Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
The recovery element is particularly important. Without a CRARRV a Challenger just becomes a 70 ton metal roadblock when it breaks. It also has the 10 ton crane needed to do an engine/transmission swap.
The transport element is easier to solve. When QRH deployed with their Challengers to Finland last year they had no HETs so just used civvie Finnish contractors (who must have been coining it).
Any fucking idiot can operate a tank (as anybody who has ever member of the RTR will attest) but the logistical and technical support burden that comes with them is very significant.
Total number of 'spare' British CR2 (ie the ones that are going to be scrapped, not upgraded to CR3) is 88.
"Any fucking idiot can operate a tank "
This is a typical fucking @Dura_Ace pissing on everybody comment - you're a poster who virtually never has anything positive to say about anyone.
I'll alter what you say above to make it accurate: "Any fucking idiot can operate a tank; but to use one effectively requires training, experience and not a little skill."
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
Trans Pennine Express totally failing to provide a service today.
08:00 from Leeds to Liverpool is announced, rolls in, and is then promptly cancelled. 08:07 was already cancelled and so is the 08:30. Thankfully Northern can get me to Manchester.
Coming back is going to be just as bad - three TPE services in a row in the evening peak already cancelled.
Yebbut we need that Mick Lynch to answer the nice Tory MP's question at the select committee about whether he feels the unreliability of the strikes are causing people to stop travelling. Because everything works brilliantly when not on strike, as you have seen. Nobody travels anymore post Covid, so no trains are needed between backwater places like Dirty Leeds and Manchester.
What would you say are the contributing factors to the fact that the railways have problems on non-strike days?
In my experience despite everything, the trains in the UK are actually a lot better than similar countries in northern Europe, IE Germany, Holland, Denmark.. Newer trains, more punctual, far better information, you actually get refunds when they are late etc. There are still problems but the trains seem to work a lot better overall.
Regarding the strikes, I support them, but I would support the idea that there has to be some statutory minimum service on strike days. Then they can strike as much as they want, as long as there is some way of getting where you need to go in an emergency. It isn't reasonable that a set of workers can hold the country to ransom over the operation of national infrastructure.
I have to disagree. Certainly as far as the Netherlands or Germany are concerned. I think both are miles ahead of the vast majority of UK train services I have experienced. The East Coast line is very good in the UK but cross country services are a joke - and not just the Trans-Pennine stuff.
I don't think German trains are any better these days than British trains (in terms of punctuality or cancellations). Dutch trains in my limited experience are very reliable. Italian trains are worse.
But it depends what you value: you can get a reasonably priced ticket at the station for the next train in Italy. And the coffee at the station bar is always good and cheap.
They are much cheaper, though. At least whenever I've been from Zurich to Munich the price was always pretty reasonable compared to what I'd pay for an equivalent journey in the UK. It used to be about £40 each way, London to Cardiff is an hour shorter and is about £90 each way. Also the DB trains are so much nicer than what we have here.
£50 rtn London-Cardiff if I wanted to go next Thursday for the day specifying trains.
Specifying trains though, get the much better flexible ticket and it's very expensive and the service is pants. I wish there was a flight to Cardiff/Bristol from London.
BA does dozens of flights from Heathrow to Cardiff every week. Shame they don’t sell tickets for them.
Should be an opportunity for someone out of LCY really. Give the train some competition.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
If robots take over more of the economy and act rationally, does that mean economic models will start working?
What is rational for an AI might be very different from our understanding.
If AI is truly intelligent, it may be corrupt, stupid, arrogant and/or taking drugs.
The idea that AI is automatically Plato’s Philosopher King made manifest has always seemed bizarre to me.
As is the idea that a truly intelligent AI might think in a recognisably human manner.
"It's intelligence, Jim, but not as we know it"?
I'm now re-evaluating the apparently strange logic of one of our more persistent posters; perhaps we just lack the capacity to understand the deep arguments made?
Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
The recovery element is particularly important. Without a CRARRV a Challenger just becomes a 70 ton metal roadblock when it breaks. It also has the 10 ton crane needed to do an engine/transmission swap.
The transport element is easier to solve. When QRH deployed with their Challengers to Finland last year they had no HETs so just used civvie Finnish contractors (who must have been coining it).
Any fucking idiot can operate a tank (as anybody who has ever member of the RTR will attest) but the logistical and technical support burden that comes with them is very significant.
Total number of 'spare' British CR2 (ie the ones that are going to be scrapped, not upgraded to CR3) is 88.
"Any fucking idiot can operate a tank "
This is a typical fucking @Dura_Ace pissing on everybody comment - you're a poster who virtually never has anything positive to say about anyone.
I'll alter what you say above to make it accurate: "Any fucking idiot can operate a tank; but to use one effectively requires training, experience and not a little skill."
A chap I used to know did tank driving days - mostly stripped down Abbotts, though there were options to drive other things including MBTs.
His pictures of what a novice driver could do with a heavy tracked vehicle were entertaining - he did a lot of dragging vehicles out of hilarious positions.
The Kremlin is belatedly conducting personnel mobilization, reorganization, and industrial actions it probably should have undertaken before launching its invasion of Ukraine in Feb '22 and is taking steps to conduct the “special military operation” as a major conventional war. https://mobile.twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1614825184766185473
Maybe they should have thought of that, while they still had deployable tank regiments and elite squadrons of men in their army.
Now, not so much, when there’s almost no tanks left that aren’t relics from Afghanistan in the 1960s, 30% of their entire army of men has been killed or wounded out, and they’re relying on anti-ship missiles aimed at residential apartment blocks.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
Yes, I was thinking a new base rail tunnel rather than road but either or both would do. And keep it as a base tunnel, as low down as you can feasibly do it. Ignore Bradford and Huddersfield - just link those up to Leeds better.
There's a reason Woodhead didn't reopen - it is in a right state. And it carries a lot of high voltage lines now anyway.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
If robots take over more of the economy and act rationally, does that mean economic models will start working?
What is rational for an AI might be very different from our understanding.
If AI is truly intelligent, it may be corrupt, stupid, arrogant and/or taking drugs.
The idea that AI is automatically Plato’s Philosopher King made manifest has always seemed bizarre to me.
As is the idea that a truly intelligent AI might think in a recognisably human manner.
"It's intelligence, Jim, but not as we know it"?
I'm now re-evaluating the apparently strange logic of one of our more persistent posters; perhaps we just lack the capacity to understand the deep arguments made?
This is one of the weaknesses of the Turing Test. It's conceivable that you would create an artificial intelligence that would be very recognisably not human, and so would fail the Turing Test,
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Unbelievable, for the force that had one member of an elite armed security team locked up for the rest of his life last year - for raping and killing a woman he pulled off the street - and had at least a dozen more rapists and sexual assaulters convicted from within the ranks?
Very believable, if you ask anyone who follows the news on the Met.
Germany’s beleaguered defence minister is expected to stand down in the coming days as Berlin comes under renewed pressure to approve the delivery of Leopard battle tanks to Ukraine.
This isn't really anything to do with die Leoparden but a sustained sequence of Truss level performance.
I reckon the CR2 donation was because #globalbritain wanted to be first with an MBT donation and were worried a Leopard deal was imminent.
