here in Paris, anyway, after what felt like 3 months of rain.

I was in Normandy last week, where rain is tolerated much more easily - for one, it makes the sea a much more pleasant place to be in, even at 16°C :)

Wind power

K Treasury denies anti-green bias after meeting register published

The UK Treasury denies that it has a preference for big energy companies after the department's quarterly register showed that Treasury ministers had met energy intensive sectors seven times more often than green energy representatives.

It emerged that Chancellor George Osborne has not met a single green sector representative since the coalition came into office, while Treasury ministers have met with representatives from fossil fuel and energy companies; airports and airlines; and the motoring lobby and car manufacturers on 119 occasions since May 2010.

Treasury ministers have held 17 meetings with either green campaign groups or clean energy lobbyists during the same period, reports the Guardian.

The Treasury has long been accused of harbouring an anti-green bias.

Wind power

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18910560

Wind power

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

Pepsi-drinking, Nike-wearing, MasterCard-using customers to receive 30% off as part of anti-Olympics Oddbins campaign

Wine merchants Oddbins has said that non-sponsors of the Olympic Games have been treated by LOCOG as `beggars on the gilded streets of the Olympic movement'.

The company is planning a counter-strike for the next three weeks, with censored window posters.

As well as the window display campaign, anyone who comes into an Oddbins branch wearing Nike trainers and has in their pocket a set of Vauxhall car keys, an RBS MasterCard, an iPhone, a bill from British Gas and a receipt for a Pepsi bought at KFC to receive 30 per cent off their purchase.

If I drunk wine with any regularity, I'd buy it from Oddbins

keep to the Fen Causeway

Matt Taibbi: No Kidding: The Most Incoherent Tom Friedman Column Ever (Rolling Stone, July 25)

I realize this is not a statement anyone can make lightly, but: this morning's column by Thomas Friedman, "Syria is Iraq," is the single most incoherent thing he has ever written. It's... well, breathtaking is the only word.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

okay, I have finally decided that iTunes is such a bloody hopeless manager for my iPod music that I want to replace it. I've just tried loading a couple of compilation CDs into it and when it wanted me to re-edit the details on each and every bloody track so that it would recognise they were all the same bloody album I decided that it had to go.

So, if not iTunes, then what ? I'm on Windoze, so no Linux only stuff please. I don't do anything fancy, don't download, don't connect to iPhone or store photos. Just music from CDs.

keep to the Fen Causeway

for the Python fans out there. Terry Gilliams daughter is catalogueing his archive and blogging anything interesting she finds

http://hollydgilliam.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-beginning.html

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Martin Wolf: Getting out of debt by adding debt (July 25, 2012)

Suppose that all the people who lent and borrowed knew what they were doing: thus they had an unbiased and reasonably accurate appreciation of the future course of incomes and asset prices. Then, barring some huge and unexpected external shock -a world war, for example - the debt some have contracted would create no problem. It would simply reflect improved opportunities for inter-temporal trade in savings.

This is, however, not the world we live in. Indeed, if we did live in such a world, huge financial crises would be impossible. If you disagree on that point, I recommend that you read something else.

Hmm, one could argue that rational behaviour under uncertainty can also lead to huge financial crises. That is, even if you know what you're doing, you may be grossly wrong. Even collectively. But I'll continue reading.

These forces for shifting the private sector into surplus are very strong, as the previous post showed. But, as I also noted, the sum of all sector financial balances must be zero. This is basic accounting. As the Oxford University macroeconomist, Simon Wren Lewis notes, sectoral financial balances provide a fundamental check of the feasibility of envisaged adjustments.

...

It follows as a matter of logic that the only way of accommodating the private sector's need to run aggregate financial surpluses is for the government to run large fiscal deficits. It is, therefore, not only untrue that one cannot get out of debt by adding to debt, it is in fact the obvious way of doing so.

...

Now, suppose that instead of letting that happen, it followed advice to eliminate the fiscal deficit promptly. What would happen? If the government is to eliminate its deficit, the rest of the economy must also go into balance. If we assume a modest adjustment in the external balance, that must mean an elimination of the private surplus.

...

Thus the deleveraging brought about by the offsetting of a large private surplus with a large government deficit is the least disruptive way of securing the post-crisis adjustment. This policy will not work , however, if one (or both) of two things are the case: first, the government risks becoming excessively indebted; or, second, the private sector will save more, precisely because the government is becoming excessively indebted.

The evidence for the latter - "Ricardian equivalence", as it is called - is weak. The assumptions that underlie it - perfect capital markets, for example - are particularly inapposite in a financial crisis.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa