Count Kostov Counts

The cost of oil

2008-08-17T15:30:00.003+01:00

The Count has it on good authority that the end of the world is nigh. The Amazon Queens who drive their little princesses to school in their Chelsea tractors are aghast at the cost of oil and are convinced that the entire universe will collapse if they have to give up their Chelsea tractors in favour of more humble modes of transport, like walking the little darlings to school. Walking may be healthier, but it means that mum can not look down from her chariot on low life pedestrians and can not play one unpwomanship with all the other school mums in their 4x4 chariots. It would, indeed, be the end of the world for them.

This is a sore point in the Count's household. The Countess is determined that a 4x4 is not safe enough and is still hankering after the T-72 main battle tank as a safer mode of transport for going along to Whole Foods, where she can save the planet by buying organic food (which costs more than the whole bloody T-72) while killing anyone who disagrees with her with a blast of exhaust from the tank.

Things went really wrong when I tried to explain how expensive petrol was. She got out her intellectual shot gun, loaded both barrels and blasted away. It was not a pretty sight. First, she pointed out that at $120 a barrel it still only costs about 30 pence per litre. That is before the government has got hold of it and added another 80 pence of tax to help pay for MPs televisions, sofas, second houses, first class travel and all the other basic necessities of maintaining democracy. For reasons which remain entirely obscure, they do not tax airline fuel which is why flights are so cheap, provided you do not want to check in, have hand baggage, require a seat or have any of the other items which Ryanair clearly deem to be a luxury. But I digress.

Pumping oil out of the bottom of the sea, or from some godforsaken part of the world (anyone who has had the misfortune to work in Riyadh can guess where such places might be), then refining it, transporting it and finally selling it for 30 pence (plus 80 pence of tax) is a bargain.

Water costs about £1.80 per litre from my local newsagent, which may explain why he can afford big holidays and the Kostovs have to hang out on their decrepit Siberian estates for a break. Don't tell me that bottling water is six times more expensive than producing oil. A StartFucks organic semi-skinned raspberry ripple frapuccino to go costs £6 a litre. A decent bottle of Krug comes in at £100 a litre (for heavens sake, its grapes - how much do grapes cost??) and printer ink for my lousy printer comes in at £3,000 a litre. Its probably not even organic. But it is a rip off.

The problem is not the cost of oil. The problem is that all the peasants want to whirl around the world: without sea, sun, sand, sex and sangria in Spain the peasants of Britain would be revolting at home rather than disgracing themselves abroad. Over a million people a year jet between New York and London - why? The peasants on the Kostov estates are happy enough drinking illicitly distilled vodka and shagging anything on two feet (or four feet at a push). These are simple communal and family pleasures which require the ability to do no more than stagger from one hut to the next.

And as for the school run - why cant we make the little beggars run? Solve the obesity pandemic, NHS tax burden and global warming all in one fell swoop.

Flying in the face of reality

2008-08-10T12:07:00.004+01:00

Business In The Community (BiTC) has kicked off the smug awards season by giving Tesco an award for environmental responsibility. Tesco's qualifications for this are:

its buying practices lead to factory farming and eco-disasters
its out of town stores destroy the green belt and encourage massive car pollution
it is a member of BiTC and a big donor to it.

This is like giving a serial mugger an award for crime prevention and reduction on the basis that he has mugged fewer people this year than last year.

British Airways is not waiting for BiTC to help out: it is awarding itself awards and slapping its own back. The Count will happily slap any part of BA for its scumbag dishonesty which serves to show that business people are as bent as a seven pound note.

BA is spending a few million on advertising the great success of Terminal 5. Its latest claims are that "90% of flights take off within 15 minutes of the scheduled time" and that on average it only takes six minutes to check in. If this is the best they can do, they need to give BiTC a big donation and wait to be given an environmental prize in return. Let's take a chainsaw to this nonsense.

90% of flights do not take off within fifteen minutes of schedule. They push back from the gate and then spend several hours wandering around the Heathrow tarmac finding a runway and a runway slot. And if BA manage to have 10% not even pushing back within fifteen minutes of schedule, then they really can not even run a BAth, let alone BA.

Only six minutes to check in sounds great, except that most people check in by the internet or by machine, so that is no big deal. They quietly ignore the problems of getting through security: if they were so efficient, why do they say that everyone must complete check in sixty minutes before scheduled departure (which will not happen for 90 minutes anyway) - or they will not be allowed to continue.

And the six minutes ignores the evening peak (they only measure results to 2pm). And it ignores the hell of getting to check in at T5 which appears to have been designed by a demented leprachaun after a night on the town. Getting from the tube to departures by escalator is a labyrinthine exploration of shops, offices, arrivals halls, up and down escalators, hidden signs and utter chaos. And T5 is only served by half a tube line: the other half serves the other terminals.

So BA's great success is this: it has constructed an inaccessible, badly designed terminal where passengers need over an hour to get through security to catch flights which will not leave on time. But check in only takes six minutes of the four hours of hell you are likely to endure from leaving home to sitting on the aircraft.

Meanwhile BA want us to know that their submissions for the third runway at Heathrow are completely honest and objective.

At this point the only sensible thing to do is to hire a few shoulder launched SAMs and see if Al-Qaeda would like to do some target training near Heathrow: if not on BA aircraft, then at least on BA management.

$50 billion for a knighthood?

2008-08-08T14:39:00.003+01:00

An iron rule of government is that prestige project + government = huge waste of money. Think Millennium Dome. Fear the Olympics. Actually "Prestige" is a redundant term in the above equation. Government = huge waste of money.

Naturally, the private sector is far superior to government, even when it comes to blowing money away and no one being accountable. As the Count's first exhibit, step forward the senior management of Britain's banks.

Today, RBS announced that it was writing off £5.9 billion. Woops. That would pay for the Olympics with change left over for a couple of Millennium Domes, if the government's cost estimates are to be believed.

RBS, HBOS, HSBC and the whole alphabet soup of Britain's banks, plus the quaintly named Barclays (what, a real name) have written off $52 billion. That's only £27 billion in real money.

Next time my impertinent bank manager tries charging me for my very modest overdraft, I will ask him where all the money goes. Down the drain. The banks have become expert at fleecing good customers and throwing the money away on vast salaries and dodgy lending. The basic idea of lending money is that you get it back at the end of the loan. This very simple principle seems to have eluded the geniuses that run Britain's banks. They are highly skilled and giving money away, but have no idea how to get it back. This myopia has been a windfall for the Kostov estates which are kept afloat with dodgy loans from dodgy banks. Banks have been very obliging about investing in the Russian economic renaissance (more hunting estates for the Kostov clan): they have all realised far too late that in the absence of the rule of law they have as much chance of getting their money back as mad Uncle Vanya has of winning the Nobel prize for temperance.

In Russia, we know what to do with people who lose our money. It is a mistake they can only make once.

What happens when you lose $52 billion in the UK? Arise Sir Fred Godwin: CEO of RBS. Arise Sir James Crosby, the CEO who bled HBOS. Feel that ermine, Lord Stevenson, Chairman of HBOS. Arise Sir John Bond, the Chairman who led the losses at HSBC.

How many senior executives and city grandees have lost their jobs as a result of losing $52 billion? Precisely none. How many people will lose their homes because of the bankers' greed and incompetence? 40,000 home repossessions for 2008 alone. To add insult to injury, the government has asked Sir James Crosby, who screwed up so badly with his dodgy mortgages at HBOS, to lead a government inquiry into how to make mortgages and housing work better. You can not make this stuff up.

Its enough to turn any self-respecting aristocrat into a communist. But then when the revolution comes, I will have to be the first person to line myself up against a wall and shoot myself.

£20 billion for a jog in the smog

2008-08-06T21:06:00.002+01:00

Beijing says that the Olympics will cost $40 billion. Go kiss my communist pants (they are the unwashed ones which have been festering in the servants quarters since the fall of communism nearly 20 years ago. They are now a WMD if they fall into the wrong hands).

Beijing was saying that the games would cost $40 billion 5 years ago: this either proves how perfectly planned the Chinese Communist regime is, or it proves that they have 100% control over the media and can peddle any bollocks they want. Most of the horse shit they produce lands up in the atmosphere. This is fine as long as it poisons the Chinese: not so smart when they start melting all the ice caps.

So now we come to London. The London branch of the Chinese Communist party, aka nuLabour, claimed that the games would only cost £2.3 billion. Look, the price of a cappucino is London is roughly the annual income of fourteen labourers in China. And yet somehow nuLabour convinced itself that Beijing would cost six times more than London. That is as fanciful as thinking that Gordon Brown is a competent Prime Minister.

Within months Tessa Jowell, Minister of the Glorious People's Culture and Diversity Division, was announcing that the cost of the Olympics would go up by another £900 million. Only £900 million? A mere rounding error to a Labour minister with her snout in the trough of privilege and entitlement.

Except that was never going to be enough. Now the Cabinet is admitting that the cost will be nearer £9 billion. Oh well, that's only four times the original estimate. Imagine buying a pint of beer for £2.50 and suddenly being charged £10. I would personally horsewhip any publican who tried that on the Count. But publicans have a good deal more honesty than politicians: unfortunately the politicians live in a security bubble to prevent them getting horsewhipped by aristocrats. The concrete toblerone around their offices may prevent bombs, but they can not prevent the tidal wave of ridicule which sweeps over them.

Of course, we are promised "regeneration" for our £9 billion. For "regeneration" refer to the fiasco of the Millennium dome which lay empty for years as they tried to foist it onto someone, anyone, to get rid of the embarrassment. The Greenwich penninsula is still like the end of the world. So much for the regeneration programme: in ten years we will have vandalised swimming pools and decaying housing as the Olympic regeneration legacy.

And does anyone actually believe £9 billion? Do I hear £10 billion, £12 billion, any more?

Baron de Courbertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, claimed that it was "the taking part, not the winning that counts." That is patently untrue of nuclear war and it is also untrue of the commercial, jingoistic dope fest which the Olympics has become. If a real aristocrat ran the Olympics, the amateur ideal would be rediscovered and both the drug users and commercial villains of the Olympics would find them standing in line with Tessa Jowell and the other pathetic politicians waiting for their horsewhipping.

Its time for the politicians, venal commercial interests and self-aggrandising Olympic bureaucrats to stand aside. Let the Count save the Olympics for posterity.

Kangaroos, cars and the tube that costs more than it earns

2008-08-03T12:33:00.004+01:00

The Australians have calculated that traffic delays costs the colonials $30 billion a year. My faithful retainer, Digdog, assures me that this is roughly £15 billion in real money. In Zimbabwean dollars it would not be enough to buy a tin of the amber nectar. Quite how traffic delays can cost them so much is a mystery: are there really traffic jams of jackeroos riding their kangaroos down to the local billabong?

By contrast, TfL (transport for London) estimates that traffic delays in London cost a mere 837 million minutes a year. Perhaps that is because we don't have so many kangaroos jamming up the roads. Although Thames water is doing its best to create as many billabongs as possible in London: potholes are not good enough for Thames water. They dig up entire roads and convert them into little lakes. Their latest ruse is to dig up the main road into London (the Cromwell Road) and reduce it to one lane. Inevitably, no one has actually seen anyone working on the Cromwell Road billabong. That alone must account for 850 million minutes of delay a year.

Digdog is good at numbers. He assures me that this converts into about 14 million hours or about 8,000 working years. Even giving each car commuter a value of £40,000 a year, that still only comes to £320 million a year. Peanuts compared to what the Aussies are able to claim.

The real cost of delays are not above ground: they are below ground on the tube. TfL goes very quiet about this, since they are responsible for the tube. Digging around finds that they admit the average delay, on TfL's own metrics are 6.6 minutes per tube journey. This excludes time spent queuing while the person in front of you attempts to pay with Lithuanian luncheon vouchers. That is just actual travel time. 6.6 minutes delay is nothing. Until you multiply it by the 1 billion passenger journeys on the tube this year. That suddenly becomes 110 million hours of delay a year. That comes to about 60,000 average working years or £2.4 billion of lost productivity a year.

Tube delays cost nearly eight times as much as road delays: they cost more than the entire revenues of the tube network. The tube costs twice as much as it earns. Of course this "cost of" calculation shows why all such "cost of" calculations are pure meadow mayonnaise. An accountant would promptly conclude that we would be better off closing down the tube. And everyone else would rightly conclude that we would be better off closing down accountants.

The real cost of tube delays are not financial. They are the cost of the Count's sanity while waiting for yet another mythical tube train to go in a faintly useful direction.

The only real solution is to dump the tube and hire a kangaroo instead.

£200,000 a vote

2008-07-26T17:05:00.006+01:00

The Count and his ancestors always maintained a healthy distaste for democracy. Clearly, Gordon Brown shares the Count's aristocratic distrust of anything democratic. Having run away from four elections so far (Labour's leadership election, the dodged call for a general election, the promised EU referendum and the David Davis by-election) it is clear he is no fan of letting anyone other than G Brown vote on anything. His dislike is understandable. When forced into an election, his disasters include:

Crewe (first Tory gain from Labour since the Ice Age)
Henley (lost Labour's deposit),
London (lost the plot and let a toff win, which at least shows Londoners have some sense)
Glasgow East, which was Labour since the time God was born.

In his desperation to achieve popularity, he has resorted to bribery. When the Kostovs needed to rig an election, things were simple. We would give all our peasants a bottle of vodka and some nicely boiled cabbage, and they would vote the right way. Those who put their illiterate mark on the wrong part of the voting slip would promptly be evicted. This was a cheap and effective way of making sure that the voters made the right choice. Gordon Brown can not even bribe the electorate well.

In an attempt to buy the Glasgow East election, he threw £600 million at the electorate in the form of delaying a 2p rise in fuel duty. The dummy did not realise that if you need a car in Glasgow East, you steal it. When it runs out of petrol, you steal another car. So no one in Glasgow East has ever been near a petrol station, except to raid it, and no one pays fuel duty. His bribe missed the target completely. If he had given the Glaswegian voters the latest Scottish delicacy, a deep fried chocolate covered pizza, for free he would have earned their votes and adulation. So that was £600 million to gain less than 11,000 votes: over £50,000 per vote. That would buy as much deep fried pizza, dodgy booze, fags and dope to keep the whole constituency happy for decades. They could even afford to buy some petrol to torch the cars they have stolen.

And he still managed to lose the election. His corruption is forgivable: his incompetence is not. At least he should be able to rig an election properly. Even Mugabe does a better job: at least he manages to declare himself the winner.

Glasgow East was nothing compared to the disaster of Crewe. He decided to bribe the voters of Crewe by doing a U-Turn on his policy of doubling income tax on the poor. The last time the Kostovs tried doubling the tax on their poor, we were faced with 70 years of Communist revolution, Stalinism, gulags, bad television and worse food. Of course, Brown did not quite have the guts to say it was a U turn, so instead of repealing his tax rise he decided to throw £2.6 billion at some mind numbingly complex and inefficient scheme designed to make good the worst effects of his tax hike. Brown's £2.6 billion garnered him a grand total of 12,679 votes. That is £200,000 per vote. And still he lost. He is a genius in terms of incompetence.

However, the good news is that Gordon Brown can count on the Count's vote: slip the Count £200,000 (used notes, non sequential serial numbers please) and the Count would vote even for G Brown. Even better, give the Count a few billion and he will show the Prime Minister how to bribe voters efficiently, while letting the Count earn a nice little commission on the side.

Of course, there is a simpler alternative. Revert to aristocratic rule and do away with elections altogether. Count Kostov stands ready to serve....

The cost of a child: 61p ha ha ha

2008-07-20T20:04:00.003+01:00

The toe rags at UNICEF have been at it again. They are trying to con money out of the hard of thinking and deep of wallet. Their advertising is full of doe-eyed kids, sad stories, big promises and even bigger lies.

UNICEF's big promise is that for 61p they can save a kid's life. If they can save the Kostov's kids for 61p, they are welcome to have a go, but trying might bankrupt even the spendthrifts at UNICEF. The 61p will "pay for the medicine to save a child's life". They reckon that they could save 3,400 kids a day or 1.24 million kids a year, all for 61p. Surely only a heartless bastard, or Count Kostov, would not give up 61p to save all those kiddies.

Now let's look a little further. The cost of saving the 1.24 million kids is about £750,000, or $1.5 million if you live on the roadkill-for-Jesus side of the Atlantic. UNICEF's annual budget was $2.78 billion in 2006. In other words, UNICEF could fund all the medicine for all the kids by spending just 5 cents out of every $100 of their income. Where does the other $99.95 cents go to? One way of finding out is to go to Timbuktu, where you will find all the aid agencies floating around in vast 4x4 vehicles with outsize ariels; their staff live in nice accomodation with local servants and drink and eat at nice expatriate watering holes. In other words, they are latter day colonialists but with the moral hypocrisy of spending other people's money while affecting their moral superiority over mere mortals like Count Kostov.

So now let's guess where your 61p will actually go. Will it:
a) go on saving kiddies lives (5 cents chance)
b) be spent on frapuccinos, large cars and international flights for UNICEF functionaries who like to maintain the lifestyle associated with such morally superior beings? ($99.95 chance)

Next time the CEO of UNICEF goes out for a nice $100 lunch, he will have the joy of reminding himself that his meal has cost the lives of over 100 kids, according to his own organisation's publicity. If there is a choice between cutting back on the CEO's restaurant bill or letting kids die, which decision does he make....?

