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Only $52.5B? There are over 22 million homes in the UK. So that's like $2,400 per home. People pay $50+/month in the US for broadband (much more for FIOS!). If they had no other expenses, they would pay this off in 4 years. Realistically, this should still be profitable after 10 years.

From TOA - £28 billion fibre infrastructure bill.
Currently there are 16 million households with Internet access in Britain.

If all of them adopted fibre, the cost per household would therefore be £1750, which would need to be recouped in ISP charges etc. over the course of this generation of technology's lifetime. Maybe £350 a year over 5 years = £30 a month.

That's more than I currently pay for unmetered ADSL, and doesn't factor in any profits, nor all the other stuff ISPs do.

OTOH commerce and government get a lot of value out of the Internet, so it makes sense to me that the effort should be funded by the public purse and taxes on business.

Given that there are 61 million people in the UK, 4 million is actually 7% of the population, not 0.7%.

Of course, we don't know how many of these people are distinct.

Maybe some driving-learning child-benefit-claiming seasonal agricultural worker interested in joining the military has had his data lost four million times!

SVG is designed for still vector images and animation on the order of animated gif (IE, short and no sound). Nothing else.

SVG can do a lot more.

It may not do everything that Silverlight of Flash can, but SVG + Javascript can do what is actually useful: the important exceptions are embedded media players and games.

See this is what I really don't understand. $1000 is approximately £500. I earn that in one day. From here it looks like the US economy must be really going down the pan if $1000 is too much for a high end computer.

According to the British government, the median wage in the UK, as of April 2007 was £457 per -week- for full time employees. Even at the 90th percentile one would only be making £1,019/week. So you are claiming to be what? In top 1% of the income scale? Go figure such a person could afford a computer easily.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285

Meanwhile in the US, the median wage is currently ~$35,000/year, which is ~$675/wk. Which works out to about £100 less than in Britain...

Of course, gas at even at record levels is still half the price of europe, and housing is cheaper in the US, the tax situation is different, etc... so one can't really speculate who is really further ahead based on wage alone. but a $1000 PC is FAR more than a day's pay for well over 90% of the population in either country.

Oh... according to the HDI index, the standard of living in the US is higher than UK. US is ranked 12th, UK is ranked 16th. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

But I'd have thought Britain would have scored better than that... what with everyone apparently making in a day nearly what an american makes in a week?!

The reason that devices such as this exist is because crime is inversely proportional to age (exponentially so) [See http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=442]. This is exacerbated by the fact that in a growing population, the percentage of youth is quite high; leading to some researchers to suggest that stable population growth will relieve some of the pressure on the justice system (among other things) [See http://www.growthfetish.com/clive.htm].

Some of the recent increase in mentions of MRSA on death certificates may be due to improved levels of reporting, possibly brought about by the continued high public profile of the disease.

Some of the recent increase in mentions of MRSA on death certificates may be due to improved levels of reporting, possibly brought about by the continued high public profile of the disease.

Nothing like losing data on half the population of the UK...
I think the law in TFS stands a good chance of passing now.

There are of course, comparable scenarios when you move to the cutting-edge of the IT industry - how long have we heard of quantum computing? 10 years ? In an industry that proceeds with just darting pace, I don't have a quantum computer on my desktop yet. Is it because the researchers are incompetent ? No. It's because the problems they are trying to solve are inherently hard.

How long does it take to invent new mathematics on which useful algorithms can be built ?

Besides , biology changes with time, context, and is inherently and mathematically a complex, if not chaotic system. Anyone who has visited the E-Cell project knows how hard it is to create a standard working model of a single minimum cell, let alone create models of organisms, colonies, ecologies, epidemiologies and disease states.

Silicon, though, does not change its behaviour based on context, the complexity in creating circuits does not by far approach that of living organisms. In one way, the IT industry has been surfing the semi-conductor break-through wave for some time...and we all know what Moore's law predicts. It's hard to say what will happen in the future, but barring economic factors, the current availability of technology is only a reflection of our level of understanding and the maturity of a science. It is NOT necessarily an indicator of the competence or lethargy of the scientists pursuing a particular field.

What Mr.CEO of Intel, does not know is how much biotechnology has changed the last century. How does he think his bread, wine, beer, antibiotics, industrial chemicals like acetone, textiles, (the list goes on) are produced. What of the eradication of small pox, near total eradication of poliomyelitis, MDR for tuberculosis, 80% survival rate for breast and prostate cancer ..and so on ?

