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What we need is for having more than 2 kids to be as socially unacceptable as thievery.

This article is about Britain. In Britain, the total fertility rate was 1.76 children per woman (per 2017 data). Since replacement rate is 2.1, this means that the intrinsic population growth is negative.

...As is, having more than 2 kids is actually celebrated by most people. "Wow, you have 5 kids! Good on you! Must be a lot of effort!"

I can't think of anybody in my social circle who would say that. Where do you live?

Indeed, the UK is one of the worst in the world for family visas.

Several years ago the government made a most unwise promise to reduce immigration to the "tens of thousands" (net). At the moment it's about +230,000 net which is actually down quite a bit from a peak of around +330,000 due to Brexit.

There are about 85,000 family reunions a year. The rest is skilled workers, foreign students who keep the university system going and fees for British students down, and EU workers exercising their freedom of movement rights.

The government could have stopped about 60% of immigration any time it liked (40% is EU freedom of movement), but obviously didn't because it would be economic suicide. So the squeeze is being put on families, particularly British people with foreign spouses and children. They don't have commercial interests backing them, and they don't have money to pay the ever increasing fees or fight decisions in court.

This will probably only get worse after Brexit, as the demand for falling immigration increases. Some Brexiteers like Rees-Mogg promised that it would get easier, but they were lying. The worst part is that most people don't realize. Literally every single person, 100% no exceptions, that I told I was getting married followed up with something like "oh, and then she is coming here?" Most people assume that if you are married and a British citizen you have a right to unite your family here, but in reality it's extremely difficult and the Home Office will resist in every way possible.

When people talk about having a guest worker system that doesn't allow families to come they are being delusional. No skilled worker who isn't fresh out of university and free from all attachments is going to want to move to another country by themselves and abandon their spouse and children. If you want skilled labour you have to accept the family of skilled labour. Most countries are fine with this, except for the ones in the grip of populism and anti-immigrant scaremongering/scapegoating.

Pah it just lost my comment.

I do suggest you listen to some women and radical feminists for their views, listening hurts no one and the world is a better place when people with divergent views can share them openly without fear. Most of the radical feminists I've met seem welcoming enough if you can manage polite conversation.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep...
https://www.theguardian.com/so...
https://nordicmodelnow.org/201...

It is not 'violence against women', it is 'Male Violence against women', there is a subject the violence is not committed by the passive voice. I criticise men because I think most men have something to be sorry for, whether it be hands where they were not wanted to rape and murder. I certainly have things I am sorry for. I did at least learn the lessons as a teenager and not repeat them as an adult. Male violence and male socialisation have also caused me worry and pain. So when the house of men is in order I can then feel in a position to criticise others. Until then I will continue to speak out on male violence. You may see it as anti-men rhetoric but you know when you read of a domestic murder, either it was a violent man killing his partner or those rare occasions when a woman abused for years finally snaps and kills the man. You see those same stories in the papers I do. Also male violence affects men too, more than 50% of reported victims of violent crime in the UK are male (90+% committed by males). Yes I get 'not all men' I do, I try to be one of the not all group, don't really need to say it, prefer to do something about the Problem. 100% of rape is committed by men (in the UK at least), it has something like a 2% conviction rate. I don't think men are particularly worried about it. As rape seems to be on the increase data suggests they are not overly concerned with being caught.

Also speak to your female friends, see if they would agree if male violence is a topic men should discuss.

But porn is not healthy sexual relationships. It's mostly abuse of women for men's pleasure. It is normalising the abuse of women in relationships. There is no alternative source of healthy sexual relationships available to many. Data seems to suggest abusive relationships are starting in teenage years and the growing asexual numbers who don't enjoy the pornified sex that is portrayed and know nothing else so avoid it all. There are many differing views on porn, I don't think it helps and the normalisation of porn into mainstream culture seems to be damaging some women and men. You can actually act out legally most things in porn so it's not quite the same as video games (I really like shooting things in the head sometimes). But I used porn for many years (never bought sex, never could I see that as personally moral) but started listening to women a couple of years ago. They make a lot of good points and I've not been able to find arguments against them. But a middle aged man can only give you a certain view, listen to others who are not like you, see what they think and then consider the whole.

But men are the ones most profiting from porn from mostly the labour of women. It's all pretty exploitative. You can't just look at the product but how it's made too.

