Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
Debit cards and phone payments take longer than Oyster cards because on the latter the reader just communicates with the card - with the former it checks a central database. The trick is to reach forward so the card/phone reads while your'e still moving towards the gate, if you can time it right you don't need to stop. But it's not easy.
Yes that is what I've noticed, I definitely get through quicker with Oyster than with a payment card or phone. And it seems to me that for whatever reason the phone takes slightly longer than a payment card. I'm happy to stick with Oyster, it's in the back of my wallet and on auto top up. It's annoying being held up a few seconds each time by other commuters though. I'm a Londoner - don't hold me up be a couple of seconds!
A virtual Oyster card, to add to your phone wallet, was tested, IIRC.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
With stories like this it's small bleeding wonder things are in a mess.
Bad enough there aren't enough training places, worse that we can't even employ the ones we do train!
Worse still is that there are hundreds of vacant anaesthetic Consultant posts.
HEE (and its devolved equivalents) is a nightmare. Sorting it out would massively help Junior Doctors in their careers, improve retention and tackle backlogs.
Just read the comments by Juniors under this rather smug HEE tweet:
Will there training spaces for the "bump" in undergrads caused by the COVID/A Level/increased university entry issue?
In general, the conditions and career structure for medical staff appear to be constructed on the basis that "Beatings will continue until moral improves". Put up with terrible conditions and OKish pay until you break through into the sunny uplands of being Senior.
This is 19th cent thinking. It is completely unsurprising, to me, that people in the 21st cent are not massively enthused by this.
It is how things were done, historically. But times have changed.
And other countries have discovered that they can get UK educated Medical staff but merely offering 20th century working standards and a tiny bit more money.
A friend was told that the number of places for his son to go to medical school have gone down.
Apparently, the foreign aid budget is being used to pay for undergrad medical education - the putative doctors then go back to their own countries to complete their training. This has increased a bit this year.
Since they are paying full overseas fees, the universities *love* this. And push domestic students out of the way.....
The thought occurs - since we don't have enough training places in the UK..... Could we send our undergrads to train in various parts of the world? Some kind of swap?
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
Debit cards and phone payments take longer than Oyster cards because on the latter the reader just communicates with the card - with the former it checks a central database. The trick is to reach forward so the card/phone reads while your'e still moving towards the gate, if you can time it right you don't need to stop. But it's not easy.
Yes that is what I've noticed, I definitely get through quicker with Oyster than with a payment card or phone. And it seems to me that for whatever reason the phone takes slightly longer than a payment card. I'm happy to stick with Oyster, it's in the back of my wallet and on auto top up. It's annoying being held up a few seconds each time by other commuters though. I'm a Londoner - don't hold me up be a couple of seconds!
A virtual Oyster card, to add to your phone wallet, was tested, IIRC.
and scrapped because the use of Oyster cards has declined rapidly as contactless credit / debit cards became widespread.
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
Debit cards and phone payments take longer than Oyster cards because on the latter the reader just communicates with the card - with the former it checks a central database. The trick is to reach forward so the card/phone reads while your'e still moving towards the gate, if you can time it right you don't need to stop. But it's not easy.
Yes that is what I've noticed, I definitely get through quicker with Oyster than with a payment card or phone. And it seems to me that for whatever reason the phone takes slightly longer than a payment card. I'm happy to stick with Oyster, it's in the back of my wallet and on auto top up. It's annoying being held up a few seconds each time by other commuters though. I'm a Londoner - don't hold me up be a couple of seconds!
A virtual Oyster card, to add to your phone wallet, was tested, IIRC.
and scrapped because the use of Oyster cards has declined rapidly as contactless credit / debit cards became widespread.
The problem is that there is no alternative for season ticket users.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
None of those arguing the cash side however have been saying people shouldn't be able to use phone/card/watch. We have just been saying that cash should also be kept as an option.
I am certainly no luddite as I write software for a living. I pay for stuff online with a card quite happily and access government and council services. I just don't want to carry a phone when out and about and there are many times I don't want to carry a card either.....hint someone gets hold of my card they can now spend upto around 700 pounds via contactless depending on where I am in the cycle before it asks for a pin number. If I am going out to a pub, the card stays at home and the amount of cash I am willing to spend goes in my pocket. Then if I get my wallet stolen well I have only lost what cash I had on me. If my card is in my wallet I have lost the ability to pay for anything till I get issued a new card.(Yes I have like most people only one bank account and no I have never had a credit card nor do I want one)
One thing the NHS could do is immediately stop all prescriptions for paracetomol & ibuprofen. A (rather fed up) GP on the radio claimed the cost to the NHS of one of these prescriptions was ~ £20 a time !
Wtf? How have they managed that?
It is a perfect example of the fact that a nationalised system of healthcare is bureaucratic and inefficient. The Labour party has been trying to convince it's less well travelled and informed followers that the NHS is the "envy of the world". It never has been and never will be. That is why no other western country has tried to copy it.
That's an interesting way to describe the Tories. And Mr Streeting wouldn't agree.
I am sure I don't need to tell you that is what is called a political pivot. The Labour Party has been trying for years to convince us that all the NHS needs is more funding. It hosed money at it it in the Blair years and the improvements were marginal at best, but doctors benefited very nicely.
The reality is that the NHS is a nationalised industry run by vested interests in the interests, not of patients, but of the vested interests. The Labour Party set it up, convinced many people that it was "the envy of the world" (to the amusement of those with better systems) and continues to believe that all it really needs is more money, when in fact what it actually needs is to be broken up
But my point is that the Conservative Party has been claiming the same for the last decade and more, that hte world-beating NHS is safe with them etc etc. .
Correct - all parties have become infected with this nationasl religion thing about 'our NHS' and it is fast becoming a death spiral. Public services need a much more rational, balanced and detached approach. I see it in Spain in the bureaucracy ridden town halls dominated by older staff paid the most and painfully old-fashione,
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
More that they relish their ignorance of that stupid tech stuff.
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Truble is, that expands the private healthcare sector (great, you might say) which then poaches the NHS doctors, nurses etc (with better pay and a lower stress, less stretched working environment). We either then need to train more doctors or the NHS needs to pay more to poach them back (the private sector then pays even more, puts up insurance premiums etc, which reduces demand for private healthcare and then you're back where you started, but with richer doctors, nurses etc).
The point is that we need more clinical staff. You can invest in training more, invest in pay and conditions in NHS or invest in tax breaks etc for private healthcare, but then you still need to train more and unless you really train a lot more you still have a shortage and need to pay more to retain.
There are no shortcuts here. Whatever model you advocate, whether via government or via greater private provision, we need to spend a great % of GDP on healthcare if we want better healthcare.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Hasn't Dorries finally killed off Radio 4 LW?
Not yet. I can still get it at 198 on some of the older work van radios that have LW and MW on the same “band”
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
Knowing how computers work is precisely why I oppose electronic voting!
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
More that they relish their ignorance of that stupid tech stuff.
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
I have no problem with Sunak using Excel (I currently have 13 workbooks open) but I do question whether as PM this is a good use of his time.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
Knowing how computers work is precisely why I oppose electronic voting!
I think that was his point, those that know about computers oppose it
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) for COVID-19 is expected to be dissolved next month, along with the reclassification of the disease from a category 5 to a category 4 notifiable communicable disease, Minister of Health and Welfare Hsueh Jui-yuan (薛瑞元) said yesterday.
As Japan has announced that it would lift all remaining COVID-19 border measures on May 8 and US President Joe Biden has said he would end the nation’s COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has lately often been asked when the CECC would be disbanded...
They did pretty well, with under 19k deaths for a population of 23.5m, compared to our 200k plus.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Call me hard-hearted but I have stopped paying attention to US mass shootings. If they can't be bothered to fix the problem I don't see why I should be bothered to read about it. There are other parts of the world facing real problems that aren't entirely self-inflicted that are more worthy of my attention.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
Debit cards and phone payments take longer than Oyster cards because on the latter the reader just communicates with the card - with the former it checks a central database. The trick is to reach forward so the card/phone reads while your'e still moving towards the gate, if you can time it right you don't need to stop. But it's not easy.
Yes that is what I've noticed, I definitely get through quicker with Oyster than with a payment card or phone. And it seems to me that for whatever reason the phone takes slightly longer than a payment card. I'm happy to stick with Oyster, it's in the back of my wallet and on auto top up. It's annoying being held up a few seconds each time by other commuters though. I'm a Londoner - don't hold me up be a couple of seconds!
A virtual Oyster card, to add to your phone wallet, was tested, IIRC.
and scrapped because the use of Oyster cards has declined rapidly as contactless credit / debit cards became widespread.
I haven't used an Oyster since 2015 for precisely this reason.
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Hasn't Dorries finally killed off Radio 4 LW?
Not yet. I can still get it at 198 on some of the older work van radios that have LW and MW on the same “band”
I meant "it is actually going next year" this time.
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
And they would be correct surely until it's made clear that this is now routine.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
That is very interesting, thank you. It makes sense. One of the issues with public sector pensions is that they were designed for when most people didn't live much beyond retirement age (because so many were smokers). Now it seems that many folk would like to retire at 60 and have the younger generation fund pensions for around 20 odd years which in the case of higher paid public "servants" is often more than double what the average worker earns!
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
More that they relish their ignorance of that stupid tech stuff.
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
I have no problem with Sunak using Excel (I currently have 13 workbooks open) but I do question whether as PM this is a good use of his time.
It depends what he is using it for. Complex models would be too much time. As a jotting pad - sort of live maths paper to guesstimate numbers & check other peoples glib answers - invaluable.
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) for COVID-19 is expected to be dissolved next month, along with the reclassification of the disease from a category 5 to a category 4 notifiable communicable disease, Minister of Health and Welfare Hsueh Jui-yuan (薛瑞元) said yesterday.
As Japan has announced that it would lift all remaining COVID-19 border measures on May 8 and US President Joe Biden has said he would end the nation’s COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has lately often been asked when the CECC would be disbanded...
They did pretty well, with under 19k deaths for a population of 23.5m, compared to our 200k plus.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
That is very interesting, thank you. It makes sense. One of the issues with public sector pensions is that they were designed for when most people didn't live much beyond retirement age (because so many were smokers). Now it seems that many folk would like to retire at 60 and have the younger generation fund pensions for around 20 odd years which in the case of higher paid public "servants" is often more than double what the average worker earns!
I added a couple of links to the post via edit but to make sure you didnt miss them
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
Knowing how computers work is precisely why I oppose electronic voting!
I think that was his point, those that know about computers oppose it
Or we are violently in favour and keen to make a bid to run the system, and then run as a candidate. The latter completely independently of the former, course.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
I'm against the abolition of cash and against electronic voting. I *think* I understand how computers work ...
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
More that they relish their ignorance of that stupid tech stuff.
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
I have no problem with Sunak using Excel (I currently have 13 workbooks open) but I do question whether as PM this is a good use of his time.
It depends what he is using it for. Complex models would be too much time. As a jotting pad - sort of live maths paper to guesstimate numbers & check other peoples glib answers - invaluable.
Two or three instances of the PM spotting dodgy maths or assertions not backed up by numbers would be enough to make everything he saw from then on perfect. That would be a very good use of his time.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Hasn't Dorries finally killed off Radio 4 LW?
Not yet. I can still get it at 198 on some of the older work van radios that have LW and MW on the same “band”
I meant "it is actually going next year" this time.
That’s a shame
I’ve liked having it as a backup when TMS isn’t on R5
Greeks and Italians - smoke and drink ( regularly rather than binging ) a lot, high obesity, but Mediterranean diet and a lot of sociability and chats on the doorstep, hence they still live longer than Brits.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
I'm against the abolition of cash and against electronic voting. I *think* I understand how computers work ...
I don't understand how computers work. This is because I've worked with them long enough not to trust them to do what I want. Hence 5 layers of automated tests (running constantly) and UAT.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
We need a greater focus on improving health and that's best done with both a carrot and a stick approach.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
More that they relish their ignorance of that stupid tech stuff.
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
I have no problem with Sunak using Excel (I currently have 13 workbooks open) but I do question whether as PM this is a good use of his time.
It depends what he is using it for. Complex models would be too much time. As a jotting pad - sort of live maths paper to guesstimate numbers & check other peoples glib answers - invaluable.
Two or three instances of the PM spotting dodgy maths or assertions not backed up by numbers would be enough to make everything he saw from then on perfect. That would be a very good use of his time.
I've caught bullshitting in the numbers by having Excel open in a meeting and doing an autosum on the figures presented....
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
FPT legal tender thing is largely a myth but I would be sad if cash ceased to be used.
For me it's a civil liberties issue. Why should the vendor know who I am when I buy something? A whiff of the officious and a step towards dystopia I think.
In the olden days I had always thought cash would be with us because of, among other things: on course betting, old people, people who don't have bank accounts, Poppy Day, blokes who do roof jobs at weekends, taxi drivers, small children, money laundering in suitcases, and, most of all, low level drug dealing - where especially neither the Revenue nor the police are especially welcomed into the information circle.
Now I am not so sure. OTOH Radio 4 still goes out on longwave and there are still cheques. What do people think? And how else can drug dealing be concealed? (Asking for a friend)
BBC Radio is an interesting example. Twenty years ago they were going to make us junk our old receivers and buy digital ones instead. But they relented after consumer resistance. Nowadays digital radio is a niche medium, about to be supplanted by the internet. Meanwhile, as you say, long wave keeps on rollin'.
Isn't the norm DAB for the car, Alexa for the home in terms of radio these days ?
Hasn't Dorries finally killed off Radio 4 LW?
Not yet. I can still get it at 198 on some of the older work van radios that have LW and MW on the same “band”
I meant "it is actually going next year" this time.
That’s a shame
I’ve liked having it as a backup when TMS isn’t on R5
Also, without Long Wave, how will Brits get the cricket in the car or camping in France? That’s what we relied on when I was a kid.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
More that they relish their ignorance of that stupid tech stuff.
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
I have no problem with Sunak using Excel (I currently have 13 workbooks open) but I do question whether as PM this is a good use of his time.
It depends what he is using it for. Complex models would be too much time. As a jotting pad - sort of live maths paper to guesstimate numbers & check other peoples glib answers - invaluable.
Two or three instances of the PM spotting dodgy maths or assertions not backed up by numbers would be enough to make everything he saw from then on perfect. That would be a very good use of his time.
I've caught bullshitting in the numbers by having Excel open in a meeting and doing an autosum on the figures presented....
I like to ask on what basis trend lines were drawn. If someone doesn’t understand the question they ought not to be allowed to present the data.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
And politicians, almost without exception, are comfortably in the middle.
I think a large part of the political class is IT and scientifically illiterate.
More that they relish their ignorance of that stupid tech stuff.
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
I have no problem with Sunak using Excel (I currently have 13 workbooks open) but I do question whether as PM this is a good use of his time.
It depends what he is using it for. Complex models would be too much time. As a jotting pad - sort of live maths paper to guesstimate numbers & check other peoples glib answers - invaluable.
Two or three instances of the PM spotting dodgy maths or assertions not backed up by numbers would be enough to make everything he saw from then on perfect. That would be a very good use of his time.
I've caught bullshitting in the numbers by having Excel open in a meeting and doing an autosum on the figures presented....
I like to ask on what basis trend lines were drawn. If someone doesn’t understand the question they ought not to be allowed to present the data.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
The tank deliveries have already started - quite a few are already in Ukraine. Perhaps that is the reason.
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
Planning to see this. Have to get my wife to watch the film first otherwise I'll know the songs and she won't - bad dynamic.
