Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
I love a bit of frog-bashing, but this is absurd. Paris is a magnificent city, going through some social problems - not unlike London
I prefer London as it is more interesting and exhilarating (and probably has better food, now), but Paris is still uniquely glorious at its best
But that's the problem it hasn't been at its best for ages. It's like San Francisco, a reputation that it no longer deserves and slowly the reality is catching up. Paris is smelly, dirty and everyone contends with petty crime, and it gets much worse as soon as you're out of the centre.
Head out to the suburbs of London and it's still safe, boring, but safe. The same can't be said for Paris.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
If you want to see public transport horror, look at recent videos of the Los Angeles metro
There’s one image from this week of a naked guy lying dead - apparently - of an OD in a LA Metro train. Americans just don’t DO public transport
I remember once trying to persuade a rich American that the best way from Heathrow to central London was via a public train. 15 minutes. Then jump in a cab, be in Claridge’s in another 15 minutes?
He just couldn’t get his head around it, and insisted on taking a black cab from LHR all the way, which probably took three times as long as cost twice as much, excluding tip
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Presumably all the Brexiters are too busy holidaying in Cleethorpes to worry about “dumps with not very good food”.
That’s fine. I’ve no urgent need to share Paris (or France) with the sort of people who complain about “shit-ache” mushrooms.
HYUFD was quite lyrical on PB recently about the potential for holidays in places such as Skegness post_Brexit, interestingly. (Though I am rather fond of Whitby and Scarborough myself.)
Given prices of flights and foreign holidays at the moment and squeezed savings due to cost of living, British seaside holiday resorts could see a bumper year this summer
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Presumably all the Brexiters are too busy holidaying in Cleethorpes to worry about “dumps with not very good food”.
That’s fine. I’ve no urgent need to share Paris (or France) with the sort of people who complain about “shit-ache” mushrooms.
HYUFD was quite lyrical on PB recently about the potential for holidays in places such as Skegness post_Brexit, interestingly. (Though I am rather fond of Whitby and Scarborough myself.)
Well Max was pointing out the other day that the UK’s tourism receipts have collapsed, so Skegness needs you more than ever.
Foreigners coming to London may have declined post Brexit but British people holidaying at home has increased post Covid
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
If only the French presidency were determined by the urban innovation community it sounds like she would walk it (or e-scooter it).
It’s been reported that the Chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murthy, is not tax domiciled in the UK. This has been confirmed by a statement issued on her behalf. But I think the statement of facts issued by her is wrong. And I also suggest HMRC could challenge this claim. A thread….
According to flow chart one on this govt website, nobody with settled long term plans to stay in the UK should be a non-dom. If the Chancellor's wife has no settled long term plans to be in the UK then that is a rather odd state of affairs isn't it?
I absolutely love this line of attack on the Chancellor, because it basically boils down to "women are the property of their husband, who is therefore to be held responsible for all the silly things they do".
Which is... let's say, somewhat at odds with the general views on gender equality usually held by many of those people making the argument.
It boils down to nothing of the kind. Those of us less inherently gammonious than you are quite capable of regarding a spouse as, gender neutrally, a spouse.
That's my point. If you believe that, it's incompatible with the idea that Sunak is somehow responsible for his spouse's financial affairs. What's he supposed to do, order her to change her status? Beat her if she refuses?
Isn't the issue here that she has a choice every year whether or not to have her income, wherever it comes from, taxed in the U.K. or only on a remittance basis? She is actively choosing the latter and her husband knows this, I assume, and is benefiting from the fact that his family's wealth is therefore larger than it would otherwise have been.
If Sunak did not have such a tin ear for how people feel at the moment about inflation, rising taxes, increasing bills etc, this might have less traction.
Perhaps as much to the point, it is made possible by the powers to be to have the non-dom setup at all to pamper people who are living in the UK more than half the time.
Moreover, was it not the Conservative Party who brought in the current modification of the system a few years back?
Neither of which is good optics in the current climate.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
If you want to see public transport horror, look at recent videos of the Los Angeles metro
There’s one image from this week of a naked guy lying dead - apparently - of an OD in a LA Metro train. Americans just don’t DO public transport
I remember once trying to persuade a rich American that the best way from Heathrow to central London was via a public train. 15 minutes. Then jump in a cab, be in Claridge’s in another 15 minutes?
He just couldn’t get his head around it, and insisted on taking a black cab from LHR all the way, which probably took three times as long as cost twice as much, excluding tip
Ok, maybe your second tweet was pretty out there, but the NYC subway makes you want to fumigate after you’ve used it.
Just the other day I travelled from the “tony” UES into Midtown (one of the better lines) and this black guy was lying on the bench opposite me peering at a woman a few seats to my right, moaning lasciviously,
“Hey Mama” “Hey Mama” “Hey Pretty White Lady” “Hey Mama” “Wanna Fuck Me Mama?”
Not really a follower of US politics, but am I to gather that a black woman has been appointed somewhere? And we are to be delighted, because despite not knowing anything about her beliefs or skills (aside of obviously being talented enough to reach the position she has) because of her skin colour and gender? Is it not me to move on from this?
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Presumably all the Brexiters are too busy holidaying in Cleethorpes to worry about “dumps with not very good food”.
That’s fine. I’ve no urgent need to share Paris (or France) with the sort of people who complain about “shit-ache” mushrooms.
HYUFD was quite lyrical on PB recently about the potential for holidays in places such as Skegness post_Brexit, interestingly. (Though I am rather fond of Whitby and Scarborough myself.)
Well Max was pointing out the other day that the UK’s tourism receipts have collapsed, so Skegness needs you more than ever.
Not sure that it was a major destination for, say, the average Parisian or Chinese visitor (as opposed, in the case of the latter, to Banbury shopping village - quite an eye opener to be on a Sunday morning train from Maryelobone to Oxford a few years back along the Princes Risborough line btw). So not sure how Skegness is doing even worse than it was.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
If only the French presidency were determined by the urban innovation community it sounds like she would walk it (or e-scooter it).
Well, if you eliminate Macron, it’s either her or the fash.
As for the e-scooter etc, what Paris does today, London does tomorrow. And Leeds does never.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
If you want to see public transport horror, look at recent videos of the Los Angeles metro
There’s one image from this week of a naked guy lying dead - apparently - of an OD in a LA Metro train. Americans just don’t DO public transport
I remember once trying to persuade a rich American that the best way from Heathrow to central London was via a public train. 15 minutes. Then jump in a cab, be in Claridge’s in another 15 minutes?
He just couldn’t get his head around it, and insisted on taking a black cab from LHR all the way, which probably took three times as long as cost twice as much, excluding tip
I worked near Denver for 3 months in 2011, managed to do the entire RTD light rail network (as it was, has expanded a fair bit since!). Free travel by virtue of working for the Uni of Colorado helped, natch
I suppose there are some who seem positively gleeful at the prospect of a Le Pen victory in the French Presidential election and we have for the first time seen one pollster give Le Pen a fractional lead in a hypothetical run off against Macron. Said pollster is interesting and could be described as Brazil's answer to Trafalgar but apparently they did best in the 2020 US election so we'll see.
