NICE OUT AGAIN….

Is it? I might get mine out later.

Have a stumbled into an old folks home?

Depends what your daily routine is, if you are a care worker or an undertaker I'd perhaps rather not hear about it

In times of recession people hanker for nostalgia, which is the real reason theres been a lot of chatter about stoves in the last few years

Its also why fish finger sales are on the up

if you happen to have a free/cheap source of wood then a stove is a bit of fun and might save you a few bob topping up your existing heating.

If you have to rely on burning solid fuel for all your heating and hot water then its a time hungry, expensive, dirty pain in the tits, and you'll often be cold.

Which is what 'relative' poverty is all about. Social misfunction goes hand in hand with widening inequality. Its accepted that it does, but I don't think it should be accepted. Governments talk in terms of skewing benefits and taxation one way or another to favor one class or another but thats because those are the only levers available to a government to pull.

The presence of the rich makes the poor self destructive in a myriad ways, surely there must be a more subtle, social and cultural ways of tackling that with P60s and UB40s?

But is it because the locals don't want or aren't available to fill the jobs?

Its a cosmopolitan city – locals/foreigners are the same thing – you were working there and you were form out of town.

If its a straight cut then the metal cutting circular saws (made by evolution commonly but a few others make them) will be just up to the job. As simple, straight and accurate as cutting plywood with a regular circular saw. No heat/sparks/dust and a beautiful clean, straight, square cut with a lovely almost crystaline finish to it.

A tool hire shop should be able to hook you up with one, the biggest / powerfullest of the Evolution models (1750w) will cut 12mm mild steel plate

t seems that a lot of the people working in the shops and bars are foreign

well London is a cosmopolitan city, you could say the same about any capital city

epicsteve – Member
The fact that a supposed Labour government failed to do anything about it is equally shameful though.
The didn't fail to do anything about it. I think you'll find that they made it a lot worse.

I think you'll find they made it a fair bit better

i know this sounds harsh, but i think that the only way to help some of these people is to remove all benefits and force them to do something. Make it impossible to sit back and do nothing for ever.

That would make us more like the US then, a rich country without a social safety net. The have roughly the same Rich/Poor divide as us but markedly higher social problems. More than 750 people / 100,000 in the states are in jail (compared to less than 150 here or 93 in the Netherlands or 66 in Norway). Infact almost a quarter of the worlds prison population are in the states. They do everything big.

I'm quite sure I don't aspire for us to have any of the problems the US creates for itself.

We're also presuming that the poor don't/won't work. While there are people who play/cheat the system there just aren't enough of them to get in a twist over. There are plenty of poor people in employment and doing important jobs. There are also the sick, the disabled, the elderly and their carers. Included in those are roughly 2 million people who've been made sick, many terminally, by their work.

I'd rather eat glass than go through the crap of getting BT to put in a connection again. Literally counting the days til I can get shot of them again. Weeks of delays, surly replies and lies. And for the year that followed "the system is down just now so we can't access your data" on any occasion we've needed to contact them, including today when we asked for our MAC code

The sceptical Glaswegian

iRight

Like the joke about a teacher explaining how a double negative makes a positive, but a double positive does not make a negative, to which the sceptical glaswegian school boy replied "Aye right"

I think the first step is to get rid of the university gown.

Oh now come on, theres got to be a university somewhere that'll let him in, eventually! Don't give up hope OMITN

Any of the changes needed to break the poverty gap won't be accepted by the masses, even though we'd all move to a much happier world if we took the medicine

If we wanted to have the kind of society we all crave we could have it in 10 – 20 years from now. But getting from here to there would hurt a bit. But we could all have better, happier lives if we did it. In a democracy that means asking turkeys to vote for christmas though.

Both political parties would like to get there, but we won't vote for either of them if they try. What they will do, especially cuddly Dave, is use the flowery words.

Someone above mentions "bizarrely" the rich are also unhappy.

I've found myself living next door to a castle, and the owners invited us over a few weeks ago for a knees up. Now they are a young family, have both grown up with wealth (he's just inherited the castle and everything you can see out the window) she grew up owning a large swathe of the upper Thames.

