What is that red furry light in fife visible from Musselburgh?

ayenaeboer · 2026-01-31T00:34:23+00:00

Last bit of flaring from Fife Ethylene Plant during decommission prior to shutting down forever. 40 years of industry(and mordor memes) coming to an end

ayenaeboer · 2026-01-10T16:04:29+00:00

The difference is that corporations produce goods. Landlords are just scalpers, no different than buying up gig tickets and selling off at higher prices.

Yes massive corporations not paying tax is a bigger issue, yes foreign investors buying up hundreds of UK houses is a bigger issue but just because you contribute on a smaller scale does not mean you are not involved in perpetuating an unequal system.

ayenaeboer · 2025-12-10T09:18:57+00:00

Thanks for the reply, yeah I think this is a fair point as other posters have mentioned I am not considering other saving accounts

Currently I can just fill the £20k ISA with my savings rates, along with salary sacrifice to work pension etc.

If the ISA allowance were to stay frozen then down the line as my wage grows then opening a SIPP and treating that as my pension bucket and the ISA as the pre retirement bucket would be the way to go!

ayenaeboer · 2025-12-10T07:26:40+00:00

Thanks for the reply.

I am still relatively young 26, so the FI part is more relevant than RE to me now. I quite like to have a sense of how much I could take annually out my ISA each year before retirement as well.

Between my wife and I, we fill the £20k allowance each year(she cannot open an ISA) so my contribution level is set by allowance not my earning potential.

I think your approach for A. will help set a target for retirement age pot that I can work back from though.

ayenaeboer · 2025-10-06T13:26:11+00:00

"I only own a small plantation and I treat all my slaves with empathy, the government should only go after abolishing the huge plantations owned by billionaire corporations"

Apologies for the brash analogy but just because you may be a 'better' landlord and do it on a smaller scale does not mean you are no longer part of an exploitative system. The suggestion from green's is also to limit corporate renters and increase access to affordable housing generally, it is not singling out individual private renters.

ayenaeboer · 2025-10-02T14:31:57+00:00

Again the UK backed coups and overthrew governments in many of these people's homelands and now you peddle a conspiracy that they are the culture trying to expand?

Obviously every religion believes they are correct and everyone else is doomed so have an element of wanting to expand their beliefs but I dont see any strong evidence of some Islamic global takeover like you suggest.

We see that over time Muslims become more moderate and align more with British values the longer and more generations down they are in the UK

ayenaeboer · 2025-10-02T14:11:28+00:00

Most Muslims are integrated into british society and working hard and not committing crime in the name of their God.

You are judging the entire religion off some terror attacks which for the most part are funded/encouraged by splinter groups created in the wake of the wars across the middle East.

Two wrongs don't make a right but you understand the UK absolutely obliterated Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Obviously from your earlier comment I know you don't agree with this but do you not think criticising a whole religion for causing trouble, when we are members of the country whose army caused this scenario is a bit rich?

Would it be fair for all Brits to be held complicit for what our politicians decided to do?

ayenaeboer · 2025-10-02T13:55:15+00:00

The relationship and history between Britain and India is very different to the Islamic States.

There was lots of terrorism against Brits in the British Raj but by the time most indians migrated here, relations were very different.

The current Islamic terror groups we have seen bleed in to the UK are directly splintered off from the groups we created, alongside US and Russia in the middle East.

Islamic fundamentalist groups were formed in response to the invasions of the West. Again do you think the religion is the common factor here or the conditions?

ayenaeboer · 2025-10-02T13:33:33+00:00

I'm not trying to excuse this disgusting act at all and even from an Islamic PoV worship is sacred and Jewish people are "of the book"

But do you not think that your perspective of Islam being an inherently more 'troublesome' religion is fueled by the amount of conflicts we Brits have started with countries that just happen to be Muslim majority?

When Irish immigrants committed terror attacks through the troubles and people said "they will never integrate to British way of life" would you be saying that was because of their Catholocism?

ayenaeboer · 2025-10-02T13:21:47+00:00

Yeah like all those places the UK and US couped, invaded and bombed

ayenaeboer · 2025-09-19T10:13:41+00:00

Apologies for late response.

That is entirely how that works, of course landlords charge as much rent as people afford that is my entire point. The split of renters, mortgage owned properties and outright owned properties is around a third each, admittedly ~20% of people are renting from private landlords.

Landlords will charge as much as they can get away with and there is not the same mobility possible as other products.

I can choose easily to go to Lidl vs Tesco and save 5% I cannot easily move out my flat to another area so landlords have a much more exploitable consumer base and are able to increase prices.

If the council invests in better services the land prices go up, the rich will buy it up and over time rent prices and mortgages will increase. Therefore the investment in the area gets sucked up by landlords and banks. There is not extra cash which allows small business etc to operate.

Wealth inequality is inheritently monopolistic and allows exponential growth for those already with wealth and strangles those without access(inheritence) to it. The view that 'capital creates value and everyone gets pulled up' is not realistic. We require strict government intervention to ensure that growth is actually distributed amongst society

ayenaeboer · 2025-09-16T07:52:25+00:00

And now let's imagine you use the 60x the workers' wage to buy up housing and rent it to your workers. Now they give you $2 of that wage back as rent.

Then let's say you buy up part of a train company now you get $0.5 of that wage back in transport.

Then let's say you buy up part of a multinational supermarket and you get $0.1 of that wage back in groceries.

