I used to work in a bar in Perth where the pre-football sharpener on a Saturday lunchtime was snakebite and blackcurrant.

1 x bottle Special Brew
1 x bottle White Lightening
1 x splash blackcurrant

One fat idiot with diabetes used to drink them with CC and soda chasers. That was 22yrs ago, reckon he’s dead?

Why are all these economies bawked? Because we’ve been living WAAAAAAAAAAY beyond our means for far too long. That’s the cold harsh reality of the situation

Someone has hacked binners’ computer.

So if you’re a nasty Tory Chancellor who wants to rinse one part of society to fund a tax cut for yourself/your mates, they’re easy prey.

conveniently forgetting everyone who is no longer paying tax until they earn £9200. 50p rate was a waste of time, far better replaced by 7% stamp duty and no more loopholes.

If it makes work pay its a good idea, beyond nickels and dimes, its GOOD.

One group is ridiculously pandered too

Not by G.Osborne this week.

I thought Mylo – Destroy Rock and Roll was an incredible dance album. He put it together on a Mac in his parents house in Skye. Why hasnt he done anything else since 2004?

Did I mention I’m seeing Leftfield at Brixton Academy next month?

Come on!

Hat-tip to STW…….good taste in music. Boards of Canada, The Campfire Headphase always makes an appearance in our kitchen after a long lairy night with mates…..just around 3am, you love it. No better way to let the dawn break than some lovely mellow electronica.

The BBC had some great programmes on the radio a few weeks ago, story of Kraftwerk. Its scary (and brilliant) how much of modern music you can hear in those albums. Almost 40yrs since Autobahn.

She’d have been fine on a Ti hardtail

I like it. Especially with Ennis in it.

What is it with heptathlete shapely figures? Oh my.

I work in Spitalfields/Hoxton. Fixies are over. Even the Hipsters have proper bikes now.

Who do you think is buying all those celebrity loving hating magazines? Stephen Fry?

I do like this idea of sending everyone a tax statement showing them how much tax they pay and what it goes on.

Who could object to that?

Yep, still a few hundred better off.

B4stards I tell you…..

So i forsee a future where you will have personal healthcare insurance and if you can’t afford it you will not get treatment.

I dont doubt that 30-40yrs from now we will have a insurance based system, and like Obamacare it will be provided free for those who cannot pay. Sooner the better too.

The Sky News calculator is better, it lets you look at 2013/14 when the income tax cuts kick in. I’m better off.

http://news.sky.com/home/interactive-graphics/budgetcalculator

instant hit – Member
Supposedly im better off as well, however as we will be paying for our health care

Sorry I didnt see this in the NHS bill that just went through Parliament. Maaaaaaybe you made it up.

You are just going to have to accept that those Evil Tories and their LibDem capitalist running dog lackies have put some money in the pocket of the working man.

Rubbish. It’s a tax – comes straight out of the pay packet, I can’t change the payment terms or decide them, it was enacted by parliament, and it’s for something that used to be free

It wasnt ever free. Its just that someone else used to pay for it.

Politically what matters is whether we have growth in the economy over the next 3yrs. I dont think anyone is going to say 45% is an unreasonable top rate of tax or taking all those people out of income tax at the bottom end was a bad idea if the economy picks up.

Seems I’m £562 worse of but I dont think that is right, think I’m a bit better off.

Basically if you work, you’re going to be better off. If you are a pensioner earning between £10,500 and £25,000 you will be worse off as they reduce your tax free allowance to bring into line with people in work. Libdems will rightly claim some of the cudos for raising the tax threshold over £9,000, that should have been a core Tory policy too. Lets take it higher, make work pay, maybe exclude the well off from the benefit next time.

We gave pensions and benefits an uptick of 5.2% in Sep when inflation had spiked right up, nothing in the budget for those on benefits on top of that. If like me you think that we shouldnt be spending more on Welfare than we do on education, health and defence COMBINED you wont have a problem with that.

Agreed, best online shop by miles.

Do you guys wear a synthetic base when its really hot? Sometimes see guys on the Tour doing so……can it actually cool you?

Believe it or not Rapha merino is a bargain if you buy in a bundle of 3. I wear them (long and short sleeve) all year apart from high summer. Need to hand wash them though as a bit fragile but combined with a couple of Icebreaker 200 you will be set for woolies.

£110 for 3. Worth it.

http://www.rapha.cc/base-layer-3-pack/

TJ – Thatcher never had a popular majority
THM – Which government did ?
TJ – Thats irrelivent!

Seriously…..

You’ve dropped 5 stone (well done) but then put on the best part of 2 stone over the winter. Maybe a less dramatic regime might rendor more consistent results and be a bit more pleasant? I stuff my face before every ride, go out and enjoy a good long blast then try not to overdo the rewards after. Dont you want to to enjoy riding your bike too?

