Also known as thieving bastards
Lets say a pint costs £3 (so £3 logically costs 1 pint), there's only £9 in existence, and I've just set up a bank.
Andrew puts £3 in the bank. I know money's not a good store of value, so I buy a pint and put that in the vaults.
Ben puts £3 in the bank.
Charlie asks to borrow enough for a pint, so I give Ben's £3 to Charlie.
Dan is wize to my shenanigans, so keeps his £3 in his pocket.
Ella, Francis and Gerry all want to borrow £3 to get a pint each. I don't have it, but I'm a bank so I just credit their accounts with £3 each, creating £9.
Whoops! I've just doubled the amount of money in existence. Simple market forces: if the supply doubles but the demand remains the same, the cost of money will half. So, £3 no longer costs a pint, it costs half a pint; or, a pint now costs £6.
Lets look at what happens:
Andrew wants his money back. I sell half his pint and give him his £3 back.
I go to Charlie and demand my £6 back. I explain that as I lent him enough to buy a pint (£3 in yesterdays prices), he now has to pay me enough to buy a pint (i.e., £6 in todays prices). I can summon a police officer to use the threat of Reasonable Force to the face if he disagrees, so he gives me £6.
Actually, he gives me £6.50 (£3, adjusted for inflation + interest).
Ben comes along. I give him his £3 back. Actually, I chuck Ben and Andrew 20p extra each (interest).
I now have half a pint and £3.10. Because I know money's quite shit, I spend £3 on another half-a-pint, giving me a pint and 10p (£6.10, in todays money).
Ella, Francis and Gerry each owe me £6 (plus interest), and Dan's pissed off that, despite having nothing to do with me, he's suddenly only got enough for half a pint.
In numbers:
Andrew and Ben each gave me £3, and I gave them both £3.20 back.
Charlie borrowed £3 and had to pay back £6.50; likewize with Ella, Francis and Gerry
Dan had, and still has, £3
I have total assets (money + a pint + debt) worth £25.60 (10p + 1 pint (£6) + 3 * £6.50 debt (£19.50) )
In terms of wealth:
Andrew and Ben each gave me enough for a pint. I gave them back just over half-a-pint's worth of wealth.
Charlie borrowed enough to buy a pint. He payed back just over enough to buy a pint. likewize with Ella, Francis and Gerry.
Dan had enough for a pint, and now only has enough for a half.
I have a pint, plus am owed enough to buy over 3 pints
wealth is going from everyone (even dan, who has nothing to do with me) to me.
Specifically, notice how much 'money' there is knocking about:
Andrew: £3.20
Ben: £3.20
Dan: £3
me: 10p
For a total of £9.50; more than actually exists! Generally, if I fuck up and there isn't actually enough money to cover my scheme the government will simply print me some more money.
It gets worse tho.
Andrew: £3.20
Ben: £3.20
Charlie: £0
Dan: £3
me: 10p + £25.50 assets
That's a total of £9.50 (actual money), or £35 (total money, including in assets).
Lucky assets != money. However, if I can somehow blur the line between money and assets (by, perhaps, trading in debt as if it was cash), then we've gone from £9 (9 of which existed) to £9.50 (9.50 of which exist) to possibly £35 (9.50 of which exist).
If we actually print off extra cash so that £35 exists, a pint will now cost approximately £12 and Dan'll be absolutely furious, to the point where he might be ruined or simply decide not to trade in money. So we can't actually do this , which begs the question:
If Ella and Gerry can't pay their collective debts of £13 back for some reason, and I've been trading in their debts with other banks etc. as if they were money; iow if £13 of the £35 is backed on Ella and Gerry, and they can't pay their debts, so suddenly over a 1/3 of the 'money' is worthless, what happens?
Recession.
So, why's this allowed? Well, the banks and the government regulate the banking system.
The banks lend the government money.
The banks complain about lack of money that actually exists.
The government say 'we've checked, and that's not your fault'.
The government print money and give it to the banks, paying back their debts.
The banking system checks, and says 'the government aren't "just" printing money to pay their debts, they're printing money to cover non-existing money'.
So, iow they back each other up. The government are allowed to print money, the banks are allowed to create money, and they both say the other's not being irresponsible.
I've also noticed that, in a recession, small businesses tend to go bust whilst large businesses tend to expand; recessions unfairly favor large businesses over small. In return, large businesses not only give the political parties cash, but also are more compliant: wanna introduce an ID-fucking-everybody policy? Betcha every Tesco's will comply, but only half the smaller offies and corner-shops will.
Big business: government-compliant, government-funding
Government: pro-big-business, manipulate the economy to allow big-business expansion; allow banking scheme
Banks: facilitate government influence of economy; government-compliant; allow government to print money
Small business: gets suppressed
Small people: get fucked.
Showing posts with label power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Thursday, 29 July 2010
How to Evade Tax and Get Away With It
courtesy of Tescos
Cheap booze! Gotta love it, because it's booze and it's cheap.
However, there is something wrong with cheap booze; no, it's not the gangs of feral youths, pissed off their head from half a shandy who will undoubtably rape your mum given half the chance, or the £3b/year cost to the NHS.
No, it's worse: it's tax evasion, on a rampant scale, being aided-and-abetted by Tescos (and other supermarkets), those cheeky bastards!
See, most people would answer the above 'a quid'. And thats why most of us are poor.
Rich people would say 'it depends': on how much it costs to get that quid, how many quids you already have, how many pounds you need, when you're going to get the pound, and various other factors, one of which is how much tax you're going to have to pay on it.
For an example, lets change the tax rate to something less confusing than 17.5%: lets say that everything has a VAT of 10%, except booze, which has a duty of 50% instead.
Now, you earn £1 on bread, or clothes, or newspapers or bogroll or anything other than booze, and (ignoring production costs etc) that £1 is worth 90p to you, as 10% of it is tax actually, something that cost 90p before tax and that then takes a 10% tax would come to 99p, and to cost £1 after tax it's original value would have had to have been 91ish-pence, but fuck it I'm going to ignore that for the sake of simplicity
But, you earn £1 on booze, and it's only worth 50p to you, 'cos that's how much you get to keep after tax.
