dsr-burnley

Not in the UK, at least not for tax purposes. You can't crystallise a tax loss unless you sell the property.

Nobody chooses to make losses to offset taxes. It would be like paying £100 for a money saving tip worth £50. What landlords often do is to aim for break even on the rents while keeping the house as their store of capital, in the case of non buy-to-let landlords, or of making a capital profit in the case of buy-to-let landlords. Obviously the government is trying to drive individual buy-to-let landlords out of the market (while making their tenants homeless at the same time) by mortgage relief restrictions, which will leave the market open for corporate landlords. Not sure that will help, frankly. Especially as even the corporate landlords are hit by the swingeing heat efficiency regulations that are designed (or might as well be) to take the cheaper properties off the market as well. The idea being, I suppose, that landlords should not be allowed to make profits out of the poor, and that poor people who can't buy a house should be in council houses (or on the streets, of course).

I think half the people in football are former Watford managers, aren't they?

Same shoulder as he dislocated 5 years ago at Burnley. He was out for half the season that time, and then didn't get past Heaton into the first team for the rest of the season.

Perhaps the referees and linesmen should be encouraged to scream and shout at the players when the players miss open goals.

Agreed, plenty of reasons why child mortality has reduced. I suspect that a lot of the reason why 1940's and earlier babies and children died young, was because of the lack of vaccinations and antibiotics and the far few calories that they used to eat, rather than lack of heat. Bedroom heating was still relatively rare into the seventies and child mortality was well down by then. No doubt inside toilets and hot and cold running water were factors in the improvement as well.

Shows how times change. My brother was born prematurely in December 1960 (before central heating for most people) and not only was the bedroom cold enough for frost pictures on the window, but also my parents were told to put him outside for an hour or so each day to strengthen him. 14 degrees at night? I'm surprised he or she can sleep at all. Very warm.

I don't think there is an "imperial theft" argument. There's no doubt that Elgin paid for the marbles, about £40,000 I believe (equivalent to £3.4m today). There is a question about whether the seller had the right to sell. The Parthenon was in good shape until the Ottoman government of Greece used it as a gunpowder store and it blew up. Of course, we also need to address the question of imperial slavery. The Parthenon was built by a major slave trading empire, which surely takes some of the moral high ground away from them.

I don't disagree, but the fall in value of one of the current EVs would be sharper IMO than the fall in value of a petrol car. And I think it will have to happen one way or another because the current EVs are not versatile enough to replace petrol cars for the foreseeable future. The DAB radio thing at present is a bit similar IMO. DAB radios were supposed to have replaced FM radios by now, but their limitations stopped them doing so. And now DAB is out of date and becoming obselete, to be replaced with DAB+, while FM is still going. I reckon cars will go the same way - the current generation of electric cars will be obselete, superseded by a new generation, while petrol cars are still in use.

I don't have an option for electric vehicles because I have nowhere to charge it and I'm not playing the "park it half an hour from home and collect it three hours later" game. But if I did have that option, the thing that would really put me off is not just the frightening price, but also the very real chance that a better version of electric vehicle - eg. solid state battery, 600 mile range and 10 minute charge, which I have seen mooted more than once - might come along and make my vehicle obselete and therefore worth very much less.

Almost? It was a dive, pure and simple. I know there is a school of thought that if you can touch the defender on the way down then it isn't a dive, but even so if someone flings himself to the floor voluntarily, it can't truthfully be said that the defender has tripped him. What I want to know is who tells the refs that they must only look at slow motion replays and never the full speed replay. Only a complete fool would think that you can learn nothing from watching it at normal speed - but refs, when called to the screen, never do. Someone is teaching them that they need to pretend to be (pretend? well, some of them must be quite bright) complete fools when reffing a game. Sack the PGMOL, the whole organisation. For the rest of this season and the next, let the referees do their reffing without VAR looking over one shouldser and the PGMOL looking over the other. It can't be less controversial, and it would make the game better.

I suspect not. I certainly don't think it would be a good idea to sack Kompany because we have built a squad designed for tippy-tappy and, however bad they are now, any attempt to play a different way would be worse. We've taken the lead in 6 out of 13 games so far, which isn't bad. we've lost the lead in all 6 (though we scored again for our solitary win). We have two problems - can't score, can't stop the others from scoring. Hmm. But if we could get a midfield enforcer and a goalscorer in January, we've still got a chance. And if we don't, Kompany is clearly the man for the Championship, and he's not going to be poached by a PL club in the near future.

