Tim Worstall

1) Smoke less.
2) Cycle more.
3) Eat better.
4) Drink better not less.
5) Be nicer.
6) No, we have enough dogs.
7) And cats.
Annoy Ritchie.
9) And the nef.
10) Well, looks like it’s about time to do it then. The Chinese are threatening to cut off rare earth exports meaning that the high tech industrial world will either [...]

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Saw in one of the local English language rags here that RyanAir has just agreed a €400 million investment in making Faro one of it’s regional bases.
They don’t fly out of Faro at present.
From what I understand RyanAir turning up at the local airport (50km away) leads to something of a boom in the price [...]

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Tagged by the Devil to do this write a letter to myself at 16 thing.
Dear Tim,
Could you please go and buy some decent running shoes. My left knee has been giving me gyp for 15 years now and it’s all because you insisted on going out for a trot every afternoon (yes, I know, it [...]

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A number of years ago, more than I really care to remember, I was gearing up to try and take the Cambridge University entrance exams (which I failed, dismally and quite naturally) by taking A- Level economics again*.
I’d been out of school for a couple of years and thus needed to get back into some [...]

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This is probably trivial for someone who knows how to do this.
For me it’s impossible (given the help you don’t get from google itself).
Over at the other blog I’ve a problem with getting Google Adsense to run.
This blog, a number of blogspot ones and a couple of Typepad ones all run off the same Adsense [...]

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Peace on earth is a little tough to ask for. I am, despite being not worthy, loved by those I wish to be loved by and to my surprise by some who I have wronged.
My parents, my wife, my family are all hale and hearty despite some of them being in dangerous parts of the [...]

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Watch this video and buy me beer.

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Slightly odd to see somewhere you used to live pictured in The Times of a morning.
After lying dormant for 4,000 years, one of Europe’s most powerful volcanoes, Campi Flegrei near Naples, is showing signs of life.
Instinct would tell you to stay away, but an international team of scientists are doing exactly the opposite. [...]

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Leading libertarian Tim Worstall
That’s how I’m described over at Touchstone, a blog by the TUC. I guess it’s a measure of quite how wide the ideological gap is: perhaps even the comprehension gap.
That I, a classical liberal, should be described as a libertarian. For the truth is that I sign up to all of the [...]

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MW2, on the other hand, ditches all that wussy tension and plot stuff, and just turns the explosions up to eleven. It’s Red Dawn joyfully skullfucking 300 during the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now, with Slipknot handling the tunes.
Apparently that’s how a recommendation goes these days.

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If I were a rich man (da da da da da da da…sing it Tevye!) I would buy this company.
Whatever the theory, the practice of change-ringing church bells is peculiarly English., and the founding of bells spans the centuries. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry boasts of its foundation in 1570, though it developed from local bell [...]

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We’ve ended up (inevitably) with yet another animal. This time a puppy that was dumped at about three weeks old (ie, only the very first traces of teeth showing).
OK, now at 5 weeks, she’s about 1.3 kg (just back from the vets). Of course she is a mutt, but a mutt of which various breeds [...]

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A chart showing how the phrase “low hanging fruit” has become a cliche.
A website of a company called “The Low Hanging Fruit Company”.
We’ve been using that as a trading name since the early 1990s.
See, using a cliche before it becomes a cliche!

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Richard Murphy seems to be rather full of himself as a result of his presenting a paper at the World Bank this week.
Reacting to a fairly mild criticism of his views on the efficient markets hypothesis he tells me the following:

Tim
Talk, talk, talk
I do action
Very different
It’s irrelevant that the issue may have been discussed if [...]

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Anyone help with this?
For the past couple of days it’s been difficult to load a page. Keep getting “Connection reset” page.
“connection reset while this page was loading”.
Is this something on my machine? Or further down the line at my ISP?
Hitting “try again” four or five times usually loads the page.
Any ideas?
Update: All fixed now. Something [...]

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The Americans have their knickers in a twist over this.

I hav a feeling I know who is the catering manager for that camp. Indeed, I might even be related to him…..

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Or at least my behaviour when trying to fix things does.

see more Funny Graphs

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Apologies, but taking a month off from blogging.
No, no blogger’s block or anything.
Rather, I’ve got a new job of sorts. I’ve spent a month playing with it part time and the results have been satisfactory in terms of income. Now I need to do it for a month properly and full time. To see whether [...]

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Anyone with access to Science or the AAAS out there?
Would you like to send me the .pdf of this article?
My knee jerk reaction is that those fisheries that are seeing stocks rebound are those that have sorted out property rights. I’d like to see how well the old knee is jerking at the moment.
Update. OK, [...]

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The area around us here in Southern P (or the Northern Algarve as it might be called) is pretty rural stuff. It’s also pretty bad soil: fruit trees are the only commercial crop for most of the area and in fact, most of the land is left pretty much fallow. It used to be farmed, [...]

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