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Could Truss be tempted by an early election? – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited August 2022 in General
imageCould Truss be tempted by an early election? – politicalbetting.com

The timing of the next general election is not something that we have looked at very much on PB and the general assumption is that it will be 2024. I just wonder whether Liz Trust, assuming that it is her, might be tempted to go early if by any chance she gets a pulling boost when the result comes out the week after next.

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • londonpubmanlondonpubman Posts: 3,152
    Not unless she wants to be the shortest serving PM of all time!
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    Does she want to call a General Election, and lose, or wait for her MPs to defenestrate her and try to resurrect the ghost of BoZo?

    Tough choice...
  • Easiest. QTWAIN. Ever.
  • Betfair next prime minister
    1.07 Liz Truss 93%
    15 Rishi Sunak 7%

    Next Conservative leader
    1.06 Liz Truss 94%
    15.5 Rishi Sunak 6%
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092
    edited August 2022
    Brenda from Bristol has a view …
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571

    Not unless she wants to be the shortest serving PM of all time!

    What if she does ?
    Or one of them, anyway.
  • geoffw said:

    Brenda from Bristol has a view …

    Strange to think it's nearly three years since our last national election now.

    Considering that in a five year span, 2018 was the only one with a vote.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    She might get a polling boost but it would have to be of an unprecedented size to make the risk worthwhile.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,342
    edited August 2022
    No.

    T May did and it was a disaster. GB didn't and it was a disaster. Boris did and in special circumstances it was such a triumph that the next election is nearly lost already.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
  • What would Truss gain from a snap election? She already has a good working majority and there does not seem to be much in the way of Trussism for which she might want to gain a mandate; regional pay was dropped quickly enough.

    An election would (almost certainly) get shot of Boris, who'd probably not stand again, but it might be safer to see how the Privileges Committee deals with her main threat.

    Hang on and hope something turns up would seem the most likely strategy.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    It would make her the Lady Jane Grey of UK politics, the only upside being more time/reduced majority. She cannot be that stupid.

    i think.
  • DougSeal said:

    She might get a polling boost but it would have to be of an unprecedented size to make the risk worthwhile.

    Best guess is that Labour are about 10 points ahead right now. So even a C+5/L-5 bounce only takes things back to level pegging, which isn't going to be enough.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    Lol, Whitehouse twitter feed dragging critics of the student loan forgiveness with details of the critics' PPP loan forgiveness.

    https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1562916200866267138

    Prediction for how long a "lack of civility" column will be written.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703
    England destroying South Africa at the moment.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,342
    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
    Sounds as thrilling as Bill Knox's fishery protection thrillers. Or indeed C J Box's thrillers about making sure Wyoming moose hunters have a the requisite licence.

  • rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    I'm sure you've told us this before, but what's the way out?

    Obviously, we should all have been having more children over the last few decades (thank you Boris, great patriot that you are), but short of a time machine, what should we do now?
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,717
    IshmaelZ said:

    It would make her the Lady Jane Grey of UK politics, the only upside being more time/reduced majority. She cannot be that stupid.

    i think.

    I don't think she'd be executed though would she? Always thought that was particularly vicious of Bloody Mary!
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    algarkirk said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
    Sounds as thrilling as Bill Knox's fishery protection thrillers. Or indeed C J Box's thrillers about making sure Wyoming moose hunters have a the requisite licence.

    It's a murder mystery. Set in the world intellectual property law. In a small town in East Texas.

    I really enjoyed it, and the reviews have been excellent too.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/it-s-time-for-the-young-to-pay-for-us-and-stop-complaining/ar-AA113eUt?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=a0659a99488f4d90565aa6c4d1e49f31

    "Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "

    "When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”


    ..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”






  • FishingFishing Posts: 4,555

    IshmaelZ said:

    It would make her the Lady Jane Grey of UK politics, the only upside being more time/reduced majority. She cannot be that stupid.

    i think.

