Further, our investigation has found that top pay is a symptom of market failure based on a misunderstanding of how markets work at their best.

Markets work at their best when people can trade freely.

Within companies, fair pay matters. It affects productivity, employee engagement

If it is true, free markets will discover it. The best performing companies will be the ones with the fairest pay. No commission needed.

and trust in our businesses.

This is a matter for the customers. In a free market, if they don’t trust a business, they don’t have to do business with it.

Pay in publicly listed companies sets a precedent;

That doesn’t make any sense. Pay is the result of negotiations in a free market; A’s pay is not influenced by B’s: both are affected by the presence of A and B negotiating in the market.

when it is patently not linked to performance, or rewards failure

In a free market, no-one is rewarded for failure. By definition, no-one voluntarily pays for something they do not want.

it sends out the wrong message

It is not a message. It is a transaction between private individuals.

and is clearly a symptom of a poor functioning market.

If people are paying for things they don’t want, then they cannot be doing so voluntarily, so yes, the market would be performing poorly. But the High Pay Commission does not agree with the decisions on pay that are voluntarily made.

In addition, high levels of inequality in income contribute to sectoral imbalances, regional disparities and asset bubble inflation.

Where to start? Inequality is measured wrong, anyway. Wealth is not proportional to money. The top 1% might have diamond encrusted watches, but a cheap Casio still tells the time. I don’t know what a sectoral imbalance is, but it’s probably to do with teachers getting smaller pay rises than the CEO of BP. In a free market, the top teachers might well get pay rises as big as the top executives. But then they’d be in the same sector. Regional disparities are probably caused by a combination of planning regulations and the plain fact that productivity increases with population density. Asset bubble inflation is caused by government policy that props up asset bubbles, like bailouts and manipulation of interest rates. None of this has bugger all to do with the CEO of BP’s £4.5m salary which, frankly, doesn’t even sound all that much.

I’m exhausted, and goes on like this for 65 pages.

Oh, here’s an enlightening quote:

“You have to realise: if I had been paid 50% more, I would not have done it better. If I had been paid 50% less, then I would not have done it worse.” –
Jeroen van der Veer, Former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell

This is probably true, and completely irrelevant. If they’d been prepared to pay 50% more, they could have hired someone else who was better.

Presumably the idea is that since only government action could reduce emissions enough to avert global warming, you need big government to solve any such crisis. Libertarianism can’t solve this because the atmosphere is the ultimate commons.

But whatever the seriousness of global warming and whatever its causes, more freedom will always be a better solution than less freedom.

There is no conceivable problem that cannot better be solved by a free society than by a society ruled by a large state.

Free people are richer, more innovative and can respond more quickly. Governments are slow, and because they are centralised have a tendency to make the wrong choices. A government can only make one choice at a time, so it goes to its best experts and they decide what is to be done and it gets done, and then we find out what the unintended consequences are and start again. This is far inferior to a free market of competing ideas where lots of things get tried and winners emerge.

But what if the only way to prevent catastrophe is it dramatically reduce emissions immediately? Then there will be catastrophe! Governments are not able to co-ordinate the whole world into reducing emissions. They’ve been trying for long enough and not succeeding. Now, how do you want to face catastrophe? Free, or constrained?

But then there is this viewpoint:

No, not with conditions. Not with asset disposals. Not with commitments. It must never be allowed. Ever. No way, no how. The absolute bedrock of capitalism is competition. The whole essence of our free market system lies in consumer choice… Take away that choice and the consumer is powerless.

That’s Brett Arends on Market Watch.

If you think you need government regulation to preserve capitalism, I think there is something wrong with your thinking. I suspect something else is going on: could government regulation be causing this merger, indirectly? Why aren’t there dozens of small operators? Probably because regulation makes being a mobile telecoms operator more difficult to do than it should be.

Here’s a sample:

Here is the thing. ‘Government’ is made up of a bunch of individuals who are no more or less qualified to speak for the rest of humanity than you or I. They have no superior intellectual knowledge or special, super-human skills. They are normal, fallible human beings who have decided that their life course shall be to tell other people what to do. They are often prepared (and sometimes eager) to use violence to make their vision happen, even if only a minority subscribe to it. This is the ugly truth of democracy.

Here’s another:

If people become unhealthily overweight they might find it harder to play with their children, or buy comfortable clothes. They might not be able to insure themselves, or purchase appropriate medical treatment. They might not be able to fly on an aeroplane, or go on rollercoaster. For the overweight person, it then becomes a cost-benefit analysis exercise to determine whether losing weight or maintaining their sedentary lifestyle is the most preferable option. And only they have the unique information to make that decision, not a government official or Alain de Botton!

