Peter Bond,

You've voted Liberal all your life. So for your whole life you've supported a party that believes in electoral reform that they expect to mean regular coalition governments. Partly because they believe the current system of winner-takes-all is undemocratic (which in some ways it is). Also partly because some believe that coalitions lead to more consensus and better long-term behaviour from governments.

For the first time in 40 years there's a hung Parliament. The party that believes coalition government is a good thing goes into coalition.

They choose to ally with the party that won. By a massively clear margin. The alternative being a coalition with a party who'd lost, and still wouldn't have quite enough votes for an overall majority, and were led by a man who'd been PM without winning an election, and had now got his party's worst result in 80 years.

What the fuck else was Clegg supposed to do!

To not go into coalition would mean the Lib Dems should just wind the party up, and give up. That they didn't really believe in their own politics and should just re-join Labour. They said before the election they'd try to form a coalition with the winner (whoever it was), they did so. There's nothing wrong, dishonest or inconsistent about it.

If you can't work out what the party you say you've always supported was going to do, even though they told you, put it in their manifesto, and it chimes with everything they've said they believed in since their formation, then you should consider not voting again, as it's possibly too complicated.

Sorry to be rude, but that argument about the Lib Dems really pisses me off. I don't like them as a party, but the hysterical criticism of politicians can get wildly unfair, and how can we have democracy if people won't use their fucking brains? The Lib Dems have done exactly what they've been saying they believe in for 30 years. If politicians compromise and try to get on with things, they've got no principals. If they stick to their guns, and do what they believe in it's because they can't rise above narrow party advantage and act in the national interest. As an electorate we need to grow up.

Re: John Maynard Keynes

Er, the government is cutting spending by 1% of GDP a year. Or trying to. That's not slashing. It's nothing close to the madness the Eurozone are pursuing, even though we've now got a worse budget deficit than Greece!

Learn some economics. Keynes (who was a genius) said you had to pay down debt in the boom, in order to keep the economy more stable, and to build up a reserve to deficit spend in the recession. The ones who forgot Keynes were Labour. Now they talk as if he was a genius, when it's easy. When he was in government they ignored him.

There might have been a collapse in confidence in the UK economy if there had not been any cuts. There's no way of knowing. The result of having little growth, but no drop either is not that bad, considering the alternative. Look at the Eurozone for what can go wrong, and just how fast and badly.

Could the government have done better. Always. By the way it was Labour who cut the capital spending, Osborne confirmed the decision already taken by Darling. That looks to have been an error both parties made.

In an ideal world you'd design and set up a bunch of big capital spending projects, and only do them when a recession hits. That way the government could get them cheap, and boost the economy at crucial times Hard to organise though.

Re: but, George, this is UK, not Cyprus, right?

Piro,

What high inflation!?!?!

CPI is under 3%, RPI just over. That's not even close to being high! What are you talking about! It's over target, but it's not ridiculous, nor high, and certainly not hyper. It doesn't even appear to be out-of-control.

Just because people keep talking about high inflation, doesn't mean we actually have it.

Re: Who'd have thunk it?

Except the 'you need people to lend to you' line is bollocks.

The BoE have spent nearly £400 billion - look it up - on QE. Where did that money come from?

Answer: nowhere. It appeared magically out of thin air when it was needed. Literally. With no exaggeration.

Basically the BoE makes up some electronic cash and hands it to banks cash in return for worthless paper 'assets.' Then the banks invest the cash in more worthless paper, and make profits from it.

And then you've got all the other usual boring 1% stuff...

TheOtherHobbes,

You don't really quite QE. Mostly it's been used to buy government gilts, so the banks aren't making money with that lot - although the other lot has probably lead to some of the spike in the stock market. Supposedly the government will pay this money back, or it'll be sold to the markets at a time when we're not in such a financial mess that this is possible. However doing this has its costs. QE has been one of the major causes of the currency devaluation, which means the pound in your pocket is worth less. However it's allowed us to cushion the financial shock - which otherwise would have lead to chaos. At some point, I'd imagine some of this debt will be sold, and some cancelled. But you can't keep on magicking the money up, eventually you have to stop, or get dangerous levels of inflation.

