10 funniest jokes of the Edinburgh fringe

Source: The Guardian

1. Darren Walsh: I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It’s Hans free.

2. Stewart Francis: Kim Kardashian is saddled with a huge arse … but enough about Kanye West.

3. Adam Hess: Surely every car is a people carrier?

4. Masai Graham: What’s the difference between a hippo and a Zippo? One is really heavy, the other is a little lighter.

5. Dave Green: If I could take just one thing to a desert island, I probably wouldn’t go.

6. Mark Nelson: Jesus fed 5,000 people with two fishes and a loaf of bread. That’s not a miracle. That’s tapas.

7. Tom Parry: Red sky at night: shepherd’s delight. Blue sky at night: day.

8. Alun Cochrane: The first time I met my wife, I knew she was a keeper. She was wearing massive gloves.

9. Simon Munnery: Clowns divorce: custardy battle.

10. Grace the Child: They’re always telling me to live my dreams. But I don’t want to be naked in an exam I haven’t revised for.

Honourable Mentions

Jenny Collier: I never lie on my CV, because it creases it.

Ian Smith: If you don’t know what introspection is, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself.

Tom Ward: I usually meet my girlfriend at 12:59 because I like that one-to-one time.

Gyles Brandreth: Whenever I get to Edinburgh, I’m reminded of the definition of a gentleman. It’s someone who knows how to play the bagpipes, but doesn’t.

Ally Houston: Let me tell you a little about myself. It’s a reflexive pronoun that means “me”.

James Acaster: Earlier this year I saw The Theory of Everything – loved it. Should’ve been called Look Who’s Hawking, that’s my only criticism.

Is the game up for China’s much emulated growth model?

Jayati Ghosh in The Guardian



Illustration by Robert G Fresson



Whatever happened to emerging markets? Brics, Mints, whatever global investors call them: For a while it appeared as if countries such as Brazil, India and Turkey had secure and buoyant futures, regardless of the travails of advanced economies. There was much trumpeting of their advantages, such as the demographic bulges producing young populations. Few asked about the nature of the growth, or whether it could last. The euphoria spread, leading to large private-capital inflows that pushed up asset prices in these countries.

That already seems a long time ago, as investor opinion has done yet another volte face. Investors who were slow to read the tea leaves during the boom times have now taken fright. In just 13 months, capital outflows from these countries have crossed $1tn. Stock markets have tanked across countries as distant and diverse as Malaysia, India, South Africa and Brazil; currencies have depreciated; and bond issues are slowing down, with fewer takers.

For a change, this is not being driven by policy in the developed world. Unlike the “taper tantrum” unleashed in mid-2013 by Ben Bernanke, the then US Federal Reserve chairman – when he simply announced the possibility of reducing the massive liquidity stimulus that was being provided in the US – the current skittishness in emerging markets is the fallout of what is happening in China. This is hugely important, not just because of China’s major role in global trade, but because it signifies the end of a particular growth strategy that many other countries were trying to emulate.

The recent travails of China’s economy are well known by now: falling real estate prices put paid to the construction boom, and the subsequent bursting of the stock market bubble was hamfistedly controlled through official measures. But these current difficulties are the outcome of earlier economic strategies that were widely celebrated, when the going was good.

From the early 1990s China adopted an export-led strategy that delivered continuously increasing shares of the world market, fed by relatively low wages and very high rates of investment, enabling massive increases in infrastructure. It led to big increases in inequality and even bigger environmental problems, but the strategy seemed to work – until 2008-09, when exports were hit by the global financial crisis.

Yet even then, China, India and other large emerging markets continued to grow. The talk at the time was that they were already “decoupled” from the west. In reality, China (and much of developing Asia) had simply shifted to a different engine of growth without abandoning the focus on exports. The Chinese authorities could have generated more domestic demand by stimulating consumption through rising wage shares of national income, but this would have threatened their export-driven model. Instead they put their faith in even more accumulation to keep growth rates buoyant.

So the “recovery package” in China essentially encouraged more investment, which was already nearly half of GDP. Provincial governments and public sector enterprises were encouraged to borrow heavily and invest in infrastructure, construction and more production capacity. To utilise the excess capacity, a real estate and construction boom was instigated, fed by lending from public sector banks as well as “shadow banking” activities winked at by regulators. Total debt in China increased fourfold between 2007 and 2014, and the debt-GDP ratio nearly doubled to more than over 280%.

We now know that these debt-driven bubbles end in tears. The property boom began to subside in early 2014, and real estate prices have been stagnant or falling ever since. Chinese investors then shifted to the stock market, which began to sizzle – once again actively encouraged by the Chinese government. The crash that followed has been contained only because the government pulled out all the stops to prevent further falls.