If you also look up the nordic model and how it has actually worked https://nordicmodelnow.org/wha... locking up the Johns does indeed solve the problem, providing help to the women, helps the women. If there were not such data on how you can reduce the problem I could see your point. But unfortunately there is data and it mostly shows what to do. If we di

You're right I was slightly inaccurate because I looked at an overall statistics on Wikipedia. In the UK, crime rates were at an all high in 1995 and fell down since then (but with fluctuations, not "continuously" in the sense of monotonically decreasing), with current crime rates at beginning of 2017 being lower than in the 80s. Homicide, however, was still going up at 1995 and peaked at the early 2000s, and since then has declined to a level lower or around that of the 80s. Homicide rate was overall lower in the 70s than now, though.

What I meant is that if you or the OP are really interested in this kind of data, then it's easy to find out because every country (plus the EU) publishes these kind of statistics openly on official websites. For example this is what I found as one of the very first links for the UK.. Notice that it's going slightly up again since 2015, which is probably what the fear mongering OP had in mind...

The number of murders and other violent crimes is about the same, or higher than before

No, it isn't.
The murder rate was at its highest around 2002-2004, with around 15 murders per million population (excluding the 172 victim count of Dr. Shipman in 2003 which skews figures). The last 3-4 years, it has been under 10 murders per million population. That's down, not up.
Gun murders have gone down, while knife murders have not gone up. The ratio of knife murders to other murders in the UK has been pretty much the same since the 60s.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep...

Fuck productivity, where's the equality in income tax?

The Office of National Statistics states that there is a gender gap on median hourly earnings of 9.1%
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employm...

Yet men pay over 72% of income tax (from https://www.gov.uk/government/... )

Don't hear the fucking feminists demanding equality there.

In 2016:

1604 Americans were murdered by knife. With a population of 323.1 million in 2016, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.496 per 100,000.

175 Canadians were murdered by knife. With a population of 36.3 million in 2016, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.482 per 100,000.

71 Australians were murdered by knife. With a population of 24.1 million, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.295 per 100,000.

213 people were murdered by knife in the UK. With a population of 65.6 million, that works out to a knife-murder rate of 0.325 per 100,000.

Despite the widespread availability of guns, Americans killed each other by knife at a higher rate than other countries. So it's not the guns. There's just something about Americans which make them more likely to kill each other, period. In that light, it's not at all surprising that U.S. police response is more aggressive than in other countries.

A two second Google search shows that your stated facts are wrong for 2015. According to the Independent which is quoting the Office for National Statistics which is an official government department and so vastly more reliable than some random website you picked Muhammad was the 14th most popular boys in 2015.

If you go direct to the ONS website you will see that they do not have statistics yet for 2016 but you can also see that 'Oliver' was the top boys name in 2014. So please stop peddling lies and fake news. Mohammad is a boys name which has increased in popularity and in some regions, like London, where there is a large concentration of Muslims it is the top name but overall in the UK it is certainly not number one or even in the top ten!

"Cowboy movies aside, guns don't "save" anywhere near that number. For example, even if you take every police killing as justified and "saving lives", a theory easily disputed, that's still only around 1200 killings a year. Each of those killings would need to save dozens of lives in order to achieve the same ratio as hospitals' unintentional deaths:lives saved in order for your analogy to work."

Please cite your source.

http://killedbypolice.net/.

Your turn:

The problem is the FBI is not allowed to collect those stats because the Dims blocked them by statute because the actual numbers put their arguments squarely in the toilet.

The entire US code is available online. Please cite this alleged statute.

Lets look at some numbers that I was able to find:

1200 police fatal shootings 7,459 (est) police non-fatal shooting incidents (the ratio appears to be around 230/37) 22,750 (at least) police brandishing/aiming firearms to arrest dangerous felon criminals (virtually every arrest)

Please cite your source. And you're begging the question with that last statistic - even assuming that police are pointing guns at people 22,750 times a year, who's to say that they were at all dangerous, or that even a single life was at risk?

Another way to look at this is look at countries like the UK. They banned guns and their violent crime rate doubled the next year.

I'd ask for a citation here, but we both know this is a blatant lie and you'll just delete this paragraph from any reply to this post. But in case anyone else is reading this post and is potentially misled, here is a chart of violent crime in the UK, from the UK's office for national statistics. Violent crime peaked in 1995, the year before the handgun ban, and has declined almost every year since. It never "doubled" as you claim. There was nothing true whatsoever in your post, and you should be ashamed to have submitted that made up tripe while simultaneously demanding citation of sources.

net immigration was down in 2016.

https://www.migrationwatchuk.o...

And down YoY in the first quarter.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep...

So I guess either the population estimate or those stats have to be wrong (or there are lots of babies.)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep...

Interesting. So police self-reporting shows a less dramatic fall in crime compared to direct surveys. So instead of hiding crime (as GPP claimed) the police are actually inflating crime rates, most likely to justify keeping their jobs.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplep...

According to the UK Government the average working week for the UK is ~37.5 hours, so I'm not sure where that 31 is coming from.

More expensive? have you looked at the numbers? http://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-d...

And yet, in polling, the people who are most opposed to immigration are the ones who live in areas with the least immigration.

Yeah, you want to know what's funny about that? They didn't look at the demographic shift in those areas or they ignored it because it tells an interesting story. Those were people who were pushed out of the areas that they lived in, and now live in those other areas that "don't have areas with high immigration." You can even see the trend using the ONS's own data. But the media, and I know the exact article you're talking about is all over it but only telling half the story. They also don't count the people that have fled the UK to Canada or Australia, in my neck of the woods there have been at least a dozen families who have moved here and become citizens since the UK's brilliant "let's import every person, and not make sure they integrate!" It started speeding up when stuff like the Rotherham scandal broke, and the Trojan Horse Scandal broke.

Smaller. Beureaucracy.....

There are 55,000 eurocrats working for the commission (source). There are 60,000 in Birmingham alone (according to the same link) and for the UK as a whole there were 405,573 in 2015 according to the UK's own statistics.

The UK joined the EU as an economic basket case in 1973, and its trajectory since has been largely upward. This simple fact was lost in the debate. In every way, the UK is more prosperous now than it was then. Obviously, this is an aggregate and some areas have faced particular hardships, the older mining areas in particular but that was nothing to do with Brussels and everything to do with internal politics. The NHS funding issues are nothing to do with migrants and everything to do with the current government attempting to cut back. The migrant integration issues have almost nothing to do with EU migrants, and nearly all the problems occur because of immigration from former imperial holdings like Pakistan and (to a lesser extent) India. The European Court of Human Rights (a particular bugbear of the Daily Mail) is not related to the EU, it predated the EU and the UK is still subject to it.

The leave arguments were trivially debunkable but very emotive, and the remain arguments were basically putting a sheet over their head and saying "woooooo, scary". It really doesn't help that the UK government (and they're not alone in this) spent the last 40 years justifying every single unpopular decision by claiming that the EU made them do it. They are reaping what they sowed, and we can only hope that 1973 isn't their destination.

Strange how the UK itself disagrees with you. "The United Kingdom is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain, however, comprises only England, Scotland and Wales..."

If Europe had American style gun control laws then it'd probably have an American style problem with mass shootings happening every day due to ordinary white citizens going crazy, instead of every few years or so due to poorly integrated Muslim men who are radicalised by the blowback from foreign military campaigns.

Somehow that would not seem like an improvement.

It looks like every time someone finds a gun and pulls the trigger in Europe (a place larger than America), crazed yanks immediately pop up and start saying it could have all been avoided if only literally everyone was carrying guns including in cafes and rock concerts.

The reality is a lot more boring. The combination of strong borders and gun controls do work. The experience of the UK is unequivocal. Gun crime is virtually unheard of, guns being involved in merely 0.2% of all crimes, and that proportion has been steadily falling for a decade. Guns are so hard to obtain in the UK that gangs have been observed using antique 19th century weapons and the few that do still exist tend to be owned by professional "armourers" who rent the guns out, often to opposing sides in the same dispute. Gangs literally rent the same gun to go shoot at each other with.

I've noticed that the UK experience is sometimes dismissed by US gun advocates using misleading statistics. For example it's commonly pointed out that after gun controls were tightened in 1996 the number of gun offences went up. Actually that's an artifact of changed police reporting standards that increased all types of crime figures simultaneously and it doesn't show up in the British Crime Survey, which gives an independent measure of crime by polling randomly selected people instead of counting police reports. Also there tends to be an assumption that merely passing a law immediately implements working gun control, whereas in reality it can take police forces quite some years to drain the supply of weapons even when they have all the tools they need.

Nonetheless, the outcome 20 years on is quite clear - mass shootings are so rare they're basically non-existent, gun crime in general is falling towards extinction, and the local people are happy with it.