The fact remains for all the second places Le Pen and RN (as they are called rather than FN) only won eight seats in the National Assembly election last time. Marine Le Pen's 34% in the second round became 13% in the National Assembly elections just a few weeks later.
Would it be different if she won? Would we see, as with Macron in 2017, a presidential landslide in the National Assembly elections or not? Presumably Macron's movement collapses if he loses the Presidency which opens the door to LR or perhaps Melenchon's FI or a return of the Socialists?
Unless her party wins a majority, Le Pen would face "co-habitation" with a Government led by other parties which would weaken her opportunity to be too radical which oddly enough might guarantee her second term.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Presumably all the Brexiters are too busy holidaying in Cleethorpes to worry about “dumps with not very good food”.
That’s fine. I’ve no urgent need to share Paris (or France) with the sort of people who complain about “shit-ache” mushrooms.
HYUFD was quite lyrical on PB recently about the potential for holidays in places such as Skegness post_Brexit, interestingly. (Though I am rather fond of Whitby and Scarborough myself.)
Well Max was pointing out the other day that the UK’s tourism receipts have collapsed, so Skegness needs you more than ever.
Not sure that it was a major destination for, say, the average Parisian or Chinese visitor (as opposed, in the case of the latter, to Banbury shopping village - quite an eye opener to be on a Sunday morning train from Maryelobone to Oxford a few years back along the Princes Risborough line btw). So not sure how Skegness is doing even worse than it was.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Not really a follower of US politics, but am I to gather that a black woman has been appointed somewhere? And we are to be delighted, because despite not knowing anything about her beliefs or skills (aside of obviously being talented enough to reach the position she has) because of her skin colour and gender? Is it not me to move on from this?
Apparently it's "time", whatever that means.
Not, apparently, time to choose the best qualified person, whatever his/her skin colour or genitals, but time to choose them precisely because of those.
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Paris remains the most beautiful city of its size on earth. That will never change, even if it becomes ever more preserved in aspic.
You’ve made me think about the food. It’s possible that one reason for the decline in food quality is that it’s just too posh now.
Very rich people have banal, insipid taste in all things, including food. Which is why there are no destination restaurants in Hampstead or Richmond.
I agree it is the most beautiful large city on earth. Of all cities, I would put Venice first.
The most beautiful small city is Cambridge (and it really is). Yay, go UK
i disagree on your diagnosis of the food problems. The issue is Paris is too popular. The restaurants don’t have to try, they can rake it in, so they don’t try, and they rake it in. See Venice again for an even worse situation. The food in Venice is famously appalling and overpriced. Fifty quid for fucking terrible risottos. But people will pay it because its in Venice and if they wont pay then there are 3 billion Chinese and Indians newly flush with money and passports who are DESPERATE to see Venice and they WILL pay it, so fuck the Brits and French and Germans they can eat pizza by the train station
London now has better food than Paris for this same reason. London is not entirely swamped with tourists and has to cater for a huge, diverse, affluent and notably sophisticated LOCAL dining crowd, so the pressure is to get better and better; if your food is crap someone else will take over your slot very quickly
Of course this is all pre Covid wisdom but my guess is it still applies, and will apply as we exit (please God) the recent horrors
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris…only 4 years behind Shanghai…and still only talking about the concept
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
I'm sure it's lovely, but do you want to go down the road of judging a place as great based on tourist arrivals? Do you believe Germany and the UK are about equally good? That China is better than Italy?
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
A bit more overt and extreme, I think ( Priti Patel is certainly a threat to democracy, though). "National preference" for housing and services, in Putin's pocket for foreign policy.
If Patel had her own party, I could see such a policy. Even Brown had British jobs for British workers.
Its daft how much insulting daftness heads her way.
I will happily defend her.
I dont like her brand of politics, even if it is not her fathers anymore, but think it would be better if those who approve of her winning, would just say so and that they quite like most of what she stands for, rather than give it the standard "it would be funny and great if she won, but I really don't want her to" line.
I don’t believe there is anyone on here who actively wants her to win. There are a lot of people who enjoy political drama - most of us? - and what was a tedious one horse race is now much more exciting. That’s fun
Also seeing Macron frightened is a pleasure. He is a twat. And an anglophobe
As for myself, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Despite the twatness, I’d vote for Macron. He’s done OK. he’s the best of a fairly feeble bunch.
I don’t think Le Pen would a fascist catastrophe. She’s not Mussolini. But her victory would encourage Putin, and that alone is reason enough to want her to lose
How can there possibly not be anyone here who wants her to win? There are hundreds of regular posters, maybe thousands including casuals, from a wide spectrum of views and experiences and she is getting high polling numbers. Are we really to believe none of the UKIPers or Brexiteer wing of the Tories agree with her more than they disagree?
Er, because no one has expressed that sentiment? You can only go by what people say
Except that you seek to look into pb-ers souls where you are sure they are secretly pro Le Pen, because you just KNOW
Whatever
It would be quite extraordinary to have many posters who are quite keen on authoritarian nationalism and protectionism, but none of them favour an authoritarian nationalist protectionist.
I can think of exactly one poster who might describe himself as keen on authoritarianism/nationalism/protectionism - and even he might express some reservations about Le Pen. Many of us think Macron's a dick. Possibly even relish his discomfort a little. That absolutely doesn't equate to wanting Le Pen to win.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Take away Macron, who would you vote for, of the leading candidates
For me, it probably would be Le Pen
Melenchon is Corbyn: no way Pecresse seems totally feeble Zemmour is almost a Nazi, and mad Hidalgo is a woke joke and terrible mayor of Paris
Who is going to stand up for France, is also sane, and a patriot, and would make an interesting change?
Hold your nose: Le Pen? And pray she really has detoxed
So @noneoftheabove makes a valid point, in a sense. There are circs where she gets support
Edit to add: this is a mind game where Putin has NOT invaded Ukraine
Pecresse, I suppose. With absolutely no enthusiasm. Le Pen has, to my mind, absolutely nothing going for her.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Presumably all the Brexiters are too busy holidaying in Cleethorpes to worry about “dumps with not very good food”.
That’s fine. I’ve no urgent need to share Paris (or France) with the sort of people who complain about “shit-ache” mushrooms.
HYUFD was quite lyrical on PB recently about the potential for holidays in places such as Skegness post_Brexit, interestingly. (Though I am rather fond of Whitby and Scarborough myself.)
Well Max was pointing out the other day that the UK’s tourism receipts have collapsed, so Skegness needs you more than ever.
Not sure that it was a major destination for, say, the average Parisian or Chinese visitor (as opposed, in the case of the latter, to Banbury shopping village - quite an eye opener to be on a Sunday morning train from Maryelobone to Oxford a few years back along the Princes Risborough line btw). So not sure how Skegness is doing even worse than it was.
Bicester Village.
The standard circuit for Chinese tourists venturing outside of London is Oxford, Stratford and Bicester Village shopping village.
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
I love the metro.
You can hop and skip down to the platforms very easily, because it’s so close to the surface, and the “meandering” nature you bemoan actually means you get to all sorts of places quite quickly rather than just east west or north south.
It’s no more dirty than London, station for station (compare with the New York subway, which is effectively a sewer with a mass transit built into it).
As for the nutters and flashers and ne’er-do-wells —- this is Paris, ffs.
