"From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a.300 in an IPv4 address in The Net"
I don't know how it works in the rest of the world but in the UK there are a bunch of telephone numbers reserved for TV/Movie use so that real numbers don't get called when people see it on screen.
This is the same as with IP addresses, they don't want anyone harassing a real IP so they just make it up. Sure they could've used 127.0.0.1 instead but then geeks would've said "LOL SHE'S HACKING LOCALHOST" or whatever so they'd still get flak. It's not accident or a blip, use of IPs like that is wholly intentional and as the example of the reserved British phone numbers above demonstrates, it's an age old problem in using real addresses, phone numbers, or now IP addresses - if you do then the people owning those addresses will get harassed. You could use one you own thinking "Well, I don't use it now so it'll be fine" but what if in 20 years you forgot you had that in your film and use it? what if someone is watching old films and stumbles across it? You have to be sure you're happy with that IP not being used for anything forever.
I don't know if IANA already has any reserved IPs for this sort of purpose in the same way as reserved British phone numbers they could've used though? anyone know?
Sure, I agree that's a problem. I disagree that it's a problem where I live in the UK for example because there is so much free distance learning available and so many massive brand new learning centres built in the last decade or two in areas of high unemployment but I fully accept that sometimes and some places it's an issue.
This is what the likes of EdX hope to solve of course though, and the internet is doing a good job of eliminating that excuse.
Wow, who is the ignorant one? You're implying everyone in India is of a different race which is wrong. In defending the earlier comment you're implying that anyone from India has a different skin colour to someone from America. You're implying there's no such thing as say, a white-caucasian person with Indian nationality.
I don't think you meant to, but the person you're responding to is right and you're wrong, there's no evidence this has anything to do with race and that it is more about what they can get away with paying someone from a country with much lower average levels of wage - their race and skin colour have absolutely nothing to do with that.
Referring to him as Indian tells us nothing about his race, his colour, or his ethnicity, it merely tells us his nationality, so anything else you've projected onto the victim in question is merely evidence of your own pre-existing bias about what it means to be Indian.
It's still completely wrong, it's still completely unacceptable but don't try and play the racial defender whilst making grossly ignorant remarks that imply everyone from India is of a certain skin colour or whatever.
No one is disputing that what was said was unacceptable, but whoever made this about race is making something up that simply is not present in the story.
I thought that too, until through a combination of a fire sale, the will of my girlfriend to play Lego City Undercover, and an onset of Mario nostalgia convinced me to impulse buy one.
Don't regret it at all. It's not perfect, I only seem to get 6 hours or so out of the main controller which is rather annoying if you want a longer session without recharging, and it needs more games, but what it has is all really good. I loved Pikmin 3, it was one of my favourite games of last year. The controller is surprisingly comfy, far more so than say the PS3's Dualshock controllers for example, and the pro controllers for classic mario style action are almost exactly like the Xbox controllers so are really comfy too.
It's what I wish the Wii had been, something innovative and different to what people call the "hardcore" gaming systems, but without the need to flap around like an idiot, something I got bored of rather quick with both the Wii and Kinect because gaming is a thing I do when I want to just sit back and chill.
I was a skeptic when I saw it, in fact I was so frustrated by the Wii failing to be worthwhile coupled with Nintendo's arrogance that I kind of wanted it to fail. But I warmed up to it and I love it now. I wish it had more games, but the few games it does have are almost universally excellent.
It's that casual getaway that I crave every now and then as a mostly "hardcore" gamer, but to date simply have never had because the Wii was shit and the Xbox 360/PS3 just didn't have anything close to the quality of more casual games as Nintendo manages to churn out with Mario and Pikmin etc.
Oh, and it's nice being able to throw Mario or Pikmin or something on when my girlfriend decides to take over the TV to watch something shit.
That's not really how the world works though, the jobs just shift elsewhere. Online retailing did away with the need for many stores and many stores went bankrupt as a result causing a loss of retail jobs, but those jobs were replaced with courier delivery jobs, with picking and packing jobs, and with IT jobs to run those sites whilst whole new classes of sellers appeared producing and selling items online that they could never have made a business selling before because the cost of a retail unit and the cost of marketing to pull people there was prohibitive compared to the cost of setting up and online retail presence.
Similarly automation by robots in the car industry meant many jobs were lost producing cars, but as cars could be produced more quickly it also meant you needed more car salesmen, more people to ship them around, more workers in the oil industry to satisfy increasing fuel demands, more inspectors to check quality, more mechanics to fix them all, more scrap merchants to get rid of the old ones and reclaim the materials.
If you argue we can reach a point where jobs are being made obsolete so fast that no one can train for them then it's questionable whether there was a job there in the first place, it's like saying search engines killed off millions of online directory inquiries jobs that may or may not have existed otherwise where you asked a question and a human had to get you an answer.
Ultimately someone has to design, develop, implement, and maintain new technologies so there are always jobs to do exactly that, then someone has to deal with what they produce.
If you're talking about a potential future where robots do everything then there wont be a need for jobs anyway, because they'll provide all our food and needs automatically for us but given that's a decent way off I'm guessing that's not what you're referring to.
"If you combine that with the fact that you refuse to accept mild weather as contradictory evidence, now you're moving into a faith-based, rather than scientific, realm."
This is completely false, it shows nothing more than a lack of understanding of scientific method on your behalf. It would only be true if the models that predict an increase in extreme weather also predict abolition of all mild weather. Given that this is false then what you say is incorrect - the models that predict increases in extreme weather do no predict that all mild weather will vanish so there's nothing faith based about it, it's merely a case of highlighting that the model has some reasonable degree of accuracy - more extreme events, mild weather still sometimes exists.
If there are 365 days in a year, and historically we see extreme weather for 65 of them, and mild weather for 300 of them, and a model predicts an increase to 100 days of extreme weather and so only 265 of mild weather and that happens then the scientists have reasonable grounds to suggest their prediction likely has some validity. They're not predicting 365 days of extreme weather which is what is implied by your suggestion that any mild weather disproves the prediction of any predicted increase in extreme weather.
"You've set up a scenario where there is no possible evidence that can ever contradict your hypothesis."
This is also false, if the hypothesis is an increase in extreme weather events then it can be trivially disproven by there being normal or fewer extreme weather events.
Just because you think if they're predicting an increase of one thing it inherently means they're predicting the complete absence of another (rather than a simple relative decrease) doesn't make it so, it just means you're incapable of basic logical reasoning. That's a problem with you, not the science or scientists.
The irony is you're falling into the exact trap the TFA refers to, you're assuming that a single event is evidence of anything, scientists aren't claiming that, they're claiming it's part of a possible pattern.
"That said, those hackers went out to cause harm on a large scale, and they did."
Did they? or did they set out to deal with companies that were themselves causing harm through corruption and subversion of democracy because the authorities weren't dealing with the problem?
In this respect it's not unreasonable they were actually preventing these companies causing further harm. Even the attacks against Sony - it's not as if Sony isn't a leading RIAA figure that's been responsible for bribing for laws against the will of democratic opinion that destroy freedom and undo long established rights such as the right to be innocent until proven guilty.
In this respect is was more like vigilantism in the face of inaction by the authorities. Still wrong, but not exactly as clear cut as pure destruction without justification, which is what causing death by drink driving ultimately is.
Yes, the only real barrier, and what in essence is being complained about, is that people now have to reskill if their job does become automatable and automated.
