With respect to ballot access for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. note that IMHO he's HIGHLY likely to make the nut in all 17 states where his voter petitions are "awaiting certification" by state authorities.
Why? Because RFK Jr campaign has spent a LOT of money and devoted a LOT of effort to gaining access to the general election ballot from sea to shining sea. Meaning in practice gathering and submitting sufficient valid signatures from eligible voters, according to local laws and regulations. And that provided enough sigs are validated, and rules followed, he'll qualify for the ballot there.
For example, in WA state requirement for Independent AND minor party candidates for POTUS are > hold convention (can be multiple locations) > gather minimum of 1,000 valid voter signatures (note that RFK Jr submitted 4,181 so should make 1k min. with room to spare even if half or more of his sigs don't get validated) > submit full slate of Electors (for WA = 12) > Zero filing fee required.
With Brook and Pope England's batting is in good hands. Not so confident with the ball. Wood has incredible pace but just doesn't pick up the wickets. Woakes is useful but no match for the Anderson/Stokes combo that helped England so often. Atkinson strikes me as similar to Broad, he will have days when he is unplayable and others when he is harmless.
Tougher tests lie ahead, the Windies are not what they were, but overall a decent, but not outstanding performance.
Of all the things that Osborne did, making it so landlords can't deduct the cost of interest from costs associated with rental properties had to be the dumbest.
Coupled with the UK's chronic housing shortage, the result was that the increased cost was immediately passed on to renters. Bad enough when interest rates were ultra low, but now...
Osborne's policy is essentially a tax on renters. If there is any Osborne era policy that needs scrapping, start there.
That's the standard argument against any increased cost for landlords, direct or indirect.
I'm not so sure. I think that the rents are ultimately set by the overall demand and supply of housing in an area - not just that for rental properties. If increased costs for landlords mean that some rental properties aren't made available to renters, those properties don't just disappear.
There has been a significant change in housing tenure over the last 10 years, with a 28% increase in the number of households renting. Unless you think that for reasons of flexibility renting has become much more popular, this must be due to some change in housing supply.
When I was searching for my first flat, I was repeatedly matched by cash buyers seeing my city as an investment opportunity. In some cases, it was someone borrowing money from the bank to do the same. Much of the demand for rental properties comes from people like me who, despite having a significant deposit and a good job, simply could not compete with these people.
While that's true, it also makes building new homes less profitable because there are fewer potential purchasers.
The building of new homes would undoubtedly be more profitable if the builders actually worked on building the houses. So far as I can see ALL construction projects of any description in the UK have workers actually on site and working about 10% of the time. Even when they're working it's a man with a shovel whilst two colleagues comment on his style.
Okay. I live very near two construction projects - the £1 billion A421/8 road and Cambourne West. I walk, run, cycle or drive past these most days. Aside from Sundays, I don't see people acting anywhere near how you claim.
I've also worked on projects in my ancient youth. Let me give you an example. You want to dig a trench across an area of non-virgin ground; an area where there might be pipes and cables. The digger driver may be proficient, but they rarely work alone on that sort of trench job, as you have one or two spotters looking out for anything in the trench - cables, pipes, different colour ground (pipes and cables are often buried in sand or pea gravel); or the plastic tape that often covers them. Because the digger driver does not necessarily get a good view from his position, espeically when the earth falls back in.
"What a waste!!!" I hear people screech. "They're just standing by their shovels!" Well, the costs of knocking out power to part of a town or worse, knocking out the water supply, is far, far greater than the cost of the spotters. And what they're doing is looking for any trace of a problem.
I know; I spent many hours doing exactly this. Then you see a flash of yellow or blue, you signal the driver who stops, and you jump into the trench with your shovel to look at what you glanced.
If anything it's got better; when I learnt to survey, it was a two- or three-man job. One person to operate the level or theodolite; another to move the staff, and a helper. Now, thanks to differential GPS and the laser levels, it is often just one man. Or one man to survey and another to help (for some situations).
