We’ll go from a first-past-the-post system which allows a party with a minority of the vote to dominate, to a system of proportional representation which more accurately reflects the views of the people

This is just as wrong as it was the last time you stated it as fact, and the time before that and the time before that……..

Moots? OK they are not the most exciting bikes out there but they look lovely and the only negatives you ever hear are the price.

What’s that annoying buzzing?

It’s a design feature, my dog knows to speed up when she hears the racket, it properly confuses her if I use Shimano hubs.

More bluff and bluster

Maybe some of the Scottish MEPs should have backed Cameron?

Have we done the thing about Better Together’s “Grassroots” support yet? the bit where they bus the same bunch of people all over Scotland and hope no-one notices?

A campaign group actually going around the country campaigning to voters is hardly headline news is it?

Is this better or worse than the UK using figures even the source said had been abused to the point is misrepresentation?

Misrepresentation by the SNP perhaps? Here’s what the UK government actually said (my bold)

“Professor Robert Young has examined the potential costs of independence in modern industrial states. Whilst recognising that the costs of transition can be exaggerated or downplayed in the course of political debate, his independent analysis in relation to Quebec, shows that the costs of institutional restructuring in the event of independence could range from 0.4 per cent to 1 per cent of the new country’s GDP. 1 per cent of Scottish GDP in 2012-13 is equivalent to £1.5 billion or around £300 for every person in Scotland.”
“The Institute for Government (IfG) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) estimate the average cost for a new policy department or a mid-sized merger to be approximately £15 million. In Scotland’s Future,3 the Scottish Government estimate that 300 institutions currently serve Scotland, of which 180 would need to be recreated or have powers transferred to a Scottish institution following independence. If this cost were incurred for all 180 organisations, the total cost would be £2.7 billion. Given these estimates, £1.5 billion is likely to be a favourable estimate of the total costs of setting up new institutions.”

So, they didn’t claim the setup costs would be 2.7billion, which is what Dunleavy was running to the press complaining about; perhaps he had a reason to get his name in the papers, maybe a book release to publicise?

Then, following a ‘briefing’ at Bute house with Salmond and Sturgeon he comes up with his own “guesstimate” of costs;

“Based on detailed work on the costs of Whitehall reorganizations, and our analysis of major tasks set out above, we have estimated the set-up costs for Scottish government as being in the range from £150 million to £200 million.”

So the Yessers jump up and down with glee – 2.7billion, bluff and bluster, it will only cost 200million. But hold on what’s this in the following section of his report;

“the Scottish government would need to pay £400 million to create new IT systems and processes to handle all welfare benefits itself – which is targeted to happen by 2018 (see timetable above); and
– they would need to pay £500 million to create IT systems capable of handling all their tax administration – the main bulk of which is due to happen by 2020.

These estimates are not based on any careful analysis, but given prevailing IT and change costs they do not seem implausible.”

So that’s 200m+400m+500m=1.1billion after being briefed on what to say by the SNP – not so far away from the Westminster estimate, so who misrepresented what?

My wife was a teacher, and her brother is a clinical psychologist so I have some knowledge of both.

My wife finally threw in the towel when our daughter was born and has zero desire to go back into teaching, what annoyed her the most was that some of her colleagues seemed to get by copy/pasting ILPs, lesson plans etc. whereas it used to take her hours each day.

My brother-in-law complains that he spends more time in the car than with patients, this is partly due to his location (Scottish highlands) but also because the area he now covers has expanded due to NHS cutbacks. In terms of paperwork when we were there at Christmas he was complaining how difficult it was to get authorization to even see a new patient, so I would say the role is very paperwork heavy. The flip side is that he earns a very healthy salary.

It won’t work out that way – there will be an intergovernmental agreement that shifts liability onto the Scottish state

The Scottish government has already committed to take responsibility for pensions, From Scotlands Future;

“for those people living in Scotland in receipt of the UK State Pension at the time of independence, the responsibility for the payment of that pension will transfer to the Scottish Government”

I had the same dilemma recently. I use 2 21”screens at work and they are too big to use as one working area so I have a working screen where my main application is running and the second screen has Outlook, Communicator and OneNote. The only time I use an application across the two screens is CAD & FEM where some of the menu windows are on the second screen.

In the end I got a single 24” screen and it’s fine for everything at home (mainly Photoshop).

Now before someone says she’s bored, I don’t think she is. She gets walked twice a day (loves the beach and loves fetching sticks from the surf). We have a massive back garden. We leave chew toys out for her, kongs, etc

I think she’s bored :wink:

Our dog is about the same age, she gets walked/ran for at least 2 hours a day but unless we spend some more time playing with her, a tug-fight, obedience training, searching for treats and also some relaxation time giving her a stroke and scratch (good at this time of year anyway for finding ticks) then she gets all mardy and will go into the garden and either dig in the flower bed or bring a stick inside and chew it up and sit looking at the mess knowing that she’s going to get in trouble.

