Monday 7 October 2019

Monday Quick Takes

- Markets are unusually resilient given the shenanigans in both Washington and Westminster. I just hope this lasts!

- There is still no real insight from the EU as to what to do with Boris's new offer. Parliament is telling them to ignore it but there are a few worried in Brussels that their disingenuity will finally get spotted.

- Corbyn is well on the election war path, targeting football bosses now. Classic Corbyn timing as he attacks the Newcastle owner just as they finally have their biggest win in years.

- The Rugby world cup is still boring, the Group stages are entirely unnecessary as there are not 8 decent teams in the world worth watching.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

OT, but reading John Derbyshire's account of a return to China 36 years after he met his wife while teaching there, I note that

"Xiaoyan and Shiyu live well. Both are retired: in China most women retire at 55, most men at 60. Xiaoyan was a nurse, Shiyu a math teacher. The apartment, in a newish high-rise, is paid for, and there is no property tax. Their pensions give them about RMB10,000 a month ($1,400). They are active—swimming, yoga, hiking—and take vacations abroad, most recently to Thailand. They have a daughter, gainfully employed, who lives not far away.

They are pretty contented and not interested in politics. Rosie tells me, however, that one of the ladies at the banquet referred to Beibei’s central administration building as fubai lou, “Corruption Towers,” to nodded agreement from the others."

55 and 60!

Anonymous said...

China seems to have much the same problems with pensions and an ageing population as other countries, and as elsewhere there are plans to raise the retirement age.
https://clb.org.hk/content/china%E2%80%99s-social-security-system

Don Cox

E-K said...

A caller to Jeremy Vine said that China was clean, modern, polite with unthreatening teenagers.

Vine said that unthreatening teenagers was a sign of something sinister in society, meaning that being threatening at that age was healthy. He was not being ironic.

It shows how far our standards have fallen since the 1950s.

Anonymous said...

You're right about most of the games but you get the odd gem like Uruguay beating Fiji - and Japan of course, although I wonder if the refs aren't channeling the 'spirit' of the soccer World Cup in Korea. I've not seen a straight put-in at the scrum since the early 70s, and then the ref pings Samoa 5 metres out, in the last minute, with Japan needing a try, for doing what every other team does. Highly suspicious.