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
Greeks and Italians - smoke and drink ( regularly rather than binging ) a lot, high obesity, but Mediterranean diet and a lot of sociability and chats on the doorstep, hence they still live longer than Brits.
More likely the result of an easier climate as well as the diet. Not so sure about the doorstep chats!
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it. I know people For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
The example you give fits one of the groups I described - nostalgia merchants.
Bit presumptive to describe who I am concerned about. My dad is about as tech-phobic as you can get. He is a classic cash nostalgia person, but even he now does online shopping. Took some doing but they can now do a shop without having to physically go. For someone who was adamant that he'd get robbed online its real progress.
Is caring for my parents enabling them to be able to have shopping delivered? Or pandering to his cash is king nostalgia so they can't...?
I know people want this dropped, but if you think the example I gave was one of "nostalgia merchants", then you either did not read what I wrote, or are trolling.
If you cared for people "left behind", then you wouldn't be quite so dismissive or condemnatory of users of cash.
This is beyond the debate about cash, this is about access to the modern world. Like it or not, technology has evolved at whirlwind pace. *everything* is now online, so we need to be helping people gain access.
You used cash as an example and I respect that. I could also have raised access to council services, to the tax man, to banking or services. Even when there is a paper form it gets scanned and uploaded. A bigger risk of error having to faff around uploading paper forms than there is just doing the online one.
Some people will resist modernity because they dislike change - hence my "nostalgia merchants" label. Sometimes for ideological stubbornness reasons. Sometimes because they don't understand it. Sometimes because circumstance means they don't have access to it.
Making 2023 accessible to all is the challenge. Cash is just one part of this broader issue.
Opposition to the abolition of cash is a lot like opposition to electronic voting. It's clustered around the two ends of the spectrum, people who don't understand how computers work and people who do.
Knowing how computers work is precisely why I oppose electronic voting!
The obvious thing surely is to ask* ChatGPT who the best candidate is in each seat and then go with that. Avoids any concerns about insecurity etc in electronic voting.
*might need the 'my grandma used to lull me off to sleep by going through parliamentary constituencies, weighing up candidates' qualities and then telling me who was best in each' to get an answer
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
Planning to see this. Have to get my wife to watch the film first otherwise I'll know the songs and she won't - bad dynamic.
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
Was hoping to see it this weekend (when I'm in London for 1 day).
However we've promised to take my parents to a show so we are off to see Oklahoma. Going to fun watching my parents who will be expecting a film like version seeing what is almost a different play giving the new arranagements and staging (we saw it in New York in 2019).
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Greeks and Italians - smoke and drink ( regularly rather than binging ) a lot, high obesity, but Mediterranean diet and a lot of sociability and chats on the doorstep, hence they still live longer than Brits.
More likely the result of an easier climate as well as the diet. Not so sure about the doorstep chats!
Well, I think they're all a bit of a virtuous circle. There's a lot of research I've read over the years over social contact and community increasing life expectancy, but obviously the climate and generally better food available encourages people to be outside more and in the sun in the first place, too.
I've got to say I find the amount of smoking in places like Rome and Athens a bit excessive though. It's gone from a regular outdoor socialisation to an almost anti-establishment f** you- style badge in those places too, I have the feeling.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Yes, but perhaps while his last years were not so good, it is possible that had he not taken those steps his last decade might have been significantly worse?
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Reminds me of the old joke...
A man asks his doctor: "Do you think I'll live to be a hundred?"
The doctor asks the man "Well, that depends. Do you drink?"
"Oh, no sir! I abstain from all alcohol. Soda, too. I just drink plenty of fresh water."
"Do you smoke?"
"No, sir! Never smoked in my life, and I stay away from any place with second hand smoke."
"Do you eat a lot of sugary and greasy foods?"
"No, sir! I carefully watch my diet and caloric intake, and I'm sure to eat plenty of vegetables."
"Do you go to parties? Stay up late? Are you sexually promiscuous?"
"Not at all! Early to bed and early to rise! And abstinence is key."
The doctor raises an eyebrow at the man. "So... Why exactly do you want to live to be a hundred?"
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Covid is ongoing. My mother has just had it
I think it's still officially a pandemic according the WHO? Maybe should be reclassified as endemic. In the latest wave that peaked a few weeks ago around here, there was the highest number of patients in my wife's hospital because of covid since the start of the pandemic, though fewer ending up in intensive care.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
F-16s were the new MBTs for a while but but even the doughtiest Couch Cossacks on here are getting a bit bored of the SMO. Ukraine need to reboot the franchise.
It is not an "SMO" you twat. It is a war. A war of murderous aggression. Why do you persist with this ludicrous acronym? Do you think it makes you seem a bit "edgy"? It doesn't, it underlines that you are an apologist for Putin. Scum of the earth that can only be equated to a holocaust denier.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
Coke turns users into monomaniacal bores, so..
Possibly. I have heard it is endemic amongst SNP supporters. maybe that is where all the cash went?
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
Did they show gratitude for your congratulations?
Big "Danke JJ" flag flown from the Berliner Fernsehturm.
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Also still a virus to be feared if you're frail.
If you're frail most viruses are to be feared.
Covid is now like flu - something which will finish off some of the sick and old.
