The dedication of those up and about at 4am (UK) to write lengthy contributions on the virtues of private vs public ownership is to be admired.
The problem isn't private vs public but foreign vs domestic. Many of our current problems with utilities stem from the incomprehensible decision to allow foreign companies to acquire controlling interests in UK infrastructure.
Quite apart from the security aspects, the issue then becomes the UK consumer is a cash cow. The company owning our infrastructure charges UK consumers more so the consumers in the country from which the ownership originates can get subsidised power or water. Thus, we pay more while others pay less.
We need to break the foreign ownership of any and all companies involved in the provision of utilities in the UK and then look at infrastructure - fortunately, the Government is getting the railways back from foreign-owned operators and should now be looking at British run private companies to operate the services.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
And that, in a way, is the question.
We know roughly "what works" in terms of generating the prosperity that allows a town, region or nation to afford nice things. In rough terms, it's cities with enough population density to support trams and metros so that people can commute to service jobs in offices. Then everything else in the economy flows from that.
Places more like London, Manchester, Edinburgh. We know people want to live there, because property prices are so high. But it means social change, and that's traumatic.
We're seeing it in Romford since the opening of the Elizabeth Line. Too often that social change is callous and cruel. But how seriously do we all want to be rich?
I've lived in Leith for ~25 years and seen massive change. I was at the opening party for a new hip bar on Leith walk back in 2004, it had taken over the site of an old-mans-pub, during the event one of the old regulars came in and took station at the bar for his usual half and nip. He looked lost, and frankly horrified at the cost of his usual (and at the age of the new clientele). he quietly finished his drinks and walked out. I felt sorry for the chap.
Leith for a time was described as the Shoreditch of the north, which I always thought undersold the place.
The New Kirk Gate still has quality street theatre, for local colour*
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
A counter argument is that it was too little regulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which in turn led to the unusual conditions you describe. I'm not defending the regulations you are criticising, but I think we underestimate how much 2008 f***ed everything up and 2008 was a classic case of deregulation gone wrong.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
Says the person who thinks no one normal gives a 'flying fuck' about the 26000 children killed in Gaza.....
Withdraw that comment. You are confusing me with another poster. I have never said this. I described this the other day as a tragedy.
Though perhaps it is time for a reminder that you defended a person who drugged, raped and sodomised a child then ran away because of his art. So you are part of the problem.
It's your holier -than -thou hypocricy I find loathsome. You endorsed a post which celebrated the killing of 86,000 people of which 26000 were children under the age of 14. Whatever I might have said about Roman Polanski 10 years ago think you have well and trully trumped it.
Amazon v High street. Just bought from Amazon a great corner sofa. It arrived in 4 vacuum boxes in 3 days - took all of 10 minutes to assemble. Looks great and really comfy. Cost €600. Way cheaper than crappy high street options which don't sell them. It's a no brainer.
Well yeah. Amazon is always going to beat a High Street shop for a sofa.
You either 1) level the playing field via tax and delivery fees or 2) accept that High Streets can’t survive based on a sofa purchase every two decades or so and change what they are for. 2) is far preferable IMO, Amazon’s tax dodging aside.
My High Street (10 minute walk away) has removed almost all car parking, put in cycle infrastructure, and built a tram line. It’s busier than ever before and my flat’s value has soared.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
Says the person who thinks no one normal gives a 'flying fuck' about the 26000 children killed in Gaza.....
Withdraw that comment. You are confusing me with another poster. I have never said this. I described this the other day as a tragedy.
Though perhaps it is time for a reminder that you defended a person who drugged, raped and sodomised a child then ran away because of his art. So you are part of the problem.
'You 'liked' a post which said 'No one normal gives a flying fuck about Gaza'
This puts you in the Robert Kenyon category whose crime was 'liking' a disgusting post about Carol Vordeman.
You are utterly obsessive about Gaza, which is funny because you don't give a flying fuck about far worse tragedies like what is happening in Ukraine which you justified by saying incorrectly that Russia has a claim over Ukraine.
So get off your high horse.
What has happened in Gaza is a terrible tragedy, a tragedy caused by Hamas. That you are so obsessive about that, while ignoring the role of Hamas (and the role of Hezbollah in Lebanon) while making excuses for malign actors like Russia shows what your real priority is.
Roger's high horse gives him a great view of the moral high-ground from up there...
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
There's high density and there's high density iykwim. (Seems like I keep banging on about Leith, but...) Around here we have a mixture of old (~18thC) Tenements, f-ugly 1960s flats, and down by the shore lots of bonded warehouse conversions and new(ish) build apartment complexes. And seemingly endless construction of student accommodation, where are all these bloody students coming from? The tenements are (mostly) lovely, the new builds mostly tiny and overpriced.
What we don't really have is affordable family homes. Lots and lots of 2 bed flats, but little in the 3+ bed area that most people can afford. And given that this is Edinburgh, you can't afford a 3+ bed property in the outskirts either, until you hit the likes of Penicuik.
Amazon v High street. Just bought from Amazon a great corner sofa. It arrived in 4 vacuum boxes in 3 days - took all of 10 minutes to assemble. Looks great and really comfy. Cost €600. Way cheaper than crappy high street options which don't sell them. It's a no brainer.
I read that as arriving over the course of three days. I have this image of you setting it up in stages...
Indeed, but this is nothing new. I remember as a kid I was most upset when the newsagent wouldn't sell me sweets because he claimed my £10 monopoly note apparently wasn't real money.
Amazon v High street. Just bought from Amazon a great corner sofa. It arrived in 4 vacuum boxes in 3 days - took all of 10 minutes to assemble. Looks great and really comfy. Cost €600. Way cheaper than crappy high street options which don't sell them. It's a no brainer.
Well yeah. Amazon is always going to beat a High Street shop for a sofa.
You either 1) level the playing field via tax and delivery fees or 2) accept that High Streets can’t survive based on a sofa purchase every two decades or so and change what they are for. 2) is far preferable IMO, Amazon’s tax dodging aside.
My High Street (10 minute walk away) has removed almost all car parking, put in cycle infrastructure, and built a tram line. It’s busier than ever before and my flat’s value has soared.
The other reason the high street can't compete with Amazon is that a high street store will be selling goods that comply with regulations. An amazon purchase might not.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
Great idea, but what happens if the publisher is, say, in Vietnam and the posts complained of refer to activity in UK?
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
I used to collect the (really obvious) fake pound coins...
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
I used to collect the (really obvious) fake pound coins...
They didn't need to look like pound coins to work in vending machines. Just the right size and weight. Was a big issue on the T&W Metro.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
A counter argument is that it was too little regulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which in turn led to the unusual conditions you describe. I'm not defending the regulations you are criticising, but I think we underestimate how much 2008 f***ed everything up and 2008 was a classic case of deregulation gone wrong.
In the immediate aftermath of 2008, pension funds and local authorities were the only two groups in the commercial property and investment property markets.
