For those following the collapse in the stablecoin markets - Tether is now trading at below $1 so at some point soon that whole ponzi scheme will be revealed to be the ponzi scheme it is.
Tether is teetering on the edge now, could be about to make a big boom.
DeFi = deregulated finance.
Good. The sooner the whole Bitscam worse than a Ponzi scheme collapses the better.
I feel sorry for the poor schmucks who've fallen for the scam, but its even worse than a traditional Ponzi scheme - it'd be better if there were nothing underpinning it like a traditional Ponzi, the Bitscam environment is ultimately worse than worthless.
At a time we're supposed to be worried about the environment, Bitscam is responsible for more emissions now than many countries I believe. A total crash of the entire thing so the lot of them are revealed to be worthless and shut down for good, would be good for the world.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. @RochdalePioneers and @BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
This is an interesting one for students of government. This journalist seems to be suggesting that Kit Malthouse is a member of cabinet. My understanding is that as a junior minister he is not. Sloppy journalism or am I technically wrong?
A few years ago I did some analysis of food bank use and couldn't find any correlations with various economic indicators, food prices or the rollout of Universal Credit etc.
My conclusion was they offset cost pressures from other areas. I'd suggest the huge increase in costs in general (not just food) will push people towards then in the next few months.
They are a good thing though - their use frees up cash for energy, clothing, and the food provided tends to be of a much higher nutritional value. Very important for children - there is a grain of truth in what the batty Tory said.
There was a thread on this a couple months ago where we dredged up all sorts of statistics, however. A large and disproportionate increase around the time of the government's first welfare cuts, which has since remained on a similar trajectory ever since. Indicators for homelessness and other forms of social breakdown also rose around the same time.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Tuesday evening I gave £30 to a woman who claimed she had mental health issues and needed the money to pay for a hostel for the night. I do not know if her story was true but that is not the point. Why are these places not free? Like foodbanks or the NHS.
NHS = taxes. Food banks = donations. Everything costs. Hostels = I think partly council, partly charity, so you could donate to Shelter or someone.
But if you have to do that - at least give it in a way you can allocate gift aid. (I don't entirely like the GA system, as it divcerts tax revenue in ways for which we did not vote, but it does help the charity.)
This is an interesting one for students of government. This journalist seems to be suggesting that Kit Malthouse is a member of cabinet. My understanding is that as a junior minister he is not. Sloppy journalism or am I technically wrong?
Although the parliament.uk website lists Malthouse and does not make that distinction, which really exists only because the number of paid Cabinet posts is limited. As with much else on this thread, it is all a question of definition and measurement. https://members.parliament.uk/Government/Cabinet
The comments might have been better phrased but there is no doubt more people could learn how to cook better on a budget. As Jamie Oliver has done programmes on for example
Alex Cole-Hamilton, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats:
- "We have flipped a lot of communities who have traditionally voted Tory, they have now realised they get a better service with the Liberal Democrats."
Just as in southern England, the Lib Dem uptick in Scotland terrifies the Tories. But for a different reason: any significant SCon to SLD tactical unwind will see all SCon seats fall… not to the Lib Dems, but to the SNP.
If I was Douglas Ross I’d be doing everything in my power to attract these floating voters. Shame his bosses in London are doing everything they can to repel and disgust them.
I'm very pleased with the progress we have made in Banff and Buchan Coast. Taking seats in Fraserburgh and Peterhead shows there is opposition to the idiot Duguid. But yes, come the general election the challenge is replace the mince with something more palatable, and if that means SNP then fine.
Er, point of order, nothing wrong with mince. It's positively sentient when cooked with shallots, as opposed to the ScoTories at present.
Shallots you say? Gotta try that.
Fiddly. 10x as much chopping as onions for a less than 1000% gain.
FPT - but a crucial and imperative issue of current affairs, for @StuartDickson as well: I put them in whole (peeled of brown skin) for a stew or mince, or cut almost halfway throuigh for a large bud or clove or whatever the term is. So no chopping needed.
Also banana shallots are dead easy to chop. And excellent in risottos.
A few years ago I did some analysis of food bank use and couldn't find any correlations with various economic indicators, food prices or the rollout of Universal Credit etc.
My conclusion was they offset cost pressures from other areas. I'd suggest the huge increase in costs in general (not just food) will push people towards then in the next few months.
They are a good thing though - their use frees up cash for energy, clothing, and the food provided tends to be of a much higher nutritional value. Very important for children - there is a grain of truth in what the batty Tory said.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats:
- "We have flipped a lot of communities who have traditionally voted Tory, they have now realised they get a better service with the Liberal Democrats."
Just as in southern England, the Lib Dem uptick in Scotland terrifies the Tories. But for a different reason: any significant SCon to SLD tactical unwind will see all SCon seats fall… not to the Lib Dems, but to the SNP.
If I was Douglas Ross I’d be doing everything in my power to attract these floating voters. Shame his bosses in London are doing everything they can to repel and disgust them.
I'm very pleased with the progress we have made in Banff and Buchan Coast. Taking seats in Fraserburgh and Peterhead shows there is opposition to the idiot Duguid. But yes, come the general election the challenge is replace the mince with something more palatable, and if that means SNP then fine.
Er, point of order, nothing wrong with mince. It's positively sentient when cooked with shallots, as opposed to the ScoTories at present.
Shallots you say? Gotta try that.
Fiddly. 10x as much chopping as onions for a less than 1000% gain.
FPT - but a crucial and imperative issue of current affairs, for @StuartDickson as well: I put them in whole (peeled of brown skin) for a stew or mince, or cut almost halfway throuigh for a large bud or clove or whatever the term is. So no chopping needed.
Also banana shallots are dead easy to chop. And excellent in risottos.
Haven't tried those in risottos - we tend to use onions as easier to get and they cook longer anyway. Will try. (I was talking about the usual small round shallots.)
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. @RochdalePioneers and @BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
Its certainly possible for companies to make a profit from people making home deliveries of food, Domino's Pizza* is a very profitable business that does precisely that.
The question is getting the balance of costs right. That's never going to be profitable for delivering crisps and a coke, it can be profitable if you're delivering a significant order though.
The question as with many things is about getting the pricing right. It won't happen for "free". There's a reason why Domino's will charge £19 for a pizza with "free delivery", but have a collection "promotion" reducing the price to £9.99 if you collect it.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
A few years ago I did some analysis of food bank use and couldn't find any correlations with various economic indicators, food prices or the rollout of Universal Credit etc.
My conclusion was they offset cost pressures from other areas. I'd suggest the huge increase in costs in general (not just food) will push people towards then in the next few months.
They are a good thing though - their use frees up cash for energy, clothing, and the food provided tends to be of a much higher nutritional value. Very important for children - there is a grain of truth in what the batty Tory said.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
He states "rumours" are of 1,500 Russian dead in this one encounter.
It's not impossible. The photographs of the aftermath show a very large number of destroyed vehicles. If they were accompanied by infantry who were trapped on the wrong side of the river, it would have been a bloodbath.
For those following the collapse in the stablecoin markets - Tether is now trading at below $1 so at some point soon that whole ponzi scheme will be revealed to be the ponzi scheme it is.
Tether is teetering on the edge now, could be about to make a big boom.
DeFi = deregulated finance.
Good. The sooner the whole Bitscam worse than a Ponzi scheme collapses the better.
I feel sorry for the poor schmucks who've fallen for the scam, but its even worse than a traditional Ponzi scheme - it'd be better if there were nothing underpinning it like a traditional Ponzi, the Bitscam environment is ultimately worse than worthless.
At a time we're supposed to be worried about the environment, Bitscam is responsible for more emissions now than many countries I believe. A total crash of the entire thing so the lot of them are revealed to be worthless and shut down for good, would be good for the world.
It has reached the point where my taxi driver was (unprompted!) volunteering the suggestion that BTC looked like a scam and that he didn't understand how it was worth anything other than what the next mug was prepared to pay for it.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats:
- "We have flipped a lot of communities who have traditionally voted Tory, they have now realised they get a better service with the Liberal Democrats."
Just as in southern England, the Lib Dem uptick in Scotland terrifies the Tories. But for a different reason: any significant SCon to SLD tactical unwind will see all SCon seats fall… not to the Lib Dems, but to the SNP.
If I was Douglas Ross I’d be doing everything in my power to attract these floating voters. Shame his bosses in London are doing everything they can to repel and disgust them.
I'm very pleased with the progress we have made in Banff and Buchan Coast. Taking seats in Fraserburgh and Peterhead shows there is opposition to the idiot Duguid. But yes, come the general election the challenge is replace the mince with something more palatable, and if that means SNP then fine.
