Pharma corp Insidious tactics and Cystic Fibrosis.

Pharma corp insidious tactics and Cystic Fibrosis. What if your sister had cystic fibrosis wouldn't you like the HSE to spend €250,000 a year on her so she could live a normal life and have lots of  kids. Pharma corp, has really scored this time with a new tactic - getting the HSE to replace short term savings on silly things like home care for the elderly, with generational exponential spending on genetic disorders, assuring the survival of the disease and the industry for hundreds of years.

To get into the Pharma mindset here is a personal account I once had a conversation with the former head of Sandoz Ireland and I explained that there was a new cure for stomach ulcers, one or two antibiotic treatments and the ulcer goes. "That's no use, there is no repeat business" the good doctor exclaimed.

I laughed til I cried when I read the headline in the Irish Times "Price of CF may be health cuts elsewhere" oh my god how could anyone take the "analysis" seriously. Simple English lesson: the use of the word "may" implies a shorter than certain probability of something happening. "No price is too high"  sorry you are wrong here, €20 million for 120 people is too much. You can train 100 doctors for that, or improve the health on 10's of thousands of people for that.

Croke Park Agreement - the innumeratti remeet

All the hype and spin about this Croke Park Agreement is both frightening and dangerous. The trolls of the Irish Independent and "sum bad" Irish Times journalists, in hyper mode hoping for riots on the streets something that lazy writers can cant about. Even if any of them had the capacity to analyse the situation they wouldn't bother.

Bottom line,  €1 billion will be saved purely by public sector workers retiring and resigning within three years.

No pay cuts, no extra hours, no compulsory redundancies required.

I am sure about that fact. I used two recent publications to come to this conclusion 1. Earnings and Labour Costs (CSO 26th November 2012) and 2. Analysis of Exchequer Pay and Pensions Bill 2006 - 2011 ( Dept of Public Expenditure and Reform).

Year end    Payroll cost           Number of full time Equivalents      Total savings at year end


2012          €14,500,000,000              300,000

2013          €13,920,000,000              288000                                  €580,000,000

2014          €13,363,200,000              276480                               €1,136,800,000

2015          €12,828,672,000              265421                               €1,671,328,000

2016          €12,315,525,120              254804                               €2,184,474,880


If you look at the pay bill for 2012 it is €14,500,000,000 (€14.5Bn) , the number of full time equivalent public sector workers is 300,000 , the average rate of retirement for the last 4 years is 4%. So 12000 will retire this year, 11520 next year and 11059 the following year. In total staff reduction of 34579 in three years, this is a €1.67Bn payroll saving

There is no getting away from the tyranny of reason.

You might say what about the extra pensions. Teachers, Gardai, Semistate and most public sectors workers privately fund their pensions most to the tune of 20% of their gross salary.  All pay a 7% pension levy. Those who had the option of not contributing to their pension funds do not get a pension.

Comments welcome.

Has globalisation something to offer in Ireland ?

I have finally got the globalisation concept into my numb skull, thanks to a very enlightened talk by one of the guys in the Central Statistics Office. I wasn't looking forward to it, as previous talks and discussions left me none the wiser.

Charles Haughey understood the concept, and initially muscled into the global financial markets. He set up the financial centre, realised a reduced tax offering would bring the companies in "and sure if we only got some employment from building and employing bank clerks wouldn't that be better than nothing". The development of the pharmaceutical sector soon followed. Then the computer companies came in huge numbers. Eventually all sectors with a global market gravitated to Ireland.

Recent experience has shown that the gain for Ireland is insignificant in comparison to the risk posed. So lets look at all these companies' figures, total assets €3.7 trillion and total liabilities €3.8 trillion (a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 or one thousand billion). At a very simplistic level who owns the €100 billion loss if everything was liquidated. You would like to think "the owners", but you might find that as happened before, that the state all of a sudden becomes the owner due to some technicality such as it is "of systematic importance to the state". The scare example above is of course far from real but shows how risky the situation is, if you are dealing with stocks and flows involving €8 trillion.

