Gulf Oil Leak... Not So Dramatic After All

So yesterday we hear from no less than the U.S Government,  that the oil spill in the Gulf is...  75% cleared up already.  And despite all the wailings and gnashings of teeth only a month or so ago,  about the enviroment being "ruined for decades to come" and "the worst ecological disaster ever to hit America" and such hysterics,  we hear that the actual amount of oil leaked was about 5 million barrels, or 200 million gallons. 


And what is the sea volume of the Gulf itself  ?      Well.... actually it's 693 Quadrillion gallons..   er..yes, that's 693 million-billion gallons... or if you prefer,  693 thousand-trillion gallons..... or  just plain old 693,000,000,000,000,000 gallons  (as compared with 200,000,000 gallons of oil).   


Rather a lot less noughts in the latter figure.  In fact, scaling the Gulf to an Olympic-sized swimming pool, this is like tipping just about one cupful of oil, into the deep end.    Not quite so devastating as earlier implied.


More importantly than the bald figures,  what is crucially different about the Deepwater Horizon spill is that it leaked from more than a mile down in the ocean,  rather than on the surface, which is where most spills occur - when tankers break up or hit reefs.    In the many major oil tanker disaters, like the Prince William sound spill of years ago, the oil was released right at the surface in those cases - so it ALL floated on top, causing great thick surface slicks which sloshed over huge areas of shoreline, choking and killing creatures in the tens of thousands. 


But down in the Gulf, most of the oil has been streaming out at huge depth, drifting away in every direction as it slowly surfaced:  so it has been truly distributed through quite a lot of that vast 693 Quadrillion gallons.   Add to that the fact that it is warm, and the oil light,  it is evaporating and being consumed by ocean organisms massively faster than in the cold north of Prince William sound.  


Perhaps the earth won't crack in two then. 
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/science/earth/04oil.html

A Letter to the Times and Sunday Times on their New 'PayWall'

I emailed the papers the other day after the new (mad) regime was announced.   I doubt anyone sensible will reply.... 

Hello Times and Sunday Times online Marketing Dept  
 
Constructive Feedback on your new Subscription Scheme  (and I why I will only join after you alter it....)

Who am I ?    I'm a regular, enthusiastic reader of the Sunday Times and (less frequently) the Times in paper format.  I have been reading your papers for 40 years.      I am also a web-cognisant businessperson:  I own several businesses in the IT sector and work in web-specific technologies so I am aware of the technical as well as commercial issues. 
 
I'm sorry to say it but you have missed a very important point,  in setting your present pricing scheme. 
 
I might pay £2 a week  -   but NOT in the form you're currently promoting  -  let me explain why. 
 
 
1.  When I buy a broadsheet,  I buy it for a specific experience.  It is to sit down with a whole newspaper, and luxuriate, in having the whole paper to pick amongst and choose from, over a period.   That period might last several days, even a week  -  but the reading has a minimum period too - any broadsheet buyer wants to sit down over a coffee and spend a minimum of 20 or 30 or 40 minutes in the sheer pleasure of reading, just to get started.    SO -  when I do that, I don't mind paying £2 for that much enjoyment: the coffee I buy to go with it will cost at least that much. 
 
 
2.  However, when I read online,  it is a completely different experience, and a different mode of reading.  I can still read for pure pleasure: but never in the same way as with a physical broadsheet.   I,  and a million people like me,  am more likely to 'dip in' for single articles to get our updates in smaller snippets.    I'm also much more likely to arrive there from an aggreator link (NewsNow being my starting point most mornings)  -  impossible too if your 'paywall' blocks them   -   or I'm likely to go electively and search, to catch up on a specific story. 
 
This being so,  I and readers like me are reading much more incrementally:  small fragments,  not the 'big swig' of reading that the real paper gives. 


3.  So - CRUCIALLY:  I DO NOT MIND PAYING for that incremental reading:  I don't even mind putting my money on a credit with you:   but I want to SPEND the money, incrementally - same way as I read.     That means micropayments,  not flat subscriptions.
 
I would be perfectly happy to put £10 on credit with my 'Times Account'  :   but I don't want to be told it has 'expired'  because I've been away.   If I've not read,  then I've not spent:   a flat subscription is you taking my money when I'm not looking.   Micropayment (pence per article charged from pre-credit at the moment of opening)  is spending electively.   
 
