Liberals believe in personal liberty (except if you say a bad word in which case you should be silenced)(or unless you defend someone accused of rape)(or unless you were accused of rape), which includes doing what you^H^H^H *they* want with your own money. That isn't liberal, it's socialist.
http://www.libdems.org.uk/media/documents/policies /It'sAboutFreedom.pdf
Both liberal and conservative parties are pro-big government / anti personal freedom in the US these days. ok. i don't think your liberals are liberal at all. They just aren't, it's almost an insult to the word. They are social democrats, which is fine, but it isn't liberalism.
And the pro big government/ anti personal freedom are inevitable results of parties which internally have fundamentally conflicting philosophies. The conservatives require big government to police their social conservatism, have a look at the War On Drugs. The Democrats (social democrats in reality) attempt to use government to redistribute wealth. To do that they have to restrict liberty. It's a fundamentally conflicting policy.
The result of both Conservative and Labour, Republican and Democrat philosophies is the inevitable growth of government. They both end up in the same place. It has to be said though that there are members of the conservative, labour, republican and democrat parties who are actually liberal in philosophy but who remain members because the electoral system collapses elections to just two parties.
Broadly correct.
except that they also seem to favor a welfare state, which is a solidly leftist position in the U.S., and not generally favored by people who seek as a stated goal to minimize state interventionism in private life We already have a well entrenched welfare state. It's been around for decades, since the end of the war. The question is what to do with it. Simply abandoning it is an entirely unelectable position in the UK. The focus then becomes, how do we get people out of the welfare state to become productive members of society.
U.K. politics seems rather spirited. Honestly it's not that spirited, Labour and the Conservatives are both quite happy with the status quo. It's a bit more diverse than the US, but nothing like most EU countries with proportional representation. Also unlike EU countries, turnouts at elections are dreadful.
And how do you think they're going to make up that deficit? By even higher taxes on the people who actually produce the money in the first place. Great idea, that'll make more poeple want to live and work and run businesses in Britain.
"Our package of reforms is tax neutral overall"
Do you understand what "tax neutral" means? It means that overall, the level of taxation, and therefore cash in the economy, will remain the same.
"To simplify the tax system for businesses we will:
Create a simpler Corporation Tax structure, removing complex reliefs and cutting the main rate."
Right. this is dreadful. Horrible of them. Make it easier for small businesses to work out their tax liabilities. Easier to pay them. AND WILL CUT THE MAIN RATE OF CORPORATION TAX.
Repeal most anti-avoidance legislation and use a General Anti-Avoidance Rule to simplify the
tax code."
Hmm. Simplify the tax system. Oh My God! Stop them. Stop them. Small businesses will be decimated!
"
Give an option for small businesses to be taxed on net cashflow not profit.
Introduce a small business rates relief as an interim measure before major reforms to the
business rate can be implemented.
In the longer term we aim to achieve much more radical change:
Raise the income tax threshold further - an intermediate objective would be to raise the
threshold to around £10,000, the approximate annual equivalent of the National Minimum
Wage.
Enlarge the tax base by developing policies on land taxation.
Merge the system of employee and employer National Insurance Contributions as the
contributory principle becomes obsolete.
Overhaul the system of taxing transport and congestion to reflect the potential of road user
pricing.
Reform the taxation of assets, notably Inheritance Tax by changing the basis on which IHT is
charged so that it falls on accessions, including lifetime gifts in the taxable sum, and raising
thresholds and cutting rates.
Reform Stamp Duty Land Tax into a progressive tax that only charges higher rates of duty on
the proportion of the property value above a threshold."
Did you even look at the tax document? I made it pretty bloody easy for you. Basically the LibDems will simplify the tax system massively, for everyone, which actually equates with smaller government and will make it much easier to run a small business. They know fine well that it's the small businesses which make the economy run. Unlike the conservatives and labour who seem to think it's the big businesses which contribute to the party coffers which cause the market economy to work.
If the Lib Dems ever put the bottle down long enough to get themselves elected, you can probably look at paying £2 a litre for petrol, £1 for a carrier bag and double benefits to people who just can't be bothered working.
Ah... You're a Sun reader... How's that unthinking dogma working out for you?
From the LibDem poverty and inequality consultation paper:
Basically the same reason as your accountants. You by definition pretty much have to give the people managing your computer infrastructure access to the company secrets.
Oh, it's also a perfect industrial espionage position. You can get into the innards of a competitor and be kept up to date completely automatically on what they're up to. If the technical guy is good it can be almost undetectable. In really big companies, it's almost certainly going on constantly.
See the military for security systems to prevent this. Read as very expensive and major pain to set up and manage.