The report doesn't ask the fundamental question about whether equality is a good thing per se. On average we are far richer now than we were in the seventies, and this includes the poorest as well as the richest. Part of this, of course, was that tax rates were so high that those rich people who could afford it, left the country. Few people (James Herriot) being an exception) were willing to pay 90%+ tax if they had a choice.

I'm encourage to know that the NHS can be fixed - fully fixed, presumably - at an increase of only £67 billion over 15 years. That's a 2% increase in budget. I wonder if those plans are fully costed?

I think it's a surprise to look back on the seventies as the glory days of equality and wealth. Just because we all had power cuts equally does not mean we were richer. As for child poverty doubling, that's only true if you have a weird definition of poverty (which the government does). Child relative poverty may have doubled, but children nowadays have far more than children then.

It's also good for PR. It seems that while Israel is still getting criticism (even from David Cameron) for unspecified potential breaches of international law, Hamas is getting credit for graciously allowing a few civilian human shields to return home. Instead of the "9 year old child returns home after 50 days" story, I think the slant perhaps ought to be "this organisation is so evil that they hold 9 year olds hostage".

0.3% of 672,000 is about 2,000 people. The actual number is estimated at about 27,000 this year so far, 45,000 last year.

You calling me a fascist defender? I didn't realise you were so vile. I put few people on ignore, but you're the first on here.

Coming from where I do, it's easy to get sick of posts of the type "I'm glad I'm not prejudiced like people in Burnley". Have you no sense of irony?

True, though of course we have to bear in mind that this is worldwide profit and the UK's share would be a much smaller number. Can HSBC and Santander be truly described as British anyway? Shareholders do get taxed on dividends, if they are based in the UK.

The report quoted above does end by saying there are no reported deaths.

Do they estimate how much of this is because of covid and the Ukraine war? They use pre-covid as the high point that they are measuring from.

I don't disagree. (Though in many cases death, eventually, comes as a blessing. But that's a bit of a technicality because part of the process of dying is the often-long slide to get there. The worst case scenario is when the pathway to death starts, or at least becomes so bad as to make death better than life.) The point about government is that they have to try and decide on the best case scenario for 67 million people, not just one. They have to decide what is best, taking gains and losses into account, what is the best for people in general. It is inevitable that as a result of their decisions, some people will die who would not have died if they had made a different decision.

It wasn't possible to do both, or even to do either. Old people were going to die no matter what we did, but there were things that we could do to reduce deaths. Younger people were going to suffer no matter what, but there were things we could do to mitigate that as well. The issue was how best to compromise to give each party (so to speak) the best outcome without unduly damaging the other. Old people, ironically, were the ones who suffered most from lockdown - especially the survivors among care homes. The effect on a person with dementia who was not allowed to see loved ones (except - perhaps - through a closed window) was bound to be awful. Even for the non-dementia old, the effect of being banned from seeing friends and relatives had a definite debilitating effect. All things the enquiry needs to consider, and politicians at the time should have been considering. The language they used in asking the questions may have been inappropriate (it was supposedly in private discussion, but they probably should have had an eye to future disclosure), but the questions needed to be asked.

But the moral compass needs to take account of the number of deaths caused by lockdown as well as the number of deaths saved. And even if the lockdown saves more than it costs, you need to take into account the quality of the lives saved. If you could save the lives of three old people with dementia at the cost of two young people with cancer, would you? Should you? One thing that medical care indisputably does, in cases of expensive or scarce resources eg, transplants, is to prioritise the lives of the young ahead of those of the old. Should it? Should it have done in this case? Big questions for the enquiry to answer. I hope they're going to try. As for the report by Cummings about what Sunak may have said, take that with a very large pinch of salt. Cummings is not a reliable witness, and even if we allow that he is telling the truth, in informal discussion he may have been hyperbolic for effect rather than strictly accurate. The questions about whether we let covid sufferers die in greater numbers because of the all-round impact on everyone, is one that had to be asked and thoroughly discussed. The object of "we won't let anyone die" was unattainable; they were (or should have been) pursuing the best possible result, not the impossible perfect result.