    I don't think she'd be executed though would she? Always thought that was particularly vicious of Bloody Mary!
    I always thought Bloody Mary was one of the models for Circe Lancaster:

    "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die..."
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    I'm sure you've told us this before, but what's the way out?
    Logan’s Run ?

  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,246
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    Can I suggest an unusual pick for the Dems' VP candidate in 2024 (assuming it is not Ms Harris): Ro Khanna.

    He is an Indian American, and the Congressman who represents Silicon Valley. He's been on the campaign path in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, etc., which is not something you'd normally do if you weren't interested in... a national campaign.

    Because of where is district is, he has been a recipient of donations from some of the richest people in America.

    And his big focus is on bringing manufacturing back to America.

    I think he's going to run for President with the goal of raising his national standing. And I think he's very impressive. Could he win the nomination? Highly unlikely. But he might well grab himself a good job in the next administration. And if - say - Amy Klobucher was the nominee, he would be a perfect VP pick.
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    I'm sure you've told us this before, but what's the way out?

    Obviously, we should all have been having more children over the last few decades (thank you Boris, great patriot that you are), but short of a time machine, what should we do now?
    I'd be very interested in @rcs1000 response to this, but would suggest that the fundamental problem is that there is no acknowledgement or discussion of the problem. Politically the NHS is off limits to even discuss. So are the principle of universal pensions and the triple lock etc, so the spending in these areas just continues on an unsustainable upward trajectory. It isn't really social democracy, because the same rise in spending in other areas doesn't happen.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703
    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    I’m not young, I’m overweight. I had covid. I twatted it into the neversphere.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,246
    edited August 2022
    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
  • ChrisChris Posts: 11,009
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    Supporters of the Conservative Party should be very careful about what they wish for in terms of killing off the elderly and stupid.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    Sheesh.

    Is that going to be common for all blocks of flats?

    If so I expect to see riots next week?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    Nicely done, Foakes.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    darkage said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/it-s-time-for-the-young-to-pay-for-us-and-stop-complaining/ar-AA113eUt?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=a0659a99488f4d90565aa6c4d1e49f31

    "Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "

    "When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”


    ..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”






    And there you have the Conservatives' massive problem:

    They are dependent on the oldies.

    If they screw over the people who elected them by - you know - acknowledging the problem, then they will be out of power for twenty years.

    But if they continue to screw over the workers, then the situation will continue to worsen, and when we finally do recognize it... it will be so much harder to fix.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    rcs1000 said:

    algarkirk said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
    Sounds as thrilling as Bill Knox's fishery protection thrillers. Or indeed C J Box's thrillers about making sure Wyoming moose hunters have a the requisite licence.

    It's a murder mystery. Set in the world intellectual property law. In a small town in East Texas.

    I really enjoyed it, and the reviews have been excellent too.
    Mm, about a lawyer, must be good if the author can cope with such an antihero. Duly ordered, will make a change from SF and Viking chop-em thrillers.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    edited August 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    darkage said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/it-s-time-for-the-young-to-pay-for-us-and-stop-complaining/ar-AA113eUt?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=a0659a99488f4d90565aa6c4d1e49f31

    "Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "

    "When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”


    ..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”






    And there you have the Conservatives' massive problem:

    They are dependent on the oldies.

    If they screw over the people who elected them by - you know - acknowledging the problem, then they will be out of power for twenty years.

    But if they continue to screw over the workers, then the situation will continue to worsen, and when we finally do recognize it... it will be so much harder to fix.
    Which is a very compelling reason for electing a Labour government which is *not* dependent on the aforesaid oldies next time.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    edited August 2022
    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,717
    Deleted; all sorts of things suddenly happened here!
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,246
    edited August 2022
    Chris said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    Supporters of the Conservative Party should be very careful about what they wish for in terms of killing off the elderly and stupid.
    Touche

    But my loyalty to the "Conservative Party" is about the same as my loyalty to European golf, practically zero, if not actually zero. Or less

    My loyalty is to my fellow humans, my fellow Britons. We have screwed the pooch
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458
    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    I’m not young, I’m overweight. I had covid. I twatted it into the neversphere.
    I'm sure Leon has other plans for having you bumped off.
  • ChrisChris Posts: 11,009

    What would Truss gain from a snap election?

