First, as The Economist notes, the global energy system is not adjusting smoothly through price signals, as orthodox economic models suggest it should. Instead, market demand is being propped up by policy intervention, most especially through short-term inventory depletion. Politicians are maintaining the pretence that all is “normal”.

So, as Spud doesn’t go on to say, don’t use politics and politicians to fuck up market responses.

The reality is we need fuel rationing, and we need it now.

So, let’s fuck up markets and market pricing with politics and politicians.

The post Truly glorious first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Weight loss drugs transformed our sex life
A couple who lost 17st between them say Mounjaro gave them more than weight loss, restoring confidence and closeness

I am reminded of a story – a story, not something fact checked.

A farmer’s wife – and of the size and shape of a proper farmer’s wife – decided she desired to lose weight. Further, that the manner of doing so was to have lots and lots of sex. She was rural, but not that rural, so this required the cooperation of hubby. Which duly arrived and everything was fine – she lost weight.

As happens with these things so did he lose weight and apparently he was 6 stone when he fainted off his tractor.

Obviously not fact checked because who would want to destroy a story that good?

The post So, it works then? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The former private secretary of billionaire philanthropist Judith Neilson has been charged with dozens of counts of fraud after she allegedly used a business credit card to make more than $1m worth of purchases, including luxury clothing, artwork and jewellery.

Annalouise Spence, 50, was refused bail at a local court hearing on Thursday after being charged with 68 counts of dishonestly obtaining property by deception.

When will government solve the Servant Problem?

The post Just can’t get the staff these days first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Hence, the Richard Murphy Question: If governments create the money that sustains our economies, and if we have the real resources to provide security, care and a livable future free from fear, why do we continue to organise society as if we cannot afford to do so?

Because we do not share Spud’s priorities? Because to allow spud to design society would be a disaster?

The post To answer the Spud question first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Sir Keir Starmer must invest billions more in the military after decades of “over-reliance” on the United States allowed Britain to “neglect” its Armed Forces, an ex-Nato chief has warned.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, a former Nato secretary general, said Downing Street must “reassess” its “outdated and unhelpful” special relationship with the US.

He’s right, but I doubt it will happen. The thing the Americans really provide is lift and logistics. The actually important things in a full on war. And they’re expensive, really, really, expensive. No British government – I propose – would be willing to spend enough to provide lift and l;ogistics at the scale required. Nor would any other European govt.

Wish it were not so but feeding the lanyards is far more electorally important.

The post Don’t think it’ll work first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Democracy is under mounting threat from the climate crisis, with new analysis documenting how elections are increasingly shaped not only by political forces but also by floods, wildfires and extreme weather.

Democracy is good! So, if we can link climate change to ani-democracy then hugs all around! Except Xir who is non-tactile. We win!

The post They’re getting desperate first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that transgender women athletes would be barred from competing in all Olympic events in the women’s category – but not the men’s events.

Err, yes?

The new rules effectively redefine womanhood – but not manhood – as a novel and previously unrecognized category consisting only of those with a specific set of genetic prerequisites.

It’s a very odd hill to decide to die upon and it’s a strange way of doing so too.

Those who support the bans claim that testosterone, male puberty or male genetics confer an advantage in athletics, and that trans women must therefore be banned in order to preserve the integrity of women’s competitions. This sounds like the kind of argument someone could make without being unreasonably motivated by bigotry; the IOC, for instance, claims that its new ban is backed up by science and evidence. But the actual science of sex development, hormone therapy, and their impact on athletic performance turns out to be quite complicated, with a broad variation across both individual athletes and different sporting events. The science of how to ensure fairness and measure advantage in these contexts is “not settled at all”, said Eric Vilain, a University of California, Irvine, geneticist who advised the IOC on gender for more than a decade. This new insistence that a complicated scientific question is in fact a simple one – and that it is determinative and relevant only for women, and not for men – suggests that something other than a robust commitment to fairness is at play.

They’ve all got it in for me. Or them at least, a grand conspiracy to explain something as simple as nose on face. The reason we have “women’s” sports is because without the classification no woman would ever win anything. So, there must be policing of the classification becuase that’s why we have the classification.

Women’s middle distance running for example. Was it the women’s 2016 1600 where the first truly XY came in fourth?

It all is an odd hill to die upon.