We still struggle with pensions or rather with the issue of ensuring as many of us as possible can maintain a decent standard of living once we have stopped working. I've been very fortunate - I suspect others on here have. For some, it's been a matter of adroit investment choices but for many they really on the capital asset of their property to see them into their dotage - downsizing and realising the capital receipt.
I really do worry for those in their 30s and 40s now and how it will be for them thirty or more years down the track. I fear the stock market ponzi scheme will collapse at some stage and obviously property won't guarantee the return it has for previous generations.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
If they use an algorithm, making them, legally, the publisher.
After all, newspapers have always been liable for the contents of the letters they publish.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
It's one of the few places I pay cash, if she's in a good mood I get a discount. And I do carry £20-£40 "just in case", just as I take a physical card in case Google Pay doesn't work.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
He does a good job with scissors but I'm a little iffy about his command of electronics.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
A counter argument is that it was too little regulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which in turn led to the unusual conditions you describe. I'm not defending the regulations you are criticising, but I think we underestimate how much 2008 f***ed everything up and 2008 was a classic case of deregulation gone wrong.
In the immediate aftermath of 2008, pension funds and local authorities were the only two groups in the commercial property and investment property markets.
We still struggle with pensions or rather with the issue of ensuring as many of us as possible can maintain a decent standard of living once we have stopped working. I've been very fortunate - I suspect others on here have. For some, it's been a matter of adroit investment choices but for many they really on the capital asset of their property to see them into their dotage - downsizing and realising the capital receipt.
I really do worry for those in their 30s and 40s now and how it will be for them thirty or more years down the track. I fear the stock market ponzi scheme will collapse at some stage and obviously property won't guarantee the return it has for previous generations.
The other area of concern, talking of financial regulation, is cryptocurrency, but with Farage getting millions and Trump getting hundreds of millions, there are political forces pushing for even less regulation of what is already an under-regulated area.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
I saw a self-employed person complaining his clients pay him in £50 notes but he can't pass them in shops. I refrained from pointing out he could pay them into the bank* but presumably he is trying to hide his income from the taxman.
*yes I know that's becoming more difficult but if I had several hundred pounds in cash I'd make the effort
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
I agree with you about male nature, and I am a male. I have three daughters, three granddaughters and am married - to the same person for 47 years. I don't agree that my demands are holy writ, that women are ethically invisible or that the demands of decent behaviour breach my human rights.
What would you like me to do next to 'try and stop this'? Serious question.
You are a decent man. As are many.
I would like to see much longer sentences for such crimes. And for less serious crimes such as voyeurism and indecent exposure. I would like to see accessing such forums made a crime and people imprisoned it for it. I would like to see the forums hosting such sites made responsible in a meaningful way. I would like a much more serious discussion about the effects of violent porn on our young men and women and society and what we should do about this. I would like young men taught that there is no safe way of "choking" a woman during sex, that men should not be trying to choke a woman at all during sex or at any other time. I would like a society where understanding that when a woman says no, this is a complete sentence and this understanding needs to run through every policy, every practice not simply recited as a mantra while our society's actions show the opposite. I would like a society where men like you, like my father, my husband, my brother feel emboldened to call out the appalling behaviour of so many men - not just crimes like this but a fundamental disrespect for and disregard of women at all stages of life and in so many small ways.
There is no one single action but there are lots of small iterative steps that could be done to encourage and push boys and men into their better selves and lots of steps to come down hard on bad behaviour from the moment it starts.
Ignoring the question-begging around whether longer sentences work, a couple of points:-
Teach your sons that no means no. But don't forget also to teach your daughters that no has to mean no rather than not yet but if you play your cards right, maybe later on and isn't this champagne nice? Because the latter undermines the former.
Second, conflating minor offences with major crimes might not be helpful. Recently Jess Phillips (then Minister responsible for ending violence against women and girls) was criticised when she appeared to equate rape with someone sitting too close on the tube.
Third, availability of hard core and harmful porn is a problem, partly now being addressed through age verification. But how many were driven to these sites because soft core porn was made unavailable? Page 3 of the Sun may have demeaned women but it also allowed young men to see breasts without also seeing women being choked.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
If they use an algorithm, making them, legally, the publisher.
After all, newspapers have always been liable for the contents of the letters they publish.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
But this appears to be about forums dedicated to illegal or dubious activity. This isn't general social media with lots going on.
As long as you are sure that there is no deceit, fakery, scams, mistakes, disappearing money etc in the digital/online/card/phone/bitcoin worlds this makes good sense because then all those people using the systems would not be 'part of the problem'. You seem sure you are not part of the problem whereas I am, using cash sometimes. I am less sure.
The dedication of those up and about at 4am (UK) to write lengthy contributions on the virtues of private vs public ownership is to be admired.
The problem isn't private vs public but foreign vs domestic. Many of our current problems with utilities stem from the incomprehensible decision to allow foreign companies to acquire controlling interests in UK infrastructure.
Quite apart from the security aspects, the issue then becomes the UK consumer is a cash cow. The company owning our infrastructure charges UK consumers more so the consumers in the country from which the ownership originates can get subsidised power or water. Thus, we pay more while others pay less.
We need to break the foreign ownership of any and all companies involved in the provision of utilities in the UK and then look at infrastructure - fortunately, the Government is getting the railways back from foreign-owned operators and should now be looking at British run private companies to operate the services.
It's also (perhaps more importantly) about regulation in the sense of doing things. And not just creating mountains of paperwork. And being properly independent.
In the case of the privatised water industry, the regulator repeatedly waved through the financial stuff.
In the case of the publicly owned water industry, they got the government to write them exemptions for water quality etc - because investment would have gone on the National Debt and the politicians needed the National Debt to support their spending to win the next election. There was no regulator.
Both modes have problems. If we don't learn from the past, we will repeat it.
Amazon v High street. Just bought from Amazon a great corner sofa. It arrived in 4 vacuum boxes in 3 days - took all of 10 minutes to assemble. Looks great and really comfy. Cost €600. Way cheaper than crappy high street options which don't sell them. It's a no brainer.
I read that as arriving over the course of three days. I have this image of you setting it up in stages...
The pieces did come in 3 consecutive days and I undid the vacuum in 3minutes and they fit together perfectly. Practically zero effort on my part!
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
I agree with you about male nature, and I am a male. I have three daughters, three granddaughters and am married - to the same person for 47 years. I don't agree that my demands are holy writ, that women are ethically invisible or that the demands of decent behaviour breach my human rights.
What would you like me to do next to 'try and stop this'? Serious question.
You are a decent man. As are many.
I would like to see much longer sentences for such crimes. And for less serious crimes such as voyeurism and indecent exposure. I would like to see accessing such forums made a crime and people imprisoned it for it. I would like to see the forums hosting such sites made responsible in a meaningful way. I would like a much more serious discussion about the effects of violent porn on our young men and women and society and what we should do about this. I would like young men taught that there is no safe way of "choking" a woman during sex, that men should not be trying to choke a woman at all during sex or at any other time. I would like a society where understanding that when a woman says no, this is a complete sentence and this understanding needs to run through every policy, every practice not simply recited as a mantra while our society's actions show the opposite. I would like a society where men like you, like my father, my husband, my brother feel emboldened to call out the appalling behaviour of so many men - not just crimes like this but a fundamental disrespect for and disregard of women at all stages of life and in so many small ways.
