"If you showed some interest in LD but don't approve of the coalition, you are in fact just a New Labour supporter in disguise."
Why have I seen this with-us-or-against-us argument from certain LD supporters so much in media and forums? Was there a memo from LD central office I missed?
There is (was?) a swathe of left-leaning LD supporters who would naturally object to the LD/Con coalition. You may disagree with their views, but they have nothing to do with their being clandestine Blairites. Repeating the argument further undermines the traditionally fairly democratic spirit of the LD.
Yes, they spent too much on unnecessary war, Trident, public-private partnerships, mid-level civil service bureaucracy, a tax system to favour offshoring and making it impossible for bankers to fail. The Tories are responding by cutting back on the social welfare system and privatising the NHS.
Which she did, I'm sorry if your sensibilities were offended, but she unloaded some deeply unprofitable industry from the state
Like British Gas? British Telecom? British Rail? Oh, that's right, what you actually meant is that some coal mines were making a loss, but you felt the need to generalise this to nationalised British industry in general.
Sorry, WTF? After the Iraq fiasco you're saying the Tories will invent enemies!?!?!!!
Pay more attention to history. After the Vietnam fiasco... after the Falklands fiasco... after the Cold War fiasco... after the Iraq (part 1) fiasco... after the Afghanistan fiasco...
People have already forgotten when the Liberal Democrats were the Party of "no war!" over Iraq. Notice the drastic conditions of coalition relating to Iraq? Thought not.
I was going to say that you're severely overestimating the public's ability to remember, but I think you're merely demonstrating the public.
I have yet to hear about the UK scrapping the NHS in favour of the US insurance model
Everything happens in stages. You need to pay more attention. In brief: private outsourcing under the guise of choice. Fire people then re-hire them at a lower level as private contractors but at higher wage (in the short term, with no job security or concomitant organisational familiarity and loyalty). See also British Rail.
bitterness and fear-mongering from the section of the population that relied too heavily on labour handouts in the last parliament.
Are you seriously arguing that New Labour was the Party for the mythical Daily Hate Benefit Scrounger, possibly the least expensive source of wastage the government has to deal with?
So far, the coalition seems to be the best government the UK has had while I've been alive
Only if you're Thatcherite and born after Thatcher was ousted. It's doing precisely what she did: blaming a previous socialist government for over-spending then implementing "austerity" measures which come down to pushing the neo-conservative agenda on Britain. 30 years ago there were wide-eyed Tories proudly announcing in the first few months of Thatcher - who was a fine orator for the easily soundbitten - how she would save the country with her laissez faire mantra.
If the government wants to save money, it can abandon unnecessary war, Trident, public-private partnerships and mid-level civil service bureaucracy. It can adjust the tax system not to favour offshoring, and stop bailing out bankers.
Don't forget:
so is looking at developing other solutions
Cameron's the kind of guy to make public statements telling Facebook to take down messages when they speak positively about people he doesn't like. If you think Blair was bad, it's because the honeymoon period isn't over. And can you recall the Blair honeymoon period?
ContactPoint and Blair's ID cards were abandoned because, well, they were overtly oppressive. The Tories, unlike Labour, recognise that you can't take away people's freedom by imposing classical Eastern programmes on them - you have to be more subtle. You lower taxes but raise a fuel escalator. You cherish freedom but implement the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. You talk about the freedom to do business but beat collective bargainers with a stick. And, within the first two years of government, you must divert all attention to some enemy: the Argentinians, the Russkies, the Arabs. I dread to think what Cameron will come up with.
Indeed. If anyone wants to rebalance their views on what makes for an average Western democracy on the basis that there exist some repressive, backward regimes in Asia, then they need a sense of perspective.
This is what you sound like:
Prima: Waterboarding is bad. Secunda: But have you seen what Saddam did! Prima: Oh haha, I guess waterboarding isn't so bad after all.
This is an alternative which doesn't make use of the "but I only fucked one goat" fallacy:
Prima: Waterboarding is bad. Secunda: But have you seen what Saddam did! Prima: Waterboarding is still bad.
Uh....what do European politics have to do with whether a US president is liberal or not?
If you stick to intrinsic measurement systems, you're going to miss out on the whole story. See also Flatland.
I can say that compared to Ahmadinejad Bush was an absolute social liberal, but it is absolutely irrelevant.
