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Trust matters. – politicalbetting.com
Trust matters. – politicalbetting.com
Kwasi Kwarteng is I’m sure an intelligent man, but by arguing that fraud is not “real crime” or “what people feel” replaces the actual data, he is downplaying the impact of crime on ordinary citizens whilst trying to defend his lying Prime Minister pic.twitter.com/GzsimkrJOZ
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The phenomenon of the virtual de-criminalisation of certain crimes is a fascinating one. In the case of fraud, it seems it is cheaper to compensate (most of) the victims of such crimes, via insurance. It's just the cost of doing business etc....
What seems to happen is the building up of a wall of resistance to prosecuting the de-criminalised crimes. "Not in the public interest", "Needs to take into account community issues" etc etc.
In one way the Nat West 3 did some good in the UK - prosecutors seemed to wake up (again) to the possibility of prosecuting financial crime. They had longs slept on the issue, after a series of high profile cases had collapsed after vast expense.
Advocates of de-criminalising petty theft/shop lifting leave out the distress and anxiety caused to the victims. When someone steals, often aggressively, from the little shop that is your livelihood, on a weekly basis.. And nothing is done... well, not surprisingly, the victims start having all kinds of problems.
And, also, it seems to be pretty easy, with little interest from the authorities in taking any effective steps to prevent the crime, or to catch those responsible after the event.
Thanks. I may well extend by a few days! Seriously
You can generally tell how bad it is back home by the grumpiness or monotony of posts on here.
And YES definitely book winter sunshine hols. You are a man of means, you are retired (I think?) why would you not bugger off to the sun for a fortnight or two if you can, in the dreary depths of Jan and early Feb?
I don’t know why people who can afford it (in terms of cash and time) don’t do it more often. The absolute joy of getting off a plane that left a dank and drizzly Heathrow suffering 2 degrees C to step into blazing sunshine and 29C is probably one of the greatest pleasures of travel. Certainly much greater than just flying to the Med in summer when it is already generally pleasant at home
This is, of course, particularly true this winter, when we have all been in jail for 24 months
Jewellery of the kind that has major re-sale value has dropped out of fashion, for most people.
The value is on your credit cards.
Is this the pass we have come to, that the Conservative Party feels the need to defend fraud as a point of principle?
Also we give quite a lot of support to elderly parents (just Mrs P's dad now) which makes her reticent to leave him for too long.
But we'll definitely aim to get away next year.
I had thought that he was one of the more capable Cabinet Ministers, one of the few who would merit surviving the end of Johnson's Ministry, but I'm not so sure of that now.
There is quite a lot of phone theft in London. I’ve often wondered what is the resale value of, say, an iPhone? Given that most will be locked and pretty useless - and the data erased by their owners when stolen, how much can they be worth?
Or can some criminal gangs unlock them and sell them on for serious money?
This website suggests yes it can be done quite easily, but can it? I seem to recall the CIA having trouble cracking an iPhone without the passcode
https://www.makeuseof.com/unlock-iphone-without-password/
I dunno, just wondering.
Sri Lanka is perfect, and so surreally cheap. You get negative sticker-shock. The bizarre feeling you are being consistently undercharged
Most things that people buy are often expensive at the point of purchase, but have little value second hand. A wardrobe full of expensive clothes is only good of the charity shop etc...
If you have credit card details (for example), then you can steal 5 figures and up in minutes. In a different country - if you have friends abroad....
This site suggests what they might really want is the SIM
https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/iphone-stolen-access-apple-id-bank-account-details-sim-card-brazil-criminals-detail-2482218
Some phones are cracked, some the victim is threatened with violence for the passcode.
In general phone theft has replaced the other kind of street robbery, since it is the only thing making *some* money.
The big bucks in crime is in drugs and fraud.
CarlottaVance said:
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They don’t have a currency, central bank or reserves, for starters.
You fool we have the Bank of England at present as Central bank , it stores our reserves at £ for £ for all Scottish pounds and we use pounds Sterling, what planet are you on.
PS: It appears you have Borisitis, an inability to tell the truth.
Question from an emigrant as well who has no part to play in it.
Re drugs, yes of course. The UK must do everything it can to stop Fentanyl and Co getting on to our streets. We need Singapore-style punishments. Reading about it in the USA, it is brutally destructive, and I see no reason why someone won’t at least *try* and extend the market to Europe
It is the perfect drug in a terrible way. Quite a good high, but cripplingly addictive, with a grotesquely painful withdrawal
Yes, someone at state level could crack it given enough time, there’s an Israeli company who offer such services to governments.
What really annoys me, is when banks make you jump through a million hoops to get and maintain an account, yet if you’re a victim of fraud they appear not be able to find the details of the bad guy who received the money.
