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True, that still happens... because the Tube is one of the best ways to get around, so EVERYONE uses is. I get 1 train per minute at my stop, and if there is a 2 minute delay in the service then it's so full you can't get on. Still, it beats trying to drive... what with the traffic, congestion charge (tax) rising to £24/day for diesel cars, then paying on average £42/day to park:

https://news.sky.com/story/die...
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/...

So you're stung for ~£66/day before you factor in your time, etc. Using a private car to commute into London is reserved for the 1%.

Icelanders, who are skeptical of speculative financial ventures after the country's catastrophic 2008 banking crash

Skeptical my arse, they made out like bandits.

It was their customers that lost out.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Why should a nation's population pay the price for a few bankers' gambling? Some people lost money, the people responsible for the crash went to prison, and the majority of the people weren't shouldered with a debt they had no say in creating.

Icelanders, who are skeptical of speculative financial ventures after the country's catastrophic 2008 banking crash

Skeptical my arse, they made out like bandits.

It was their customers that lost out.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

it seems the focus is on benefiting the seller.

The whole bit in the summary about making it so the merchant won't have to store (and protect) your CC# gave it away.

They are shifting the cost of protecting customer information on to the customer. Which is a bad idea - merchants have the resources to protect that info - they can hire experts, even smaller merchants can just outsource the entire system to dedicated card processors. Meanwhile the average user is 100% clueless about the risks and completely unprepared to defend against them.

It reminds me a lot of how chip & pin in europe turned into an excuse for the banks to stick card holders with fraudulent charges.

But the cards can be skimmed, and they have been! Getting the PIN is extremely simple, so don't even count on that as security. So it's just a matter of intercepting the data going to the bank as a man-in-the-middle, replicating even temporarily a card, predicting the upcoming "random" number, and so forth.

I'm not saying chip and pin is worse than mag stripe, but they are not so completely secure as the marketing would have you believe. Don't trust the banks or others when they say the cards "cannot be read". They have the same sorts of vulnerabilities as ATM in many cases; relying on cheap manufacturers who don't follow best practices on security, over confidence of the security, assuming a PIN is private, or willingness to accept a certain level of loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://people.csail.mit.edu/r...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-...
http://krebsonsecurity.com/201...
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-b...
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Referring to something like this? http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Which is odd, because for Cardholder Not Present, you need to know the card's house number and postcode, as well as the CVV, for the transaction to be approved. That was put in place in the UK about 12 years ago. I know many online retailers only require the CVV once when registering the card (Amazon, Paypal, etc), but you would then also need to access the attackee's amazon account, change the delivery address ...

And for cloned cards, you need to know the pin.

Something isn't right with the story.

So 12.86% of the UK lives in a single City, and 79.6% live in cities, the vast majority of the UK tax money comes from cities, but the UK shouldn't use it's (mostly urban) tax money to create high speed rail stops because the 20.4% of the population is too far from them to use them?

You do realize there are precisely zero transportation options for rural areas that don't suck? Sometimes you get a highway through one, if it's between urban centers, but generally what they get are surface streets and buses. And the bus tends to be a Greyhound to the next County over, not a Megabus.

Even in the US we have a high urbanization rate (82% or so), and most tax money tends to come from a) downtowns of big cities or b) wealthy suburbs.

What OAP benefits have they slashed exactly? Winter fuel payments, free bus passes, free TV licenses are all intact regrdless of whether you're a pauper or a billionaire. The state pension has been increased in value, and ever more money has been poured into social care and the NHS to try and resolve the crisis that their failure to pay a fair share through their working life that covers the costs of what they expect to receive from the state now has caused.

All in all they've got it pretty good - the stats show that they're the only demographic whose wealth has increased on average throughout the recession and the failure to start taxing pension withdrawls or the wealthy pensioners or cut their benefits means that everyone younger is now having to pay for services for these folks that the state will never be able to afford to give the folks paying when they get older and that the folks receiving them refuse to pay for for themselves.

It's hard to see how they could reasonably have it any better given that things are currently massively in their favour due to being subsidised by everyone else and at everyone elses expense and to everyone else's long term detriment much less see how they've had any real kind of slashing of benefits.

The figures don't lie, it's a fact that those folks have profited through the recession whilst everyone else has suffered:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Entertainers get paid according to the market value of the entertainment they provide. Full stop. Personally I'm happier seeing them get it for making me laugh than to see someone make more than that kicking a football / hitting a golf ball / swinging a tennis racket (etc). Top footballers (soccer...) earn silly money, and I'm sure it's the same with American football, baseball, basketball etc...

If people stopped paying to watch them, stopped spending a fortune on the satellite and cable packages, the rewards would come down. That they don't is simply market forces. I don't begrudge them personally, but it makes me a bit sad that the world values their skills so highly.

Chip & pin has never been about security. It's about the ability for CC issuers to eliminate the repudiation of fraudulent transactions by claiming that their authorization system is fraud proof and therefore every transaction is a priori an authorized transaction: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

i would take anything Dyson says very sceptically, he outsourced his "bagless" cleaners manufacture to China and his taxes offshore
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

so forgive me if i cant take his word on anything about the UK when he cant even contribute to his countries wellbeing.

In the UK, almost everything that's "owned" is leasehold.
No, that's not true. No idea where you got that idea from. Maybe you were thinking of central London. Nearly all properties in the UK** are freehold, only about 2 Million are leasehold, mostly flats/apartments. There are about 22 Million properties in the UK, so that's about 10% leasehold.

This mentions the 2 million figure:
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/mortgageshome/article-1585043/Mortgages-homes-guide-Leasehold-vs-freehold--right-buy.html

**UK: Actually figures may be for England and Wales not Scotland probably, but that covers about 90% of the UK by population so that's good enough for these purposes.

Yeah, removing the second jobs and one off fees would make sense. British MPs are not under-paid by any stretch of the imagination. It seems the average is £66,396 ($106,812), which is comfortably above the median salary for the UK. They also have a raft of expenses they can pull.

Anyone wanting to get rich by sitting on numerous boards and committees should be actively discouraged from seeking office. I'd rather see people in this to do the job, and with the salary as it stands I don't see issues in finding suitably qualified candidates. I'd understand as well that the government may well employ advisors on higher salaries, due to a need for specific expertise, but MPs do not require high expertise in any discipline that should be commanding salaries higher than the ones they already have. Obviously salary would vary based on their position - such as the Home Secretary probably pulling in more than a vanilla MP.

Some interesting sources:

http://www.parliament.uk/about/faqs/house-of-commons-faqs/members-faq-page2/

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2269520/Best-paid-jobs-2012-Official-figures-national-average-UK-salaries-400-occupations.html

wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars

But you need to plan to replace the wind turbines about every 12 years, and this cost must be factored in to the cost of the power.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9770837/Wind-farm-turbines-wear-sooner-than-expected-says-study.html

Hydro is mature. All the good locations already have hydro plants; and environmentalists are trying to get existing hydro plants torn out to benefit river wildlife, so just forget about building new hydro plants.

I'm pretty sure pumped hydro storage is in a similar situation... you need a giant reservoir uphill of a source of lots of water you can pump. Where can you build a new one of these, and will the environmentalists approve?

Using a decentralized group of electric cars as an energy-storage system is an interesting idea, but I don't think you can dependably store very much that way in the near future.

I have hopes for molten-salt solar plants, which can keep producing power after the sun goes down because the salt holds so much heat. And it would be cool if we could work out a good way to use hydrogen to store excess energy from wind or solar... but it takes a lot of electricity to strip hydrogen out of water, and hydrogen is tricky to store.

And just as you will face opposition to building more hydro, you will face opposition to building solar in the desert.

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/its_green_against_green_in_mojave_desert_solar_battle/2236/

Nuclear is more expensive than wind, and is also poor at load following; you normally find nuclear needs hydro as well; because it's so expensive to build it runs flat out and then the hydro does the load following- nuclear is better for baseload.

I agree with your final statement; nuclear is indeed better for base load and not good at load-following. But probably natural gas is a better near-term way to reliably follow loads.

By all means get renewables into the mix, but don't make the same mistake the U.K. made, wasting huge sums of money on a system that doesn't work very well. (Right when demand is most heavy in winter, the wind farms stop producing. Quote: "In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work.")

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2008055/Energy-giants-want-billions-windfarms.html

One no-brainer idea: homes and businesses in warm places (Arizona, Florida, Texas, etc.) should have solar panels on the roof. This will produce peak power during peak demand times (when everyone is running the air conditioning, the sun will be shining). This is only a tiny part of the overall energy picture, though, and will happen on its own as the cost of solar panels keeps falling.

FYI I have compared a same sized house (similar number of sq meters) in a similar neighborhood. Yes my grandfather was a hard working person however I could not buy a same sized house in the same time frame he did even if I worked overtime. I have crunched the numbers more than once. I am a software engineer with a graduate degree so its not like I am earning minimum wage here. My grandfather was a stone mason in case you were wondering.

You can downmod me all you want. I know what I am talking about. I have the documents of the transaction and I know the regular wages in that era. I talked with my grandmother while she was still alive. I have seen similar studies of people both in the US and elsewhere in Europe claiming the same thing. If you read this article you can clearly see even back in the 1980s houses in the UK were a lot more affordable than they are now.

What did not exist back then was the ease of credit people have now so house prices were not inflated nearly to the same degree. But you can keep drinking the kool aid as much as you want.

There's no french money, there's only european money.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2145882/How-tell-euro-note-comes--German-doesnt-beat-Greek.html

If the number of the euro note has a "U" in front, it's French euro.

Example:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/17/article-0-13243611000005DC-4_468x286.jpg

Average lowest of £727 is scotland
Per the chart, 71+ averages the lowest at £436, the average of £971 from the other article would be for somebody closer to 30, with an average driving record.

Still waiting for where you source a 'mere' £150 from. Basically, I'll dispute that your insurance figure has any real meaning on reality as you're very far from average, and might be getting a deal such as I'm figuring the automatic driving vehicles might get.

It's a touch annoying to not have a '£' on my keyboard for this conversation. ;)

Diesel vehicles here tend to be viewed as smelly, underpowered beasts by the masses. A diesel engine means a big old monster truck with stacks, based on the TV ads, or a VW Golf with no oomph based on the puttering around town.

While this is not factual, that's where it's at. Someone needs to market sleek, speedy, sexy diesel vehicles on this side of the pond, much like a few of these (I'm lookin right at you, 3 Series.... hawt): http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-2058914/Ten-best-used-diesel-cars.html

"'SMS is the closest thing to pure profit ever invented" - Sir Chris Gent, founder of Vodafone. (from here)

And to think, the only thing you have to do to avoid the SMS charge is use the phone as a PHONE and call the person you wanted to communicate with. And yet somehow the texting option is more popular despite the constantly increasing cost...

"'SMS is the closest thing to pure profit ever invented" - Sir Chris Gent, founder of Vodafone.
(from here)

It's not wrong at all. I spent 6 weeks fighting Robert Dyas over an appliance I'd bought there 14 months before. The small claims court ruled in my favour and I was able to claim the cost of the item, the cost of the engineering report and my filing fees. However, the judge explained to me that the retailer acted within their rights, and as such I could not claim for time or any punitive damages.

See http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1677034/Two-year-warranty-EU-law.html for clarification, specifically the bit that says

"After six months, the burden of proof switches to the buyer and it is they who must then show a fault is due to some inherent problem, something that can be almost impossible in all but the most straightforward cases.
Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1677034/Two-year-warranty-EU-law.html#ixzz1f09afLsq"

It's not wrong at all. I spent 6 weeks fighting Robert Dyas over an appliance I'd bought there 14 months before. The small claims court ruled in my favour and I was able to claim the cost of the item, the cost of the engineering report and my filing fees. However, the judge explained to me that the retailer acted within their rights, and as such I could not claim for time or any punitive damages.

See http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1677034/Two-year-warranty-EU-law.html for clarification, specifically the bit that says

"After six months, the burden of proof switches to the buyer and it is they who must then show a fault is due to some inherent problem, something that can be almost impossible in all but the most straightforward cases.
Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1677034/Two-year-warranty-EU-law.html#ixzz1f09afLsq"

You can't make money on stocks now... the FTSE is about the same level as it was in the early 90's. No one seems to mention this - if you'd invested across the board, 20 years ago, all you'll have back is the dividends.

Money out of nothing doesn't work.... the reason pension funds etc are doing crap is because the markets aren't growing. Pension funds did invest across the board, and because there's no real inflation in their investment, they're in trouble.

In desperation, banks have been looking to new markets, which might sustain them for a while.

This kind of article truly annoys me, since it seems to project optimism.... the market hadn't moved for about 15 years, all the gains were in the first 5. And now is the time to invest?

I think governments sometimes lose sight of the purpose of taxation, to raise revenue. Fuel taxes are already in place, and easy to administer.

In the UK, two thirds of the retail price of fuel is tax.

Barclaycard's customers weren't interested in being sold a load of crap with their credit...

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cardsloans/article-1591611/Barclaycard-ends-Nectar-points.html

Since the end of the Second World War there has been a proliferation of wealth amongst the richest nations of the world meaning that now there are far more of us with a large amount of disposable income in our hands. Corporations have taken advantage of this by providing goods & services that make things easy for us on the basis that we don't mind parting with our money to have easy lives.

I'm lucky in that I work in the Telecoms/IT Industry and have a stable consulting job with a few big clients who are happy to pay good money, year-on-year, for my services. However, like just about anyone else outside of a CEO role or the banking industry, I've not had pay rises or bonuses over the past few years - yet I have more money than ever at my disposal.

The reason is simple - my wife and I have taken a long hard look at where we spend our money, done a lot of research & made some large cash savings as a result. Over the past few years, we've changed banks, house insurances, energy providers and kept our cars a bit longer rather than buying new ones.

We also fly quite a lot and, again, whereas we used to fly with one airline in order to enjoy member benefits, when those benefits were taken away by that airline one-by-one as a cost-saving, we started getting our flights as cheaply as possible as well.

It's got to the point whereby we now only travel with carry-on luggage & take our own snacks & non-alcoholic drinks on-board aircraft in order to avoid the high costs from the airline. What we have learned is that you do not need 3/4 of the stuff that you usually pack anyway.

I imagine that a lot more people are also becoming a lot more frugal during the economic downturn - this means that airlines and other companies need to become more inventive in how they make their money & it's inevitable that they will try to capitalise on those people who don't watch their money so carefully - things will therefore only get worse.

So my advice is to look at how you are spending money very carefully and do the research for cheaper goods & services as I'm sure most people can make some immediate cost savings without any real change in their lifestyles. And for airlines particularly, read the small print, use bags that are the right size for carry-on luggage & weigh them before you leave for the airport.

Also check if the airline adds a booking charge for certain types of payment card - here in the UK, RyanAir is renowned for that little trick but in order to add that booking charge legally in the first place, they need to accept at least one type of card (in this case a prepaid Mastercard designed for those with low credit ratings) where they do not apply the booking charge; so if you fly regularly with them (like we do) then it makes sense to get and use one of those cards.

So there's no point sitting back & moaning about how everything costs more these days - take some responsibility, stay one step ahead of them & learn some frugality.

One change that they introduced some months back was a charge on credit card use. Because they have to offer one form of card payment without charge (a UK or EU law) they chose a card that almost no one uses -- a prepaid card that costs some £15 a year and a 50p transaction charge. It is all about grabbing as much money from their customers through hard to avoid extra charges so that they can make decietful adverts claiming to be cheapest.

If I have an MP3 in my collection, then I have either purchased it electronically or have a physical media of it that I've purchased.

Just my $0.02

-JJS

Then you'd be a pirate in the UK - this sort of Fair Use does not exist here and backups/format shifts of your audio/video media are not allowed. Technically, anyway. I can't see the plods chasing you down for the offence

Oddly, it's legal to make a backup of software, though

You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident. It's not been cracked yet. It's been done really well - unsurprisingly, because the stakes are so high.

Really?

You'd better tell the people whose chip cards have been cloned.

And Google turns up rather a lot of reported incidents of chips and their readers being compromised on a grand scale. Here are just the first three I found:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2963534/Three-fraudsters-jailed-for-elaborate-petrol-station-credit-card-scam.html

http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/Cards-compromised-in-petrol-station.4870282.jp

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1025761

You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident. It's not been cracked yet. It's been done really well - unsurprisingly, because the stakes are so high.

Really?

You'd better tell the people whose chip cards have been cloned.

not made up, do some research please:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/11/worlds-richest-people-billionaires-2009-billionaires_land.html

and

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=480406&in_page_id=2

May be a good place to start. It was a Forbes article where I found the original stat although I can't find the actual article right now.

Good luck on your broadening your horizons.

Some medical locum's are paid 150 pounds/hour.

Though the top 40 list of professions by average salary is as follows:
(from Best Paid Jobs)

£94,293 Brokers
£77,931 Financial managers and chartered secretaries
£63,664 Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
£58,802 Managers (mining and energy)
£54,950 Managers (research and development)
£54,241 Police officers (inspector and above)
£54,029 Managers (marketing and sales)
£52,049 Lawyers, judges and coroners
£51,911 Air traffic controllers
£50,649 Legal professionals
£49,717 Personnel and industrial relations managers
£49,148 Managers (purchasing managers)
£48,787 IT strategy and planning professionals
£48,258 Managers (advertising and PR)
£47,517 Management counsultants and economists
£46,718 Finance and investment analysts
£44,755 Local government officers (senior)
£44,204 Financial and accountant technicians
£43,810 Fire, ambulance and prison officers (senior)
£43,744 Managers (construction)
£43,569 Managers (production and works)
£43,009 Physicists, geologists and meteorologists
£42,800 Broadcasting associate professionals
£42,487 Surveyors (chartered)
£40,678 Managers (property, housing and land)
£39,930 Mangers and owners in other areas
£39,108 Town planners
£38,714 Managers (pharmacy)
£38,559 Architects
£38,372 Managers (hospital and health service)
£37,916 Engineers (electrical)
£37,868 Management accountants
£37,624 Officials of special interest organisations
£37,533 Managers (transport and distribution)
£37,320 Accountants (chartered and certified)
£37,231 Train drivers
£37,228 Managers (quality assurance)
£36,982 Engineers (mechanical)
£36,805 Managers (customer care)
£36,651 Software professionals
£36,433 Coal miners

"you have nothing to hide, right"

That idea is an extremely slippery slope, that is all too often used to extend ever more control over people. For example, one of the fundamental principles of law, is someone is innocent, until proven guilty. But by applying the idea, "you have nothing to hide", it means anyone suspected (in this case, by automated profiling) of being a criminal, now needs to prove they are innocent. It means if you are a false positive, then you will be stopped from what you are doing and interrogated and even your house and belongings can be searched, until you can prove you are innocent. While all this is happening, you will also have no privacy at all and your freedom is removed from you while you prove you are innocent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_until_proven_guilty

So over time, as they add ever more automated profiling, they get ever more ways to get more people caught up as false positives. That's ever more people, being deprived of freedom, until they can prove their innocence.

The route to a totalitarian society, is via people using the idea of, "you have nothing to hide". Yet ironically, all too often, its the minority of people who have power in (ever more) totalitarian style societies, that are able to cause the greatest injustices to their powerless minions. They cause their harm through multiple means. Some are self-righteously ignorant of the harm they cause. Others deliberately seek to exploit their position of power, for their own gain.

The real danger is this minority of people (in ever country) who seek to dominate and control others. This applies to people who seek political or business power over people and ironically terrorists also seek to dominate and control others, into their twisted points of view, for their groups gain. In the case of the terrorists the gain they seek is for their own side, (even if their lower foot soldiers don't gain) as they see it as a battle for their point of view. In the case of political or business power, the gain is directly for them.

The majority of us who don't seek power over others, are simply caught up in an endless power struggle, throughout history between different minority groups, who do seek power and so seek to get others on their side, to boost their own power and to overthrow the other power seeking groups.

Therefore, "you have nothing to hide", is wrong. Everyone has something to hind from some of these groups, who seek power. Because some of the groups will use anything they learn to gain power over people and the more extreme they push towards a totalitarian controlled society, the more they can exploit, stop, search, detain or interrogate, you and your family. That's not the kind of world I want to live in. Plus once these laws are passed, they can be used by any new party getting into power later on. Imagine what power some more extreme groups would do, if they gained access to this kind of power in the future.

For example, in the UK, http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00065/cartoon291008_65504a.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Smith "As the UK Home Secretary, she has been noted for advocating strongly authoritarian policies."

"Authoritarian", in her case, as in extremely arrogant, self-righteous, self-serving, power seeking, contempt for the views of others. She is a great example of how power corrupts and she is dragging the whole UK into her own total police state hell.

For example, in the UK, even some companies can legally break into peoples homes.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/consumer/bills/article.html?in_article_id=427634&in_page_id=510
That

Yeah. British citizens have great gov controls on the mortgage market don't they.

Oh and the Spanish are genius at financial matters aren't they?

As I understand it Virgin didn't 'unilaterally drop' Sky channels, they and Sky couldn't agree on a price.

Virgin did quite well the recent YouGov/uSwitch Broadband customer satisfaction survey.

Northern Rock was known for doing some rather dodgy lending practices such as offering internet loans - no need to enter a bank to get a loan - just visit their website, enter the amount you wish to borrow, the account you want the money to go into, and your desired monthly repayment rate. Not forgetting the 125% mortgage deals that they were offering. It is estimated that every house in the UK has lost 5000 pounds in value since Northern Rock experienced the credit crunch.

Given that this is a very similar situation to Farepak, it is not a surprise that every saver was wanting to take their money out of Northern Rock.

Why are we not holding banks liable for having a system that encourages identity theft by making it as easy as stealing a laptop?

I know from personal contacts that this woke the banks up pretty sharply (Nationwide are small and were the first: the FSA have told the big four that they'll get far fiercer treatment). In practice the big four have been quite careful, and have tended to use fairly good encryption: it's no accident that the former building societies have found things harder (see also, in an unrelated area, Northern Rock). But the threat of eight-figure fines (the numbers I've heard bandied around) make it a simple business case to do things properly.

ian

When the price of solid state drives is competitive with hard disks, I'll pay attention.

Hah. When I were a lad you could get a 7 MEGABYTE Winchester Hard Disk for a mere £3500 (what, about $5000?). (Source, 1981 copy of Personal Computer World).

That's about £10k in modern money (according to this calculator - a.k.a. $20k dollars (or $10k at Microsoft/Adobe screw-the-Brits rates).

Now, if you think that 1981 was, like, ancient history then GET OFF MY LAWN! If the usual growth rate applies, 1TB solid state drives will be cheap and plentiful by the time you get round to repainting your house.

Forget age - getting things done is what counts. Are you PMP certified? PMP is sorta like the old Netware certification - read a book, memorize it, take a test - get paid more.

Where I live in Atlanta, much less costly than NYC, Project Managers with PMPs routinely earn $100K+/yr.
Heck, at age 23 about 20 years ago, I earned $32K/yr as a starting salary. 15 years ago I was making $42K/yr and these were government jobs, but I had an engineering degree from a name-brand top 10 program.

The good news is that more money doesn't really make you any happier once you're above $50K/yr. Read that somewhere that I can't find now. There is a UK study that showed different results http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=421202&in_page_id=2 that must be a cultural difference.

So, either you are unbelievably underpaid, working here illegally or you really suck!

I understand that our tax rate is significantly lower here http://www.worldwide-tax.com/ in the States too. According to the link, around 22% less. Only someone very naive would think that in the UK health care is free. My personal health care/insurance costs for 2006 were less than $2350 annually according to Quicken, but I'm not sick. This page http://www.abpi.org.uk/statistics/section.asp?sect=4 shows that in 2005, the estimated cost per person in the UK was 1,562 - converting that to USD ... $2231. So exactly who pays less? My health insurance is called a PPO - I select my doctors and pay a co-pay for every visit, then I pay 20% of the total cost until my annual out of pocket limit, $1K, is reached. So for covered costs, my upper limit is $3350 even if I'm really sick. That's a fairly minor cost to my family.