The point of austerity is that we currently spend more than we tax. To the tune of well north of £100 billion. Some of that is good deficit spending. Money on unemployment benefit, redundancy pay-outs, special help for times of recession helps to make recessions less painful. This is sometimes called the automatic stabilisers, and is temporary. When the recession goes away and unemployment drops, this kind of spending also drops.

Sadly we also have a very large structural deficit. That's the damage to our tax base from not getting quite so much cash from the financial services industry - basically because a lot of that boom profit wasn't really real. It would be interesting to see our real economic output for that time, with the bizarre not-real-profits that caused the crash taken out (but probably impossible to work out). Anyway there's that, plus the £30-odd billion of unfunded spending that Gordon and Tony bequeathed us. That's government spending they gave us, but were too dishonest to raise the taxes for.

You simply can't spend £60 billion a year more than you tax for eternity. You can't keep printing money to save the day, QE is an emergency measure only. Otherwise it's hyper-inflation-a-gogo.

Finally, your little graph from Paul Krugman is interesting. And rather dishonest. Don't know how good an economist he is, I've only studied it for a few years, but I have noticed him being very flexible with the facts in his public pronouncements, so Nobel prize or not, I've little faith in the man. He talks about how low UK debt was by historical standards - and yet even if George Osborne's plans had worked perfectly debt to GDP would be expected to go well over 100% by 2015. So just by filling in the projections on that graph things would have looked a lot less like a little bump at the end.

Finally, look at the 1930s depression. That gave us a spike in debt to GDP of only 25%, and it was paid off / grown off again in 5 years! So the debt to GDP rise in the great depression was less than the 'little insignificant' one on the right of the graph he was talking about, even not including for the trajectory meaning that it would be doubling again. The huge spikes on that graph were caused by Britain paying for 2 world wars (3 if you count the Napoleonic). So his graph shows us that debt was rising at the same rate as World War I or II, but that was no reason to be worried. What a genius! Or possibly not...

Re: Who'd have thunk it?

Tony S,

You don't necessarily need to pay off the national debt. Having some is even useful, as long as the interest payments aren't too high, it allows people to be able to buy safe bonds, with predictable (if low) returns. Although at the moment they're not looking quite so safe.

If you can balance the budget, and grow the economy - then the level of debt becomes less-and-less important, as the economy gets bigger. If GDP grows by 2%, and inflation is also 2%, then your economy has got 4% bigger and your national debt has stayed the same. It doesn't take many years of that for the national debt to become less of an issue. You can even pay some off if you're feeling rich.

Italy's problem is that it's been holding national debt above 100% of GDP for years. But now the population is stagnant (it may be dropping now), and joining the Euro buggered up their economy. So there were doubts about their debt when they were only growing slowly, the damage in the recession means their economy is the same size as it was in 1998, but with an extra 15 years of debt (although inflation makes that slightly less bad). Which is why they're going to either need to leave the Euro, massively restructure their economy, accept a million immigrants or default. Or some combination of those. Plus inflation, but being in the Euro they don't get to make that call.

Re: To fix the problem

all the major political parties at the moment are unappealing!

Well of course they are. There's no infinite supplies of money for doing nice things. Plus the major priority has to be the economy, so all they can really do is argue about who'd manage it best - and spout on about depressing economics.

Cameron and Osborne lost the last election by being honest in January 2010. They were sitting on a solid 42-44% in the polls, and had been for over a year. Then they started a campaign to talk about what they'd cut in order to get the deficit down while not cutting health or education. Osborne said if they didn't do this, they'd have no mandate for cuts. After 2 weeks of that their poll rating had crashed to around 36%, so they stopped, and went back to being non-specific. Their polling never really shifted again.

Have we as voters taught our politicians a valuable lesson here? Be Blair and Brown, massively raise spending in 2002, but don't say you will in the preceding election. Don't raise tax all that much though. Hope for the best. Keep on winning and being popular for ages. Or, tell the truth about the economy as you see it, and what's required in order to protect the most popular areas of spending (health / education), lost nearly 10% of your support. Perhaps the voters get the politicians they deserve?

Due to the oddities of our electoral system, had Labour won an election with 36% of the vote to the Conservatives 29%, they'd have got a landslide. Because it was the other way round, we got a hung Parliament. As I recall the figures, Blair only got 37% in 2005, against a Conservative 35%, and still got a majority of 60.

Interestingly the Lib Dems decided to sulk and veto the Tory constituency redrawing, and pretty much guaranteed they won't be in government for a while. Labour are looking to be the most likely winners of the next election, as if they can recover up to say 35% of the vote (polling in the 40s it should be easy), and the Conservatives get about the same (or even a few percent more), the current system is likely to give Labour an absolute majority. So no room for Lib Dems in coalition unless Labour do really, really badly.

This oddity is because of the way the boundaries are drawn. Labour tend to represent constituencies with fewer voters. So they don't need as many votes to win an election. Of course, PR has it's own oddities. In Greece and Italy, parties with well under 30% of the vote got topped up to an absolute majority in the lower house of Parliament, in an attempt to give more stable governments...

Re: Who'd have thunk it?

Now is a great time to borrow. Except when no-one will lend to you. See Spain, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, for details... Remember the Eurozone are doing QE, they're just funnelling it through the banks and calling it LTRO. Otherwise Spain and Italy would already be in default.

Of course, people will currently lend to us. And it's possible that we could have spent some more, and still got low government interest rates. But no-one knows how much more. All this is psychological. Will the current Eurozone fuck-up in Cyprus cause bank-runs and destroy the Euro, or will people just see it as a small case not worth worrying about? No-one knows. No-one can know until you do it, and no-one can know if the alternative would have worked if you don't.

As you rightly point out, if we'd not been borrowing £30 billion a year since 2002, we'd have had lower debt when the crisis hit, and not been employing 100,000 odd public service workers more than we could pay for. Even to balance the books without a recession would have been painful, but if you're going to deficit spend it really helps not to have a huge structural deficit as well, that you've no idea how to pay for.

Basically the (probably) permanent damage done to the financial services industry by their own incompetence, plus the chronic government overspending left a structural deficit of £50-£90 billion per year. Depending on how Eyeore-ish the economist you asked. Quite hard to convince people to lend the extra £100 billion a year we were borrowing at the time, when even once everything was over we'd still be guzzling down the cash at say £60 billion a year...

Having our main trading partners committing a protracted and bizarre eurocide isn't exactly helping either.

As Jim Hacker said, Chancellor is an awful job. You're always responsible for taxes, and recession. Much better to go straight to being Prime Minister. I wonder if Gordon Brown would agree with him...

Re: Not allowed to criticize a Reg author?

Larry 54,

Thanks for the response. I guess if you can be bothered to go back through a bunch of their articles and say they were wrong here, here and here all about the same company, then you can make a polite accusation of bias with evidence. Obviously, everyone's got their biases anyway, it's just a matter of how successful they are at keeping it out of what they write. I've seen plenty of other posters say it about Reg writers, so I've no idea why you got your posts nixed though...

Also, a quick scan through your posting history doesn't show any deleted comments. Are you sure you weren't posting on Andrew Orlowski's articles, where all posts are usually delayed for moderator approval - and they're now up there? Or have you changed username?

I guess it's also hard to say what's bias, and what's a legitimate opinion. For example Andrew O gets accused of anti-Google bias, but then he's got a valid (even if it's not correct it's defensible) criticism of the big G. So just because he mentions that in relevant articles, does that make him biased against them, or is he just doing his job? I happen to agree with quite a lot of what he says about them, so it may be he's the most biased anti-Googler in the world except for me...

If you'd had a post modded for it once, then I can imagine all the next ones getting the same treatment, if they're close together in time. But they normally let that sort of thing go, if polite, so I've no idea what the problem was.

Re: Fire drill

I did a school trip to Sellafield. And was very impressed by the loud noises and attention that you get when someone accidentally sets off a radiation alarm.

Alarm was the appropriate word for my state of mind at the time too...

Re: I have a plan

I'm sure Osborne's got a grasp of basic economics. The correct answer to the current mess is unknown, as there's not really been a crisis like this. The 1930s Depression was different, for various important reasons.

It's obviously easy for Ed Balls to say that if he'd been in charge things would have been different. But without access to a time machine, or the correct parallel universe, it's impossible to know for certain.