Tories really don't see the extent of the harm the endless lies, evasive explanations and unbelievable contortions they seem to come out with every time they open their mouths are doing to them individually, their party, the country and politics generally.
Although I suspect the one place where that isn't true is fraud as you only have to look at the African variations to see how profitable it can be. Once you've got a working scheme it's literally just a numbers game...
I am assuming that in the event of independence there would need to be a central bank established and Scottish currency notes would be used as a new currency, on the basis that's the only logical thing to do. But at this moment there is no 'Scottish pound.'
In fact on further checking it looks as though I may have been wrong in my estimate of when the pound Scots died out - it looks as though it was when coinage was standardised in 1816. So over a hundred years after the Act of Union.
https://www.marrkt.com/
Lot less dependence on the street level idiots who have trouble not fucking things up - which is why drug cartels spend so much time murdering people. You'd think that even the most basic idiot wold get the message - "Don't steal from a Mexican Drug Cartel". But no. They steal. And die.
- Much more money comes in.
- Since it is electronic, much easier to "wash" than physical, in many ways.
- law enforcement is much less, and the sentence much lower than other crimes for the same return.
Most entertainment I've had in years was getting the Danske Bank counter at Copenhagen Airport to change some Northern Irish Danske Bank notes to Danish Krona - Danske had just introduced the polymer £10 note so it really did look and feel like toy money to the Danish workers.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/has-this-experiment-in-celebrity-government-given-us-the-most-disreputable-leader-in-history-m22zlpxk0
Very nice too.
At the same time each person would start to accrue brand new entitlement from a zero start to a Scottish state pension.
So on retirement, each person would receive part preserved UK pension and part Scot pension. It is possible that these would start at different ages depending on whether the Scots have the same or a different state pension age.
The part UK pension would be unlikely to index-linked each year - it would be a partial entitlement to the state pension at the monetary amount applicable when Scotland left the union. The reason for this is that leaving to another country only attracts indexation if there is a reciprocal agreement between the UK and the other country (e.g. USA). A reciprocal agreement with Scotland would be unlikely because Scotland would have nothing to reciprocate.
I don't see why the UK would get out of funding the Scot's partial entitlements to our state pension - but I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise.
But it would have no exposure to the vagueries of an independent Scotland. And a shorter route to London --> Dover --> Europe.
And would do wonders for the IoM.....
The fact the fix has a fundamental flaw within it that utterly screws the Unionists in NI is something that will need to be dealt with later on (after Bozo has left)
Sri Lanka?!
I just don’t trust wam water oysters. Instinctively. Doesn’t seem right. OTOH New Orleans does pretty good oysters from the Gulf of Mexico. And Sydney rocks are amazebombs (but is that due to the proximity of the Antarctic?)
Namibian oysters in Luderitz (discussed the other day) are world class. But they have the freezing Benguela current
the SNP's current currency position is to unofficially continue to use sterling outside the formal sterling area, much in the same way Montenegro uses the euro without the agreement of the eurozone or the European Central Bank. It is envisaged this 'sterlingisation' arrangement will last a considerable period. The SNP would then plan to launch a new Scottish currency if the economic conditions merited it.
McCrone sees the danger in this. Figures show that an independent Scotland would start life with a classic twin deficits problem. The country would be importing more than it is exporting and spending more money than it is generating in tax. It would therefore have unsustainably large current account and budget deficits.
'In the short term, even if taxes were raised or public expenditure cut, Scotland would have to borrow to finance both of these deficits,' notes McCrone. But as a new borrower with no long record of credibility like the UK, Scotland would 'have to pay considerably more on its borrowing'.
'Interest rates would be in danger of constantly increasing in a vicious circle, resulting in eventual collapse,' he warns.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-book-that-shatters-the-snp-s-economic-myths
A Big Cheese announced that he was extremely tired of idiots who "demanded" that new launchers should not use solid boosters. Any Proper Rocket design had to have solid boosters, because of the political realities of launcher development in Europe.
Shades of "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."
Just as these are not a separate currency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_Northern_Ireland
As I said, they could conceivably be used as banknotes for a new Scottish currency, although a lot more would have to be printed. But they are at the moment sterling.
A minuscule native species? Certainly not fat Pacific Rocks
But someone abroad, what is their legal situation, taking another countries legal tender?
What is remarkable is the claim it isn't discussed on the doorstep. Fishing emails, strange phone calls seems to be a popular conversation with all the oldies in my life.
The one that annoys me is how the landline is now 100% scam calls for me, how did operators allowed that to happen.
MrB
https://web.archive.org/web/20171014174408/http://www.acbi.org.uk/legal_position.php
In Scotland and Northern Ireland because there is no such thing as legal tender, technically a shop doesn't need to give you change so you should pay the exact amount displayed..
So the SNP are arguing that English tax payers would be paying for Scottish pensions.
Why?
