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gp_

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Everything posted by gp_

  1. Can you be more specific? What subsidies and tax breaks are you thinking of?
  2. That should be covered by fuel tax. Also, if you count the externalities you should also consider the positive externalities - people can use the road network to drive on.
  3. If that is true that means roads are net heavily taxed rather than subsidised.
  4. You need to look at the details. Firstly, China is not particularly productive. Look at the numbers: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-PennWorldTable?country=IND~MYS~PRT~JPN~GBR~ESP~USA~FRA~DEU~CHN China's railways (and a lot of its shiny infrastructure) is built for political rather than economic reasons.
  5. That cost is covered by road tax, and road transport also requires paying very heavy taxes on fuel.
  6. They are already in France, again concentrated in and around Paris, and several in airports. https://locations.pretamanger.fr/ They are also using a local partner in Spain and Portugal, so they are not funding everything (if anything).
  7. They have been expanding abroad for years. I remember seeing one in Hong Kong more than 15 years ago. On the other hand most of their shops are not just in the UK, but in London. Most of their shops in the US are in New York and Washington. Most of the others are in airports. It also sounds like a horrible place to work: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts
  8. There would have been periods of hardship, such as plagues and famines, but those happened both before and after and outside (e.g. the plague of Justinian in the Eastern Roman Empire) the "dark ages". There were periods of great hardship, but not most of the time many people were better off than in Roman times. You should read some of the sources quoted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)#cite_note-Williams2020-56 Random hardship through disease and famine happen. This is a dramatic example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
  9. The UK is corrupt but not compared to almost anywhere else: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021
  10. The "dark ages" did not really happen. It was mostly made up by imperialists like Gibbon who thought the fall of an empire was a bad thing. https://time.com/5911003/middle-ages-myths/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
  11. The obvious solution to me is to change the tax on property. The government is moving this way, but not enough. What is really needed is that properties you own other than your main residence should be taxed at a percentage of their value and should be at least twice the tax you would pay if it was your residence (i.e. you pay whichever is more). It would raise a lot of revenue - even a 1% tax would raise a lot of revenue on more expensive houses.
  12. I suspect most do not care. I voted leave and conservative and I would love to get rid of some of the remaining imperial units - distances in miles. I think this is about distracting your opponents with something that does not matter than making your supporters happy. Some older people do prefer to have things marked in pounds etc. though and I see no harm in allowing the imperial measure being the more prominent on packages (not currently allowed) if or measuring/pricing loose goods in imperial measures that is what your customers want (personally I would ask what it is per kilo and I suspect enough others would that both were used).
  13. You distinguish between mass and force when shopping? Even with the metric system legally required I have not often seen goods marked in newtons. You do realise this only affects labels in shops - i.e. shops can mark things they sell in pounds instead of kilos?
  14. I am beginning to think this is trolling remainers. Firstly, the UK never completely switched over the metric - road signs are always in miles, as a speed limits, beer is sold in pints, milk is sometimes sold in pints (although labelled with the metric equivalent too). Secondly, just because you allow people to use imperial instead of metric, does not mean they will. At most some shops will label things in both. It will make no practical difference, but it annoys a lot of people so gets talked about (and distracts from other issues).
  15. Its a trigger, but it is not the cause. Sri Lanka's problems long predate the invasion of Ukraine. There was a foreign exchange problem more than an year ago. The government reacted with a bunch of short term measures, including disastrously, a ban on fertilizer imports, turning a 10 year plan (that would probably never have been fully implemented) for a transition to organic agriculture into a 1 year shock change. Devastating food production and the country's most important, export, tea (its not the biggest in terms of value exported, but it is in terms of value added). That case on top of years of running up debt, primarily to China, mostly spent on vanity projects. https://news.yahoo.com/sri-lanka-ex-presidents-vanity-airport-used-store-000920542.html Even the non-vanity projects were doubtful decisions. Building coal power stations, for example.
  16. Its not what we say we want, but in practice we just by everything online and from supermarkets.
  17. TL;DR, yes but the number used is not really that useful, and can be misleading. Its measured per hour worked. The UK does fine comparatively if you do it per employed person per year. The problem is we work longer hours to achieve that. There is a lot of evidence working longer hours for any length of time end up producing the same output. It would not apply to some jobs - e.g. a security guard who mostly has to just be there in case, but applies to enough, and my guess is the more skilled the worse the effect. The evidence has been around for a long time: the earliest was an experiment with lengthening the day at an aircraft factory decades ago. I think that is what is going on here. We work long hours, end up producing the same as we would on shorter hours, and so the hourly rate is bad. Another thing is the proportion of low skilled, badly paid, jobs. If wages for these people goes up, some of their jobs will be automated, others will get less work etc. So a rising minimum wage and the cut off of the supply of Easter European workers will increase productivity as measured this way.
