erat_forte
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Posts posted by erat_forte
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9 hours ago, The Angry Capitalist said:
That's a law thing more than a landlord thing though.
Pass a law that enables landlords to give tenants 12 months notice to increase the rent.
That way if the tenant cannot afford it then it gives them time to make plans and find somewhere else.
Why not the other way round?
Pass a law that enables tenants to give landlords 12 months notice that the rent is going to be reduced.
That way if the landlord cannot afford it then it gives them time to make plans and find some other line of business to try and make a go of.
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22 hours ago, Far Canal said:
Don't buy a leasehold.
Yes apart from this one blindingly obvious guideline I would just like to add a recommendation for an old fashioned push mower. I have a Brill mower and it is really god, much faster and easier to mow a small lawn with it than with an electric one, and easier to store.
Like this:
https://www.reelmowerguide.com/brill-luxus-33-push-reel-mower-information/
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55 minutes ago, bartelbe said:
The system is stupid because uses property values as a proxy for income. The fairer way to do would be a local income tax, with property taxes only for those with multiple properties.
Property value tax is much fairer and economically more effective and sensible than income tax.
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Poor woman and her partner own a 30 per cent share of a one bed flat in Kings Cross
Correct me if I am wrong but they don't actually own a share in anything. They just have a massive and arcane contractual liability and a large debt, and the right to reside in the flat as long as they pay the various fees and charges on time.
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Stewey's fatuous comparison with houses, and other things like cars, tinned food, and medication, shows a deep confusion about the different categories of "things". I think this is related to the common confusion between Land and Capital - I think this confusion has been deliberately encouraged by the landed classes.
The difference of course being that anyone can obtain their own capital, merely by producing stuff, and consuming less than what they produce. It is not possible to obtain land this way for the simple reason that no-one produces land, they just take it off the previous occupiers.
Landlordism is basically a kind of private taxation, and has all the economic deadweight and fiscal drag characteristics of any other kind of taxation.
The main thing missing from the article as far as I can see is that it doesn't discuss the role of mortgage lending as a kind of second order landlordism - it is just as much a private taxation, to extract an income stream out of private individuals as a condition of them occupying land. It is just more subtle and sophisticated than rent landlordism.
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1 hour ago, MancTom said:
sure, how does this add up to 100k for 1 day of bin collection though? Say 4 people on 30k each, so real cost of 100k each. Then divide 100k/260 days to get 380 pounds per day. What about the other 99.5 k per day?
Its an accounting wheeze, you write up the free truck, fuel, maintenance crew, depot, disposal facility, etc. as "benefits in kind" to artificially make the daily figure look bigger
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No idea what either of these people thinks.
On inequality I read a few years ago an interesting paper on "the laws of large numbers", which discussed power-law distrbutions, how income and "wealth" basically follow a power law, same as for other natural phenomena involving large numbers e.g. size of settlements. I'm always irritated with myself that I cannot find it again.
And also I think there are good studies that where you sit on the distribution is closely correlated to two things, one is where you start, and the other is "random walk" chance. People think they were clever for leveraging multiple times to buy houses, or to start the right kind of business at the right time, or to choose the correct lottery numbers... but its all random chance or "luck".
Then finally you as an individual can choose your own life philosophy - you can gloat about your superior intelligence and effort, or you can complain that you are hard done by, or you can keep your head down and work hard to try and better yourself (knowing that whether you succeed depends more on luck than hard work), or you can boast of your entitlement while trying to cheat as much as possible out of others...
But it doesn't really make much difference in the end.
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6 hours ago, Bruce Banner said:
His latest one is really clever, one word, "Plan". Easy to remember and to constantly repeat in interviews, and it works for or against each leader. "Sunak has a plan", "can't vote for Starmer because he hasn't got a plan".
Make no mistake, this guy is dangerous.
I hope it is a cunning plan! They always work perfectly.
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2 hours ago, regprentice said:
i've said before that you could have an app, and ask the entire country to vote on all issues once a week. collate the answers and theres your democracy. Parliament doesnt do that much... it takes an age to pass an act of parliament, you'd only be asking people to answer 5 or so simple multiple choice questions a week.
