It was reported this week that South Crofty tin mine in Corwall is reopening after being closed for a decade. When South Crofty closed, it was no longer viable to extract tin from the ground in Western Europe.

However, since 1997, the price of tin has increased by three and a half times and South Crofty has become viable again. For some reason there is a bit of back-story about Cornwall County Council thinking the mine is unviable and attempting to block the restart but none the less, South Crofty mine is restarting…

…which leads to an interesting problem. In order to restart, they obviously have to recruit miners. Unfortunately, not much mining of any note has been going on in Cornwall for those 10 years since South Crofty closed so the only real option is to recall the original employees who are, of course, advancing a little in years. Quite where you recruit people to work down tin-mines in 2007 is anybody’s guess, perhaps a change in the UK economy could make that viable too.

South Crofty hope to be extracting 2,400 tonnes of tin in 2008. The mine could produce tin for up to 80 years to come.

As a result of the video I found on youtube describing the ’sub-prime’ concept, I’ve been getting a major influx of direct traffic. Examinations of the delusionofgrandeur logs seems to suggest that the link is being passed around everyone’s e:mail address-books in Norway.

I became curious as to why so many people from Norway should be so interested in subprime. The story I found is an incredibly unfortunate one.

Now, most people will have heard of the sub-prime crisis in the USA and have seen the endless videos on the news of people being forced out of their homes due to over leveraged mortagages which they can no-longer afford.

Could this be happening in Norway too? Apparently it is not.

What has actually happened is that a banking group known as Terra Gruppen sold funds to four Norwegian public municipalities to buy massively complex investment products from Citigroup. In effect the municipalities borrowed money from Terra Gruppen which they then invested in the securities from Citigroup. The investments were high risk with small potential gains and big potential losses. This may sound a rather strange thing to be doing as a public body but this practice has actually existed in Norway since 2001.

Some might think that no harm is done, the money is not from the public purse as it is borrowed and will be paid back with the gains from the investment…right?

Wrong. It all broke down when the hedge fund turned bad. The subprime crisis in the USA hit Citigroup and the investments hard. Now the four public municipalities have to cover the short-fall in the investments with public funds. One small town has reportedly been unable to meet this weeks payroll so bad is the situation.

In essence these Norwegian people have been hit by the US sub prime crisis through no fault of their own. Their politicians have taken them into an investment that they had no real say over and now the people are having to pay for their politician’s mistakes.

The crisis is the hottest item in the news in Norway and is being referred to as the Terra Securities Scandal

I’m crossing my fingers and hoping we don’t have any poisons like this one waiting to hatch in the UK.

Earlier on, I was checking the delusionofgrandeur server logs and I nearly feel out of my chair when I discovered…..

….wait for it….

…what do you mean you guessed by the picture? ….oh.

That’s right, we were visited by a user of the hallowed Playstation 3. I feel privileged that perhaps as much as one fifth of the world’s Playstation 3 userbase chooses to read delusionofgrandeur (They may have even paid Five Hundred and Ninety Nine US Dollars for the experience!). It appears that the PS3 has an integrated web-browser that simply identifies itself as PLAYSTATION 3 Suggestion to Sony; check caps lock

To PS3 User; If you happen to come back, please let us know if you’re using or intend to use Linux on your Playstation 3

If you’ve seen the news in the UK in the last couple of days, you’ll be aware that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs has managed to lose the digital records of 25 million British citizens in the post and exposed them to potential identity theft.

For those not aware, briefly: The National Audit office requested a sample of National Insurance numbers of Child Benefit claimants from HMRC stripped of any other data. HMRC therefore sent the entire record of all British child benefit claimants on apparently unencrypted CD-Rs via unrecorded delivery. Almost inevitably, these disks have been lost in the post. The data contained on the disks includes:

• Name
• Address
• Date of Birth
• National Insurance Number
• Bank details (or, presumably PO accounts)

The details cover 7.25 million families, a total of 25 million records of both the claimants and their children.