MotoTaxi is the only way to get around Paris these days
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris…only 4 years behind Shanghai…and still only talking about the concept
Shanghai has achieved the enviable feat of clearing the city of all traffic whatsoever.
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
I'm quite prepared to believe Paris is a bit shit but anyone suffering acute delusional states, depersonalisation and tachycardia from it probably has plenty issues of their own to be getting on with.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
Presumably all the Brexiters are too busy holidaying in Cleethorpes to worry about “dumps with not very good food”.
That’s fine. I’ve no urgent need to share Paris (or France) with the sort of people who complain about “shit-ache” mushrooms.
HYUFD was quite lyrical on PB recently about the potential for holidays in places such as Skegness post_Brexit, interestingly. (Though I am rather fond of Whitby and Scarborough myself.)
Well Max was pointing out the other day that the UK’s tourism receipts have collapsed, so Skegness needs you more than ever.
Not sure that it was a major destination for, say, the average Parisian or Chinese visitor (as opposed, in the case of the latter, to Banbury shopping village - quite an eye opener to be on a Sunday morning train from Maryelobone to Oxford a few years back along the Princes Risborough line btw). So not sure how Skegness is doing even worse than it was.
Bicester Village.
The standard circuit for Chinese tourists venturing outside of London is Oxford, Stratford and Bicester Village shopping village.
I've been in Cambridge a lot recently, and there's a lot fewer Chinese faces about. Pleasantly busy, though.
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
It's more that money-grubbing shysters are not universally loved by the electorate. You may take pleasure in being forcibly sodomised by our insect overlords, others of us find it uncomfortable.
I agree it is the most beautiful large city on earth. Of all cities, I would put Venice first.
The most beautiful small city is Cambridge (and it really is). Yay, go UK
i disagree on your diagnosis of the food problems. The issue is Paris is too popular. The restaurants don’t have to try, they can rake it in, so they don’t try, and they rake it in. See Venice again for an even worse situation. The food in Venice is famously appalling and overpriced. Fifty quid for fucking terrible risottos. But people will pay it because its in Venice and if they wont pay then there are 3 billion Chinese and Indians newly flush with money and passports who are DESPERATE to see Venice and they WILL pay it, so fuck the Brits and French and Germans they can eat pizza by the train station
London now has better food than Paris for this same reason. London is not entirely swamped with tourists and has to cater for a huge, diverse, affluent and notably sophisticated LOCAL dining crowd, so the pressure is to get better and better; if your food is crap someone else will take over your slot very quickly
Of course this is all pre Covid wisdom but my guess is it still applies, and will apply as we exit (please God) the recent horrors
I have to confess Mrs Stodge and I are looking forward to returning to Las Vegas, one of our favourite places. I find the food there as a whole quite superb - there are some truly excellent restaurants in some of the hotels but the best food is Downtown these days and with plenty of new openings in 2020 and 2021 as well as this year, there's a whole set of venues in which I can spend my blackjack winnings.
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
A bit more overt and extreme, I think ( Priti Patel is certainly a threat to democracy, though). "National preference" for housing and services, in Putin's pocket for foreign policy.
If Patel had her own party, I could see such a policy. Even Brown had British jobs for British workers.
Its daft how much insulting daftness heads her way.
I will happily defend her.
I dont like her brand of politics, even if it is not her fathers anymore, but think it would be better if those who approve of her winning, would just say so and that they quite like most of what she stands for, rather than give it the standard "it would be funny and great if she won, but I really don't want her to" line.
I don’t believe there is anyone on here who actively wants her to win. There are a lot of people who enjoy political drama - most of us? - and what was a tedious one horse race is now much more exciting. That’s fun
Also seeing Macron frightened is a pleasure. He is a twat. And an anglophobe
As for myself, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Despite the twatness, I’d vote for Macron. He’s done OK. he’s the best of a fairly feeble bunch.
I don’t think Le Pen would a fascist catastrophe. She’s not Mussolini. But her victory would encourage Putin, and that alone is reason enough to want her to lose
How can there possibly not be anyone here who wants her to win? There are hundreds of regular posters, maybe thousands including casuals, from a wide spectrum of views and experiences and she is getting high polling numbers. Are we really to believe none of the UKIPers or Brexiteer wing of the Tories agree with her more than they disagree?
Er, because no one has expressed that sentiment? You can only go by what people say
Except that you seek to look into pb-ers souls where you are sure they are secretly pro Le Pen, because you just KNOW
Whatever
It would be quite extraordinary to have many posters who are quite keen on authoritarian nationalism and protectionism, but none of them favour an authoritarian nationalist protectionist.
I can think of exactly one poster who might describe himself as keen on authoritarianism/nationalism/protectionism - and even he might express some reservations about Le Pen. Many of us think Macron's a dick. Possibly even relish his discomfort a little. That absolutely doesn't equate to wanting Le Pen to win.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Take away Macron, who would you vote for, of the leading candidates
For me, it probably would be Le Pen
Melenchon is Corbyn: no way Pecresse seems totally feeble Zemmour is almost a Nazi, and mad Hidalgo is a woke joke and terrible mayor of Paris
Who is going to stand up for France, is also sane, and a patriot, and would make an interesting change?
Hold your nose: Le Pen? And pray she really has detoxed
So @noneoftheabove makes a valid point, in a sense. There are circs where she gets support
Edit to add: this is a mind game where Putin has NOT invaded Ukraine
Pecresse, I suppose. With absolutely no enthusiasm. Le Pen has, to my mind, absolutely nothing going for her.
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
It's more that money-grubbing shysters are not universally loved by the electorate. You may take pleasure in being forcibly sodomised by our insect overlords, others of us find it uncomfortable.
Absolutely fine, don’t vote for his party. The implication is that there should be a cut off for how rich someone can be to be in government. Utterly bizarre.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
If you want to see public transport horror, look at recent videos of the Los Angeles metro
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Paris remains the most beautiful city of its size on earth. That will never change, even if it becomes ever more preserved in aspic.
You’ve made me think about the food. It’s possible that one reason for the decline in food quality is that it’s just too posh now.
Very rich people have banal, insipid taste in all things, including food. Which is why there are no destination restaurants in Hampstead or Richmond.
I agree it is the most beautiful large city on earth. Of all cities, I would put Venice first.
The most beautiful small city is Cambridge (and it really is). Yay, go UK
i disagree on your diagnosis of the food problems. The issue is Paris is too popular. The restaurants don’t have to try, they can rake it in, so they don’t try, and they rake it in. See Venice again for an even worse situation. The food in Venice is famously appalling and overpriced. Fifty quid for fucking terrible risottos. But people will pay it because its in Venice and if they wont pay then there are 3 billion Chinese and Indians newly flush with money and passports who are DESPERATE to see Venice and they WILL pay it, so fuck the Brits and French and Germans they can eat pizza by the train station
London now has better food than Paris for this same reason. London is not entirely swamped with tourists and has to cater for a huge, diverse, affluent and notably sophisticated LOCAL dining crowd, so the pressure is to get better and better; if your food is crap someone else will take over your slot very quickly
Of course this is all pre Covid wisdom but my guess is it still applies, and will apply as we exit (please God) the recent horrors
The most wonderful place in the universe is clearly Cambridge on a long afternoon at a garden party in a college garden. Even today if I walk through the courts of the Cambridge colleges it sort of sends a shiver up my spine. Oxford is close sometimes, but Cambridge is the real deal.