This is the real problem, all too many people still have a jobs for life attitude, a belief that the world owes them a job doing what they want to do rather than asking the question of themselves "What can and am I willing to do that everyone else wants so that they'll pay me?".
It's not a new thing, the whole drama with Thatcher and the miners in the 70s/80s was about miners wanting to continue getting paid a certain amount that meant British coal was drastically more expensive than coal from elsewhere where people were willing to do it for less because unions weren't artificially inflating the prices.
Jobs for life worked in a most industries pre-globalisation and where the pace of technological change was slow enough that a lifetime could pass without an industry undergoing massive changes, but now? There's barely an industry that technology doesn't touch and make drastic changes to in a single person's working life and so as distasteful as it may be to some, it's a simple reality that if you're not going to be flexible with what you know and can do, you're going to become obsolete.
Sadly we then have to sit and listen to those people whinging about how unfair the world is and how we owe them jobs and benefits even though the rest of us have made the effort to stay relevant in a changing world and they just couldn't be bothered or felt they had a right to defy the reality of it all.
I don't know about MI6 because it's kept under tighter wraps, but MI5 agents aren't that different to undercover police in the way they work and so forth.
MI6 is external security, so their agents shouldn't really be operating in the UK anyway as they'd then be stepping into MI5's domain.
So this will apply to agents more than any other as they're the ones in the field doing the undercover work that will have any kind of need for speeding, and those agents most definitely are employees of MI5. You can go to the MI5 website and have a look at the job posts themselves, or at least, you could a few years back, I'm assuming they're still there. Even the salaries were public, a rather pathetic £23k or so a year last time I looked.
You realise it's also the case that nowhere near every job is filled too right? some are open indefinitely unable to get candidates, even some unskilled jobs? If it were the case that everyone wanted to work then every open position would be immediately filled but that is not the case.
"Where is the evidence these people do not want to work ?"
Where is the evidence they do? A long time ago when I'd finished my A-Levels I was a neets, I didn't want to work because it was quite nice being sat at home getting money in. When I grew up I learnt how bad a thing that was but try explaining to an 18 year old who lives at home and has never had an income why he shouldn't sit and enjoy it rather than work for an income.
"You are arguing a 45 minute commute is unusual. In actual fact itâ(TM)s common if you live in London."
You're making things up now. I've never argued this. But regardless, other studies including those directly from the ONS suggest that the vast majority of people in the UK have less than a 30 minute commute:
My commute has wavered between about 55 minutes and 1hr and 5 minutes everywhere I've worked for the last 6 years, I do not find this exceptional nor do I find it a reason not to work.
"You have a scheme that picks children up from their homes, takes them to childcare and returns them at the end of the day ? From anywhere ?"
It depends on the local council as to the details but yes there are many schemes involving the use of everything from private taxis to scheduled buses. Parents have a legal obligation to send their children to school but as part of that local councils are obliged to ensure parents can get them to school by providing help.
"A quick Google says the base tax credit is 500 quid. I know the cost of living there is a lot lower than Australia, but I still doubt that would be enough turn a profit on the annual costs of child rearing."
Er, I think you kind of missed the important part. The £500 is just for having children, you then get upto £2690 extra per child, double that again if the kid is disabled and another £1000 on top if severely disabled. This is on top of the standard child benefit which is around £1000 per year for your first child and around £700 for every other child after that. If you work and are on less than or equal to the national average salary you can get the full benefit, diminishing as you earn towards £50k a year (i.e. roughly double the national average salary). If you're working at least 16 hours a week you also get working tax credits on top.
So no, it's not just £500. Again you're demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge, you're way out of your depth in this discussion.
Welfare spending in the UK spiralled out of control because it could, because whilst the last government was turning a blind eye to the questionable practices in the financial sector they were also bloating welfare and benefits spending higher and higher off of the profits from doing that. When it all came crashing down we were suddenly left with all these welfare and benefits payments that were unsustainable in the face of a crippled financial sector.
Fraud is a problem because when we were all getting so fat and rich off the taxes pouring in from our financial sector it also didn't matter that people were taking the piss, because we could afford to ignore it. It became too easy for people to opt not to work if they couldn't be bothered. As I said to the other guy there's a reason why disability claimants rose by 30% in that period despite there being no statistical explanation for such a drastic increase in severe disabilities to go with it, and again, the reassessment that was done recently that weeded out 27% of claimants as not having a need for it is evidence of the fact that the vast bulk of it was fraudulent. As clampdowns on benefits
"Pot is a bogeyman for politicians to campaign against, and isn't a moneymaker for Big Pharma, nor can it be patented, so it's in their best interest if as much anti-pot research is produced."
I've seen this said on Slashdot a couple of times but I've never had it explained. What is special about pot over say, bottle water, that you still couldn't build a brand around it? Why are certain strains of cannabis plant not patentable in the way every other plant is? What is preventing big pharma from producing their own patented strain and marketing it with their own brand?
Sorry but "big pharma hates it because it's not profitable" seems to be a conspiracy theory and nothing more. Big pharma seeks to gain massive profits from engaging in producing their own branded version of the stuff using a perfectly patentable strain of the plant (it's well established in law that you can patent strains of plants).
I'm not arguing with the rest of your point but I've yet to see this big pharma conspiracy theory padded out and explained and it's contradictory with both what the law actually says, and how business actually works. You could use the same argument to suggest Coca Cola wants water banned because you can't patent and make money off of selling water - they do, bottled water is big businesses and complements their fizzy drinks business well.
If they're just lumping them into the same category as police etc. then they wont be able to speed just because they want to get home faster. They still have to be able to provide justification.
IIRC even ambulance drivers aren't actually even supposed to speed unnecessarily and possibly even without police permission so it may well be the same for the security services (which will also avoid the embarrassment of a cop pulling a spy over). This is why you often see ambulances only going 70mph even with their blue lights and siren flashing away.
I agree I'm concerned about the scope for abuse, but a lot of cops and ambulance drivers have been prosecuted for abusing the privilege, I don't see why spies would be any different and I'm not sure they'd even want the attention.
Few people genuinely obey the speed limit but 100mph is pushing it, I rarely ever see people go that speed on UK motorways and for good reason - you'll receive an instant ban from driving for doing so.
Motorway speed limit is 70mph, speed cameras (fixed and in police vehicles) normally have a leeway of 10% + 2mph, so 79mph on a 70mph road before you get caught. If it's your first time getting caught you can in most places go on a speed awareness course and avoid points on your license if you were only speeding within an additional 5mph on top. Speedometers almost always overestimate by a few mph at that speed, so when people are going 80mph on their speedometers the chances are they're under the actual limit that speed cameras are calibrated to catch them at. Some will push it up to 85mph if they've never been caught before and risk a mere course if they did get caught on the off-chance (but frankly from what I've seen even at 85mph as long as the conditions are good and the road is clear the cops wont pull you anyway). A few people push it up to 90mph and chance it, and at that speed the cops will pull you, but 100mph is uncommon, you'll see it maybe what, once per hundred miles on a motorway if that? Most people just aren't willing to risk the chance of an instant ban from driving to go that fast.
In all honesty I don't think it'll make the slightest bit of difference.
Really, the number of agents in the UK, and the number who are in a situation where they need to use their power to speed is so vanishingly small they'll be completely lost amongst the general public who speed.
They're not common enough that the majority of the population will ever even see an MI5 or MI6 agent, let alone see one speeding.
Right, so if I quit my job now there's no other jobs available for me? Don't be so stupid.