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Call me hard-hearted but I have stopped paying attention to US mass shootings. If they can't be bothered to fix the problem I don't see why I should be bothered to read about it. There are other parts of the world facing real problems that aren't entirely self-inflicted that are more worthy of my attention.
There is a simple solution to Save America: Arm Absolutely Everyone. If every citizen over the age of 5 was forced to carry a gun at all times, nobody would every be shot.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
That's very disingenuous of you. Germany got itself into a right mess over sending tanks.
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
What I noticed was that hardly anyone was making much fuss about Leopard 2 tanks. Then when Germany got itself into a mess over sending them and were rightly being criticised for it you were one of the posters who was posting several times a day very passionately about how terrible it was. After a few days when Germany agreed to send tanks (as I predicted on the very same day that the US announced that it would some day send tanks, you claimed that this was just an "excuse" despite all the obvious evidence that that was consistent German policy) you didn't post any more. How many countries have actually sent Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine 3 months later? and how many? and what difference have they made so far? Was Germany really the one country stopping everyone else from sending loads of tanks immediately, as some posters were saying?
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
Wow that is really interesting. thank you for that
While I do think people in general be encouraged to live more healthily, I do get annoyed by this mantra of smokers,fatties and drinkers are costing the nhs when in fact they are in reality taking one for the team
Politically it is interesting too. Fundamentally it returns health to the concept of an individual responsibility rather than something "the state" should nanny everyone cradle to grave. In the case of the fatties and smokers, the grave is an earlier prospect.
Also it doesn't take into account the extra tax paid by smokers and drinkers which certainly in the case of smokers far exceeds yearly the amount spent on smoking related illnesses. Think last time I saw the figures it was 5.5bn tax and 2,75bn on treatment for smoking related illnesses
I have often thought that if my comparatively healthy lifestyle leads me to being fortunate enough to still be healthy in my eighties, I might take up smoking again (used to enjoy it in my 20s) and possibly even cocaine, which i never tried, even in my 20s.
I look at my 83 year old father who gave up smoking in his twenties, cut his drinking back in his thirties and adopted a healthier diet and exercise in his 40's. I watch him trying to remember, struggling to dress himself etc and often wonder if he knew how the last few years of his life would be whether he might have wished he spent more time enjoying his life and less time worrying about losing a few years off his lifespan
Yes, but perhaps while his last years were not so good, it is possible that had he not taken those steps his last decade might have been significantly worse?
It is always possible but we won't know that. Physically quite possibly, mentally however probably not. I can think of few things worse than losing your mind. I could cope with physical infirmity etc but I never want to go down the dementia route
London based lovers of musical theatre - get yourself down to the Bridge Theatre to see Guys and Dolls ASAP. Get promenade tickets if you can. One of the best shows I've ever seen - the atmosphere was like a revival meeting by the end - utterly joyful.
Planning to see this. Have to get my wife to watch the film first otherwise I'll know the songs and she won't - bad dynamic.
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
My wife knows the songs very well as she played Sarah Brown in a local production a few years back.
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Call me hard-hearted but I have stopped paying attention to US mass shootings. If they can't be bothered to fix the problem I don't see why I should be bothered to read about it. There are other parts of the world facing real problems that aren't entirely self-inflicted that are more worthy of my attention.
There is a simple solution to Save America: Arm Absolutely Everyone. If every citizen over the age of 5 was forced to carry a gun at all times, nobody would every be shot.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Tax incentives for private health care and back of the queue for the obese.
The first won't happen under Tory or Labour, regrettably, mainly because Labour has scorched the political earth for a mixed economy solution.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
There was a study done by if I remember the swedish where they looked at the lifetime healthcare costs of drinkers,smokers,the obese and healthy living. The healthy living had the highest lifetime healthcare costs. I will see if I can find the link
If you compare the average annual costs between the groups, the differences are much less than those between the lifetime costs, though.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
My quick skim suggested higher annual costs for the obese/smokers which were offset by longer life for the healthy giving them higher costs overall. Did I mis-read?
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
Those extra years the healthy gain are unlikely to be years working, they will be years taking from the government in the form of a state pension.
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Call me hard-hearted but I have stopped paying attention to US mass shootings. If they can't be bothered to fix the problem I don't see why I should be bothered to read about it. There are other parts of the world facing real problems that aren't entirely self-inflicted that are more worthy of my attention.
There is a simple solution to Save America: Arm Absolutely Everyone. If every citizen over the age of 5 was forced to carry a gun at all times, nobody would every be shot.
I think it's more likely that the 2 million surviving Americans would eventually decide that allowing everyone to have a gun was a frankly stupid idea.
Sadly until that occurs America will continue to treat guns insanely.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
Not entirely true. Going private normally means using facilities that are not available o the NHS (though sometimes are outsourced). Where you are partially correct is that the medical staff are often NHS consultants who have a unique employment status enabling them to work in both sectors, while simultaneously claiming they are underpaid and over worked.
Proper privatisation of the NHS (if carried out effectively) would sort out the problems. Sadly it won't happen because there is not the political will to take on the vested interests. Blair should have done it, but he missed his chance
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Covid is ongoing. My mother has just had it
Covid is ongoing and always will be. The Covid pandemic is not ongoing. I have to admit it no longer affects my life or choices at all.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
Yes, in the old days us lefties used to call going private by its proper name: "queue jumping".
