I was one of the photographers. My pics, searchable by rider number where I could see it, should be up tomorrow night. In the meantime I’ve put a little slideshow together with some of my favourite images:

http://www.flickr.com//photos/30973426@N06/sets/72157635033081174/show/with/9487846827/

Pix at http://www.rightplacerighttime.co.uk

Didn’t tag any of 404 or 563, but there were a couple of galleries from the wiggly woods section near the transition area where I couldn’t see many numbers so there may be some in there. Along these lines:

Here’s my take on it – a few pics[/url]

Didn’t take any pictures of the food though.

Rough Ride 2011

Rough Ride 2012

rightplacerighttime.co.uk[/url]

And what % of their salaries do the partners at Goldman Sachs get?

And what % do regular employees get?

Much like John Lewis, the level of bonus paid is according to the position and salary of each member of staff.

Nothing like John Lewis.

Why do you think I went to the trouble of explicitly stating that “John Lewis, when everyone in the company gets an equal share of the bonus pot“?

You really are an utter ****.

(Yes I except my banning – I spend far too much time on here anyway).

Personally I disagree with that.

Then you’re wrong.

Go ask a psychologist.

So anyone see a real point to them?

As per my earlier post using the example of John Lewis, when everyone in the company gets an equal share of the bonus pot dependant on the performance of the company as a whole, then I think they can be justified.

When a few of the most senior people in the company get a huge payout and the menial staff at the bottom get nothing, then no I don’t.

Loads of people keep going on about how motivating it is for the CEO, but how motivating do you think it might be for the staff on the ground floor who see their boss getting all of the bunce?

One that is big.

Go read some of those studies I mentioned.

The only person arguing against this, is you TJ!

No, I’m arguing against it too, I just break off to eat and play chess with my kids sometimes.

Big bonuses don’t motivate – it’s fact.

Go google “bonus motivation” and you’ll get page after page of psychological studies telling you just that.

The reason we have big bonuses for fat cats at the top of banking and industry is because they can.

It’s an emperor’s new clothes situation, but fortunately some of the crowd are starting to laugh.

Just so you know – the Civil Service have bonuses.

What, £1million??

The NHS do bonuses too…

What, £1 MILLION??

Lothian and Borders Police do bonuses.

WHAT ****£1 MILLION?????******

Never have I seen such a concerted effort to willfully miss the point.

Actually, I don’t mind how much we pay the top people, so long as we tax them at 100% above about £500,000

I’m sure that a distribution of take home pay that gives the top earners about 25 times more than the bottom earners is reasonably fair.

In just about every large organisation I’ve ever dealt with there have been people in the management below board level who I’ve thought to be equally, or more competent than their bosses.

Think about it for one second and you must surely know in your guts that that is true.

The reason that most CEOs get to where they are is a combination of luck/who they know or just hanging around long enough.

I’m not saying that they’re not good at their jobs, but most of them are just people with the same mix of skills and talents as a whole raft of others who don’t quite make the top of the pile and they are eminently replaceable.

If ever there was a company that was made in the image of one brilliant man it is Apple, and what has happened to Apple now that the irreplaceable genius has gone?

1% would still be a fair deal to reward exceptional performance, just the size of that 1% changes with the size of the profits being brought in.

Also rubbish.

And this completes the circle in that these people are doing jobs that ordinary people can not do.

Rubbish.

I agree that tube drivers are overpaid (OTOH, I wouldn’t’ want to do it!)

But all of this stuff about teachers and tube drivers is a diversion – both of those jobs are not out of the ordinary as they are broadly similar to average wages.

What is really corrosive in society are salaries/bonuses that are 100s of times what ordinary people make.

It’s not so much the fact that the money is given as a bonus, so much as the fact that many executives/bankers are paid an obscene amount of money.

If you happen to think that growing inequality is a bad thing (I do) then big bonuses are bad.

If you think that bonuses mean this then I guess they aren’t too bad.

Tough breaks dogbert – hang in there, and don’t forget, it’s not much, but you still get to vote and you’re still allowed to be politically active without spending any money.