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/what-is-legal-tender
I suspect however the real problem is that banks outside the UK are more reluctant to accept Scottish notes simply because they don't see them very often.
Anyway, relatedly on both fraud and lies, they keep on coming. Gove claimed last week that "97% of the (PPE) equipment secured was ready. fit-for-purpose and on the front line." Apparently this is a whopper. By value (rather than item), around a third of PPE did not meet the criteria Gove set out. Full Fact has this, which seems plausible:
https://fullfact.org/health/covid-ppe-procurement-use/
(Of course, at the time the need for PPE was absolutely desperate, so we were quite justified in scouring every single Tory source and their mates to find somebody who wanted to make a bob or two).
(Ref. www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/about/faqs.htm.)
This is by turns brilliant and UGH. Negombo is by the airport and known for its dirty touristy beaches. Oyster report:
https://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=NL19810668238
But it looks like these grow slightly inland in the lagoons, so they are clean. They are delicious, albeit absurdly small
If I haven’t commented again within fifteen hours I have succumbed to fatal food poisoning, please inform my kinfolk
https://www.cityam.com/mark-zuckerberg-and-team-consider-shutting-down-facebook-and-instagram-in-europe-if-meta-can-not-process-europeans-data-on-us-servers/
When contacted by City A.M. today, John Nolan, Meta’s London-based tech media and advertising communications leader, did not deny or play down the reports.
Instead, he shared a statement from Nick Clegg, Meta’s VP of Global Affairs and Communications.
Clegg warned that “a lack of safe, secure and legal international data transfers would damage the economy and hamper the growth of data-driven businesses in the EU, just as we seek a recovery from Covid-19.”
“The impact would be felt by businesses large and small, across multiple sectors,” he continued.
“Businesses need clear, global rules, underpinned by the strong rule of law, to protect transatlantic data flows over the long term.”
“In the worst case scenario, this could mean that a small tech start up in Germany would no longer be able to use a US-based cloud provider. A Spanish product development company could no longer be able to run an operation across multiple time zones.”
“A French retailer may find they can no longer maintain a call centre in Morocco,” Clegg stressed.
He added: “While policymakers are working towards a sustainable, long-term solution, we urge regulators to adopt a proportionate and pragmatic approach to minimise disruption to the many thousands of businesses who, like Facebook, have been relying on these mechanisms in good faith to transfer data in a safe and secure way.”
Here is how absurd the fund argument is: you say there is no fund, only an unsecured promise by the government to pay. But if you have a pension fund which you want to be as secure as possible where do you invest it? You invest it in gilts. What are gilts? They are unsecured promises by the government to pay.
Additionally it is misleading to say English taxpayers would be paying Scottish pensions. The government would be paying. The money might originate from English taxpayers, but so what? If I pay you a debt out of earned income the money originates with my employers. That doesn't mean they are paying you. I am.
“However, in the title and in two other places the release refers to a fall in crime, without making clear that this is true only if fraud and computer misuse are excluded."
Sir David is, I understand, the head of the UK Statistics Authority.
The fact that it was stated once and that it is not unusual to exclude fraud and computer crime when looking at trends in crime seems to me to make this more of a misdemeanour than a crime on the part of the PM and the HS.
None of that takes away from @Cyclefree's more fundamental point, however. I come across so many examples of blatant fraud that the police or prosecution service deem "civil matters". It is absurd.
At the moment I am in the middle of a proof where a family who speak little to no English lost their deposit for their house (their life's savings) when someone sent a false email claiming the bank details of their solicitors had been changed. Neither the bank nor the police showed any interest. An IT investigator instructed by the solicitor made some progress but was hampered by the lack of warrants etc. He gave what he had to the police. They remained uninterested. In the witness box the wife was distraught and sobbed. It was painful to see. She had been let down so badly by a system that just doesn't seem to care.
Would MalcolmG and co deem it fair if we offered the reverse terms to Scotland - you can have a referendum if you accept that on separation you pay the state pension of all rUK pensioners.
The same thing that has happened through out history, when the law won't make things right.
Azure Germany is great because of the way it needs to work to meet German security rules it has to have it's own set of German staff completely separate to other regions. So it's a great place to be if you don't want to be forced to get things early....
If you are ever bored go and look at Adobe's US marketing tools and then ask Adobe EU why you can't have them (it's because the tricks they pull are as dodgy as F*** but Adobe EU can't quite say that out loud).
One of the reasons I like history so much, is that there is so very little that is fundamentally new. The mistakes the politicians make are like old friends.....
Strangely symmetric, isn't it?
As I've pointed out before, any other solution that results in rUK tax payers sending money to Scottish Pensioners would last as far as the next election and then disappear in a Landslide.
Why is this any different from someone who moves to, say, Spain or Australia receiving their partial pensions from UK coffers (as is the case now)?