The Ultimate Guide to Gambling Tax Rates Around the World

I recently wrote this up for my friends who asked me how I do what I do. I figured I'd share it here. This is freely available to anyone who wants it, though please credit me if you simply copy/paste. Nothing here is novel, and can be done by anyone. I am not a financial professional, and the example given below is only Abbvie because I forgot that Abbott Labs was alphabetically the first in the S&P 500 when picking an example.

First, let’s come right out and say that if you do not have the time to do this, or do not find it enjoyable, just buy low-cost index funds that track either the total market or the S&P 500.
Second, let’s make an important distinction:
Investing – This is the act of purchasing assets for less than their intrinsic value. This PDF will focus on how to determine the intrinsic value of an asset that produces income. Note that for most assets, this is simply how much money you can extract from the asset over the period of time that you hold it for. There’s no other value than money in investing. Causes and emotions are what philanthropy is for.
Speculating – This is, at its core, the act of taking supply of an asset from the present to the future (by hoarding it). If there is more demand, lower supply, or both, this pays the speculator to take the asset from a period of low value to one of high value. It is not gambling, but is very difficult to do, since it entails taking on timing risk. It is not illegal, immoral, or impossible, but I have no special insight into it. I’ll leave it there.
Gambling – This looks a lot like speculation, but without any particular reason to believe the asset will be more valuable in the future. Speculators at least estimate the value of an asset to investors, as they are ultimately the end market for an asset. Do not gamble. Full stop.
Determining the intrinsic value of an asset
The value of an asset is simply the present value of all future income that asset can provide you. Since a dollar in five years is naturally less valuable than a dollar today, you have to discount future income against the opportunity cost of forgoing the dollars you invest today. When we get to the Present Value equation, this is represented by interest. It can also be thought of as the opportunity cost of investing in the asset instead of some other asset or simply consuming the dollars instead.
Here’s the actual math. Note that it’s not super hard, and while I will explain it, there are dozens of free websites that will quickly let you calculate this. The key phrase to Google would be “present value of a growing annuity calculator.”
PV = (C / i - G) * {1 – [(1 + G)/(1 + i)]^n}
PV = present value
C = cash flow per period
n = number of payments
i = interest rate
G = growth rate
The value for PV is your estimation of what the asset is worth today. If this ends up far higher than the market price, you are probably purchasing dollars for quarters. Avoid edge cases, as you are guessing about both the interest and growth rate.
C is the cash flow per period. If you have a high degree of confidence in the culture of the company and it has a long history of being good stewards of retained earnings, you can use the earnings per share (EPS). I usually use the dividend. It is impossible to fake or financially engineer a dividend, and requires less looking through financial documents to make sure it’s what it appears to be. But for, say, Apple or Microsoft or Chevron, feel free to use the EPS.
The number of payments is how many payments you expect while holding the asset. Dividends in American companies are typically quarterly (though some pay monthly or every six months, so check on that), so every multiple of four would represent one year if you choose to do it that way. If n = 16, then you’re expecting to hold the asset for 4 years. You can also put in a year’s worth of dividends and keep n = years rather than quarters.
I typically do n = 30, since 30 years is both a long time horizon that is realistic, and coincides when I will hit “retirement age.” You will have to decide how far ahead you’re planning. For most people, they are net purchasers of investments while working and net sellers while retired, so keep that in mind. Note that using years instead of quarters will lessen the amount of compounding, and will provide some cushion in case you’re wrong.
Interest is one of the two variables you have to guess at. Typically, one would put what you expect the actual long-run interest rate to average for this investment. Unfortunately, this is really difficult. Instead, I use a rate that represents my opportunity cost. There are any number of relatively safe ways to get a 5% yield on money invested, so I generally use i = 5% to represent that this asset has to perform better than a utility or telecom or real estate investment trust. Feel free to use what you feel is most appropriate for you. A higher interest rate will lower the value of the asset, so high-balling this number will provide some cushion in case you’re wrong.
The second variable you have to guess at is the growth rate. If you’re looking at the dividend, you want to know how fast to expect it to grow over time. If you’re using the EPS for C, then you want to see how quickly the total earnings are growing per share. This is extremely difficult to predict. I recommend taking the 5-year growth rate and halving it. Dividends will also be more predictable here, as most companies pay out far less than they make, which means even if EPS grows slowly, the dividend can still grow quickly for many years after a boom is over for the company. Note that lowering your estimate for G will lower the value of the asset, so low-balling this number will provide some cushion in case you’re wrong.
OK, so let’s walk through an example. I’ll use Abbvie, a biotech/pharmaceutical company. It has a quarterly dividend for the coming year of $1.30/share. Its dividend has an 18.5% growth rate over the last 5 years, and has grown it for the last 7 (it’s only been around for 8 years).
I assumed a growth rate (G) of 7%. I used $5.20 as the starting dividend this coming year and used years for my n = 30. As always, I used i = 5%.
This gave me an estimated present value of 1 share of Abbvie at $197.94. As of writing this, Abbvie shares are trading on the market at $103.43. This looks like a screaming buy, but first let’s look at why I have a high degree of confidence.
Note how the interest was higher than the going rate – I used my “low-risk alternative” as an opportunity cost. Abbvie has an extremely high rate of growth for its dividend, so I took less than half of its current rate. I also calculated annually rather than quarterly, which reduces the impact of high rates of growth. That’s three places in the equation where I consciously lowered the estimated value of a share of Abbvie, and it still came out as a strong buy – spending less about 50c for a dollar!
I do this because even if I’m wrong in some or all of my predictions, I now have quite a bit of room to be wrong and still make money. It’s like how you don’t walk next to a steep cliff, right? You should know how to walk where you want to, but there’s always the small chance something could cause you to slip or put a foot wrong. But if your plan is always to be 5 feet away from the edge of the cliff, the odds are that you’ll not go over the edge even if you fall down.
Many people feel this is over cautious. But let my portfolio speak for itself. I’ve beaten the S&P 500 index fund every year except one since 2008. My brokerage only keeps digital records back to Dec 2015, but the S&P 500 returned 101% since then – with dividends reinvested. My own portfolio has returned 256%.
So caution is still very high reward. In fact, if you just don’t lose, you’ll do better than the vast majority of professional money managers (about 85% of whom cannot even match the index funds).
Due diligence still has to occur
Now, we can’t just go straight out and buy Abbvie – though it’s a high profile company that receives lots of investor and regulator scrutiny so it’s less likely to have a landmine than most. Just to make sure, you’ll want to do the following before buying shares in this company:
-Check the debt load. If the debt is very high, has very high interest rates, or has a lot of it maturing very soon, then this is a yellow flag. It doesn’t mean don’t buy, but make sure you understand the structure of the company’s debt and make sure it won’t impair the company’s earnings going forward. This information is found on the balance sheet. Abbvie has $97.287 billion in long-term liabilities such as debt, pension liability, and deferred taxes. That’s a lot compared to their assets, but they also are owed some money, so it nets out about $90 billion.
-What’s the book value? Book value is fairly low at $8.65/share. This is pretty much the assets minus the liabilities. Abbvie is in a knowledge industry, however, so you shouldn’t expect their main assets to be physical capital that can be sold. It’s mostly organizational or human capital from their workforce, so this isn’t worrying. If Abbvie was, say, a retailer with stores and land and inventory, you’d want this to be much, much higher for the share price. There’s no easy way to judge this one, unfortunately, but it’s good to look it up and you’ll eventually get a feel for it. No red flags here.
-What are the catastrophic risks that even you or I could think of? For a company in the pharmaceutical space, the obvious answer is regulatory and political risk. Regulatory risk is just want it sounds like – more regulation which can be either costly to comply with or lower profits. This does have an upside, which is that it makes it harder for new competitors to enter a market, so I tend to be rather sanguine about regulatory risk. Political risk is much more severe. This is when politicians decide to either confiscate a company, target it specifically rather than the industry it’s in, or other ways in which the government is involved with taking rather than regulating. In Anglo countries (US/UK/Canada/Australia), the rule of law is typically strong enough that this doesn’t happen much, as there is usually some kind of due process. Places like China, Argentina, Russia, and the EU are much more likely to nationalize or otherwise capriciously penalize a company due to the prevailing political winds. Abbvie has a global footprint, but that also means it’s diversified against such risk. It’s headquartered in the US, so it’s unlikely someone will simply take the entire company.
-Payout ratio? Abbvie has a fairly high payout ratio (80% for the last completed fiscal year of 2019), as they have been aggressively growing the dividend. That’s another good reason to input a much lower G than the last few years. That being said, Abbvie has been around for 8 years (it was spun off of Abbott Labs) and has grown its dividend for the last 7 years and has announced it will this coming year as well. The payout ratio is pretty high, but not worrisome. It suggests a fairly mature company that’s now returning cash to shareholders. I’d say this is not nothing, but less than a yellow flag for me. Any company with 95%+ payout ratio is much more vulnerable to a dividend cut.
-Credit rating? S&P gives Abbvie a BBB+ grade for its unsecured debt. This is a slight downgrade because their balance sheet is currently digesting a big acquisition from early 2020 (Allergan). Moody’s gives it a Baa2 rating for unsecured debt. These are both good, solid, investment-grade credit ratings (if you were buying the bonds of Abbvie). This looks great.
-Does it need a genius? Some companies run on all cylinders because they have a genius at the helm – often a founder. But what you want is a company any dummy can run, because sooner or later any dummy will. Don’t plan to invest long-term in companies that require skilled management. Abbvie is fairly diversified and has an OK pipeline of research. They also can buy little biotech companies that invent something but can’t navigate the regulations to bring it to market. So pondering giants are actually a good thing. Means they’re hard to break.
So, given that there was nothing obviously treacherous in our basic due diligence, and the extreme discount at which our example is selling for, this would be one you might want to buy! This is what I do for all the companies I invest in.
Notice that there is no story, no excitement, no narrative, no counting on good or bad management. Emotion has no place in investing. You also will notice that we took every opportunity to reduce the risk of losing your capital by always sandbagging the estimated value of the company. You never want to pick up nickels in front of a steamroller. You want the investment to be so obvious it hits you in the face like a baseball bat. If you’re ever on the fence, don’t do it. You don’t have to hit home runs – just don’t strike out.
You can be even more conservative in your estimates than I am. If, for instance, you used 5% growth rate for Abbvie’s dividend, you’d still get a present value of $148.57/share vs the current market price of $103.43. Similarly, you could use a higher interest rate, which would also lower the estimated present value.
You may have to do this calculation with more companies to find one to buy, but even in a very expensive market like today’s, there is always an opportunity. You don’t even have to look at little companies. There’s around 500 companies in the S&P – just start with “A” and work your way through all of them.
A quick note about further reading: I very strongly urge most people to actually read as little as possible on this subject once they get the basics. That’s not because there’s not more to learn, but because I would sadly say the majority of what I see and hear is actively bad advice. But if you do want to keep up with financial news and books and chat boards, the best thing to do is find out what the historical returns of the person giving advice are.
Since WWII, the long-run return on the S&P 500 has generally been just a bit shy of 10% per year. If someone can’t beat that, year-in-and-year-out, then their advice is worthless. As in, you don’t want to accidentally absorb it. This is, unfortunately, true for most professionals. Over the last 15 years, 92.2% of actively managed funds have underperformed a simple S&P 500 index fund (and they charge you fees for the privilege). Beware anyone selling something. The advice here is given freely
That’s why I made a point of mentioning that I have and regularly outperform the standard fund almost every year. Granted, I don’t have many of the regulatory restrictions a public fund would have, but it shows how useful the advice I’m giving here is. You don’t need anything fancy. You don’t need anything high risk. I’ve done this through two deep recessions and the longest bull market in history.
If you want to learn more about investing in general and where I learned how to do this, you can read Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. It was written in the 1930s, so much of the technical information is out of date. Skip over that and just read it for the concepts.
Even easier reading is to go online to Berkshire Hathaway’s website and pull Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s annual letter to shareholders. Almost all of them have something useful in them and don’t make you do equations.
I am available for questions in the comments

South Africa part 3: Cecil Rhodes

To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far. -- Cecil Rhodes, Last Will and Testament