I really don't think so. Given the prior extreme reluctance to supply MBTs (and Germany's to permit the supply of Leopards by third countries), it's not unreasonable to think that it's just as much about building pressure to change that ahead if this week's Ramstein meeting.
The German defence ministry was where idiots were sent, for years. Ursula von der Leyen was the *successful* one.
Interesting to hear how the goalposts are moving. The new line is that no tanks can be ready before 2024.
What will be the timescale for delivery of the 12(!) CR2s with trained crews and adequate support? I read somewhere that currently the AFU has no suitable tank recovery ability for Challengers so that would have to be organised.
Afaics from a distance and as a non military expert (so much like almost every other PB military expert), though Germany’s aid is delivered furtively from a pacifist mindset while the UK’s comes with much bellicose self praise, the level of help doesn’t seem to differ that much. Not to restate the bleedin’ obvious that’s what happens with different countries with different histories and politics.
The main differences are that the UK has given what it can much more quickly and with less agonising, but Germany has more in the way of useful and usable kit than the UK.
The British Army seems to be in a terrible state in terms of usable equipment, and, nearly one year after Russian tanks started heading towards Kyiv, there doesn't seem to be much urgency in fixing those issues, or producing new kit for either the British Army or Ukraine.
It means Britain is in the position of hoping that Germany and the US will do what we would like to do, but can't.
I think the understanding within NATO is that the UK prioritises navy/air/nuclear while countries like Germany should, understandably given the geography, have a greater focus on ground forces. But at least the UK is taking a lead with the decision on supplying Challengers.
If the UK and US had taken the approach adopted by the Germans I suspect Putin would have had a much merrier Xmas.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
This can’t go on. The Met needs to be disbanded and oversight for Borough policing handed over to the nearest county force (eg former Kent, Essex, Surrey and Herts boroughs given back to their respective county forces, ex-Middlesex ones to Thames Valley) while a new structure for the capital is put in place.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
The UK Gov't has suggested it could block this law [Scotland Gender recognition reform] from going through in order to safeguard women's rights in England's schools, hospitals, and prisons. Would British voters support or oppose this? (11 Jan)
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
It seems those people hyper-ventilating about Gender Recognition Certificates should be more concerned about Police Warant Cards.
Part of the sending tanks story which is not much discussed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/14/tanks-will-help-kyiv-break-deadlock-but-its-ukraine-allies-now-face-a-fork-in-the-road ...Despite these sound operational reasons for providing Ukraine with armour, the provision of Nato-designed main battle tanks presents some major challenges. The Leopard 2, weighing about 69 tonnes, and Challenger 2, weighing 72 tonnes, are more than 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed main battle tanks currently operated by Ukraine. There is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which such heavy vehicles can travel, while their engineering and recovery vehicles are optimised to support Soviet designs. Putting aside the training needed to maintain and fight with Nato-designed tanks, they would also need to be provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale.
It is this requirement for enablers that poses hard choices on Nato members wanting to offer Ukraine their vehicles. After the cold war, frontline tank fleets declined significantly, while the cutbacks in bridging, breaching and transport and recovery vehicles have been even more severe...
The recovery element is particularly important. Without a CRARRV a Challenger just becomes a 70 ton metal roadblock when it breaks. It also has the 10 ton crane needed to do an engine/transmission swap.
The transport element is easier to solve. When QRH deployed with their Challengers to Finland last year they had no HETs so just used civvie Finnish contractors (who must have been coining it).
Any fucking idiot can operate a tank (as anybody who has ever member of the RTR will attest) but the logistical and technical support burden that comes with them is very significant.
Total number of 'spare' British CR2 (ie the ones that are going to be scrapped, not upgraded to CR3) is 88.
"Any fucking idiot can operate a tank "
This is a typical fucking @Dura_Ace pissing on everybody comment - you're a poster who virtually never has anything positive to say about anyone.
I'll alter what you say above to make it accurate: "Any fucking idiot can operate a tank; but to use one effectively requires training, experience and not a little skill."
A chap I used to know did tank driving days - mostly stripped down Abbotts, though there were options to drive other things including MBTs.
His pictures of what a novice driver could do with a heavy tracked vehicle were entertaining - he did a lot of dragging vehicles out of hilarious positions.
I was thinking of when I used to do jobs with a JCB. I could dig a trench, lay pea gravel down ready to accept a pipe, and lower pipe in, to what was probably an acceptable standard. But I only did it in holidays, when I was fit enough. But when compared to a full-time driver, I was an absolute novice. One in particular would dig the trench immaculately level, get the pea gravel so barely a pebble was out of place, and in a much shorter time. It was like the backactor was an extension of one of his arms.
Unfortunately war does not grant you a great deal of time to gain experience.
This can’t go on. The Met needs to be disbanded and oversight for Borough policing handed over to the nearest county force (eg former Kent, Essex, Surrey and Herts boroughs given back to their respective county forces, ex-Middlesex ones to Thames Valley) while a new structure for the capital is put in place.
Why do you think that non-Met police forces are better? Especially since it has been revealed that one way to escape investigation has been to retire sick due to stress. Which halts the investigation. Then get a job with another police force.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
At the top they know they have a massive problem, the commissioner said at the weekend, “We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them. It’s sort of, it’s crazy.”
This should be addressed with an emergency cross party bill to allow them to get rid of the most toxic by the end of the month.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
This can’t go on. The Met needs to be disbanded and oversight for Borough policing handed over to the nearest county force (eg former Kent, Essex, Surrey and Herts boroughs given back to their respective county forces, ex-Middlesex ones to Thames Valley) while a new structure for the capital is put in place.
Why do you think that non-Met police forces are better? Especially since it has been revealed that one way to escape investigation has been to retire sick due to stress. Which halts the investigation. Then get a job with another police force.
I’m not saying they’re much better but the issue is, undoubtedly, primarily with the Met. To me it’s telling that Wayne Couzens, originally from Dover and resident in Deal when he killed Sarah Everard, chose to join the Nuclear Constabulary and then the Met rather than apply full time with Kent. I think he was briefly a special with Kent but avoided applying for a full time post with them. There is too much coming out of the Met to deny it has a very specific problem.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Nope - see the extensive literature on The Sungularity.
There will always be scarcity. All that virtually free production does is remove the scarcity from many items.
For example, even if we had totally free house construction - “Build a house there, all services sorted etc” - there would be a shortage of places you’d be allowed to build a house.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
At the top they know they have a massive problem, the commissioner said at the weekend, “We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them. It’s sort of, it’s crazy.”
This should be addressed with an emergency cross party bill to allow them to get rid of the most toxic by the end of the month.
Any policeman convicted of anything more serious than a speeding ticket, should be fired on the spot for gross misconduct. A policeman facing an internal enquiry, cannot have that enquiry simply disappear by resigning or retiring, especially in the senior ranks.
The public expects those put in change of upholding the law, to be held to a higher standard then the rest of us.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
At the top they know they have a massive problem, the commissioner said at the weekend, “We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them. It’s sort of, it’s crazy.”
This should be addressed with an emergency cross party bill to allow them to get rid of the most toxic by the end of the month.
