the down side is that the parties will choose who your MP is to be, you will vote for a party and not for a person.

Technically we still vote for the individual and not their party, but in reality they stand on the platform of their party, they are the representatives of their party, they are chosen by the party to stand as their candidate at the selection stage (no selection = no money) and most people aren't really familiar with their individual candidate's policies in contrast with the party's.

A party could win 100% of seats with 30,000,630 votes to 29,999,370 if they won each seat by the minimum necessary amount.

No – that assumes there are only two parties running in each seat, it's worse than that. Imagining, for a moment, that three parties stood in each constituency, then the "winner" could get 34% of the vote in each constituency and 100% of the seats.

the crime being brought in from Eastern Europe.

Crime in the UK has never been lower and this has coincided with immigration from Eastern Europe. If anything (pirates/global warming analogy), Eastern European immigration has made Britain safer.

The broken Britain of legend is one where danger stalks the streets as never before. In the real Britain, the police have just recorded the lowest number of murders for 19 years. In mythical broken Britain, children are especially at risk. Back in real life, child homicides have fallen by more than two-thirds since the 1970s. Britain used to be the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world; it is now the 17th. And more mundane crimes have fallen too: burglaries and car theft are about half as common now as they were 15 years ago. Even the onset of recession has not reversed that downward trend so far.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15452811 <— from the deranged anti-Tory lefties at, err, The Economist

to the person who said he was born in 1977 and said he remembered Thatcher 'snatching the milk'. It really is amazing that you can remember something which happened during the 1970-74 goverment.

Actually, it was the mid 1980s before the Tory government really managed make any real progress in removing state-subsidised milk from state primary schools:

The 1980 Education Act added a further £25 million in EEC subsidies to LEAs to help subsidise milk in schools although six years later as part of an amendment they were told it could only apply to the very lowest income families.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1507023/Thatcher-the-snatcher-may-not-have-been-wrong.html

Unless your argument was that the Tories promised a policy in 1971 and only got around to anything near full implementation fifteen years later, and this is a good thing?

From a non-political point if view, I for one am not sorry to see the back of the coal industry. It is rare that I have to treat someone with pneumoconiosis nowadays, for the simple reason that the vast majority are dead!…I will be out on my bike in an hour or so, breathing in relatively clean air on a rolling green countryside, something which could not have happened a few years ago.

Well, absolutely – and if we shut down and remediated all offices and factories, we would be sure there would be no more industrial injury, and you're right, there would be much more clean air and places for middle class IT spods to ride their bike around. :roll:

http://www.jupix.co.uk/frames/pooletownsend/more_details.php?profileID=222628

18 grand – but accessible to many, not just to certain people.

1) Go to Petronas Towers – you may as well, it's free and it's pretty interesting. Huge mall but upper end so not many bargains.

2) Go to Jalan Bukit Bintang (has monorail). Eat Chinese dinner outside on Jalan Alor, have drinks on Changkat Bukit Bintang. Get massage at any of the many, many shopfront places on Jalan Bukit Bintang – they're not dodgy although the ones upstairs etc probably are. If you have women in your group, hit Bukit Bintang Plaza/Sungei Wang Plaza – lots of cheap clothes. Not so good for men's stuff, though.

3) Use monorail and not cabs where possible. It actually works and is not just a novelty, unlike most monorails!

4) Mosque at Masjid Jamek is nice enough and right by the monorail. Gatehouse dude is exceptionally friendly and will give you a druidic cloak to wear if you're wearing shorts or are female. But nothing astonishing if you've seen mosques before. National Mosque/Masjid Negara – didn't get to see anything there 'cos I arrived late. Looks pretty big though.

5) Chinatown for all your pirate DVD needs – but actually, who cares any more?

6) Read the local paper – the Star is an English-language paper that you can find in most places. It's not a foreigners' paper – in fact, I believe it's owned by the Chinese Businessmen's Association (or something), and is mostly for a local audience, which is what makes it interesting.

Where are you on your way to? Is this a cheapie Air Asia flight to Oz?

Enjoy it – Malaysians were very (obsessively!) friendly in our experience and we thought it was a really nice place, would consider living there in fact…

Wow no way where the hell do you live?

Well, they're the ones saying householders should be entitled to defend their property

using whatever means they deem necessary

.
so if it deem it necessary to punch anyone who looks like they might be "attacking" my letterbox, that would be OK, by their law.