This Is the only true democracy
You could get to a clear policy quite quickly. In week 1 ask a general question
- "should immigration be higher or lower"
week 2 get more detailed feedback
- "should skilled/unskilled/international student be higher or lower"
then week 3 nail down the target
- "should international students be 600,000, 400,000, 200,000 or 0 a year"
The main problem here is that the public will vote on two issues in a contradictory way for example they'll vote to increase funding to the NHS by 100% and to reduce income tax to 5% at the same time. That'll be the new job for ministers, making their instructions from the public work no matter what.
That's very similar to how Tony Blair's "focus groups" worked, except it was a selection of people rather than the entire population who voted.
The focus groups decided that taxes should be cut and the transport system should not be invested in.
10 years later the focus groups were raging at the government for letting the transport system go to the dogs.
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13 minutes ago, Will! said:
My favourite conspiracy theory, as per Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov / Tomas Schuman, is that educational reform in the West in the 1970s was a Soviet plot to subvert the West by destroying its young people's capability for critical reasoning. The plan took on a life of its own and, although the Soviet Union is long gone, the reforms continue. These lead to more people with weak critical reasoning skills, who tend to believe in conspiracy theories!
There's an interesting theory that the more highly educated and technologically advanced a society becomes, the more prone it is to nutjob conspiracy theories.
Here's why: as the technology and science and knowledge advances, the entirety of the knowledge base of the society becomes larger. However any single human has only a certain capacity for learning and understanding on a technical level.
So education becomes more specialised, and systems are developed to enable highly educated individuals to have an insanely detailed knowledge about smaller and smaller areas of expertise - think of the people who write operating systems, the people who write software, the people who design chips, the people who design aircraft control systems, the people who sequence genomes, the people who develop genetical drug therapies... it gets more and more capable and requires ever more focussed specialisation.
These people collaborate through systems of trust, of accreditation (PhD, professorship, members of internaitonal research groups, publication in peer reviewed journals etc.
But this means that each individual highly educated expert is trained to take the majority of their understanding of the world on trust from other highly trained and highly educated experts.
Therefore it is very easy for an entryist to feed misleading or conspiratorial misinformation into the system as long as they do it by playing on this educated trust in experts.
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22 minutes ago, Huggy said:
Make being an MP a like jury duty. You have to do it for x amount of time, paid, and at the end of it you are done and no coming back. People who want to be in politics are likely to be the worst people you want to go into politics, so this nicely takes that away.
Pros. Career politicians are gone. Short term policies not looking beyond the next election are gone. A wider representation of people.
Cons. It's not actually democracy (Not necessarily a bad thing in certain circumstances). Normal people are quite fick and have short attention spans, this makes them worse than people who want to be politicians. How can you get rid of someone early?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Well according to the original ancient definition, it literally is democracy, rule by the ordinary people. Nowadays the idea of democracy has been corrupted; in ancient times our system would be called "elective oligarchy" because the ordinary people only get a choice of a few oligarchs to select from.
Look up "sortition" which is the is the usual modern word used to describe the jury selection system.
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23 hours ago, Trampa501 said:
I have a better idea. Scrap the licence but allow the Beeb to enter into agreements with Netflix/Amz etc and let it earn by charging for streaming.
What a great idea, this could be rolled out to all kinds of other license fees. Abolish gun license fees, and replace it with a new tax for all households whether they own guns or not. Abolish pub license fees, and replace it with a new household tax whether the household is run as a pub or not. Abolish oil drilling license fees, and replace it with a new household tax whether the household drills for oil or not. Genius idea what?
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9 hours ago, FTB-house-hunter said:
@MonsieurCopperCrutch can I just ask, who hurt you so badly? Or are you just that heavily invested in stocks belonging to ICE manufactures? Honestly you are acting like a child 🤨 Anyone with any common sense can see EV's are the future for the vast majority and are much more environmentally friendly when compared to ICE equivalence. The vast majority of drivers are doing small local trips, not 200+ miles per trip!
Well... I think EVs and ICEs have quite different use-cases. I think any proposal to electrify all the current world vehicle fleet like for like is pie in the sky... but clearly a good number of people are enjoying using EVs.
But I disagree with you about "the future for the vast majority" - I would be thinking that space is for pushbikes and handcarts.