Why is this not happening in France? Well, France is inside the Schengen border free zone and that zone has recently accepted a number of former communist states where there are large stockpiles of Soviet era weaponry still easily accessible. West Europe can't implement UK style gun control even if they wanted to (actually, French gun control law isn't even as strict as the UK anyway). There isn't any easy solution to that beyond waiting for the eastern countries to step up gun law enforcement and track down/destroy the remaining weapons, which could easily take decades. Americans should therefore be careful about over-generalising from the mainland European experience to all gun control everywhere. In island nations like the UK and Australia it tends to work a lot better.

If Europe had American style gun control laws then it'd probably have an American style problem with mass shootings happening every day due to ordinary white citizens going crazy, instead of every few years or so due to poorly integrated Muslim men who are radicalised by the blowback from foreign military campaigns.

Somehow that would not seem like an improvement.

It looks like every time someone finds a gun and pulls the trigger in Europe (a place larger than America), crazed yanks immediately pop up and start saying it could have all been avoided if only literally everyone was carrying guns including in cafes and rock concerts.

The reality is a lot more boring. The combination of strong borders and gun controls do work. The experience of the UK is unequivocal. Gun crime is virtually unheard of, guns being involved in merely 0.2% of all crimes, and that proportion has been steadily falling for a decade. Guns are so hard to obtain in the UK that gangs have been observed using antique 19th century weapons and the few that do still exist tend to be owned by professional "armourers" who rent the guns out, often to opposing sides in the same dispute. Gangs literally rent the same gun to go shoot at each other with.

I've noticed that the UK experience is sometimes dismissed by US gun advocates using misleading statistics. For example it's commonly pointed out that after gun controls were tightened in 1996 the number of gun offences went up. Actually that's an artifact of changed police reporting standards that increased all types of crime figures simultaneously and it doesn't show up in the British Crime Survey, which gives an independent measure of crime by polling randomly selected people instead of counting police reports. Also there tends to be an assumption that merely passing a law immediately implements working gun control, whereas in reality it can take police forces quite some years to drain the supply of weapons even when they have all the tools they need.

Nonetheless, the outcome 20 years on is quite clear - mass shootings are so rare they're basically non-existent, gun crime in general is falling towards extinction, and the local people are happy with it.

Why is this not happening in France? Well, France is inside the Schengen border free zone and that zone has recently accepted a number of former communist states where there are large stockpiles of Soviet era weaponry still easily accessible. West Europe can't implement UK style gun control even if they wanted to (actually, French gun control law isn't even as strict as the UK anyway). There isn't any easy solution to that beyond waiting for the eastern countries to step up gun law enforcement and track down/destroy the remaining weapons, which could easily take decades. Americans should therefore be careful about over-generalising from the mainland European experience to all gun control everywhere. In island nations like the UK and Australia it tends to work a lot better.

The UK one is here: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guid...

Broadly, it's
- who lives here, and how are they related?
- how big is the house, and is it owned or rented?
- what is your age, ethnicity, education, origin, religion?
- are you healthy, do you have a job and what kind?
- how do you travel to work?

They don't ask for income, or any identity numbers.

Knowing how many bathrooms are in the house is useful for planning water usage, and tracking poverty or overcrowding (no / shared bathroom).

It's all for the sake of "National Security" of course. OMG terrrrrrists. It's the government's duty to protect the people.
How about some fact based governing to make the country safer? Perhaps starting by leading cause of premature death, rather than with the 26 people in total who died of terrorism related issues?

Perhaps tackle anus cancer before eroding people's basic human rights in the name of fighting terrorism?

Cancer diagnosis has quadrupled in the last 40 years.

Now, I know there's no proof that this is coke related, but I think there's enough evidence that the last half century has ushered in an age of mass health complications for those of us who are data-inclined to say that you were a little glib and premature in firing your mouth off like that.

I recommend you do something rather unreasonable. That thing is to learn about what you're talking about.

mmm

I'll also bring up that the UK has a horrible problem with violent crime in areas other than gun violence.

Hi. I'm in the UK and I don't think this is actually true. Also, I'm not the only one to think that way. The Guardian, The BBC and The Office for National Statistics all think violent crime is lower than ever:

• Crime statistics for England and Wales: violent crime and sexual offences
• Violent crime in England and Wales falls again, A&E data shows
• Crime Statistics, Focus on Violent Crime and Sexual Offences, 2012/13

Yeah, all those elderly hooligans are such a menace, what with their muggings, their drive-by's, their suicide bombings, their oh wait, old people don't do those things. Old people with nothing to lose just die.

