Very cool, if true

It genuinely baffles me seeing Alex Salmond petitioning to keep defence industry jobs in Scotland, whilst saying they are critical to the economy, when he and his party stand for independence - which will result in Scotland losing every single defence related job there is.

I mean, the Royal navy are not going to pay to construct ships in Glasgow. The RAF aren't going to keep air bases open in Scotland.

If we want to keep these things under an independant Scotland, we'd have to find the money for doing it ourselves...

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I've tried over the years to discern what the SNP's real, underlying defence policy is. As far as I can tell, it boils down to:

- Get rid of everything except the Royal Regiment of Scotland.
- Break up the RRS into its original Scottish regiments.
- Employ them on ceremonial duties as a tourist attraction.

I'm not being entirely facetious here. The most loudly-expressed defence-related issue coming from the SNP is the restoration of the Black Watch, the Argyll and Southerland Highlanders, and so on. But what they want to restore them for seems to be the admiration of tourists at Edinburgh Castle.

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zornhau.livejournal.com

Presumably, they could then adopt the Swiss model and sell their swords around the world.

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I think you assume the SNP has any real idea what it would do after independence. Many of their "policies" seem to be popularist rather than pragmatic. Hardly surprising - they know voting for independence is a primarily an emotive decision, rather than a rational one.

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khbrown.livejournal.com

Aren't the majority of votes for all parties or positions primarily emotional and only secondarily rational?

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I would hope not. Thinking about the policies of each party, weighing them up and then deciding which one to vote for is to me a rational process. But I suspect the reality is that I am in a minority and many people do simply vote based on emotional responses.

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It's one of the ways in which I feel the SNP are very dishonest about the true costs of independence.

Because, I mean, if we want to keep a defence industry, we would need to establish, from scratch, a Scottish defence ministry, all of the infrastructure to support a defence ministry. Procurement. Equipment. (Because you betcha the MOD would say well okay, you can have your regiments back, but all of their equipment and weapons belong to The Crown.)

Which actually, active servicemen have sworn oaths to the Queen, so arguably the servicemen and women in the armed forces in scotland would probably have to quit, and seek re-employment in the independant scottish army. (Which they probably wouldn't do.)

So. Yeah. Very bad news for the large portions of the scottish economy that rely on MOD expenditure.

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To be slightly fairer, the current MOD is the MOD for the whole of Britain. If Scotland separated from England/Wales/NI then some chunk of those assets would belong to it.

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The MOD doesn't maintain any staff or offices in Scotland though does it?

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Doesn't matter. It's a part of the UK government, which is jointly constructed of all of its constituent parts, including Scotland.

Just because its head offices are in London doesn't mean that everything it runs belongs to England.

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The problem is one of allocating centralised resources.

Let's say that a newly-independent Scotland gets (completely arbitrary figure) 20% of the former UK's armed forces. Now, you can easily earmark 20% of the personnel. Or indeed 20% of the tanks or aircraft. You can probably do 20% of the ships, but now it is gettig rather granular (e.g one destroyer and two frigates at this rate).

But how do you allocate 20% of the infantry training centre? 20% of the flying training school? 20% of the aircraft deep maintenance facility?

My whole time (17 years) in the RAF was spent against a backdrop of increasing rationalisation and centralisation, not just within the RAF but between the 3 services. An independent Scotland would have to generate much of its capacity to train, supply and maintain its armed forces from scratch, because it would be impractical to cut a chunk of such capability from England and haul it north of the border.

(And don't get me started on what happens with large-scale issues such as air defence command and control. At present, fully half the UK Air Defence Region is north of the England/Scotland border - a legacy of the main threat coming from the former USSR. Would Scotland want to remain tied into that radar and tracking network? Would it let England still have the data from the radar bases in the Scottish islands? If Scotland stayed in NATO then presumably this would be taken care of by participation in NATO ACCS. But the SNP wants to withdraw from NATO.)

