Recent content by threespires

Yeah I dragged you into it cause sadly he's probably not wrong about me but I suspect you have much more strength of character :-)

Close the thread.

Yeah a good point I hadn't considered, as taxpayers we're already on the hook given the subsidies and support for infrastructure etc that's been flying around. The bit that does my head in the most is uncontrolled government procurement with some of these firms like Palantir when typically we...

Don't disagree we need a huge revisit and rebalancing of the tax burden and I can't really think of any capable politicians who are obviously up for it. At the moment though we're so hopelessly divided as a population that even if they were out there, could people put aside their tribalism to...

Yeah both fair points. The shape of the state has undoubtedly changed and without actual checking the numbers you'd assume local government, housing and presumably defence are the biggest losers to accomodate the health and social budgets. To your point re the tax regime none of it inherently...

Might have been. Sounds like slander (or is it libel?) to me @RobMCFC . Yep, even on the days when I choose to convince myself otherwise.

Maybe we need to find another thread but my understanding of epistemic humility is possibly different from yours and I don't think it's synonymous with neutrality even if it's sometimes presented like that; your have to hold a position in order to be in a position to then accept that there may...

The fact that we are discussing Burnham as left wing once again illustrates quite how far the Overton window has shifted in my lifetime. At one level this is all irrelevant though because until a sufficient number of people in the country decide that our problems stem from the increase in...

You have the habit of raising imo very interesting points that are entirely tangential to the threads core (I accept not tangential to your view of the music). I don't know anything about what goes on in Neil Finn or Nick Seymour's heads but I could easily argue that rather then showing a...

Some sort of record on who the backbenchers were or how many of them he is talking about, what were the meetings, what they were actually asking for and how frequently they asked for it along with his analysis of why whatever they were asking for was economically bad for the country. It's...

Actually I don't consider that substantive tbh. Have you ever been in a political party? The higher up the greasy pole people get (or want to get) the more time they spend bitching about their own people and in internecine warfare rather than looking outward. Labour are bad for it but I think...

What are all these leaked communications you refer to? Are you referring to McFadden's email to Mandelson or something more substantive ?

No science to it, more just a bit of idle musing on a few things rather than any properly thought through calculus tbh. Think there's a difference between the established players and the startups themselves. In no particular order: most of the big beasts who are publicly quoted, whilst they've...

I have some sympathy with that view as we are completely overloaded with information and journalism has been in many cases debased. The problem is that erosion of public trust in institutions is a huge threat to democracy and at the point when we give up trusting anything we are in a very dark...

I'm familiar enough with this album that in theory I don't needed to listen to it to review but at lunchtime I started doing my normal min 3 listens whilst simultaneously looking at Car & Classic and it strikes me that this album and probably Crowded House themselves remind me of a Mk 2 Golf...