There is no one single action but there are lots of small iterative steps that could be done to encourage and push boys and men into their better selves and lots of steps to come down hard on bad behaviour from the moment it starts.
Ignoring the question-begging around whether longer sentences work, a couple of points:-
Teach your sons that no means no. But don't forget also to teach your daughters that no has to mean no rather than not yet but if you play your cards right, maybe later on and isn't this champagne nice? Because the latter undermines the former.
Surely this goes against hundreds of years of social conditioning that women need to be persuaded. "Yes, let's fuck" is deprecated, instead she has to pretend she isn't interested and has to be persuaded/coerced/emotionally blackmailed.
I don't understand it myself, I couldn't respect anyone I could tell what to do, but maybe that is why I have mostly been single.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
The junior school fete. (This afternoon). The coffee morning run by women over 80 in a village with a population of 300. (Next week). The farmer's wife who does the occasional haircut. (Two weeks time). The church collection plate at a wedding. (Next month). Collecting tins for Hospice at Home (September). Children buying cheap confections in sweet shops which 65 years ago were infinitely attractive to me but not now. The far north rural and small town world I inhabit which has its lovely aspects.
The dedication of those up and about at 4am (UK) to write lengthy contributions on the virtues of private vs public ownership is to be admired.
The problem isn't private vs public but foreign vs domestic. Many of our current problems with utilities stem from the incomprehensible decision to allow foreign companies to acquire controlling interests in UK infrastructure.
Quite apart from the security aspects, the issue then becomes the UK consumer is a cash cow. The company owning our infrastructure charges UK consumers more so the consumers in the country from which the ownership originates can get subsidised power or water. Thus, we pay more while others pay less.
We need to break the foreign ownership of any and all companies involved in the provision of utilities in the UK and then look at infrastructure - fortunately, the Government is getting the railways back from foreign-owned operators and should now be looking at British run private companies to operate the services.
It's also (perhaps more importantly) about regulation in the sense of doing things. And not just creating mountains of paperwork. And being properly independent.
In the case of the privatised water industry, the regulator repeatedly waved through the financial stuff.
In the case of the publicly owned water industry, they got the government to write them exemptions for water quality etc - because investment would have gone on the National Debt and the politicians needed the National Debt to support their spending to win the next election. There was no regulator.
Both modes have problems. If we don't learn from the past, we will repeat it.
I do agree getting the regulatory balance right is an issue. The truth is noone likes to see untreated or part-treated sewage going into rivers or the sea and we also know the level of leaks remains a problem.
Sorting that out requires investment which has to come from somewhere - indeed, that's true of all infrastructure including transport.
The problem is when you have a privately-owned company which looks like it is fleecing the UK consumer in the interests of shareholders, people don't take kindly to it. They demand tighter control, more regulation so it comes back to the kind of capitalism we have and the kind of companies that in turn creates.
Capitalism can't just be about making money - it hasn't always been.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
But this appears to be about forums dedicated to illegal or dubious activity. This isn't general social media with lots going on.
OK. So maybe the issue should be the lead article/purpose of the forum, and I agree that action can be taken on that. But if, buried in an otherwise inoffensive forum, I express a repulsive, perhaps illegal, opinion, should any action be taken? If I make a habit of it, the forum owner might notice and ban me, but otherwise, I'm not sure there is much to be done.
The dedication of those up and about at 4am (UK) to write lengthy contributions on the virtues of private vs public ownership is to be admired.
The problem isn't private vs public but foreign vs domestic. Many of our current problems with utilities stem from the incomprehensible decision to allow foreign companies to acquire controlling interests in UK infrastructure.
Quite apart from the security aspects, the issue then becomes the UK consumer is a cash cow. The company owning our infrastructure charges UK consumers more so the consumers in the country from which the ownership originates can get subsidised power or water. Thus, we pay more while others pay less.
We need to break the foreign ownership of any and all companies involved in the provision of utilities in the UK and then look at infrastructure - fortunately, the Government is getting the railways back from foreign-owned operators and should now be looking at British run private companies to operate the services.
I think you're perhaps confusing dedication with summertime insomnia ?
In the case of large monopoly utilities, public v private and domestic v foreign tend very strongly to be one and the same thing.
Quite possibly the only way to bring about what you suggest would be to have UK pension funds own them. Would they do that willingly ? Perhaps, but I suspect would need significant persuasion of one form or another.
But I agree entirely with the thrust of your argument, and have repeatedly made the same point myself.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
If they use an algorithm, making them, legally, the publisher.
After all, newspapers have always been liable for the contents of the letters they publish.
If they are prioritising the conversations, then they are responsible for them.
It's like the pub owner saying to other customers "Come over here and listen to this chap".
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time.
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
A counter argument is that it was too little regulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which in turn led to the unusual conditions you describe. I'm not defending the regulations you are criticising, but I think we underestimate how much 2008 f***ed everything up and 2008 was a classic case of deregulation gone wrong.
In the immediate aftermath of 2008, pension funds and local authorities were the only two groups in the commercial property and investment property markets.
We still struggle with pensions or rather with the issue of ensuring as many of us as possible can maintain a decent standard of living once we have stopped working. I've been very fortunate - I suspect others on here have. For some, it's been a matter of adroit investment choices but for many they really on the capital asset of their property to see them into their dotage - downsizing and realising the capital receipt.
I really do worry for those in their 30s and 40s now and how it will be for them thirty or more years down the track. I fear the stock market ponzi scheme will collapse at some stage and obviously property won't guarantee the return it has for previous generations.
The other area of concern, talking of financial regulation, is cryptocurrency, but with Farage getting millions and Trump getting hundreds of millions, there are political forces pushing for even less regulation of what is already an under-regulated area.
I'm highly (and not unpleasantly) conscious of hurtling towards 'off the pace old fart' status but I simply do not see the problem that 'crypto' has emerged to resolve. Afaics its utility is confined to criminals, speculators and hucksters.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
A counter argument is that it was too little regulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which in turn led to the unusual conditions you describe. I'm not defending the regulations you are criticising, but I think we underestimate how much 2008 f***ed everything up and 2008 was a classic case of deregulation gone wrong.
In the immediate aftermath of 2008, pension funds and local authorities were the only two groups in the commercial property and investment property markets.
We still struggle with pensions or rather with the issue of ensuring as many of us as possible can maintain a decent standard of living once we have stopped working. I've been very fortunate - I suspect others on here have. For some, it's been a matter of adroit investment choices but for many they really on the capital asset of their property to see them into their dotage - downsizing and realising the capital receipt.