I do fear that might actually be counter-productive. These guys were protected, perhaps because they were 'one of the lads'. They were protected by the people above them.
There has to be a big question whether they'd get rid of the good people and keep the bad ones...
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
You mean cut everything that does not affect you, how surprising.
A cynic might trawl Max and CR's posting history to see whether education and childcare etc were noted priorities before the arrivals of the little Maxling and Royalelet
I, of course, am completely objective and my priorities for government spending never change according to my personal circumstances. We do of course need much better paid academics if we're not going to fall behind other countries!
I've been suggesting education and childcare changes for over 10 years on this site. And one of my proposals, the wealth tax, would result in a pretty big tax increase for me personally. Far, far more than any benefit I'd get from funded childcare, which we don't qualify for anyway.
Off topic, and at the risk of waking up @Leon from his Bangkok slumbers:
“It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)” by R.E.M., with every line of the lyrics represented by an image generated by feeding the lyric into an AI.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Nope - see the extensive literature on The Sungularity.
There will always be scarcity. All that virtually free production does is remove the scarcity from many items.
For example, even if we had totally free house construction - “Build a house there, all services sorted etc” - there would be a shortage of places you’d be allowed to build a house.
It doesn't if you are unemployed due to automation and don't even have a UBI to buy many of those goods and services
Whoops! That’s not going to get fixed anytime soon.
It's not a surprise. We've had so much rain recently. Still, better it being that side of Woking than the other! (obviously feel for the people beyond Woking)
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
At the top they know they have a massive problem, the commissioner said at the weekend, “We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them. It’s sort of, it’s crazy.”
This should be addressed with an emergency cross party bill to allow them to get rid of the most toxic by the end of the month.
Any policeman convicted of anything more serious than a speeding ticket, should be fired on the spot for gross misconduct. A policeman facing an internal enquiry, cannot have that enquiry simply disappear by resigning or retiring, especially in the senior ranks.
The public expects those put in change of upholding the law, to be held to a higher standard then the rest of us.
The problem with trying to enforce perfect behaviour is that this can lead to even more corruption and blackmail. There was some very good stuff on this by the RAND Corp, way back. Their concern was reliability of personnel around nukes - but the same issues apply.
What you need is a system that deals appropriately with transgressions. Outside enforcement is a part of it. Culture of openness about problems is another one. A system where small problems are noted and dealt with early is also critical.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Dystopian pessimists (e.g. @Leon ) have been getting their kicks by forecasting the end of work as we know it due to new technologies since the days of the Luddites. What generally happens is that more jobs are created to make or manage the new technology, while sadly (for those individuals) some roles are lost. I recall being told by a somewhat emotionally unintelligent lawyer in about 2000 that my business would be finished off by the internet. In reality, I used the internet to make it a lot more effective.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Dystopian pessimists (e.g. @Leon ) have been getting their kicks by forecasting the end of work as we know it due to new technologies since the days of the Luddites. What generally happens is that more jobs are created to make or manage the new technology, while sadly (for those individuals) some roles are lost. I recall being told by a somewhat emotionally unintelligent lawyer in about 2000 that my business would be finished off by the internet. In reality, I used the internet to make it a lot more effective.
Well we would hope that will be the case but I don't think it is a certainty
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
What's the German for Buggins' turn ?
Not sure what it is in German, but I suspect it will have about twenty odd letters.
The alternative phrase for Buggin's Turn in the UK is surely Gordon Brown's Turn.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Nope - see the extensive literature on The Sungularity.
There will always be scarcity. All that virtually free production does is remove the scarcity from many items.
For example, even if we had totally free house construction - “Build a house there, all services sorted etc” - there would be a shortage of places you’d be allowed to build a house.
It doesn't if you are unemployed due to automation and don't even have a UBI to buy many of those goods and services
As the cost of production falls to zero, the government will be able to give out more and more free stuff. If the political cost of higher provision tends to zero…
Simple example - an AI robot as protector/helper for every old person. Carry the shopping, make sure they’re ok etc. if the cost of production is £1, the government will give every OAP one. Why not?
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
In London young average earners will be willing to pay the same rent those getting housing benefit did for a tenancy in London.
Without new social homes it just prices the lowest earners out of the market
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
It's full of very high voltage cables, they mean you cannot run trains (or cars) through the tunnel and would have to be re-routed if you wished to do so.
I know a fair bit about this. In practice, cables are probably making the best use of the tunnel. If it was thought there was a case for reopening the alignment to rail and/or road, it would, as Rochdale says, in all likelihood be more cost-effective to bore a new tunnel which could accommodate overhead wires/whatever width you thought you needed for road/both. This comes up periodically on the rail side, and there was a study done a few years back for a road tunnel. It's quite hard to make a positive Benefit-Cost ratio using traditional transport economics, but traditional transport economics aren't the whole picture (just the part of the picture it's easiest to quantify).
Tunnel boring is getting cheaper and cheaper (and is considerably cheaper in the tunnel-friendly rock of the north of England). And acquiring land on the surface is getting more and more expensive.
The Woodhead line was electrified with overhead cables.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
At the top they know they have a massive problem, the commissioner said at the weekend, “We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them. It’s sort of, it’s crazy.”
This should be addressed with an emergency cross party bill to allow them to get rid of the most toxic by the end of the month.
Any policeman convicted of anything more serious than a speeding ticket, should be fired on the spot for gross misconduct. A policeman facing an internal enquiry, cannot have that enquiry simply disappear by resigning or retiring, especially in the senior ranks.
The public expects those put in change of upholding the law, to be held to a higher standard then the rest of us.
The problem with trying to enforce perfect behaviour is that this can lead to even more corruption and blackmail. There was some very good stuff on this by the RAND Corp, way back. Their concern was reliability of personnel around nukes - but the same issues apply.
What you need is a system that deals appropriately with transgressions. Outside enforcement is a part of it. Culture of openness about problems is another one. A system where small problems are noted and dealt with early is also critical.
Normally I’d be the one arguing hard for “Just Culture”, but it’s clear that the Met especially is totally rotten from the top to the bottom. The Just Culture can be installed, once the police stop covering for rapists in their own ranks.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
I think there is a chunk of the legal profession that enjoys giving him a kicking.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Dystopian pessimists (e.g. @Leon ) have been getting their kicks by forecasting the end of work as we know it due to new technologies since the days of the Luddites. What generally happens is that more jobs are created to make or manage the new technology, while sadly (for those individuals) some roles are lost. I recall being told by a somewhat emotionally unintelligent lawyer in about 2000 that my business would be finished off by the internet. In reality, I used the internet to make it a lot more effective.
Well we would hope that will be the case but I don't think it is a certainty
The only thing that is ever certain about prognostication is it's certain uncertainty.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Nope - see the extensive literature on The Sungularity.
There will always be scarcity. All that virtually free production does is remove the scarcity from many items.
For example, even if we had totally free house construction - “Build a house there, all services sorted etc” - there would be a shortage of places you’d be allowed to build a house.