I can't say there's a lot there I disgree with.

Really? You didn't notice that it's a half-thought through collection of expensive and pointless schemes?

Hmmm, but would you sell a garage/piece of land for £2k?

Who else is going to buy it? Sounds like no-one.
Is it much use to him? Sounds like no.

Reintroduce right of householders to defend themselves and their property, "using whatever means they deem necessary"

Really? A subjective test for the use of force? So if I deem it necessary to punch them in the face in order to protect my letterbox, they'd be OK with that?

Clegg being elected wouldn't take the media out of politics: politics doesn't exist without the media, the media is politics.

I'd vote for them if I wasn't voting green on principle.

Well, that's a waste in our current system. Vote LibDem and you might get PR and your vote might be worth something…sometime. (OK, I admit there's a lot of "mights" in there).

The best thing you could do is to call up the local candidate and act like a floating voter, then keep them for hours on your doorstep. The more you're wasting their time, the less they're out bothering people.

The downside is that that would actually require you to speak to these tossers.

When I worked at a consultancy, we used to make 40% regularly, and 60% often. Eeh, those were the days (well, actually, they weren't as I was just an employee not a shareholder or director, so it's not as if I got a big slice of that pie).

"brown out" is where you've got too much demand and not enough supply…Speaking from experience of living in a country where it happens all the time this is not something you want to have to put up with…

If you have too much demand and not enough supply, then in a capitalist country you put the price of the good up because it shows it's priced too cheap.

Did the country you live in have price controls, by any chance?

Not planning on going out in the rain.

No-one ever does! ;)

like a squashed TT with extra chrome.

Sorry, I was in a taxi on the M6.

Driver's seat or in the back? ;)

if its a church of england church and your a british citizen I dont see why not.

Im pretty sure legally they have to marry you even if you dont turn up for X number of weeks. By integrating into state the church receives some benefits but it also has duties such as it has to carry out marriages funerals etc for british citizens.
Any source for that? Sounds remarkable!

That's what Cheltenham looks like? Looks quite nice.

jean-claude van damme

none of that makes them "worth" 20 times as much as a nurse or whatever

I agree entirely…and note that it's interesting we find it hard to talk about people's "value" without using the terms of the market.

So, you don’t actually know what they do that is so complicated and difficult, you just believe that is the case. As for making money, why did they need so much of our money to bail them out if they were making so much?
Your belief in "the special ones" seems nothing more than new religion.

I think at this point you're either willfully misinterpreting what I wrote because you realise your earlier claims are nonsense or just a bit thick. I haven't said once that what they did was special, always successful at making money or in any way socially constructive.

What you'd need to know as a banker depends on what market you'd work in but you might, taking some of the words/phrases thrown up on this thread as an example, be expected to understand the theory and practice of remuneration committees of publicly listed companies, what being publicly traded meant and how it impacts operations, the difference between investment and retail banks, the difference between employees' interests and shareholders' interests, whether and how fiduciary interests can clash with public interests, and whether that matters. And you'd be expected to apply that knowledge to large transactions, demanding internal/external clients and you'd also be expected to work some life-killing long hours. Some of those things are fairly complex and – unsurprisingly – are part of what gets studied on the average university economics/business/law/finance course (along with Countdown and Neighbours). You'd also be be expected to be reasonably numerate, articulate and be capable of a degree of abstract thought, and know the difference between a normative and a positive statement. And unfortunately that's not the sort of thing that – as you suggest – the majority of the population can just pick up with "a little training". It is, actually, quite complicated and not that straightforward. Again, and this seems to have blown by you, none of that necessarily makes it good or that it makes bankers nice, sympathetic, interesting, deserving or anything else. They're not salt miners or hospice nurses and if they don't like it, they can take their marketable skills and **** off.

Your perception of banking as being a sinecure for the upper classes and the preserve of pink-tied Old Etonian Tim-Nice-But-Dim buffoons who get the job because Bunty from the Drones Club recommended them is 20 or possibly 30 years out of date. It's very competitive, internally (between banks) and externally (vs law, accountancy, consulting, whatever).

jacques chirac (take two mistresses)

Do you really believe we live in a meritocracy?