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Yeah, this is kinda my point. All of this is going to be insanely complicated, if it ever comes to fruition. It's not as simple as drawing a line down the border and handing everyone new passports.

I'm hoping that the current polling (57% against, 28% for) will remain reasonably steady, and Scottish people will remain part of the UK. I'd quite like to see a referendum though, so that we can get it all over with.

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I have a bad feeling the SNP will time the referendum for right bang slap in the middle of the biggest social unrest over the upcoming service cuts, which will result in huge resentment towards the evil English tory government...

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They'll try for that. But there's still a backlash over the mess that RBS/BoS got into. If we'd been devolved when that happened then we'd be Iceland right now...

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Damn right. Hell, we'd probably be worse than Iceland, because don't the SNP want us to join the Euro? So we'd be on our knees begging the Germans to come take control of our economy and bail us out.

And I don't think the Germans are going to be keen to do that for anybody else once the extent of the hellhole they are in having gotten involved in the Greek situation become apparent to the electorate.

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Actually, some quite large parts. All of Army personnel management is run out of Glasgow, if I recall correctly.

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burkesworks.livejournal.com

Government launches scheme to offer borrowers with a poor credit history an alternative to loan sharks

With an APR of 29.9%, that's not far off the kind of rates offered by such bottom-feeders as the Provident or those awful Bright House shops. At times like this, it's important that said borrowers should have the opportunity to learn more about the much fairer deals offered by local credit unions rather than sign up for Government-sanctioned usury.

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Apparenttly that's not-for-profit. Which I can believe, considering the overheads on short-term loans to people on the poverty line.

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So, do you believe that we (be it the UK, or Scotland) need a defence budget, or armed forces, at all?

If you do, then why not make the equipment for them locally rather than buying from another country?

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I'm not arguing against us needing a defence budget.

I'm saying that arguing that we shouldn't cut our defence budget _because_ it would cause job losses is ridiculous. Either we need another three X-10 hunter killer drones, or we don't. Buying them in order to keep people employed is a terrible idea - a far smaller amount of money would pay for retraining and keeping people afloat until new jobs were generated.

It's akin to saying that the government should buy up excess cars so that Rover wouldn't go bust.

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It's akin to saying that the government should buy up excess cars so that Rover wouldn't go bust.

Which was pretty much idea behind the recent scrappage scheme. It was little more than a state subsidy to car manufacturers.

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Yeah, I didn't approve of that either.

I was happier with the boiler scrappage, because at least they were making things more eco-efficient there.

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skington.livejournal.com

Arguably newer cars would be more eco-efficient as well, as well as safer. And that's before you talk about the benefit of jump-starting the economy by having people move their spending earlier.

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The problem iwth the boiler scrappage schemes, we looked into this, but the company that was doing new boilers for old, were charging about £200 more for the boilers than you could get them from a competing company.

And the scrappage allowance from the government, was about £200.

So it was really all just a big con.

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Same with the car scheme. People were getting what £1k for their old car. If you can't negotiate £1k off the list price of a brand new car during a recession, you really aren't trying. Although that said, many people I suspect never negotiate and just pay the full price.

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The "straight" statistics might be different if society clarified what "straight" and "gay" means.

I think most people take "gay" to mean "I want an emotional relationship with a member of my own sex."

In that context it's perfectly reasonable for 95 percent of the population to identify as "straight."

If the terms "bisexual" or "gay" were expanded to simply mean "I'm willing to or sometimes fantasize about having sex with someone of my own gender" the numbers would be quite different.

For example, I have no desire at all to date a dude. But, I've been with a couple girls who were really turned on by the idea of MMF threesome where both guys interacted sexually with each other.

It both cases it never happened (mostly because the guys she wanted to do it with either didn't want to have sex with a female as well as a male because they identified too strongly as gay, or else the guys thought it would be weird to interact with a straight guy or found one or both of us unattractive.)