Not that that would be a reason to ignore the problem except guess what? Women in the industrialized world aren't having children either. And guess what else? Some people don't want to have kids. Perhaps as many as 25%? Maybe more? Have you done a poll lately? Hint: No. This topic is very under-studied, and your explanations are pure speculation.

GDP is of relevance to everyone, the fact you don't understand it does not change anything. GDP is a measure of the size of the economy, and if the economy is growing then that means there is more money in it. You're correct that that does not mean that as soon as the economy grows people will see instant benefit from it, levels of inflation play in too and companies will not start handing out pay rises left and right the second the economy shows signs of growth, so yes you can see GDP go up, but no people wont instantly see benefit.

I don't know why you say Ireland has a high GDP, no it doesn't, it has a smaller GDP than countries like Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, maybe you meant GDP per capita? If you want to know why Ireland's GDP per capita is high but the people aren't seeing the benefit of it then it's simple- Ireland is a tax haven and like all tax havens they have a high GDP per capita, there's a reason Apple has many tens of billions sat in banks there - it's a low tax regime, but that money sat in banks isn't in the real economy, it doesn't feed down to employees because it's being held in banks simply for the purpose of being kept off shore. This is the price of running your country as a tax haven, you get a lot of income, but it wont be productive money for the economy - it wont be used to pay higher wages or any such thing. The UK is not a tax haven so is not in even a remotely similar situation.

What we have in the UK is healthy growth because it's sustained, and the fact it's sustained means companies can start increasing wages, and guess what? contrary to your parroting of now obsolete memes that's exactly what's happening. Throughout last year wage rises started to track with inflation, and through this year they've finally started outpacing inflation.

Yes there have been big issues with zero hours contracts and self-employment over the last few years, and this has been key in Carney not increasing the bank of England's base rate, but as bank of England minutes have shown over this last year it's now clear that even that trend is in decline- those zero hours contracts, and that self employment is now being replaced by real sustained employment. It's for this reason that a rate rise now looks likely next year, instead of in 2016/2017 as originally planned. I suggest you catch up on this years monthly BoE meeting minutes if you want to get an updated view of the situation of the healthiness of employment in the UK rather than the outdated view you currently hold.

The things you cite were true a year ago or just over, but in the last year it's become clear that this is real growth and as a result even salaries are increasing (they're certainly not decreasing as you claim- go check the ONS stats on the issue, or see here for example: http://www.theguardian.com/bus... - this is from April just as above inflation wage growth started, the pace has improved even more since then).

So I hate to say it but your whole argument is wrong, it's based on a lack of understanding of economics on a national level, it's based on a naive belief that improvement should be instant, and it's based on a simple lack of knowledge about what the underlying trends actually are in our economy.

Our GDP is growing, our wage rises are outpacing inflation, zero hours contracts are no longer growing, debts are not soaring, bailiffs are not doing record business. That's what I consider healthy growth- you're right, your theorised claims would not be healthy growth but they're not what's actually happening in the country right now, they stopped being true at least a year ago, your information is now completely out of date and incorrect.

Sources:

- Wage increases: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/...

- Reposessions:

GDP is of relevance to everyone, the fact you don't understand it does not change anything. GDP is a measure of the size of the economy, and if the economy is growing then that means there is more money in it. You're correct that that does not mean that as soon as the economy grows people will see instant benefit from it, levels of inflation play in too and companies will not start handing out pay rises left and right the second the economy shows signs of growth, so yes you can see GDP go up, but no people wont instantly see benefit.

I don't know why you say Ireland has a high GDP, no it doesn't, it has a smaller GDP than countries like Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, maybe you meant GDP per capita? If you want to know why Ireland's GDP per capita is high but the people aren't seeing the benefit of it then it's simple- Ireland is a tax haven and like all tax havens they have a high GDP per capita, there's a reason Apple has many tens of billions sat in banks there - it's a low tax regime, but that money sat in banks isn't in the real economy, it doesn't feed down to employees because it's being held in banks simply for the purpose of being kept off shore. This is the price of running your country as a tax haven, you get a lot of income, but it wont be productive money for the economy - it wont be used to pay higher wages or any such thing. The UK is not a tax haven so is not in even a remotely similar situation.