I really do worry for those in their 30s and 40s now and how it will be for them thirty or more years down the track. I fear the stock market ponzi scheme will collapse at some stage and obviously property won't guarantee the return it has for previous generations.
The other area of concern, talking of financial regulation, is cryptocurrency, but with Farage getting millions and Trump getting hundreds of millions, there are political forces pushing for even less regulation of what is already an under-regulated area.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
Conversations on Social Media or web forums. They are published and broadcast to the world, and we see they are also around forever, not ephemeral.
They are as published as any opinion piece or letter in the conventional press or media, and the company hosting should be as liable.
The dedication of those up and about at 4am (UK) to write lengthy contributions on the virtues of private vs public ownership is to be admired.
The problem isn't private vs public but foreign vs domestic. Many of our current problems with utilities stem from the incomprehensible decision to allow foreign companies to acquire controlling interests in UK infrastructure.
Quite apart from the security aspects, the issue then becomes the UK consumer is a cash cow. The company owning our infrastructure charges UK consumers more so the consumers in the country from which the ownership originates can get subsidised power or water. Thus, we pay more while others pay less.
We need to break the foreign ownership of any and all companies involved in the provision of utilities in the UK and then look at infrastructure - fortunately, the Government is getting the railways back from foreign-owned operators and should now be looking at British run private companies to operate the services.
It's also (perhaps more importantly) about regulation in the sense of doing things. And not just creating mountains of paperwork. And being properly independent.
In the case of the privatised water industry, the regulator repeatedly waved through the financial stuff.
In the case of the publicly owned water industry, they got the government to write them exemptions for water quality etc - because investment would have gone on the National Debt and the politicians needed the National Debt to support their spending to win the next election. There was no regulator.
Both modes have problems. If we don't learn from the past, we will repeat it.
I do agree getting the regulatory balance right is an issue. The truth is noone likes to see untreated or part-treated sewage going into rivers or the sea and we also know the level of leaks remains a problem.
Sorting that out requires investment which has to come from somewhere - indeed, that's true of all infrastructure including transport.
The problem is when you have a privately-owned company which looks like it is fleecing the UK consumer in the interests of shareholders, people don't take kindly to it. They demand tighter control, more regulation so it comes back to the kind of capitalism we have and the kind of companies that in turn creates.
Capitalism can't just be about making money - it hasn't always been.
The most effective societies are a balance between capitalism and the state providing the laws, protection and infrastructure within which capitalists can compete and innovate. It's a balance.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
Your analogy breaks down, Nick, when one considers the following
The crucial difference is that the landlord of a pub doesn’t: - algorithmically amplify the loudest conversations, - recommend them to strangers, - monetise engagement with them, - or deliberately optimise for people staying in the pub as long as possible.
Social media companies do precisely that.
They’re no longer merely providing the room; they’re influencing which conversations are heard, by whom, and at what scale. That makes them something rather more than a passive host.
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time.
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
If they use an algorithm, making them, legally, the publisher.
After all, newspapers have always been liable for the contents of the letters they publish.
If they are prioritising the conversations, then they are responsible for them.
It's like the pub owner saying to other customers "Come over here and listen to this chap".
Problem is the US (because of Trump) sees any such introduction of editorial rules as anti-competitive. At which point he starts talking about 100% tariffs on all exports.
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time.
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
Amazon v High street. Just bought from Amazon a great corner sofa. It arrived in 4 vacuum boxes in 3 days - took all of 10 minutes to assemble. Looks great and really comfy. Cost €600. Way cheaper than crappy high street options which don't sell them. It's a no brainer.
Well yeah. Amazon is always going to beat a High Street shop for a sofa.
You either 1) level the playing field via tax and delivery fees or 2) accept that High Streets can’t survive based on a sofa purchase every two decades or so and change what they are for. 2) is far preferable IMO, Amazon’s tax dodging aside.
My High Street (10 minute walk away) has removed almost all car parking, put in cycle infrastructure, and built a tram line. It’s busier than ever before and my flat’s value has soared.
The other reason the high street can't compete with Amazon is that a high street store will be selling goods that comply with regulations. An amazon purchase might not.
I avoid Amazon due to their poor controls. Co-mingling where you think you are buying brand A but it was a rip off copy has been rife so unless you want tat (and there is a lot of it) go to a retailer where at least you have a comeback (unlike complaining to Amazon)
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
Amazon v High street. Just bought from Amazon a great corner sofa. It arrived in 4 vacuum boxes in 3 days - took all of 10 minutes to assemble. Looks great and really comfy. Cost €600. Way cheaper than crappy high street options which don't sell them. It's a no brainer.
Well yeah. Amazon is always going to beat a High Street shop for a sofa.
You either 1) level the playing field via tax and delivery fees or 2) accept that High Streets can’t survive based on a sofa purchase every two decades or so and change what they are for. 2) is far preferable IMO, Amazon’s tax dodging aside.
My High Street (10 minute walk away) has removed almost all car parking, put in cycle infrastructure, and built a tram line. It’s busier than ever before and my flat’s value has soared.
The other reason the high street can't compete with Amazon is that a high street store will be selling goods that comply with regulations. An amazon purchase might not.
I avoid Amazon due to their poor controls. Co-mingling where you think you are buying brand A but it was a rip off copy has been rife so unless you want tat (and there is a lot of it) go to a retailer where at least you have a comeback (unlike complaining to Amazon)
Co-mingling is disappearing because even Amazon has discovered it's too much risk...
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
I think that a good part of the solution is making websites and hosting companies as liable for what they publish as legacy publishers.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
The problem is that social media platforms are the electronic equivalent of conversations. If someone you're chatting to in a pub offers a repulsive, even illegal, opinion, what do you do? Loudly disagree? Move on? I bet you don't call the police. The publisher of the website is like the owner of the pub where you're chatting, except that they have perhaps several thousand guests, so can't easily follow all the conversations. You simply can't expect them to follow and act on every conversation, although the police could get involved if the discussion was led by the lead article on the site.
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
Conversations on Social Media or web forums. They are published and broadcast to the world, and we see they are also around forever, not ephemeral.
They are as published as any opinion piece or letter in the conventional press or media, and the company hosting should be as liable.
Agree. Social media sites to which a large number of people can contribute (including PB) are not a naturally occurring phenomenon like the weather, the exist because people want them to. In the case of the big players they exist to make an awful lot of money for some already plutocratically wealthy people. (PB, I imagine, is not an example of this, and also seems to me to take care over highly offensive or libellous material.)
This is power and economic power on an intergalactic scale without lawful accountability. No ordinary person could get away with it.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
A counter argument is that it was too little regulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which in turn led to the unusual conditions you describe. I'm not defending the regulations you are criticising, but I think we underestimate how much 2008 f***ed everything up and 2008 was a classic case of deregulation gone wrong.
In the immediate aftermath of 2008, pension funds and local authorities were the only two groups in the commercial property and investment property markets.
