Millions down the drain

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

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

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?

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.