I’ve just been up to the club and had a chat with the coach before training. Mogrim pretty much hit the nail on the head, they get so many newbies who make claims that they can’t really achieve that they set the initial targets really low to see how people cope, one of the guys who joined at the same time as me claimed he was running 6min miles but was really measuring his runs in kms!

I went out with the big boys tonight, 20km in 1:40 with tempo sets of 4min km’s in torrential rain. I’m just going for a bit of a lie down!

Sorry – Double Post

your coach does not know what they are talking about. Get another coach

In that case your coach is an idiot

I was thinking that TBH. For me that advantage of joining the club was to run with faster guys, and in the group sessions so far I’ve been easily the strongest in the group so it’s a bit pointless. This club is very convenient though, it’s 1/2mile up the road and I get unlimited access to the track and gym and it’s free (well work is paying, but it costs me nothing).

I just checked and the local hospital has a sports medicine section and can do VO2 max test so I may look into that but I am pretty confident my max is correct to within a few bpm.

(Assuming your HRM is reliable, of course…)

I’m not sure what the claimed accuracy is (I have 2 HRMs both Polar and the results are similar) – I might have to do some googling!

I’m 41, 220 – my age has always been way out. 204 is my actual max at the moment, I hit that down the home straight in a 5k recently.

From what I saw Cav was boxed in and tried moving Gerrans out of his way

Pretty much sums up what I saw, plus sticking his head in as well. Sometimes you just have to accept that you’ve followed the wrong wheel.

Brilliant opening stage though, people of Yorkshire (and visitors) did the UK proud.

We dog sit a friends Visla sometimes and getting it to heel isn’t a problem, it’s getting the damn thing to leave you alone for 5 minutes that is. They call them velcro dogs for a reason!

Beautiful dogs though.

I certainly wouldn’t want to sit through the whole of a stage very often the exception being some of the mountain stages in the tour, but often watch the last hour. There has been some great racing recently though, the Dauphine and Tour of Switzerland were full of attacking riding with the race going down to the wire, possibly due to Sky not being able to turn it into a precision which bodes well for the tour.

In fact it’s the same Prof Dunleavy who’s figures the government completely misunderstood and inflated by 12 times to get their discredited estimate.

The same Patrick Dunleavy who said;

“Scotland’s voters can be relatively sure that total transition costs over a decade will lie in a restricted range, from 0.4 of one per cent of GDP (£600 million), up to a maximum of 1.1 per cent (£1,500 milion). This is a step forward in debate and I am grateful to Iain for helping to bring it out.”

Ignoring his obvious maths issues. Is it really such a step forward in the debate from the original position of the UK Government document which stated;

“…shows that the costs of institutional restructuring in the event of independence could range from 0.4 per cent to 1 per cent of the new country’s GDP. 1 per cent of Scottish GDP in 2012-13 is equivalent to £1.5 billion”

And

“Given these estimates, £1.5 billion is likely to be a favourable estimate of the total costs of setting up new institutions.”

Yep, he’s done a good job discrediting those figures!

Where have you got 12bn from?

GERS, £12b was the difference between what Scotland raised in tax last year and what it spent.

Even then, you need to compare income with a or scrapped Barnett with the income of iScotland, not the current Scotland

Agreed, so what proposals have the Yes campaign put forward which will increase the income of iScotland to compensate for the loss of Barnett? All I can see promised is lower tax rates and increased public spending.

Though we do know some things – the Barnett formula is likely to be scrapped, and there’s a lot more austerity to come, so staying in the UK could well be very bad for the £’s in people’s pockets

As you implied it is Barnett that allows Scotland to sustain its current levels of public spending. Following a ‘No’ this may be scrapped, it is likely that it will be revised but the the only thing that we do “know” is that a ‘Yes’ will mean no Barnett.

Given a Yes vote, assume that you put all of the HS2 and Trident money into a pot (lets be generous and estimate Trident @ £500m/yr and HS2 @ a one off cost of £5b), what else does Scotland need to put into that pot to get to the £12b/yr Barnett bonus?

Dear Mr. Hodgson, my dog has found the cutting edge that you seem to have lost, if you would like to collect it then you can find it on the Dutch/Belgian border. Oh, and 150Euro for the vet bill would be nice.

I know it’s a ‘shopped up picture but I still chuckled,

When we got a new kitten the dog was very unsure about it. They were best of friends soon enough.

Ours was pretty much the same but with added puking. Everything calmed down when she was finally diagnosed lactose intolerant and put onto Nutramogen (sp?).

The AVERAGE function ignores blanks

Scotland has had the government it voted for less than half the time since the war.

Since 1945 there have been 18 elections, the Scottish electorate got the result they wanted in 9 of them. Or looking at it slightly differently, from 1945 to present date is 69 years, the government Scotland voted for has been in power for 37 of them. So Scotland has had the government they voted for more than half of the time. Not a bad result for <10% of the electorate?

(based on % votes cast, since the Scottish are all about PR)

How many times has England not had the government it voted for?

