I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
Doctors on high wages funded by private insurance that is paid for by everyone = productive members of society.
Doctors on modest wages funded by general taxation = drag on the private sector.
... I think that's the logic of some on the right anyway.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
That has a feel of MPs on that committee having to say what they are expected to say about it.
For example, who'd have thought that a 2 year programme started 15 months ago would not have finished yet?
In July 2023, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) - which is responsible for maintaining and servicing military accommodation - was given £400m to tackle those issues over the next two years.
But, the report said, "outstanding problems" remain across the estate that the DIO "must resolve"
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Do you not have a Cultish devotion to Capitalism?
Or are some Cultish devotions acceptable?
Capitalism has plenty of flaws. It should be commercial democracy but the power of large firms can lead it to become more like commercial oligarchy. Taken too far, you can end up with US healthcare. But it's better than the alternatives. You certainly won't find me applauding capitalism on my doorstep, then condemning those who refuse to participate for their ingratitude.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Do you not have a Cultish devotion to Capitalism?
Or are some Cultish devotions acceptable?
Perhaps it's a country slavishly devoted to overreactions to small symbols .
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Like the shoplifters in the story upthread they're clearly not in it for the money ?
Police arrest 93 gang members behind £4m thefts in shoplifting crackdown A new police unit has for the first time mapped the gangs targeting shops around the country to see where they're operating. https://news.sky.com/story/flatplan-13270885
Geography is not just for running through fields of wheat. Who knew?
At first glance it sounds like a big operation. But if £4m the retail value, they are probably selling it on <50% so <£2m. Divvied up between the 93 thats £21k each. Not unsubstantial but worth risking your liberty for? And then we are told the arrested ones are part of a much bigger crime gang. So far less than £21k each. Then expenses for travelling around the country.
Crime doesn't pay particularly well for most, maybe less than minimum wage, is what I take from that report.
I've only known a few minor villains but invariably they'd have been better off with proper jobs. And those at the top may as well be running major companies, albeit with alternative mechanisms for dispute resolution. This might also be why county lines gangs recruit children – if they waited till they were adults, they'd realise Tesco paid more for stacking shelves.
(Also please do not use less than symbols which confuse Vanilla. I've replaced them with html codes.)
(They also confuse the AI summaries of search results: < must be written as <. Gosh, thanks, Copilot.)
OT: It seems to be a "Free Amazon Prime Day", which (I think) means that the great unwashed get the benefits of free delivery that some of us pay for.
Free delivery has applied to my caviar (!) order and a couple of others this morning, even though yesterday it was trying to charge me on one even as a Prime member.
Worth a look, but check the free delivery on your basket as I'm not totally clear on the setup.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Were there any other countries that had something similar to the applause for health workers thing (of which I did not partake)? Perhaps Britain is a country of cultish devotion (see also Royal family).
I hope you clapped for Boris when he took a bout of COVID for the team. He nearly died you know, but his resilience kept the national pecker up, so every Thursday we clapped for Boris. Stuff the lazy nurses.
Rechargeable batteries cost about £100* a Kilowatt/Hour. That is, the amount of batteries that provides a thousand watts of power for an hour. So, 10p a watt/hour.
The new plant in Spain to build batteries can build 50 Gigawatt/Hour of batteries per year. 50,000,000,000,000 watt hours of batteries. So £5 billion as year of sales price
10% would be a pretty important subsidy. The kind of number that changes locations of factories. So £500 million on a year's production.
So instead of carbon capture, we could subsidise 44 production years of such plants. Of course, that would probably be spread over multiple plants. So we could subsidise the first 5 years of production of 5 such plants, and save a pile of money.
Which would be enough batteries to build 2.5 million cars per year. Or 50,000 ISO containers of batteries, used for storage of power.
*Actually high and the price is dropping. Chosen for simple maths.
FPTP really is a rubbish system plus if any other system were used voting patterns would likely favour the smaller Parties like the Greens even more as people vote for the Party thet actually want rather than for one of the 2 big parties to stop the other big Party
Give it a couple of years and nobody except fringe loonies will vote green. How a socialist can vote for a party that advocates the working poor shivering in the cold while the Government subsidises the sovereign wealth funds of other nations billions to provide unreliable expensive power is utterly beyond me.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
FPTP really is a rubbish system plus if any other system were used voting patterns would likely favour the smaller Parties like the Greens even more as people vote for the Party thet actually want rather than for one of the 2 big parties to stop the other big Party
Give it a couple of years and nobody except fringe loonies will vote green. How a socialist can vote for a party that advocates the working poor shivering in the cold while the Government subsidises the sovereign wealth funds of other nations billions to provide unreliable expensive power is utterly beyond me.
They don't.
That I think is a deliberate misreading of the policy.
(And no, I don't vote Green in General Elections.)
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Police arrest 93 gang members behind £4m thefts in shoplifting crackdown A new police unit has for the first time mapped the gangs targeting shops around the country to see where they're operating. https://news.sky.com/story/flatplan-13270885
Geography is not just for running through fields of wheat. Who knew?
At first glance it sounds like a big operation. But if £4m the retail value, they are probably selling it on <50% so <£2m. Divvied up between the 93 thats £21k each. Not unsubstantial but worth risking your liberty for? And then we are told the arrested ones are part of a much bigger crime gang. So far less than £21k each. Then expenses for travelling around the country.
Crime doesn't pay particularly well for most, maybe less than minimum wage, is what I take from that report.
I've only known a few minor villains but invariably they'd have been better off with proper jobs. And those at the top may as well be running major companies, albeit with alternative mechanisms for dispute resolution. This might also be why county lines gangs recruit children – if they waited till they were adults, they'd realise Tesco paid more for stacking shelves.
(Also please do not use less than symbols which confuse Vanilla. I've replaced them with html codes.)
(They also confuse the AI summaries of search results: < must be written as <. Gosh, thanks, Copilot.)
A number of years back - early 90s, I think - the Economist did a dive into the economics of the drug trade.
Nearly everyone in it was paid less than minimum wage - and that irregularly. A few windfalls, really. And drug dealing is often product before cash. So everyone is in debt to other people.
A tiny number get good money, an even tinier group got the riches.
This explains the continuous issue of theft and the constant Klingon Promotion system.
As they put it, 95% of people in the drugs trade would be better off working in fast food. More money for a start.
Basically FPTP is the only one that doesn’t ensure a coalition of chaos?
We have a coalition of chaos, but it's just entirely internal to the Labour Party.
This is a key point. FPTP doesn't avoid coalitions - it just hides them within the Big Two parties and makes it much more difficult for the electorate to affect them (you don't get the ability to discriminate between candidates of the same party like you do with STV, for example, or open list PR).
It's very reminiscent of the way monopolists aim to avoid free market influences.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Do you not have a Cultish devotion to Capitalism?
Or are some Cultish devotions acceptable?
Capitalism has plenty of flaws. It should be commercial democracy but the power of large firms can lead it to become more like commercial oligarchy. Taken too far, you can end up with US healthcare. But it's better than the alternatives. You certainly won't find me applauding capitalism on my doorstep, then condemning those who refuse to participate for their ingratitude.
OT: It seems to be a "Free Amazon Prime Day", which (I think) means that the great unwashed get the benefits of free delivery that some of us pay for.
Free delivery has applied to my caviar (!) order and a couple of others this morning, even though yesterday it was trying to charge me on one even as a Prime member.
Worth a look, but check the free delivery on your basket as I'm not totally clear on the setup.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
But the private sector has not provided much economic growth either in the UK - productivity growth has been dreadful there too.
True, but the private sector are still massive overachievers when compared to the Public Sector.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected? DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings
I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously
It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it
She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me
Police arrest 93 gang members behind £4m thefts in shoplifting crackdown A new police unit has for the first time mapped the gangs targeting shops around the country to see where they're operating. https://news.sky.com/story/flatplan-13270885
Geography is not just for running through fields of wheat. Who knew?
At first glance it sounds like a big operation. But if £4m the retail value, they are probably selling it on <50% so <£2m. Divvied up between the 93 thats £21k each. Not unsubstantial but worth risking your liberty for? And then we are told the arrested ones are part of a much bigger crime gang. So far less than £21k each. Then expenses for travelling around the country.
Crime doesn't pay particularly well for most, maybe less than minimum wage, is what I take from that report.
I've only known a few minor villains but invariably they'd have been better off with proper jobs. And those at the top may as well be running major companies, albeit with alternative mechanisms for dispute resolution. This might also be why county lines gangs recruit children – if they waited till they were adults, they'd realise Tesco paid more for stacking shelves.
(Also please do not use less than symbols which confuse Vanilla. I've replaced them with html codes.)
(They also confuse the AI summaries of search results: < must be written as <. Gosh, thanks, Copilot.)
A number of years back - early 90s, I think - the Economist did a dive into the economics of the drug trade.
Nearly everyone in it was paid less than minimum wage - and that irregularly. A few windfalls, really. And drug dealing is often product before cash. So everyone is in debt to other people.
A tiny number get good money, an even tinier group got the riches.
This explains the continuous issue of theft and the constant Klingon Promotion system.
As they put it, 95% of people in the drugs trade would be better off working in fast food. More money for a start.
Freakonomics covered that in one of their books. A piece called “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?”
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Were there any other countries that had something similar to the applause for health workers thing (of which I did not partake)? Perhaps Britain is a country of cultish devotion (see also Royal family).
I hope you clapped for Boris when he took a bout of COVID for the team. He nearly died you know, but his resilience kept the national pecker up, so every Thursday we clapped for Boris. Stuff the lazy nurses.
On a connected note, and to make a change of tedious bicker from CASH, private v public sectors etc. The combination of John Simpson and a French institute may have veins in foreheads bulging, but that's a feature not a bug.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Petty scroungers. Sucking on the teat of the wealth creators.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected? DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
Yes sheep and cattle about the only thing of any value for Baggy Point.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected? DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
The comic thing here is that after literal centuries of trying to protect stuff, the legal responsibility for such is confused. Process State at work.
The answer is - clear simple law on defining a protected piece of land, what is protected and by whom.
I would suspect that the main reason that this hasn't been sorted out is the problem of who then pays for maintaining land. Clear lines of responsibility would mean clear lines of responsibility.
F1: I'm going through my results and managing to pick the only race in the first four when Perez failed to be top 2 to back him to be top 2 was quite the achievement.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
I guess that depends on who is asking the question! Enough to at least allow you to participate in society, I guess. Enough to make working that job worth it. A lot of Public sector jobs are a bit hard to price.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected? DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
The comic thing here is that after literal centuries of trying to protect stuff, the legal responsibility for such is confused. Process State at work.
The answer is - clear simple law on defining a protected piece of land, what is protected and by whom.
I would suspect that the main reason that this hasn't been sorted out is the problem of who then pays for maintaining land. Clear lines of responsibility would mean clear lines of responsibility.
NT could also have made it a condition of the lease. Presumably the reason the remains have been undisturbed for centuries is that the land isn't suitable for crops just grazing.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Do you not have a Cultish devotion to Capitalism?
Or are some Cultish devotions acceptable?
Capitalism has plenty of flaws. It should be commercial democracy but the power of large firms can lead it to become more like commercial oligarchy. Taken too far, you can end up with US healthcare. But it's better than the alternatives. You certainly won't find me applauding capitalism on my doorstep, then condemning those who refuse to participate for their ingratitude.
While interesting, differing voting systems do alter voter behaviour.
Yes, this analysis after every election is based on changing the counting system, not the voting system, and without the parties or voters having noticed.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Were there any other countries that had something similar to the applause for health workers thing (of which I did not partake)? Perhaps Britain is a country of cultish devotion (see also Royal family).
I hope you clapped for Boris when he took a bout of COVID for the team. He nearly died you know, but his resilience kept the national pecker up, so every Thursday we clapped for Boris. Stuff the lazy nurses.
On a connected note, and to make a change of tedious bicker from CASH, private v public sectors etc. The combination of John Simpson and a French institute may have veins in foreheads bulging, but that's a feature not a bug.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
I guess that depends on who is asking the question! Enough to at least allow you to participate in society, I guess. Enough to make working that job worth it. A lot of Public sector jobs are a bit hard to price.
*All* jobs are hard to price - other than by "Can we get enough people to do the job, and not quit every 30 seconds".
What is "Enough to at least allow you to participate in society"? - one friend works in IT contracting, saves a vast pile of money, lives not quite on bread and water (but close) and will retire to an income rise, probably (pension max'd out, for a start). He lives like a not very well off student, really.
Another is mortgaged up to the eyeballs on multiple properties and takes the family on sailing holidays in between the skiing holidays.
Years back, a guy I knew was considering building a factory, for his company. Either up North, or in the Far East, were the options. They did do some calculations about household budgets and affordability. Someone at the putative factory in the UK could buy a 3 bed terraced house, within a half hour drive of the plant, for 2x (or something like that) the median wage they would be paying. Obviously that would go up with demand....
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
TBH that's just the Telegrunt's Grunt of the Day for the benefit of the Blue Rinse Brigade.
I don't see what the issue is - it's a normal tax liability. Though if the plan is to lessen IHT on family businesses, such should be included as business assets. I'm surprised that small incorporated LL businesses have not been addressed, which avoid much of the same taxes, as well as the rest ... one man bands etc.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
If that's all you hear, you seem to be listening to about 1 poster.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
TBH that's just the Telegrunt's Grunt of the Day for the benefit of the Blue Rinse Brigade.
I don't see what the issue is - it's a normal tax liability. Though if the plan is to lessen IHT on family businesses, such should be included as business assets. I'm surprised that small incorporated LL businesses have not been addressed, which avoid much of the same taxes, as well as the rest ... one man bands etc.
I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings
I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously
It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it
She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me
Isn't that one for an "I'm here, wake up!" toot, which is iirc the only valid reason for hooting?
Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
What have I invented? Every NHS trust, every Fire and Rescue Service, every Local Authority are recruiting all types of jobs, not just the glamorous "moral" ones. Fill yer boots, get on the gravy train. I don't care about moral value, only that these jobs need doing, you want these jobs doing, and you definitely don't want to do these jobs yourself so you have to pay someone to do them. How much we pay is all we're debating.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
TBH that's just the Telegrunt's Grunt of the Day for the benefit of the Blue Rinse Brigade.
I don't see what the issue is - it's a normal tax liability. Though if the plan is to lessen IHT on family businesses, such should be included as business assets. I'm surprised that small incorporated LL businesses have not been addressed, which avoid much of the same taxes, as well as the rest ... one man bands etc.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected? DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
The comic thing here is that after literal centuries of trying to protect stuff, the legal responsibility for such is confused. Process State at work.
The answer is - clear simple law on defining a protected piece of land, what is protected and by whom.
I would suspect that the main reason that this hasn't been sorted out is the problem of who then pays for maintaining land. Clear lines of responsibility would mean clear lines of responsibility.
The landowner is in this case National Trust. If the land has "irreplaceable artefacts" under the surface then a dig needs to be coordinated with them ASAP.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
There is a simple way to define, reward and pay key Emergency Workers and other key roles and to help fill vital empty roles very quickly
Introduce a 10% basic and 30% higher tax rate for those roles. It would cost the relevant Departments of State nothing.
The Treasury meanwhile could claw back the tax take shortfall from merchant bankers, gambling companies, the likes of Amazon and Google and multi billionaires.
It's not rocket science and maybe the pragmatist SKS may consider it.
I signed a petition to push forward with May's deal. The deal went down like cold sick with both remainers and brexiteers alike; it got about 20 signatures iirc. But I realised that we weren't in a good situation and practicality needed to be the order of the day.
I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings
I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously
It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it
She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me
Isn't that one for an "I'm here, wake up!" toot, which is iirc the only valid reason for hooting?
Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
There is a simple way to define, reward and pay key Emergency Workers and other key roles and to help fill vital empty roles very quickly
Introduce a 10% basic and 30% higher tax rate for those roles. It would cost the relevant Departments of State nothing.
The Treasury meanwhile could claw back the tax take shortfall from merchant bankers, gambling companies, the likes of Amazon and Google and multi billionaires.
