PayPal are a Monopolistic Bunch of Spivs

PayPal just charged me £3.60 to receive a payment of £100 from someone.  If someone sends me a cheque for £100 and I pay it into my bank account my bank do not charge me a penny for it, even though in their case they incur real costs with real human beings sitting behind a counter processing it for me.  PayPal on the other hand is totally automated, the payment is processed in nanoseconds by a computer with no human involvement at all.

The banks don't charge because they make good money out of having our money sitting with them earning next-to-no interest (and if they do charge its by way of annual bank charges based on the number of transactions on my account, not a percentage of my money passing through their hands).  PayPal must have zillions of pounds of our money sitting with them at any one time waiting for us to get round to moving it out to our bank accounts, on which they pay flat zero interest, so why do they need to charge when the banks don't?

And even if they do need to charge, why do they need to charge on this hefty 3.6% basis?  The cost to them of processing each payment is the same whether it is £1 or £100 or £1 million pounds, so why not just charge the same tiny flat-rate fee for every payment?  10p or something should give them a handsome profit given that they are processing zillions of payments all over the world every minute of the day.

The answer to all my questions is that it is because PayPal are a bunch of spivs controlled by eBay, neither of whom I trust as far as I could kick them and whom I use only because I have no real choice. When is our government going to get round to doing something about them?

In Terms of Bollocks 6

Today, 17.20, Matthew Amroliwala reporting on BBC World News on David Cameron's meeting with the 1922 Committee:

  "Backbenchers were cheered up in terms of what they heard from the Prime Minister ...."

   = Backbenchers were cheered up by what they heard from the Prime Minister ....."


Today, 17.26, Matthew Amroliwala reporting on expansion of the Operation Weeting team:


  "That will take the team in terms of size from 45 to 60 officers"


   = That will take the team from 45 officers to 60"


Today, 17.29, Matthew Amroliwala reporting on the Somalia famine:


  "In terms of difficulties on the ground in Somalia, how are those difficulties adding to your problems?"


  = How are difficulties on the ground in Somalia adding to your problems?


Can you believe all this verbal crap coming out of the mouths of BBC presenters?

In Terms of Bollocks 5

Mark Somebody-or-Other reporting from Watford on the BBC 10.00 a.m. news about the death of Sean Hoare :

"Very little has been heard in terms of detail about"  =  "Few details have been heard"

A minute later he went on to say something like "In terms of the loss of a key witness this is a big problem for the policy inquiry going forward"  = "The loss of a key witness is a big problem for the police".

Even when journalists have a big story to report they can't resist padding it out using ten crappily fashionable pseudo-intellectual words when five plain and simple grammatical words are all that is required.

Eurozone Hell Bent for Political and Fiscal Union - I said it first

I'm flattered that my post of 20 June, saying it had become crystal clear that full political and fiscal union of Eurozone countries was the only way of saving the Euro and resolving the debt crisis, is rapidly becoming the received wisdom among the great and the good of the commentariat - see for example Anatole Kaletsky in The Times yesterday and Daniel Korski in Spectator Coffee House today.

More Utter Lunacy from Huhne's Windpower Maniacs

Well I never.  The Committee on Climate Change, which, we are told by The Times, is 'the Government's watchdog on global warming', has published a report warning the Government that 'lulls in wind speed could occur at times of greatest demand for electricity, exposing Britain to a greater risk of blackouts unless more coal and gas plants are built and kept on standby.'  

Apparently when we all thought we knew that already we were all thinking bollocks.  We couldn't have known it because it could only be known after the Committee had commissioned a report from 'AEA, an energy and climate consultancy', no doubt at vast expense, to tell them so.  

Apparently what really troubles the Committee though is not that this will leave us all unable to pay our energy bills and freezing in our beds, but that it 'could undermine progress towards having legally-binding targets to cut emissions'. 

But never fear says 'Renewable UK', 'the wind industry's trade body', the problem can be solved by building underseas electricity connectors to tap spare electricity supplies in other countries, and by having a "smart grid" that could automatically switch off our fridges and washing machines and draw back the power from our electric cars' batteries at such times.


It would be the funniest thing I've heard in months if it wasn't so terrifying. Don't you just love the way that for the green energy lunatics the only 'truth' that matters is the delivery by any means possible of their insane green energy objectives and damn the collateral damage?  It's just like the old Bolshevik definition of truth - truth is what is good for them.

More Deceitful Green Bollocks from Sir John Beddington

Yesterday I let out a whoop of joy when The Times finally published a major Opinion piece criticising wind power and the rest of the government's ludicrous green energy agenda - a superb half-page piece by Matt Ridley totally exposing the lunacy of it all.

But this morning joy turns to disbelief when I read that the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, has advised the Government to scare the public into accepting green energy policies that will send their energy bills through the roof by linking them in the public mind to major disasters around the world and blaming them on climate change.  He cheerfully admits that none of these disasters have anything to do with the UK and will not affect us, and that nothing the Government is doing on green energy will make the slightest difference even to UK climate let alone global climate.  He doesn't seem to mind too much blaming disasters on climate change even if they may well have nothing to do with climate change at all.  And his willingness to resort to deceit is broadcast loud and clear when he suggests that the Government cite measures such as the ending of the smog threat by smokeless zone regulations as examples of why we all have to pay more for green energy to protect us from other climate threats - as blatant a case of calling apples oranges as one can imagine.

And why does he suggest all this?  Apparently because if we don't do this the rest of the world will never be persuaded to take effective measures against climate change.  By destroying our industries and freezing in our homes when we can't pay our energy bills, we can apparently shame the rest of the world into doing something.  Can you believe this bullshit?


So now we know that the Chief Scientific Adviser sees his role not as providing scientific advice to the Government but as advising the government on how to distort and misrepresent science to achieve its political aims.  Seems to be a consistent character trait with climate change scientists.  Excuse me while I go an throw up somewhere.

#MartinNarey, #Adoption, and the Question that Dare not Speak its Name

In its editorial today about the report on adoption it commissioned from Martin Narey, now the government's new adoption Czar (God how I hate that word) The Times mentions that only 10% of black children in care are adopted whereas over 33% of white children are, the reason being that local authorities insist on ethnic matching when assessing the suitability of applicants.  

The Times and Martin Narey rightly condemn this policy and call for children in care to be placed without regard to ethnicity, but have you noticed that neither of them asks the question that screams to be asked?  If the numbers of white and black children ending up in care, and the numbers of white and black parents wishing to adopt, were both roughly proportionate to the respective sizes of our white and black populations, there would be no such discrepancy between the numbers of white and black children being adopted.  The fact that there is such a massive discrepancy can only mean either that the scale of black parental failure is massively greater than that of white parental failure, or that the need and/or desire of black people to adopt children is massively smaller than that of white people, or a combination of the two.

Given that this is so, this fact must be a huge part of the adoption problem.  That being so, investigating why it is so and what can be done to change it must be a major part of any solution.  So why do you think neither The Times nor Martin Narey address that question?

Of course, it's because they are both terrified of being accused of racism; the very same terror that led the powers that be to sweep under the carpet for years the fact that the incidence of the grooming for sex of young girls by organised groups of men had a massive predominance of whites among the victims and of Asians among the predators.  It took a handful of brave politicians and social workers to get that problem tackled.  How long will we have to wait for the same courage on the adoption front?

We pay such a heavy price in so many fields for the tyranny of political correctness.