I have switched off Google Ads for the time being. While the income justified their use, I can no longer justify their placement directly in individual posts. I may alter the theme in order to make them more amenable to readers, probably by placing them alongside posts rather than inside them
Month: June 2008
Outsourcing your coursework
The FP blog has a good story in US and British students outsourcing their “studies” to people in India.
Work is being contracted out for as little as £5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It’s causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect.
Wolfowitz on Mugabe
Paul Wolfowitz, “who knows a thing or two about overthrowing tyrants”, tells Foreign Policy that the secret to ousting Zimbabwe’s president is showing his people how much better off they’ll be without him.
“FP: What do you think will be the tipping point when Zimbabweans are strong enough to take matters into their own hands?
PW: In some ways—there are some big differences, too—this reminds me of the experience in the Philippines 22 years ago, early 1986, when Ferdinand Marcos tried to steal an election. I was the assistant secretary of state at the time for East Asia. Some people thought we could simply snap our fingers and Marcos would leave, but we didn’t have that kind of power. But what we were able to do, by the kinds of actions we did take and the kinds of statements we did make, was to do exactly what I hope would start to happen in Zimbabwe, which is [to ensure] that the people who are angry because the election was stolen will feel more emboldened to sustain the pressure, and the guys with the guns who are being asked to kill on behalf of the regime will begin to lose confidence.
Click Here!At the risk of overdoing the analogy, it certainly didn’t hurt matters 22 years ago that President Reagan offered President Marcos a refuge in the United States, and he left peacefully. I think this is a tougher situation, to be honest. I don’t know where the tipping point is. What I do know is that it seems pretty clear who is the legitimately elected president of the country. It does seem pretty clear who are the people that want to get Zimbabwe onto a positive course.
It’s amazing that this country is one of the very poorest countries in the world, and yet it was once a breadbasket of southern Africa. It shouldn’t be this way. And the more we can get the people who see a better future willing to stand up—and they’re standing up, one has to admire their courage, it’s incredible—and the more we can get the people who are standing in their way to think that maybe it’s not such a good position to be in, we’ll reach a tipping point. You’ll know when you reach it. I don’t think we can sit outside here and put a mark on the wall and say what it is.
Beds and Blowjobs
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary. Um nothing more to add.
Cat update
Mr Puds has been up to his usual tricks. Here I caught him just prior to him sleeping for the night.
Mr Puds was taught from a very early age that he was never allowed on the worktops, even when no one was home. He has stuck rigidly to that rule, as evidenced by a lack of paw prints even after he has been home alone. Here I tempt him with some ham:
Knowing that he can’t leap onto the worktop he instead tries to stretch up to swipe the ham with his paw… he just misses. But I gave him the ham as reward for not jumping up 🙂
Why Newspapers Must Embrace RSS
As an aside to my post on Jeff Jarvis, Felix Salmon has a good post over at Portfolio.com. Salmon is referring to a recent report from Forrester.
The main thing I’d try to communicate to the newspaper-industry readers of the Forrester report is that RSS and blogs are not unfortunate necessities, they’re one of your brightest hopes. Few US newspapers will ever be able to compete with the NYT in terms of attracting inbound links for the nation’s biggest stories. But when it comes to local content, the field is wide open: the NYT isn’t even the best newspaper for metro news in New York City, let alone anywhere else.
So embrace the bloggers in your area, encourage them, feed them, give them full RSS feeds sliced and diced to whatever specifications they desire, and let them bring you the new generation of readers which will replace the old print subscribers who are dying out. Don’t worry if you don’t make a lot of money serving ads to those bloggers directly: they’re much more useful as traffic drivers in any case.
Interesting too are the questions of why the NY Times should be bought by Google.
Bush made Americans safer?
So claimed Powerline last month. Hm. I’m just catching up with some feeds!
2002
October: Diplomat Laurence Foley murdered in Jordan, in an operation planned, directed and financed by Zarqawi in Iraq, perhaps with the complicity of Saddam’s government.2003
May: Suicide bombers killed 10 Americans, and killed and wounded many others, at housing compounds for westerners in Saudi Arabia.October: More bombings of United States housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia killed 26 and injured 160.
2004
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.2005
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.2006
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.2007
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.
As Sadly No says…
2003
May: Suicide bombers killed 10 Americans, and killed and wounded many others, at housing compounds for westerners in Saudi Arabia.October: More bombings of United States housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia killed 26 and injured 160.
2004
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.
May, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: terrorists attack the offices of a Saudi oil company in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, take foreign oil workers hostage in a nearby residential compound, leaving 22 people dead including one American.June, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: terrorists kidnap and execute Paul Johnson Jr., an American, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 2 other Americans and BBC cameraman killed by gun attacks.
December, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: terrorists storm the U.S. consulate, killing 5 consulate employees. 4 terrorists were killed by Saudi security.