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited nor married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Frankly I don't think Sunak has helped himself in this row over his wife's tax status. By whinging about people asking questions about her finances, when spousal interests are a legitimate concern, he looks like he is trying to hide things behind phony outrage. It has made people more inclined to jump on any other titbit around the story.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
If you want to see public transport horror, look at recent videos of the Los Angeles metro
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
I agree it is the most beautiful large city on earth. Of all cities, I would put Venice first.
The most beautiful small city is Cambridge (and it really is). Yay, go UK
i disagree on your diagnosis of the food problems. The issue is Paris is too popular. The restaurants don’t have to try, they can rake it in, so they don’t try, and they rake it in. See Venice again for an even worse situation. The food in Venice is famously appalling and overpriced. Fifty quid for fucking terrible risottos. But people will pay it because its in Venice and if they wont pay then there are 3 billion Chinese and Indians newly flush with money and passports who are DESPERATE to see Venice and they WILL pay it, so fuck the Brits and French and Germans they can eat pizza by the train station
London now has better food than Paris for this same reason. London is not entirely swamped with tourists and has to cater for a huge, diverse, affluent and notably sophisticated LOCAL dining crowd, so the pressure is to get better and better; if your food is crap someone else will take over your slot very quickly
Of course this is all pre Covid wisdom but my guess is it still applies, and will apply as we exit (please God) the recent horrors
I have to confess Mrs Stodge and I are looking forward to returning to Las Vegas, one of our favourite places. I find the food there as a whole quite superb - there are some truly excellent restaurants in some of the hotels but the best food is Downtown these days and with plenty of new openings in 2020 and 2021 as well as this year, there's a whole set of venues in which I can spend my blackjack winnings.
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited nor married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
Global rentier class, is that better or worse than citizens of nowhere?
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris…only 4 years behind Shanghai…and still only talking about the concept
Shanghai has achieved the enviable feat of clearing the city of all traffic whatsoever.
And to be fair there’s less dog shit in Paris than there is in Nice
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited or married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
She benefits from dual nationality, as I believe do you. That’s your right, and hers. As long as she pays the tax she owes in the U.K. and he does what’s the problem? Should she impoverish India by NOT paying the due tax there? Or pay twice to keep people happy? Isn’t this really just because she is rich? She’s not even the elected mp. Are we saying spouses and other family are fair game now?
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited nor married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
Global rentier class, is that better or worse than citizens of nowhere?
Better, as it does not include connotations of rootless cosmopolitanism.
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
And, as far as I can tell, Labour don't want to get rid of non dom status.
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
Time and circumstances matter. The same thing in the right (or wrong) moment can chime with people a lot more.
People were told the same things about Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, but it mattered more in the latter. Boris hasn't changed a bit between 2019 and 2022, but the same sort of thing annoys more people than it did to begin with.
Ronald Reagan set the precedent for Ketanji Brown Jackson. In the 1980 campaign, he promised to nominate the first woman to the US Supreme Court -- and did, Sandra Day O'Connor. So Biden is following Reagan in keeping a campaign promise.
(In contrast, George H. W. Bush was under considerable pressure to admit that he was choosing Clarence Thomas for the color of his skin, as well as the content of his character, but never said so.)
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
A bit more overt and extreme, I think ( Priti Patel is certainly a threat to democracy, though). "National preference" for housing and services, in Putin's pocket for foreign policy.
If Patel had her own party, I could see such a policy. Even Brown had British jobs for British workers.
Its daft how much insulting daftness heads her way.
I will happily defend her.
I dont like her brand of politics, even if it is not her fathers anymore, but think it would be better if those who approve of her winning, would just say so and that they quite like most of what she stands for, rather than give it the standard "it would be funny and great if she won, but I really don't want her to" line.
I don’t believe there is anyone on here who actively wants her to win. There are a lot of people who enjoy political drama - most of us? - and what was a tedious one horse race is now much more exciting. That’s fun
Also seeing Macron frightened is a pleasure. He is a twat. And an anglophobe
As for myself, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Despite the twatness, I’d vote for Macron. He’s done OK. he’s the best of a fairly feeble bunch.
I don’t think Le Pen would a fascist catastrophe. She’s not Mussolini. But her victory would encourage Putin, and that alone is reason enough to want her to lose
How can there possibly not be anyone here who wants her to win? There are hundreds of regular posters, maybe thousands including casuals, from a wide spectrum of views and experiences and she is getting high polling numbers. Are we really to believe none of the UKIPers or Brexiteer wing of the Tories agree with her more than they disagree?
Er, because no one has expressed that sentiment? You can only go by what people say
Except that you seek to look into pb-ers souls where you are sure they are secretly pro Le Pen, because you just KNOW
Whatever
It would be quite extraordinary to have many posters who are quite keen on authoritarian nationalism and protectionism, but none of them favour an authoritarian nationalist protectionist.
I can think of exactly one poster who might describe himself as keen on authoritarianism/nationalism/protectionism - and even he might express some reservations about Le Pen. Many of us think Macron's a dick. Possibly even relish his discomfort a little. That absolutely doesn't equate to wanting Le Pen to win.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Take away Macron, who would you vote for, of the leading candidates
For me, it probably would be Le Pen
Melenchon is Corbyn: no way Pecresse seems totally feeble Zemmour is almost a Nazi, and mad Hidalgo is a woke joke and terrible mayor of Paris
Who is going to stand up for France, is also sane, and a patriot, and would make an interesting change?
Hold your nose: Le Pen? And pray she really has detoxed
So @noneoftheabove makes a valid point, in a sense. There are circs where she gets support
Edit to add: this is a mind game where Putin has NOT invaded Ukraine
Pecresse, I suppose. With absolutely no enthusiasm. Le Pen has, to my mind, absolutely nothing going for her.
Le Pen: not even as cute as her niece
Who is?
Is that “who is her niece?” or “who is as cute as her niece?”
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited or married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
She benefits from dual nationality, as I believe do you. That’s your right, and hers. As long as she pays the tax she owes in the U.K. and he does what’s the problem? Should she impoverish India by NOT paying the due tax there? Or pay twice to keep people happy? Isn’t this really just because she is rich? She’s not even the elected mp. Are we saying spouses and other family are fair game now?
If you cannot see the issue with the Chancellor of the Exchequer levying taxes (or scrapping welfare) on the poorest in society, while taking advantage of tax dodges only available to those who must claim they don’t have any real commitment the UK, then I’m afraid you are a moral pygmy.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
By far the best restaurant I have ever been to was in Paris.
Le Taillevant.
I think the second best could be in London, Paris, or the hills of Italy (don't know which hill). A small list.
The everyday 'best restaurants ever' seem very poor thirds, and quite often I'd prefer the local curry house.
Despite its fame for an elegant and interesting dinner in outstanding art nouveau surroundings I'd give the award to Maxim's. Not necessarily for the food but certainly for the ambience.
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
If he got this bang on, then his prediction of a Le Pen victory carries a lot more weight
I'm no expert but I've used it.
OK cool. So what did he predict?!