 
4.  MICROPAYMENT.   Think about it:  there are lots of models of Micropayment already proven working.   Anyone with a Pay As You Go phone ( a massive acknowledged commercial sucess as a charging model) is using micropayment:  they don't get charged when they don't make calls:  they pay WHEN they make calls.    Exactly the same with pre-credit  VOIP telephone accounts:  we put credit up ahead for the next few months use, but only spend the money when we make calls:  businesses all over the world now use VOIP instead of legacy telephones and they all pay like this.
 
 
I do hope you see the light.   Else no-one will read your columnists ever again.    The site does seem 'dark'.   Whatever will Jeremy Clarkson do if he thinks no-one is listening ?

 
CHARGE ME UP FRONT,  but let me spend on a per-article (repeat-read allowed once paid) basis,  and I'll join tomorrow.    So  -  not till you institute micropayments.  
 
No reason not to really:   why not just offer both options ?
 
Good luck
ThatColumn

Are Peter Oborne and Peter Hitchens in fact the same person ?

Well any reader of their rants this week might think so  ...  both growling and grumbling and groaning on, about how terrible it is that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have formed a coalition,  and what dreadful moral failures the various participants are to do so,  and both of them full of self-righteous certainty that they predicted the whole thing.  

Peter H  applies a lot of   "... and then add the number you first thought of.."   arithmetic to assure us that Labour has cost us  £2,000,000,000,000.    Yes Peter.    For your information we are not all fools out here,  we can do our own mathematics and yes we do know that the country is deep in debt.    But it is pure scare tactics to quote figures like the one above.   

The broad numbers are as follows :  

• We have annual government spending (budget total) of around £700 billion ;
• We have current government annual income of something under £600 billion at present ;
• We are hence borrowing annually over £100 billion to fill the gap (£163Bn this year).
• Some of that was due to the large outlays in stimulus during the 2008-9 crash ;
• The structural part of it, the overspend level before the crash, was nearer £70-80Bn a year.

So - we have to SAVE something like £70Bn a year in the long term - about 10% of government annual spending.  

And in the short term we could do with saving a good bit more than that: say 20% of government annual spending.  

The real question is - can we stomach that ?   Yes - we can - split the 20% in two and you have the simple, stark reality we all need to get on with :  tax take needs to go up about 10%, falling back over a few years;   and government spending needs to come down 10%, at least for a few years.    

Can we cut 10% off the £170 Billion welfare budget ?  Yes.

Can we cut 10% off the pointless investment in illegal wars ?   Yes. 

Can we haggle down supplier prices 10% for most government outlays (by not taking no for an answer) ?  Yes.  

And the tax ?   A one-tenth increase in the major taxes would be :

• Personal tax up by about 3%
• VAT up by 1.75%
• Capital Gains Tax up by about 2%
• National Insurance up by about 1%.

Can we afford this ?    YES.  WE CAN.    It is not the cataclysm that the Peters and other ritual moaners would have you believe.   Every small business has already cut back massively more than that as a matter of ordinary daily planning.   

Now get over it and stop moaning.     And good luck to our interesting new government.  

Cameron and Brown Share a Common Policy... But Neither Realise It

Cameron and Brown go on blasting away about the National Insurance increase without actually listening to each other.      If they did,  they might realise their supposedly opposite policies, are actually the same in effect.    Permit me to illustrate.

Cameron berates Brown for "wasting £6Bn" which he doesn't need to, and for planning an N.I increase next year which he calls a "jobs tax".     And Brown rips into Cameron,  claiming that to "take £6Bn out of the economy"  would be the worst thing to do before the recovery is sound. 

But Brown is mis-describing mercilessly  (innocently I think).    For, with regard to "taking money out of the economy",  that  is exactly what  taxing the populus with the extra 1% on National Insurance,  is.  Tax takes money from the economy to pay for government.    So he's describing the exact opposite of what would happen if a new Tory government cancelled his 1% tax rise:    rather than "taking £6Bn out",   that £6Bn would be left within the (commercial) economy.      

What he means to say of course, but fails to,  is it would take the £6Bn out of government funds  - which he wants to re-spend inside the economy.

Equally though,  Cameron is mis-describing :  he implies that cancelling the N.I. tax increase next year if he comes to power,  would somehow "ease" the load on businesses by not adding to 'jobs taxes'  -   but the difference is,  he  won't  spend that money back into the economy from government (because he is so adamant that we must cut the budget defecit more quickly),  while Gordon would.

This shows that both of these two policies would in fact have the same net effect.     Cameron wouldn't take the £6Bn in extra tax,  but wouldn't spend it back in the economy either;   and Brown would take the extra tax,  but would re-spend it all back on public services. 

