Panto_Villan

I’m no expert but that’s gotta be missiles, right? Both bridges hit in the same place. If so it’s impressive they managed to nail a (presumably moving) fuel train on the rail bridge while doing so.

I certainly didn’t stop to ask! It was a pretty surreal experience really.

They’re having a break until 10 October. I guess someone put in a big order?

An angry guy with a dog once chased me down a street yelling “Go back to Albania!” so even being a standard white British bloke apparently doesn’t protect you from racism.

We’ve got a young baby and we bought an electric heater for his room. Much more efficient to heat one room instead of the whole house.

Yeah. To be fair I think there was a torture chamber and the teeth were stolen so the Russians could use them to scare prisoners held there - but nonetheless it does seem a fairly big correction that they really should be aware of. I mean, the sheer number of teeth there means it’d probably be the biggest atrocity of the war. The average person doesn’t have very much metal in their mouth.

Posting this because it’s nice to know one less horrific thing has happened to Ukraine than previously thought:

Yes, but if you think that most or all of that would stop if Russia collapses then I think you’re going to be disappointed - Tucker Carlson gets paid far more by Fox than Russia could ever possibly pay him. There’s a massive audience for his views, and seeing Putin as the puppet master behind all the ills in Western democracy is overstating his relevance and understating our own problems.

I run a small business that has message boards that technically fall under the ICO and I’d love to not have to pay £50 a year or whatever and spend half an hour filling in stupid forms for no reason. I’m quite tempted to shut the message boards down because I can’t really be arsed with the extra admin and cost, it’s just so needless. Of course it’d be much more efficient overall to just stop posting on Villatalk and do more work in that time instead - but we all know that’s not going to happen.

You gotta wonder how important "playing good football" is to NSWE, relative to just getting results. If we keep playing ugly football but getting results that aren't completely disastrous, is Stevie going to be sticking around?

Sounds like things might be happening in Kherson now. Fingers crossed!

Nah. Insider trading is when you get told specific information in advance and make money off it. If Kwarteng is meeting people after his budget and they're telling him to keep crashing the economy, it's just corporate lobbying. Same as if a fishing company met him and said we should loosen our restrictions on the size of the nets fishing trawlers are allowed to use. Maybe what they are saying is true, but either way their motivation for saying it should be pretty obvious. (It's worth noting that lobbying itself isn't necessarily bad. Like, trucking companies pointing out to the government that the post-Brexit immigration reforms would screw over the HGV industry and paralyse the country is also "lobbying". Really lobbying is just communication, which can be both good and bad depending on the content.) What's more concerning, really, is the fact that Kwarteng allegedly met his former hedge fund boss Crispin Odey during the leadership contest for lunch and after that lunch Odey put a big bet against the pound. It's pretty much impossible to prove anything dubious happened, because Kwarteng wouldn't have needed to say anything specific - simply that he and Truss genuinely believed that tax cuts were needed - and at that point Odey would know that sterling would nosedive as soon as the budget came out. So the Lib Dem call for an investigation is good politics. Almost certainly no crime has been committed, but the story won't sit right with anyone that reads it so it's smart to try and get it as much airtime as possible.

While I don't think we should be telling the subjects of racist abuse on the football pitch to shut up and laugh it off, I do have a problem with this principle when it is applied too widely. Of course other members of society have a role to play in establishing who is a victim, and how that victim should behave. You can't just decide that you've been the victim of attempted murder, for instance - we have a method of establishing whether you are or not, and what justice you are entitled to if you are. It's not only the victim's views that matter when it comes to percieved harm inflicted on them by other individuals. Of course, the example of the banana throwing at a football game is pretty clear cut and the principle holds there. By law and commonly agreed prinicple it's a racist hate crime; there's no other possible interpretation of throwing a banana at a black player. It's not really legitimate to tell someone that it's no biggie in that instance. But when you're talking about something where causality is muddier, the whole of society is absolutely entitled to a view on whether something constitutes racism or not. If Kwarteng came out and said all the recent attacks on his competence were rooted in racism then white people would be perfectly within their rights to tell him to jog on.

Stevie allegedly also had a local fixer deal with an aggressive criminal who had been threatening him to try and make a name for himself. Provided a letter or good character for the guy when he went on trial. I remember reading the fixer and some buddies shot the guy in the face with a shotgun, but from a distance so it wasn't too damaging.