Er, point of order, nothing wrong with mince. It's positively sentient when cooked with shallots, as opposed to the ScoTories at present.
Shallots you say? Gotta try that.
Fiddly. 10x as much chopping as onions for a less than 1000% gain.
FPT - but a crucial and imperative issue of current affairs, for @StuartDickson as well: I put them in whole (peeled of brown skin) for a stew or mince, or cut almost halfway throuigh for a large bud or clove or whatever the term is. So no chopping needed.
Also banana shallots are dead easy to chop. And excellent in risottos.
Haven't tried those in risottos - we tend to use onions as easier to get and they cook longer anyway. Will try. (I was talking about the usual small round shallots.)
They're a less strong flavour - which is what you want in a risotto.
Morning all, Definitely spent too much time here yesterday - had a dream about being stuck in Wick with Rishi Sunak. Most odd. He was very relaxed about it all.
Just wander into Pultneytown and the distillery and you wouldn't care any more...
Indeed, a triumph of urban planning, like Bath on a small scale. And the walks on either side to clear one's head.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
He states "rumours" are of 1,500 Russian dead in this one encounter.
It's not impossible. The photographs of the aftermath show a very large number of destroyed vehicles. If they were accompanied by infantry who were trapped on the wrong side of the river, it would have been a bloodbath.
That will have had quite the affect on Russian morale, aside from the loss of men and materiel.
It’s incidents like this, that make the enemy start to realise they’re losing the war.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. @RochdalePioneers and @BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
As a daily user of Deliveroo, hmm. Round here, it is mostly motorbikes, cars and electric bikes. I cannot remember the last time I saw a bona-fide cyclist. Using Deliveroo adds about a fiver to the cost of walking to the fish and chip shop. But if I walk there, then in order to get home with the food still warm, I need to take a minicab which costs £5, so for me Deliveroo is cost-neutral. What I do not know is how much the drivers are paid after Deliveroo has raked off its share.
I should add that the drivers might have Deliveroo logos or one of their rivals like Just Eat, so each driver working for more than one firm adds to the British economic miracle of full employment without much uptick in GDP.
The comments might have been better phrased but there is no doubt more people could learn how to cook better on a budget. As Jamie Oliver has done programmes on for example
That is self-evident. However, food banks tend not to carry ping and ding meals or takeaways, they have basic staples. So the people who thanks to your government's uncaring attitude have to rely on food banks do know how to cook at least something. They don't have the luxury of living off takeaways.
So we're back to just how pig ignorant you lot can sound.
The myth of the 'feckless poor' persists amongst the idle rich.
That would have been fair if the comment had been made by Rees-Mogg. Not so much by a former Labour councillor....
The deserving and undeserving poor is a notion often promoted on PB:
An example of the deserving poor is someone who is struggling on £150k a year and supplementary handouts from benefactors to cover maintenance payments and an unaffordable bon viveur lifestyle.
An example of the undeserving poor is someone who is struggling on £15k a year and supplementary handouts from the state to cover fuel bills and an unaffordable three McDonalds' meals a day lifestyle.
In your mind maybe. Otherwise, give us some links.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. @RochdalePioneers and @BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
Its certainly possible for companies to make a profit from people making home deliveries of food, Domino's Pizza* is a very profitable business that does precisely that.
The question is getting the balance of costs right. That's never going to be profitable for delivering crisps and a coke, it can be profitable if you're delivering a significant order though.
The question as with many things is about getting the pricing right. It won't happen for "free". There's a reason why Domino's will charge £19 for a pizza with "free delivery", but have a collection "promotion" reducing the price to £9.99 if you collect it.
* Other food delivery companies are available.
We're talking about two different kinds of business. One is the producer - like a Dominos - who offer a delivery service. The other is Deliveroo who collect food from the producer - like Dominos - and deliver it for a fee.
Dominos can afford to subsidise the cost of delivery via the profits made producing the food. Deliveroo et al cannot. They produce nothing, they simply shift product from a to b. Without the ability to make a profit on the produced item there is nothing to subsidise the operation with other than VC cash injections.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
The myth of the 'feckless poor' persists amongst the idle rich.
That would have been fair if the comment had been made by Rees-Mogg. Not so much by a former Labour councillor....
He may or may not be idle but he's certainly rich:
Lee Anderson MP, who today said poor people forced to use foodbanks 'cannot cook or budget properly' claimed £222,000 in expenses in 2020/21 - including £4,100 on travel and 'subsistence'
MP expenses are always a bit of a red herring: 1. They include office and staffing costs 2. These are higher when its a new MP as there are start-up costs
I actually think MPs should be paid more. At the same time it's undeniable that a) Anderson is relatively rich and b) he's blaming the poor for their own poverty.
I sense one of those bluff, 'self-made' tory types who likes to 'speak his mind'. An irritating species.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
I'm too cynical - I want to believe that's a legit account, but I can't help wondering whether it's just Trevor in Milton Keynes who has set up a paypal account and doing quite nicely from posing as a UA soldier. Perfectly fine for soldier to ask for funds - for equipment and for himself - of course, but it does make me wonder.
This is an interesting one for students of government. This journalist seems to be suggesting that Kit Malthouse is a member of cabinet. My understanding is that as a junior minister he is not. Sloppy journalism or am I technically wrong?
Malthouse attends cabinet, but not as a member. It's a slightly odd position, that has come more common in recent years. As such, he'd presumably receive all papers and participate to an extent in cabinet discussion, although would not ultimately vote on anything.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Employment in the EZ is up 8% in the last decade, versus 11% in the UK. That isn't a massive difference in the grand scheme of things especially when you factor in the EZ sovereign debt crisis that held back their recovery in the early part of that period. Employment growth has been strong in all advanced economies, the UK performance isn't especially anomalous. A big increase in female employment has been a significant factor here and elsewhere. Perhaps that reflects the mix of jobs on offer, better availability of childcare or pressure on household incomes making a second income increasingly necessary. Meanwhile, an ageing population means that that increase in employment is matched with a shrinking or stagnant working age population, so you get a very tight labour market and record low unemployment. Unemployment is at or close to multi decade lows in the UK, Euro Area and US. It's not a UK specific story.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats:
- "We have flipped a lot of communities who have traditionally voted Tory, they have now realised they get a better service with the Liberal Democrats."
Just as in southern England, the Lib Dem uptick in Scotland terrifies the Tories. But for a different reason: any significant SCon to SLD tactical unwind will see all SCon seats fall… not to the Lib Dems, but to the SNP.
If I was Douglas Ross I’d be doing everything in my power to attract these floating voters. Shame his bosses in London are doing everything they can to repel and disgust them.
I'm very pleased with the progress we have made in Banff and Buchan Coast. Taking seats in Fraserburgh and Peterhead shows there is opposition to the idiot Duguid. But yes, come the general election the challenge is replace the mince with something more palatable, and if that means SNP then fine.
Er, point of order, nothing wrong with mince. It's positively sentient when cooked with shallots, as opposed to the ScoTories at present.
Shallots you say? Gotta try that.
Fiddly. 10x as much chopping as onions for a less than 1000% gain.
FPT - but a crucial and imperative issue of current affairs, for @StuartDickson as well: I put them in whole (peeled of brown skin) for a stew or mince, or cut almost halfway throuigh for a large bud or clove or whatever the term is. So no chopping needed.
Also banana shallots are dead easy to chop. And excellent in risottos.
Haven't tried those in risottos - we tend to use onions as easier to get and they cook longer anyway. Will try. (I was talking about the usual small round shallots.)
They're a less strong flavour - which is what you want in a risotto.
At the opposite end of the scale from today's discussion, have you tried Natoora? I've switched to their home delivery and the quality is absolutely phenomenal. Genuinely the best fruit and veg I've had, plus they do some really good charcuterie. If you live in a delivery area it's worth a try, but it isn't cheap.
Ashfield is a 3 way marginal not a 2 way marginal - Tory / Labour / Jason Zadrozny. Up until 2015 JZ was a Lib Dem, when he stood down because 'rumours' of historic sexual offences 'emerged' a few weeks before the 2015 Election. LDs only got 7000 votes in that Election. There's plenty of filthy politics there that I do not know in detail.
Years later, the police withdrew their case at the door of the Court.
From 2015 JZ was an Ashfield Independent, and aiui built the party off part of the LD base that went with him - Councillors etc. I think of them as LDs minus the EU fundamentalism, though LDs themselves are evolving a little.