I wonder if the reason why oldies still think covid is ongoing is because they're invited every six months for another vaccination, most recently this month.
Also still a virus to be feared if you're frail.
If you're frail most viruses are to be feared.
Covid is now like flu - something which will finish off some of the sick and old.
Take your point but it's a bit worse than flu. Also it's new, and new nasty things are more frightening than old nasty things. We don't get a brand new killer disease in common circulation very often after all. Covid was a rare and traumatic event. I'm not surprised the memory lingers on and that for many people "it" is not deemed over.
Anyway, I will spend the rest of the evening with my family.
Five years ago I got annoyed that London cabbies still only took cash and refused cards. I'm just arguing for choice.
Deeply odd how cash v. card has become such a fervent culture war issue. It's possibly fuelled by whichever group is detected to be largely on one side of it or not.
Sign of the times perhaps.
Cash is being defended by three groups: 1. Dodgy Traders who love cash as they don't pay tax on it. Have been quoted different amounts for work if I want an invoice for my company to pay vs cash. "Err, really?" 2. Nostalgia merchants who are still living pre-covid. My MIL who at Easter got arsey with wife because she wasn't carrying cash for a restaurant tip 3. People who want to withdraw lovely anonymous cash before buying something they don't want on a credit card statement.
As I understand it the old legal tender arguments went out with Covid. Its now legal not to take cash. When we get our shop open later in he summer I'm only planning to take cash because there are some elderly people and small kids who may want to use it.
For a business like ours cash is an absolute arse.
The only thing worse than cash is being given a cheque.
Cash is still useful. Some posters (and sadly, seemingly RP) look at their own lives and see no use for it: they seem not to understand that others *may* have use cases where cash is useful. It's particularly funny given that the people most against cash appear to be the left-leaning on here - who should allegedly care for those left behind in society...
As a small example: when we had covid recently, a friend got us a few groceries whilst we awaited a supermarket delivery. I paid him back yesterday, in cash. The alternatives would have been a cheque (inconvenient), or bank transfer (slightly awkward for such a small sum, esp. as I did not have his account set up). It was much easier to just walk over and hand over a couple of notes.
Admittedly, I use cash much less than I used to. But it is still useful.
Then there are other use cases: people who use cash as they have problems controlling spending; people who do not want their controlling partners to see everything they have spent, etc, etc.
I am not *anti-cash*. I laid out a few areas where it is still useful. Your example of someone has got a few groceries I accept. But do you have cash to pay them? Do they have change to give you? As cash disappears it becomes just as likely that cash becomes more, not less, difficult.
An example. We have a chinese takeaway in the village who studiously refuse to get a card reader. The nearest cash machine is 5 miles away in the next village. So if we want to use them it takes planning. Because having ended up with notes sat in a wallet for literal months we just don't get cash out regularly any more - it is by exception.
Cash won't disappear and I don't want it to. But its utility is shrinking rapidly. When you understand that fiat money is a computer-created fiction anyway it seems archaic creating these tokens to represent something which is entirely digital.
TBF, you said: "Cash is being defended by three groups:", and then gave groups in a negative manner. My point is that cash is used, and needed, far wider than those three groups.
In fact, I'm amused that you wrote that post in such a manner. The people who primarily be using cash are the people I'd expect you to care about, and be concerned about, the most.
I will say this once more, and then leave it.
The key group who use and need cash are small businesses and their customers in poorer areas. Where margins are tight, the high fees charged for card machines and card transactions are literally the difference between solvency and closure. Although there are fees for banking in cash, they are (a) somewhat lower and (b) it's in your power to vary them by deciding how much cash you do and don't bank. You don't have that power with cards.
Banks and their apologists claim it is cheaper to use cards, but this is simply not true. It is cheaper for (1) people who pay large amounts every time, so it's a smaller percentage of the overall take and (2) large corporations including banks, who are deliberately running down their branch network to increase their profits and therefore want us all to pay by card.
Now I can understand why in London or Manchester, dominated by the big corps and with a high (extortionate, truthfully) cost of living, that means cash is no longer important.
That does not mean it is the case everywhere. Outside of major cities and tourist honeypots, where you can still get a decent meal for a fiver, insisting on card only would mean some businesses paying near 20% of turnover in card fees, instead of around 5% for cash banking fees. Which seems to me utterly unfair, ridiculous and in itself pretty well criminal.
And while I have no objection to people using cards to pay (I do it myself an awful lot) I cannot understand the mentality of people who say 'I find cash inconvenient in my particular circumstances, therefore everyone who uses it must be a criminal or a moron.' Which we see one particularly weird example of on this board.
If that person doesn't like that, that's his problem. But he should understand that his is playing the games of big businesses against ordinary people, out of selfishness.
I think you may be very out of date on card fees. Square charge 1.75% on contactless and inserted cards, so 9p rather than £1.
My information is from nine months ago. I do not think it is out of date.
Anyway, I suggest we leave this. It grew out of Anabobazina's decision to criticise somebody for not paying for a bus by smartphone in 2005. I don't see why we should pander (to link to my other pun) to his obsessions on the subject, particularly when it generates so much more heat than light.
Edit - incidentally I think the 1.75% is a fee to use the machine separate from bank fees, which is what I was referring to.
