We had thunder and lightening yesterday, as i have already noted. After that we had hours of rain. It rained heavily all night, or at least for the parts I was awake, and it is still raining now, at midday. If you are a plant that needs rain, or a depleted pond, or a duck, this must be great weather. If you live near a river it is, I assume, less good.
It’s an example of how we all live our lives in selfish compartments. I’m lucky enough to live in a fairly hilly country, so we aren’t going to disappear as global sea levels rise, though we may change shape. If I were living in the Maldives, which would probably be a great experience most of the time, I wouldn’t consider myself quite so lucky as my country gradually submerged.
Healthy Salmon. Well, healthy for me. The salmon is looking like it’s beyond the reach of medical aid.
I have varying degrees of sympathy for flood victims. Some, like the people of the Maldives, are blameless victims (or at least as blameless as anyone cn be in these days of consumption and consumerism). People who come on the UK news, complaining that the government should “do something” to stop their house flooding, I have less sympathy for. If you buy a house by a river, this is going to happen. I don’t wish bad things to happen to anyone, but you have to take care of certain things for yourself, and government can’t fix everything. In fact, as we have seen recently, governments can’t fix much. It’s the old bookshelf problem, as the new government squeezes a new policy onto the crowded shelf, something else falls off the end.
It’s like taxing the rich. Good policy – far better than taxing the poor. But as we are already seeing, the rich are a moving target, and if you tax them they will move. And when they move, they take their taxes and their businesses with them and we end up losing out. labour, just like the Tories before them, have the right idea – impose tax on the middle classes. They can’t afford to move, they can’t afford expensive accountants, but they do have money. And, more importantly they can’t afford to give gifts to politicians. I mean, if you scare all the rich people away, who is going to keep Kier Starmer in suits and glasses?
A well known cure for depression and cynicism – you can’t feel bad with fish and chips.
Well, you’ve had Wordless Wednesday and Thankful Thursday, so welcome to cynical Sunday. I am now going away and will try to find a few non-cynical thoughts for a second post.
Nothing actually matters if they don’t fix the climate.
True. Sadly we don’t seem to be making progress on that.
Nicely reflective
🙂 Thank you Derrick.
There is always fish & chips, but they must be top notch. It is hard to find good fish & chips here.
Tootlepedal has a good idea.
The Fish and Chips from The Cod’s Scallops are always good. It takes a bit more effort to drive and get them, and they are not cheap, but they are good. We no longer have fish from our local shop as it is a bit hit and miss.
My favorite were the H. Salt Fish & Chip company when I was growing up. They went out of business in my area. Never found any quite like that. I looked them up, here is their story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Salt_Esq._Fish_%26_Chips
An interesting story. We had one attempt at a similar thing in UK – Harry Ramsdens.It has not, sad to say, prospered in recent times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Ramsden%27s
Another case where a business grows too large.
That is true. It works for some but never seems to work for fish and chips.
One good idea is to have a transaction tax on financial dealings. It would be a very tiny tax but as there are millions of these dealings every day, it would rise quite a good sum. If it put people off their financial dealings, that would be a good result too as most of them involve gambling with other people’s money with us taking the risk.
There will never be a perfect tax system, public services will never be run efficiently, and we will never be able to keep up with demand. we may as well just take it all to Monte Carlo and put it all on black. Or red. If we win, we will be quids in, if we lose, we can sell the country to the highest bidder.
I don’t agree about public services. We ran our school very efficiently, making full use of the resources that we were given and not wasting anything. We all worked very hard and did a reasonably good job. Some public services may waste money but so do a lot of private sector enterprises too. I take mild offence at the view that everyone who works in the public sector is an incompetent waster, though I certainly knew a few.
I guess that about sums it up. But if everywhere the rich were taxed, then there would be no places for them to run. A pipe dream, I know.
Like so many things, there is much to consider. To start with, their are different sorts of rich people – some who became rich through hard work, some who were merely left it. Some who already do goo, some who just live a lavish lifestyle and complain how hard their lives are . . .
Yes, it would be nice if the tax systems synchronised, but there is always a loophole somewhere. As Communism shows, even the simple fix of shooting them all and stealing their money doesn’t work. 🙂