In the unlikely chance that any of the money lands up with the kids, not with the UNICEF plutocrats, the result will be that our overpopulated planet will become even more overpopulated. For many centuries the Kostov estates did very well through war, famine and pestilence: it kept the population at a sustainable level. The black death was a bummer because so few peasants were left that they started to think they could gain thinks like money and democracy: a few generations of over-breeding re-established the natural order. Now we have overbred so much that the greenest thing the human race can do is to have a massive cull of itself: some combination of global warming, global pandemics and a few nutcases with nukes may provide for the involuntary cull of humanity that is required. Meanwhile, UNICEF are adding to the problem, not curing it, by encouraging ever-greater over-population. Hopefully, they are so wasteful and inefficient they will fail in their mission.

In the meantime, Count Kostov would like to get a list of the suckers who donate to UNICEF's scam. They should be ripe for the latest Kostov project: letting western investors buy up virgin forest on the Kostov estates to save them and reduce global warming. So far, my land agent has successfully issued certificates of title to the same plots five times over: the few people who come to check the forest have no idea that at least four other people have also bought the forest. And because it is a green investment, no one is allowed to touch or develop the forest which remains perfectly preserved for the Kostov hunting season.

The Count is back and ready to serve.

2008-07-17T18:07:00.004+01:00

The count is back and is as pissed as hell. The countess says I should stop drinking so much.

The reason the count has been away is because he wanted to post a letter. This meant buying a postage stamp from the post office. He has been queueing for at least the last two years trying to get served. In the meantime, the Post Office network development managers decided to develop the network by destroying it: George Orwell would be proud of their double speak.

Being funded by the taxpayer, they had to consult on their plans to develop the network by closing it down. This sham involved politicians making speeches (be very worried when the loony left and loony right agree on anything). The post office said that we could object if we could show that the existing post offices were economic, but they would not release the financial data because of "commercial confidentiality". Then they said we could object of we could show that service at alternative post offices was not good enough, but they would not say what constituted "good enough" service. So the Count went to an alternative post office to buy a postage stamp and has been queueing ever since. Apparently, two years is an acceptable waiting time for buying a postage stamp. But they did send a letter to the count assuring him that the decision to close all the nearby post offices had taken full account of the local mountains and rivers that needed to be crossed: there are as few mountains in the plains of Cossack territory as there are in London: the count gets vertigo walking upstairs.

Perhaps it was not surprise to find that the post office is run by someone who used to run the Football Association: a degree in incompetence, complacency, buck shifting, arrogance, greed and stupidity is clearly required for both jobs, so his appointment made perfect sense. Above all, you need someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

As the network shirnks and service gets worse, fewer people will want to use the service: the dummies at the post office have clearly not understood this basic reality of network economics. As revenues fall, the post office will discover that they need to develop the network even more by cutting back even more. Eventually, the network will disappear as surely as the Cheshire cat. At the end, the only thing left will be the smile on the face of management as they collect their bonuses for managing the destruction of a viable business.

The true cost of this sham is to be seen in the queues and frustration at post offices and the ever declining trust that anyone has in officials, official statistics, official processes and the whole nature of government. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that government was on our side. It is now clearly becoming the enemy of the people: it is a machine that serves and protects itself at our cost.

The time has come to get rid the evil, faceless bureaucrats and put in place a government which is clearly impartial, competent and capable of looking after the nation: aristocrats are above the venality that corrupts modern government. Our time has come.

The Count has returned and will humbly accept the offer to become the leader of the people.

The cost of a life

2006-06-05T13:42:00.000+01:00

So how much are you worth, really? At this, my bank manager will laugh and point to my overdraft, credit cards, unsecured loans, mortgage and say "nothing". Which shows how little he knows. Put it another way, how much is it worth to save your life? From your perspective, presumably it is worth spending billions to save your life. But somewhere in the bowels of Whitehall, the paper pushers and adjusting their eye shades and figuring out how much they really want to spend saving you. For instance:

How much should we spend on new drugs and operations to save you (and for how long will it save you?)
How much should we spend on road safety to cut a few more fatalities each year? How much should we spend on railways to achieve the same result?
How much should we spend on regulations to prevent nasty stuff getting into the air and the water to save how many lives?
Should you pay as much to save the life of a young person (who might recover fully and be a productive member of society) as you would to extend the life of a 90 year old by one year?
How much more should society pay to keep the count alive versus, say, a hooligan, social worker or Tony Blair?

The truth is, there is no bottomless pit of money for all these worthy things, however much our politicians may want to promise to us. Inevitably, this leads to the scene where a valiant mum goes on TV to say that she has been sentenced to death by the government which will not pay for the latest and greatest cancer treatment: does the mum have a right to blank cheque from society? Will you pay the cheque, in person?

Some answers, please:

The American EPA reckons that a life is worth $6.3 million. In other words, if a regulation saves 100 lives and costs less than $630 million to implement, they should implement it.
Fitting ATP (Advanced Train Protection) will cost £20 million per life saved - but should be worth it since it might also protect the career interests of a government minister as well.
Road safety improvements vary from £0.1 million (local authority spending) to £1.1 million (national guidelines) per life saved.

WFTV in Florida reported on May 31 that the Jackson family tried to hire a hitman for $100 to kill four family members: $25 a pop. A life worth less than a half decent meal out.

So now we move onto quiz for the day. Rank the following in order of value. Much would you pay (as a taxpayer, you will pay for the limitless generosity of government) to save each one of the following and for how long?

Wayne Rooney's metartasal
Cherie "Pyramid Power" Blair
Count Kostov
Darren, who is doing 18 months for GBH.
Arthur, who fought in the last war and is now on his last legs in a nursing home.

The cost of a bath

2006-06-02T13:08:00.000+01:00

Mention the word "spa" in the Kostov household and the Countess will get very excited and the Count will hide all the plastic he can find. But even the Countess would struggle to spend £43 million on a spa treatment. The Government could spend £43 million sneezing. Spending £43 million on treating the Bath Spa to a revamp is a doddle for anyone in the public sector.

The Count humoured himself by reading a report from September 200o which said that the Bath Spa should be fully revamped inside two years at a cost to the local taxpayer of a mere £3 million. Ha ha ha. The total cost was meant to be about £13 million: the rest came from the lottery commission (which does an even better job at extorting money from the poor than the Kostovs ever managed from our peasants) and from some suckers in private business who wanted to clean their dirty money.

Six years later, the project has taken three times as long and has cost three times as much as the original estimate. The Spa is still not open. And the local taxpayer is shouldering 100% of the cost increase: their share has rocketed from £3 million to £30 million. There are the normal excuses: they did not realise that there might be some archealogical remains to be preserved (duh...in a Roman spa???); there were some rare frogs (the frog liberation front is all that stands between England's green and pleasant land and the rampant concrete mixer front of developers). And of course, no one is to blame. Everyone points the finger at someone else.

Yesterday the Count wrote the immutable law of government efficiency:

(Prestige project plus) government = expensive waste of money.

The Count consoles himself that the shooting season will re-open soon. Not that there should ever be on off-season for shooting bureaucrats and the good and the great who like to spend other people's money, presumably to stop us wasting our own hard earned money on pointless projects where we are unable to control the costs......

The curse of the count strikes again

2006-06-01T12:34:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago the count reported that the cost of the NHS IT system would not be the original £2 billion, but closer to £30 billion. At which the Count's numerous critics started to enquire a) what was I putting in my tea? and b) could they have some as well? Surely not even the imbeciles that spend our money in government could spend 15 times the original estimate? If you think that, you have not been paying attention and have not heard of the Scottish Parliament.

Yesterday Lord Warner made a little announcement on progress of the NHS IT work. Lord Warner? Who is he? An iron rule of government is that when there is bad news you get a nonentity to announce it: step forward Lord Warner. If there is good news, like spending £1 million on a pet project, the Prime Minister, Chancellor and all the big wigs will leak it, pre-anounce it, announce it and then finally tell Parliament. Bad news, like a missing £20 billion or so (that's 20,000 pet projects) gets put out by whatever fall guy they can lay their hands on.

Fall Guy Warner casually announced that the project would not cost £6.2 billion (that's already three times the original estimate) but nearer £20 billion. They will get to the Count's £30 billion estimate in time.

£20 billion?!?!? That is £650 for every hard working household in the country. If the Count came knocking on your door to ask for £650 to buy a new laptop, even the Count would not expect the heartiest of welcomes. But since it is the government and the taxman everyone coughs up for the NHS to get its new laptop.

The cost has risen ten fold since the original estimates. Imagine going into a pub and asking for a pint of beer which you have seen advertised at £2. The barman then asks for £20 on the basis that he was unable to foresee all the costs involved in delivering the pint to you. This is not a mis-estimate. This is theft of the highest order. Even when the Kostovs are exploiting the peasants back home, at least we only double the price of essentials like bread and we get called all sorts of names for it. Increasing the price ten fold? The last time we tried that was around 1916: half the family got shot by revolutionaries and we had communism for the next 75 years. Shooting half the government would be a good start in this case.

At this stage the Count will now unveil another iron rule of government:

Prestige project plus government = expensive waste of money

Think Edinburgh Parliament, Millennium Dome, British Library, Diana Memorial. Did anyone mention the Lonodn Olympics? Be afraid, be very afraid.

Of course, there is one small amendment to the iron law of government profligacy: "Prestige project" is an unecessary term in the equation. Try instead:

Government = expensive waste of money.

£30 billion for a phone call - or is it £160 billion?

2006-05-30T13:18:00.000+01:00

Anything the sleaze balls in government can do, the private sector can do better. That includes cheating on numbers.

Today, Vodafone grandly announced that it had made £8.8 billion profit, and CNN announced that Vodafone had made a £21.9 billion loss (the colonials have a quiant attachment to the greenback, so they called it $40 billion loss, which sounds even bigger).

The difference in reported profit and loss estimates is a mere £30.7 billion. Given that Vodafone's entire revenues are £29 billion, this is quite a difference. No one is arguing about how much the orally incontinent coughed up for gabbing endlessly on the phone - most of it seems to have come from the Countess herself. But no one can agree whether this was as profitable as peddling cocaine or as efficient as government spending on the NHS.

This particular little argument has been going on for years. Back in 2001 Vodafone was reported as having made either a £7 billion profit or a £10.6 billion loss: that's another £17 billion disappearing down an accounting black hole. Over the last five years, Vodafone has made somewhere between a £40 billion profit and a £120 billion loss.

Woops, there goes £160 billion. Did you see it? No chance.

Of course, the answer is that they are both making a profit and a loss at the same time. They are carefully gouging the Countess every times she picks up her mobile to arrange an urgent smokey bacon frappucino meeting at Starbucks. They are also paying the price for insane acquisitions. Having paid top dollar/pound/euro they are now writing off the value of those investments: that is where the loss comes from.

Having racked up £120 billion of losses by squandering money, we discovered the true value of the acquisitions: a knighthood for the ex-CEO. Government does not understand value or profit or loss, but it does understand big. It always rewards big, in particular the biggest cock-ups. Someone should have told the last CEO that there was no need to spend £120 billion to get a knighthood. Simply slip Anthony Charles Trustme Blair one or two million for a pet project like an Academy, and bingo you get a knighthood for free. Arise Sir Christopher Gent.

Meanwhile, the real mystery is who paid for the £120 billion loss? Step forward the long suffering shareholders who have seen their share price drop by from £3.20 to £1.20. That's smart investment: for every ten pounds you put into Vodafone you can get less £4 back: the other £6 disappears into the pockets of executives and the lucky shareholders of companies which Vodafone has acquired. The only surprise is that such a dismal performance in helping pensioners on their way to poverty was not rewarded with a peerage.

Sleep your way to $150 billion

2006-05-29T13:56:00.001+01:00

In a desert of statistical meadow mayonnaise it is, just occasionally, possible to find an odd gem. The Count has been up to his nose in statistical shit but has just found a diamond.

Congratulations go to Professor James Maas of Cornall University who has declared that the cost of sleep deprivation is $150 billion a year. This is a finding to cheer the Count who has long been accused of being an idle waste of space. I can now prove that I am sleeping to keep the economy afloat: it is my patriotic duty to fall asleep at every possible moment.

It gets better. I will not only save the economy by going to sleep. Professor Maas assures me that I will lose weight, reduce the risk of hyper-tension and heart attacks, increase happiness and generally become the sharpest knife in the box.

And if teenagers slept the 9.5 hours they need, they would cease to be a combination of walking zombies and homicidal knife-wielding maniacs. It is hard to stab someone to death while you are asleep instead of getting smashed out of your mind on a $15 all you can drink booze cruise.

Of course, the $150 billion is pure meadow mayonnaise. He got there by multplying the number of hours of lost sleep by the implied lost productivity of workers and produced $150 billion. Who cares if it is bullshit? The difference between bollocks and brilliance has nothing to do with scientific integrity and everything to do with what you want to believe. The Count strongly favours sleep as a solution to all the world's problems.

At this point the Count is off to save the world, not by going into a telephone box and puttting my pants outside my trousers, but by going to bed.

Second class FT -this is urgent

2006-05-22T13:55:00.000+01:00

The FT has decided to cheer the Count up, and it has succeeded by proving that incompetence reaches from the heart of government to the heart of the capitalist system (at least, the FT thinks it is the heart of the system: more like the anal passage. The FT is the moral equivalent of the News of the World. Both deal in soap operas: one deals with TV soaps and the other with corporate soaps. The readers of neither paper can do anything about the soap operas other than talk about them with co-workers over the two hour morning and afternoon coffee breaks, plus the three hour lunch before going home again. But the Count digresses).

The FT decided to ask me some impertinent questions, like :

"Do I live in a bungalow". A bungalow?!?!?
How much am I worth? (Ha ha ha: they did not have any "negative net value" box)
Would I like to receive lots of spam from the FT and a few "carefully chosen" (ie paying through the nose) suppliers?

They thoughfully provided me an envelope to post my reply. The envelope was marked "URGENT". The postal frank was for second class post.

I fully expect that they will receive their second class urgent response in the next year or two.

The cost of marriage: £1 million a week

2006-05-19T11:11:00.000+01:00

The Count has decided that he is going to marry Sir Paul McCartney. Single sex marriages are all the rage nowadays, but Sir Elton John has already been nabbed. The next best knight for a night is Macca. Of course, first he must ditch the bitch: Heather. The tears (of joy and laughter) fell from the count's face to hear her explain that she is not a gold digger. So I presume we will soon hear that she will leave the marriage with the same assets as she had when it started and will not take the £200 million which Messrs Sue Grabbit and Run and promoting: that is £1 million a week for each week of marriage. Even the Countess does not run the plastic quite that hard. Rest assured, however, that the Count is a gold digger, so he will be very relieved to hear that the £200 million will be left untouched for the Count to nab when he divorces Macca in a couple of years time.

This plan is bound to succeed. I am sure that Macca would like to be upgraded from being a Sir to a Countess (or whatever the single sex version of a Count is). Heather is on her way out. I may have to play for the sympathy vote with Macca. Last time he went for a one legged bird. A legless bird should be an absolute winner. The current countess complains that I am constantly legless as it is, so I should be in with a shout. Unfortunately, the current countess will have to go, taking with her my entire net worth of several mega millions of debt.

Things are looking up.

The cost of £2.3 billion is £30 billion

2006-05-16T16:37:00.000+01:00

Actors should never play with animals or children.

Politicians should never play with computers or money. Giving money to politicians is like giving whisky and car keys to a teenager. You know disaster will ensue.

In this case, the politicians have got very excited about computers and health. Hang on to your wallets. The cost of health is damaging to your wealth. Initially, they figured out that buying £2.3 billion of shiny new computers would transform drunken, chain-smoking, idle, fast food guzzling Glaswegians/Geordies/Cocknies/Welsh/Russian Counts (delete as appropriate) into healthy tofu eating joggers. That is as likley as getting a smile from a soviet babushka in a shop.

£2.3 billion was in 2002. Very old fashioned. Now the cost is officially £6.2 billion. And most independent estimates put it at £30 billion. This will get hidden by central government which will swing most of the costs onto local health authorities where no one can see it. So they will then cut the cleaning and nursing budgets (managers have to do something to justify their existence) and then there will be mass outbreaks of food poisoning, legionnaire's deisease and the rest of it becuase the entire NHS is going to be full of managers looking up porn on their £30 billion computer system. Nurses, doctors and cleaners are very last millennium.

This system has the snappy title NPfiT. For £30 billion, at least they could have thought up a decent name for it.

The cretins behind this are Accenture, who are qualified for this because they are also behind the cock ups at the DWP. They used to advertise "Technology, Outsourcing, Consulting and Innovation". After a while, they dropped innovation when it was pointed out to them that they were as innovative as a donkey's turd. Now they advertise "Performance. Delivered". Perhaps they should be more accurate and advertise "Crappy performance. Delivered Late. And at ten times the original estimate".

Give me a break

2006-05-14T20:26:00.000+01:00

This is the time of year when the Count starts rummaging through the attic in search of last year's sandals, shorts, knotted handkerchief and bucket and spade. In short (or shorts) it is time to think of having a break.

So the Count was delighted to see that lastminute.com was advertising breaks in Paris for a mere £83.

Never let it be said that government are the only scumbags on the planet. Lastminute and all the other tour operators can join them in the gutter. Their "cost of" calculations should carry a wealth warning. Especially when they say the cost is "from....."