Although one thing that I find constantly amazing is just how many Keynesians we've got kicking around now the world economy is in the toilet, who entirely failed to be Keynesian during the boom (i.e. spending cuts in the boom to limit bubbles - allowing for large borrowing during busts). Were Keynes around today I'm sure he'd make some great suggestions, as he seemed to be a genius, but I'm also sure he'd have been doing a lot of re-writing of his theories, given the experience of the last 50 years.

Seriously though, how much paperwork actually exists inside a government these days? Enquiring minds need to know...

Ministers all still have red boxes, and get their homework put in them to do each night. See all the gags in Yes Minister about it for details.

So I'd imagine they're mostly on paper reports. Given the amount, and varied nature, of the information that ministers have to absorb, paper is probably the most efficient way to deal with it. Obviously they have to have a large support staff to make this work, but top ministers have so much information to go through that single person, that it would be impossible for them to manage the infomation flow themselves.

The Treasury have got a really advanced visualisation machine. They've got a model of the British economy done in plumbing. You open and close different valves, to show the effect of tax/spending changes and see what happens.

Quick Wikipedia link (it came up first) here. Sadly looks like the Treasury don't have one, I'm sure they still did in the 90s, but there's one in the Science Museum.

In reality I'm sure the Chancellor doesn't get to play with the spreadsheets / models. He just gets fat reports with predictions of what effects changes will have.

Re: Not allowed to criticize a Reg author?

Larry F54,

Despite what you may think, it is not actually polite to accuse a journalist of being biased. So if you've done so in a comment, that comment was not polite, by any reasonable definition. Just saying things without swearing does not politeness make...

Of course there's nothing stopping you commenting on why you think an article was wrong. Also, I'm not accusing you of this as I've not seen your posts, but just because a commentator disagrees with someone, that doesn't necessarily make them a shill, or biased, or an idiot. Too many commentards seem to find it impossible to comprehend the idea that other people have different opinions.

The El Reg House Rules are here. In them they state something like, please don't insult our writers or accuse them of being shills. Then go on to say, it's our house so our rules - in the same context. So if they see something as an attack on the writer, rather than the article, their mods can delete it. That's reasonable, as they say, it's their forum.

Finally, expect inconsistency. Mods are human (despite what users say), and see lots of posts. I think the Reg ones are also their sub-editors, so they've got a real job to do first, modding second. They'll make mistakes. They don't have a 'punitive' modding system, so I guess it's a pretty quick decision to just hit delete on a post, rather than spending too much time with a process. Having done it myself, on a million user forum, I can tell you that modding can be incredibly time-consuming.

However if you accuse their writers of bias on their site, you've no right to complain if they don't let you. Especially as the Reg are very tolerant of criticism on here, I've done it plenty of times and never had a post nixed.

Re: Can any tablet+keyboard combo be used with portrait screen?

I don't know about the Windows 8 ones, but I very much doubt it. Where you've got the laptop-with-detachable-keyboard type, then its going to have special hinges and fit together like a laptop.

If you want to do this, then you're stuck with the Bluetooth keyboards as tablet accessories. For example, I've got the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for my iPad 3. This has got a magnetic connector so it can be used as a cover, which looks like a laptop when closed, but in all other ways is a completely separate keyboard, In fact, it's pretty much pointless being able to clip it onto the iPad, as you'd never use them clipped together, the only reason is for neatness and protection when bunging them in a bag.

What the Logitech has got is a groove across the end of the keyboard, so you can stand your iPad up in it. It's pretty robust. You can use it on your lap reasonably safely with the iPad in landscape mode. In portrait mode it's a bit more top-heavy, with less contact area, and so I wouldn't be happy using it on anything other than a table.

Obviously if you're not going the iPad route, then this post is no help to you whatsoever...

Re: Dumbo Reg Hack

How's he supposed to mention call quality? He hasn't seen it, he's reporting on the launch.

Re: Cluster...

An awful lot of companies have an awful lot of money, both branding and advertising, tied up in the current domain name system. It's very unlikely that they're going to want to change, without even more severe provocation than this. The most likely thing for them to hope is that no-one cares about the new gTLDs and the whole issue pretty much goes away, with a minimal defensive effort on their part.