There is a Conservative case for removing the cap, eg we are now below replacement level in terms of children per woman which is set at 2.1 and Meloni as Italian PM has provided funds to mothers who have more children to increase the Italian birthrate as a right of centre leader. Osborne though was an economic liberal and fiscal conservative more than a traditional pro family Conservative.
I doubt it makes much difference in Scotland if Labour retain it, Yougov has 59% of Scots backing the 2 child benefit cap
If you are serious about increasing the birth rate then builds lot of nice, affordable houses with gardens in nice parts of the country.
Actually, just build lots of houses in places where there's demand, and the market will sort it out.
Or, to put it another way, don't let great be the enemy of good. (I'm sorry, because there's no space for gardens, there's no point in building homes here.)
How about this for a “grow the population” policy?
On the birth of your third child, you get a 5 bed house in a nice new garden city, that is in one of the areas that the country is trying to “level up”
A free house.
It’s not 640 acres of Norte Mexico, but..
Yes, that's pretty much the current scheme.
Work all your life to make a nice home for potential children - you're screwed. Just have the children - no worries.
That's not just wrong but offensively wrong. Anyone who thinks a life on benefits is anything but utter shite should try it and see how they get on.
I'm sure you're right, but as such there should be a strong disincentive to spending a life on benefits. Sometimes it has been otherwise.
Since we are slightly on housing policy, one important point is that Self-Build is a middle class activity, as anything less than a £750-800k budget in the SE, £500k in the rest of England, and probably £400k in Scotland / Wales is a fool's errand.
Unless you have a free plot from somewhere.
Access needs to be broadened.
There is a vast number of things that need doing on housing.
1. Give councils powers to tax landbanking to fill the holes in their accounts. 2. Find some way for pension funds to crawl out of their overvalued commercial property portfolios, so such properties are sold, redeveloped or let at a lower rate, creating more High Street dwellings. 3. Sort out nutrient neautrality rules - why are we blocking 100,000 new dwellings because of a stupid EU rule we don't even have to follow any more? 4. Build a new garden city on the HS2 route.
I never unnecessarily use my brake. I drive at a sensible enough speed that I normally never need to brake; I use my gears to regulate my speed
When I have clear road in front I never break the speed limit (50 mph for vans on single carriage roads; why it's 60 for these massive, weighty, people-carrying SUVs wtfk), but I corner considerably quicker than the braking morons behind me. I leave them behind at the bends, but they obviously catch me on the straights
When I have a car in front going slower, I just leave a decent gap so I don't have to brake when they inevitably and idiotically do
I like to try to make the braking morons behind think that my brake lights are broken
Just before I returned my last leased car (a Skoda Fabia), it had to go into the the dealer's for a well overdue service. I got a call from them while it was being serviced; they wanted to know who had replaced the brakes. They could see I had original Skoda brake pads and discs, but no record of them being changed
It took quite a while to convince them that I hadn't had them replaced, even though I'd have to have been an idiot to have had it done elsewhere with full service lease contract
They told me that the brakes looked like they'd done twenty thousand miles, but the car had done eighty thousand
Drive like me
Back when I was motoring the roads, used to call what you describe as "Zen driving".
Good for the car, even better for the soul . . . and also the sole of your shoe . . .
Since we are slightly on housing policy, one important point is that Self-Build is a middle class activity, as anything less than a £750-800k budget in the SE, £500k in the rest of England, and probably £400k in Scotland / Wales is a fool's errand.
Unless you have a free plot from somewhere.
Access needs to be broadened.
There is a vast number of things that need doing on housing.
1. Give councils powers to tax landbanking to fill the holes in their accounts. 2. Find some way for pension funds to crawl out of their overvalued commercial property portfolios, so such properties are sold, redeveloped or let at a lower rate, creating more High Street dwellings. 3. Sort out nutrient neautrality rules - why are we blocking 100,000 new dwellings because of a stupid EU rule we don't even have to follow any more? 4. Build a new garden city on the HS2 route.
These are only a couple off the top of my head.
It was because of building new towns on the west coast main line between London and Rugby that HS2 is needed in the first place.
Why do we need to encourage procreation when we can just import three quarters of a million fully formed adults each year?