JZ gets 25-30%, and about half of it imo is a personal vote that vanishes when he is not the one standing. When he does not stand it seems to become a Tory / Lab marginal.
In the 1990s, LDs had about 20% of the vote in 2 elections, and somewhat lower since. AFAICs JZ has taken a large majority of the LD vote to the Ashfield Independents with him. 2017, 2019 LDs have been
I do not see a pile of rather vapid sneer politics from London politicos / media causing an earthquake here. Poverty-cased charities may have more of a potential impact.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
I'm too cynical - I want to believe that's a legit account, but I can't help wondering whether it's just Trevor in Milton Keynes who has set up a paypal account and doing quite nicely from posing as a UA soldier. Perfectly fine for soldier to ask for funds - for equipment and for himself - of course, but it does make me wonder.
Hence my qualification. I agree that you have to read all this stuff with a degree of scepticism.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
I'm too cynical - I want to believe that's a legit account, but I can't help wondering whether it's just Trevor in Milton Keynes who has set up a paypal account and doing quite nicely from posing as a UA soldier. Perfectly fine for soldier to ask for funds - for equipment and for himself - of course, but it does make me wonder.
His is a very credible account of yesterday's fighting at the river crossing. I believe it.
But I would make any donations to a well known and researched website rather than this individual's site.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. RochdalePioneers and BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
A rare point on which you and I can agree entirely. (AIUI, you come from a food background, and I come from an IT/tech background).
While I can just about understand the business model of Uber, trying to undercut the competition to get a monopoly, at which point they can raise prices as monopolies do, there’s a very high price electricity of demand for deliveries of small grocery orders. No-one is ever going to pay £10 for delivery of beer and crisps, except for those in rural areas where the business model makes no sense anyway, and for the home drinkers on a Saturday night, who can’t face a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute drive to the local shop.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
A few years ago I did some analysis of food bank use and couldn't find any correlations with various economic indicators, food prices or the rollout of Universal Credit etc.
My conclusion was they offset cost pressures from other areas. I'd suggest the huge increase in costs in general (not just food) will push people towards then in the next few months.
They are a good thing though - their use frees up cash for energy, clothing, and the food provided tends to be of a much higher nutritional value. Very important for children - there is a grain of truth in what the batty Tory said.
A grain of truth, along with a pound of mince.
We have soaring costs, high inequality and high rates of obesity.
We know there is a correlation between household income and obesity. And its quite a new thing (from the 1990s onwards, from memory), and probably related to the rise of crap food.
We need to work really hard to change that - whether it's to do with shift work, ability to drive to supermarkets to do big shops (my pet theory), cultural stuff, adverts, or smashing food manufacturers if they add sugar to food.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
And wherever and whenever it was rolled out, food bank use sky-rocketed. Thanks to the bizarre delay in the first payment plus aggressive and arbitrary sanctions regime, primarily, I believe.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
I don't think so. I really tried to dig into that as much as possible and couldn't find anything that would stand up to scrutiny.
Mainly because life is shit on legacy benefits too!
This is an interesting one for students of government. This journalist seems to be suggesting that Kit Malthouse is a member of cabinet. My understanding is that as a junior minister he is not. Sloppy journalism or am I technically wrong?
Malthouse attends cabinet, but not as a member. It's a slightly odd position, that has come more common in recent years. As such, he'd presumably receive all papers and participate to an extent in cabinet discussion, although would not ultimately vote on anything.
That situation comes from the fact that there are only so many Cabinet salaries allowed to be paid, and it’s easier politically to persuade someone to attend without the salary, than to pass legislation increasing the number of salaries.
The myth of the 'feckless poor' persists amongst the idle rich.
That would have been fair if the comment had been made by Rees-Mogg. Not so much by a former Labour councillor....
The deserving and undeserving poor is a notion often promoted on PB:
An example of the deserving poor is someone who is struggling on £150k a year and supplementary handouts from benefactors to cover maintenance payments and an unaffordable bon viveur lifestyle.
An example of the undeserving poor is someone who is struggling on £15k a year and supplementary handouts from the state to cover fuel bills and an unaffordable three McDonalds' meals a day lifestyle.
In your mind maybe. Otherwise, give us some links.
Well, Boris was getting his meals delivered and paid for by Lady Bamford and his wallpaper paid for by Lord Brownlow (although iirc eventually he had to dip into his own pocket) and his exotic holidays paid for by David Ross (Mustique) and Zac Goldsmith (Marbella) and his whitewash paid for by Lord Geidt.
It's hard to make ends meet on £200,000 a year plus whatever the missus brings in.
Samos is, in places, quite stunning. Vivid green stands of cypress trees, whitewashed chapels snoozing between. The cloudless sky gazes serenely down. Wow
Samos is indeed very beautiful and green, outside the over-developed areas. It's a very big island, so there's a lot left to go. Part of the Ionian heartland, like Chios.
It’s also cheap. I’ve got a whole (brand new) apartment in the old port of Pythagorio. Looks like this
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
And wherever and whenever it was rolled out, food bank use sky-rocketed. Thanks to the bizarre delay in the first payment plus aggressive and arbitrary sanctions regime, primarily, I believe.
I looked into that too. Plenty of anecdotal evidence (which is enough, sometimes) but not coming up in the data.
Loads of confounding factors and as @Carnyx points out, the rollout confuses everything.
Edit: agree that the 5 week wait is a real problem though. Two -child limit is the real killer for child poverty.
Mr. Boy, Universal Credit was introduced after food banks first came on the scene, and after they rose during both boom and bust under Labour.
Food bank use has just gone up since the early 2000s. Unless you're arguing Universal Credit is so powerful a concept that it transcends the traditional flow of time and manages to have effects that precede rather than follow a cause, I'm unpersuaded that you can just blame food banks on Universal Credit's introduction.
This is an interesting one for students of government. This journalist seems to be suggesting that Kit Malthouse is a member of cabinet. My understanding is that as a junior minister he is not. Sloppy journalism or am I technically wrong?
Malthouse attends cabinet, but not as a member. It's a slightly odd position, that has come more common in recent years. As such, he'd presumably receive all papers and participate to an extent in cabinet discussion, although would not ultimately vote on anything.
That situation comes from the fact that there are only so many Cabinet salaries allowed to be paid, and it’s easier politically to persuade someone to attend without the salary, than to pass legislation increasing the number of salaries.
Yes, and it does not imply Malthouse and the others have no vote, no voice, and no collective responsibility, which is where the original article came in.
Samos is, in places, quite stunning. Vivid green stands of cypress trees, whitewashed chapels snoozing between. The cloudless sky gazes serenely down. Wow
Samos is indeed very beautiful and green, outside the over-developed areas. It's a very big island, so there's a lot left to go. Part of the Ionian heartland, like Chios.
It’s also cheap. I’ve got a whole (brand new) apartment in the old port of Pythagorio. Looks like this
Cost? £40 a night
I remember Pythagorio ! There's also Hora, the village I seem to remember nestled underneath the mountain opposite. Nice beaches, and beautifully azure waters - watch out for those large wasps though.
Ashfield is a 3 way marginal not a 2 way marginal - Tory / Labour / Jason Zadrozny. Up until 2015 JZ was a Lib Dem, when he stood down because 'rumours' of historic sexual offences 'emerged' a few weeks before the 2015 Election. LDs only got 7000 votes in that Election. There's plenty of filthy politics there that I do not know in detail.
Years later, the police withdrew their case at the door of the Court.
From 2015 JZ was an Ashfield Independent, and aiui built the party off part of the LD base that went with him - Councillors etc. I think of them as LDs minus the EU fundamentalism, though LDs themselves are evolving a little.
JZ gets 25-30%, and about half of it imo is a personal vote that vanishes when he is not the one standing. When he does not stand it seems to become a Tory / Lab marginal.
In the 1990s, LDs had about 20% of the vote in 2 elections, and somewhat lower since. AFAICs JZ has taken a large majority of the LD vote to the Ashfield Independents with him. 2017, 2019 LDs have been under 2%.
These are current Council seats. I don't see where Lab are going to rebuild from quickly in these circs, short of an earthquake. Tories are as weak, but they have the MP who is digging in.
I do not see a pile of rather vapid sneer politics from London politicos / media causing an earthquake here. Poverty-cfocused charities may have more of a potential cut-through.
These are the County results for Ashfield. Ashfield Independents have 10 from 10, having gained the other 5 last year.
As I see it, Lab's main hope is that AIs fail, or that the Tory efforts to get a single council for Notts work.
