If their Lordships so wildly misunderstand the true nature of what they call the national debt, which in reality is nothing more than an optional savings facility made available by the government,
Jeebus.
So, err, why does the govt pay interest on it?
Needless to say, he was frequently asked to offer advice to aspiring young musicians. “Learn to read music and listen to a bit of Miles Davis,” he would tell them. “Don’t do drugs and don’t play too many notes. That’s about it.”
Herbie Flowers
In 1950 there were 97 Japanese centenarians. At the end of September last year there were 92,000, 81,600 of them women. Last year 47,000 Japanese received a congratulatory letter from the prime minister (the Japanese equivalent of a telegram from the King). In 2009, when the number surpassed 40,000, the government had to reduce the size of the silver sake cup given to people who turned 100 — the cost was becoming prohibitive.
Well, sorta and not so much. An article about those Japanese centenarians really should include those recent investgations that a considerable number are unreported corpses but the kiddies are still collecting the pension.
And yes, this is important. Because folk go around saying that eating cold rise is what makes you live long, but if they’re not living long then….
This is a project of “the right”; its commissioners include Rupert Lowe, Great Yarmouth’s new Reform MP, sitting alongside new Tory MP Katie Lam, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and special adviser to Suella Braverman. Charles Moore is their august keeper of the Thatcherite flame. They are led by Paul Goodman, a Tory grandee, who writes a column that warns: “Unless the right changes course, Britain is dooming itself to perpetual Labour rule”. Their Tory-leaning pollsters include Rachel Wolf – founder of Public First, No 10 adviser and author of Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto – and James Kanagasooriam of FocalData, coiner of the phrase and idea of the “red wall”.
Polly thinks this is the right of the Tory Party. Even, the right of the country. It’s hardly the right of the Labour Party these days….
It’s a truly dreadful irony: for many of the 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to even a basic water supply, there is likely to be a significant reserve in aquifers sitting just a few metres below their feet.
Groundwater – the water stored in small spaces and fractures in rocks – makes up nearly 99% of all of the unfrozen fresh water on the planet. Across the African continent, the volume of water stored underground is estimated to be 20 times the amount held in lakes and reservoirs.
The opportunity that groundwater presents for increasing access to water is widely recognised, with more than half of the global population already believed to be relying on it for drinking water.
When you add the ability of solar energy to power the necessary infrastructure and the fact that groundwater supplies are much more resilient than surface water during drought, the potential for harnessing this water source to provide a clean and regular supply to communities in chronic need comes into focus.
So, that’s another problem advamncing tech has solved. Aren’t we the lucky ones.
but it must be sustainable and fair
Typical bleedin’ Guardian.
There’s a bit in one of the Reacher novels. He’s down by the Tx/Mx border. Land’s dried out. Old V8 engines (the old 5.7 litre hemis I guess) appear regularly along the roadside. Used to be used – back in the days of fixed and low oil prices – to pump up the groundwater to irrigate. Rising oil prices stopped that decades back now it’s just scrub, near desert.
I realise that I am weird but reading that bit of it – while waiting for the next punch up in the story – my thought was, well, wouldn’t solar powered pumps solve that? And put that land back into agricultural production?
You know, buy southern TX land?
The Government has placed a particular focus on new garden towns and villages as it looks to create scores of new communities across Britain.
Why do this?
Why not just build more houses where people already want to live? Take advantage of all the extant infrastructure? Why this insistence on big new schemes rather than just relaxing the regs so that folk can built 2 houses here, three there and 5 behind that hedge?
The SEIS allows investors to claim reinvestment relief of 50pc when investing the proceeds of a capital gains-liable disposal, in effect cutting the tax bill in half. Gains from the scheme are also exempt from capital gains taxes.
The SEIS was established in 2012 to help stimulate Britain’s start-up economy. Companies that are less than three years old and have fewer than 25 employees can raise up to £250,000 from the SEIS.
