Heathrow Terminal 5
So the Press is having a field day as Terminal 5 opened to the world's passengers yesterday amid tales of losses and cancellations. Well, poo happens as they say: teething problems are to be expected.
That teething problems happen is a given but I know that, for example, they have been testing the new baggage retrieval system at T5 for about TWO YEARS already.
What we saw yesterday is probably incompetence layered on top of the teething problems that do always happen!
Duncan Williamson
Smelly business ... It's a top tip
Don't have the front entrance of your business right next to a sewage drain, if there is any danger of the drain stinking to high heaven.
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
Roads and time savings
They keep coming with these cracking ideas, these political types.
Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly has announced the opening of a 1.7 mile motorway lane that links the M606 with the M62. A report on the BBC web site says this:
Vehicles, except motorcyclists, must contain two or more people to use the lane and will save the regular commuter, it is claimed, an estimated 30 to 40 minutes a week.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bradford/7306091.stm
I wonder what a regular commuter might be, by the way.
Kelly said that four out of five cars contain no more than one occupant: I have done my own informal surveys of such things and I think four out of five is a significant underestimate.
Why do I think this is a bad idea? Of itself, it is possibly not a bad idea. What is wrong is that saving 30 – 40 minutes a week means between six and eight minutes a day and assuming a return journey between just three and four minutes a journey. Not that earth shattering is it? I want to hear about the savings that will prevent me having to leave the M1 and wend my way round the A roads in an unfamiliar area with no diversion signs because of an accident that happened THREE to FOUR hours earlier. I would also like to hear how they are going to make life easier for the country owing to enormous congestion at some junctions and roundabouts. Many millions of man and vehicle hours are lost at these traffic jams.
Traffic lights on roundabouts look to me like one of the most stupid inventions ever that they could get rid of for a start.
DW
For clever accounting types
Here's one for you!
I have just received a newsletter from IASlus, that awfully good web site for anything to do woth international financial reporting standards (IFRS). In this newsletter they say:
IASB issues DP on Financial Instruments Accounting
The IASB has published today for comment a Discussion Paper (DP) on Reducing Complexity in Reporting Financial Instruments. The DP discusses the main causes of complexity in reporting financial instruments and possible intermediate and long-term solutions to reduce this complexity. The DP has three sections:
- Problems related to measurement.
- Intermediate approaches to measurement and related problems.
- A long-term solution - a single measurement method for all types of financial instruments.
The paper draws the conclusion that fair value is the only measurement attribute for financial instruments that provides relevant information, but that the IASB has to undertake more work on presentation and disclosure before it can introduce a general fair value measurement requirement for financial instruments. |
In a summary of an article in the Economist I have just read they say that the Bear Stearns share price has fallen to $2 per share from $170 ... sorry, I don't know the time scale at the time of writing.
My question/comment/observation here is that Bear Stearns is being rescued as I write. I asume this means that its share price will recover in some way or form. What, then, is the real fair value of Bear Stearns? Is it $2 a share, $170 a share or something in between?
Duncan Williamson
Drug Dealers
This is a simulcast on duncanwil and oxbow
Taxi drivers are interesting people: they know a lot about their community and must be a fantastic resource for a wide variety of people and not just taxi passengers either.
I heard from my latest taxi driver that in Halifax drug dealers, the ordinary every day young drug dealers are making £6,000 a DAY from their evil activities. Now, let’s imagine that this figure is an exaggeration ... how much of an exaggeration, I wonder?
These people buy houses to get their filthy money into legitimate cash streams. They don’t buy for cash since that would look suspicious and they don’t buy more than one house in their own name either. They buy a house for themselves and then another one for their father, mother, brother, sister, wife ... who knows? More than that, they put down as much as a 70% deposit and take a mortgage for the rest. These people are potentially buying a couple of houses a month.
This news, taking it at face value, rather points the mocking finger at Freakonomics doesn’t it? In the book, reviewed last year by yours truly, they ask the question why so many drug dealers in the US live with their mothers ... the answer is clear: either they don’t or if they do it’s because they are hiding their huge stashes of cash. Easy to pull the wool over some people’s eyes isn’t it?
What are the police reported to have responded when told about the activities of these leeches on society? Erm, that they are looking for Mr Big rather than these also rans. Really? £6,000 a day is £42,000 a week and that’s £2.19 million a year. No tax, no records, no bother if the police aren't after them. Moreover, that’s £2.19 million for EVERY drug dealer operating at the level the taxi driver was talking about.
