Barbe bleu
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Posts posted by Barbe bleu
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3 hours ago, TheGunnShow said:Herodotus famously wrote that the Persians would discuss weighty matters twice, initially when soused and usually under the influence of wine, then sober the next day. If they still were in agreement after being sober, they'd go ahead.
There's not much evidence to say this is really the case, but it's a jolly amusing story if nothing else.Interesting I've not heard that before and I heartily approve. My mate guy used to day that he could never trust anyone he hasn't got drunk with. Maybe wannabe MPs can get us all drunk two days before an election, that way we can satisfy both guy and heroditus?
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1 minute ago, TheGunnShow said:I'm sure Herodotus and the Persians would have some fun with this. 😉
Famous for getting on the beers before going to the ballot were they? Persia was famous for its wines so maybe (perhaps not as famous for having actually ballots though)
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2 hours ago, TheGunnShow said:Yeah, using historic old battles is not a bad idea, and I'd say the summer and winter solstice should be worth considering as bank holidays too. I'd also make any election day a bank holiday too.
They are on a Thursday now precisely to ensure that people aren't smashed when they cast their vote!
(Insert hilarious comment on previous election results here)
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27 minutes ago, Yellow Fever said:I'd rather a new bank holiday late October - Trafalgar day ?
I'd get behind that. We just need to convince the Guardian readers that Nelson was a trailblazer for disability rights by proving that disabled people can be shaggers and heroes as well as, if not better, than anyone.
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17 minutes ago, littleyellowbirdie said:That has knocked me sideways. Played a part in the founding of the Orange order as well it seems.
Me too. Not my area of history so never really looked into it before but prompted by this I had a flick through Wikipedia and it seems that almost all of the prominent Irish nationalists of the 18/19th centuries were also protestant, albeit not anglican.
Not sure we need another bank holiday in April. I wouldnt say no if offered but I'd rather have a day or two after August, probably in honour of the UK rather than England. If you can think of an excuse, I'll put it to ministers next time i see one.
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2 hours ago, Yellow Fever said:Not sure that's really true.
What it did confirm is that you can't borrow money to simply give away.
You can borrow money to invest (the left) - you can borrow money for national emergencies (war, pandemic) or you can cut taxes, but must cut benefits / expenditure too to balance (the right).
What Truss did was simply insanity - as any 'stress' test would have confirmed 😉
It wasn't really what was to happen to the borrowed money that caused the shock. Truss wanted to borrow to pay for tax cuts that would feed investment but it could just have easily been corbyn borrowing for social projects.
Truss felt she had very limited time to act so felt the need to go all in (and did so at a time when the BoE was doing something in the opposite direction but let's not get into that). The sting that created will prevent anyone else trying something similar (on either side) for sometime yet. That's why there is nothing between the parties, both are scared of market reaction.
I'd say that this event is paradoxically both irrelevant to any election in the next 20 plus years and also a very big reason why the politics of those 20 plus years will be as they will.
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This was 2 years ago and has largely been overtakeen by events, it was the work of a different cabinet and neither of the big parties is going to adopt a similar model. I'm not sure it is worth getting into the weeds on this. AlOS has a certain 'style' but he is probably right to advise not getting overwrought about it.
Ironically it might have killed off possibilities at both the right and left wings. Stymied the left by emphasising the importance of 'the markets' and the threats posed by borrowing too much and constrained the ability of the right to induce investment into enterprise .
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15 minutes ago, Nuff Said said:If she is innocent, and we don’t yet know, then she hasn’t been hypocritical. Yet you’re accusing her of hypocrisy in advance of any conclusion. Wait and see what happens first.
Mainly although, if i recall correctly, she did call for some MPs to resign whilst under investigation though so there is still a charge of hypocrisy to be answered. Mind you no one did resign so maybe she is entitled to follow suit having 'reviewed her own advice'
17 minutes ago, Nuff Said said:Having said that, I don’t believe this is about the result of the investigation, it’s mainly being done to generate some noise to try and counter the repeated negative news coming from the government. Especially given that most of the potential offences happened too long ago for any action to be taken now.
Agree with most of that. Tories went after her because she was the attack dog and they saw an opportunity to neutralise her and to relieve some pressure on them- it's not really about 'seeing justice done', it never is.
Second part is interesting. We don't actually know what she is accused of so can't really conclude that no action can be taken. If that does prove to be the case then 'yea I did it, but I got away with it for lomg enough' isnt the best line with which the draw this to a conclusion. So maybe she will want to explain herself and her advice to square it off nicely for her?
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2 hours ago, Herman said:David Davies et al learned at the very beginning of this debacle that members of the EU don't do individual deals. Why were they still attempting to?