"Yet apparently you think tens, hundreds of thousands of people would rather âoehold outâ and choose to be unemployed, living on the pittance offered by welfare ?"
Yep, that's exactly the problem, over a million of them are NEETS for starters, youths not in employment, education, or training. They can get away with it because they live at home and £90 a week is still plenty enough to pay for the latest XBox games.
"Anecdotally, I know many people living in London. None of them have less than a 45 minute commute door-to-door, each way."
What's the relevance of your anecdote exactly? It doesn't change the fact that 3 hours gets you from one end of England to the capital. I live in rural England where transport is far worse than that in London but an hours commute still gets me comfortably to the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the UK despite the fact I live in the arse end of nowhere. Of course if you live on one side of London and commute to the other and dawdle about walking slowly or happen to work or live far from a tube station then you're going to be able to get your commute up to 45 minutes but that still means they can get anywhere in the capital from their doorstep within 45 minutes which for a city with a population of over 7 million (think about the size of that) is not unreasonable.
"For a parent who has to drop off and pickup a child at care or school on the way to and from work, a commute could easily stretch to a couple of hours in each direction."
Except that's unnecessary because guess what? we also have publicly funded schemes to deal with those problems for parents. They also get the bulk of childcare paid for, and child tax credits which leaves them with a net profit for having a child. Soon they'll even have free school meals so they don't even need to fund the bulk of their kids food.
"No, that would have been the bank bailouts."
You're just showing you have no idea about the breakdown of UK finances, the amount of benefits available and so forth. Bank bailouts don't even get included in general spending figures as they're classed as one off costs. Some of those banks have been sold back to private investors and much of the money recouped now anyway.
"The kind of welfare benefits youâ(TM)re railing against are a small part of the UKâ(TM)s national expenditure (as they are in every other country). You could eliminate all of it tomorrow and public expenditure would be largely unaffected."
Incorrect. See above. You've no idea what you're talking about:
The sorts of benefits that are frustrating to hear about but that make a fraction of the budget include winter fuel payments for old folks even if they're millionaires, free bus passes for over 65s, again, even if they're millionaires, and that sort of thing. The things we're talking about are not included in that. The sorts of things we're talking about cost a phenomenal amount.
I think you just need to admit you're bitching about problems in your country and trying to project them everywhere. That's fine, you can do that, but it makes you wrong. I'm sure you may well be right about where you are, but you're completely wrong about the UK and the more you talk the more clueless you demonstrate that you are about the situation here.
If ever there was a poster child for "Marijuana does no harm" then you're not it, you claim to smoke loads and then you come here spouting nonsense conspiracy theories whilst being unable follow the conversation, you're an example of someone whose mind is clearly completely messed up so how can you then say "Hey look at me, weed causes no problems!" when you're clearly mentally deficient?
It wasn't me that needed to provide a citation, I'm not the original guy you demanded a citation from, I'm someone who saw you demanding a citation from someone whilst making spurious claims that you haven't provided citations for. I merely asked you to adhere to the same standards you're asking someone else to adhere to, something you still have not done, and given that you're not willing to adhere to the standards of conversation you're demanding of someone else then how can anyone think your point has any validity? You're a hypocrite.
I did however provide a link giving some examples of harm that you seem to have glossed over, so even when I have adhered to the standards you're demanding of someone else but have failed to adhered to yourself you still seem to ignore their existence.
So I mean what is that? are you brain damaged from smoking weed? were you that full of shit to start with even before you ever tried it? Either way you're making no sense, either way you can't back up your claims, either way you're pretending to want facual debate by demanding citations whilst ignoring those that are given and refusing to give any of your own.
This tells us one thing, you're most certainly wrong, you just don't want to admit it. If you weren't wrong you'd provide some objective unbiased sources, you'd respond to citations provided to you. The fact you can't do that tells us everything we need to know.
So keep getting high all the time, I mean, look on the bright side, even if there are side effects you can't exactly get any more paranoid and stupid than you already are can you? It's already too late for you so you might as well keep on at it.
"I believe your unemployment rate is higher than 0% (or the effective 0% to allow for brief periods between jobs). That pretty much means there's more job seekers than jobs by definition."
Right, but it doesn't mean there aren't jobs. You can be a job seeker willingly - opting to hold out for the job you want, rather than any job you can get, this is a conscious choice to be unemployed and it's one I'd make if I were in that situation too because I have enough savings to get by so that if I did become unemployed I'd be able to do that, but it doesn't change the fact that many people are unrealistic about what they can hold out for or, how much they have in savings to be able to hold out for something they're never going to get and simply can't afford to be choosy. If my cash reserves ran out I'd stop being choosy and take one of the many other options available.
So yes there are people unemployed, some reasonably so just waiting a little longer to get what they both want and know they can get, others not so reasonably so holding out for something they couldn't get even if they were employed, or simply not wanting to work at all.
"Note also that official unemployment figures almost certainly vastly underestimate real unemployment, since the definition of "employed" (usually something like a few hours of paid work in week) and "unemployed" (must be actively searching for work) have been comically gamed to try and make the under- and unemployment problem look much less worse than it actually is."
That's an American thing. It doesn't apply globally. Here we have two figures, the claimant count which is those taking unemployment benefits and so excludes housewives and working age teens and early 20s still in education and the actual unemployment levels which you quoted. For what it's worth it has changed quite drastically, unemployment has been falling non-stop in the UK, far faster than estimates expected.
"If the only job available to you requires a three-hour commute in each direction and you have a young child that goes to school, then that job is not a feasible option. That's not a "choice", that's reality."
But we're talking about the UK, there is no 3 hour commute. A 3 hour commute would get you from the North of England right down to London by train. We're not a large country, apart from an absolutely tiny handful (we're talking a few thousand at best) amount of people who live in the likes of the Scottish highlands an hours commute will get you to multiple major cities. I sympathise in America or Australia which are much more sparsely populated countries this may be true, but it's not true in almost the entirety of the UK.
"I'm glad you agree that it might have gone up quicker than wages in recent times doesn't matter because it all balances out over the long run, even though I sincerely doubt it hasn't balanced out at all over the last 30 years (it would certainly be unusual if it had, because it certainly hasn't in the other countries of the Anglosphere)."
If you really want to talk about benefits over the last 30 years and ignore the changes in systems that have taken place then they have drastically increased in the UK. This is a large part the reason we ended up with one of the highest levels of public debt in the world when the financial crisis hit. I was trying to keep things in your favour by referring to only the current unemployment benefits which have kept pace with average earnings increases, but if you really want to compare against what they replaced then they replaced much lower benefits meaning that factoring those in leads to a clear increase in the last 30 years which means your clinging on to this arbitrary 30 years number does you know favours, it destroys your argument completely. Sticking to current benefits at least allows you to argue that they've stayed roughly static in line with average wage increases. Or, to put it into context, they've stayed pretty much in line with a part time minimum wage job which isn't bad for doing nothing and that'
"Fraud - as defined in those numbers - is not 'We assessed this person, and had enough proof to criminally convict them'. It is 'on the balance of probabilities' the person intentionally mislead on their application, and we have stopped their benefit, and they have failed to prove we are wrong'."
You're making stuff up now, the very link you provided conflicts with what you say:
Fraud: This includes all cases where the following three conditions apply:
- the basic conditions for receipt of benefit, or the rate of benefit in payment, are not being met;
- the customer can reasonably be expe cted to be aware of the effect on entitlement; and
- benefit stops or reduces as a result of the review.
Those are the conditions required for it to be criminal, they have to be able to determine that it was an intentional act to mislead for financial gain which is the very definition of criminal fraud. You're still ignoring the fact that this doesn't cater to those claims that were fraudulent but that were never even detected, let alone investigated. We already know full well that existing methods of detecting and dealing with fraud were insufficient, hence why you're cherry picking numbers from 2010/2011 when Labour era government ineffective methods were still in place. That's why it's very different now, why the real numbers are now coming to light in reassessment.
"The 30% figure is due to: People getting better (people did not stay on IB forever and some will improve around their assessment for ESA). Significant changes in the criteria."
This is a different excuse to what you used previously but still makes no sense. You're saying that between 2005 and 2011 30% more people mysteriously were incapacitated for work purposes then in just a year or so, half a million people magically all healed up with no other people becoming incapacitated at the same time across the whole country? You realise how absurd that argument is? It makes literally zero statistical sense. We don't get magical mass-healings and cures against incapacity across the rest of the population like that. The only thing you're right about is the criteria, yes it has changed to close loopholes so that people who are actually fit to work do not receive these benefits, which is kind of the point and precisely what was going wrong with the old system - you could claim to be unfit for work and not be required to submit reasonable medical evidence of the fact to get these benefits.
Yes, these people are getting found out under the new criteria that require proof, that's exactly what I've been saying all along.
"There's NOT "always at least some job you can get". That's the problem."
Really? Can you give an example? Here in the UK there are always warehouse, fast food, or shop jobs, if you accept the free training then you have options ranging from IT support to plumbing. There's plenty of options - this isn't a country where you can only retrain if you stump up the money yourself, in places of high unemployment there are well funded learning centres offering a range of courses, but if you live more remotely then online options are available. You can even do a full on degree remotely using a special loan if you're willing to pay it back once your earnings are at about the national average, or never have to pay it back if they never reach that level meaning you get it for free. It's risk free, you're completely protected.
The only way there isn't a job in the UK is if you intentionally place artificial reasons in the way like "I can't be bothered to commute that far", "I don't want to do that job", and so forth, but all of these are choices, not impairments.
"And how does it look when you go back over the last 30 years ? My bet is inflation and wage increases have vastly outstripped the increase in the welfare payment."
It's pointless to go back 30 years because different benefits have come and gone in that time, or been drastically altered, but as I say in general they've been tied to inflation so have generally done worse than average earnings in boom times but much better in bust times. Overall it tends to balance out though and they do as well as average earnings increases for workers as a result.
I don't think the staff really do that sort of thing here as it's upto the individual to apply for what they think they need rather than social workers or whoever to go around finding out what people need.
You're right that the disability allowance is higher, but that's because it's intended for people who outright can't work, whilst job seekers allowance is intended as a short term measure for people who can work but simply can't find a job - you're not meant to live off of it indefinitely. It is however bolstered by free training, access to apprenticeships and so forth to ensure that there's always at least some job you can get meaning not getting a job long term isn't really an excuse, but a choice.
As an aside our welfare payment have risen with inflation, so for example in 2012 when everyone's wages were going down, unemployment benefits saw a 5.2% rise because inflation was high in the month they determine payments. The government is changing this now to try and make sure unemployment benefits more closely mirror average increases (or decreases) in wage rather than inflation.
Really, here it was mostly just dishonesty because our Labour government simply made such benefits too attractive an alternative to work and too easy to get which is why a roughly similar number lost these benefits when the current government did a complete re-assessment of everyone receiving that benefit. They simply shouldn't have had them in the first place, and didn't deserve them simply because job seekers allowance has become a less reasonable option for simply choosing to be long term unemployed.
The British rifle you're thinking of is the SA80, otherwise designated as the L85 with a long barrelled LSW version the L86.
Unfortunately the SA80 isn't ambidextrous either and it had a lot of earlier problems jamming in sandy environments (as discovered in the first gulf war).
Nowadays it's a pretty nice weapon, but it's only got about another 10 years of service left in it currently anyway.
That's only because job creation is one of the best arguments arms manufacturers have when placing bids with government etc. so sticking whatever bottom of the rung jobs you can in the bid country whilst keeping the highly paid jobs of design and testing back home and also returning the profits back home is not uncommon practice.
Even if you're doing the physical manufacturing work, you're still not retaining the design and engineering talent, and you're still not getting the lion's share of the financial benefits which are both what really matter for a developed economy because if nothing else, the manufacturing could be shipped off to India or China on a whim as they can outcompete you on cost, but the engineering skills much less so.
Q: Which European ally of American shot down Obama's attempts to launch military action on Syria rather spectacularly in parliament?
A: Britain.
Yes we have politicians all too quick to please the US, no we're not universally a US lapdog.
I'd say that was our spine growing moment quite honestly. Do we have a lot of work to do and a long way to go? sure, but we're working on it.
It's a battle for sure, but don't mistake the resurgence of atlanticists and euro haters like Liam Fox and UKIP for resurgent pro-Americanism, it's not, on the contrary, it's the last desperate attempt of the baby boomer generation that is primarily in support of this sort of politics before they all finally die off. The challenge is to prevent them doing too much damage before they finally do, but these people, these parties like UKIP are only a couple of decades away from death because few of the younger generations support their insular, religious, homophobic and xenophobic ideas. These are the same people that read and fund the likes of the poisonous Daily Mail and so forth too - these vested interests are desperately working together to push their agenda before the generations that they're dependent on are gone.
The parliamentary vote on Syria is the first real symbol of the fact that that old guard pro-Americanism and anti-European attitude is dying out in our country. The proposed EU referendum is a high risk strategy because on one hand there's a danger the fascists will get what they want, but on another if they lose then they'll be finished for good - they simply wont have time to regroup and try it again before their time is up.
It'll take decades to detangle the likes of our complicity with the NSA and CIA in everything from global spying to extraordinary rendition but the will is certainly there. Maybe we wont win, maybe we will recede back into the same old mindset but Britain is trying hard to grow a spine and there's a decent bit of hope yet because the Murdoch-Daily Mail-Political old guard circle of hate filled selfishness is slowly dying out.
But you're relying on a very tight definition there which is that the is legally classifiable as fraud. For example, someone claiming to have a bad back that prevents them working but who is then caught on camera by investigators doing some sports proving they're lying about their back would be taken to court for fraud. There can be many many more however who simply never get caught and because fraud has therefore never been proven against them even if they are acting fraudulently it cannot be factored into the figures.
Effectively the numbers you quote are for actual captured fraud, rather than the real levels of underlying fraud. That's why reassessment has thrown up such a disparity and why the 30% increase in claimants cannot be otherwise explained by anything other than increased levels of actual underlying fraud.
Their definition of fraud is explained in the very link you posted and explains this precisely - that it's only defined as fraud if the benefit stops as a result of review upon suspicion of fraud, this means that any case where fraud was failed to be proven (even if it's actually happen) and cases where fraud simply wasn't even suspected even if happening aren't including.
Or in other words, the numbers you quote are the numbers of successful fraud cases actually dealt with, rather than the underlying levels of fraud itself.
To conflate the two as you have done would require that fraud detection and prevention was 100% perfect and flawless, something we know for a fact isn't true, and something the reassessment has demonstrated couldn't in fact be further from the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
"From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a .300 in an IPv4 address in The Net"
I don't know how it works in the rest of the world but in the UK there are a bunch of telephone numbers reserved for TV/Movie use so that real numbers don't get called when people see it on screen.
This is the same as with IP addresses, they don't want anyone harassing a real IP so they just make it up. Sure they could've used 127.0.0.1 instead but then geeks would've said "LOL SHE'S HACKING LOCALHOST" or whatever so they'd still get flak. It's not accident or a blip, use of IPs like that is wholly intentional and as the example of the reserved British phone numbers above demonstrates, it's an age old problem in using real addresses, phone numbers, or now IP addresses - if you do then the people owning those addresses will get harassed. You could use one you own thinking "Well, I don't use it now so it'll be fine" but what if in 20 years you forgot you had that in your film and use it? what if someone is watching old films and stumbles across it? You have to be sure you're happy with that IP not being used for anything forever.
I don't know if IANA already has any reserved IPs for this sort of purpose in the same way as reserved British phone numbers they could've used though? anyone know?
Sure, I agree that's a problem. I disagree that it's a problem where I live in the UK for example because there is so much free distance learning available and so many massive brand new learning centres built in the last decade or two in areas of high unemployment but I fully accept that sometimes and some places it's an issue.
This is what the likes of EdX hope to solve of course though, and the internet is doing a good job of eliminating that excuse.
Wow, who is the ignorant one? You're implying everyone in India is of a different race which is wrong. In defending the earlier comment you're implying that anyone from India has a different skin colour to someone from America. You're implying there's no such thing as say, a white-caucasian person with Indian nationality.
I don't think you meant to, but the person you're responding to is right and you're wrong, there's no evidence this has anything to do with race and that it is more about what they can get away with paying someone from a country with much lower average levels of wage - their race and skin colour have absolutely nothing to do with that.
Referring to him as Indian tells us nothing about his race, his colour, or his ethnicity, it merely tells us his nationality, so anything else you've projected onto the victim in question is merely evidence of your own pre-existing bias about what it means to be Indian.
It's still completely wrong, it's still completely unacceptable but don't try and play the racial defender whilst making grossly ignorant remarks that imply everyone from India is of a certain skin colour or whatever.
No one is disputing that what was said was unacceptable, but whoever made this about race is making something up that simply is not present in the story.
I thought that too, until through a combination of a fire sale, the will of my girlfriend to play Lego City Undercover, and an onset of Mario nostalgia convinced me to impulse buy one.
Don't regret it at all. It's not perfect, I only seem to get 6 hours or so out of the main controller which is rather annoying if you want a longer session without recharging, and it needs more games, but what it has is all really good. I loved Pikmin 3, it was one of my favourite games of last year. The controller is surprisingly comfy, far more so than say the PS3's Dualshock controllers for example, and the pro controllers for classic mario style action are almost exactly like the Xbox controllers so are really comfy too.
It's what I wish the Wii had been, something innovative and different to what people call the "hardcore" gaming systems, but without the need to flap around like an idiot, something I got bored of rather quick with both the Wii and Kinect because gaming is a thing I do when I want to just sit back and chill.
I was a skeptic when I saw it, in fact I was so frustrated by the Wii failing to be worthwhile coupled with Nintendo's arrogance that I kind of wanted it to fail. But I warmed up to it and I love it now. I wish it had more games, but the few games it does have are almost universally excellent.
It's that casual getaway that I crave every now and then as a mostly "hardcore" gamer, but to date simply have never had because the Wii was shit and the Xbox 360/PS3 just didn't have anything close to the quality of more casual games as Nintendo manages to churn out with Mario and Pikmin etc.
Oh, and it's nice being able to throw Mario or Pikmin or something on when my girlfriend decides to take over the TV to watch something shit.
That's not really how the world works though, the jobs just shift elsewhere. Online retailing did away with the need for many stores and many stores went bankrupt as a result causing a loss of retail jobs, but those jobs were replaced with courier delivery jobs, with picking and packing jobs, and with IT jobs to run those sites whilst whole new classes of sellers appeared producing and selling items online that they could never have made a business selling before because the cost of a retail unit and the cost of marketing to pull people there was prohibitive compared to the cost of setting up and online retail presence.
Similarly automation by robots in the car industry meant many jobs were lost producing cars, but as cars could be produced more quickly it also meant you needed more car salesmen, more people to ship them around, more workers in the oil industry to satisfy increasing fuel demands, more inspectors to check quality, more mechanics to fix them all, more scrap merchants to get rid of the old ones and reclaim the materials.
If you argue we can reach a point where jobs are being made obsolete so fast that no one can train for them then it's questionable whether there was a job there in the first place, it's like saying search engines killed off millions of online directory inquiries jobs that may or may not have existed otherwise where you asked a question and a human had to get you an answer.
Ultimately someone has to design, develop, implement, and maintain new technologies so there are always jobs to do exactly that, then someone has to deal with what they produce.
If you're talking about a potential future where robots do everything then there wont be a need for jobs anyway, because they'll provide all our food and needs automatically for us but given that's a decent way off I'm guessing that's not what you're referring to.
"If you combine that with the fact that you refuse to accept mild weather as contradictory evidence, now you're moving into a faith-based, rather than scientific, realm."
This is completely false, it shows nothing more than a lack of understanding of scientific method on your behalf. It would only be true if the models that predict an increase in extreme weather also predict abolition of all mild weather. Given that this is false then what you say is incorrect - the models that predict increases in extreme weather do no predict that all mild weather will vanish so there's nothing faith based about it, it's merely a case of highlighting that the model has some reasonable degree of accuracy - more extreme events, mild weather still sometimes exists.
If there are 365 days in a year, and historically we see extreme weather for 65 of them, and mild weather for 300 of them, and a model predicts an increase to 100 days of extreme weather and so only 265 of mild weather and that happens then the scientists have reasonable grounds to suggest their prediction likely has some validity. They're not predicting 365 days of extreme weather which is what is implied by your suggestion that any mild weather disproves the prediction of any predicted increase in extreme weather.
"You've set up a scenario where there is no possible evidence that can ever contradict your hypothesis."
This is also false, if the hypothesis is an increase in extreme weather events then it can be trivially disproven by there being normal or fewer extreme weather events.
Just because you think if they're predicting an increase of one thing it inherently means they're predicting the complete absence of another (rather than a simple relative decrease) doesn't make it so, it just means you're incapable of basic logical reasoning. That's a problem with you, not the science or scientists.
The irony is you're falling into the exact trap the TFA refers to, you're assuming that a single event is evidence of anything, scientists aren't claiming that, they're claiming it's part of a possible pattern.
"That said, those hackers went out to cause harm on a large scale, and they did."
Did they? or did they set out to deal with companies that were themselves causing harm through corruption and subversion of democracy because the authorities weren't dealing with the problem?
In this respect it's not unreasonable they were actually preventing these companies causing further harm. Even the attacks against Sony - it's not as if Sony isn't a leading RIAA figure that's been responsible for bribing for laws against the will of democratic opinion that destroy freedom and undo long established rights such as the right to be innocent until proven guilty.
In this respect is was more like vigilantism in the face of inaction by the authorities. Still wrong, but not exactly as clear cut as pure destruction without justification, which is what causing death by drink driving ultimately is.
Yes, the only real barrier, and what in essence is being complained about, is that people now have to reskill if their job does become automatable and automated.
This is the real problem, all too many people still have a jobs for life attitude, a belief that the world owes them a job doing what they want to do rather than asking the question of themselves "What can and am I willing to do that everyone else wants so that they'll pay me?".
