pap

The locals respond. Some really beautiful shots of the city on here. http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/real-liverpool-echo-readers-offer-6743264

There are better ways to discourage the likes of Google and Amazon than tax harmonisation, but even if that was the option taken, it doesn't make it something that only the EU can do. Individual governments managed to impose corporate sanctions easily enough for national security reasons (e.g. you can't deal with company X because they're dealing with Iran, etc). I don't see why the principle can't be extended to cover large corporations that don't pay their share, or a law enacted to ensure that money derived from UK has to go through a UK cost centre and attract the appropriate corporation tax.

By the same token, Amazon is "part of the business community", but is just a "delivery business" in the UK and pays its corporation tax to Luxembourg. That's a huge p!ss-take. This is a mature market that generates strong demand for consumer products. Any company benefiting from the infrastructure the country has should be pitching in. I wonder how well Amazon's "delivery business" would work if we didn't have roads, hospitals or coppers keeping their vans from being robbed.

No cherry picking; that's his wiki opener verbatim. People can do their own research if so inclined, just as they can draw their own conclusions. The numbers don't lie.

Meet Stephen Elop, the new boss of XBox. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-25-and-the-new-boss-of-xbox-is Wiki opener:- Not an appointment that inspires confidence, then

Some higher profile benefit scroungers:- http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/queen-prince-charles-cash-tens-3180813

I'm not sure that Clegg is especially confident. This move could just as easily be a last throw of the dice, both for him and his party. Government has not been kind to the Lib Dems. The Tories have been excellent in diverting rivers of sh!t their way, mostly because the Lib Dems said such lovely things before the election. Returns at elections have diminished to the point where the Lib Dems are increasingly becoming the fourth party, behind UKIP. Is it confidence that underpins this decision, or desperation? Onto Saintandy666's points. What is Clegg's base now? We've discussed the wider impact the Lib Dems haven't had in elections, but I'm not a party member; I don't know how well he is regarded in a party that historically, hasn't shown any compunction in throwing its leaders under the metaphorical bus. Indeed, I think one of the reasons that Clegg hasn't been chucked already is the bizarre set of circumstances the party is in. e.g. Being in government and all that. These debates are still a new concept in the UK. Difficult to know what the long term impact is. Is Clegg sharing power now because of his performance in those 2010 debates? Difficult to say, but one thing I think you can say is that he'll enter this debate on much dodgier ground, sporting a much dodgier reputation and will be up against someone who has obsessed over EU policy for over a decade, and is pretty cool at ripping it apart. Big ask for Clegg, I reckon.

Yet another EU thread, but things seem to be developing at quite a pace. Nick Clegg invited Nigel Farage to have a public debate on Britain's membership of the EU. This video gives a decent overview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uyXXlLt54w Clegg gave a good performance in the 2010 leadership debates (remember Cleggmania? ), but he'll be entering the April debate as damaged goods, right before the European elections. Farage is a decent orator on the way up, addressing an issue on which he'll have a lot of popular support; the debate itself will attract a lot of viewers and generate headlines. As the video points out, it will almost certainly increase calls for Farage to be amongst the speakers in next year's leadership debates. I don't know about anyone else, but I think this is a potential huge own goal for Clegg; he stands every chance of being eviscerated by Farage and won't be able to hide behind the "that's nice, dear" safety-in-numbers response that works so well when Farage is spouting off in the European Parliament. The timing of other events such as EU elections could give UKIP real momentum heading into next year's general election. What do we reckon? Is this debate going to be pivotal or irrelevant?

Groundhog Day is perhaps his greatest achievement. A tremendously satisfying film on every level. What do you do with eternity?

I didn't mind it, but I like post-apocalyptic stuff and robots and stuff. It wasn't bad, just not as good as the others. Timecop is bad. No Retreat, No Surrender is bad (but glorious). Terminator: Salvation is not bad, just the worst of the Terminator films. It's no Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

It reminded me of this, Bear. (sorry for slope. couldn't be arsed plugging scanner in).