After much digging, the best price the Count could actually get for a three start hotel somewhere in Paris (as opposed to a hovel in a cabbage patch surrounded by rioting immigrants 100km from Paris) was a mere £740. To which they doubtless add every surcharge and optional extra they can think of: booking fee, credit card fee, delivery fee, upgrade fee, administation fee, insurance etc. So the actual cost of Paris is ten times the cost they advertise. And that is before the countess has done her best to turn around the French perma-recession by going in for serious plastic abuse at all the boutiques and restaurants in the capital.

Searching for the elusive £83 deal is like looking for hen's teeth. Possibly the only £83 tour involves being given a pogo stick at Dover and being invited to pogo stick your way across the channel to Paris. Of course, there is also a non-refundable deposit of £2,000 on the pogo stick. But the good news is that for a modest upgrade they will provide a mad fenchman with a bicycle, baguette and foaming rottweiller to chase you all the way to Paris. Or perhaps they provide a rottweiller on a bike and a foaming frenchman. Whatever.

Of course, the bullshit is given away by the weasal word "from". "from" brings on involuntary spasms from the count, whenever he sees it being used in advertising:
"Spain from only.."
"Bargain computers from..."
"Apartments from..."

If any one sees any particularly egregious (don't know how to spell that word or what it means, but it sounds pretty good to me) uses of the word "from" let the count know: your fame will be assured in this massive column. And the curse of the count will fall upon the villains.

£45 billion of bollocks

2006-05-11T19:19:00.000+01:00

The Count is back after and enforced absence. I was herding reindeer in the Arctic with some of my peasants. This was, conceivably, an attempt by the Countess to gain full control over my Siberian empire. Sleeping under the stars sounds very wonderful, except when it is my 20 centigrade and hypothermia is setting in. Luckily, I could count on my loyal retainers to run off with the bloody reindeer and leave me stranded.

There are some people who think this is all fantasy. Ha. For you doubters, the Count is going hi-ttech and adding an image of my overnight arrangements with my peasants. I will also add a picture of the bloody reindeer. And one of most faithful retainer: Nesta the dog.

In between chasing reindeer round the Arctic the Count was also obliged to write a book. Well, two books having fooled two publishers into thinking I had something worth saying. The were fooled and then I found I was the fool who had to write the bloody things.

So this has not given the Count the time to Count the Cost of Folly. With Blair and Brown arguing over who can sink the ship best and fastest, there is no shortage of folly ot count. But no sooner does the Count resurface from the Arctic, (chased by kid Cameron showing off his green (or greenhouse killing) creds by helping destroy the arctic ice cap with his trip to the Arctic) than the Count is confronted by one Professor Bone

Professor Bonehead professes that the UK Universities are worth £45 billion to the UK. Let it never be said that he may lack a teeny weeny bit of impartiality as he is President of Universities UK.

So how has Professor Dickhead done his professorial calculation? He has observed that the income of the Universities is £16.9 billion: he then multiplies that by 2.5 because he wants a big and impressive number and then concludes that the universities are worth £45 billion a year to the UK.

Pure meadow mayonnaise. Bonebrain is using the same calculation that the Countess uses when confronted with her latest and greatest credit card statement. They confuse cost and value. If the universities cost the long suffering taxpayer £16.9 billion, that does not make them worth £16.9 billion. They are probably causing huge damage to the UK by churning out illiterate dumbshits who expect to be vastly paid for minimal work just because they have a BA (hons) in media studies from Hull. And as for multiplying the cost by 2.5.... Brown and Blair may as well say that the government is worth £1,300 billion a year to the UK (even although that is greater than the GDP of the UK): first, take taxation at £550 billion and then multiply it by professor Bonehead's multiplier and suddenly you have the value of all the paper shufflers in Whitehall.

Its enough to make the Count want to go back to reindeer herding...

Counting the cost of being a count

2006-03-19T15:45:00.000Z

The media have finally discovered that many of our so-called peers are slimeballs, sleazeballs and scumbags of no merit whatsoever who have got their peerages by dodgy means: mainly by way of cheques made out to the Labour Party. Cheque book journalism meets cheque book peerages. Duh. Welcome to the real world.

Peerages go to villains who are well connected. Poorly connected villains go to prison. It has always been that way. Invade another country, kill lots of locals and get a peerage from the new Noramn king of England. Sleep with the king, and your bastard offspring get to be Dukes, courtesy of Charles II. If you live on a sink estate and you go round fornicating and killing people, go straight to jail, do not pass go and do not collect your peerage.

Of course, the Kostovs are the exception to this rule. And I totally deny those rumours about the 1748 massacres and the nocturnal habits of my great (eight times) grand mother Ivana, bless her. Everything was done in the true patriotic belief in Mother Russia.

So the only real question is: how much?

Llloyd George took a very pragmatic view and sold peerages openly. £20,000 got Vestey a peerage. In today's money that is about £900,000, which seems pretty close to the amount that Anthony Charles Trustme Blair is selling peerages for. The market economy is alive and well.

For cheapskates there are alternatives. Burkes Peerage offers right berks the right to pay for a title (http://www.burkes-peerage.com/acquisition.htm) . They are flogging Scottish titles at £50k to £100k and French titles at £30k to £70k. Distressingly, they assure you that you can become a Count for less than you can become a Maquis. They also do a nice line in German and Italian titles.

Fortunately, they offer no line in Russian titles. A Russian title is beyond price. At least the world knows that we are the real thing. Count Kostov, proud to be of service to you....

When £10 costs 9 pence.

2006-02-25T11:07:00.000Z

The Countess is trying to persuade me that the cost of a main Soviet battle tank, The T-72, is a bargain for the school run. The nub of her argument seems to be that £10 costs only nine pence. This is an argument I would dearly like her to win with the increasingly insolent tax man and bank manager: even the Count would countenance given them nine pence out of every £10 they demand.

To back her case up, the Countess produced her credit card statement. It took several shots of vodka to recover from the numbers in the botom right hand corner of the statement. To add insult to injury, the card company was inviting the Countess to condolidate all her debts into one easy payment every month, of just nine pence per £10 or £9 per £1,000.

At first glance, this seems to be too good to be true. At second galnce after another shot of vodka, everything becomes very clear: it is too good to be true. They only want their nine pence paid every month. If you do that for 25 years, you will have paid the credit card company £27, and you will still owe them the original £10.

The deal does not seem quite so good now: I will give you £10 and in return you will pay me £27 and still owe me the original £10. Then we all scratch our heads and wonder how the banks make so much money.

Then they make it even easier, and let you roll the debt up. At this point, the Count runs out of fingers to do the sums. But my ever faithful retainer, Digdog, assures me that for every £1 borrowed at nine pence per month interest, rolled up for 25 years becomes an intersting £14.70. So the bargain second hand T-72 at £100,000 becomes a ruinous £1.47 million. The T-72 may not have done much damage to the enemy, but it probably wrecked the Soviet Union financially. When the true history of the collapse of the Soviet Union is written, an accountant will probably discover its true cause: some blockhead in gosplan went and bought 1000 T-72s, a few nuclear submarines and a fleet of aircraft and put them all on the plastic to make that years numbers look OK and to avoid a long holiday in a Siberian salt mine. For a while the debt looked after itself, until the local friendly bank manager started threatening to repossess a few nukes. At that point, the solids truly hit the air conditioning.

At this point it becomes clear that the private sector are at least as dangerous as the public sector when it comes to creating bullshit "cost of" calculations. I am inclining to believe that the only solution is to contact Vladimir and ask if he can supply the Count with a fleet of well armed tanks. That, as any hoodie on the street knows, is the way to command respect. No one's going start dissin' the Count when he is pointing a 128mm canon at them.

A horse, a tank or a load of *******

2006-02-24T13:58:00.000Z

The Countess has got it into her head that she needs to buy a T-72. When she announced this, the Count did what husbands have done down the millenia: I muttered "yes dear" and then quietly hid the credit card. I innocently thought that a T-72 was a camera, or new designer label.

I then got called by Vladimir, who has both got me into and out of more scrapes than I care to count. He was very happy. Besides being a fixer, a bounder and a second hand car salesman he also has an interesting side line in military equipment. It turns out that a T-72 is a main battle tank from the old Soviet Union. Those which were not destroyed by Uncle Sam in Iraq are now being flogged off for the odd crate of vodka or greenback to the likes of Vladimir. The new Russia has a new tank, the T-90 and wants to get rid of the old lot. It appears he had worked his dubious charms on the Countess who was now set on a T-72.

I diplomatically asked the Countess why she needed a Soviet battle tank in central London.

"School run. Safest option" She said. The she gave it away "Anyway, I am not going to be looked down on by those dreadful jumped-up Abramovichs in their fleet of ugly cars."

The Count then made a fatal error. I tried fighting social competitiveness, masquerading as safety, with logic. I had to hand a bullshit study by the Lampl foundation which showed that the cost of the school run was £580 million a year, and for a mere £120 million year the government could eliminate this cost. Not only that it would reduce social exclusion, save the environment and we would all live happily after. Tears came to the Count's eyes as he read the report. When he had finally finished laughing and wiped away the tears he did the Count's three step dance on the report:

Step One: the illogical start. Start by claiming an implausible cost of a problem. The £580 million saving is based on the idea that instead of doing the school run, all the "hard working mothers" (to quote our hard working chancellor) will be working hard earning money. Casual observation of the Countess would indicate that stopping the school run would not save money: it would cost money. The Countess would be let loose on the shops for two more prime shopping hours every day. The thought fills the Count with dread.

Step two: the implausible cost of the solution. The solution proposed by the Lampl foundation is that Britain should convert en masse to yellow school buses which will only cost £120 million a year. Except that this nets off existing transport subsidies of £60 million a year, so in practice the real cost is £180 million a year. And that is probably as reliable an estimate as the cost estimates for the Channel Tunnel, Wembley Stadium, the Jubilee Line and the Olympics. Like all dodgy builders, these pressure groups put in a low estimate and once the buyer is committed, the price suddenly and inexorably rises out of all recognition.

Step three: the daft outcome. At the end of this, the government can be sure it will be spending another £180 million (£280m, £380m??) The savings will have vanished faster than a bottle of vodka in the hands of mad Uncle Vanya. And the Countess will still be insisting on buying a Soviet battle tank, for just the same reasons as everyone else wants a 4x4 in central London. At least the Countess will have no problems parking: at 41 tons the tank will crush any vehicle in the way; it will be totally safe; she can look down on all her neighbours; any pesky traffic wardens can be dealt with by the 7.62mm machine gun, or by a quick blast of the exhaust fumes. At a steady 75kph it goes significantly faster than a Ferrari: Ferraris have to stop for other traffic, a T-72 simply goes over the top of other traffic.

The Count tried all this logic on the Countess: the response was frostier than Moscow in February. At this point, the Count had yet another stroke of genius, and summonsed up his cossack breeding and heritage.

There is a far better solution than either the Countess or the sad anoraks at the Lampl foundation who dream up bad answers to bad problems supported by bad numbers. Like all good cossacks, children should be obliged to go to school on horseback (or walk barefoot if they can not afford the horse, stables and servants to look after the horses). This is a solution our Mayor should approve of greatly. In his naive and mistaken view, horses are zero emission vehicles, so they escape the congestion charge and we get to save the planet. On a decent horse, you also get to look down on 4x4 owners physically, socially, ecologically and morally.

The Curse of the Count: the Count counts himself a winner

2006-02-03T13:53:00.000Z

Good breeding always shines through in the end.

On this occasion, it has taken less than 24 hours for the Curse of the Count to take its toll on the lowlife that pretend to be our masters: politicians.

Yesterday, the Count had the temerity to suggest that Mr Andy Burnham, a nonentity that has crawled out out of a hole and into a home office ministerial limousine, was a slimeball who acquaintance with truth, integrity or honesty was about as strong as the Count's acquaintance with financial solvency. A short conversation with any of the financial institutions from whom the Count has obtained large amounts of unrepayable money will establish just how distant such an acquaintance is.

The Count's avenging angels came in the unlikely form of APACs. These worthy citizens are, by all accounts, bean counters who spend their days shoveling mountains of money from one financial institution to another. If any of you know of any way of helping APACs reduce this mountain by diverting some of it into the bottomless pit of the Count's bank account, you will be assured of a friendly welcome at any of the Count's estates in Siberia.

Take a deep breath while we try to disentangle the battle of the bean counters.

In the Red Corner, the Home Office claimed that ID fraud costs £1.7 billion a year. This a a very convenient figure at a convenient time: just before ID cards are debated in Parliament, they produce figures to show that ID fraud is greater than the cost of ID cards. Within that number, they included £504 million for ID fraud using plastic cards.

In the Blue Corner, APACs, which actually has the numbers says that plastic card ID fraud is less than £37 million. The £504 million realtes to total losses on plastic cards which come from all sorts of sources. Oh well, the Red Corner has only inflated reality thirteen fold. Surely more reality is better than less, so what's wrong with inflating the numbers thirteen fold?

Back to the Red Corner. They included £395 million, which is the total cost of all money laundering. Again, at most 10% of money laundering relies on ID fraud.

Faced with an unwlecome dose of reality, the Home Office (not Mr Andy Burnham who appears incapable of defending his own numbers in case he gets associated with bad news, ie with himself) has said their numbers were "for illustrative purposes".

What was the Home Office trying to illustrate? That they can not be trusted with the truth? That they are lying scumbags?

At this point, we can hear the howls of anguish from politicians who complain about loss of respect for authority (ie themselves). And they wonder why this has come about. Most of the population can put two and two together. Ask a politician to add two and two together and he will ask "what do you want the answer to be? What answer will generate the best headline for tomorrow? What answer will best advance my career?"

So the Count will now progress from Counting to multiplication. We will start with a simple lesson for Mr Andy Burnham. What is two times two? Too difficult. OK. Try this one: If politicians lie what happens to trust in politicians? Drrrrrr........

I'm a politician, I'm here to help

2006-02-02T10:27:00.000Z

Feeling a bit down? Got the winter blues? Headaches? Tough to shift stains on your underpants? Teeth falling out? Crooked bananas? Can't figure out how to sit in front of a VDU?

Dont worry. Help is at hand. A politician near you will sort out all your troubles. Just give him your vote and half your income and you can hear him make any promise you want. And then he will take your money and go to war withIraq.

The latest saviour of the human race is called Andy Burnham. Never heard of him? Think he has crawled out of a rock somewhere? He is going to save us all from.......ah yes, today's headline for the gullible press is fraud.

The easiest way to save the world from fraud is to shoot all the politicians. This is a simple idea which appears not to have crossed the mind of the wonderful Mr Burnham.

Mr Burnham has been slaving away in the bowels of the Home Office with his ministerial calculator and home office meadow mayonnaise machine and the result is that he has today declared that the cost of ID fraud is £1.7 billion a year.

Only a cynic would ask why he is banging on about fraud, and why today. So Count Kostov is asking why the cost of fraud is suddenly tugging at the heart strings of Mr Burnham. It appears that Mr Burnham has a little problem (he may have several, but only one of which he admits to in public): he is responsible for foisting ID cards onto the British public. And he has a problem right now: next week he has to introduce the unpopular ID card bill to Parliament.

As it happens, he has suddenly discovered that the cost of ID fraud is greater than the cost of the ID cards. Bingo! ID cards all round.

What he fails to mention is that:
a) his £1.7 billion figure is probably a gross over estimate: the Home office website itself claims that it is only £1.3 billion, and they provide precisely zero back up for their estimate of 100,000 people a year suffering ID theft.
b) ID fraud will continue, and probably even grow, despite ID cards
c) the cost of ID cards will not be the Home Office estimate, but nearly ten times as much if we are to believe the estimates produced independently by the London School of Economics.

Mr Burnham is absolutely right to identify the problem of fraud and fraudsters. He could make an immediate start on reducing the amount of fraud by going into his office, locking the door, pouring himself a stiff whisky and doing the honourable thing with the loaded revolver which the Count is happy to lend him.

Alternatively, we might be able to rely on our dear Prime Minister to walk out of Parliament at the crucial moment, fail to vote and thereby defeat his own bill, as he did with the Religious Hatred Bill last week. Duh. Not so much a case of pointing revolver at head, more a case of pointing revolver at his own foot. This is the same government that spent seven years in a hue and cry over hunting, eventually passed a bill banning hunting with the result that hunting is now more popular and just as legal as ever. Never mind, they want to assure us that they are deeply competent (even when their CSA costs £1.85 for every £1 it collects) and that ID cards will be a roaring success. Laugh? I nearly died.

The cost of shit

2006-01-31T13:46:00.000Z

The Count finds perverse interest in paddling through the effluent which politicians, lobbyists and corrupt scientists spew forth from their backsides (or wherever they talk from). On one paddle up yet another shitty creek, the Count wondered how much all this meadow mayonnaise might be worth.

Fortunately, help is at hand. The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs for Ontario has done a very precise estimate for the value of this shit. I will spare you the details. The answer looks like it is about £5 per acre of shit. The University of Minnesota has produced a long algorithm to help you work out how to maximise the value of your shit. It apparently depends on the type of shit, when you apply it and how much you have to handle it. Haven't they heard of peasants? Keep a good stock of peasants on your land and they will not only handle all the shit you can produce, they will eat it as well. Which is roughly what most citizens of modern democracies are forced to do every day: we are forced to eat the shit that all these politicians produce every day. "Hi. My name's Tony. I'm a pretty honest sort of guy. Iraq has WMD which will wipe us all out in a nano-second. So let's invade. Ya? Good Idea? OK!! Tough on honesty and tough on the sources of honesty, ya!"