The Government said it has launched an urgent review into whether it can stop "evil monster" Levi Bellfield from marrying his fiancee, who is described in the Sun newspaper as a "besotted" blonde-haired woman in her 40s.
Bizarre. Horrible man but, come on, guys, rule of law.
This will be spun as the Home Sec's hands being tied by the libtard Yuman Rights Act, but there is actually no "no marriage" clause in the sentence.
A few years ago I did some analysis of food bank use and couldn't find any correlations with various economic indicators, food prices or the rollout of Universal Credit etc.
My conclusion was they offset cost pressures from other areas. I'd suggest the huge increase in costs in general (not just food) will push people towards then in the next few months.
They are a good thing though - their use frees up cash for energy, clothing, and the food provided tends to be of a much higher nutritional value. Very important for children - there is a grain of truth in what the batty Tory said.
A grain of truth, along with a pound of mince.
Uncooked. No money for the leccy.
Many years ago I told by a housing officer for Swansea County Council that on re-patriating a house from a tenant in Blaen-y-Maes it was noted that every item of wood short of the roof rafters had been used as fuel, so there really is no excuse.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
Between 2013 and 2018. There are still many on legacy benefits though.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
I'm too cynical - I want to believe that's a legit account, but I can't help wondering whether it's just Trevor in Milton Keynes who has set up a paypal account and doing quite nicely from posing as a UA soldier. Perfectly fine for soldier to ask for funds - for equipment and for himself - of course, but it does make me wonder.
You’d think that if he was an actual engineering officer for the military, he woudn’t have his own Twitter account with details of military operations.
He’s more likely a freelancer, maybe his job before the war was doing aerial drone surveys for farmers. He’s looking for donations to buy professional, rather than military, drone kit to continue his surveillance. The language isn’t of a native English speaker.
He joined Twitter three years ago. Someone with more time than me, might go back in his timeline to see what he posted last year?
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
Between 2013 and 2018. There are still many on legacy benefits though.
Mr. Boy, Universal Credit was introduced after food banks first came on the scene, and after they rose during both boom and bust under Labour.
Food bank use has just gone up since the early 2000s. Unless you're arguing Universal Credit is so powerful a concept that it transcends the traditional flow of time and manages to have effects that precede rather than follow a cause, I'm unpersuaded that you can just blame food banks on Universal Credit's introduction.
Foodbank use rose suddenly and disprorportionately around 2013-2014, immediately coincidental with the government's first round of welfare cuts, as we sourced and discussed extensively here on PB a few months back.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. RochdalePioneers and BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
A rare point on which you and I can agree entirely. (AIUI, you come from a food background, and I come from an IT/tech background).
While I can just about understand the business model of Uber, trying to undercut the competition to get a monopoly, at which point they can raise prices as monopolies do, there’s a very high price electricity of demand for deliveries of small grocery orders. No-one is ever going to pay £10 for delivery of beer and crisps, except for those in rural areas where the business model makes no sense anyway, and for the home drinkers on a Saturday night, who can’t face a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute drive to the local shop.
See my earlier post on this thread from a Deliveroo customer's point of view. Briefly I pay £5 for fish and chips to be delivered. This saves me £5 in cab fares, so it is cost neutral to me as a customer. I do not use Deliveroo for groceries but if I did, then it would be offset against the bus fare to and from the shops. Whether there is a sustainable business model underlying this, I do not know.
New: What’s happening in Tory heartlands in the South? We ran a @kekstcnc@timesradio focus group of swing voters in Tiverton & Honiton who voted Conservative in 2019.
None would vote Tory in the upcoming by-election, and all bar one said they will vote for the Lib Dems. (1/12)
These voters – pro-Brexit Conservatives – feel extremely disappointed in the government with their frustrations led by Boris Johnson, lies over partygate, and a feeling that things promised have not been delivered. Here is what they said about the Conservative leader. (2/12) https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1524664028601192456/photo/1
Boris Johnson is a direct block to them voting Conservative again.
Most said they would “never” vote for the party until he left. In the words of a long-time Conservative: “When a dog bites you, you never know if it's going to bite you again. You can never trust him". (3/12) https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1524664032380215296
James Johnson is yet another presumably well-educated journalist who cannot be bothered to check the spellings of people's names. It's Susanna Reid (no trailing aitch on her given name).
Susanna(h) Reid, Angela Rayne(o)r, Sir Kei(ie)r Starmer and Sue Gra(e)y alone must account for thousands of ignorant and discourteous misspellings every day, not least on PB.
Why can't educated hacks and the Ostentatiously Oxbridge PB Shrewdies do people the basic courtesy of spelling their names correctly?
Mr. Boy, Universal Credit was introduced after food banks first came on the scene, and after they rose during both boom and bust under Labour.
Food bank use has just gone up since the early 2000s. Unless you're arguing Universal Credit is so powerful a concept that it transcends the traditional flow of time and manages to have effects that precede rather than follow a cause, I'm unpersuaded that you can just blame food banks on Universal Credit's introduction.
Foodbank use rose suddenly and disprorportionately around 2013-2014, immediately coincidental with the government's first round of welfare cuts, as we sourced and discussed extensively here on PB a few months back.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
I'm too cynical - I want to believe that's a legit account, but I can't help wondering whether it's just Trevor in Milton Keynes who has set up a paypal account and doing quite nicely from posing as a UA soldier. Perfectly fine for soldier to ask for funds - for equipment and for himself - of course, but it does make me wonder.
His is a very credible account of yesterday's fighting at the river crossing. I believe it.
But I would make any donations to a well known and researched website rather than this individual's site.
If it's a fake, I'd guess it will get picked up fairly soon, as a couple of Ukraine based journalists have noted the tweet.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
Between 2013 and 2018. There are still many on legacy benefits though.
37%. The rest by the end of 2024, apparently.
Yes. Although the "managed migration", from legacy to UC was put on hold during the pandemic and hasn't been re-started. You still get moved if there is a significant change in circumstances. I think the aspiration for end of 2024 simply remains as a hangover. It isn't going to be hit at this rate. Pilot schemes don't appear to have been re-started AIUI.
Samos is, in places, quite stunning. Vivid green stands of cypress trees, whitewashed chapels snoozing between. The cloudless sky gazes serenely down. Wow
Samos is indeed very beautiful and green, outside the over-developed areas. It's a very big island, so there's a lot left to go. Part of the Ionian heartland, like Chios.
It’s also cheap. I’ve got a whole (brand new) apartment in the old port of Pythagorio. Looks like this
Cost? £40 a night
I remember Pythagorio ! There's also Hora, the village I seem to remember nestled underneath the mountain opposite. Nice beaches, and beautifully azure waters - watch out for those large wasps though.
Greek wasps are a mare
Should be ok in May tho. It’s August and September when they are satanic
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. RochdalePioneers and BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
A rare point on which you and I can agree entirely. (AIUI, you come from a food background, and I come from an IT/tech background).
While I can just about understand the business model of Uber, trying to undercut the competition to get a monopoly, at which point they can raise prices as monopolies do, there’s a very high price electricity of demand for deliveries of small grocery orders. No-one is ever going to pay £10 for delivery of beer and crisps, except for those in rural areas where the business model makes no sense anyway, and for the home drinkers on a Saturday night, who can’t face a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute drive to the local shop.
Doesn't Uber's future depend on them getting self-driving vehicles to work? Otherwise, how do they creat a sufficient barrier to entry to do a proper capitalist gouging?
All these delivery firms look like a way to transfer VC money into someone else's money. Maybe that's how it all ends, with rich investors running out of genuinely useful businesses to invest in.
Samos is, in places, quite stunning. Vivid green stands of cypress trees, whitewashed chapels snoozing between. The cloudless sky gazes serenely down. Wow
Samos is indeed very beautiful and green, outside the over-developed areas. It's a very big island, so there's a lot left to go. Part of the Ionian heartland, like Chios.
It’s also cheap. I’ve got a whole (brand new) apartment in the old port of Pythagorio. Looks like this
Cost? £40 a night
I remember Pythagorio ! There's also Hora, the village I seem to remember nestled underneath the mountain opposite. Nice beaches, and beautifully azure waters - watch out for those large wasps though.
Greek wasps are a mare
Should be ok in May tho. It’s August and September when they are satanic
Indeed. May is stunning in the Greek islands. Intense colours, shades and aromas that you'll never see again the rest of the year, and less people.
Incidentally, correction, the village that I remember near Pythagorio was Iraion, not Chora.
New: What’s happening in Tory heartlands in the South? We ran a @kekstcnc@timesradio focus group of swing voters in Tiverton & Honiton who voted Conservative in 2019.