Again, I did not criticise him – you are making this up. It is a lie, and I have shown you why in an earlier post.
I merely asked@Sandpit when the incident occurred as you have been able to pay for a bus with your phone for several years now, and he replied "2005, and I noted his response by liking it.
Stop repeating this fiction.
It’s a while, since I travelled on the bus, and anyway I always use my bus pass, but I don’t recall ever seeing anybody paying on our service with a phone.
My pet hate on public transport is standing behind someone at the ticket barrier paying with their phone who only decides to open their app at the point they reach the barrier rather than having it ready. Or even worse, standing there looking through their bag for it. I still use an Oyster card because I need my phone free for reading PB.
Weird as they don't need to open the app! It will do it automatically when they touch their phone to the reader!
Whatever they're doing it takes a couple of seconds longer than tapping an Oyster card. With ten people in line in front of you that accumulates!
On the card fees - they are largely a rip off and are being eroded by new entrants into the market for payment provision.
On the TfL system - then annoying thing is that despite promoting using contactless card/phones, they haven't full integrated season tickets, multiple cards etc with an account.
If you are making a cross-London rail journey involving the underground between two terminals, then you need to use a paper ticket as the paperless options now available on the big railway don't work on the London Underground - i.e. you can't get through the ticket gates.
This arm-everyone idea was the basis of Sacha Baron-Cohen's very close-to-the-bone satire a few years ago, where he played an over-trigger happy Israeli security expert trying to convince everyone to follow his "kinder-guardians" programme from Israel, where everyone would be armed from toddlers onwards. This being America, there were several congressmen actually liking the idea, and who went along with it, actually believing it.
Separate from the usual mass shooting madness, which seems to have become almost accepted by large parts of US society, I don't know if there is a sudden rise in irritable guys shooting innocent people for no good reason, or whether it's just getting more media attention.
Kinsley White, 6, was shot by a North Carolina neighbor who was upset that a basketball rolled into his yard. The gunman also shot her parents and other family members. White was released from the hospital overnight. https://mobile.twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1648792325156401153
Gun law is perhaps going to be a more significant issue at the next election, beyond its usual purpose of motivating the Republican vote.
Given the number of shootings I suspect its always happened.
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
Call me hard-hearted but I have stopped paying attention to US mass shootings. If they can't be bothered to fix the problem I don't see why I should be bothered to read about it. There are other parts of the world facing real problems that aren't entirely self-inflicted that are more worthy of my attention.
There is a simple solution to Save America: Arm Absolutely Everyone. If every citizen over the age of 5 was forced to carry a gun at all times, nobody would every be shot.
As well as putting more funds into the NHS we need to ease the burden on it by encouraging those who can afford it to go private. In terms of Covid as long as we avoid any new vaccine immune variant it is over for now
Half the time "going private" isn't easing a burden, it's just accessing the same resource but quicker because you're paying, ie someone else now waits even longer on the NHS.
Yes, in the old days us lefties used to call going private by its proper name: "queue jumping".
You much prefer most should have a shitty lowest denominator service, while touching the forelock to the doctors that enable the system and enrich themselves on it.
The US remain the only NATO nation with really significant readily usable reserves.
I remember the fuss 3 months ago when Germany was delaying the decision on Leopard 2 tanks by 5 days. According to some on here every day's delay meant Germany was deliberately murdering Ukrainian babies, and every single other NATO/European country was just itching to give hundreds of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine immediately if only Germany would stop preventing them. The reality of the last 3 months has been very different (with the exception of Poland), and yours is the first post about Leopard 2 tanks I've seen here for months. What happened to people's passionate urgency about Leopard 2 tanks?
The tank deliveries have already started - quite a few are already in Ukraine. Perhaps that is the reason.
Maybe. I think the delays in deciding to send any, the small numbers being offered, the delays in actually sending any, are all pretty disappointing.
There's also definitely a bit of a strange double standard with some posters where any German delays are evil and any reasons given are just excuses, but delays by anyone else are understandable and reasons given are reasonable.
Comments
Apparently, the foreign aid budget is being used to pay for undergrad medical education - the putative doctors then go back to their own countries to complete their training. This has increased a bit this year.
Since they are paying full overseas fees, the universities *love* this. And push domestic students out of the way.....
The thought occurs - since we don't have enough training places in the UK..... Could we send our undergrads to train in various parts of the world? Some kind of swap?
But has been ignored by the media obsession with mass shootings, which only make up a tiny percentage of total gun incidents.
I am certainly no luddite as I write software for a living. I pay for stuff online with a card quite happily and access government and council services. I just don't want to carry a phone when out and about and there are many times I don't want to carry a card either.....hint someone gets hold of my card they can now spend upto around 700 pounds via contactless depending on where I am in the cycle before it asks for a pin number. If I am going out to a pub, the card stays at home and the amount of cash I am willing to spend goes in my pocket. Then if I get my wallet stolen well I have only lost what cash I had on me. If my card is in my wallet I have lost the ability to pay for anything till I get issued a new card.(Yes I have like most people only one bank account and no I have never had a credit card nor do I want one)
The response to the idea that Rishi is using Excel is revealing in some ways - "A proper chap should have a pleb for that".
The point is that we need more clinical staff. You can invest in training more, invest in pay and conditions in NHS or invest in tax breaks etc for private healthcare, but then you still need to train more and unless you really train a lot more you still have a shortage and need to pay more to retain.
