First you pay income tax. Then they pay some of it back as child benefit. Then you pay some of the child benefit back as the higher income child benefit charge.
That really is how it works.
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Kickstarter is a web site that allows business people to pitch their ideas to the general public instead of venture capitalists. In return the general public gets to fund projects in the hope of seeing them come to fruition and other rewards depending on the amount donated to the project. In a video interview, David Braben, who along with Ian Bell wrote the classic space trading computer game Elite, talks about the advantages of making a computer game funded by Kickstarter over using a conventional publisher:
When David Braben started making computer games in 1984, individuals could make them in their bedrooms, but there was no Internet so publishers were needed to distribute them. Today distribution is easier, but a top computer game needs a large team of programmers and artists, so lots of funding up front which publishers can help with. But, like movie studios, games publishers mostly want predictable money makers and understandably to impose constraints on the game that gets made. Kickstarter means developers can work directly for gamers, or movie fans, or people who want to experiment with home aquaponics. Kickstarter is an example of something the Internet is particularly good at: disintermediation. I can buy coffee beans very nearly directly from the farmer; I can buy gadgets from some bloke in Hong Kong; I can vote with my wallet for the computer games I want to see made. People with niche interests can find each other anywhere in the world and cater to each others’ needs. Incidentally, the original Elite taught me all about trade when I was 8. This sequel will have proper celestial mechanics and Newtonian physics too, but still needs funding. December 24th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
That is just one paragraph from a guide to filling in a form related to my pension. I do not want this stuff filling up the hard disk in my head. I want to free up space for important things like the plot of the Lord of the Rings fan fiction I am reading or the details of Climategate or even some mathematics or the rules to Magic: The Gathering. But no, the great game of Nomic that officialdom plays goes on, and the boring stuff requires ever more attention. December 10th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
In China, the government wanted to build a road where there were some flats. Instead of evicting the residents, they lured them away with money. But for one couple the money was not enough, so the rest of the building was knocked down and the road was built anyway. The couple who refused to move now live in the middle of the road. The article does not mention whether they still have water and electricity, but it does give some other examples of similar situations where utilities were disconnected. This is China, so it is likely that there is more going on than meets the eye. But on the face of it no property rights have been violated. The land the road sits on was bought fair and square. This situation demonstrates that compulsory purchase and eminent domain are not necessary to solve the problem of recalcitrant landowners: if all your neighbours sell it is likely that your property is about to lose value and you would be wise to sell also. November 23rd, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Clearly someone does not have enough real work to do. November 21st, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
— Detlev Schlichter, 8th November 2012
— The Bank of England, 14th November 2012 November 14th, 2012 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Patrick Crozier, Michael Jennings and Brian Micklethwait are currently sat around my television discussing the election. We plan to stay here eating pizza and drinking beer for as long as we can stand. I will be posting some sort of running commentary in a hastily prepared chat room. If you want to join in, give yourself a username and leave the password blank. November 6th, 2012 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
In primary school I very much enjoyed arithmetic. I distinctly remember rattling through activity books with names like “Starting Points” and “Fletcher”. One day, someone, possibly a teacher, alluded to a kind of mathematics that involved letters instead of numbers. It sounded very interesting, and I looked forward to “getting to” that. That was how it was, in school. You sort of learned what you were told to learn. At the time it did not occur to me that I could just go and study algebra. In fairness I remember individual teachers in later years who gave me out-of-curriculum books to take home. But looking back on this I am left thinking that it is very easy for schools to hold children back, and even beat the enthusiasm out of them. I think the unschooling movement gets a lot of things right. Self-directed learning is more efficient because you are always studying what you are interested in. Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, we find out what happens when you leave a big pile of tablet computers (loaded with Neal-Stephenson-Diamond-Age-esque software) in a village with no school.
October 31st, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The US Supreme Court is going to be discussing the legal doctrine of first sale today, in a case that has something to do with school textbooks but will ultimately have further repercussions. Your right to first sale means that you are allowed to sell on books and DVDs that you bought. However publishers are attempting to license, rather than sell, such materials, and these end user license agreements seek to prevent such selling on. I find it hard to agree with either side in the debate. On the one hand, if you want to sell on a book that you bought in a book shop, this should not be answered with violence. On the other hand, if you write a book and want to sell it on the condition that the buyer does not then sell it on to someone else, this should not be answered with violence. What if you attempt to make this agreement and the buyer then breaks it? Refuse to deal with that buyer again and tell all your friends. Not practical? Consider alternative business models. The state should neither uphold nor prohibit specific business models, and I suspect it should not be involved in contract enforcement either. For a publisher there are plenty of non-violent solutions, such as encryption, digital rights management, watermarking, subscription services or being so awesome that everyone wants to throw money at you. October 29th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been reading the libertarian sub-Reddit lately. I recommend it. Interesting links are posted, discussion ensues, and thanks to the voting system, interesting comments float to the top. Such as:
This is from the discussion of a story from the Institute for Justice about police using an alert from a sniffer dog as an excuse to seize assets even if no drugs are found. The Institute for Justice is “our nation’s only libertarian public interest law firm”. They have also taken an interest in eminent domain. October 16th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
…out of my cold, dead hands. I am always using the tech industry as an example of how wonderful things can be when largely unregulated by governments. But of course it is not really true.
Blah, blah, blah, etc. The thing to realise is that the EC is taking an arbitrary measurement (memory bandwidth), making arbitrary categories, and then applying energy consumption limits to the categories. But innovation does not work that way. Specialised graphics processing hardware might choose any number of other trade-offs than memory bandwidth to achieve other goals. What will happen now is that human effort will be spent on maximising performance within constraints set by bureaucrats. Hat-tip to the libertarian sub-Reddit. Update: The source article has been updated (thanks to Sigivald for noticing). It seems graphics cards with a high enough memory bandwidth are now said to be exempt from the regulations. But this is in itself a restriction and regulations only ever get more restrictive. October 16th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
ARMA III is a realistic first person military simulation game set on an accurate, high-definition rendering of the Greek Island of Lemnos which is close to Turkey. Last year the mayor of Lemnos expressed his displeasure at this, citing the Island’s peaceful reputation, while the head of the town council worried about national security. This year, two of the game’s developers visited the island and ended up in prison for allegedly taking photographs of military installations there. Perhaps they had not heard of what happens to plane spotters in Greece. They are having to wait in jail for their trial for a long time because Greek judges have gone on strike in protest against austerity measures. I am not sure what all this means but I will be considering other holiday destinations. Hat tip to Reddit. October 16th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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