People have been talking about amicable separation from Europe since long before Farage had any significant influence in British politics.

Yes. That's what we signed up for: economic and trade relations. Everything that has come after that has never been asked for or voted for here (or in many other EU member states, for that matter).

Why is this a problem? It worked fine for years, and good trade relations are mutually beneficial.

So do a lot of other people. But the UK isn't asking for a free lunch. It's suggesting that if, say, Germany makes good bread and the UK farms good cows, they trade so everyone can enjoy a tasty burger-in-a-roll for lunch. Plenty of nations outside the EU have this kind of relationship with plenty of nations within the EU today. The UK has, and wants to develop, these kinds of relations with other global trading partners as well.

The UK is a net importer with most of its major trading partners within the EU. Financially speaking, there is probably more benefit to those nations if they preserve good trade relations with the UK than the other way around, but both sides benefit greatly.

The trouble with that argument is that it relies on the stronger members having enough economic power to actually do that. It is far from clear that this is currently the case, with the expansion of the EU in recent years to include many far less economically advanced member states, not to mention a few of the longer-standing ones habitually cooking the books. The likes of Germany can't make up for shortfalls across so many of their fellow EU nations indefinitely; it isn't politically viable, and even if it were, it probably isn't economically viable in the long term either.

Not really. I hear bookies are giving odds of 1/25 on "badly".

The trouble is, the Eurozone hasn't actually solved the underlying problems that caused or amplified most of the troubles in recent years. There is still wide disparity between the economic strengths of different EU member states, including those within the Eurozone. They still share a common currency but control their own taxation, government spending, and trade relations with partners outside the EU.

Measures like quantitative easing (as we seem to call "printing money" these days) might create some temporary breathing space that allows more time to address underlying problems. However, if the real problems aren't addressed then sooner or later they will just undermine the whole economy and cause everything to crash again. And next time, the rest of the world will be even less trusting of the Eurozone's future financial strength, making it even harder for its member states to recover.

People keep posting this, but seem to be referring to only one bank, HSBC. It would be a loss economically if they went, but there is a lot of scare-mongering going on about what would happen to big business if we do/don't leave. No-one really knows how many, if any, of these big businesses would really follow through on their threats if they don't get the result they want.

There have also been leaders of big business arguing for leaving. The main argument is that it would make it easier for the UK to negotiate bilateral trade agreements with other rising economic powers around the world if it were not tied to the EU.

And there have certainly been plenty of small businesses criticising all the badly implemented rules from the EU recently on everything from VAT to consumer protection, which are creating an absurd burden particularly in the growing on-line sector. In theory we are supposed to benefit from more trade as a result, but some less charitable/more realistic commentators have pointed out that many nations in the EU are still in such a poor state financially that they generate almost no custom for things like new on-line businesses anyway.

The difficulty with all of these issues is that since no-one can see far into the future, none of us really know which agreements are more important to keep or develop and which are just getting in the way now. It's all just marginally-educated guesses.

The UK is part of Europe because of geography.

The UK is part of the European Union because of history, and in particular because of trade agreements followed by dubious political manoeuvring to expand the resulting relationship far beyond their originally intended scope.

That seems like a good summary of the current situation, yes.

Why? I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'm erring on the side of leaving for entirely rational reasons.

In short, I think the UK and much of continental Europe have different long term goals. The Eurozone nations have opted for a degree of financial integration that the UK doesn't want or need. Obviously that hasn't worked out very well recently, at least for the economically stronger EU nations, so there is little reason for the UK to join in the foreseeable future. I think the wider EU is also heading for a more centralised, federalised system of legislation and broader government, which again the UK does not generally want to join. I suspect that in the long term these two fundamental types of integration will prove to be inseparable, and those who want to be part of the EU will increasingly lose sovereignty over things like taxation, weakening national governments in favour of ever-more-powerful central EU authorities. That's OK if it really is what they want, but I don't think it is what the UK is looking for in its relationship with its European neighbours.

On the other hand, the UK and many other EU nations are valuable trading partners for each other, so maintaining a liberal trading environment is in everyone's interests. This was what our previous generation actually signed up for by joining the predecessors of the current EU, of course. I think many in the UK also value things like the the European Convention on Human Rights (even if our current administration do not like it) and would be happy to remain a signatory, but that is a different European system, not part of the EU. Similarly I think those from the UK who often travel to Europe or vice versa would see merit in the UK joining the Schengen Area (even though again our current administration are probably strongly against it).

As things stand, it may be that the best way of everybody getting as close as possible to achieving their own goals is for the UK and EU to separate amicably, and then for the UK to establish alternative agreements for mutual benefit with the EU and/or individual member states in those areas where everyone's interests do align. It would no doubt be painful for everyone in the short term, but this might be a having to break eggs to make omelettes situation.