Obviously, then, a quid made on bread is worth more to you than a quid made on booze; it's less efficient to earn money on booze...
E.g., imagine you spend £3 on cider, and £3 on bog roll (cos cider gives me the squits): thats £1.50 Tesco keeps on cider, and £2.70 it keeps on bog roll, for a total of £6 received and an after-tax net income of £4.20.
"Bingo!" say the execs at Tescos, "we'll lower the price of booze and subsideze it with an increase across the board on other products".
So this is what happens: you're pleasantly suprized to find that you only have to spend £1 on the cider, then slightly miffed to have to spend £5.70 on bog roll, but you can't be arsed to buy your cider from one supermarket and your loo-roll from another, and anyway the total bill is still £6, so fuck it.
Tesco gets to keep 50p of that money spent on cider (after 50% duty) and £4.43 from the bogroll (after 10% VAT) for a total after-tax net income of £4.93, which is more than £4.20, so a win for Tescos by effectively transferring pounds from products where they would have to pay 50% tax to other products where they only have to pay 10% tax.
Those clever gits!
In fact, if you spread the increase thinly across products no-one will really notice that they're a bit more expensive, especially if Tescos shares some of this goodness with it's customers: e.g., for every pound lost due to cheapening the alcohol (that pound was only worth 50p to Tescos, remember), only 70p extra will be made on other goods (that's worth 63p to Tescos after 10% VAT), resulting in us customers paying 70p more on other goods for every £1 less spent on booze, for a net saving to us of 30p for every pound we would have spent on booze whilst Tescos make 13p more per pound-we-would-have-spent-on-booze.
OK, the end result is cheaper overall prices for us customers, and higher net income for Tescos, with the added benifit that they can attract customers with the promise of lower booze. Everybody wins!
Except the government; because this scheme works by avoiding (or, you could say, evading) the duty (also known as tax) on alcohol, the government misses out on some tax revenue at a time when it reeeeeeeally needs money and probably isn't in a mood to tolerate what amounts to large-scale tax-evasion being co-ordinated by the supermarkets.
Of course, this is a sticky situation for the government. Times are tough, and we want to save money and quite like the option of getting pissed every now and again with our mates on the cheap. The government are being blamed for times being tough and don't want to piss us off. Yet, the government effectively has to tell us that either taxes are going up to compensate for this new, exciting, world in which Tescos helps us evade tax, or we're going to have to lose our only-recently-aquired cheap booze. "Boo!" either way.
So, here's what I think is going to happen.
The government are going to approach newspapers and say that they will grant interviews with high-level figures, invite the reporters to all their meetings, and give them sound-bites from the PM, BUT only if they tow the 'cheap booze is bad' line. Any newspapers caught trying to point out that 'mostly drunk teens don't rape peoples mothers' or 'if you increase the price of booze beyond the point where youths can afford, some of them might get jobs ohwaittheyarentallowedto they might start nicking stuff to buy booze' won't get invited to the press conferences or granted interviews with Officer Highup, and therefore will have a harder time actually writing articles.
So, furnished with Official Figures given to them in interviews with Important People, we get articles like the one I linked to earlier, bemoaning the cost of alcohol to the NHS whilst carefully avoiding mentioning that the £3 billion/year cost is easily off-set by the in excess of £7 billion/year claimed in alcohol duty so that the government will keep talking to them and giving them a hand writing their articles
(btw, that source: download the XL spreadsheet, and it's in tab A2, 7.278 UOM in the period 04-05 from alcohol where UOM = Units Of Mystery, which are only refered to as being 'in real terms'; from tab A1b, which is measured in £millions, a quick addition confirms a total from-alcohol-duty income of somewhat in excess of £7billion)
So, my prediction is:
So, in summary, the government will manipulate the media into manufacturing a demand for less cheap booze, and then pass minimum-price laws so that they can carry on taxing us for something that they know we won't give up. The bastards.
Cheap booze! Gotta love it, because it's booze and it's cheap.
However, there is something wrong with cheap booze; no, it's not the gangs of feral youths, pissed off their head from half a shandy who will undoubtably rape your mum given half the chance, or the £3b/year cost to the NHS.
No, it's worse: it's tax evasion, on a rampant scale, being aided-and-abetted by Tescos (and other supermarkets), those cheeky bastards!
How much is £1 worth?
See, most people would answer the above 'a quid'. And thats why most of us are poor.
Rich people would say 'it depends': on how much it costs to get that quid, how many quids you already have, how many pounds you need, when you're going to get the pound, and various other factors, one of which is how much tax you're going to have to pay on it.
For an example, lets change the tax rate to something less confusing than 17.5%: lets say that everything has a VAT of 10%, except booze, which has a duty of 50% instead.
Now, you earn £1 on bread, or clothes, or newspapers or bogroll or anything other than booze, and (ignoring production costs etc) that £1 is worth 90p to you, as 10% of it is tax actually, something that cost 90p before tax and that then takes a 10% tax would come to 99p, and to cost £1 after tax it's original value would have had to have been 91ish-pence, but fuck it I'm going to ignore that for the sake of simplicity
But, you earn £1 on booze, and it's only worth 50p to you, 'cos that's how much you get to keep after tax.
Obviously, then, a quid made on bread is worth more to you than a quid made on booze; it's less efficient to earn money on booze...
E.g., imagine you spend £3 on cider, and £3 on bog roll (cos cider gives me the squits): thats £1.50 Tesco keeps on cider, and £2.70 it keeps on bog roll, for a total of £6 received and an after-tax net income of £4.20.
"Bingo!" say the execs at Tescos, "we'll lower the price of booze and subsideze it with an increase across the board on other products".
So this is what happens: you're pleasantly suprized to find that you only have to spend £1 on the cider, then slightly miffed to have to spend £5.70 on bog roll, but you can't be arsed to buy your cider from one supermarket and your loo-roll from another, and anyway the total bill is still £6, so fuck it.
