Yeah, it’s pretty good. Definitely has a pro-Labour bias (naturally!) but it’s independent from the party, so it publishes a fair bit that’s critical of the leadership, too.

I am not confused. The distinction you are making is irrelevant to me. Yet another thing I use every day has had AI shoehorned into it and I’m annoyed about that. Telling me that it’s only the host, not the software, does not suddenly make me okay with it.

It’s not ragebait. I use a wordpress.com site, and WordPress have added an ‘Improve with AI’ option to the new post sidebar as I see it; these are facts! I don’t see that I need to go around and verify that its been added to every variant of WordPress site before I say that it’s there. It is there.

‘Wow, your blog is so great! Have you thought about making it really fucking generic instead?’

I really would prefer it if you could get more than one post into a discussion before you start making baseless suppositions about what I think and why I think it.

Nothing but respect for my short king/mayor.

I do think the spending is ‘comparable’, which is not at all the same thing as ‘equal’.

The UK’s planning documents are all publicly available and show that you (and !samc@feddit.uk) are partly right: spending on infrastructure is not equal in cash terms; but would we want it to be?

If (hypothetically) you get a bigger return on investment when you invest in region A than region B, it’d be absurd to invest ‘equally’ in both, especially because those returns can be (and obviously are!) spent anywhere in the UK.The upshot of this is that investing in A might well lead to greater wealth for people in region B.

Plus, investment - spending - is only half the picture. What if the citizens of region A make a tax contribution that is greater than the relative share of investment they receive? I’m personally fine with that because I believe in redistribution, but it complicates the fairness argument. And then there are other considerations: it was expensive to build Crosssrail partly because the land is very expensive and (relatedly) Londoners need higher wages to make ends meet, so it (and all infrastructure) just did require relatively higher spending.

As the documents also show, vague waving at a supposedly deprived ‘the north’ is just grievance mongering. For example, Scotland and the North West are second and third to London in terms of overall investment, while the South East (clearly part of the London commuter belt!) is only just ahead of the North East in the bottom half of the table.

There are real disparities in all kinds of things in the UK, but making these kinds of baseless zero-sum arguments will get us nowhere.

This kind of vague zero-sum thinking is part of the problem.

Prince of Persia on the GameCube (I think? It was a long time ago!) had a mechanism very like this, where you manually rewound time after you died/failed. More Action/Adventure than an RPG, though.

I, for one, welcome our new cephalopod overlords.

Can you imagine explaining this to people in a few decades?

‘People were opposed to electric cars back in the old days.’

‘Oh, that’s weird. Were petrol cars cheaper?’

‘Nope’.

‘Were they… cleaner?’

‘No, no. They made the air poisonous, actually.’

‘Even for the people driving them?’

‘Especially for the people driving them!’

‘Oh, so petrol engines must’ve been more efficient.’

‘Ha ha, oh God, no.’

‘???’

What drives me up the wall is that Labour clearly see that there are no easy answers, but every time they have to choose, they either pick a delaying tactic OR the option most likely to annoy their own voters (or both!), with the result that they are neither fixing anything properly nor giving themselves any chance of being re-elected. I’m tearing my hair out watching them.

Every small town/village has loads of kids hanging out in supermarket carparks. It is, as you say, bleak.

That is really upsetting! Those old housing estates get a bad rap (sometimes justified), but it’s noticeable that they’re the only inner city neighbourhoods where kids still play outside regularly, precisely because they’re designed with pedestrians rather than cars in mind.

The usual nonsense from the SWP. If you’re a member of one party, you can’t be a member of a different party. That is, in fact, the normal rule and has nothing to do with socialism.

But they’re not! The IfS, for example, says:

The package was skewed towards raising more from those with high incomes.

Thanks for not downvoting me, but I don’t really mind! I always think that if people downvote rather than argue, that means they have nothing to say.

The point is that they’re redistributing wealth: taxing the rich to spend on the poor. Just because they’re not doing it in one of the two ways you’ve cited (they are taxing wealth, through a mansion tax) doesn’t mean they’re not doing it.

I’d also tax people more for having more cars. Like, the more cars you have registered to an address or an individual, the more tax you pay.

Petrol cars pay fuel duty, which is finally going to be unfrozen, so they do effectively get taxed more if they’re driven more. Agree Range Rovers should be taxed more, though!

Yes, exactly. If it turned out that, e.g., Ed Davey was a bit of a dick when he was 14, we’d all say: ‘Yeah, obviously. He was 14.’ But it’s your second and fifth points that make this especially salient: Farage’s childhood nasty racist comments fit perfectly with the adulthood nasty racist policies. He hasn’t changed, he just expresses it differently!