How much tax do workers in the UK pay on their wages, and how does it compare to others across the world?
I posted some charts yesterday on how the UK tax system compares to other countries when we look at tax as a % of GDP. One response was to say: "well, I don't care about tax as a % of GDP... I care about the tax I pay". Which is fair enough. How can we fairly compare the tax actual pe
"There is no greatness without a little stubbornness... Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity."
Albert Camus on writing and the importance of stubbornness in creative work https://t.co/dwkSLFdGv5
IF I HAD INFINITE MONEY…
I’d figure out how to display the 100 UK #NativePlants & #WildFlowers in my Garden Wild Spreadsheet so you can a gantt chart of which plant flowers when, in order of date.
I would also add a column for ”grows best with” companion plants.
And I would have a chart grouping the plants by *colour*, in a visually pleasing manner.
BUT I DON’T
So, here's a vanilla spreadsheet. Use it in #GardenDesign, grow #NativePlants where possible.
https://open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/the-disconnect?r=e7fna&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Important article that descibes the chaos in the UK justice system, illustrating how fiscal austerity was designed to punish the most disadvantaged in society. The bill for that misguided policy is now due for settlement and the hard truth is that we can’t afford to pay it, but neither can we afford not to. #austerity #inclusivedevelopment
The United Kingdom is crisscrossed with public footpaths where the public holds a legal right to traverse.
Many of these paths are centuries old. Many of them are probably even older, dating back thousands of years to the Neolithic or older.
They predate virtually every extant property claim that could be leveraged against them. They have belonged in common to the community that uses them since before there was a British state.
And yet, the British state is in the process of handing over thousands of miles of public footpaths to private owners because these paths—older than the state—have not been registered with the state. In James Scott’s terms, they are not *legible* to the state.
But carefully surveyed, delineated, discrete parcels of private property linked to individual owners—the state’s favorite—are legible to the state. So over they go.
Enclosure never really stopped.
Land Sparing predicts that agricultural intensification is the best way to meet productive, humanitarian and conservation goals, and the recent prominence of this strategy on conservation and agricultural agendas is notable. The basic idea is that, by producing more, agriculture intensification can spare natural habitats from further agriculture expansion. Nevertheless, some authors have suggested that intensifying and increasing productivity may actually lead to increasing expansion of agricultural lands (Jevons Paradox). We test the association between agricultural yield on farmland expansion and on deforestation between 2000 and 2015 in 122 nations along the tropics, and in the main tropical regions. To this end we used Generalized Linear Models, as well as Panel Data to verify the effects of agricultural yield and socioeconomic variables on farmland expansion and deforestation. Greater yield increases lead to higher deforestation rates in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and Caribbean and increasing yield average induces agriculture expansion in East Asia and Pacific, giving support to the Jevons Paradox hypothesis. On the other hand, we found a positive association between yield average and forest area change in the tropics, nevertheless, regression coefficients were very small, compared to other significant models. Therefore, Jevons Paradox seems to be more common than Land Sparing and increasing yields inducing deforestation rather than curbing it.
There are no boring people in this world.
Each fate is like the history of a planet.
–
When people die, they do not die alone.
They die along with their first kiss,
first combat
They take away their first day in the snow
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “People”
translated by Boris Dralyuk
#everynightapoem #poetry #translation
Dan Neidle
Maria Popova
Jake Rayson
HeavenlyPossum
Philip Loring
Michael Shank
eileen chengyin chow