191–200 of 210 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
President Boris. Sounds fantastic. Perhaps not though, yeah?
In a lot of countries, it would be much better than "prime minister Boris". Look at the president roles in Italy and Germany, for example. Not all countries in the world are the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Double checked this and it's still correct, after a period of time a squatter can claim ownership if they can prove they've been living in the property. That's not quite the whole story. The rules around adverse possession were changed a while back so that even if someone has been using some property for a long time they can't just file a bit of paperwork and take the legal ownership away from the real owner. The rea…
In Australia, this still happens. The man is the story below, discovered a house in Sydney whose occupant had died. He changed the locks with no-ones permission and started renting the property out to other people. He did this for 20 years before filing the paperwork to take ownership. Relatives of the the decease owner were contacted, and they tried to to fight him, but he won in court fairly convincingly -- And got…
> Justice Darke said when the last owner Henry Thompson Downie died in 1947, he did not leave a will and no representative was appointed to the deceased estate.
> A tenant was living in the property at the time, and she remained there for a further 51 years until she died in April 1998.
Who was paying the property tax I wonder, and did the gov't even notice? I suppose that's the "council rates".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s true in many places beyond the UK. The US has similar laws where if you meet the requirements of ownership and nobody contests it for X years, you can claim it.
In the state I live in, the "adverse possession" has to last 17 years. One of our neighbors had put a fence about 3 feet on our side of the property line. It was falling down (he also had a swimming pool; both state & city laws required a fence around the property). My sister had a property survey done (by a registered land surveyor). After finding out the fence was on the wrong side of the property line, she had the…
Never remove the ancient boundary stone that your ancestors set up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Land title systems are really interesting. You are correct that under the deed system, proof is held by the owner through a link of subsequent deeds. Some countries still use this system. When I bought a house you could see ownership going all the way back to the establishment by the British Crown, then the provincial government, then the township, then the city, then the developer and then 5 different owners. All of…
When I bought property in Tokyo, you could see all the times the previous owners made any changes the the old (splits and mergers) as well as how many mortgages have been taken out on it. I was quite surprised at how much private info was on it, and the record of it supposedly will last til the government falls or something I guess. Will archaeologists from the future stumble upon some filing cabinet and have a good…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We've never been a democracy I’ve definitely heard it argued that the brief commonwealth between Charles I and II was the first modern democracy, where ‘modern’ means a system somewhat like current democracies rather than ‘after 1500’.
May be of interest in relation to the opaque nature of British history - The City of London’s strange history Lord Glasman on what the Romans did for the Square Mile https://www.ft.com/content/7c8f24fa-3aa5-11e4-bd08-00144feab... Alway interesting to try to read the tea leaves on the relationship between the two UK entities who run the two sovereign states - the palace and the city of London
"An ancient, semi-alien entity lodged inside the British nation state." "The last of England's rotten boroughs."
Predating Parliament and not subject to it. Kinda makes ya wonder if the entire purpose of Brexit was to resist any hint of financial regulation by the EU.
Over the years The Guardian has had a number of interesting articles about the City, such as [1].
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corpor...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US Constitution has been regularly amended since the beginning. Your claim that it would be heresy falls flat here. 2nd amendment ruined society, exactly how? The US still enjoys the largest economy and military in the world respectively. Religious and personal freedoms are codified in law. What is in ruins?
I didn't claim that amending the constitution was heresy. I claimed that removing the second amendment is heresy. And I stand by that. [edit: on re-reading, the above is not true. I meant to claim that removing the 2A was heresy. My bad] Look, this is just an opinion, but from the outside looking in, your society is frankly awful at looking after its people , and the everyone-gets-a-gun made sense a few hundred years…
The core societal question is do we still believe that?
If one believes that it isn't, then the constitution should be amended to reflect the tradeoff between safety and security the populace is willing to accept.
If one believes it is, then one must look for other ways to moderate risk and accept that any group that has power will sometimes abuse it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too. They defined a custom method combinator that squashed the diamond problem. Implementing it was literally painful for many of the people involved. Truly a killer problem.
And then in 16.8.8 they imported a completely new package from the Netherlands called 'Orange' (but they rebranded it), and marked a bunch of things as 'protected' to lock down inheritance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.
"Every operating system then, and every threat model, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be deployed longer, it is legacy tech, and should be deprecated." - Thomas Jefferson
"What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the contents of sudoers? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of sysadmins and backdoors. It is it’s natural manure." [2] Thomas Jefferson
[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/h...
[2] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tre...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a lot of countries, it would be much better than "prime minister Boris". Look at the president roles in Italy and Germany, for example. Not all countries in the world are the US.
We already have a non political head of state. I’m not sure I see any benefit in us switch to a system like Italy or Germany.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We'd struggle to fairly take it back; probably not even worth trying. And whilst I never said so specifically I presumed it apparent that I never meant just the Queen. I accept I could have been clearer (sorry). The first steps might be: - An end to the honours system (entirely - even though many 'commoners' get them now it perpetuates the class concepts) - Fair and universal application of inheritance tax to reduce…
> The taxation of assets (beyond a certain point so that people don't need to sell their home) and not just income. That’s a great way to discourage investment and capital formation and encourage emigration. There’s a reason wealth taxes are not popular in OECD countries. https://taxfoundation.org/wealth-taxes-in-the-oecd/
Well, there are two reasons: the Prisoner's Dilemma, and good old fashioned bribery (or "campaign financing" as we euphemistically call it).
Fortunately, however, the recent agreement for a global minimum corporation tax rate[0] shows that major economies can sometimes solve the coordination problem needed to avoid the "race to the bottom" that capitalists try to impose on nation states.
A modest proposal would be that the top 1% of wealth holders in the world would have to pay a 1% annual tax to their country of residence. The WTO could be tasked with determining the true wealth of any multi-millionaires who bribe national officials into under-reporting their holdings. Any country that defects from this agreement, and any multi-millionaire who hides in one of those countries, would be met with sanctions and treated like the corrupt oligarch that they are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_minimum_corporate_tax_r...