TonyIn similar vein isn’t it appalling how quickly the review of the Lords has been announced after the current government was embarrassed?
If nothing else it comes across as petty and revenge based….
Snafu, what’s happened here is the Government tried to slip through important legislation in a sneaky way using Statutory Instruments that would have hit hard three million people in April by withdrawing tax credits to those can least afford it because they earn the least in the country.
While getting rid of complicated rules brought in by Brown is a good idea, George Osborne is so out of touch he doesn’t understand £1500 (peanuts to him) make a big difference to someone earning very little.
(Don’t even get me started on that complete t**sser Ian Duncan Smith! Living in a grace house (and not paying a penny on it) on an estate owned by his rich in-laws and moaning about scroungers not paying for anything (the irony!) and poor people being poor because they want to be!:D)
Statutory Instruments are delegated legislation meaning they are not debated or scrutinised and can’t even be amended as can “normal” bills that are presented to parliament to be enacted.
The Tories voted down Statutory Instruments during Blair’s time and are now crying when they have it done to them!:D
Put through a full bill that can be debated and tweaked a bit and it would have passed.
Now the Tories will have to water down the tax credits arrangements anyway and bring them in over time to soften the blow on three million people earning the least….a miscalculation that will hurt George Osbourne in his bid to be Prime Minister (Dave is a lame-duck after announcing he is going….should have kept it under his hat for a while ;- ))….Boris will be chuffed (Boris’s policy is simple: Boris No.1. Fcuk everything else including UK. That’s it!)
TonyLet’s agree to differ on that?
Moggy
Yes, of course we can agree to differ on that.
Just think if it wasn’t for the crash in 2008 people would still be saying what a great chancellor Gordon Brown was with 13 years of uninterrupted boom….but he didn’t actually make it happen!
He was just lucky to be in office when there was a boom and there was no connection between Gordon Brown and Britain have a boom during the Blair years because that was just where we were in the economic cycle (fuelled with cheap debt and a property bubble).
Towards the end when he took over from Blair and bottled the election the wheels were starting to come off a bit and people starting revising their opinion of what a great prudent chap he was, because before the bailout money was borrowed to give to our clammy handed friends in the bank, Britain was actually in a better position than Germany with debt (our debt in 2008 was only 43% of GDP because Brown paid off a lot of debt, compared to 65% debt to GDP owed by Germany!).
For me the mistake was how he did it because he could have got a bit more money than he did.
If you say he should never have sold half the gold reserves because look at the price today….my answer would be isn’t that a bit like people saying I bought a house for £1,000 years ago and it’s worth £300,000 today and I should never have sold it 10 years ago for £150,000.
Well, selling then was the right option….sometimes people say if I’d known how much property went up I’d bought ten houses at £1,000….but sadly at that time one house to live in was what most people could afford and they probably couldn’t afford to buy ten houses that would go up in value 10 years later….I’ll leave it at that.
TonyLet’s agree to differ on that?
Moggy
Yes, of course we can agree to differ on that.
Just think if it wasn’t for the crash in 2008 people would still be saying what a great chancellor Gordon Brown was with 13 years of uninterrupted boom….but he didn’t actually make it happen!
He was just lucky to be in office when there was a boom and there was no connection between Gordon Brown and Britain have a boom during the Blair years because that was just where we were in the economic cycle (fuelled with cheap debt and a property bubble).
Towards the end when he took over from Blair and bottled the election the wheels were starting to come off a bit and people starting revising their opinion of what a great prudent chap he was, because before the bailout money was borrowed to give to our clammy handed friends in the bank, Britain was actually in a better position than Germany with debt (our debt in 2008 was only 43% of GDP because Brown paid off a lot of debt, compared to 65% debt to GDP owed by Germany!).
For me the mistake was how he did it because he could have got a bit more money than he did.
If you say he should never have sold half the gold reserves because look at the price today….my answer would be isn’t that a bit like people saying I bought a house for £1,000 years ago and it’s worth £300,000 today and I should never have sold it 10 years ago for £150,000.
Well, selling then was the right option….sometimes people say if I’d known how much property went up I’d bought ten houses at £1,000….but sadly at that time one house to live in was what most people could afford and they probably couldn’t afford to buy ten houses that would go up in value 10 years later….I’ll leave it at that.
TonyYes, he ‘refreshed the portfolio’, achieving around $250 per ounce. Today’s price is well over $1,100. Prudence personified. So glad he kept his eye on the ball.
