Member Info for Love_You

Hi jl5006,

That made me chuckle out loud - thanks.

The incentive for politicians to change is that it's obvious they are extremely unpopular - and the raison d'être for a political life is to be popular (well, assuming that one believes that a democracy is better than a dictatorship).

Fining people is a ridiculous answer to society's current issues - you can't make everyone the same - and each area of the country has different natural resources and landscape. Hence you really have to get people asking each other three important questions:

(1) If you could spend the rest of your life in any way you wanted what would you do, where would you live, what would you create, and how would you interact with others?

(2) In what ways could our local town/city/village/community become a better place for me and you to live in?

(3) How can the local authority make itself more accountable/responsive to the collective desires of the majority rather than only proceeding with projects that the most vocal/richest egos wish - because it is not good governance to think that just because a few people are shouting loudly, or have a lot of money, that their proposals would actually be what the majority of local citizens would like to see being done to improve their lives.

And lastly please stop closing down public libraries - if the Kindle is a good thing it will sell regardless given all the tax-breaks that Amazon has and no business rates as well. Hence a bit more money being spend on physical books and on public libraries would be great to see - people have enjoyed reading for the past several thousand years - libraries are often thought of as places of calm and contentment where people can share ideas which they have adequately thought through and reflected upon (which is one of the benefits of the written word over the spoken word).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_(novel) - Mr. Wormwood was based on a real-life character from Roald Dahl's home village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire.[7] The library in Great Missenden was the inspiration for Mrs Phelps' library, where Matilda devours classic literature by the age of four and three months.

I always thought Labour was mad to think that it was sustainable in the long-term for the state to subsidise the wages of people on the minimum wage (through tax credits). Subsidies mostly create false economies and in some cases (when they are initially successful in creating economic growth) they can lead millions of people into thinking their lifestyle is sustainable when actually it was only sustainable because the government was manipulating the market system in a way which was sure to cause a calamitous breakage at some point (aka the global financial crisis - but really even without this Labour's policies of over-taxing the oil industry to subsidise growth of businesses employing people on minimum wage (able to top up with tax credits, as were the companies themselves))

Hi Wids,

To be popular politically (and to win the next election) one needs to focus on lifestyles. Forget special interests/clubs and even the EU. Most people really just want a house, a car, to work about 4 days a week and to have enough money so that on the other 3 days they can socialise, partake in sports, and explore the UK, go on holidays.

If Corbyn wants to win the next election I believe he needs to write a manifesto which includes most of the following:

(1) Maximum working week legally limited to 30 hours.
(2) To limit cars to a minimum mpg of at least 40 - every car must do a minimum of 40mpg to be legal - and therefore every will be able to own a car without driving oil consumption too high.
(3) To plan the energy infrastructure for the future - also to build several new gas-fired power stations
(4) To improve the rail network - electrify it and make sure it is easy and cheap to get from Birmingham to all of the following areas: Northumberland, Cumbria, Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Cornwall, and the South-East
.(5) To plan food production/distribution in the UK - basically to increase domestic production especially towards the coasts in all directions - to transport the fresh produce by rail to Birmingham where it will be transformed into higher-value artisanal products by local business -before being taken by rail to London, Manchester, Leeds and back to the local areas where the raw produce (meat, veg, fruit) came from.

(6) To get people more engaged with healthier, more active, especially outdoor lifestyles - encouraging cycling, walking, kayaking, sailing, fishing, etc. etc.

(7) To encourage more localism through financial incentives so that communities can help themselves to overcome social challenges - hence reducing the UK's dependency on big-pharma and perhaps even allow more money to be spent on staffing the NHS - but using this money also to create services which better dove-tail with communities, i.e. selecting scenic locations for care homes and encouraging the elderly to support each other.

Hi Kitsz, nice of you to post,

Nobody can decide what is fair value but the person who decides to buy - they should (rationally) not even look at what prices the city offer but should do their own calculations - as an independent ego why would you assume the city has an better an idea of value than what you have been taught/learned yourself about how to value future cashflows (which is the money potentially available to be returned to investors from the company in the future).

Market value is pretty much irrelevant to a sale process as logical people shouldn't be influenced by the prices of technical or momentum traders who are only in the stock to make a fairly quick buck.

Value investing is only flawed in a world where investment managers pay attention to the price offered by the City (often set by lunatics in that they are often incredibly short-term and that is a form of lunacy because life is not a hort-term project).

So I do see value investing as offering a lot more value to citizens/governments than the short-term antics of momentum/technical traders.

Value investing means making a set of assumptions about what citiens want from the future and assuming that in a deocracy governments will aim to deliver what citizens want (as this will make the government popular and get it re-elected). Then assuming the above one calculates the future cash flows of the company in question based on assumptions that citizens will spend their money on products/services which they value the most - hence if you are aiming to please the majority of citizens your company will have more pricing power than companies which don't constantly try to provide citizens with the lifestyles that they desire. Hence if you have more priving power it would be reasonable to assume one could grow sales more than one's rivals whilst potentially increasing prices at say double the rate of inflation at the same time (because often competitors take years to react it seems). Then you add up all the future predicted cash-flows over the next x-many years and discount it to present-day value using an inflation rate based on a wide basket of products/services in the economy (or based on the money supply change is perhaps another valid method). And then the future cash flows discounted to present day value is the current value of the company - that's the market cap that it should have for another company to buy it today.