This is the 3rd post in a series on South Africa and Apartheid and so far in the first two neither Apartheid nor South Africa even exists. But we are to the mid climax. In first part we discussed how our groups of players: Afrikaners, British, Xhosa, Zulu, minor tribes, other ethnicities got to what would become South Africa. In the second part we discussed how the Zulus and Xhosa knocked themselves out of the game leaving the British and Afrikaners as the main players standing for who got rule what would become South Africa. We also discussed how the British policy was non-viable. This part is going to discuss how the British changed course and consequently won control. We are also going to get to the genesis of the Western Left's hatred of the Afrikaners and the genesis of Apartheid, We'll end on the creation of the Union of South Africa which while not the Republic of South Africa will allow me to stop talking about "Southern Africa", "territory that will become South Africa".... But unfortunately you will have to sit through this one more post where South Africa doesn't exist yet.
Cecil Rhodes was born in 1853 the sickly asthmatic 5th son of a not particularly notable clergyman. He'd remain sickly his entire life dying in 1902 at the age of 48 from the sorts of deterioration of the heart and lung one wouldn't expect to see until a man was at least well into their 90s. In that short span he would: become one of the richest men in the world; found several countries; change the entire economic structure of the territories that would become: South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe; found 2 major corporations: the British South Africa Company and De Beers; rethink British imperialism inventing what would become the British Commonwealth; becoming one of the defining figures and great visionaries of the Victorian Age; trigger the 2nd Boer War; demonstrate the strategy changing nature of the machine gun decades before World War 1; be the only genuinely important Prime Minister of the Cape Colony; invent the concept of corporate armies; play a large role in saving the South African wine industry and most importantly be the only individual getting his own post in this series. :) Rhodes was sent to South Africa at the age of 17 so that the British weather didn't kill him. Rather than doing the normal thing and spending the money (amounting to a decade or less of a comfortable middle class salary, but no great fortune) on living with some gambling and girls thrown in he decided to head to the newly discovered diamond mines in Kimberly and started buying up small diamond mining operations leveraging each mine's output and outside financing to buy the next. Later he partnered with leading financing and trading firms so by 1888 had what amounted to monopoly control of diamond industry turning De Beers into the diamond powerhouse it remains to this day though the last pieces wouldn't fall into place until 1890. He by the 1880s De Beers was throwing off enough excess profits that he could pay investors and continue expending De Beers while being able to found the predecessor to the British South Africa Company operating much further into the interior opening up Bechuanaland and Rhodesia as colonies using his own profits to fund the administrative expenses much as the East India Company had done a century earlier.
Rhodes believed that British policy wasn't viable because it was petty. A vibrant healthy economy throws off an enormous amount of tax revenue. Petty colonialism, like the kind the British were engaging in would never generate much profit because of its very short term nature. Britain should make money by investing in the local economy, spend some on upkeep, reinvesting most of the profits and just skim a little of a forever growing payout. What Britain had tried to do with the American colonies encouraging economic development was the right approach. The problem was London had been shortsighted and selfish turning the local administrators against them. The independence of the USA wasn't a strategic failure it was the result of poor tactical implementation. The problem the British were facing in Southern Africa was similar and since the policies had been similar the results would be as well. The Afrikaners had no reason to be loyal to a Britain which had spent almost a century making very clear that it had no interest in their welfare or society beyond some ports which were frankly not nearly so important since Suez had opened. Rhodes changed policy to have Britain stop acting like a colonizing power and start acting like the domestic government of South Africa as much as possible .Outlining his changes to colonial governing policy:

Colonial financing -- utilize profits from business ventures fund army. Rhodes' companies were good examples of this the British charter and the backing of British troops allowed him to make excess profits which allowed him to incur expenses which the previous skinflint administration could never have tolerated. For example British colonial bonds generated an average return of 4.7%. Investments in independent American bonds generated an average return of only 2.9%. The difference was not being taken into account when the Colonial Office calculated their return on investment which to Rhodes' mind was simply lousy accounting.
Long term investment -- In general rewire the metrics used at the London Colonial Office to focus on long term investment not short term profits.
Demographics -- The British were the world's first people. Physically populate as much of the world as possible. Assimilate other people's into the British way of life. In South Africa in particular he intended to win the hearts and minds of the Boer.
Stability -- The previous administration had focused on stability because instability created upheavals that increased administrative costs. For too long British colonial policy was to tolerate and coexist with local culture. To create a profitable economy agricultural efficiencies are going to need to be introduced. That means 90% of the natives are going to freed up to work in a manufacturing and processing workforce. It also means the agricultural tribal traditional culture is going to be completely destroyed. Instability not stability should be policy. Seek to replace local culture with British culture to enhance the potential for economic growth.
Glory to British not England -- English colonies exist for glory of England. British colonies self exist. England's glory is that is the Birthplace of the 1st people not how much of the world remains completely non-British while in some vague unimportant sense recognizing Victoria as their Queen.
Representation -- As long as colonial governments respond to a English democracy they will be unrepresentative of their people. Create a democratic institution which provides representation for all British people in a British Parliament. There should be an English parliament for England. Invite the United States to join this new institution. "Inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity" (NB: this is essentially the British Commonwealth, though of course the USA was not invited)
Devastating defeat of enemies -- Colonial policy was designed to solve conflict cheaply. Small military victories do not undermine the hostile's economy nor their society and thus don't accomplish much. They simply delay and prolonging the problem created by the enemy allowing the enemy to choose points in time to achieve advantage. Avoid costly wars certainly but when war is needed seek to inflict devastating defeat so the subject people realize their inferiority. This realization facilities undermining their institutions and thus during the peace their way of life easily becomes more British. Further a willingness to war like this makes challenging Britain very costly and risky for potential enemies and thus wars will be far less frequent. The financial people are correct that the aggregate cost of inflicting devastating defeats infrequently is higher than more frequent small wars but the benefits are far greater. War carried out towards devastating defeat becomes a form of investment not a pure non-productive expense.
Scope -- The British were far to unambitious in their aims. The goal of British colonialism should be "all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise". The scope was, "the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire"

map of Cecil Rhodes' proposed British Empire
You'll notice that all of Africa was in the map. Rhodes was of the opinion that Africa was incredibly rich in minerals and peoples. But it wasn't exploitable for profit because of a lack of transportation infrastructure. Rhodes was pushing to start fixing this by creating a full African north-south railway connecting "Cairo to the Cape". Rhodes' BSAC conquests were designed to drive north while he used his political influence to push the Egyptian conquest further south into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and then a business similar to BSAC run by Sir William Mackinnon to push into Uganda.
For the northward push (primarily in what today is Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana) Rhodes was directly implementing his policy using a private army funded from the British South Africa Company. The Ndebele and Shona (Zulu tribes) were handled easily by the devastating defeat principle. Rhodes' forces demonstrated how effectively Maxims (a primitive form of machine gun) and barbed wire worked against simple rifles, spears and long shields achieving kill ratios never before seen in the history of warfare. As an aside these battles against the Zulus would also be used by those military theorists and historians who correctly anticipated in the later 1890s through 1910s how devastating a war between the great powers would be using these weapons against each other. Rhodes through BSAC had managed to push north of Lake Mweru and to the Northern tip of Lake Nyasa. Which almost connected with Sudan were it not for German East Africa (Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania) in the middle. In theory an alternative route through the Belgian Congo would also work but the gold mines in Tanzania kept Rhodes focused on taking German East Africa. Further Rhodes met his match in ruthlessness when it came to the Belgians. When Rhodes' negotiating agent sought a development contract for mineral-rich Katanga (in Congo) the native ruler Msiri refused. King Leopold II of Belgium obtained the same concession by having his agent signing it to Belgium himself over Msiri's dead body in the name of the "Congo Free State".
At the same time Rhodes worked with the Colonial office and in 1890 British issued the "1890 British Ultimatum" to Portugal. This ultimatum by the British government forced the retreat of Portuguese military forces from areas which had been claimed by Portugal on the basis of historical discovery and recent exploration, but which the United Kingdom claimed on the basis of effective occupation. Portugal had attempted to claim a large area of land between its colonies of Mozambique and Angola including most of present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia and a large part of Malawi, which had been included in Portugal's "Rose-coloured Map". This ultimatum violated the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373 which to that point had been the longest standing peace treaty in history.

Who owned what by the early 1900s
Take a look at the map above and imagine the British controlling the north-south line connecting to a British/Portuguese line running east-west in the south and a joint French/British/Italian line running east-west in the north. From there local government and companies could construct smaller feeder lines creating a modern rail system. Hopefully and you start to see how Rhodes intended to start developing the transpiration infrastructure needed to create a strong African economy.
All this was going to be for naught though if Southern Africa ended up as a Boer state hostile to British interests on the model ZAR (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, Transvaal Republic). So Rhodes decided to run for Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and solve the problems of British strategy explicated in part 2. The primary problem the Boer had with British government is their divide and conquer approach. The British tilted to whomever was losing (a standard British policy they would also follow in Palestine) which for decades meant treating the Boer and native Africans as both being subject peoples while favoring the native Africans against the Boer. In Rhodes mind you could not expect to get loyalty from people you were obvious disfavoring. The British were the ones turning the Boer into enemies.
So in 1892 Rhodes instituted the Franchise and Ballot Act. This was seen as a compromise between factions in the Colonial Office and the traditions in the Cape Colony for a broad democracy (anyone with £25 in property could vote) and Orange and ZAR's (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, Transvaal Republic) more exclusive democracy. Rhodes raised the amount of property to £75, an amount specifically chosen to disempower many of the native Africans while allowing many Boers to vote. With a Boer and British based democracy locked in the Cape Colony's democratic powers could be strengthened, creating more self rule and making the involvement of the London Colonial Office less obvious. This concept of using a not explicitly racial criteria while instituting laws with racist intent is very modern.
Various Liberals in the London Colonial Office especially missionaries disagreed strongly with Rhode's policies. They had been the ones advocating for the enlightened colonialism that was British policy. Missionaries in particular saw their role as: combating godlessness, superstition and backwardness. In particular encourage better use of land; encourage paycheck work; become trusted advisor to tribal leaders. The slogan "Bring the 3Cs into Africa" referred to Commerce, Christianity and Civilization. To their mind Rhodes' vision of British Imperialism was straight up military tyranny. If followed he would make England no different than a modern day Genghis Khan, creating a empire loathed by a vast expanse of subject peoples who would unite against it from all directions. Instead interfering minimally and being seen as an ally while slowly educated the elite in British custom and religion would cause a gradual consensual change that would build British alliances that would last centuries. Plus such an approach would fulfill the Lord's Great Commission (term for Jesus' command to convert the entire world to Christianity) in a way that honored God rather than shamed him. One need only look at how the Spanish, Portuguese and Balkans had thrown off Islam after centuries to see how ineffective military tyranny was at long term conversions that didn't require force. So in their mind: No the London Office should stand by its traditional values of: monopoly companies and plantations run in (unequal) partnership with indigenous elite. free trade, free (and indeed forced) migration, infrastructural investment, balanced budgets, sound money, the rule of law and incorrupt administration. As far as their Boer, in their mind the Boer were the primary impediment to enlighten British rule in South Africa, being Christians they were obligated to agree with the missionaries on the vision of the White Man's Burden and Enlightened Empire. Rather than making concession to the Boer they needed to be crushed to demonstrate the moral difference between the Boer and the British. With Rhodes' change in policy tilting towards rather than away from the Boer the Western Left came to truly hate the Boer in 1890s. Since the point of this series is the analogy I'll add that I wrote two posts about more or less the same groups of Liberal Christians turning against Israel again having to do with Israeli/Jews discrediting Liberal Western values and thus interfering with the Great Commission: WCC churches and Quakers.
Rhodes in debates before and at the time considered this Liberal Empire stuff to be simply aspirational. Without economic interference there wasn't enough money to fund anything like what the Liberals proposed. He'd point to facts like that after a century of such rules in India they had increased the secondary schooling 7x to a whopping 2% while England with not nearly as many well funded missionary organizations was over 16%.
Rhodes hoped to unify all of Southern Africa around this compromise approach to the franchise. ZAR however rejected this compromise. By the mid 1990s approximately 1/3rd of their white population were British (Anglicans). ZAR had every intent of maintaining religious based voting criteria (i.e. citizenship in ZAR was only open to people who were members of several Dutch Reformed Churches, see part 2). Obviously for Rhodes a situation where British people were the disempowered minority was intolerable. Additionally the ZAR were maintaining an anti-Cape Colony / anti-British / anti-Rhodes trade policy. It was becoming increasingly clear there would need to be regime change. So in 1895 Rhodes organized an attempted coup d'état now called the "Jameson Raid" (yes the same Jameson who went on to be Prime Minister 1904-8 of the Cape Colony after the 2nd Boer War). The Afrikaners were more astute than natives had been caught wind of the early organization and waited until the forces were committed trapping hundreds of Rhode's people creating a great embarrassment.
Its at this point that the Boer made by far the greatest mistake of their history as a people. The 4 years between 1895-9 were when they made the choices that led to their ruin. The British were really embarrassed. A colonial governor who had a crown chartered corporation had been caught red handed engaging in a serious act of war against another sovereign state with no approval from Parliament. The Colonial Office admitted as much and forced Rhodes out of office in 1896. The Afrikaners had real negotiating leverage to work out a deal. It obviously would be extremely important that the next leader of the Cape be friendly. But they didn't decide to negotiate. Instead they started flirting with the Germans, while not actually signing a formal alliance with Germany that at least had the potential to provide them real protection. The flirtation however, turned a nasty incident into a serious threat to all British interests in Southern Africa forcing a British response. In Britain an alliance of Jingoists (populist military hawks) angry about the humiliation of 1st Boer War, Conservative Imperialists who wanted to end Boer independence especially in the ZAR (the 3 core values for Conservatives at the time were: Union with Ireland, the Empire and the superiority of the British race), Liberal Imperialists who supported Rhodes' vision and Missionaries who hated the Boer formed pushing for a war. Seeing this alliance form against them the Afrikaners did nothing to avert the danger. Rather they made a mistake many 2nd tier powers do when it comes to 1st tier powers. The Afrikaners confused the light force and weak will the 1st tier power is willing to spend on them with the amount of force the 1st tier power is capable of employing if it so chooses. Having beaten the British handily in the 1st Boer War when they were fighting the C-team (as I called in part 2) the Afrikaners grossly underestimated what they would face against a British army that had a political mandate for victory, what Britain's A-team would look like. Preparing for something slightly worse than the 1st Boer War the Boer began a serious arms buying program in 1897. ZAR also got more belligerent in their rhetoric which led to a formal alliance with the Orange State and Boer guerilla groups that could support the war effort in the Cape. The Boer had about 63k troops including some foreign troops. .
The British were determined not to lose the 2nd Boer War. This was going to be the British-A team. By the second phase of the war between British soldiers, soldiers from other colonies and local Africans providing auxiliary Boer were facing a 500-600k man army. Nor was the command third or even second rate as it had been in the 1st Boer War. For example, the top military command would be Herbert Kitchener who was fresh from the victorious Anglo-Egyptian invasion of Sudan. Kitchener after the 2nd Boer War would go on to be the Commander-in-Chief for the armies in India and a decade after that the UK's Secretary of State for War during World War 1. He's this guy:

Kitchener famous 1914 recruiting poster
The cost to maintain that army would be £60m / year far more than Britain could ever pull out of Southern Africa (GDP and inflation adjusted the Boer War would cost the UK about $250b). The first phase of the war was a Boer offensive while the British were still deploying troops in October–December 1899. Once the British were done they conquered all pockets of resistance in the Cape and Orange as well as essentially the entire ZAR territory January to September 1900. The Afrikaners decided to fight when surrender was the better option. Leading to a guerrilla war between September 1900 and May 1902.
The British simply could not afford to keep an army of that size in the field for years dealing with guerilla tactics until the Boer admitted they were beat. Facing time pressure the British felt they had no choice but to come down hard. The British cut the guerilla war short by instituting a scorched earth policy against areas giving support to guerillas in the ZAR (most of the ZAR). ZAR men were mostly in the militias. Scorched earth destroyed the food supply in the ZAR so the British threw the women and children in concentration camps. The army hadn't prepped for needing to support massive numbers of civilians so malnutrition and disease were rampant in the concentration camps. This disease and malnutrition resulting in a camp death rate of approximately 30% annually. A policy amounting to genocide. Pro Boer forces in the UK generated widespread opposition to the camps so the military response was to not confine woman and children and instead leave civilians on the now barren earth to die of starvation and exposure. Actual POWs were deported to Bermuda and India preventing the Boer from standing any chance of liberating them. African tribes that had lost territory to the Boer began moving in. While both sides had agreed not to arm natives or recruit tribes. But the British weren't going to fight for the Boer if tribes decided to take advantage of their defeat. The Boer were quickly losing everything they were fighting for: freedom, their lands, their family, the self dependence and surrendered rather than have their population geocoded to oblivion, being left with no economy and whatever lands they managed to hold being assaulted on all sides by natives who would take it from them.
The Boer society that emerged from the surrender did not have separatist attitude. Destitute Boers now willing to work in the minds and alongside black Africans swelled the ranks of the unskilled urban poor competing with the "uitlanders" in the mines. The new economy was unambiguously focused on gold causing mine production to swell enriching the British interests. The Afrikaners were both physically and psychologically crushed, and wouldn't be causing any more problems for decades.
In the UK the war came to be seen as excessive especially as the financial cost of the war sunk in. The Conservatives' suffered a spectacular defeat in 1906 driving the Conservative Prime Minister at the time (12 July 1902 – 4 December 1905) Arthur Balfour from office. He comes up rather regularly on this sub in his later role as Foreign Minister. As the Boer are no longer resisting the British Empire the shift towards more pro-Boer policies from England continues. In 1909 the British Parliament dissolves the British colonies of: Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony, and Transvaal and combines them into a Federal Union of South Africa. This makes South Africa into a Dominion (essentially Australia's status at the time). Jan Smuts (an Afrikaner) resurrects Rhodes' idea of a Common Wealth and the British embrace it.
And so we conclude part 3 our story of how the British eventually won and South Africa came to exist. How the Western Left started to hate the Boer, a hatred they would resurrect later. And how the first steps towards apartheid were taken. Whew that was longer than I intended!

Wonderful source free online: Speeches Cecil Rhodes
Cecil Rhodes' obituary

Unleashed pt. 45

Some words from u/eruwenn and I. Enjoy?
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Chae’Sol stood at the centre of a large command deck, meticulously peeling the protective film from his new captain’s chair. The sensation of the slow but steady yielding of the film, the sweeping line following the contours of the seat in flowing curves; it was incredibly satisfying. Finally, with one last gentle pull, the last of his chair was uncovered and he stood back to admire his throne. Aside from the freshness of the seating itself, there were shiny new holo displays, touch sensors, and comms relays that were within easy reach of his seated fingertips. This ship would be the jewel in any fleet, a prototype Dreadnought made by the infamous Bardul of Shi’an. The Gowe Military faction had run into financial problems, and it had been left unpaid and unclaimed. What sorcery Kadir had used to find it, and purchase it, he did not know.
His comms unit beeped and Danyd’s voice came through. “Chae’S-” -He grumbled incoherently- “Captain, we’re ready to get underway.”
The Niham turned and sat back on his pristine chair, swinging his long legs over the armrest. “That was quick, Chief Engineer Ef’Yto”
Danyd grunted at the use of his title. “Aye, these Awakened are efficient bastards.” The Satryn looked around at the enormous engineering bay. The entirety of the Porkchop Express could comfortably sit inside, and two of them could likely squeeze in. “Plus, this thing has never been used; feels weird not having anything to work on. It’s state of the art, and I’m having to read the manuals on half the new systems.”
Chae’Sol laughed, looking around at the Awakened as they were preparing their workstations. “Yeah, this command deck is a little intimidating. Even the Niham Armada didn’t have ships like this. There are fifteen weapons stations here, what in Tulseria’s name were the Gowe planning to do with this thing?”
“No idea.” The chief engineer walked to the large seat in front of his new work terminal, and hopped up onto it. The protective covering squeaked. “This thing has more firepower than half their fleet, it must have been something big. We’re lucky Kadir found out about the graveyard of unclaimed ships from one of his contacts.”
The newly-minted captain swung his legs down and sat up, straightening his black uniform and white collar. “That’s another thing: how does he have so many contacts? I was in the Tulseria-damned military, and I had no idea they would sell us fighters and weapons.”
“I know the feeling.” Danyd watched a junior engineer – Lily, an Awakened who wore a headband in her silver hair that sported long Kittran ears on it – begin running diagnostics on the Hoban Field Generator. “I'm aware he got the automated weapons for the system port from my people, somehow. As for how he accomplishes all he does, I think his time working with that fancy Anatidae councillor opened more than a couple of doors for him.”
Chae’Sol stood, running his fingers through his perfect hair. “Doors, windows, rear entrances and damned secret portals, all leading to a dark realm of shady deals and supplies. We have an Imperium Capital Ship for Tulseria’s sake! Nobody knows where he got it, or where he’s now hidden it.” He looked at his holo display, noting the specks springing blinking into existence as the other ships of Federation origin came to life. “Let’s just be glad he’s on our side.”
The chief engineer tugged at the green collar to his uniform. “Our side used to be a damn sight smaller.” Lily had finished her diagnostic tests and sent the results to his console. Her report included an adjustment that would create a potential three percent increase in crystal efficiency, and a small drawing of a smiling leokit with a crim-bar. He groaned, then reported back with, “We’re ready to go when you are.”
The Niham strode confidently across the command deck, stopping to stand in front of the huge vid screen at the front of the room. All around him were his crew, made up mostly from the Ashi, Awakened, and Kasurians. “Let’s get this show started.”

Jaym sat with a bowl of Tony the leokas cereal in front of her. It wasn't just a catchy advertising slogan - it really was great. She and Elizabeth had worked together so much in the engineering section of the Porkchop Express that they had become close, often spending their free time together. Indeed, Elizabeth currently sat opposite her, carefully rebuilding a power coupling and occasionally tapping at her datapad. Shortly after the results of her most recent tap played out, Elizabeth paused her work on the power coupling. Without speaking, she held up her datapad so that Jaym could see.
On the screen was Tony and his mate Jolie, and Skeena’s voice could be heard excitedly talking about collecting urine samples from the female. Jaym screwed up her face at first until Skeena announced the pregnancy test was positive. Tony was going to be a father! She couldn't contain her joy and screamed loudly, grabbing the screen and running all the way to the bridge to show the others.
Ranjaz was stretched out across the captain’s chair as Jaym burst in, and didn’t open his eyes until she began shaking his leg. Even then he didn’t pay much attention. “I told you not to let Elizabeth play with any more systems till after the mission.”
She blushed slightly, as their last improvement had inverted their water treatment system and blown six power couplings. "It's not that!" she said, holding up the datapad and starting the video. "Look!"
At the first syllable of Skeena's voice, Ranjaz sat bolt upright. The video held his full attention, and when Tony's impending fatherhood was announced the Kittran's whoops of delight could be heard all through the Porkchop Express. He reached underneath his seat and retrieved a small, fluffy bed, then picked up Aiov. Ranjaz led his unusual dance partner in a quick spin of joy before replaying the GalacTube video for her. “You’re going to be an Aunty!”
Eruwenn leaned back in the large seat that had once been Embar’s. “I didn’t think they were related?”
The Kittran nodded. “Aiov is Tony’s sister. Aaron adopted them both, and that’s how human families work. They just keep adding members, like a Dular adding shells to its burrow. Family is family.”
Cygna pressed a few buttons on her Navigator terminal, moving the video to the main screen as well as starting it over. “I still can’t believe you keep one of these under your seat. I mean, it’s a leokas!”
Ranjaz held Aiov up and they briefly rubbed noses. “Just a little one!”
The Anatidae laughed. “I can see living with the human has had quite a profound effect on you.”
With one of his trademark grins he held Aiov out towards Eruwenn. “Wanna nose rub?”
"Ah," the councillor said, shrinking back from the offer, "despite her size she is still a predator, and I am not quite ready for such a close encounter.”
From the pilot seat Ripley stood, taking Aiov from Ranjaz. “She is not a toy.” She briefly snuggled the tiny leokit to her chest, then passed her to Jaym. “Take her for food and exercise; she must grow up strong.”
Jaym also cuddled the wriggling Aiov close, and not just because the little leokit was adorable. Aiov had tripled in size, and was becoming a bit of a handful. “Thor was preparing her food; I’ll take her down to him.”
Once the junior engineer had left, and Ripley returned to the pilot seat, Ranjaz began tapping on the console in front of him. “Looks like we’ll be free to take the shuttle down to the surface with the next group.”
Cygna drummed her fingers on the arms of her chair. “I didn’t realise it would be so busy.”
Ranjaz shrugged. “There was a quake on the fourth planet, so mining colonies are shut down while the nerds poke around. Along with that, we got three big freighters waiting for resupply. That’s a lot of bored folks looking to kill time.” Ripley grunted, prompting a chuckle from the Kittran. “You don’t approve of their choice of leisure activity?”
After their few cycles together Eruwenn was already learning a lot about her shipmates. Ripley, for instance, wasn’t one for talking. She decided to interject before the Captain irritated her too much, as they would need her focus soon enough. “Gambling and pleasure palaces are not to everyone's taste, of course, but these sorts of things are covered under local governance.”
Without skipping a beat Ranjaz replied, “I know that’s the official line, but you sure as shit have tax codes for all of it. If you want to look down on folks, don’t pretend you aren’t profiting from it.”
Cygna, ever defensive of her mentor, jumped in. “That’s a bold statement for someone who never paid a credit in tax until it was automatically deducted from his Galactic Federation pay.”
Ranjaz laughed, then continued, keeping his voice care-free. “Taxed on what? I never owned anything.”
Eruwenn could see the trap her junior was walking into but decided to let this be a learning experience. The Kittran was wily, and the Anatidae found him entertaining. Cygna, as she had predicted, scoffed at his claims. “I’ve read your file. When you were arrested you had a ship, five shuttles and thousands in valuable goods confiscated.”
“Exactly!” His eyes lit up as he cornered her. “It was confiscated because it was stolen, so I didn’t own it. Imagine a world where you can keep stolen goods if you pay tax on them. Even I think that’s crazy.”
The Fae’Dan paused, and the anger evaporated from her voice as she realized what he had said, replaced by a slightly impressed tone of surprise. “Well, maybe, but… Really? You stole all of it?”
Ranjaz shrugged. “Or won it. I’m pretty good at Dalcho.”
Cygna perked up. “I play Dalcho myself, we shou-”
“No,” Eruwenn interrupted. Some lessons were too expensive. “Do not play Dalcho with someone who can get free priority entry permits to a casino.”
The former operative shook her head. “I’m a great player, you’ve seen me in the council chambers. I took that Ley’Rulian trader for five hundred credits.”
The Anatidae smiled kindly. “And he had five shuttles when he was arrested.”
Cygna slowly turned from Eruwenn to Ranjaz, noticing his grin and the sparkle in his eye. It was most definitely the smile of a predator. He gave a little chuckle. “Don’t worry, it’s been a long time since I played. No gambling on Galactic Federation ships, you know.” He laughed again. “Oh wait, you read my file.”
The Fae’Dan nodded. “Perhaps we should focus on the mission.” She gave a slight bow to Eruwenn before returning her attention to her console.
Ranjaz looked at Eruwenn and stuck out his tongue. “Don’t ruin my fun!”
The Ambassador smiled. “I don’t play Dalcho, but there is a human game called chess I quite enjoy. Perhaps we could play sometime?”
The Kittran gave a nod. Keeping his voice neutral, he replied. “I don’t know that one, but there’s another human game we could try. Poker?”
"We have permission to dock at the holding ring and send down a shuttle," Ripley abruptly called out. "Let’s get this whatever it is and make the rendez-vous.”
Both of Ranjaz’s fangs showed as he grinned. “If we’re going to pull a job on Chisola Prime, first you’re going to need to look the part!”