Plenty of savings to be made. Shut down the schools. Shut down the maternity wards. Non-parents able to carry on working full time. Where are the downsides?
Of all the things that Osborne did, making it so landlords can't deduct the cost of interest from costs associated with rental properties had to be the dumbest.
Coupled with the UK's chronic housing shortage, the result was that the increased cost was immediately passed on to renters. Bad enough when interest rates were ultra low, but now...
Osborne's policy is essentially a tax on renters. If there is any Osborne era policy that needs scrapping, start there.
This policy was to stop buy to letters dominating the housing market and to give more chances to first time buyers with small deposits. It partially succeeded in that objective. If we want generation rent to buy we need to keep this policy.
Not everyone can afford the 20k+ deposit you need to get on the housing ladder. Much more if you live in London and the SE. Which is, er, where the jobs are.
While I get the general idea was to make BTL less profitable, when you have a chronic supply shortage, landlords can more or less charge what they want. This is obvious from the post 2017 spike in rental prices, and again over the last couple of years with interest rates rising significantly.
The idea was to make landlords pay more, but in practice all that has happened is that they have passed their increased costs on to the tenant. Like I say, it's a tax on renters, not on landlords.
There are jobs available pretty much all over the country now.
Regional imbalances in jobs was something from the era of when the West Indies were good at cricket.
Comments
Why? Because RFK Jr campaign has spent a LOT of money and devoted a LOT of effort to gaining access to the general election ballot from sea to shining sea. Meaning in practice gathering and submitting sufficient valid signatures from eligible voters, according to local laws and regulations. And that provided enough sigs are validated, and rules followed, he'll qualify for the ballot there.
For example, in WA state requirement for Independent AND minor party candidates for POTUS are
> hold convention (can be multiple locations)
> gather minimum of 1,000 valid voter signatures (note that RFK Jr submitted 4,181 so should make 1k min. with room to spare even if half or more of his sigs don't get validated)
> submit full slate of Electors (for WA = 12)
> Zero filing fee required.
Tougher tests lie ahead, the Windies are not what they were, but overall a decent, but not outstanding performance.
I've also worked on projects in my ancient youth. Let me give you an example. You want to dig a trench across an area of non-virgin ground; an area where there might be pipes and cables. The digger driver may be proficient, but they rarely work alone on that sort of trench job, as you have one or two spotters looking out for anything in the trench - cables, pipes, different colour ground (pipes and cables are often buried in sand or pea gravel); or the plastic tape that often covers them. Because the digger driver does not necessarily get a good view from his position, espeically when the earth falls back in.
"What a waste!!!" I hear people screech. "They're just standing by their shovels!" Well, the costs of knocking out power to part of a town or worse, knocking out the water supply, is far, far greater than the cost of the spotters. And what they're doing is looking for any trace of a problem.
I know; I spent many hours doing exactly this. Then you see a flash of yellow or blue, you signal the driver who stops, and you jump into the trench with your shovel to look at what you glanced.
If anything it's got better; when I learnt to survey, it was a two- or three-man job. One person to operate the level or theodolite; another to move the staff, and a helper. Now, thanks to differential GPS and the laser levels, it is often just one man. Or one man to survey and another to help (for some situations).
1. Give councils powers to tax landbanking to fill the holes in their accounts.
2. Find some way for pension funds to crawl out of their overvalued commercial property portfolios, so such properties are sold, redeveloped or let at a lower rate, creating more High Street dwellings.
3. Sort out nutrient neautrality rules - why are we blocking 100,000 new dwellings because of a stupid EU rule we don't even have to follow any more?
4. Build a new garden city on the HS2 route.
These are only a couple off the top of my head.
Good for the car, even better for the soul . . . and also the sole of your shoe . . .
Looks interesting.
BIDEN QUITS THE WHITE HOUSE RACE
NEW THREAD
Plenty of savings to be made. Shut down the schools. Shut down the maternity wards. Non-parents able to carry on working full time. Where are the downsides?
Regional imbalances in jobs was something from the era of when the West Indies were good at cricket.