the fourth place

Uni fees. High taxes. House prices kept artificially high by too low interest rates. Rip-off railfares. Proposed new taxes and road pricing.

I'm not an economist, so I won't beat myself up for not noticing this before, but after a UKIP home blogger put this idea into my head this seems obvious and right. It's an idea that has gone "click" in my head in the way free-market liberal ideas did when I first read those.

There are too big economic issues that get a lot of attention:

• too much individual credit-card debt
• high house prices

Now then, what do those things have in common? Borrowing! Affordable borrowing must increase mortgage spending and credit card spending for exactly the same reasons. It's cheaper to do it.

It's so obvious in retrospect that I feel all I need now is to dispose of the counterargument. So, what else might cause these issues if its not low interst rates? And why is the situation artifical? Has the Government lowered the interest rates somehow?

One of Jackie Danicki's alleged attackers has allegedly been arrested. The Police (not the suspect) have purportedly advised her that the suspect is likely, but not certainly, going to plead guilty.

To avoid further literary knot tying during a potential-but-probably-not-going-to-happen trial I'm taking my post on the topic down for a while and shutting up about it.

It melted (somehow) and trickled (photos) down the side of a crater (map).

I've just caught up with the work of New Popular Edition, a web based outfit looking to get approximate, highlevel postcode data for the whole of the UK using old copyright-expired maps. They need to place post codes in just 21 districts before they have complete coverage at the prefix level e.g. SW11, or SA10. The idea is that you can use the data free of charge in whatever project it is you've got going, and maybe save yourself some cash.

They also have the scanned images available for you to play with under a non-commercial licence, or to use to derive factual data under a copyright-expired regime.

So, if you like old maps or can provide postcodes and push pin locations in any of the 21 target areas then get over there. This is a great example of what kind of thing can be done with old copyright expired material and reinforces the message that copyright should not go on forever.