All this comes in the midst of an overall slowdown in China’s economy. Exports fell by around 8% in the year to July. Manufacturing output is falling, and jobs are being shed. Construction activity has almost halted, especially in the proliferating “ghost towns” dotted around the country. Stimulus measures such as interest rate cuts don’t seem to be working. So the recent devaluation of the yuan– which has been dressed up as a “market-friendly” measure – is clearly intended to help revive the economy.

But it will not really help. Demand from the advanced countries – still the driver of Chinese exports and indirectly of exports of other developing countries – will stay sluggish. Meanwhile, China’s slowdown infects other emerging markets across the world as its imports fall even faster than its exports and its currency moves translate into capital outflows in other countries.

The pain is felt by commodity producers and intermediate manufacturers from Brazil to Nigeria and Thailand, with the worst impacts in Asia, where China was the hub of an export-oriented production network. Many of these economies are experiencing collapses of their own property and financial asset bubbles, with negative effects on domestic demand. The febrile behaviour of global finance is making things worse.

This is not the end of the emerging markets, but is – or should be – the end of this growth model. Relying only on exports or debt-driven bubbles to deliver rapid growth cannot work for long. And when the game is finally up, there can be severe political fallout. For developing countries to truly “emerge”, a more inclusive strategy is essential.

Once, firms cherished their workers. Now they are seen as disposable

Will Hutton in The Guardian


 

July 1909: a street in Bournville village near Birmingham, a new town founded by chocolate manufacturer and social reformer George Cadbury. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images



More than 100 years ago, the Cadbury family built a model town, Bournville, for their workers, away from the overcrowded tenements of central Birmingham. Cadbury’s vast chocolate factory was at the centre of thousands of purpose-built villas, a village green, schools, churches and civic halls.

The message was clear. Cadbury cherished and invested in their workers, expecting commitment and loyalty back, which they got. Sir Adrian Cadbury, now in his 80s, still proudly shows visitors how his Quaker forefathers felt a genuine sense of responsibility to their workers. His family believed in capitalism for a purpose – innovation and human betterment.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, would regard the Cadbury family as crazed. His relationship with his workforce is entirely transactional: they are to give their heart and soul to Amazon, undertaking to follow Amazon’s “leadership principles”, set on a laminated card given to every employee, and can expect to be summarily sacked if they don’t make the grade. These injunctions are aimed at not only Amazon’s fork-lift truck drivers and packagers but also at its executive workforce.

At first glance, the principles seem unexceptional, exhorting “ Amazonians” to be obsessed with customers, drive for the best and think big. In practice, they mean workers have to be available to Amazon virtually every waking hour, as a devastating article claimed in last week’s New York Times. The workers should attack each other’s ideas in the name of “creative challenge” and buy into the paranoid culture Bezos believes is essential to business success, with their hourly performance fed into computers for Big Brother Bezos to monitor.

Working at Amazon has become synonymous with stress, conflict and tears – or, if you swim rather than sink, a chance to flourish. It is, as one former executive described it, “purposeful Darwinism”: if the majority of the workforce can flourish in such a culture, you have a successful company. Bezos would claim in his defence that he has founded the US’s most valuable retailer that ships two billion items a year. Cadbury ended up being taken over. Better his approach to capitalism than defunct Quakers, except now everyone is expendable. This is the route to success. Or is it?

The nature of firms is changing. The capitalist world of the so-called golden age between 1945 and the first oil crisis in 1974 was defined by Cadbury-type companies. Even if they didn’t build estates in which their workers could live, big companies offered paid holidays, guaranteed pensions related to your final salary, sickness benefit and recognised trade unions. Above all, they offered the chance of a career and personal progression.

This was the domain of the corporation man commuting to a steady job in a steady office in a steady company with their blue-collar counterparts no less secure in a steady factor. It delivered though. If western economies could again grow consistently at 3% or 4%, underpinned by matching growth in productivity, there would be delight all round.

The companies were much more exciting than they looked. They were purposeful – repositories of skills and knowledge, seeking out new markets, applying new technologies with an appetite for growth. In Britain, great companies such as ICI, Glaxo, EMI, Unilever, Thorn, British Aircraft Corporation, Marconi along with Cadbury were centres of growth and innovation.

A critical doctrine at the time was they were held back by trade unions and soft economic policy that encouraged inflation. The proof that inflation was so damaging is scant and beyond the print, coal, rail and motor industries, British trade unions were pretty weak and pliant. What instead held these companies back was the evaporation of the guaranteed markets of empire. Second, a short-term, gentlemanly, disengaged financial system was unable to mobilise resource behind these companies and their greater purpose as imperial markets shrank. That wasn’t widely understood then – and certainly not now. Instead, the economic problem was defined as pampered, unionised workers, a view further entrenched by an avalanche of free-market economics from the US. Worker privileges and rights must cease.