Aaron walked down the corridor of the Hive ship, the strange spiderlike creature trailing behind him as he followed one of the corpse vines as it receded deeper into the ship. He turned and watched the creature, which shrank back from him and crouched low to the ground. “I’m sorry I kicked you. You simply startled me; you don’t have to hide.”
The lighting never changed in the endless corridors of the ship, and only the most uninteresting of doors deigned open for him. At this point, he had lost track of time completely. Through perseverance he’d made several important discoveries. The bulbous shapes in the flower vase room were seats; he was fairly certain of that after finding another room with bodies sitting in them. The vines that came for them were the ones he was now following, and by now he must have seen hundreds of dead Hive.
The second discovery was that the Hive came in a variety of shapes and sizes. There were two main ones, as far as he could tell, and the first were the four legged kind that had so kindly thrown him in the rejuvenating jelly bean. The second was bipedal, and looked a hell of a lot meaner. While the ones he deemed workers looked somewhat like ants to him, in shades of reds and browns, the second type looked much more commanding. Their carapace had thicker layers of armour in green, gold and red, and was spiked at the shoulders and joints. Even their legs had spines and to top the look off their heads were much more angular. Whether they were soldiers, commanders, or something else, he didn’t know. Through observation of the corpses he had discovered the most confusing feature yet: a strange section in the centre of their abdomen that was filled with what seemed to be a grey fluid.
Ahead of him, not skittering away like the rest, was an aphid that no longer emitted a pale green glow. Something whooshed overhead towards the slow and sluggish aphid, and Aaron instinctively threw himself to the ground before he realized what it was. "That's how you get kicked!” He stood up, brushing himself off. “Fuck, that scares the ever-loving shit out of me every fucking time.”
The huge creature looked up at him and whined as it munched on the sick aphid. He was probably imagining the apology in its eyes, but Aaron still shook his head. “I know, I know. It’s your job. They clean the floors, you keep their population healthy. Just stop leaping over me like that, fuck. I’m going to have a heart attack.” It whined and backed away from his angry words, and he tried to keep his voice to calmer tones. “Don’t be like that. I’ve told you enough times.”
When he looked down the corridor again, the retreating corpse vines had disappeared around a corner. Aaron began to jog after them, and after he'd put some distance in he heard the pattering footsteps of his terrifying shadow. He tried to pay it no mind. Once the vines were back in sight he slowed and followed behind them, singing his direction song quietly to himself. “Left, right, straight. Left, left, right. Straight, straight, left, left. Right, right, straight, right, right.”
The ship was massive and, other than some areas smelling funkier than others, there was no variation in lighting, decoration or layout. The song was his map back to the rejuvenation pod, which was his only safe source of hydration. His companion padded along behind him, a friendly nightmare to accompany him on his seemingly endless journey. “We really need to give you a name.” He wished he had his phone with him so he could channel all his nervous energy into making a video. “The audience demands a name. Plus, I won’t be able to sell merch without one.” He turned and looked at the creature. “I’ll probably have to create space-halloween first, or maybe I’ll get lucky and find that you’re cute to some species.”
Aaron returned to following the corpse vine, waving a hand high as he spoke, gesticulating to the heavens. “The name is what matters: a good name makes all the difference.” He began seriously pondering the naming matter. “Aragog, Shelob; you know, lean into your size for a characterization. But then again, that's not really going to make people like you.” He looked back over his shoulder as the unnamed beast trotted happily behind him. He assumed happy, at least. It now tended to make an odd gurgling noise after eating, and it roamed closer to him than before. “You know, I never got to name Sassie – she’s my dog. I told you about her yesterday, or the day before.” He really was losing track of the days he’d been here. “I got her from a rescue. She was skinny, and so damn angry, with scars on her legs and under her fur. I had to have special visits before I could keep her. Prove I was worthy.”
Talking helped take his mind from the gnawing emptiness in his stomach. Hydration and nutrients osmotically obtained from some weird pod were nowhere near as satisfying as a burger and a cold beer. “Her first visit, she had a rubber ball. It was her only possession, and she loved it.” There was a touch of pride in his voice. “Took me an hour before she gave it up to play. The lady from the rescue centre said I was the first.” He choked up, blinking back tears. “Anyway, couple more visits and she got to stay. Crazy dog was such a handful. She once tried to climb a tree to chase a squirrel. Got her legs over the first branch and just dangled, kicking her back legs.” He began chuckling to himself. “She once tried to jump through a car window; some guy was parked at the lights as we walked past.”
He was just chatting now, lost in his memories as he walked. “You know the type, loud radio, windows rolled down on a sunny day, annoying the shit out of everyone in the town. He tossed some litter out of his window and she just launched herself at him. Scared the life out of me at the time - funny as fuck now, of course.” He laughed again. “Then there were the swans. Man, were they not ready. She loved to swim – I told you that before – swimming and splashing was her favourite release. Well, that and chasing rabbits which is, kinda, how I ended up here. Anyway, she would just swim up and down, right past the ducks and stuff, somehow never interested in them. Then one summer these swans came along...” He paused, realising his new friend didn’t know what a duck or a swan was, or even summer, probably. Before attempting to explain, he realised they also didn’t understand english, so it really didn’t matter. “Anyway, swans being belligerent bastards, I called her out of the water straight away. Those mean white fuckers chased her all the way to shore.”
He turned around, now grinning broadly. “But, once her feet hit the ground in the shallow water and she was able to stand, did those sons of bitches turn and swim away as fast as they could.” He paused, trying to remember his original point. He really was very hungry. “Oh yeah, so trying to stop her fighting everything that moved meant I didn’t have time to teach her a new name. Figured it would be confusing to her. Sassie she was, and so Sassie she stayed.”
There was a tightening in his chest as he thought of her missing him. “Took a lot of years and a lot of time for her to get where she is now. I know Alexa will take care of her, but still, it’s my job, and I need to get back to doing it. She won’t understand…” He choked up completely, taking a moment to compose himself before clearing his throat and returning his monologue to its original course. “Anyway, names. Names matter.”
“Maybe you’re a girl monster. Charlotte?” He shook his head. That name just didn’t seem fitting. “We could call you Peter Parker? Although, you’re more of a man-sized spider than a spiderman... Parker Peter? Then again, big, scary spiders say one thing to me. Australia. You like to jump, we could call you Roo? Or, how about Ozzy? Or Bruce? Hmm, that’s a sharks name though… can you swim?”
His train of thought derailed suddenly as he saw an open door ahead of them through which the vines were receding. The pair of them continued walking behind the vine until it disappeared into the doorway and Aaron ran forward, pulling something from his pocket. He’d been saving the foil wrapping from the ration bricks, folding them together to form a wedge. He jammed his makeshift door stop under the bottom corner of the door as it began to slide shut. It ground to a halt. “Boom! Told you it would work.”
He stood and finally looked into the vastness beyond. Through the doors was, somehow, a rolling meadow, complete with trees, giant mushrooms and plants he had no name for. Vines were also everywhere, receding further across the great wilderness. “What the hell? I thought I was on a spaceship? Am I underground?”
Staring intently at the sky, he stepped onto the deep moss beyond the door. He looked at the wall around the interior and saw it was rock, and more plant life clung to every crack and crevice. As he walked slowly forward his eyes followed the vine as it headed for a large, colourful, monolith. He approached and saw that its shape was similar to the vase flowers. He watched as the corpse vines deposited their cargo on top of the monolith. Not on, he corrected himself;they were dropping inside.
He looked back to the door, nervous that it might close and lock him in. A large black shadow lurked just beyond the door, and he was torn. Should he explore this 'outside' world, or retreat to the place where he at least had the rejuvenation pods? He looked up at the sky, basking in the warm and invigorating embrace of the sunlight. He blinked at the brightness, being cautious to not look at the sun directly, and something else suddenly caught his eye. It was, incredibly, a door. A door that floated in the sky.
The thing about human eyes is that they might be easily fooled, but a shift in perspective can easily change what you see to something entirely different. Aaron was looking up at a ceiling, like the one in the Atrium back on the Azrimad, but a hundred times more convincing.
Once back inside the doorway he watched the spiderling he was beginning to think of it as a friend dancing back and forth a short distance away. It seemed… happy. “Ok buddy, I’m back.” Aaron’s stomach made a loud gurgling sound and he rubbed it, trying to squeeze the hunger away. Fingers found muscle easier than usual, and he knew he was definitely losing weight. “We should head back. I need sleep.” He thought for a moment and made a final decision, bending down to pull the foil wedge clear. “I doubt there’s a communicator or command deck in there. Let’s go home, Ozzy.”
The trip back was uneventful, Aaron sang his direction song as they navigated the labyrinth. A few more aphids were snacked on by his leggy companion, but his own legs were heavy by the time he was almost back to the jelly beans. Despite being exhausted he had made two stops to create another pair of flower vases for the aphids, as well as scattering a ration brick as he passed by. The aphids waited, as they always did, till he and Ozzy were far enough away before enjoying his bounty. Still, the human derived satisfaction from their presence.
Exhausted and weary, Aaron was glad to finally make it back to the room he was reluctantly calling his temporary home. As the door to the rejuvenation pod slid open he was met, forcefully, by the barrel of an energy rifle. Unfortunately for Aaron, due to a considerable height difference, the barrel had struck him squarely in the groin, and he instantly fell to his knees. He came face to face with his attacker with tears in his eyes, clutching his tenderness and coughing. From the other being came incomprehensible yelling, as well as a lot of gun waving. Also, there was coughing.
Aaron, eventually mustering enough self-presence to do something other than deal with the after effects of the gun-to-groin encounter, wiped the moisture from his eyes and tried to butt in to the one-sided conversation. "Relax! I'm the one who just got snookered in the fucking balls, here! Why in the world are you so mad?"”
The gun was pressed to his forehead by the tiny attacker, who shouted something unintelligible with their black eyes focused on him. They paused to cough, then stepped back, glaring at Aaron until they seemed to feel comfortable enough with the situation to take one hand off of their weapon and pull out a datapad. They held it up, and Aaron frowned at the familiar but still unintelligible colours that swirled on the screen. Then a small vent at the bottom of the device squirted out a puff of sickly sweet scent.
Aaron pulled back from the odour. "What the fuck was that?"
With some distance between them, the human finally got a good look at his opponent. They were barely waist-height, furry, with a long nose and dark banding across their brown fur. The banding was heaviest across their eyes and although that’s where the similarities ended, it was enough for the human’s brain to forge a connection. “Listen, Rocket, there’s a virus on this ship. You need to get in the jelly bean. Trust me.”
The rifle was thrust at him shakily in one hand, the tablet again was raised and a swirl of colours and shapes greeted him. “I don’t speak fucking winamp plugin!” On the wall behind his captor Aaron spotted a dull orange aphid, struggling to climb the wall. He smiled as he slowly leaned to one side. “Have you met Ozzy?”
The huge arachnid leapt over them both, causing the newcomer to blindfire at the wall. Aaron seized his chance and snatched away the weapon. He grabbed the newcomer by the front of their armoured uniform and slammed them to the ground. They cried out in pain and began their incomprehensible yelling once more. The accompanying coughing fit was bad, and Aaron dragged them to their feet. Realising that his solitude had caused him to revert to English, he switched back to galactic standard to offer a warning about the disease. “You’re going to die!”
A shocked look crossed their face as the human effortlessly lifted them and slam dunked them into a blue jelly bean. Ozzy gurgled happily through his aphid crunching. Aaron snatched up the energy rifle, but found it was difficult to hold due to its small size. He leaned over the jelly bean, noting the occupant drifting off to sleep.
Hunger and tiredness were forgotten as adrenaline flooded his system. There was no way the newcomer was alone. He left the pod room to begin searching, and Ozzy seemed to pick up on his intention and followed behind, keeping close to the human. “Good boy!” He had no idea what prompted it, likely some automated response, and it was as though he watched his movements from outside of his body as he reached back and gently scratched the arachnid's head. He was rewarded with happy gurgles, or at least that's what he hoped the noises were. “You did good back there.”
He made his way along the corridor towards the same airlock he had once chosen as his final exit. His recent suspicion proved correct as he heard a strange sound up ahead, as if someone was running a wet finger around the rim of a glass. He carefully leaned around the curve and saw another figure, dressed in the same uniform as the first. No fur on this one, although they were equally small in size, and they somehow looked like they were made of glass which couldn’t decide on a colour.
This time he remembered to use galactic standard. “Keep your hands where we can see you. We’ve got you surrounded!” The figure was clearly startled, as the ambient resonating noise began varying wildly in pitch at the same moment as their colour shifted to a solid blue. Aaron cursed. He didn’t have a translator, having instead opted for learning standard and winging everything else. The whole federation knew standard, so he hadn’t truly considered getting the implant. “Something is wrong with our translators,” he continued to bluff. “Do you speak galactic standard?”
A datapad was hastily pulled from a pocket, and as buttons were pressed the resonating sound became more rhythmic. From the datapad sprung noises. No, it was a voice! “Why do you speak Procyon? Where is Commander Bertolannixostraphes?
Aaron began relaxing at the situation he found himself in, but inside he was brimming with joy. Finally, he could talk with someone! “There is a virus on this ship, and many are dead. If your commander is the raccoon-looking guy, I got them into a healing pod. They’re going to be fine.” Under his breath he added, “probably.”
The resonating began and shortly afterwards the voice translated, “Who are you? Why did you not answer our communications.”
Opting for honesty in the hopes of leniency, Aaron stepped into view. “I’m a passenger. I don’t have access to the ship's systems.” The newcomer was looking at the tiny gun, so the human tossed it forward. “I didn’t know if you were friendly. I can take you to your friend, and you should probably get treatment as well.”
The now-orange alien walked forward, their movement accompanied by the strange sound of ceramic plates rubbing together. “That won’t be a problem, we Tricinic do not catch meat diseases. I am Tsy'lo, take me to the commander.” They turned to look behind them. “Where are the others?”
Aaron pointed to Ozzy. “It’s just us two.”
Colours swirled and the small glass person thrummed. The datapad spoke, “You are the last human, the Ambassador. Correct?”
Turning and gesturing to be followed, he began to lead the way to the rejuvenation room. “I am the first human, Ambassador Aaron Cooper, professional bounty hunter. Just call me Aaron. Are you the rescue party? Is Alexa here? Did she bring Sassie?”
It took a moment for the translation to come back. “I don’t know those names. We are the Special Tactics and Rescue Squad and we responded to distress calls and found this ship. Adrift.” They had walked a little way when Tsy'lo stopped and regarded Ozzy, who was still faithfully following behind. “Why does the achalo follow you?”
“Ozzy?” Aaron shrugged. “I think he was lonely. So, were you sent into Hive space to find me, or are you on some top secret mission? You aren’t with the Sentinels, are you?”
“Lonely? But it is an achalo.” Tsy'lo was confused and their colour visibly swirled. “Why would a rescue mission be secret? And, we weren’t sent, we were already here.”
Now it was the human who was confused. “Like spies behind enemy lines? Is that why you are in Hive space?”
The Tricinic hummed at a higher frequency. “It is our space. We are the Hive!”