Tesco gets to keep 50p of that money spent on cider (after 50% duty) and £4.43 from the bogroll (after 10% VAT) for a total after-tax net income of £4.93, which is more than £4.20, so a win for Tescos by effectively transferring pounds from products where they would have to pay 50% tax to other products where they only have to pay 10% tax.
Those clever gits!
In fact, if you spread the increase thinly across products no-one will really notice that they're a bit more expensive, especially if Tescos shares some of this goodness with it's customers: e.g., for every pound lost due to cheapening the alcohol (that pound was only worth 50p to Tescos, remember), only 70p extra will be made on other goods (that's worth 63p to Tescos after 10% VAT), resulting in us customers paying 70p more on other goods for every £1 less spent on booze, for a net saving to us of 30p for every pound we would have spent on booze whilst Tescos make 13p more per pound-we-would-have-spent-on-booze.
What?
OK, the end result is cheaper overall prices for us customers, and higher net income for Tescos, with the added benifit that they can attract customers with the promise of lower booze. Everybody wins!
Except the government; because this scheme works by avoiding (or, you could say, evading) the duty (also known as tax) on alcohol, the government misses out on some tax revenue at a time when it reeeeeeeally needs money and probably isn't in a mood to tolerate what amounts to large-scale tax-evasion being co-ordinated by the supermarkets.
No, counter-intuitively enough, you DON'T like cheap booze (this statement sanctioned by the government)
Of course, this is a sticky situation for the government. Times are tough, and we want to save money and quite like the option of getting pissed every now and again with our mates on the cheap. The government are being blamed for times being tough and don't want to piss us off. Yet, the government effectively has to tell us that either taxes are going up to compensate for this new, exciting, world in which Tescos helps us evade tax, or we're going to have to lose our only-recently-aquired cheap booze. "Boo!" either way.
So, here's what I think is going to happen.
The government are going to approach newspapers and say that they will grant interviews with high-level figures, invite the reporters to all their meetings, and give them sound-bites from the PM, BUT only if they tow the 'cheap booze is bad' line. Any newspapers caught trying to point out that 'mostly drunk teens don't rape peoples mothers' or 'if you increase the price of booze beyond the point where youths can afford, some of them might get jobs ohwaittheyarentallowedto they might start nicking stuff to buy booze' won't get invited to the press conferences or granted interviews with Officer Highup, and therefore will have a harder time actually writing articles.
So, furnished with Official Figures given to them in interviews with Important People, we get articles like the one I linked to earlier, bemoaning the cost of alcohol to the NHS whilst carefully avoiding mentioning that the £3 billion/year cost is easily off-set by the in excess of £7 billion/year claimed in alcohol duty so that the government will keep talking to them and giving them a hand writing their articles
(btw, that source: download the XL spreadsheet, and it's in tab A2, 7.278 UOM in the period 04-05 from alcohol where UOM = Units Of Mystery, which are only refered to as being 'in real terms'; from tab A1b, which is measured in £millions, a quick addition confirms a total from-alcohol-duty income of somewhat in excess of £7billion)
So, my prediction is:
- an increase in newspaper articles mentioning:
- The total cost of alcohol to the NHS and thus taxpayer, and how this could be avoided if only alcohol cost less, thus discouraging 'binge drinking'
- emotive examples of a small number of crimes committed by people who had binge-drunk, followed by figures of total number and/or cost of alcohol-related crimes, subtly implying that all alcohol-related crimes were committed by people pissed out of their heads because they'd binge-drunk cheap booze from Tescos
- shocking stories, with emotive details, or how Johhny Teen raped someones cat 'because he was pissed', probably with Wild Speculation as to how many feral youths might rape our cats if they can afford a bottle of scrumpy (answer: ALL OF THEM!)
- Expert Opinion from Experts in the Alcohol Business (i.e., landlords) who's completely unbiased opinion which they're offering for free as a service to society is that Tescos selling cheap booze is a Bad Thing
- whilst religiously avoiding mentioning
- the fact that, according to the government, alcohol duty is more than alcohol's cost to society, effectively admitting that duty isn't an exercise in internalization so that we don't blithely overspend, but rather an exercise in taxing us a lot on our hobbies because we won't exactly stop doing it and therefore because they can, the cunts
- suggesting that if someone goes out and gets pissed and beats someone up, they're probably just an arsehole who likes both beating people up and getting pissed, and if he couldn't afford to drink he'd probably just beat someone up, steal their money, buy booze, and then beat someone else up for fun
- finishing the stories that a nice police representative helped you write by answering all your questions with 'but then he got pissed in a pub, not off of cheap supermarket booze, so it's kind of irrelevent', or with anything other than 'therefore cheap booze is bad boo!'
- mentioning inconvenient facts about the crime stats, such as 'the person who binge-drinks 27 pints and is still capable of beating someone up is an exception, not a representative example of people who commit crime whilst drunk
- suggesting that some, let alone most, underage drinkers don't commit crimes (except underage drinking)'
- sarcastically focusing on 'unintended consequences', such as people who are too young to legally work stealing to buy expensive alcohol, or a likely increase in illegally imported booze in response to it's rise in price
- pointing out that the landlords probably are biased by a cheap stay-at-home-where-you-can-smoke competitor
- relatedly: interviewing the brewers to see what they think
- Culminating in a Sun/Express 'campaign' to 'save us from the horrors of cheap booze'
- A compliant government, democratically bowing to our demands and passing minimum-price laws
- but not on spirits, that's what they drink
tl; dr?
So, in summary, the government will manipulate the media into manufacturing a demand for less cheap booze, and then pass minimum-price laws so that they can carry on taxing us for something that they know we won't give up. The bastards.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Simpsons Paradox
Electoral Systems 102: Divide and miscount
Another problem with our electoral system is Simpsons' Paradox.
In a nutshell, Simpsons Paradox is where you can divide a set of results into chunks, assess each chunk, and then combine the results of each assessment to draw a conclusion about the whole which disagrees with a direct assessment of the whole.
