Example of Road Tax Idiocy.

 Okay, here's a car, it's £1500 currently on eBay, and I doubt anyone will touch it:

Why, you ask? Well, because government legislation actually make this car impossible to justify. 

First off, local government in London i imposing the wider ULEZ zone, which this diesel car falls foul of. If it were petrol it probably would be ULEZ compliant, but Diesels have to be Euro 6 compliant which means realistically they have to be made after 2016 and have all the Euro 6 complications like DPFs that clog and use adblue which needs refilling, not always easily. Also being a newer car they are a lot more expensive. 

Second, if you pay the road tax on this car monthly, as most of us cash-strapped people do, then it's over £700 a year. That's £60 a month just to keep the car on the road. That's an unjustifiable expense when you're on close to minimum wage.

It actually costs more to tax than it does to insure. 

It really can't be right that the road tax on a car is half the car's value, let alone more expensive that the insurance.

It get the fact that when it was new and the car was worth a significant amount of money, then the owner of the car would probably figure that £700 a year is a minor price to pay. Anyone that can buy a twenty or thirty thousand pound car probably sees that sum as justifiable.

But to me £675 (the price of a one-off payment) is around half a month's wages. I have other bills like council tax and energy bills to pay.

I resent that the government is restricting my choices by their interference. As it is they are forcing me into a teeny hatchback, which unfortunately doesn't suit my needs. I resent that the government are backing me into a corner, for what exactly?

Just because it's a great way of raising tax.

End of Life Idiocy Regarding Old Cars

 I'm car hunting (yet again) after one of the current Mazda's conrod bearings is getting ever so noisy. 

It's not done badly, I've put several thousand miles on it since Christmas, seeing mother every few weeks.

But it's time for a change because repairing the engine is as much as a replacement car.

So hopefully we can find a load-lugger for under a couple of grand. Prices have eased somewhat from the lunacy of a year ago, but not quite. Also some cars are holding on to their value and not easing. I blame Scotty Kilmer for that. I wanted another Lexus, but they're beyond my budget still, thanks to the Scotty Kilmer effect and his undying praise of the Lexus brand.

Anyway, I'm looking at and Estate, MPV or SUV , something that will hold a decent amount of stuff.

But one thing has caught my eye. Amongst the 2K heaps I've been looking at are a number of Mercedes models. Now the E-class estate with the 3.7 litre diesel engine is £395 a year for road tax. An R-class Merc with the same engine however is £695! 

How can that be justified? I mean, that's over £50 a month for road tax, on a car that is being bought by someone like me to whop £50 is a lot of money. 

The reason? The R-Class, although having an MPV style body, has four wheel drive. 

Yet the 4 wheel drive M-class with the same engine is still only £395.

I assume the reason being the rules changed in 2004/2005 so the earlier models with the same engine are okay, the other later car doubles the road tax.

It's idiotic that a car that is coming to the end of it's useful life is likely to be scrapped because no-one will buy it due to the running costs. If that car is scrapped, that's a whole heap of resources required to scrap it, process it and also to build a new car to replace it.

Isn't it better to reduce taper the road tax so it reduces as the value of the car reduces? I think I've said this before, but it makes no sense to ask luxury-level premium running costs for a poundshop priced car. 

It's just going to sit forlorn of a forecourt and eventually go for spares.

It's an idiotic policy.

The Push to Cashless is Not a New Thing.

 I was involved in the first push to go cashless back around 1994. The original idea was called Mondex.

Basically you would carry around an electronic wallet that carried your cash equivalent. There were various ways of topping up this wallet, from plugging it into an ATM to having a home swipe machine.

The Idea didn't really take off because why would you carry an electronic wallet full of money when a wallet full of cash does the same thing? 

I was also involved in the next step after Mondex: telephone banking. I write the application for one of the big 4 banks. It's still essentially the same application today, albeit with bolt-ons. 

But the push to cashless has been a thing since having weekly cash pay packets stopped being a thing. Why have cash if you get electronic tokens into your account for your wages and you spend electronic tokens in the shop? Because Banks. Banks don't like cash. It is labour intensive, as anyone trying to extract cash from a bank recently has found out.

But even the original cashless projects have now been superseded by the smartphone application.

It wasn't until improvements in internet availability and online services really took off that the idea of a cashless society really took off. The convenience of cashless has moved on leaps and bounds. Your smartphone now works like a card, making payments.

You can also manage your account, make payments all on your phone.

But the technology requires several external factors to be available and work for the cashless system to work.

You need electricity, fundamentally, in order for the point of sale systems to work. Cash can work without tills.

If you have electricity you also need the POS system to have network connectivity and on from that access to the internet. 

And that's just the user end. Then you have all the back end infrastructure and processing necessary to process payments and keep track of your account.

Cash works without any of that. It can be exchanged during power cuts, on bomb sites, outside internet access, away from wireless phone signals. And there still are places without any of that.

Cash needs to stay. Otherwise, yet again portions of the population will be disenfranchised. 

Instead of an inclusive monetary system, where all can participate without prejudice, going cashless moves us to a permissive monetary system, where the system has provide special access for people that  don't have all the facilities required to participate.

Someone needs to provide something to people that allows access to money without internet, without power and without access to the internet. 

Of course cash does that already. 

And this is where we get into tinfoil hat territory. Because if cash works fine already and allows a small portion of society access to money regardless of technology, why of why are the Banks trying to get rid of it?

Hopefully, there will be some way to get cash and spend it even when the majority of people are cashless, because it's still very much required by some parts of society.