It's not rocket science and maybe the pragmatist SKS may consider it.
There is no "t" in CAN do
"Wealth tax now" Klaxon. Good luck trying that.
Perhaps they can sacrifice some of their rather generous pension and holiday allowances in exchange for more pay.
Surely there's a big mistake in either the model, or the data copied into the lead, if the Greens do as well as the LibDems on many of the systems and better on "List PR", when they only got half the votes. List PR - which is presumably the D'Hondt system - simply cannot deliver a party more seats than another that got a lot more votes than it did. So they've messed up, somewhere?
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
If that's all you hear, you seem to be listening to about 1 poster.
I skim read it and the mood since the change of government has turned much uglier. Compassion has disappeared and in your face racism such as the 'white babies' has become endemic. One brilliant post by the firestopper but then drowned out by the new emboldened Faragists. You must have noticed.......
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
And the private sector wouldn't exist without law, courts, police and wouldn't be efficient without education, roads, hospitals, refuse collection etc. They are symbiotic.
And nearly all businesses depend on Limited Liability, an invention of the state.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
There is a simple way to define, reward and pay key Emergency Workers and other key roles and to help fill vital empty roles very quickly
Introduce a 10% basic and 30% higher tax rate for those roles. It would cost the relevant Departments of State nothing.
The Treasury meanwhile could claw back the tax take shortfall from merchant bankers, gambling companies, the likes of Amazon and Google and multi billionaires.
It's not rocket science and maybe the pragmatist SKS may consider it.
There is no "t" in CAN do
Given the massive increase in NHS employment it seems that there is no difficulty in filling empty roles.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I'm generally positive about the Government, but have a "wait and see to judge them on outcomes and consequences"; they're making a mix of the usual good, bad and indifferent decisions; but my classification will be different to others.
I'm not really interested in the polls and assorted spats at the moment; there's years before any of that really matters.
The site has felt more "hostile to Governments" for quite a while, when you filter out the overtly partisan.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Were there any other countries that had something similar to the applause for health workers thing (of which I did not partake)? Perhaps Britain is a country of cultish devotion (see also Royal family).
I hope you clapped for Boris when he took a bout of COVID for the team. He nearly died you know, but his resilience kept the national pecker up, so every Thursday we clapped for Boris. Stuff the lazy nurses.
On a connected note, and to make a change of tedious bicker from CASH, private v public sectors etc. The combination of John Simpson and a French institute may have veins in foreheads bulging, but that's a feature not a bug.
That's as appalling graph. Why does it stop at July 2020? What's it trying to prove?
It's worse than you think: it's the excess death rate (per month?), not the absolute death rate or cumulative deaths. You need a graph of total excess deaths to tell which country was worse, not this graph.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
That is because the site tends towards opposition.
So, when the government was Conservative, they were getting panned on a minute by minute basis.
So, when the government is Labour, they were getting panned on a minute by minute basis.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Money isn't a matter of moral value, just economic value. A nurse always contributes more in that sense to society than a footballer. But the ridiculous wages of a footballer provides a shedload of cash via tax which can then pay nurses.
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit: "You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
I think he's saying our values are distiorted and read PB for a few days and try to argue with him. All we hear is that public sector workers are scroungers....the government are robbing millionaire farmers blind....we want white babies....
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
If that's all you hear, you seem to be listening to about 1 poster.
I skim read it and the mood since the change of government has turned much uglier. Compassion has disappeared and in your face racism such as the 'white babies' has become endemic. One brilliant post by the firestopper but then drowned out by the new emboldened Faragists. You must have noticed.......
PB is always a lot less interesting after lunch. Lunch seems to be bad for the discourse.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
The demography of the site is skewed male and old which is not fertile territory for Labour recently.
But, also, Labour received only 33.7% of the vote, and that included a lot of people on here who did so primarily as a means to eject the incumbent Tory government. As far as PB.com is concerned there were an extraordinarily large number of first time Labour general election voters given that Labour only received such a low vote share.
So the circumstances aren't really that conducive to having more Starmer-supporting posters.
I’m not a big fan of this kind of thing. She has views, let’s hear them.
Every now and then somebody gets fired for a speechcrime in the real world, and PB discusses whether the firing is justified. When this happens I put the #pbfreespeech hashtag on the comment so I can keep track. It usually boils down to whether the person agrees with the views expressed.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I would suggest that is a result of the direction of travel by the government and not taking the people with them
With an approval rate in yesterday's yougov of just 18% and elected on 33.8% of the electorate they are unpopular
Mind you @Shecorns88 is the Labour supporter most in love with his government on this forum
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I would suggest that is a result of the direction of travel by the government and not taking the people with them
With an approval rate in yesterday's yougov of just 18% and elected on 33.8% of the electorate they are unpopular
Mind you @Shecorns88 is the Labour supporter most in love with his government on this forum
Possibly ever. Even back in the heady days of Tim and the last Labour administration.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous weath is that shown by Ukrainians.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
That is because the site tends towards opposition.
So, when the government was Conservative, they were getting panned on a minute by minute basis.
So, when the government is Labour, they were getting panned on a minute by minute basis.
Opposition can be against a government's policies, against a government's incompetence or against a government's sleaze.
