Graeme's

Blog

Pointless EU bureaucracy

I was going to write about why people are irrational, but the sheer stupidity of the EU bureaucracy trumps ordinary irrationality.

Making money by giving away

The advocates of ever stronger copyright and patent laws claim that these are the only way to give people an incentive to create new works and inventions. Here are a few examples that show otherwise, mostly of how people make money by giving away.

What happend to increasing leisure?

Thirty or forty years ago widely expected that as technological advances made labour more productive, working hours would shorten and the biggest problem, at least in develop countries, would be educating people to enjoy leisure instead of working. This has clearly not happened, so what went wrong?

Drug patents: inefficient R & D funding

Patents allow pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs at several times the price they would be able to get in a competitive market. Only a small proportion of the extra money spent by the public goes into research and development (R & D), despite the latter being the supposed benefit of the higher prices.

11 reasons free markets are not

  1. Most markets are oligopolies dominated by a few companies). For a market to be able to ensure sufficient competition individual companies should be not be able to significantly influence market prices. Economics text books acknowledge this.

No competition please!

Yet another example of the public sector being asked to get out of the way so the private sector can do a worse job. The BBC is restricting its downloads using DRM, in order to avoid competing too much with commercial broadcasters.

Bad incentives in drug development

The pharmaceutical industry would like you to believe that they fund the expensive development of new drugs, they get patents in return, and this provides a nice efficient market driven mechanism for developing new drugs. There are many things wrong with this picture:

Ten effects of DRM

For those who do not know, DRM is the technology that prevents users from taking copies of various types of videos, audio and even written material in electronic form. It is an abbreviation of Digital Rights Management – and its your rights they are managing.

Most people should be agnostics

I suppose it is suprising that a Christian should promote agnosticism, but I think that for many, if not most people, it is the belief that they can most honestly hold.

I baked a site

My most successful website, Moneyterms used to run on Wordpress. I have found it linked to as an example of Wordpress running something other than a blog. However things changed.

Vodafone's loss that wasn't

According to most of the press Vodafone made a £15bn loss in the 2005/6 financial year. The largest loss ever made by a British company. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the company made a real profit but an accounting loss.

Volunteers? No.

I have noticed that the media make serious factual mistakes when covering any topic about which I have any real knowledge. This applies even to supposedly quality media. I can only assume that what I read about topics/countries/issues that I have no particular knowledge is equally wrong.

Wordpress plugin: Slug Trimmer

I have got sick of URLs that end in really long post slugs that look-something-like-this-and-are-far-too-long so I wrote a little plugin that shortens post slugs more intelligently than simply truncating them.

New site

I have decided that I should blog about investment on a separate site.

The new site is The Strategy Blog. I intend to put a fair amount of work into it - have a lot of ideas that simply do not fit into any of my other sites and it seems a shame to waste them.