It doesn't if you are unemployed due to automation and don't even have a UBI to buy many of those goods and services
As the cost of production falls to zero, the government will be able to give out more and more free stuff. If the political cost of higher provision tends to zero…
Simple example - an AI robot as protector/helper for every old person. Carry the shopping, make sure they’re ok etc. if the cost of production is £1, the government will give every OAP one. Why not?
How? Where is the money coming from for the government to pay for all that free stuff and to buy and maintain AI robots without a robot tax?
Big private sector companies just want big profits, they will not give the government any more money than they legally have to in tax.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Nope - see the extensive literature on The Sungularity.
There will always be scarcity. All that virtually free production does is remove the scarcity from many items.
For example, even if we had totally free house construction - “Build a house there, all services sorted etc” - there would be a shortage of places you’d be allowed to build a house.
It doesn't if you are unemployed due to automation and don't even have a UBI to buy many of those goods and services
As the cost of production falls to zero, the government will be able to give out more and more free stuff. If the political cost of higher provision tends to zero…
Simple example - an AI robot as protector/helper for every old person. Carry the shopping, make sure they’re ok etc. if the cost of production is £1, the government will give every OAP one. Why not?
How? Where is the money coming from for the government to pay for all that free stuff without a robot tax?
Big private sector companies just want big profits, they will not give the government any more money than they legally have to in tax.
How does one define “robot”, for the purposes of imposing a “robot tax”, and why should a company keep industry in a country which charges such a tax, vs one that doesn’t?
The think tank idea to cap ISAs at a £100k lifetime allowance seems completely mad to me. It seems like an idea designed to destroy what little saving and investment culture that exists in the country. Surely a wealth tax that includes ISAs would work better, raise more money and not discourage people from investing, in fact it would increase risk appetite so investment gains covered the tax.
Sometimes I wonder whether these think tank policy wonks actually live in the real world. But then I remember they probably all did PPE at Oxford and went to Eton so they don't.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
Not sure what you mean by "handing it out semi-randomly". There is nothing "semi-random" about Zelenskiy's urgent plea for heavy armour.
In Russia, an ex-cop serial maniac who murdered 80 women, wants to join Wagner. He told about this in an interview with the OFFICIAL Russian TV channel.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
It's full of very high voltage cables, they mean you cannot run trains (or cars) through the tunnel and would have to be re-routed if you wished to do so.
I know a fair bit about this. In practice, cables are probably making the best use of the tunnel. If it was thought there was a case for reopening the alignment to rail and/or road, it would, as Rochdale says, in all likelihood be more cost-effective to bore a new tunnel which could accommodate overhead wires/whatever width you thought you needed for road/both. This comes up periodically on the rail side, and there was a study done a few years back for a road tunnel. It's quite hard to make a positive Benefit-Cost ratio using traditional transport economics, but traditional transport economics aren't the whole picture (just the part of the picture it's easiest to quantify).
Tunnel boring is getting cheaper and cheaper (and is considerably cheaper in the tunnel-friendly rock of the north of England). And acquiring land on the surface is getting more and more expensive.
The Woodhead line was electrified with overhead cables.
My understanding however is that there isn't room in there for overhead cables. Maybe the space needed has changed since the early 80s?
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Could still be reopened, but the route would need re-engineering to make it fast, and there is the minor issue of where it goes east of Dunford Bridge. You'd need a completely new link to head north to Leeds, and the same to head south to Meadowhall and Sheffield Midland. Probably cheaper to build a new base tunnel.
It's full of very high voltage cables, they mean you cannot run trains (or cars) through the tunnel and would have to be re-routed if you wished to do so.
I know a fair bit about this. In practice, cables are probably making the best use of the tunnel. If it was thought there was a case for reopening the alignment to rail and/or road, it would, as Rochdale says, in all likelihood be more cost-effective to bore a new tunnel which could accommodate overhead wires/whatever width you thought you needed for road/both. This comes up periodically on the rail side, and there was a study done a few years back for a road tunnel. It's quite hard to make a positive Benefit-Cost ratio using traditional transport economics, but traditional transport economics aren't the whole picture (just the part of the picture it's easiest to quantify).
Tunnel boring is getting cheaper and cheaper (and is considerably cheaper in the tunnel-friendly rock of the north of England). And acquiring land on the surface is getting more and more expensive.
The Woodhead line was electrified with overhead cables.
Pedantic point of order. It was, but the Woodhead route was electrified to 1,500 volts DC. The rest of the network uses 25kv AC - and the cost of upgrading the route to 25kv was one of the arguments against closure. AIUI 1,500v DC requires much smaller clearances, and that would be a problem with the tunnels. Having said that, the railway has become rather good in the last four decades at electrifying through 'small' tunnels - e.g. by lowering the track into the invert.
Every time I start to think , just maybe, that Sunak might not be as bad as I think he is, I remind myself that he reappointed Braverman as Home Secretary and all my doubts about his unsuitability disappear.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
Yet there appears to be no shortage of people willing to support their crowdfunders !!!
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
The litigant is the client not the counsel. Barristers can’t be labelled vexatious litigants in respect of cases they act in (as opposed to ones they bring in their own name) but they can be disbarred etc.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
I don't think it is nimbies that stop it. I think it is politicians of all stripes. Keeping the housing supply in deficit to the rising need keeps house prices rising which suits those that own houses (and they vote more). The previous Labour government chose not to act on this for the same reason as the current Tory administration chooses not to. They are terrified of a crash. If you really wanted to build more housing at pace then the first place to start would be compulsory purchase of land with compensation set a little bit higher than its agricultural value. Prefabbed houses could be built at scale. This would remove new entrants to the lower end of the market causing the start of a housing surplus and therefore a crash.
In Russia, an ex-cop serial maniac who murdered 80 women, wants to join Wagner. He told about this in an interview with the OFFICIAL Russian TV channel.
This can’t go on. The Met needs to be disbanded and oversight for Borough policing handed over to the nearest county force (eg former Kent, Essex, Surrey and Herts boroughs given back to their respective county forces, ex-Middlesex ones to Thames Valley) while a new structure for the capital is put in place.
No, we do not need yet more deckchair-shuffling. The Metropolitan Police is far larger than the county forces (and larger than the national police force for the whole of Scotland) so while it employs more wrong'uns, does it have proportionally more?
Like Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard, David Carrick worked in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection group, which is an unlikely candidate for amalgamating with county forces in any case.
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
At the top they know they have a massive problem, the commissioner said at the weekend, “We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them. It’s sort of, it’s crazy.”
This should be addressed with an emergency cross party bill to allow them to get rid of the most toxic by the end of the month.
Any policeman convicted of anything more serious than a speeding ticket, should be fired on the spot for gross misconduct. A policeman facing an internal enquiry, cannot have that enquiry simply disappear by resigning or retiring, especially in the senior ranks.
The public expects those put in change of upholding the law, to be held to a higher standard then the rest of us.
The problem with trying to enforce perfect behaviour is that this can lead to even more corruption and blackmail. There was some very good stuff on this by the RAND Corp, way back. Their concern was reliability of personnel around nukes - but the same issues apply.
What you need is a system that deals appropriately with transgressions. Outside enforcement is a part of it. Culture of openness about problems is another one. A system where small problems are noted and dealt with early is also critical.