We still struggle with pensions or rather with the issue of ensuring as many of us as possible can maintain a decent standard of living once we have stopped working. I've been very fortunate - I suspect others on here have. For some, it's been a matter of adroit investment choices but for many they really on the capital asset of their property to see them into their dotage - downsizing and realising the capital receipt.
I really do worry for those in their 30s and 40s now and how it will be for them thirty or more years down the track. I fear the stock market ponzi scheme will collapse at some stage and obviously property won't guarantee the return it has for previous generations.
The other area of concern, talking of financial regulation, is cryptocurrency, but with Farage getting millions and Trump getting hundreds of millions, there are political forces pushing for even less regulation of what is already an under-regulated area.
We have not given him the chance. The issue of what he would do if he could remains open. It could always be added to to the list, like banning refugee black mayors if Goodwin has his way.
It's not a very good argument. Basically, it's saying that in the short term, it's easy to introduce an ordinal system on the current constituencies. There are two common and similar ways of doing this: AV and SV. AV was rejected in a referendum, so why not pick SV. It's also what we use for Mayors.
I think the argument that a referendum rejected AV, but the very similar SV is OK is sophistry. AV is also clearly superior to SV: it better represents voters' wants, it's easier to understand.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
A counter argument is that it was too little regulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, which in turn led to the unusual conditions you describe. I'm not defending the regulations you are criticising, but I think we underestimate how much 2008 f***ed everything up and 2008 was a classic case of deregulation gone wrong.
In the immediate aftermath of 2008, pension funds and local authorities were the only two groups in the commercial property and investment property markets.
We still struggle with pensions or rather with the issue of ensuring as many of us as possible can maintain a decent standard of living once we have stopped working. I've been very fortunate - I suspect others on here have. For some, it's been a matter of adroit investment choices but for many they really on the capital asset of their property to see them into their dotage - downsizing and realising the capital receipt.
I really do worry for those in their 30s and 40s now and how it will be for them thirty or more years down the track. I fear the stock market ponzi scheme will collapse at some stage and obviously property won't guarantee the return it has for previous generations.
The other area of concern, talking of financial regulation, is cryptocurrency, but with Farage getting millions and Trump getting hundreds of millions, there are political forces pushing for even less regulation of what is already an under-regulated area.
We have not given him the chance. The issue of what he would do if he could remains open. It could always be added to to the list, like banning refugee black mayors if Goodwin has his way.
The PM does not possess pardon powers. Other than that, I should have said "he has not yet..".
'4 July marks 250yrs of US independence. YouGov finds…
- 10% of Brits think independence was a bad thing - 53% view George Washington favourably - Over its history, 28% say the US has been more a force for bad in the world vs 38% a force for good - But 64% see the US as a force for bad *today* - 35% think Trump has permanently changed America'
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time.
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time.
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time.
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
The benefits of devolution are: 1. Decisions made locally are likely to be better informed of local problems and opportunities. 2. The people responsible for implementing them will be more motivated having been involved in the decision making.
There is an additional benefit. It encourages innovation rather than one central size fits all.
But the downside is that there will be losers as well as winners.
The solution is glocalisation - devolution within a strong but light global framework consisting of: 1. Minimum standards 2. Crucially, an effective method of sharing best practice
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
The benefits of devolution are: 1. Decisions made locally are likely to be better informed of local problems and opportunities. 2. The people responsible for implementing them will be more motivated having been involved in the decision making.
There is an additional benefit. It encourages innovation rather than one central size fits all.
But the downside is that there will be losers as well as winners.
The solution is glocalisation - devolution within a strong but light global framework consisting of: 1. Minimum standards 2. Crucially, an effective method of sharing best practice
anyone using the term 'postcode lottery' in a new highly devolved UK, needs taking outside and shooting.
A 'postcode lottery' is exactly what you would expect when everything is not dictated from the middle.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
And private spaces are superior to forced public interaction.
We caught a cab back from the Toon. Driver was a lovely chap. Wouldn’t shut up.
I find taxis intensely claustrophobic. I'd much rather take a bus in most circumstances.
Same here, especially one that drops off on the estate. Our problem last night was a long walk when we got back, and we’d had a late lunch and were well refreshed.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
The junior school fete. (This afternoon). The coffee morning run by women over 80 in a village with a population of 300. (Next week). The farmer's wife who does the occasional haircut. (Two weeks time). The church collection plate at a wedding. (Next month). Collecting tins for Hospice at Home (September). Children buying cheap confections in sweet shops which 65 years ago were infinitely attractive to me but not now. The far north rural and small town world I inhabit which has its lovely aspects.
The shops which wish to avoid tax by keeping trade off the books?
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
I saw a self-employed person complaining his clients pay him in £50 notes but he can't pass them in shops. I refrained from pointing out he could pay them into the bank* but presumably he is trying to hide his income from the taxman.
*yes I know that's becoming more difficult but if I had several hundred pounds in cash I'd make the effort
Or he wants to avoid bank charges by paying in the cash.
Gift link as balance of payments is a recurring PB topic.
A good article, made better by it reinforcing my intellectual priors thus:
Balance of payments. We need to stop selling British assets and business to foreigners. There's no point in making foreigners rich and ourselves poorer
Deregulation. We have no growth and any money generated goes to pay off debts. In such an environment the only way we can generate growth is to deregulate.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
<cough>Holyrood</cough>
I like the idea of devolving power, in theory. The problem isn’t devolution per se, it’s duplication. We rarely remove a layer of government when we create another, so powers become shared, blurred and slower to exercise. We’ve added another abstraction layer without refactoring the architecture. Holyrood is an interesting example. It has demonstrated both that devolved government can make decisions better suited to local priorities, and that devolution doesn’t magically produce better politicians or better policy. It merely moves accountability closer to home.
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time.
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
How much does VVP pay you to spout this propaganda?
The first bit isn't necessarily propaganda. The counteroffensive was indeed a blunder, or a series of blunders, but the story around it is not at all clear, and it's not as though any of the protagonists (including the US) has published a blow by blow, other than as part of efforts to exculpate themselves from blame.
As the war hasn't finished it's hardly surprising that a lot of people won't volunteer information.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
The benefits of devolution are: 1. Decisions made locally are likely to be better informed of local problems and opportunities. 2. The people responsible for implementing them will be more motivated having been involved in the decision making.
There is an additional benefit. It encourages innovation rather than one central size fits all.
But the downside is that there will be losers as well as winners.
The solution is glocalisation - devolution within a strong but light global framework consisting of: 1. Minimum standards 2. Crucially, an effective method of sharing best practice
anyone using the term 'postcode lottery' in a new highly devolved UK, needs taking outside and shooting.
A 'postcode lottery' is exactly what you would expect when everything is not dictated from the middle.
Ah but the British public are absolutely opposed to two things;
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
And private spaces are superior to forced public interaction.
We caught a cab back from the Toon. Driver was a lovely chap. Wouldn’t shut up.
I find taxis intensely claustrophobic. I'd much rather take a bus in most circumstances.
Same here, especially one that drops off on the estate. Our problem last night was a long walk when we got back, and we’d had a late lunch and were well refreshed.
