… being both British and Australian. It only took seven and a half years of living in Ol’ Blighty to do it. The ceremony took place in the chambers of the Camden Council Hall — all dark timber and green leather. There were about 30 of us in the ceremony. Roughly half chose to swear their allegence by God, and half to affirm it without any religious reference. Now I get to wait six weeks before getting my British passport.
Archive for the 'UK' Category
Here are two examples:
- At every sandwich shop in Britain (Pret A Manger, Eat, etc), when you attempt to pay for your sandwich you will be asked if you will be eating in or taking the food out of the shop. The reason is that, thanks to the complexities of the UK tax system, the shop is meant to pay VAT if you dine in, but they don’t have to if you take it out.
The shop doesn’t care in the slightest whether you actually eat in or out. So long as they’ve asked you about your intentions, they’re legally covered. The upshot is that for anybody actually intending to eat their sandwich in the shop, the rational thing to do is to say that you’re taking it out and then eat in the shop anyway. If anybody asks why you chose to do so, simply explain that you changed your mind. Since the sandwich shop doesn’t care, the probability of being caught is zero; and since you can always say that you changed your mind even if you were, the cost of being caught is precisely none. Hence, the rational von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility maximiser should never pay more than the take-out price. But people do …
- When you book cinema tickets online, you have the option of selecting a student discount. Cinemas love online bookings because you then collect your ticket from a machine instead of a person. That means that they’re free to either hire one less person, or put the person saved onto the candy counter. It also means that they can have ticket collection take up less space and expand the candy counter (where all the fat profit margins are located).You do not need to show a student card when collecting your ticket from the machine at the cinema.
You do not need to show a student card when entering the cinema with your ticket. You can, in fact, claim a student discount without any risk of being asked to prove that you are actually a student. But people don’t …
Both of these examples are of price discrimination by a monopolist. In the second example, the Cinema is the discriminator, charging less to students because students, in general, have a lower willingness to spend than non-students. In the first example, the UK government is the discriminator. The people with the lower willingness to pay are those that are prepared to take their food out rather than dine in.
In standard economic theory, both examples should succeed only if a) people are risk averse — which, in general, they are — and b) there is a non-zero chance that a “cheater” will get caught and suffer some loss as a result. Even then, the probability-weighted loss from being caught would need to exceed the probability-weighted gain from successfully “cheating”.
But since the probability of being caught in these examples is zero and, with the sandwich shop, at least, the loss from being caught is also zero, the theory breaks down here.
I suspect that even Loss Aversion, a consequence of Prospect Theory, would fail to explain people’s behaviour here because we are talking about zero-probability events.
I don’t think we can avoid including social norms and ethics to explain them. People have a socially-conditioned aversion to lying (saying that you will take the food out when you really intend to eat in; saying that you’re a student when you’re not) and this is what offsets the gain from the deception. It also pretty clearly depends on the size of the gain relative to some internal scale. A non-student with a low income is more likely to pretend to be a student than someone with a high income.
I don’t understand the (failed) attempt by Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon to inspire a leadership challenge in the Labour Party here in the UK. Any serious contender for the job (i.e. Milliband) would surely recognise that the chance of a Labour victory in this year’s general election is miniscule, no matter who leads the party, and to lose an election three or four months into your leadership would hardly make for a sterling start.
If one takes a Tory victory as given, it would be far better to let Brown take the full hit for the loss. Keep him on as a figurehead to take all the bile, spit, rage and blame for the state of the country as a whole and the state of the government’s finances and the electoral loss in particular. Let the voting public gorge themselves in a cathartic spasm of kicking the Blair/Brown pairing and then shuffle Brown off, declare that there will be no return to Old Labour and start observing loudly at every opportunity that now it’s the Tories that are all about spin.
Brown’s job at this point is not so much to put out the fire — that can no longer be done — but to save the furniture. So why did Hewitt and Hoon do this? It was never going to work and it only serves to further lessen the probability of Labour retaining some of their seats.
The obvious answer is that they don’t consider a Tory victory to be a foregone conclusion and somehow think that simply getting rid of Brown will help the broader party separate itself from the Blair/Brown brand. The first part of that sentence may indeed be true (afterall, the Tories need an average swing of 7% to win), but the second is utterly false. Labour will not escape the Blair/Brown brand until they’ve spent some time in opposition for the simple reason that the public needs to kill it before they will forget about it.
