A wee bit more on electricity in Scotland

Fri 20 November 2015
This is a just a quick follow up to my last post to tighten up a few details on the estimates I made. The numbers and graphs presented in this post supersede the ones in the last one for a few reasons which I'll detail below. But, in short, the …

A question on electricity in Scotland

Sun 15 November 2015
Note: More refined estimates and better graphs are provided in this post, but the conclusions remain unchanged. Scotland currently has four large conventional power stations. In descending order of capacity they are: Longannet - coal - 2.260 GW Torness - nuclear - 1.185 GW Peterhead - gas - 1.180 GW Hunterston B - nuclear …

Scottish public funding - fair or needed?

Wed 23 September 2015
A report on local government funding was published yesterday by the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe). The BBC and the Scotsman, amongst others, reported on these two findings: The funding of local government as a percentage of the central Scottish government budget has not significantly decreased. The Scottish government has …

Scotland's age distribution

Wed 09 September 2015
I've been looking at the age distribution of people in Scotland and made this animation to visualise trends between 1982 and now - a period of 33 years. Source: National records of Scotland Additions to the population are highlighted in blue and people leaving Scotland are in red, including those who …

A simple argument against austerity

Sun 30 August 2015
The argument for austerity goes like this: The public debt is too high so businesses and consumers lose confidence which hampers economic growth. If the government is seen to be reducing public debt then confidence will be restored. Confident business will invest and become more efficient, and sell more products …

Inequality mathematics

Wed 29 July 2015
This post describes the mathematics of inequality in income distributions. It is sufficiently abstract that it's applicable to wealth and many other distributions. You can find the ideas explained without mathematics in this post over on the Rational Intuition blog. The essential point is that commonly stated income fractions, such …

Poverty

Thu 23 July 2015
A very pleasant Friday afternoon. My son and I went to the cinema, then had a good lunch at a cafe, with amazing baked-on-premises cake, and then browsed a few shops, coming away with a box set of Alien films and a Dr Who and the Web of Fear DVD …

Notes on Piketty's famous book

Wed 17 June 2015
Here are some rather raw notes on my reading of Thomas Piketty's famous book Capital in the twenty-first century. Part one - Income and capital Chapter 1 - Income and output Domestic output equals GDP less depreciation; depreciation is significant, typically around 10% of GDP. National income is equal to domestic output …

Scottish government cuts?

Thu 28 May 2015
I was writing a blog post on education when I noticed something rather odd about the Scottish government's budget for 2015-16. In the overview I found on the Scottish government's website it states that the budget has been cut "as a result of the UK government's austerity programme". Fair enough …

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