porca misèria
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Posts posted by porca misèria
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Erm, why should Apple issue bonds of any kind? I thought they had a vast cash pile! Are they borrowing money at negative interest rates?
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It could be argued that 'the race to the bottom' is itself the new paradigm that has replaced the previous order- what is globalisation if not a planetry scale race to the bottom in terms of prices, wages and regulations?
Bla bla bla. Yes of course it could be argued. Marx did exactly that.
Sadly, Marx was one of those fine armchair strategists with a great insight into a problem but hopelessly impractical proposals to try and solve it.
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I don't have an obsession I am simply using the one objective measure of success in schooling that is widely recognised - exam results.
I am not sure what you mean by pushing back the frontiers of a subject, but I very much doubt that it happens in a GCSE physics class at a south London grammar school.
That is a huge frustration!
Later childhood and the 'teens are an incredibly creative time of life. Why are bright kids held back for so long by school, instead of - for those whose interests point that way - pushing the boundaries of physics?
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Does Primark have a separate pension fund from its owner ABF (of which it is a big part)?
It's not listed in any of the lists I've seen of companies weighed down by disproportionate pension liabilities.
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Yet the fiddle has quite a history in folk music, which doesn't suggest fundamentally impossibly expensive instruments only available to the wealthy. For a good quality one perhaps, but isn't the same true for brass?
Classical musicians aren't rich in general. Of course a few at the top make big money, but the vast majority who scrape a living on a portfolio of freelancing odd jobs, teaching kiddies, playing a church organ, and the like often scrape by on an income in the ballpark of minimum wage or lower.
And not every fiddle is a Stradivari or Amati. You would surely start a kid on something much cheaper, and get the best only for the elite who show the level of promise to make a glittering career, and serious money, on the concert platform.
I know violinists that would spend what I spent on all my college instruments on one bow!!! Classical is a bit different to folk (although some of those instruments aren't cheap either)Umm ... so how much does a modern violin fit for an orchestra set you back?
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I think that if you have a real talent in something than being exposed to really oustanding exponents of the field early on is almost essential for development of that skill.
Hmmm. You're talking about areas like music and sports there? Where the outstanding pupil progresses from the local teacher to the national or world-class teachers if they're to achieve the top of their field? And there are plenty below that level who can still enjoy their hobby as amateurs - like me with music.
There's a crucial difference in purely academic disciplines. You still need early exposure to great minds, but you can get it on-the-cheap from books. And nowadays also the 'net.
This is something that benefits the poorest most.
What a bizarre statement. How are the rich or the moderately-poor to become the elite in a vacuum? Are you saying "the poorest" as a proxy for parents who keep the kids well away from any positive stimulus?
I do see this when I sit down every year with my tutorial groups. The big different as many have said, between independent and comprehensive is in confidence, social skills etc.
That seems entirely likely.
However it is clear to me that much of this is in the fundamental nature of comprehensive education and the exposure of the best students to a very unruly and disinterested student cohort. Quite often they are quite damaged and spend the first few months amazed to discover there are other people out there like them.
From my own experience, it's not entirely that. "Don't be different or you'll get bullied", "keep the head down" is a hell of an issue at certain ages (more in the earlier than the later years of comprehensive school - or maybe I just learned to conform), but there's another side to it which is deference: the parental "don't be a nuisance", "don't ask for things, wait until you're offered".
I certainly had a big adjustment to make on arriving at Cambridge. But that was at the academic level. For the first time, I wasn't getting bored witless (and resorting to displacement activities) by a teacher giving us a concept that takes one minutes explanation to grasp, and dragging it out over many hours and even weeks as if it were somehow difficult. For the first time, I was among people where someone else might grasp a concept while I was the one still struggling with it! Would you see that as a difference between comprehensive and elite schools in your students?
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I'm not anticipating collapse, per-se, but I am anticipating the importance of ideas, institutions and people, who were once considered very important, to wane - and for new ideas, institutions and people to replace them. I'm not expecting that the changes that will have most effect will be 'events' - but, rather, a steady transformation of 'accepted norm' from one paradigm to another.