Or, in less confusing terms, it is how someone can come second in each leg of the tour-de-france yet still come 1st overall: as long as no-one consistantly comes 1st in each leg, the best overall cyclist may well be the one who was always 2nd. Yet, the fact that he came 2nd in each leg makes it appear as if he'd be overall 2nd...
It can occur in more confusing ways, too.
Lets devise an experiment to figure out who is harder: Charlie Chaplin or Mike Tyson?
The experiment can be that we will pit each of them against two opponents — Bruce Lee and a 10-year-old girl — and see who wins most.
Stupid? Yes, but the results are:
vs. 10-year-old girl:
Charlie does suprisingly poorly against the 10-year-old girl, who manages to win nearly half her bouts against him; Mike, tho, predictably wins all of his bouts against the girl. The results are so obvious that not many fights are neccesary to establish that Mike Tyson is harder than a 10-year-old girl:
Charlie Chaplin: 50/90
Mike Tyson: 10/10
WINNER: Tyson, with 100% victory vs. 10-year-old girl, against Charlie's 55%
Against Bruce Lee, Tyson manages to win some, but nonetheless Bruce Lee proves the stronger; Chaplin, again, gets his ass handed to him, but at least this time it's not by a 10-year-old girl:
Charlie Chaplin: 0/10
Mike Tyson: 35/90
WINNER: Tyson, with a 38% success rate vs. Lee, against Chaplin's 0%.
OVERALL WINNER: CHAPLIN.
eh?
Well, overall they both fought 100 fights: Chaplin won 50 of these, whilst Tyson won only 45, meaning that Chaplin wins more bouts, grabs the trophy and has proven himself in trial to be harder than Tyson, until Tyson decks him, grabs the trophy, and runs off shouting 'bloody Simpsons Paradox!'
Ok, that was all daft, but that's the essence of Simpsons Paradox. In this case, breaking the data down and assessing in chunks gives the correct interpretation (Tyson does best against a girl + Tyson does best against Lee = Tyson is better fighter), whilst in other times it can be the overall view that is correct whilst breaking it into chunks gives a false view.
A really quick example: this time, it's two fighters vs. Frank Bruno:
Trial one:
A: 65/100
B: 7/10
WINNER: B (70%, vs. A's 65%)
Trial two:
A: 4/10
B: 53/100
WINNER: B(53% vs. A's 40%)
OVERALL WINNER: A (69/110 vs. B's 60/110)
Unlike the first example, here the correct interpretation is the overall view, with the breaking-into-chunks-then-combining-results giving a false view.
So our country is divided into constituencies. The votes are tallied per constituency, and then these results are combined to give the national result. This is the situation that you need for Simpsons Paradox to arise, and is how the Labour party managed to 'win' the last election with 55% of the power (i.e., majority control) with only 35% of the vote[1]; hell, on two occasions the 'winner' actually had less votes than the party that came second[2] (on one of those occasions, the winner had enough for a majority control, i.e. they were in charge), and also explains the huge disparity between how many votes Lib Dem get and how much power they end up with:
That first result is appauling: just over a quarter of the vote translating to just over a thirtieth of the power...
In fact, Gerrymandering (see previous post) is essentially an attempt to force Simpsons Paradox in order to grant yourself even more disproportionate power.
Dividing the country up into constituencies is the fundamental cause for the disproportionality of our voting system: it's what causes some parties to get more power than their vote-share indicates they deserve, whilst others get less; it's one of the main reasons why our electoral system is not fit-for-purpose.
One of the repercussions of this is that gerrymandering is possible (see last post); the other is 'wasted votes' and the repercussions of wasted votes (see next post?)
[1]
BBC News election scoreboard
356 seats for Labour = 356/646*100 = 55.1%
[2]
Wikipedia: Jan '10 election results
Wikipedia: Feb '74 election results
Another problem with our electoral system is Simpsons' Paradox.
In a nutshell, Simpsons Paradox is where you can divide a set of results into chunks, assess each chunk, and then combine the results of each assessment to draw a conclusion about the whole which disagrees with a direct assessment of the whole.
Or, in less confusing terms, it is how someone can come second in each leg of the tour-de-france yet still come 1st overall: as long as no-one consistantly comes 1st in each leg, the best overall cyclist may well be the one who was always 2nd. Yet, the fact that he came 2nd in each leg makes it appear as if he'd be overall 2nd...
It can occur in more confusing ways, too.
Lets devise an experiment to figure out who is harder: Charlie Chaplin or Mike Tyson?
The experiment can be that we will pit each of them against two opponents — Bruce Lee and a 10-year-old girl — and see who wins most.
Stupid? Yes, but the results are:
vs. 10-year-old girl:
Charlie does suprisingly poorly against the 10-year-old girl, who manages to win nearly half her bouts against him; Mike, tho, predictably wins all of his bouts against the girl. The results are so obvious that not many fights are neccesary to establish that Mike Tyson is harder than a 10-year-old girl:
Charlie Chaplin: 50/90
Mike Tyson: 10/10
WINNER: Tyson, with 100% victory vs. 10-year-old girl, against Charlie's 55%
Against Bruce Lee, Tyson manages to win some, but nonetheless Bruce Lee proves the stronger; Chaplin, again, gets his ass handed to him, but at least this time it's not by a 10-year-old girl:
Charlie Chaplin: 0/10
Mike Tyson: 35/90
WINNER: Tyson, with a 38% success rate vs. Lee, against Chaplin's 0%.
OVERALL WINNER: CHAPLIN.
eh?
Well, overall they both fought 100 fights: Chaplin won 50 of these, whilst Tyson won only 45, meaning that Chaplin wins more bouts, grabs the trophy and has proven himself in trial to be harder than Tyson, until Tyson decks him, grabs the trophy, and runs off shouting 'bloody Simpsons Paradox!'
Ok, that was all daft, but that's the essence of Simpsons Paradox. In this case, breaking the data down and assessing in chunks gives the correct interpretation (Tyson does best against a girl + Tyson does best against Lee = Tyson is better fighter), whilst in other times it can be the overall view that is correct whilst breaking it into chunks gives a false view.