    Several weeks of being interrogated by the media and public about how she will deal with the Cost of LIving Crisis ...
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,342
    rcs1000 said:

    algarkirk said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
    Sounds as thrilling as Bill Knox's fishery protection thrillers. Or indeed C J Box's thrillers about making sure Wyoming moose hunters have a the requisite licence.

    It's a murder mystery. Set in the world intellectual property law. In a small town in East Texas.

    I really enjoyed it, and the reviews have been excellent too.
    Thanks. I am going to look out for it. TBF both the guys I am slagging off (Knox - almost entirely forgotten now - and Box) are good fun in medium doses.

  • ChrisChris Posts: 11,009
    Leon said:

    Chris said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    Supporters of the Conservative Party should be very careful about what they wish for in terms of killing off the elderly and stupid.
    Touche

    But my loyalty to the "Conservative Party" is about the same as my loyalty to European golf, practically zero, if not actually zero. Or less

    My loyalty is to my fellow humans, my fellow Britons. We have screwed the pooch
    Yes, I wasn't quite sure exactly which brand of crazy you were, so I worded my response carefully.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,717
    edited August 2022


    "And there you have the Conservatives' massive problem:

    They are dependent on the oldies.

    If they screw over the people who elected them by - you know - acknowledging the problem, then they will be out of power for twenty years.

    But if they continue to screw over the workers, then the situation will continue to worsen, and when we finally do recognize it... it will be so much harder to fix."

    And who created the problem that the next generation is having to cope with? I don't remember my generation opposing increased pensions.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,342
    Carnyx said:

    rcs1000 said:

    algarkirk said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
    Sounds as thrilling as Bill Knox's fishery protection thrillers. Or indeed C J Box's thrillers about making sure Wyoming moose hunters have a the requisite licence.

    It's a murder mystery. Set in the world intellectual property law. In a small town in East Texas.

    I really enjoyed it, and the reviews have been excellent too.
    Mm, about a lawyer, must be good if the author can cope with such an antihero. Duly ordered, will make a change from SF and Viking chop-em thrillers.
    Lawyers. Add Michael Gilbert 'Smallbone deceased' and Cyril Hare.

  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458
    Leon said:

    Chris said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    Supporters of the Conservative Party should be very careful about what they wish for in terms of killing off the elderly and stupid.
    Touche

    But my loyalty to the "Conservative Party" is about the same as my loyalty to European golf, practically zero, if not actually zero. Or less

    My loyalty is to my fellow humans, my fellow Britons. We have screwed the pooch
    But not to the old and fat ones? I'm just messing with you.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,246
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
    Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    rcs1000 said:

    algarkirk said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
    Sounds as thrilling as Bill Knox's fishery protection thrillers. Or indeed C J Box's thrillers about making sure Wyoming moose hunters have a the requisite licence.

    It's a murder mystery. Set in the world intellectual property law. In a small town in East Texas.

    I really enjoyed it, and the reviews have been excellent too.
    Mm, about a lawyer, must be good if the author can cope with such an antihero. Duly ordered, will make a change from SF and Viking chop-em thrillers.
    Lawyers. Add Michael Gilbert 'Smallbone deceased' and Cyril Hare.