Now, HMRC have stated that they do not believe that the disks have fallen into the wrong hands. However, this is based on their being no evidence of fraud being perpetrated using these details as of yet. The fact of the matter seems to be that HMRC and the Police simply have no idea where the disks are.

Furthermore the Chancellor, Darling, mentioned that the records were contained within “password protected” files. I take this to mean that they were in unencrypted ‘password locked’ zipfiles or similar, otherwise the Chancellor would have been telling us all not to worry as the encryption could not be broken. Exactly how hard can it be to use something like Truecrypt to secure files?

The Real Risk

Another red-herring from the Chancellor, Darling, was that banks were now monitoring accounts for suspicious activity. Any even moderately organised criminal worth his or her salt will not be bothering to try to access people’s accounts with this information. They will appreciate that if the information relates to benefit claimant’s details then the likely hood of any given account containing much money at any given time is rather slim.

Instead, they would use the details they have acquired to assume the identity of the person from any given record. This stolen identity would then be used to take out lines of credit in the victim’s name. This is the most common use of identity theft. With the details that have gone missing, it should be trivial, for example, to obtain items like birth certificates to further back up the identity-thief’s operations.

Unfortunatly, when identity theft is used to perpetrate credit fraud, no amount of checking your current account will help you. Only the likes of Experian and Equifax can tell you if someone is taking out credit in your name without your knowledge and their service is both chargeable and reactive (They can only tell you it’s happening after it has happened).

As anyone who lives in the UK will know, our remaining automotive industry is exceptionally thin on the ground. With the loss of Rover in 2005, there is now no major domestic car manufacturer under British ownership.

In the interests of unfounded optimism, I thought I’d have a look at which of the time-served British marques were still owned by British companies and could potentially (although not probably) be used for future British car production. Marked in Red are marques that are still owned by UK companies, in Blue are UK companies still manufacturing cars and in black are names that have been aquired by foreign companies.

• AC Active: Alan Lubinsky (Hal Far, Malta)

• Austin Defunct: Nanjing Automobile Group (China)

• Bristol Active: Tony Crook (UK!)

• BSA Defunct as a manufacture, now parts company UK

• Daimler Active: Ford Motor Company (USA)

• Jaguar Active: TATA Motor Company (India)

• Land Rover Active: TATA Motor Company (India)

• Leyland Defunct: Possibly Volvo or Nanjing

• Lotus Very active UK company. Majority shares probably held by Proton via LGIL

• MG Active: Nanjing Automobile Group (China)

• Mini Active: Formerly a model name, now a marque (capitalised as MINI) BMW (Germany)

• Morgan Active: Charles Morgan (UK!)

• Morris Defunct: Nanjing Automobile Group (China)

• Nuffield Defunct: Possibly now Nanjing Automotive (China)

• Riley Defunct: BMW (Germany)

• Rover Defunct: Ford Motor Company (USA)

• Triumph Defunct as a car manufacturer. Offshoot Triumph Motorcycles is active. BMW owns Triumph cars brand.

• Vauxhall Active: General Motors (USA)

• Wolseley Motor Company Defunct: Nanjing Automobile Group (China)

Out of the remaining names, Lotus is the biggest operation and is still a fairly autonomous company despite much of it’s shares being owned by overseas companies. Morgan are still very British and are experimenting with hydrogen fuel-cell cars and Bristol are still Bristol

I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the UK fuel price of late as it was last seen increasing at a rate of up to 0.3p/litre/day.

Unfortunately, my primary data source, the UK AA website stopped updating with the fuel price at 101.2p/litre on Tuesday. The same happened for Petrolprices.com

Petrolprices.com say they use fuel-card user data to compile a daily survey of about 8,000 petrol stations across the country to calculate the average price. It is not immediately clear why the data would suddenly become unavailable. The AA website says that they source data from Catalist Ltd & Arval.

Extrapolating from Tuesday’s data, the current average price of a litre of unleaded could be 101.8p/litre by now.

So, does anyone know of an alternate source for up-to-date fuel price data?

Photo credit: Steevven1