I’ve been told that follow on milk is a bit misleading, in that the contents are virtually identical to new baby formula milk, but is produced (or should that be “Specially formulated!) in order to get around new strict EU regulations prohibiting the advertising of formula milk to babies.

This is why the packets now have eg. big 1, 2 and 3 on the packets, so a product advertised as 3 will mean your mind will recognise 1 and 2 without advertising being necessary. Maybe I’m just being cynical but I’d check the ingredients/vitamin breakdown very carefully.

I can’t verify this, but it sounds plausible. It’s certainly true that it is illegal to advertise formula for babies up to 6 months old.

The National Childbirth Trust, Save The Children and Unicef say the current partial ban is not enough, and parents have been left confused.

They want the government to extend a ban on infant milk adverts to include “follow-on” milks for older babies.

I don’t really understand why the breastfeeding movement is so vehement. As far as I can tell, breast milk is slightly better for a baby than formula, but formula is a marvel of modern technology and perfectly good enough. Certainly a mother who prefers to use it for whatever reason shouldn’t feel guilty.

So why the scare-mongering and bansturbating?

Update: Lisa from All About the Voluntary responds.

He mocked people who said they preferred salmon because it had fewer bones. But people can like whatever fish they like for whatever reasons they like. And fishing out tiny bones is annoying. And salmon tastes good.

He complained that farmed salmon is fed on herring and sardines. It takes three pounds of these to get one pound of farmed salmon. So what? Quite a lot of the herring and sardines would be thrown away anyway. And hasn’t Hugh heard of the law of conservation of mass? It’s not as if the organic matter disappears. It eventually rots or is eaten and the carbon dioxide ends up as plant and algae food and so around it goes. Nothing is ever really wasted.

Hugh would prefer us to eat the herring and sardines directly, but given that we have already expressed a preference for salmon, that would achieve nothing except to make us less happy. To make us decide to be less happy, Hugh is trying to make us feel guilty.

It’s time people stopped letting people like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall make them feel guilty.

Hugh spent much of his programme about salmon worrying about the scale of the operation. Oh no, they hoover up salmon with a big pipe! Oh no, they have a big machine to chop off all their heads! Oh no, there are so many! I had no idea we ate so much salmon!

Well Hugh, how do you think you feed a nation of 60 million people without them all spending their entire lives farming and fishing? It’s the economies of scale of things like fish farms that makes it possible for us all to eat salmon and still have leisure time. Hugh wants to make salmon more expensive so that only people like him can eat it, and we’re all stuck eating herring.

He’s not just talking about it on TV, he wants to influence policy. He has a campaign web site promoting an early day motion and wants us all writing to our MPs. Much of it talks about the “problem” of discards.

Fishermen are throwing away the fish they don’t want — the ones we don’t eat. He wants politicians to prevent this.

But it’s a non-problem, for the same reason that wasted salmon feed is a non-problem. The waste is an illusion: the dead fish don’t just disappear, they are recycled by the sea: eaten by other creatures and bacteria, and eventually turned into new tasty fish. The energy for all this comes from the sun, so there’s an endless supply. It’s all sustainable. Where does Hugh think fish come from?

But what if we eat too much of one kind of fish and run out? Market forces will keep this in check. If we fish to many of one kind of fish, they become harder to find and prices go up, and fewer will be sold, until a balance is reached. Prices will settle at a level people are prepared to pay for that kind of fish. Innovations such as farming can make an otherwise expensive fish cheaper, as in the case of salmon. This is all good.

But the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls don’t like innovation. They yearn for an imagined golden age when we all gamboled in meadows and were in tune with nature and ate fish caught with our bare hands. If such an age ever existed there were a lot more hungry people in it who didn’t live very long and they certainly didn’t get to eat salmon.

Nature isn’t something to be in-tune with. It’s something to conquer, before it conquers you. So sod off back to nature, Hugh, and let the rest of us enjoy our salmon.

Update: And another thing. If you still think there is something good about Hugh’s campaign, consider the outcomes. The only way he can get us to eat less cod and salmon is to make it more expensive. There are various ideas on his site, such as fish credit trading schemes for fishermen, but ultimately it’s about reducing the supply of our favourite fish, which will make them more expensive. Now what do you think people will do? Buy herring because they can’t afford salmon? Of course not. They’ll end up eating less fish overall, to the detriment of their health.