    I prefer 'The Crack in the Teacup' of Gilbert's legal whodunnits, but I know I'm in a minority.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
    Nah. It's the entire building AIUI.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,081
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
    He probably is, from where Leon is looking?
  • FishingFishing Posts: 4,555
    darkage said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/it-s-time-for-the-young-to-pay-for-us-and-stop-complaining/ar-AA113eUt?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=a0659a99488f4d90565aa6c4d1e49f31

    "Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "

    "When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”


    ..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”


    I'd suggest three measures:

    1) Increase immigration by allowing British-descended foreigners the right to live and work in the UK

    Italy and Ireland make it very easy for descendents of emigrants to move there. We should do the same. Importing lots of semi-literate Somalis or homeless Romanians is politically and socially impossible, but I've never heard any objections to Canadians or Australians. Most of those who take advantage of this would be young and productive. Also we should remove the remaining restrictions on Hong Kongers living and working here.

    2) Promote the building of large family houses where people actually want to live

    The current planning system is far too skewed towards "density", i.e. stack-a-chav concrete boxes. We need to build more houses that families want to live in to get the country having children again.

    3) Stop taxing work and start taxing idleness

    It is insane that employment income is taxed more heavily than retirement income, though the old use government services far more than those of working age.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454
    edited August 2022

    "And there you have the Conservatives' massive problem:

    They are dependent on the oldies.

    If they screw over the people who elected them by - you know - acknowledging the problem, then they will be out of power for twenty years.

    But if they continue to screw over the workers, then the situation will continue to worsen, and when we finally do recognize it... it will be so much harder to fix.

    --------------------

    And who created the problem that the next generation is having to cope with? I don't remember my generation increased pensions.

    -----------------------

    Blame the French and hope no-one notices.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,246
    ydoethur said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    It was instructive on PB that we didn't have any posters panicking so much about COVID's impact on their personal health that they fled to another country and locked themselves down hard there to avoid it.
    Those with the brains and resources to realise Covid was coming about 6 weeks before anyone else in the world, or on PB, deserve to be rewarded for their wits. That's Darwinism. They get to survive. Give them money

    What we did was protect the dull fat decrepit morons who can barely make it to the fridge for another tuna sandwich, let alone the Welsh Marches during the early stages of a pandemic
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703
    kjh said:

    Taz said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    I’m not young, I’m overweight. I had covid. I twatted it into the neversphere.
    I'm sure Leon has other plans for having you bumped off.
    Thanks for the tip. If Covid doesn’t do it something else will

    I’ll be extra wary when I’m out on my bike. 👍
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,046
    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    But if they do make record profits this year, something is clearly very wrong with the consumer energy market that needs sorting. Profit isn't a dirty word, but big profits, with no competition, is not good - Adam Smith himself had a lot to say on monopolies and overpowerful corporations.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    400 for England as Foakes Stokes England.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145
    algarkirk said:

    Carnyx said:

    rcs1000 said:

    algarkirk said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    (FPT)
    Good article about the Pfizer/Moderna lawsuit.
    https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccine-patent-fight-expands

    It actually sounds quite a lot like the antibody lawsuits, which went on for many years. It's complicated; a lot of other people's discoveries were involved in commercialising the technology; and there isn't one thing, but many different things in dispute.

    Just a flavour:
    ...Specifically, they say that Moderna patents filed between 2010 and 2016 have been infringed, and in their press release they highlight two features in particular. They point out that Pfizer took several mRNA vaccine candidates into clinical testing (including some that they say would not have infringed), but ultimately picked one “that has the exact mRNA chemical modification” as theirs. They say that they began developing this in 2010 and were the first to validate it in human trials in 2015. Without seeing the lawsuit itself (which I’m sure we’ll get a look at soon), they have to be talking about pseudouridine incorporation. I am not going to try to do a detailed evaluation of Moderna’s IP here - people get paid a lot of money to do that sort of thing, because it ain’t easy - and I am not going to pass any judgment on who has a case and who doesn’t. But this is surely not going to be as straightforward as the Moderna press release makes it sound (what patent fight ever is?) The first thing to know is that the pseudouridine idea, with its higher levels of transcription and lower immunogenicity, was discovered in 2008 by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman and co-workers, and both Moderna and BioNTech licensed their patents. So there’s going to be a lot to work through here - not least because Moderna at first did not license this technology, claiming that it had its own modification and that BioNTech copied that. It’s a mess....