I guess that sometimes things are worth a try even if you think they will likely mot work? Or maybe sounding out an idea on a smaller basis and without the baggage ?
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24 minutes ago, Yellow Fever said:Yes. It's the simple dismissal of the idea that is so wrong as opposed to exploring it. The politics of the old and sadly spiteful.
It's the way it is I'm afraid.
According to the BBC it was our government that initiated this with individual states- the EU didn't like that and took over.
Perhaps with both sides having made their point there is now room for sensible discussions?
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8 hours ago, Yellow Fever said:I see Sunak has brushed off the 18 - 30 idea. I guess he's following on from the smoking ban. A snub to the young.
I'm not opposed to some sort of deal in this area.
The terms reported: four years, no NHS deposit and subsidised university are non-starters but something along less generous terms could work all around. Language skills mean that this will be a lop sided deal but both sides qould benefit I suspect so why not
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2 hours ago, ricardo said:Console yourself with the knowledge that in some other universe he did take that penalty and probably still missed😀
Regret to inform you that my prayers to the Gods failed. When I woke up snodgrass had still pulled rank on the penalty.
However, this has confirmed my belief in God. Like 137% of norwich supporters I know that snoddy was the devil incarnate against villa and that he single handedly destroyed Rickie's career that day. And as we know the existence of the devil surely implies the existence of the other fellow.
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5 hours ago, ricardo said:Well, according to Nietzsche, all us atheists need to do is put our faith in the non existence of those footballing God's.😁
If I did would I wake up tomorrow to find that Snodgrass let Rickie take that penalty, or it that a miracle/multiverse/timetravelling neutrino too far?
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Checked out that tweet at source and found this
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7 hours ago, dylanisabaddog said:I'd be interested in your take on this. I'm not tax lawyer but the statute and advice you linked to suggested that she would have been entitled to the CGT impcaton of the sale if two things applied:
1) the couple used both properties as a 'home' and that they nominated this one as their single main residence. They could not nominate as their home an empty property or one rented out to a third party
2) both positively assented to that status.
Does this seem right?
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1 hour ago, dylanisabaddog said:Sorry you feel like you're walking through mud. I've given you the HMRC guidance but if you don't like that have a look at S222(6)TGA1992.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/12/section/222/enacted
A married couple can only have one property for the purpose of main residence and CGT.
I think there is probably nuance to be added to what you are saying. The rules say that a married couple can only have one CGT exempt property between them and that they can nominate which one of the two or more that is. If that were the end of it then rayner is probably OK. But the following bits complicate it a bit. He must agree with what she nominates, and both must be used by them as dwellings, I'm not sure about the first qualifier but the other is now in dispute
"If when they marry or register as civil partners they each own a residence and---- they continue to use both as residences-----, they can ---jointly--- nominate which is to be treated as the main residence. "
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10 minutes ago, A Load of Squit said:Was it as serious when John Major did it? The Daily Mail dismissed it as a 'BBC hatchet job'.
A front-page cover from 1991, unearthed by journalist Michael Crick, shows that they took umbrage to BBC Panorama reports on John Major, which showed he had been registered at a house in Lambeth simply so he could win a seat in the constituency.
According to Crick, the owner told him he’d never lived at the address, but won the seat regardless.
For what it is worth I think the electoral declaration thing is pretty minor. If its demonstrated she did wrong I wouldn't want to see her resign over it. Whether that makes her a hypocrit given her statements about other transgressions is a matter for the electorate.
The tax issue is the bigger one. Knowingly filling out duff info to reduce your burden is a serious allegation which, if proven, is a sacking offence even if it was some time ago. Wouldn't necessarily bar her from a comeback on my book but these things shouldn't be just nodded away.
Thing is all we really know is that GMP are looking at something, that's the limit of the conclusions we can draw. If she followed her own advice she would step down but as no one else took her advice i think she is entitled to stay, for now at least
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2 hours ago, dylanisabaddog said:There is no evidence that HMRC is carrying out an investigation....Bear in mind that HMRC won't comment publicly even if Rayner asks them to.
I think you're right to be intrigued by the police investigation. Have they really been asked to investigate a 'crime' that is time barred from prosecution?
I've truncated your first two paragraphs to highlight and then shelve one issue for now- we don't know what HMRC are doing so not much point speculating.
Yes, my intrigue is about the police investigation. They have already declined to investigate once. So what will they now be looking at? Seems to me to be only three options: (1) there is no new investigation, there is only perfomative action designed to a alleviate pressure (2) they are investigating a whole new offence, not the time barred one (3) they are investigating a more recent incident of the same offence.