I think most here would agree that Starmer's government has given plenty of scope for people to oppose it on grounds of both incompetence and sleaze.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
I try not to argue about the merits/demerits of trams, preferring to proceed to the "nuke them from orbit" stage quickly.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I only have one friend who I categorically KNOW is an actual Starmer fan. Probably far more of my left leaning friends voted Labour but I wouldn't really describe them as "Starmer fans" talking to them
Police arrest 93 gang members behind £4m thefts in shoplifting crackdown A new police unit has for the first time mapped the gangs targeting shops around the country to see where they're operating. https://news.sky.com/story/flatplan-13270885
Geography is not just for running through fields of wheat. Who knew?
At first glance it sounds like a big operation. But if £4m the retail value, they are probably selling it on "less than" 50% so "less than" £2m. Divvied up between the 93 thats £21k each. Not unsubstantial but worth risking your liberty for? And then we are told the arrested ones are part of a much bigger crime gang. So far less than £21k each. Then expenses for travelling around the country.
Crime doesn't pay particularly well for most, maybe less than minimum wage, is what I take from that report.
Note to PB moderators: it's not possible to reply to this message because Vanilla has decided not to escape the angle bracket used as a "less than" sign in the blockquote, so it always says "body 1 character too short".
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
Police arrest 93 gang members behind £4m thefts in shoplifting crackdown A new police unit has for the first time mapped the gangs targeting shops around the country to see where they're operating. https://news.sky.com/story/flatplan-13270885
Geography is not just for running through fields of wheat. Who knew?
At first glance it sounds like a big operation. But if £4m the retail value, they are probably selling it on "less than" 50% so "less than" £2m. Divvied up between the 93 thats £21k each. Not unsubstantial but worth risking your liberty for? And then we are told the arrested ones are part of a much bigger crime gang. So far less than £21k each. Then expenses for travelling around the country.
Crime doesn't pay particularly well for most, maybe less than minimum wage, is what I take from that report.
Note to PB moderators: it's not possible to reply to this message because Vanilla has decided not to escape the angle bracket used as a "less than" sign in the blockquote, so it always says "body 1 character too short".
Reply to my reply where I replaced the less than symbols with their html codes (and you can even edit out my bit!).
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
What about the agony of those yacht owners, deprived of their beloved vessels by the Ukrainian war? The mood in the Proper Hotels was very down, I hear.
What certain posters on here would struggle with is that in the very wealthy parts of the Cote d'Azur -those areas around Cap ferrat and up to Monaco-the most conspicuous wealth is that shown by Ukrainians.
I heard the same on a call in to a Tom Swarbrick phone in a while ago. The country has received $380bn in aid since the start of the war which is roughly the entire Russian annual budget; and more than their defense spend through the war.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I think the point of adding trams when the site is in development is because if you don’t implement it now it will never be done in this country
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
£100 a month on clothes! Wow, I do not buy enough socks.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)
Yes, someone's going to be in trouble over that report linked from the lead, since there's clearly been a gross error somewhere.
Look at the Scotland result - the LibDems got 9.7% of the vote, and the Greens 3.8%
There is NO WAY a list system applied to Scotland as a single area - as they've done looking at the full report - can deliver six Green MPs and five LibDems. The AMS model also looks suspect.
In Wales, the LibDems got 6.5% of the vote and the Greens 4.7%.
The model gives the LibDems two List MPs and the Greens three, which is clearly wrong. The AMS model is also wrong - the map in the report shows neither LD nor Green win any of the constituency seats, so there's no way the top-up formula can elect two Greens and one LibDem.
I reckon someone's mixed up some of the columns in their Excel spreadsheet. Embarassing, now these nonsensical results have been published to the world.
This is a very interesting read. The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
It mandates trams. There's nothing a tram can't do that a bus can't do quicker and cheaper, and they have electric buses now with batteries.
Much as I love "createstreets", I cannot share its approval of buildings over three stories. A building should be low enough for an old lady to get to the top floor with a stick, and for six men to carry her coffin down when she dies. Even the Soviets worked that out.
Only 15% of us live in flats (compared with 60% in Germany). There are more than enough bungalows to go around for older people. Or people with disabilities get first dibs on ground floor flats.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
Because buses don't actual travel that many miles in a day, batteries aren't a problem. Interestingly, there is a move to battery trams - getting rid of the overhead wires (for at least a portion of the journeys) is a massive saving. Both in money and time to get approval/construct.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
I suppose I come from the privileged position of the best bus service anywhere in the UK, and therefore look at trams as the natural next step. 250 people every 5 mins with 1 minute stops makes a substantial difference, with bus overload on Princes Street etc
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
That is interesting for London. The initial privatisation led to all shapes and colours of buses ploughing their own furrows but the uplift fits Ken Livingstone making them red again and under TfL control, but still privately operated. (Some London buses are run by the Paris bus company. You can tell by their logo of a diagonal squiggly line which for us cognoscenti is the River Seine.)
The RATP one that is also a face? I did not know that about London buses!
I do wish we had some more Starmer fans here to balance out the site a bit. I feel like I’m the only one writing from that perspective.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
Starmer is shite though. He's better than what he replaced, but only because he isn't what he replaced. He's just working his notice.
I don’t think he is shite. I think his comms ability is poor but I really believe in some of the fundamental changes he is trying to make.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade.
Spot on
He is a vast improvement on Boris, Truss and Sunak
He's better than May
Probably best compared with Major.
The FACT we seem to have forgotten is the absolute shit show he inherited from the Tories.
No contrition from them and then this vacuous personality driven neo fascist populism from Farage built on sand and millions of laundered dirty money from Putin and the rabid American Right.