Now 'unhappy' isn't a word I'd use, but just as self destructive as the poorest people I've met.

Churchill believed that in the same way the rich inherit their riches, the poor inherited their poverty. He believed poverty could be eradicated by simply preventing the poor from breeding.

There seem to be a lot of factors being jumbled about in that article. Income and wealth are very different things. Many people have become 'wealthy' in the past few years (even with a recent dip) simply because the home they live in has raised in value. So are we comparing the 'wealth' of a homeowner who can't realistically mobilise the value locked up in their house against the savings of someone who rents their home?

The gap between rich and poor is important but its important to measure it in a way that meaningful. Without delving into that particular article, when this has been tossed around in the media recently its been to look at the very poorest 1% and the very richest 1% and the fact that that gap has increased. Well the very richest 1% are rich beyond imagining, by themselves they pay something like one fifth of the UKs tax. With business becoming an ever more global affair there has never been a better time for the very very rich to get a bit richer. So measuring the gap between the super super rich and the very poorest in a country with a social safety net is a wee bit dumb.

The gap between most poor, the the bottom 20% and most rich, the top 20% is much more important. Countries with a large gap between those two groups (Us, the US, portugal have the rich earning 9 times what the poor earn) have all the sorts of social problems we associate with deprivation – crime, murder, mental illness, teen pregnancy the whole lot. Countries that have a small gap (Japan, the Nordic countries, where the rich earn 4 times what the poor earn) have far fewer of those problems.

Here in the UK although the wide gap between rich and poor persists, the poor are better off now, in real terms, rather than relative terms, then they were 10 – 15 years ago.

And as much as we like to think otherwise, all the phenomena related to poverty have been steadily improving.

blimey a 94 volvo is pretty secure if you need a 94 volvo is pretty secure if you need a coat hanger. my old astra from that era just needed any similar looking key to open and drive it, you just needed the astra key to lock it again. I drove it from Edinburgh to Bristol only to realise when I got there I'd left my keys at home. I'd been using the keys to a works mercedes van and not even realised until I couldn't lock it when I got there

Ian Munro – Member
I think the major difference is that chiropractors have a track record of killing people and oesteopaths don't.

So Chiropractor if I need to have someone assasinated, Oesteopath if I just want to have them roughed up a bit?

waynekerr – Member
OMG!
Definitely not position 7

Thats the closing credits to Morcambe and Wise isn't it?

but why pay for empties?

Just to clarify, you talked about jumbling up the numbers: Has the shed been broken into or did some know/guess the combination?

As for your home insurance – its totally hit and miss, you'll just have to read the policy docs and see what you bought into

Its worth seeing what the offer is for direct replacement as some of the direct replacement companies are a bit over-keen to up-value your replacement. But refuse if its not what you want. I had a bunch of tools stolen, some were just B&Q own brand guff, the direct replacement stuff obviously can't source other peoples own brand gear so offered me makita and electra-beckum stuff of four or five times the value in the hope it 'would be acceptable'. Eventually I caved in 🙂

Thats one hell of a heroin binge you must be on!

so you've bought a TV then Stoner?
🙂

oops indeed

If only this site had some sort of edit button
🙂
Edit: It seems there isn't

"Granny'" soap flakes should be in most supermarkets, fairly low key packaging so doesn't really jump out at you amongst the Cillet Bang and Radion

Try and figure out exactly what you need as 'quite a big van' covers a fair range of vehicles and prices so one price for 'quite a big van' isn't really going to be comparable to another.

transits and sprinters come in three lengths, but not everybody stocks the largest size, so when they say 'long wheel base' sometimes they are referring to the middle size van. Vivaros are smaller than transits and "long wheel base' vivaro is roughly comparable with the smallest size transit.

