pap

Private browsing dude. Private browsing.

I dunno Whitey G. According to Kevin Cahill's Who Owns Britain (admittedly written in the early 2000s), he reckons that 77% of people in this country live on just 6% of the land. I completely take your point about our low stock being hammered by new arrivals though.

Fixed

Thanks for using two of your three posts a day to say nothing, apart from act as an unofficial tourist board for New Earswick. Perhaps you need to be clearer in your posts if you're unable to afford a fiver. I'm still waiting for your panacea for the housing crisis. So are millions of other people. Let's hear it, Verbal. Show us that you can create an idea.

You don't read, do you? Or at the very least, you don't understand. New estates are required because it'll be very difficult to get the sort of people you'd want into existing estates, partly because of the perceptions you allude to, but also because of the fragmented nature of these estates after right-to-buy, and the fact that there aren't very many left. You speak of housing being about building community, and point to nineteenth century housing builders as your example (!). I don't really agree. I've lived in those houses myself. The only thing conducive to community building in those days, that still remains, is people living in very close proximity to each other - and I'd argue, with quite a bit of personal experience, that's not always a good thing. Try parking a car on the same terraced street for a decade. You say this is the very last thing we should be doing. What's the very first thing we should be doing? You seem to have all the answers. Let's hear your plan for solving the housing crisis.

You can stick to your one point if you wish, but I can't let you get away with continuing to ignore mine. As my post clearly indicated, I think the cost of housing is too much. I feel I'm vindicated in that position because every taxpayer is paying rent for other working people. I've acknowledged that the cost of housing has always been a large expense; at no point did I suggest that this was unique to the UK, or a modern phenomenon. The difference is the chasm of affordability. 3x yearly salary vs 6x times average salary. Public housing programmes could be very effective in tackling prohibitive costs. If we go with your plan of filling these new builds up with scumbags, it'll be a disaster. Personally, I'm in favour of building entirely new estates, and eligibility for those estates being decided along the same lines as one would get a mortgage, where evidence of responsibility and stability weighed heavily into a applicant's chances of success. I'm also very much up for land tax and rent controls, two other big levers that haven't even been built, yet alone touched.

Yes. You're at least going off-piste with your choice of insult.

I think that your best bet in this instance is to contact Valve Customer Support. Send them the old email address, account name and explain what happened (if you can provide some extra info to help them verify, all the better). You've got two paths into that system, one which requires knowledge of a password, or another that requires access to an email inbox. Neither helps you, so I think an email to Valve is the way to go.

Central banks are around three hundred years old. They now form the primary conduit through which people get a house. I'm not suggesting that we return to serfdom, btw - but attitudes to housing have changed massively. Here in Liverpool, we've still got entire estates that were constructed by industry for the people they wanted to employ. In the last century, we had a massive program of building social houses to ensure that our people were housed. Most of that has gone, and successive governments have left the homeseeker in the hands of the banks, not an especially smart idea. They got greedy, lent to people they shouldn't have lent to, put a massive amount of credit into the market, and predictably, prices rose to what the market would bear. I'm sure that housing has always been comparatively expensive when stacked up against the rest of the line items on the monthly budget. The question is whether we've gone too far. The help to buy scheme is really kicking the problem of the cost of housing into the long grass, using tax payer's money to prop up house prices, which eventually filters through to the rental market as new landlords buy at high prices (and old ones realise what they can get away with). The Conservatives are hardly unique in their "prop the financial system up" ways. We've been giving housing benefit to people in full-time employment for years. At what point do we say "enough?". When do we recognise that the true cost of housing should reflect what people can actually afford unaided, not what it can be when housing is subsidised by the government. Someone was good enough to link an image from Another Angry Voice, containing the text:- We pay into this broken system every time we send shekels to the HMRC. When you pay tax, you're needlessly paying someone else's rent to benefit big corp, landlords and the financial system. It's high time we remembered what housing is supposed to be about, protection from the elements, stability, a foundry for the creation of happy memories - and not a f**king earner for the select few. Rant over. Soz

The whole system is idiotic. The Britons of 1000 years ago would be utterly bemused by how we go about getting a place to live. The biggest single expense for the vast majority of people is housing. The cost of housing makes the entire country uncompetitive with emerging economies. Someone posted a link to someone contesting an eviction a while ago. An interesting claim was made; that the signing of a mortgage agreement creates the money that is being lent. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but if true, gives an indication of how gratuitous the mortgage system is. It's just there to make more money for people who already have loads, and to enforce a form of bondage on those who are not independently wealthy.

Excellent post, ant.

You need a new insult, skip. Repetition.

Has your life now entered the phase where schadenfreude is your only source of joy?

I like that his full name reads Fabio "Glen" Quagmire on the Wiki site Vandals!

I love rallyboy.

Yeah, same here. Where has that figure come from? Source us up, bee-hatches.

Seems like a reasonable enough exchange. Under my reign, the capital will be moved to Liverpool, so these southern shires are of little interest to me.

Do they have an offy?

I'm all for the monarchy if I'm in with a shout of being King. Does anyone have a list of all the people I'd need to "displace" to become the monarch? It's how it was done in the old days, after all

Could be a mirror universe, Alps. Roddenberry's vision, perhaps best vocalised during the otherwise questionable First Contact, was that humanity's purpose is self-improvement in whatever field one felt was fulfilling. Is what's going on now the complete opposite?

Good luck, revolution

So if someone said "we've logged you watching horse porn for 32s, and we're going to tell your mum", you'd be okay with that?

Read the article. Confirmed by US, but dismissed as a ploy. Who made that call, eh?

The throat shooting did seem rather convenient. Reports indicated that he was communicating via the medium of written notes, which always leaves an element of doubt regarding potential coercion. It is good news that he will be able to give evidence in his defence. The not guilty plea he entered means that we'll hopefully see some judicial process, especially since the surgeon's initial prognosis turned out to be pessimistic. It's odd. I originated very little in the Boston thread. Most of it was thrown in by other esteemed posters, which I commented on. I seem to remember the comment about Russia and Syria coming from someone's mate's Facebook feed. I quite liked it. The West has been clamouring to get the gloves off in Syria for some time. It seemed like a viable way to approach such an impasse. Discussing the possibility of something doesn't necessarily mean you have to believe it 100% (see transfers threads on main board for examples). It just means its worthy of discussion. As it turns out, Russia is just as intractable on Syrian matters as it ever was. That doesn't actually preclude the Facebook-suggested scenario. The Russians may just have said no, or, as you suggest, the scenario could have been boll*cks from the start. All comments are fair game. You keep banging the nut job drum, I'll keep knocking your assumptions for six every time you shoot from the hip. Super teamwork, I say!

I meant to post this earlier, although now seems to be a more opportune moment. The Taleban offered Bin Laden up before 9/11. True story. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2011/09/20119115334167663.html How different might our world be today if they did?