"Our package of reforms is tax neutral overall - that is it does not alter the total amount of taxation raised,but raises it in different ways."
"The specific proposals for the national budget in a new Parliament would be to:
Abolish the existing 10p starting rate of income tax - taking more than two million people out
of tax altogether and removing one rate of tax.
Raise the employee NICs threshold so that NICs begin to be paid at the same level of income
as income tax, simplifying the system, and to seek to make employee NICs payable on annual
rather than a weekly earnings.
Raise the starting threshold for the 40% upper rate of taxation to £50,000 pa - taking 1.3 million
people out of paying upper rate tax (while raising the upper threshold for the higher rate of
National Insurance Contributions to £50,000 pa.)
Cut the basic rate of national income tax by 2p. "
and more control over everyone's lives. And from their "trust in people" policy paper:
"The Liberal Democrats are not like the other two parties, ditching their entire policy prospectus when they elect a new leader. We know what we believe in. Trust in People: Make Britain free, fair and green takes as its starting point It's About Freedom"
I have no idea WTF you are getting your ideas from... Are you a Daily Mail reader?
The accuracy of the pump is irrelevant, unless its inaccuracy tends to be downward. Ehm no, it's not irrelevant. It's completely relevant.
In the real world all measurements have error. Systematic and random. If the thermal expansion (a systematic error) is well within the legally acceptable pump measurement accuracy then you aren't being ripped off at all.
You're assuming politics are 1 dimensional, left -> right. Not the case.
Liberals believe in personal liberty, which includes doing what you want with your own money. It seems to confuse people that they believe in reduced government involvement in both business and personal lives. They confuse reduced involvement and taxation as conservatism and assume only reduced involvement in personal lives is the liberal philosophy.
In fact, of the major parties in the UK, the Liberals are the only ones with a consistent philosophy.
The Labour party's belief in government responsibility for the redistribution of wealth inevitably impinges on personal liberty, and the conservative party's belief in social conservatism inevitably increases taxation.
The fact is, financial and social liberty are intimately intertwined. You can't really have one without the other. It's a bit like geocentrism. Your models and equations get more and more complex to account for little differences and variations until you have a large unwieldy and clumsy system full of exceptions and special cases. Then someone comes along and points out that everything "just works", elegantly and simply if you just change your point of view and use a heliocentric model instead.
Even a tiny difference in volume makes a big difference over a long time. The difference based on volumetric expansion is on the order of 0.02%. The acceptable accuracy of a pump is around 0.5%.
Do you see why this is the height of stupidity now?
Christ, if your tyres are the wrong pressure or you leave your window open while driving there's a bigger loss.
because they are ripping people off quite a lot in hot area's, and they don't want the gravy train to end. You know what? I bet they've never even thought about it. An engineer somewhere might have worked it out on a slow day and laughed at the insignificant difference.
What far more likely is they're pissed off that there are one or two paranoid skinflints out there who are trying to make them spend millions refitting all their petrols stations.
Honestly, it was like going to a Scientology convention. The audience ate it up and the sales rep just kept shovelling it on. The more outlandish the quote, the bigger the grins. Think of it as fucking them as good and hard as they deserve.
Inevitably it's the weirdest perverts that try to get this stuff banned. Something to do with the public school system I think. I think it's a form of projection.
One day they're in parliament trying to get sex banned, the next they're found dead in a hotel room, orange stuffed in their mouth, dressed up in nylons, plastic bag over their head and their belt wrapped round their neck in a failed attempt at auto-erotic asphyxiation.
How comforting that today's politicians don't even understand what freedom is. The nature of socialism is that the state takes responsibility for the care of it's citizens. Which is fine, until you recognise one thing.
Freedom and responsibility are the same thing.
If you take responsibility, you inevitably removing the freedom of the individual. It cannot be escaped. The Labour party are fundamentally a socialist party and Labour party MPs are basically socialist. Well meaning, but the inevitable result is the removal of freedom.
Something else to note. Liberalism, concerned with the freedom of the individual is fundamentally incompatible with the left, with socialism. The term "liberal left" is an oxymoron, a fundamental misunderstanding of what being liberal means.
What the hell is a chocolate fireguard and what does it have to do with the internet? It's rumoured to be the code name for Microsoft's new security system.
The Glasgow (for want of a better word) "bombers" I think Flamers is a better word. It suggests a degree of crispyness or that flame grilled flavour.
Fair to assume they're capable of intelligence Hmm. I'm not so sure. I'm far more concerned that these guys were imported into the NHS, and that there are potentially even more equally dumb people masquerading as doctors.
Still. It's good that religious nuts don't believe in experimentation.
