Riedquat

That's the sort of thing that gets you dismissed as a NIMBY. Can't say I've ever been to Heathrow for anything other than a transit to elsewhere, and it's a nuisance having to do that. Most alternative plans for new / expanded airports seem to be in locations that are even more inconvenient for the rest of the country.

If it's the difference between mere existance and a comfortable living most people would still work. Personally I still don't see that it can work. The revenue argument doesn't cut it IMO. If it pays for much more than a basic existance then it's probably too high, but if it can't afford to pay for that due to revenue drops there's no point in having it anyway. Also, if you are working you'll presumably contribute towards it then get it paid back, minus some that goes to those who don't work. So how is the net result different from benefits with a bit of shuffling about where the beurocracy occurs?

Or like to hear largely pointless facts being presented as something of substance.

First question - do the numbers add up? Could it ever be done without imposing far too big a tax burden? Second question - can you simply cut it and expect people who aren't working to start working? It's not as if everyone who's unemployed is simply scrounging because they can't be bothered to work.

Doesn't surprise me, but then I don't like living in cities anyway.

In other words the denialists spend most of their time attacking the experts rather than attacking the evidence with counter-evidence. No scientist is neutral. They'll always put forward their own theory and expect others to try to argue against it. The ones who do the latter are the sceptics, and they're far more worth listening to than the deniers.

Everyone starves because no-one has earned any money to buy anything. Obviously that's a ludicrous example, but how far down that path do you have to go before it becomes ludicrous? We've got it now IMO. Get rid of a load of public sector non-jobs, but there's not much for them to do in the private sector either because we're producing most of what we want and need. With some of the basic constraints freed we can find new things to do that benefit us that we couldn't attempt before because we were too busy growing food to survive, but for that to keep working we need to keep thinking of new things to do (or to simply waste time and resources with) as fast as we automate or improve the efficiency of what we're currently doing. I don't see any fundamental need for access to the land, although what you say is probably true for our current technology, up to a point. It doesn't answer how you address that when most of the land is needed for the obvious biological requirements (which are the important ones - you don't need liberty for survival, it's just that quality of life is far better with it), but technology is such that it requires very few people to do the necessary work.

I sometimes think that the worst thing anyone could do would be to build a robot that could provide all our needs for us. Instead of being able to sit back and enjoy ourselves we'd just have 100% unemployment and everyone would starve. What a stupid system we've got.

I thought that you didn't like predictions.

Depends on the future possible event. If it's the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow, yes. And what is a verified historical event? You can usually find some nutcase who'll say the evidence for it is faked or edited. Most people reject their claims not because they're definitely wrong, just wildly implausible. Historical event acceptance runs from the almost certain to the definitely questionable to downright speculation, and it's usually possible to get an estimate of where on that scale you lie. Exactly the same is true for future prediction. I'm as certain as I can be for any prediction that the sun will rise tomorrow. It may not, but that's highly unlikely. I'm reasonably sure that the train will turn up within half an hour of when it's supposed to, but it's not something I would want to bet my life on. I'm about as sure as I can be that I won't win the next lottery draw, particularly as I don't waste money on it. All those assumptions rely on models. You can't separate out simple models of fairly simple phenomena into one box and complex ones of probably chaotic systems into another because there's a continuum in between them. What you can do is say that they'll probably get more uncertain as the complexity increases. So when it comes to climate where do you draw the line? "Well, it's too complicated" will only get you off the hook so far. At some point there'll be an extreme, even if it's a ridiculous one, e.g. if we could strip the atmosphere off Venus and dump it on the Earth we'll notice a difference, or if the sun's output doubled. How far down the line to the absurd would it take you to be reasonably confident of making a significant change, and why?

I do remember a fairly widespread feeling of relief that the Conservatives were out, though (mind you, I was at university at the time). There seemed to be real hope that we might finally get some investment in the infrastructure of the country. What I'm amazed is that there hasn't been a bigger backlash about what we actually got - authoritarianism, spending but not investment, and far more than could be afforded, yet the only things that actually appeared to get the public worked up were Iraq and Afghanistan. They could see the mess being made abroad but not at home? (and at least it got rid of a couple of very unpleasant regimes in the process, which I suppose is more of a silver lining than most of what they did at home).