    Can I recommend a novel called The Local? It's set in the East Texas District Court and around the world of patent lawyers. It's also a fun legal thriller.
    Sounds as thrilling as Bill Knox's fishery protection thrillers. Or indeed C J Box's thrillers about making sure Wyoming moose hunters have a the requisite licence.

    It's a murder mystery. Set in the world intellectual property law. In a small town in East Texas.

    I really enjoyed it, and the reviews have been excellent too.
    Mm, about a lawyer, must be good if the author can cope with such an antihero. Duly ordered, will make a change from SF and Viking chop-em thrillers.
    Lawyers. Add Michael Gilbert 'Smallbone deceased' and Cyril Hare.

    Ooh yes, Gilbert's book was one of the better discoveries of buying huge and very cheap box sets of several dozen of the vintage mysteries published by the British Library. Must try Hare though - only read short stoties in the aforesaid BL paperbacks.

    And @DavidL came up with a SF - not murder as such - novel set in a conveyancing writer's practice in Glasgow c. 1960. The Krugg Syndrome by Angus McAllister. Aliens in Glasgow (though an Easterner such as I would always have this sneaky thought, how would they know?).
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703
    Leon said:

    Chris said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This is another reason we should have let Covid rip. It was a once in a lifetime chance to "shuffle off" the very old and the very fat, rebalancing the world

    Instead, we sacrificed the economy to save those with no more than 2 years to live anyway, or stupid people who just can't stop eating doughnuts

    It was insane, and completely counter-Darwinian. And now we shall pay
    Supporters of the Conservative Party should be very careful about what they wish for in terms of killing off the elderly and stupid.
    Touche

    But my loyalty to the "Conservative Party" is about the same as my loyalty to European golf, practically zero, if not actually zero. Or less

    My loyalty is to my fellow humans, my fellow Britons. We have screwed the pooch
    That’s ruff.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
    Nah. It's the entire building AIUI.
    So how is that defined as a commercial premises? Does it have offices in it or something as well?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742

    Thread header: "Could Liz Truss be tempted by an early election?"

    PB commenters: "Of course not, no one would be that stupid"

    Have you heard Liz Truss?

    She'd be totally batshit crazy to go for it.

    I'm thinking it's got to be worth a bet.

    However, I would actually lay, on the grounds that if she doesn't go for it, at least you get a small amount of money to make up for the disappointment of not getting her out.
  • DynamoDynamo Posts: 651
    edited August 2022
    Yes, it would be like 2017. Truss won't win an election, whether she calls one early or waits until the last moment. She is too nasty. Nasty is her default. Imagine someone with foreign policy experience saying the "jury's out" on whether France is a friend or a foe of Britain. Look at the list of foreign secretaries going back to 1970 and there's not a single one who could be imagined as saying anything so f*ckwitted. Apparently she thinks it's her role to "judge" President Macron too. I bet she slurps like hell to royals and oligarchs, for what it's worth - if they're British. I bet she doesn't want to "judge" any of them. The country needs a Labour government but sadly that's not on the horizon. What price then for the Crimean Reconquista?
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454
    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Applies to approx half a million residents in 17k buildings.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-10477033/The-flat-owners-facing-huge-bills-without-energy-price-cap-protection.html
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038

    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    But if they do make record profits this year, something is clearly very wrong with the consumer energy market that needs sorting. Profit isn't a dirty word, but big profits, with no competition, is not good - Adam Smith himself had a lot to say on monopolies and overpowerful corporations.
    See the tweet I posted earlier. The retail energy companies are capped so that they can only make at most 2% profits and of course dozens have gone to the wall.

    The companies that actually get the stuff out of the ground are making a ton of money, but not the same as the retail energy suppliers.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 2,995
    HYUFD said:

    Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities

    Spot on. I would be amazed if we see an election before 2024, unless some major event or incident were to prompt it.
  • pm215pm215 Posts: 926
    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    Sheesh.