GitHub just stores the code. We'd have to pull it down, feed it his data source and run it to see his graphs (it runs a loess regression and outputs a bunch of histograms, at a quick glance)
(Ah - it scrapes the FT's brexit polling so it should be runnable by anyone with R skills)
Yup, FT data, loess fit, put into a shiny app with a graph. No rocket science here.
Yes yes, but what did he predict?!
If he aced it, then his French predix carry more weight
Alright, it's been a while since I've used R and I don't have it installed on this machine, so I'll see if I can spin up a machine in Google Cloud and run it. Only because it's you.
If the code is buggy, I'll stop. I'm not going to debug someone else's 6 year old code. Give me a few minutes.
You’re a star. Also that all sounds highly impressive
Oh god I wish I hadn't started this. He's got a hot mess of dependencies in there. One of them is called "kirkegaard", which seems to be his own dump of random code bits. And there's a reference to another packages called "psychometric" which I don't even know what that is. It's not on CRAN and it's not in his personal Github, so fuck knows what that's about. That code is officially NOT in a working order.
So basically, bullshit. But @Leon’s hope is palpable.
The PB Tory’s onanistic fantasy of a Le Pen win seems to come around more and more frequently. Perhaps I am just getting old.
Does @HYUFD still maintain Le Pen actually won the last election, pending final returns from Kerguelen?
Does anyone actually want her to win? Other than hope of a more excisting contest, pretty sure most people on both sides think Macron is far and away the best choice the French have.
A Le Pen win is one of those secret desires held by the PB Tory / Brexit tribe.
See Telegraph/Spectator articles and various PB Tory comments passim.
It’s a bit like the Japanese fetish for vending machines that sell schoolgirls’ knickers. Inexplicable to outsiders.
Is it inexplicable? How different is Le Pen's platform from that of someone like Priti Patel?
A bit more overt and extreme, I think ( Priti Patel is certainly a threat to democracy, though). "National preference" for housing and services, in Putin's pocket for foreign policy.
If Patel had her own party, I could see such a policy. Even Brown had British jobs for British workers.
Its daft how much insulting daftness heads her way.
I will happily defend her.
I dont like her brand of politics, even if it is not her fathers anymore, but think it would be better if those who approve of her winning, would just say so and that they quite like most of what she stands for, rather than give it the standard "it would be funny and great if she won, but I really don't want her to" line.
I don’t believe there is anyone on here who actively wants her to win. There are a lot of people who enjoy political drama - most of us? - and what was a tedious one horse race is now much more exciting. That’s fun
Also seeing Macron frightened is a pleasure. He is a twat. And an anglophobe
As for myself, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Despite the twatness, I’d vote for Macron. He’s done OK. he’s the best of a fairly feeble bunch.
I don’t think Le Pen would a fascist catastrophe. She’s not Mussolini. But her victory would encourage Putin, and that alone is reason enough to want her to lose
How can there possibly not be anyone here who wants her to win? There are hundreds of regular posters, maybe thousands including casuals, from a wide spectrum of views and experiences and she is getting high polling numbers. Are we really to believe none of the UKIPers or Brexiteer wing of the Tories agree with her more than they disagree?
Er, because no one has expressed that sentiment? You can only go by what people say
Except that you seek to look into pb-ers souls where you are sure they are secretly pro Le Pen, because you just KNOW
Whatever
It would be quite extraordinary to have many posters who are quite keen on authoritarian nationalism and protectionism, but none of them favour an authoritarian nationalist protectionist.
I can think of exactly one poster who might describe himself as keen on authoritarianism/nationalism/protectionism - and even he might express some reservations about Le Pen. Many of us think Macron's a dick. Possibly even relish his discomfort a little. That absolutely doesn't equate to wanting Le Pen to win.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment. Take away Macron, who would you vote for, of the leading candidates
For me, it probably would be Le Pen
Melenchon is Corbyn: no way Pecresse seems totally feeble Zemmour is almost a Nazi, and mad Hidalgo is a woke joke and terrible mayor of Paris
Who is going to stand up for France, is also sane, and a patriot, and would make an interesting change?
Hold your nose: Le Pen? And pray she really has detoxed
So @noneoftheabove makes a valid point, in a sense. There are circs where she gets support
Edit to add: this is a mind game where Putin has NOT invaded Ukraine
Pecresse, I suppose. With absolutely no enthusiasm. Le Pen has, to my mind, absolutely nothing going for her.
Le Pen: not even as cute as her niece
Who is?
Is that “who is her niece?” or “who is as cute as her niece?”
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
And, as far as I can tell, Labour don't want to get rid of non dom status.
I should bloody well hope not. That really would be cutting off our noses to spite our feet.
Most of the commentary about non-dom status has been extremely ill-informed (it's not a 'tax dodge'), but in the particular case of Mrs Sunak that is irrelevant, it's politically a non-starter to have someone in Rishi's position as party leader.
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
And, as far as I can tell, Labour don't want to get rid of non dom status.
I should bloody well hope not. That really would be cutting off our noses to spite our feet.
Most of the commentary about non-dom status has been extremely ill-informed, but in the particular case of Mrs Sunak that is irrelevant, it's politically a non-starter to have someone in Rishi's position as party leader.
Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
Lost me there, unless he's going to be buried at Corunna?
But yes best he fucks off to spend more time with his rupees. Wanker.
Or run a successful sports shop in Bath?
Wot?
John Moores Sports. The only John Moore I know (apart from Peninsular fame).
From wiki:
"John Edward Michael Moore, Baron Moore of Lower Marsh, PC (26 November 1937 – 20 May 2019[1]) was a British Conservative Party politician who was Member of Parliament for Croydon Central from February 1974 until 1992. During the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher he enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks of government, which culminated in his serving as a Secretary of State in the Cabinet from 1987 to 1989. For a time, he was considered a rising star of his party and a potential leadership contender."
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
And, as far as I can tell, Labour don't want to get rid of non dom status.
I should bloody well hope not. That really would be cutting off our noses to spite our feet.
Most of the commentary about non-dom status has been extremely ill-informed, but in the particular case of Mrs Sunak that is irrelevant, it's politically a non-starter to have someone in Rishi's position as party leader.
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited or married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
She benefits from dual nationality, as I believe do you. That’s your right, and hers. As long as she pays the tax she owes in the U.K. and he does what’s the problem? Should she impoverish India by NOT paying the due tax there? Or pay twice to keep people happy? Isn’t this really just because she is rich? She’s not even the elected mp. Are we saying spouses and other family are fair game now?
If you cannot see the issue with the Chancellor of the Exchequer levying taxes (or scrapping welfare) on the poorest in society, while taking advantage of tax dodges only available to those who must claim they don’t have any real commitment the UK, then I’m afraid you are a moral pygmy.
It’s breathtakingly awful.
So what would be the moral thing to do? Give up her Indian nationality? Only pay taxes in the U.K. on earning made elsewhere? Do the taxes paid in Indian not go to the Indian state? If the claim was that the chancellor was changing the laws to enable her to dodge tax, then I’d get the anger. He isn’t. She is following the law. Don’t like it? Vote the Tories out, elect a government to change it. It’s a personal question so feel free to ignore, but you surely in a limited way have to answer the question of where you should pay tax on U.K. earnings. Small beer compared to a billionaire for sure.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
Paris remains the most beautiful city of its size on earth. That will never change, even if it becomes ever more preserved in aspic.