It's not a new thing, the whole drama with Thatcher and the miners in the 70s/80s was about miners wanting to continue getting paid a certain amount that meant British coal was drastically more expensive than coal from elsewhere where people were willing to do it for less because unions weren't artificially inflating the prices.
Jobs for life worked in a most industries pre-globalisation and where the pace of technological change was slow enough that a lifetime could pass without an industry undergoing massive changes, but now? There's barely an industry that technology doesn't touch and make drastic changes to in a single person's working life and so as distasteful as it may be to some, it's a simple reality that if you're not going to be flexible with what you know and can do, you're going to become obsolete.
Sadly we then have to sit and listen to those people whinging about how unfair the world is and how we owe them jobs and benefits even though the rest of us have made the effort to stay relevant in a changing world and they just couldn't be bothered or felt they had a right to defy the reality of it all.
I don't know about MI6 because it's kept under tighter wraps, but MI5 agents aren't that different to undercover police in the way they work and so forth.
MI6 is external security, so their agents shouldn't really be operating in the UK anyway as they'd then be stepping into MI5's domain.
So this will apply to agents more than any other as they're the ones in the field doing the undercover work that will have any kind of need for speeding, and those agents most definitely are employees of MI5. You can go to the MI5 website and have a look at the job posts themselves, or at least, you could a few years back, I'm assuming they're still there. Even the salaries were public, a rather pathetic £23k or so a year last time I looked.
You realise it's also the case that nowhere near every job is filled too right? some are open indefinitely unable to get candidates, even some unskilled jobs? If it were the case that everyone wanted to work then every open position would be immediately filled but that is not the case.
"Where is the evidence these people do not want to work ?"
Where is the evidence they do? A long time ago when I'd finished my A-Levels I was a neets, I didn't want to work because it was quite nice being sat at home getting money in. When I grew up I learnt how bad a thing that was but try explaining to an 18 year old who lives at home and has never had an income why he shouldn't sit and enjoy it rather than work for an income.
"You are arguing a 45 minute commute is unusual. In actual fact itâ(TM)s common if you live in London."
You're making things up now. I've never argued this. But regardless, other studies including those directly from the ONS suggest that the vast majority of people in the UK have less than a 30 minute commute:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13627199
My commute has wavered between about 55 minutes and 1hr and 5 minutes everywhere I've worked for the last 6 years, I do not find this exceptional nor do I find it a reason not to work.
"You have a scheme that picks children up from their homes, takes them to childcare and returns them at the end of the day ? From anywhere ?"
It depends on the local council as to the details but yes there are many schemes involving the use of everything from private taxis to scheduled buses. Parents have a legal obligation to send their children to school but as part of that local councils are obliged to ensure parents can get them to school by providing help.
"A quick Google says the base tax credit is 500 quid. I know the cost of living there is a lot lower than Australia, but I still doubt that would be enough turn a profit on the annual costs of child rearing."
Er, I think you kind of missed the important part. The £500 is just for having children, you then get upto £2690 extra per child, double that again if the kid is disabled and another £1000 on top if severely disabled. This is on top of the standard child benefit which is around £1000 per year for your first child and around £700 for every other child after that. If you work and are on less than or equal to the national average salary you can get the full benefit, diminishing as you earn towards £50k a year (i.e. roughly double the national average salary). If you're working at least 16 hours a week you also get working tax credits on top.
So no, it's not just £500. Again you're demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge, you're way out of your depth in this discussion.
Welfare spending in the UK spiralled out of control because it could, because whilst the last government was turning a blind eye to the questionable practices in the financial sector they were also bloating welfare and benefits spending higher and higher off of the profits from doing that. When it all came crashing down we were suddenly left with all these welfare and benefits payments that were unsustainable in the face of a crippled financial sector.
Fraud is a problem because when we were all getting so fat and rich off the taxes pouring in from our financial sector it also didn't matter that people were taking the piss, because we could afford to ignore it. It became too easy for people to opt not to work if they couldn't be bothered. As I said to the other guy there's a reason why disability claimants rose by 30% in that period despite there being no statistical explanation for such a drastic increase in severe disabilities to go with it, and again, the reassessment that was done recently that weeded out 27% of claimants as not having a need for it is evidence of the fact that the vast bulk of it was fraudulent. As clampdowns on benefits
"Pot is a bogeyman for politicians to campaign against, and isn't a moneymaker for Big Pharma, nor can it be patented, so it's in their best interest if as much anti-pot research is produced."
I've seen this said on Slashdot a couple of times but I've never had it explained. What is special about pot over say, bottle water, that you still couldn't build a brand around it? Why are certain strains of cannabis plant not patentable in the way every other plant is? What is preventing big pharma from producing their own patented strain and marketing it with their own brand?
Sorry but "big pharma hates it because it's not profitable" seems to be a conspiracy theory and nothing more. Big pharma seeks to gain massive profits from engaging in producing their own branded version of the stuff using a perfectly patentable strain of the plant (it's well established in law that you can patent strains of plants).
I'm not arguing with the rest of your point but I've yet to see this big pharma conspiracy theory padded out and explained and it's contradictory with both what the law actually says, and how business actually works. You could use the same argument to suggest Coca Cola wants water banned because you can't patent and make money off of selling water - they do, bottled water is big businesses and complements their fizzy drinks business well.
I wish America understood this when it's ICE domain seizures took down the domains of legitimate overseas gambling businesses.
If they're just lumping them into the same category as police etc. then they wont be able to speed just because they want to get home faster. They still have to be able to provide justification.
IIRC even ambulance drivers aren't actually even supposed to speed unnecessarily and possibly even without police permission so it may well be the same for the security services (which will also avoid the embarrassment of a cop pulling a spy over). This is why you often see ambulances only going 70mph even with their blue lights and siren flashing away.
I agree I'm concerned about the scope for abuse, but a lot of cops and ambulance drivers have been prosecuted for abusing the privilege, I don't see why spies would be any different and I'm not sure they'd even want the attention.
Few people genuinely obey the speed limit but 100mph is pushing it, I rarely ever see people go that speed on UK motorways and for good reason - you'll receive an instant ban from driving for doing so.
Motorway speed limit is 70mph, speed cameras (fixed and in police vehicles) normally have a leeway of 10% + 2mph, so 79mph on a 70mph road before you get caught. If it's your first time getting caught you can in most places go on a speed awareness course and avoid points on your license if you were only speeding within an additional 5mph on top. Speedometers almost always overestimate by a few mph at that speed, so when people are going 80mph on their speedometers the chances are they're under the actual limit that speed cameras are calibrated to catch them at. Some will push it up to 85mph if they've never been caught before and risk a mere course if they did get caught on the off-chance (but frankly from what I've seen even at 85mph as long as the conditions are good and the road is clear the cops wont pull you anyway). A few people push it up to 90mph and chance it, and at that speed the cops will pull you, but 100mph is uncommon, you'll see it maybe what, once per hundred miles on a motorway if that? Most people just aren't willing to risk the chance of an instant ban from driving to go that fast.
In all honesty I don't think it'll make the slightest bit of difference.
Really, the number of agents in the UK, and the number who are in a situation where they need to use their power to speed is so vanishingly small they'll be completely lost amongst the general public who speed.
They're not common enough that the majority of the population will ever even see an MI5 or MI6 agent, let alone see one speeding.
"Yes, actually, it does."
Right, so if I quit my job now there's no other jobs available for me? Don't be so stupid.
