Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Betrayal on a scale that only the British can stomach.
In 1898 Britain signed a treaty for a 99 year lease from China on Hong Kong, and was legally obliged to return it in 1997. Anything else would have been a violation of international law. Would you have preferred war with China?
1. Introduce a fossil fuel car VAT supplement, starting at 2%, ratcheting up by an additional 2 percentage points every year until it hits 20% - ie gradually double the VAT on any vehicle that is in any way powered by petrol or diesel.
That's what triggered the "yellow vest" protests in France, and could well cause haulage strikes in the UK. Certainly, some government is going to have to tackle the road haulage industry at some point, but I think it will need a lot more carrot & less stick than this.
Introduce an electric/AF car VAT discount, starting at 20%, ratcheting down by 2 percentage points every year until it's gone - i.e. remove the VAT for now, gradually reintroducing it.
Still wouldn't encourage me to buy a battery electric car. Do it for plug-in hybrids and I might be interested, but then I'll probably buy one anyway, so it could become another subsidy for people who don't need it.
Those that impose extra wear and tear on the network or consume extra capacity [think heavy and/or XL vehicles] pay even more.
40+ tonne lorries do so much damage to the roads that the wear & tear from cars is insignificant. The labs that do road wear & tear measurement don't even consider light vehicles any more. Structuring car tax based on relative damage done by bigger cars is in the "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" category.
either independence* is good for all or it isn't good for anyone.
That's overly simplistic, and of course can be looked at the other way around: if being in the EU is so good, why do the Scottish Nationalists want to leave the UK?
The reality is far more complex, and needs to consider exactly what sort of union is involved. The UK has been a fairly successful and well-integrated political and economic union for 300+ years, the EU was a successful economic arrangement but has never had any real sense of political or cultural community. The main reason that Sturgeon & co want to leave seems more to be based on the idea of gaining some sort of glory for righting an ancient wrong, irrespective of any future harm. I really doubt if many English folks care whether Scotland goes or stays, except perhaps those close to the border who would have to handle the resulting mess, much as those in Ireland did in the 1920s.
a 7% hit to GDP is quite a good starter
We always knew there would be a temporary hit while agreements are re-aligned. What's important is how far our GDP growth exceeds the EU's in 5-10 years. Brexit was never intended to be a short-term magic fix, it's a means to a long-term end.
If you leave the golf club, you aren't allowed to still use the course.
A sensible club would allow you to use the course if you paid visitors' green fees, knowing that you'd spend money in the bar afterward as well, and would welcome reciprocal playing agreements on your course. The EU just threw up a fence around the course, while those outside spend their money elsewhere.
as is evident from where the squeals are emitted from.
Mostly, it seems, from UK nationals who hold .eu domains, but don't want the bother of setting up an EU base to keep them. How hard would it be to get an accommodation address in an EU country like, say, Ireland? For that matter, Belfast would probably work, accepted as part of the UK but I doubt the EU would want to open a can of worms by claiming it isn't in Ireland!
still sad, still angry, and even more of a minority now.
Proof, or is this just more desperate sour grapes? As I said above, I'm not at all sad, and irritated with the EU rather than angry. If we're more of a minority now, how did a pro-Brexit party get such a large majority in the last election?
They should be happy - they've destroyed the UK, they've got what they want.
I have absolutely no desire to destroy the UK, I want it to remain a strong world power. At the moment the person working hardest to destroy it is Nicola Sturgeon, with assistance from some EU members who would love the chance to smack the UK for daring to leave, and who have always found that a divide-and-conquer strategy is best for them. A United Kingdom had the power to make the EU's life difficult, 4 separate smaller squabbling nations would have been much easier to contain and ignore.
What's really irritating is the Brexit supporters constant cries of 'oh wow is us, the EU are pulling all the benefits of EU membership, we thought we could leave the club and retain all benefits'
Not at all. We leave, of course we lose benefits that exist only because of membership. There aren't as many as people like to suggest, many of the benefits agreed between EU members actually come from pre-existing international agreements. The EU requires that they exist as a condition of membership, but they aren't made possible only because of membership.
What irritates us is when a particular proposed arrangement is clearly of some benefit to both the EU and a non-member like the UK, but the EU refuses to agree because any apparent benefit to the UK post-Brexit is unacceptable, even if it also benefits the EU.
It's what a sad, angry minority wanted
The only sad and angry people I see are the ones who wanted to stay, and if you're in a majority how come you lost a referendum and three elections? Those of us who didn't want to stay in a failing political and monetary polity are quite happy at the moment, if a bit irritated at the EU's continued determination to punish the UK even at the expense of making its own life difficult.
As for the .eu domains, apart from those used by EU bodies, like the somewhat tautological "europa.eu", most seem to have been bought more as as a defence against cyber squatters than from any especial EU commitment.
the private sector, whose main and only interest is to make money with the least effort.
When it's my tax money being spent, I expect it to be used to get best results for least expense, no matter whether it is a public or private organization spending it.
Past experience has shown that the public sector does not understand the concept of "value for money" in the slightest.
It's rarely that black & white, though. I used to have a rack of a dozen old machines in a test lab, they were great for prototyping new builds of code where performance wasn't an issue. The code on the actual servers was often Beta, with potential security issues, so the system was on an isolated lab network.
The one downside was that the console access to each system was via SSH to a service processor which only supported old algorithms. The systems were obsolete, no-one was generating new firmware, so to login I had to override the block on unsafe algorithms. It didn't matter, the consoles were on a completely isolated management network. The alternative would have been to ask for a dozen new systems, an unnecessary expense that would probably have been reduced to one or two per annual budget cycle.
There are times when blocking old stuff by default, but allowing it to be selected, is justified.
They also have your address and phone number.
Not according to the email I got from easyJet: "name, email address, and travel details ... information including where you were travelling from and to, your departure date, booking reference number, the booking date and the value of the booking were accessed", but no passport or credit card details.
Still, my address and phone number are public information anyway.
Like I say, annoying, but I wouldn't want to see them bankrupted for it.
Considering how many Easyjet customers (including me) have vouchers due to cancellations, this sort of lawsuit doesn't seem to benefit anyone. Landing EJ with a bill like that might just push them over the edge into bankruptcy, and everyone loses.
My personal info was affected by the breach, and some scammers now have details of flights that I didn't take, and a one-shot email address that is only used for EJ. It's mildly annoying, and I hope the ICO delivers a suitable smack on the wrist, but personally I have no desire to make lawyers rich over it. I'd prefer EJ to stay in business.
A month or so ago I read of bars in Boston ( United States one ) substituting daily deliveries of Guinness to the faithful just like we used to have milkmen.
Why on earth didn't British publicans do the same,
One Belfast pub did, untill some jobsworth police decided it breached the letter of the licensing regs:
can't even drag the North of *England* out of poverty,
selling an optimistic vision of the future can help people aspire to be greater than on their own
Bit of a contradiction there. Drag or inspire, which is it? Me, I prefer inspire.
Even if breaking from the UK causes economic hardship to Scotland, it's not stupid to think it would be worth it
That's the SNP ideal. The glory of reversing that defeat (or sell-out, as you prefer) 300 years ago is all that matters. Who cares about the economic future, Scotland will be "free". Might look good as an epitaph, not so great for the generations to come, at least those that can't emigrate.
Always wondered if that was a slow (in human terms but still a blink of the eye in geological ones), progressive rotation or it would get to a point and suddenly flip overnight...
There's a wikipedia article on it which suggests that ~5000 years is a likely timescale, with large variations. Not overnight, though.