Take the example of comparethemarket.com. That's their name. They've spent a fortune advertising it, and comparethemeerkat.com as well of course. Their whole schtick is based around that - and if they had to change, it would be quite disruptive.

Although I suppose we could go back to com.comparethemeerkat, and make no other changes.

Re: bloody hell

Not sure about that. I think we're just running out of exciting innovations to put in phones at the moment.

I certainly don't need a bigger screen though. I think the current iPhone is too big, just a touch too tall for my tastes. Something under 4" seems better to me, but obviously I'm in a minority. Just like I'm in the minority who like a stylus, for which I'm very grateful to Samsung, for being the only people who seem to still love them.

Re: Cluster...

Ragequit,

There were something like 1,500 applications for new gTLDs (from memory). Although quite a lot of them were duplicates. Also ICANN didn't say that was all there could ever be, just that this was a one-off big chunk, that would go through in one process, and then they'd sit back and wait for a few years before doing the same again.

How much of that was marketing is another question. i.e. Get your special offer now, there might not be a chance to set up your own gTLD for literally YEARS!

It is a nice extra little slice of scam to charge a few hundred dollars extra to operate a trademark register, which is barely effective anyway. And of course to charge for dispute resolution too.

It's basically a horrible mess. But a profitable mess.

I have a medical condition called nystagmus, basically me eyes don't ever stay still. So would this leave me unable to watch video, and with the screen auto-scrolling around like a flea on speed?

Interestingly (and irrelevantly) drinking alcohol makes this condition improve - I presume because it's a muscle relaxant. Sadly my doctor refused to prescribe me booze though...

Re: Truly pathetic.

Well that's all very well. Except they're killing the free services, while still harvesting the data.

Also if Google do something, and give it away for free, then they could kill or damage existing, and stop new, paid-for services getting to market.

Actually I'm starting to wonder if we should look seriously at banning and/or regulating a lot of free services. It can be very market distorting if companies offer stuff for free, when they're getting their cash from a different-but-related market. Look at 'free' mobile phones on contract for example. Customers end up paying much more for the phones, get locked into long contracts and the features available on phones get dictated by the telcos rather than the customers. It was also bad for the environment as people updated and threw away perfectly good dumb phones each year, just to get the latest shiny that was little different. As happens the market somewhat corrected, as the manufacturers and telcos got a righteous spanking from Apple.

Obviously it's up to Google how they run the their company. I don't believe the shareholders get much of a say, as the executives own disproportionate amounts of voting stock compared to the financial value of their holdings. But if they do an awful lot of stuff for the information or the customer goodwill, and still make almost all their cash from advertising. They probably don't want to get a reputation as behaving completely randomly though. You gain some nice PR from giving things away for free, but you create more bad-feelings from stopping a free service than you created goodwill when you started it. Do that too often and you're basically spending money on anti-marketing...

To to agree with you about 3D. I remember loving the first couple of versions of Civilization. Then they went 3D, and everything got that much less clear and easy to see or move around with the cursor keys. I personally didn't think the prettiness made up for the ease of viewing,and would have preferred much less graphics and the more 'board game' look of the original.

Re: CalDAV?

CalDAV is for the calendar (if you use it). CardDAV is how your iPhone syncs it's contacts with GMail. And then there's IMAP for the emails. As I understand it, since they killed Exchange Active Sync for new users, you now have to set up 2 accounts to connect your iPhone to Google.

The GMail account set-up in the iPhone is set up to sync mail and calendars, so it may be that the Google Calendar API is already used, rather than CalDAV. You then set up the second account to sync contacts by CardDAV.

If you set your iPhone up before January this year, then it can do all 3 using EAS - and the deadline for killing that has been extended (that's how my iPad works). But if you've set up a new iPhone since (as I have) then you have to do it a different way. Messy.

Re: Destroying trust

You've got to wonder about YouTube. By all accounts they make a hefty loss on it, and they haven't managed to turn a profit with more-and-more intrusive advertising, because the bandwidth costs are so high. It also brings them into conflict with the media industry, who they'd like to buddy-up with to sell stuff through Play. Was YouTube one of the reasons they failed to get much content for Google TV?

