dsr-burnley

Unlikey, I would have thought. I would have thought that about half the people ever to inhabit the earth didn't live long enough to get killed by mosquitos. Link?

The Brewers just had a great time in the windy city.

I don't get that. If you pay £50k to have a depreciating asset that is worth £30k in 4 years' time, is that really so much worse than paying £20k to lease it and having no car at all in 4 years' time? My own preference is to buy second hand, with the result that my total capital outlay has been £22k for 40 years driving. But I wouldn't say anyone was an idiot for buying or leasing a £50k car; I would just say they have different priorities on how to spend their money.

I don't understand your first paragraph. (Obviously I understand the chatGPT bit, but all that proves is that you have a very high opinion of yourself and you know diddly squat about me.) Why do you think that the sale of residential properties does not bring about a taxable gain for overseas companies? How do you structure assets to be "ATED compliant" - isn't that like trying to structure assets so that they are Council Tax compliant? The tax is payable on properties over £500k owned by foreign landlords. You overestimate the difficulties of being a landlord. It may or may not be beyond you, but there are hundreds of thousands of non-specialists who manage to get by.

If you're saying that you can avoid CGT by forming an offshore company and therefore paying Corporation Tax on the gains, that's a bit bogus really. But apart from that, we both know that all residential property, even when owned by non-UK residents, is subject to UK CGT rules and has been since 2015. I accept that it's possible to dodge IHT by setting up a blind family trust in a friendly tax haven, but it's complex and expensive and not within the remit of the standard small landlord who are the government's target. I thought a "happy clapper" was a football fan who supports his team through thick and thin and doesn't get upset when they lose? What relevance has it to landlords, please?

Is that what you think because you have known landlords and understand how they work, or is that what you think because of prejudice? An individual can't avoid inheritance tax by incorporating, and if they already have the property there will be a CGT cost on incorporation that might scupper the whole idea. Those extra taxes don't "just push the case to incorporate", they give large advantages to big overseas companies.

Tax breaks. Individual landlords pay a 2% surcharge on profits, the their mortgage interest expenses are only partly allowable, and they have to pay inheritance tax. Overseas corporates don't have any of those impositions.

It's nice to know that you are so much a better person than the rest of the landlords. Surely if landlords with a conscience are desired, then the government should be encouraging individual landlords and not, as they are actually doing, encouraging overseas corporations to take over the market?

If you're a scourge on society, then perhaps you need to throw your tenants onto the street now, not wait until a convenient moment?

Parker has a system that works well when we have better players than the opposition, but fails miserably when the opposition has better players than us. Basically it involves passing the ball round at the back until the opponents leave a gap for us to score. If they don't leave a gap, we don't score. Even in the Championship season, we had 11 0-0s in the first 32 games, until Edwards signed and provided the extra bit of class that could unlock a packed defence. In the PL, opponents are better and so they score first. We have just gone 13 home games without a win, and taken the lead twice in those 13 games - one of them was an own goal. The plan is to play for 0-0 until we go behind, and then (perhaps) try and equalise. When his plan doesn't work, he persists anyway. His only tactical change, whether in game or from the start of a game, is to play 4-5-1 instead of 5-4-1, and he does it with different defenders every game. He has spent all season telling the players they aren't good enough, and they believe him. Would you like him to get you promotion? Yours for a smartie and an opal fruit.

Going back to the wood burning survey, there is no reason to disbelieve it but there is every reason to look closely at the figures. They were taken over an 11 year period. In the first place, this survey refers strictly to people who live inside a house with wood burner(s). It does not apply to neighbours. Secondly, the headline 43% increase in risk can be looked at in the source numbers. Of 25,083 women who lived in houses where no wood was burnt, 163 had lung cancer (0.650%) but in houses where wood was burnt more than 30 days a year, it was 98 out of 10,257 (0.955%). So the chances were increased by one chance in 300. (86 out of 14,458 used wood between 1-29 days per year, 0.595%.) Of the 347 women who developed lung cancer over the 18 years, 58 were smokers and 274 non-smokers. (The other 15 presumably don't fit either category.) Non-smokers who lived in wood burning homes, though the numbers aren't spelt out, have an estimated chance of getting lung cancer compared with non-smokers in non-wood burning homes between the ranges of no more likely at all to three times as likely. The survey doesn't say (not that I can find) how many of the participants were smokers.

At risk of derailing the thread completely, the reason we can have nice things is because capitalists make them. (I suppose ecomonics is a science?) The poorest people somehow seem to live in countries that haven't embraced capitalism.

Yes, I've seen that one before. I got it, once it was explained to me! (The crucial thing is that the question has to be framed exactly right. It is vital that the fact that Monty knows which door has the car, is included.) My background is statistics, and I think I agree with our head of department who explained how complex numbers work. His theory is that as complex numbers revolve around the square root of minus 1, and since there is no square root of minus one, that ends that subject. I agree. My nephew has a first class Cambridge degree in mathematics. What a brain. Typical boffin, he wears odd socks because it's easier than pairing them.

Thanks. My mind doesn't do counterintuitive very well, I don't think. Science that can be observed, I can follow (mostly!) but not theories built on theories that can never be seen. Fortunately the size of the universe is something that interests me but doesn't matter to me, so it can be as big as it wants!

If the universe is 14 billion years old, how can it be 150 billion light years across? And how could we possibly know if it was, bearing in mind that for us to see anything 75 billion light years away, the light would have had to start its journey before the universe existed? (Genuine question, not being snarky.)