There are no shortcuts here. Whatever model you advocate, whether via government or via greater private provision, we need to spend a great % of GDP on healthcare if we want better healthcare.
Your second suggestion is extremely discriminatory and simplistic. Obese people are a health problem, but a lot of the causes are demographic. The poorer someone is the greater chance of them being obese is. One of the many problems of the NHS is that it is an illness service, not a health service. It does very little to treat the causes and focusses on the symptoms. It is beginning to look at rehabilitation approaches for the obese and there are interesting innovations in this area, but there is a long way to go.
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan
The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) for COVID-19 is expected to be dissolved next month, along with the reclassification of the disease from a category 5 to a category 4 notifiable communicable disease, Minister of Health and Welfare Hsueh Jui-yuan (薛瑞元) said yesterday.
As Japan has announced that it would lift all remaining COVID-19 border measures on May 8 and US President Joe Biden has said he would end the nation’s COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has lately often been asked when the CECC would be disbanded...
They did pretty well, with under 19k deaths for a population of 23.5m, compared to our 200k plus.
I've seen a few restaurants request it the reasons being:
1) They don't have to pay a fee for card usage.
and/or
2) People are less likely to get into debt if they use cash rather than 'putting it on the card'.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225430/
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001678
Having only three fingers on one hand seems the least of Miss United Kingdom’s problems.
The NATO Secretary-General was seen by a Kyiv Independent journalist on the morning of April 20 paying tribute to fallen Ukrainian soldiers on St Michael's Square in central Kyiv.
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1648949370824577024
3) They are only reporting half their income to the taxman.
Possibly Farage crouched behind her.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001678
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225430/
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3959031-biggest-winners-and-losers-in-the-blockbuster-fox-dominion-settlement/
...The $787.5 million payout from Fox is about half what Dominion initially demanded, but still far more than the $80 million the company was valued at when private equity group Staple Street Capital bought a controlling stake in the company in 2018, according to a filing during the case. ..
I’ve liked having it as a backup when TMS isn’t on R5
And where is the shipping forecast going?
"Taking a chance ... talk about your long shots ... taking a chance on ME"
And for the record, I've congratulated Germany since for getting kit over there. Once they unequivocally decided to do it, they've done well.
Lifetime costs for healthy individuals are 12% more than the obese, but the annual cost is only 4% more, as it's spread over a greater number of years.
For smokers vs healthy, the numbers are 27% and 14% respectively, so much more significant in reality.
*might need the 'my grandma used to lull me off to sleep by going through parliamentary constituencies, weighing up candidates' qualities and then telling me who was best in each' to get an answer
That is a very high barrier to overcome. Fox was liable only because their behaviour was so egregious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI
live in a couple of hours.
However we've promised to take my parents to a show so we are off to see Oklahoma. Going to fun watching my parents who will be expecting a film like version seeing what is almost a different play giving the new arranagements and staging (we saw it in New York in 2019).
I've got to say I find the amount of smoking in places like Rome and Athens a bit excessive though. It's gone from a regular outdoor socialisation to an almost anti-establishment f** you- style badge in those places too, I have the feeling.
A man asks his doctor: "Do you think I'll live to be a hundred?"
The doctor asks the man "Well, that depends. Do you drink?"
"Oh, no sir! I abstain from all alcohol. Soda, too. I just drink plenty of fresh water."
"Do you smoke?"
"No, sir! Never smoked in my life, and I stay away from any place with second hand smoke."
"Do you eat a lot of sugary and greasy foods?"
"No, sir! I carefully watch my diet and caloric intake, and I'm sure to eat plenty of vegetables."
"Do you go to parties? Stay up late? Are you sexually promiscuous?"
"Not at all! Early to bed and early to rise! And abstinence is key."
The doctor raises an eyebrow at the man. "So... Why exactly do you want to live to be a hundred?"
In the latest wave that peaked a few weeks ago around here, there was the highest number of patients in my wife's hospital because of covid since the start of the pandemic, though fewer ending up in intensive care.
There's also the point that the healthy are likely to contribute more in taxes etc, although that seemed to be accounted for in at least the second link. What I didn't get to was whether they counted other costs of illness such as carers having reduced working capacity etc, likely more relevant in a working age obese/smoking population than the retired carers of the generally healthy but old.
I suspect its something where you can get different answers depending how many societal costs you include, but I wouldn't be surprised if the basic point stands. People who live long enough to have multiple joint replacements (and particularly those developing dementia, if you include care costs) could easily cost more than those dying of cancer or heart disease.
The election starts here!
Covid is now like flu - something which will finish off some of the sick and old.
Toddlers, of course, also have form shooting people in the US.
Sadly until that occurs America will continue to treat guns insanely.
Proper privatisation of the NHS (if carried out effectively) would sort out the problems. Sadly it won't happen because there is not the political will to take on the vested interests. Blair should have done it, but he missed his chance
Whatever the verdict, surely screaming blue murder at minions is a welcome tonic in the face of Sir Softie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_LXgWTSj8
Barrett Light 50s for the Toddlers!
There's also definitely a bit of a strange double standard with some posters where any German delays are evil and any reasons given are just excuses, but delays by anyone else are understandable and reasons given are reasonable.