Comments by "Tony L" (@tlangdon12) on "Richard J Murphy" channel.

  1. @ Well, he will be so the speculators are happy.
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  2. I doubt the Conservatives will move back to the centre; not while populism seems to pay dividends at the ballot box. I think we have two options: apply pressure on Labour to implement better (more equitable/left-leaning) policies than they currently seem inclined towards, or start a new party with a proper social agenda and the economic rigour to deliver this within the UK economy. This party might well be on the left of Labour on some issues and to the right of Labour on others.
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  3.  @Buckets1000  That would cetainly help Denmark defend its citizens in Greenland from American aggression.
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  4. There is a risk that moving to a new model in the UK makes the UK more attractive to economic immigrants who don't want to work. We may need to prioritise giving work to immigrants so that they can earn the right to the Universal Income, if this is the route we go down.
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  5. We have a choice as to how we respond, as do the politicians. Richard is correct that Donald Trump will try to pick off countries individually and will not cope if a block of countries does not capitulate. If the UN and NATO do not act because of American influence, then they are not useful at this time.
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  6. A good education has potential. Even AI systems need someone to set the goal and what can be changed to achieve the goal. We will also be needing people who can understand what AI has learned, to make sure that the AI is applying sensible rules. It would be perfectly possible for an AI system to apparently determine the severity of someone's disability by counting the number of letters in their surname! This approach might, even with a large sample size, product 'perfect' results, but is this a lesson that we want AI to apply or do we want it to figure out an approach that is better? Someone has to watch over the AI to check that the goal is set correctly, and that the lessons it is learning are appropriate.
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  7. Agreed.
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  8. I see what you did there!
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  9. My view is that it is wrong, because we are taxed throughout our life. If we earn money, we pay tax (Income tax), if we spend money, we pay tax (VAT, Insurance Premium Tax, Passenger Air Duty, Fuel Duty, etc), if we save money, we are taxed on the interest (Income Tax), if we buy more than one house we pay tax (Stamp Duty Land Tax), if we invest prudently and are lucky enough to make a gain, we pay tax (Capital Gains Tax). At the end of our life, what we have managed to accumulate in spite of the tax system, should be ours to do with as we please. It is my view that the state should have no call on it.
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  10. It wasn't 17% all the time. My mortgage rate varied from 8% to 15% over a 17 year period.
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  11. The size of UK housing is dire, and this has the knock-on effect that internal insulation is impractical for perhaps 50% of the housing stock because it would reduce room sizes too much - e.g. you couldn’t get a bed into the bedrooms!
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  12. He probably hasn't heard of Australia, or if he has, he thinks it's just outback and kangaroos.
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  13. We will probably end up with a society where there are no employees. Society will stratify into two layers; the people that own the access to AI (those people who are allowed to tell the AI to learn something new) and those people who are only allowed to consume the AI proided to them.
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  14. I think Richard understands that pension assets are dynamic, but he is suggesting a far greater dynamism will be needed to ensure that pension funds remain invested in assets that are capable of producing a return in the future. He is also concerned about the assets that are being superseded - who will buy them if they clearly have a very limited life left - the price of them will reflect the limited life and the loser will be the pensioner whose pension fund has hung onto the asset for too long.
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  15. All the vested interests in the country have been aligned against the new Labour Government. The opinion polls have been influenced by all these vested interests talking down the government. We had to suffer the Tories for 14 years, I think we should give Labour a go for five years and see what they make of it - oh wait, that's what we did on 4th July 2024!
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  16. Exactly. But it is a sandcastle that has taken nearly 250 years to build! Business people can destroy value in an instant with bad decisions.
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  17. The Tories tried hard to do irreparable damage in 14 years, and didn't quite acheive that, although they got devastatingly close to it.
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  18. You only have to look at the dividends paid by solar and wind energy companies to see how profitable these companies are with the current model. This has to change.
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  19. This ability to be kind is important. There is a need to be kind to the real farmers in the UK, who work extremely hard, running businesses that are complex and financially challenged, but we don't need to be kind to the privileged and the entitled.
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  20. I'm sorry to hear you have been struggling to find work.
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  21. That was a very powerful statement, which I endorse wholeheartedly.
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  22. Family trusts can work to a degree but discretionary trusts have to pay IHT every 10 years, and the overheads of running a trust can be onerous.
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  23.  @MyKharli  No, they haven't! Money isn't cake. The old still have some of the money, but mostly it is in the hands on billionaires and the super rich.
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  24. It is insane. The current Labour government is not doing ordinary voters any favours by allowing electricity prices to remain so high when they don't need to be.
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  25. You know how bad things have got when a Conservative MP says we need a "Modern Workhouse" for the first time!
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  26. Credit Cards are one of the most complicated financial products that you can take out as a retail customer. They are as complicated as pensions. You people need to be warned about this.
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  27.  @CurtOntheRadio  Do you understand the order in which payments to your card are applied to outstanding balances, cash withdrawals, and zero percent interest purchases, and what the different interest rates you pay for purchases and cash withdrawals on your own credit cards? Do you know when Section 75 protection applies to credit card purchases, and when it doesn't? Do you know what the late payment fees are? Do you know why your credit limit is what it is, and why the lender might want to increase this? Credit Cards are way more complex than pensions, even after you add in the fact that pensions are taxed. It's easy to get your head around saving for retirement. It's not so easy to understand the byzantine rules associated with your credit card!
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  28.  @Misaki.Manifestation  They certainly should.
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  29. All it will take is for a flaw to be found in the blockchain algorithm.
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  30. You are so wrong. The UK isn't finished. The UK has a history of leading the changes. We have some incredible thinkers in the UK. We can solve this problem, but the government has to engage with the problem, rather than repeating what has been tried before.
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  31. The application process described in the video might be appropriate for employers who are hiring on a long-term basis, e.g. Officer Selection in the Army, Airforce or Navy, or for Management Training schemes at top employers where the successful candidates will have a great deal spent on their development, but it is completely inappropriate for the majority of jobs that young people without degrees will be applying for. This behaviour clearly isn't as a result of it being difficult to dismiss someone who is not able to do the work. I suspect it is due to a lack of trust within organisations. Hiring managers aren't trusted to get it right, so they make the candidates jump through hoops to secure even basic jobs.
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  32. Wes Streeting’s portfolio is large, but he should have arrived in office with his ideas on how to implement the Dilnot report so that what could be afforded could be implemented immediately already fully formed. Not to do so is wasting valuable time and leaving people and the care sector to suffer.
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  33.  @piccalillipit9211  Your father's prediction was just one of a small number of possibilities. One of them was almost bound to be correct.
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  34.  @alex_n8863  While your concerns are valid, I do think there is time to do things to arrest the decline of civil society, and to reduce the rate at which we are causing the climate to change. We are perilously close to creating climate conditions that no technical solutions or investment or behavoural change can reverse. We have to keep the pressure up to make changes to improve matters, on all fronts, but especially on climate change, so that there is some sort of future for our children. We cannot just give up.
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  35. The small family farms are all too small to pay IHT. The introduction of IHT will cause land prices to fall. A farm that was worth £5m today and would require IHT to be paid will be worth less than £3m in future so no IHT will be due. Richard addresses this apparent contradicition in an earlier video about this policy change.
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  36.  @AK-np4rp  Starmer has more about him than most, but I am with Richard in thinking that Starmer should not be trying to get along with Trump. My view is that the only safe response from the UK government is ignore the USA until there is no option to do otherwise, and then engage with them to the bare minimum.
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  37.  @downshift4503  Agreed. The motivation to create the goods and services that sustain life has to be maintained. If a Universal Income would destroy the motivation to create these goods and services, we can't have it.
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  38. So have you restarted your business?
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  39.  @sarahjaneross2918  I agree we have plenty of space - you only have to fly over the UK to see the vast areas of green space. Only 13% of UK land is occupied by housing, roads, industry and commercial buildings!
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  40. We didn't have much information about the consequences of our behaviours, but I'm fairly sure that even if we had had the Internet and someone like Richard Murphey telling us what would happen, we still would have done exactly what we did! All we can do now, is try to do the right thing to improve the situation for all the younger generations, not just our own children.
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  41. You only have to watch It's a Wonderful Life to see how the rich (Mr Potter in the film) act during bad times.
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  42. More taxes would pay for more Police.
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  43. Luckily, the Danish government passed a law in 2009 that allows Greenland to become an independent country, but the law does not allow it to decide to join another state (independence is the only option), so the Danish Parliament would need to make a new law for this. In the absence of such a law, Denmark would be bound by its own constitution to defend Greenland. Would the USA really go to war with Denmark (as Argentina did with the UK over the Falkland Islands)? I suspect they would, and I suspect that the EU would help in the same way it has helped Ukraine, even though Ukraine is not a member of any military alliance with Europe.
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  44. But it doesn't have to be. There are sustainable alternatives to most of the uses of oil, but there will probably always be a requirement to produce some oil. However, if people won't stop burning plastics at the end of their life, then governments might have to prevent the production of oil using more draconian means.
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  45. Accounting and auditiing aren't part of the popular conciouslness. Only a Professor of Accounting can help everyone understand that it really is important that central and local government have proper accounts that can be trusted when the data in them used!
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  46. Love the irony!
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  47. I agree that firing the new hires is going to lead to vast knowledge gaps in future.
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  48. Very interesting video Richard. Thanks for making it. I agree that organisations do not respect the people applying to join them. While free market capalists will argue that there is no commercial imperative to provide young people with opportunities, there is a very great societal risk if we don't!
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  49. Some change was necessary, but dismantling the whole government, in a matter of months, will lead to incredible problems. Surely an intelligent person would have done some research and thought about what needed to change? As Richard points out. Musk is breaking everything as quickly as he can. Mistakes will be made needlessley, and vast amounts of value destroyed. It's a social experiment without parallel. I'm not sure I want to be one of Musk's white mice.
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  50. I disagree. The potential for fraud isn't dictated by policy, but how the policy is implmented. It seems that neither the goverment nor the civil service has been paying attention to the prevelence of fraud, and don't know how to implement policies in a way that prevent fraud from the outset.
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