Now, does the fact that I would have participated because I knew it would have turned those girls on make me bisexual? Probably on some level. Would I have answered the survey as bisexual, probably not, because I wouldn't think that was a truthful answer to their question.

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See, I'd be willing to engage in things like that, for someone else, but I've never fantasised about a man. Which leaves me squarely in the Straight camp, I feel.

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See, I can't honestly say where that would place you and I, therefore I'd respond "straight" - but some people would disagree.

I think that 99 percent of non super religious people would engage in same sex play in some random perfect circumstance (that would be different for each person) but by standard societal definitions would be considered straight.

But, I can also see an argument that that makes everyone bisexual. It's murky waters.

I have a female friend whose husband is deep into her humiliating him sexually. Generally this involves peeing on him, telling him his dick is too small, pretending he can't make her cum when actually she has simply trained herself to be silent during orgasm, etc...

Because of this from time to time she force him to suck the cock of one of her gay friends. He gets turned on by it - but not because he wants to suck cock, but because it's humiliating to be sucking cock while your wife calls you a 'cocksucking faggot" and that turns him on.

Both him and his wife consider him straight (in fact if they considered him bisexual the thrill would be gone.)

Yet, I'm fairly certain bisexual activists would label him bisexual.

We need better terms than the ones we have, is all I'm saying

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I'd say I'm not bisexual, because I have no sexual feelings towards men. It seems like a pretty cut and dried definition to me. If you have sexual feelings only towards members of the same sex then you're gay. If you have sexual feelings only towards members of the opposite sex then you're straight. If you have sexual feelings towards members of both then you're bi.

There's always going to be unusual situations with any definition, of course. And nobody (so far as I know) fancies every member of a particular group.

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Yeah, I mostly agree with you. I was just making the argument because of the way you phrased the link.

Really, I think that polls like this don't reveal much of anything, because people respond with what's comfortable for them.

I know several guys who I am sure would have clicked off the "gay" box on that form, despite the fact that when they are drunk and horny they often fuck girls.

And I've yet to have a single female friend who I know well enough to know who hasn't eaten pussy at least once, even though they all identify as straight.

For me, when I want to get laid, I want pussy, so I say "straight" but if Angelina Jolie told me I could do her doggy style if I blew Brad first, I'd be on my fucking knees in a heartbeat.

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Yeah, people are messy, damn them!

I don't view the stats there as being that useful, except for setting a minimum. The differences between London and NI, for instance, will be largely because people in NI will be less comfortable being out.

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Exactly.

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anef.livejournal.com

Re Robert Peston, it isn't at all clear whether the Royal Mail are using futures to buy equities at a price they want to pay, or whether they are gambling on the price going up or down. It's the same with commodities trading - people who are producing commodities and the end users use futures to give themselves some certainty. It's the middle men who are the gamblers.

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Yup, agreed there. Futures, and hedging, both have excellent uses for some people.

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It amazes me there are still any video rental stores left, not least because they are expensive. I last went into a shop to rent a video 7 years ago. Now thanks to the wonders of online/postal rentals, I can rent as many DVD's per month as I can watch for less than I would pay to rent 2 films from a physical store. If Blockbuster hasn't captured a decent share of that market, it's quite understandable that it will go out of business.

I imagine in 5 years time that the idea of even receiving DVD's by post will be pretty much non-existent as broadband speeds will have increased to the point that shipping a physical disc is pointless.

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It's going to take a while before downloading 30GB to watch a BluRay is really feasible. But not _that_ long, I suspect.

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broin.livejournal.com

Blu-Ray is actually only about 350MB per movie. It's the chuffing CGI menus that add 29.7GB.

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God knows my mates blu-ray player takes an eternity to load the sodding things. we timed it last time, high end Sony player, took almost 4 minutes to load the menu.

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broin.livejournal.com

4?! We rented a DVD recently and after fumbling with the DVD menu for ages decided to download the show instead.

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