A really quick example: this time, it's two fighters vs. Frank Bruno:
Trial one:
A: 65/100
B: 7/10
WINNER: B (70%, vs. A's 65%)
Trial two:
A: 4/10
B: 53/100
WINNER: B(53% vs. A's 40%)
OVERALL WINNER: A (69/110 vs. B's 60/110)
Unlike the first example, here the correct interpretation is the overall view, with the breaking-into-chunks-then-combining-results giving a false view.
So?
So our country is divided into constituencies. The votes are tallied per constituency, and then these results are combined to give the national result. This is the situation that you need for Simpsons Paradox to arise, and is how the Labour party managed to 'win' the last election with 55% of the power (i.e., majority control) with only 35% of the vote[1]; hell, on two occasions the 'winner' actually had less votes than the party that came second[2] (on one of those occasions, the winner had enough for a majority control, i.e. they were in charge), and also explains the huge disparity between how many votes Lib Dem get and how much power they end up with:
That first result is appauling: just over a quarter of the vote translating to just over a thirtieth of the power...
In fact, Gerrymandering (see previous post) is essentially an attempt to force Simpsons Paradox in order to grant yourself even more disproportionate power.
Tl; dr?
Dividing the country up into constituencies is the fundamental cause for the disproportionality of our voting system: it's what causes some parties to get more power than their vote-share indicates they deserve, whilst others get less; it's one of the main reasons why our electoral system is not fit-for-purpose.
One of the repercussions of this is that gerrymandering is possible (see last post); the other is 'wasted votes' and the repercussions of wasted votes (see next post?)
References
[1]
BBC News election scoreboard
356 seats for Labour = 356/646*100 = 55.1%
[2]
Wikipedia: Jan '10 election results
Wikipedia: Feb '74 election results
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Criminomics 103
Examples
From here
A few examples of 'organized crime as a branch of the secret service':
Lucky there's all that organized crime about the place, eh? I wonder if anyone in power's ever thought that it's in their best interests to sustain global organized crime *coff* war on drugs *coff*
From here
A few examples of 'organized crime as a branch of the secret service':
The fact that organized crime and the United States government have had some common enemies (Mussolini in Italy, and Castro in Cuba) has sometimes led to cooperation between them. In Italy local Mafiosi were active in the underground and provided the Allies with intelligence for the invasion of Sicily. As the Allies then moved on to the Italian mainland, anti-Fascist Mafia were appointed to important positions in many towns and villages. The French liner Normandie was burned in New York, just before it was to become an Allied troop ship. Following this incident, the government sought the aid of mob-controlled longshoremen, truckers and guards as help against waterfront sabotage and infiltration during World War II. 7 Help was received from Joe (Socks) Lanza on the East Side and Lucky Luciano on the West Side. Just what the government offered in return is less clear, although Luciano’s cooperation won him, at the least, a transfer to more comfortable prison quarters near Albany (Talese, 1972: 206).
Recent reports of connections between the CIA and the underworld may simply be the continuation of an old American tradition. The CIA with its “executive action program” designed to “eliminate the effectiveness of foreign leaders” also delegated some of its dirty work (such as assassination efforts directed against Castro and Lumumba) to underworld figures. In Castro’s case organized crime figures were thought to have “expertise and contacts not available to law-abiding citizens.” They also had a motive which it was thought would take attention away from sponsorship of the U.S. government. According to one estimate (Schlesinger, 1978), Castro’s coming to power cost organized crime $100 million a year. Outsiders were used by the CIA to avoid having “an Agency person or government person get caught” (Select Committee, 1975: 74).
A former bank robber and forger involved in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Lumumba was given plastic surgery and a toupee by the CIA before being sent to the Congo. This man was recommended by the Chief of the CIA’s Africa Division as a “field operative” because “if he is given an assignment which may be morally wrong in the eyes of the world, but necessary because his case officer ordered him to carry it out, then it is right, and he will dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience. In a word, he can rationalize all actions” (Select Committee, 1975: 46). It appears that in extreme cases one crucial element which agents of social control may obtain in such exchange relationships is a psychopathic personality not inhibited by conventional moral restraints
Lucky there's all that organized crime about the place, eh? I wonder if anyone in power's ever thought that it's in their best interests to sustain global organized crime *coff* war on drugs *coff*
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Criminomics 102
Or: how to maintain a secret-service branch on the cheap
Put yourself in the position of a secret-service high-up.
You've been given a big task: you're to create an organization that can achieve 'things' within the UK. These things will be 'ground-work': the actual 'doing stuff' leg-work that exerts small-scale, local influence which, if carefully applied (to, e.g., politicians, police-chiefs, etc) could have useful larger-scale effects. Your organization will work with other departments (psyops/propaganda, political, economical, military, etc) in order to exert influence within the UK.
The exact specifications are:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff: espionage, entrapment/framing, bribery, forgery of documents, theft, breaking-and-bugging, kidnap, torture, blackmail, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, manufacturing stuff; finances (movement of cash); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives; etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary.
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not traceable back to us) and be as cheap as possible.
Now, the 'cheap as possible' requirement kind of rules-out many potential approaches: armies of operatives spread thickly throughout the UK would cost a bomb and, anyway, it would kind of risk the 'deniable' requirement.
A much better idea is to pass 'stupid' laws.
See, illegalizing cannabis, for example, contributes to the profitability (and thus sustainability/maintenance) of the UK criminal infrastructure. It funds illegal transportation networks, and criminal gangs. Cocaine does likewize, and also makes it financially viable for 'organized crime' to maintain some (at least small and basic) chemical manufacturing plants. All drugs contribute to the profitability of crime, and thus facilitates criminals bribing police officers for information.
Patent laws lead to forgery, which includes stuff like, e.g., televisions: make a sub-par TV that just-about works, slap a 'sony' label on it, and sell it above what it's worth, and you get 'organized crime' maintaining electronic-equipment factories and the skilled electronics and machining experts who are required to set up the factories.
