Haje’s Brain

In any conversation the endurance of the first party is inversely proportional with the insistence of the other party to steer the topic to his / her children.

- Kamps / Jacobsen

This morning, I stumbled across a news story about how:

1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.

This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.

Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits.
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I recently had the fantastic opportunity of writing a book about photography for an US publisher. Of course, with the publisher being abroad, there were some tax issues with the venerable Internal Revenue Service. Basically, I was given the choice between a) giving the US Internal Revenue Service 30% of my earnings, and subsequently pay another significant percentage to the Inland Revenue (which are, of course, the UK tax authorities), or somehow get out of the US tax, and pay tax only in the UK.
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So. You are at a rock concert, and you decide it would be a good idea to let a bunch of people hoist you up on top of all the other people, and get lifted across, eh?

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This is an article about the lack of a gender neutral 3rd person singular (he / she) in the English language, if this is really a problem, and a couple of words about the measures that have been attempted to solve the “problem”

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Charities. You probably have your favourite one. Protection of birds. Protection of wildlife. Food for hungry children. Recycling. War veterans. Gun victims. For every good cause in the world, there is a charity - an organisation that is happy to take your money to pressure politicians, or to use the cash to take more direct action. However, I believe that some charities may be a bad idea in the long run.

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Many people believe that the concept of socialism is quite a good idea. Others would beg to differ, and think that the implementation of socialism could mean serious trouble.

This article presents an argument between myself (SharQ) and a stout capitalist (John) - the result is what appears to be a moral discussion over the impacts of socialism.

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