Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond

It's not so much that people dying to live there then, but ... cows. (see what I did there?)

We have more in common than I thought. How refreshing and depressing in equal measures. ;-) I have been here since 2005 or 6 too. I lived in Japan for a while and my wife hails from north Tokyo. I sometimes think about going back there. But my Japanese is a little rusty (no, I won't hug your teddy!) and I bought a modest place in zone 3 a couple of years back. Fear of giving up what I've scraped together keeps me in the UK but I can well understand why you live in Japan. While your quality of life declines a little there, your living standards are generally much higher than the UK. I'm usually in Tokyo in October or November. PM me if you want to meet up for an early evening beer.

Hmmm. Welcome to unfettered capitalism, sonny. There will be a large number of losers and a very small number of winners and according to the economics textbooks I read, that's not a design fault. The only thing standing between you and obsolescence is the state - effectively reigning in capitalism's excessive and destructive tendencies. I wish this were better understood in Conservative government who don't seem to regard their own ideal as ultimately flawed. It is flawed because when you are on the scrapheap, you can no longer afford the very goods and services you were designed to consume. It is unsustainable. Communism is the logical opposite, where the state controls everything and the small number of winners are bureaucrats (instead of entrepreneurs). This was shown to have been a failure in the USSR because of the practical implications of such demand management - without computers of course. Communism is not synonymous with a jackboot state (which is how its main detractors describe communism). Communism has been shown to be reasonably successful when implemented on a micro scale (like a Kibbutz) but latter examples ultimately succumbed to easy credit in the 1980s which led to eventual destruction too. This is also why it is bitterly ironic that Maggie Thatcher's dotage and funeral was paid for by the state which was an obsolete institution in her mantra. If she had truly lived by her own creed, she should have allowed herself to have been thrown on the scrapheap when she stopped being useful to the capitalist engine. Unfettered capitalism has shown itself to be a busted flush and I am still gobsmacked that it is the Conservatives of all people advocating direct market intervention in a free market in the form of Help To Sell Help To Buy. It is fundamentally against all free market capitalism stands for. That is basically how bloody revolutions begin of course. The only sensible solution is social democracy or regulated capitalism. Germany does this, Japan does this. The US doesn't, the UK doesn't. I see a pattern there.

Can I just say, I want to nip this little f*&ker in the bud. The size of the financial crisis next to the size of the public debt for pensions is incomparable. One look at the numbers should tell you that - the financial crisis is totalled at around $4.5tr. The UK's liabilities from it are - what £200bn? If you just work it out, paying one pound every second, it would take you ... what ... 6341 years to pay that off. That's just nowhere near the pension bill for even the whole of the UK population, let alone for the few public sector employees who will get their pensions.

That flat certainly has some errr .. skeletons in the cupboard. See what I did there?

The smell is from the tobacco left on the furniture, carpets walls and ceilings. So price in replacing or deep cleaning every visible surface. For a short while I cleaned a bar on a ship many years ago. You'd be amazed what cigarette smoke leaves behind - it's a thick glue like brown residue.

This is a weird one. I bought a modest house in West London a couple of years ago (figured the government was going to bail ad inifinitum) and came home the other day to find a local letting agent had nailed a sign onto the brand new brick wall I had built at the front. Naturally I pulled it down and broke it into three pieces. Cheeky scum. They came and quietly removed the pieces this afternoon. Anyway, my question is this - I'd like to invoice the letting agent for the damage they (mistakenly) did to my property. I assume its a mistake, but they haven't apologised yet. Does anyone have any experience of this? Any advice? They said they would call me today to discuss but being letting agents, they didn't bother of course . Cheers

Ah, the return of QE ...

I actually get 6 cans of Becks for £5 from a Tamil-run shop i go to to get my beer - every time. Supermarkets are now putting Becks full strength (as opposed to the newer 4%) back on the shelves at about a quid a can too I noticed recently.

Gone Daddy Gone (The Loving's Gone) by Gnarls Barkley Its a great video too.

Go with where you know. I lived in a borough for six years before buying there because I knew where was a good deal.

Broken Windows Fallacy

In other news it was revealed that in 2012 bankers in London were on the whole happier than their international counterparts with their remuneration packages, by quite a few percentage points.

Faisal Islam was the person who asked Mervyn King the question at a press conference "Isn't QE simply a way of funding government expenditure by monetizing their debt?". He didn't get an answer, which in itself raised eyebrows.

Bitcoin represents the single most potent threat to monetary hegemony of central banks - so much so that it is almost impossible to buy bitcoins in the UK and I'm quite sure if you do, you'll be put on a 'special list' somwhere. The EU is so worried enough about bitcoin that the ECB patronisingly calls them 'virtual currency schemes' in its report which can be found here. For the TL;DR brigade, Libertarian News (whatever that is) wrote a commentary on it here. I quote: The ECB report contains a number of technical untruths about the process of creating and issuing bitcoins - namely that the currency's validity cannot be checked (it can) and that there is no control over issuance (there is). But let's face it, turkeys don't vote for Christmas. And that's why you get put on a 'special list'!