Man in a Shed: Sign of the times No 94

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Sign of the times No 94

The spam arriving in Man in a Shed's inbox has switched from fake watches and highly improbable claims I've won the Irish/EU/Microsoft lottery to offers of degree and now job offers (identity theft of course ).

We've fallen on hard times.

2 comments:

Letters From A Tory said...: You might want to forward those job offers to your readers, just in case some of them are looking to work for the former King of Nigeria.; 9:55 am
John M Ward said...: Oh, I've been getting those for a long time, usually camouflaged as "Bacheelor" degrees in the former case and a slight increase in the latter type recently.

There aren't many that are not caught by either my ISP's own filtering system or my own filters, but they're still a slight irritation. I just wish there were a way to deal with this whole issue, which is after all with criminal intent.; 11:58 am

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman