Month: 80’1’02 (2012-01-15)

bookmark_borderA minimum price of £18 for one copy of a magazine

Posted on by thomas

According to this article (in Danish), the Danish government is considering a radical price increase for foreign magazines.

At the moment, letters and parcels from outside the EU go through customs without any interference if the value is less than 80 Danish crowns (£9). However, if the value is more than £9, it will in most cases be intercepted, and Danish VAT (25%) is added (as well as any other custom duties that might apply); on top of this, the Danish HMRC add a handling fee of 160 crowns (£18). You’ll also need to pick up your parcel from the post office so that you can pay the fee at the same time. The effect currently is that Danes tend to order very cheap products from outside the EU, or very expensive ones, so that the £18 fee doesn’t make up too large a part of the final price.

However, the Danes are considering to remove the £9 limit in order to catch also magazines printed abroad. The effect will be that if you buy a magazine sent from the US costing £4 per issue, you’ll now have to pay £4 + £1 (VAT) + £18 (handling fee) = £23, as well as having to pick it up from the post office instead of having it delivered to you.

The idea behind the change is to prevent Danish magazines from being printed and delivered from Norway, which seems to happen frequently at the moment (for some bizarre reason that is significantly cheaper than doing it in Denmark).

However, whereas these Danish magazines from Norway will just move to some other location within the EU, the real victims of the proposed change will be Danes with special interests that are best catered for by foreign magazines, and especially foreigners in Denmark who are trying to keep up to date with developments in their home countries.

I really don’t understand how the Danish government can even consider such a ridiculous proposal. From my point of view it’s insular, xenophobic, anti-intellectual and just plain stupid.

bookmark_borderA Scottish currency board

Posted on by thomas

Several articles, such as this one in the Scotsman, have covered the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s announcement that Scotland after independence won’t be able to use the pound:

The Treasury confirmed that, while it could not block Scotland from using the currency, it could be reduced to a situation where it had no say in fiscal policy, was prevented from printing its own money and was locked out of any valuation decisions.

Treasury officials confirmed this would mean Scottish banks, which are licensed by the Bank of England to print their own notes, would be barred from doing so in the event of independence.

Royal Bank of Scotland, Clydesdale Bank and Lloyds-owned Bank of Scotland are able to print bank notes with the faces of famous Scots, in a long tradition that has been symbolic of Scottish identity.

Whereas there’s nothing Scotland can do about being locked out from England’s fiscal policy – but to be honest, it currently tends to cater for the needs of the City of London anyway – an independent country can certainly make its own decisions about printing bank notes.

I would recommend creating a Scottish pound after independence, locking it to the English pound using a currency board. This basically means that the Central Bank of Scotland would store English pounds in its vaults and print Scottish pound notes and mint Scottish coins in the same amounts.

The advantage – apart from having distinctive Scottish money – would be that it would be easy to break the peg and link the Scottish pound to the euro instead if that was decided to be desirable. If English money was used directly, that would be much harder.

Lots of countries use currency boards, and they work really well, so it’s a no-brainer to use one at first, at least until Scotland has been seen to have a strong economy, after which it might even be desirable to let the Scottish pound float freely.

bookmark_borderMultiple categories in WordPress – an undocumented feature?

Posted on by thomas

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a way to find postings that are filed under two or more categories in WordPress. It’s very easy to click on any of the categories in the column on the far left to find all blog postings within this category, but how do you find all blog postings about linguistics in Danish, or the blog postings I’ve written in English about Scottish politics?

I assumed there was no easy way to do it. I read the documentation I could find, I searched through lots of of WordPress plugins, but to no avail.

Today I then suddenly got the idea to see whether they had implemented it anyway, so I decided to try the different URLs that would make sense to me as a programmer.

My first instinct was to try a ‘+’ sign, and much to my surprise it actually worked!

For instance, category/fooddrink+es gives you food and drink in Spanish, linguistics+da gives you linguistics in Danish, and politics+en+scotland gives you Scottish politics in English.

You even seem to be able to get a feed, such as category/kids+linguistics/feed for the RSS feed for kids & linguistics.

The only problem seems to be that the generated heading is wrong – I’ll need to have a look at that to see whether it’s something I can fix.

bookmark_borderSå blev den mindste to år gammel

Posted on by thomas


Bops
Originally uploaded by PhylB

Amaia fyldte to år i dag.

Vi fejrede hende på sædvanlig manér med fælles morgenmad for os alle syv, fødselsdagslagkage om eftermiddagen, og aftensmad bestående af suppe, pizza og is.

Det er altså lidt underligt, når ens yngste fylder år. Mine to døtre er nu to og fire, og selvom jeg husker deres fødsler, som var det i går, så er de jo altså ikke små spædbørn længere, og om blot elve år er de begge teenagere!