Right now Starmer is the only thing saving this Country from full on Dictatatorial full on 21st century Fascism.
The Tories are riven by infighting, The LDs are being ignored, the Greens have No credible leadership.
I'm amused by the notion private sector workers are going to be delighted to vote Labour given recent policies of flinging private sector taxpayers' cash at public sector workers and increasing taxes on the private sector while the public sector gets exempted.
Simple solution take a job in the public sector if you think it's well paid and easy money. I recommend a nursing assistant role on grade 2 (over 7000 vacancies )
It is fun how every 'public sector worker' becomes a nurse. And be glad of the private sector. That's the sole source of wages for the public sector.
That's just silly.
I do not only contribute to the economy when working at Spire, I do exactly the same work on the NHS. How is one a boost to the economy and the other a drain?
In purely financial terms, every public sector worker is a net cost. Your taxes in the public sector reduce the cost they don't make up for it.
Of course, the essential services (health, education, bin collection etc) are needed. But without the private sector they wouldn't be possible. If that were not the case, the state could simply employ everyone and watch miraculous tax revenues and endless growth.
Hammer the private sector to fund the desperately virtuous public sector and economic growth gets hit, which in the long term is not just bad for those in the private sector, but the zealous left so keen on spending tax revenue, which also drops.
Mr. Owls, the cultish applause for the NHS was indeed a disturbing trend,
Really enlightening to hear your thoughts on the disturbing trend of people being grateful for the NHS saving lives.
I think even ungrateful types like yourself still get treated for "free"
Mr. Owls, cultish devotion is always disturbing.
I didn't applaud for the local supermarket during the pandemic, even though I was very glad indeed it was there. As for ingratitude, I suppose you'll just have to use my avatar for a quick Two Minutes Hate.
Were there any other countries that had something similar to the applause for health workers thing (of which I did not partake)? Perhaps Britain is a country of cultish devotion (see also Royal family).
They did in Spain. But to be fair the 'veneration' for the health service is not like in the UK
Basically FPTP is the only one that doesn’t ensure a coalition of chaos?
We have a coalition of chaos, but it's just entirely internal to the Labour Party.
This is a key point. FPTP doesn't avoid coalitions - it just hides them within the Big Two parties and makes it much more difficult for the electorate to affect them (you don't get the ability to discriminate between candidates of the same party like you do with STV, for example, or open list PR).
It's very reminiscent of the way monopolists aim to avoid free market influences.
Interesting point. Every majority government is actually some sort of coalition between the various factions and shades of opinion in the winning party and this is only right because their voters are not a monolithic bloc either. Very few voters will like/dislike all of the policies or share/reject all of the values of any political party. It's more of a soup than a cheese-plate.
An issue then is how does the internal coalition reflect voter opinion? Eg under Keir Starmer little influence is being granted to the left of his party. They are (very) junior partners in this Labour coalition government. They probably have less influence than the Conservatives who are not even part of the coalition. Is this democratic? Yes and no would be my answer. It depends how you look at it.
If they aren’t dodging taxes then farmers are destroying our heritage. Ghastly people.
Farmer in court over ploughing D-Day training grounds
Natural England seeks permanent injunction to protect Mesolithic settlement and Second World War artefacts
A farmer is in a court row with the countryside protection watchdog after ploughing fields home to “irreplaceable” D-Day relics.
Andrew Cooper, a tenant of National Trust-owned Croyde Hoe Farm in North Devon, is facing legal action over claims he is ploughing protected fields with artefacts from the Second World War, and the Neolithic and Mesolithic eras.
It reads like the Judge has been a bit of a pedantic d**k. Ruling that the protection only covers artefacts on the surface not buried. Does that mean that when he brings them to the surface by ploughing, which will damage them, that they are then protected? DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
The comic thing here is that after literal centuries of trying to protect stuff, the legal responsibility for such is confused. Process State at work.
The answer is - clear simple law on defining a protected piece of land, what is protected and by whom.
I would suspect that the main reason that this hasn't been sorted out is the problem of who then pays for maintaining land. Clear lines of responsibility would mean clear lines of responsibility.
The landowner is in this case National Trust. If the land has "irreplaceable artefacts" under the surface then a dig needs to be coordinated with them ASAP.
Reading the piece, it doesn't seem to me to be about digs; it's mainly about a farmer who wants to do what he wants with his land without regulating bodies interfering.
A tenant farmer has fought the case to Appeal Court level, and is imo arguing on dots and tittles. The claim afaics is that archaeological remains only count if they are on the surface, which seems illogical.
He previously received ~£200k of grants to maintain some of his fields. The piece is not clear whether it is the same fields.
I'd punt that the Telegraph are on it either to stir up farmers or stir up dust in their campaign against the NT.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
I guess that depends on who is asking the question! Enough to at least allow you to participate in society, I guess. Enough to make working that job worth it. A lot of Public sector jobs are a bit hard to price.
The IFS makes this very point in their recent podcast, how do you guage the efficiency of a teacher? Grades, pupils taught? Very often the government jobs just can't be easily calculated for productivity because their out put is so different. Ie how do you calculate the efficiency of the banking regulator? It's a lot easier for businesses to figure out as its cost per employee to profit ratio (in its simplest form)
I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings
I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously
It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it
She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me
Isn't that one for an "I'm here, wake up!" toot, which is iirc the only valid reason for hooting?
Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
The nation (As a whole) spends a bonkers proportion of it's income on (not particularly good or spacious) housing. Probably one reason why the economy has been so shit - if cash is being spent on property, and those receiving cash are spending that received cash on more property then it's not going into business capital, retail and so on...