Obviously, chuck thieves and thugs, forgers and whores in there too, as they're all illegal. And, for every law that pushes more 'economics' into the hands of the organized criminals, and -- given that even the 'victimless criminals' such as prostitutes can't really go to the police -- there's more and more demand (and more and more money available) for organized crime's 'police' -- People Who Go Have Words With People, People Who Break Other People's Legs, People Who Kill People...
Mostly staffed by People Who Do Things For Money, and administrated by People Who Know People...
Lets look at the requirements of our organization again:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff:
espionage; breaking-and-bugging: Pay the more-skilled thieves to break and enter, and plant bugs (the bugs can be manufactured by the patent infringers in bulk, or the people who design their factories in small numbers, or by the gov. and then smuggled in by the drug smugglers); use the police/etc contacts for internal information.
entrapment/framing/blackmail: whores and drug-dealers would be good for this. 'Got caught snorting coke off of two whores breasts' makes an awful headline, don't'cha think... as does anything relating to whores or drugs, tbh.
bribery: of officials? drug-dealers, crime-lords, etc, already do so for early-warning of raids and 'accidentally' losing evidence. Of other people, you just need the money and someone to go make the offer.
Forgery of documents: forgers
theft: theives
kidnap, torture, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing: organized crime is quite versatile enough to get all of these things done, given sufficient money, and half of those things are done by their 'police'.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, (drug smugglers mainly) manufacturing stuff (patent infringers; drug-makers for chemical stuff); finances (have their own trust-based money-moving systems, and money-laundering too); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives (the 'leaders'); etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary (umm... yes).
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not tracable back to us, criminals take the blame) and be as cheap as possible (no maintenance costs, simply pay on an as-needed basis).
Bloody cheap way of doing it. You just need to make sure that the criminal infrastructure remains strong. That's easy, just illegalize enough that they have a crapload of stuff to do and make money off of, and ignore all arguments based on 'makes organized crime more powerful' and police badly ('zero tolerance' policing, for example, leads to more and more people not being able to go to the police == more power for organized crime; underfunding would work too).
Now you have a branch of the secret service that can do the 'ground-work' cheaply. No one who matters will get hurt.
On the down-side you'll have to constantly fend off 'hippy liberals' who want to decriminalize stuff, and you'll have to play silly-buggers with the organized criminals so that they don't get too powerful (maybe arrest the leaders who try to unite the gangs, and leave the more conflicty bosses in charge to keep the society less cohesive?), not to mention that others could, in theory, use this system against you; but on the plus it's a method that can be applied to other countries as well, as long as you can put enough influence on them to pass organized-crime-friendly laws and have enough money to be 'the highest bidder' when it matters.
If we assume that the secret service desires a large, deniable network of people who can get local-scale dodgy stuff done in order to exert control, with its own supporting infrastructure (e.g., logistics) and all on the cheap, then organized crime doesn't half fit that need well...
Also, it works to exert influence on foreign countries as well, as long as you can influence them enough to get an organized-crime friendly set of laws passed.
Therefore, our arguably stupid approach to law and order (especially conceptual crimes) may well not be so stupid, if you assume they're supposed to promote, rather than suppress, crime (especially organized crime).
Put yourself in the position of a secret-service high-up.
You've been given a big task: you're to create an organization that can achieve 'things' within the UK. These things will be 'ground-work': the actual 'doing stuff' leg-work that exerts small-scale, local influence which, if carefully applied (to, e.g., politicians, police-chiefs, etc) could have useful larger-scale effects. Your organization will work with other departments (psyops/propaganda, political, economical, military, etc) in order to exert influence within the UK.
The exact specifications are:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff: espionage, entrapment/framing, bribery, forgery of documents, theft, breaking-and-bugging, kidnap, torture, blackmail, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, manufacturing stuff; finances (movement of cash); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives; etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary.
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not traceable back to us) and be as cheap as possible.
Now, the 'cheap as possible' requirement kind of rules-out many potential approaches: armies of operatives spread thickly throughout the UK would cost a bomb and, anyway, it would kind of risk the 'deniable' requirement.
A much better idea is to pass 'stupid' laws.
See, illegalizing cannabis, for example, contributes to the profitability (and thus sustainability/maintenance) of the UK criminal infrastructure. It funds illegal transportation networks, and criminal gangs. Cocaine does likewize, and also makes it financially viable for 'organized crime' to maintain some (at least small and basic) chemical manufacturing plants. All drugs contribute to the profitability of crime, and thus facilitates criminals bribing police officers for information.
Patent laws lead to forgery, which includes stuff like, e.g., televisions: make a sub-par TV that just-about works, slap a 'sony' label on it, and sell it above what it's worth, and you get 'organized crime' maintaining electronic-equipment factories and the skilled electronics and machining experts who are required to set up the factories.
Obviously, chuck thieves and thugs, forgers and whores in there too, as they're all illegal. And, for every law that pushes more 'economics' into the hands of the organized criminals, and -- given that even the 'victimless criminals' such as prostitutes can't really go to the police -- there's more and more demand (and more and more money available) for organized crime's 'police' -- People Who Go Have Words With People, People Who Break Other People's Legs, People Who Kill People...
Mostly staffed by People Who Do Things For Money, and administrated by People Who Know People...
Lets look at the requirements of our organization again:
Must be capable of 'getting stuff done', mainly the illegal stuff:
espionage; breaking-and-bugging: Pay the more-skilled thieves to break and enter, and plant bugs (the bugs can be manufactured by the patent infringers in bulk, or the people who design their factories in small numbers, or by the gov. and then smuggled in by the drug smugglers); use the police/etc contacts for internal information.
entrapment/framing/blackmail: whores and drug-dealers would be good for this. 'Got caught snorting coke off of two whores breasts' makes an awful headline, don't'cha think... as does anything relating to whores or drugs, tbh.
bribery: of officials? drug-dealers, crime-lords, etc, already do so for early-warning of raids and 'accidentally' losing evidence. Of other people, you just need the money and someone to go make the offer.
Forgery of documents: forgers
theft: theives
kidnap, torture, coercion, assassination, provoking riots, anything else that might need doing: organized crime is quite versatile enough to get all of these things done, given sufficient money, and half of those things are done by their 'police'.