"Yet apparently you think tens, hundreds of thousands of people would rather âoehold outâ and choose to be unemployed, living on the pittance offered by welfare ?"
Yep, that's exactly the problem, over a million of them are NEETS for starters, youths not in employment, education, or training. They can get away with it because they live at home and £90 a week is still plenty enough to pay for the latest XBox games.
"Anecdotally, I know many people living in London. None of them have less than a 45 minute commute door-to-door, each way."
What's the relevance of your anecdote exactly? It doesn't change the fact that 3 hours gets you from one end of England to the capital. I live in rural England where transport is far worse than that in London but an hours commute still gets me comfortably to the 3rd and 4th largest cities in the UK despite the fact I live in the arse end of nowhere. Of course if you live on one side of London and commute to the other and dawdle about walking slowly or happen to work or live far from a tube station then you're going to be able to get your commute up to 45 minutes but that still means they can get anywhere in the capital from their doorstep within 45 minutes which for a city with a population of over 7 million (think about the size of that) is not unreasonable.
"For a parent who has to drop off and pickup a child at care or school on the way to and from work, a commute could easily stretch to a couple of hours in each direction."
Except that's unnecessary because guess what? we also have publicly funded schemes to deal with those problems for parents. They also get the bulk of childcare paid for, and child tax credits which leaves them with a net profit for having a child. Soon they'll even have free school meals so they don't even need to fund the bulk of their kids food.
"No, that would have been the bank bailouts."
You're just showing you have no idea about the breakdown of UK finances, the amount of benefits available and so forth. Bank bailouts don't even get included in general spending figures as they're classed as one off costs. Some of those banks have been sold back to private investors and much of the money recouped now anyway.
"The kind of welfare benefits youâ(TM)re railing against are a small part of the UKâ(TM)s national expenditure (as they are in every other country). You could eliminate all of it tomorrow and public expenditure would be largely unaffected."
Incorrect. See above. You've no idea what you're talking about:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/08/uk-benefit-welfare-spending#zoomed-picture
The sorts of benefits that are frustrating to hear about but that make a fraction of the budget include winter fuel payments for old folks even if they're millionaires, free bus passes for over 65s, again, even if they're millionaires, and that sort of thing. The things we're talking about are not included in that. The sorts of things we're talking about cost a phenomenal amount.
I think you just need to admit you're bitching about problems in your country and trying to project them everywhere. That's fine, you can do that, but it makes you wrong. I'm sure you may well be right about where you are, but you're completely wrong about the UK and the more you talk the more clueless you demonstrate that you are about the situation here.
If ever there was a poster child for "Marijuana does no harm" then you're not it, you claim to smoke loads and then you come here spouting nonsense conspiracy theories whilst being unable follow the conversation, you're an example of someone whose mind is clearly completely messed up so how can you then say "Hey look at me, weed causes no problems!" when you're clearly mentally deficient?
It wasn't me that needed to provide a citation, I'm not the original guy you demanded a citation from, I'm someone who saw you demanding a citation from someone whilst making spurious claims that you haven't provided citations for. I merely asked you to adhere to the same standards you're asking someone else to adhere to, something you still have not done, and given that you're not willing to adhere to the standards of conversation you're demanding of someone else then how can anyone think your point has any validity? You're a hypocrite.
I did however provide a link giving some examples of harm that you seem to have glossed over, so even when I have adhered to the standards you're demanding of someone else but have failed to adhered to yourself you still seem to ignore their existence.
So I mean what is that? are you brain damaged from smoking weed? were you that full of shit to start with even before you ever tried it? Either way you're making no sense, either way you can't back up your claims, either way you're pretending to want facual debate by demanding citations whilst ignoring those that are given and refusing to give any of your own.
This tells us one thing, you're most certainly wrong, you just don't want to admit it. If you weren't wrong you'd provide some objective unbiased sources, you'd respond to citations provided to you. The fact you can't do that tells us everything we need to know.
So keep getting high all the time, I mean, look on the bright side, even if there are side effects you can't exactly get any more paranoid and stupid than you already are can you? It's already too late for you so you might as well keep on at it.
"I believe your unemployment rate is higher than 0% (or the effective 0% to allow for brief periods between jobs). That pretty much means there's more job seekers than jobs by definition."
Right, but it doesn't mean there aren't jobs. You can be a job seeker willingly - opting to hold out for the job you want, rather than any job you can get, this is a conscious choice to be unemployed and it's one I'd make if I were in that situation too because I have enough savings to get by so that if I did become unemployed I'd be able to do that, but it doesn't change the fact that many people are unrealistic about what they can hold out for or, how much they have in savings to be able to hold out for something they're never going to get and simply can't afford to be choosy. If my cash reserves ran out I'd stop being choosy and take one of the many other options available.
So yes there are people unemployed, some reasonably so just waiting a little longer to get what they both want and know they can get, others not so reasonably so holding out for something they couldn't get even if they were employed, or simply not wanting to work at all.
"Note also that official unemployment figures almost certainly vastly underestimate real unemployment, since the definition of "employed" (usually something like a few hours of paid work in week) and "unemployed" (must be actively searching for work) have been comically gamed to try and make the under- and unemployment problem look much less worse than it actually is."
That's an American thing. It doesn't apply globally. Here we have two figures, the claimant count which is those taking unemployment benefits and so excludes housewives and working age teens and early 20s still in education and the actual unemployment levels which you quoted. For what it's worth it has changed quite drastically, unemployment has been falling non-stop in the UK, far faster than estimates expected.
"If the only job available to you requires a three-hour commute in each direction and you have a young child that goes to school, then that job is not a feasible option. That's not a "choice", that's reality."
But we're talking about the UK, there is no 3 hour commute. A 3 hour commute would get you from the North of England right down to London by train. We're not a large country, apart from an absolutely tiny handful (we're talking a few thousand at best) amount of people who live in the likes of the Scottish highlands an hours commute will get you to multiple major cities. I sympathise in America or Australia which are much more sparsely populated countries this may be true, but it's not true in almost the entirety of the UK.
"I'm glad you agree that it might have gone up quicker than wages in recent times doesn't matter because it all balances out over the long run, even though I sincerely doubt it hasn't balanced out at all over the last 30 years (it would certainly be unusual if it had, because it certainly hasn't in the other countries of the Anglosphere)."
If you really want to talk about benefits over the last 30 years and ignore the changes in systems that have taken place then they have drastically increased in the UK. This is a large part the reason we ended up with one of the highest levels of public debt in the world when the financial crisis hit. I was trying to keep things in your favour by referring to only the current unemployment benefits which have kept pace with average earnings increases, but if you really want to compare against what they replaced then they replaced much lower benefits meaning that factoring those in leads to a clear increase in the last 30 years which means your clinging on to this arbitrary 30 years number does you know favours, it destroys your argument completely. Sticking to current benefits at least allows you to argue that they've stayed roughly static in line with average wage increases. Or, to put it into context, they've stayed pretty much in line with a part time minimum wage job which isn't bad for doing nothing and that'
"Fraud - as defined in those numbers - is not 'We assessed this person, and had enough proof to criminally convict them'.
It is 'on the balance of probabilities' the person intentionally mislead on their application, and we have stopped their benefit, and they have failed to prove we are wrong'."
You're making stuff up now, the very link you provided conflicts with what you say:
Fraud:
This includes all cases where the following three conditions apply:
- the basic conditions for receipt of
benefit, or the rate of benefit in
payment, are not being met;
- the customer can reasonably be expe
cted to be aware of the effect
on entitlement; and
- benefit stops or reduces as
a result of the review.
