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UK PoliGAF thread of tell me about the rabbits again, Dave.

J

JonathanEx

Member
Was anyone else at the demo? I was there, proud to be part of the (now ignored) 50,000 - but saw Millbank kicking off. Interesting day. Filmed a bunch of it too.

Got a completely different side to what was reported - it really was a tale of two protests.
 
K

Killamangiro

Member
thats it i've had enough i'm moving to south korea, whose with me!?

I've had enough of stupid people and depressing news. add to the discussion the rise in gas and electricity announced today. UKGAF is it going to get better? I'm 22 years old and have recently graduated I am now thinking it might not be such a bad idea to escape. Problem is I don't know where to exactly...
 
D

Dark Machine

Member
Meadows said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11748167 :(
Click to expand...

Why the fuck, why the fuck, WHYYYYY THE FUCK ARE WE STILL THERE?! WHYYYYYYYYY THE FUCK ARE WE STILL THERRRRE?! /footballchant

Seriously, instead of cut the welfare, cut the students, they could save money by just withdrawing the troops. That whole war is just fucking stupid now. We've already seen it's BRITISH people who're able to blow stuff here up most effectively (7/7). Why the hell are our soldiers still in Afghanistan? /rant

Poor bugger, good to see he's still carrying on, and kudos to her for standing beside him. Hope he does well in future.
 
R

radioheadrule83

Banned
I saw that report on yesterdays 6 o clock news... poor fella! I'd definitely have completely broken under the pressure of such life changing scars, I have so much respect for him, facing up to it and struggling to get on with his life - having his wedding and having a baby etc. His wife sounds like she's been brilliant as well. Shows he chose the right person to marry.
 
I

industrian

will gently cradle you as time slowly ticks away.
I'm already committed to living abroad until 2013 to nullify my student debt, but I might as well wait until 2015 so I miss out on the fun of this Tory Administration.
 
J

J Tourettes

Banned
industrian said:
I'm already committed to living abroad until 2013 to nullify my student debt, but I might as well wait until 2015 so I miss out on the fun of this Tory Administration.
Click to expand...
How does that work? I assume it's not the statute of limitations as I thought that didn't apply to student debt? I always thought you were a jock as well our am I confusing you with someone else?
 
K

Killamangiro

Member
industrian said:
I'm already committed to living abroad until 2013 to nullify my student debt, but I might as well wait until 2015 so I miss out on the fun of this Tory Administration.
Click to expand...

How many years do you have to live abroad to do that? Isn't it something like 10 years?
Also does it mean you cant step foot in the country within that time or are short trips back possible? Sounds odd to me..

I guess it depends on your chosen career path, don't think people really mind paying their student loans if they are earning above the threshold and are working in their field.
 
louis89

louis89

Member
industrian said:
I'm already committed to living abroad until 2013 to nullify my student debt, but I might as well wait until 2015 so I miss out on the fun of this Tory Administration.
Click to expand...
Since when do you not have to pay back student loans if you live abroad?
 
R

RedShift

Member
louis89 said:
Since when do you not have to pay back student loans if you live abroad?
Click to expand...

You just have to not earn more than a certain amount in the UK for a certain amount of time then it gets written off, so you can either not work or go abroad.
 
M

Mecha_Infantry

Banned
RedShift said:
You just have to not earn more than a certain amount in the UK for a certain amount of time then it gets written off, so you can either not work or go abroad.
Click to expand...

I thought most people knew of this loop hole already?? I was going to do it when my fiancee lived in Canada, I think it's like 3 months of living back in the UK you have to start paying it back if you've been abroad...Dunno if it has changed much, this was in 2008
 
I

industrian

will gently cradle you as time slowly ticks away.
I'm led to believe that if I make zero contributions towards my student debt within 5 years of graduating then it's annulled.

I graduated in November 2007, since then I had one job in the UK (that only paid £12k a year, well below the threshold) before leaving the country.

And before anyone asks, the two jobs I've had outside of the UK have paid well below the threshold as well. God bless the lower cost of living in East Asia.
 
D

Dark Machine

Member
industrian said:
I'm led to believe that if I make zero contributions towards my student debt within 5 years of graduating then it's annulled.

