Interesting Links for 22-06-2017

[andrewducker]

Tory-DUP deal plunged into fresh jeopardy as unionists demand £2bn investment in Northern Ireland

(tags: politics NorthernIreland Conservatives money )

World's biggest coal company closes 37 mines as solar power's influence grows

(tags: india coal electricity )

Directors? Star Wars Don't Need No Stinking Directors

(tags: StarWars movies )

Wal-Mart to vendors: get off Amazon's cloud

(tags: amazon business Technology )

DUP MP says there is 'no demand' for removing terrorist flags flying in her constituency

(tags: terrorism NorthernIreland uk )

Ikea investigates after bowl sets Swede's grapes on fire

(tags: ikea Sweden fire design viaSwampers )

Is £70,000 a year rich?

It is, and it isn't. Basically, the middle-class standard of living has dropped. Largely because of housing prices, I suspect.
(tags: money uk )

What Wonder Woman got right and wrong about World War I

(tags: WonderWoman history wwi )

Damon Lindelof's Bringing a Watchmen Series to HBO

(tags: watchmen comics tv )

f.lashes - Interactive LED Lashes!

(tags: led light Technology viaElfy )

Radical kindness as an expression of anger.

(tags: life anger niceness viaElfy )

Portrait: Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker

(tags: time design japan )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

£2bn is a non-trivial amount of money particularly if it gets multiplied up by whatever Barnett formula provisions apply.

That said, if I were the DUP I think my line is going to be "It's £2bn in advance as a bulk buy. Or it's £100m for each of the 24 bills you have going through Parliament plus extra for our support on things that are out of scope. Emergency call out charges are extra."

There is a distinction here I think between the Prime Minister, the Government and Parliament.

The DUP will probably want to avoid ending this Parliament early. They did very well in the June 2017 general election and probably can't expect to end up with as many seats. They also fluked a massively beneficial negotiating position. Perhaps the perfect outcome for them. They won't want to go back to the electorate and risk Corbyn winning a majority or perhaps worse Corbyn requiring support from the Lib Dems and the SNP who are less socially conservative than the DUP.

They would want to avoid changing the party of Government. They share some common ground with the Tories. The current Labour leadership is not their friend and a Rainbow Coalition would likely be against their social policies.

However, which Tory is actually Prime Minister is probably less important to them. This is particularly true if they believe that they could remove any particular Tory PM at will without collapsing the Government or Parliament.

Whilst it is therefore true that the Conservatives can almost certainly rely on the DUP to keep the Conservatives in government any particular Tory PM or Cabinet Minister can be less sure of personal support. This will only get worse as by-elections erode the Tory position.

Meanwhile the Labour Party will happily propose any No Confidence vote they can even if that only removes the sitting Prime Minister or forces them to scurry off to Arlene Foster to exchange English money for Irish votes.

So they can negotiate to extract concessions from any given Tory PM with the threat of voting with Labour for the first No Confidence vote and then with the new Tory PM in the second Confidence vote two weeks later.

It's a nice position for them.

It is a shame that Sinn Fein don't take up their seats as the DUP position would be weaker.

[danieldwilliam]

This from Jon Worth

https://jonworth.eu/dups-shoes-youd-ask-world-well-mays-government-bound-held-hostage/

and on the DUP's road map in the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/12/dup-theresa-may-deal-conservatives

[andrewducker]

Thanks, both fascinating.

I wonder what they _can_ push through, with the bare majority they have.

[danieldwilliam]

Unclear.

Whilst the DUP have some common ground with the Tories it's not like the DUP are the Ulster wing of the Conservative Party.

Looks like they have some bills on domestic violence and rental fees that they should be able to get through but things like the Great Repeal Bill (or as UD have started calling it the Secret Handshake Bill) are going to be carnage. The Lords are a bit off the hook because of the election result, the sparse Queen's Speach and the U-turns on the manifesto. I expect some excitement along the way for all the players.

Gut feel says they don't get much passed and the government runs out of steam in about 18 months time once the DUP have gutted the treasury.

[andrewducker]

I am curious where this is all going to go.

It would be a lot more entertaining if it was TV...

[danieldwilliam]

Yeah, more fun if it was happening on TV or to some other country or on the TV of some other country.

But it's not, it appears to actually be happening to us.

I'm begining to wonder if this might actually be the time that the Conservative Party have over played their hand and end up properly broken. They are begining to look squalid.

[danieldwilliam]

The IKEA bowl is like one of those solar cookers that one occassionally sees being sold on social crowdfunding websites.

[andrewducker]

Only, I suspect, cheaper. And more reliable.

[danieldwilliam]

I am not convinced that it is the solar price and solar PV that is driving the coal mine closures in India.

Three reasons.

The Indian grid is a bit ropey and I'm not sure is robust enough to accomodate very, very large amounts of solar PV right now.

I'm not sure that solar PV is cheaper than coal burnt at an already existing coal plant at the moment. You can see a cost curve that takes solar PV below coal in the near future. One might not open a new coal mine scheduled for production in ten years because of this but many other countries appear not to able to understand this. I am surprised that India is more forward looking and able to inact longer-term policy than the average of countries who are quite good at that.

But mostly, three, I think gas prices seem to be behind the problems with coal in other parts of the world. I wonder if what is happening is that low gas prices make gas cheaper to run in India (replacing Indian coal) and also restrict export markets or prices for Indian coal.

