I own far too many books, so as an experiment, I decided to try and sell a few on Amazon to see whether it’s worth my while.

I put six books up for sale – fiction and non-fiction, hardbacks and paperbacks – a couple of weeks ago, but although I agreed to sell them at very low prices, I didn’t sell the first one till three days ago.

It was a paperback, and the price was £1.69.

However, that’s only vaguely related to what Amazon are paying me:

Buyer’s Price: £1.69
Shipping: £2.75
Amazon Fees: £-1.64
Your Earnings: £2.80
Envelope: £-0.33
Postage: £-1.04
Grand Profit: £1.43

Note how Amazon’s fee is almost exactly the exactly the selling price, so my profit is basically the difference between the fixed shipping fee and the actual cost.

Given that it must have taken me at least ten minutes to list the book on Amazon, print out the receipt, wrap the book and go to the post office, there really are better ways to make money.

So how do I get rid of a thousand books more easily and/or profitably?

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So products like the iPad will probably break all the time unless people put them into big cases, in which case they might as well have bought a notebook.

So I started wondering whether the solution would be to roll up the computer instead, and my father-in-law has now sent me a video that shows that I wasn’t the first person with this idea:

It looks like a great idea, although I’m wondering whether the outer casing won’t scratch the screen when it’s rolled up — I would have thought it needed to be soft on the outside. I also wonder whether it needs to be so big. An iPad rolled up wouldn’t be much bigger than an banana, I reckon, so it would fit into a jacket pocket or a lady’s handbag.

Sadly, however, this is just a design project AFAIK, not an actual product.

But perhaps somebody will make an actual product out of this one day. If it’s Apple, they could call it the iScroll.

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More and more people are pointing out that coalitions can lead to stable and successful governments, at least in continental Europe, the point being that one shouldn’t fear the so-called “hung parliament” that so many supporters of the two big parties dread.

I agree, and I actually think that it would be much better for the UK instead of the adversarial two-party politics that Westminster is focused on.

However, discussing coalitions, Fraser Nelson was worrying that “if everyone thinks they’re one year away from a new election how popular are cuts going to be”.

I think this is exactly why coalitions have worked badly in the UK in the past.

In countries where coalitions are successful, it’s also the case that they have fixed-term parliaments and/or an electoral system that means that there is no hope for any one party to get a majority.

In other words, in many countries the parties know that they have to make coalition a success, because they have no alternative.

Sadly, however, if no single party gets a majority after this year’s general election, it’s likely they’ll only treat coalition as a way to prepare for the following general election, which will happen as soon as the PM of the day thinks that he can get a majority by calling an election.

The consequence of this is that the LibDems shouldn’t hope for four years of influence. At the most, they’ll be influential for a year, so they’ll have to make the most of it, especially by changing the electoral system.

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The media today agree it is now inevitable that the general election will take place on 6 May.

I’m not convinced.

It could well be that Brown thinks he’s going to go for the 6th, but when he has to make the announcement in April, he’ll check the opinion polls, and what will the Great Ditherer do if they’re going against him again? Go for the planned date or postpone it for another month in the hope that things will be better then?

I have put good money on a June election, and all the budget date has told me is that the election won’t take place in March or early April.

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Both books have been important to me.

The former was for many years my favourite book, and if I hadn’t read it, I might have been much worse at English (I had already stopped doing English at school, and it was only because I wanted to read Douglas Adams in the original language that it didn’t slowly get worse, but that’s really a separate blog posting).

The latter is a fine cookbook, but it’s actually been more important to me because it taught me not to regard the US a one homogeneous country.

It has divided the US into six regions: New England, the South, the Heartland, Louisiana, the Southwest and the Pacific States, and the food in each part is clearly quite distinctive.

I have often in the years since then used these regions to understand American issues, and most often than not it has helped my understanding of them.

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When people in the UK discuss alternatives to the current electoral system used for Westminster (first-past-the-post), they tend to look towards Ireland, Australia or possibly Germany, but never Scandinavia.

However, the system used there has many advantages, and indeed people there just take it for granted, so it must have got something right!

To make the Danish electoral system tangible, I have therefore made a simulation of the UK General Election 2005 according to the Danish system. (It’s quite long, so feel free to skip down to the results instead of reading all the details.)