That has happened in the UK within most of our lifetimes.
Consider two worlds. How did we move from one to the other?
- You are (largely) defined by your job. You progress through life up the corporate career ladder, or equivalent such as civil service. If you have a good degree, you have a reasonable expectation of a fast track. On the other hand, it's rude to push yourself forward, and the word for (what we now call) entrepreneur is "spiv".
- The career ladder is clogged up by people already somewhere above you, and opportunities for progression are much-diminished. "Dead mens shoes" has become dark humour for a system that is broke, clogged up, and creating ever fewer new opportunities. A new paradigm is needed, oldfashioned politeness is swept away, and the age of the entrepreneur is born.
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Introduce national insurance on the income of retirees. Completely unfair that a priced-out youngster on £25k pays more tax than a comfortable homeowner retiree on a £25k pension.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Get rid of the stupid, artificial distinction between the two income taxes.
You'd also have a double-taxation problem, as NI (unlike honest income tax) has already been paid on money in pension pots.
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The problem I think I will have with sending my children to state school is that about 30% of the children will have parents who are extremely poor role models. This means the school has to run around fire fighting instead of concentrating on the pupils that are there to learn. I witnessed this first hand when I went to school.
No matter what the state does with schools they will never be able to save people who do not want to be helped.
Elephant? Here? What elephant?
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If that is true why do parents go to such ridiculous lengths to get their kids into "good" comprehensives. Surely they should just buy a cheap house and send their kids to any school?
If you look at areas where elitism is still allowed, you see that most of those Olympic athletes come from fee-paying schools. There is still value to be had for money, and that includes sporting facilities most of us will never see as well as probably an above-average chance of being noticed if you start to show real promise.
So if they are promising musically say than the local comprehensive would develop their skill just as well as Cheetham's music school in Manchester say?
Ah, yes. Another area where some schools matter. There's a choir in London that does most of the Hollywood soundtracks, because the 'merkins don't have a comparable group with the capability of those educated in cathedral schools to just pick up a new score and record it on first sight.
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A quick wealth warning for any readers of this thread who use an AJBell YouInvest wrapper (trading/ISA/SIPP). They are changing their T&C's from the 01 October 2016. You might want to have a look how the changes affect you.
If I had have done nothing my SIPP wrapper expenses would have increased by 68%. I did something and instead of an increase have reduced product/wrapper expenses by 23%. As always I'm pretty transparent so if anyone wants to see how I did that it's here.
As your anonymous comment says, HL has something somewhat similar. I've moved quite a lot of money from funds to listed ITs in response, but there's a long way to go. In part because some of the funds have no IT equivalent, or the latter trades at a massive premium (global infrastructure being a case in point - I hold the First State OEIC).
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The NHS is a better system than private insurance based systems,
Any particular private insurance based system?
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For real-life figures, look at service charges on flats. That is, those flats owned and managed by the leaseholders on their own behalf, and not paying for things like some poncy concierge. There's a tradeoff between money spent and standard of maintenance.
A house should be rather more, because you're losing the benefits of pooling your resources. But is under your control: you can do nothing for long periods and the house remains perfectly habitable, though it'll lose value.
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Exactly. People speak as if there is only two systems out there.
"The NHS is great it saved my life, it should never be touched"
Sadly the alternative is necessarily unspoken:
"The NHS is crap: it strung me along until it was too late to go elsewhere, now I'm dead".
So perhaps I should speak it again on behalf of my late lamented relative, whose NHS cancer operation remained for 4-5 months on a "week after next" timescale until it was too late.
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That is an interesting observation. LETS and local currency seem to have been in decline for a few years, whereas AirBnB & Uber are growing. The former was oriented towards exchanging skills and labour: the latter about putting capital work.
The problem with local currencies is there's no real point. Noone actually benefits from them.
But the sharing economy certainly extends to skills and labour. You could argue that the Yellow Pages and similar directories, or the small-ads, are an earlier incarnation of it. Now there are lots of online sites in that space: in software development, find-a-freelancer sites have been around since sometime last century. And just look at the number of wannabes seeking to crowdfund right now!