Don't think you've got this one quite right. The "I'm rich" and "tens of thousands" comments were pretty close together. I was left with the impression that GM thought 10s of thou was a lot of money. Certainly enough to make you feel secure for maybe a couple of years, but by no means Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth.

I can understand where Whitey G is coming from. He is an older gentleman and I am sure that he can remember Hedge End being upgraded from "one horse" to "a town". However, there's still plenty of room to build, and though I'm not necessarily advocating the futuristic thingies I sometimes do in other threads, I do feel that there's a lot of wriggle room in terms of architectural design, as other cities around the world (Tokyo included) show.

Must be returned to nature to please our EU masters, according to the Torygraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/10625663/Flooding-Somerset-Levels-disaster-is-being-driven-by-EU-policy.html

Do better. This is the debating equivalent of pantomime.

Good read of the situation, JackFrost. Pretty much precisely how it is. The firm he works for has been pretty static in the director's department for years. The bloke in question benefits from a long association with the higher ups. They turn a blind eye to most of it.

And on the same day, BBC publishes speculative piece on whether there'll be a WW3 or not. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-26271024

The real cost of building a home is land, time, materials and labour. Any monetary figure you see is always going to be some kind of fiction, because it's all based on the same fiction - the level of credit created by the banks to finance the property market. So let's examine the labour component of building a home. You'll need to pay x people for y day's work, at z an hour. I'm not really interested in x and y; there's a saying the Irish have - "it is what it is". Absent some revolutionary change in the way we build houses or the sort of houses we build, we're stuck with it. The rate of pay is something I'm interested in, because I know the only reason I'm paying the z rate is because I'm covering someone else's housing expenses, which are set too high in the first place. Further, many of the items on the bill of materials are going to be locally sourced. You're paying bank tax there too. Anyone involved in the production of those materials will probably also have expensive housing costs to cover. Of course, much will come from overseas, which creates its own problems (less jobs, more people on housing benefit in first place). Finally, you need to look at the cost of land, which could also come down. The idea that Britain is concreted over is a fallacy. There are just a lot of people holding onto a lot of land and making it more expensive for anyone else to procure. Housing shouldn't be a market, and shouldn't be a business. The only people that benefit from its current state are banks and landlords.

Defo, which makes your demand for them to drop the price on their best-selling product even more bizarre.

It would deprive them of £30 of additional revenue on every unit. There is no lack of demand for this product. Why on earth would they reduce the price?

Arf. 1) November 2013. PS4 launches at £349. XBox One, a less capable machine, launches at £429. 2) February 2014. After the rush of early adopters, XBox One sales tank, getting outsold 2:1 in its home market in January 2014. MS reduces price to £400, still £50 more expensive than the more powerful PS4. 3) 24 Feb 2014 : Nolan comse onto SaintsWeb and accuses Sony of "fleecing" the UK If anyone's getting fleeced here, Nolan - it's you. Anyone buying an XBox One will be getting it £30 cheaper than you did. I hope they're at least going to compensate you with a free game, like Nintendo did after their price cuts. Nolan on launch day

Governments are comprised of many individuals, some less trustworthy than others. Same things can be said of governments as a whole. Anyways, it's not like I'm doing Arnie-style one-liners here. I've talked at length about various aspects of government; how far it should go, its responsibilities, the way it's composed, the way it's f**king us now and the general tricks which facilitate all of the above. You've reduced seven years of input on the subject to two conveniently opposing viewpoints for your purposes here. Uncharacteristically straw-man for you, KRG

Wouldn't expect Sony to be dropping their price anytime soon, Nolan. They have demand for their product at the current RRP. Microsoft don't, and won't at £400 either. I think £250 will be my entry point. Christmas 2014, then

On the rent-control note:- How Germany Achieved Stable and Affordable Housing.