It's weeks later isn't it? It takes fucking ages to count everything.Originally Posted by Yevrah
It's weeks later isn't it? It takes fucking ages to count everything.
Nah, it was obvious (to all but Trump) that Biden had won at some point in the evening/morning on the day last time.
Don't the polls close in the meaningful states around 3am our time, but then they have robo-counting which gives a pretty quick idea of who has won unless it's super close?
2 weeks later is if it ends up in THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA which would be an epic outcome.
Last two elections we knew in the morning. This one should be the same.
Last time I seem to remember Trump going heavy favourite early in the night our time, and then the air gradually came out of it and he'd lost by about 7am.
Those were the days, back when Biden hadn't yet gone full Weekend at Bernie's.
Just seen Trump’s speech in the orange hi vis vest and his face is the same colour.
He also struggles to open the door of the truck, his supporters now cutting about in MAGA bin bags
This is why we need Trump to win. The west is fucked anyway, the end may as well be funny.
I know this is all well trodden ground, but the assumption that he'll destroy the World if he gets in when there's absolutely no evidence for it (only president in living memory not to bomb anyone or start a war, right?) is all kinds of lol. The man only cares about himself, so why on earth would he want to be rolling around an irradiated golf course within the next four years?
If he does get in, he'll do some tours, sidle up to anyone he can (dictators et al very welcome) in a tragic effort to prove what a great diplomat he is and generally feather his own nest.
He will do and achieve nothing but it will be funny listening to his retarded rambling and watching his supporters walk around eating cat food from the tin or whatever he makes them do next.
If Harris wins she will also do and achieve nothing, but there'll be no memes.
He's a dealmaker by nature, he'll want to do deals with all the foreign powers, especially Putin, look how he tried cosying up to Kim Jong-Un last time round. The destructive damage he does will be internal.
I had cause to take a proper look at how business rates work yesterday and fuck me, if there was anything that made me side with your "everything is terrible/we're all fucked" Spikey it was that. If only a fraction of the unnecessary complication and abysmal administration involved is repeated elsewhere in the public sector then we have literally taxed businesses heavily only to piss it all down the drain elsewhere.
Wholesale business rates reform from 2026. Long overdue. Was allowed to rot pre- and during Covid, we've still got a relief system because the Tories ran out of time/inclination to actually do anything about the system.
It's still rotting now. The retail, leisure and hospitality relief, or rather the way it's been implemented is an absolute disgrace and will be haemorrhaging cash as a result.
We will continue down this road until we realise that the national debt is an insurmountable problem that we are continuing to make worse. We have no money because we are servicing trillions of pounds worth of debt and it's still increasing.
What do we do about that? I don't know, I amYevrahSpikey, but we need to do something about it, because we are on a steady path to bankruptcy at present. It's going to be very, very shit, whatever we eventually end up doing, anyway.
My very basic understanding tells me we either devalue the currency massively so that the debt is worth less but a loaf of bread now costs £200. Or go through austerity so deep that Shinners is personally scrapping everyone's benefits, Baz is closing every library and drug rehab centre, RL privatises the NHS and Spikey is evicting all of you from your council houses to sell them to Saudi Arabia.
Last edited by Spikey M; 01-11-2024 at 09:16 AM.
In this country the best solution is to completely remodel health so that the state has enough capacity to actually run other things well. Good luck getting that one past the civil service and facebook mums though.
Nor do I think it's desirable. The NHS is one of the only legitimately good things to come out of the war. It's just being chronically mismanaged like everything else is.
Good luck not mismanaging it is all I can say.
The solution to all issues is to incessantly pursue growth, something all European countries (and the UK and to a lesser extent the US) seem to have completely abandoned. You can reform this, cut here, increase that tax over there. You will not get those numbers to match. What we all need is a lot more wealth.
Haven't Ireland managed it with increased taxes for a decade and they're now in surplus?
Didn't they basically just bend over for big business when we left the EU? So all the US companies moved their European HQ's from here to there after being offered incredibly low taxes? Meanwhile they taxed their own population more. They may have a stronger economy now but I doubt normal people there are any better off than we are.
@Giggles?
Don't know the Irish specifics all that well, but "bending over" to big business via offering them low taxes is a good move that everyone should pursue. Or just have a stagnant industry and try to get people into the pubs to keep your economy rolling, I guess.
EDIT: Based on really quick Google numbers, Ireland gets ~2.4 more in corporate tax per capita than the UK does.
Last edited by Pepe; 01-11-2024 at 01:21 PM.
Having super powerful businesses that have your government in the palm of their hands has its own issues. A massive opiod crisis, pollution of the natural environment and basically legalising corruption being just a few of them. The key is in the balance.
You can get all of those regardless of what you choose to set your corporate rate at. Might as well set it low, since it leads to more income and some people might even get a job out of it.
The issue in the UK is basically Margaret Thatcher. Still.
We no longer build anything, produce anything or export anything. Instead it was all in on big businesses and big finance in particular. Which was great for a while, I guess, but now that the big businesses are moving elsewhere - which is only going to increase now - we are left with a barren wasteland of decline.