Public transport links from here are amazing. I'm even a grudging fan of the tram (though still fuming about the cost/overrun/disruption). It's very easy to take this for granted until I experience how crap it can be elsewhere.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
The benefits of devolution are: 1. Decisions made locally are likely to be better informed of local problems and opportunities. 2. The people responsible for implementing them will be more motivated having been involved in the decision making.
There is an additional benefit. It encourages innovation rather than one central size fits all.
But the downside is that there will be losers as well as winners.
The solution is glocalisation - devolution within a strong but light global framework consisting of: 1. Minimum standards 2. Crucially, an effective method of sharing best practice
anyone using the term 'postcode lottery' in a new highly devolved UK, needs taking outside and shooting.
A 'postcode lottery' is exactly what you would expect when everything is not dictated from the middle.
Ah but the British public are absolutely opposed to two things;
A “Post Code Lottery!” And “One Size Fits All!”
The two calls that sum up what they want are;
“We Want More!” And “ Make it Go Away!”
Peter
People hate a postcode lottery when they’re told it’s a one-size-fits-all national service.
If power and money were genuinely devolved, I suspect people would, if not welcome the lottery, at least understand it and know who to hold accountable. That’s the trade-off with local democracy.
Gift link as balance of payments is a recurring PB topic.
A good article, made better by it reinforcing my intellectual priors thus:
Balance of payments. We need to stop selling British assets and business to foreigners. There's no point in making foreigners rich and ourselves poorer
Deregulation. We have no growth and any money generated goes to pay off debts. In such an environment the only way we can generate growth is to deregulate.
Speaking of the 80s coming back into fashion, my daughter has started looking like something out of The Breakfast Club.
When the history of the invasion of Ukraine is written, it will be very interesting to find out in detail why the 2023 counteroffensive happened in the way it did.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign. https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
The 2023 fiasco was well documented and down to Zelensky and Zaluzhniy ignoring the Americans then micromanaging the force deployment by handing out or withholding NATO trained units to individual commanders depending on their level of political favour with the regime at the time...
How much does VVP pay you to spout this propaganda?
Note we're still arguing over praise/blame for various WWII disasters and triumphs.
It's taken generations for Chamberlain's reputation to attract some form of (deserved) rehabilitation. It took decades for Dowding and Park to be accorded proper recognition for their masterminding Britain's air defence in 1940; Dowding was effectively sacked for winning the Battle of Britain.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
The benefits of devolution are: 1. Decisions made locally are likely to be better informed of local problems and opportunities. 2. The people responsible for implementing them will be more motivated having been involved in the decision making.
There is an additional benefit. It encourages innovation rather than one central size fits all.
But the downside is that there will be losers as well as winners.
The solution is glocalisation - devolution within a strong but light global framework consisting of: 1. Minimum standards 2. Crucially, an effective method of sharing best practice
anyone using the term 'postcode lottery' in a new highly devolved UK, needs taking outside and shooting.
A 'postcode lottery' is exactly what you would expect when everything is not dictated from the middle.
Ah but the British public are absolutely opposed to two things;
A “Post Code Lottery!” And “One Size Fits All!”
The two calls that sum up what they want are;
“We Want More!” And “ Make it Go Away!”
Peter
I there any actually evidence that "postcode lottery" is a thing that really upsets people?
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
I think more to do with high population density and a population with plenty of disposable income. Also London tends to attract the most ambitious and creative types so there is always something new happening to tempt you out your front door. The bits of London that have thriving high streets are places like where I live, zone 2 inner London, moderately to highly gentrified, with people who are in the market for a nice fish shop or a local bakery or a vermouth bar etc. Places like Bexley are much like the rest of the country, boarded up shops, dying high streets, elderly populations who don't like going out or don't have the money to buy a £10 sourdough or whatever (I'm making up the price, I don't know how much a sourdough costs at our local farmers market).
There's a paradox of people not wanting high density housing near them but also wanting nice high streets.
Mixed housing - high density flats in the town centre and lower density housing further out - is probably optimal for creating a town that retains some character. With good transport links into a major city.
The trouble is many parts of the country lack the transport links so there's not demand for high density housing. And fewer workers want to live there. And so you end up with town centres dying.
We need a strategy for expanding the proportion of the country that can achieve this.
... And then of course if you want to live in the countryside that's fine but don't complain about a lack of amenities nearby.
and what comes first, the good jobs to attract the (young) workers in to live in a densley populated city or the young people to give confidence to a company that it makes sense to expand into that area.
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
This is the big question regarding devolving powers. It's got to be right - in theory - to get decisions taken as close as possible to those affected and to back that up with resource. But you need good people. Good as in ability and integrity. If not you'll probably end up with (in aggregate) more inefficiencies (and sadly corruption) than you had before.
The benefits of devolution are: 1. Decisions made locally are likely to be better informed of local problems and opportunities. 2. The people responsible for implementing them will be more motivated having been involved in the decision making.
There is an additional benefit. It encourages innovation rather than one central size fits all.
But the downside is that there will be losers as well as winners.
The solution is glocalisation - devolution within a strong but light global framework consisting of: 1. Minimum standards 2. Crucially, an effective method of sharing best practice
anyone using the term 'postcode lottery' in a new highly devolved UK, needs taking outside and shooting.
A 'postcode lottery' is exactly what you would expect when everything is not dictated from the middle.
Ah but the British public are absolutely opposed to two things;
A “Post Code Lottery!” And “One Size Fits All!”
The two calls that sum up what they want are;
“We Want More!” And “ Make it Go Away!”
Peter
People hate a postcode lottery when they’re told it’s a one-size-fits-all national service.
If power and money were genuinely devolved, I suspect people would, if not welcome the lottery, at least understand it and know who to hold accountable. That’s the trade-off with local democracy.
Yes, if we're going to have regional government with Scotland levels of devolution, then the postcode lottery would be accepted, I think.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
I saw a self-employed person complaining his clients pay him in £50 notes but he can't pass them in shops. I refrained from pointing out he could pay them into the bank* but presumably he is trying to hide his income from the taxman.
*yes I know that's becoming more difficult but if I had several hundred pounds in cash I'd make the effort
Or he wants to avoid bank charges by paying in the cash.
There are bank charges for all forms of money, including cash, unless he was going to cheat the tax somehow
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
And private spaces are superior to forced public interaction.
We caught a cab back from the Toon. Driver was a lovely chap. Wouldn’t shut up.
I find taxis intensely claustrophobic. I'd much rather take a bus in most circumstances.
Same here, especially one that drops off on the estate. Our problem last night was a long walk when we got back, and we’d had a late lunch and were well refreshed.
Public transport links from here are amazing. I'm even a grudging fan of the tram (though still fuming about the cost/overrun/disruption). It's very easy to take this for granted until I experience how crap it can be elsewhere.
Ours are certainly better than they were and now TPE does seem to run on time through town.
The fast bus into Newcastle is excellent too.
