, and tax revenues collapsed, this left us in the mess we are in today. Of course the bankers were the immediate trigger for the financial crisis, and must share some of the blame, but it was Brown’s job to ensure that the Govt finances were run prudently (something he claimed to do, but in fact actually did the opposite). Britain should have sailed through this crisis with our banks unscathed, and a budget surplus turned into a modest & sustainable deficit. Instead Brown created the biggest boom & bust in living memory, whilst seemingly unaware of what was actually happening. The man was a total charlatan. THIS is what Labour need to ‘fess up to. That they were imprudent, totally incompetent across a broad range of areas, and under their stewardship the UK has plunged into the worst crisis since the 1970’s (which funnily enough was also under Labour’s stewardship when we had to go to the IMF for a Bail-Out). Every Labour Govt in history has ended the same way - with a financial crisis brought about from over-spending. It’s what they do. Every time. I pity the young people starting out in their careers now. A hefty chunk of their lifetime taxes will be used to service (let alone repay) the debt which has been needlessly incurred in the past 5 years. It’s about £500bn at the moment (on top of £400bn existing debt), and will continue to rise for several years yet.
My generation should hang our heads in shame that we will selfishly leave a legacy of over £1trn of debt to the next generation - not to pay for a World War. No, just because we’ve been too greedy to accept more modest public services now. Instead Brown built up a completely unaffordable public sector that future generations will pay for, with interest. They will have correspondingly worse public services. What a smashing legacy. Well done Brown. Let’s hope these dreadful fools are kept away from the levers of power for a generation (at least).

First his brother, now Ed Miliband’s at war with Ed Balls - UK Politics, UK - The Independent

Lannan Foundation cancels premiere of Pilger film “The War You Don’t See”

Lannan Foundation abruptly bans, and cancels the US premiere of, John Pilger’s film “The War You Don’t See” (which, of course, you won’t see)

The banning and cancellation, which have shocked David and me, are on the personal orders of Patrick Lannan, whose wealth funds the Lannan Foundation as a liberal centre of discussion of politics and the arts. …

There is a compelling symbol of our extraordinary times in all of this. A rich and powerful individual and organisation, espousing freedom of speech, has moved ruthlessly and unaccountably to crush it.

I wonder what they don’t want us to see?

So, what did the male sex ever contribute :-)

Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Projective geometry. Differential geometry. Algebra. Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. The penis. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Roads. Buildings. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera.

This guy rants just so well!

(Source: fredoneverything.net)

Gender based IQ differences?

All the research I’ve done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.

Anyone have any ideas of later studies?

(Source: independent.co.uk)

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-5-29)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Tom Morris: Busting a semantic web myth: "top-down committees"

tommorrisdotorg:

With the announcement today of the ridiculous schema.org built atop the utterly silly microdata specification, I feel it is time to bust the oldest, most often repeated Semantic Web myth ever.

The myth

Semantic Web ontologies or vocabularies are designed by shadowy gangs of librarians and…

Awesome - but then, a lot of Tom’s stuff is…

↵ Reblogged from tommorrisdotorg

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-5-22)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-5-15)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz