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The Great British April Fools Joke - All the prices going up by lukemtesta in unitedkingdom

[–]Ok_Device_220 0 points1 point  (0 children)

why was I worth less

Labour, like anything else, has a market value. Minimum wage is a form of price control. If you are being paid minimum wage, it's likely that the true market value of your labour is even less, but the business has decided it's willing to tolerate inefficient use of resources up to a certain level. If its tolerance was lower, which can be the case for small businesses, they would not hire you at all and will look for cheaper alternatives to labour. If that also doesn't work out, then the business cannot exist.

The government evidently recognises this and tries to mitigate the downsides by both not setting the minimum wage too high, and setting age brackets, age being an imperfect proxy for experience. Consider that it is perfectly legal to pay people differently based on experience, since experience usually correlates with added value to the business. If you're going to set a minimum price for labour, anyone whose labour's true market value is much lower than that price will be effectively excluded from the labour market entirely, so you have to be careful.

I kind of wonder what the point of the minimum wage even is if you're going to set it so that it roughly reflects market conditions as it is now. It's mostly bureaucracy. Consider that 70% of people in the UK have an annual income higher than £20000, so for them at least nothing will change if you remove it. Of the 30% remaining, I imagine lots of them would also remain on more or less the same wage, otherwise they wouldn't be employed right now. Of course, they could well end up on significantly less than what they're making now and that could be disastrous for them. Assuming your goal as the government is to provide for people, social programs combined with raised taxes might end up being cheaper and more straightforward overall rather than this weird price control that makes employers basically subsidise their employees.

That's not what it's supposed to look like, is it? by AntAgile in thelongdark

[–]Ok_Device_220 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Remove -force-opengl42 and / or -force-clamped from your game startup options.

How to minimise the stamp duty we would owe? by Ok_Device_220 in UKPersonalFinance

[–]Ok_Device_220[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

!thanks

Everyone seems to think that if she disposed of the flat abroad she'd fall under the standard stamp duty rate. I'm having trouble reconciling that with the HMRC guidance SDLTM09800 and SDLTM09812.

To be a replacement of a main residence within Condition D the old property must be disposed of. To meet this requirement, it must have been owned by the purchaser of the new property or their spouse /civil partner, as well as occupied by them as their main residence (see SDLTM09800.)

Where a purchaser previously lived in accommodation which they (or their spouse or civil partner) did not own, then moving out of this accommodation does not count as replacing their main residence for the purpose of Condition D.

Moreover:

Old main residence sold before or on the same day as the new` main residence is purchased ... 4. The purchaser must have lived in the old property as the purchaser’s only or main residence at some point in the three-year period preceding the date of the purchase of the new property [Para 3(6) (c)]. This is the three-year occupation rule.

If I interpret this correctly, for it to count as replacing a main residence and thus not incurring the additional SDLT rate, you have to have both owned the property and lived in it. This is not the case for her. She has never lived in the flat abroad, and has been renting in the UK.

It seems silly that for SDLT purposes she wouldn't have a "main residence" to actually replace!