So, despite their protestations that they are so different,  this particular sample of policy would produce results not a jot different from one another.   

One thing is sure - those spin-doctors of theirs obviously do think we're all stupid. 

AT LAST...... Someone Points the Finger at the Ratings Agencies

AT LAST.....   when the financial crisis bit us all in the backside, and the documentary programmes started to be made,  one massive truth seemed to emerge.   Among all the greed and double-dealing that doubtless went on in the banks, one big, unmentioned fact seemed to be lurking in the background, particularly in relation to how otherwise uninvolved financial institutions were dragged into buying these "repackaged" mortgage-debt instrument, CDOs.  

The Credit Ratings Agencies.    Standard & Poor and Moodys being the best known, these are the outfits whose job it was to "grade" the risk of all those obsure investment products.  But they seemed to have run out of labels - except for "AAA".   

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8639224.stm

Conservatives reveal their 'Big Stick' to beat Sun Readers with

This week the Conservatives revealed their 'Big Stick'  -  and with it, the truth about where they're going to cut all those needed billions from,  among Government spending.

First sign I saw of it, was seemingly a Conservative PR Tweet (Twitter is just a PR machine, after all).   At first I thought it was a spoof : surely the Cons were not being so crude ?   But yes - they were - and are -  and a few clicks over to their blue blog on the Conservative website, and there was their own press release for it - this is it verbatim:
"This new poster underlines our positive agenda for welfare reform - http://twitpic.com/1h3db6     10:54 AM Apr 20th  via Echofon"  

And there too was Theresa May banging on about all those terrible welfare dependents too : 
http://blog.conservatives.com/index.php/2010/04/20/we-need-to-tackle-welfare-dependency/

Well blow me down.   So the Tories are going to slash and burn in the welfare budget..  no big surprise really.  

It was always clear that all the parties would have some serious cost-cutting up their sleeve : and we're not surprised that no political party wanted to show their cards in that area before the election.    And with the Tories,  you just knew they wouldn't funk it: they would have some serious cuts in mind.

 
Now no-one would dispute that we do have some perfectly fit,  but yet work-shy people lolling around in this country..   just pop into the betting shop or a high street pub at ten to eleven on a Tuesday morning, and see who's propping up the bar.    Not retired folk, that's for sure.   And no-one would dispute that at a running cost - the UK welfare budget - of  £170,000,000,000 a year at the moment  - one-third of all government spending, or about  £500 million per day (yes, per day)  -  that there is doubtless some fat to be cut off.

But these are going to be sorely painful cuts,  and some of them will fall on people who thought the Tories were their natural political choice: all those Sun readers for example.   So why did the Tories admit it so openly before the election ?  

What makes me smile is that Boris Johnson made a joking reference at the start of the campaign to the Tories being misunderstood - saying in so many words that   "... after all [we're] not a load of boss-eyed maniacs  ...  seeking to grind the face of the poor into the dirt....".   

Only the Lib Dems give their figures... and even they are still £157,000,000,000 short

Yesterday the Liberal Democrats released their manifesto in the UK general election and were the first to put their figures in the back.

But, like the Conservatives and Labour,  the only actual contribution that they show,  to the cutting of our enormous Government spending defecit of £167Bn,  is around a flat £10Bn a year, from next year. 

They offer to raise the threshold of personal tax to £10,000  -  but that costs a staggering £17Bn in itself.  So, dutifully, they scrape up an odd £17Bn to pay for that from a mix of some cuts and from some tax increases.

Then over the page, they set out their "Savings".   But look all down this list, and you'll find about £10Bn saved - next year, not this - and then about the same for four more years ahead.   But this defecit of ours is an annual committment - we're not short £167Bn once, we're short that much every year.   So saving an odd ten off the top is good,  but barely a fifteenth of the pain we'll need to inflict to solve this problem eventually.

This is the problem with all three parties.   None of them can bear to show us the true horror of that much cash needing to be saved.   In truth, since the gap is around £170Bn now and annual government spending is around £700Bn,  we need to somehow reduce the cost of government by around 25%.   Yes 25%.  A quarter.   Or, to split it between taxes and expenditures,  we need to raise tax revenues by at least 10-12% and cut spending by at least 10-12%.   But that is still massive on both sides of the equation.   And none of them will explain any of this. 

Will we find out more in the third (economy-focussed) TV debate ?   I doubt it.