These things didn't occur on their own. The community worked hard to solve these problems, even if partially.

Sorry, average wage is £447 a week in 2006, from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285. That's just over £23k. So I was off by a couple of grand, less considering pay went up 3.5% in the year since.

In GB, The median gross household income in 2004/05 was £24,700 per year. ... so no, I don't think he was.

So, all in all, you can (on average) afford way more stuff than we can. Yet you complain about the cost of things every bit as much as we do.

While that makes it the biggest "newspaper" it still doesn't let it reach the majority of the population. I'd like to see the Sun's sales numbers if it actually reaches the majority of the UK population.

True, the UK population is ~60million people, whilst the daily circulation of The Sun is 3,107,412 (Wikipedia's not a great resource, but will do for these purposes). But the majority of people cannot be arsed to buy a newspaper every day, but what we can do is get a ratio of right-wing bastards Vs. lefty-woofters by comparing the circulation of The Sun with its left-wing counterpart: The Guardian. So, The Sun has a daily circulation of 3,107,412 and The Guardian has 378,228 that's over eight right-wing Sun readers to every left-wing Guardian reader. We're not even taking into account the circulations of other right-wing papers like The Mirror or The Times.

Really all the proof one needs is the special relationship between Rupert Murdoch and the British Government, those who get the support of Murdoch have the support of the people (and in case you didn't notice: Murdoch is right-wing). Look at who won on the issue of the Euro, Tony Blair wanted the UK in but Murdoch said no and the whole nation is now brainwashed into hating Europe.

Beyond a National Minimum Wage, none of their other manifesto promises have been kept

Well, to be pedantic it is statistical. The UK's census data is available on the macroscopic and mesoscopic levels, but microscopic (ie: individual data) is held in confidence for 100 years. So IIRC, you can find out exactly how many Jedis (seriously) are in a certain census district (mesoscopic - usually resolves to a street, couple of streets or single apartment block) or in the county/country (macroscopic), but not how many are at 13 Anywhere Street, Somewhereshire (microscopic).

That said, I think a census has outlived its purpose. Inland Revenue (or the IRS for Americans) will likely have far more accurate data on how many people there are in the country (the original point of the census), and what they earn. The census itself these days, at least in the UK, is becoming a ten-yearly compulsory market research form, with various ministers and groups trying (thankfully with some lack of success) to add ever more invasive questions to it.

Really, compared to some of the actions of some governments, Google's use of email to compile statistical information is really not a worry. This is after all, the Internet. You're sending plain text via how many machines before it even reaches Google? If people are that worried, they should cut and paste their email as a PGP or GPG-encrypted block. The tools are widely available, and make cracking the message either impossible or so expensive it just isn't viable.

Well, to be pedantic it is statistical. The UK's census data is available on the macroscopic and mesoscopic levels, but microscopic (ie: individual data) is held in confidence for 100 years. So IIRC, you can find out exactly how many Jedis (seriously) are in a certain census district (mesoscopic - usually resolves to a street, couple of streets or single apartment block) or in the county/country (macroscopic), but not how many are at 13 Anywhere Street, Somewhereshire (microscopic).

That said, I think a census has outlived its purpose. Inland Revenue (or the IRS for Americans) will likely have far more accurate data on how many people there are in the country (the original point of the census), and what they earn. The census itself these days, at least in the UK, is becoming a ten-yearly compulsory market research form, with various ministers and groups trying (thankfully with some lack of success) to add ever more invasive questions to it.

Really, compared to some of the actions of some governments, Google's use of email to compile statistical information is really not a worry. This is after all, the Internet. You're sending plain text via how many machines before it even reaches Google? If people are that worried, they should cut and paste their email as a PGP or GPG-encrypted block. The tools are widely available, and make cracking the message either impossible or so expensive it just isn't viable.

The government calls them countries: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/geography/glossary/c. asp

Decision time: do I believe a random pedant on the internet or the Office for National Statistics? Hmm.

Pedant hint time: Always claim something is something (for example: potatoes are weeds), rather than something isn't something (Scotland isn't country). They probably didn't cover that on your introductory course.

Of course, it may be possible that this is, in some way, important for you - so important that you are willing to look argue the toss about it on the internet. In which case you have my sympathy, although I'd advise caring about something that matters instead.

Now-in England last year, they had fourteen deaths from handguns.