Comments
Doctors on modest wages funded by general taxation = drag on the private sector.
... I think that's the logic of some on the right anyway.
The proposals are pretty well tailor-made for the possibility of CPO-ing green or grey belt land, and building well over half a million houses, quickly.
The schemes would also generate somewhere between £50bn and £100bn in surplus value.
CREATING NEW TOWNS FAST AND WELL
https://www.britainremade.co.uk/newtowns
For example, who'd have thought that a 2 year programme started 15 months ago would not have finished yet?
In July 2023, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) - which is responsible for maintaining and servicing military accommodation - was given £400m to tackle those issues over the next two years.
But, the report said, "outstanding problems" remain across the estate that the DIO "must resolve"
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
(Also please do not use less than symbols which confuse Vanilla. I've replaced them with html codes.)
(They also confuse the AI summaries of search results: < must be written as <. Gosh, thanks, Copilot.)
Free delivery has applied to my caviar (!) order and a couple of others this morning, even though yesterday it was trying to charge me on one even as a Prime member.
Worth a look, but check the free delivery on your basket as I'm not totally clear on the setup.
A thought exercise.
Rechargeable batteries cost about £100* a Kilowatt/Hour. That is, the amount of batteries that provides a thousand watts of power for an hour. So, 10p a watt/hour.
The new plant in Spain to build batteries can build 50 Gigawatt/Hour of batteries per year. 50,000,000,000,000 watt hours of batteries. So £5 billion as year of sales price
10% would be a pretty important subsidy. The kind of number that changes locations of factories. So £500 million on a year's production.
So instead of carbon capture, we could subsidise 44 production years of such plants. Of course, that would probably be spread over multiple plants. So we could subsidise the first 5 years of production of 5 such plants, and save a pile of money.
Which would be enough batteries to build 2.5 million cars per year. Or 50,000 ISO containers of batteries, used for storage of power.
*Actually high and the price is dropping. Chosen for simple maths.
That I think is a deliberate misreading of the policy.
(And no, I don't vote Green in General Elections.)
Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background?
You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
Nearly everyone in it was paid less than minimum wage - and that irregularly. A few windfalls, really. And drug dealing is often product before cash. So everyone is in debt to other people.
A tiny number get good money, an even tinier group got the riches.
This explains the continuous issue of theft and the constant Klingon Promotion system.
As they put it, 95% of people in the drugs trade would be better off working in fast food. More money for a start.
It's very reminiscent of the way monopolists aim to avoid free market influences.
https://www.costco.co.uk/Jewellery-Gold-Bars/Gold-Bars-Coins/100-Gram-Gold-Minted-Bar/p/664978
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/600000-landlords-death-tax-ticking-time-bomb/
DT BTL is hilariously confused, surely the origin of "Conservative" is "conserve"? (I jest)
I'm also surprised that you could economically grow crops on Baggy point.
I was in town with my wife yesterday driving along the main street and I approached a pedestrian crossing on green, with pedestrians waiting on either side, when a young woman on her mobile stepped out straight in front of me absolutely oblivious of her surroundings
I did stop and she 'jumped' out of her skin and made a beeline into the nearest shop with everyone looking on incredulously
It was all captured on my in car dash cam and you have to hope she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it
She was very lucky that I anticipated her walking out in front of me
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-apr-24-oe-dubner24-story.html
There’s even a TED talk on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UGC2nLnaes
https://x.com/Psythor/status/1866109877715661115
Also, I think you're exaggerating a teensy tiny bit:
"You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?"
That's a nice caricature you've chosen to invent. Winning a argument is much easier when you invent the position of your opponent.
There's a difference between not wanting public sector workers to receive any salary whatsoever and observing the current Labour Government is not exactly brimming with defiant resistance every time a union wants a pay rise.
The answer is - clear simple law on defining a protected piece of land, what is protected and by whom.
I would suspect that the main reason that this hasn't been sorted out is the problem of who then pays for maintaining land. Clear lines of responsibility would mean clear lines of responsibility.
A lot of Public sector jobs are a bit hard to price.
Presumably the reason the remains have been undisturbed for centuries is that the land isn't suitable for crops just grazing.
https://bmcglobalpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s44263-024-00103-z
What is "Enough to at least allow you to participate in society"? - one friend works in IT contracting, saves a vast pile of money, lives not quite on bread and water (but close) and will retire to an income rise, probably (pension max'd out, for a start). He lives like a not very well off student, really.
Another is mortgaged up to the eyeballs on multiple properties and takes the family on sailing holidays in between the skiing holidays.
Years back, a guy I knew was considering building a factory, for his company. Either up North, or in the Far East, were the options. They did do some calculations about household budgets and affordability. Someone at the putative factory in the UK could buy a 3 bed terraced house, within a half hour drive of the plant, for 2x (or something like that) the median wage they would be paying. Obviously that would go up with demand....
I don't see what the issue is - it's a normal tax liability. Though if the plan is to lessen IHT on family businesses, such should be included as business assets. I'm surprised that small incorporated LL businesses have not been addressed, which avoid much of the same taxes, as well as the rest ... one man bands etc.
Full piece: https://archive.ph/JVdE9
I did enjoy the other piece it linked me to:
‘Our £700k home is a money pit – how can I still retire at 60?’
(The guy is 34, living with partner in a 3400 sqft listed townhouse in Leicestershire.)