About an hour ago I wrote about an article in The Guardian about how they had been prevented from writing about parliamentary proceedings via a court injunction. In particular, they weren’t allowed to write about this question put before parliament:
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Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.
The story became a Twitter sensation. Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have been the hottest trending topics on Twitter for the last few hours, the Liberal Democrats sought an urgent debate on press freedom and now, as their journalists write furiously in the background with their editors looking over their shoulders to save time, The Guardian is reporting on their front page:
Breaking news: * LATEST: Guardian can reveal that parliamentary question from Paul Farrelly MP subjected to reporting ban was related to Trafigura toxic waste scandal. More details soon ..
Which is to say that the gag has been lifted in under (?) 24 hours.
This has all been a tremendous example of the Streisand effect, named for Barbara Streisand’s catastrophically backfiring attempt to prevent a picture of her house being made available on the internet. While attempting to surpress attention, Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have only managed attract a huge amount of attention to themselves.
It’s a PR nightmare for them and a happy day for The Guardian.
Update 1: Here is confirmation from the Guardian.
Update 2: Here is the BBC on the matter. By way of explaining why they did not cover the story despite not being expressly mentioned in the injunction, they say:
No injunction was served on the BBC, but ever since the Spycatcher case in the 1980s news organisations which knowingly breach an injunction served on others are in contempt of court, so the corporation too felt bound by the Guardian injunction.
Which is the equivalent of “once bitten, (forever) twice shy.” The Beeb finishes by quoting Steven Fry’s tweet from when he discovered the good news:
Can it be true? Carter-Ruck caves in! Hurrah! Trafigura will deny it had anything to do with Twitter, but we know don’t we? We know! Yay!!!
Update 3: BBC Newsnight will have a special on Trafigura and their chemical disposals tonight.
Dani and I went to watch the European Heavyweight championship fight for chess boxing last friday. Yes, chess boxing. In case you don’t know it, chess boxing combines speed chess with boxing, alternating four minutes of chess with three-minute rounds of boxing. The winner is determined by checkmate, knockout, the opposition running out of time in the chess (each competitor gets 12 minutes in total) or, in the unlikely event of no result by the end of the sixth and final chess round, by points from the five rounds of boxing.
There were three matches in the evening, but the main event was between these two freakin’ mountains of men (click on the image for the full-sized version. My apologies for the poor image quality – I forgot the camera and was reduced to using my phone):
As you can see, during the chess rounds the competitors have earphones on (and cotton wool stuffed in their ears) to avoid distraction from the crowd and to allow a commentator to talk about the game. The old-school board in the background was used because the projector gave up the ghost half-way through the night.
The event got coverage from The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph, although the Times correspondant (or her management?) seems to have been a little caught up with the “glistening muscles.”
We had a great time. I was amazed at how well the guys were playing in their chess despite being repeatedly pummelled about the head.
When ordering a latte from a British caff, remember that their unit of measure for barista-applied sugar is much larger than the little packets you get at specialist coffee shops.
The Murdoch Empire ™ has decided to pull the plug on their free newspaper for the going-home-on-the-tube market, The London Paper, after making a pre-tax loss of £12.9 million in the year to June 2008.
That they’re hemorrhaging cash right now is no surprise since advertising expenditure is strongly pro-cyclical — it plummets in a recession and explodes in a boom. To some extent, they’ve been unfortunate that the credit crisis and it’s associated advertising caution has been around for two of their three years and obviously the competition with Associated Newspapers’ London Lite won’t have helped. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that it was ever a viable business model and frankly, even if it were, I’m glad that they’ve folded. Ian Burrell puts it mildly when he says:
For the past three years, the sight of purple-and-mauve jacketed vendors thrusting free newspapers into the hands of office workers as they headed home from work has been a familiar feature in the capital.
“Thrusting” is the correct word to use, but I would prefix it with a few choice adverbs, “obnoxiously” being the most polite. The vendors are seriously rude. They make a deliberate point of blocking traffic and getting in your face. It is genuinely infuriating — I find myself wanting to scream at them — but I know that they’re just doing what they’re told to do.