Here are some of the advantages of the Danish system:

• Every vote counts. Even if your vote doesn’t get anybody elected where you live, it will count towards your party elsewhere in the country. This combats the way parties under FPTP tend to concentrate all their efforts on swing voters in marginal seats.
• The politicians need to get themselves elected, not just their party. A politician will typically be up against at least ten other candidates from their own party, and it is therefore important to have a personal agenda, not just to toe the party line.
• Need to be positive. When all votes count, if party A claims party B are evil, it might benefit party C or D just as easily as party A. So instead, party A needs to give the voters reasons to vote for them.
• It preserves some sort of constituency link. Given that it’s still the constituencies that put up candidates, and given that MPs are elected in small groups of constituencies, there is still a very strong local link, and it’s easy to understand how to get rid of a bad MP.
• Results are available quickly. Like FPTP, but unlike STV, results come in quickly, thus providing for a good election night experience.
• Opinion polls are right. Under FPTP, there is no simple correlation between share of the vote and number of seats won, so a party can lose votes but gain seats and vice versa. Under the Danish system, more votes leads to more seats, and opinion polls will therefore accurately predict how many MPs each party will get.
• Parties become truly national. Under FPTP, most parties tend to get most of their MPs elected in specific geographical areas (LibDems in the South West, Labour in the cities, the Tories in rural England). The Danish system spreads out the MPs more evenly, so that the LibDems will get fewer seats in the South West but more in the cities and rural England, Labour will get fewer seats in the cities but more elsewhere, etc. (This is not taken to extremes. The SNP only gets seats in Scotland – it’s not artificially extended to England.)

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The famed three-volume Georgian-German dictionary by Kita Tschenkéli (კიტა ჩხენკელი), “Georgisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch”, which is the best bilingual dictionary of Georgian into any language, including English and Russian, is in print again!

When I studied Georgian in Tbilisi, my dad had to get all 2508 pages photocopied from the university library’s copy and sent to me because it was absolutely essential but impossible to buy anywhere.

The price is €145, which is really quite cheap for this type of work. The only reason I’m not ordering it is because I still have my prized photocopies.

They’re also selling his excellent Einführung in die Georgische Sprache at €75. This is not essential in the same way, but it’s definitely worth having if you’re serious about learning Georgian. I don’t own it, but I’ve spent many happy hours with it in the library of the Department of Linguistics in Aarhus.

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The BBC’s Michael Crick can report that “the Leaders’ Debates at the forthcoming election have now been cancelled. Instead, over the past 2-3 weeks they’ve been quietly replaced with Prime Ministerial Debates. It’s a cunning manoeuvre, agreed by the three main broadcasters (the BBC, ITV and Sky) and the three main parties, to exclude the SNP and Plaid Cymru leaders from the debates.”

I’ve discussed in the past why the SNP cannot be excluded in Scotland.

It is also very well described in a comment to Crick’s story by DougtheDug:

If it is true that this renaming has been done to exclude the SNP and PC from the debates along with the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, (The Ulster Unionist Party will be represented via their link with the Conservatives), then it’s a clever ploy but once again done with no knowledge of the rules of the game.

Under OFCOM the SNP is classed as a major party in Scotland along with the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib-Dems. PC has major party status in Wales and the NI parties have major party status in Northern Ireland.

Party political election broadcasting is not worked out on the basis of a party’s UK standing but its standing in each of the constituent home nations of the UK. The debates, call them what you will, are multi-party election broadcasts and unless they are impartial in all four home nations then they will fall foul of OFCOM, the BBC guidelines and the law. The only way they can be impartial in Scotland is for all four major parties to be on the platform at the same time. Similarly for Wales and Northern Ireland.

What the broadcasters are trying to do is to apply the rules of impartiality in England which has three major parties to the four party setups in Scotland and Wales and the four party set up in Northern Ireland. It’s a classic case of the broadcasters thinking that England is Britain is England.

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Willem Buiter describes Brown’s economic legacy well in the Financial Times today:

Britain’s true fiscal circumstances are about as bad as Greece’s reported situation, once we allow for the understatement of UK public debt through the off-balance-sheet accounting tricks of the past decade (the private finance initiative, unfunded public sector pensions, student loans and other Enron-like constructs).

The fiscal weakness of the UK is largely government-inflicted, rather than a result of the financial crisis and global contraction. During the long boom preceding the crisis, fiscal policy was relentlessly pro-cyclical, with public spending rising steadily as a share of gross domestic product.

[...]

Public finances during the last boom are the obvious guide to expectations about the likely future fiscal behaviour of a Labour government. The cynical manipulation of Gordon Brown’s “golden rule” (over the economic cycle borrowing only to invest) and the decision to jettison it and the sustainable investment rule (net debt not to exceed 40 per cent of GDP) as soon as they threatened to become binding constraints will cause the markets to act like St Thomas towards promises of future fiscal tightening: seeing is believing.

Do read the whole thing!

I’m surprised that anybody can still think that Brown is the right person to get us out of this mess.

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Today it’s exactly one year ago that I wed my beloved Phyllis!

So much has happened since then – Amaia was conceived and born, I left Collins, and Phyllis and I started up our own company – but it still feels like yesterday.

It was definitely one of the best days of my life.

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