Er ... move somewhere smaller?
https://archive.ph/AiJMD
..............actually that was when I realised I was in the wrong place...
Brexit protest bad
Election petition good
Brexit petition bad
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/starmer-tax-loophole-lawyers-law-firms-budget-b2651965.html
Ashley Neal's learning point yesterday was quite interesting about Zebra Crossings with various complications such as if it's out because of road works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7csyGpWmlKM
I don't care about moral value, only that these jobs need doing, you want these jobs doing, and you definitely don't want to do these jobs yourself so you have to pay someone to do them. How much we pay is all we're debating.
They still need the rest of the £80-100bn per annum from somewhere.
Brexit protest good
Election petition bad
Brexit petition good
Works the other way too.
As a student, I helped organise protests that I was actually opposed to. Anyone else done similar?
Introduce a 10% basic and 30% higher tax rate for those roles. It would cost the relevant Departments of State nothing.
The Treasury meanwhile could claw back the tax take shortfall from merchant bankers, gambling companies, the likes of Amazon and Google and multi billionaires.
It's not rocket science and maybe the pragmatist SKS may consider it.
There is no "t" in CAN do
Perhaps they can sacrifice some of their rather generous pension and holiday allowances in exchange for more pay.
We’ve still got a small contingent of lefties but overall the site feels far more hostile to the government that it has since I’ve been around these parts.
I liked this site because it had a range of views across the spectrum.
I'm not really interested in the polls and assorted spats at the moment; there's years before any of that really matters.
The site has felt more "hostile to Governments" for quite a while, when you filter out the overtly partisan.
Trams are great in built up areas because they can load people much more quickly than a bus, enjoy prioritised signals etc. You don't have charging/battery issues either.
So, when the government was Conservative, they were getting panned on a minute by minute basis.
So, when the government is Labour, they were getting panned on a minute by minute basis.
But, also, Labour received only 33.7% of the vote, and that included a lot of people on here who did so primarily as a means to eject the incumbent Tory government. As far as PB.com is concerned there were an extraordinarily large number of first time Labour general election voters given that Labour only received such a low vote share.
So the circumstances aren't really that conducive to having more Starmer-supporting posters.
With an approval rate in yesterday's yougov of just 18% and elected on 33.8% of the electorate they are unpopular
Mind you @Shecorns88 is the Labour supporter most in love with his government on this forum
I think most here would agree that Starmer's government has given plenty of scope for people to oppose it on grounds of both incompetence and sleaze.
There have also been some interesting experiments in the design of lengthened buses, with each segment using smart steering to follow the previous one.
The cost per mile of building tram lines is insane - and must be factored into the overall costs. Yes, more effective once running, but with the same money, you could line the roads with electric buses.
But for the rest of the UK, I understand why buses should come first:
SO, for someone where I live that means per month:
Rent 1600
Other bills 400
Food and groceries 800
Kids clothing activities etc 500
Car 250
Personal clothes etc x 2 200
Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
My concern with him is that he needs to communicate and I’m struggling to see if he has that in him.
My point wasn’t that I am hoping for lots of people to say how fabulous he is because that’s clearly nonsense but I do really think this forum is fairly one-sided on the government and has been since day one.
I just struggle to take seriously some of the people who tell us how bad Starmer is but were also saying how Johnson would be going for a decade. I am struggling to understand how intelligent people here can conclude he’s finished in December 2024.
Perhaps it's not all gone where it should ?
Look at the Scotland result - the LibDems got 9.7% of the vote, and the Greens 3.8%
There is NO WAY a list system applied to Scotland as a single area - as they've done looking at the full report - can deliver six Green MPs and five LibDems. The AMS model also looks suspect.
In Wales, the LibDems got 6.5% of the vote and the Greens 4.7%.
The model gives the LibDems two List MPs and the Greens three, which is clearly wrong. The AMS model is also wrong - the map in the report shows neither LD nor Green win any of the constituency seats, so there's no way the top-up formula can elect two Greens and one LibDem.
I reckon someone's mixed up some of the columns in their Excel spreadsheet. Embarassing, now these nonsensical results have been published to the world.
He is a vast improvement on Boris, Truss and Sunak
He's better than May
Probably best compared with Major.
The FACT we seem to have forgotten is the absolute shit show he inherited from the Tories.
No contrition from them and then this vacuous personality driven neo fascist populism from Farage built on sand and millions of laundered dirty money from Putin and the rabid American Right.
Right now Starmer is the only thing saving this Country from full on Dictatatorial full on 21st century Fascism.
The Tories are riven by infighting, The LDs are being ignored, the Greens have No credible leadership.
An issue then is how does the internal coalition reflect voter opinion? Eg under Keir Starmer little influence is being granted to the left of his party. They are (very) junior partners in this Labour coalition government. They probably have less influence than the Conservatives who are not even part of the coalition. Is this democratic? Yes and no would be my answer. It depends how you look at it.
A tenant farmer has fought the case to Appeal Court level, and is imo arguing on dots and tittles. The claim afaics is that archaeological remains only count if they are on the surface, which seems illogical.
He previously received ~£200k of grants to maintain some of his fields. The piece is not clear whether it is the same fields.
I'd punt that the Telegraph are on it either to stir up farmers or stir up dust in their campaign against the NT.
Full piece:
https://archive.is/20241209175655/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/09/devon-farmer-court-row-ploughing-fields-d-day-relics/
It's a lot easier for businesses to figure out as its cost per employee to profit ratio (in its simplest form)