On their way home from work, nobody cares which of the free papers they read. Since the papers themselves are desperate to get your eyeballs, the ideal economic situation would therefore be for them to pay you to choose them. But that’s impossible on a practical level, so instead they end up forcing a non-monetary cost on everybody by slowing everyone down and annoying the hell out of people.
Since Associated Newspapers still have a 24% stake in the Evening Standard, this will probably mean the end of the afternoon freesheet (I imagine that the Metro in the morning will stick around), but even if it doesn’t, it will almost certainly mean the end of the obnoxious vendors forcing themselves on people. They’ll just stick the London Lite in the same bins that they use for the Metro instead. Presumably those vendors are being paid (minimum wage, I would guess) and so getting rid of them might make it narrowly profitable if there is just one afternoon freesheet.
Hallelujah.
On Saturday night, just before midnight, Daniela and I were roped into playing a game of cricket on Sunday for a team of ex-pats. Well … “roped” is the wrong word and much too unfair: we signed up with enthusiasm. No, that’s not quite right, either. Dani gets incredibly excited by this sort of random adventure and she signed up with genuine enthusiasm. It was inevitable at that point that I sign up as well (with Australia levelling the Ashes up in Leeds, I did have a patriotic duty to join the fray), but my enthusiasm was buoyed somewhat by the wine and had a slightly greasy patina of apprehension. I hadn’t played a proper game since October 1992 when I was in my high school team and Dani had only played a couple of games of backyard cricket with the dog chasing the ball. Still, we were assured that experience and ability were by no means necessary, so we agreed con gusto.
We only got to bed at 3am on Sunday (it was a big night – a friend was leaving London), but managed to wake in time to gather with the rest of the team in central London at 11:30am, coffee in hand. To the casual eye, my whites may have looked a bit like an old pair of khakis supplemented with a borrowed white polo shirt. Dani, of course, was resplendent in white from top to bottom. The team we played for represents a charity and, it turns out, there are charities that offer transportation services to other charities, so we all piled into the mini-bus more usually used for carrying disabled children to be driven for an hour and a half to the interminable maze otherwise known as the Oxfordshire countryside.
We must have spent 40 minutes twisting and turning and silently swearing at the perpetually manic directions of the lady in the SatNav (“Recalculating. After point four miles, turn left, then turn left.”). I was sitting next to our captain – an Indian chap with an easy grin who was about to submit his Ph.D. He alternated between trying to figure out where we were, pouring scorn on the English badminton team for pulling out of the world championships in India and declaring confidently that, as an Australian, I must be a fantastic fielder who would happily throw himself horizontal to stop a boundary. I mumbled something about a bit of practice in the nets before the match and stared anxiously at the six-foot hedges.
We eventually found the Ipsden Cricket Club [Google Maps]. It’s a beautiful ground that backs onto a (recently harvested) wheat field and has a gigantic ash (?) tree down on the long boundary at the western end. The pavilion even has a piece of the original floorboards of the Long Room at Lord’s. The weather was superb, with barely a cloud and a fair breeze coming from the north west. I guess that the temperature would have been in the mid-twenties (Celsius). There were some Red Kites in the sky and quite a few gliders were out for the day.
A couple of the guys padded up and we took turns bowling in the nets. I somehow managed to keep mine in the general direction of the stumps, managed a few yorkers and even clean bowled one of our batsman once. The captain told me that I would bowl in the match and our friend that had invited us expressed some joy that he wouldn’t have to be bowler number five all on his own. I started to pick up some confidence. It was fun. It was relaxed. I didn’t suck.
The game was to be 35 overs each; we fielded first. The Canadian on our team used to play as a catcher in baseball and became the wicket keeper. Dani alternated between Third man and Long on, while I swapped between Point and Mid-wicket. We had two good bowlers, two pretty-good bowlers, and me and my mate who’d invited us. We did pretty well in the first 10 or 11 overs. We got a couple of wickets and they weren’t scoring too quickly (maybe four per over?). I didn’t fumble my first couple of touches of the ball and Dani was enjoying herself.