Well, you've said it yourself with "cut-throat" Show me a large business management team that wouldn't have a problem with literally cutting a throat if it was to their gain and they thought they could get away with it. When business gets tough they'll do their best to make sure it's not them personally who suffers, whatever the cost to anyone else. The striking staff need to get real about the situation too, and realise that even if the only thing their management was interested in was their well-being they still wouldn't be able to carry on as they have done. You rightly see the faults on one side but are strangely blind to those on the other.

That sounds exactly like the management's attitude to me. Do you really see things from such a one-sided point of view?

+1 It's depressing the amount of "screw 'em" attitutde towards the staff and unions on here. The fact that unions seem to expect that their members should get paid a fortune and never actually bother doing any work seems to make some people think that instead the staff should happily bend over and take whatever the management gives them (or come up with some crap about "find another job" - only a fair point if it's as easy to find another job as it is to get rid of someone). They're both as bad as each other a lot of the time, but a tug of war is needed between them to stop thing going to either extreme.

One of them claims to be enterprising simply for managing to grab control of some assets? I can't even stand to use the word "investing" for them. You can invest in a building firm that actually builds houses, that's the sort of thing I always thought "investment" was supposed to be about. Perhaps that's why I'm not rich (or perhaps it's why I'm not in debt).

Am I meant to feel some sympathy for an idiot who didn't realise that rates might rise, and if they're very low almost certainly will sooner or later? We shouldn't be hearing stories like this unless they jump up to something really extreme. My only worry is that they won't learn the lesson and will spend the rest of their lives whinging about how unfair it all was, and how it was all someone else's fault.

I've had deposit hassle from all of them (although the current one is the only one since the start of the TDS, plus I know and trust the guy anyway), but even the dodgiest at least got things done quickly when it was needed.

If you voted Liberal to keep the Tories out but they got the most votes and seats anyway isn't the next best thing to want them to have a bit of influence to tone down the presumably disliked Tory policy? What are they complaining about?

Another thought - there are so many models around for this and that that it's possible that even if they were broadly correct there will still be a few producing unlikely results, and those are the ones you hear about. If something is a once in a thousand year event, but equally and independently possible in a thousand different places you'll hear about it a lot more often than once every thousand years. 12 times the standard deviation coming up several times does however suggest that crap models is a much more plausible explanation.

Putting aside all the waste and profiteering, railways are still going to be expensive to run. Track should actually be more expensive to maintain than road, particularly if it's fit for high-speed use, and the impact of failure on one part of the system is vastly more expensive than on roads. It would be interesting to see how many people are required to actually run it day to day (signalmen etc., even ignoring a few old bits of line with expensive manual signalling) vs whatever is needed for the roads. Still strikes me as daft that a train with 200 people on it appears to have no economy of scale over a car with two, though. Then there are all the costs once you move away from the practical - separate companies owning the track, rolling stock, and actually running the trains doesn't seem terribly efficient.

He certainly sounded keen, but will the Liberal Democrats ever go with anyone who doesn't offer them the electoral reform they want? At least he drew the line under some of the Liberal's more loony policies.

Point it out to those who don't understand the difference with a simple analogy. If you're hurtling towards a cliff then reducing the defecit is easing off on the accelerator a little whilst reducing the debt is putting the brakes on.

The get-out is that he's a candidate, not an MP.

All bad on this, but Clegg not quite as bad. Brown going on about how he wants to do everything wrong, I feel like punching him. Build more. Right, it's just a supply and demand problem and there aren't empty houses? Anyway, this country is too built up anyway. Don't want even more built on, especially when it's not the cause of the problem in most places. Try to stop the population from continually going up would kill two birds with one stone.

Not entirely sure that's why they're voting Labour - it might be that that's where their idiology lies anyway. What if you're in favour of a certain level of public services and social protection, but take the rather simplistic view that it's not a good idea to have any more of that than can be afforded? (thanks to the current mess then zero is probably close to what can be afforded). At the risk of abuse from rather a large number of regular posters, I'll admit to being more left wing than otherwise (at least on provision but not on control), but think that living within the nation's means has to come first. The issue seems to be (to me) of what you're supposed to do when the party you're closest to is also completely incompetent.