You’ve made me think about the food. It’s possible that one reason for the decline in food quality is that it’s just too posh now.
Very rich people have banal, insipid taste in all things, including food. Which is why there are no destination restaurants in Hampstead or Richmond.
I agree it is the most beautiful large city on earth. Of all cities, I would put Venice first.
The most beautiful small city is Cambridge (and it really is). Yay, go UK
i disagree on your diagnosis of the food problems. The issue is Paris is too popular. The restaurants don’t have to try, they can rake it in, so they don’t try, and they rake it in. See Venice again for an even worse situation. The food in Venice is famously appalling and overpriced. Fifty quid for fucking terrible risottos. But people will pay it because its in Venice and if they wont pay then there are 3 billion Chinese and Indians newly flush with money and passports who are DESPERATE to see Venice and they WILL pay it, so fuck the Brits and French and Germans they can eat pizza by the train station
London now has better food than Paris for this same reason. London is not entirely swamped with tourists and has to cater for a huge, diverse, affluent and notably sophisticated LOCAL dining crowd, so the pressure is to get better and better; if your food is crap someone else will take over your slot very quickly
Of course this is all pre Covid wisdom but my guess is it still applies, and will apply as we exit (please God) the recent horrors
The most wonderful place in the universe is clearly Cambridge on a long afternoon at a garden party in a college garden. Even today if I walk through the courts of the Cambridge colleges it sort of sends a shiver up my spine. Oxford is close sometimes, but Cambridge is the real deal.
Cambridge is spell-blindingly beautiful. I believe we overlook it because it is ours. And perhaps because we are used to our cities being a bit tatty and ruined?
Cambridge is peerless for its size. No other small city on earth matches, no, not even Siena
Because Cambridge has all the history and setting and architecture and the discovery-of-DNA (up there with the Renaissance) but is also has the University, still one of the very best on earth
The equivalent would be Siena still being home to some of the best painters and sculptors, working away, making amazing new things. Siena is not doing this. It is selling overpriced pizza to Americans and is merely a tourist playground, however charming
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
And, as far as I can tell, Labour don't want to get rid of non dom status.
I should bloody well hope not. That really would be cutting off our noses to spite our feet.
Most of the commentary about non-dom status has been extremely ill-informed, but in the particular case of Mrs Sunak that is irrelevant, it's politically a non-starter to have someone in Rishi's position as party leader.
OR as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Yes, that too.
There's no way Sunak is getting the sack because of his wife.
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
Time and circumstances matter. The same thing in the right (or wrong) moment can chime with people a lot more.
People were told the same things about Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, but it mattered more in the latter. Boris hasn't changed a bit between 2019 and 2022, but the same sort of thing annoys more people than it did to begin with.
I understand, and agree.. but I think the partygate stuff and egregious breaches of lockdown rules is far more damaging, in this respect, and cuts through with the public a lot more.
People don't really know what 'non-dom' status is. They're just probably going to roll their eyes at it, if that. It just seems primarily like a westminster bubble story. Even in this realm, it is nowhere near as bad as the Patterson lobbying story.
Of course, whether Mrs Sunak actually is non-domiciled in law is an interesting question. Contrary to what people seem to believe, it's not something you can simply self-declare yourself to be.
If she is, however, then it means she is not planning to live here permanently or make the UK her main long-term home. Which is why it would be odd to have her husband as a potential PM, or indeed as Chancellor, since as far as we know they are not planning to separate.
That being said, waiting for entry into Waterloo I did see some bloke piss out of the window of a slam door train. They were standing on the seats poking their bits out of a small gap.
On a Southern third rail system that’s a bold move.
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited or married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
She benefits from dual nationality, as I believe do you. That’s your right, and hers. As long as she pays the tax she owes in the U.K. and he does what’s the problem? Should she impoverish India by NOT paying the due tax there? Or pay twice to keep people happy? Isn’t this really just because she is rich? She’s not even the elected mp. Are we saying spouses and other family are fair game now?
If you cannot see the issue with the Chancellor of the Exchequer levying taxes (or scrapping welfare) on the poorest in society, while taking advantage of tax dodges only available to those who must claim they don’t have any real commitment the UK, then I’m afraid you are a moral pygmy.
It’s breathtakingly awful.
So what would be the moral thing to do? Give up her Indian nationality? Only pay taxes in the U.K. on earning made elsewhere? Do the taxes paid in Indian not go to the Indian state? If the claim was that the chancellor was changing the laws to enable her to dodge tax, then I’d get the anger. He isn’t. She is following the law. Don’t like it? Vote the Tories out, elect a government to change it. It’s a personal question so feel free to ignore, but you surely in a limited way have to answer the question of where you should pay tax on U.K. earnings. Small beer compared to a billionaire for sure.
The correct thing to do would be to get these affairs sorted BEFORE Rishi sought high office.
As to how, without knowing Ms Murty’s precise situation I can’t say, but I do think she should not LIE about having “no firm plans to stay in the UK” despite her husband being CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER.
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
And, as far as I can tell, Labour don't want to get rid of non dom status.
I should bloody well hope not. That really would be cutting off our noses to spite our feet.
Most of the commentary about non-dom status has been extremely ill-informed, but in the particular case of Mrs Sunak that is irrelevant, it's politically a non-starter to have someone in Rishi's position as party leader.
OR as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Yes, that too.
There's no way Sunak is getting the sack because of his wife.
True. But there's also no way he's going to be leader of the Conservative Party (and not just because of his wife's position).
If the Sunak-Murtys have “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, will Sunak please resign and just fuck off?
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Can only a poor person govern now? Have we come to this?
I still can't see the traction in this given that he is a tory - this is what they do, and people still vote for them anyway. The scheme is lawful, and organised by the government.
And, as far as I can tell, Labour don't want to get rid of non dom status.
I should bloody well hope not. That really would be cutting off our noses to spite our feet.
Most of the commentary about non-dom status has been extremely ill-informed (it's not a 'tax dodge'), but in the particular case of Mrs Sunak that is irrelevant, it's politically a non-starter to have someone in Rishi's position as party leader.
Whether or not it's a tax dodge ( and it might be, none of us knows enough about the issues to take a view) the point is that either she is lying, or she is telling the truth, and if she's telling the truth she is saying: fuck the UK, I may own 3 homes here and educate my children here and be married to the CotE, but I'm just temporarily passing through the shitty little place. Which is fine, but people do have a choice who they vote for.
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited or married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
She benefits from dual nationality, as I believe do you. That’s your right, and hers. As long as she pays the tax she owes in the U.K. and he does what’s the problem? Should she impoverish India by NOT paying the due tax there? Or pay twice to keep people happy? Isn’t this really just because she is rich? She’s not even the elected mp. Are we saying spouses and other family are fair game now?