This is obviously a BIG problem when multiplied out onto a national scale.
DW
AmerEnglish from Harford
Readers and folllowers of this the most august of Blogs will know that I thought Tim Harford's book The Undercover Economist was not that good. Well, yesterday I saw his follow up.I don't remember the title of the book but I skimmed the foreword and read about a mechanic's yard (American for scrap yeard) and car wrecks (American for scrapped or crashed cars). He said these things immediately surrounding taking his daughter somewhere in London.
I know that publishers are revelling in not having to edit UK English for an American audience and vice versa but I for one will not pander to such cost savings when I think it should be edited and the book is likley to be sub standard anyway.
However, if anyone here would like to read and review the book FAIRLY and without my prejudices being pandered to then I will happily consider it and post it on the site if I like it. If it's fair and objective, I publish; if it's blatantly dismissive or sychophantic, I won't!
Duncan Williamson
Just an Ordinary Chap
Have you seen the furore over the new role for Marks and Spencer Chairman Stuart Rose? Having been given the CEO's job at M&S, Rose has been credited with a major turn around of its fortunes. As a customer of theirs, like millions of other people, I can confirm that Rose's work has been nothing short of ... ordinary. He has done nothig spectacular: he knows it and he knows he didn't need to. M&S never needs a lot of fiixing. The M&S problems stem from Rose's two immediate predecessors who had ideas way above their station and ken. All Rose had to do and all he did was to reverse the nonsense.
Speaking of nonsense, Rose has now broken all the rules of UK Corporate Governance and had himself made Chairman and CEO: it really is against the rules. How does Rose justify this action? Here's a classic, showing just how ordinary he is:
On Monday Sir Stuart defended the move, insisting that just under 30 per cent of the shareholding base contacted by the company were broadly comfortable with the arrangement.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1f3cc59e-ee8c-11dc-97ec-0000779fd2ac.html
Erm, Mr Rose, didn't they teach you at primary school that if less then 30% are in favour of something that means that more than 70% are against? Democracy? Good business practice? Personal ambition and greed? Notice also "... of the share holding base contacted by the company ...": it's not even 30% of
all shareholders!
Very ordinary Mr Rose.
Then again, we read in the newspapers at least that some of the M&S major institutional investors are against Rose's coup: just watch as nothing will come of it other than Rose will retain his new position and everyone who attends the M&S annual general meeting and who is in the more than 70% of people against Rose's move will leave just tut tutting and no more.
Duncan Williamson
Government woes
A few stories have surfaced over the last couple of days that make one cringe. Two from government are typical
The Tote
The Tote is a government owned betting company (forgive me if I got that description wrong!) that they now want to sell. I heard on the radio yesterday, however, of the tale of woe coming with this escapade. I understand that a buyer offered to pay HM Governent £400 million for the Tote but the Government didn't so much as turn them down as dither and shilly shally. By the end of the year the value of the Tote had fallen to £320 million ... an instant loss of £80 million for doing nothing. Now the governement is keen to sell again but it wants more than the £300 million or so that it's valued at on the market.
Ministry of Defence (MOD) Housing
I heard a piece on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning about MOD housing stock. Whilst many people are homeless and whilst assets need to be managed properly, there are 2,410 houses and blocks of flats owned by the MOD that are vacant; and some of them are just rotting for want of attention. Some of the houses are left vacant so that soliders returning from active duty abroad might move in at short notice: that's fine. What's not fine is the entire block of flats that is not only apparently needlessly unoccupied but the reporter was able to walk in through open doors and do what he liked in the properties.
The reporter also told us that he went to another property and whilst the house was safely boarded up, he could hear constantly running water pouring down the drains from inside one of the properties. Other houses had the doors unlocked, windows left open.
Sounds to me as if there may be thousands of abused properties depreciating at an accelerating rate whilst people who need them might be languishing in some inappropriate but probtably very expensive bed and breakfast place.
The 2,410 houses have all been vacant for more than 1 year and of them
600 have been vacant for more than 3 years and
104 have been vacant for more than 10 years
The costs and opportunity costs here are significant. The asset values must be pheonomenal and the repair costs of the houses is probably running into million.
Duncan Williamson
unemployment and Galbraith
I was flicking through John Kenneth Galbraith's book The Afluent Society this morning when I came across this sentence:
When men are unemployed, society does not miss the goods that they do not produce.
Page 143 of the 1999 Penguin edition
Do you agree with Galbraith's assertion? Why or why
Duncan Williamson