4 – again based on % votes cast, (not including the current government though).

Carl,

“I think I’ve just logged onto my internet”

We use Skydrive to share with my parents. They also have my Skydrive login details so can remotely access my shared drives without me having to upload to the cloud all the time.

FTP with a NAS could be another option?

There is a ferry from Rozenburg over the river – I would definately take that, otherwise it’s getting on for 20miles through industrial areas and Rotterdam centrum until you can get across the river.

The coastal route is quite nice depending on the wind direction! If you are in a big group it gets quite narrow in places (like a footpath rather than road).

I did it once for a route where the GPS had lost reception on a couple of occasions so the total distance wasn’t measured correctly (I think it was my first 1/2 marathon, so I wanted a record of my time). I imported the .gpx data into Excel, created the missing sections of GPS data using Garmin Basecamp and interpolated the times for each point. It was a pain in the rear, I haven’t done it again!

The deputy first minister is pretty clear what the fallback position is;

“Scottish Government has made clear it will retain sterling as the currency of an independent Scotland. Accordingly it will not be in any position to meet the prerequisites for membership of the Eurozone. I have enclosed some further quotes from experts to reinforce this point.”

you’d be nuts to give away info like that

:wink:

Source: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_EuropeanandExternalRelationsCommittee/Inquiries/20140222_DFM_to_Gavin_Brown_re_ratification.pdf

Carly Rae jepsen – call me maybe

Check, any One Direction song – Check, Salina Gomez – Check, welcome to the world of having a daughter!!

Edit: Forgot Katy Perry, which has led to some pretty weird dreams, the lazy cow doesn’t do any washing up.

I go through Baarle Nassau on some of my road rides which sounds quite posh when most of the places round here translate to ‘pig town’ or similar, the best thing about it is you go from Holland to Belgium about 10 times in 1km.

I use https://sites.google.com/site/openfietsmap/

It’s based on the openstreet map but the routing is cycling biased (although that may only be beneficial for road riding and maninly in Belgium / Netherlands)

As well as Benelux I’ve used Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland without any problems.

However the only ones who can ask at present are the UK and they will not ask. It is definitely not because they fear the answer and is certainly because they are honourable people unlike wee eck etc.

Really? because as proved above, when a SNP MP asked a direct question about an iScotlands position within the EU, the EU supplied a direct answer.

and as you well know the Yes campaign have stated in their own document that the right time to negotiate with the UK and the EU is following a yes vote,

“Following a vote for independence in 2014, agreements will be reached between the Scottish and UK Governments, in the spirit of the Agreement, setting the parameters for Scotland’s transition to independence. These agreements would establish:

the process and timetable for the negotiation and conclusion of the agreements which will form the final independence settlement”

(my bold)

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0041/00413757.pdf

you’re going to have to show me that.

It’s in the letter linked below, in direct response to the official request for information from Christina McKelvie. It seems that the EU would answer the question and there really wasn’t any need for the UK government to ask after-all :wink:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_EuropeanandExternalRelationsCommittee/Inquiries/Letter_from_Viviane_Reding_Vice_President_of_the_European_Commission_dated_20_March_2014__pdf.pdf

Which is a matter for negotiation between the two governments after the referendum

What would Scotlands bargaining chip be? It seems to me that Scotland want to negotiate with the UK over lots of things but except for a deal over the continued use of Faslane what have they got in their pocket?

Do you honestly think that the EU will issue any statement that would contradict those repeatedly made by the president, the vice president and its own defining treaties?

How can;

“When part of the territory of a Member State ceases to be a part of that State, e.g. because that territory becomes an independent state, the treaties will no longer apply to that territory. In other words, a new independent region would, by the fact of its independence, become a third country with respect to the Union and the Treaties would, from the day of its independence, not apply anymore on its territory.”

Be spun into the White papers version of events?

This one seems to have slipped under the radar (sorry if I’ve missed it), It hasn’t been splashed all over ‘wings’ for some reason!

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_EuropeanandExternalRelationsCommittee/Inquiries/Letter_from_Viviane_Reding_Vice_President_of_the_European_Commission_dated_20_March_2014__pdf.pdf

OK, the content is nothing that Barusso hasn’t already said but I would have thought that a direct response to the Scottish government regarding EU entry would have been important information for the voters, you would think AS has something to hide.

@irelanst / @sharkbait – it’s not been allowed for many years to treat an employee as self-employed – http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/employment-status/

Things may have changed, it’s been over 3 years since we lived in the UK and even then the HMRC were starting to get a little touchy about self-employed statuses in general. But all ours were self-employed, with ‘certification’ from HMRC. Thinking about it a little more, ours was a fairly specific situation with the nanny working different days and times each week to suite us, so not regular hours or full-time and no expectation of exclusivity.

Why do you need to do the PAYE? All of ours have been self-employed so sort out their own tax. The only other reason I can think is you run your own company and want a nanny on the payroll, but then your own accountant would be able to sort that out.