She won't pay twice nor impoverish India. She will pay tax in India and then the UK but will use any double taxation agreement to offset that Indian tax in the UK. That is assuming there is an agreement. She may not be able to offset it all. The UK limits how much, but you can normally claim any difference back from the overseas authority. I have no idea what the agreement is with India, but that is what I do with income from Swiss shares. It is all pretty fair.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
I haven't been to Paris for 20 years, so my views may be out of date. But I thought the metro was shit. 1) It didn't go anywhere directly. Each line meanders all over the place. From a transport planning point of view, not great. 2) Full of nutters and flashers and other neer-do-wells. 3) most of the trains ran on rubber tyres. What's that all about? 4) dirty and unkempt. Made London look like Singapore.
It is odd that there is so much wrong with France yet they manage to attract the most visitors in the world by quite a considerable distance.
I think you were unlucky. I spent quite a bit of time there around 20 years ago and I'd say objectively it was better then than now. I don't like rats and they seem to have a plague of them
If Trump got back in at the same time, things could get "interesting"..
i think several of the candidates have quite anti-NATO positions. It’s not a unique “Le Pen” thing
Anti NATOism (a proxy for French detestation of Anglo Saxon hegemony) is a big tradition in France; De Gaulle did it too
Indeed, Melenchon and Zemmour are even more anti NATO than Le Pen
Yes another example of pathological impulses fed by perception of national decline and resentment of the free and easy anglosphere. Not as bad as Russia obvs.
Dipped into PB for a few minutes and what do I find? ...@Leon wants to vote for Le Pen.
Shocked I am, truly shocked! Never saw that coming, no not at all.
I love how, in his thought experiment, he wrote off Hidalgo as a “failed mayor”.
Admittedly her campaign for president was a complete non-starter, but she’s been a very successful mayor.
She’s trashed the city and she’s polling at 1% for president. Lol
Trashed the city?
She’s made the “15-minute city” concept globally famous. Paris is considered the world leader for urban innovation, in a way Boris the biker only dreamt of.
She may be woke, I don’t know, but she’s won twice, already, even if Paris mayor (which has a lot more power than London mayor) is the summit of her achievement.
Paris is a pain as regards transport in my one recent visit. (Admittedly there was some sort of a strike on one day of the three I was there)
London is better.
Do tell.
Well in London you generally get where you want to relatively swiftly and other than some time in the morning you'll not be a sardine.
In Paris the metro was often over-crowded, and quite slow - just a function of the density of stations. It really shows its age.
25 years ago it would have been the reverse. Back then the tube was pretty awful, and the metro pretty great.
I think the last time I was in Paris was late 2018, a while ago. What I do know is there’s been quite significant expansion into the suburbs as part of the Grand Paris Express project - twice as large as Crossrail.
And yet most Parisian suburbs are a mixture of hellholes and shitholes.
I have no idea why you seem to like Paris, it's a dump with not very good food. France has got so much to offer, Paris isn't even close to the top of their list.
Yes, Paris is known far and wide as a “dump with not very good food”.
Do you think you might be over-egging the omelette?
The perception and reality are somewhat disconnected, but they are aligning. Its reputation has been sliding for years and there's no sign of improvement.
My main issue with Paris is that it’s become globally gentrified in the twenty years since I’ve known it, and the centre is ever more a kind of cleaned-up disneyfied ghetto for the very rich.
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Certainly its food reputation - once stellar - is sliding. No way it is the global capital of cuisine, that hasn’t been true for decades, and no one really believes it any more
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
By far the best restaurant I have ever been to was in Paris.
Le Taillevant.
I think the second best could be in London, Paris, or the hills of Italy (don't know which hill). A small list.
The everyday 'best restaurants ever' seem very poor thirds, and quite often I'd prefer the local curry house.
Despite its fame for an elegant and interesting dinner in outstanding art nouveau surroundings I'd give the award to Maxim's. Not necessarily for the food but certainly for the ambience.
I've never been - I sort of like the old grand places though. 'Le Grand Vefour' for example.
As I'm retired now I suspect I'll only go to such places infrequently in the future. Admittedly I did go to a quite amazing place in Colmar recently.
By extension it is though. The argument is that he is rich and has comprehension of the common man. I’d also wonder about @Gardenwalker’s own tax arrangements, as he now lives in the states and earns profits in th3 U.K. on his properties.
It’s not at all what I said, you berk.
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire. 2. I neither inherited or married into money. 3. I’m not seeking elected office. 4. I’m not a cunt.
She benefits from dual nationality, as I believe do you. That’s your right, and hers. As long as she pays the tax she owes in the U.K. and he does what’s the problem? Should she impoverish India by NOT paying the due tax there? Or pay twice to keep people happy? Isn’t this really just because she is rich? She’s not even the elected mp. Are we saying spouses and other family are fair game now?
If you cannot see the issue with the Chancellor of the Exchequer levying taxes (or scrapping welfare) on the poorest in society, while taking advantage of tax dodges only available to those who must claim they don’t have any real commitment the UK, then I’m afraid you are a moral pygmy.
It’s breathtakingly awful.
So what would be the moral thing to do? Give up her Indian nationality? Only pay taxes in the U.K. on earning made elsewhere? Do the taxes paid in Indian not go to the Indian state? If the claim was that the chancellor was changing the laws to enable her to dodge tax, then I’d get the anger. He isn’t. She is following the law. Don’t like it? Vote the Tories out, elect a government to change it. It’s a personal question so feel free to ignore, but you surely in a limited way have to answer the question of where you should pay tax on U.K. earnings. Small beer compared to a billionaire for sure.
The correct thing to do would be to get these affairs sorted BEFORE Rishi sought high office.
As to how, without knowing Ms Murty’s precise situation I can’t say, but I do think she should not LIE about having “no firm plans to stay in the UK” despite her husband being CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER.
Everyone’s marriage is different. Some couples need to be together all the time, others are happy living apart and only getting together from time to time. I have no way of knowing if this is the case for them. She is rich enough to to fly to India and back for the weekend, every week, Ist class, or private jet. Maybe she does. We don’t know that it’s a lie. The current career of politicians is much reduced. PMs could lose, serve as leader of the opposition and then return as Pm 5 years later in the past. Not now. Lose once and you are done. Rishi is being described as finished already. He could be free in 2024 to move to India full time.
Comments
Head out to the suburbs of London and it's still safe, boring, but safe. The same can't be said for Paris.
Christ
There’s one image from this week of a naked guy lying dead - apparently - of an OD in a LA Metro train. Americans just don’t DO public transport
I remember once trying to persuade a rich American that the best way from Heathrow to central London was via a public train. 15 minutes. Then jump in a cab, be in Claridge’s in another 15 minutes?
He just couldn’t get his head around it, and insisted on taking a black cab from LHR all the way, which probably took three times as long as cost twice as much, excluding tip
That’s true of a lot of places, though.
I dunno if Paris’s reputation has been sliding. I think it lost ground against London for many years as the “place to be” in Europe, but like I said the stuff Hidalgo has been pioneering is considered a testing ground for urban innovation.
Shite food but the longest queues!
Moreover, was it not the Conservative Party who brought in the current modification of the system a few years back?
Neither of which is good optics in the current climate.
Just the other day I travelled from the “tony” UES into Midtown (one of the better lines) and this black guy was lying on the bench opposite me peering at a woman a few seats to my right, moaning lasciviously,
“Hey Mama”
“Hey Mama”
“Hey Pretty White Lady”
“Hey Mama”
“Wanna Fuck Me Mama?”
I don’t remember that on Tooting Broadway.