Ed Prior, head of investor services at SFC Capital, which runs the UK’s biggest SEIS fund, said investments since the start of July were up 90pc,
And thus the story of vast numbers dodging future CGT rises etc.
at £3.1m compared to £1.6m in the same period a year ago.
Ah.
SFC accounts for around 10pc of all SEIS investments. In total, the scheme invested £157m in 1,815 companies in the 2022-23 tax year.
Fairly trivial in the scheme of things then…but got an article about in the Tele so well done there….
But the committee in question – the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee – is tasked with, is tasked with controlling inflation, and what is glaringly obvious is that it did not know how inflation works because as a consequence of these external shocks, over which it had precisely no control at all, they raised interest rates in this country to reduce demand for goods and services, which they claimed would drive away inflation when that was completely unnecessary, because that inflation was always, as I’ve already said, going to pass as a matter of fact through the progress of time. And what we now know is, that that inflation has passed through the progress of time.
But what we’ve got is a legacy of the actions of that committee.
We have interest rates that are now far too high.
Standard economics says raising interest rates curbs inflation. Interest rates were raised, inflation wa ccirbed. Spud is arguing that this proves that raising interest rates doesn’t curb inflation.
Small firms behind 80% of tax evasion
All that Spud stuff about miltinationals and offshore wsa complete crap. Obviously.
Deluge of abuse sent on X to prominent UK politicians in election period
If you can’t call a politician a cunt then you’ve not got free speech, do you?
They are, after all, vying to be able to spend 45% of all your money – seems pretty cuntish.
Walk on the Wild Side, Grandad, Tuba Smarties, Herbie Flowers played on the first and wrote the other two.
I’ve always liked this:
But as long as there are ambitious tuba players – and brass bands – they’ll be playing this for centuries:
Vale
When Claire Watson moved to Sydney in 2022, the keen runner was excited to try out the famed track around the city’s vast, picturesque Centennial Park.
But when the 29-year-old turned up for her first run shortly after 6am before work one morning, she was stunned.
“I’d heard so much about Centennial Park, but when I got there it was dark and there were no lights, so I just turned around and went home,” Watson says.
“As a woman, I know it’s not safe to run in the dark.”
The problem isn’t confined to Centennial Park. Watson was unable to find accessible running tracks lit up before sunrise or after she finished work.
But, but, we’re all being told to reduce the amount of light because it obscures the stars, aren’t we?
Some have already gone. The “impuesto de solidaridad a las grandes fortunas” raised just €632m in 2022, representing 0.1pc of all taxpayers in Spain.
Despite the relatively low yield, Labour’s union paymasters are already calling for the UK Government to follow suit. The Tax Justice Network claims as much as £24bn a year could be raised from the UK if it copied Spain’s model.
They’ve said they’ll copy Spain’s model but have calculated the income by not following Spain’s model. They’re to tax all the things that Spain doesn’t tax – family companies, close companies and so on.
Jus’ lyin’
“Smiles were made for sales,” a room full of women were told in one bizarre training session. The only reason I stuck it out was because it was better paid than other retail jobs and completely flexible. Everyone I worked with (all women) felt the same.
So I empathise with the thousands of shop floor staff who joined retail for perks such as flexibility but are now fed up with being underpaid and undervalued.
Job that’s better than others, provides something you value other than money – that flexibility – and yet it’s underpaid?
Err, no?
There’s technically nothing stopping female store workers from applying for a better-paid warehouse job. But in reality it’s not that easy.
Aside from the skills being very different, the draw of a shop floor job is flexibility and location – attracting carers, students and working parents who want to work part-time and close to home.
Flexibility and location is why I put up with working in a shop that told me “smiles were made for sales”, many years before I could begin to appreciate how vital a flexible job like that might be for a parent. That doesn’t justify poor pay.
Right about now is when we tell this bird to fuck off, isn’t it.
Reducing massively the consumption of sugar.
Reducing, as a part of that goal, but also because of its impact on A&E demand, the consumption of alcohol.