Maybe there is hope for the BBC yet.

It’s the most slimy bit of reporting I’ve seen. They don’t say that Barclays was bailed out, but they show Diamond being asked about his bonus, and then talk about how the sector was bailed out. At no point to they make clear that Barclays, under Diamond’s helm, refused government help.

They point out that Barclays is paying the most in bonuses in one breath, and talk about how banks are owned by the taxpayer in the next.

The intention to smear Bob Diamond is clear. It’s disgraceful, especially as the guy is a hero. Yes, there was a brief clip of him saying that banks should not be bailed out on the News at 10, but there was no commentary on this at all and they went right back to talking about bailouts. The TV version even had a member of the public talking specifically about Diamond and bailouts in the same sentence.

Update: Devil’s Kitchen has a suggestion for Bob Diamond.

Update 2: Tim Worstall has more.

Of all the people you might want to pay a large bonus to Diamond is one of the top few. Firstly Barclays didn’t go overboard into bankruptcy, unlike some others. Secondly, when the shit hit the fan they found (Diamond found) Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to shore up the capital and thirdly, he made the bank a fortune picking up bits of Lehman Briothers.

“I’m only allowed to sell you two packets,” said the cashier.

So, obviously, my wife bought two packets, I bought two packets, and then I snuck off to another till to buy the other two packets.

The regulations about sale of paracetamol, which I assume were brought in after some people overdosed, are stupid in every possible way. They are easily avoided, they wouldn’t work even if they were enforceable because people can save stock, and they would see an ill and wobbly relative, to avoid the imaginary risk of taking too many pills, take the very real risk of venturing out into the ice and snow every four days to buy more.

The toll booth guy told the taxi driver to roll down the rear window. Toll booth guy says, “did someone take a picture?” My mother is holding her camera. “I see the camera”, says toll booth guy. To the taxi driver he says, “what are you supposed to tell your passengers?” Taxi driver has no idea. “You are supposed to tell them no photos of bridges or tunnels. This has been in effect since 9/11. It is an act of terrorism. You could be fined $5000 or go to jail.” He asks to see our ID. I hand him my driving license. My mother hands him her passport. He demands my passport and I hand it over. He looks at the documents, then rings his bell, and a supervisor comes over.

“Go and pull over there and talk to the lady.” To the lady, toll booth guy says, “make sure my face isn’t on that camera.”

We pull over. The lady asks to see the last photo on the camera, which is of the tall buildings in the distance but the entrance to the tunnel is also visible. She makes us delete the picture, and generally lectures us and the taxi driver, before handing back our papers.

The taxi driver is now convinced he is in big trouble and will be reported, which makes for an unpleasant ride to the hotel.

Later, I try to find reference to the law against photographing bridges and tunnels (or toll booth guys’ faces). I can’t find it. What’s going on?

I can find an NYPD document reminding officers that photography is not a crime, and some discussion of Port Authority rules. But if there is a law about this it is far from common knowledge — there is no way a tourist would know about it. So what happened?

Alan Jones is about as no nonsense and plain speaking as they come. He’s acting as the FIA’s fourth steward for the race this weekend. Asked whether he would swing things in favour of Mark Webber, he responded jovially, “knowing my luck there’ll be some controversy and I’ll be buggered if I do and buggered if I don’t”, for which Jake Humphrey later had to apologise to sensitive 5am BBC viewers for his “colourful Australian language”.

Anyway, Eddie Jordan asked, “When you and I were racing everything was about Europe, and now it’s all about the Middle East and Far East. Are you surprised?”

Replied Jones, “Not really, I’m not. That’s the way everything’s going at the moment. With the emerging economies of China and India, Formula One has to follow that. I think they’re doing the right thing. Europe’s getting more stringent with the rules in terms of what you can do and say and put on the car and off the car. There’s a lot more leniency in this part of the world, so to me it just makes a bit of sense.”

Indeed.

They are trying to make it seem hip and cool by presenting a magazine show, but really you could argue that it’s a propaganda outlet for the Chinese government. Which is why I found it odd that they were discussing internet privacy. I recorded some snippets, my edits are indicated by silence.

cri-net-privacy.mp3 [4min32s] [3.12MB]

Some quotes: “We’re asking whether your privacy can be revealed. How safe are you when you are at work? [...] Can your employer read your messages? [...] Who’s watching you when you’re at work?”