Yes. Can I just point out that you are still alive and clearly have all of the equipment you used to have in the seventies... Though I suggest you try the tapes, I suspect they'll be gone.
Microsoft are providing virtualisation so they can run old software in order to convert it into newer formats That doesn't make any sense. Microsoft already know the file format, just write a bit of software which will read in the old and write out the new format. We're talking terabytes of information here. it isn't as if you can just open each file manually and choose "export as".
The idea that an institution like the British Library, which is run by people bright enough to make you look like a dead match, would accept such a preposterous idea is insulting. You seem to have a remarkable faith in institutions. They're planning to use OOXML. I think insulting them is entirely fair.
Let me quote:
Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library, praised Microsoft for its adoption of more open standards. Stop and consider that quote for a moment. Given your vast experience of the history of IT, does something not quite ring true. The pertinent qualification with "more" is highly significant.
He said: "Microsoft has taken tremendous strides forward in addressing this problem. There has been a sea change in attitude." Yes... Except for all the proprietary bits in OOXML.
Microsoft's UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age" A dark age caused by... Microsoft... Actually they're just doing what comes naturally.
The real problem seems to be the credulous morons in charge of the National Archives project.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.libdems.org.uk/media/documents/policie
And the pro big government/ anti personal freedom are inevitable results of parties which internally have fundamentally conflicting philosophies. The conservatives require big government to police their social conservatism, have a look at the War On Drugs. The Democrats (social democrats in reality) attempt to use government to redistribute wealth. To do that they have to restrict liberty. It's a fundamentally conflicting policy.
The result of both Conservative and Labour, Republican and Democrat philosophies is the inevitable growth of government. They both end up in the same place. It has to be said though that there are members of the conservative, labour, republican and democrat parties who are actually liberal in philosophy but who remain members because the electoral system collapses elections to just two parties.
And how do you think they're going to make up that deficit? By even higher taxes on the people who actually produce the money in the first place. Great idea, that'll make more poeple want to live and work and run businesses in Britain.
"Our package of reforms is tax neutral overall"
Do you understand what "tax neutral" means? It means that overall, the level of taxation, and therefore cash in the economy, will remain the same.
"To simplify the tax system for businesses we will:
Create a simpler Corporation Tax structure, removing complex reliefs and cutting the main rate."
Right. this is dreadful. Horrible of them. Make it easier for small businesses to work out their tax liabilities. Easier to pay them. AND WILL CUT THE MAIN RATE OF CORPORATION TAX.
Repeal most anti-avoidance legislation and use a General Anti-Avoidance Rule to simplify the
tax code."
Hmm. Simplify the tax system. Oh My God! Stop them. Stop them. Small businesses will be decimated!
"
Give an option for small businesses to be taxed on net cashflow not profit.
Introduce a small business rates relief as an interim measure before major reforms to the
business rate can be implemented.
In the longer term we aim to achieve much more radical change:
Raise the income tax threshold further - an intermediate objective would be to raise the
threshold to around £10,000, the approximate annual equivalent of the National Minimum
Wage.
Enlarge the tax base by developing policies on land taxation.
Merge the system of employee and employer National Insurance Contributions as the
contributory principle becomes obsolete.
Overhaul the system of taxing transport and congestion to reflect the potential of road user
pricing.
Reform the taxation of assets, notably Inheritance Tax by changing the basis on which IHT is
charged so that it falls on accessions, including lifetime gifts in the taxable sum, and raising
thresholds and cutting rates.
Reform Stamp Duty Land Tax into a progressive tax that only charges higher rates of duty on
the proportion of the property value above a threshold."
Did you even look at the tax document? I made it pretty bloody easy for you. Basically the LibDems will simplify the tax system massively, for everyone, which actually equates with smaller government and will make it much easier to run a small business. They know fine well that it's the small businesses which make the economy run. Unlike the conservatives and labour who seem to think it's the big businesses which contribute to the party coffers which cause the market economy to work.
If the Lib Dems ever put the bottle down long enough to get themselves elected, you can probably look at paying £2 a litre for petrol, £1 for a carrier bag and double benefits to people who just can't be bothered working.
Ah... You're a Sun reader... How's that unthinking dogma working out for you?
From the LibDem poverty and inequality consultation paper:
"Barriers to Work
5.1.1 Barriers to wo
Basically the same reason as your accountants. You by definition pretty much have to give the people managing your computer infrastructure access to the company secrets.
Oh, it's also a perfect industrial espionage position. You can get into the innards of a competitor and be kept up to date completely automatically on what they're up to. If the technical guy is good it can be almost undetectable. In really big companies, it's almost certainly going on constantly.
See the military for security systems to prevent this. Read as very expensive and major pain to set up and manage.
http://www.libdems.org.uk/party/policy/paperlist.