2005
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.
November, Amman, Jordan: Suicide bombers hit 3 American hotels, Radisson, Grand Hyatt, and Days Inn, in Amman, Jordan, killing 57. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.2006
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.March, Karachi, Pakistan: Four people, including a U.S. diplomat, were killed and 52 others were injured when a suicide bomber rammed the diplomat’s car outside the Karachi Marriott – yards away from the U.S. consulate.
2007
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.January, Islamabad, Pakistan: A suicide bomber attacks Marriott Hotel.
January, Athens, Greece: A terrorist group fires anti-tank missile at U.S. Embassy.
2008
So far, there have been no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.January, Beirut, Lebanon: An explosion apparently targeting a U.S. Embassy vehicle convoy killed three civilians and injured at least 22 others, including several employees of the American Embassy in Lebanon.
Immigrants leave Ireland
The Wall Street Journal highlights the downturn here with a story on immigrants leaving. The statistics are pretty stark, and I like how the WSJ uses these and most Irish media don’t:
Citigroup economist Piotr Kalisz in Warsaw estimates that up to half of Polish émigrés to Western Europe since 2004 will return home in the next two years. In the U.K., half of an estimated one million Eastern European arrivals since 2004 have already left, says the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research in an April report.
Aiding the reversal: currency dynamics that have narrowed the East-West wage gap. Poland’s currency, the zloty, has benefited from the stability of EU membership, the growing economy, a steady flow of remittances from Polish emigrants and, more recently, Poland’s central bank raising its interest rates.
Andrej Golczewski, who arrived in Ireland in 2005 expecting to stay five years, at first earned a monthly salary for laying sheet metal that was equivalent to four times what he could earn at home in zloty, a boon in saving for his daughter’s university fees. But the euro has dropped 30% since May 2004, and with Polish construction wages rising, Mr. Golczewski left Ireland for home last month.
Similar dynamics are at work in the U.K., where a housing bust is threatening to tip the economy into recession and the pound is down 40% against the zloty since May 2004.
Jeff Jarvis at the Guardian and the future of journalism
Jeff links to two videos of him talking with staff at the Guardian about the future direction of the news organisation. As ever he is refreshing to watch, equally so as his writing, which I have been reading now for seven years.
Unfortunately many of my colleagues in the industry (in various firms) are slow to think about these changes, or the repercussions these changes will have for everyone working in the media in Ireland. I consider myself fortunate for not only having discovered Jeff’s writings early on (and indeed Dan Gillmor), but for the fact that I will myself shortly start my seventh year blogging. And I guess I am one of the relative few that made the transition from blogging to print media.
As for changing people’s habits in the old media world – I consider it a good day when I convert a colleague to Firefox 3 – nevermind Delicious, Magnolia, blogging, Twitter, RSS, Podcasts, or any of the other exciting things going on online.
Slowly but surely, I guess.
Exchange Traded Notes – tax treatment in Ireland
For the past several weeks I have been in correspondence with the Revenue in relation to their treatment of various investment instruments. I was particularly interested in more exotic ones like Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) Futures Contracts, Options Contracts, CFDs and Spreadbetting.
Perhaps the most surprising result of my questions was that Revenue don’t know how to tax ETNs. They said:
Revenue haven’t encountered these products to date so therefore we haven’t expressed an opinion on their tax treatment.
I don’t know which is more surprising, that they haven’t encountered ETNs or that they have not expressed an opinion on their tax treatment. In the US, ETNs are treated for tax purposes as prepaid forward contracts.
For those who don’t know, here is a good general background to ETNs.
I suppose my next question to Revenue would be, if I profit from buying an ETN like the iPath Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index Total Return ETN, am I liable to any tax whatsoever?
In relation to Futures contracts the position is more clear:
Future contracts, within the meaning of section 607 (of the Consolidated Tax Act), are not chargeable assets. Accordingly capital gains are not chargeable and capital losses are not allowable. Gains on the disposal of future contracts and traded options, within the meaning of section 608 and which are regarded as investments for the purpose of that section, are not chargeable to CGT. Capital gains & losses on the disposal of future contracts and quoted options, other than in the above scenarios, are chargeable in the normal manner.
Similarly, gains and losses which occur in the course of a financial trade are taxable under income tax rules.
In the case of a futures contract dealt in or quoted on a stock exchange or futures exchange, the requirement that the security be delivered will be met if the person by whom the contract is made closes out the contract by
entering into a reciprocal and opposite contract on the exchange and settles through the exchange on a net payment or receipt basis.
In relation to options contracts:
Gains or losses on options contracts arising in the course of a trade are taxable as income.
I take this to mean that if I buy or sell an options contract before options expiry, the gain is classed as income as oppose to a capital gain.
CFDs are liable to CGT, Spreadbetting is not liable, although there could be an income liability if it becomes your primary source of income.