With a bit of effort yourself think you can co better than most fund managers

I think I'd need more money than I've got to make the effort pay 😆

And maybe a year or two playing fantasy stock market.

Supply and demand – reduce demand then prices drop.

You don't get it. There is a total demand for housing – be it let or bought. Landlords don't buy houses to leave them empty, and people who are renting are very often saving to buy.

The only way to reduce demand for housing is to resort to real left wing politics – telling people what they want.

How do you propose the money to finance that will be raised?

Why would you need huge sums to finance it? I reckon the biggest problem in state education is the paucity of ambition – most of the grammars and private schools work hard to get as many as possible into Oxbridge. My state school discouraged applying!

Remove property speculation based on house price inflation and you get more affordable housing.

Supply and demand. People tend not to have massive unoccupied property portfolios – they have tenants. House prices in the UK are driven by the fact that demand exceeds supply. Taxing expensive houses does nothing to alter that situation. Your reasoning is incorrect.

Edit: And for what it's worth, he appears to be suggesting a tax on all assets, not just bricks and mortar.

Why not just stick it in a Nationwide 3 year fixed rate ISA paying 3.75%?

I'm after a mix of equity and savings, so I might yet 😆

Nobody who asks the weakness question has thought about it much – nobody is ever going to sit there and say "Well, I like to procrastinate", unless they have a screw loose. 😆

It's not a question you can expect to ever get an honest answer to.

Personally, I'd see education pushed, properly pushed. And forcible intervention powers for Surestart.

Having been to an ex poly and a Russell group uni, I'm flabbergasted by how different the intake is. Lots of ex private and grammar school pupils when you compare it with the ex-poly. And education, including uni, pretty much dictates your social networks and life chances.

Raise the bottom up, don't drag the top down.

the c**ts and they are c**ts

I can vouch for that. Got all the way through the recruitment process for a grad trainee job at a smallish firm and somewhat inexplicably, got a letter saying I wasn't being offered a job. Couldn't work out what had happened, until I saw the same firm advertising what sounded very much like the same role, but this time wanting a grad from another discipline. Nice one! 😆

"Tell us your best feature… ok, now tell us your worst feature…"

A book I have on interviews has a very good technique for answering this question. Think of something about yourself which is true, then extend it to the point where it becomes a fault, then say you're working on it.

An example would be something like "I have a very good eye for detail, so I have to be careful not to apply my standards to the work of my subordinates."

Elfin, I think most people agree with you that improving social mobility is a good thing. I just don't think many agree with how you think it can and should come about.

tron, that puts you very firmly in step with the trots, maoists, and other infantile ultra-leftists

That's a very basic failure of logic. The Soviets and the Nazis had some similar opinions – both were keen on death camps, for example, but you can't say that one thing put them in the same ideological pigeonhole.

"I don't know"

Would be a cracking response to a competency question 😆

"Can you tell us about a time when you've worked in a team?"

"I don't know."

Can you not tone the CV down a bit? Normally it's all about pumping things up – negotiated this, managed that. Arranged and co-ordinated would normally be weaker ways of saying these things.

Ring up your references, and explain the situation. Massage your old job title into something a little less threating. No need to lie, just use a less grandiose title than your old one.

As far as I can see, it's a tax on being anything but in debt. I don't see what relevance it has to the UK – it could be useful in Japan where the propensity to save is very high, and it's holding back their economic growth.

In the UK personal debt levels are still high. It would discourage any accumulation of assets, meaning that a lot more people would rely on credit as their "rainy day fund". Short term it could kick start the economy a little (every pound saved is a pound that's not being spent), but I think the events of the last two years have shown us that people would do well to save more, not less.

Ultimately, I suspect this means he's got little support in the Labour party as there's obviously nobody giving him economic advice.

He honestly won't deal with knotweed? If he leaves it, he'll have a field full of the stuff and a massive bill. If he ploughs it up or rotavates it, he'll have a field of the stuff much more quickly.

He could quite easily give it a going over with Round-Up once a year every spring when new growth appears and have it gone in a fairly trouble free manner. The process of killing off new growth every spring exhausts the energy stores in the rhisome network below.

As for electric heaters – they're near 100% efficient. The only difference between any of them is how they give heat out – a fan heater will give you heat now, but not when it's off, and an oil filled rad will stay warm for a bit once it's turned off.