Comparing a modern Western democracy with Ahmadinejad is not the same as comparing a modern Western democracy with a modern Western democracy.
Europe tends to be more liberal, but also more authoritarian.
As the old Eastern commentary goes, in the West you're free to denounce your government, and in the East you're free to denounce your boss. Although Assange has shown that the former doesn't really hold. But Americans do like redefining words to build their strawmen. Summary: On the left we have socialism and on the right we have capitalism. On the extreme left we have communism and on the extreme right we have fascism. Authoritarianism is a superimposed U. HTH.
Some countries still have fascist parties.
In what sense? Pretty much every Western country has a fascist party. Or do you mean seats in parliament/equivalent, particularly in countries with proportional representation? Is this a bad thing? Do you think it wouldn't happen in the US with PR?
The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition.
Have you spent a moment in the "Open Source community"? The majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations. Most of the remainder take glory in advertising their contributions for CV and geek cred. Certain projects are so cliquish that a friendly attitude (read "sucking up") to the core team is a far better way of being welcomed as a contributor than technical expertise.
My original post included specific project examples, but since the most political organisations also have the most time to loudly whine at their detractors, I thought I'd remove them. I can think of at least one major open source Unix distribution the central developers of which seem to deliberately so poorly document their work that getting up to sufficient speed on what they do to make a positive contribution requires mentorship.
FWIW, Debian as a whole doesn't suffer so much from this problem. I guess because it doesn't attract the glamour-seekers, nor does it consider itself elite. If politics is a hindrance there, it's more about idealism than personal power struggles.
Are you saying Clinton was right-wing? And that the Obama-Pelosi time (Pelosi started earlier) has been right-wing? I think that says more about your own personal political leanings than it does about anyone else's.
No-one outside the USA thinks of the Republicans and the Democrats as anything but "right wing", often to the right of the most right-leaning mainstream parties in European countries.
The fact that Americans think otherwise says more about the homogeneity of beliefs in free-thinking[tm] America than it does about anything else.
So... doing work which benefits an organisation is wrong, but it can be cancelled out somewhat if they pay me. IOW, getting a job at Puppy Killing Party HQ is OK as long as my salary is high enough;-).
Look, you're not being paid for the precise value of your work to PKP (or at any non-cooperative firm, but that's another discussion). You're being given a token sum to encourage you to work more and to make them look good. No amount paid out will be sufficient to do them significant damage if used against them. If the beginnings of damage were apparent, they'd stop paying out to anyone, or add a clause stating that money would not be paid out to those who drag them into disrepute.
It's possible that you are the only completely incorruptible person in the world, aiming to channel the income only to causes which counter PKP and not letting the prospect of personal income influence you. It's further possible that you aim correctly, carefully noting such dangers as two sides of the same coin (the ostensible diametric opposition to any cause is often as bad as the original cause) and avoiding donations which can be used as PR in PKP's favour.
But to PKP you're just another productive employee.
To fit into your analogy, I graciously accept the $2000 from the PKP, then refuse to help them again.
You know from the start that your work is incidentally helping the Mozilla Foundation.
But even if you didn't, what if your work happened to mean that you regularly do stuff which you find out incidentally helps the PKP (e.g. you write some open source product from which they greatly benefit)? Do you refuse further payments? Stop working on the product?
"Give a small amount of money to a charity which is perceived as opposing you," is a classical tactic, accompanied by rhetoric (not my opinion!) to disguise the organisation's true mission. What matters here is how the de facto public relations officer for the Puppy Killing Party feels about his position.
The PKP will continue giving money as long as the drop in an ocean payment to the Humane Society continues giving such great publicity.
I’m pretty sure the Humane Society is also against the outright killing of puppies,
What does "outright killing" mean? That puppies in general shouldn't be killed? We at the Puppy Killing Party of America don't believe that a puppy should necessarily be killed on sight. No, we have a set of rational criteria for puppy control. If a sensible proportion of puppies are killed, remaining puppies have the strength and resources to be properly looked after. Whereas many American so-called "humane" societies are happy to kill puppies at the request of the owner - though they'll use words like "euthanasia" and give the dog the indignity of dying in a white room with a needle - we believe in the right for humans to enjoy animal sports.