What we have in the UK is healthy growth because it's sustained, and the fact it's sustained means companies can start increasing wages, and guess what? contrary to your parroting of now obsolete memes that's exactly what's happening. Throughout last year wage rises started to track with inflation, and through this year they've finally started outpacing inflation.

Yes there have been big issues with zero hours contracts and self-employment over the last few years, and this has been key in Carney not increasing the bank of England's base rate, but as bank of England minutes have shown over this last year it's now clear that even that trend is in decline- those zero hours contracts, and that self employment is now being replaced by real sustained employment. It's for this reason that a rate rise now looks likely next year, instead of in 2016/2017 as originally planned. I suggest you catch up on this years monthly BoE meeting minutes if you want to get an updated view of the situation of the healthiness of employment in the UK rather than the outdated view you currently hold.

The things you cite were true a year ago or just over, but in the last year it's become clear that this is real growth and as a result even salaries are increasing (they're certainly not decreasing as you claim- go check the ONS stats on the issue, or see here for example: http://www.theguardian.com/bus... - this is from April just as above inflation wage growth started, the pace has improved even more since then).

So I hate to say it but your whole argument is wrong, it's based on a lack of understanding of economics on a national level, it's based on a naive belief that improvement should be instant, and it's based on a simple lack of knowledge about what the underlying trends actually are in our economy.

Our GDP is growing, our wage rises are outpacing inflation, zero hours contracts are no longer growing, debts are not soaring, bailiffs are not doing record business. That's what I consider healthy growth- you're right, your theorised claims would not be healthy growth but they're not what's actually happening in the country right now, they stopped being true at least a year ago, your information is now completely out of date and incorrect.

Sources:

- Wage increases: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/...

- Reposessions:

there's no way to tell if this is significant, or if it's a problem the average person is likely to run into.

I spent approximately 5-10 seconds typing phone theft statistics into Google and it led me to the Office of National Statistics, which says that 4% of 14-24 year-olds were victims of phone theft in the 2011/12 year.

It seems pretty obvious that this is being pursued because it gives the semblance of government helping consumers while at the same time giving government one more tool they can use to control the population.

It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.

I'd like to see a citation as well, but a quick check of http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/... has deaths due to measles in 2012 in the UK, and deaths due to contact with hornets, wasps and bees in 2012 in the UK, both equalling 1. Looks like we'd have to do further research, but it seems we shouldn't outright dismiss "bees vs measles" as impossible. :)

Seriously though? Speaking as someone who was born aspie, and had a bad reaction to one of my vaccinations, and managed to catch the measles (twice), chicken pox and rubella despite being vaccinated against all three, I'm still pro-vaccination (but _not_ to the extent of thinking "anti-vaxxers" should be prosecuted, that's a stupid knee-jerk reaction).

Vaccinations work in the sense that they provide _herd_ immunity. Your own personal vaccination is _not_ guaranteed to work, and yeah, there's _also_ a small chance it's going to suck and a smaller chance it's going to really suck, but vaccination is the _community_ version of "a stitch in time saves nine". A little pain now, or a lot more later.

London is a terrible example. Population density is far higher in the centre. Employment density is also relatively even -- London's businesses are spread over many large areas.

Except for finance, London does have "small-to-medium sized business conglomerations around a city". And the bankers can afford to live close to the City / Canary Wharf anyway.

How many copies does the government buy per year? And how many do they really need?

£200 million over 4 years, at the single-unit MSRP of £199, is about 250,000 new copies per year. If we factor in a reasonable discount, say 50%, that is 500,000 copies. According to the government, total headcount is about 450,000. Does every single government employee need a brand new copy of Office every single year??

That RT article is bogus. This shows that Islam rose 2% from 3% to 5% - in the same period, "no religion" rose 10% from 15% to 25%. Islam is still a tiny religion in the UK. The increase in non-UK born Christians was larger than the _total_ increase of Muslims. The decrease in UK born Christians is almost entirely because of the rise in "no religion".

Holocaust deniers keep prattling on about how hard it would be to incinerate 6 million Jews.

Having seen a couple of posts on here alluding to the same theory (that is, cremating 6 million Jews during the Holocaust is implausible) I decided to do a couple of calculations.