The post Moira thinks she’s got a gotcha first appeared on Tim Worstall.

X Factor finalist accused of driving car into influencer rival
Social media creator on attempted murder charge after three people mown down by vehicle in Soho

Well, OK, it’s still missing the Ghost of Diana and Elvis flipping a cheeseburger but no doubt we’ll get there.

The post Ain’t this a story with everything? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The Guardian reported last week that the so-called “legacy generators” will be offered the opportunity to sign up to the new contracts, which are similar to deals struck by low-carbon projects since 2017, or face higher windfall taxes on their profits.

Securing the bulk of the UK’s electricity from fixed-price contracts should mean electricity costs will fall and bill payers would be less exposed to sudden market price shocks.

The saving will be only of that extra paid to those on the older contracts when gas prices are very high. And we must assume that they’re going to be offered a sweetner on their regular prices, right?

This could well mean a fall in the wholesale price of electricity. But the new CfD costs aren’t there, they’re in the other part of the ‘leccie bill.

The post No it won’t first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Baby was sexually abused before being killed by man adopting him, court told
Boy died aged 13 months after ‘routine abuse’ by Jamie Varley and his partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, jury hears

We do not have the death penalty any more. Well, except that meted out by prisoners themselves.

a secondary school teacher

The post Oh aye? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Europe’s “stone age” system of booking train tickets makes it needlessly difficult for travellers to avoid polluting flights, a report has found.

Booking equivalent train tickets is “difficult or impossible” on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, analysis from the Transport & Environment (T&E) thinktank shows.

Popular flight paths such as Lisbon-Madrid or Barcelona-Milan could not be booked from any rail operator’s website, the report found,

Lisbon Madrid by train is an idiot idea.

I think – haven’t checked – it’s because the Spanish network is a different gauge to the Portuguese one…..it takes under 6 hours to drive the same route.

The post This seems an excellent idea first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Historically it may come to be recognised as equivalent to the 1948 creation of the NHS, with Ed Miliband the Nye Bevan of our day. He has fought his cause in much the same ruthless way Bevan did. He faces the same ferocious (and politically deranged) opposition from the right, who will have to eat their hats over rejecting renewables. Just as the NHS is a prime reason for pride in Britain, we can expect the same national pride in homegrown energy independence, freeing us from rollercoaster markets and mercurial foreign oil and gas dictators: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump or ayatollahs.

But the NHS was a shit idea.

The post Typical Polly first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The $2bn (£1.5bn) a week that Donald Trump was spending on his reckless war in Iran could have funded saving more than 87 million lives, the head of the UN’s humanitarian agency, Tom Fletcher, said on Monday.

He also warned the normalisation of violent language, such as threatening to bomb Iran back to the stone ages, was very dangerous since it encourages every “wannabe autocrat” to use similar threats and tactics, including the destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure.

Military theory suggests otherwise. If we beat the crap out of autocrats then that will dissuade autocrates.

The post Why isn’t anyone listening to me? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The reality is that the fundamental pension contract, which is the collective acceptance of responsibility to provide for those in old age, is not reflected in the savings-based model of pension provision.

Petitio principii. He reaches his conclusion by the assumption he makes rather than proves.

If you assume that the base idea is the collective provision then anything which is not collective provision fails, doesn’t it?

Sigh.

The post Spud tries pensions again first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The penny is dropping. Reeves’ denial of reality is no longer sustainable. As I have been saying for weeks, Trump and Netanyahu’s war is likely to deliver an outcome requiring a response at least as great as that required after WWII.

We face shortages of gas, oil, other raw materials, and components for many manufacturing processes. The impact will already last for years, given that no immediate end to this conflict is now in sight.

Hardship, poverty, potential famine, business and personal bankruptcy, recession, and a resulting collapse in government revenues, and more, are very likely to result.

We need rationing, much more progressive taxation to balance enhanced social security payments, and major institutional reform to create resilience as a core element of defence policy to achieve the outcomes we need.

We might have a recession. So, increase taxes.

The post ‘S Glorious first appeared on Tim Worstall.