By maths

So Ewan, in history, when would you say the Middle Ages were?

Assuming that the average life expectancy in the UK is 80.1 years then middle age is defined thus:

By Ewan.

Firstly a caveat – I have no particular financial knowledge or qualifications, just an opinion, however….

Don’t panic!

30 isn’t middle aged, so don’t get into a hunkering down mindset. You’ve got plenty of time to do things with your life.

Despite the fact that there are loads of “experts” out there who tell you that you need to be salting away vast amounts of money into your pension, I don’t believe it. I have pretty much zero confidence in financial markets and the ability of pensions providers to act in my best interest or protect the value of my savings.

That said, if you’ve had a pension since 19 and it has been an essentially painless way for you to save then carry on with that as it’s good to spread your risks. My wife is a teacher and has a very good occupational pension, but as we’ve seen lately even a pension like that is not the “safe” haven that people thought they had been buying into over the years (20 years in my wife’s case).

In your position I’d be paying off the loan.

Then I’d be building up a war chest of easily available money – just in case. 6 months salary sounds like a handy amount to have around, which I’d personally invest in premium bonds so I can have a bit of fun with the chance of getting a good return on my money + no chance of losing it.

You might also want to adjust your mindset to how life might actually be in 30-40 years, because it won’t be like it is now. My opinion is that global issues such as climate change, resource depletion, population growth, economic meltdown etc are going to totally transform the outlook, so at the least I’d be thinking about how to cut down my reliance on world energy markets – so invest in making your house energy efficient (which may require you buying a house!) – may cost 000’s but insulating you from risk. In fact think about how/where you want to live and whether you might need real money to be able to afford to move house in the future without building up more debts.

You might also turn your mind to whether you are really going to retire on that pension you are building up. I don’t think I will be, but I’m not really bothered about that – I’ve got lots of skills that I’m hoping to use to keep working so long as I’m physically able, just in a reducing amount – I don’t ever want to “retire”

I’ve also gone a bit further than many people in the “survivalist” mode – I’ve an allotment and I grow food, and I’m hoping at some point to move onto a smallholding with utility woodland to hand for fuel. I’m also actively involved in some community groups as I believe that “social capital” is going to become increasingly important as financial capital becomes less important. Work on building up strong relationships, not just strong finances.

If you have kids at some point in the future (if you’ve not got them already?) you may find that that £500 doesn’t go that far.

I expect you’ve enough to be going on with there for the next few years, but if not I also quite like moneysavingexpert.com as a good place to look for ideas.

Is the homebuyer’s part of the mortgage requirement BTW?

Last time I bought I just had to have a valuation.

What, this Didcot?

Or some other Didcot that doesn’t have a bleedin’ great power station next to it?

He pointed me towards further specialist opinions as necessary and between them saved me about 10 times what they cost.

How?

DId you haggle the price down the cover the deficiencies?

Just as an example of crap surveying, the first house I did up I re-plastered myself with lime mortar in a very “rustic” style to suit the old brick and flint cottage.

When the next people moved in the surveyor commented that it had the original plaster.

I’ve bought two Victorian houses and didn’t bother with surveys on either of them as I could see that they both needed loads of work (new windows, floors replastering throughout, rewiring, new boiler, bathrooms moving, new roof on the second etc etc.) They’d both been stood up for over 100 years without any obvious structural faults beyond a few cracked bricks and some damp, so what was a survey actually going to tell me?

Also, back in the day, I don’t think my parents ever had surveys done on houses they bought – it just wasn’t done then.

OTOH, if you’re risk averse and won’t sleep at night unless you’ve got one, then you’d better fork out your £600.

What I would recommend though, if you happen to know any builders, or someone else with a dispassionate point of view and some relevant experience – get them to have a look and point out anything that looks untoward, and if you find anything you may want to revise your offer downwards.

As you know he pulled the ‘pay off your cards speech’
under threat of upsetting all his mates in big business and banking no doubt

He could afford to, safe in the knowledge that no one would actually pay a blind bit of notice to what he was saying, but that loads of old buffers around the shires would say “Quite right. What a sensible young man our Prime Minister is”

Serious question – what are you all doing with these records of your runs?