Then I missed a ball badly. I froze, didn’t get down to it and had to run swearing after the thing only to watch it dribble over the boundary. Not to worry, it was only one mistake and other people were occasionally missing some too. After a couple more overs I was called up to bowl. I was okay in my first over: clearly nervous and not very good, but not obscenely bad either. My second over, however, was a shambles that in hindsight I’m almost oddly proud of. It was chaotic, occasionally dangerous to the batsman and very, very expensive. I was “rested” after that.
My second over also roughly marked the start of our mini collapse. Without a fifth bowler, our two decent guys had to bowl 11 or 12 overs each (the Ipsden team very kindly waived the rule requiring no more than seven overs per bowler) and they started to get tired. I was fading mentally pretty quickly and I missed four or five balls in what turned into a pretty farcical fielding display. I even managed to have my feet slip out from under me on one occasion. Drinks came out after 21 overs and our captain took the time to observe that we were fielding atrociously.
By that point the batsmen had settled in nicely, though and our fielding was rarely the problem. Boundaries, boundaries, everywhere became the order of the day. Poor Dani had to scramble down the embankment past the boundary to hunt for the ball in the bracken on more than one occasion. I was out at Deep cover point and Deep forward leg by then and under instruction to stay on the boundary (not walk in with the bowler). I may not have had the reflexes for the infield, but dammit, I could run around like a mad hare as sweeper. For the last five overs or so, I switched over to the northern side of the field and played Square leg and Deep cover. I managed to stop the three or four balls that came to me, saving a couple of singles and a boundary, so my fielding ended, if not a high note, then at least having recovered a smidgen of self-confidence. Ipsden managed 3 for 236 after 35 overs, with one chap on 101 not out. It had taken three and a half hours.
Our hosts put on quite a spread for the break. Half a dozen types of sandwiches, some chips (“crisps” to the English) and a bunch of delicious sweet tarts and teacakes filled us up mightily with endless cups of tea. The black labrador of the club president happily wandered between us, soaking up the attention. I reminded Dani how to hold the bat (it’s not a natural position for someone new to the game) and we both earnestly hoped that we wouldn’t need to pad up.
Dani’s and my friend opened the batting along with the captain and it shortly became clear that the race was on. I was surprised. Apparantly last year the Ipsden team had gotten our lot all out for only 60. Dani and I ended up sitting and watching a fine batting display as our batters clipped along to seal the win with two balls and six wickets to spare. One of our lads managed a fantastic century and another 74. The sun had started to set by the end and the wind, still fresh, began to chill a little. Jumpers, cups of tea and the dog to the rescue, we were toasty warm through to the end.
It was the last game for our captain, who on top of the win to remember was presented with a bottle of champagne and a first-edition copy of C.L.R. James’s classic, “Beyond a boundary“, by the regular members of the team. We got back to London about 9:30pm and were home by 10. It was an absolutely cracking day. We really enjoyed ourselves and the team was a great bunch of guys. It was, in many ways, the very best sort of day in England.
Now if only I weren’t so stiff the day after that I can barely walk …
It’s both spectacular and petty. The fraction of MPs that truly scammed the system is tiny and the scale of the claims for the most part only seems offensive in a recession. It was started by Cameron as a political stunt, but when Torys were implicated he had to take it nuclear or look terrible. The Speaker was culpable, yes, but he was thrown under the bus by Brown all the same. That The Telegraph got the complete list in a leak is more of a story, to my mind.
What style of Speaker will emerge is an interesting question. If it’s another Labour party member, it will be easy to imagine the role moving somewhat in the direction of the Speakers of the lower houses in Australia (where the role is quite partisan) and the USA (where it is extremely partisan). In a parliamentary democracy (Australia, UK) , that will serve to grant the executive more power over the legislature, which is a Bad Thing ™ in my books, as it reduces the ability of the opposition to contribute to the legislative process in any meaningful way.
I’ve occasionally thought that in the event of Australia becoming a republic, the president’s primary constitutional role might simply be to ensure the fair operation of the judicio-political system. So, for example, the president – or their appointee – might be the official Speaker of the House but would not have a vote (even in the event of a tie) and could not introduce legislation.
Of course, having the monarch appoint an independent Speaker of the Commons in the UK would get MPs’ knickers in a collective knot over the sovereignty of parliament. Another reason to be a republic.
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