Admiral Pelar of the third fleet stood in the centre of the training mat. On the floor around her were four tough looking Ashi, while a fifth was now squaring off against her. She blocked the jab and the surprise knee strike that followed, turning effortlessly to bring her elbow to her opponents ribs. With another deft turn she was behind him and kicking his knees forward. He tried to roll clear but she had anticipated the move and, as he rose, her spinning boot struck the side of his head.
“Nice try gentlemen.” She walked away and caught a towel thrown by the drill instructor. “That last one has potential,” she said, and the drill instructor nodded. “Next time, I expect at least one of them to land a hit. If not, I’ll have you in the ring instead, to make sure you still have what it takes.” She saw the fear in his eyes. “I accept nothing but the best from the Third Fleet.”
The medics ran onto the mat as she dabbed at her forehead, and she spotted Jar’Bek sitting on a bench nearby. She walked over to him and he stood, straightening what was no doubt an extremely expensive suit. “From one disappointment to another.”
The lawyer smiled. “Imagine only seeing your son when he is paid to be in your presence,” he countered.
She smirked. “Your tongue is still your most deadly weapon.”
He nodded. “Ah, but it must make you proud to see me make use of the things you taught me.”
Her face twitched. “I taught you to be a true Ashi, a soldier. I taught you to respect-”
Jar’Bek held up his hand. “I’m here on my client’s business, not yours. And, as I am paid a considerable sum per gal, let us not waste their money on matters that are concluded.” He enjoyed the irritation on her face. “I am here to finalise the amnesty treaties, and conclude your membership as citizens of Earth.”
The Admiral held up her hands, looking down at her combat training clothing. “I must shower and change first. Please, wait for me in my private office.” She smiled politely.
“No.” His smile seemed to hover as if it was a mask that could slip at any time. “You may have disowned me, but I still remember your tricks. You knew the time of our meeting; you had me brought here so you could intimidate me with this display of aggression. Then you ask me to wait in your office amongst your memorabilia and trophies.” He watched the anger behind her eyes. “You really think these tired old tricks will work on me?”
She sneered. “At least you remember something.”
“Oh, I had the scars removed, but I kept the lessons.” He walked away. “My client's time is valuable and I have scheduled a meeting with the other fleet Admiral’s for later this cycle. Since we have no time for your games, let us go to the briefing room. My team is already set up. If you wish to shower, know that it is more of your negotiating time you are wasting, and I do so hate waste.” He collected his briefcase and walked out of the room.
Captain Loring hurried after Jar’Bek, catching him as he entered the elevator. “You sure you want to antagonise the Admiral like that?”
He leaned back against the wall of the elevator and relaxed, letting out a small sigh. “A little negotiating trick a Kittran taught me. Anyway, she is no longer my Admiral.”
Elora’Tan leaned back on the opposite wall. “She is your mother, Jar.”
“Ha.” Jar’Bek laughed. “She disowned me. This is the first contact we’ve had in I forget how many celes. Her first thought is to try and intimidate me with that display. She likes to beat on cadets, she likes to cause pain, and she wanted me to watch.”
Loring gave a weak smile. “It forges strong soldiers. We can’t afford weakness.”
The elevator stopped and Jar’Bek took a step closer to Elora’Tan. “You think it was weakness that made me leave?” He didn’t let her answer, turning and exiting into the hallway. His voice now resonated with authority as he growled, “In case you people have forgotten, the Ashi will operate under the same rules as the rest of the colony. My mother is not the law... I am the law.”

Next

Silver Miners Guide

Came Into Some Money - My Story/Discussion

UK conservative opinions on Uk policy ideas (immigration, unions, advertising, electoral reform etc)

