Jump to content

Recommended Posts

DJKillaQueen Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------


> India, as pointed out above, has huge problems

> with real poverty. But at the same time it is a

> country that is developing successfully.


Again I think that's debatable. The burgeoning Indian middle class loves to give that impression, but so did the British middle class in the mid-1800s, amidst grinding poverty in both countryside and town...

Jeremy Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> BrandNewGuy Wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------

> -----

> > Enriching the Indian middle class is

> > probably not useful to the poor.

>

> I thought they had tax in India too. Is this not

> the case?


Of course, but I bet they don't spend much of it on the poor - the infrastructure situation in India is so chronic that even the middle class won't get much richer until they spend serious money on it.

Jeremy Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> BrandNewGuy Wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------

> -----

> > Enriching the Indian middle class is

> > probably not useful to the poor.

>

> I thought they had tax in India too. Is this not

> the case?


As this country has shown, the gulf between rich and poor have got wider despite reforms to the taxation system since the days of Thatcher.

Beer in The Evening? Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Er, so? Opium was a widely-sought commodity in the

> 19th century. Not forgetting that its trade was

> perfectly legal, and any profit made from it.

> Should we seek indemnity from the Wright brothers'

> descendents, seeing as their ancestors' creation

> has lead to so much pollution?


Next you'll be saying that slavery wasn't wrong because it was legal at the time. Sorry I don't accept your point.

Undisputedtruth Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Beer in The Evening? Wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------

> -----

> > Er, so? Opium was a widely-sought commodity in

> the

> > 19th century. Not forgetting that its trade was

> > perfectly legal, and any profit made from it.

> > Should we seek indemnity from the Wright

> brothers'

> > descendents, seeing as their ancestors'

> creation

> > has lead to so much pollution?

>

> Next you'll be saying that slavery wasn't wrong

> because it was legal at the time. Sorry I don't

> accept your point.


No, the point is that we're no longer reponsible for that wrong

Not to mention it wasn't perfectly legal.

The Chinese authorities specifically banned us from selling it, so we killed lots of their folk, blew shit up and forced a one sided humiliating treaty on them allowing us to sell them opium and ravage their society with destructive addiction as long as we stopped killing them and blowing shit up.

I suppose you could call that technically legal, it I think a modern court might deem that coercion.

Anyway, the whole historical responsibility thing aside, surely the crux is that we generally alleviate want and poverty specifically where the government does neglect its responsibility.


I'm sure there were many BITE types in the mid 80s farting on about how it wasnt our responsibility to do anything when Ethiopia had among the highest military spend as a proportion of GDP in the world.


Technically they may well have been right but they'd have also been cunts.

Nothings different if you ask me.

El Pibe Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Anyway, the whole historical responsibility thing

> aside, surely the crux is that we generally

> alleviate want and poverty specifically where the

> government does neglect its responsibility.

>

> I'm sure there were many BITE types in the mid 80s

> farting on about how it wasnt our responsibility

> to do anything when Ethiopia had among the highest

> military spend as a proportion of GDP in the

> world.

>

> Technically they may well have been right but

> they'd have also been @#$%&.

> Nothings different if you ask me.


But aid to India today isn't equivalent to emergency relief to Ethiopia in the 80s. Aid is phenomenally complex in its effects - and appeals to people's kindness doesn't make it less complex.

I think a more cynical approach to Indian aid would be to describe it as enlightened self interest.


Sometimes we 'give' a little because we get so much more in return.


If you don't think that retaining political influence and trade relations in the second largest nation in the world is in Britain's best interest then you're a little bit dumb.


India is the UK's biggest export market outside of the EU (yes bigger than the US), with around $30 billion dollars a year. The aim is to make this $60 billion dollars a year within 3 years. India is the biggest external investor in the UK even compared with the EU.


UK aid to India is a piss in the ocean compared with this, and to be honest marketing costs at a fraction of 1% of the overall income would be celebrated by every CEO in the world.


The newspapers are simply trying to sell copies, and appealing to simplistic thickos is a pretty good way of doing this.


But small brained right wing pillocks don't get any of this. They just go 'space travellers don't need poverty reduction'. Mainly because they haven't thought it through.


There is a substantial number of Indian MPs who want British aid to India to stop. If it was just free money they wouldn't care. They care because with that cash comes influence and conditions.


If you don't understand that then go back to criticising your neighbours.