None would vote Tory in the upcoming by-election, and all bar one said they will vote for the Lib Dems. (1/12)
These voters – pro-Brexit Conservatives – feel extremely disappointed in the government with their frustrations led by Boris Johnson, lies over partygate, and a feeling that things promised have not been delivered. Here is what they said about the Conservative leader. (2/12) https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1524664028601192456/photo/1
Boris Johnson is a direct block to them voting Conservative again.
Most said they would “never” vote for the party until he left. In the words of a long-time Conservative: “When a dog bites you, you never know if it's going to bite you again. You can never trust him". (3/12) https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1524664032380215296
James Johnson is yet another presumably well-educated journalist who cannot be bothered to check the spellings of people's names. It's Susanna Reid (no trailing aitch on her given name).
Susanna(h) Reid, Angela Rayne(o)r, Sir Kei(ie)r Starmer and Sue Gra(e)y alone must account for thousands of ignorant and discourteous misspellings every day, not least on PB.
Why can't educated hacks and the Ostentatiously Oxbridge PB Shrewdies do people the basic courtesy of spelling their names correctly?
It really drives me up the effing wall.
And these are bog standard Anglo names. I was at a conference yesterday where an Indian guy was introduced and the woman doing the introduction actually refused to even say his surname because she said it was too hard to pronounce. He laughed it off but I almost walked out, I can't stand this kind of low grade racist bullshit. I checked his surname out afterwards, and it wasn't even that difficult to say. Seriously, getting people's names right is really a basic thing, if people can't manage that perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
And wherever and whenever it was rolled out, food bank use sky-rocketed. Thanks to the bizarre delay in the first payment plus aggressive and arbitrary sanctions regime, primarily, I believe.
I looked into that too. Plenty of anecdotal evidence (which is enough, sometimes) but not coming up in the data.
Loads of confounding factors and as @Carnyx points out, the rollout confuses everything.
Edit: agree that the 5 week wait is a real problem though. Two -child limit is the real killer for child poverty.
The data we get in this country is Trussell Trust, so the expansion of their network, which was only founded in 2008, also skews it.
We also have a lot of heavily discounted (eg Tesco Clubcard now does many 20-40% reductions, Co-Op up to -60/70%) or clearance food, which would otherwise perhaps be in the foodbank numbers. Don't most places in Europe have a ban on eg BoGoFs?
Compare eg France where the whole system is government enforced, and the numbers show approx. 20x as many free meals as we see reported for Trussell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank
It doesn't mean France has more food poverty; it means they are counting different things.
And an absence of reliable data feeds bunfight politics.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. RochdalePioneers and BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
A rare point on which you and I can agree entirely. (AIUI, you come from a food background, and I come from an IT/tech background).
While I can just about understand the business model of Uber, trying to undercut the competition to get a monopoly, at which point they can raise prices as monopolies do, there’s a very high price electricity of demand for deliveries of small grocery orders. No-one is ever going to pay £10 for delivery of beer and crisps, except for those in rural areas where the business model makes no sense anyway, and for the home drinkers on a Saturday night, who can’t face a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute drive to the local shop.
See my earlier post on this thread from a Deliveroo customer's point of view. Briefly I pay £5 for fish and chips to be delivered. This saves me £5 in cab fares, so it is cost neutral to me as a customer. I do not use Deliveroo for groceries but if I did, then it would be offset against the bus fare to and from the shops. Whether there is a sustainable business model underlying this, I do not know.
Yes, you’re paying £5 for Deliveroo to deliver your fish and chips. But their costs of that delivery are £8, and the driver is a contractor earning under minimum wage after his own expenses. If the delivery charge were to be £10 or £12, a level at which they are a sustainable company paying employees, would you still be willing to pay it? More likely you’d walk there and cab back.
Samos is, in places, quite stunning. Vivid green stands of cypress trees, whitewashed chapels snoozing between. The cloudless sky gazes serenely down. Wow
Samos is indeed very beautiful and green, outside the over-developed areas. It's a very big island, so there's a lot left to go. Part of the Ionian heartland, like Chios.
It’s also cheap. I’ve got a whole (brand new) apartment in the old port of Pythagorio. Looks like this
Cost? £40 a night
I remember Pythagorio ! There's also Hora, the village I seem to remember nestled underneath the mountain opposite. Nice beaches, and beautifully azure waters - watch out for those large wasps though.
I remember Adelstrop. Of course, I should not post that because the baddies can look up when Edward Thomas was the O-level poet and use that for doxxing purposes. That's the trouble with online security — aggregation of otherwise innocuous information. @Leon manages to avoid these traps!
True story: once had sex with my corbynite ex on a table outside our villa in Kephalonia
We were so immersed in the throes of passion - or at least I was - we didn’t notice we were being serially stung by wasps until the deed was done. Hurt like hell for a day or two
Forever afterwards she referred to the incident as the “Kephalonian Wasp Rape”
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
Recently, I have accomplished a mission which made huge impact on Russian losses and completely screwed up their plans to encircle Lysychansk....
I'm too cynical - I want to believe that's a legit account, but I can't help wondering whether it's just Trevor in Milton Keynes who has set up a paypal account and doing quite nicely from posing as a UA soldier. Perfectly fine for soldier to ask for funds - for equipment and for himself - of course, but it does make me wonder.
His is a very credible account of yesterday's fighting at the river crossing. I believe it.
But I would make any donations to a well known and researched website rather than this individual's site.
"How I won the war" - on Twitter, instead of bookshops.
There are plenty of examples, in history, going back to the Romans, of engineers looking at rivers and saying "the enemy will cross here". Sometimes they are even right.
Surveying locations to pre-target weapons against them is another old military task. During WWI, such "calibration" of bridges, fords, crossroads and other choke points was a major thing. So that when the word came that "the enemy is at X", the artillery could hit the target rapidly.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. RochdalePioneers and BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
A rare point on which you and I can agree entirely. (AIUI, you come from a food background, and I come from an IT/tech background).
While I can just about understand the business model of Uber, trying to undercut the competition to get a monopoly, at which point they can raise prices as monopolies do, there’s a very high price electricity of demand for deliveries of small grocery orders. No-one is ever going to pay £10 for delivery of beer and crisps, except for those in rural areas where the business model makes no sense anyway, and for the home drinkers on a Saturday night, who can’t face a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute drive to the local shop.
Doesn't Uber's future depend on them getting self-driving vehicles to work? Otherwise, how do they creat a sufficient barrier to entry to do a proper capitalist gouging?
All these delivery firms look like a way to transfer VC money into someone else's money. Maybe that's how it all ends, with rich investors running out of genuinely useful businesses to invest in.
And the phrase that pays is "genuinely useful". There is no benefit to our economy in us turning into the passengers of the Axiom - increasingly fat people who sit all day clicking buttons to have a robot deliver unhealthy food to us. OK so the robots don't yet exist so its thin fit poor people riding bikes to deliver to increasingly fat people, but you take my point...
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
Thought this was an excellent turn of phrase by the BBC reporter outside Kharkiv: "War in the Kharkiv region has changed - it's now a game of hawk and mouse, where each side's drones circle constantly, trying to pinpoint the enemy's tanks and guns, for targeting by artillery."
What the Russians are doing is what they did against Syrians with no airforce. They don't seem to have any idea how to take on an equivalent, if much smaller, airforce. If you compare and contrast that with what NATO forces did in the gulf war it is amateur hour and shows a very serious lack of training.
New: What’s happening in Tory heartlands in the South? We ran a @kekstcnc@timesradio focus group of swing voters in Tiverton & Honiton who voted Conservative in 2019.
None would vote Tory in the upcoming by-election, and all bar one said they will vote for the Lib Dems. (1/12)
These voters – pro-Brexit Conservatives – feel extremely disappointed in the government with their frustrations led by Boris Johnson, lies over partygate, and a feeling that things promised have not been delivered. Here is what they said about the Conservative leader. (2/12) https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1524664028601192456/photo/1
Boris Johnson is a direct block to them voting Conservative again.
Most said they would “never” vote for the party until he left. In the words of a long-time Conservative: “When a dog bites you, you never know if it's going to bite you again. You can never trust him". (3/12) https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1524664032380215296
James Johnson is yet another presumably well-educated journalist who cannot be bothered to check the spellings of people's names. It's Susanna Reid (no trailing aitch on her given name).
Susanna(h) Reid, Angela Rayne(o)r, Sir Kei(ie)r Starmer and Sue Gra(e)y alone must account for thousands of ignorant and discourteous misspellings every day, not least on PB.