So how can Ireland gain from this situation. Traditionally companies are taxed on profits and loss are offset against profits, everything else is left alone. I propose a very small tax divided across profits, losses, assets and liabilities. Such a tax set at the current property of 0.2% would yield €30 billion. I don't see much different in this approach considering I pay tax on my assets in property tax, and liabilities in the form of VAT on food and insurance as well as on profits. The only difference is that I don't pay taxes on losses, the concept of incentivising losses by making them tax deductible was always beyond me.

A maths error in the Irish Times

Red faces in the Irish Times today, not from the sunny day yesterday, but a gaff about maths scoring in the Leaving Cert. Seán Flynn Educational Editor with smiling face on the front page stands over the article which states that a C3 or better in higher level maths is the starting point for bonus points, this is incorrect it starts at D3. Most innumerates will not think much of this mistake, but the error strikes at the heart of the bonus system, those who would normally get a D3 or D2 would have been better off taking the pass paper up until the bonus system was introduced. Hopefully, this year's students will not pay heed to todays paper. Below is a copy of the bonus scheme.



Implementation of Bonus Points for Higher Level Mathematics by the Universities, DIT & RCSI


Points awarded:

A bonus of 25 points will be allocated to students who achieve a grade D3 or above in higher level (HL) mathematics. This means that the maximum cumulative LC points total will increase from 600 to 625 (existing maximum points plus bonus points).

Time scale:

The scheme is to be introduced for a four year pilot period commencing leaving certificate 2012 and will be reviewed in 2014.

Formula:

• All students presenting HD3 or above in HL mathematics will have 25 points added to their score for mathematics

• The six highest subject points scores will then be counted to achieve a cumulative points score, as is normal practice

The bonus points will only be relevant in cases where the subject HL mathematics (including bonus points) is scored as one of the candidate’s six best subjects for points purposes. Consequently, if HL mathematics (cumulative points score) is not among these six subjects, the bonus points will not be included in the total points score.

Date of examination:

Bonus points will be awarded during the 4 year pilot period irrespective of the year in which the examinations were taken.

Medicine:

The maximum possible adjusted points score for applicants to Medicine will increase from 560 to 565. (For all scores over 550, each 5 point band equals one extra point.) The baseline score of 480 points will still apply but can include the bonus points if HL mathematics (cumulative points) is among the best six subjects.

EU other than Irish examinations:

All EU students presenting for admission to an Irish university with a clear equivalent to HL Mathematics as one of their EU school leaving subjects will be awarded bonus points. 
The table below illustrates the impact of the bonus points.

Table:

% Range LC Grade Points for HL Maths, including 25 bonus points Existing points for HL subjects inc maths Points for Ordinary Level subjects
Marks                                  Grade  HLmaths       HL      LL
90 – 100                                A1     125               100     60

85 – 89.99                             A2     115                90      50

80 – 84.99                             B1     110                85      45

75 – 79.99                             B2     105                80      40

70 – 74.99                             B3     100                75      35

65 – 69.99                             C1       95                70      30

60 – 64.99                             C2       90                65      25

55 – 59.99                             C3        85               60      20

50 – 54.99                             D1        80              55       15

45 – 49.99                             D2         75             50      10

40 – 44.99                             D3        70              45       5

25 – 39.99                             E           0                 0       0

10 – 24.99                             F           0                 0       0

0 – 9.99                                NG        0                 0        0

So what is happening in South Dublin Schools ?

So what is happening in South Dublin Schools ?

Parliamentarian's son expelled (type in your email and I'll tell you who) was one of four boys expelled from Oatlands Boys Secondary school in South County Dublin. This is a Christian Brothers non fee paying school boys only school so as you would expect there is a bit of sleaze involved. Like most years in most secondary schools there is a Facebook group page set up and administered by a group of pupils in the year. These group pages are for members only and require invitation for participation. Generally the pages are used for reminding students of events, bring in money for such and such, or for questions like when is the Geography homework due. Unfortunately a bit of a conversation got going on the page in question and covered topics such as whether a teacher was hot or not and whether another teacher liked boys in the Christian Brother sense of the word. A couple of students were overheard discussing it, the culprits were rounded up suspended and then expelled, with the usual attention to rights of the accused as you would expect in a CB school. Now where does the responsibility lie - with the parents of the children involved or with the school. Everybody is in a bit of a spin. Undermining the boys position, a well placed piece was printed on the front of today's Irish Times, where a number of Oatlands Old Boys are employed.