I think you can use them interchangeably in many situations.

“I was headed towards….”

“I was heading towards….”

Guardian Style Guide doesn’t mention it.

My brain.

I’m not saying that doctors don’t get things wrong – just that they don’t have a vested interest in doing so.

Whereas in the financial sector there is often an incentive to behave inappropriately – hence the vast number of mis-selling cases now going through the system.

But my point about taking on credit isn’t that a few wrong uns were pushing a few specific deals, it’s that for a while, not only the whole of the industry, but almost all of Government, and the Opposition, and the media were urging a particular (wrong) course of action.

It’s very difficult for individuals to see past that.

Of course I understand what you are trying to say.

You are trying to say that people who are now in difficulty are there largely because of their own greed.

I disagree.

I think that some were greedy, but that many, if not most were conned into thinking that the economy and housing market works in a different way to the way it really does.

I also think that they/we are still being conned.

We are led to believe that economists/politicians/bankers might be best placed to run the financial system in a way that benefits us all. But I don’t think they do. I think that they run it largely for their own interests in a conspiracy of silence.

Just as most people wouldn’t question a doctor who looked after their health, so they don’t question professionals who look after their money. But they should because people who have control of your money have a conflict of interests.

I’ve said it before.. I wish the STW forum archives were extensive enough to let us pull out the threads whinging that the Banks weren’t handing out loans easily enough.

You have a different memory to me then.

I recall about 10 years ago, loads of people remortgaging their houses to “release the equity” that they could then spend on a car/kitchen/holiday – safe in the knowledge that their house prices would rise inexorably and that it would all be covered.

I also know people who took out self certified (liar) mortgages for almost the entire value of their houses.

I also know people who leapt into the buy-to-let business pretty much at the drop of a hat.

And all the time people were being urged to jump into the housing market NOW, before they got left behind forever.

so, RPRT if someone told you to go through a door and something nice would be waiting for you, would you walk through that door without having done your homework? Or would you just wander in and hope for the best?

Well, as it happens we have a nice house and not much of a mortgage, so no, I personally didn’t go through the door.

But if you really don’t understand what I’m trying to say, but would rather exercise your pedantry muscle, carry on…

Would you jump off a cliff if a banker/politican said it was good for you?

Of course not, but it wasn’t like that.

It was more like people were being told to go through a door and something nice would be waiting for them on the other side…

But just to be going on with, I’m not sure that there is any sort of capitalism that doesn’t concentrate wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.

And I’m against that in principle.

I think I’d better get on with some work.

I’ll come back later though.

all caused by our collective greed! the need to own your own home (regardless of whether you could afford one!)

I don’t think this is quite fair.

There was a concerted effort by the monied classes to convince the general public that they could afford to buy their own homes without proper consideration of what the freeing up of credit would do to house prices.

And we are still being conned by politicians and bankers into believing that high house prices are due to a lack of supply, when in fact they have far more to do with too much credit.

What sent house prices into the stratosphere was banks providing 100% (+) mortgages, which led people to believe that it was OK to pay more for a house than you knew it was worth (on the grounds that it would be worth that at some point in the future).

It wasn’t just greed. It was a cynical exercise to get people into debt, where they could be milked for the rest of their lives.

But now we are all paying the price, because the (truly greedy) banks have created more debt than can be serviced by the economy, leading to defaults and the whole thing unravelling.

Some people might have been greedy/opportunist, but the people who should have known better, and allowed the situation to get out of hand were politicians and bankers.

There’s a sliding scale from pure free-market (zero taxes, no public services, public ownership or public regulation) to somewhere near socialism.

And where on this sliding scale do “we” need to be for everything to be marvellous?

You see, you started talking about capitalism in it’s widest sense, and then when I joined in in the same vein, talking about capitalism generally, you suddenly seemed to think that it was important that we start considering exactly what types of capitalism we mean.

So you go first, precisely which are the bad types of capitalism that have got us in this mess, and which are the good types of capitalism that are going to get us out of it?