  18. They still have shareholders. The shareholders are all related, more likely to take a long term view, and understand the business better, and will be involved in running it
  19. I do not trust the Sunday Times rich list because I knew someone who got on it by lying. Even a tiny bit of fact checking would have revealed this.
  20. I know Sri Lanka, but am not up to date on its economy (although I know a lot of people there who are) and I know even less about Indian politics (although I do sometimes read Indian news for an alternative perspective) It is in India's interest to help to counter Chinese influence. Sri Lanka is in a Chinese debt trap, Chinese influence has grown, and Sri Lanka is strategically and politically important to India. I think the critical question is whether Sri Lanka can rid itself of its current president. The prime minister has been replaced, and his replacement is, at least, intelligent and educated (I have met him - quite unassuming and charming too). However, the president has a lot of power and is hard to get rid of. The current Sri Lankan constitution was designed by a former president who wanted to concentrate as much power in his own hands as he could get away with. As far as I can the economic situation is recoverable if Sri Lanka gets loans (no doubt there will be strings attached). A lot of problems are cashflow problems with foreign currency. Sri Lanka needs to import fuel, medicines, and inputs for agriculture and industry (things like fertilizers, parts and raw materials) to get the economy restarted.
  21. I am afraid my memory of Saxon times is getting rather vague these days
  22. One of the women who could not get a visa says it is because her fiance was an "ex-rebel fighter" - a member of a terrorist organisation that is, among other things, the inventor and main user of modern suicide bombs. People here associate them with Middle Eastern terrorists, but the group her fiance belonged to used more than everyone else combined. That said i am sceptical of Sri Lankan asylum claims, apart from people who are high profile, especially more than a decade after the civil war ended. Certainly there is a lot of racism and Buddhist fundamentalism. That said, one of the nice things about the protests against the current government is the level of unity shown across communities. Is there any data to back up the fake passport numbers? I get what you are saying, but Syria would be a better case. Christians and other minorities in particular from there and Iraq. The best thing we could do for Sri Lanka is: 1. Help get the president out of office. 2. Lend some money to the country so imports can resume. The economy is stalled because of a lack of fuel, medicines, and raw materials. Its a bit more complex than that. Older people speak better English if they do speak it at all, a higher proportion of young people speak some English. There are a lot of bilingual people who speak English with native fluency (although a Sri Lankan dialect of English) and you cannot get a lot of jobs (most private sector desk jobs, most professional jobs) unless you can read, write and speak English reasonably well.
  23. Really? Warwick, Leamington Spa, Stratford upon Avon, Worcester...? Have you ever been to the actual third world? Coventry to London is not that bad by car (a lot quicker than from Manchester!), and does not take long by train.
  24. Its complicated with regard to my older daughter and our experience was atypical in many ways because we were not living in the UK, we were in a country where HE is much harder because it is rare and of doubtful legality (although that has been clarified and people are more keen on it post pandemic). We also went back and forth between school and HE. My wife did not work full time because of a lack of jobs that paid well enough to be worth it where we were living. I took over education when the kids got to about 9 so the important thing was that I worked from home, so I was around to set up studies and without commute time etc. could find the time. My wife is now working part time and will soon be full time (possibly away) and that does no worry me. We did not employ tutors for her, but we did get about £1,000 worth of free tutoring in one subject towards the end from her godmother who is a former teacher. Once she got to her teens she mostly self-studied anyway, I would guide her, find resources and mark answers. We were also lucky with her, because she did a lot of subjects I could teach. We will have to spend more on her younger sister. With the younger one we have so far spent a few hundred pounds: classes in one subject once a week for two terms and online courses during lockdown. I am excluding things that school going kids might also do (e.g. weekend and after school stuff) I expect to have to spend more on her. Possibly £2k or so between now and the last of her GCSEs. The biggest cost so far has been exam fees. Private centres charge about £200 a subject but are easier to deal with and used to entering private candidates. Some schools will do it just for the exam board's entry fee (about £40, I think) if they have space to spare, but its harder to organise, and there are fewer willing to do this since the pandemic. HE is not something that everyone can do, and some people struggle with the cost. I do think it is something more people should consider. A lot depends on family circumstances and the children concerned. Some people are pretty much forced into it because they have kids schools cannot cope with (SEN, mental health issues, etc). This sadly varies with local authorities. I have a friend with an SEN child who gets superb support. A friend from a few miles from them is in a different LA and gets terrible support. Some people struggle with the costs too. One other thing. A lot of people assume that working parents struggle to HE. Not the case. The worst HE parents are middle class hippies who think exams do not matter, and self-fulfilment and creativity are all that matters. Of course they are very important, but you need the qualifications too. On the other hand, in the family like that I know best the kids who went to school did not do any better either so - to be fair the school was the one that we took our daughter out of because it was so bad. The two HE ones I think of as "home uneducated".
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