“A diary is kind of out of date [compared to a blog], but it’s much safer, right?”

“You know what happened the other day? Somebody quite legally wrote a computer algorithm or program that went through lots of different Facebook pages harvesting or gathering all the personal, private information from people’s pages. And you can now buy this on a download of literally millions of pieces of data on millions of Facebook users. And it’s completely legal. And yet this is exactly the kind of infringement of people’s privacy that people have been concerned about since the Internet started.”

“Do remember: there are no secrets on the Internet.”

Beware the Internet. But don’t mind the Great Firewall Of China, I’m sure that’s *nothing* to worry about.

Above, people have complained that the wolf whistle can be intimidating, and certainly can be accompanied by more intimidating behaviour. So why is it that men can so easily intimidate women? It *doesn’t* work the other way around.

Ultimately, sexual inequality derives from men’s physical strength. Men are stronger than women, and that is why a woman might be afraid of a wolf whistle, because she fears it might lead to violence. And it is why, if that is his intent, a man feels able to be rude or intimidating to a lone woman just to get a response, because there is no danger in it. This also explains why he won’t do this when she is accompanied by a man. It is the root cause of the “unequal balance of power between the male and female genders”.

And yet, in 1836 a tool was invented that makes everyone physically equal. A tool that anyone can use. A uniquely democratic tool. And it could instantly solve all of the problems that LASH are concerned about. No longer would women fear the predations of men. No longer would men feel able to make women feel uncomfortable, comment on the appearance of strangers in public, or intimidate them.

Because Robert Heinlein was right:

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”

Surely, if ever libertarians and feminists had common cause to change legislation, this is it.

Is it possible to be a feminist and in favour of gun control?

The first obvious solution is WiFi. But I find it’s annoying for anything more than normal web surfing. The signal comes and goes, latency is jittery, and playing twitch-based online games over WiFi is hopeless. I tried doing online racing with one of the Simbin titles a while ago and just annoyed everyone as my car jumped all over the track.

To the rescue comes Homeplug. These gadgets plug into the wall and have an network socket on them. They use the electrical wiring in your home to talk to each other, and by all accounts you can get good quality connections with them.

But there is a downside: amateur radio enthusiasts hate them because they leak radio waves all over the spectrum, including the HF band. An article in PC Pro about whether or not there was a real problem stirred up much controversy.

It does seem as if most of the problems are caused by Comtrend devices used by BT Vision. These apparently transmit continuously even when not in use. The Homeplug standard, meanwhile, only transmits when data is being sent between computers, and makes some effort to avoid certain frequencies used by radio hams.

However, radio hams are not convinced, and I am not convinced. Signal levels used for two way communications between continents are miniscule, and this activity seems to be at risk of being affected.

Why should I care about a bunch of old guys in sheds sending Morse code to each other? Lots of reasons:

First, I’m a geek, I have obscure hobbies, so I have a lot of sympathy for other people’s obscure hobbies. I’m the last person you will hear say, “why would you want to do that?”

Second, I’m a geek, and one day I might want to play around with amateur radio. Some of the equipment looks really cool. Just look at the ICOM IC-7800. That’s one hell of a gadget. Looking at that thing gets my geek juices flowing: that is a serious number of buttons and switches to learn how to use.

Third, I’m a geek, and there is something deeply cool about bouncing radio waves off the ionosphere that you just don’t get from the Internet. I have a big Grundig shortwave radio and I have listened to the Voice of Justice from Iran and it is great fun knowing that you’re picking up faint signals from a distant transmitter. Downloading a podcast from a web server half-way around the world is cool too, but it’s a different kind of cool.

Fourth, I’m a libertarian, and that means I know about stuff like homesteading and property rights. These guys were using the spectrum first, so have some rights over it. Now radio spectrum isn’t quite property, and there are ways to use it that don’t stop other people from using it at the same time so most of the government licensing of it could be replaced with technology. But as long as I am interfering with someone else’s enjoyment of a finite resource I am the bad guy, and that is certainly the case with HF communications.

So even though it is the best technology to solve my particular problem I reject Homeplug. I have just ordered a pair of WiFi N access points that will link the upstairs of my house to the downstairs. That should be as fast as Homeplug would be, and if it is too jitter for games, I will get a really long Cat 7 cable and hook that up just for games.

There is a chance that Homeplug will be widely adopted anyway, but hopefully it will remain a niche as most people just use WiFi. Niche users who are attracted to Homeplug should be aware of other people’s niches.