"Anyway, what is wrong with "automatic law enforcement"? It works very well with speed cameras - the automatic systems are much more accurate and fair than the manual ones."

A few years ago, having so much as one point on your license was a shameful thing. These days, at least in the UK where the proliferation of CCTV and speed cameras seems to be increasing at pandemic proportions, automatic fines and points for speeding offences are so commonplace that various insurance companies won't even penalise you for having up to six points on your license. They have simply lost the stigma associated with them.

So how has that made the roads safer? Someone, please tell me how.

The bottom line with this I believe is it's simply a way for councils to make more money. Currently they simply don't get enough money from the government, so they turn to unreasonably fining people. We've heard about people being fined over scraps of paper, councillors wanting to survey peoples homes to try and charge more council tax, and more similar stories. The councils are just getting desperate for money and it's horrible to watch.

It depends on what you think of certain acts that are currently labelled as criminal. Surely nobody on here would seriously suggest that walking into a school and shooting anything with a pulse should be a legal activity. However, what of the person caught on camera smoking a joint? It wasn't centuries ago that alcohol was prohibited across the United States (with the associated massive rise in organised crime and general disregard for the law by many). At the moment in the UK, there are so many new invasive laws and ways of enforcing the law coming out that when someone defies them, you're as likely to see a "good on them" response evoked as any kind of public outrage. Speed cameras are a case in point. Sure, lots of people take the "well you shouldn't be speeding" line, but there are also plenty who would be the first to congratulate "Captain Gatso" on his organisation's efforts to destroy what they see as a threat.

Even amongst less shady organisations, car insurance companies are now beginning to say they will not raise premiums for drivers with three penalty points on their license. What was once a shameful mark to have on your license, is now so commonplace due to the mechanisation of the law and the prosecution of absolutely everyone who breaks the speed limit rather than those who are driving dangerously, that even the people who's job it is to assess your risk are saying they will not penalise you for breaking the law!

About UAVs, sure. Use them in situations when you'd use a helicopter - when you think there is a serious crime going on. But, in this country I fear that it'll just be another way for the government to not only spy on everything at once, but find whole new ways to extract yet more tax. With this, a proposed GPS tracking system for all cars to implement a pay-per-mile taxation system (don't drivers pay heftily per mile thanks to fuel duty at getting close to $9-$10 US per gallon?), the National Identity Register and the fact that we already have 20% of the entire world's CCTV cameras on this island, it would take someone with a big set of blinkers on to not think that maybe, just maybe, we really are sleepwalking into, if not an Orwellian surveillance society, then certainly into a state where the mechanisms for some real Big Brother-esque monitoring are all in place and just awaiting the right kind of government.

Here in Limeyland, Alan Sugar put his personal reputation on this with the em@iler.
After 6 years, he finally gave up early this year. http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_ article_id=407184&in_page_id=2

See an explanation here.

Also, eBay makes UK users fill out an anti-money-laundering form and performs an additional verification once a paypal account receives £4500 (US$8300). This probably goes into the UK Gov anti money laundering and terrorist profiling systems.

Most IT folks who run home businesses should structure them carefully, because they could be subject to higher rate tax of 40% on profits plus 17.5% VAT. If you setup your ebay/paypal account as a limited company then you will only pay 25% tax and VAT can be paid as an offset percentage (agree with tax man) between 9 and 17.5%.

rd

From this article: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_ article_id=409510&in_page_id=2

"Thomas Sawyer, 23, was incensed at wasting £375 on the computer and, after repairing it, plotted his revenge.

He designed a site showing embarrassing images of the vendor, Amir Tofangsazan, pornographic images and '90 pictures of women's legs' which he said he had found on the machine.

In a mocking first person account, Mr Sawyer told the story of the sale in detail. His victim, an 18-year-old A-level student from Barnet, North London, said his life had been made 'a living hell' and threatened to sue for libel.

Mr Sawyer, a student from Exeter, said he would take the site down in return for a refund and an apology. "

Indeed, and sometimes fast food companies get busted there *, as well.

* link grabbed from an excellent post by thesubtlesnake on Shacknews about this topic.