So to the firm of today. The new model firm no longer has workers who are members of the organisation in a relationship of mutual respect and shared mission with committed, long-term owners; rather, the new ownerless corporation with its tourist shareholders employs contractors who have to pay for benefits themselves and can be hired and fired at will.
They are throwaway people, middle-class workers at risk as much as their working-class peers. Unions are not welcome; pension benefits are scaled back; sickness, paternity and maternity benefits are pitched at the regulatory minimum. Last week, the Citizens Advice Bureau said it estimated that 460,000 people nationwide had been defined by employers as self-employed (and thus entitled to no company benefits), even though they worked regularly for one employer, often in office roles. It is the same approach that has delivered 1.4 million zero-hours contracts. All this allegedly is to serve growth. Except over the last 20 years, growth, productivity and innovation in both Britain and America have collapsed. These new firms whose only purpose is short-term profit with contractualised workforces turn out to be poor creators of long-term value. The exceptions, paradoxically, are the great hi-tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook.

The alchemy of their success is they combine innovative technology, produce at continental scale, invest heavily and commit to a great purpose, usually because of the powerful personal commitment of the founder. Bezos may have constructed a Darwinian work environment but it is all “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company”. He has invested hugely to achieve that end, but his workplaces, by contrast, seem terrible.

But even Bezos does not want to be depicted as an employer with no moral centre: he urged his employees to read the offending article and refer examples of bad practice to his human resources department.

Ultimately, long-term value creation can’t be done by treating your workforces as cattle. It’s the great debate about today’s capitalism. It would be a triumph if it was taken more seriously in Britain.

What happens when an Ashley Madison-shaped bomb goes off in your marriage?

Helen Croydon in The Telegraph

As Loraine, 43, put her three-year-old daughter to bed in their home in Windsor she received a text from her husband. Instead of his usual “almost home” cheery tone, what she opened ripped her world apart. It was an explicit message clearly intended for someone else – another woman. “It pains me to recall the words but suffice to say it was obvious they had either had sex, or were about to.” She says. “I went into shock. I felt sick. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t think straight. I had so many questions for him.”

She confronted him and he claimed it was harmless flirtation with someone he’d met on an evening out with friends. But weeks later when Loraine logged on to the family computer, she found a page open at an email account under an alias name. The inbox was full of messages from women and notifications from a dating site which, like Ashley Madison, appeared to be aimed at married people seeking affairs.

“What followed was the worst few weeks of my life,” says Lorraine. “It sucked every ounce of self-confidence out of me. I started to blame and question myself. I wondered if I’d been giving too much attention to my daughter and neglected him. He admitted he had a problem, akin to an addiction. I did my best to understand it. I wanted things to be right. I wanted to whitewash it, press reset. I even stepped up efforts in our relationship – that’s how much I wanted it to work. I was super strong and thought ‘we’ll get through this – some good will come from it’. But inside I was devastated.”

Lorraine’s earth shattering discovery happened three years ago and a year later brought about the end of her marriage.

More than a million Britons fear their work and home lives could be wrecked after their details were leaked online by hackers who published the entire database of the Ashley Madison adultery website

How many couples around the world face similar ordeals this week as they deal with the fallout from the Ashley Madison hacking scandal? An anonymous group calling itself The Impact Team went through with its threat to publish personal details of its 37 million worldwide subscribers. It first dumped the data on the dark web, but it didn’t take long for the information to drip-feed on to the mainstream internet. Several sites sprung up allowing worried spouses to check whether their other halves were straying by entering their email address. One internet user who claimed to have created a searchable database reportedly saw their website crash within minutes of going live.

More than 100 UK government email addresses was among those leaked, as well as more than 20 BBC ones, but it was unclear how many were genuine users of the site. Michelle Thomson, one of the SNP’s newly-elected Westminster MPs, was along those who said someone had stolen her email address and used it without her knowledge.

Within days, relationship counseling service Relate was receiving calls from people who had discovered partners’ details among the data and had their infidelity confirmed to them. Family law firms also report they have been contacted by suspicious spouses since the leak.

Many have taken to the internet forum SurvivingInfidelity.com to express their shock and seek advice. It makes for moving reading: “I had been hoping against hope that my husband would not show up on the list but it seems that he is….This nightmare never seems to end,” says one. Others share tips on how to access the data: “I’d be HAPPY to pay someone to mine the data, package it up and send it to me. Surely this service will be offered shortly, right?”