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22 minutes ago, whitemice said:
I’ve been on a plane and have petted a bird, so I can confirm that both exist.
I didn't think birds were permitted to be carried in the passenger cabin of an aeroplane?
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1 hour ago, PeanutButter said:
Do developed countries with a land value tax have replacement value birth rates (excl immigration).
Don't know but I doubt there is a connection... birth rates are likely largely driven by economic growth (correlate world population with world economic activity or primary energy usage for the past few thousand years to see this very obviously).
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3 hours ago, fellow said:
Yep, every plane would require the pilot and ground crew to be in on the plan. It makes you wonder why they bother going to the trouble of dispensing these chemicals from aircraft in such a visible way when they could just as easily pump this out from ground level in much greater quantities without anyone noticing?
Presumably the Chem is very sensitive and can only survive at high altitudes or something.
Perhaps the entire Chem dispersal thing is a distraction to give the conspiracy theorists something to discuss online, and to keep them filming the sky, so they don't have the time or don't ever look around them to see the hazmat-suited people going along the street injecting people in broad daylight. I mean have you ever seen that happen in a city street? No? Well there you go. Proves how successful this strategy is.
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18 hours ago, Pmax2020 said:
This was a half arsed census, and I apologise.
Let me do this again properly when I’ve bored on a beach holiday in June. I’ll give it some proper thought.
This was just me getting frustrated at the amount of posters talking about their wealth… it seems a bit unbelievable at times how well off posters are on these boards..
see, I told you so, I always thought people here were rich gits. My poll (which obviously only asks the rich gits if they are rich gits, since I assume everyone on here is a rich git) shows that everyone who answered is a rich git. QED.
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Good to find some "excuse" for increased costs and supply chain disruptions. Even better there is a scapegoat to bomb who can't fight back. Win-win.
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We have some interesting "insiders" here, who post detailed technical (anonymised) information about how the financial system works.
I'm sure there must be a Chemtrail Operative lurking on HPC, maybe one of the pilots, or the nozzle operatives, or perhaps the Chief Chem Synthesis Manager, or maybe even the Air Traffic Control (Chem Division) Planning Officer who works out the optimal flightpaths for the chem-dispensing sorties.
Can any of these who are lurking give us some tidbits of "insider" information?
The locations of any of the chem depots? Can we get some grainy secret photos of the insides? Maybe we could collectively try to enhance the images to read the labels on the tanks of Chem.
Can anyone smuggle out a faulty Chem nozzle from the scrap bins?
There must be some DIY weather balloon people who could work out a system to get a homemade balloon up into the chemtrail and take a sample or even better have a raspberry pi and some sensors to detect what the Chem is made of?
On second thoughts that looks really difficult. Perhaps the most productive way to solve this mystery for all time is to grumble about how cloudy the weather is over England.
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Interesting article from Chris Grey about parallels between the Post Office scandal and the EU settlement scheme scandal - both involving IT bugs, and a culture of bullying / cover ups / bureaucracy applying its own rules wrongly or incompetently.
https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-scandal-of-settlement-scheme-for-eu.html
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1 hour ago, MancTom said:
One crazy thing I discovered reading about this is that it's a fact of law (MP's passed legislation stating this) that evidence from a computer system is correct. Up to the defence to prove otherwise, which is presumably impossible without expert knowledge of the system accusing you.
Yes I remember hearing this discussed before - its like the state parliament somewhere in the US trying to pass a law that pi=3
Why do we have ministers MPs and judges who are basically scientifically illiterate and innumerate? Its all very well studying Rhetoric and Philosophy, so you can sound like you know what you are talking about... but if you haven't studied mathematics statistics and engineering you haven't a clue basically.
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I was imagining them listing boarded up terraced houses in ex-industrial towns in the north, where the liability of taxes, refurb etc. is higher than any sensible valuation... Anyway carry on.
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Don't believe it
If it is really the poorest town in Britain why did they specify that part of it had the lowest income in England and Wales
I bet there are poorer towns in Scotland
And the whole programme talked about "the country" with the UK flag - I bet there are even poorer towns in Northern Ireland.
Share Ownership Woes
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How can a person be a "Professor in Real Estate Finance"?