    Is that going to be common for all blocks of flats?
    I imagine it will depend on whether the flats are supplied with communal hot water and/or heating, versus whether they have individual gas or electric supplies to each flat which then has its own self-contained hot water and heating arrangements.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770

    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    But if they do make record profits this year, something is clearly very wrong with the consumer energy market that needs sorting. Profit isn't a dirty word, but big profits, with no competition, is not good - Adam Smith himself had a lot to say on monopolies and overpowerful corporations.
    Energy suppliers are going bust left, right and center - so I'm not sure where Santander's "expert" gets his information.

    It is upstream producers - Shell, Apache, Anadarko, etc. - who are making out like banditos.
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746
    rcs1000 said:

    darkage said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/it-s-time-for-the-young-to-pay-for-us-and-stop-complaining/ar-AA113eUt?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=a0659a99488f4d90565aa6c4d1e49f31

    "Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "

    "When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”


    ..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”






    And there you have the Conservatives' massive problem:

    They are dependent on the oldies.

    If they screw over the people who elected them by - you know - acknowledging the problem, then they will be out of power for twenty years.

    But if they continue to screw over the workers, then the situation will continue to worsen, and when we finally do recognize it... it will be so much harder to fix.
    Older people have nowhere to go from the Conservative party though.
    So it is something that the tories arguably are in a position to tackle, but they keep choosing not to.



  • A savvy politician who understood the realities might go early. That isn't Truss.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038
    HYUFD said:

    Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities

    At the moment she is guaranteed two years as PM (well, unless her own MPs decide to ditch her next summer). Why would you gamble that in exchange for possibly getting seven years as PM but with a major risk of being dumped within months of taking office?
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092
    It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    edited August 2022
    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
    Nah. It's the entire building AIUI.
    So how is that defined as a commercial premises? Does it have offices in it or something as well?
    "If there is a communal heating system, even if it is supplying residential premises, it is defined by Ofgem as being commercial. And this is why the energy price cap doesn't apply."
    17 000 blocks apparently.

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-10477033/amp/The-flat-owners-facing-huge-bills-without-energy-price-cap-protection.html
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454
    geoffw said:

    It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.

    They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,787
    geoffw said:

    It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.

    Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,246
    England IMPALING South Africa


    Despite everything, it has been quite a marvellous summer. Travel, cricket, football, sunshine, Florence, Montenegro, wine, picnics, jazz, Ben Stokes, friends, Rome, Regents Park, more wine, Armenia, children, Greece, dancing, laughter, Soho, cigars, Michelangelo, New Orleans by night...

    A perfect summer before the awful storm of winter
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    rcs1000 said:

    Can I suggest an unusual pick for the Dems' VP candidate in 2024 (assuming it is not Ms Harris): Ro Khanna.

    He is an Indian American, and the Congressman who represents Silicon Valley. He's been on the campaign path in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, etc., which is not something you'd normally do if you weren't interested in... a national campaign.

    Because of where is district is, he has been a recipient of donations from some of the richest people in America.

    And his big focus is on bringing manufacturing back to America.

    I think he's going to run for President with the goal of raising his national standing. And I think he's very impressive. Could he win the nomination? Highly unlikely. But he might well grab himself a good job in the next administration. And if - say - Amy Klobucher was the nominee, he would be a perfect VP pick.

    Mentioned on the last thread, when I noted that you can't bet on him at the moment.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
    Nah. It's the entire building AIUI.
    So how is that defined as a commercial premises? Does it have offices in it or something as well?
    "If there is a communal heating system, even if it is supplying residential premises, it is defined by Ofgem as being commercial. And this is why the energy price cap doesn't apply."
    17 000 blocks apparently.
    Bloody hell.

    That's going to be - ugly.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    Nigelb said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Can I suggest an unusual pick for the Dems' VP candidate in 2024 (assuming it is not Ms Harris): Ro Khanna.