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Latest Discussions

    • OK, I have been extremely stupid. This is a long and sorry saga, so unless you are into schadenfreude,  or know about laptops and might actually be able to help, you probably need to stop reading here. I got a new laptop last May, with a 2 year guarantee from John Lewis (that was my first mistake, but the laptop met all my requirements at a very good price). I hate OneDrive, and I  had been using Carbonite for backing up files.  When I got the new laptop, the files from my old laptop which had been backed up on Carbonite were downloaded onto it. For tedious reasons originally related to problems with my old laptop, files and folders were duplicated all over the place. Sorting this out wasn't top of my priorities. In an attempt to at least keep new files,  and files edited since I bought the laptop, in one place and completely separate from all the old duplicated  files, I saved them all into folders  on the SSD. However, I didn't restart the Carbonite backup, because my intention was to sort out all the duplicate files first. About a fortnight ago, I bought an external hard drive. My intention was to copy everything on the new laptop onto it before I started deleting any of the duplicate files. I hadn't done that yet because I had to finish doing my accounts and then do my online tax return. So the copying was next on my To Do list. The inevitable happened. Out of the blue, my laptop went into complete meltdown. I was editing a spreadsheet and went into settings to turn the brightness up. I checked the brightness was ok on the spreadsheet, came out of settings, and suddenly everything went black. I did all the obvious things, then googled other possible fixes, including specific to my laptop model, but nothing worked. On starting the laptop, the Lenovo logo came up, the little white circle turned round, the red light for face recognition flashed, then zilch.  But clearly it wasn't a problem with the physical screen, as it displayed the logo. It wouldn't start in safe mode either. I thought I might either have accidentally changed some setting, or else it might be connected with a recent update  I couldn't try some of the tests suggested, eg removing RAM, because anything involving physically unscrewing my laptop would invalidate the guarantee  I am a member of Which Tech, so I contacted them. Obviously their hands were rather tied as they couldn't connect remotely to the laptop as there was no display. They said I couldn't have clicked on some other setting by mistake, as the display section only related to the display. They said they thought it was probably an issue with either the operating system or the mother board, or a component of them. They said it should be possible to identify the fault without losing my data. Given the involvement of John Lewis, I said I thought this was unlikely, as they had once told me to do an unnecessary factory reset on my old laptop and told me this wouldn't lose my data, which I had queried at the time,  and had to pay me compensation. So at this point I phoned John Lewis, to be told a repair would take "up to 28 working days" and no they wouldn't supply a replacement laptop during that time. I decided to take the laptop to John Lewis rather than have it collected, so their tech people could look at it first. So then the JL tech person said I must have clicked on  Bitlocker by mistake and locked myself out out of the laptop. I thought this was highly unlikely. Anyway, pursuing this line of thought did not help, and she was still unable to get into it by putting in the Bitlocker code. So then we had the data saving conversation. She said the company the laptop would go to was approved by Lenovo. She said they would do a factory reset first regardless. I said could they not try to identify the fault first. She said no. I said could I not request that they did. She said no. She said I could pay £150 for data retrieval, which could be done first. She said it would require removing the hard drive. She said if anybody else did this it would invalidate the guarantee. So. I have brought the laptop home to think things over. But I'm not willing to pay £150,  because the important files I can reconstruct by other means, and I have hard copies of most of them, it's just a time consuming pain. I have contacted Carbonite to see if they have any way of backing up the non backed up data even though I can't get into the laptop. If you have managed to reach the end of this post, congratulations 🤣 and do you have any bright ideas? I have typed all this on my mobile. It has taken a very very long time 🤣
    • I thought I saw some TW workmen there when it first happened last weekend but maybe it's too big for them to fix and they can't switch the mains off there without shutting all the businesses down.
    • You copy the address in the URL and then paste here  
    • Off the top of my head, there are notice boards in Sainsbury's and the library where small businesses can advertise, not to overlook the internet and forums such as this which these days is where very many go to first for small business information. I find it strange that you are mounting this crusade to allow small businesses the right to advertise in the Community noticeboards when there are so many alternatives these days. As I said before, the Community noticeboards are too small to accommodate commercial notices and would probably overwhelm and obscure the NFP notices. For info, during the week there is just as broad a mix passing by the NXR boards as the one by the station
Home
Events
Sign In

Sign In



Or sign in with one of these services

Search
×
    Search In
×
×
  • Create New...