The difference between hog shit and politician shit is that hog shit is at least useful; you can choose to buy it or not buy it; you can spread it where you want. Politician shit has negative value, and we have no choice about it: we are force fed the crap every day.

Where's that bloody vodka bottle gone?

The £100 billion theft of time

2006-01-30T14:22:00.000Z

The Count has had a most unpleasant discussion with his bank manager. The bank manager was hoping to repossess what is left of the Kostov estate. Little does the bank manager realise that:
a) all that is left of the Kostov estate is a window box with a dead geranium in it and
b) there are about four other banks who have also had the same idea, not to mention my nemesis at the tax office HP Potts. Mr Potts labours under the illusion that Counts are obliged to pay tax. He should be horsewhipped for impertinence.

The real insult was not the discussion, but the waiting. The bank manager appeared to be looking at his emails in the vain hope that someone might be offering to teach his cat how to play the ukelele, while he kept the Count waiting. After horsewhipping Mr Potts, it will be the turn of the bank manager.

The waiting time, with a tepid cup of tea in a plastic cup, gave plenty of time for thinking about the cost of waiting. The Count proceeded to count the waiting time in the day.

Three minutes: turning computer on
Five minutes: rebooting computer when it freezes
Four minutes: waiting to get through to bank while they reassure me that they value my call so much they can not be arsed to answer it. They clearly value aristocratic time as less than that of a call centre operator in Bangalore on $3 a month. In this respect, they have common cause with the Countess who reckons the Count is worth much less than $3 a month.
Twenty two minutes trying to find, then wait for, the microsoft help desk.
Thirteen minutes waiting for the tube and getting delayed on it.
Nine minutes waiting for the Countess to decide whether her outfit will go with the colour scheme at Sainsbury.
Six minutes waiting to get to the front of the check out queue: Sainsbury have a system for punishing their most valuable customers. They let all their lowest value customers (with five items or less) go through a fast queue, while making all their most valuable customers wait in line. And they never have enough staff at check out: don't they even want to take our money? No wonder they are in so much shit.
Four minutes waiting at Sainsbury check out while the stupid cow in fronts waits for all her items to be scanned; only then does she look in a bag for her wallet, then in another bag, then back to the first bag, find the wallet, open the wallet, then look in her coat for the precise change, then offer a mix of coins and lithuanian luncheon vouchers as payment before finally offering up a credit card. Belatedly she offers a store loyalty card. After all this she starts packing her items and looks all shirty and pissed off when the Count's very refined shopping starts going through the till.

Twelve minutes waiting for the bank manager to turn up to his own meeting.
Five minutes waiting at the cashiers in the bank: two tills open. The other three were staffed but all the staff were drinking coffee and talking to each other about the stress of their jobs.
Two minutes waiting for the traffic lights to turn and wondering whether it is worth risking death anyway to cross the road. Death would be a merciful way out, but I fear I will be kept waiting for that as well.

By this stage the Count was going into a kamikaze zen like trance. The older you get, the less time there is to waste. The novelty of watching Tracey gift wrap the 60p bar of chocolate for the customer in front of you, and then hearing her take a phone call from the boyfriend wears off after a few decades. These time thieves are everywhere: unlike other sorts of theft, there is no chance of getting the stolen time back. It is mugging people of the only real resource we have: our time and our lives. So all the time thieves can join the queue for a good horse whipping, and rest assured that they will be kept waiting.

At this point I have to defer to DigDog, my butler, to provide the sophisticated mathematical calculations which may or may not make sense of this. He assures me that the following is true
a) I am bankrupt, so he would rather be paid in cash thank you very much sir. I will add him to the extensive horse whipping queue in good time.
b) I am typically wasting 90 minutes a day in queues: the Countess is tartly observing that I waste the other 22.5 hours a day quite successfully without any help from time thieves.
c) 40 million working hours are being lost every day in the UK to queues and time thieves, which is £400 million a year or £100 billion a year.

A calculation like this would normally qualify as pure meadow mayonnaise if it came from some dodgy, self-interested lobby group. But this comes from the Count, so it must be objective and there is no self interest in here at all. Clearly, something needs to be done about this disaster for British productivity: all that is needed is a small grant of, say, £1 billion to research the problem properly. As it happens, the Count has the perfect research forum for this effort: CATTI (Campaign Against Time Thieves Institute). You may rest assured that the £1 billion will be well spent as, by pure coincidence, the sole proprietor of CATTI is the Count himself. Please forward your cheques in some haste as the bank manager and Mr Potts grow more insolent by the day.

The cost of reading this is $759 billion

2006-01-29T21:41:00.000Z

Each time I start to doubt our American cousins and masters, they suddenly serve up the blinis.

They have gone and figured that the time wasted at work costs America $759 billion a year. So if you are bunking off work, not finishing that tedious report and instead focusing on the serious business of getting acquainted with Count Kostov, you are costing the nation a cool $759 billion.

Normally, this sort of number would qualify for a gold star meadow mayonnaise moment. But in this case, the the Count relents. $759 billion is probably an underestimate. If nothing else, time wasting is a sport at which the Brits can whip those Yankee asses. Ever since they threw the tea in the water, they have forgotten the true tea sipping art of wasting time, as practiced by those world champions of time wasting: the British Civil Service. It is thus called because it is rarely civil, never gives a service and is decreasingly British.

The Americans http://www.salary.com/careers/layoutscripts/crel_display.asp?tab=cre&cat=nocat&ser=Ser374&part=Par555 figured that the average American wastes 2.09 hours a day at work doing important things like:
the internet (44% of time wasted)
socialising (23.8%)
conducting personal business (6.8%) - which shows true entrepreneurial spirit
and then a lot of other stuff like applying for other jobs (1.8%). Most reassuringly "spacing out" accounts for 3.9% of time wasted, which augurs well for the health of the drugs trade in America.

Reading the survey carefully it would appear that no American ever goes to the toilet or drinks tea. These strategies, carefully deployed, could double the amount of time wasted, especially as frequent tea drinking leads to frequent pee making.

They also figured out that the champion slackers are from laid back Missouri (a heroic 3.2 hours a day wasted) and in the public sector at a more modest 2.4 hours a day wasted.

Clearly, here is something the Brits can beat the Yanks at. If the good folk of Missouri (where the hell is Missouri?) can waste 3.2 hours a day without going for tea or a pee, then the average British civil servant should be able to waste at least 4 hours a day. On a 35 hour week, that reduces their working time to 15 hours a week, which is nearly as much as the Count works in a month. Put the other way round, the civil servants should be wetting their badly tailored pants at the prospect of the 35 hour working week being fully implemented. The legislation calls for a "working" week, not a "being present at the office and drinking tea" week. Given they waste four out of every seven hours in the office, to actually work 35 hours they would have to be present in the office for about 80 hours a week.

At this point I have to defer to the infinite knowldege and mathematical capability of Digdog, my butler. He assures me that with 28 million peopel claiming to work in the UK, if they were all wasting as much time as the average citizen of Missouri, then it follows that:
- the average Brit wastes 690 hours or £6,900 a year of their employers money
- in total we are wasting £193 billion a year.

Of course, all of this begs the question: is time spent reading Count Kostov really wasted time? In general, the answer has to be No. In the case of Civil Servants, time wasting should be positively promoted as a far better alternative to working. The last thing we all need is to have civil servants causing us more trouble with their policies, initiatives, regulations and taxes which are all designed to make themselves feel important and useful, when in truth they are far better when they admit they are irrelevant and useless.

Only a government could do this....

2006-01-29T16:17:00.000Z

For the last three hundred years or so, the Count's family has had a tenuous grip on mental and financial health. But there were a few things we figured out. If we needed to get our money back from an impecunious peasant or a thieving merchant, we would send our bailiffs round to do the necessary. In the good old days that resulted in merchants without noses and peasants without homes, but it certainly ensured that debts got paid. Unless, of course, the Kostovs were the ones in debt.

If the bailiff did his job properly, we gave him a few kopecks out of every rouble he collected. 10% would be more than enough to keep the bailiff happy, especially as most of the bailiffs took the trouble to steal another 20% for themselves anyway.

Now let's see how our super efficient government manages to collect debts. The pinnacle of its wonderful machine is the CSA: child support agency. This has the general role of duffing up fathers who probably don't even know they are fathers until a letter with the results of a DNA test from a long forgotten fling turns up on the doorstep.

For every pound that the CSA collects, it needs to spend something on its collection efforts. How much am I bid:

10p - 2op- 30p or 40p?

Anyone think that they could spend 50p in the pound on administration?

If you think they spend 50p in the pound on administration, you are a wishful thinker. The cretins at the CSA manage to spend £1.85 on administration for every pound they collect.

This is so mind numbingly incompetent that the Count is going to have to resort to the Vodka and pray that a gun and a CSA cretin are not nearby: the results would be messy.

Essentially, the world in general and the taxpayer in particular, would be far better off if the CSA cretins did not exist. Their lives are 100% useless: they are costing money instead of making money. If they all went home and farted for 24 hours a day in front of the TV, they would be making a better contribution to society than they are at the moment.

I can't go on...this is too depressing...find me some vodka. Fast

A super sized $192 billion

2006-01-29T15:49:00.000Z

The Count is back from his Xmas pudding by way of the Sahara and New York. A little local difficulty with some gentlemen who took exception to an earlier blog made it advisable for the Count to make himself scarce for a while. Searching for the safest place on earth, he decided to entrust himself to the tender care of the Tuare. They have a noble heritage of plundering anything that moved across the Sahara, in a tradition that any true Cossack would admire. This, more than any specious complaints about the lack of water, may explain why the Sahara was so difficult to cross for so many millenia. Besides entrusting himself to cut throats, the Count decided that Colonel Gadaffi is just the sort of person who would ensure a country is safe for Russian Counts. True to form, all the locals smiled happily. Anyone who fails to smile in this glorious revolutionary republic is duly put in prison.

Returning to the grey grey English winter via New York was perhaps a mistake. The Count made several discoveries. First, US immigration officials do not have a sense of humour. Second, they are convinced that anyone coming from Gadaffi's hideout must be a nuclear terrorist. Third, the US is pretty useless at law and order. They have far too much democracy for that: they need a little revloutionary dictatorship, like the good Colonel in Tripoli. Or if they must have their democracy, then a little democratic dictatorship like President Putin would not go amiss. In any event, the Count discovered the Bronx is significantly more risky than the Sahara. He was relieved to get out of the Bronx having been relieved of his wallet and not his life. It was not the mugger's lucky day: he should have realised that all true aristocrats do not carry cash. This is to maintain the illusion that we have servants to deal with grubby money matters, when in reality we are constantly fending off impertinent bank managers who think we are obliged to repay the modest overdrafts we contrive to live on.

In any event, the Americans were up in arms about diabetes. Apparently about 128% of all Americans aged under 100 are going to have diabetes within fifteen years, if current trends continue. If current trends continue, the Count will go as mad as his Uncle Vanya after he bit a rabid dog. A cursury examination of the eating habits of the natives shows why this is going to happen. At the diner, the waffles and pancakes and muffins are sold by the storey. The food is piled so high on the dish that it is not clear whether you are meant to climb it or eat it. And then there are the vast gunk buckets of fizzy drinks which would be large enough for a swimming pool in most countries. It is mandatory for New Yorkers to carry these gunk buckets with them in the street, in case they should die of dehydration from the exertion of walking from the deli store to MacDonalds and back again.

In any event, they were all in a stink about diabetes which will cost them $192 billion a year by 2020.

At first sight, this looks like a classic meadow mayonnaise moment. Especially as this highly impartial estimate was produced by the American Diabetes Association, which has a wholly altruistic interest in drumming up as much money as possible to spend on giving its staff offices, nice salaries, a retirement fund and as many gunk buckets and food mountains as possible.

Look a little closer and you in fact spot that the Americans are losing it. The champions of super sizing everything have failed to super size the costs of being super sized and getting diabetes. They have failed to include the cost of undiagnosed diabetes: any attorney worth his salt would show that already at least 100% of Americans must be suffering from undiagnosed diabetes. Have you ever felt tired and listless? It must be diabetes: pass the compensation claim and make me rich please. They have also failed to cost in the "pain and suffering" of diabetes victims (that must be worth a few billion per person with a decent lawyer) and the cost of informal care and support by friends and family. The cost should be in the trillions. What is happening to America? Can't they supersize a half decent legal claim any more?

The Count began to yearn for the muddling incompetence of Britain in a cold, grey winter.

2005-12-20T12:07:00.000Z

It's tough being a charity. You gotta slug it out with your competitors to gain attention. If one charity parades a victim with a bleeding stump, you need a victim with two bleeding stumps before they find the orphan with two bleeding stumps. You can only trump that with an ethnically challenged, blind orphan with three bleeding stumps. Hell, that should open up the sluice gates of public funding and charidee appeals by C-list celebs desperate to relaunch their careers.

So how are you gonna take on obesity? Answer: show that malnutrition costs at least twice as much as obesity. Eh?? Last time the Count was obliged to walk along Piccadilly before heading to Pall Mall and club land, he was nearly trampled to death by vast herds of marauding elephants who were carefully disguised as Xmas shoppers. It took two stiff ones and a glass of champagne to settle the nerves.

No matter, some outfit called BAPEN has declared that the cost of malnutrition in the UK is £7.3 billion which, they proudly announce, is twice the cost of obesity. So please give us twice as much money to deal with our problem. And a knighthood for being so generous with other people's money, while you are about it.

Where the hell did they get that number from? The Count's very refined nose starts to smell the unmitakable odour of a vast mountain of bovine waste. Sure enough, a little digging by my faithful retainer, Digdog, found a report from MAG (the malnutrition advisory group, which is unlikely to be that neutral): it claimed that the NHS might save £220 million a year by feeding its patients properly, and that 60% went underfed in hospital. Given the crap they serve in hospital, that is not surprising.

MAG also estimated that the total cost of malnutrition could be as high as £2 billion a year.So in three years, the cost of malnutrition has been bloated from £2 billion to £7.3 billion.This has nothing to do with reality. It has everything to do with special interest groups special pleading. Because it is for a "good cause" (as they see it) they seem to think they can dispense with honesty or accuracy. Then they wonder why there is an increasing tide of cynicism, loss of faith in authority and increasing belief in alternatives (holistic medicines, lifestyle gurus and the rest):.

There is only one known antidote to all this crap. Bring back some people who can be trusted to run the country impartially, who can stay above the fray of special interests and who can instill trust and respect once more: it's come back time for the aristocracy.

Champagne poverty

2005-12-19T17:32:00.000Z

The Count has discovered that he is living in champagne poverty. Fortunately, this is a crisis that our masters in Parliament are now going to resolve. A DTI committee of MPs has been looking urgently into the problem of the Count's champagne poverty. It has some dire warinings for the Count. In a scarcely veiled reference to the Count's champagne habit, the Committee declared that "the largest users may either have to suffer interruptions to their supply or pay very high prices". What with Xmas round the corner, an interruption to the Count's champagne supply is a serious matter. And as for the price of Krug, well they bloody well should do something about that.

The committee reminded the government that it has "a role to play in ensuring the European market is opened up, and that the largest firms co-operate to guard against shortages. " Given that most of the champagne houses are owned by LVMH, this is not good news: they are already carving the market up badly enough.

The casual reader may wonder how the government defines champagne poverty: it defines it as anyone who spends more than 10% of their income on champagne. By the same reckoning, the Countess suffers from severe Harvey Nichols poverty, especially when the January sales come round. The Count has been busy trying to locate and destroy her Harvey Nicks store card, without success.

It was only on re-reading the committee report that the Count discovered that they were referring not to champagne poverty, but to fuel poverty. So if you spend over 10% on something, then you are in poverty for that thing and the whole constitution of do-gooders and committees and commissions will work overtime on how to spend other people's money solving the problem.

The 10% of income rule means that half my acquaintances are in severe fast car and faster women poverty. Most of the population of the UK is in housing poverty. And the Count is most definitely in champagne, and possibly taxi, poverty.

On the other hand, my butler is not in poverty at all. He works for food, shelter and the opportunity to make vast amounts of unearned cash from house guests and the more credulous corporate guests who happily trade their money for the Kostov style once in a while. So once again the aristocrats have found the solution to another pressing problem: stop paying people and thereby remove poverty.

In the meantime, the Count will plunge deeper into champagne poverty for the sake of Xmas...cheers!

Millions down the drain

2005-11-13T14:14:00.000Z

What is the cost of a gutter?

If you are spending your own money: not much. If you are spending other people's money, then you must spend as much as possoible. There are no greater spendthrifts than government and the good and the great. At least, they think they are the good and the great because they get to spend other people's money and act very superior as a result. The Count would much prefer to be part of the mad and the bad wasting his own rapidly vanishing money. The mad and the bad are always and naturally superior to the oiks who style themselves good and great. True aristocrats have more fun and do less harm than any do-gooder good and great jumped up arriviste who probably has had to buy their own furniture. The shame of it.

So we will now contrast how much a Count spends on a gutter and how much the good and the great spend on a gutter.