Moggy
If you want to bash him feel free….I am not a fan of his and Blair’s (we now know it was Alastair Campbell’s) damning of him as ‘psychologically flawed’ turned out to be quite accurate.
The mistake he made was not in selling the gold but announcing to the world that he was selling so much (395 tonnes) and that gold was being sold by auction (sold in 17 tranches over three years 1999 to 2002 at an average of $275 a ounce)….it was the advance notice of the sale that drove the price down 10% by the time of the first sale.
Why sell it? To reduce potential volatility in the UK reserves because the price of gold can be volatile.
So selling the gold as a matter of monetary strategy was ok and it was not a mistake to unload gold and buy other currencies instead.
(If you think anyone can predict the price of any metal then they would make millions….I don’t know many people who can; -) ….those that think they know the market can lost their shirt like the billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother did when they tried to corner the silver bullion market).
Instead of big public announcements, he should have quietly unloaded it to the market over a few years without a big fanfare of an announcement like many other countries did and do. The money raised from the sale the gold was used to buy Euros, which also went up in value.
As a result of the announcement of these massive series of sales, central banks made an agreement to limit sales to 400 tonnes a year and this triggered a price hike of almost a third in a couple of weeks in 1999.
The price of gold hadn’t done much for years and prices remained steady in the years after the sales in 1999-2002 until 2007, where in a bull market, the price more than doubled to $675…giving a net loss of £2 billion if the gold hadn’t been sold (because the Euros bought with the proceeds of the gold sales had also gone up in value). So you can see there was a bit more to it.
Gold’s high was almost $2,000 an once end of 2011 and now about $1,100…so why are you bringing in the price today and not the price in 2011? Should we have held onto 400 tonnes of gold? And on what basis? Who is smart enough to work out the price years ahead?
Shoot down the man down (use Jeremy Clarkson’s words if you like) but selling the gold wasn’t a mistake….it was how he did it with advance notice his intention of selling half the country’s gold that was bad. In contrast, if you remember when the Tories were in power, we had to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday in 1992 and this cost even more loss, £3.3 billion….and weren’t the conservatives supposed to be good at running the economy!
Answer, none of them (Tories or Labour) are as good as they think they are in stopping boom or bust because of so many variables! 😀 If you’re lucky enough to be in office during a boom then people will say you’re good (some even said that about Gordon Brown! :D). A bit like the US Fed chairman Alan Greenspan who was lauded until the crash! 😎
TonyYes, he ‘refreshed the portfolio’, achieving around $250 per ounce. Today’s price is well over $1,100. Prudence personified. So glad he kept his eye on the ball.
Moggy
If you want to bash him feel free….I am not a fan of his and Blair’s (we now know it was Alastair Campbell’s) damning of him as ‘psychologically flawed’ turned out to be quite accurate.
The mistake he made was not in selling the gold but announcing to the world that he was selling so much (395 tonnes) and that gold was being sold by auction (sold in 17 tranches over three years 1999 to 2002 at an average of $275 a ounce)….it was the advance notice of the sale that drove the price down 10% by the time of the first sale.
Why sell it? To reduce potential volatility in the UK reserves because the price of gold can be volatile.
So selling the gold as a matter of monetary strategy was ok and it was not a mistake to unload gold and buy other currencies instead.
(If you think anyone can predict the price of any metal then they would make millions….I don’t know many people who can; -) ….those that think they know the market can lost their shirt like the billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother did when they tried to corner the silver bullion market).
Instead of big public announcements, he should have quietly unloaded it to the market over a few years without a big fanfare of an announcement like many other countries did and do. The money raised from the sale the gold was used to buy Euros, which also went up in value.
As a result of the announcement of these massive series of sales, central banks made an agreement to limit sales to 400 tonnes a year and this triggered a price hike of almost a third in a couple of weeks in 1999.
The price of gold hadn’t done much for years and prices remained steady in the years after the sales in 1999-2002 until 2007, where in a bull market, the price more than doubled to $675…giving a net loss of £2 billion if the gold hadn’t been sold (because the Euros bought with the proceeds of the gold sales had also gone up in value). So you can see there was a bit more to it.
Gold’s high was almost $2,000 an once end of 2011 and now about $1,100…so why are you bringing in the price today and not the price in 2011? Should we have held onto 400 tonnes of gold? And on what basis? Who is smart enough to work out the price years ahead?