Must be capable of logistics to facilitate the above: importing, exporting, transporting, storing, (drug smugglers mainly) manufacturing stuff (patent infringers; drug-makers for chemical stuff); finances (have their own trust-based money-moving systems, and money-laundering too); identification and appropriation of skilled operatives (the 'leaders'); etc.
Size and spread: must be present in every city and ideally infiltrate the power structure (police officers, magistrates, civil-service, etc.), and be large enough to bear a large workload if necessary (umm... yes).
Must do all the above in a deniable way (not tracable back to us, criminals take the blame) and be as cheap as possible (no maintenance costs, simply pay on an as-needed basis).
Bloody cheap way of doing it. You just need to make sure that the criminal infrastructure remains strong. That's easy, just illegalize enough that they have a crapload of stuff to do and make money off of, and ignore all arguments based on 'makes organized crime more powerful' and police badly ('zero tolerance' policing, for example, leads to more and more people not being able to go to the police == more power for organized crime; underfunding would work too).
Now you have a branch of the secret service that can do the 'ground-work' cheaply. No one who matters will get hurt.
On the down-side you'll have to constantly fend off 'hippy liberals' who want to decriminalize stuff, and you'll have to play silly-buggers with the organized criminals so that they don't get too powerful (maybe arrest the leaders who try to unite the gangs, and leave the more conflicty bosses in charge to keep the society less cohesive?), not to mention that others could, in theory, use this system against you; but on the plus it's a method that can be applied to other countries as well, as long as you can put enough influence on them to pass organized-crime-friendly laws and have enough money to be 'the highest bidder' when it matters.
tl; dr?
If we assume that the secret service desires a large, deniable network of people who can get local-scale dodgy stuff done in order to exert control, with its own supporting infrastructure (e.g., logistics) and all on the cheap, then organized crime doesn't half fit that need well...
Also, it works to exert influence on foreign countries as well, as long as you can influence them enough to get an organized-crime friendly set of laws passed.
Therefore, our arguably stupid approach to law and order (especially conceptual crimes) may well not be so stupid, if you assume they're supposed to promote, rather than suppress, crime (especially organized crime).
Friday, 22 January 2010
Crimonomics 101
Really obvious stuff about economics and the black-market
Lets take John Smith. John likes drinking beer. So, John has several problems:
Now, people have sprung up to solve John's problems: brewers make beer, land-lords store beer and maintain a nice drinking environment, and taxi drivers will ferry you to and from the pub. They'll do all this under the assumption that you'll give them money. Pretty much economics 101.
Now lets take Druggy McCokehead. Druggy likes snorting coke. So, Druggy has several problems, pretty similar to John's: for a start, he needs cocaine.
Again, people will have sprung up to solve Druggy's problems. A taxi-driver might ferry him to and from his local drug-dealer, who stocks cocaine for him.
If you have a problem, and are willing to sacrifice money to get it fixed, there will be people available to fix your problem, whatever it is. Economics 101.
Similarly, there's infrastructure for other problem-solvers. Take the person who solves John's beer-problem: he'll need a way of getting the beer from the brewers to his pub, hence there's a transportation infrastructure. Some of these transporters might address clients/goods with special requirements: maybe those goods are perishable and thus require cooling/freezing whilst being transported, or maybe the goods need to be hidden and transported covertly because armies of big men with sticks are out to find and confiscate the goods. Either way, there will be people willing to solve your transportation needs... for money.
Similarly, John's land-lord might, in his quest to provide an enjoyable drinking environment, encounter the problem of violent drunks; if he can't, or doesn't want to, solve this on his own, there are bouncers who will solve his crowd-control problems for him. For money.
And, in the worst case, if the problem can be summed up as 'so-and-so is being a problem for me and the people who's problems I solve', there's always lawyers and/or the police (or bouncers).
Exactly the same exists within the black market. As a support-service for out-sourcing the problems that you encounter whilst trying to solve other people's problems, there are available:
The latter one consists of:
People who stand there looking intimidating (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who physically remove someone from the premises (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who go and have a word with people (police, lawyers, 'heavies')
People who go and have a stern word with people (police, lawyers, people who break legs for money)
People who remove other people from the equasion. (police & prison service, hit-men)
All for the same fundamental reason: if someone else has a problem, and you will solve it, there's money in it for you. OK, granted, police are done socialistically via tax, but whatever, I'm mainly focusing on the black-market equivalent here.
Both legal and illegal economies also have people who know what's going on and wander round organising stuff, whether they're called managers or crime-lords.
And there's much, much more to the criminal infrastructure. Coke-dealers, for example, quite often give discounts and are friendly to any of their customers who happen to be taxi-drivers or police, because taxi-drivers tend to go everywhere (so make passable 'spies' and relatively inconspicuous traffickers) and pigs have inside information on 'the enemy', for example; a successful coke dealer often moonlights as an information broker.
My point? Just that problems beg solutions, and that if you have both problems and money, you will have people solving the former for the latter. Laws create crimes not only in the strait-forward 'this is illegal now so everone who does it is a criminal' sense, and not only in the 'criminalising coke creates coke-dealers as well as coke-takers' sense, but also in the 'each law contributes to the existence and financing of the organized criminal infrastructure' sense.
Now... this is all relatively obvious. And the main point of this blog is to force me to write stuff down, and thus check it (in fact, I'm relatively sure I don't have any readers, but whatever). So, the next part of this avenue of thought will come later, when I've checked some (relatively mundane) facts.
Lets take John Smith. John likes drinking beer. So, John has several problems:
- He needs beer
- He needs a nice place to drink the beer
- He needs to get to and from the place where he drinks beer (as he'll be drunk, the normal solution -- driving his car -- might not be appropriate)
Now, people have sprung up to solve John's problems: brewers make beer, land-lords store beer and maintain a nice drinking environment, and taxi drivers will ferry you to and from the pub. They'll do all this under the assumption that you'll give them money. Pretty much economics 101.