Normally I’d be the one arguing hard for “Just Culture”, but it’s clear that the Met especially is totally rotten from the top to the bottom. The Just Culture can be installed, once the police stop covering for rapists in their own ranks.
If you simply try and get rid of the current rotten apples the problem will recur. You need to do both - get rid of the current problems and change the culture.
Otherwise we repeat the experience of the US. Where Infernal Repairs endlessly chases corrupt cops. And there is an infinite supply of them to chase…
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
As the article says it does point towards a post-work society where all kinds of jobs have been automated. So the basic question is who will pay for our retirement if we keep cutting jobs from the labour market?
A robot tax? Would also reduce the incentive to automate jobs
"Robot tax" just means more (doubled?) corporation tax if everything everywhere is automated and AI-ed. The disincentive will only work at the carwash level, unless your robot tax is so high it is expected and intended to be a pretty much expressly Luddite piece of Rage Against the Machines.
If automation leads to high unemployment and few permanent jobs, a robot tax would have to be high to fund the much higher welfare bills and/or a UBI
Also, the death of capitalist Conservatism. Robots paying ubi comes to the same thing as the ex workers owning the means of production, and if everyone gets the same, no chance to amass the extra dosh required for mortgages school fees etc.
Automation leading to mass unemployment and few permanent jobs and massive welfare bills kills off capitalism anyway as a significant electoral force. The choice would just be socialism v social democracy or One Nation big state Toryism in effect.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
Nope - see the extensive literature on The Sungularity.
There will always be scarcity. All that virtually free production does is remove the scarcity from many items.
For example, even if we had totally free house construction - “Build a house there, all services sorted etc” - there would be a shortage of places you’d be allowed to build a house.
It doesn't if you are unemployed due to automation and don't even have a UBI to buy many of those goods and services
As the cost of production falls to zero, the government will be able to give out more and more free stuff. If the political cost of higher provision tends to zero…
Simple example - an AI robot as protector/helper for every old person. Carry the shopping, make sure they’re ok etc. if the cost of production is £1, the government will give every OAP one. Why not?
How? Where is the money coming from for the government to pay for all that free stuff without a robot tax?
Big private sector companies just want big profits, they will not give the government any more money than they legally have to in tax.
How does one define “robot”, for the purposes of imposing a “robot tax”, and why should a company keep industry in a country which charges such a tax, vs one that doesn’t?
A robot or a chatbot or any machinery replacing paid human labour.
The problem would obviously be global if multi national corporations use automation to replace paid human labour worldwide so a global solution would be inevitable to rising unemployment and few permanent jobs ie a UBI funded by a robot tax
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
Yet there appears to be no shortage of people willing to support their crowdfunders !!!
A fool and their money.
I would not be surprised if state actors were indirectly providing some of that funding - because they think Jolyon's actions cause chaos. Unfortunately for them, he provides a great deal of hilarity instead.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
The litigant is the client not the counsel. Barristers can’t be labelled vexatious litigants in respect of cases they act in (as opposed to ones they bring in their own name) but they can be disbarred etc.
In this particular case, it could be argued that Jolyon and the Good Law Project (sic) are one and the same.
He is personally fronting a crowdfunding effort, the funds raised from which pay his own fees for bringing frivolous cases against the government.
In an environment where there are huge delays in the court system, disbarring individuals who seek to deliberately make mischief with the legal process, doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. Yes, there are wider issues about the rights of judicial review, but it’s clear by now that Jolyon is a bad faith actor.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
Not sure what you mean by "handing it out semi-randomly". There is nothing "semi-random" about Zelenskiy's urgent plea for heavy armour.
We were discussing the awarding of the post of Defence Minister.
Scholz appears about to appoint someone politically convenient, as opposed to choosing the best person for the job.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
I don't think it is nimbies that stop it. I think it is politicians of all stripes. Keeping the housing supply in deficit to the rising need keeps house prices rising which suits those that own houses (and they vote more). The previous Labour government chose not to act on this for the same reason as the current Tory administration chooses not to. They are terrified of a crash. If you really wanted to build more housing at pace then the first place to start would be compulsory purchase of land with compensation set a little bit higher than its agricultural value. Prefabbed houses could be built at scale. This would remove new entrants to the lower end of the market causing the start of a housing surplus and therefore a crash.
We need to build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the left behind regions. We need to spread economic activity, and prosperity, throughout the land, not just add more congestion to an already dominant and often over-heated south-east.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Cast iron cert. Get the bad news out of the way in the first two years after the election and then focus in winning a new term with nice fluffy stuff after that.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
It may well result in further reshuffling at some point in order to keep the 50% promise, if a man is appointed. Whether there is any actual pressure on him to appoint another woman as defence minister I don't know: I've only heard a couple of comments saying the opposite ie he shouldn't appoint a woman. If anything, I would have thought there's more pressure to appoint a man, otherwise there will be this argument every time he loses a cabinet minister.
Either way, it doesn't take a political genius to appoint whoever you want, and if it's a man say "the 50% balance will be regained at the earliest opportunity".
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Your hypothesis is that if you stop paying housing benefit (or the housing component of UC, which has largely replaced it) then rents and house prices will decline but basically the same people would live in the same houses and it would simply be a transfer of resources from landlords to taxpayers. If you do the thought experiment I don't think that hypothesis is supported. The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing. The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium). The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords. The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution. Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
Not sure what you mean by "handing it out semi-randomly". There is nothing "semi-random" about Zelenskiy's urgent plea for heavy armour.
I think that is a reference to the holder of the post of Defence Minister. Handing the job to yet another clown is not really an option.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
I don't think it is nimbies that stop it. I think it is politicians of all stripes. Keeping the housing supply in deficit to the rising need keeps house prices rising which suits those that own houses (and they vote more). The previous Labour government chose not to act on this for the same reason as the current Tory administration chooses not to. They are terrified of a crash. If you really wanted to build more housing at pace then the first place to start would be compulsory purchase of land with compensation set a little bit higher than its agricultural value. Prefabbed houses could be built at scale. This would remove new entrants to the lower end of the market causing the start of a housing surplus and therefore a crash.
It's also an artefact of FPTP. If you propose housing in a place, the people who lose from that development are all concentrated in one location- enough to swing a council ward, maybe a parliamentary constituency. The people who benefit are spread everywhere. The antis win.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
The highest number of new social homes and housing association properties built in a single year since 1949 was by the Tory government of 1953
In Russia, an ex-cop serial maniac who murdered 80 women, wants to join Wagner. He told about this in an interview with the OFFICIAL Russian TV channel.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
It may well result in further reshuffling at some point in order to keep the 50% promise, if a man is appointed. Whether there is any actual pressure on him to appoint another woman as defence minister I don't know: I've only heard a couple of comments saying the opposite ie he shouldn't appoint a woman. If anything, I would have thought there's more pressure to appoint a man, otherwise there will be this argument every time he loses a cabinet minister.
Either way, it doesn't take a political genius to appoint whoever you want, and if it's a man say "the 50% balance will be regained at the earliest opportunity".