If you can get a SWB transit for about £30 thats an OK price. That gets you a load area 8ft long and about 4ft between the wheel arches and about 4ft tall

if you can get a MWB for £35/£40 thats an OK price. 2ft longer, perhaps a foot taller (but some will call this a LWB)

if you can get LWB for £60 thats and OK price. about 12ft long. Some will call this extra long wheel base, or a Transit Jumbo

Luton Vans are around £60-£80 About 7ft wide, 7ft tall, length can vary from 10 to 14ft though, so worth asking for measurements to make a comparison. Lutons are thirsty, if the hire company's stock isn't very new then lutons can also be leaky and not very secure. Its also very difficult to make the best of a luton if you can't secure large/ungainly items well. A good luton will have tie bars along the wall that you can rope your furninture to, a bad one will have nowt and the interior, the roller shutter (and consiquently all your belongings) will be smashed to ****

Important factor with lutons is although they are cavernous they don't carry a great deal of weight and are very easy to overload. If you are going to have to do more than one trip use a luton to move the big and awkward stuff (beds, sofas, anglar awkward items) then do the rest of the boxed heavy stuff in a smaller, cheaper van. A MWB transit can carry nearly twice as much weight as a big luton.

Mark out an area 8ft x 4ft on the floor and imagine how your stuff will fit in it, then mark one out 10 x 7ft. That should help you work out the right tool for the job.

Get prices, but try and give the stock a look over once you find something cheap – there are some shocking vehicles out there.

Push to get all the pricing info over the phone, don't take the cheapest quote only to find the add on damage waivers, milage prices, fuel and all sorts of other guff when you collect

For house moves keep in mind that left unattended in a van your belongings aren't likely to be insured by your home contents, especially not if you leave the van unattended and pretty much never overnight. Some will will cover 'in transit' but thats literally while the vehicle is on the move.

thats either cheap or expensive – what kind of van are you hiring? big? small?

that looks like either a great deal or a mistake. Go through the policy in detail and see if theres anything missing that you'd need.

By 'as part of the tenancy deal' does that mean that you are required to insure the landlords possessions as well as your own? M&S includes 'Tenant's liability' upto about £40k with their policy.

is there another picture of a bald porcupine?

The latest incarnation of Flip4Mac is awful though, it seems to go through some sort of longwinded rendering process that takes nearly as long as it takes to play the movie. The older version used to delay opening the file for a moment, the new version opens instantly but renders while it plays, it means you can't skip forward through the movie if you want to.

VLC player is worth downloading, its a scruffier interface than Quicktime it seems to handle WMV files better and is good for crappy AVI files too. Keep quicktime as the default player and use VLC for anything thats badly behaved

Install flip4mac anyway as it helps for stuff like movies viewed through your browser

Nice, tan, suede – pick two

I'd be tempted to just pick one actually

Some germans have a sense of humour, even about the war. I know someone who was on a Lufthansa flight into heathrow, they were delayed landing because of a fault with the runway lights. The captain of the flight came over the tannoy applogising for the delay and criticising air traffic control for being over cautious as "german pilots hadn't had any trouble finding london in the dark in the 1940s"

I've had requests from expat scots to tape it for them, followed by the same people requesting I don't bother. Seems not to be what people were hoping for

incidentally he was on itv2 simultaneously hells kitchen USA, why does no one slap him?

Incidentally he was also pretty much simultaneously on Alex Riley's rather excellent BBC1 documentary on disgusting food being called to account (again) for his endorsement of Booker Cash and Carry's slurry-and-chemicals-and-salt-packaged-as-meat products. First of three, well worth catching the rest.

I hire them occationally, to my mind compared to say a berlingo they are a spot on the narrow side, I think you can comfortably fit 2 adults and 5 children, or 4 adults and luggage. Five adults means it'll be a bit snug in the back. 7 adults would require two of them the be amputees.

edit: that said I really like them, the indicators annoy me, which I suppose means nothing else does

'ah hopefully they will be off duty A&E staff enjoying their 'night out' (I hope!)

Nope, they were coach drivers on their way to the carpark 🙂

Only half joking actually

Lots of rightwing christian zealots are recovering alcoholics, maybe you should buy him George W Bush's autobiography (or Steven Baldwin's)

save energy and just imagine it in your head

But thinking uses a disproportionate amount of calories, so don't imagine anything too complicated. Whenever I'm on a long fireroad climb I get the theme tune for Garden Force stuck in my head. I'm sure thats the reason I'm so knackered at the top.