    He is an Indian American, and the Congressman who represents Silicon Valley. He's been on the campaign path in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, etc., which is not something you'd normally do if you weren't interested in... a national campaign.

    Because of where is district is, he has been a recipient of donations from some of the richest people in America.

    And his big focus is on bringing manufacturing back to America.

    I think he's going to run for President with the goal of raising his national standing. And I think he's very impressive. Could he win the nomination? Highly unlikely. But he might well grab himself a good job in the next administration. And if - say - Amy Klobucher was the nominee, he would be a perfect VP pick.

    Mentioned on the last thread, when I noted that you can't bet on him at the moment.
    Yes, but I was ASLEEP and didn't see your comment.
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746

    HYUFD said:

    Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities

    At the moment she is guaranteed two years as PM (well, unless her own MPs decide to ditch her next summer). Why would you gamble that in exchange for possibly getting seven years as PM but with a major risk of being dumped within months of taking office?
    On this question, a big factor is that in 2017 Labour was in total disarray under Corbyn and the tories thought they could capitalise on this. Starmer looks a lot more like PM in waiting now.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
    I suspect your and @Leon 's baselines for that are a little different.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,741
    geoffw said:

    It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.

    Today's award for "most ludicrous post" has an early contender.

    Boris Johnson is still Prime Minister - the problem is he's much more popular in the Ukraine for whom he has provided money, weapons and support than he is in the UK for which he has provided some bicycles (in London), "got Brexit done" and not much else.

    Fair enough - it seems there are still a few diehards who will forgive Boris Johnson anything and everything - that doesn't of course include the majority of the British people or the Conservative Parliamentary Party.

    As for these "chicken lickens" - presumably they are the ones who have to pay energy bills - perhaps you aren't one of them?
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    HYUFD said:

    Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities

    At the moment she is guaranteed two years as PM (well, unless her own MPs decide to ditch her next summer). Why would you gamble that in exchange for possibly getting seven years as PM but with a major risk of being dumped within months of taking office?
    How many MPs really believe in her and/or think she will do a good job? My guess between 50-100 with another 150 willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. A big majority on paper but not a strong position.
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092

    geoffw said:

    It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.

    Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
    A post-defeat Russia will be desperate to sell its hydrocarbons.

  • ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
    Nah. It's the entire building AIUI.
    So how is that defined as a commercial premises? Does it have offices in it or something as well?
    The definition is in the Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Act 2018, section 12 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/21/enacted

    “domestic customer” means a customer under a domestic supply contract;

    “domestic supply contract” means a contract (including a deemed supply contract) for the supply of gas or electricity at domestic premises wholly or mainly for domestic purposes;
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    But if they do make record profits this year, something is clearly very wrong with the consumer energy market that needs sorting. Profit isn't a dirty word, but big profits, with no competition, is not good - Adam Smith himself had a lot to say on monopolies and overpowerful corporations.
    Energy suppliers are going bust left, right and center - so I'm not sure where Santander's "expert" gets his information.

    It is upstream producers - Shell, Apache, Anadarko, etc. - who are making out like banditos.
    Well the large renewables operators won't be doing too bad, too.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Anecdote

    I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting

    We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"

    I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed

    After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?

    In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice

    A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
    Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
    That's not pedantry. The man is an expert at selling Santander products, he knows next to nothing about finance beyond what generates him a bonus.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,742
    Stokes declares with the small lead of 264.

    England to lose by 500?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,246
    geoffw said:

    geoffw said:

    It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.

    Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
    A post-defeat Russia will be desperate to sell its hydrocarbons.

    Also, if Russia is ever defeated, I am sure Putin will be toppled shortly after. Or shortly before

    So we would NOT be dealing with Putin
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,911
    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
    Nah. It's the entire building AIUI.
    So how is that defined as a commercial premises? Does it have offices in it or something as well?
    "If there is a communal heating system, even if it is supplying residential premises, it is defined by Ofgem as being commercial. And this is why the energy price cap doesn't apply."
    17 000 blocks apparently.