The service economy is all we have left. Hence the pub shenanigans. Who else are they going to help? The steel industry? Oh. Car manufacturers? Erm. Oh, I know UK Energy and HS2... again.
Last edited by Spikey M; 01-11-2024 at 01:44 PM.
I exported £150,000 of goods in October alone. It's you public sector wankers letting the side down.
Aside from the fact that we do, in fact, make quite a lot of stuff, that whole make stuff/dig stuff out of the ground is better than 'services' is such a load of shit, in a similar oeuvre to people who lose their minds at the idea of a national budget not necessarily being run on the same footing as a domestic one.
The majority of our operating nuclear reactors were commissioned under Margaret Thatcher, there were more houses built in her worst years than there are now (when the population was significantly smaller), North Sea oil and gas was allowed to flourish, and I think it's something like she completed more miles of motorway than have been built since. Anyone blaming her for our lack of industrial output is mental. Even if she had fucked everything up - which she didn't, because the industries she finished off were for the most part already dead - she left office in 1990. That is as far away from us as 1990 was 1956, when the country was still building steam locomotives and employed 700000 people to keep them running.
Britain is circling the toilet because we have deliberately made energy expensive, deliberately made building anything stupidly time consuming (expensive), run a stupidly slack labour market to discourage any sort of investment in productivity, and all the rest of it. We need to start thinking of ourselves as a developing economy, and if that means twerking for every multinational then so be it.
Cheap energy should be step #1 on any plan.
I mean, I don't disagree. Nothing is made in Silicon Valley yet is the biggest driver of innovation in the planet. You do need innovation though, especially if you don't plan to build physical stuff.
I wonder how much of our Motorsports valley has contributed to actual road vehicles?
I would also prioritise cheap energy. As well as:
- Abolish private landlords. If you're not living in it, you're not having the place. That goes back into THE MARKET for a council to rent/sell.
- Money management winds up on the National Curriculum. School leavers get the job experience stuff but they need the financial sense to go with it.
- Look at what we're importing and see if we can't strong arm those companies into setting up shop here.
Man, that's a short list. I'm really thick, sorry.
Money management is more commonly known as 'maths'.
No private landlords? You just made renting more expensive / impossible.
Money management in school? Kids already don't learn anything of what they are taught in school. What makes you think they will learn that?
Tariffs? Everything is suddenly more expensive for everyone. If things are cheaper abroad, you should be importing them.
They don't teach you pensions in maths. They'll add too numbers together all day, every day but they won't think about money in a proper way.
And my thinking on the private landlords is that it'd flood councils/estate agents with properties they'd quickly want to get rid of rather than manage. Total bollocks but whatever.
Last edited by Shindig; 01-11-2024 at 08:11 PM.
On the industry thing, I've said that after the recession that instead of any of this levelling up/HS2 bollocks, the one thing they should have concentrated on is building manufacturing in the north capable of building microchips, EV and lithium batteries. They take about 10 years to get online but when borrowing is at 0% you've basically guranteed easy and cheap access to a internationally sought after technology for the next hundred years that would employ tens of thousands and doesn't require high education levels on a production side. It was a no brainer. Now it's too late and we'll be buying them off China forever.
We really fucked the low to zero interest rate period. Should have been borrowing everything we could to invest then.
Isn't that what all the super rich were doing?
Having seen a bit of one of Harris' rallies earlier it's really hard to get over quite how shit she is.
She has this handily, I got 500 on @ 2.60.
Ireland had low corporate tax rates to bring in US investment long before Brexit, over a decade before it, so I wouldn't be taking it as the personal affront.
Just a normal candidate by the way. Both sides.
He's obviously a nut but seeing Harris grinning inanely saying God is Great as if a bit of Smokin' Joe B's dementia has rubbed off on her isn't a whole lot more confidence inspiring. Still think she wins, but that it is so close is a worry and an indication of what a meh choice she is.
The Harris whataboutism whenever Trump does something pathetic is a bit tiring. Yes she might prove to be useless but Trump is a fucking crook. He’s literally banned from opening a charity because he embezzled money from his last one that was set up to help kids with cancer. Not to mention inciting insurrections and whatnot.
Saying she is shit isn't whataboutery, it's just saying she is shit. As evidenced by the prospect of her losing to a deranged felon.
Reckon the recent trend of swings to the right not really materialising anything may hold out though and she takes a Biden type victory.
I think she's going to win comfortably.
How does the most powerful country in the world end up with two candidates like that in the first place? It's insane.
Apparently that "sex-act" was not meant to be that. Not that it makes a difference to anything. Trump haters will hate him regardless and Trump supporters will keep supporting him regardless.
Why is E. Musk shilling so hard for Donald? Surely as a mega-businessman you want to hedge your bets in these situations, like Cuddly Jeff has (albeit clumsily) done.
I think that he is fueled by the same thing that most people into politics in the US are: hate for the other side.
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