Approximately 70% of all deaths in the UK currently result in a cremation: http://www.salford.gov.uk/cremation.htm . In 2010 there were 493,000 deaths in England and Wales (UK minus Scotland): http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/vsob1/mortality-statistics--deaths-registered-in-england-and-wales--series-dr-/2010/stb-deaths-by-cause-2010.html . 493,000 x 70% = 345,000 cremations in the England and Wales, in 2010.

If you multiply 345,000 cremations per year by the 6 year duration of World War 2, that means in 6 years, as a matter of routine there are at least 2 million cremations in the UK. It stands to reason that a regime with control over the entire industrial output of a major country could manage to cremate 6 million people in a couple of years.

And obviously stupidy non-sensical correlations are up. Wow.. talk about ridiculous. Libs want to ban guns because they are so dangerous.. the number of guns going up is actually a direct correlation according to DoJ and dozens of studies showing that the number 1 thing that causes a criminal to NOT commit a crime is the potential presence of a gun. Same reason that Crime is up in all but two small townships in the UK,.. and that the groundswell there is to re-legalize guns.. Number one argument?.. so that people can defend themselves. But that's okay... disregard the facts (as most libs do) and inject your semi-witty banter.

Ohh the humanity! Look at all that Crime in the UK!

Yes, instead of my witty banter lets rely on your unimpeachable data consisting of a cherry picked example that doesn't even seem to be right, unnamed "studies", and reports by a non-scientific government agency (I'll trust their stats, but not their analysis).

Here's the one quick bit of info I found that suggests that there's isn't much correlation either way. Which isn't surprising, in most cases I'd expect guns to be dwarfed by socio-economic factors when it comes to crime, and it's hard to remove confounders from the data. Still, there's a piece of actual data for the null hypothesis.

I'd like to colour code the UK in the same way using the "well-being" data found from this XLS file (look for "Average rating").

Is there any way I can go about this efficiently? The software would need to recognize the locations (Aberdeenshire, Hampshire, Surrey etc.), ask me what column and range for the colour coding I want to use, and colour a map of the UK automatically. Does anyone know if any site (maybe an app from Google?) could do this?

Here's another dataset on UK nationwide happiness. It would be interesting to compare how close these two studies get.

Hmmm

Yes, it is accurate to state we have more recorded Violent Crime than you have in the USA. However I cannot help but notice, that you fail to qualify your statement by noting that the 2 countries use different methods to record/classify Violent Crimes. The following quote from the wikipedia article sums up the issue : "The comparison of violent crime statistics between countries is usually problematic, due to the way different countries classify crime. (1)"

I will leave it you to do the research into the differences in how our 2 countries record & classify violent crimes. I have provided links to both the FBI (2) and the ONS (3) report on Crime in England and Wales as starting points for your research...

Link :
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_crime
2. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-crime/violent-crime
3. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_283456.pdf (page 16)

Not to burst your bubble, but the violent crime rate in England is not only higher than the US, but it is so much higher that the actual number of violent crimes in England is higher than the US, a country with SIX times the population.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/crime-stats/crime-statistics/period-ending-december-2012/stb-crime-in-england-and-wales--year-ending-december-2012.html#tab-Violence
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-crime/violent-crime

Private health insurance means that everyone pays a premium dependent on their risk level. An NHS type system means people pay a premium based on their income level.

So with private health insurance I don't really care if you live an unhealthy lifestyle. With an NHS type system I do - my taxes will need to go up.

In fact in the UK there have been proposals to remove NHS treatment for people who injure themselves when drunk

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theoneshow/2010/02/should-boozers-foot-the-bill-f.shtml

I work for the NHS on the frontline, and binge drinking is a huge problem, but you can't charge drinkers, unless you charge the smokers and the fatties for the illness their choices cause. You'd even have to charge sportsmen who damange their ligaments running!

http://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2012-03-07/health-trusts-restrict-treatment-to-those-with-unhealthy-lifestyles/

A nationwide Freedom of Information request by the medical magazine Pulse revealed many types of surgery, MRI scans and IVF treatment are being withheld from obese people and smokers.

In the Anglia region, NHS Bedfordshire has barred obese patients from hip and knee surgery until they loss 10% of their weight or their Body Mass Index drops below 35.

NHS North Essex requires patients to lose at least 5% of their weight, and keep it off for 6 months.

While NHS Hertfordshire patients must have a BMI under 30, while smokers have to attend a stop smoking course to have any type of surgery.

Lawyers warn that health authorities risk being sued by patients if they can prove they've been discriminated against.