Meanwhile, the annual kidnap of the a Mary's boy ended in tears yesterday. Blind folded and tied to a pole outside Dublin's premier girls school, covered in cat food and mayonnaise didn't end his problems. The Garda helicopter arrived followed by several Garda cars one of which was involved in a collision on the way to save him.

Little did the kidnappers know that they were adding to the stress of a young girl in the school who's dog Fluffy kenneled (again type your email to find the name of the kennels) at Christmas for holidays was returned home expectant. After much discussion the kennels declared that they thought that the dog was neutered. The puppy arrived and it was a family decision to keep him, no compensation was paid by the kennels.

Regulator wrecking Irish Credit Unions

Regulator wrecking Irish Credit Unions

The regulator is trying to fix what isn't broken in his attempt to interfere with the Irish Credit Unions. I don't know whether it is arrogant incompetence or just frustration at not being able to deal with bad bankers, but this guy is for the birds when it comes to the credit unions.

The nauseating and condescending  MBA speak would be funny if it wasn't so serious. They are going to take a "top down approach" in dealing with the credit unions. Thankfully there is no top, the credit unions are all independent co-operatives. Of the 500 credit unions 27 are in trouble, all of them now have to have an extraordinary amount of reserves if they have accumulated property over the years. There is a move to get all the credit unions to behave in the same way whether they are rural, suburban, city or commercial. This one size fits all approach is not suitable for such diverse organisations.

I don't care if he has a Cum Laude degree from Bridgetown, it does not mean squat when it comes running credit unions. He simply does not understand that the success of Irish Credit Unions is based on the work of the volunteers who run them for free on a non profit making basis. The independent autonomous nature of credit unions saved them from destruction during the boom, not unlike successful less peaceful cell like organisational structures.

The regulator persists in undermining the reputation by highlighting the few basket case credit unions. Another tactic is layering on regulation after regulation, so that small credit unions can no longer cope with the amount of extra unnecessary work complying with these regulations.

I have looked at several credit unions, most are success stories. The Garda credit union has €100 million in assets, and like most credit unions it also provides insurance at cost price. The Gardai and the ESB also run their own health insurance at cost price. Any large group of individuals combined can cut costs and improve living standards using co-operative principles.

Canal Cycle

It is possible to cycle from Dublin to the Shannon along the Grand Canal tow path. Over the last 10 weeks I have been cycling various stretches of the canal. It is an ideal exercise, all flat. Mind you some parts of the tow path covered in short grass and can be tough going, best to get off and walk here in the wet months.

Terenure to the 12th Lock near Lucan via Harold's cross takes an hour each way and is 22k in total. Technically the canal from Harold's Cross to Rialto is the Circle line and Loch 1 Grand Canal is in Rialto. There is a "green way" from the 3rd to the 12th Lock. at each lock there is a description of the wild life and some orientation information as well as a few seats. The Green Way is lit up 24/7 and is computer controlled to accommodate animal nocturnal feeding habits, there is also CCTV.

Up to the 12th Lock it is all paved. You will share the journey with dog walkers, joggers and other cyclists. Broken glass on one or two spots so use Kevlar bicycle tyres. It is probably a good idea to finish your cycle before 1pm as groups of youths begin to form and hang out in the afternoon.

At the 12th Lock you change sides and it is grass for about 4km up to the Hatch Pub, looking back on it I would have been better off walking this section. Very nice Georgian structures here, walls, buildings, bridges in a nice rustic setting. The first of the many barges are moored at the Hatch Bridge. Change sides again and a further paved 5km  and you are at the 13th Lock. The Lyons estates back out on to the canal here ( a substantial Georgian building with a very good restaurant).

Six kilometers to Lock 14, the first 4km paved followed by 2km short grass. Another kilometer and you are at lock 15, this is where the Grand Canal crosses the River Liffey on the Leinster Aqueduct, a spectacular sight.

In tandem at Lock 14

Lyons Estate Lock 13

Looking "up stream" to Lock 15

Looking "down stream" from Lock 14

Cute House at Lock 14