Shoot down the man down (use Jeremy Clarkson’s words if you like) but selling the gold wasn’t a mistake….it was how he did it with advance notice his intention of selling half the country’s gold that was bad. In contrast, if you remember when the Tories were in power, we had to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday in 1992 and this cost even more loss, £3.3 billion….and weren’t the conservatives supposed to be good at running the economy!
Answer, none of them (Tories or Labour) are as good as they think they are in stopping boom or bust because of so many variables! 😀 If you’re lucky enough to be in office during a boom then people will say you’re good (some even said that about Gordon Brown! :D). A bit like the US Fed chairman Alan Greenspan who was lauded until the crash! 😎
TonyAh yes, long nosed T7 is much prettier that the snub nosed single version, and the wider T4 Lightning reportedly performed better then the single seat version.
Talking of performing better….despite new software two heads are better than one and on a longish mission (say 10 hours +) will the Indian Air Force really go for a MKI-ised two-seater PAK-FA despite the cost which will have to be borne wholly by India?
TonyLooking forward to the cost escalations on this.
What cost escalations, it’s not Lockheed Martin! :D….a great win of course for shareholders of Northrop.
Joking apart….having a subsonic mini-B2 with a price tag of below $1,000m each (that’s right a billion each) and using already developed technology from existing UCAVs and the F-35 (spent the money might as well put it to good use;-) hopefully will mitigate the kind of cost escalation seen on flawed programs.
(By flawed I don’t mean the problems and expense in writing millions of line of software, but a more fundamental design flaw in say having a single air frame type doing different jobs for the Marines, Navy and Air Force. Even the best supporters of Lockheed Martin would grant that given the chance to start again with a clean sheet, only the USAF F-35A and Navy F-35C versions only would share an airframe (boosting performance), with a unique separate air frame design just for the Marines version F-35B).
TonyDavid Laws, the Liberal Democrat MP who was appointed by the coalition government to succeed Byrne as No 2 at the Treasury.
This is the same millionaire David Laws who made false expense claims for £40,000 (his claims for rent were in excess of market levels for a lodging agreement, and a market level agreement would not have included contributions from the lodger towards building repairs and maintenance, which Laws also falsely claimed).
He didn’t need £40,000 being a millionaire and this was pure greed (whatever other reason he gave had absolutely nothing to do with making the fake claims)…so I wouldn’t take any lessons on financial probity from him!:D
As regards the note left in the Treasury saying there’s no money left, it was patently a joke…even if it was a poor or lame joke ;- ) But if you need a stick to beat someone with you then can pretend it was meant to be serious!
They also repeated the lie the economic crash was because of labour. It wasn’t! It started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers just a few hundred yards away. A bit like when the neo-cons were spreading the lie that Al Qaeda was in Iraq (planting fake news about meetings in Vienna etc. Nice try boys ;- )) and another (fake) reason why we should invade Iraq when Saddam the whisky drinker hated the Al Qaeda lot!
TonyDavid Laws, the Liberal Democrat MP who was appointed by the coalition government to succeed Byrne as No 2 at the Treasury.
This is the same millionaire David Laws who made false expense claims for £40,000 (his claims for rent were in excess of market levels for a lodging agreement, and a market level agreement would not have included contributions from the lodger towards building repairs and maintenance, which Laws also falsely claimed).
He didn’t need £40,000 being a millionaire and this was pure greed (whatever other reason he gave had absolutely nothing to do with making the fake claims)…so I wouldn’t take any lessons on financial probity from him!:D
As regards the note left in the Treasury saying there’s no money left, it was patently a joke…even if it was a poor or lame joke ;- ) But if you need a stick to beat someone with you then can pretend it was meant to be serious!
They also repeated the lie the economic crash was because of labour. It wasn’t! It started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers just a few hundred yards away. A bit like when the neo-cons were spreading the lie that Al Qaeda was in Iraq (planting fake news about meetings in Vienna etc. Nice try boys ;- )) and another (fake) reason why we should invade Iraq when Saddam the whisky drinker hated the Al Qaeda lot!
TonyHave you ever stopped to wonder why this was necessary? ….The man who sold off our gold reserves at just about the lowest point in the market to fund his spending.
Moggy, it wasn’t that he sold gold reserves….all central governments “refresh” their portfolio holdings of currencies and gold from time to time by selling and buying currencies and gold in order to spread and mitigate future risk (not all eggs in one basket and all that).
The reason why Gordon Brown is reviled is because he was so guileless when selling the gold by announcing publically how much and when! ….you can imaging that would depress prices quite a bit! 😀
If I recall correctly the Swiss were selling gold at the some time but did it quietly and discreetly….if Brown had ever run a business or had any idea of the “market” he would have done the same and perhaps we would have got more money for the Treasury.