I graduated in November 2007, since then I had one job in the UK (that only paid £12k a year, well below the threshold) before leaving the country.

And before anyone asks, the two jobs I've had outside of the UK have paid well below the threshold as well. God bless the lower cost of living in East Asia.
Click to expand...

I was going to ask about that, because you have to report your wages when living abroad otherwise the buggers just send you a bill for the whole lot, my mum wouldn't like that...

I graduated this year, so doubtless the rules have changed, would be nice to get some info though.
 
louis89

louis89

Member
industrian said:
I'm led to believe that if I make zero contributions towards my student debt within 5 years of graduating then it's annulled.
Click to expand...
:lol

Good luck with that!

Also, you're supposed to tell them if you move abroad, and pay it from there. It's not a loophole. Not saying you can't get away with it, but you are scamming the system if you do that.
 
C

Chinner

Banned
industrian said:
I'm led to believe that if I make zero contributions towards my student debt within 5 years of graduating then it's annulled.

I graduated in November 2007, since then I had one job in the UK (that only paid £12k a year, well below the threshold) before leaving the country.

And before anyone asks, the two jobs I've had outside of the UK have paid well below the threshold as well. God bless the lower cost of living in East Asia.
Click to expand...
*has lost respect for you*
*posts on the internet*
*you probably dont give a shit*
 
S

Sage00

Once And Future Member
louis89 said:
:lol

Good luck with that!

Also, you're supposed to tell them if you move abroad, and pay it from there. It's not a loophole. Not saying you can't get away with it, but you are scamming the system if you do that.
Click to expand...
If he's still under the threshold when abroad (as industrian said), then he still doesn't need to.
 
I

industrian

will gently cradle you as time slowly ticks away.
louis89 said:
:lol

Good luck with that!

Also, you're supposed to tell them if you move abroad, and pay it from there. It's not a loophole. Not saying you can't get away with it, but you are scamming the system if you do that.
Click to expand...

I should be in Glasgow or Edinburgh right now earning £26-32k a year and making full contributions to my student loan. But as we all learnt in Q4 2008: shit does, and will, happen. I earned £12k a year in Korea and currently earn slightly less in Taiwan. If I was earning £26-32k a year in Asia then I would let the powers that be know about it. That and I'd be living like a fucking emperor over here with that kind of flow.

I guess this is as good a time as ever to say I got a tax refund for 2008/2009 recently, meaning I've only paid around £350 in income tax since 2006. That's more an indication of how crap my wages were in the UK rather than my skills at tax evasion though.

Chinner said:
*has lost respect for you*
*posts on the internet*
*you probably dont give a shit*
Click to expand...

I know that this is a Chinner (aka, the Anglo Astrolad) post, but I really don't see what I've done wrong here except have a tone that could be considered "gloating" regarding the fact that I've earned pocket money compared to the average graduate wage of £25k a year for the last three years.

Now if you excuse me, I've got to go cry in my bathtub & eat some ice cream to get over being hated by NeoGAF. :(
 
S

Salazar

Member
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/11/why-humanities-conference-page/

This is a recording of a fairly recent conference at Birkbeck on the humanities and the Browne report/the general governmental and administrative approach to universities. It is very much worth listening to. Stefan Collini, Quentin Skinner, and Iain Pears in particular.

This is a summary from Prospect.

The value of the humanities has long been under-represented in public discourse in this country. Attempting to put this right, Stefan Collini kicked off the day’s proceedings with a brilliant call to arms: scholars in the humanities must resist the dominance of economic vocabulary in argument about public goods—that is, measuring the value of Shakespeare in terms of ticket sales at Stratford—and refuse to allow the government’s “quality assurance” vocabulary to colonise their own sense of what they’re up to. Real education involves an inherently risky and unpredictable interaction between minds, he said, so the idea that its quality can be assured is a nonsense.

I found myself wanting simultaneously to cheer and hold my head in my hands. Even my youngest child, who is only seven, has to head every piece of classwork she does by specifiying its “Learning Objective.” So proficient are she and her classmates in quality assurance lingo that all they actually have to write is “LO.”