To be fair, there were 22 homicides involving handguns in England and Wales in 2005/06 (see http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb0207.p df page 44). Based on a mid-2005 population of 50,431,700 for England and 2,958,600 for Wales (see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=6), that's 0.41 hangun homicides per million people.

In the United States, there were 8,299 handgun homicides in 2004 (see http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/weapo nstab.htm). Based on a mid-2004 population of 293,638,158 (see http://www.census.gov/popest/national/files/NST_ES T2006_ALLDATA.csv), that's 28.26 handgun homicides per million people.

Therefore, the per capita handgun homicide rate is about 69 times higher in the US compared to England and Wales.

Where you get that 18K figure from? I was under the impression that it was about £26K, before tax.

This page seems to suggest £27K!

There are multiple issues here as we both know.

>Britain for example has a population density that's almost unlivable

48th in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ population_density - behind Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, India (that was a surprise to me).. busy but not impossible.

I'd suggest *population distribution* is more of an issue -too many in south east of England, quite sparse in other areas. English average population density for example is 3.77 people per hectare (Office of National Statistics 2005).

Household density might also be an issue: in England and Wales the average number of people per household in 2.31 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/c ommentaries/housing.asp
Maybe if more people shared we'd have more space. My understanding (no reference, sorry) is that the UK has been moving from multiple occupancy to single occupancy. Plus the average house size (and land round it is increasing).

>Most people can't even afford a house to live in

I agree with you on that one, I am in that situation myself. I'd suggest that's got as much to do with the economic model of the country as anything else. People paying 100,000+ for single room "studios" in the South East doesn't help.

>The roads are congested

Number of cars is not tied to a direct correlation with population. You have to factor in expectation of people for cars they own. New towns in the 60s were built with the expectation that family houses would have one, possibly two cars. These days a family of two parents and three over 18 yr old kids might expect space for 5 cars. Get out of your car, use public transport, pressurise the government to improve it. Length of one Routemaster bus (traditional London red bus) 8.38m, seats 64 people. I've stood waiting for buses in Islington (London) held up by car traffic and most of the cars have one person each in them. Length of a Ford Fiesta: 3.99metres. So 64 Ford Fiestas takes up 256m of road against the same people in a Routemaster - less than 9 metres. Do the maths, why are roads congested? Get people to use mass transit systems.

>there's hardly any countryside left, there's nowhere to build anything or do anything.

Very scientific. Care to be a little more precise?

I agree population is gradually rising, I understand your concerns but I think we've got to take a broader view of what is going on. I completely agree that house prices are unequal, I am thinking of moving to the north of the UK for that reason so I can buy somewhere to live. But I don't think it's as simple as being draconic on immigration. I'm arguing that if the birth rate from UK citizens is declining, maybe we need to encourage young people from elsewhere to move into the UK. I think you're suggesting we let population decline. I'd say that's fine in theory but in 50 years time there's going to be a lot of old people who can't get cared for, a really social problem.

The population of Europe is definitely ageing, we have a problem with supporting pensions and health services in less than 50 years time, more people will be trying to claim than paying in: "The proportion of population at working ages is set to fall as the baby boomers move into retirement and are replaced by the smaller numbers of people born in each year since the 1960s." http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=949 &Pos=&ColRank=1&Rank=342

I welcome your proposed solutions. You've heard some of mine.

There are multiple issues here as we both know.

>Britain for example has a population density that's almost unlivable

48th in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ population_density - behind Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, India (that was a surprise to me).. busy but not impossible.

I'd suggest *population distribution* is more of an issue -too many in south east of England, quite sparse in other areas. English average population density for example is 3.77 people per hectare (Office of National Statistics 2005).

Household density might also be an issue: in England and Wales the average number of people per household in 2.31 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/c ommentaries/housing.asp
Maybe if more people shared we'd have more space. My understanding (no reference, sorry) is that the UK has been moving from multiple occupancy to single occupancy. Plus the average house size (and land round it is increasing).

>Most people can't even afford a house to live in

I agree with you on that one, I am in that situation myself. I'd suggest that's got as much to do with the economic model of the country as anything else. People paying 100,000+ for single room "studios" in the South East doesn't help.