Selling gold was never the issue because all central banks re-arrange their holdings from time to time to spread risk….and no one can foresee the price of commodities and metals for too long in the future as happened when gold went through the roof during the global economic meltdown (again nothing to do with Labour, the conservatives would have had to do exactly the same by bailing out RBS and Lloyds banks that Thursday afternoon).
TonyHave you ever stopped to wonder why this was necessary? ….The man who sold off our gold reserves at just about the lowest point in the market to fund his spending.
Moggy, it wasn’t that he sold gold reserves….all central governments “refresh” their portfolio holdings of currencies and gold from time to time by selling and buying currencies and gold in order to spread and mitigate future risk (not all eggs in one basket and all that).
The reason why Gordon Brown is reviled is because he was so guileless when selling the gold by announcing publically how much and when! ….you can imaging that would depress prices quite a bit! 😀
If I recall correctly the Swiss were selling gold at the some time but did it quietly and discreetly….if Brown had ever run a business or had any idea of the “market” he would have done the same and perhaps we would have got more money for the Treasury.
Selling gold was never the issue because all central banks re-arrange their holdings from time to time to spread risk….and no one can foresee the price of commodities and metals for too long in the future as happened when gold went through the roof during the global economic meltdown (again nothing to do with Labour, the conservatives would have had to do exactly the same by bailing out RBS and Lloyds banks that Thursday afternoon).
TonyThe Su-27UB-style tandem layout was rejected by Sukhoi when designing the Su-33UB (Su-27KUB) – because the two crew members would have different eye-lines when viewing the Luna-3 Optical Landing System (Fresnel Lens).
The instructor on the Su-27UB trainer is sat a few feet higher than the trainee and has a good view forward – but his eye line is also higher – too different for carrier ops.
I’m not sure how the Chinese plan to deal with it – any news about the J-15S ???
One other fact about the J-15S…. the tandem two-seaters have taller fins than the single-seat Su-33/J-15 – so how is J-15S going to fit into the Liaonings hangar deck ?? (which is designed for the shorter Su-33 fin)
Ken
Ken, thanks I knew you were the man for this question! ;- )
It seems eye-line is critical for carrier ops…..have the Chinese really thought it through or were they constrained by only having the single-seater T-10K-3 prototype to copy from? Was the dual seat T-10K-4 prototype in Russia proper? (within the old Soviet Union?).
We used to have more Chinese posters and hopefully we can get more up to date news from them re the J-15S.
Interesting about the height of the fins not being able to fit into the Liaonings hangar deck….perhaps the tandem seater is based at a naval shore station as I’ve not seen any pictures of the tandem seater taking off from the carrier?
As regards operational use in the near future, the designation number CV-16 given to the Liaoning would indicate a wholly training vessel (after the USS Lexington which ended its life as a training carrier CVT-16)….funny thing about Chinese copying of US carrier operations right down to identical copies of deck uniforms they even copied the hull numbers! 😀 ….I would see the carriers under construction being slated for ops in the South China sea and more pressing local needs like Taiwan and as a result cannot see them being sent further to e.g. Syria until they get a few more carriers built in the next couple of decades.
TonyIndonesia needs a lot of things…..more than it needs a handful of 5th gen hanger queens.
Buy Gripen…., stick with KF-X…build a modern and professional air force whilst encouraging local industry…
A decade from now…..consider T-50, F-35, and whatever else is on the market…….
+1
TonyThe T-10KUB two-seater was developed as a trainer for the Su-33 with a side-by-side twin seat arrangement because apparently it gave better vision for both the trainee and trainer operating on carriers with a very short run than would traditional tandem seating.
http://www.sukhoi.org/eng/planes/military/su33/history/
The Chinese two-seater trainer J-15S, based on the unfinished T-10K-3 Ukrainian prototype has the more traditional tandem seating….does anyone know why they went for tandem seating….was it just easier or were the advantages of side-by-side seating marginal or just too difficult to do without Sukhoi’s help?
http://sinodefence.com/2014/02/15/pla-flanker-fighter-family/
TonyAnd some very clear footage of TOS:
Originally Posted by MSphere
Quite frightening effects of thermobaric rockets fired from TOS-1A Buratino 220mm heavy launcher/flame thrower
Thermobaric warheads are indeed very potent battlefield weapons….perhaps less useful in urban areas in the full glare of the world…but extensively used in Grozny.
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