Comments by "Rob Fraser" (@krashd) on "Business Insider" channel.

@jaxjax2011 No one said a single word about subsidising, YOU are the one who brought up subsidising. The dude said "investing", and yes a country can invest in something, it's how most countries that don't have the privilege of being able to print money continuously (ie. everyone but the US) bring in much needed extra revenue. In the 80's the UK privatised every industry and France and Germany bought them all, now those two country's governments make a fortune each year from British citizens. Britain on the other hand owns most of Europe's pension plans and we make a fortune from the interest.
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Said practically no one who has ever used both.
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@racingtheweb Every 14 days, a fortnight is 14 days, bin collections used to be weekly on the same day each week, but now that we have 6 or 7 different bins (depending on where you stay) the collections are now 14 days apart. So every second Thursday is the main black bin which is usually empty, every second Tuesday is the blue bin with paper in it, the purple bin with plastic and metal in it is every second Friday but they often don't turn up. The brown bin with the garden waste is not mandatory, you call the local authority when the bin is full of grass cuttings and dead plants and they will pick it up. I think this is because so few people use the brown bin so no need to have a regular pick up. We used to have green bins for glass but they took them away and just started placing large green dumpster-sized bins at the end of every street. So now you have to carry your glass to the end of the street and drop them in. It's noisy and everyone on the street gets to see how much of an alcoholic you are. Then we also have tiny little food-waste bins that look like picnic hampers - not many people use them because food waste can just be fed to your pets or fed to your vegetables in the garden :) "Food waste is good waste" as my dad, the gardener, used to say.
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@racingtheweb Trash collection is included in our main tax which is known as "council tax", in the UK the word council has several different meanings and one of those meanings is "local government". So your council tax is your local government tax and it covers almost everything. So council tax pays for trash collection, street lighting, street cleaning, the police, fire service, water usage, it generally covers most things and it is about £1200 per year (1400 euros). My bill is always £98.80 each month so that's pretty much 1200 annually. It seems quite steep to some people but after you pay your council tax you are only left to pay for electricity/gas and food. Your Italian trash bill would be more than a third of our whole council tax 0_o
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@agent_605 Gotta love daft questions, eh, Alasdair? :D
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"This can right here would probably have contained maybe a can's worth of beans."
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7:51 Holy moly, when the WTC was built it was literally on the edge of the river. That's crazy.
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@ba_salt Confirmed by the people who shot it down. Just as every cop "confirms" that the perp had a gun until the investigation learns that it was a comb or a cellphone or...
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In the UK we have recycling bins for everything now, plastic, metal, glass, paper, food waste, garden waste, in fact the only thing that goes into my main bin is the contents of my vacuum cleaner. It angers and saddens me when I put out the main bin every fortnight and I see some of my neighbour's bins are overflowing while mine is only about a quarter full, it makes me wonder what crap they are throwing in there that can't be recycled.
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Oh, and rent, I forget about rent because I own my house but if someone did not own their house they would obviously have to pay rent/mortgage.
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Homeless people don't want homes, the UK has arguably the best welfare system on the planet where anybody can request housing and assistance and get it, those that want to rejoin society use these systems, those that don't want to work, don't want to pay rent and don't want to integrate in any way end up back on the street, so why give them a roof for free? Now I'm about as liberal, socialist and pro-UBI as it gets but even I think that you need to be willing to contribute at least a little and not just expect a warm bed and a roof without any attempt at integration. Most homeless folk have chosen that lifestyle, those that are willing to receive help tend to do so and aren't homeless for long.
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There was a request to turn it into a nightclub but it failed on countless grounds, the biggest being that the track is still in use and that high-speed trains and drunk people don't mix.
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American don't spend money on defence, they spend money on projection aka gunboat diplomacy or "my carrier says you are going to agree to my question". It bugs me when people refer to America's fleets as defence, a country with few or no carriers but a massive standing army is a country that spends on defence. Russia and China spend their military budget on defence for example.
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