Of course I recognise there are problems with valuing companies based on the above value-investing approach. Two of the largest problems are,

(1) The assumptions that one makes about the priving power the company will have going fowards - it's very hard to say what citizens will want/desire from life in the future - and hence which products/services will have the most pricing power in five years time for example.
(2) One also needs to select a timeframe over which to calculate/estimate the company's future net cash flows - the applicable t

Snige I think you do a disservice to yourself when think of other people in terms of categories such as socialist, capitalist, "allotment holders," doctor," "pilot."

For example I know a commercial pilot who loves to grow his own fruit and vegetables and is pretty much self-sufficient in food.

And yet there are doctors who eat far too much sugar, milk chocolate, and cakes, than is good for their own health.
Yet they tell their patients to eat less sugar, milk chocolate and cakes - and to eat more vegetables and fibre.

Just sayin' that erhaps you are at the stage of understanding the world through correlations - such as people in suits in the city have money, doctors don't just rely on pharmaceutical-funded research far too much, people with busy jobs probably don't grow/homecook all their food themselves, footballers spend more of their time thinking about football than their partners/children and how to live ethically.

I'm just sayin' that although these correlations have some use, as often they do give us an insight into the most probably future from our initial impressions, that also the world to me at least seems far more complex.

Hence I try not to see people are one having a few dimensions (such as their job, their level of knowledge or speed of though, their fitness, and their goals/motivations). I try to see people within the complex social networks which they exist in and believe that if external circumstances change then their behaviour will change and hence simple labels such as teacher, conservative, church warden, arise just because people like to simplify things .... and whilst simplicity can be pleasant .... it can also lead to incorrect predictions such that just because someone enjoys having an allotment that they don't also have the potential political skills to unify the UK with a vision for the economy/society which provides a win-win for far more citizens (voters) than the current system is delivering for.

What I don't get is why would anyway take any EU directives as something which need to be complied with?

The EU are a bunch of people who don't believe that each citizen should be free to try and achieve happiness as best they can.

The EU has presided over zero or negative population growth in Eastern Europe despite this being millions of square miles of prime countryside where people could make good lives for themselves.

The EU think humans were designed to live in little holes (government owned blocks of apartments), several storeys up in the air, and largely be fed by a benefit system supported by agricultural subsidies and just a few enormous global agri-business which using GM crops and combine harvesters about 40 foot wide.

This is not my vision of the future for my family and my children. Hence personally I don't accept EU directives as law - because law has to be made by people of sound moral judgment - and the people who run the EU are lacking in moral judgment.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/tui-travel-stocks-get-slammed-new-737-max-warnings-093256558.html

Peabody plans less investment this year.

The company allocated about two-thirds of its free cash flow last year toward dividends and share buybacks. This year the plan is to return all of it to shareholders.

Seems sensible - if you know the government has got the destruction of your industry firmly in its mind then it's only right to return as much capital to shareholders as possible until the government decide that your destruction (as a company or even as an entire industry) is not actually in the best interests of millions/tens of millions of its citizens.

I know I've aid this before but oil is triple taxed - first on the employees wages, + corporation tax, + the pecial petroleum revenue tax, + tax on fuel at the pump (65% of the selling price to consumers).

Hence the oil industry really need to lobby harder for lower taxes because the current system is completely unjuest when you have much of the online industry paying almost zero tax and yet they wouldn't even exist as an industry without shipping their products by road, air and sea - i.e. they are all making far larger returns on investor capital than the oil industry is - despite the fact the online shopping/food delivery industries wouldn't even exist without all the hard work of the oil companies (yet they are the ones who constantly erode shareholders' capital).

What do people think of the sale price PMO achieved. $65.5 million for 5.3koepd of gas in Pakistan.

If that was for the North Sea it would be a very low price achieved and I think shareholders would feel aggrieved. However in relation to this deal in Pakistan do you think PMO achieved a reasonable price (or above or below what could have reasonably been expected)?

Even if US go ahead with NOPEC what effect would it have? If I was an oil company CEO I would keep cutting costs even as oil prices rise - almost everyone in the oil market has been double-crossed by the USA twice in the past three years. It will take a long time for the USA to get investment again into oil after the way they have behaved from 2015-2019.

If CEO's fell for investing before 2021 I would be very surprised. Every time they increase investment Trump just uses it as an excuse to say he want oil at $40 per barrel. This behaviour is killing the oil company's shareholders. There is no way anyone sane would lend to oil companies until they see some sense return to the sector because their was massive over-investment in new oilfields from 2010-2017.

He has no idea of what the oil price will be next year - how could he possibly be so specific as to predict $65-$75 when oil hit $153 in 2008 and touched a low of $26.53 in 2016.

There are 2.5 billion citizens on Earth who use oil/petrol/diesel everyday (out of the Earth's population of 6.8 billion).

