From the Summit of the Moral High Ground

Bruce Heard  former staff writer and editor for TSR's Dungeons & Dragons game, based now in France recently approached the current owners (Hasbro Inc, through their wholly owned subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, the company that bought us Magic the Gathering) recently approached the owners of the D&D world of Mystara with a view to additional creativity but the response was not favourable "Some of you have known that for some time I've queried Wizards of the Coast for options to get some life back into the World of Mystara and the Princess Ark. Unfortunately, Wizards isn't interested in cooperating. This became clear when I began talking to their IP manager, who informed me that any arrangement regarding Mystara was out of the question at this time. There was no interest in anything involving a transfer of rights, a sale, a license agreement, a permission to publish, or any other option--as a matter of policy. From what I'd heard of WotC, I knew this...

I have talked previously about forming a political party as part of Jersey Reform Day. Ideally any party would want to start from a base of ten members for each electoral district. Members need to be real people and not politicians, the strength of a party lies in the volunteers, it must be built from the bottom up and not, as has previously been attempted, from the top down. The success of the A team in garnering a sizeable chunk of the vote in the recent referendum, shows the power of individuals working together towards a common goal; that the goal provided no personal gain for any of the campaigners can only restore hope for the future of Jersey. Working together the people of Jersey can get the government they deserve, it would be a shame if the efforts recently made during the referendum could not be repeated in the general election. It is one of the legal requirements of a registered party to endorse candidates during the election; the candidates do not have t...

For those of you who have been following this blog the one remaining point of contention in an otherwise worryingly free of litigation life that I lead is to do with whether or not the States of Jersey can charge GST on the rents in the Central Market . The main law regarding the public markets is a very old one ( written in 1885 ) and the 'style' of laws from that time is markedly different from today. Back then laws were written to minimise government and particularly the cost of government sadly in the modern age there has been a reversal of this and now most laws aim to generate the maximum amount of money and work for the bureaucracy (it's the only way to ensure continued 'economic growth' as the real economy is not and has not been growing in Jersey for a considerable period of time). The matter has passed through all the various departments and today I have received confirmation from the Law Officer's Department that the matter will have to be adju...

So, if it wasn’t abrupt change in the fundamental story in the various separate markets that were hit to the downside yesterday, then what the heck accounted for the steep declines in price? Stated differently, what was the common denominator present in the markets that plunged? The most visible common denominator was that the various big price declines occurred on the NYMEX/COMEX markets owned and run by the CME Group. But the most important common denominator was the nature of the buyers and sellers across all the markets that got smashed. Without exception, in any market that declined significantly, the big net buyers were the traders classified as commercials and the big net sellers were those traders classified as non-commercials, largely technical trading funds. Not only was this true yesterday, it has been true on every single big price decline throughout history, according to US Government data (COT reports). This may seem elemental, but I ask you to contemplate this anew. I...

So it is that time once more when I report the statistics to the States Statistician and it has come as something  of a shock this quarter, sales are up 130% on last year. And for those of you statistically minded that refers to just sales in the Central Market Store, excluding repairs and other services (which were down 17%) and does not include internet sales (which were up 50%). So what does these numbers say? Well with so much of Jersey's jewellery having been scrapped in the past five years (it is well over 5,000 kilos of 9ct gold which has been scrapped and that is just in local jewellers, some people prefer to get ripped off by the UK companies who come over but such is their right) there simply is not so much being repaired. It is simply not wise to scrap your gold unless you have something to spend the money on, gold is going up in value and money is going down, but that does not mean that no gold gets scrapped. Gold jewellery is now of course as expensive as it sho...