There is still more to do, especially with expanding the metro.
Is it not the converse? People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
Or modern technology making it easier to produce fakes. The problem used to only be with £50 notes, as it was too expensive to produce lower denominations
Pound coins were a problem. Hence the change of shape.
Going to the barbers for a haircut this morning. Only accepts cash, so got to ensure I've (at least) a £10 note.
And yes, he's British.
I refuse to shop at places that only do cash. There's no excuse nowadays.
I saw a self-employed person complaining his clients pay him in £50 notes but he can't pass them in shops. I refrained from pointing out he could pay them into the bank* but presumably he is trying to hide his income from the taxman.
*yes I know that's becoming more difficult but if I had several hundred pounds in cash I'd make the effort
Or he wants to avoid bank charges by paying in the cash.
There are bank charges for all forms of money, including cash, unless he was going to cheat the tax somehow
It's of interest to see the reaction people have, when they are first exposed to the world of business banking. The charges for *everything* tend to startle them, or if they are a self employed person who have just been switched over by the bank (often without much notice or asking for it) - outrage.
Instagram running ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India, BBC finds
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgm4e0316zo Instagram has been running paid adverts promoting child sexual abuse material in India, a BBC Eye investigation has found. The ads, seen by the BBC World Service, use terms including "rape video" and "child video" and link users to channels on the messaging app Telegram, where they can buy the material for as little as 99 rupees (about $1). Ads on Instagram are only published after first being approved by its moderation technology. When the BBC reported one of the ads to Instagram, the social media platform responded 24 hours later saying the post did not violate its "community guidelines". Later, when the BBC asked Instagram's parent company Meta for comment, it said it had already disabled several adverts and suspended the accounts posting them. The company said it had removed additional ads, disabled more accounts and blocked URLs for other content that violated its policies in response to the BBC's findings...
"Moderation technology" is evidently inadequate to the task. Should they get a pass for this simply because they are "social media" ?
Comments
The dedication of those up and about at 4am (UK) to write lengthy contributions on the virtues of private vs public ownership is to be admired.
The problem isn't private vs public but foreign vs domestic. Many of our current problems with utilities stem from the incomprehensible decision to allow foreign companies to acquire controlling interests in UK infrastructure.
Quite apart from the security aspects, the issue then becomes the UK consumer is a cash cow. The company owning our infrastructure charges UK consumers more so the consumers in the country from which the ownership originates can get subsidised power or water. Thus, we pay more while others pay less.
We need to break the foreign ownership of any and all companies involved in the provision of utilities in the UK and then look at infrastructure - fortunately, the Government is getting the railways back from foreign-owned operators and should now be looking at British run private companies to operate the services.
Leith for a time was described as the Shoreditch of the north, which I always thought undersold the place.
The New Kirk Gate still has quality street theatre, for local colour*
*Scarlet
Living in Manchester I look around the north, places along the cost from Morecambe, Blackpool and even Liverpool are unlikely to have similar routes to a brighter future in every post code compared to Manchester.
I guess that is the point of devolution though, each area will require a different route to prosperity and each mayor in those regions will need to have the vision and powers to get there.
You either 1) level the playing field via tax and delivery fees or 2) accept that High Streets can’t survive based on a sofa purchase every two decades or so and change what they are for. 2) is far preferable IMO, Amazon’s tax dodging aside.
My High Street (10 minute walk away) has removed almost all car parking, put in cycle infrastructure, and built a tram line. It’s busier than ever before and my flat’s value has soared.
If you use cash you are part of the problem.
Fake cash comeback: Notes being 'openly sold' on popular websites
Sky News' Shingi Mararike investigates why fake cash is on the rise and how the police hunt for those suspected of selling counterfeit currency.
https://news.sky.com/video/fake-cash-is-making-a-comeback-as-more-people-are-openly-selling-it-on-social-media-and-online-13559812
(Seems like I keep banging on about Leith, but...) Around here we have a mixture of old (~18thC) Tenements, f-ugly 1960s flats, and down by the shore lots of bonded warehouse conversions and new(ish) build apartment complexes.
And seemingly endless construction of student accommodation, where are all these bloody students coming from?
The tenements are (mostly) lovely, the new builds mostly tiny and overpriced.
What we don't really have is affordable family homes. Lots and lots of 2 bed flats, but little in the 3+ bed area that most people can afford.
And given that this is Edinburgh, you can't afford a 3+ bed property in the outskirts either, until you hit the likes of Penicuik.
People's unfamiliarity with cash makes it easier to pass fakes?
An amazon purchase might not.
If the website company directors were liable for criminal prosecutions for hosting forums discussing drugging women to rape or other misogyny then they would soon self police.
The same goes for the fake news, racism and anti-semitism rampant on Social Media platforms. Make the publisher criminally responsible.
A woman on her way home from the local shop, a hoodie over the top of her pajamas, carrying two Pot Noodles.
And Good Morning ladies and gentlemen.
We still struggle with pensions or rather with the issue of ensuring as many of us as possible can maintain a decent standard of living once we have stopped working. I've been very fortunate - I suspect others on here have. For some, it's been a matter of adroit investment choices but for many they really on the capital asset of their property to see them into their dotage - downsizing and realising the capital receipt.
I really do worry for those in their 30s and 40s now and how it will be for them thirty or more years down the track. I fear the stock market ponzi scheme will collapse at some stage and obviously property won't guarantee the return it has for previous generations.
And yes, he's British.
1. Gutted
2. Disappointed
3. Horrified
4. Nonplussed
5. Happy
I'm not sure there is otherwise a legal remedy to people offering repellent opinions (quite apart from the difficulty in obtaining total agreement about where to draw the line), although actually urging illegal activity probably does cross the line, in the same way that you might consider calling the police if someone you were talking with urged listeners to kill people. "Merely" expressing a repulsive opinion? I think that's part of the openness that we now live with every day, and the remedy, insofar as there is one, is simply to fiercely disagree.
When the Russians do their mobilization keep in mind the following:
1: Russians are suffering more casualties per day than they are recruiting, as such their forces are depleting. This means they need many more men to refill their units to full strength.
2: The size of Russian units are too small to sustain their casualty rates and must become much larger to keep combat effectiveness long term
3: Their rear requires enormous amounts of manpower to man their anti-drone defenses, building counter-drone defenses, and managing drone damage
Right now is similar in some ways to the end of 2022. Ukraine has the opportunity to make small counterattacks to retake ground before a Russian mobilization stops them this autumn. Unfortunately, Ukraine has not developed the reserves necessary to fully take advantage of this situation. Which, in my opinion, is largely due to the absolute trainwreck of the 2023 summer campaign.
https://x.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/2072941866476061182
After all, newspapers have always been liable for the contents of the letters they publish.
*yes I know that's becoming more difficult but if I had several hundred pounds in cash I'd make the effort
Teach your sons that no means no. But don't forget also to teach your daughters that no has to mean no rather than not yet but if you play your cards right, maybe later on and isn't this champagne nice? Because the latter undermines the former.
