erat_forte

Anecdotal from a person I was chatting to, schoolteacher so still on full pay working from home interacting with a cross-section of children and their parents. People are "changing their attitudes" to work and to being at home. Thinking of not having both parents working in future, one to stay home and look after the children. Enjoying living at home instead of using the house as a crash pad. Less focussed on consumption and purchasing tat, more focus on enjoying life. No mention of income or making ends meet - kind of presumes the free money will continue flowing?

I never told them, just ignored everything.

Struck me as quite significant that both employers furlough payments and self employed grants were anti-means-tested, i.e. the more you earned the more you got, the exact opposite of universal credit and other government handouts.

According to the law you need to pay for a license, if you watch live broadcasts (also I think if you have receiving equipment installed to receive live broadcasts). If you don't, then my understanding of the law is, that you don't need to do anything, you don't need to pay, you don't need to tell anyone, you don't need to open any threatening letters telling you that you might need to pay etc. I stopped paying a TV license when they switched to digital TV, because I didn't have the equipment and couldn't be arsd buying the gear and setting it up. You can get so much on Netflix, Youtube, boards like this, who seriously needs to sit and look at live broadcast TV these days?

I read testing sewage plants for virus RNA could detect local hot-spots of infection two days before any other method. You know where the sewage comes from into each local plant... instant quarantine of the community and targeted testing etc. Simple but how much chance it gets taken up?

And the bike, and the journey. I have an old racing/touring bike, wear normal clothes, drift along at 10mph, no effort, no sweat, very comfortable for trips up to 5 miles on the flat. The problems are carrying luggage, rain, wind, traffic, all of which are equally problems with an electric bike I would imagine. And a journey more than 10 miles on any bike type thing is going to be an effort, the exposure etc. I can see that some people are not fit enough to ride a normal town bike a couple of miles - fair enough - but some people are not capable of riding an electric safely? What is the overlap between people not fit enough for a pedal bike but not frail enough for an electric bike? Electric trike might be more plausible but it gets heavier, wider, storage issues...

What is the advantage of of an electric bike over a human powered one? There ill be a balance of advantages and disadvantages...

You should take this over to the NIRP thread

What do you mean by "living standards" then? if food and energy are cheap, then most people can live well. What else do you need?

If only it were that simple... I don't think, under international law, that a country can just withdraw its sovereignty unilaterally from part of its sovereign territory - and I can't see the Republic of Ireland just agreeing to take on N.I if it is in full-on civil war which it may well be if the UK tries to pull out of NI in the next 6 months. And what about top leaver politicians like Gove who are anti peace process, anti good friday agreement, who see N.I. as an intrinsic part of the UK and won't countenance the break up of the UK? "as British as Finchley" is still getting trotted out. Even now the UK government is digging its heels in to try and stop N.I. being properly in the E.U. e.g. refusing permission for the E.U. to have an office in Belfast.

There is, think of how much people go on about the amount of debt (that is the flip side of super-wealthy individuals and organisations pots of money). Plus, how much do we hear on this board about crazy unearned property wealth? Land value tax has a lot of different aspects, should it be on improved or unimproved purchase value or on rental value? These things have big effects on the levels. I think one basic idea is that it is fundamentally better to tax unearned vs. earned income or wealth; and it is better to tax resource use than work. Owning land is the ultimate source of unearned income and also the classic case of using limited natural resource. My guess as to what land value taxes are not used in the UK is that the whole country for a thousand years or more has been based on a landed aristocracy who own the bulk of the land and control the levers of power.

I think there is response by savers to rates. Its not like there are a specific number of savers with a specific amount of savings. Individuals will balance different choices. I was saving for a car - do I carry on saving to buy a better car in a years time or do I buy a lower spec one now? I think the rates influence whether people save or spend. But really I agree with Scepticus, private individuals at the retail banks have little influence on this compared to the big institutions. I'm also interested in the idea of "alternative savings". If you buy gold coins, or fine art, then effectively you're not saving, you're spending. The seller then has the extra money and has to decide what to do with it - save or spend. In some ways it doesn't matter what the thing is. You could buy sovereigns - the sovereigns go in the cupboards, your money goes to the dealer, pays the salaries of the dealer's staff, pays the rent on the dealer's property, profits to the dealer's owner, and the rest goes on up through the economy to the dealer's suppliers... You may as well buy new kitchen cupboard doors, has the same effect on the economy.

I like the look of this exercise, I would enjoy writing one-line responses, etc. etc. But what does it have to do with the thread which is for chatting about recent NIRP rumours? Start a new thread with the questionnaire and we will all flock to it to argue about the nature of ideal societies.

That's a potentially interesting but incredibly badly designed and misleading "infographic". Looks like the sizes of the spikey blobs are scaled by area yet they are rendered as if they were 3D spheres. Black Death at 200M is about twice the diameter of Smallpox at 56M... so four times the area in 2D, which is about right, but subconsciously implies 8x because they are rendered as spheres. And who ever drew a graph in perspective?

Well there is already a "deal" of sorts, isn't there, in the withdrawal agreement? So presumably in a "no further deal" situation, that would all apply - are there clauses in the WA that are automatically triggered in the event of no further deal? Also what is the situation regarding this 6 weeks deadline, if no extension is requested in 6 weeks, then there is a 6 month "countdown" to the "no deal exit" which gives (actually very little) time to work out what is going to happen from the beginning of 2021. My guess is that the EU would as a point of principle put down the same offer on the table and wait for the UK to ask for concessions. Probably the EU would hold back some low-value symbolic negotiating cards e.g. fish concessions. Will the EU decide it is in its best interests to be strict, follow the letter of the law, impose massively strict barriers from 1 Jan 2021, make the UK beg for concessions, almost cutting its nose off to spite its face, suck up the cost, just to set an example that a member country that decides to leave will get no special treatment?