The idea that school-leavers and their prospective teachers at university form a natural alliance against uncomprehending martians from BIS—in case you didn’t know, higher education is now in the hands of the department for business, innovation and skills—is, I fear, a fantasy, not least because young people spend 13 years in schools drinking in the very same misunderstandings about the value of the humanities (in fact, the value of most things) that Collini was complaining about. Friends of the humanities certainly need to inspire one another, but they must also find ways to talk over the heads of bureaucrats to the wider constituency of their own future students and future colleagues.

But finding words in which to do this is no easy task, in part thanks to the very notion of what it is for something to be valuable—as studying humanities subjects surely is—“for its own sake.” Much of the time when we explain why something is worth doing, we point to some further effect: it’s good because it makes you healthy, say, or because it promotes economic growth. Of course we are entitled to ask, of most further effects, “what’s so good about that?” But the explanations that carry conviction cite further effects where on the whole people don’t bother to ask the follow-up question—wisely (as with health) or maybe not so wisely (as with growth). However, what it means for something to be good for its own sake is that explanations of that sort are out of place.

This is not to say no explanation can be given of the value of such things. Things we pursue for their own sakes—from fly fishing to philosophy—each come with a rich vocabulary which insiders use to judge work within that field. But such insider-speak by its nature won’t be very good at conveying the value of the activity to someone who is not already part of it—a minister at BIS, for example. When talking to outsiders, often all there is to fall back on are generalities like “it’s an end in itself” which, when not carried along by the current of insider-speak they summarise, sound rather lame, and rarely make the standard outsider’s challenge—“yes, but what is it for?”—go away.

Iain Pears, art historian and novelist, proposed a more drastic remedy: since humanities degrees cost less and attract more applicants, humanities should simply cut loose from the sciences. For instance, if a faculty’s budget depended on its fee income minus the costs of providing the course, humanities departments might be better off, no longer having to justify themselves to uncomprehending paymasters. But is a divorce really desirable? Not only does some fertile work in the humanities depend on having scientists around to talk to, but the problem of justifying their research face the sciences just as acutely. If what funding councils want is “impact,” will they be any more willing to fund blue skies research in pure science than they will a new monograph on Milton?

Intellectual historian Quentin Skinner was guardedly more optimistic, arguing that there’s no reason why research in the humanities shouldn’t live up to the most “stringently philistine” standards of social utility. His example was Princeton philosopher Philip Pettit. Having developed his “civic republican” political philosophy without any eye to consequences, Pettit was invited in 2004 by José Luis Zapatero, the newly elected prime minister of Spain, to tell the Spanish government what it needed to do in order to live up to civic republican ideals. Not only that, but three years later Zapatero invited Pettit back to judge whether he had stayed on track. So “blue skies” work in the humanities stands as good a chance as blue skies science of making a fundamental practical difference.
Click to expand...
 
D

Deadman

Member
Source

The government is preparing to cut the tax it expects to impose on City banks through George Osborne's £2.5bn a year levy, prompting a furious reaction from tax experts and opposition MPs.

After being alerted by leading banks that the proposed levy could raise an unexpectedly high £3.9bn a year, the Treasury is considering cutting the rate of the tax on UK and international banks to ensure the chancellor's £2.5bn target is not breached.

The Treasury had consulted on a levy that would consist of a charge of 0.04% of a bank's total balance sheet in the first year — generating £1.1bn — rising to 0.07% in 2012-13 to raise £2.3bn and up to £2.5bn in 2013-14.
Click to expand...

They are basically cartoon villain levels of evil now :lol
 
D

Dambrosi

Banned
...and people had the gall to call me hyperbolic when I said the Tories were scum.

:lol

And you'll all forget about all this in four years anyway, won't you, Lib-Dem voters?
 
louis89

louis89

Member
30% of this country's GDP is produced in the Square Mile. Let's drive huge multinational corporations with no obligation to remain in London out of the country and into Zurich or Paris or somewhere by making them pay more tax than they would elsewhere. Sounds logical.

While I appreciate that you want banks to pay more in tax because you hold them responsible for the economic woes we have at the moment, you have to appreciate that there is a balance to be struck.
 