HMRC’s claimed logic is that, by imposing this obligation on businesses, with serious penalties soon to be attached for failure to comply, businesses will secure a supposed benefit as a result of them knowing their own real-time accounting performance. This claim by HMRC embraces, with an arrogance that borders on the profoundly presumptuous, the claim that these businesses would not otherwise know how they were doing financially, when, as I well know from my own experience of working with them, a simple range of heuristics is normally enough for most small businesses to be able to completely appreciate the performamce of their businesses.

And let’s not pretend the requirement isn’t extremely onerous.

The post Most, most, amusing first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Trump defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy. His wars, killing of innocents, and indeed, the threatening of entire civilisations are reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan. He is animated by little more than momentary impulses and resentments.

Not really necessary to read more of Nesrine here. It’s not informative, analytical, it’s performative, political porn for The Elect.

That dreadful man, why isn’t he forced to use the servants’ entrance?

Oh well, guess it sells newspapers.

The post Oh. Right then. first appeared on Tim Worstall.

When the Grammy award winning songwriter, Olivia Nervo, agreed to start a family with her partner she believed she was in “a monogamous, committed relationship leading to a future”, and had never heard of reproductive coercion.

Her world came crashing down when she was six months pregnant and she found out that her partner was in a relationship with another woman who was also pregnant, and with whom he already had a child.

Clearly not gentlemanly behaviour (tho’ given some past definitions of gentleman, perhaps very much so).

She said: “If you have sex with someone and you don’t disclose the fact that you have an STD (sexually transmitted disease), that’s assault [if you are infected they can be charged with grievous bodily harm] and that’s criminally chargeable. And if you remove a condom covertly that’s considered rape. But if you deceive someone into having a child, or just even having sex, you just fall between the cracks.

“I can’t get over it, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. And I just feel like reproductive coercion needs to be considered properly within family courts, at the very least. I would love it to be a standalone offence, but I understand that’s a big wish.”

A 2022 poll of 1,000 women aged 18 to 44 found 50% believed they had experienced reproductive coercion of some form, including pressure around pregnancy, abortion, sex and contraception.

Reproductive coercion is recognised in England and Wales as a form of coercive control under the Serious Crime Act.

Now, estimates here vary. Wildly. But that one about 10% of kids aren’t of the bloke who thinks they’re his. That, clearly, falls under a wide definition of this reproductive coercion. So when do the prosecutions start? For it ain’t, by a long shot, only men who lie about such things, is it?

The post This offence of reproductive coercion then first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Glory Be! Our regulations are tighter.

Well, no, they’ve just not as specific. Instead of saying two – well mushed – maggots per 100g we say not enough to compromise safety or to be seen. Which, with well mushed maggots will be, oooh, say 2 per 100g?

It’s a different approach. And it’s absolutely not “tighter” either.

This also produces an opportunity to repeat an old story. Not wholly sure how true it is but so the saying goes vegans coming from poorer countries end up sometimes with deficiency diseases in the UK. In those foreign places they were gaining a hefty dose of animal proteins from contamination, much less here, and enough less to trigger those diseases.

The post This means less than you might think first appeared on Tim Worstall.

So why have I put up a chart of the oil price? That is because it is utterly baffling that those supposedly tasked with making rational decisions in speculative markets can be so utterly stupid that they actually appear to believe what Donald Trump says, as if it might either represent the truth or have any bearing on what might actually happen when there is not the slightest evidence that either might be the case.

If markets are meant to appraise available evidence, the fall in the oil price last week records their incompetence. They have one job to do, and they do it very badly. The fact is that they trade sentiment and not evidence. What is clear is that these markets, in which the world’s leading banks are major players, are a major disruptive influence. Far from revealing prices or providing mechanisms for trade, they appear to exist slowly for the purpose of permitting high-stakes gambling at enormous cost to society at large. The volume of trades to actual goods delivered is the clearest indication of that.

What can be done about this? My suggestion is that we need a variation on a financial transaction tax, called Spahn taxation, to deal with this situation. This does, first of all, require that a financial transaction tax at a low rate be charged as a matter of course on all trades in markets such as these, and that an additional tax rate be charged as market volatility, indicated by significant price variations, increases. That would be designed to tax speculation heavily and would provide an incentive for everyone to take a step back, examine the evidence, stop short-term speculative thinking, appreciate what is really going on, and trade only when necessary.

Markets disagree with Spud. But Spud is right, obviously. Therefore markets need to be screwed, by Spud.

The post A certain confidence here first appeared on Tim Worstall.