He can answer for himself but I don't think he said we lived in a meritocracy, he just said that the wages are set in order to pay for the people who can be hired to do the job. How they got to that position (the private education, the subsidised Uni places and the unpaid work experience which only the rich can afford to undertake) is neither here nor there to the employer – they're not interested in social mobility, they're just interested in making money.

And it's that making money interest that undermines your silly claim that 60% of the population could do it with a little training. Obviously if 90% of the population had had the same education and opportunities (and attitude) of the average investment banker they could be because bankers aren't born different from anyone else. But if Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs etc could hire 1000 temps from Manpower on a tenner an hour and give them a little bit of training to do the same job as the guys that are making 100 quid an hour, then obviously they would do it tomorrow!

Had the Curve before, **** it, got a 9700 on insurance. Now on my second return – phone keeps freezing, contact list self-replicates, disappearing emails and messages. Gonna try to shove it back on Vodafone for an iPhone at this point – "not fit for purpose".

Old one was good but out of 10-20 people who had BBs, practically all of them had a trackball that died. Probably that's not the experience of everyone, though.

That won't happen, the ceo's come from the same schools and are part of the same system of inflated egos and self intrest, they believe they are all something special, without any evidence to support the fact.

Think you're confusing two different things – director/ceo pay circlejerk and pay set for employees. Bankers are not the CEO's peers and banks are not collectives based on upper class solidarity. The management would screw the employees out of any salary in a second if they could. They only pay what the market demands – and if highly-paid banking was actually monkey work that 60% of the populace could do with minimal training, they'd have them in doing it instead.

boring.

it seems to be intellectually on par with low level technical work or administrative jobs, the kind of work that could be done by 60% or more of the population with a little training.

That would certainly come as good news to bank CEOs because now they can fire all their expensive staff and replace them with much cheaper people.

Had to read that a couple of times before I realised you meant "sticker". Was thinking of those reflective lollipops that you used to see (and I saw today for the first time in years!).

I imagine there's a fair amount of "why do we even bloody bother?"-ing going on at the Iranian seismological service at the moment: http://irsc.ut.ac.ir/

Confused why Iran hasn't coped a mouthful of lead sooner.

US/UK/France spent most of the 80s trying to do that exact thing through its proxy, Iraq.

In my police experience, the CPS only charge if there is a 110% chance of conviction. And I've given evidence in both Crown and Magistrates courts numerous times, and I'd suggest that if there is a lower conviction rate in the Crown, it's because of the jury system.

:?: :mrgreen:

noice!

I remember observing in court a man charged with burglary (a local smack head who could hardly keep his eyes open in court)! He was found in possession of a screwdriver (the offensive weapon).

Sounds like he was probably charged with "Going equipped for stealing" (s25 of Theft Act 1968) rather than carrying an offensive weapon.
http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?LegType=All+Legislation&searchEnacted=0&extentMatchOnly=0&confersPower=0&blanketAmendment=0&sortAlpha=0&PageNumber=0&NavFrom=0&parentActiveTextDocId=0&activetextdocid=1204274&versionNumber=3

Never seen the attraction, having done a couple of 12/24 hour train trips in Russia but apparently plenty of people do.

how long will it take to sort out visas etc?

http://www.visahouse.ru can do instant (almost) invitations for a small amount and then you can take all the stuff to the Russian Consulate and have it processed anywhere between an hour and three weeks, depending on how much you want to pay. You don't need anyone to take it along for you unless you want to save the hassle of doing it.

Modern car paints generally consist of a coloured base coat and then a clear coat over the top. If it's just a scratch through the clear coat (i.e. you can't see bare metal), then Meguiar's 2.0 Scratch-X. Works really well and is very hard for you to get wrong. Did a lot of this last year with a car I had – branch scratches the length of car. Takes an age without a random orbital polisher but does amazing things. Spend the money and get the little foamy pads, too, not just a J-cloth.

Bilbao ferry?

What's all this bollocks about 'businesses losing millions'?….do they assume we live in a perfect world where nothing unusual ever happens?

Roses are imported to the UK by air from Kenya. If you're a Kenyan rose farmer, all your product just died, and if you're a florist, you'll have had nae roses to sell.

I'm more than a bit ambivalent about how sustainable I think that arrangement is but, err, yeah – that's an example of money lost. There'll be loads of others.

yeah, that was gonna be my next project (got a $50 voucher with the domain registration), but I wanted to knock off the free stuff first.

http://www.seat61.com/UnitedStates.htm