[naath]

70,000/year is richer than me, it is enormously richer than someone on minimum wage. It is less rich than a premier league football player (male, that is...). It doesn't buy you everything you might want to buy, like a nice 4 bed detached house in Cambridge, or (easily) a Tesla.

I have much more than a person on minimum wage, but I don't feel 'rich' because I want things I can't have, I expect desires expand to exceed ability for many people and can well imagine Mr Musk thinking 'but I can't live on Mars, I'm not really RICH'...

Taxation should be based on fairness, not whether you 'feel rich'.

[andrewducker]

I completely agree about taxation. I don't think Jennie was saying that taxation should be based on how people feel.

[rmc28]

You reminded me suddenly of this post from 2011: How the rich don't feel rich

[calimac]

"In risk assessment for the bowl Blanda it has been established that many different parameters would have to converge for the content of the bowl to overheat and that the risk for this to happen is very low."

Evidently not low enough.

"What Wonder Woman got wrong about World War I"

Judging from the photo next to the headline, the hairstyles.

[marymac]

In the DUP/flag equation - the MP in question is the daughter of a prominent UVF paramilitary and makes a point of using her maiden name. There is no Catholic family in the area who is going to tell her they want the flags down to her face in case they are driven out of their homes, or burned out.

(I live on the road, there are multiples of the amount of flags there were last year residents are pissed off but helpless and the atmosphere is distinctly edgy.)

[andrewducker]

Thank you, I appreciate the information.

(And if I lived there, I'd feel very edgy indeed)

[movingfinger]

If you're into baking or cooking at all, I encourage you to go out and get a set of Blanda before they remove them or alter the design, as they make perfect molds for things like zucotto and ice-cream bombes as well as being good for making spherical (e.g. planet-shaped) cakes.

[bohemiancoast]

£70k remains a pretty solid income in areas where the housing market isn't overheated. But there's some altered expectations here - although our parents had a house and a car and possibly an annual foreign holiday, they didn't have anything like the normal modern run of consumer spending and entertainments. The poster says 'they were in the pub three times a week' - that's because there was a local fleapit with three screens if they were lucky, and three channels of TV and that was it. I'll never have the large detached house that my parents, or more shockingly, my grandparents had*. But I'd rather live in a bedsit and have the Internet. People have no idea; we are so rich and blessed.

(Also, that's 95th centile for individual income. Household income is a bit higher.) Plus nobody ate out at all, and 'everyday dining' accounts for a ton of money. I'm probably feeling aggrieved right because, intending a treat, I took Jonathan to what I had hoped would be a gourmet burger joint, and managed to spend £28 on a meal that was really only a tiny step up from Burger King. Also, only about 40 years ago the 'middle-class' lifestyle was predicated on one earner, and one unpaid domestic slave. We don't do that any more as a rule, but two-income couples don't actually end up with any more time or money after all the follow-on costs have been picked up.

*Ahem. My grandfather did have a senior professional job, as a civil engineer. But just the one salary bought a new build large 4-bed detached house with outbuildings on a half-acre plot half a mile from Winchester station. There are, I think, about sixteen townhouses built on that back garden now (the original house is still there and every so often I stalk Rightmove in case it's come on the market, just to look nosily at the interior because obviously not in my wildest dreams).

[andrewducker]

I'm wondering how much the tendency of people to move to cities has contributed to this. If we spread people back out across the country, would that bring housing prices back down again?

[bohemiancoast]

Yes it would, and see "life without Internet" above. Even 'fast rural broadband' is a joke compared to city speeds. And that's without considering 4G; now pretty solid in London to the extent that I normally turn off WiFi in coffee shops so I won't join a shabby shared connection instead.

In my mums and tots group, almost everyone left before the kids turned four. We were outliers; even ten years previously it would have been considered extraordinary for a family like us to stay in Walthamstow. Now, almost nobody leaves.

It's not just broadband. Now that we all have a surfeit of stuff and entertainment, people search for experiences. And if you want to have a lot of interesting and varied experiences, living in a city helps. If you live in the country, your life is like https://xkcd.com/915/ except with chaffinches. (Hi flick and drplokta.)

But a lot of people fretting about house prices didn't notice that 'being able to buy houses in London' was the anomaly. Ordinary people have never been able to buy houses in New York, Paris or Tokyo.

[andrewducker]

I more meant, to other cities more than everyone moving to London. The UK seems to be unusual in quite how centralised it is to one city.

[nojay]

Housing in Tokyo is not necessarily that expensive, even centrally. Someone I know (and you almost certainly know them too) owns a new-build house in Sumida-ku which is pretty central, only a few kilometres from Tokyo central railway station and Ginza where the national parliament building is located. It wasn't that expensive, built on the site of a small shop and affordable on two middle-class salaries. It's small and wedged in between a couple of other properties in a side-street with no parking but it didn't cost a million quid.

You can pay a lot for Tokyo housing (Roppongi, for example) but the costs of building plots are not always that great.

[naath]

Then more people would do more driving to get to jobs which are concentrated in cities, and the planet would die faster. I could move to a village outside Cambridge and save some money, but I'd have to buy a car and re-learn how to drive it in order to have a job or a social life.

[andrewducker]

I more meant to more cities. London is ridiculously over concentrated.

And the green belt really doesn't help.