The group behind the attack apparently have a gripe not only with the morals of a website offering an illicit playroom to married people, but with Ashley Madison’s practice of charging its subscribers to delete information. “Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion. Too bad for ALM (the company behind Ashley Madison), you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver,” the hackers wrote last month.

Founder of the site, Noel Biderman, said: 'The reason we’ve been so successful is because monogamy is counter to our DNA'

But public exposure could prove an irresponsible means of justice. Susan Quilliam, a relationship psychologist and author of The New Joy of Sex, says discovering a partner’s infidelity can cause more devastation to the innocent party than the guilty one. “When you lose a relationship and you weren’t expecting to lose it, there is betrayal, shock, horror, bereavement, denial, depression. It impacts on family, friends, relatives. In a way it’s worse than a bereavement. With a bereavement you lose the future with them. When you discover casual infidelity you lose the past too.”

And what of the danger to those whose details have been leaked in punitive regimes? Data monitoring group CybelAngel says there are 1,200 email addresses with a Saudi Arabian suffix, where adultery is punishable by death. Also included are names on Ashley Madison’s gay encounters site, many from countries where homosexuality is illegal. Blackmailers have reportedly been trawling through the database in an attempt to extort users.

The Canadian company behind Ashley Madison, Avid Life Media, has long defended its business principle, claiming humans have cheated for centuries and they are merely enabling people to meet their sexual needs free from emotional complications. The founder of the site, Noel Biderman, told me in an interview in April this year: “The reason we’ve been so successful is because monogamy is counter to our DNA…What we’ve done is created a platform where likeminded individuals can be more honest and open about their intentions than they could be on [other sites].”

There may well be plenty of anthropological arguments to support the “monogamy is unnatural” thesis, but there are plenty more in favour of a little self-control.

As Quilliam points out, too much of a good thing can lead to problems: “Men and women have always had urges for short-term sexual encounters but in previous years we didn’t have the opportunity. Now it’s available. It’s online. Because it’s so easy there is a danger of getting addicted to the high. There is a dopamine rush with every message and every encounter. We try to curb smoking by making it not readily available, banning it indoors etc. Perhaps we should be thinking about what we can access online.”

When Lorraine discovered her husband’s secret dating life, she created a fake profile to try and understand why her husband would want to betray her. “The only way to forgive was to try to understand it,” she explains. What she discovered angered her: “If you don’t log on for a while you get reminders, or incentives like a month’s free membership. They even give tips on how not to get caught. On bank statements the name of the transaction is disguised – they’ve got it all sorted. It’s actively encouraging deceit. Obviously if someone wants to cheat they will cheat, but these sites accelerate a behaviour pattern. It’s like giving a drugs to drug addicts and then putting them all together to encourage each other.”

'Despite the morally questionable tagline, 'Life is short, have an affair,' Ashley Madison’s popularity is undeniable'

Despite the morally questionable tagline, “Life is short, have an affair,” Ashley Madison’s popularity is undeniable. It claims thirty-seven million members in 50 countries worldwide, including 1.2 million in UK and reports a growth in membership of 20% since March this year (although a growing number of supposed members whose details have been leaked online insist they had never even heard of it). And it is just one of a growing number of so-called cheating dating sites.

Nor is it just men who may be feeling nervous this week. Ashley Madison recently told the Telegraph it has more female members than men, although it refuses to disclose how many are active. A source close to the FBI investigation into the leak has, morever, told this newspaper that many of the female profiles on the site appear to have been created by a relatively small number of individuals. Men pay to send and receive messages. Women do not, and it has been claimed that fake profiles are created to reel in husbands.

There are plenty who support the actions of the hackers. Denise Knowles a counselor at Relate, says: “When something like this comes into the public arena people take time and take stock to look at their relationship. When a secret like this is discovered, it can open up the possibility of talking about things and it can give the opportunity for good to come out of it.”

But for Lorraine, no amount of talking could fix her relationship. Discovery of her husband’s sordid secret spelled the end. “I absolutely did not want to divorce him but it was always the elephant in the room,” she says. “I’m still heartbroken and I can’t explain to my daughter why we separated. If I hadn’t found what I did, we’d have made it.”

What may have been intended by the hackers as a self-righteous pop at philanderers around the world is fast escalating into something with far graver consequences. The data even included extracts from profiles, quoting cringeworthy descriptions of sexual fantasies. It was perhaps an attempt at ridicule, expected to be greeted by nothing more than sniggers. The reality is that the biggest cost is not to the adulterers being exposed, but the families affected.