Surely it must be possible for us, as a nation, to give these people jobs building a high speed rail network with the aim of getting it done in 5 years? This would simultaneously reduce unemployment, carbon emissions, congestion, and travel times. And while we’re at it, why can’t they be upgrading our communications and energy infrastructure by laying fibre optic cable, and increasing our renewable energy generation capacity.

What are your views on this? Could it work? How would it be paid for? Are our current politicians ambitious enough?

The government says that the cost of doing nothing is worse than than the cost of the bailouts to the banking industry, yet they are reluctant to make those costs transparent. We think the public have a right to know the truth about the sheer size and extent of these bail outs, and that there should be a debate on the merit of pursuing them.

Economics is often referred to as the dismal science, so we’ve tried to make it a bit more entertaining with our new Bail Out Brown site. The site aims to keep track of the nature and scale of the government’s bail outs, whilst having a bit of fun along the way!

Since the game was launched on Monday we’ve been addicted to the satisfying ‘thwack’ of size 10′s hitting Mr Bush’s face at Fubra HQ, so much so that we bought the site! As of the end of a 24 hour eBay listing we are now the proud owners of SockandAwe.com.

It may seem like a strange addition to the Fubra portfolio on the face of it, but the figures dont lie:

Monday: 587 unique visitors
Tuesday: 417,397 unique visitors
Wednesday: 1,239,744 unique visitors
Thursday: 1,914,243 unique visitors
Friday: 1,140,394 unique visitors in the first 12 hours of today!

We have added a top scorer board and a made a few adjustments to the site but the concept is working so well because it’s highly addictive we haven’t wanted to change too much about the site.

Perhaps SockandAwe.com will fade away in a week or so or perhaps it will evolve into a cool site for flash games but whatever we do with the site we have all had great fun working on it.

The whole event has been pretty stressful too though as we were actually at our Christmas party when we found out we won the auction and a number of us came back and worked through the night to migrate the site and add more content and features.

London 2012 Logo Gallery

At the time of writing we have had 4603 votes, 92.8% of whom agreed that we need a different logo for the London Olympics. The question is, will the games committee listen?

Here is what all the fuss is about for those of you who haven’t seen it:

Although I won’t be voting for Veritas personally, I find their views on taxation very interesting. They have suggested that if they got power they would move the country towards a system of flat tax. For those of you who don’t know what a flat tax is, it is basically a simple tax system that charges a single rate of tax on all income, with a high personal allowance.

There are many benefits of a system like this, but I won’t list them all here so I suggest you go read this report by the Adam Smith Institute on the effects of a flat tax on the UK economy. It presents a favourable argument for a flat tax concept and even suggests that the idea maybe more feasible than some would have us believe. Maybe soon the other mainstream parties might even take this idea seriously.

For those of you like me, who couldn’t find Veritas’ home page, try looking here.