I would call myself a libertarian. I am a Marxist in that I use a materialistic interpretation of history and events. I have some ideas that I think would benefit the UK. Some of which are in line with conservative ideas. I would love to know what you guys think or what you think would be a better idea. Please criticize. I hope to have a dialogue about this as much as possible.
Drugs
de criminalise all drugs (much like portugal) treat it as a mental health issue. A lot of people take drugs because of homelessness and poverty so by dealing with those hard drug use will go down. Legalise Cannabis, Mushrooms (and most hallucinegics), LSD, MDMA and Cocaine (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/bad-science-cocaine-study). tax them inline with the estimated costs for misuse of them. regulate them like tobacco and alcohol.
Obesity and Food
Ban the sale of energy drinks to children below 16. ban the sale of very sweet confectiionary and drinks to children below 16 (some mexican states have done it recently), This includes in schools. tax very fatty, sugary or nutritionly rare foods in line with what the estimated costs are for the NHS to deal with the health problems caused by them (much the same way we do with alcohol, tobacco and in my tax system other drugs). Possibly make it mandatory to fortify very cheap foods with minerals and vitamins so the impoverished can get more nutrients. although the body doesnt absorb these very well so it might be pointless.
Make it illegal for a company/business to throw away food stuff and make them donate it to foodbanks/food charities.
Advertising/product placement/Games/Gambling
Ban all adverts to children in any way. Ban alcohol ads, vaping ads, gambling ads, payday loan ads, ads for big SUV/highly polluting vehicles. Ban product placement, ban TV shows for kids that have toys explicitly linked to them. Ban Loot box system in games. Make fixed odds betting machines have lower returns. Either tax very highly online gambling sites (spin wheel style), forced break periods or make it a state monolopy. Gambling is effectively a license to print money. why shouldn't the state take the proceeds from what is a worthless noncontributing part of the economy. All ads that have photoshopped used need to a sign saying they've been photoshopped and very thin models have to have a medical certificate that they are healthy (like france).
NHS
repeal the Blair laws making the NHS act more a competitive business which have proved to ineffective. Make the English NHS system more in line with the Scottish system.
Tax or in some make people who do more dangerous activities pay a small amount extra for the increased likelihood of needing the services of the NHS like motorcyclists, horse riders, extreme sportspeople.
Free speech
repeal a lot of the Blair era censorship legislation. repeal with 2014 porn ban.
prostitution
legalize brothels. but make prostitution licensed to stop sex trafficking. Mandate the wearing of a condom. Possibly make it that you can only be a prostitute if you hold a british passport to stop sex trafficking from abroad.
Trade Unions
repeal the anti-trade union legislation.
Electoral reform
I think a system like Single Transferrable Vote would be better than FPTP. I think that registered political parties should somehow get some minimum funding from the state to facilitate a healthy and varied democracy. Remove the hereditary peerages from the house of lords.
availability of credit
I don't think payment plans for normal consumer goods should be available. I think it should be harder to get a pay day loan than it currently is.
Fines
I think that fines for speeding, other fine-able offenses should be means tested and shouldn't have a cap.
Copyright
I think that Copyright should expire for everything after 50 years. So at the this point everything from before 1969 should be in the public domain. I think any British citizen creator who leaves the UK to not pay income tax should have the copyright for their work removed in the UK when they do leave.
Welfare
Introduce Universal basic income in the UK. replace all the means tested and tedious bureaucracy associated with current system. I think it should start from 18 years old and increase slightly each year. Maybe start at 5,000 pounds and by your thirties move up to 10,000 pounds by the time you want to start having kids etc. I think UBI would make work always pay more than being on benefits. It would disincentive benefits fraud as well as people having children to acquire more benefits.
Tax
I do believe in a progressive taxation system. I think the tax free threshold should be raised. I think the brackets for taxation are good at the moment but I would add higher tax thresholds at higher rates e.g. 50% at 200,000, 60% at 500,000. I am unsure what the upper limit should be for tax rate or income. The rich will leave anyway (Jim ratcliffe most recenty) no matter what the tax rate is. If they ever wants to come into the UK they should have to pay to do so. If they have a knighthood it should be taken away.
Immigration.
remove all EU citizens not in critical under supplied or high paying jobs from the UK as well migratory workers from outside the EU. Syrian Civil war refugees should go back as well. basically as many people as possible should be made to go back to their country of origin without directly endangering their lives. I think the pay threshold for workers to legally migrate here should be much higher probably 40,000 pounds a year. there should be not net migration to the UK each year.
children and population growth
I think the UK should aim for net 0% population growth. I think couples who want to have kids should be made to screen for any hereditary recessive genetic diseases before they plan to have a child so they can know if they're kid is going to be disabled. Possibly people should have to have in the womb embryo testing as well to see if theyre child has any genetic diseases. legalise child euthanasia (like belgium and the netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol). I think people should be discouraged from having lots of children especially those without the means to provide for them. however if people do decide to have kids I think the provision for parenting should be a lot. 2+ years of paid maternity leave. free parenting lessons, support as much as possible the needs of the child and mother in the critical early bonding years. Ban all Child beauty pageants including trans ones (like france has done). I don't think childen can legally consent to hormone replacement drugs. I think the age of criminal responsibility should be raised should be raised to about 14. I think there are arguments to lower the age of consent in the UK to 15.
the environment
Library of things/Repair cafes in towns and cities to be able to more easily repairs good or not have to buy in the first place.
Government subsidy scheme to better insulate homes across country.
More extensive use of nuclear fission energy for electric generation.
Large scale food waste reclamation for Compost or animal feed.
Subsidy for Ground source heat pumps for poor households
Subsidy for Thermal exchangers in home for poor households
Make planned obselescene illegal. Make right to repair legally mandated.
simplify the amount and types of plastic products to make it easier to recycle goods. Ban non recyclable plastics from being used in single use items.
Make products label their expected lifetime (from average use) so consumer knows what a good long lasting product is. For large electric goods perhaps put a minimum expected lifespan for it to be sold in the UK.
I think you could legislate to make products illegal from rainforests or unsustainable harvested forest.
Tax loopholes
make all gift-aid illegal, make art donations as tax write off illegal, donations to think tanks,charities illegal as tax write-offs,
currently if you live outside the UK for more than 6 months you don't pay any income tax. I think the amount of income tax you pay should be proportionate for how long you spend in country with a bare minimum of 20% (estimate).
Make shell companies illegal so large multinationals can't escape to tax havens and not pay corporations tax. If they don't ban them from trading in the UK. This may need to be done in a coalition of states working together.
education
repeal Blair era education legislation that created needless hoops and paper work for teachers. repeal new laws that teachers can you sources from anti-capitalist, anti-democratic sources etc. repeal the Gove/Cameron legislation that made schools behave like businesses. The point of school is for the kds to work hard and earn qualifications not the teacher. It is an inherently discriminatory system. allow at GCSE much more education in technical qualifications. e.g. bricklaying, carpentry, electricians etc, machine work. I don't think they need to start at 16 or above. I think theres an argument that children should be able to leave school at 16. Some of the courses they do are pointless. Apprenticeship pay is so low that in the short term it makes more sense to get a minimum wage job. Atleast make apprenticeship pay in line with minimum wage to incentivise it rather than literally force kids to be extremely cheap labour.
self defense
I think it should be legal to carry around pepper spray, mace or stun gun. The criminals already have weapons. Why not decriminalise the ability for an individual to defend themselves especially women. Free female self defence classes.
BBC
release all BBC created media onto the Iplayer. The British Tax payer paid for it. Why shouldn't they be able to access it. Perhaps make a BBC iplayer app to host it all for foreigners to use and pay for like Netflix.
International business
Make corporations who sell goods in the UK prove that they don't come from slave/child labour. If they don't then they can't sell that product in the UK.
VAT
remove VAT for resold,recycled products, upcycled products, products that are good the planet (re-chargeable batteries, battery chargers). effectively rebrand VAT as a carbon tax. completely remove VAT on sanitary products, all energy efficiency/saving products.
Voting
like Australia make it mandatory to go to the polling booth.
University
make universities offer their humanities subjects as online only option so that people can do their degree from anywhere and not necessarily in the expensive university town. the course would be cheaper. Make foreign students pay for their healthcare when they are here.
Tourism
make foreigners pay to get into British Museums especially the big ones in london. I realise this may be cost prohibitive for smaller Museums.
Housing
change the rental legislation that tenants can legally not pay full rent if a landlord hasn't done repairs to the standard of the property when the renter moved in.
No foreigner can own more than 2 homes in the UK (in thailand you can't own any property unless you're thai)
Cap the number of a properties anyone can own. especially for buy to let landlords.
If a house has sat vacant for too long it has to be put on the market as a competitive price.
houses cannot be treated as an investment where it doesn't matter if its occupied or not. a roof over ones head is a right.
Homelessness
expand the access to homeless shelters. the best way to stop human and sex trafficking as well hard drug use to is stop homelessness.
migratory farm workers
ban migratory farm workers in the UK. there are thousands of Uni, GCSE, college and A level students who have months off school in the picking season. Why not get them to pick fruit and vegetables? same thing goes for homeless people. Get them all to pick fruit and veg.
littering & dog tax
small tax on having a dog to pay for dog park maintenance, dog bins, etc. small tax on single use packaging to pay for more Bins on high street, bins to be emptied more regularly to reduce littering. Same small tax on tobacco for cigarette butt bins.
These are all my ideas. Please critique them.

UK Labour opinions on UK policy ideas (immigration, unions, advertising, electoral reform etc)

I'm not sure if this is allowed here. I would call myself an environmental libertarian-ish. I am member of the Labour Party. I am a Marxist in that I use a materialistic interpretation of history and events. I have some ideas that I think would benefit the UK. Some of which are in line with Labour ideas. I would love to know what you guys think or what you think would be a better idea. Please criticize. I hope to have a dialogue about this as much as possible.
Drugs
Decriminalise all drugs (much like portugal) treat it as a mental health issue. A lot of people take drugs because of homelessness and poverty so by dealing with those hard drug use will go down. Legalise Cannabis, Mushrooms (and most hallucinegics), LSD, MDMA, Steroids and Cocaine (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/bad-science-cocaine-study). Tax them inline with the estimated costs for misuse of them. Regulate them like tobacco and alcohol.
Obesity and Food
Ban the sale of energy drinks to children below 16. Ban the sale of very sweet confectionery and drinks to children below 16 (some Mexican states have done it recently), This includes in schools. Tax very fatty, sugary or nutritionally rare foods in line with what the estimated costs are for the NHS to deal with the health problems caused by them (much the same way we do with alcohol, tobacco and in my tax system other drugs). Possibly Ban the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup and Margarine in UK foods. Possibly make it mandatory to fortify very cheap foods with minerals and vitamins so the impoverished can get more nutrients. although the body doesn't absorb these very well so it might be pointless.
Plain Packaging and warning labels on Junk food like cigarettes. make the nutritional information for actual representative portions. If companies shrinkflate a product then they have to put it on the packaging of the product that they have done so. Ban the sale of Alcohol and Tobacco to pregnant women (not sure how you enforce this).
Make it illegal for a company/business to throw away food stuff and make them donate it to foodbanks/food charities (Like France)
Advertising/product placement/
Ban all adverts to children in any way. I think you could also make toys/mannequins sold in the UK have realistic proportions for both boys and girls. Ban junk food ads, alcohol ads, vaping ads, gambling ads, payday loan ads, ads for big SUV/highly polluting vehicles. Ban the sponsorship of events by any of these things either. Ban product placement, ban TV shows for kids that have toys explicitly linked to them. All ads that have photo shopped used need to a sign saying they've been photo shopped and very thin models have to have a medical certificate that they are healthy (like France).
Gambling/Games
Ban or reclassify Loot box systems in games. Make fixed odds betting machines have lower returns. Either tax very highly online gambling sites (spin wheel style), forced break periods or make it a state monolopy. Gambling is effectively a license to print money. Why shouldn't the state take the proceeds from what is a worthless noncontributing part of the economy. Either make the lottery state run and recieve all the profits for public work or ban it and replace it with a government bond deposit scheme like premium bonds but a lower threshold to enter.
NHS
repeal the Blair laws making the NHS act more a competitive business which have proved to ineffective. Make the English NHS system more in line with the Scottish system.
Tax or in some make people who do more dangerous activities pay a small amount extra for the increased likelihood of needing the services of the NHS like motorcyclists, horse riders, extreme sportspeople.
Ban the ever greening of drugs so they can be made cheaply and generically. If a pharma company has received funding to develop a drug then it must be sold at cost (or much lower profit). Somehow democratise the access to science and medical journals e.g. higher tax, made to be free if research was publicly funded, government run science journal).
Free speech
Repeal a lot of the Blair era censorship legislation. repeal with 2014 porn ban.
prostitution
Legalize brothels. but make prostitution licensed to stop sex trafficking. Mandate the wearing of a condom. Possibly make it that you can only be a prostitute if you hold a british passport to stop sex trafficking from abroad.
Trade Unions
repeal the anti-trade union legislation.
Electoral reform
I think a system like Single Transferrable Vote would be better than FPTP. I think that registered political parties should somehow get some minimum funding from the state to facilitate a healthy and varied democracy. Remove the hereditary peerages from the house of lords.
availability of credit
I don't think payment plans for normal consumer goods should be available. I think it should be harder to get a pay day loan than it currently is.
Fines
I think that fines for speeding, other fine-able offenses should be means tested and shouldn't have a cap.
Copyright
I think that Copyright should expire for everything after 50 years. So at the this point everything from before 1969 should be in the public domain. I think any British citizen creator who leaves the UK to not pay income tax should have the copyright for their work removed in the UK when they do leave.
Welfare
Introduce Universal basic income in the UK. Replace all the means tested and tedious bureaucracy associated with current system. I think it should start from 18 years old and increase slightly each year. Maybe start at 5,000 pounds and by your thirties move up to 10,000 pounds by the time you want to start having kids etc. I think UBI would make work always pay more than being on benefits. It would disincentive benefits fraud as well as people having children to acquire more benefits.
Tax
I do believe in a progressive taxation system. I think the tax free threshold should be raised. I think the brackets for taxation are good at the moment but I would add higher tax thresholds at higher rates e.g. 50% at 200,000, 60% at 500,000. I am unsure what the upper limit should be for tax rate or income. The rich will leave anyway (Jim ratcliffe most recenty) no matter what the tax rate is. If they ever wants to come into the UK they should have to pay to do so. If they have a knighthood it should be taken away.
Immigration.
Remove all EU citizens not in critical under supplied or high paying jobs from the UK as well migratory workers from outside the EU. Syrian Civil war refugees should go back as well, The war is over now. basically as many people as possible should be made to go back to their country of origin without directly endangering their lives. I think the pay threshold for workers to legally migrate here should be much higher probably 40,000 pounds a year. There should ideally be no net migration to the UK each year.
children and population growth
I think the UK should aim for net 0% population growth. I think couples who want to have kids should be made to screen for any hereditary recessive genetic diseases before they plan to have a child so they can know if they're kid is going to be disabled/Birthing complications. Possibly if a couple is high risk of a genetic diseased child people should have to have in the womb embryo testing as well to see if theyre child has any genetic diseases. I think people should be discouraged from having lots of children especially those without the means to provide for them. However if people do decide to have kids I think the provision for parenting should be a lot. 2+ years of paid maternity leave. Free parenting lessons, support as much as possible the needs of the child and mother in the critical early bonding years.
Ban all Child beauty pageants including trans ones (like France has done). I don't think children can legally consent to hormone replacement drugs. Ban Gay conversion therapy. I think the age of criminal responsibility should be raised should be raised to about 14. I think there are arguments to lower the age of consent in the UK to 15.
Euthanasia
Legalise child euthanasia (like belgium and the netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol). Legalise normal euthanasia for people of any age as well.
the environment
Library of things/Repair cafes in towns and cities to be able to more easily repairs good or not have to buy in the first place.
Ban or curtail the sale of bottled war. Install more water fountains and public bathrooms instead.
Government subsidy scheme to better insulate homes across country.
More extensive use of nuclear fission energy for electric generation.
Large scale food waste reclamation for Compost or animal feed.
Subsidy for Ground source heat pumps for poor households
Subsidy for Thermal exchangers in home for poor households
Make planned obselescene illegal. Make right to repair legally mandated.
simplify the amount and types of plastic products to make it easier to recycle goods. Ban non recyclable plastics from being used in single use items.
Ban paper junk mail and possibly free newspapers.
Make products label their expected lifetime (from average use) so consumer knows what a good long lasting product is. For large electric goods perhaps put a minimum expected lifespan for it to be sold in the UK.
I think you could legislate to make products illegal from rainforests or unsustainable harvested forest (palm oil specifically)
Tax loopholes
Make all gift-aid illegal, make art donations as tax write off illegal, donations to think tanks,charities illegal as tax write-offs,
Currently if you live outside the UK for more than 6 months you don't pay any income tax. I think the amount of income tax you pay should be proportionate for how long you spend in country with a bare minimum of 20% (estimate).
Make shell companies illegal so large multinationals can't escape to tax havens and not pay corporations tax. If they don't ban them from trading in the UK. This may need to be done in a coalition of states working together.
education
Repeal Blair era education legislation that created needless hoops and paper work for teachers. Repeal new laws that teachers can you sources from anti-capitalist, anti-democratic sources etc. Repeal the Gove/Cameron legislation that made schools behave like businesses. The point of school is for the kids to work hard and earn qualifications not the teacher. It is an inherently discriminatory system. allow at GCSE much more education in technical qualifications. e.g. bricklaying, carpentry, electricians, machine work, DJing etc . I don't think they need to start doing it at 16 or above. I think there's an argument that children should be able to leave school at 16. Some of the courses they do are pointless. Apprenticeship pay is so low that in the short term it makes more sense to get a minimum wage job. Atleast make apprenticeship pay in line with minimum wage to incentivise it rather than literally force kids to be extremely cheap labour like now.
self defense
I think it should be legal to carry around pepper spray, mace or stun gun especially for women. The criminals already have weapons. Why not decriminalise the ability for an individual to defend themselves especially women. Free female self defence classes.
BBC
Release all BBC created media onto the Iplayer. The British Tax payer paid for it. Why shouldn't they be able to access it. Perhaps make a BBC iplayer app to host it all for foreigners to use and pay for like Netflix.
business
Make corporations who sell goods in the UK prove that they don't come from slave/child labour. If they don't then they can't sell that product in the UK. Ban or reclassify Multi Level Marketting companies as Ponzi Schemes. Label Scientology as a cult (like Germany has). Regulate detox tea and supplements like any other medicine/pharmaceutical. One day a year allow any to search for a named person and see what their salary is (Norway does this).
Government
Ban former MPs from ever holding any business position once they retire. Make them divest all their business interests before being an MP. Make their spouses and children's company's to never receive state money or have a job in a state enterprise. Same goes for Generals/Civil Servants. Spread of Government facilities from London to other cities e.g. does any every ministry need to be in London? Pay HMRC accountants/auditors much more than they a company would so they tell the government the loopholes companies use to not pay tax. Make it Financially rewarding to be ethical.
VAT
Remove VAT for resold,recycled products, upcycled products, products that are good the planet (re-chargeable batteries, battery chargers). Effectively re brand VAT as a carbon tax. Completely remove VAT on sanitary products, all energy efficiency/saving products.
Voting
Like Australia make it mandatory to go to the polling booth.
University
make universities offer their humanities subjects as an online only option as well as in person so that people can do their degree from anywhere and not necessarily in the expensive university town. The course would be cheaper. Make foreign students pay for their healthcare when they are here. Give less money to unis with more beneficiary (e.g. red brick unis). They already have so many endowments they don't need as much from the state. Foreign students can't work at all while studying here.
Tourism
Make foreigners pay to get into British Museums especially the big ones in london. I realise this may be cost prohibitive for smaller Museums.
Housing
Change the rental legislation that tenants can legally not pay full rent if a landlord hasn't done repairs to the standard of the property when the renter moved in.
No foreigner can own more than 2 homes in the UK (in Thailand you can't own any property unless you're Thai)
Cap the number of a properties anyone can own. especially for buy to let landlords.
If a house has sat vacant for too long it has to be put on the market as a competitive price.
Rent control for a property inline with inflation for renters.
Houses cannot be treated as an investment where it doesn't matter if its occupied or not. A roof over ones head is a right.
Homelessness
Expand the access to homeless shelters. The best way to stop human and sex trafficking as well hard drug use to is stop homelessness.
migratory farm workers
Ban migratory farm workers in the UK. There are thousands of underemployed Uni, GCSE, college and A level students who have months off school in the picking season. Why not pay them to pick fruit and vegetables? Same thing goes for homeless people. Get them all to pick fruit and veg.
littering & dog tax
Small tax on having a dog to pay for dog park maintenance, dog bins, etc. Small tax on single use packaging to pay for more Bins on high street, bins to be emptied more regularly to reduce littering. Same small tax on tobacco for cigarette butt bins.
These are all my ideas. Please critique them.