Why can't educated hacks and the Ostentatiously Oxbridge PB Shrewdies do people the basic courtesy of spelling their names correctly?
It really drives me up the effing wall.
And these are bog standard Anglo names. I was at a conference yesterday where an Indian guy was introduced and the woman doing the introduction actually refused to even say his surname because she said it was too hard to pronounce. He laughed it off but I almost walked out, I can't stand this kind of low grade racist bullshit. I checked his surname out afterwards, and it wasn't even that difficult to say. Seriously, getting people's names right is really a basic thing, if people can't manage that perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.
Absolutely. I was taught that hearing their name is the sweetest sound anyone will ever hear. The reverse is of course also true. As you say it's an absolute basic. And your anecdote about the conference is pretty bloody shocking.
Isn't Lee Anderson speaking on behalf of his local food bank? You can't say he is out of touch when this is the source of his suggestions.
It won't be "on behalf of". It will be X happens, and it shows Y - a little exaggerated imo to be an anecdote. I don't know which food bank he volunteers at.
Samos is, in places, quite stunning. Vivid green stands of cypress trees, whitewashed chapels snoozing between. The cloudless sky gazes serenely down. Wow
Samos is indeed very beautiful and green, outside the over-developed areas. It's a very big island, so there's a lot left to go. Part of the Ionian heartland, like Chios.
It’s also cheap. I’ve got a whole (brand new) apartment in the old port of Pythagorio. Looks like this
Cost? £40 a night
I remember Pythagorio ! There's also Hora, the village I seem to remember nestled underneath the mountain opposite. Nice beaches, and beautifully azure waters - watch out for those large wasps though.
Greek wasps are a mare
Should be ok in May tho. It’s August and September when they are satanic
Indeed. May is stunning in the Greek islands. Intense colours, shades and aromas that you'll never see again the rest of the year, and less people.
Incidentally, correction, the village that I remember near Pythagorio was Iraion, not Chora.
Just did a cab ride across the island. You’re right. The intense green of the cypress trees against the throbbing turquoise of the sea - amazing. And wildflowers adazzle everywhere
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. @RochdalePioneers and @BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
Its certainly possible for companies to make a profit from people making home deliveries of food, Domino's Pizza* is a very profitable business that does precisely that.
The question is getting the balance of costs right. That's never going to be profitable for delivering crisps and a coke, it can be profitable if you're delivering a significant order though.
The question as with many things is about getting the pricing right. It won't happen for "free". There's a reason why Domino's will charge £19 for a pizza with "free delivery", but have a collection "promotion" reducing the price to £9.99 if you collect it.
* Other food delivery companies are available.
We're talking about two different kinds of business. One is the producer - like a Dominos - who offer a delivery service. The other is Deliveroo who collect food from the producer - like Dominos - and deliver it for a fee.
Dominos can afford to subsidise the cost of delivery via the profits made producing the food. Deliveroo et al cannot. They produce nothing, they simply shift product from a to b. Without the ability to make a profit on the produced item there is nothing to subsidise the operation with other than VC cash injections.
But they do take money from the food.
Deliveroo have a very sneaky business model and they actually take money many ways if you read up on it.
They approach restaurants, many of whom are desperate for the cash, and say to them "your kitchen is open anyway, we'll bring orders to you and we'll take a 30% commission". As such the price you're paying for the food, much of it isn't going to the food.
Then they tell customers that the customers need to pay a "service charge". In fact Deliveroo now charges two service charge fees they add on top of the food prices, of which they're taking a commission.
So if you order £40 of food from a restaurant, Deliveroo might take £12 in commission, charge you £4-£5 for delivery/service fees and pay the delivery driver about £3 because they're expected to do 3-4+ deliveries per hour.
Their business model doesn't just rely upon beggaring their delivery drivers, they also do the same for the restaurants too.
True story: once had sex with my corbynite ex on a table outside our villa in Kephalonia
We were so immersed in the throes of passion - or at least I was - we didn’t notice we were being serially stung by wasps until the deed was done. Hurt like hell for a day or two
Forever afterwards she referred to the incident as the “Kephalonian Wasp Rape”
We’re divorced now
It's only a little prick so perhaps it's no wonder she didn't feel it.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
And wherever and whenever it was rolled out, food bank use sky-rocketed. Thanks to the bizarre delay in the first payment plus aggressive and arbitrary sanctions regime, primarily, I believe.
I looked into that too. Plenty of anecdotal evidence (which is enough, sometimes) but not coming up in the data.
Loads of confounding factors and as @Carnyx points out, the rollout confuses everything.
Edit: agree that the 5 week wait is a real problem though. Two -child limit is the real killer for child poverty.
The data we get in this country is Trussell Trust, so the expansion of their network, which was only founded in 2008, also skews it.
We also have a lot of heavily discounted (eg Tesco Clubcard now does many 20-40% reductions, Co-Op up to -60/70%) or clearance food, which would otherwise perhaps be in the foodbank numbers. Don't most places in Europe have a ban on eg BoGoFs?
Compare eg France where the whole system is government enforced, and the numbers show approx. 20x as many free meals as we see reported for Trussell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank
And an absence of reliable data feeds bunfight politics.
Trussell Trust also runs only 2 out 3 food banks also. I'm much more in favour of the smaller independent ones.
The Bank of England plans to keep interest rates at a record low until unemployment falls to 7% - something unlikely for another three years - in a major new departure for British monetary policy.
Barely a month after Canadian Mark Carney took over from the long-serving Mervyn King as BoE governor, the central bank said on Wednesday that it would keep interest rates at 0.5 percent unless inflation threatened to get out of control or there was a danger to financial stability
Unemployment went below 7% just five months later and it kept on falling. Today it stands at 3.8%.
The issue then was that we imported a lot of deflation from China. Raising interest rates may have ended up causing deflation.
There was also a truly massive deflationary effect from the gradual unwinding of the mountains of "fantasy money" that had been created on the back of CDOs and similar financial products post 2008 which went on for several years. That came close to driving several parts of the world into deflation and the EZ dipped into it more than once.
The British jobs miracle, post 2012, however, remains largely unexplained. Why did it happen here? How did so little of that growth end up being reflected in GDP? Are our GDP figures correct? What policies do we need to sustain high employment? Can we improve productivity within that mix? Are we right about productivity? The reason it is found to be so low is that we effectively divide the number of people in work by the output. As that number went up and the measured output didn't productivity fell, but did it?
These are not just historical issues. They are right at the centre of the economic challenges we face today. I am not sure I believe the official figures.
Surely this one is pretty simple. Different jobs deliver different levels of economic output. The "jobs miracle" delivered an awful lot of low paid low output low security jobs. Whilst I have a lot of respect for the physical effort made by the Uber Eats cyclists delivering people's booze and crisps order its hardly GDP-generating.
What we need to do - as has been the case for the lost decade back to 2012 - is invest in training and skills and manufacturing. Make more stuff, improve balance of payments, increase disposable incomes - the virtuous circle.
The problem is that in the 2008 era we replaced capitalism with bankism. Borrow cheap money, invest it, deliver a return on investment, reinvest the profits is now seen as "who will pay for it" subsidy.
But why did noone else in the EZ produce jobs like we did? That is the mystery. Our employment laws were largely set to European standards. We had a relatively high and increasing minimum wage (Germany didn't even have one for nearly all of that period). And the money spent on takeaways and deliveries was substantial in cumulo and should have boosted GDP by more than it did. My speculation is that we are not very good at measuring that kind of spending, partly because there is significant under declaration of it. We get the employment part because people need to be registered to get in work benefits but the money taken largely disappears from the figures.
Universal credit, and the easy availability of casual work also helped. RochdalePioneers and BartholomewRoberts also raise good points about the need to treat human capital as valuable, and invest in training and development. At the bottom end of the labour market, we now no longer have virtually unlimited supply, so there will be a need to replace labour with capital as the cost of labour rises.
Yes, some businesses will find things difficult in this new environment, but no-one bar a few VC investors ever thought that delivering a can of coke and a packet of crisps to someone’s front door, was ever going to be a profitable business model. Nor washing cars inside and out for a tenner.
Remember what the business model is. Create a new business - "DeliverCo" - which when you sift past all the guff about technology pays the desperate by the hour to cycle through the rain delivering stuff from your corner shop you can no longer be arsed to walk to.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
A rare point on which you and I can agree entirely. (AIUI, you come from a food background, and I come from an IT/tech background).