Because we're fundamentally both in favour of puppy killing, we are happy to donate this money through clone54321, who has done so much work for our cause over the past few months. Thanks to his work, our puppy-killing is now 15% more efficient.
Sometimes you have no choice but to accept the payment and continue to do the work.
Equivocation. Mine is a moral (free) choice, whereas in that case it was afaict required by law to run the ads.
The Humane Society does their report. The Puppy Killing Party counterbalances by indicating that they're not for anything inhumane, just campaigning in support of outright killing of puppies. Hell, they've proven how much they are against anything truly evil by happily giving a cash sum to you to donate to the Humane Society. The Party leader gives another $500 to show how much he cares.
And the tenth time that the Humane Society receives a $1500 donation from the Puppy Killing Party thanks to your work, how do you think things will be playing out?
When someone pays you for work you do, you're working for them. If you don't want to work for them, you have no choice but to refuse their payment.
Imagine that the Puppy Killing Party of North America (Republican/Democrat/ADL/ADC/AMI/PETA/whatever sinks your boat) saw that you happened to do something in some way aligned with their mission, even if not directly killing puppies.
They approached you and said, "On behalf of the puppy killers of North America, we're happy with what you've done and we'd like to present you with this cash sum of $1500."
Assuming that some community of volunteers could reasonably do the work, then it depends on whether you think clearing up the oil spill or spiting BP is more important.
The poorest people in the world need to be left to suffer slow death by starvation, because helping them will only encourage their corrupt governments, right?
I've helped out in projects which help the wider community but which are controlled in some way by organisations which I do not approve of. In such cases, I refuse to take anything but expenses. Benefitting from some organisation of which you disapprove is morally bankrupt, but helping out a good cause which happens to be promoted by that organisation is a fine act.
To do a bit of occupatio:
1. No, the effort in finding the bug isn't an expense, unless you're one of those consumer-citizen types who translates each hour into some cash value;
2. Something exists outside of its ownership. It is not inconsistent to judge that Firefox is good but the Mozilla Foundation is bad.
I guess you could say that their 'shear ignorance' was sheer ignorance.
The post is technically correct, the best kind of correct. To avoid shear ignorance, one must avoid posts by non-structural engineers. Since kdawson and timothy were taken out of education at the age of 13 to work the/. mines, this includes them.
The best security is formed of a nice area, a good lock and a well-trained guard (yourself, for most households; your neighbours might also keep an eye out for you).
Electronics will just make you feel cooler. But the stuff will still be stolen and, no, you won't get it back. Those tracked-my-IP-address-camera stories are one in a million, and always seem to have glaring holes in the accounts.
I've done the extended family + friend IT support thing and left some people on IE. Neither these guys nor the ones with FF seem to end up virus-laden once I've taken over the job. They've learnt to follow my eloquent speeches about how to behave online and enjoyed an appropriate level of anti-malware installation.
Today it's almost impossible to find straight up-to-date IE on a machine with good anti-malware installed being used as a vehicle for automagic malware installation. The guys who download a trojan.exe using IE will do the same with FF. The guys who leave Javascript enabled in Acrobat Reader will find the same setting in either browser.
tl;dr User education and least privilege all the way.
Is this home users? Business users? How's the data collected?
My experience of home users that the majority certainly aren't downloading alternative browsers. My experience of business users is that you get some IT types hating IE but others wanting the enterprise integration IE offers, the balance being those apathetic who leave IE on. So, assuming the stats are representative, what is triggering this switch?
I've been spending the last decade looking at the budgets and doomsaying, but it's fallen on deaf ears. The few mathematicians/investors/whatever who have tried to speak up about the unsustainable behaviour of the market were firmly ignored by government and media because it was in the interest of the wealthy to promote this short-term profiteering and everyone else seemed to enjoy the ride.
Anyway, today I see lots of money being channeled to (at the high level) war, Trident, bailouts, (at the lower level) sooo much middle-management bureaucracy, public-private partnerships, etc. Then I see a couple of mouthfuls of gruel going into social care.
And, yes, raise taxes for those who profit from speculative investment. London today is little more than a paper exchange and PR management office. Return Britain to actually building and inventing.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you showed some interest in LD but don't approve of the coalition, you are in fact just a New Labour supporter in disguise."
Why have I seen this with-us-or-against-us argument from certain LD supporters so much in media and forums? Was there a memo from LD central office I missed?