Removed comments/submissions for /u/thatguy3019

Hi thatguy3019, you're not shadowbanned, but 90 of your most recent 97 comments/submissions were removed (either automatically or by human moderators).

Comments:

ggow2r7 posted in stimuluscheck on 22DEC20:

Right. People see all the lies both sides tell to get votes and then still believe. We are so damn gullible.

ggoaatr posted in stimuluscheck on 22DEC20:

I'm ready

ggnjyf6 posted in stimuluscheck on 22DEC20:

Be careful. The states decide. Texas already said they want their overpayment back. They aren't charging interest and aren't giving a time line.

ggm7akj posted in stimuluscheck on 21DEC20:

Yeah I made it to the last page too. I think the last words are "Fuck you and Thank you for the billions."
I'm pretty sure that is referring to all the American people. It should be okay though....

ggm51gk posted in stimuluscheck on 21DEC20:

Both sides are evil. Dems just lie to your face and tell everyone what they want to hear. They use it to gain votes. They do it every election. We will give you all this free stuff if you vote for...

ggm4hxb posted in stimuluscheck on 21DEC20:

You all are forgetting trump. Mitch wouldve done whatever trump told him to do pre-election. Trump needed the bill to gain votes. Dems didn't want a bill because they didn't want him to get credit....

ggjfvkw posted in stimuluscheck on 21DEC20:

Stimulating the economy!

ggjedtm posted in stimuluscheck on 21DEC20:

They are old enough to vote.... that's why we are in this mess to begin with

ggj1gc0 posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

He has to post both sides so he can say he is correct regardless. Lol

ggj16uw posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

Those countries are way smaller. Its easier for masses of people to organize whenever they dont have to travel far. Americans get over things easily. We don't have the fight in us like other...

ggivdtr posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

I think you will get yours whenever you file your taxes next year. Not sure

ggivb6l posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

Did you get money for them on the last one? I think it will be a repeat of last time.

gggtc7k posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

I traveled outside the states a lot. The majority thinks every single part of the states is one big NYC or LA. They base it off of the media and movies. They don't believe me and it doesn't help...

gggss4g posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

Thats all the dems did this whole time. They cave into everything. We need officials for the people and that have a backbone. Gop is like an old school pimp and the dems are what Dave chappelle...

gggs78d posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

You still have one? I sold mine to pay rent.

gggrwa4 posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

I'm worried that the dems gave in without getting nothing in return. This all has been completely one sided. The 600 dollar checks aren't because of the dems. Its mitch if you think about it. He...

gggrjbi posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

No they won't. All politicians talk but they fall in line when told to get in line. They cant make enemies in their own party or they will be outcast.

gggr48y posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

We would've never been like new Zealand, Australia, Korea or whatever other country you want to compare us to. You have to stop comparing us to other countries. You can't compare those countries to...

gggqhvw posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

That may be the next game play. They must have x amount of senators to vote. If none show up, no vote. No stimulus. They probably left the country lol

gggpxdu posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

Its not nothing. They get to go home for Christmas after patting themselves on the back.

gggprkl posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

2 got to vote again in 2 years. People forget.

gggpofj posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

They always gamble and it seems like the gop is always the dealer. I rather take my chances playing 3 card monte on the street.

gggp9om posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

They are both on the same team behind closed doors. That pop loan forgiveness and tax deductible for business can from both sides so companies don't get a huge tax bill. The people got paid nothing...

gggoltd posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

I think this too. They pushes benefits to when the vaccine starts rolling out in larger quantities in march/April. Then they will say something about that and heard immunity. They don't care if...

gggoagk posted in stimuluscheck on 20DEC20:

What happens if the senate is lost? Are you all not tired of depending on a congress that only serves itself? It shouldn't matter who wins the senate races. People need help

ggetzj3 posted in stimuluscheck on 19DEC20:

Companies increase costs without wages going up. Companies will definitely increase costs. They would have to pay extra in employee costs so they will take it from their customers. I agree. The...

gge4wsc posted in stimuluscheck on 19DEC20:

Its called quantitative easing. Feds buy up assets to control or help the economy. Japan is notorious for this

gge4pkh posted in stimuluscheck on 19DEC20:

Stock market has been rising even though a lot of things are shutdown. The feds used their power to keep it afloat while trump was in office. If the stock market falls, rich people get mad. The...

ggbl194 posted in stimuluscheck on 19DEC20:

They both will leave at the same time and blame each other. 1 side may walk out a minute or 2 early, but that's about it.

ggbkjy3 posted in stimuluscheck on 19DEC20:

If I remember correctly, income tax didn't start until prohibition. They needed to make revenue after they couldn't make it from alcohol. Alcohol came back, but they never dropped taxes. The same...

ggbiy3l posted in stimuluscheck on 19DEC20:

They will have another one that goes until Christmas eve and then they will leave until next year. They are all in on it.

gg910c0 posted in stimuluscheck on 18DEC20:

Math is crazy. Ceo makes 1000 an hour. Bag clerk makes 8 dollars an hour. The average is 504 dollars. You see the difference?

gg5qwlw posted in stimuluscheck on 17DEC20:

They gambled before this election. It didn't turn out well for anyone. I hate that both sides choose to gamble with our lives

gfywmnm posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

Yes. I have several friends that worked for American companies overseas. Their unemployment is based on the state the company is headquartered in because the company was required to pay unemployment...

gfyvsgd posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

I tried this but the app told me they sold out. They do keep pushing the ads

gfyg92f posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

I dont trust polls. I always see poll results but never actually see the polls whenever they are posted for votes. Also, it can be skewed to fit whatever you want. For example... if I wanted to see...

gfyfp3i posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

I wouldn't put my trust into it. I mean look at what opioids are doing. That company pushed opioids, sold the cure, and then had billions so they don't have to pay for those they hurt. You can test...

gfyf81i posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

Even more reason to be worried. Sure companies don't lie and rush out things for profit without everyone in the world competing against you. Thats why there is always those infomercials 5 years...

gfyez4b posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

No money to state and local government and no liability shields for businesses. You wouldn't be allow to take your employer to court if they don't protect you from covid properly. It takes...

gfydhcu posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

Yeah mitch and Pelosi are each other secret Santa lol

gfwr2hy posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

Yup. There is enough money for everyone.

gfwqwd6 posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

Look at the stock market and look at days our government acts like an ass. The stock market is supposed to be future looking so it does change. Well, not as much as it supposed to. The feds are...

gfwqr7t posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

Its not a fix amount whenever congress can literally pick a random number. They could pass a 3 trillion or 3 dollar bill if they really wanted to.

gfvqgy2 posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

They probably had this sitting in a backroom since summer. They just hit print today. Everything these days is scripted. I wouldn't be surprised if our government wasn't.

gfvod0q posted in stimuluscheck on 15DEC20:

So the Republicans win. Dems aren't fighting for us at all. A high school debate team could get a better deal than what they are getting. No help for the people.

gfv15k2 posted in stimuluscheck on 14DEC20:

FYI
Its not just a texas thing. Its all states. Cares act is dated. Regardless of how many weeks you still have, they cant pay you for any weeks after dec 26. They are saying congress would need to...

gfv0y2x posted in stimuluscheck on 14DEC20:

Its not just a texas thing. Its all states. Cares act is dated. Regardless of how many weeks you still have, they cant pay you for any weeks after dec 26. They are saying congress would need to...

gfv08ax posted in stimuluscheck on 14DEC20:

Why did it take a week for them to do this? They divided the bill into 2 parts and made no real changes. I guess it took them a week to find 2 pieces of paper. It wouldn't surprise me.

