Posts by Peter

The 'green' car tax grabs that don't add up

@Tim W

"I'm sure you'll be very happy to learn that the ASI fully supports your right to ingest any and every substance you should wish to. Yes, we argue very strongly (as I do individually) for the full legalisation of all narcotics. 'Coz we're liberals, see?"

Quite frankly my dear I don't give a damn....

I think you'll find that such views are 'Libertarian' rather than 'Liberal', but that's just nit-picking.

More to the point your "support" for liberalising the laws merely confirms that there is currently a constraint. As the Afghani farmers or Columbian Coke growers have discovered no matter how profitable (or merely capable of sustaining subsistance) a crop can be, when someone with a big gun says "No" (or "yes") it pays to obey, seriously screwing the free market! Of course the Real World is full of people with both pysical and metaphorical big guns who have absolutely no investment in absolutist market economics.

Mike's Right!

The Adam Smith Institute and its luminaries make the stereotypical 'swivel-eyed' loonies look positively benign. Only the most ridiculously ignorant and stupid politicians have implemented their crackpot schemes: Mike points some of these out.

Wheras 'Economics' aspire to being 'scientific', the ASI and its fellow travellers have a religious fervour akin to the Taliban, or possibly Scientolgists when it comes to promolgating their free market views. In their own comfy virtual reality the 'market' is both all powerful and all wise: everything is simple and straightforward. I make or grow something, you want to buy it, the price is determined solely by supply and demand. If the price is too low, I stop making widgets or growing corn and move into doofers or growing hash....

OOOps but ther's the rub. I'm not "allowed" to grow hash, because it isn't just the 'market' operating here. And of course calculating some arbitary number that represents the 'ideal' in terms of CO2 costs ignores all the contextual factors surrounding that issue too. In the 'real world' (their favourite phrase when slagging socialist etc. as I recall) markets are always constrained by other factors, and never, ever, free. Like most right-wing 'philosophising' the ASI's pitch is just too simplistic; it has an appeal that convinces superficially until one considers how it might work in practice.

City to Intel: Kick the rest of the tech industry into line

I'm dealing in brain futures here

If these guys had brains instead of MBEs (and didn't get stupid bonuses paid on the basis solely of sales, not risks) then the "Credit Crunch" would never have happened.

Similarly despite the crap IT equipment they are forced to use, surely they might have figured that buying and selling the debts of poor people was a bit unlikely to be a long-term moneyspinner. Sounds like reverse pass the parcel where the winners are the ones who got rid earliest!

Ultimately though it derives from "derivatives" "products" so arcane that St Thomas Aquinas would have been hard-pressed to arive at a definition of most of them. As Yoda might say "Stupid they are", but lose all the theologically validated "products" and most of the MBEs in the city would have nothing to buy and sell, and might have to go out and get a proper job.....

Only Sky can save digital TV

Have you gone Bonkers?

I normally expect to see a bit of sharp, cynical and amusing commentary on the Reg, not NewsCorp Press releases!

I was tempted to do a blow-by-blow deconstruction of this piece, but then I thought "Why bother?"

Anybody stupid enough to write or publish such nonsense clearly lacks the intellectual equipment to understand a rational argument.

If you want to know why handing SKY DTT is such a bad idea, just look at the SUN (or Times) then switch on SKY TV. 'Nuff said.

Dell finally switches on PC network in Glasgow schools

No need to be silly about MS

Sounds like "contractor error" to me. There would have been similar problems even if Pure LINUX had been installed end to end, with hand-knitted mueseli Cat5 cables!

Most SMBs will be virtual by 2020

Inverse Christmas Turkey syndrome??

OK so Rackspace sell online services. This hardly makes them unbiased...

I don't dispute an increasing use of these services by SMB, but I still doubt that any sane person who has ever dealt with the average (let alone sub-average) hosting company would put their business (i.e. all their data etc) in the hands of a third party.