>The roads are congested

Number of cars is not tied to a direct correlation with population. You have to factor in expectation of people for cars they own. New towns in the 60s were built with the expectation that family houses would have one, possibly two cars. These days a family of two parents and three over 18 yr old kids might expect space for 5 cars. Get out of your car, use public transport, pressurise the government to improve it. Length of one Routemaster bus (traditional London red bus) 8.38m, seats 64 people. I've stood waiting for buses in Islington (London) held up by car traffic and most of the cars have one person each in them. Length of a Ford Fiesta: 3.99metres. So 64 Ford Fiestas takes up 256m of road against the same people in a Routemaster - less than 9 metres. Do the maths, why are roads congested? Get people to use mass transit systems.

>there's hardly any countryside left, there's nowhere to build anything or do anything.

Very scientific. Care to be a little more precise?

I agree population is gradually rising, I understand your concerns but I think we've got to take a broader view of what is going on. I completely agree that house prices are unequal, I am thinking of moving to the north of the UK for that reason so I can buy somewhere to live. But I don't think it's as simple as being draconic on immigration. I'm arguing that if the birth rate from UK citizens is declining, maybe we need to encourage young people from elsewhere to move into the UK. I think you're suggesting we let population decline. I'd say that's fine in theory but in 50 years time there's going to be a lot of old people who can't get cared for, a really social problem.

The population of Europe is definitely ageing, we have a problem with supporting pensions and health services in less than 50 years time, more people will be trying to claim than paying in: "The proportion of population at working ages is set to fall as the baby boomers move into retirement and are replaced by the smaller numbers of people born in each year since the 1960s." http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=949 &Pos=&ColRank=1&Rank=342

I welcome your proposed solutions. You've heard some of mine.

Approximate population
USA: 300,904,156
UK: 60532074

Which makes the UK about 1/5th the size of the USA. Assuming half of those 30K deaths annually are suicides, when adjusting for population that would be equivalent to about 3K deaths annually.

Which is pretty piddly when you consider 512,692 people died in 2005 in the UK.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ population
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp? vlnk=618

You've hit the nail on the head. This government's obsession with 'targets' and 'league tables' and all that associated statistical crap has ruined this country. The police have become more about catching criminals (which appear on the stats) rather than preventing crime (which doesn't).

It's exactly the same in the education system - teachers spend more time filling offsted reports about what they've done than they do sorting out leasons for the children, and in the health service where more and more people are being employed as 'administrators' to keep track of the ever increasing paperwork, and in local goverment, and in... well the list is endless.

Approx 1 in 5 people in employment in the UK are working in the public sector (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=12 92) that's approx 5.9m people in 2005.

Crime rate IS high in several cities in most countries.

In 2004, there were about 500000 deaths in the UK; of those, there were 360 deaths from assault. For comparison, there were 3300 deaths from "self-harm", 10000 deaths from accidents, and 350 deaths from tuberculosis. Assault is just way low on the list of things to worry about, in particular since it is generally pretty easy to avoid.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp? vlnk=618

I don't have a link to the statistics, but I think the trend has been down for several decades now. Morbidity tends to follow mortality.

"It's clear that something is going on. Polar caps on both Earth and Mars are shrinking, by roughly the same percentage. In spite of all the doom sayers, sea level is not rising measurably. (Unchanged in the last 200 years, to within the margin of error.)", YetAnotherBob

"Over the entire period from 1870 the average rate of rise was 1.44mm per year. Over the 20th Century it averaged 1.7mm per year; while the figure for the period since 1950 is 1.75mm per year .. the scientists behind this study say they are the first to verify the trend using historical data"

"You should remember that a lot of the organizations on both sides of this 'debate' have an agenda. If you don't know the agenda, you won't know the 'researcher' bias", YetAnotherBob

I figure those opposing are big Oil and the corporations as anything done to reduce human impact on the environment would impact revenue. What hidden agenda do those finding evidence for global warming have? You claim it's only about funding. Are we to believe that Scientists would fake research data and big Oil exectutives only ever tell the truth.

"Take the headline here on Slashdot a day or two ago that in 30 years there won't be anything living in the oceans", YetAnotherBob

I do know that edible fish round these shores have all but disappeared. Of what's left, the average size of catch is about one third of what it used to be. The seasons also seem to have disappeared. Doesn't get very cold in 'winter' and doesn't get very warm in 'summer' except when we get two weeks of a heat wave followed by a semi tropical hurricane.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/05 15_030515_fishdecline.html http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=367

"The best solution at present seems to be more study and analysis"

Let's do nothing ..