The strengths of the UK in banking weren’t really built on the tax regime. If people went where tax rates were lowest then all the bankers would be in Dubai. The UK in general got a lot of business being the English speaking gateway into Europe, in a time zone midway between the US and Asia, and a well-established legal framework. For example - most of the EU Euro denominated bonds were traded in London, but the EU has (or will) change the rules so that’s no longer possible. My mate is a very successful banker and he sees very little value in the bonus cap being removed. Bankers base salaries have already ballooned to make up for the reduced bonuses, and it’s not like the rules affected hedge funds etc anyway. Businesses and rich people would much rather have a stable business and investment environment than handouts, anyway. There’s really no winners when you’re putting out policies like these.

Yes, the Ukraine situation is another concern I’d have had with Corbyn. Re: the EU, I think there’s value in having the Tories in power after Brexit (especially with Corbyn being more Eurosceptic than the Labour Party in general). It makes the inevitable betrayal narrative less convincing. Brexiteers would love to foist Brexit on the country, then hand it over to Labour with all its unsolvable contradictions. That way they could complain forever about whatever solution Labour came up with and blame all future problems on that.

Under Starmer, or indeed any Labour general election candidate since Blair other than Jeremy Corbyn? No, of course not. But what’s unfolding here is the catastrophic “stubborn leader who doesn’t believe in orthodox economics” scenario, which is a major reason why large numbers of people would rather hold their noses and vote for Boris rather than see Corbyn in office. In fact, Corbyn could actually have been worse than this. Not necessarily because of his ideas, but simply because he’d have a full four year term and a mandate. Hopefully the fact Truss is an unelected leader means she’ll face a major rebellion if she carries on down this path.

So let’s say you’re a Tory strategist - what’s your best plan at this point (aside from jumping out of a window)? Immediate vote of no confidence? Stick with Truss and hope everyone has forgotten about this in two years time? Those polls are showing an extinction level event right now.

Agreed. The idea that someone would never vote for one of the two major parties in our country, irrespective of what policies / actions the other might take, is not something to be celebrated. Democracy relies on people changing their votes based on how the different parties perform.

There’s sort of a web of interconnected effects. Technically a house is a good thing to hold during inflation because logically it should retain its relative value with inflation, while the outstanding amount of the mortgage is being eroded by inflation. In a vacuum you could theoretically keep remortgaging the increased value to help with the increased payments (unlikely to be viable in practice, but still interesting I think). Also if you’re employed you’d expect wage increases to somewhat keep pace with inflation, so you’d expect people to be able to keep up on their mortgages if they are employed unless they have very little disposable income and can’t cut back at all if their wages get eroded a bit. Unemployment is a killer though because then people are reliant on savings to keep up their payments, and that’s when houses get repossessed in large numbers.

The problem with this is the valuations. It’d be pretty much impossible (not to mention extremely tedious) to reliably calculate your net wealth every year. How much has your laptop or phone depreciated this year? Do fluctuations in the commodities market mean your wedding band has increased in value this year, or does the scratch it got this year cancel that out? Whereas PAYE is a straightforward way for the government to calculate and collect the right amount of money each month. And it also doesn’t mean that tax take falls to zero during a recession when the price of assets decreases.

Yes, this is true and is an interesting debate. I read a long article about it a few months ago that made some good points. Stamp Duty also discourages people from moving from areas with few jobs to more jobs, which is another economic harm. But abolishing it does also require an increase in council tax and then that extra element being diverted to the central government - and higher taxes on house worth would be politically unpopular, and depress house prices too so I can’t see it happening. One reason why SDLT is unlikely to disappear is that it’s one of the easiest taxes to collect and it’s impossible to fiddle. Unlike with council tax where there’s a subject element to the valuation, this just goes on the sale price and the government can refuse to transfer ownership until it gets paid. So it’s very efficient in that regard.

This is a good point, although I’m not sure your point about household income vs national holds here - as you say, it’s still a good idea for a household to take out loans for valuable education or tools that increase your earnings in the long run. National finances work the same in that regard. The question mark regarding the tail end of new Labour is whether that borrowed money would be put to an economically productive use. Because lots of physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, railways, broadband etc) falls into that category but there’s only so much of that stuff and it’s much more debatable whether services do the same - whether say throwing money at the NHS provides the same long term economic benefits, or just improves peoples lives a bit during the period that the increased spending occurs - a bit like a cheap Netflix subscription you still can’t really afford, to use your household analogy.

Ah, I stand corrected. Thanks for the heads up.