Riedquat

Some of them started off as hard-woking entrepreneurs.

Use yours - which is going to be more profitable, a cure or a drug that people have to keep taking for years? The discussion has not been had (in a quick skim over the last few pages), all that's happened have been a couple of bald statements that they'd clean up. Such a statement does not make a discussion. It's not about deliberately developing sub-optimal drugs, it's about concentrating your efforts on what'll make you the most money. It's exactly the same reason why stuff is rarely built to last any more.

They get massively richer, the trickle-down effect makes everyone else slightly richer. Well, that's the theory, anyway. I (a) don't believe it, and ( don't find it tolerable even if it is true. It's, at best, throwing a few crumbs to your slaves whilst you grow fat ("Hey, they're not starving and they've got shelter!")

Probably not. What happens when people want back the deposits that have been leant out but the borrowers haven't paid them back. I think it's supposed to rely on "It'll all come out in the wash in the end, as long as you don't actually try to check that it will."

Spot on there. I've been amazed to sometimes hear people complaining that they can't afford to feed their kids fresh fruit and veg. Fruit can sometimes be a bit pricey but basic vegetables often seem ludicrously cheap. I suspect the real problem is that you can't just chuck them in the microwave.

Not if they improve it too much, to the point where patients don't need their drugs any more.

That is rather worrying, especially since it seems to be coupled to their traditional approach of making sure that their wealthy pals can still rake it in even if everyone else already seems to have been bled dry, but unfortunately most of the opposition to the cuts seems to come from people with a high-Labour ideology which doesn't seem to concern itself with the simple, hard reality of the economic situation.

I'm assuming that most of those come from the idiocy of the last decade or so where there was a ridiculous attitude of "Don't provide for cars and no-one will use them." I've always been puzzled as to how modern high-density developments seem to make such a mess of it compared to Victorian ones, probably without even managing greater density.

We'd be better off without banksters, but not without banks (I don't want to risk keeping my savings in a box under the bed). Their is a bit of an analogy - the inefficient self-serving rubbish that's wrecking the whole thing needs to be cut away ruthlessly, but totally wrecking the banks (again, separate from totally wrecking the vastly over-paid useless self-serving morons who run them) is about as good as wrecking the mines.

And the really depressing thing? It still looks like every other possible outcome of the election would've been even worse.

Which all seems to say that the idea of it is far worse than the reality of it. The human immune system has evolved to cope with far more than that, day in, day out. If people aren't falling ill from it all the time then even if it sounds unpleasant there's no risk worth thinking about. All those adverts saying "There are all these germs on your kitchen worktop!" Well, since I'm not always getting ill then I can only assume that it's telling me that having them there is harmless.

Although in general I agree with the overpopulation issue this isn't an example of it. Most streets too narrow for cars are simply too narrow for cars because they were designed and built before cars existed (or at least before they were at all common)., and will have to remain that way unless we want to knock down lots of perfectly good housing in order to replace it with wider roads and badly-designed, badly-built modern rubbish.

Everything is a bloody health risk. There's a one in a billion chance of you getting a slight rash from handling this product, shock, horror, must be banned, rethink everything! They've cried wolf and been far too paranoid for far too long for me to take anything seriously involving health and dangers. I'll continue ignoring them because almost certainly nothing will happen to me and I won't be worrying about it all the time (I'll just be worrying and getting worked up about everything else instead, things that actually matter and affect people's lives, like overpriced housing). It all sounds like yet another case of equating "There might just be a risk" with "This is definitely bloody dangerous."

Patents expire, they've cut R&D, and complain that the money is going to start drying up. Awww.

Hamish and Sibley both posting on that? I'd better not look at it if I want to keep my blood pressure down.

Of course it makes a huge difference! They've now got a big asset worth twice as much as it was! That's all that matters, don't you see? Next you'll be saying that everyone earning isn't twice as rich if their salary doubles, even though so has the price of everything. Anyway, think of all that extra money you can get by remortgaging - next you'll be telling me that that isn't simply borrowing a huge lot more than you could before, and borrowing == good. Some people even seem waste time thinking about paying that money back. Those dangerous fools, with their weird ideas about how that'll cost you more than just saving up for your holidays and tat, destroying the economy by in the long run wanting to be able to spend more on what they want and less on interest to the banksters.

Partially, but a long way from entirely. If you're comparing to the price of houses then wages are pretty damned low anyway, so the real cost of building a home (labour, materials, but not land with planning permission - i.e. the costs you have no matter what) can't drop much no matter what happens. No matter what builders will end up earning vaguely comparable amounts to other professions, so, even ignoring materials, what's the number of houses built per year per builder? Very crudely speaking, that'll be the average salary multiplier you'll need to buy a house no matter what. That'll be far cheaper than we've got now, but still high enough for most people to require a loan of some sort. Well, probably. I've got no figures whatsoever to base that on.

It's always struck me as one of those situations that seems OK whilst they manage to keep the plates spinning. I suppose it's the banks themselves borrowing from themselves now to pay themselves back in the future. Coins are only representative too, although they can't get worth too much less on face value than in the metal because people start melting them down when that happens ("copper" coins since the early 90s will stick to magnets).

In a way I hope you're right, because I can't see us getting out of the mess without the pain. Trying to avoid the pain is like refusing to pull the plaster off to treat the festering wound beneath. Having massive unemployment might be the sign that we're on the right track at last, but there absolutely must be a way of picking up the pieces to stop it from turning unpleasant into disastrous.

I see where you're coming from, but I'm not sure it would work. The cost of building a house will set a lower limit, will that be low enough for enough people to be able to buy without a mortgage? I don't want a change that'll result in a small number of very wealthy landlords renting out to the rest.

How is the public sector the enemy? Well, the tax burden needed to support it, but I can't see any tax cuts coming. Anyway, let's lose this "growth" obsession, get the basics sorted out so that everyone gets what they actually need, and anything on top of that is a pleasant luxury. Having (sustainable) growth is nice, to rely on it is nuts.

In a free market demand can still go flying upwards against all reason if the "You must buy this at any cost!" mindset arrives, and even without that the supply and demand part can still hold (although it's been a minor contributor towards HPI) - if one can move it'll adjust to the other.

Train tickets are possibly even more overpriced than houses.

It appears that the great British public still firmly believe that you must spend as much as you possibly can beg, buy, or steal on a house as soon as you can no matter what else is going on. It's so stupid it's depressing.

Long term obviously not, if you've got people dying off one end but no-one new coming in at the other.