$20 trillion for telly

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

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

$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.

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.

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.

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......

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.