They did. In fact, none of this is really a surprise to anyone involved, because this kind of contingency planning is part of the Bank's official responsibilities.

As far as I can see, the only problem here is the premature release of information that could be politically/diplomatically sensitive via an inappropriate channel and at an awkward time for the government. It doesn't look like this exposed any wrong-doing, and it's not like the other EU leaders our Prime Minister is starting to negotiate with wouldn't have expected it, even if it's not great PR given the delicacy of those negotiations.

Those "stupid journalists" appear to be in good company, starting with official press releases from both the European Commission and indeed the European Court of Justice itself about the 2010 Spanish newspaper case.

I would be the first to agree that moves towards a more powerful right to be forgotten such as you describe would be a good idea, but as of today, these are mostly just proposals. For example, while there is already a right under some limited circumstances to request deletion of personal data, the UK's data protection regulator has written guidance for data controllers that makes clear that the right is quite tightly constrained for the time being.

In this case, "filter" means select only those items that match the criteria, i.e., where the given predicate is true.

This usage is about as consistent as anything you'll find in the programming world: languages using it this way include Python, PHP, JavaScript, Java, D, and many well-known functional programming languages including Haskell, several of the ML family, Erlang, Scala and Clojure. Some other well-known languages have related algorithms under other name, but I know of no counter-examples that use "filter" in the opposite sense.

I think you're confusing two different things here. The "right to be forgotten", as much discussed recently with regard to Google and the like, is primarily about search engines digging up old information that would otherwise naturally fade into obscurity, and in particular the danger of finding old information that looks plausible but may in fact be misleading without context or now incorrect/outdated.

Sadly, most of us even in Europe still have rather limited rights to compel businesses not to store personal data about us or to delete that data on demand, if the data is correct, they register the fact that they are doing it with the appropriate national privacy regulator, and they can come up with some vaguely plausible argument for why they want to have the data.

I guess a few million people are about to find out the hard way why some of us have been arguing for a long time that we should have stronger privacy safeguards in the Internet/big data/data mining age. I wish they didn't have to find out this way, though.

Sure there are. The trouble is, every single one you listed has serious drawbacks compared to the current model.

Yes, they did. Plenty still do, though for most of them it's beer money rather than a career.

But before recordings you didn't need a sound engineer in a studio with a mixing desk and a lot of expensive equipment. Who pays the sound engineer in your world? Or the composer of the symphony? Or all those people whose names come after the actors when the film credits roll? Your model might work for the latest production of Hamlet. It isn't going to produce Fast and Furious 8.

That damages the experience for the majority of viewers, who no longer have the option to enjoy the movie in the comfort of their own home.

Because an ad-funded internet is so good that people invented ad-blockers, and blatant product placement doesn't in any way reduce the enjoyment of TV shows.

This is one of the more promising ideas on your list. However, right now, even the most successful projects on Kickstarter and the like are still coming in with an order of magnitude or two less funding than comparable projects generate through a copyright-based system. When GTA VI comes along, do you think it's going to be supported by a successful crowdfunding campaign?

People like stuff for free. I'd agree that some people rip content illegally just because of the convenience factor -- films out in theatres before you can buy physical media or stream a legal download, DRM, and so on. But the idea that the only reason people don't pay for stuff they can download illegally for free is because it's inconvenient is implausible.

Do you know what does work, very reliably, by your arguments about violating property rights? Locking down the Internet and limiting devices you can legally buy/sell/own in the first place to those that play nicely with your closed ecosystem.

The trouble is, the "information wants to be free" crowd think this is a joke and can never happen, and that cute sound-bites like "censorship is damage and the Internet routes around it" will overcome the will of the billion-dollar infrastructure companies that actually produce a lot of popular content and the governments with laws and police and jails. They will not, and all you're doing is pushing those powerful organisations towards systems where -- as, ironically, you suggested -- content providers will keep everything under their control. The only way to enjoy any content will be to rent it and access it via limited mechanisms.

Really? What are they, then?

Of course there is, but at no point have I (or anyone else I've seen in this discussion) suggested doing the latter just to make the code shorter. The point is that there are plenty of languages that can say in one clean, readable line of code what takes half an editor window in Java. I gave some typical examples in my reply to another post.

Right. The marginal cost of extra copies of information is very low. Unfortunately the initial cost of putting that information together may be extremely high, and if the information is never collected it won't be distributed either.

So we create an economic incentive to encourage that creation and distribution, effectively amortizing the initial development cost over all those who ultimately obtain a copy. This might not be the perfect economic model, but I'm still waiting for anyone to offer a plausible better alternative.

You can repeat these arguments as often as you like, but the not-a-lost-sale argument still contradicts basic economics, and the just-trying-it-out argument still contradicts overwhelming empirical data the industry has been collecting for years.