I think the main point here is that, in the absence of barriers to entry, the "sharing economy" tends to become a race to the bottom. Find-a-freelancer sites are well known for it. Where there are high barriers to entry (e.g. serious professional qualifications), the "sharing economy" has yet to make inroads into more traditional means: I guess a more complex situation is less amenable to simplistic solutions, and linkedin is probably the most successful attempt. But where the barrier is simply capital (like uber and airbnb), it's kind-of a happy medium where something works.
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If you're looking for a new paradigm, the so-called Sharing Economy might be a revival of capitalism. Like Airbnb and Uber enabling millions of owners of capital to leverage it on a small scale for profit in new ways and for less effort than starting up a more traditional business. All based on a market much less corrupted and regulated than the banks have become. And with its low marginal costs, it should be quite resistant to interference short of outright outlawing.
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[chop]
That was on Radio 4 a few days ago. Wonder if the Wail nicked it?
The big sticking points on TTIP are areas like this, where the EU won't accept practices that the US insists on. Even more important instances are food pumped full of growth hormones (which I think the EU is entirely right to resist) or genetically modified (where the EU is wrong but nevertheless has an underlying point).
With brexit, we in Blighty will be in urgent need of new trade deals, and in a much weaker negotiating position. Chances are we'll roll over and accept US conditions with just some token concessions on their part, just to get an agreement up-and-running.
That could have quite a radical effect on shopping. Because Uncle Sam won't accept practices that would lead to de facto exclusion of their growth-hormone-filled, genetically modified beef. Like, for instance, labelling, whether directly in the form of "GM-free" or indeed a proxy like "British reared".
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£20k does sound a lot but equally £14k is not exactly a lot to live on in either (ignoring TC's etc. - they should not be modelled into private sector pay).
Speaking as someone who is now on minimum wage, I can say it's a lot better than I've been on for much of my life. Rent is a big chunk of it, but gets me a house that would've been a HMO for 7 people (and a better one than I lived in) for the same proportion of my graduate income in 1983. And tax has all-but disappeared due to the rapid rise of the threshold.
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Saw something on the news yesterday - BMA I think it was saying we need to be quick to let all the EU nationals working in the NHS know they are 'welcome' to stay as it wouldn't survive without them.
The facts it survived before they arrived en masse - and the rise in population due to the 5 million or so EE now living in the UK may have something to do with the increased strain on it - clearly passed them by.
Maybe Brit pensioners getting the boot from France and Spain could be the straw that breaks the NHS's back?
It survived on immigrants in the old days, too. The comedians were allowed to send it up a bit:
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It's not the 'next step', it's right here right now...
When you call a GP and get given an appointment in 10 days time (yes it's happened to me), or you have to wait 6 months for a routine operation... then it's pretty clear that the NHS is not there when you need it. But you're still paying for it.
Ten days? Luxury! See the post immediately before yours ...
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"Should we really be punishing those with decent jobs to compensate the people at the bottom of the pile?"
Core question of the squeezed midden.
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A flood of properties have hit the rental market after successive tax increases in 2014 and 2016 deterred buyers, leading would-be sellers to put their places up for rent instead.
That - if true - is the core of a HPC. No buyers.
Not 1990: zero interest rates mean few are under any pressure to sell. But a market where buyers and renters are better-placed to drive a harder bargain!
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The other side of it is the banks/financial institutions skimming their cut off every transaction, even if it is a fraction of a currency unit it adds up rapidly. In our financialised world there are not many things left to take a cut of and as far as the banks are concerned the more financial transactions the merrier it will be for them.
Yes, but the alternative of handling cash is more expensive now, according to various retailers. Sorting it, securing it, counting it.
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Well done on getting that piano up the loft. I wouldn't fancy taking one up the stairs myself.
Bank Of England To Buy Apple Bonds
in House prices and the economy
Posted · Edited by porca misèria
I hope you'd pick better companies than those to lend to! OK, Virgin's not all bad, but neither is it a single company ... but I'd apply the bargepole to sky or dyson.