Oh.

Members of the For Dog Sake dog rescue centre, based in Kells Athboy, Co Meath – including Claire McMorrow (top) and Jennifer Dalrymple – were in Dublin on Saturday to raise funds fro the charity.

(Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hkAfd2vBOI

Mmf. Promised we wouldn’t…cry.

Thanks Virginia Thomas

Nobel Prize-winning cat lover Paul Krugman writes:

One of the reasons Ireland has been touted as a great success story for austerity is the fact that unit labor costs have fallen sharply, suggesting that Ireland is well along in the process of “internal devaluation”.

But there’s a puzzle here. If you look at Irish nominal wages, they have fallen only slightly:

That still adds up to a significant fall in relative costs, because wages have risen elsewhere in the euro area. But it’s nothing like the big competitiveness gain we’ve been hearing about. That, it turns out, comes in large part from a surge in measured productivity, calculated, as best I can tell, by real value-added per worker.

And I had a suspicion here, which I shared with Kevin O’Rourke, who it turns out had the same suspicion — and who pointed me to work by the Irish central bank (see Box A in the first-quarter 2011 report) that lends support to this argument. It seems likely that a large part of the apparent gain in Irish competitiveness is a statistical illusion.

How so? Well, Ireland is an economy that generates a lot of GDP — but not much GNP — out of capital-intensive, foreign-owned export sectors, such as pharma. And what has happened in the austerity era is that these sectors, which aren’t selling to the domestic market, have held up much better than labor-intensive sectors serving that domestic market. And this causes a spurious increase in labor productivity: if you lay off a construction worker but don’t lay off a pharma worker who basically watches over very expensive machines that produce a lot of output, it looks as if productivity has gone up, but in any individual sector nothing has happened.

It’s a bit small, but the line at the bottom shows relative unit labor costs the way they’re often reported; the blue line at the top shows what happens when you correct for compositional effects.

I’d like to see an update, of course. But it looks as though much — not all — of the apparent success of Ireland in achieving internal devaluation may be a statistical illusion.

.

Irish Competitiveness (Wonkish) – Paul Krugman, New York Times

John Eves writes:

Hey, thought you might be interested in a Physics themed Christmas Carol Physics FM recorded with the Rathdown TY Physics class. Listen here for the choon “Merry Physmas Everyone”

Merry Physmas, Everyone

Snow is falling cos of gravity,
It’s why the earth moves around the sun
Force of attraction between two point masses
Christmas physics for everyone

Force is mass times acceleration, second law of Isaac Newton,
all important when I’m on my sleigh ride
laws of physics at Christmas time

We’re gonna build a circuit tonight
having bulbs in series means if 1 bulb blows must replace it or my Christmas tree won’t light.

Cooking my turkey, in an oven
making blackbody radiation
was the source of the ultraviolet catastrophe
gave us the physics we call quantum

Santa travels the world in one night,
Physics laws are broken cause Einstein says nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

Flying reindeers, complex physics
Further research must be done
Laws of physics don’t apply to Santa
No more physics for everyone.

Thanks Orlaith Shore

The Data Protection Commission has given Eircom 21 days to respond to its decision to instruct the operator to halt its ‘three strikes’ policy against music piracy. Under the policy, users caught downloading copyrighted material would be warned three times otherwise their broadband would be cut off for 12 months.

The decision will come as a blow to the recorded music industry which, as part of a settlement in a court case against Eircom in 2009, got the incumbent operator to agree to implement a ‘three strikes’ policy to combat the wholesale downloading of copyrighted material.

This set in motion a court battle between the record companies and UPC, which declined to implement a similar policy. UPC won the case in October last year.

As part of the agreement between Eircom and the record labels, IRMA would provide Eircom with notifications that would contain the IP address identified with illegal downloading activity along with evidence. The IP addresses were understood to be captured and processed on behalf of IRMA by a third party.

Eircom Has 21 days To Respond To Halt ‘Three Strikes’ Order By DPC (Silicon Republic)

Earlier: Access: Denied

Thanks Dave G K