The good and the great decided that a high maintenance, publicity seeking gutter in the mud would be the best way to remember Princess Diana. So they decided to spend £3 million on building the gutter.

£3 million for a gutter??? It does not even work when there are leaves (hello - welcome to planet earth and Hyde Park trees in autaumn: durrr.) It does not work when kids visit because little Johnny might slip, fall and sue for £20 gazillion. So the dysfunctional gutter has to be guarded and minded at great expense: again, perhaps this was how they want to remember Diana: dysfunctional, high maintenance gutter in the mud under constant protection and seeking endless publicity.

Except, of course, that the good and the great can not even build a dysfunctional gutter for £3 million. They could not build a cardboard bix for £3 million. They managed to over run their own absurd budget by £2 million.

So the true cost of the gutter is £5 million. Plus £200k a year to protect and maintain it. This is the rank insanity that comes from letting unaccountably jumped up oiks spend other people's money.

For £5 million, the Count might consider buying a shovel and some sand and cement and building the gutter himself. Even Count's have a price for their pride, and £5 million is a nice little earner. Not that the Count has good memories of gutters.

Now contrast this with how the Count got some gutters built on the estate. He promised a couple of peasants, led by Roman, a bottle of vodka each if they could build a few gutters to drain the bog which we passed off as our garden. They did so.

That should have been end of story: five bottles of vodka verus £5 million. Once again aristocrats win.

Unfortunately, the Count discovered that concrete and acid soil do not mix. Within a few years, the concrete had disintigrated and the garden was restored to being an ecologically sound bog. So we asked Roman and his mates to dig again, under threat of a severe horse whipping. Instead of being dismayed, they came back overjoyed. They dug and had found oil. At this point, the Count started counting his billions. Unfortunately, Roman took it into his head that since he had found the oil he owned it. The Count's father objected. A day later, the current count came back to the estate to find that he had inherited the title. The coroner subsequently decided that the elder count had committed suicide by taking a chain saw, hacking himself to pieces, throwing most himself down the well before impaling his own head on the railings at the front of the estate. At this point, the current Count decided to get as far away as possible: to London. Meanwhile, the toe rag Roman became an oil billionaire and also escaped the Motherland by buying up Chelsea, just to irritate the Count. So the bloody Kostov gutter has in fact cost the Kostov clan about £10 billion in lost oil revenues.

Whatever happens, never mention gutters in the presence of the Count He can not be held accountable for the resulting actions which will occur while he is of even more unstable mind than normal.

How Unicef can kill millions of kids: a bargain at 8 pence each

2005-11-06T10:59:00.000Z

How much does it cost to kill a pesky kid? This is a question which has been much exercising the Count since Halloween. Next Halloween when the kids come round demanding treats with smiles and menaces with a valkerie of a mother in the background, the Count intends to give them a trick, not a treat: he will kill the little varmits. To do so, he will contact Unicef who have handily calculated that they can kill off loads of kids for less than eight pence a time.

Most bullshit cost of calculations are done to show that there is a billion or trillion dollar problem somewhere, so if someone gives the slimeball who made the calculation a few hundred million to make the problem go away, that is a good investment. Naturally, the calculations are all designed to maximise the cost of whatever their pet problem is, like Social Anxiety Disdorder (solution: become an actuary) or Antention Deficit Disorder (symptom: being a male child being taught by a useless and boring teacher. Solution: get a good teacher).

These calculations are turned on their head when asking the public for money. Suddenly, the bullshit artists want to show that a few pounds every month will save the world from poverty, famine disease, war and disasters like having to listen to Oasis.

Enter the leading contender for the "save the planet for a quid" contest: Unicef.

Here is their latest appeal for £2 a month from the Count's rapidly dwindling fortune: £2 "could save the lives of 13 children". That is eight pence a child. Then they get even better: "with just £2 a month...you can continue to provide children all over the world with immunisation, shelter, clean water, food and protect them when emergencies arise."

This is clearly a bargain. I would like to entrust my many children, legitimate and otherwise, to the care of Unicef. I hope Unicef can feed them all and deal with their emergencies (like "I absolutely must have the latest gameboy because all my friends have one... and a pony...and the latest mobile phone... and a frock or two....and a car...you just don't understand what it's like: how am I expected to live another day without this?") for just £2 a day. It sounds like the bargain of a life time.

Of course, the thought that the £2 might actually be used to buy a raspberry frapuccino for a Unicef slime ball is unreasonable. Or if the Count contributed £2 a month for, say a hundred years, it might just go to pay for one of the outsized vehicles with even more outsized aerials that Unicef staff like to swan around in like latter day imperialists. They have all the trappings of imperialism: power, money, servants, nice houses away from the riff raff, pensions and big salaries. Like the imperialists of old, they also claim to have morality on their side. They figure that by making the poor dependent on aid they are superior to imperialists who generally encouraged the poor to look after themselves and get rich: poor people were a drain on empire, rich ones could support empire. The new imperialists prefer to keep their clients poor because otherwise they will put themselves out of business.

And Unicef is big business: $2 billion turnover. But their annual report would have the directors of a real business put in jail faster than Unicef can blow £2 on its raspberry frapuccino. They have no balance sheet, cash flow or P&L and give no clues as to how much they spend on advertising their bullshit and no clue as to how much they pay their cretinous management. But let's assume the head of Unicef receives a modest $250,000 a year with the same again for pensions, allowances and travel and the same again for the office support of secretaries and flunkies. That comes out at $750,000 a year. Call it £400,000. For that amount of money, Unicef could save 5 million children's lives according to its own figures.

If the leadership of Unicef actually believed in what they were doing, they would work on a voluntary, unpaid basis. Or they would survive on a modest $20,000 a year. But by putting their own comfort first and investing in themselves not in children, they are electing to let up to 5 million children die. So if it comes to a nice comfy life for Unicef slimeballs or letting millions of children die, there is no doubt what Unicef will choose: let the kids die. A few millon child deaths versus a comfortable retirement? Easy choice.

They should follow the example of the Count who will never work for pay. The Coutness, with her normal droll wit, observes that I never work at all. The joys of marriage.....

The price of fraud is a glass of vodka

2005-11-03T12:53:00.000Z

My invitation to you to send a large donation to my Cayman Islands bank account in return for an understanding of the cost of fraud has clearly fallen on stony ground.

However, I was offered a glass of vodka for this earth shattering revelation. I have a nasty feeling that the gentleman in question was an agent of HP Potts, my nemesis at the tax office who will do anything to entrap me. If the vodka had been in the Cayman Islands, I would not have to declare it, but as things stand.....

In any event, noblesse oblige. So the cost of fraud, if you are a government minister, is £14 billion. The tot up various scams such as identity theft (£1.4 billion) benefit fraud (£3 billion) credit card fraud (£500 million) and pretty soon we have a good picture of the remarkable entrepreneurial creativity, zeal and hard work of the average British citizen trying to rip off his fellow citizen. Pause for a moment and think of when you were last asked to pay cash by a builder, plumber or home help. Fraud? Moi? Ha ha ha.

Of course, the biggest fraud of the lot is government itself, which defrauds the public of £500 billion a year from what the taxman, including Mr Potts, refer to as their "customers". I asked Mr Potts if I could exercise my rights as a customer: to choose another supplier, and to not buy or pay for their lousy services and to get my money back when they do not deliver. In return I got special "customer service" in the form of a special investigation.

The reason that the government publishes such a large figure for fraud is that it justifies their plan to defraud us of even more of our hard looted cash by introducing identity cards. This, they say, will cost a mere £5.8 billion to eliminate £14 billion of fraud annually, which sounds like a good deal.

Now let's look at reality.

The cost of fraud is fraudulent: they have no idea how much the fraud is. If they count tax dodging as fraud then clamping down on this will be economic disaster: no more Polish builders, no more Philippina nannies and no more East European fruit and veg pickers. Our houses, food and children depend on avoiding the rapacious taxman. If they get hold of this lot, we are doomed.
The good news is that ID cards will fail: everyone will quickly find a way round ID card to continue with their entrepreneurial fraud activities. So the "benefit" (to the tax collector) will evaporate faster than an open bottle of vodka in the hands of Uncle Vanya.
The cost of ID cards will go through the roof. The London School of Economics put their cost not at £5.8 billion, but at £19 billion. Other estimates (ZD Net) put the cost nearer £30 billion. Given the ability of government to mismanage costs on a heroic scale (think Dome and Scottish Parliament), I know which result is most likely.

So instead of spending £5.8 billion to rip the tax payer off to the tune of £14 billion, the government is more likely to spend £30 billion to rip the taxpayer off to the tune of £2 to £3 billion. This is economic lunacy of the highest order, which is precisely why we should expect to see ID cards implemented very soon.

£5 billion? £15 billion? £30 billion? Any more offers?

2005-11-01T12:25:00.000Z

At some point we are going to discover the cost of fraud. Trust me.

Here are three guaranteed methods of causing total confusion:
- ask Uncle Vanya to find the corner of a circular room (and watch him fall down dizzy after five minutes)
- ask Uncle Vanya which is heavier: a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? He never approved of metric nonsense: the metric system originated in France which also produced Napoleon who invaded Russia. France also caved in to Hitler and let him invade Russia as well. So anything faintly French was right out for him, except, curiously, champagne. In truth, asking Uncle Vanya any question was a good way to see total confusion unfold unless, of course, the question was "do you like France?" in which case he would leap to his shotgun faster than a bishop can bed a tart.

And then there is the third way of causing total confusion: ask two experts to agree on anything, like "what day of the week is it?" One expert will argue that it is Tuesday; another will argue that it is already Wednesday in New Zealand, so don't be so sure of yourself. A third will argue that days are simply a linguistic device which we impose on the real world and therefore the question is meaningless. At this point, the best solution is to whisper in Uncle Vanya's ear that the experts are not just pedants: they are French pedants. Intellectual confusion will be replaced by total panic as the experts start running for their lives through the woods, trying to dodge bears, bear traps and Uncle Vanya.

And so we turn to fraud and ask the experts: "what is the cost of fraud?".

At this point we encounter Einstein's secret theory of relativity, which he unveiled to us on a trip to our dacha. This theory states that "where you sit is where you stand". Given that English people like to sit in stands, this stands to reason. But what Einstein meant is that reality is relative to where you sit. So if you sit in Government and want to introduce ID cards, you naturally believe that fraud is rampant and that ID cards will save the day. If you are a cappucino smoking liberati, you naturally believe that fraud is low (because capuccino smokers are all inherently honest, decent, intellectual people like you average man in his Islington off road four by four vehicle) and that ID cards are not just a monstrous intrusion on your freedom to smoke capuccinos, they are also a monstrous expense. So both sides will now produce data which is totally contradictory to each other. Einstein may be dead, but he is also right about relative reality.

And as this entry is all about fraud, the best thing the Count can do is to defraud you of the denouement you have been waiting for: the numbers from all the experts.

However, the Count can assure you that if you send a seriously large amount of money, cash only, to his private bank in the Cayman islands, the Count will be delighted to let you have the details you have been waiting for.

How to blow £13 million

2005-10-19T12:21:00.000+01:00

The Count can think of plenty of ways to blow £13 million. Unfortunately, the Countess can think of even more ways of blowing £13 million and does so at great cost to what remains of the family silver, so carefully looted over the laast few hundred years by the Kostov clan in the name of Mother Russia.

But aristocratic waste is nothing compared to what the government can achieve. To them, blowing £13 million is as inconsequential as blowing their nose. They do not need to blow their noses anyway. They need to clean thier noses to make them less brown. But that misses the point. The point is that it is in the small things that the greatest waste is achieved. Like the time the Count was sent to work in a tax office. Officially, this was work experience. Unofficially it was to get hold of the Kostov tax returns and destroy them. But in this so called work, the young Kostov discovered that he was doing something which was

100% pointless: sending out tax notifications on codings which everyone knew would be changed three weeks later by the spring budget
100% inefficient: it could have been done by computer in a few moments, but had to be done by the young Kostov hand over ten weeks
60% even more inefficient, because even by hand the work could be done in four weeks, not ten weeks: but ten weeks was the alloted time and because the bureaucrats did not want to lost their budget for the following year, the young Kostov was retained for the full ten weeks. This gave him plenty of time to help out with the filing in the office, to locate the Kostov tax returns and secure the Kostov inheritance from the rapacious hands of the taxpayer for another generation.

All this still misses the point. The count has been drinking too much vodka, and it is not even lunchtime yet. Drink is what happens to people when they start thinking about the taxman.

So let's see how the government can blow £13 million without even trying. They set up a programme to recruit teachers. Because they have no imagination, they have no idea how to do it. So they try to bribe graduates into becoming teachers. But because they wet their pants at the thought of the Unions demanding equal treatment for all teachers, they can not even bribe the graduates well: they bung them a laptop computer and digital camera. If even the dullest graduate can not figure out that it is not worth blowing their career for a digital camera, then they should not become a teacher.

That's a triple negative. Award yourself a medal if you could understand it. The Count is in a generous mood today.

Then the dimwits figure that since they have a lousy proposition, the way to make it work is to spend a fortune on advertising it. £13 million later, they had managed to con 140 of the dimmer graduates into joining their scheme. That is about £100,000 per graduate just to recruit them, let alone train them or pay them. For £100,000 they could have put together a real bribe. Even the Count would consider stepping into a school for a day or two for a cool £100,000.

We will now see how the government's scheme was wasting 99% of its budget by comparing it with a private charitable scheme, called Teach First. Teach First could not offer any bribes at all. And to make matters more interesting, it was putting teachers into challenging schools, which have traditionally served as feeders to Her Majesty's Prisons in much the same way as Eton is a feeder school for Oxford, Cambridge and Parliament. It would be better if Eton fed the prisons and the challenging schools fed Parlaiment, but that is another matter.

Teach First had no money but plenty of imagination. Within three years it had recruited over 500 top teachers and had received government support totalling £200,000, or roughly £400 per teacher.

Government recruiting cost per top(ish) teacher: £100,000. Private sector cost per top top teacher: £400. Government waste: 99.6%. People whine about aristocratic waste because it is visible. But the far bigger waste are all the useless bureaucrats who save money on paper clips at the same time as they blow millions and billions on employing themselves to administer utterly useless programmes in the most inefficient way possible.

This is all so depressing, the Count is going to have to open another bottle of Vodka or two.

£5 billion for a photo

2005-10-16T09:28:00.000+01:00

It used to cost one rouble and a bottle of vodka for a family snap by the village photographer with his box camera and sodium flare. The vodka cost less than the rouble, but was valued more by the photographer. This helps explain why the Kostovs have no useful photographs from earlier than about 1997.

Compare this aristocratic waste with the parsimony of our "servants of the people" who serve themselves with as much gravy as they can from the trough of public money. For them, a photo oportunity does not cost a rouble. It costs £5 billion.

£5 billion for a photo? We could buy 2.5 billion bottles of vodka, duty free, which would be enough to keep the Kostov photographer happy and enough to make sure none of the Kostovs cared that his photographs looked like a blizzard viewed through a drunk's eyes. Given that most of the time we were drunk and living in a blizzard, this may help explain why his photographs turned out the way they did.

Here's how to spend £5 billion on a photo.

Set up something called the school Academies, which is a Good Thing. It is all about educashon. That means nice stories about edukating kids and lots of pictures of smiling politicians and smiling children in front of brand new skools which have been built at a cost of £25 million each. Then build 200 akademiz.

There is a problem with building new skools and hoping it will improve iddugation. Last time I checked, chrome and glass, however new and shiny, does not edugate. If I remember rightly, nanny and then the governess eddugated. They did not cost £25 billion. And there was no chance of vandalising the governess, unlike the chrome and glass which will all be falling down in 25 years because the kids have decided to practice some conceptual, socially inclusive art on the fabric of the scool, and the politicians can not be arsed to pay for any maintenance: once they have got their photo unveiling the plaque to the brand new skule they don't want anything more to do with it. Graffiti covered, vandalised, rotting skools are not such good photo opportunities.

Of the £25 million per school, how much goes to hiring good staff?

Zero. Nada. Nothing. Zip.

So now we know how the government will raise edugashion standards: new buildings, same old failed teachers and the same old failed methods.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the politicians huffing and puffing in the background that the Accadimmies are all about giving freedom to the scule to experiment. You can give them freedom without blowing £25 million on buildings. And freedom without the cash to hire a good few governesses, nannies or even teachers is pretty pointless. It is called giving people the freedom to fail.

Once they have failed, the true cost of the akedimies will become clear as the pupils graduate from skool to crime and to prison. The cost of keeping a failed student in prison is over £30,000 a year, which is more than the £23,000 a year Eton charges. Even allowing for spending on tail coats, skiing trips and the obligatory heroin addiction, Eton works out much cheaper than prison. And Eton is able to get away with using 500 year old buildings, which doubtless the government would want to improve with a shiny new steel and glass set of buildings which will collapse in 25 years' time.

So if you want a proper education and reduced costs, look to the aristocracy. They are far less wasteful than the spendthrifts who are addicted to spending taxpayer's money. Minister Kostov is pleased to be of service.......

solid stirling shite

2005-10-15T21:02:00.000+01:00

So congratulations to the Scottish Parliament on winning the Stirling Prize for architecture, value £20,000. If they can win another 21,750 prizes of the same value, they might just about pay for the white elephant.