There is (was?) a swathe of left-leaning LD supporters who would naturally object to the LD/Con coalition. You may disagree with their views, but they have nothing to do with their being clandestine Blairites. Repeating the argument further undermines the traditionally fairly democratic spirit of the LD.
Which they did, without any doubt at all
Yes, they spent too much on unnecessary war, Trident, public-private partnerships, mid-level civil service bureaucracy, a tax system to favour offshoring and making it impossible for bankers to fail. The Tories are responding by cutting back on the social welfare system and privatising the NHS.
Which she did, I'm sorry if your sensibilities were offended, but she unloaded some deeply unprofitable industry from the state
Like British Gas? British Telecom? British Rail? Oh, that's right, what you actually meant is that some coal mines were making a loss, but you felt the need to generalise this to nationalised British industry in general.
Sorry, WTF? After the Iraq fiasco you're saying the Tories will invent enemies!?!?!!!
Pay more attention to history. After the Vietnam fiasco... after the Falklands fiasco... after the Cold War fiasco... after the Iraq (part 1) fiasco... after the Afghanistan fiasco...
People have already forgotten when the Liberal Democrats were the Party of "no war!" over Iraq. Notice the drastic conditions of coalition relating to Iraq? Thought not.
I was going to say that you're severely overestimating the public's ability to remember, but I think you're merely demonstrating the public.
I have yet to hear about the UK scrapping the NHS in favour of the US insurance model
Everything happens in stages. You need to pay more attention. In brief: private outsourcing under the guise of choice. Fire people then re-hire them at a lower level as private contractors but at higher wage (in the short term, with no job security or concomitant organisational familiarity and loyalty). See also British Rail.
bitterness and fear-mongering from the section of the population that relied too heavily on labour handouts in the last parliament.
Are you seriously arguing that New Labour was the Party for the mythical Daily Hate Benefit Scrounger, possibly the least expensive source of wastage the government has to deal with?
So far, the coalition seems to be the best government the UK has had while I've been alive
Only if you're Thatcherite and born after Thatcher was ousted. It's doing precisely what she did: blaming a previous socialist government for over-spending then implementing "austerity" measures which come down to pushing the neo-conservative agenda on Britain. 30 years ago there were wide-eyed Tories proudly announcing in the first few months of Thatcher - who was a fine orator for the easily soundbitten - how she would save the country with her laissez faire mantra.
If the government wants to save money, it can abandon unnecessary war, Trident, public-private partnerships and mid-level civil service bureaucracy. It can adjust the tax system not to favour offshoring, and stop bailing out bankers.
Don't forget:
so is looking at developing other solutions
Cameron's the kind of guy to make public statements telling Facebook to take down messages when they speak positively about people he doesn't like. If you think Blair was bad, it's because the honeymoon period isn't over. And can you recall the Blair honeymoon period?
ContactPoint and Blair's ID cards were abandoned because, well, they were overtly oppressive. The Tories, unlike Labour, recognise that you can't take away people's freedom by imposing classical Eastern programmes on them - you have to be more subtle. You lower taxes but raise a fuel escalator. You cherish freedom but implement the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. You talk about the freedom to do business but beat collective bargainers with a stick. And, within the first two years of government, you must divert all attention to some enemy: the Argentinians, the Russkies, the Arabs. I dread to think what Cameron will come up with.
Indeed. If anyone wants to rebalance their views on what makes for an average Western democracy on the basis that there exist some repressive, backward regimes in Asia, then they need a sense of perspective.
This is what you sound like:
Prima: Waterboarding is bad.
Secunda: But have you seen what Saddam did!
Prima: Oh haha, I guess waterboarding isn't so bad after all.
This is an alternative which doesn't make use of the "but I only fucked one goat" fallacy:
Prima: Waterboarding is bad.
Secunda: But have you seen what Saddam did!
Prima: Waterboarding is still bad.
Uh....what do European politics have to do with whether a US president is liberal or not?
If you stick to intrinsic measurement systems, you're going to miss out on the whole story. See also Flatland.
I can say that compared to Ahmadinejad Bush was an absolute social liberal, but it is absolutely irrelevant.
Comparing a modern Western democracy with Ahmadinejad is not the same as comparing a modern Western democracy with a modern Western democracy.
Europe tends to be more liberal, but also more authoritarian.
As the old Eastern commentary goes, in the West you're free to denounce your government, and in the East you're free to denounce your boss. Although Assange has shown that the former doesn't really hold. But Americans do like redefining words to build their strawmen. Summary: On the left we have socialism and on the right we have capitalism. On the extreme left we have communism and on the extreme right we have fascism. Authoritarianism is a superimposed U. HTH.
Some countries still have fascist parties.
In what sense? Pretty much every Western country has a fascist party. Or do you mean seats in parliament/equivalent, particularly in countries with proportional representation? Is this a bad thing? Do you think it wouldn't happen in the US with PR?
environment cools Intel.
Pretty much this. And just because everything is somewhat political, it doesn't mean every venture is as bad as every other.
Like women and unlike wine, all man's endeavours grow more wrought with bitterness over time.
The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition.
Have you spent a moment in the "Open Source community"? The majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations. Most of the remainder take glory in advertising their contributions for CV and geek cred. Certain projects are so cliquish that a friendly attitude (read "sucking up") to the core team is a far better way of being welcomed as a contributor than technical expertise.
My original post included specific project examples, but since the most political organisations also have the most time to loudly whine at their detractors, I thought I'd remove them. I can think of at least one major open source Unix distribution the central developers of which seem to deliberately so poorly document their work that getting up to sufficient speed on what they do to make a positive contribution requires mentorship.
FWIW, Debian as a whole doesn't suffer so much from this problem. I guess because it doesn't attract the glamour-seekers, nor does it consider itself elite. If politics is a hindrance there, it's more about idealism than personal power struggles.
Hear, hear! Alas, even the geeks of the world are becoming more like those who would join the new HP than the old.
Are you saying Clinton was right-wing? And that the Obama-Pelosi time (Pelosi started earlier) has been right-wing? I think that says more about your own personal political leanings than it does about anyone else's.
No-one outside the USA thinks of the Republicans and the Democrats as anything but "right wing", often to the right of the most right-leaning mainstream parties in European countries.
The fact that Americans think otherwise says more about the homogeneity of beliefs in free-thinking[tm] America than it does about anything else.
So... doing work which benefits an organisation is wrong, but it can be cancelled out somewhat if they pay me. IOW, getting a job at Puppy Killing Party HQ is OK as long as my salary is high enough ;-).
Look, you're not being paid for the precise value of your work to PKP (or at any non-cooperative firm, but that's another discussion). You're being given a token sum to encourage you to work more and to make them look good. No amount paid out will be sufficient to do them significant damage if used against them. If the beginnings of damage were apparent, they'd stop paying out to anyone, or add a clause stating that money would not be paid out to those who drag them into disrepute.
It's possible that you are the only completely incorruptible person in the world, aiming to channel the income only to causes which counter PKP and not letting the prospect of personal income influence you. It's further possible that you aim correctly, carefully noting such dangers as two sides of the same coin (the ostensible diametric opposition to any cause is often as bad as the original cause) and avoiding donations which can be used as PR in PKP's favour.
But to PKP you're just another productive employee.
To fit into your analogy, I graciously accept the $2000 from the PKP, then refuse to help them again.
You know from the start that your work is incidentally helping the Mozilla Foundation.
But even if you didn't, what if your work happened to mean that you regularly do stuff which you find out incidentally helps the PKP (e.g. you write some open source product from which they greatly benefit)? Do you refuse further payments? Stop working on the product?
"Give a small amount of money to a charity which is perceived as opposing you," is a classical tactic, accompanied by rhetoric (not my opinion!) to disguise the organisation's true mission. What matters here is how the de facto public relations officer for the Puppy Killing Party feels about his position.
The PKP will continue giving money as long as the drop in an ocean payment to the Humane Society continues giving such great publicity.
I’m pretty sure the Humane Society is also against the outright killing of puppies,
What does "outright killing" mean? That puppies in general shouldn't be killed? We at the Puppy Killing Party of America don't believe that a puppy should necessarily be killed on sight. No, we have a set of rational criteria for puppy control. If a sensible proportion of puppies are killed, remaining puppies have the strength and resources to be properly looked after. Whereas many American so-called "humane" societies are happy to kill puppies at the request of the owner - though they'll use words like "euthanasia" and give the dog the indignity of dying in a white room with a needle - we believe in the right for humans to enjoy animal sports.
Because we're fundamentally both in favour of puppy killing, we are happy to donate this money through clone54321, who has done so much work for our cause over the past few months. Thanks to his work, our puppy-killing is now 15% more efficient.
Sometimes you have no choice but to accept the payment and continue to do the work.
Equivocation. Mine is a moral (free) choice, whereas in that case it was afaict required by law to run the ads.
The Humane Society does their report. The Puppy Killing Party counterbalances by indicating that they're not for anything inhumane, just campaigning in support of outright killing of puppies. Hell, they've proven how much they are against anything truly evil by happily giving a cash sum to you to donate to the Humane Society. The Party leader gives another $500 to show how much he cares.
And the tenth time that the Humane Society receives a $1500 donation from the Puppy Killing Party thanks to your work, how do you think things will be playing out?
When someone pays you for work you do, you're working for them. If you don't want to work for them, you have no choice but to refuse their payment.
Imagine that the Puppy Killing Party of North America (Republican/Democrat/ADL/ADC/AMI/PETA/whatever sinks your boat) saw that you happened to do something in some way aligned with their mission, even if not directly killing puppies.
They approached you and said, "On behalf of the puppy killers of North America, we're happy with what you've done and we'd like to present you with this cash sum of $1500."
What would you do?
Assuming that some community of volunteers could reasonably do the work, then it depends on whether you think clearing up the oil spill or spiting BP is more important.
The poorest people in the world need to be left to suffer slow death by starvation, because helping them will only encourage their corrupt governments, right?
I've helped out in projects which help the wider community but which are controlled in some way by organisations which I do not approve of. In such cases, I refuse to take anything but expenses. Benefitting from some organisation of which you disapprove is morally bankrupt, but helping out a good cause which happens to be promoted by that organisation is a fine act.
To do a bit of occupatio:
1. No, the effort in finding the bug isn't an expense, unless you're one of those consumer-citizen types who translates each hour into some cash value;
2. Something exists outside of its ownership. It is not inconsistent to judge that Firefox is good but the Mozilla Foundation is bad.
I guess you could say that their 'shear ignorance' was sheer ignorance.
The post is technically correct, the best kind of correct. To avoid shear ignorance, one must avoid posts by non-structural engineers. Since kdawson and timothy were taken out of education at the age of 13 to work the /. mines, this includes them.
What do you intend to achieve with this system?
The best security is formed of a nice area, a good lock and a well-trained guard (yourself, for most households; your neighbours might also keep an eye out for you).
Electronics will just make you feel cooler. But the stuff will still be stolen and, no, you won't get it back. Those tracked-my-IP-address-camera stories are one in a million, and always seem to have glaring holes in the accounts.
The internet is the single most important tool for global homogenisation and enforcement.
FTFY.
I've done the extended family + friend IT support thing and left some people on IE. Neither these guys nor the ones with FF seem to end up virus-laden once I've taken over the job. They've learnt to follow my eloquent speeches about how to behave online and enjoyed an appropriate level of anti-malware installation.
Today it's almost impossible to find straight up-to-date IE on a machine with good anti-malware installed being used as a vehicle for automagic malware installation. The guys who download a trojan .exe using IE will do the same with FF. The guys who leave Javascript enabled in Acrobat Reader will find the same setting in either browser.
tl;dr User education and least privilege all the way.
Is this home users? Business users? How's the data collected?
My experience of home users that the majority certainly aren't downloading alternative browsers. My experience of business users is that you get some IT types hating IE but others wanting the enterprise integration IE offers, the balance being those apathetic who leave IE on. So, assuming the stats are representative, what is triggering this switch?
I've been spending the last decade looking at the budgets and doomsaying, but it's fallen on deaf ears. The few mathematicians/investors/whatever who have tried to speak up about the unsustainable behaviour of the market were firmly ignored by government and media because it was in the interest of the wealthy to promote this short-term profiteering and everyone else seemed to enjoy the ride.
Anyway, today I see lots of money being channeled to (at the high level) war, Trident, bailouts, (at the lower level) sooo much middle-management bureaucracy, public-private partnerships, etc. Then I see a couple of mouthfuls of gruel going into social care.
And, yes, raise taxes for those who profit from speculative investment. London today is little more than a paper exchange and PR management office. Return Britain to actually building and inventing.