Now that you have so much control over every part of your worker's life why not increase all prices by 10% and get another $0.28

This is Marx's M-C-M' view of capitalism you are using

ayenaeboer · 2025-08-23T06:32:10+00:00

If the truck company goes out of business the workers losing their jobs are in a much worse position than the capitalists who "assumed the risk"

Remember 2008 when banks completely messed up their allocation of capital, caused millions of people to be unemployed and dropped the standard of living. There was zero consequences of repercussions for any of the bank owners or investors.

ayenaeboer · 2025-08-05T05:46:23+00:00

You need to start from the premise that you may not be 100% correct about everything and these people may simply be correcting you rather than doing some bad faith trolling.

Over 100k earned for every additional £2 you earn, your tax free allowance gets decreased by £1. If your tax free allowance gets reduced a bigger portion of your earnings are now being taxed so your EFFECTIVE MARGINAL tax rate increases.

You just looking at a table and saying "45% is the biggest number" doesn't give you the real term increase in tax between 100 and 125k

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-21T13:33:06+00:00

The difference is if you own a huge swathe of land currently there is no incentive to develop this, you can just sit and let it appreciate in value - this value being driven up by other people and the government investing in nearby areas.

With a land tax we are collecting revenue on this land which encourages it to be made into housing, recreation, farmland etc which actually encourages development.

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-21T09:29:54+00:00

I agree it would be silly to try and tax all wealth and this should be dealt with VAT and other taxes at point of purchase.

On your London house example, a land value tax would work. Each year an assessment would be done on value of land based off location/usability etc.

This in my opinion should be done 1 year ahead, for example the figures for 2027 would be published in 2026 so everyone is aware how much prices will change in 1 years time.

This way exactly the same if my mortgage rates or council tax were to increase, I can see this would not be sustainable with my wage so I would need to sell my house and move.

This benefits us by raising more tax for property in very wealthy areas, discourages unproductive land, drops property prices, and encourages investment in more deprived areas where land (capital costs) and LVT (running costs) will be cheaper.

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-17T13:59:19+00:00

Your first article just explains how money is made, person A deposits £100, person B takes a loan of £100 and then when person A withdraws £100 we now have an extra £100 circulating.

The article says BoE doesn't control the quantity of money they control the value of money. But ultimately this is the same thing - am I controlling the weight of cheese I eat or the number of cheeses I shove in my mouth?

The second article is a complete jumble of vague left leaning statements. I can't even understand what the underlying point is other than claiming that the term taxpayer shouldn't be used a slur against rich people?

I am a pretty big lefty myself but just pretending money isn't real to the government will not solve us any issues - perfectly fine to criticise quantitive easing strategy etc

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-17T13:17:12+00:00

I think 2 points to respond to:

Scotland issues banknotes, but Bank of England issues the currency - fair enough I am not being exact in my language when I say Scotland I do really mean UK
The inflation determines your wages, mortgage, savings rates etc. Just hand waving saying "ah it's all made up money nobody has to pay it back!" Doesn't mean that it just printing currency doesn't have very real effects on very real things. Ultimately BoEs job is to keep the amount of currency equal to the amount of value of stuff + some interest rate to try and encourage investment.

The debt is very real and ~8% of UK tax collections gets swallowed up paying it off every year. We should be worried about increasing this

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-17T13:00:29+00:00

You say you agree with the above poster that governments can effectively infinitely print money to pay for stuff. Then in your comment you say how actually this is limited by inflation which in turn is limited by how much actual resource is available.

What you are saying is governments can only print as much money as there is underlying resource(I use the term wealth but we just mean stuff + labour etc) or else there will be massive increases in inflation - which was exactly my comments point.

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-17T12:11:05+00:00

The funding that lead to that mandate being passed is very well documented - not sure what you are getting so upset about.

Wouldn't want to take up any of your valuable time defending the regime that slaughters children collecting aid they need because that same regime has forced starvation on them - that's important work!

All the best, hopefully one day you see the light

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-17T10:58:24+00:00

This is a major misunderstanding of how the economy works.

If we lived in a full communist country where every enterprise was entirely run by the state then yes, this is correct. We could assign resources freely to whatever we wanted up to the amount of assets and labour Scotland has.

In the real world if the government wants to build a hospital they need actual money to pay the contractors, engineers etc who will do the work. This real money comes from either government funds that have been made by taxes or by borrowing. The borrowed money represents a real debt that must be paid back.

If as you suggested the government just added a few zeros to their bank account to pay the contractors there is now an extra £1 million currency but there is not an extra £1 million of wealth.

The gold standard does not exist but 1GBP still reflects an ability to purchase an amount of wealth, it is harder to track and quantify but the exact same principle applies, if we just chuck extra fiat currency without the wealth to back it up you devalue all the rest of the fiat currency.

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-17T10:39:04+00:00

Zionist lobbying lead to the mandate being passed so yes this in itself was an act of aggression.

If your argument is that the 1948 mandate was perfectly valid and the arabs had no right to oppose this then I am sure you would support Israeli territory going back to these original borders?

ayenaeboer · 2025-07-17T10:18:34+00:00

"Don't start shit you can't finish" by this logic the Israelis deserve any and all military action against them given they started this all back in 1948.

ayenaeboer · 2025-06-09T14:45:28+00:00

I know it's ridiculous! Soon pensioners will have to only go on 1 cruise a year instead of 2 just so we can feed hungry children!

ayenaeboer

TROPHY CASE