Second, conflating minor offences with major crimes might not be helpful. Recently Jess Phillips (then Minister responsible for ending violence against women and girls) was criticised when she appeared to equate rape with someone sitting too close on the tube.
Third, availability of hard core and harmful porn is a problem, partly now being addressed through age verification. But how many were driven to these sites because soft core porn was made unavailable? Page 3 of the Sun may have demeaned women but it also allowed young men to see breasts without also seeing women being choked.
I shall pause and wait and see.
In the case of the privatised water industry, the regulator repeatedly waved through the financial stuff.
In the case of the publicly owned water industry, they got the government to write them exemptions for water quality etc - because investment would have gone on the National Debt and the politicians needed the National Debt to support their spending to win the next election. There was no regulator.
Both modes have problems. If we don't learn from the past, we will repeat it.
I don't understand it myself, I couldn't respect anyone I could tell what to do, but maybe that is why I have mostly been single.
Sorting that out requires investment which has to come from somewhere - indeed, that's true of all infrastructure including transport.
The problem is when you have a privately-owned company which looks like it is fleecing the UK consumer in the interests of shareholders, people don't take kindly to it. They demand tighter control, more regulation so it comes back to the kind of capitalism we have and the kind of companies that in turn creates.
Capitalism can't just be about making money - it hasn't always been.
That was my fear when I heard him speak. It's all very well giving Mayors overwhelming powers but supposing the electors of the area choose someone like Robert Kenyon. It nearly happened! Can you imagine what a Robert Kenyon fiefdom might look like?
https://kellnerp.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-andy-burnhams?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2975369&post_id=204740464&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1mnpci&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/2072816672457597403
@ElectionMapsUK
Malinslee & Dawley Bank (Telford & Wrekin) Council By-Election Result:
🌹 LAB: 42.9% (-32.2)
➡️ RFM: 41.4% (New)
🌳 CON: 7.6% (-10.3)
🌍 GRN: 5.5% (New)
🔶 LDM: 2.5% (-4.4)
Labour HOLD.
Changes w/ 2023.
In the case of large monopoly utilities, public v private and domestic v foreign tend very strongly to be one and the same thing.
Quite possibly the only way to bring about what you suggest would be to have UK pension funds own them.
Would they do that willingly ? Perhaps, but I suspect would need significant persuasion of one form or another.
But I agree entirely with the thrust of your argument, and have repeatedly made the same point myself.
It's like the pub owner saying to other customers "Come over here and listen to this chap".
Their current travails with retention (200,000 deserters) and recruitment (2,000,000 in hiding within Ukraine, fuck knows how many on the run abroad) is more to do with the issues that blight every post-Soviet armed force: corruption, cruelty and a curious type of turgid chaos.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/world/europe/ukraine-military-soldiers-ombudsman.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-over-1-billion-on-crypto-ventures-financial-disclosures/
They are as published as any opinion piece or letter in the conventional press or media, and the company hosting should be as liable.
China is an interesting current example.
The crucial difference is that the landlord of a pub doesn’t:
- algorithmically amplify the loudest conversations,
- recommend them to strangers,
- monetise engagement with them,
- or deliberately optimise for people staying in the pub as long as possible.
Social media companies do precisely that.
They’re no longer merely providing the room; they’re influencing which conversations are heard, by whom, and at what scale. That makes them something rather more than a passive host.
I'm more interested in postwar analysis from a more dispassionate POV.
NATO training, of course, is now largely irrelevant to what happens on the ground - other than trying to learn from it.
This is power and economic power on an intergalactic scale without lawful accountability. No ordinary person could get away with it.
More Trump corruption
I think the argument that a referendum rejected AV, but the very similar SV is OK is sophistry. AV is also clearly superior to SV: it better represents voters' wants, it's easier to understand.
Other than that, I should have said "he has not yet..".
- 10% of Brits think independence was a bad thing
- 53% view George Washington favourably
- Over its history, 28% say the US has been more a force for bad in the world vs 38% a force for good
- But 64% see the US as a force for bad *today*
- 35% think Trump has permanently changed America'
https://x.com/YouGov/status/2072965777766944868?s=20
X has suddenly banned an account documenting Trump's corrupt stock trades seemingly without explanation.
https://x.com/HQNewsNow/status/2072699828337864871
1. Decisions made locally are likely to be better informed of local problems and opportunities.
2. The people responsible for implementing them will be more motivated having been involved in the decision making.
There is an additional benefit. It encourages innovation rather than one central size fits all.
But the downside is that there will be losers as well as winners.
The solution is glocalisation - devolution within a strong but light global framework consisting of:
1. Minimum standards
2. Crucially, an effective method of sharing best practice
A 'postcode lottery' is exactly what you would expect when everything is not dictated from the middle.
<cough>Holyrood</cough>I like the idea of devolving power, in theory.
The problem isn’t devolution per se, it’s duplication. We rarely remove a layer of government when we create another, so powers become shared, blurred and slower to exercise. We’ve added another abstraction layer without refactoring the architecture.
Holyrood is an interesting example. It has demonstrated both that devolved government can make decisions better suited to local priorities, and that devolution doesn’t magically produce better politicians or better policy. It merely moves accountability closer to home.
The counteroffensive was indeed a blunder, or a series of blunders, but the story around it is not at all clear, and it's not as though any of the protagonists (including the US) has published a blow by blow, other than as part of efforts to exculpate themselves from blame.
As the war hasn't finished it's hardly surprising that a lot of people won't volunteer information.
A “Post Code Lottery!” And “One Size Fits All!”
The two calls that sum up what they want are;
“We Want More!” And “ Make it Go Away!”
Peter
If power and money were genuinely devolved, I suspect people would, if not welcome the lottery, at least understand it and know who to hold accountable. That’s the trade-off with local democracy.
It's taken generations for Chamberlain's reputation to attract some form of (deserved) rehabilitation.
It took decades for Dowding and Park to be accorded proper recognition for their masterminding Britain's air defence in 1940; Dowding was effectively sacked for winning the Battle of Britain.
The fast bus into Newcastle is excellent too.
There is still more to do, especially with expanding the metro.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgm4e0316zo
Instagram has been running paid adverts promoting child sexual abuse material in India, a BBC Eye investigation has found.
The ads, seen by the BBC World Service, use terms including "rape video" and "child video" and link users to channels on the messaging app Telegram, where they can buy the material for as little as 99 rupees (about $1).
Ads on Instagram are only published after first being approved by its moderation technology.
When the BBC reported one of the ads to Instagram, the social media platform responded 24 hours later saying the post did not violate its "community guidelines".
Later, when the BBC asked Instagram's parent company Meta for comment, it said it had already disabled several adverts and suspended the accounts posting them. The company said it had removed additional ads, disabled more accounts and blocked URLs for other content that violated its policies in response to the BBC's findings...
"Moderation technology" is evidently inadequate to the task.
Should they get a pass for this simply because they are "social media" ?