Seriously increasing the amount of exercise we take before and during old age to stop people from falling over as they get older.
Morning calisthenics it is then. But that’ll be fin as there will also be no doughnuts and Victory Gin will be 20% proof.
Tax has nothing to do with any of this. So, let’s stop the stupid claims that it does. Anyone who has researched this knows that even large companies put it way down their list of priorities.
Man who’s spent decades shrieking about what companies will do to lower their tax bill insists companies don;t care very much about their tax bill?
But persistence studies also breed something dangerous: determinism. If ancient history is so influential, what hope do we have to shape our destiny? Which is why I love a new paper by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, examining the lasting economic impact of slavery. Their findings look like the normal persistence story: black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved before the civil war have had significantly worse economic outcomes ever since, compared with black Americans whose forefathers were free – even in 2023, descendants of enslaved people had incomes $11,620 lower than other black Americans.
But this is a story about continuing choices too. Why? Because the direct effect of your ancestors being enslaved fades by 1940. What drives the lasting disadvantage is that those whose ancestors were enslaved were more likely to live in states that went on suppressing black Americans even after the abolition of slavery – via infamous Jim Crow laws, which lasted in southern states until the 1960s.
Quite so. Therefore reparations for slavery aren’t justified.
Reparations for Jim Crow could be, maybe, justified. But that’s easy, we just make the Democratic Party pay them.
Every time an upmarket home is bought in the UK, the new residents seem obliged to rip out the kitchen and install two bathrooms where there was only one.
It is almost a cast-iron rule that walking across the threshold means paying builders to rearrange what was there before, almost for the sake of it.
It is the same in government when Whitehall departments are merged or broken up. The difference is that the refreshed home will probably have extensive new plumbing to accompany the latest appliances and the state will not.
It’s that female nest-building thing. New kitchen, new bathrooms, this is my nest not that bitch before me. The answer to the government problem is not to elect women, obviously.
Six thousand Hebridean islanders and millions of pounds of whisky and seafood shipments face transport turmoil this winter after crisis-hit ferry firm CalMac slashed its timetable.
Residents of Islay and Mull will see services cut after Scottish Government-owned CalMac revealed that each island will be served by just one vessel instead of the usual two over winter.
This after that remarkable feat of the govt owned ferrry company bankrupting the govt owned shipyard over a contract to build new ferries.
Governments just aren’t competent, see?
The former boss of Molton Brown is set to take charge of The Body Shop in a rescue deal that will keep 133 branches open.
Administrators at FRP said they had sold The Body Shop to a consortium led by cosmetics tycoon Mike Jatania after weeks of exclusive talks with the entrepreneur.
Charles Denton, the former Molton Brown chief, will become chief executive.
The move is expected to save more than 1,000 jobs, with Mr Jatania’s investment company Aurea understood to have no immediate plans to close any more stores. The Body Shop currently employs 1,300 people.
The new owners may look at finding better locations for current shops in various towns and cities, sources suggested.
UK commercial leases are 21, maybe 25 or 30 year things. With 3 or 5 year rent reviews. Rent reviews are upwards only.
Now, if commercial retail gets into trouble – Hello Online Shopping! – the system is hugely inflexible. Extant shops can’t negotiate their rents down. New market entrants can gain very much lower rents. Incumbents are therefore prey to new comers.
The way out is bankruptcy, administration or there’s a third similar thing. At which point you get to tell the landlords to go pound sand. And negotiate your rents down. Also, be free of thsoe 20 odd year commitments to specific leases.
Which is, I insist, what the Body Shop admin/bkruptcy/whatever it was was all about. Being able to screw the landlords. Perfectly viable business in there, storied brand name and all that. But got to get the cost base – the rents, rightsized. Commercial leases whose rent reviews could be up or down would have made it unnecessary.
Note, this may not be 100% oand only this be true. But I guarantee you it’s a lorra ‘f it.