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Post by DADDY O on May 3, 2017 9:48:46 GMT
This is simply incredible to me. www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39789903Why doesn't the UK tell the EU that the EU owes money to the UK..........and then walk away? What are they going to do......reposes Buckingham Palace?
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Post by sherri on May 3, 2017 15:05:54 GMT
They may have signed up for financial commitments so I can understand there may need to be some negotiation of terms, but they need to be firm with the EU and not let it get out of hand.
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Post by DADDY O on May 3, 2017 15:11:50 GMT
I look at agreements being a two way street. Exactly what has the EU done for the UK, other than bend them over and take their money?
What is worth 100 billion dollars?
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Post by sherri on May 3, 2017 15:22:20 GMT
I don't see the added value either but I bet UK signed agreements of some sort-probably up to some future date.
It'll cost to get out of those.
It reminds me of a state election here a couple of years back. The party in power signed up for a road link to be built-called the East West link. Believe you me, we need it. With the population increasing by tens of thousands almost weekly, the roads are too crowded.
Anyway, Labor promised if they got into power they would scrap the plans for this link and they would not pay a cent to do so. They got in (people in the city areas are anti roads), the premier did rip up the agreement but had to pay out billions because of the terms of the contract.
Annoys me no end. We paid billions NOT to get something we need.
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Post by DADDY O on May 3, 2017 15:30:21 GMT
No one ever said politicians were anywhere near smart....................just the opposite.
I would negotiate a trade deal BEFORE negotiating the buy-out.
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Post by sherri on May 3, 2017 23:00:03 GMT
I agree. Now this same govt that ripped up that contract is looking to build a different road-or so they say. We're heading towards elections in just over a year. Naturally, no road will be started before then, we'll be lucky if contracts have even been called. But if voted out, they can then boast about what they 'would have done' for the state. The East West was going to be a toll road though, that's the key point as the company then gets the tolls for the next how ever many decades.
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Post by DADDY O on May 4, 2017 1:11:20 GMT
I took a job as an office manager in Austin in 1985. At that time the City was growing by leaps and bounds, and there soon became a war between the housing developers and the environmentalists. So, the City of Austin with all of their mongolodian wit decided the way to control growth is simply not to build the infrastructure (roads, bridges, water facilities and sewer facilities) required to accommodate the growth. Then, the developers would just go away....right? Dead ass wrong.
It did not take too long before the wastewater treatment plants were fully overloaded and dumping raw sewage into the Colorado River thus killing hundreds of thousands of fish and other wildlife each and ever day. As you can imagine, the Bugs & Bunny Guys (environmentalists) came out of the wood works in full force. The City's reply was "Gosh guys, I thought you wanted growth to be controlled"? I kid you not.
The EPA fined the City $10,000 (a lot of money in 1985) for each and every day that a spill occurred. In order to prevent the spills, the City lined up several hundred 10,000 gallon tankers to suck the untreated wastewater out of various sewage plants and then haul the raw sewage to San Antonio (200 miles round trip) for them to treat.....................at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. San Antonio loved it.....Austin, not so much.
My first job was to expand the Walnut Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant from a 60 Million Gallon per day (MGD) facility to a 200 MGD facility.....no small feat, but it paid pretty well.
By the time it was under control, the City had spent close to one billion dollars to bring (just the wastewater) up to code.
Stupid is as Stupid Does was the sign hanging over my desk.
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Post by sherri on May 4, 2017 4:32:27 GMT
Reminds me of here. Back in the late '90s, we had a few years of good rain, dams were full. Any calls to build a new dam were opposed on the grounds that dams are bad things, to be avoided at almost any cost. That is fine-if you keep the population steady. But our population was growing in leaps and bounds (which is why no party can keep up with infrastructure, by the way). This state goes through cycles but every decade or two, there is a drought. You can count on it. So, rather predictably, the time of drought came, and immediately people started screaming-why hadn't the govt prepared, why hadn't they done something? So the Labor govt (still anti dam) arranged a large water pipeline. They also arranged for a large desal plant to be built-fast tracked in fact.
You have to understand, we were literally running out of water and our climate change gurus were saying the dams would never fill again.
Predictably, rain did come again-just before the desal plant was finished. So for the last few years it has been sitting there, a white elephant costing billions.
Now I do feel sorry for politicians in some ways as they have copped it a lot fro people who go on about how stupid it was to build a desal plant, we didn't need it.
But... had the drought not broken, it was all we had standing between us and no water. And.. the day will come again when we are in drought. the population is now even bigger. Obviously, one day we will rely on it. Mind you, a new dam would have been done the job at a lot less cost.
I am not a fan of ever more and more dams either. To me the solution is cut back on immigration, keep population numbers steady.
But I think both populations and political parties are short sighted.
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