"the result will be like Kyoto. Lots of camera ops, a few minor efforts, a few major hold outs, and total world wide failure"

Kyoto 'failed' because the US out of all the signaturities refused to ratify it.

"I'm beginning to think that the real problem is politics. From all sides."

The only politicking is coming from your side.

re Re:Anybody remember (Score:5, interference)

Most EU countries are more productive thatn US workers

I don't know where you got that idea. US workers are still by far the most productive in the world (source). Now, don't confuse productivity -or- standard of living with quality of life. In QOL, I understand that the US is behind other countries.

Annoyingly doesn't seem to give you a proper figure, but by reading off the graph, it seems to be about £26,000 in 2004/2005.

So why ignore the obvious? If American healthcare is so broken, why are cancer survival rates almost uniformly higher (and usually by a good %) than in Europe? Look it up, the data is there.

The references I see, don't obviosly say that: US mortality rate of 27 out of 135 ... vs. UK survival rate of 80% for breast cancer in the 1998-2001 period. Which is identical.

Not that I'd total trust the above stats. either way. For instance I'm not sure that the stats. are calculated in the same way ... it doesn't account for either country not diagnosing the cancer etc. What you really want is total number of people dying, or being sick, say (oh, wait ... that's what the article was about).

I wonder why we never hear people complaing that women are not 50% of the criminal "workforce".

From the UK: "Men outnumber women in all major crime categories. Between 85 and 95 per cent of offenders found guilty of burglary, robbery, drug offences, criminal damage or violence against the person are male. Although the number of offenders are relatively small, 98 per cent of people found guilty of, or cautioned for, sexual offences are male"

Or how about garbagemen (garbagepeople) or coal miners? Why are people never concerned about women not making headways there?

Riddle me that, Batman.

BoomerSooner: The US economic system grows very quickly compared to european nations. Would anyone here be happy with a 0.8% productivity increase or GDP annual growth (here in the US)? Hell no, people would be freaking out.

You're picking your figures to match your argument. Sure, the US economic system grows very quickly compared to some European nations - but others do better. The UK annual growth rate for Q4 2005 was 1.8% - faster than the US annual growth rate for Q4 2005 at 1.7%.

I work for a company in their UK HQ, with US offices; I am consistently horrified by the miserly 2/3-week holiday allowance that my US cow-orkers seem to consider "normal". The raw minimum in EU states is 4 weeks and most companies offer nearer 5 weeks for established employees.

The thing is, though, that if the cost of living is cheap enough compared to your net salary, you can afford to take unpaid leave. With the cost of living and taxes being much lower in the US, many more US employees can afford to take unpaid leave than UK employees.

So any argument comparing growth to paid leave doesn't hold water; we aren't comparing apples to apples.

Ditto unemployment. Not only do unemployment rates vary enormously across the EU (mass unemployment in France; hardly any in the UK), but the benefits paid also vary enormously.

Treating the EU as one homogenous mass, just because it's relatively small, densely populated, some bits of it share a single currency and some (different) bits of it share a single border control system, is going to completely kill any statistical argument. You can't pretend that rich countries such as Denmark and the UK are in any way economically similar to poorer nations such as Portugal or Poland. The EU exists to make trade easier and regulations more consistent, not to make the dozens of member countries into one country called Europe.

As others have said, the people in the USA work more hours per week than those in Europe - so have a higher GDP per worker. This does not mean, however, that they are more productive.

In Europe, (France, UK etc...) the productivity *per hour* is higher - France being the leader. Personally, if I were a business owner, i'd like my employee's to earn me more cash in less time than having to hire a larger workforce...

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=160

There are nearly 400,000 Jedi Knights in the United Kingdom http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/c ommentaries/ethnicity.asp... So if you know enough people from the UK, chances are, you may already know a Jedi Knight who knows the answer.

I just responded to your same statistic elsewhere, but I'll do it again here so people aren't misinformed.

The homicide rate per capita in the UK is 1.3 people per 100,000, not 13. In the US, it is around 6 per 100,000.

Your england link isn't complete, but here are some stats (only up to '98) from the same site. You will notice that the murder rate is per million people. That is, the murder rate in 1998 was 1.2 per 100,000 compared to the USA's 6.3 (in 1998, 5.5 in 2004) per 100,000.