If the Count blows a modest £15 million on country estate, all the low life will be up in arms about the extravagent waste of the idle rich. Blow 30 times that amount and the low life get a prize for it. If you want real waste and extravagence, do not look to the idle aristocracy. Look to the idle layabouts that fashion themselves as the servants of the people.

In taking on the Scots, those with thick heads and thin skins, the Count has gone in search of an ally. Step forward red Ken Livingstone, mayor of London and nutty as a fruitcake. Why on earth should a Count be allying with red Ken? Like the Count, red Ken can call things as they are. So he has made the one astute observation of the London Assembly, which he runs: fire the 25 politician assembly members because they are idlers who do no work.

Hold on to your travel ticket: we will return to Scotland via the London Assembly in due course.

Let's look at this for a moment. London has a human population of 7 million (plus politicians) for which we have 25 useless Assembly members. Scotland (human population heading south of 5 million as Scots all sign up to Johnson's declaration that "the finest sight in Scotland is the high road to England" where they can all say how wonderful Scotland is, without the inconvenience of living there). So how many politicians does Scotland need? 129. Five times as many politicians doing five times the damage for a smaller population than London.

Next stop on the Count's tour: the cost of the politician's buildings.

The London Assembly cost an outrageous £43 million. This is justified by the smellies because it is an iconic building (blah blah blah) on a a top site in the centre of London where the cost of breathing, let alone living, is measured in billions of pounds per second. Well, GDP per head in inner London is three times that of Scotland. So how much did the wonderful Scottish parliament cost for an equally iconic (blah blah blah) building in a top site for a smaller population with one third the living costs of London? Perhaps an extravagent £20 million will do nicely?

£20 million for the "servants of the people"? You must be kidding. These servants have ideas above their station: they blew £431 million (at least) on finding somewhere to put the photocopier. Haven't they heard of Prontaprint? Predictably, it took twice as long and cost four times as much as originally estimated and no politician was in any way to blame for the fiasco they so totally mismanaged: time to give themselves a few prizes for blowing their master's money. If we are their masters, we should horse whip them immediately and have them thrown in debtors' prison where they can beg for alms from vistors who can see the consequences of profligacy with the public purse. Instead, each of the 129 members has £3.5 million of office building.

The Count could buy a Scottish castle or two for £3.5 million and have cash left over to buy the fishing rights on the local river. The reason Scottish castles are so cheap is that no sane person would want to live in one, unless it could be put somewhere interesting, like Italy. But then it would not be a Scottish castle. And the Count does not even want the fishing rights to some washed up river which used to have salmon. He wants the shooting rights to the Scottish Parliament so that he can cull the useless politicians. They may have banned hunting with dogs: they have not banned hunting of dogs. That means all the politicians can be culled with immunity. Forget the Purdeys, I think this is one for my Uzi....

Plumbing the depths

2005-10-14T21:25:00.000+01:00

The Count prefers the High Life. It is certainly cheaper than the low life. The lowest forms of life always seem to turn out to be the most expensive: think of Tony Blair and his addiction to spending all the Count's ill-gotten gains.

So the Count has decided to go on a fearless journey of discovery in search of the lowest form of life on the planet. It turned out that the Count did not have to look far: the low life crawled in through the front door. The slime ball claimed to be a plumber and then charged the Count £120 for changing a flange. Apparently flanges are little bits of rubber which stop things leaking, like condoms but less useful.

The plumber joins the ranks of other low life, like "sand and cement Jim" who never saw a building problem which he could not tosh up with a little sand and cement, plus £300 for his efforts. Leaking drains? Sand, cement and £300 will tosh it up mate. Dodgy window? Sand, cement and £300 will sort it out. Cash will do nicely, but a good horse whipping would do even better.

But plumbers, builders and decorators are amateurs compared to the real low life. Consultants and lawyers are just the same as plumbers: fat, self-serving, greedy, you can never find a good one when you need one, the job is always trickier than you first thought (because you hired the wrong person last time) and so it will take twice as long and cost four times as much as you first thought. But this is your lucky day: they have just the person to sort it out for you. The only difference is that the so-called professionals wear fancy shirts which justify even fancier bills than the plumbers.

This is what happens when you let the servants get ideas above their station.

But the real low life are the shit bags who con their way into major construction projects which you know will escalate in cost out of control. Let's start with an easy one: the upgrade of the West Coast train line. This was a simple project which should have cost an outrageous £2 billion to upgrade 400 miles of track to take train speeds up from 110 mph to 140 mph. It should have been ready this year. Now it looks like the cost is going past £10 billion; the trains will not be able to run faster than 125 mph if they ever get round to completing the project. Overall train times will decline because operators are fined for being late, so their logical solution is to pad the timetable so much that even if they are delayed, they still will not be late: so they build delay into their timetables. £10 billion and the Count is still counting for absolutely zero improvement.

And we have not even got round to the Scottish Parliament (politicians controlling costs - this is a positively dangerous idea as it will make any sane person either die laughing, go mad or become a homicidal maniac: in the Count's case he may achieve all three outcomes). Then there is the Dome: more politicians controlling costs. Ha. Let's talk about nuclear power stations, the Jubilee Line extension or any other major project in the last 25 years. Or rather, let's not talk about it, because it is too depressing.

The low life complain about the extravagence of the aristocracy. Extravagent, us? We are into recylcing our house decorations and china: that is what we use Sotheby's for. Sell a Rembrandt and buy a Monet. Or, more likely, sell a Monet to pay for more mindless extravagence of a government that is addicted to spending. The Commons costs five times as much to run as the Lords and do five times as much damage.

So if you want to stop extravagence and waste then get rid of the low life, the Count will humbly take over from Tony's cronies. A few million a year for the Count as Prime Minister is far better value than the thousands of overpaid cronies and low life that live in and on governmetn wasting billions on projects that deliver zero value.

What about the cost of living?

2005-10-05T09:56:00.000+01:00

The health nazis are on the march again.

The cost of not eating our greens is estimated at $1,100 billion. Look: $1 billion here or there is clearly a rounding error in their calculation: give it to the count. I could give away $100 million and still have $900 million to buy back my Russian estates and the life style to which I am sure I could become accustomed. $1,100 billion????? That could be serious money.

$1,100 billion is what WHO reckon is the cost of avoidable chronic diseases. The avoidable chronic disease that the Count has spotted is death from the overwhelming odure of bureaucratic, self-serving bullshit running out of the WHO headquarters.

The worst fascists are the right on ones who pretend to want to help us, mainly by banning us from doing anything we might enjoy like drinking vodka, eating raw meat (and even chips) while out misbehaving with members of the opposite sex and the more alluring beasts of the forest. Nanny was bad enough, until I was old enough to know how good her badness could be. But Nanny WHO have the full UN mindset of wanting to run the world without the inconvenience of any elections. Only aristocrats are allowed to do that, and at least we do not ban everything once we are in power.

So today the World Health Organisation tells us that lots of people will die from chronic diseases which could be avoided if we all ate our peas, jogged, had cold showers in the morning and generally tried to be as miserable as the faceless bureaucrats who chew their celery sticks in the WHO. Time to look for the meadow mayonnaise: this is not a difficult exercise.

1) The venal start. Well of course the WHO is not going to produce a report which says things might be getting better. No WHO report can be produced shroud waving and the prospect of millions of deaths. They are in the business of keeping themselves in business, so the last thing they want to do is to admit that we might be a little better off than in the old days, when my mad Uncle Vanya who had to chew his own arm off without anaesthetic after being attacked by a wolf which took exception to being hunted. A rabid wolf was one thing: a rabid uncle Vanya was altogether more terrifying. And do not even mention tooth ache. The only medicine we had was opium, which was the one thing that was better in those days. WHO have banned even that.

2) The meadow mayonnaise moment. $1,100 billion? Kiss my aristocratic pants. Cut away the bollocks (of the WHO bureaucrats, preferably) and even they have to admit that the sum is only £1.9 billion a year in the UK: that is one thirtieth of the sum they chose for the press release. No matter: stick a large number out there and some journalist will fall for it. Even the £1.9 billion is totally suspect. It totally fails to count the cost of keeping these people alive. On our estates we were never to keen on the peasants living much beyond 50: their productivity went from abysmal to negative. So we encouraged them to have a good time on illicit vodka and as many potatoes as they could manage, in the hope this would help them work hard, enjoy life and die early. This way, everyone was kept happy.

3) The venal conclusion. Inevitably, the conclusion is that all the special interest groups have found another bandwagon and are jumping on board.
The WHO leads the way: "The cost of inaction is clear and unacceptable"
Diabetes UK jumps on board as well: "people must be educated to eat a healthy diet and take up regular physical activity"
The Lancet editor is calling for "concerted and co-ordinated political action" to help him get a knighthood and a job with WHO
The British Heart foundation gleefully warns of "an epidemic of obesity".

Have these people ever heard of liberty, free choice, personal responsibility or having fun? If you want any of these, you need an aristocrat, not a bureaucrat, running planet earth. Emperor Kostov at your service......

What's the cost of a billion deaths?

2005-10-04T16:20:00.000+01:00

The great professor Peto has declared that a billion people are going to die from smoking.

At least he knows how to get a headline. But in this case, the wreaths he sees are not the wreaths of a billion smokers who have wheezed their last. He is seeing the wreaths which mark the death of academic respectability at his University: the once great Oxford. Now even their professors have to stoop to sensationalism like some superannuated Russian Count to get noticed. Except that even we would not stoop quite so low, not least of all because those Mongolian horses have left the count unable to stoop at all.

The professor missed one trick: he should have put a monetary value on each life. Say each life was worth $10,000 (too much for your average peasant, but the Count is in a generous mood today). He could have then declared that smoking was going to cost the world $10,000 billion ($10 trillion or gazillion or whatever they have for loads of dosh which someone should be giving to the Count).

The inevitable conclusion is that we should Do Something to stop the world heading to smoking cataclysm. This mainly involves banning people from what they want to do: teh normal busy bodies banning bug. At some stage, it doubtless involves giving more money to the good professor to investigate the problem further.

The bullshit is so deep, Hercules needs to come along and clean it out. Lacking a river to cleanse the professors bollocks, we will take a shovel to his bollocks and see what we can do. I hope it is more painful for him than it will be for the Count.

1) The billion people is over 100 years, so that is ten million a year out of a population of 6,000 million. One in six hundred people will die from smoking every year. Is that a terrible price for smoker's to pay for a life time of pleasure?

2) When will these smokers die? If they all keel over at the age of 28, then that is a problem. If they all die after they have retired, then what precisely is the problem?
- the smokers will have had a good few decades of smoking and contributing lots of fag tax at the same time to lucky non-smokers like the Count who has always liked the notion of peasants supporting his lifestyle
- they will have finished bringing up their offspring. Hopefully the offspring will have been taught to smoke to provide more taxes to defray the Count's tax bill.
- they will no longer be economically active, so the taxpayer will be relieved of a burden.

I think the professor wants us all to live long and miserably, without any pleasures, while we become an increasing burden on our families and the state. When the Count goes, I hope to be shot by an insanely jealous husband as I am caught in bed with his wife and his daughter.

3) Where does his billion come from? Sounds suspiciously round to me. Even he admits that most of them will be in China. He should go there. From Beijing to Hong Kong there is a foul permasmog which cuts visibilty down to a few hundred metres: the Chinese will have choked on their own pollution long before they choke on their foul cigarettes.

He should do another estimate: how many people die from living each year? Roughly 100% of all deaths are a consequence of living. Perhaps we should therefore ban living, which in the professor's case would be a very good idea indeed.

Ban the $1.8 trillion banners

2005-09-04T10:22:00.000+01:00

It's bad enough having MPs wanting to ban, regulate and tax everything except themselves. Now the nurses are getting in on the act. They want to ban people enjoying life, they want us live long and miserably. The longer people live, the more health care they need, so the more employment will exist for nurses. So the nurses are wrapping themselves in a cloud of righteous morality and telling us that there must be a total ban on smoking. They conjour up images of genocide being caused by second hand smoking and society drowning under a sea of smoking diseases.

Hobbes declared that life was nasty, short and brutish. Give the nurses a chance and they will make it even worse: nasty long and brutish.

The favourite study quoted comes, inevitably, from California: land of the intolerant liberal. Professor Leonard Millar of the University of California at Berkely claims that the cost of dealing with smoking will be $1.8 trillion over the next 25 years.

Count Kostov's refined nose starts twitching at the mention of any "cost of..." calculation.

The bullshit calculation is totally one sided: it ignores any of the benefits. This is how companies in the dot.bomb era conned the public: they would declare profits based on revenues before costs. Anyone can succeed with a one sided equation. England can even beat Australia at cricket if we only count England's score.

The calculation stinks so bad the Count is having to hold his nose while writing this.

Let's look at the benefits of smoking for a bit:
a) smokers pay lots of tax to us non-smokers, thank you very much
b) smokers have the grace to die early: so they will not leech the pensions systems. Their clogged up arteries mean a few months clogging up the health care system before they shuffle off their clogs: that's much cheaper than clogging up the health system for decades as the non-smokers are likely to do.
c) some people actually enjoy smoking

And this ignores the $400 billion deal that US states did with tobacco companies to deal with their cost of smoking. It also ignores the billions that various get-lucky litigants hope to con off the tobacco companies by complaining that they were victims of smoking, not just victims of their own folly.

Both Duke University and France's Institue of Political Science reckon that smokers reduce the tax burden for the rest of us.

So the $1.8 trillion cost to society might as well be a $1.8 trillion benefit to society. Perhaps the states should be thinking of paying the tobacco companies for saving them money.

There is good news in all of this. The cost of calculations by all these professors are even worse than the baboon's bollocks. And if producing so much meadow mayonnaise makes you into a professor, then all of us can call ourselves professors. At least, we are unlikely to produce more rubbish than the so-called university professors produce.

So do not call me Count. Call me Professor Count. Or is it Count Professor?

The cost of vermin

2005-09-02T19:02:00.000+01:00

The cost of vermin is far too high.

The slimey creepy crawlies who represent the lowest form of life on the planet, apart from Oasis, are of course our pompous, preening, overpaid MPs. Not that anything has changed in the last few thousand years ago. These low life have always been among us, easily identified by their brown noses and tongues.

Here is one version: "they are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and deceivers, avoiders of danger, greedy for gain….and while you work for their good they are completely yours….but when danger comes nearer, they turn away". That was Machiavelli, about five hundred years ago, who was generally a pretty sound fellow when it came to helping the aristocracy work out how to run things.

John Stuart Mill, about 200 years ago saw all the problems which would occur if you allowed the lowlife to get paid for their efforts. It would "allow adventurers of low class into parliament for whom there would be prizes for the most successful flatterer". And then, in Adam Smith's words, they would indulge in the sort of profligacy which comes from the noble mission of spending other people's money. It is very easy to take the moral high ground when you are spending the Count's hard won inheritance.

So I asked my butler, Digdog, to find out how much these vermin were costing the Count. The dog dug but without much success. The vermin are not too keen on advertising how much they spend on themselves. Freedom of Information, public accounting, and audited accounts are something for humans, not for the vermin in the commons. Eventually Digdog found that the Commons admitted to blowing away £133 million on themselves.

£133 million smelt of meadow mayonnaise to the Count's well tuned nose. Sure enough, the vermin do not include the cost of security, upkeep of Westminster or any of the ministerial perks and privileges. Their costs are the baboon's bollocks.

I told Digdog to go and sweep out the lake while I turned to a more reliable source of information: the Lords. Sadly the Lords is now full of the very worst sort of flatterer since all the true bloods have been dismissed in favour of Tony's cronies. But some of the Noblesss Oblige has rubbed off on the staff who are still producing honest information. Honesty and information are absolutley forbidden in the lower chamber of commons vermin.

The Lords produced a handy report showing that the Commons cost us £269 million: that's more than twice what the Commons themselves admitted to. That is nearly £400,000 for each nonentity that is trying to flatter his or her way into a ministerial limo and a knighthood. To put it into Commons-speak, we could hire another 10,000 nurses for the cost of the commons.

The Lords, by contrast, cost a measly £61 million a year. Run the Commons at the same cost as the Lords, and we would save £200 million and have another 8,000 nurses from Lithuania, Poland, South Africa and Malawi looking after deserving cases like the Count.

This, of course, is yet more evidence we should be bringing back a proper form of government: let the hereditary lords run things and you will not get Iraq, B. Liar and sleaze and spin. You will get the Count.

The alternative is to let the Brussels parliament take over. They cost a very modest £712 million or more than £1.1 million per euro-MP. Their noses and tongues are brown for two reasons: they either have their snout where the sun don't shine, or they have it firmly planted in the euro-gravy train. This is simple bribery: pay an unemployable vermin from Sunderland or Slovenia £1 million a year and even if they can not spell Europe, they will become fanatically pro-european. And most of us do not even know who our euro-MP is, let alone what they do for their £1 million a year.

So if we can not put in place a decent aristocratic government led by the Count, then the least we can hope for is that the European slime balls will bribe the Count with £1 million a year. For that, I might be able to find some aristocratic goodwill to the vermin before setting my dogs on them.

$20 trillion for telly

2005-08-28T09:04:00.000+01:00

Count Kostov has decided to dive head first into the meadow mayonnaise with the intention of coming out smelling of roses. Roses grow best in dung anyway.

