the Austerity Con or Con

[Flosshilde]

sure?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

no i escaped .....

[Serial_Apologist]

sure?

Which reminds me of one time when I was travelling late at night on the Circle Line. The only other passenger in the carriage was a sleeping drunk. When the train pulled into Aldersgate, he woke, looked blearly across at me, and asked, "Ecchhh, ecchshcuse me, h-have we got to Southend?"

[vinteuil]

:

... is it a doughnut? is it the worm ouroboros* ?? - no, it's a π -chart...


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

[french frank]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eSTsUayDJE ... as we're in scholarly mode.



Ma fin est mon commencement
Et mon commencement ma fin
Est teneure vraiement

Ma fin est mon commencement.
Mes tiers chans trois fois seulement
Se retrograde et einsi fin.

Ma fin est mon commencement
Et mon commencement ma fin.

[Flosshilde]

... is it a doughnut? is it the worm ouroboros* ?? - no, it's a π -chart...


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

When I read "something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return," I mis-read the highlighted word


(sorry to drop the elevated tone by several degrees - oops, I forgot, we're all undergraduates here so we don't have degrees)

[eighthobstruction]

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKpexxzR4Ak

....I'm actually an ungraduate....

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Mr Smith

is coming

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

[Serial_Apologist]

Mr Smith

is coming

When I was a nipper, our piano tuner Mr Clap used to play Run Rabbit Run whenever he visited. Amazing man, Mr Clap: he was in his nineties, had lived in Earls Court all his life, and could remember when the district was still countryside, and Earls Court Road a country lane!

I recently acquired some old maps: he was right! Earls Court would have still been a village; the area wasn't built up until the 1870s. Amazing that, when you think about it.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

had a dotty old lady primary school [er junior probably] who told us the same about Notting Hill Gate ... a toll apparently, Portobello was a farm etc ...

this is shameless ... a chunk of the real agenda of the Tory gentry is in this article ... a new form of clearance is going on S_A ... neither of us can go home again .... too many Russian gangsters, and other Tory backers .... remember Westminster Council .... now they are all at it!

[Flosshilde]

The housing minister, Mark Prisk, insisted on Sunday night that councils should be careful about placing families in B&Bs far from their home borough. "There is absolutely no excuse for families to be sent miles away without proper regard for their circumstances, or to be placed in unsuitable bed and breakfast accommodation for long periods of time," he said.
But Prisk also defended the policy of removing families on benefit from central London. "Nor is it right that those living on benefits should be able to live in parts of the capital that those who aren't reliant on this support couldn't afford to,"

So what is he suggesting should happen? He's shrugging off any responsibility for finding a solution to a problem that his government is creating.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

... austerity kills

They argue that the real danger to public health is not recession per se, but austerity: “When social safety nets are slashed, economic shocks like losing a job or a home turn into a health crisis.” The authors note that Greece, the European guinea pig for austerity, has seen a 52 per cent rise in HIV infections, a doubling of suicides, rising homicides and a return of malaria, all as critical health care was cut. Iceland, which has a strong safety net, didn’t experience rising deaths in the Great Recession.

...

In the UK, Stuckler and Basu note that antidepressant use rose by 22 per cent between 2007 and 2009. Doctors gave out 3.1 million more antidepressant prescriptions in 2010 than they had two years earlier. Between 2007 and 2010, suicides rose by more than 1,000 above pre-existing trends, although the numbers started slowing in 2009 under the Darling boom, as employment rose. Scarily, the authors note that suicides are the tip of the iceberg. For each suicide there are an estimated 10 suicide attempts and between 100 and 1,000 new cases of depression.

Stuckler and Basu conclude as follows: “Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous standards as clinical trials they would have been discontinued long ago by a board of medical ethics. The side effects of the austerity treatment have been severe and often deadly. The benefits of the treatment have failed to materialise … austerity is a choice and we don’t have to choose it”.

[Simon]

So now we're onto housing - blaming "them" again. I read these posts and despair.

Some policies have short-term effects, that's true, though it remains to be seen what effect this cap will have.

But of course the real problem is threefold:

Firrstly, that there are too many people in the country, especially in big cities. That's almost entirely due to almost unrestricted immigration over the past 15 years.

Secondly, there has been a growth in second home ownership, which needs to be restricted so as to allow younger people the chance to buy at the lower end of the market and thereby get their feet on the first rung of the ladder.

Thirdly, the attitude that "the country owes me a house if I want one" is too prevalent. There is no logical justification for the expectation that local authorities should be obliged to house any and everybody who demands it. Those forced by circumstances to be homeless should always be housed, as also should those who are vulnerable or in danger. But the idea that every 16 year old who gets pregnant after a one night stand has the automatic right to a home away from her parents as an unmarried mother is both unfair and absurd.

As usual, it's silly and ill-thought-out policies of social engineering, allied to past stupidity on the part of politicians, that has caused the problem. Solving it is not going to be easy, and it's certainly beyond the naive answers offered upthread.

[MrGongGong]

[IMG][/IMG]

please no
i've not had my tea yet
and if ever there was a face for a pie

Is that his "smuggest of the smug" face ?