UK Labour opinions on Uk policy ideas (immigration, unions, advertising, electoral reform etc)

I would call myself an environmental libertarian-ish. I am a Marxist in that I use a materialistic interpretation of history and events. I have some ideas that I think would benefit the UK. Some of which are in line with Labour ideas. I would love to know what you guys think or what you think would be a better idea. Please criticize. I hope to have a dialogue about this as much as possible.
Drugs
de criminalise all drugs (much like portugal) treat it as a mental health issue. A lot of people take drugs because of homelessness and poverty so by dealing with those hard drug use will go down. Legalise Cannabis, Mushrooms (and most hallucinegics), LSD, MDMA, Steroids and Cocaine (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/bad-science-cocaine-study). tax them inline with the estimated costs for misuse of them. regulate them like tobacco and alcohol.
Obesity and Food
Ban the sale of energy drinks to children below 16. ban the sale of very sweet confectiionary and drinks to children below 16 (some mexican states have done it recently), This includes in schools. tax very fatty, sugary or nutritionly rare foods in line with what the estimated costs are for the NHS to deal with the health problems caused by them (much the same way we do with alcohol, tobacco and in my tax system other drugs). Possibly make it mandatory to fortify very cheap foods with minerals and vitamins so the impoverished can get more nutrients. although the body doesnt absorb these very well so it might be pointless. Plain Packaging and warning labels on Junk food like cigarettes. make the nutritional information for actual representative portions. Possibly Ban the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup and Margarine in UK foods. If companies shrinkflate a product then they have to put it on the packaging of the product that they have done so. Ban the sale of Alcohol and Tobacco to pregnant women (not sure how you enforce this).
Make it illegal for a company/business to throw away food stuff and make them donate it to foodbanks/food charities.
Advertising/product placement/
Ban all adverts to children in any way. I think you could also make toys/mannequins sold in the UK have realistic proportions for both boys and girls. Ban junk food ads, alcohol ads, vaping ads, gambling ads, payday loan ads, ads for big SUV/highly polluting vehicles. Ban the sponsorship of events by any of these things either .Ban product placement, ban TV shows for kids that have toys explicitly linked to them. All ads that have photoshopped used need to a sign saying they've been photoshopped and very thin models have to have a medical certificate that they are healthy (like france).
Gambling/Games
Ban or reclassify Loot box systems in games. Make fixed odds betting machines have lower returns. Either tax very highly online gambling sites (spin wheel style), forced break periods or make it a state monolopy. Gambling is effectively a license to print money. why shouldn't the state take the proceeds from what is a worthless noncontributing part of the economy. Either make the lottery state run and recieve all the profits for public work or ban it and replace it with a government bond deposit scheme like premium bonds but a lower threshold to enter.
NHS
repeal the Blair laws making the NHS act more a competitive business which have proved to ineffective. Make the English NHS system more in line with the Scottish system.
Tax or in some make people who do more dangerous activities pay a small amount extra for the increased likelihood of needing the services of the NHS like motorcyclists, horse riders, extreme sportspeople.
Ban the evergreening of drugs so they can be made cheaply and generically. If a pharma company has recieved funding to develop a drug then it must be sold at cost (or much lower profit). Somehow democratise the access to science and medical journals e.g. higher tax, made to be free if research was publicly funded, government run science journal).
Free speech
repeal a lot of the Blair era censorship legislation. repeal with 2014 porn ban.
prostitution
legalize brothels. but make prostitution licensed to stop sex trafficking. Mandate the wearing of a condom. Possibly make it that you can only be a prostitute if you hold a british passport to stop sex trafficking from abroad.
Trade Unions
repeal the anti-trade union legislation.
Electoral reform
I think a system like Single Transferrable Vote would be better than FPTP. I think that registered political parties should somehow get some minimum funding from the state to facilitate a healthy and varied democracy. Remove the hereditary peerages from the house of lords.
availability of credit
I don't think payment plans for normal consumer goods should be available. I think it should be harder to get a pay day loan than it currently is.
Fines
I think that fines for speeding, other fine-able offenses should be means tested and shouldn't have a cap.
Copyright
I think that Copyright should expire for everything after 50 years. So at the this point everything from before 1969 should be in the public domain. I think any British citizen creator who leaves the UK to not pay income tax should have the copyright for their work removed in the UK when they do leave.
Welfare
Introduce Universal basic income in the UK. replace all the means tested and tedious bureaucracy associated with current system. I think it should start from 18 years old and increase slightly each year. Maybe start at 5,000 pounds and by your thirties move up to 10,000 pounds by the time you want to start having kids etc. I think UBI would make work always pay more than being on benefits. It would disincentive benefits fraud as well as people having children to acquire more benefits.
Tax
I do believe in a progressive taxation system. I think the tax free threshold should be raised. I think the brackets for taxation are good at the moment but I would add higher tax thresholds at higher rates e.g. 50% at 200,000, 60% at 500,000. I am unsure what the upper limit should be for tax rate or income. The rich will leave anyway (Jim ratcliffe most recenty) no matter what the tax rate is. If they ever wants to come into the UK they should have to pay to do so. If they have a knighthood it should be taken away.
Immigration.
remove all EU citizens not in critical under supplied or high paying jobs from the UK as well migratory workers from outside the EU. Syrian Civil war refugees should go back as well. basically as many people as possible should be made to go back to their country of origin without directly endangering their lives. I think the pay threshold for workers to legally migrate here should be much higher probably 40,000 pounds a year. there should be not net migration to the UK each year.
children and population growth
I think the UK should aim for net 0% population growth. I think couples who want to have kids should be made to screen for any hereditary recessive genetic diseases before they plan to have a child so they can know if they're kid is going to be disabled. Possibly people should have to have in the womb embryo testing as well to see if theyre child has any genetic diseases. I think people should be discouraged from having lots of children especially those without the means to provide for them. however if people do decide to have kids I think the provision for parenting should be a lot. 2+ years of paid maternity leave. free parenting lessons, support as much as possible the needs of the child and mother in the critical early bonding years. Ban all Child beauty pageants including trans ones (like france has done). I don't think childen can legally consent to hormone replacement drugs. Ban Gay conversion therapy. I think the age of criminal responsibility should be raised should be raised to about 14. I think there are arguments to lower the age of consent in the UK to 15.
Euthanasia
legalise child euthanasia (like belgium and the netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol). Legalise normal euthanasia for people of any age as well.
the environment
Library of things/Repair cafes in towns and cities to be able to more easily repairs good or not have to buy in the first place.
Ban or curtail the sale of bottled war. Install more water fountains and public bathrooms instead.
Government subsidy scheme to better insulate homes across country.
More extensive use of nuclear fission energy for electric generation.
Large scale food waste reclamation for Compost or animal feed.
Subsidy for Ground source heat pumps for poor households
Subsidy for Thermal exchangers in home for poor households
Make planned obselescene illegal. Make right to repair legally mandated.
simplify the amount and types of plastic products to make it easier to recycle goods. Ban non recyclable plastics from being used in single use items.
Ban paper junk mail and possibly free newspapers.
Make products label their expected lifetime (from average use) so consumer knows what a good long lasting product is. For large electric goods perhaps put a minimum expected lifespan for it to be sold in the UK.
I think you could legislate to make products illegal from rainforests or unsustainable harvested forest (palm oil specifically)
Tax loopholes
make all gift-aid illegal, make art donations as tax write off illegal, donations to think tanks,charities illegal as tax write-offs,
currently if you live outside the UK for more than 6 months you don't pay any income tax. I think the amount of income tax you pay should be proportionate for how long you spend in country with a bare minimum of 20% (estimate).
Make shell companies illegal so large multinationals can't escape to tax havens and not pay corporations tax. If they don't ban them from trading in the UK. This may need to be done in a coalition of states working together.
education
repeal Blair era education legislation that created needless hoops and paper work for teachers. repeal new laws that teachers can you sources from anti-capitalist, anti-democratic sources etc. repeal the Gove/Cameron legislation that made schools behave like businesses. The point of school is for the kds to work hard and earn qualifications not the teacher. It is an inherently discriminatory system. allow at GCSE much more education in technical qualifications. e.g. bricklaying, carpentry, electricians etc, machine work. I don't think they need to start at 16 or above. I think theres an argument that children should be able to leave school at 16. Some of the courses they do are pointless. Apprenticeship pay is so low that in the short term it makes more sense to get a minimum wage job. Atleast make apprenticeship pay in line with minimum wage to incentivise it rather than literally force kids to be extremely cheap labour.
self defense
I think it should be legal to carry around pepper spray, mace or stun gun. The criminals already have weapons. Why not decriminalise the ability for an individual to defend themselves especially women. Free female self defence classes.
BBC
release all BBC created media onto the Iplayer. The British Tax payer paid for it. Why shouldn't they be able to access it. Perhaps make a BBC iplayer app to host it all for foreigners to use and pay for like Netflix.
business
Make corporations who sell goods in the UK prove that they don't come from slave/child labour. If they don't then they can't sell that product in the UK. Ban or reclassify Multi Level Marketting companies as Ponzi Schemes. Label Scientology as a cult (like germany has). Regulate detox tea and supplements like any other medicine/pharmaceutical. one day a year allow any to search for a named person and see what their salary is (norway does this).
Government
Ban former MPs from ever holding any business position once they retire. Make them divest all their business interests before being an MP. Make their spouses and children's company's to ever recieve state money or have a job in a state enterprise. Same goes for Generals/Civil Servants. Spread of Governemnt facilites from London to other cities e.g. does any every ministry need to be in London? Pay HMRC accountants/auditors much more than they a company would so they tell the government the loopholes companies use to not pay tax. make it Financially rewarding to be ethical.
VAT
remove VAT for resold,recycled products, upcycled products, products that are good the planet (re-chargeable batteries, battery chargers). effectively rebrand VAT as a carbon tax. completely remove VAT on sanitary products, all energy efficiency/saving products.
Voting
like Australia make it mandatory to go to the polling booth.
University
make universities offer their humanities subjects as online only option so that people can do their degree from anywhere and not necessarily in the expensive university town. the course would be cheaper. Make foreign students pay for their healthcare when they are here. Give less money to unis with more beneficiarys (e.g. red brick unis). They already have so many endowments they don't need as much from the state. Foreigns students can't work at all while studying here.
Tourism
make foreigners pay to get into British Museums especially the big ones in london. I realise this may be cost prohibitive for smaller Museums.
Housing
change the rental legislation that tenants can legally not pay full rent if a landlord hasn't done repairs to the standard of the property when the renter moved in.
No foreigner can own more than 2 homes in the UK (in thailand you can't own any property unless you're thai)
Cap the number of a properties anyone can own. especially for buy to let landlords.
If a house has sat vacant for too long it has to be put on the market as a competitive price.
rent control for a property inline with inflation for renters.
houses cannot be treated as an investment where it doesn't matter if its occupied or not. a roof over ones head is a right.
Homelessness
expand the access to homeless shelters. the best way to stop human and sex trafficking as well hard drug use to is stop homelessness.
migratory farm workers
ban migratory farm workers in the UK. there are thousands of Uni, GCSE, college and A level students who have months off school in the picking season. Why not get them to pick fruit and vegetables? same thing goes for homeless people. Get them all to pick fruit and veg.
littering & dog tax
small tax on having a dog to pay for dog park maintenance, dog bins, etc. small tax on single use packaging to pay for more Bins on high street, bins to be emptied more regularly to reduce littering. Same small tax on tobacco for cigarette butt bins.
These are all my ideas. Please critique them.

is gambling tax free in australia video

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