jnty

You're misunderstanding my point. Transport subsidy funded from current income is a good idea. Spending your entire capital infrastructure budget on making it free for a few years is not. The 'lingering benefits' don't linger long if you then have to hike fares massively because you've got a big loan to repay as a result with no new assets you can exploit to service it.

It's for this reason that saying 'we could spend the money on making buses free for a N years' is meaningless. It would be more sensible to say 'we should spend the £Nbn we spend on maintaining the motorway network on free buses' because those types of spending are equivalent.

The non-schematic map is quite out of date given that the Borders Line to Galashiels and Tweedbank opened five years ago.

edit: oh, it says 2013

But it would only decrease traffic and pollution for the duration of the spend. Once it's over, those benefits stop and there is nothing left beyond the lingering effects of the intervention.

It's actually worse than that, because you've essentially taken out an unsecured loan of £100bn and spent it on something which neither increases ongoing tax revenue or asset value, so you now have to cut other spending to pay it off. Which is why governments and businesses separate capital expenditure (building things) from current expenditure (doing things) very carefully.

Nobody who says we can get 'improved rail' for the cost of HS2 had ever explained how we get that in the vicinity of London without something which looks extremely similar to HS2. We have solid proposals for 'improving rail' from the rail industry, and HS2 is the bedrock of it all. Where's the silver bullet hiding?

And after subsidising bus travel for 20 years we are left with nothing - other than, probably, an expectation to fund for the next 20 years too.

After HS2 is built we have an extrememly valuable asset which will generate returns for years to come.

Capital and current spending are very different, and it's quite unhelpful to compare the two.

Just wait until they see the Windows save symbol!

Minecraft was on the cusp of that change, and it's pretty telling how much of a hellscape the code was for years.

This was the first thing I thought of when I read this question. So often I find myself and people around me basically assuming that the folks on the other side of the phone are idiots. Well, chances are they're thinking the same. You only need 15 minutes to disagree, but it takes much more time and effort to humbly understand a stranger's worldview and motivations. However, once you do, you're much more likely to deliver something you're both happy with at the end.

I think this is a significant part of the value of face-to-face meetings - it's much easier to 'get' someone when you observe and speak to them and their colleagues. At the very least, the connection you get makes it harder to subconsciously write them off as an idiot!

Of course, occasionally you come across people who really are very unsuited for the task at hand and end up talking total rubbish. But it's still worth taking the time to be sure - it's probably not as obvious to you as it is to other people, and you'll find yourself having to justify your assessment more often than you expect, particularly to decision-makers.

The definition of niche is literally "appeals to a small, specialized section of the population" so, er, yes.

The price of a 32in TV has presumably gone down though right? And the same would surely be true of a 29in TV if you could find one. The fact that the market has moved on and you have to tweak your basket of goods is a measurement quirk, not a definition issue.

It's not very different to finding out you can buy a 12-pack for as much as a 6-pack used to cost. Also deflation.

I don't understand how the situation above is a 'quirk' and not a straightforward example of deflation. The price of a typical TV - now represented in the basket of goods as a 32in TV - has fallen.

The fact that lower prices might lead people to buy larger TVs is no more surprising than a fall in the price of meat leading people to buy more steak.

I get this for vegetables, but surely the 'strategy' for a lot of fruit is that they are tasty when ripe and get eaten so that the seed is spread?

As the article says, many metros (including the one in the article) combine automation with drivers. You only need to pay for the bit of automation that actually increases frequency and use the driver for all the fiddly bits.

So all jobs you personally dislike should be abolished?