It doesn't matter if you were shot or stabbed, dead is dead. I didn't ask for the total gun related deaths, the total homocides per capita.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/xsdataset.as p?More=Y

http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Cri me/State/statebystaterun.cfm?stateid=52

in short:
England ~13 per 100,000
U.S.A. ~6 per 100,000

Polls about religion in the UK aren't taken at all seriously.

I was surprised to see that, of the 100% of 6-10 year olds, only 48% were female when normally slightly over 50% of children are female. Suspecting bad stats, I checked out the last census:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/pyramids/p ages/UK.asp

The figures are by no means unreasonable.

The page talking about "Heavy Use" is really a bit lame. Once a week, more than one device? That's quite subjective. I mean, if I took heroin once a week, you wouldn't exactly call me a "heavy drug user", would you?

The quiz/puzzle games coming top makes me a little suspicious. Maybe I'm too way hardcore or something, but these games never seem very popular. I once loitered in a games shop for about a year and they hardly sold. It seems unusual to me that this genre would crush the others.

It makes me think that, considering one of the game types is "PC/INTERNET", a lot of people have noted down great quizzes like "What harry potter pairing are you?" and "What did you do during the great livejournal outage of 2004?" and "Are you a tree?" and "Are you 53% gay?" as serious hardcore gaming.

I don't know why I wrote any of this.

I think the discussion about and measures against terrorism are quite out of proportion. Of course we should protect ourselves against attacks, but we must find a middle ground and not go totally overboard.

According to National Statistics (the UK statistics bureau), the rate of road deaths in UK is 6.1 per 100,000 inhabitants (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.a sp?vlnk=7254), which is equivalent to more than 3,500 a year ... every year!

The equivalent rate for Sweden is ... 1.1 per 100,000 inhabitants! If UK, by working really hard on road safety, could achieve similar numbers, it would reduce the amount of road deaths to less than 700 a year. Or a reduction of almost 3,000 a year! How about that?

Add to that the number of homicides (more than 700 a year in the period from 1998 to 2000), and our fear of terrorism seems rather out of proportion, doesn't it?

Now, I will agree with you that parts of the county can seem pretty empty, but that's because it's traditionally sheep-farming land, and has been for long before Sellafield arrived on the scene. In fact, as Sellafield is the biggest (over 12 000 jobs at present) employer in the West of the county by some considerable margin (and has been ever since the local mining industry closed down), you could quite easily argue that West Cumbria would be more desolate without Sellafield than with it.

1. More laws
2. More crimes
3. More criminals
4. More prisoners
5. £39k per prisoner
6. ???
7. More money for the State.

>The UK business market continues to decline
Gosh, that statement is so vague as to be almost immune to attack. But a couple of broadsides:

Stocks are going up http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EFTSE&t=my

The economy is growing, despite a dangerous asset bubble in the housing market. I'm sure you'd like to pin that on Kyoto as well - it'll be fun to watch.

But anyway, while the UK economy is far from perfect, it's hard to see how it's declining.

> as burdens from Kyoto compliance
What burdens, precisely? Reducing your emissions by a few percent is trivial compared to the mess that Messrs Sarbane & Oxley cooked up for us.

>make UK's unionized labor even less efficient on a global scale
Unionised labour? What unionised Labour? http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=4
Maggy pretty much got them back into rational behaviour, and even Tony's not stupid enough to allow the union's to take over again.

As for global efficiency, that's probably more down to a ridiculously inefficient and expensive goverment, and decades of a stupid education system, than Kyoto.

> More lives will be lost and more suffering will be created than any CO2 emissions can create.
That doesn't even begin to make sense. Even if there were an onerous Kyoto compliance regime trying to drive the UK economy into submission, how would that cause dramatic loss of life?

>Exactly what Kyoto supporters want. Bring the middle class into the lower class through regulations and taxes rather than uplifting the lower class through opportunity and expansion of the industry base.
Have you always suffered from a persecution complex? I mean, I hate regulations and taxes more than most people I know, but at least I don't base that dislike on a bizarre conspiracy theory.

US workers are not the most productive in the world.

I will not fish out the details for you, but organizations like the OECD and others will cure your unabashed optimism.

You might not bother to fish out the details, but I will.

First, let me cure your ignorance as to what productivity is with this site: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=132

Then let me show you how the US is compared to the world with this site:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=160

The definition that economists use when they talk about productivity is the GDP per person. The US DOES have the highest productivity in the world.

