British Gas admits agents break into struggling customers' homes
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Eventually people are going to tire of being told one thing while another actually happens.
As it stands, people who are in work are still requiring state help because they are not earning enough.
I mean people complain about medicine as well. And then you check. If we fully nationalized all pharma, and put their profits at zero (but kept development going) ... that would mostly be a 10% drop in the cost of medicine on average at most (more like 2-3% for the really common ones), 20% for some of the more expensive ones and there would be the exceptional medication getting 25% off.
This is not the price reductions for medicine that people are looking for when they're complaining ...
I suspect this is similar. If you redirected all profits to employees, it would be those sorts of numbers. 10% more. 20% more, with 30-60% of the increase going to the state. 100% and more increases would be limited to some companies that are already paying pretty well, like Google or Facebook.
So this simply does not provide a solution.
Do you know the cost of insulin in the USA and its cost in the EU, although being both private companies?
There's problems with it. It's not the right variant of insulin, it's very fast acting, requiring you to do the measurement-inject dance every 2 hours or so. It's slightly uncomfortable to have in your veins (because it's not really purified, and includes a couple thousand other proteins, some of which are irritating) ...
Re-inventing insulin the way people want it to work:
1) adaptive. Currently means combining making minute quantities work perfectly, but slowly, which is, of course, a total contradiction.
2) the perfect form of insulin, not just the human form, but variants that actually feel better, for you personally (ie. not the same variant for every patient)
3) VERY long lasting (which is of course also a total contradiction because the dose has to vary over time, however 4, even 24 hours without eating, is doable)
4) Keep developing this further, to get to oral application, but at some point totally adaptive without an implant would be excellent.
5) without using animals, or even animal cells (even though that doesn't really matter)
6) oh and without using cancerous cells, which is the other trick we know
7) so in essence using the newest, most expensive, most patented trick we know, "yeast expression"
8) which necessitates the most expensive protein purification tricks we know
9) administered using an implanted insulin pump
10) all of this approved by doing studies on >5000 patients (who get all medical care necessary for such studies for free for at minimum 2 months)
Yes, this is expensive. And, uh, well of course it is. Now, I get it, the best treatment is the best treatment and the most expensive one, and everyone should get it, and of course doctors will advise the most expensive one, for good reason. But there's currently various compromises available too.
“ The richest 1% of Britons hold more wealth than 70 per cent of Britons “
It would make sense if the 1% paid more than the combined bottom 70%
Source: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-grab...
that statistic is disingenuous without also stating how much of the national income the top 1% earn. i.e. Its obvious that the top 1% pay the most tax because they earn the most.
With any vaguely reasonable calculation of this, it becomes painfully clear that the poor pay far, far too much (because they have, effectively, no disposable income) and the rich pay far, far too little (because almost all of their income is disposable).
However, disposable income has a technical meaning. When the ONS publishes disposable income statistics, they mean income remaining after tax (I presume they subtract income tax and NI, but not council tax because that's local). They don't subtract e.g. energy bills or food.
From where I sit, "income after tax" doesn't really seem to fit as the meaning of "disposable income", though I suppose I can see why it would look that way to an office like ONS.
Now, to be clear, "where I sit" is in the US, and I've never seen "disposable income" be given an official usage like that over here; its only meaning that I've known is, much more colloquially, just what I said: the amount of money you have left over each $timePeriod after paying for the basic necessities of life. (How one defines those, specifically, varies greatly from person to person.)
In the us for example the top 1% pay 6 times the taxes than the bottom 50% on a dollar for dollar basis
Let me put this another way; anyone in the 99% would happily swap income with the 1% and then pay twice as much tax on that income than the current 1% do.
Because if it's just top PAYE owners you're missing out all the truly rich people who're tax efficient.
The poor pay a higher PROPORTION of their income in taxes than the rich pay. But because the poor earn so little it amounts to such a small amount of the total taxes collected.
Your static actually highlights the vast gulf in wealth/income between rich and poor. Shame on u for not seeing that.
Old Ladies, If You Don’t Pay Your Gas Bill This Winter You’re Going To Prison
The Gas Board: We'll get our fucking bit - don't you worry
That sentiment is supposed to be comically brutal but seeing British Gas break into people's homes and effectively force them to pay a higher price for energy... right now living in the UK is odd.
1. For those outside the UK, Viz is an adult satirical comic and great British institution.
Why am I not surprised to see the name "Arvato" in there. For those OOTL: they have been under fire in Germany for using outdated datasets for credit scores [1], lacked identification requirements for obtaining credit reports [2], cooperated with Deutsche Bahn to use data of fare dodgers for credit scoring [3], and most recently for exploitative labor conditions in their Facebook moderation team [4].
[1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bericht-Infoscore-nu...
[2] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NDR-Mangelhafter-Dat...
[3] https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2016-05/bahn-kundend...
[4] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Verdi-kritisiert-pre...
Sir Edward Coke, Semayne’s Case, 1604
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russian-gas-europe-v...
Sorry for the sarcasm, but the whole gas business is so dirty that it would take a 4000 word essay to express it more gently. I hope the US and Quatar enjoy their LNG sales.
If we’re going to timidly poke at a big ol’ conspiracy, don’t forget Canada!
This is a governance failure: for letting prices get out of control, for allowing poverty so bad that _people cannot heat their homes_, and then for allowing utilities to shut off people's utilities like this.
It doesn't have to be that way: on that last point for example, in Ontario, Canada, there's a law that says that a utility cannot shut off a house's electricity or gas during the winter for non-payment. It doesn't matter how far behind you get on your bills, it's illegal to shut it off. This would, I think, make pre-payment meters illegal here, and this probably explains why I've never heard of them being a thing.
By your admission it is not illegal to turn the electricity of during summer, but presumably people have to cook there too?
The solution is not to let people use electricity without payment, because that will be abused. Have the bills be paid directly for those on unemployment if you want, raise the benefits to match if you want, but a system where there is nothing that effectively stops you from not paying is going to result it bad outcomes for everyone.
Welfare is essentially a subsidy for crap wages. U either pay them a proper wage (surplus value) or u get taxed for govt services.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-gas-prepayment-me...