It's particularly risky in places like the UK where the rich pay most of the income taxes but the poor tend to have unhealthy lifestyles.

E.g.

http://fullfact.org/factchecks/tax-28258

In 2009-10, the top 1% of Income Tax payers were responsible for 13.9% of declared income before tax. Conversely, the same group paid some 26.5% of the money taken by HMRC in Income Tax. These figures are very close to those cited by Mr Redwood, albeit slightly different.

and

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9819607/Minister-poor-families-are-likely-to-be-obese.html

According to Department of Health figures, the poorest children are almost twice as likely to be obese than the richest.

Government figures published last month showed that 24.3 per cent of the most deprived 11 year-olds in England were obese, compared with just 13.7 per cent of children from the wealthiest homes.

There's a strong incentive for the rich to support an authoritarian model whereby NHS treatment is withheld from the obese and smokers simply because the rich are less likely to be in that category.

Incidentally if you add in VAT and duty on tobacco and alcohol you find that the poor pay about the same percentage of their income in tax as the rich

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/household-income/the-effects-of-taxes-and-benefits-on-household-income/2009-2010/data---the-effects-of-taxes-and-benefits-on-household-income.xls Table 3

Still despite that there is an incentive for NHS trusts to deny treatment to people with unhealthy lifestyles - it cuts down on the expensive medical care you need to provide.

It's like in the US where you pay your premiums and then get denied treatme

You mean the UK, where the violent crime rate is 3.5 times that of the US?? Where there was recently a run on small baseball bats because police weren't able to protect businesses and people from rioters?? That country??.

Which definition of Violent Crime are you using? That of the UK or the USA, or are you doing a direct comparison based on what is recorded as Violent Crime by each country? There is a substantial difference between how the USA & the UK record Violent Crime
UK :
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_283456.pdf (page 16)

Definition :
Violent crime covers a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving
that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder. Robbery, an
offence in which violence or the threat of violence is used during a theft (or attempted theft) is not
included in the police recorded violence against the person offence group as it is reported separately
in the robbery section, but it is included within CSEW violence.

USA :
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-crime/violent-crime
Definition :
In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/violent-crime/aggravated-assault
Aggravated Assault :
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program defines aggravated assault as an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury. The UCR Program further specifies that this type of assault is usually accompanied by the use of a weapon or by other means likely to produce death or great bodily harm. Attempted aggravated assault that involves the display of—or threat to use—a gun, knife, or other weapon is included in this crime category because serious personal injury would likely result if the assault were completed. When aggravated assault and larceny-theft occur together, the offense falls under the category of robbery.

And if you'd like to see the UK "Use of weapons in violent incidents,1 2001/02 to 2011/12, CSEW " stats they are downloadable from the UK office for national statistics.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/search/index.html?newquery=gun+crime
An AC that is wrong? What are the statistics for that? I@M sure you can down load more detail from other places. Can't be bothered looking.

The numbers from the pdf show 0.31% of the uk is pretends to be a jedi, and that somehow qualifies the religeon for a most popular tag?

UK still has almost two IPv4 addresses/each person.
If considering the Internet users only, UK has about 2.43 IPv4/each user (exaggerating a bit, you can say that each Internet user in UK can have one client and one server with their own IPv4).
If you throw into the picture the number of households (which can share a NAT-ing router) - it comes to 6.7 IPv4/household.

So the IPv4 expiry panic was overblown?

I like to observe the ineptitude of governments around the world in driving IPv6 adoption and compare it with their similarly inept response to Global Warming.

Yeah, and similar consequences? http://penrose.uk6x.com/

We're out of IPv4s, we've been out for ages. What has changed? Nothing. So what.

UK still has almost two IPv4 addresses/each person.
If considering the Internet users only, UK has about 2.43 IPv4/each user (exaggerating a bit, you can say that each Internet user in UK can have one client and one server with their own IPv4).
If you throw into the picture the number of households (which can share a NAT-ing router) - it comes to 6.7 IPv4/household.

I know quite a few people who've visited the Middle East. It can be a cheap stop-off on the way to the far east (from Europe), or a close-ish place that's not European, but still has plenty of culture, history etc.

Does Turkey count? Loads of people visit Turkey. Just looking at one budget airline (Easyjet), they have flights to Turkey, Isreal and Jordan.

Also this was easy to find, but I knew to go straight to http://www.statistics.gov.uk/