It's quite possible the media reports are, as you suggest, wrong, but that is what they reported.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
Not sure what you mean by "handing it out semi-randomly". There is nothing "semi-random" about Zelenskiy's urgent plea for heavy armour.
We were discussing the awarding of the post of Defence Minister.
Scholz appears about to appoint someone politically convenient, as opposed to choosing the best person for the job.
Isn't it very unusual for a cabinet minister anywhere to be appointed because they are the best person for the job, rather than someone who is politically convenient?
In Russia, an ex-cop serial maniac who murdered 80 women, wants to join Wagner. He told about this in an interview with the OFFICIAL Russian TV channel.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
It may well result in further reshuffling at some point in order to keep the 50% promise, if a man is appointed. Whether there is any actual pressure on him to appoint another woman as defence minister I don't know: I've only heard a couple of comments saying the opposite ie he shouldn't appoint a woman. If anything, I would have thought there's more pressure to appoint a man, otherwise there will be this argument every time he loses a cabinet minister.
Either way, it doesn't take a political genius to appoint whoever you want, and if it's a man say "the 50% balance will be regained at the earliest opportunity".
It's quite possible the media reports are, as you suggest, wrong, but that is what they reported.
I don't if they are wrong, but I haven't heard it reported in quite that way in German media. For example, in English:
"Olaf Scholz will be hoping that his new appointment will provide some stability to the ministry. Candidates being suggested in the German media include Social Democratic Party leader Lars Klingbeil, long-time Labor Minister Hubertus Heil, and Eva Högl, the German parliament's defense commissioner."
What the 3 people mentioned as possible candidates have in common is that they are all SPD politicians (2 men, 1 woman). Replacing an SPD cabinet minister with another SPD cabinet minister is what will actually limit the possible candidates.
This line from The Guardian's report on the resignation of the German defence minister made me laugh.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
With 100bn of new money to spend, this is likely to be the most consequential defence ministry for several decades. Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
Not sure what you mean by "handing it out semi-randomly". There is nothing "semi-random" about Zelenskiy's urgent plea for heavy armour.
We were discussing the awarding of the post of Defence Minister.
Scholz appears about to appoint someone politically convenient, as opposed to choosing the best person for the job.
Isn't it very unusual for a cabinet minister anywhere to be appointed because they are the best person for the job, rather than someone who is politically convenient?
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
The highest number of new social homes and housing association properties built in a single year since 1949 was by the Tory government of 1953
We’re very disappointed by the High Court’s decision today that the long waiting times experienced by trans people seeking treatment are lawful. We don’t believe this is right - and will be appealing the judgment.
At some point, a judge is going to formally label him a vexatious litigant. Slightly surprised it didn’t happen last time, when he was pretty much laughed out of court.
The litigant is the client not the counsel. Barristers can’t be labelled vexatious litigants in respect of cases they act in (as opposed to ones they bring in their own name) but they can be disbarred etc.
This is all wrong. The GLP was a party to this case; Maugham was a witness and effectively a party. He was represented by David Lock KC.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Based on the table in that link Labour, SNP and Green voters are most in favour of new homes, Tory and RefUK voters most opposed, LD voters in the middle.
So no surprise Sunak would have more reservations over building new homes than Starmer
Reluctantly went to A&E today after twisting my knee playing football last week. I've been hobbling ever since and whilst it has been getting better I wasn't even able to turn the pedal twice on a static bike. Wanted to get an X-Ray just to make sure there was nothing fractured before taking any other action.
Arrived, spoke to receptionist, triaged, spoke to doc, got x-ray, spoke to doc again, left. Total time - less than 1 hour. Bravo.
"Goldman Sachs laid off 3,200 employees with as little as half an hour’s notice. It will probably please the petty, pinched, Schadenfreude-prone sort of little people who have never worked for a predatory investment bank to imagine the scenes. I know it did me.
All these huffy guys dressed like Christian Bale in American Psycho, ties wrenched from necks, belongings tumbled into cardboard boxes (lucky gonks, family photos, stress balls, wrinkled twists of cocainey paper and whatnot), stepping out on to Wall Street like goddamn civilians, faces black with fury. Masters of the Universe demoted at a stroke to citizens of the universe.
What’s more unusual is what happened next. Nothing so became them, it seems, as the fact of their going. It turned out that these 3,200 employees, far from no longer just being a drag on the vampire squid’s bottom line, have made the company vastly more money by their departures than the savings on their salaries alone. The weird thing, the alarming thing, the mind-boggling thing, is this: immediately the layoffs were announced, Wall Street’s enthusiasm increased Goldman’s market cap by $3.3 billion (£2.7 billion). Ponder that, for a moment: that’s a bit more than a million dollars of value added per employee sacked." (£)
Also: It seems perfectly possible that over the coming years big companies will outsource their human resources, legal and marketing departments to ChatGPT, while algorithms will buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts, and won’t need lunch.
We (or rather Wall Street and the City) already have "algorithms [that] buy and sell shares better, quicker and more rationally than their meatpuppet counterparts".
And they brought us the Global Financial Crisis as well as other multi-billion dollar glitches that were contained, such as the collapse of LTCM and various Flash Crashes.
Be careful what you wish for.
If robots take over more of the economy and act rationally, does that mean economic models will start working?
What is rational for an AI might be very different from our understanding.
If AI is truly intelligent, it may be corrupt, stupid, arrogant and/or taking drugs.
The idea that AI is automatically Plato’s Philosopher King made manifest has always seemed bizarre to me.
As is the idea that a truly intelligent AI might think in a recognisably human manner.
"It's intelligence, Jim, but not as we know it"?
I'm now re-evaluating the apparently strange logic of one of our more persistent posters; perhaps we just lack the capacity to understand the deep arguments made?
This is one of the weaknesses of the Turing Test. It's conceivable that you would create an artificial intelligence that would be very recognisably not human, and so would fail the Turing Test,
Yes it’s humancentric. And the test is of the evidence of thinking rather than thinking. What about all the thinking that isn’t articulated? Most thinking never is. Perhaps much of it can’t be. Even the greatest communicators can’t get over more than the barest gist of what they have in mind. Then again, you can’t test things except via evidence. And we are human and we made it so it’s bound to be humancentric. All just makes my head hurt tbh. Rather not ‘think’ about it.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
I imagine they will, given maps like this (box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
Planning reform should be front and centre for both parties in the next campaign. It is one of the easiest ways to unlock higher growth. That it takes 15 court cases, a judicial review, 17 appeals and various protests to get any major infrastructure built is a major factor in our lower rate of trend growth for the last 20 years compared to the 20 years before. In any other country Heathrow would already be at 4 runways, HS2 would have been completed 20 years ago and we'd have electrified all of our railways and HS3/4/5 would be under construction and being planned.
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
A lot of people who think house prices should come down should be more grateful to Liz and Kwasi than they are - we've been looking at upsizing and I reckon that the typical asking price of the sort of property we're interested in (3-5 bed family homes) has dropped by 20-25% since the mini-budget. Its a more useful achievement than most things any government has done in the last 20 years.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Thank Thatcher for that and her hare brained scheme of getting rid of social housing and then having to pay a fortune to her Tory chums for rent. It suits theTories and their donors to have the system as it is and Labour were just as bad last time they were in. Build inexpensive social housing , then give people receiving housing benefit the choice of new social house or pay their own rent. Max and his type would not like that though.