Most of the vermin who produce the bullshit "cost of..." estimates are pathetic professionals. They should remember that professionals built the Titanic (and the Dome, 1960's tower blocks and the Morris Marina): an amateur built the Ark. So the Count will now prove that gentlemen (aristocrats and true blooded amateurs alike) can always beat the so-called professionals at their own game.

The professionals thought they had hit the jackpot by estimating global warming could cost £10 trillion in the years to come. I will now prove, by using the professionals own methods, that Television costs $20 trillion. Every year. It will cost a billion trillion over the next fifty years. If this much money was placed in pound coins in a tower above London, the planet would implode.

Step one is to find out how much telly the peasants watch. I asked my butler, Digdog, this question. He claimed not to know any peasants. I told him to ask his parents. He also complained that I made him work so hard that he never had tiem to watch telly. But so I got the dog to dig. When asked to dig for something he is like a dog with a bone: he will not give up.

Digdog eventually found that Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Scientific American had estimated that on average the peasants in the industrialised world spend 3 hours a day going goggle eyed. That is nine years of a mis-spent lifetime. Incidentally, you are entitled to award yourself another medal if you pronounced Mihaly's family name without going goggle-eyed or boggle throated.

Now take the three hours a day. Multiply by $8 an hour (far too much pay given the price of potatos and gruel, but it can't be helped). Multiply that by 1.5 billion people. Multiply that by 365 days. Suddenly you have $20 trillion a year which could be productively spent by young children climbing chimneys to sweep them and by grannies doing something useful like sweeping out the factory, cooking for the troops and knitting underwear instead of complaining that the Count is an idle layabout.

$20 trillion is about the size of the US and European economies combined. Without TV we could be twice as well off.

It may be $20 or $2 or $200 trillion. The Count ran out of fingers and believes that calculators are the invention of the devil, designed to make idle brains idler. So you go figure. Not that the maths count for the Count, because however good the maths may be, the assumptions are a load of bollocks.

This, of course, is precisely the point. All the "cost of..." calculations are complete bollocks. Someone with an axe to grind dreams up an imaginary figure to prove an imaginary problem and then demands huge amount of real money to solve the imaginary problem.

However, in this case there is clearly a real problem: $20 trillion a year. The problem needs to be understood more and to be resolved: the benefits to society of solving the TV challenge will be huge. So the first step is to invest a modest billion or two in the STOP Society. (Stop Television Overwhelming Peasants). You may rest assured that as STOP is owned and run by the Count, any billions it receives will be very well spent: on himself.

£10 trillion for a tan

2005-08-23T14:11:00.000+01:00

Enjoy the good weather while you can. The bill comes later.

You've guessed it: some spoilsport wants to pour rain on our sunshine and deny the Count his all year tan.

But this time they have hit a home run. They are not talking millions. They are not talking billions. They have hit the trillions. Ten big juicy trillions. For a tan.

That sounds suspiciously like £10,000,000,000,000. Ten thousand billions. I may be out by a nought or two, but if a nought is nothing than I can not be out at all because a nought is nothing. As previously mentioned: maths and logic are not my strongest points because none of my nannies or governesses knew much about such grubby subjects either.

Ten trillion is nearly as much as the Count himself is worth. The only shame is the Count's worth to the world is not reflected in his net worth with the bank. My one stale crumb of comfort is that no respecting aristocrat has ever had a positive bank balance, except after a particulary successful period of raping, looting and pillaging in the name of the Csar and God. My ancestors last had a good run of raping and pillaging about 300 years ago. This should keep us going for a few more generations yet.

Back to the boggling billions which have become a trillion for a tan. Pedants might observe that the estimate refers mainly to global warming: to all of those who have the classic pale and puffy faced London commuter tan, global warming mainly means the chance for better weather and a better tan.

The spoilsport is one Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research, who clearly knows how to generate a headline or two. Even the dour Scotsman picked up on it. The research may be bollocks, but you can be sure every sandal wearing, bearded and fully paid up member of the organic knitted wok liberation front will be quoting the statistic as certain fact from now on.

This time, the Count will avoid doing the three step dance to show the bullshit behind the squillions of billions: the dung heap it exposes is just too big. Suffice it to say the Her Majesty's Government also did an estimate on behalf of Her Majesty and her loyal Counts. They came up with an estimate of £1.2 billion over the next thirty to fifty years. That is less than £25 million a year for global warming according to HMG. Chicken feed to a govenrnment that throws 200 times that amount of money at the City Academies programme which will achieve precisely zero.

So now we have two estimates of the cost of global warming: £25 million a year or £10 trillion. The new estimate is 400,000 times the size of HMG's estimate. It comes from a different planet, called Zog.

We now reveal what the Count's family learned when Einstein came to stay: his Secret Theory of Relativity which states simply: "where you sit is where you stand". This means that your beliefs are relative to whatever you want to believe: if you want to believe the global warming will lead to mass extinction, you quote £10 trillion as fact. If you are a supine politician who wants to avoid dealing with any real problems of any sort whatsoever, you airbrush the problem away by calling it a £25 million inconvenience.

Between venal politicians and crazed lobby groups the sensible punter has only one realistic choice: believe in the aristocracy who are above playing games with numbers and reality.

$90 billion for PowerPoint

2005-08-22T21:18:00.000+01:00

$90 billion for a few PowerPoint Presentations seems a little steep, even by the Count's standard billing rate, which is measured in cases of Krug and caviar by the hour. $90 billion would pay for the Count to have his own seas and rivers to be stocked with enough sturgeon to keep the Kostov clan in good shape for the next few centuries or so.

The Count has been hard on our American cousins. But this time he will doff his aristocratic hat to the entrepreneurial spirit of our transatlantic friends.

But before we get too carried away and anyone starts thinking the Count has become a toadying arse licker like Boy Blair, let's do the Count's three step dance to see if American meadow mayonnaise is as rich as British bullshit.

Step One: the venal start. Look at who is behind the numbers and we find one Dave Paradi, who presents himself to the world as the PowerPoint life guard who "rescues his audience from death by PowerPoint." The Count is loathe to call such entrepreneurs commercial slimeballs who will make up any number they can to justify flogging their dodgy services to half baked bozos who can not even put a presentable PowerPoint presentation together. So in the spirit of keeping the libel lawyers at bay, we will applaud this wonderful and diligent piece of work by a consummate professional. Having said which, the Count's very refined nose is starting to detect the unmistakeable odour of dung.

Step Two: The meadow mayonnaise moment. That's right, all $90 billion of it for the time wasted in PowerPoint presentations. The sums are a classic of their kind. Take 30 million powerpoint presentations a day (thank microsoft for this estimate and inflicting the powerpoint plague on planet earth): assume four people per presentation with a quarter of the time wasted costed at the average wage of $35,000 a year, and suddenly you have a $90 billion dung heap.

Step three. The illogical conclusion. We should all hire the PowerPoint lifeguard to save us from ourselves, no doubt at very modest cost.

This is the same patter the countess goes through when the Harrods sale is on. She thinks she can save 30% at the sale on crockery we do not need: only peasants and the bourgoisie buy their own crockery. The count meanwhile saves 100% by not buying any more crockery and using the family crockery and silver instead. The same with PowerPoint. We could save 25% ($90 billion) by using PowerPoint better. Or we could save $360 billion by getting rid of it completely.

Billy Boy at Microsoft might mind, the rest of us would celebrate. Saving the planet $360 billion and ridding it of the PowerPoint plague: the Count has decided to award himself another medal for this, his latest contribution to humanity.

2005-08-21T19:00:00.000+01:00

If a little education is a dangerous thing, then too little is lethal.

Inevitably, there is someone who wants to put a cost to this. The cost of poor basic skills is £10 billion. Why £10 billion? Anything has to be £10 billion for anyone to wake up and notice. Personally, the count would wake up and take notice if someone offered him just one million. £10 billion? That's enough to create 9,000 millionaires and still leave enough for the Count to become a billionaire. I could then afford my well deserved caviar and krug on a daily basis.

Before I dance in celebration at the prospect of new found wealth, let's do the Count's three step dance to reveal the truth behind the £10 billion.

Step One: the venal start. Look no further than the people who commissioned the research. Who do we find? The DfES, or the Education Ministry, desperately trying to justify spending more money on bogus exams and qualifications. Every time the vermin run around celebrating the 120% pass rate and universal A* grades for all students who can remember their own names, they should be reminded of their own research that shows lack of basic skills costs the economy £10 billion a year. Quite how every year brings record results for these "hard working students" (which is an oxymoron like Microsoft Works or Military Intelligence or even Civil Servants who are neither civil nor do they serve the people they tax and rule - but the count digresses in the middle of a long sentence), is a mystery when the same government is complaining about the lack of basic skills being produced by the education system they mismanage.

The count will now award himself a medal for the longest sentence ever written. It was nearly long as the average German word. Award yourself a medal if you read it without falling asleep. The Count is ever generous in letting you give things to yourself.

Step two: the meadow mayonnaise moment. £10 billion? Kiss my aristocratic pants. The DfES announced that this cost was estimated from the equally unlikely fact they produced in their press release: "More than 7 million people in England do not have the skills expected of an 11 year old". Has anyone in the DfES noticed that there are more than 7 million people in the UK who are aged under 11, so it is not surprising that more than 7 million people do not have the skills of an eleven year old. Duh. The people who are lacking the basic skills of an 11 year old clearly land up writing DfES press releases, on the basis that there is no lower form of life known in the universe, other than actually running the DfES.

Step three: the illogical conclusion. Since all the education spending has failed to deliver the required skills, the DfES conclusion is that we should spend more money doing the same thing to get a different result. Of course, once you have claimed a £10 billion problem lies out there, spending £1.5 billion seems very modest.

The only way they get away with this is when we lack the basic skills to realise that their cost of the basic skills problem is bullshit and that spending more money doing the same thing will not solve the problem anyway.

There is, naturally, a much better way to spend the money. Or, to use the government's own weasel words when they try to cover up profligate spending: there is a much better way to invest the money. They should invest the money in building the social and economic capital of the Count himself. At least I would have the decency to write a thank you note before my mind melts into a drink and drug fuelled haze.

2005-08-17T08:14:00.000+01:00

Who says the air is free?

The cost of air is a mere £45 billion a year at the moment to which our friendly faceless rulers in Brussels want to add another £11 billion. That sounds like £56 billion for the privilege of breathing, although maths were never the Count's strong point.

£56 billion a year may be a mere trifle to Billy Boy over at Microsoft, but even a Count has to start counting his pennies (or stop breathing) when the Brussels bureaucrats breathing bill arrives on the butler's tray along with a neatly ironed copy of the Daily Torygraph, which carries this dismal news today, on page 32.

At this point I decided to entertain the butler with my three step dance to see if I could discover the meadow mayonnaise lurking behind the number.

Step One: the venal start. Start not by looking at the number, but at the people who produced this number. Lurking behind the £56 billion is that world famous organisation called UNICE (as in "you nice, me nasty"). Closer examination finds that this is an EU wide business lobby group that is not wildly keen on spending money on clean air. They would much prefer to choke us all to death on their pollution while they take their money and run off to the one remaining island which is not suffering Chinese style perma-smog and is not about to be submerged under the rising oceans as their pollution causes global warming.

Step two: The meadow mayonnaise moment. To prove their point, UNICE conjoures up out of thin (but polluted) air the magic number of £56 billion as the cost of clean air regulations. This is as close to reality as the Count's annual tax return.

Step three: The illogical conclusion. UNICE want us to imagine the hardship that will result from these costs: think of all the fat cats on skid row, down to their last country house and sports car. The conclusion is that we should all die in a chemical soup of their making for their benefit.

Of course, the opposite position is equally absurd. If you want a nutty perspective, look no further than Brussels and the Greens. The Greens like nuts because they are vegetarian. So the EU Commission has piped up and said that their regulations will save 350,000 lives. How do they know that? Can they prove it? This is as implausible and as meaningless as the £56 billion number.

A simplistic reading of the EU claim is this: £56 billion saves 350,000 lives at an average cost of £150,000. This is cheap for saving the Count's life, but is wild profligacy if it is the cost of saving a bureaucrat's life.

Now look again. The EU says it will save this number of lives "Over the long term". OK, lets say it will save 350,000 lives over thirty five years and that each life is extended by a generous 10 years. That mean that each year of a person's life is being valued at £560,000. It could be that the only lives being "saved" are people at death's door anyway, and the regulations simply extend their misery.

So now we have a recipe for a bullshit fight. UNICE will claim ever greater costs of the regulations. Brussels will claim ever greater benefits for their regulations.

The only solution is to bring in some sensible government again. How much pollution was there when we aristocrats ran the world? None. I rest my case. Move aside Brussels, let the Count take over.

2005-08-16T13:34:00.000+01:00

Count Kostov has learned that the cost of everything is not always financial.

This holiday to Mongolia was meant to research tribes and territory. There were two problems with this:
- the nomads have no tribes
- the nomads have no concept of territory.

The third of the two problems was the food. If you like sour mare's milk, fatty sheep's tail, dried yoghurt blocks and sheep's head stew with the sheep's gelatonous eyes staring out at you from the dish, then Mongolia is the place to be. Research has a high digestive price associated with it.

The last of the two problems were the horses. Clearly, the count's cossack heritage has been diluted by too many year's in the decadent west (not decadent enough, but that is another story). The Mongols do not think you are a good rider until you have shown you can fall off. By the end of the first morning, they felt I must be an excellent rider, because I kept on falling off. Meanwhile, I felt I had broken every bone I knew existed, and a few more besides. The problem was that the horses only had two speeds: extremely fast and suicidally fast. They could stop on a sixpence which was fine for them: I would normally stop a few yards later having performed a series of sumersaults, pikes and turns which would gaurantee a gold in the Olympics.

Dealing with the venomous con artists and rip off merchants who dream up their fanciful "cost of" studies is safer and simpler than all this tribal stuff. Back to the grindstone......

2005-08-01T12:12:00.000+01:00

A bucket, spade and $63 billion dollars is all the count needs for a happy holiday.

As ever, there is a catch. In this case, several catches.

First, it is a pretty sad day when the count is demoted from building castles to awe the locals to building sand castles to awe the kids. Not that they will be impressed anyway.

Second, my local friendly travel agent was 100% correct that I would be able to build lots of sand castles. She omitted to mention that she was sending me to Mongolia where there is a vast desert known locally as "Go in never come out again." I think she may be pursuing a vendetta against me. She has never been the same since she discovered I was not going to make her a countess. She had been counting on it.

Third, there is the small matter of $63 billion. This is the annual cost of bad weather. Most of it is waiting to attack innocent holiday makers like cossacks waiting in the woods for a passing caravan of wealthy traders or, preferably, young virgins.

Time for the counts three step dance.

1) The venal start. Let's see who is behind this study. It could be reinsurance brokers trying to drum up more insurance business. In this case it is even lower life: the Red Cross trying to drum up more funds to keep their employees stocked with oversized 4x4 vehicles with which they can roam the poorer parts of the world like latter day colonialists enjoying imperial comforts for their self sacrifice with our money. There are kinder interpretations of the Red Cross, but the count did not get where he is today (mostly wandering the streets looking for someone to spare him the price of a cup of vodka) by being kind.

2) The meadow mayonnaise moment. $63 billion? Give me a break. This is not about the poor dying. This is about Miami golf club members needing $1 million each to buy new golf clubs and cars and for the emotional stress of seeing their ball blown off the fairway into the rough. Most disasters hardly get reported. Will all pitched in for the Asian tsunami because some poor holiday makers copped it. When it is just locals no one cares. Did you hear about the tsunami in Papua New Guinea about six years ago? It killed a few thousand. Hey, they don't look good on camera, they don't speak English well so what is the emotional news value of that. Let them die. Meanwhile, we will pour millions into the pockets of western toursits and into the hands of corrupt kleptocrats and bureaucrats in South Asia.

The Red Cross admit that their estimated cost of weather disasters has risen 20 fold in the last fifty years. The number of people dying from weather disasters has decreased in the same time. So the cost is not about bailing out the poor and defenceless. It is about bailing out the rich who choose to construct their holiday hideaways on low beaches on hurricane highways.

3) The illogical conclusion. We all need to cough up more to keep the road show on the road. They need less money better spent where it counts.

In particular, they need to set aside a reserve for rescuing poor, defenceless Counts from sandstorms in the middle of Mongolia. The only known recovery plan is to give the victim copious champagne and sevruga caviar on the first class flight home.

Enjoy your holidays.

2005-07-28T10:10:00.000+01:00

The Count counts himself lucky not to be royal.

Politicians have decided that the cost of royalty is too high. They can wrap their tiny minds around tiny sums. But even the biggest headed of them can not wrap their big heads round big numbers. A tiny mind in a big head makes a lot of noise: it rattles around. To make a politician, all you need to do is to add a big mouth. Politicians can focus on the cost of a train journey (A rip off £500) but are clueless about the billions (£5 billion to rebuild 200 perfectly good school buildings while spending not one penny on the teachers: call it the City Academy programme and the MPs go to sleep and approve it). It would take ten million rip off train journeys to pay for the folly of the Academies. So if you are an MP you do the obvious thing: attack the train journey cost. Duh.

One thing is for sure. They are right about slime balls who pay themselves too much, have too many paid flunkies, offer no discernible benefit to society, insist on traveling first class, like to lord it over ordinary people, have luxury accommodationon and multiple homes paid for by the taxpayer, live in a security cocoon that protects them and leaves us to the mercy of thieves and terrorists and can look forward to a retirement with an indexed linked pension. This is a description of themselves that politicians avoid.