From their taxation paper:
"Our package of reforms is tax neutral overall - that is it does not alter the total amount of taxation raised,but raises it in different ways."
"The specific proposals for the national budget in a new Parliament would be to:
Abolish the existing 10p starting rate of income tax - taking more than two million people out
of tax altogether and removing one rate of tax.
Raise the employee NICs threshold so that NICs begin to be paid at the same level of income
as income tax, simplifying the system, and to seek to make employee NICs payable on annual
rather than a weekly earnings.
Raise the starting threshold for the 40% upper rate of taxation to £50,000 pa - taking 1.3 million
people out of paying upper rate tax (while raising the upper threshold for the higher rate of
National Insurance Contributions to £50,000 pa.)
Cut the basic rate of national income tax by 2p.
" and more control over everyone's lives. And from their "trust in people" policy paper:
"The Liberal Democrats are not like the other two parties, ditching their entire policy prospectus
when they elect a new leader. We know what we believe in. Trust in People: Make Britain free,
fair and green takes as its starting point It's About Freedom"
I have no idea WTF you are getting your ideas from... Are you a Daily Mail reader?
In the real world all measurements have error. Systematic and random. If the thermal expansion (a systematic error) is well within the legally acceptable pump measurement accuracy then you aren't being ripped off at all.
You're assuming politics are 1 dimensional, left -> right. Not the case.
Liberals believe in personal liberty, which includes doing what you want with your own money. It seems to confuse people that they believe in reduced government involvement in both business and personal lives. They confuse reduced involvement and taxation as conservatism and assume only reduced involvement in personal lives is the liberal philosophy.
In fact, of the major parties in the UK, the Liberals are the only ones with a consistent philosophy.
The Labour party's belief in government responsibility for the redistribution of wealth inevitably impinges on personal liberty, and the conservative party's belief in social conservatism inevitably increases taxation.
The fact is, financial and social liberty are intimately intertwined. You can't really have one without the other. It's a bit like geocentrism. Your models and equations get more and more complex to account for little differences and variations until you have a large unwieldy and clumsy system full of exceptions and special cases. Then someone comes along and points out that everything "just works", elegantly and simply if you just change your point of view and use a heliocentric model instead.
Actually the liberals are a party of small government... Or at least reduced government interference, which amounts to much the same.
hth.
Do you see why this is the height of stupidity now?
Christ, if your tyres are the wrong pressure or you leave your window open while driving there's a bigger loss.
I have no idea which world you live in, but I live in the real one. At some point common sense has to kick in.
Go work out the difference in volume of gasoline at the two temperatures. Then take a look at the acceptable accuracy of the pumps themselves.
What far more likely is they're pissed off that there are one or two paranoid skinflints out there who are trying to make them spend millions refitting all their petrols stations.
Inevitably it's the weirdest perverts that try to get this stuff banned. Something to do with the public school system I think. I think it's a form of projection.
One day they're in parliament trying to get sex banned, the next they're found dead in a hotel room, orange stuffed in their mouth, dressed up in nylons, plastic bag over their head and their belt wrapped round their neck in a failed attempt at auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Freedom and responsibility are the same thing.
If you take responsibility, you inevitably removing the freedom of the individual. It cannot be escaped. The Labour party are fundamentally a socialist party and Labour party MPs are basically socialist. Well meaning, but the inevitable result is the removal of freedom.
Something else to note. Liberalism, concerned with the freedom of the individual is fundamentally incompatible with the left, with socialism. The term "liberal left" is an oxymoron, a fundamental misunderstanding of what being liberal means.
Reciprocal extradition treaties
Ho ho ho isn't the world becoming an interesting place to live.
They are benchmarking against Xeons because they are going to price them at the older Xeon's level rather than the newer faster faster ones...
That human consciousness is a swarm of neuronal interactions.
Still. It's good that religious nuts don't believe in experimentation.
Stir the emotions of the technologists etc.
That's what it is.
Yes. Can I just point out that you are still alive and clearly have all of the equipment you used to have in the seventies... Though I suggest you try the tapes, I suspect they'll be gone.
I keep my knowledgebases in Wiki format.
o jects/zim/
http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/pr
Let me quote: Adam Farquhar, head of e-architecture at the British Library, praised Microsoft for its adoption of more open standards. Stop and consider that quote for a moment. Given your vast experience of the history of IT, does something not quite ring true. The pertinent qualification with "more" is highly significant. He said: "Microsoft has taken tremendous strides forward in addressing this problem. There has been a sea change in attitude." Yes... Except for all the proprietary bits in OOXML.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
The real problem seems to be the credulous morons in charge of the National Archives project.