Now OECD does explain that a six other nations have higher productivity then the US per hours worked(http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/31/7/29880166. pdf). That is to say, if everyone only worked 40 hours a week, some other nations would have higher worker productivity (GDP per person). That however is not the case, and they specifically state that in these nations they work fewer hours per person compared to the US... ...Which, is exactly what my point was. I didn't claim Americans were the smartest or most efficient, but that they were reasonably smart, reasonably efficient, and work like animals. This is great for the economy and for me, but bad for the poor dumb bastard that is wasting 80 hours each week of his life at work.

So, uh... yeah... thanks for the finding the statistics that completely confirm exactly what I said.

US workers are not the most productive in the world.

I will not fish out the details for you, but organizations like the OECD and others will cure your unabashed optimism.

You might not bother to fish out the details, but I will.

First, let me cure your ignorance as to what productivity is with this site: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=132

Then let me show you how the US is compared to the world with this site:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=160

The definition that economists use when they talk about productivity is the GDP per person. The US DOES have the highest productivity in the world.

Now OECD does explain that a six other nations have higher productivity then the US per hours worked(http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/31/7/29880166. pdf). That is to say, if everyone only worked 40 hours a week, some other nations would have higher worker productivity (GDP per person). That however is not the case, and they specifically state that in these nations they work fewer hours per person compared to the US... ...Which, is exactly what my point was. I didn't claim Americans were the smartest or most efficient, but that they were reasonably smart, reasonably efficient, and work like animals. This is great for the economy and for me, but bad for the poor dumb bastard that is wasting 80 hours each week of his life at work.

So, uh... yeah... thanks for the finding the statistics that completely confirm exactly what I said.

Your point is mostly correct IMHO.

A bit more accurate statistical data to back it up though: the population is actually 7 185 000 according to the 2001 census. Also, in 2004 there were 54 063 deaths. That works out to 147.7 deaths per day (2004 was a leap year, so there were 366 days).

So an extra 50 deaths is about a 34% rise.

Terrorism is entirely a psychological game. It's about bringing out an effect that is greater than what the action is. The perpatrators of this act seem to have succeeded in this regard.

Your point is mostly correct IMHO.

A bit more accurate statistical data to back it up though: the population is actually 7 185 000 according to the 2001 census. Also, in 2004 there were 54 063 deaths. That works out to 147.7 deaths per day (2004 was a leap year, so there were 366 days).

So an extra 50 deaths is about a 34% rise.

Terrorism is entirely a psychological game. It's about bringing out an effect that is greater than what the action is. The perpatrators of this act seem to have succeeded in this regard.

This is not a problem with London. This is a risk of living in the western world, be it New York, Paris, London, or Omaha Nebraska. Compounded over time, the statistic becomes very clear. While dying from terrorism is terrible, it's just about the least of your worries.

Even just considering the UK, 2003 saw 530,000 deaths, or one death every minute of every day. Heart disease killed 200,000 of those people. 5,000 people died from infections and parasites. 3,000 people died in transport accidents. Falling killed 2,000. 100 people froze to death. 8 people died from syphilis.

Again those statistics are just the UK, and just for one year. But it's pretty clear that the biggest killer in the UK is still not Al Quaeda, but Mc Donalds, by a pretty wide margin.

Again, I don't mean to reduce the tragedy felt by the people in London. But death is a tragedy to people no matter how it occured.

"the guy sweeping the streets here gets the equivalent of about $90,000 US."

Really? Where the hell do you live? The average UK salary in 2003 was £20,539. For those involved in 'elementary occupations', which I assume street sweepers would come under, the average was £15,764. $90,000 is £47,796, more than twice the UK average, and more than three times what a street sweeper is likely to make.

(figures from the ONS New Earnings Survey)

Take a look at this graph (taken from figures on the White House website)

US Debt

US Debt as a percentage of GDP was falling when the US first went to the moon. So the USA really isn't in the same situation as it was then. Add to that a very weak dollar which might encourage less lending, and things aren't looking that great. Debt isn't just bad in the short term, it's expensive to maintain and difficult to get rid of.

The US is doing this at a time when other countries like the UK are cutting back their debt as much as possible to limit interest payments. Here's a similar graph for the UK

UK Debt

Now I'm no economist, and this obviously isn't the only economic indicator which is important, but it looks kind of scary given the expensive war that the neo-cons have taken on all alone, and the others they still appear to be planning (Iran springs to mind). Perhaps this is the dawn of a new era of faith-based budgets.