I’m dropping 1kg a week at the moment with a bit more exercise, no chocolate or puddings and (wait for it) smaller portions. Museli for breakfast, try not to go crazy on carbs at night but still have a couple of potatoes or a small portion of rice.

Zero carbs isnt a good idea and you dont need to do it to lose a lot of weight.

Indeed. It’s more about the 300-odd lives which were lost rather than the bit of metal itself.

You dont want your ships sunk and your men drowned, dont be an anti-semitic, fascistic dictatorship and go invading folks then. I’ve known a lot of servicemen who went down there in 1982, I dont why anyone feels the need to apologise for sinking the Belgrano.

We now produce 250 times more transistors per year than we do grains of rice.

Astronomy puts everything into perspective. You read up on the Andromeda Galaxy, which if our eyes were sensitive enough to pick up the light would appear as a beautiful spiral SIX TIMES the diameter of the full Moon. We’re on a collision course with it, The Milky Way and Andromeda are going to slam into each other in about 6 billion years, yet there is close to zero chance any stars will hit each other because they are so far apart from each other……

…..you think about that kind of stuff, and then you turn on the TV and see the Church getting bent out of shape over gay marriage, or stem cell research.

I’m so sad the first thing I do every morning is check and see if Betelgeuse has gone supernova. It’s going to you know, you’ll see!

Teej doesn’t think bank bailouts are debts which is a problem because an independent Scotland is going to be saddled with the rotting carcas that is the Royal Bank of Scotland. You guys enjoy yourselves with that.

4 of jupiters moons are visible through binoculars so yes a good camera lens might work too……

Starwalk for iPad is terrific. Hold it up towards the sky and it tracks the patch of sky it is pointing at. Also shows the paths of satellites. If you sign up to @twisst on twitter you will get a message every time the International Space Station is going over, is often really bright when it passes…….quite a thrill to tell the kids to “look up and see a spaceship!”

Great view of Jupiter and Venus tonight. As a rule if you look to the south, the first objects to be visible at dusk aren’t stars, it’s the planets. Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn take it in turns, and at certain times in the year you can see Mercury really close to the horizon early in the morning and just before dusk……

and hopefully if things take off I’ll make a commitment to help them in their election work, But very early days yet.

Democracy in action that is. Not sure how a doctor running in a Labour/Tory marginal helps the left but who knows.

BTW my brother in law is a doctor, he’d go way further than the government in restructuring the NHS. Would have charges for seeing your GP for example, much like Germany and France. Doesnt think he is at all unusual in the profession in wanting to see that introduced. Doctors will do what they think benefits them, that was true when they opposed the very formation of the NHS, and it is true today.

The conservatives polled (IIRC) about 23% of the electorate’s vote

What did the party you voted for poll?

This was a deliberate policy to drive down the cost of labour

Ignore him

Nah I’m pretty sure they will replace old scratched ones, its about 40% off. Their customer service centre is excellent, just call them.

They are a very cool company. Own Rayban, Persol and Oakley, manufacture under license in Italy just about every designer sunglasses you can think of. Prada, Chanel etc etc etc……..been going 50yrs and still owned and run by the original founder and his son.

I actually met one of the senior managers of the Italian company that owns Oakley a couple of weeks ago. They are a fantastic family owned business who invest an enormous amount in R&D in Europe and the US. I know nobody gives a sh1t about anything anymore but buying crappy Chinese rip-offs hurts decent businesses and their employees.

(If you buy yourself some proper Oakleys they come with a perpetual crash replacement policy. I broke a 7yr old pair last year, they sent me a new pair of Jawbones for £100)

Germany, which, the last time I checked, is pretty prosperous, seems to manage with everything being closed on a Sunday.

Closed on Saturday afternoons too. One of the worst things about living in Germany.

A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to have noticed the national unemployment issue or the vast numbers of people loosing their jobs / terrified of loosing their jobs.

Longer opening hours = more jobs.

I dont mean to be flippant (I really dont mean to be flippant) but seriously who the hell would want a job for life as a coal miner? Thats ultimately what the Miners Strike was all about…..was she really wrong? Do we wish we still had a couple of hundred thousand men working in state owned pits producing coal we dont want?

*As a committed atheist I reserve the right to a belief in HELL for this occasion only, and to look ridiculous and vindicyive at the same time

Fill your boots then. Athiest, but not a Humanist clearly.

….it does become black and white.

But why? All this stuff about having a big party when she dies and calling her pure evil, its just idiotic. A lot of us remember the end of the 1970s, sitting in the dark at home because the power workers were on strike again. I never liked the shrill language she used and the indifference to the effects of de-industrialisation on large swathes of the country……but she wasnt all wrong.