But hypocrisy is easier than honesty. Instead of attacking themselves, they attack royalty. The cost of Royalty, according to the politicians, is £37 million. This gives them plenty of scope to complain about a plane trip costing £12,800. The same MP who whinged and whined about the use of the royal train quietly took the taxpayer for a cool £250,000 in pay, pension and allowances. Throw in the cost of running Westminster, special advisers and special security, our MPs are blowing at least £200 million on keeping themselves in a comfortable lifestyle. Although they are very clear about how much the Royals cost, you can look high and low for how much Parliament costs. That's how to be a politician: complain loudly about other people's costs and keep very quiet about your own while you milk the system for all it is worth.

The politicians may know the cost of everything (except themselves) but they clearly know the value of nothing (except themselves: they think they are very precious). What is the value of Ian Davidson, who complained about the Royal train? And how does that compare to the value of the Royals? How many millions of tourists come to see Ian Davidson each year versus seeing the Queen?

The count would like to suggest a way of economising. Royalty can be funded by cutting out 150 MPs. They would not be missed: most of them have never even been heard of. We would not miss their missives to the local council about broken paving stones and housing waiting lists. We would not miss them legislating, regulating and bossing us around. We would not miss their pompous press releases. We would not miss paying their useless salaries and allowances.

£37 million is a small sum, but qualifies for the meadow mayonnaise awards. Let's do the count's three step:

1. The venal start: you know that there is going to no impartiality when the Public Accounts Committee is involved. They are not there to scrutinise expenditure and stop waste: they are there to score cheap political points and gain publicity for its anonymous, underachieving, time-serving members who dream of a junior ministerial job followed by a knighthood. Attacking royalty is risk free, because royalty never attacks back.

2. The Meadow Mayonnaise Moment. The cost of Royalty is £37 milliion (60p per citizen annually). This completely ignores the value of the cost; it ignores that much of this is the Queen's own income anyway; it ignores the absurd costs of the people doing the scrutinising; it ignores the costs and value of any alternative. But it does provide some cheap shots for cheap politicians.

3. The illogical conclusion is to cut costs of royalty even further. We could have them all living on the dole in a council house, but it would rather lose the point. Alternatively we could appoint Ian Davidson as Queen (is he a natural for this role?); or we could ask Mrs Beckham or Mrs Blair or any other washed up C-list celebrity to be queen/king president.

It is time the country woke up to the value of its heritage. All royalty and Counts deserve to be kept at taxpayers' expense in some luxury. It is the least we deserve.

2005-07-26T12:01:00.000+01:00

Shiver me timbers, boy. $29 billion beats pieces of eight. It's time I sold my pirate ship and bought myself a pirate computer so I can sail the high seas of the internet and plunder lots of free software. I might even find myself a few free wenches disporting themselves for my pleasure at the right internet port.

All good pirates may be short on the required number of legs and eyes. But we are all long on our noses and can smell guano at fifty leagues distance. I smell guano big time. Count Kostov is going to do the three step dance to discover the guano behind the $29 biliion. This is difficult with one real leg and one wooden leg, but the Count leaves no stone unturned (or untripped over) in search of truth, wealth and wenches.

Step One: The venal start. So who is behind this research? Cue the Business Software Alliance. They are about as impartial as Dead Eye Dick when it comes to discussing who owns what. They are in business to show that there is a piracy problem.

Step two: The Meadow Mayonnaise Moment (on the high seas we call this the guano gambit). The BSA miraculously conjures up a figure of $29 billion. They claim this is how much is lost to software pirates each year. They conveniently forget that they charge such outrageous prices that most people in the pirate capitals of the world (China, India and poorer countries) could not afford to pay anyway. So there are no lost sales.

Step three: The illogical conclusion. Get ready for the heart rending pleas of poverty from Bill Gates. Software pirates are seriously damaging his wealth. We should immediately get Indian peasants and chinese labourers to give Bill hundreds of dollars for software whose marginal cost is a few cents. Microsoft needs the cash. They are only making about 30% net margin, despite being hugely inefficient and producing insecure software which is full of bugs.

By now, it is clear who the real pirates are: Captain Bill and the pirate ship Microsoft that is raiding homes and businesses across the world. The best rip off comes when they combine efforts with Captain Mike of the good ship Dell. They make unsuspecting victims pay for the Microsoft software on the Dell computer. When you replace the computer, you can not transfer the software to your new computer. You have to buy the software all over again. You pay far too much for the software first time around, and then they make you pay for it a second time around as well.

It's enough to make my parrot weep.

2005-07-21T12:14:00.000+01:00

£690 billion for Count Kostov's old age should come in handy. It might pay the champagne bill. I might even upgrade from Tesco's Transylvanian fizz to Krug. And don't mention Dom Perignon. That is drunk by peasants who have been watching too many James Bond films. They also think that a martini (shaken not stirred) is the hieght of sophistication.

But someone has stolen my little nest egg for old age.

If you want to find the biggest thieves of all, look no further than government. Legalised theft is still theft from ordinary hard working families and from layabout aristocrats alike.

This time the theft comes in the shape of the public sector pensions black hole. First the government pays civil servants to make our lives a misery. And then it pays them to do nothing for the rest of their lives. The cost of the the black hole is estimated, by our friendly useless actuaries, to be about £690 billion. (See BBC News Feb 15th 2005). The useless actuaries are Watson Wyatt who spent a great deal of time, effort and money telling us what we already knew: we are well and truly screwed paying for the post dated pensions cheques which the government has been signing off in order to buy a few more lousy votes and stay in power.

The scale of this theft is huge. Even the great fraud and robber, Maxwell, could only get hold of £400 million his pensioners money. A thousand Maxwells would still be dwarfed by the government's pension theft. Even one Maxwell took alot to dwarf, let alone 1,000 of them.

If this debt takes 25 years to pay off, that comes to about £28 billion a year we will be paying as the price of past promises. That is nearly £1,000 for every household for the next 25 years. If anything, the black hole is going to get much worse before it gets much better.

At some point the children of the idle baby boomers may decide they can't pay, won't pay for the profligacy of their parents and past generations and governments. Then the chickens truly come home to roost.

Meanwhile the government gets all pompous and lectures private companies on their pension failings and life companies on pensions mis-selling. This is the same governmetn that is raiding £5 billion a year (£40 billion so far and counting...) from private pension plans in extra tax. It then wonders why private pensions are in trouble. But the private pension mess is a storm in a tea cup compared to the public pensions mess. The difference is that anyoen who works in the private sector is screwed: first the government will wreck the pension with its £5billion a year tax on it, and then when the pesnion fund goes bust, the pensioner will be left high and dry. In contrast, the public sector pensioner will be bailed out of the bottomless black hole by the bottomless pocket of the taxpayer. The final twist is that the government now wants private sector companies to bail out failing pension funds. The consequences are obvious:

- dodgy pension funds get bailed out by good funds. This gives no incentive for the dodgy funds to clean up their act. But it gives every incentive for companies to run a mile from any involvement in pensions provision: it costs enough to pay for your own pensioners, let alone anyone elses. So the result is that company pension schemes, (at least the final salary sort which the public sector enjoys so much) are disappearing faster than the self-destruct Mynah bird can squawk "kitty kitty kitty" to the nearest cat.

Meanwhile, Count Kostov would like to suggest some simple solutions which emanate from his glorious homeland.

First, the pensions crisis can be solved completely for the benefit of society once you realise that dead peasants make very good compost, especially for the rose bed.

Second, uncle Joe Stalin was a little suspect on some things, but he was pretty good on law and order. The first to be shot are not the lawyers or bourgeois running dog capitalists: it should be the actuaries who should first calculate precisely how long it will take the shot to leave the gun and pierce their heads (heart shots would not work as a crucial part of actuarial training is the removal of the heart. They also remove any part of the brain that deals with common sense).

2005-07-20T19:28:00.000+01:00

Let's add another £130 billion to the Kostov coffers.

Blink and you will miss the billions flashing by.

Today's billions are the cost of the pensions black hole in the UK: £130 billion reported in Personnel Today. Gripping reading for Count Kostov. Nearly as entertaining and as factually accurate as Harry Potter.

And the £130 billion is a low estimate: it only includes company pension schemes. The public sector is totally screwed with promises of index linked pensions. Those pensions will only be paid through one of the greatest acts of intergenerational theft ever: today's kids (tomorrow's taxpayers) will find themselves supporting the elders but not betters through ever bigger taxation. It used to be that parents looked after kids. Baby boomers enjoyed all that, and now they want their kids to look after them. Who says crime does not pay? Call it a public pension plan and show pictures of grannies and suddenly all sense disappears. Granny is an idle thieving sponger who should have saved for her retirement: but the lure of cheap package holidays and the summer of love was more interesting than put pennies aside for the future. So now her childrend and grand children can cough up for her while she regales them with stories of how tough it was in the days before GameBoys.

In any event £130 billion qualifies for the Kostov coffers. As ever we will go through the Kostov thre step to see what this is all about:

Step One: The venal start. Who is going to be behind a study like this? Look no further than the ACA (Association of Consulting Actuaries). These are the people that were recommending pension holdiays for firms a few years ago so that firms could artificially boost their profits, artificially boost the share price and then the CEO could walk away with huge and undeserved profits on his share options. The same dickheads now say there is a crisis because the funds they were plundering don't have enough money left in them. Duh.

Step Two: The Meadow Mayonnaise Moment. Show that there is a huge problem (£130 billion gets my attention) which gains maximum publicity.

Step three: The illogical conclusion. First you pay the actuaries a fortune for advice which ruins your pension fund. Now they want you to pay them another fortune to figure out how to rebuild the pension fund.

Actuaries are people who are catastrophically wrong, to eight decimal places.

Actuary joke one: an actuary is an accountant without the charisma.

Actuary joke two: you can tell an actuary from an accountant easily. When talking to you an accountant looks at your shoes, and actuary looks at his shoes.

2005-07-17T13:41:00.000+01:00

Count Kostov is in business: this time its fruit and veg.

The cost of wasted fruit and veg is £11 billion, or £420 per household each year. Farmers throw out 20%, because it does not meet supermarket standards. Supermarkets throw out another 10%. Of the 70% remaining, we throw out another 40% because when push comes to shove we would rather not eat up our greens before diving into the bannoffee pie and cream. So only about 40% of what is grown gets to our guts. (Do the maths: 70% times 40% results in 28% etc..)

There are several ways of looking at this. One is that the supermarkets are mean and nasty. Another is that we are fat and idle. And there is just a small possibility we might want to be grateful to the supermarkets for saving us from deformed carrots and beetroot. Anyone who saves the planet from beetroot deserves a medal.

The easy way to find out what is going on behind the numbers is to do Count Kostov's test of all such research:
- look for the venal start
- find the meadow mayonnaise moment
- reach the illogical conclusion

For the venal start, we need look no further than the sponsors of the research: The Soil Association. They are not exactly friends of the big supermarkets, so we all know what the research is going to have to prove: the big and nasty supermarkets are callously exploiting the doughty British farmer. This victim of the corporate industrial machine valiantly gets by, hiring hundreds of illegal immigrants to pick fruit and veg in the Lincolnshire priaire because no Brit can be arsed to work so hard for so little when a giro and crack are easy alternatives.

Now the meadow mayonnaise moment: 30% of our crops are thrown away, and as much wasted in the home. And its all the fault of the supermarkets who won't buy crap from farmers.

The illogical conclusion is, in this case, highly illogical: there isn't one. We are simply left to feel morally superior to the supermarkets and go tut tut over our bran and raisin breakfast while we read the Independent. There could have been some conlcusions. How about farmers selling their product direct or establishing alternative channels to market? After all, they have vast amounts of "free" product to dump. Given supermarket prices, they should be able to undercut the big beasts by miles. £1.99 for 150 grammes of watercress or rocket, which grow like weeds, should not be hard to beat. But it is easier to believe in a supermarket conspiracy and farmer victims.

And Count Kostov has not even started on the cost of the Common Agricultural Policy......

2005-07-13T10:45:00.000+01:00

The Americans are causing me a great deal of stress.

They are beating us at the "cost of" game by a mile, or 1.6 kilometres if we want to keep our euro standardisation fascists at bay.

We Brits think stress costs us a puny £11 billion a year. The yanks think it costs them about $300 billion (£170 billion) a year. If there are six times as Americans as us (we are counting numbers of people here, not bodily weight) then stress costs the average American 2.5 times what it costs us.

The reaction to the terror attacks might be something to do with it. The yanks are still in a panic about 9/11. The Brits have got on with life. The tube does not work, but then it never has done anyway. So life carries on. By being normal, we won and the terrorists lost. By being stressed out and in a panic, the Americans gave the terrorists an undeserved victory. So they should chill out and have fun. That would really upset the terrorists: happiness is revenge.

But Count Kostov digresses.

The $300 billion is classic "cost of" meadow mayonnaise. It goes through all three stages of bullshit:
1) The venal start. Who commissioned the work on stress? You guessed it already: the American Institute of Stress
2) The Meadow Mayonnaise moment. The AIS got what they wanted: a huge figure for the cost of stress.
3) The illogical conclusion. In Europe, the illogical conclusion is that the state should spend more money on dealing with stress, and should introduce anti-stress regulations and laws. In the land of the free, the state butts out and it is left to market forces (cue the friendly helping hand of the AIS for a very modest fee) to help businesses deal with stress or get sued for $100 billion for the stress caused by letting the coffee machine run out of raspberry and hazelnut flavoured moccachino.

2005-07-12T21:01:00.000+01:00

Count Kostov is thinking about taking up American citizenship.

Anything we can do, they can do better. We true blue Brits, even we are from Russia, can find £250 billion of costs out of the most costly wastes in society (see yesterday's blog). We are rank amateurs compared to the yanks. They can waste $759 billion (say £420 billion) on socialising alone according to CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/07/12/wasted.work.reut/index.html

We need to retaliate. What is the cost of tea dirinking for us? It must be more than the cost of tea drinking for the yanks. They threw the tea into the harbour not because of taxes, but because their tea is so bad. Boston harbour water still tastes better than American tea. Tea drinking has never recovered since that time.

Given the tea problem, perhaps we are better off over here.

2005-07-10T15:43:00.000+01:00

Count Kostov has been counting the cost of everything. We are at £250 billion annually, and counting.

Here are the current top ten costs:
1. Crime: £60 billion
2. Unemployment: £40 billion
3. Ageism: £34 billion
4. Mental ill health: £32 billion
5. Congestion: £20 billion
6. Road Accidents: £16 billion
7. Stress: £11 billion
8. Air Pollution: £11 billion
9. Absenteeism: £11 billion
10.Back Pain: £5 billion

So back pain costs are in the same league as smoking (£1.7 billion) plus alcohol abuse (£3.3 billion) plus obesity (£2 billion) combined.

In total it comes to about £250 billion every year. That is over £8000 for every household in the country. Count Kostov wants his £8000 back.

So who are these people who produce these estimates? In nearly every case it is a familiar pattern:

1. Venal start: special interest group wants to prove that there are huge costs associated with the problem they sponsor.
2. The meadow mayonnaise moment: research is commissioned which conveniently proves the point the sponsors want.
3. The illogical conclusion: more money must be spent on the problem, preferably by channelling it through the special interest lobbyists who can keep their verminous careers going.

Count Kostov invites you to submit the following ideas:
1. Any more "cost of" studies which deserve a mention and possible nomination for the annual meadow mayonnaise awards?
2. What punishment is suitable for these vermin? Like the Mikado, we "let the punishment fit the crime."

2005-07-09T19:36:00.000+01:00

My Name is Count Kostov. My friends call me Boris. I would like to remind my numerous enemies that they should call me Count. They should remember that "Count" has an "O" in it.

I hope to create many more enemies as a result of this blog.

I suffered for many years when the my glorious fatherland was ruled by a peasant from Georgia. Never let peasants run anything. None of my family's peasants could even run a bath. They made feeble excuses for this, like being too poor to buy a bath. No wonder that peasant Stalin could not run a country.

So I came to the West in search of freedom, wealth and the truth. Sex and drugs and rock and roll were also quite attractive. They are better than the salt mines. Except for Oasis.

I tell people I came above all in search of truth. Years of being fed Pravda and news bulletins which covered every minute of the deputy secretary's speech on iron production in Siberia meant that truth was a rare and valuable commodity. We had never heard the truth.

So now I am spitting my blood, which is deep blue, at your filthy vile journalists, politicians, businessmen, lobbyists and generalised hangers-on and vermin that twist and distort the truth. They claim the cost of everything is huge. It is their way of getting attention and publicity and support. They think it is in a good cause. But then they complain that no one trusts them any more. Scientists complain that no one believes the cretinous research they produce for their paymasters. You can see them dancing like puppets on their sponsor's wings.

So over the coming weeks we will expose these people who are corrupting the truth and taking us into a capitalist version of communist truth where nothing is what it seems.

You are welcome if you are fed up living on a diet of meadow mayonnaise produced by these vermin. We should open up salt mines for them specially. Or make them listen to Oasis . You are even more welcome if you spot some bovine watse in what are laughingly referred to as your newspapers. You will see the reports about "the cost of....absenteeism, traffic delays, obesity, red tape".

If you are a politician, lobbysit, lackey, servile scientist, journalist or peasant then call me Count and may Oasis come and play in your living room for all eternity.