The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to pay up to £100,000 for tip-offs leading to action against price fixing and other anti-competitive behaviour.
The new policy of financial incentives for information will initially run for 18 months and is similar to a scheme in South Korea.
A business found to be part of a cartel can be fined up to 10% of its turnover.
The move follows an OFT campaign offering immunity for UK firms that blow the whistle on cartels.
The U.S. economy lost the title of “world’s biggest” to the euro zone this week as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets.
…
Taking official estimates of 2007 GDP — $13,843,800 billion for the United States and 8,847,889.1 billion euros for the euro zone — the economy of the latter passed the United States once converted into dollars, shortly after the euro topped $1.56.
The dollar sank to $1.5688 per euro late in European trading hours on Friday, at which rate the euro zone’s 2007 GDP equates to $13,880,568.4 billion.
hehehe
Weak dollar costs U.S. economy its No. 1 spot | Reuters
This is the second time I’ve seen one of these calculations, and they’ve always made sense to me:
according to the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and Environment, which found that while “a person of normal weight costs on average £210,000 over their lifetime”, a smoker clocks up just £165,000 and the obese run up an average £187,000 bill.
Note, this is all about costs to the state, nothing is mentioned about revenues to the state: of which a smoker will donate a healthy chunk every time they buy a packet.
So, instead of this anti-smoking witch hunt, we should encourage it!
There’s a test people did a few times where they put different stock names at the end different exits of a maze and let a hamster ‘pick’ his favorite stock. It turns out that the hamster is no worse (and sometimes better) than real life stock brokers, showing how the market is random.
In the four years since Mr. Monk has chaired and inspired this contest, his stocks have posted annual returns of 37 percent, 36 percent, 3 percent and, in 2006, 36 percent
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
I always knew my driving habits were safe!
according to an analysis of more than 12 million passenger cars insured by Progressive, the third-largest auto insurer in the United States.
It found cars with more than 200 horsepower actually generate 17 per cent fewer claims than those propelled by less than 200 horsepower.
Google isn’t the only player to experiment – Yahoo has its own public research page.
The Tech Buzz Game is a very interesting fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends.
In the Web Application Frameworks market, I’m betting on Rails.
I wonder if all the people who voted for Dubya are still going to like him when they’re back to tilling the soil in 2010..
THE NUMBERS are staggering — a US$43-trillion hole in America’s public finances that’s getting worse every day. And the stakes are almost inconceivable for a generation of politicians and voters raised in relative prosperity, who’ve never known severe economic hardship
Full story:
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/world/article.jsp?content=20050307_101541_101541
See you all in superland…
http://www.whereisthemoney.org/