Men sådan er det vel. Når man selv er barn, snegler tiden sig afsted, og blot de fireogtyve dage op til jul virker som en evighed. Når man så er voksen, føles det som om, ens børn har fødselsdag en gang om måneden, og de bliver store meget hurtigere, end man kan følge med.

Men stort tillykke til min store lille Amaia!

bookmark_borderAutumn 2014

Posted on by thomas

Today the Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Moore, was making an announcement in the UK Parliament about giving the Scottish Parliament the right to call a referendum on independence, so long as they do it the way Westminster wanted and do it soon, when Salmond went on Sky News to announce that the referendum will take place in the autumn of 2014.

Salmond usually wins in situations like this, so I’m 99% certain that the referendum will indeed take place then.

Here are a couple of interesting blog postings from today, one about Salmond running rings around Cameron, and another about why the SNP are outgunning the Coalition.

It will be interesting to see what will happen to the remaining UK after Scotland leaves. I wouldn’t be surprised if Northern Ireland will find it hard to cope without Scotland, so it’s entirely possible that Scottish independence will be followed by Irish unification. However, I’m very happy to be corrected by somebody with better knowledge of the politics of Northern Ireland.

However, if I’m right, perhaps Wikipedia will contain the following chart in twenty years’ time (based on this):

I might be getting ahead of myself, however. There’s a referendum to be won in the autumn of 2014, and I intend to do as much as I can to make it a resounding YES!

bookmark_borderEngelsk eller dansk

Posted on by thomas


026/365 – Let it snow!
Originally uploaded by kmardahl

Handelshøjskolen i København (eller Copenhagen Business School, som de kalder sig nu) blev vist ret sure, da en af deres kandidater fik at vide, at hun ikke kunne blive dansk statsborger, da hun havde fuldført et engelsksproget studium:

Af Justitsministeriets (Indfødsretskontorets) afslag af 16. november 2011 på Pavlina Ivanovas ansøgning om at opnå dansk statsborgerskab ved naturalisation fremgik det, at ”ministeriet ikke finder, at du kan omfattes af reglerne i § 11 i cirkulæreskrivelse nr. 61 af 22. september 2008 om retningslinjer for naturalisation, idet man ikke anser din cand.merc.-uddannelse i Finance and Strategic Management fra CBS for at opfylder betingelsen om at uddannelsen skal være ”af dansk karakter”, eftersom undervisningen og eksaminer på uddannelsen udelukkende er foregået på et andet sprog end dansk.”

Den var ny. En cand.merc.-uddannelse fra CBS er udviklet og udbudt på et statsfinansieret dansk universitet, er akkrediteret af ACE Denmark, og er godkendt af Uddannelsesministeriet (der sågar har en Styrelse for International Uddannelse, der skal fremme internationaliseringen af de danske uddannelser på alle niveauer, under sig) og er reguleret af dansk lovgivning på lige fod med CBS’ øvrige uddannelser. Skulle den være udansk? Ikke i CBS’ optik.

Men det er jo et interessant spørgsmål. Man kan godt få det indtryk, at danskere synes, at engelsk i Danmark er skønt, så længe det er engelsk talt af danskere, ikke hvis engelsk bruges af udlændinge, der bor i Danmark.

Men sagen er jo den, at den nuværende situation ikke kan forventes at være permanent. Hvis danske uddannelser og arbejdspladser i stigende grad er engelsksprogede, så vil der efterhånden opstå en større og større gruppe af mennesker, der bor i Danmark, men kun taler nødtørftigt dansk, da de bruger engelsk 95% af tiden.

Alt, der mangler, er, at det bliver tilladt at kommunikere med de offentlige myndigheder på engelsk, og så vil gruppen af engelsktalende nydanskere formentlig vokse år for år. Men tiden vil der sikkert også være forældre, som ikke engang kan se pointen i at lære deres børn ordentligt dansk.

Hvis det ikke er det, man vil, så bør man nok snart begynde at værne noget mere om det danske sprogs position ved ikke konstant at øge mængden af sammenhænge, hvor man kan (eller skal) bruge engelsk i stedet for dansk.

bookmark_borderA symbol for “is pronounced the same as”

Posted on by thomas

Yesterday’s blog posting made me think about the lack of a symbol for “is pronounced the same as”.

What I mean is that instead of writing that “write is pronounced the same as right“, we could just write “write ? right“.

I here used the symbol “?”, not because I think it’s ideal, but because it’s available. Other available Unicode characters based on the equal sign include the following: ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

However, ideally I think I’d want square brackets on top of an equal sign because pronunciations are given in square brackets, like this:

Does anybody know of any existing symbol that has been used for this?