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
The highest number of new social homes and housing association properties built in a single year since 1949 was by the Tory government of 1953
The DCI says "It is unbelievable to think these offences could have been committed by a serving police officer."
And that is a big part of the reason he got away with it for so long. Logic and experience show that someone who is abusive will find jobs that create opportunities for them to carry out their abuse. Policing is a perfect cover.
It is absolutely believable that such offences could have been committed by a serving police office and the police need to understand and accept reality.
Given the serial catalogue of such stories involving the Met, it's entirely believable, sadly.
Relevant question being, is this still the tip of the iceberg, or are they beginning to get an accurate sense of the reality they denied until Sarah Everard was murdered?
It seems those people hyper-ventilating about Gender Recognition Certificates should be more concerned about Police Warant Cards.
No they should not , they should be just as worried that yet another group of men have access to women's safe places..
It's really interesting. Me and @ydoethur aren't exactly political soulmates. But it seems like he's the only one who isn't just gonna make a completely ludicrous suggestion about education.
The problem is of course that outsiders assume education must be somehow easy to understand. Bright ones are actually the worst because they found it easy to receive.
See my edit. That's very fair. It's a bit fucking annoying to be told that I'll get up at 6:40 tomorrow and ought to be in a half an hour earlier, and that at home time I'll just make them run around a non-existent playing field for an hour or two.
Yes.
Just as it was a bit annoying to be told teachers need extra training to spot and monitor children with SEND, because apparently they're not doing it. Nothing to do with the government taking away all the support because they don't want to pay for it.
From a parents point of view teachers are not capable of diagnosin SEND children. My sons school I had a 6 month fight with because they wanted to do so when it wasnt needed. He just need correctional surgery. I also had a 6 month fight with the NHS to get him that surgery.
Upshot is we managed to keep him out of a "special school" got the surgery done and he was one of only 2kids in his year to pass the 11 plus. So frankly no dont trust teachers to decide or diagnose
It's not our fucking job.
It's not our job to diagnose it. We tend to be the first ones to spot it.
Frankly, I've had more trouble in the past persuading parents their child needs testing than the other way around.
Absolutely. Get grief for even suggesting it. Then. After all other options are exhausted nae thanks or apologies. A couple of extra hours a day would whip us into shape.
This is why @DavidL and I pointed out education reform would have such a problem with the teaching unions.
You need to understand the reason behind that.
Reform => new syllabus => new teaching plans => extra (unpaid) work outside school
Would you willingly do x00 hours work for free because management decided you are now a road engineer rather than railways
The attack on the unions is just a distraction technique by people who can't admit that the real problem facing education is underfunding. My son's school is running out of teachers, it's got fuck all to do with the unions and everything to do with funding. Meanwhile, most of the people telling us that state schools don't need more money send their kids private where the funding is double. The hypocrisy is sickening.
I think everyone recognises that education is underfunded, CR yesterday called for an overnight increase of 30% in education funding. I'd like to see a full doubling of the budget and a reduction in uni fees back to the £1k per year we paid. I'd also have fully funded childcare from age 1-4 as well as the school day running from 8am to 6pm.
I'd fund it by cutting spending on pensions, freezing healthcare spending in real terms and raising taxes on wealth (similar to how beneficial trusts are taxed), pension incomes, tapering the state pension for higher rate taxpayers in retirement and higher tax on other unearned incomes. I'd also look to eliminate all in working benefits, all housing benefits and have a review of how we pay long term sick and unemployment benefits as it's clear the system is broken and being abused by "won't works" rather than being used as a last resort for "can't works".
Eliminating Housing Benefit would result in a *massive* rise in homelessness.
You think that would concern Max?
Hm, he's not wrong though that housing benefit isn't necessarily a terribly cost-effective way of addressing the problem of the lowest-paid's inability to afford housing. Basically, I agree with Max - but first you have to 'solve' housing - which includes doing lots of things, including a massive programme of housebuilding (both private and social).
Housing benefit mostly benefits landlords through higher rents. The vast majority of flats and houses that are currently let via housing benefit would continue to be either let to similar tenants or sold off to first time buyers (which reduces the number of tenants needed as well as houses available for rent).
The current system creates an inflationary spiral of rents and is bad for the taxpayer, good for landlords, and averagish for tenants needing support.
Or they would be let to private tenants able to pay a higher rent than those no longer having housing benefit could afford to pay.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
Why would this richer private tenant living in a nicer place choose to move to the one previously supported by housing benefit? Even if they did, their home now comes back onto the market and can be taken by a different tenant.
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
If the property was in London for example for which there is always more demand for private rental properties than supply.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
Demand at a given price point does not always exceed supply, if it did the price would keep rising until it didnt.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
Or, I know this is controversial, have local authorities build loads of houses for low income families and let the parasite landlords go and sing for their money.
Whilst that's deffo the right thing to do...
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
Tell them to get fucked? It's a pretty easy thing to do. Labour surely need to do this, creating a generation of social renters is basically a generation of voters for them and they weren't likely to get the NIMBY votes anyway as they tend to be Lib Dem or Tory.
The highest number of new social homes and housing association properties built in a single year since 1949 was by the Tory government of 1953
I know I should be shocked that another rozzer turns out to be one of the country's worst criminals, but I am not.
Shame Cressida wasn't still around to do her bad apple routine.
In addition to the 48 rapes he has confessed to The Times are reporting
Detectives believe that there may be more victims who are yet to come forward. Hertfordshire police have created a portal to allow people to report directly online without going through a police control room or general online reporting system.
Comments
‘No reason to get upset.’
C’mon, you’re definitely not new here.
"He (Scholz) is under pressure to replace her with another woman, in order to fulfil his pledge to have an equal number of men and women in his cabinet."
Should be an opportunity for someone out of LCY really. Give the train some competition.
I'm now re-evaluating the apparently strange logic of one of our more persistent posters; perhaps we just lack the capacity to understand the deep arguments made?
His pictures of what a novice driver could do with a heavy tracked vehicle were entertaining - he did a lot of dragging vehicles out of hilarious positions.
Now, not so much, when there’s almost no tanks left that aren’t relics from Afghanistan in the 1960s, 30% of their entire army of men has been killed or wounded out, and they’re relying on anti-ship missiles aimed at residential apartment blocks.
Assuming the landlord still wants the rental income rather than to sell.
A better solution to reducing housing benefit is to build more social homes so the landlord is the local authority or housing association not private landlords
There's a reason Woodhead didn't reopen - it is in a right state. And it carries a lot of high voltage lines now anyway.
Very believable, if you ask anyone who follows the news on the Met.
If the UK and US had taken the approach adopted by the Germans I suspect Putin would have had a much merrier Xmas.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-64289461
We still have x homes and y number of people.
If we got rid of all housing benefit you would see a reduction in the number of homes available at the cheapest end as it wouldn't be economically profitable. But reducing housing benefit significantly, especially in areas of higher rents will have very little impact on supply.
Support 50%
Oppose 13%
63% of 2019 Conservative voters would support.