Each person will make their own decisions from day-to-day, within the constraints of their finances, about how much they want to travel, how they want to travel, what they want to do with their time, and hence how much they will spend on petrol/diesel.

There is no way any person on Earth can predict the oil demand when it is a sum of the usage by 2,500,000,000 people who are to a large extent all acting independently and trying to serve their own self-interest (within their financial constraints).

If the reverse was true then the American government would be demanding that the US holiday company damaged by the lack of airworthiness of its EU-built planes should pay financial compensation for the losses incurred by the US holiday company + compensation.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/tui-travel-stocks-get-slammed-new-737-max-warnings-093256558.html

Hence as the boot is on the other foot this time then surely TCG and TUI should receive compensation from Being for any financial losses incurred due to the ground of the Boeing planes.

Is this the correct moral/ethical way of looking at this. What do other people think?

I definitely agree that Parliament should be in the centre of the UK - i.e., Birmingham.

Also without being rude to Birmingham it is typical of most large cities in the UK in that it has many social problems and many things which need fixing - including forging better links with the countryside to improve and shorten supply chains.

Hence Birmingham would focus the minds of MPs on making the UK a better society - in London it is too easy for them to hop on the Eurostar and dine in Paris by night, breakfast in Bruges, and have lunch in London followed by attending the HoC's for a couple of hours, before catching the Eurostar back to Paris for a decent dinner and wine again.

You need to make the Uk attractive to foreign tourists, then TCG and TUI will be the right shares to be in even if the UK leaves the EU with no deal.

But have you seen the state of the UK - stabbings on the street - people out of their minds on spice stumbling around city centres, huge towerblocks from the 1960s (mostly ugly) - and please don't clad them, it hardly makes them look any better and it is only a fire risk.

Also the UK is a divided society - David Cameron said as much whilst he was campaigning for the 2010 election - he said Britain was Broken. I should of listened to the guy more - I though those comments were in poor taste about his own country - however he was just being honest - I think everyone can now see that Britain is far more broken as a society than either France, Germany or Scandinavia. So Cameron was just being honest - he knew he was facing a mess that he couldn't possibly hope to sort out - and he was right - in those 6 years he was in charge he didn't really do anything to start o fix broken Britain for the long-term.

I think there is a lot more the UK could do to become a magnet for foreign tourists - but currently the governments policies are just funnelling money to corrupt people - hence there is no way the current policies are going to mend the social problems that the UK faces - that would take a wise leader, a new warchest from the BoE, and at least 30 years of consistent policies to deliver.

You could always put me in if you like!

Of course he's entitled to buy at the bottom. The market shouldn't have put the price so low if it doesn't think it's reflective of the future value of this company. If the price is wrong then it's the market's fault - people are entitled to buy and sell whenever they want.

EasyJet just need to increase the price of tickets - we are a private company, we are not their to sell flights at below cost - if it makes people annoyed to pay more then they can blame the government - the government are the ones who always bash the oil sector and are therefore the ones responsible for high oil prices (which will obviously result in ticket price rises for people travelling by air).

No one can force oil down. There are 2.5 billion citizens on Earth (out of a total of 7 billion) who use oil/petrol/diesel everyday.

Are you telling me that one person can ever control a market which provides fuel to 2.5 billion people?

Each person will use oil at the rate that they can afford - that is their right within a free market system.

There is no way that Trump or anyone else can control the price of oil.

The price is determined by supply vs demand - and that demand is very hard to predict because it comes from the individual decisions of 2,500,000,000 people around the globe!

So many oil companies went bankrupt under Trump who in the oil sector would ever trust the man again.

I guess those with links to government knew the real plan …. but even so there are people in the real economy who will feel utterly betrayed and double-crossed by the US government.

It's time citizens started to create the economy that they want and to stop trusting to government to sort out issues for them - from my life so far I have seen that the government visions for the economy will just never work unless the expect all of humanity to go back to using donkeys/horse and carts.

At the end of the day construction is fun and can be beautiful. And travel is nearly always both fun and beautiful. And I really think no government is going to win elections by telling people that their plan for the economy is to reduce the amount of holidays/consumption that people currently enjoy. However I do think governments might try to force through their policies through the back door - such as council tax rises, national insurance rises, and "green taxes". Pretty much none of which were highlighted in the party's manifestos at the last General Election.

Why did oil go down to $27 per barrel in 2016, and then people say it will be higher than $60 later this year.

Logically if it didn't go so low in 2016 then it could have stayed lower for longer.

I still think Trump misplayed his hand. When he was calling for below $40 oil if he'd called for $55 as a medium to long-term prices then he would have stood a much better chance of keeping it under $70 before the next elections in the US in 2020.

Thanks AJamesW - your response was a good read!

Why did oil go down to $27 per barrel in 2016, and then people say it will be higher than $60 later this year.

Logically if it didn't go so low in 2016 then it could have stayed lower for longer.

I still think Trump misplayed his hand. When he was calling for below $40 oil if he'd called for $55 as a medium to long-term prices then he would have stood a much better chance of keeping it under $70 before the next elections in the US in 2020.