Those are the conditions required for it to be criminal, they have to be able to determine that it was an intentional act to mislead for financial gain which is the very definition of criminal fraud. You're still ignoring the fact that this doesn't cater to those claims that were fraudulent but that were never even detected, let alone investigated. We already know full well that existing methods of detecting and dealing with fraud were insufficient, hence why you're cherry picking numbers from 2010/2011 when Labour era government ineffective methods were still in place. That's why it's very different now, why the real numbers are now coming to light in reassessment.
"The 30% figure is due to:
People getting better (people did not stay on IB forever and some will improve around their assessment for ESA).
Significant changes in the criteria."
This is a different excuse to what you used previously but still makes no sense. You're saying that between 2005 and 2011 30% more people mysteriously were incapacitated for work purposes then in just a year or so, half a million people magically all healed up with no other people becoming incapacitated at the same time across the whole country? You realise how absurd that argument is? It makes literally zero statistical sense. We don't get magical mass-healings and cures against incapacity across the rest of the population like that. The only thing you're right about is the criteria, yes it has changed to close loopholes so that people who are actually fit to work do not receive these benefits, which is kind of the point and precisely what was going wrong with the old system - you could claim to be unfit for work and not be required to submit reasonable medical evidence of the fact to get these benefits.
Yes, these people are getting found out under the new criteria that require proof, that's exactly what I've been saying all along.
"There's NOT "always at least some job you can get". That's the problem."
Really? Can you give an example? Here in the UK there are always warehouse, fast food, or shop jobs, if you accept the free training then you have options ranging from IT support to plumbing. There's plenty of options - this isn't a country where you can only retrain if you stump up the money yourself, in places of high unemployment there are well funded learning centres offering a range of courses, but if you live more remotely then online options are available. You can even do a full on degree remotely using a special loan if you're willing to pay it back once your earnings are at about the national average, or never have to pay it back if they never reach that level meaning you get it for free. It's risk free, you're completely protected.
The only way there isn't a job in the UK is if you intentionally place artificial reasons in the way like "I can't be bothered to commute that far", "I don't want to do that job", and so forth, but all of these are choices, not impairments.
"And how does it look when you go back over the last 30 years ? My bet is inflation and wage increases have vastly outstripped the increase in the welfare payment."
It's pointless to go back 30 years because different benefits have come and gone in that time, or been drastically altered, but as I say in general they've been tied to inflation so have generally done worse than average earnings in boom times but much better in bust times. Overall it tends to balance out though and they do as well as average earnings increases for workers as a result.
I don't think the staff really do that sort of thing here as it's upto the individual to apply for what they think they need rather than social workers or whoever to go around finding out what people need.
You're right that the disability allowance is higher, but that's because it's intended for people who outright can't work, whilst job seekers allowance is intended as a short term measure for people who can work but simply can't find a job - you're not meant to live off of it indefinitely. It is however bolstered by free training, access to apprenticeships and so forth to ensure that there's always at least some job you can get meaning not getting a job long term isn't really an excuse, but a choice.
As an aside our welfare payment have risen with inflation, so for example in 2012 when everyone's wages were going down, unemployment benefits saw a 5.2% rise because inflation was high in the month they determine payments. The government is changing this now to try and make sure unemployment benefits more closely mirror average increases (or decreases) in wage rather than inflation.
Really, here it was mostly just dishonesty because our Labour government simply made such benefits too attractive an alternative to work and too easy to get which is why a roughly similar number lost these benefits when the current government did a complete re-assessment of everyone receiving that benefit. They simply shouldn't have had them in the first place, and didn't deserve them simply because job seekers allowance has become a less reasonable option for simply choosing to be long term unemployed.
The British rifle you're thinking of is the SA80, otherwise designated as the L85 with a long barrelled LSW version the L86.
Unfortunately the SA80 isn't ambidextrous either and it had a lot of earlier problems jamming in sandy environments (as discovered in the first gulf war).
Nowadays it's a pretty nice weapon, but it's only got about another 10 years of service left in it currently anyway.
That's only because job creation is one of the best arguments arms manufacturers have when placing bids with government etc. so sticking whatever bottom of the rung jobs you can in the bid country whilst keeping the highly paid jobs of design and testing back home and also returning the profits back home is not uncommon practice.
Even if you're doing the physical manufacturing work, you're still not retaining the design and engineering talent, and you're still not getting the lion's share of the financial benefits which are both what really matter for a developed economy because if nothing else, the manufacturing could be shipped off to India or China on a whim as they can outcompete you on cost, but the engineering skills much less so.
Q: Which European ally of American shot down Obama's attempts to launch military action on Syria rather spectacularly in parliament?
A: Britain.
Yes we have politicians all too quick to please the US, no we're not universally a US lapdog.
I'd say that was our spine growing moment quite honestly. Do we have a lot of work to do and a long way to go? sure, but we're working on it.
It's a battle for sure, but don't mistake the resurgence of atlanticists and euro haters like Liam Fox and UKIP for resurgent pro-Americanism, it's not, on the contrary, it's the last desperate attempt of the baby boomer generation that is primarily in support of this sort of politics before they all finally die off. The challenge is to prevent them doing too much damage before they finally do, but these people, these parties like UKIP are only a couple of decades away from death because few of the younger generations support their insular, religious, homophobic and xenophobic ideas. These are the same people that read and fund the likes of the poisonous Daily Mail and so forth too - these vested interests are desperately working together to push their agenda before the generations that they're dependent on are gone.
The parliamentary vote on Syria is the first real symbol of the fact that that old guard pro-Americanism and anti-European attitude is dying out in our country. The proposed EU referendum is a high risk strategy because on one hand there's a danger the fascists will get what they want, but on another if they lose then they'll be finished for good - they simply wont have time to regroup and try it again before their time is up.
It'll take decades to detangle the likes of our complicity with the NSA and CIA in everything from global spying to extraordinary rendition but the will is certainly there. Maybe we wont win, maybe we will recede back into the same old mindset but Britain is trying hard to grow a spine and there's a decent bit of hope yet because the Murdoch-Daily Mail-Political old guard circle of hate filled selfishness is slowly dying out.
But you're relying on a very tight definition there which is that the is legally classifiable as fraud. For example, someone claiming to have a bad back that prevents them working but who is then caught on camera by investigators doing some sports proving they're lying about their back would be taken to court for fraud. There can be many many more however who simply never get caught and because fraud has therefore never been proven against them even if they are acting fraudulently it cannot be factored into the figures.
Effectively the numbers you quote are for actual captured fraud, rather than the real levels of underlying fraud. That's why reassessment has thrown up such a disparity and why the 30% increase in claimants cannot be otherwise explained by anything other than increased levels of actual underlying fraud.
Their definition of fraud is explained in the very link you posted and explains this precisely - that it's only defined as fraud if the benefit stops as a result of review upon suspicion of fraud, this means that any case where fraud was failed to be proven (even if it's actually happen) and cases where fraud simply wasn't even suspected even if happening aren't including.
Or in other words, the numbers you quote are the numbers of successful fraud cases actually dealt with, rather than the underlying levels of fraud itself.
To conflate the two as you have done would require that fraud detection and prevention was 100% perfect and flawless, something we know for a fact isn't true, and something the reassessment has demonstrated couldn't in fact be further from the truth.