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-10477033/amp/The-flat-owners-facing-huge-bills-without-energy-price-cap-protection.html
    Approximately 400,000 people in London are affected by this, apparently.

    https://twitter.com/HarryScoffin/status/1563188537415311360
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,787
    geoffw said:

    geoffw said:

    It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.

    Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
    A post-defeat Russia will be desperate to sell its hydrocarbons.
    Maybe, but should we refinance them so they can try again?
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,846
    edited August 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MrEd said:

    Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.

    We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.

    We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.

    Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.

    If not now, then when?

    Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).

    Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
    I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.

    Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.

    Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.

    An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.

    The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.

    If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.

    That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
    My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.

    You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.

    Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
    The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.

    At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.

    And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.

    When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.

    To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.

    Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    HYUFD said:

    Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities

    At the moment she is guaranteed two years as PM (well, unless her own MPs decide to ditch her next summer). Why would you gamble that in exchange for possibly getting seven years as PM but with a major risk of being dumped within months of taking office?
    How many MPs really believe in her and/or think she will do a good job? My guess between 50-100 with another 150 willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. A big majority on paper but not a strong position.
    I think I would go further and say she has less proper support and belief from MPs than any new PM in my lifetime has had when they started.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703
    Enjoying the late summer sun in south Durham, sitting in the back garden enjoying some craft beer, the sun and some bangers from eighties synth superstar Nik Kershaw. Stuff over not heard for years. All crackers.
  • NickyBreakspearNickyBreakspear Posts: 674
    edited August 2022

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    ydoethur said:

    dixiedean said:

    Taz said:

    dixiedean said:

    Just discovered my block of flats is not subject to the price cap, but counts as a "commercial" property, for gas for heating and hot water.

    That’s a ‘happy coincidence’ for the energy providers.

    Does that apply to the communal areas or the whole block including the residential properties ?
    Includes residential properties. Such as mine. The landlord has agreed to keep it at the cap until March 2023. But standing charge at 70p a day from October. Trebled.
    So is it because you're a tenant then?
    Nah. It's the entire building AIUI.
    So how is that defined as a commercial premises? Does it have offices in it or something as well?
    The definition is in the Domestic Gas and Electricity (Tariff Cap) Act 2018, section 12 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/21/enacted

    “domestic customer” means a customer under a domestic supply contract;

    “domestic supply contract” means a contract (including a deemed supply contract) for the supply of gas or electricity at domestic premises wholly or mainly for domestic purposes;
    Ofgem has interpreted this in a 2002 document https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2052_supplyguidanceapril.pdf

    Ofgem has been asked by suppliers and Industrial and Commercial (I&C) customers to clarify its interpretation of the terms ‘domestic customer’ and ‘domestic premises’ as they are used in the gas and electricity supply licences. In particular, we are asked how they apply to commercial businesses providing residential services, such as nursing or care homes, and to residential landlords, including local authorities. These businesses and landlords have to date benefited from the wider pricing options available to I&C customers.

    Ofgem believes that changes in the definition of ‘domestic customer’ and ‘domestic premises’ were not intended to extend regulatory protection appropriate for domestic customers to I&C customers, whether or not they are in business to provide residential or accommodation services. Ofgem believes that the provision of such services should not be regarded as a ‘domestic purpose’. Consequently, where gas and electricity is supplied in connection with services on a commercial basis (including residential or accommodation services), Ofgem expects that I&C contract terms will continue to apply.

    Where the interpretation of ‘domestic customer’ and ‘domestic premises’ remains in dispute, Ofgem may, upon application and if appropriate, determine whether a customer should be treated as domestic or I&C.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    HYUFD said:

    Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities

    "2024 at the earliest"

    If she's planning on having it after 2024, we might have a teensy bit of problem.
This discussion has been closed.