Have a look on my posting history – I gave someone a rough guide recently – think the thread was called something like "competency interviews"

Jesus, that's a complicated and slow website. My LBS is on there, then when I click its name, it's not on the map any more.

Then I have to create an account?

Im asking on advise regarding the problem, not how to aquire another TV!!

And as others have said, there's lots of volts in the back of a telly. I assumed that if you were contemplating DIY television repair, you might not want to drop £300 on a new one.

Rally cars shouldn't be specced with powder these days

Indeed they aren't, but plenty carry a dry powder extinguisher too. Apparently AFFF isn't that well trusted by some.

Cecil knows all:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/659/why-do-so-many-native-americans-work-on-skyscrapers

CRT TVs are pretty much free these days. I reckon you could pick up one off freecycle for nowt.

Seems pretty standard to me. I used to work stupid hours, and I found that if I drove quickly on the way home, the concentration / slight adrenaline would be enough to keep me awake for a while. I suspect it's the same thing if you go out on the bike then expect to be able to sleep soon after.

Surely you can get winter candy and kendal mint cake easily in the UK? 😆

Black for both. There's a bit more spread on the Blue (not really anywhere you need it though), but the colour is 'orrid.

The key thing there is "at some point". I've naff all idea of the timescale, unfortunately, could be 3 years, could be 5, and things that are good for me buying a house – drops in house prices – are bad for the stock market.

Come off it. Everyone knows IT support come to work in Doc Martens and a faded t-shirt for a bad band. Some even still wear black jeans and leather jackets.

In rally cars, dry powder extinguishers tend to be mounted flat, longitudinally, so the forces of acceleration and braking force the powder to move around rather than stick in one place.

Aldi & Lidl have them in fairly regularly for around a tenner.

I know all the can go up as well as down business. On average, they go up more than they go down, and I'm not going to bet the farm.

Ridgeback do loads of decent bikes around the £300 mark. I wouldn't bother with anything "nice" as a commuter / shopper that'll get left on the street.

I wonder how many paedophiles use this forum? Statistically there must be some

Think of the children. If we can only save one child from pederasty, then anything can be justified. It's only right that we post up our best guesses, along with names and addresses gleaned from classifieds transactions 😯

Note for the hard of thinking: I'm joking.

If I wanted to have ultimate traction, I'd always walk about in my Zamberlans.

Shoes with rubber soles make you look like a chemistry teacher.

Cheers. Fidelity has also been recommended by a mate who knows his stuff as the cheapest UK Tracker (as mentioned in the thisismoney link).

Can I get HL to set me an ISA up and shove everything in it, or do I need to do work? 😆

Edit: It seems they will. Now to convince the bank to release my cash from their 0.1% savings account 😆

What I have will more less fit into an ISA, put it that way 😆

Looking at tracker funds, so fairly conservative – I'll want this cash for a deposit on a house at some point. I don't think there's any point in someone who isn't trading massive sums trying to actively play the market.

You send the credit card company money, either by cheque or bank transfer – normally when they send you a bill. I suppose in this scenario, you'd need to get a friend to write a check or to send a postal order. As a rule, credit card limits are quite generous – £1k would be fairly low (possible if you were lacking UK credit history), and £3k or so is very common.

You can always ring the credit card company and see how much balance you have left, if they're going to try and collect the cash from your closed account by direct debit etc.

Practice – you soon get used to it. Or those rubber stick on things 😯

Mr Grips. It's new accountant time!

To spend your money in somewhere like Dubai and pretend there's no moral element to it is just kidding yourself.

There are few places still using these methods of slavery / indentured labour. It's not at all difficult to avoid them.

Put it this way – if we organised a pressure group to get this sorted out, it would be a drop in the ocean. People like Amnesty and HRW will already be all over this, and struggling to make anything happen. Go out there and try and do something about it in person, and you'd be banged up pretty quickly.

However, if we decided to stop spending money there, they'd sort it out double quick. Money talks.

Living here does not make me complicit with human trafficking, slavery or exploitation.

From what I read in the papers, most of their economy is built on exploitation. If you live in a flat, it was most likely built by heavily exploited workers etc. The whole country is built on the back of exploitation. By being there, you help their economy, giving them a reward for doing it.

Wouldn't expect to be offered, or to offer a cup of tea in that sort of situation. I tend to haggle quite hard on stuff, so I can't see why I'd want to sit having a cup of cha trying to make small talk 😆

It'd be much easier to unpimp one than to unconvert one!