As for the e-scooter etc, what Paris does today, London does tomorrow. And Leeds does never.
NY Times Blog.
The paper is loving this!
I suppose there are some who seem positively gleeful at the prospect of a Le Pen victory in the French Presidential election and we have for the first time seen one pollster give Le Pen a fractional lead in a hypothetical run off against Macron. Said pollster is interesting and could be described as Brazil's answer to Trafalgar but apparently they did best in the 2020 US election so we'll see.
The fact remains for all the second places Le Pen and RN (as they are called rather than FN) only won eight seats in the National Assembly election last time. Marine Le Pen's 34% in the second round became 13% in the National Assembly elections just a few weeks later.
Would it be different if she won? Would we see, as with Macron in 2017, a presidential landslide in the National Assembly elections or not? Presumably Macron's movement collapses if he loses the Presidency which opens the door to LR or perhaps Melenchon's FI or a return of the Socialists?
Unless her party wins a majority, Le Pen would face "co-habitation" with a Government led by other parties which would weaken her opportunity to be too radical which oddly enough might guarantee her second term.
Has the decline stopped? We won’t know til the fogs of war and plague disperse
@MaxPB also has a point that the romantic image of Paris is sadly let down by the reality. This psychological shock even has a name - Paris Syndrome - when Japanese women brought up on Ratatouille and Emily in Paris actually go there and find some Algerian guy trying to grope them and some Slovak trying to rob them and some posh British stag-nighter trying not to puke in front of them, and lots and lots of litter and graffiti
“Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock.
The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, and hostility from others),[1] derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[2]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
You’ve made me think about the food.
It’s possible that one reason for the decline in food quality is that it’s just too posh now.
Very rich people have banal, insipid taste in all things, including food. Which is why there are no destination restaurants in Hampstead or Richmond.
Not, apparently, time to choose the best qualified person, whatever his/her skin colour or genitals, but time to choose them precisely because of those.
Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.
She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.
A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius which enables it to reduce its tax burden.
Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/04/07/rishi-sunaks-wife-avoids-paying-uk-tax-regards-india-final-resting/
Comedy fucking chancers. Bye bye Richy.
He has no moral right to impose taxation on the British people, let alone the very poorest, whom he seems to have chosen to punish.
Le Taillevant.
I think the second best could be in London, Paris, or the hills of Italy (don't know which hill). A small list.
The everyday 'best restaurants ever' seem very poor thirds, and quite often I'd prefer the local curry house.
When he was still alive and kicking.
If you'd said "excluding Italy" you'd still have been wrong, mind.
This guy is beginning to be the new John Moore.
Box me up and ship me home"
Asymptomatic so far.
The most beautiful small city is Cambridge (and it really is). Yay, go UK
i disagree on your diagnosis of the food problems. The issue is Paris is too popular. The restaurants don’t have to try, they can rake it in, so they don’t try, and they rake it in. See Venice again for an even worse situation. The food in Venice is famously appalling and overpriced. Fifty quid for fucking terrible risottos. But people will pay it because its in Venice and if they wont pay then there are 3 billion Chinese and Indians newly flush with money and passports who are DESPERATE to see Venice and they WILL pay it, so fuck the Brits and French and Germans they can eat pizza by the train station
London now has better food than Paris for this same reason. London is not entirely swamped with tourists and has to cater for a huge, diverse, affluent and notably sophisticated LOCAL dining crowd, so the pressure is to get better and better; if your food is crap someone else will take over your slot very quickly
Of course this is all pre Covid wisdom but my guess is it still applies, and will apply as we exit (please God) the recent horrors
Someone mentioned bib gourmands from the Michelin Guide and they are always good.
The Good Food Guide (to the UK), which I have mentioned on here before, seems to be returning after idiots at Waitrose tried to kill it off.
But yes best he fucks off to spend more time with his rupees. Wanker.
'Lovely boy, shoulders back now..'
I don’t mind especially that Rishi is insanely rich, although it does raise questions about his relatability to the taxpayer.
What I cannot accept is that his wife (and by extension him) is availing herself of various tax schemes available to a global rentier class, and claiming that one of them “has no firm plans to stay in the UK” so they can continue to take the piss.
As for me,
1. I’m not a billionaire.
2. I neither inherited nor married into money.
3. I’m not seeking elected office.
4. I’m not a cunt.
People were told the same things about Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, but it mattered more in the latter. Boris hasn't changed a bit between 2019 and 2022, but the same sort of thing annoys more people than it did to begin with.
(In contrast, George H. W. Bush was under considerable pressure to admit that he was choosing Clarence Thomas for the color of his skin, as well as the content of his character, but never said so.)
Is this the latest poll?
https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1512069189661454339
It’s breathtakingly awful.
I know that I'm not!
Most of the commentary about non-dom status has been extremely ill-informed (it's not a 'tax dodge'), but in the particular case of Mrs Sunak that is irrelevant, it's politically a non-starter to have someone in Rishi's position as party leader.
"John Edward Michael Moore, Baron Moore of Lower Marsh, PC (26 November 1937 – 20 May 2019[1]) was a British Conservative Party politician who was Member of Parliament for Croydon Central from February 1974 until 1992. During the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher he enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks of government, which culminated in his serving as a Secretary of State in the Cabinet from 1987 to 1989. For a time, he was considered a rising star of his party and a potential leadership contender."
If the claim was that the chancellor was changing the laws to enable her to dodge tax, then I’d get the anger. He isn’t. She is following the law.
Don’t like it? Vote the Tories out, elect a government to change it. It’s a personal question so feel free to ignore, but you surely in a limited way have to answer the question of where you should pay tax on U.K. earnings. Small beer compared to a billionaire for sure.
I suspect it saved a few cents, but you just don’t see that at Victoria.
Cambridge is peerless for its size. No other small city on earth matches, no, not even Siena
Because Cambridge has all the history and setting and architecture and the discovery-of-DNA (up there with the Renaissance) but is also has the University, still one of the very best on earth
The equivalent would be Siena still being home to some of the best painters and sculptors, working away, making amazing new things. Siena is not doing this. It is selling overpriced pizza to Americans and is merely a tourist playground, however charming
People don't really know what 'non-dom' status is. They're just probably going to roll their eyes at it, if that. It just seems primarily like a westminster bubble story. Even in this realm, it is nowhere near as bad as the Patterson lobbying story.
If she is, however, then it means she is not planning to live here permanently or make the UK her main long-term home. Which is why it would be odd to have her husband as a potential PM, or indeed as Chancellor, since as far as we know they are not planning to separate.
On a Southern third rail system that’s a bold move.
The pollster is Brazilian but, and this may mean something or nothing, apparently did very well in predicting the 2020 US Presidential election.
As to how, without knowing Ms Murty’s precise situation I can’t say, but I do think she should not LIE about having “no firm plans to stay in the UK” despite her husband being CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER.
As I'm retired now I suspect I'll only go to such places infrequently in the future. Admittedly I did go to a quite amazing place in Colmar recently.
We don’t know that it’s a lie. The current career of politicians is much reduced. PMs could lose, serve as leader of the opposition and then return as Pm 5 years later in the past. Not now. Lose once and you are done. Rishi is being described as finished already. He could be free in 2024 to move to India full time.