Now lets take Druggy McCokehead. Druggy likes snorting coke. So, Druggy has several problems, pretty similar to John's: for a start, he needs cocaine.
Again, people will have sprung up to solve Druggy's problems. A taxi-driver might ferry him to and from his local drug-dealer, who stocks cocaine for him.
If you have a problem, and are willing to sacrifice money to get it fixed, there will be people available to fix your problem, whatever it is. Economics 101.
Similarly, there's infrastructure for other problem-solvers. Take the person who solves John's beer-problem: he'll need a way of getting the beer from the brewers to his pub, hence there's a transportation infrastructure. Some of these transporters might address clients/goods with special requirements: maybe those goods are perishable and thus require cooling/freezing whilst being transported, or maybe the goods need to be hidden and transported covertly because armies of big men with sticks are out to find and confiscate the goods. Either way, there will be people willing to solve your transportation needs... for money.
Similarly, John's land-lord might, in his quest to provide an enjoyable drinking environment, encounter the problem of violent drunks; if he can't, or doesn't want to, solve this on his own, there are bouncers who will solve his crowd-control problems for him. For money.
And, in the worst case, if the problem can be summed up as 'so-and-so is being a problem for me and the people who's problems I solve', there's always lawyers and/or the police (or bouncers).
Exactly the same exists within the black market. As a support-service for out-sourcing the problems that you encounter whilst trying to solve other people's problems, there are available:
- People who move things from A to B
- People who store things
- People who get things
- People who make things
- People who stop other people from being a problem
The latter one consists of:
People who stand there looking intimidating (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who physically remove someone from the premises (bouncers, police, 'heavies')
People who go and have a word with people (police, lawyers, 'heavies')
People who go and have a stern word with people (police, lawyers, people who break legs for money)
People who remove other people from the equasion. (police & prison service, hit-men)
All for the same fundamental reason: if someone else has a problem, and you will solve it, there's money in it for you. OK, granted, police are done socialistically via tax, but whatever, I'm mainly focusing on the black-market equivalent here.
Both legal and illegal economies also have people who know what's going on and wander round organising stuff, whether they're called managers or crime-lords.
And there's much, much more to the criminal infrastructure. Coke-dealers, for example, quite often give discounts and are friendly to any of their customers who happen to be taxi-drivers or police, because taxi-drivers tend to go everywhere (so make passable 'spies' and relatively inconspicuous traffickers) and pigs have inside information on 'the enemy', for example; a successful coke dealer often moonlights as an information broker.
My point? Just that problems beg solutions, and that if you have both problems and money, you will have people solving the former for the latter. Laws create crimes not only in the strait-forward 'this is illegal now so everone who does it is a criminal' sense, and not only in the 'criminalising coke creates coke-dealers as well as coke-takers' sense, but also in the 'each law contributes to the existence and financing of the organized criminal infrastructure' sense.
Now... this is all relatively obvious. And the main point of this blog is to force me to write stuff down, and thus check it (in fact, I'm relatively sure I don't have any readers, but whatever). So, the next part of this avenue of thought will come later, when I've checked some (relatively mundane) facts.
tl; dr?
- Criminals are people who do things.
- They do all sorts of things, including boring logistical stuff like moving shit and killing people.
- They do this for money.
- Obviously.
Friday, 11 December 2009
Power Companies
Climate change has been in the news a bit this week, with 56 newspapers around the globe printing the same editorial asking the G20 summit to actually do something to sort out the environmental problems we are causing.
Hundreds of millions have been dedicated towards 'green' projects in the pre-budget report
And it was also mentioned in this weeks PrimeMinister's Questions, with projects to increase wind-farms being briefly discussed.
But, the problem we have here is that energy = power: wether we're talking about the petrol that makes our transport network run, the gas that heats our homes and cooks our food, or the electricity that make our factories and communication network run (and lets us see in the dark), energy is one of the biggest forms of power, with energy companies featuring amongst the richest entities in the world.
The fact that we are reliant on companies to provide us with petrol, gas, and electricity also means that, should, say, an area of the UK break away and rebel, the government can simply order the aptly-named power companies to disconnect the area, throwing it back into the dark-ages...
So... with such powerful companies not likely wanting to give up their riches, and with it being such a juicy last-resort means of control, with the government considering wind-farms, and hydroelectric, and hydrogen power for cars, and anything else that leaves energy centralized and in the control of a small number of rich companies, I wonder if they'll also actually push solar-panels and small (on your roof?) wind-turbines, whilst decentralizing the power grid?
In other words, will they place power into our hands?
I notice that the pre-budget report mentions and average of £900 tax-free per year for solar-equipped households that over-produce electricity and give some back to the grid, which should go some way to making them more economically viable; a very nice, non-authoritarian move by the government, if it's as-seems...
Hundreds of millions have been dedicated towards 'green' projects in the pre-budget report
And it was also mentioned in this weeks PrimeMinister's Questions, with projects to increase wind-farms being briefly discussed.
But, the problem we have here is that energy = power: wether we're talking about the petrol that makes our transport network run, the gas that heats our homes and cooks our food, or the electricity that make our factories and communication network run (and lets us see in the dark), energy is one of the biggest forms of power, with energy companies featuring amongst the richest entities in the world.
The fact that we are reliant on companies to provide us with petrol, gas, and electricity also means that, should, say, an area of the UK break away and rebel, the government can simply order the aptly-named power companies to disconnect the area, throwing it back into the dark-ages...
So... with such powerful companies not likely wanting to give up their riches, and with it being such a juicy last-resort means of control, with the government considering wind-farms, and hydroelectric, and hydrogen power for cars, and anything else that leaves energy centralized and in the control of a small number of rich companies, I wonder if they'll also actually push solar-panels and small (on your roof?) wind-turbines, whilst decentralizing the power grid?
In other words, will they place power into our hands?
I notice that the pre-budget report mentions and average of £900 tax-free per year for solar-equipped households that over-produce electricity and give some back to the grid, which should go some way to making them more economically viable; a very nice, non-authoritarian move by the government, if it's as-seems...
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