On the other hand YouTube is one of the most visited sites on the internet, and there would be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth if it went away. Plus it may be they're closer to making a profit (or at least breaking even) than people think.

Re: Sod Reader, they've killed CalDAV!

I'm surprised by the CalDAV thing as well. Given how they were only just shouting recently about how important open standards were to them, as opposed to nasty old Microsoft.

Having just moved from Windows Phone to iPhone, it was interesting to see that GMail is also worse on iPhone without using EAS. I sort of decided then on a project to slowly move away from Google services. As happens I don't use them for calendaring anyway - I just use them for a few things that were convenient. Given how hard to use the UI has become on GMail, I think I might even dump that as my repository of marketing mail and web-sign-ups too.

I wonder how much fuss there would be if Google one day decided to dump Android? Fanciful I admit... But there's no major threat to their search/advertising monopoly, and they make a huge financial loss, so the only big gain is all that lovely location and usage data they gather from all those mobile data-upload stations handsets. Otherwise Android is a defensive move, plus the hope that they can get into content sales through the Play Store. Given the other things Google do, they're in conflict with the Media industry, as much (if not more) than partnership, which will make it hard to win in that space.

Anyway this post has come out a bit more troll-like than I intended, so I'll stop rambling, shut up and hit post.

Re: Prices start at three grand for a small server per year...

How many IT staff can you pay out of that cash? Have you included software licences? What's the data and power costs for those servers you've just bought?

The whole point about this is that you're trying to avoid the expensive infrastructure that servers require. For a small company like ours, an external provider is the only realistic way to have a server. Although we're unusual, with under 10 staff but spread over the whole of SE England.

Not that I've any idea if BT are cheap. That's more than I pay for hosted Exchange, CRM and accounts/payroll combined.

Re: Does this really sound like MySpace....?

To be fair to the Dirty Digger, Myspace was already a slow-loading, horrible mess of a site when he bought it. Not that he made it any better.

Part of the problem is that if users are allowed to fill their pages with hideous flashing graphics, auto-playing crappy songs and nasty, slow-loading widgets they will do so with enthusiasm. Like magpies with attention deficit disorder.

Re: no acer iconia w700?

I hate those styluses (styli?) for normal capacitive touchscreens. You may as well just use a carrot, or a sausage, for the all the accuracy they give you. I suppose it might be OK for sketching and doodling, but I really want handwriting recognition. That's what seems to me to be the natural way to enter text on a slate. Turning it back into a not terribly ergonomic laptop with a keyboard, or picking away with your fingers at a virtual on-screen one, seems distinctly inferior to me. I'd have thought that would also be true for the arty types - but as I have all the artistic talent of a cluster of colour-blind hedgehogs in a bag, I probably shouldn't comment.

I'm surprised how many games I've played on my iPad since I got it. Mostly I got it for web browsing, and the BBC iPlayer - for which it's great. Just got myself one of those Logitech magnetic bluetooth keyboards. They're not bad, but for me the pen is mightier than the board...

Re: no acer iconia w700?

why the thumbs down?

Citizen Kaned,

I can only assume it's either some very sad, and insecure, Android fanbois, or the frothing at the mouth Windows haters. Some of them are the same people of course.

When I've been rude about Windows or Apple I've not normally had that many downvotes. I like to think I'm fair, I'm usually quick to mention the good points, and I try not to be a troll. But recently, if I'm even mildly critical of Android, I start getting the thumbs down. And it's pretty much a minimum automatic 2 down votes for being even mildly complimentary about Windows 8 / Win Phone 8 (sometime even for just mentioning it).

I've used Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7 and like them all. Although they all have their different bad points too. Haven't used Windows 8 yet, but I've always preferred penable tablets, so long as touch is the main interface. I still get frustrated with the iPad's lack of a stylus sometimes.

Thanks for those answers. I used to have an HP hinged tablet running Vista. It was slow, and high-maintenance but I was still very pleased with it. The pen was absolutely brilliant. If Samsung aren't much cheaper than the Windows tablets then they look a very good bet. I agree the difference between a proper digitiser pen and those so called styluses you can get for capacitive screens (basically vaguely pointy sticks) is huge.