While I can just about understand the business model of Uber, trying to undercut the competition to get a monopoly, at which point they can raise prices as monopolies do, there’s a very high price electricity of demand for deliveries of small grocery orders. No-one is ever going to pay £10 for delivery of beer and crisps, except for those in rural areas where the business model makes no sense anyway, and for the home drinkers on a Saturday night, who can’t face a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute drive to the local shop.
Doesn't Uber's future depend on them getting self-driving vehicles to work? Otherwise, how do they creat a sufficient barrier to entry to do a proper capitalist gouging?
All these delivery firms look like a way to transfer VC money into someone else's money. Maybe that's how it all ends, with rich investors running out of genuinely useful businesses to invest in.
Yes, Uber thought that self-driving cars would be everywhere by now, and underestimated by at least one order of magnitude how difficult it would be.
The billions of VC dollars looking for anything in which to invest, are a symptom of more than a decade of zero interest rates.
What actually happens, is that the initial investors in such a company get out quite early with large profits, or see it through to an IPO while still unprofitable. That’s how the VCs have been making money, but of course someone ends up holding the baby at the end of the run, as the stock price crashes.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
Yep Universal Credit is paid in arrears - which isn't much use if you are suddenly unemployed because your employer has gone bankrupt before paying you.
Even though the move has been expected for several weeks now, the announcement that the Finnish government is officially seeking to join NATO "without delay" has been greeted with a real sense of relief in Tallinn. The near certain accession of Finland and highly likely accession of Sweden transforms the security postion of Estonia and the other Baltic states drastically for the better. Estonian President Karis was visiting Helsinki yesterday and there was almost a sense of celebration that Estonia´s sister nation has recognised the serious danger that Putin´s Russia now poses to the entire civilised world. Nevertheless this relief is tempered by the knowledge that the crisis is still serious. The US intelligence assessment that the war could last for months or even years to come and the concerns of Western Europe do not match the sense that we have in Estonia, at least based on the Russian losses, as reported. The defeat of Russian forces in Kharkiv that has followed the defeat at the gates of Kyiv, underlines that Western intelligence has consistently over estimated Russian strength and underestimated the Ukrainians. Furthermore, Putin is losing his freedom of action: any attempt to institute conscription may be met with open rebellion, and the repeated arson and bomb attacks in Russia suggests to many here that an anti war resistance movement is growing inside Russia itself. Superior training and tactics, better equipment, higher morale, all favour the Ukrainians, yet the view remains that Putin is solidly entrenched and capable of victory in the war. This is not an assessment that chimes with the Estonians. Unless the Ukrainian losses are many multiples of those reported, the most likely end of the war can only come with a culmination that renders the Russian armed forces combat ineffective, military jargon for complete defeat. While Ukrainian victory is by no means certain, the latest victory on top of a major increase in the number of Ukrainian fresh troops and better kit is inexorably tipping the balance.
The American intelligence is probably from inside the Kremlin - that Putin will carrying on fighting a "broken back" war, no matter how badly degraded his military becomes.
Just walked out of the fracture clinic. Whenever I want (trial and error) I can throw away my orthopaedic boot and crutches. Yeah!
I've had both patella tendons go in the last 10 years. Last time was in 2019. I vividly recall attending the clinic after about 8 weeks expecting them to open the angle of the brace a bit more (starts at 0 increases over the weeks). Instead they took it away and said to get on with it! The joy (and a hint of worry...) Also looked a bit odd as wearing shorts in November but hey,
Morning, on thread..... Confected outrage that will be forgotten by next Sunday, as, sadly, will the valid point made. Ashfield's fate will be decided by Zadrozny's fortunes and not Anderson's QS intervention. It may be a regain but not because of this, as soon as they have to drag his expenses into it you know they've overplayed their hand. Unless he's an unusual trougher, which he doesn't appear to be.
Samos is, in places, quite stunning. Vivid green stands of cypress trees, whitewashed chapels snoozing between. The cloudless sky gazes serenely down. Wow
Samos is indeed very beautiful and green, outside the over-developed areas. It's a very big island, so there's a lot left to go. Part of the Ionian heartland, like Chios.
It’s also cheap. I’ve got a whole (brand new) apartment in the old port of Pythagorio. Looks like this
Cost? £40 a night
Is Greece cheaper today than it was before their financial crisis about 10 years ago? (I've never been to the country).
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
Two words: Universal Credit.
Wasn't it rolled out over a period? Which would also tend to confuse the picture.
And wherever and whenever it was rolled out, food bank use sky-rocketed. Thanks to the bizarre delay in the first payment plus aggressive and arbitrary sanctions regime, primarily, I believe.
I looked into that too. Plenty of anecdotal evidence (which is enough, sometimes) but not coming up in the data.
Loads of confounding factors and as @Carnyx points out, the rollout confuses everything.
Edit: agree that the 5 week wait is a real problem though. Two -child limit is the real killer for child poverty.
The 5 week wait was abolished years ago. They give an up-front payment for people signing up now, which is then taken back in slightly reduced payments over 12 months - even if people then sign off they still get to keep the up-front payment I believe.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats:
- "We have flipped a lot of communities who have traditionally voted Tory, they have now realised they get a better service with the Liberal Democrats."
Just as in southern England, the Lib Dem uptick in Scotland terrifies the Tories. But for a different reason: any significant SCon to SLD tactical unwind will see all SCon seats fall… not to the Lib Dems, but to the SNP.
If I was Douglas Ross I’d be doing everything in my power to attract these floating voters. Shame his bosses in London are doing everything they can to repel and disgust them.
I'm very pleased with the progress we have made in Banff and Buchan Coast. Taking seats in Fraserburgh and Peterhead shows there is opposition to the idiot Duguid. But yes, come the general election the challenge is replace the mince with something more palatable, and if that means SNP then fine.
Er, point of order, nothing wrong with mince. It's positively sentient when cooked with shallots, as opposed to the ScoTories at present.
Shallots you say? Gotta try that.
Fiddly. 10x as much chopping as onions for a less than 1000% gain.
FPT - but a crucial and imperative issue of current affairs, for @StuartDickson as well: I put them in whole (peeled of brown skin) for a stew or mince, or cut almost halfway throuigh for a large bud or clove or whatever the term is. So no chopping needed.
Also banana shallots are dead easy to chop. And excellent in risottos.
Haven't tried those in risottos - we tend to use onions as easier to get and they cook longer anyway. Will try. (I was talking about the usual small round shallots.)
They're a less strong flavour - which is what you want in a risotto.
At the opposite end of the scale from today's discussion, have you tried Natoora? I've switched to their home delivery and the quality is absolutely phenomenal. Genuinely the best fruit and veg I've had, plus they do some really good charcuterie. If you live in a delivery area it's worth a try, but it isn't cheap.
Somewhat related - I've found a lot of nice stuff on https://www.souschef.co.uk/ . Quite a lot of little odds and ends that are tricky to get otherwise.
Comments
I feel sorry for the poor schmucks who've fallen for the scam, but its even worse than a traditional Ponzi scheme - it'd be better if there were nothing underpinning it like a traditional Ponzi, the Bitscam environment is ultimately worse than worthless.
At a time we're supposed to be worried about the environment, Bitscam is responsible for more emissions now than many countries I believe. A total crash of the entire thing so the lot of them are revealed to be worthless and shut down for good, would be good for the world.
DeliverCo needs to grow market share vs ShiftCo and StuffCo, so offers not just free delivery but a fucking discount on the stuff they are delivering. Shows HUUUUUUGE growth which brings in money from other VC people to grow the business. More market share makes VC investment worth £more - they cash out with a massive profit whilst others pile in. Rinse and repeat.
Frankly they may as well all deliver Tulip Bulbs - its about as sustainable a business model. There is no future in most of these companies. No viable way to make actual money cycling around your £9 beer and crisps order from Tesco Express. Its a get rich quick scheme for investors literally making money off the backs of the people with Deliveroo boxes strapped onto them.
https://members.parliament.uk/Government/Cabinet
The question is getting the balance of costs right. That's never going to be profitable for delivering crisps and a coke, it can be profitable if you're delivering a significant order though.
The question as with many things is about getting the pricing right. It won't happen for "free". There's a reason why Domino's will charge £19 for a pizza with "free delivery", but have a collection "promotion" reducing the price to £9.99 if you collect it.
* Other food delivery companies are available.
The photographs of the aftermath show a very large number of destroyed vehicles. If they were accompanied by infantry who were trapped on the wrong side of the river, it would have been a bloodbath.
https://twitter.com/darrenmccaffrey/status/1524679999713906688
It’s incidents like this, that make the enemy start to realise they’re losing the war.