D

Dambrosi

Banned
louis89 said:
30% of this country's GDP is produced in the Square Mile. Let's drive huge multinational corporations with no obligation to remain in London out of the country and into Zurich or Paris or somewhere by making them pay more tax than they would elsewhere. Sounds logical.

While I appreciate that you want banks to pay more in tax because you hold them responsible for the economic woes we have at the moment, you have to appreciate that there is a balance to be struck.
Click to expand...
So basically, the banks have us by the short hairs.

How the fuck did it ever get to this point?
 
W

Walshicus

Member
louis89 said:
30% of this country's GDP is produced in the Square Mile. Let's drive huge multinational corporations with no obligation to remain in London out of the country and into Zurich or Paris or somewhere by making them pay more tax than they would elsewhere. Sounds logical.

While I appreciate that you want banks to pay more in tax because you hold them responsible for the economic woes we have at the moment, you have to appreciate that there is a balance to be struck.
Click to expand...
The counter to that is that their share of GDP is concentrated in the hands of a few who put little back into the economy. The Square Mile is important to the Square Mile; less so to the rest of the countries.
 
R

radioheadrule83

Banned
louis89 said:
30% of this country's GDP is produced in the Square Mile. Let's drive huge multinational corporations with no obligation to remain in London out of the country and into Zurich or Paris or somewhere by making them pay more tax than they would elsewhere. Sounds logical.

While I appreciate that you want banks to pay more in tax because you hold them responsible for the economic woes we have at the moment, you have to appreciate that there is a balance to be struck.
Click to expand...

They're not going to leave London on account of the levy. Fuck them.. the rate should stay as is. Fucking disgusting if they cut it.
 
V

Veidt

Blasphemer who refuses to accept bagged milk as his personal savior
Dambrosi said:
So basically, the banks have us by the short hairs.

How the fuck did it ever get to this point?
Click to expand...
Blame or GATT a.k.a WTO.
 
C

Chinner

Banned
Deadman said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11753050



:lol :lol :lol :lol :lol
Click to expand...
11qiebo.jpg
 
I

industrian

will gently cradle you as time slowly ticks away.
BanGy.nz said:
So how long till Labour re-invent themselves enough to get back into office?
Click to expand...

"We're not the Tories" works well enough in Scotland, they should try it more often.

defel1111 said:
JP Morgan have already as good as cancelled plans to build a new London HQ and Barclays are discussing relocating.
Click to expand...

HSBC have straight up said they'll move their HQ if they're forced to split their banking business.

Dambrosi said:
So basically, the banks have us by the short hairs.

How the fuck did it ever get to this point?
Click to expand...

Did I accidentally go to 88 MPH and end up in the 15th Century?
 
M

Mr. Sam

Member
I already knew that story. Well, I didn't know James Blunt had single-handedly stopped World War 3, but I knew he was there.
 
R

radioheadrule83

Banned
defel1111 said:
JP Morgan have already as good as cancelled plans to build a new London HQ and Barclays are discussing relocating.
Click to expand...

More than likely sabre rattling. I hope we target and partner with whatever states they consider moving to to get the same measures implemented there.
 
A

avaya

Member
You can't apply bank taxes correctly till you get cooperation from the major G8 countries and the Swiss. They won't move anything anywhere else because no one wants to live in random places.
 
D

Dark Machine

Member
avaya said:
You can't apply bank taxes correctly till you get cooperation from the major G8 countries and the Swiss. They won't move anything anywhere else because no one wants to live in random places.
Click to expand...

So bsaically Gordon Brown was right on this point? And the Tories in an attempt to grab public opinion headlines proposed a bank levy that they'd have to backtrack on (as they are now) because they didn't wait for co-operation from the other financial powerhouses in the world.

I mean, I personally thought it was damn obvious that you needed international regulation no matter how hard it might be to get. Boy George needs to get his 'International Economics for Dummies' out again...

Chinner said:
they should let the parliament be bought out by greggs
Click to expand...

This edition of Prime Ministers bake off is brought to you by GREGGS! Britain's favourite pasties!
 
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