Boom!

[Fungus]

No no no, its due to Prudence and mass immigration. Without the influx of half a million high earning honest taypaying super qualified good looking foreigners, us useless Brits would be well screwed.

Lets hope the Royal Navy is rushing home with yet more talented brain surgeons, particle physicists, and 'consultants' from Lebanon.

Immigration. You know its good for you. Beats having kids.

Let's just outsource procreation.

[mcquiggd]

Effectively, new labour policy has already achieved that.

[wendigo100]

I remember reading this story.

SF, naturally.

It was a sort of future history of the invention of interstellar travel via transmat machines..

I read a similar story. The punchline, which never occurred to anyone except one bloke who kept it to himself, is that you always died when you used one.

With transmat machines, an exact replica of you is created at the other end, with all your memories, blissfully unaware of what happened. But it isn't you. Your concious existence ended when your atoms were taken apart and you were exterminated.

So, after reading that I've never uses a transmat machine.

[stackpole]

I won't either, from now on.

What about the 12 fingers though? Spooky.

[hyperD]

SF, naturally.

The punch line comes when the narrator describes how in the twinkling of an eye the human race suddenly had 12 fingers rather than the 10 they'd started out with...

SF? No, it's already started!!

[lORD lUCAN]

… with the caveat that because of the substantial amount of VAT fraud the figures are probably grossly distorted. ( fraudulently claiming back vat on bogus imports and then re-exporting the same goods several times over to claim even more VAT)

Its called Missing Trader, and we're roughly loosing 2-3 billion per year because of it. Just to put it into perspective, that would be around 200 newly built hospitals. New Labour, New Lie....