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1614608749628428288
Unfortunately war does not grant you a great deal of time to gain experience.
The only way to preserve capitalism and Thatcherism or even New Labour Blairism would be to disincentivise companies replacing paid human workers with robots and bots
This should be addressed with an emergency cross party bill to allow them to get rid of the most toxic by the end of the month.
If you abolished housing benefit or slashed housing benefit it would therefore significantly increase homelessness and supply of properties available for those on low incomes to rent in London in particular unless there was a big increase in building of new social housing at the same time
There will always be scarcity. All that virtually free production does is remove the scarcity from many items.
For example, even if we had totally free house construction - “Build a house there, all services sorted etc” - there would be a shortage of places you’d be allowed to build a house.
The public expects those put in change of upholding the law, to be held to a higher standard then the rest of us.
There has to be a big question whether they'd get rid of the good people and keep the bad ones...
“It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)” by R.E.M., with every line of the lyrics represented by an image generated by feeding the lyric into an AI.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9p3LXWokQCY
Handing it out semi- randomly would be to stoop to Tory cabinet levels.
If the gender mix of the cabinet is of such importance, then just reshuffle it.
What you need is a system that deals appropriately with transgressions. Outside enforcement is a part of it. Culture of openness about problems is another one. A system where small problems are noted and dealt with early is also critical.
Remove govt props on housing and demand at the bottom end of the market at current prices will drop significantly as people won't be able to pay them. That will in turn lower rents. Broadly the same people who are in them now would then rent them at the lower prices. The taxpayer saves money and the landlords make less.
The alternative phrase for Buggin's Turn in the UK is surely Gordon Brown's Turn.
Simple example - an AI robot as protector/helper for every old person. Carry the shopping, make sure they’re ok etc. if the cost of production is £1, the government will give every OAP one. Why not?
Without new social homes it just prices the lowest earners out of the market
Big private sector companies just want big profits, they will not give the government any more money than they legally have to in tax.
Sometimes I wonder whether these think tank policy wonks actually live in the real world. But then I remember they probably all did PPE at Oxford and went to Eton so they don't.
He believes that his military specialisation is "in demand". Official media have no problem speaking to this individual.
https://mobile.twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1614583653048242178
You think Nimbies make it hard for housing to be built? Imagine how hard they fight to oppose housing for poor people.
A fool and their money.
Like Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard, David Carrick worked in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection group, which is an unlikely candidate for amalgamating with county forces in any case.
Otherwise we repeat the experience of the US. Where Infernal Repairs endlessly chases corrupt cops. And there is an infinite supply of them to chase…
The problem would obviously be global if multi national corporations use automation to replace paid human labour worldwide so a global solution would be inevitable to rising unemployment and few permanent jobs ie a UBI funded by a robot tax
(box size: support for new housing, colour: GE19 winner)
https://benansell.substack.com/p/the-uks-political-housing-crisis
I don't like Labour's caution on saying stuff, and I can't see it sticking for two years, but I understand why they're not telling any voters to get f&^&%ed. And I'm expecting a lot of "we knew things were bad under the Tories, but couldn't imaginge they were this bad, which is why we have to do this controversial unannounced thing" through 2025/6.
He is personally fronting a crowdfunding effort, the funds raised from which pay his own fees for bringing frivolous cases against the government.
In an environment where there are huge delays in the court system, disbarring individuals who seek to deliberately make mischief with the legal process, doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. Yes, there are wider issues about the rights of judicial review, but it’s clear by now that Jolyon is a bad faith actor.
Scholz appears about to appoint someone politically convenient, as opposed to choosing the best person for the job.
ChatGPT is very busily engaged in writing course essays with, to date, no comeback save for getting good marks.
Either way, it doesn't take a political genius to appoint whoever you want, and if it's a man say "the 50% balance will be regained at the earliest opportunity".
The first step is you reduce the incomes of low income people. As a result they will demand less housing, but also less food, heating, clothing etc since that's what happens to consumers hit by a negative income shock. Let's leave aside that these are poor people who are probably already spending the bare minimum on all these things. Let's assume that prices are flexible and adjustment is quick. Prices of everything that low income people buy will fall, including housing. That means that while these people will still see a fall in their real incomes, it will be smaller than otherwise. Meanwhile, other people's real incomes have gone up thanks to the drop in prices, and so they can afford more of everything. As a result, they will demand more of everything - which limits the fall in prices including of housing.
The net result will be disinflation including in housing. Richer households will consume more including housing - living in bigger homes. Poorer households will consume less housing - living in smaller homes - and less of everything else. Total demand for housing will be unchanged (demand=supply in equilibrium).
The purpose of housing support for low income people is to support their consumption of housing relative to others'. If you remove that support, they will consume less housing (and less of everything else) while others will consume more. The idea that there would be no redistributive effects, and that landlords will be the primary losers, is fanciful. And of course in the real world the first effect would be mass homelessness followed by massive provision of more expensive emergency accommodation largely procured from private landlords.
The solution to the housing benefit problem is more housing and a more equal income distribution.
Props to HYUFD for talking a lot of sense on this topic BTW.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new-dwellings-uk/
The economic potential being left on the table is absolutely huge at this stage but no party seems to be willing to tell the NIMBY fucks to do one. 🤷♂️
For example, in English:
"Olaf Scholz will be hoping that his new appointment will provide some stability to the ministry. Candidates being suggested in the German media include Social Democratic Party leader Lars Klingbeil, long-time Labor Minister Hubertus Heil, and Eva Högl, the German parliament's defense commissioner."
https://www.dw.com/en/german-defense-minister-christine-lambrecht-resigns/a-64401401
What the 3 people mentioned as possible candidates have in common is that they are all SPD politicians (2 men, 1 woman). Replacing an SPD cabinet minister with another SPD cabinet minister is what will actually limit the possible candidates.
https://goodlawproject.org/update/high-court-trans-healthcare/
Click through to one of the witness statements to confirm the parties to the action.
So no surprise Sunak would have more reservations over building new homes than Starmer
Reluctantly went to A&E today after twisting my knee playing football last week. I've been hobbling ever since and whilst it has been getting better I wasn't even able to turn the pedal twice on a static bike. Wanted to get an X-Ray just to make sure there was nothing fractured before taking any other action.
Arrived, spoke to receptionist, triaged, spoke to doc, got x-ray, spoke to doc again, left. Total time - less than 1 hour. Bravo.
Build inexpensive social housing , then give people receiving housing benefit the choice of new social house or pay their own rent.
Max and his type would not like that though.
Latest Westminster voting intention (10-11 Jan)
Con: 25% (no change from 4-5 Jan)
Lab: 47% (+1)
Lib Dem: 9% (=)
Reform UK: 7% (=)
Green: 5% (-1)
SNP: 5% (=)
Which of the following do you think would make the best Prime Minister? (10-11 Jan)
Keir Starmer: 32% (+1 from 4-5 Jan)
Rishi Sunak: 24% (-2)
Not sure: 40% (=)
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1614965409383325698
Detectives believe that there may be more victims who are yet to come forward. Hertfordshire police have created a portal to allow people to report directly online without going through a police control room or general online reporting system.