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5 hours ago, A Load of Squit said:More evidence of what a non-story it is.
The ** who reported Rayner doesn't know what she did wrong.
I'm very intrigued as to what the police are investigating.
The making a false claim thing seems unlikely as the time bar seems impossible but the GMP have reverse ferreted on an earlier decision not to investigate which presumably they did for some reason.
The fraud aspect will presumably be on a desk in HMRC so what is under investigation? Is it just police going through the motions because of public pressure or is there a third allegation on the table?
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On 14/04/2024 at 08:53, TheGunnShow said:If non-doms are evading tax then aren't they basically leeches anyway?
Isn't the rule that non dom status relates only to foreign income? Money made in the UK still gets taxed at the standard rate.
I dont really care about the politics of this. If abolition raises the overall take then great, if it doesn't then its a blunder. I suspect that it's 50/50 which will prove true
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4 hours ago, littleyellowbirdie said:I think it's possibly to disappear down a real rabbit hole breaking down that statement, so I'll just say I don't fully disagree with it without fully agreeing with it either.
Hahaha. I'm going to explain my thoughts, not becaus it is massively relevant but because its 5 pm on a Friday, the sun is out and I don't want to work right now.
There were no traditional front lines in Vietnam and so no easy way of telling who was winning. McNamara came from Ford motors (or was it GM?) and was used to spreadsheets that measured success so demanded the metrics for the war.
What he got was regular body counts. The higher the body count the better, he thought, even more so if the differences between ours and theirs were big. Of course this led to US troops fragging anything that moved and generally making everyone hate them, all whilst ignoring things that might actually work but which are not easily measured or put in a nice graph.
In the end mcnamara lost the ability to see stats as a tool and saw them as an outcome in their own right. This deluded him into thinking the war was being won and just a bit more, a few more troops and a bit more time would do it
We risk doing the same with housing. If we just count houses or total new builds we might think we have got it about right but as has been said here a lot, not all houses are equal, we need some houses more than others and we need houses in some places and not in others. Sure, we could build a 100 storey block in Stockton on tees and house 1000s; That would look good on a chart, but is it actually useful to do that?
Likewise, brexit may or may not cause GDP to drop but does GDP tell us everything we need to know or do we grab hold or this chart or that chart to prove a point and delude ourselves as to its real importance?
The sun is shining, I'm contributing nothing to the economy right now so my chart looks bad- but I'm pretty content. I'm not intending to spend any cash ahead of the Preston game either but I know life will be good after it...
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3 minutes ago, littleyellowbirdie said:The Rest is Money had a good episode on this recently talking about how most of the press talks about the Consumer Price Index for inflation on goods only, while most of academia looks at CPIH, which also incorporates housing costs. I believe the US index also favours looking at inflation incorporating housing as well.
It's like Robert McNamara looking at a spreadsheet to see if the US was winning the Vietnam war.
Numbers will only tell you so much, they are a tool, but if you can't measure what is important don't fall into the trap of giving undue importance to what can be measured.
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1 hour ago, Badger said:This is an important point. One of the consequences of Brexit is that we limit our building capacity in any future attempt at building to address the problem. We have limited our supply capacity which makes meeting demand even harder. "Help to Buy" and similar schemes only increase demand and therefore will drive prices still hard. It is astonishing that the party of the free market do not understand this.
Broadly agree with the first part, we have a housing capacity problem and no amount of demand management is going to fix that and supply what we need. I would be careful in saying that it is labour we are ahort of though. Appreciate that there is comfort in linking this capacity issues to brexit but it helps no one to do do if the real problem is land and not labour supply
On the second point when I first heard of Help To Buy I thought exactly what you did- that will only lead to higher prices and won't solve anything. But then I realised the futility of trying to apply free market principles to a market that is anything but free, shrugged my shoulders and thought that the only analysis worth having would be in the results and they could never really be seen.
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51 minutes ago, Badger said:If you wished to limit immigration in the future you would have to accept much lower living standards
Does this necessarily follow?
Sure having a big workforce drives up GDP and mitigates for an ageing population so the figures will work but does a high GDP equate to higher living standards? Is there often some value in the free things that no amount of accounting can really capture. Is it OK if we have less cash in our bank if we get to spend it on what we want rather than on rent that goes to an increasingly select few?
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Happy St George's day
in Non-Football
Posted
I was a bit worried when I first heard about this parade.
But then I saw a few people had the word 'England' written on the cross of St George and some others were shouting 'In-ger-land' in thick Cockley accents. These two things were sufficient to create a safe space in which I could express my snobbery and class prejudice, which of course I delighted in.