I should add that the drivers might have Deliveroo logos or one of their rivals like Just Eat, so each driver working for more than one firm adds to the British economic miracle of full employment without much uptick in GDP.
Just be careful for the next couple of months as the bones strengthen.
So we're back to just how pig ignorant you lot can sound.
Dominos can afford to subsidise the cost of delivery via the profits made producing the food. Deliveroo et al cannot. They produce nothing, they simply shift product from a to b. Without the ability to make a profit on the produced item there is nothing to subsidise the operation with other than VC cash injections.
Mr. Eabhal, given food banks arose during the boom under Blair, and use has increased under the recession, recovery, and since, it does seem that food banks are just on the up regardless of the broader economic picture.
https://twitter.com/Joe_Mayes/status/1524615844428460033
Exclusive: Most of the UK has fallen further behind London & the South East since Boris Johnson became prime minister, a major blow for `levelling up'
https://bloomberg.com/graphics/uk-levelling-up/boris-johnson-level-up-plan-in-trouble.html
Meanwhile, an ageing population means that that increase in employment is matched with a shrinking or stagnant working age population, so you get a very tight labour market and record low unemployment. Unemployment is at or close to multi decade lows in the UK, Euro Area and US. It's not a UK specific story.
Ashfield is a 3 way marginal not a 2 way marginal - Tory / Labour / Jason Zadrozny. Up until 2015 JZ was a Lib Dem, when he stood down because 'rumours' of historic sexual offences 'emerged' a few weeks before the 2015 Election. LDs only got 7000 votes in that Election. There's plenty of filthy politics there that I do not know in detail.
Years later, the police withdrew their case at the door of the Court.
From 2015 JZ was an Ashfield Independent, and aiui built the party off part of the LD base that went with him - Councillors etc. I think of them as LDs minus the EU fundamentalism, though LDs themselves are evolving a little.
JZ gets 25-30%, and about half of it imo is a personal vote that vanishes when he is not the one standing. When he does not stand it seems to become a Tory / Lab marginal.
In the 1990s, LDs had about 20% of the vote in 2 elections, and somewhat lower since. AFAICs JZ has taken a large majority of the LD vote to the Ashfield Independents with him. 2017, 2019 LDs have been
I do not see a pile of rather vapid sneer politics from London politicos / media causing an earthquake here. Poverty-cased charities may have more of a potential impact.
I agree that you have to read all this stuff with a degree of scepticism.
But I would make any donations to a well known and researched website rather than this individual's site.
(AIUI, you come from a food background, and I come from an IT/tech background).
While I can just about understand the business model of Uber, trying to undercut the competition to get a monopoly, at which point they can raise prices as monopolies do, there’s a very high price electricity of demand for deliveries of small grocery orders. No-one is ever going to pay £10 for delivery of beer and crisps, except for those in rural areas where the business model makes no sense anyway, and for the home drinkers on a Saturday night, who can’t face a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute drive to the local shop.
We know there is a correlation between household income and obesity. And its quite a new thing (from the 1990s onwards, from memory), and probably related to the rise of crap food.
We need to work really hard to change that - whether it's to do with shift work, ability to drive to supermarkets to do big shops (my pet theory), cultural stuff, adverts, or smashing food manufacturers if they add sugar to food.
Mainly because life is shit on legacy benefits too!
It's hard to make ends meet on £200,000 a year plus whatever the missus brings in.
Cost? £40 a night
Con 10,485
Lab 9,870
Reform UK 1,465
LD 1,220
Green 441
Ind 92
Loads of confounding factors and as @Carnyx points out, the rollout confuses everything.
Edit: agree that the 5 week wait is a real problem though. Two -child limit is the real killer for child poverty.
Food bank use has just gone up since the early 2000s. Unless you're arguing Universal Credit is so powerful a concept that it transcends the traditional flow of time and manages to have effects that precede rather than follow a cause, I'm unpersuaded that you can just blame food banks on Universal Credit's introduction.
As I see it, Lab's main hope is that AIs fail, or that the Tory efforts to get a single council for Notts work.
The Government said it has launched an urgent review into whether it can stop "evil monster" Levi Bellfield from marrying his fiancee, who is described in the Sun newspaper as a "besotted" blonde-haired woman in her 40s.
Bizarre. Horrible man but, come on, guys, rule of law.
This will be spun as the Home Sec's hands being tied by the libtard Yuman Rights Act, but there is actually no "no marriage" clause in the sentence.
He’s more likely a freelancer, maybe his job before the war was doing aerial drone surveys for farmers. He’s looking for donations to buy professional, rather than military, drone kit to continue his surveillance. The language isn’t of a native English speaker.
He joined Twitter three years ago. Someone with more time than me, might go back in his timeline to see what he posted last year?
Health issues = less work. Social stigma against overweight people, particularly women.
Susanna(h) Reid, Angela Rayne(o)r, Sir Kei(ie)r Starmer and Sue Gra(e)y alone must account for thousands of ignorant and discourteous misspellings every day, not least on PB.
Why can't educated hacks and the Ostentatiously Oxbridge PB Shrewdies do people the basic courtesy of spelling their names correctly?
It really drives me up the effing wall.
https://www.trusselltrust.org/what-we-do/research-advocacy/universal-credit-and-foodbank-use/
You still get moved if there is a significant change in circumstances.
I think the aspiration for end of 2024 simply remains as a hangover. It isn't going to be hit at this rate. Pilot schemes don't appear to have been re-started AIUI.
Should be ok in May tho. It’s August and September when they are satanic
All these delivery firms look like a way to transfer VC money into someone else's money. Maybe that's how it all ends, with rich investors running out of genuinely useful businesses to invest in.
Incidentally, correction, the village that I remember near Pythagorio was Iraion, not Chora.
We also have a lot of heavily discounted (eg Tesco Clubcard now does many 20-40% reductions, Co-Op up to -60/70%) or clearance food, which would otherwise perhaps be in the foodbank numbers. Don't most places in Europe have a ban on eg BoGoFs?
Compare eg France where the whole system is government enforced, and the numbers show approx. 20x as many free meals as we see reported for Trussell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_bank
It doesn't mean France has more food poverty; it means they are counting different things.
And an absence of reliable data feeds bunfight politics.
We were so immersed in the throes of passion - or at least I was - we didn’t notice we were being serially stung by wasps until the deed was done. Hurt like hell for a day or two
Forever afterwards she referred to the incident as the “Kephalonian Wasp Rape”
We’re divorced now
There are plenty of examples, in history, going back to the Romans, of engineers looking at rivers and saying "the enemy will cross here". Sometimes they are even right.
Surveying locations to pre-target weapons against them is another old military task. During WWI, such "calibration" of bridges, fords, crossroads and other choke points was a major thing. So that when the word came that "the enemy is at X", the artillery could hit the target rapidly.
What the Russians are doing is what they did against Syrians with no airforce. They don't seem to have any idea how to take on an equivalent, if much smaller, airforce. If you compare and contrast that with what NATO forces did in the gulf war it is amateur hour and shows a very serious lack of training.
Deliveroo have a very sneaky business model and they actually take money many ways if you read up on it.
They approach restaurants, many of whom are desperate for the cash, and say to them "your kitchen is open anyway, we'll bring orders to you and we'll take a 30% commission". As such the price you're paying for the food, much of it isn't going to the food.
Then they tell customers that the customers need to pay a "service charge". In fact Deliveroo now charges two service charge fees they add on top of the food prices, of which they're taking a commission.
So if you order £40 of food from a restaurant, Deliveroo might take £12 in commission, charge you £4-£5 for delivery/service fees and pay the delivery driver about £3 because they're expected to do 3-4+ deliveries per hour.
Their business model doesn't just rely upon beggaring their delivery drivers, they also do the same for the restaurants too.
I'm much more in favour of the smaller independent ones.
The billions of VC dollars looking for anything in which to invest, are a symptom of more than a decade of zero interest rates.
What actually happens, is that the initial investors in such a company get out quite early with large profits, or see it through to an IPO while still unprofitable. That’s how the VCs have been making money, but of course someone ends up holding the baby at the end of the run, as the stock price crashes.
No, it's not 'exactly right' you discourteous sod!
Take it easy!
Confected outrage that will be forgotten by next Sunday, as, sadly, will the valid point made. Ashfield's fate will be decided by Zadrozny's fortunes and not Anderson's QS intervention. It may be a regain but not because of this, as soon as they have to drag his expenses into it you know they've overplayed their hand. Unless he's an unusual trougher, which he doesn't appear to be.