I’m broke. If I borrow more and spend more will it make me richer?

Depends what you spend it on. Invest or use it wisely and yes it might.

EDIT – beaten to it!

Might make a few rethink their plans to vote for Milliband and Balls

Milliband and Balls will be infinitely preferable to Dickhead and Bollocks who are failing to run the shop now.

Yeah, pardon me for not fully understanding the geography of Gullane Point and Aberlady. Or the exact route you took your dog. “Fruits”? f***ing ha ha!

I sometimes get this when I’ve had my saddle set a bit too high…

“Sticking it” to local wildlife surely?

^^ My thoughts exactly.
Thought the OP was about stupid dogs, not owners..?

probably.
try abebooks.co.uk – they often have books, new and used, cheaper than amazon marketplace

Why not have a crack at fly fishing for those trout? I used to coarse fish years ago, and took up fly fishing three or four years back. I can honestly say there’s nothing (fishing-wise) like the feeling of taking a river brownie on a dry fly, except maybe, and perversely, the pleasure of releasing him unharmed back into the river. There’s all the pleasure of contemplation and serenity you get with coarse fishing, but with more involvement and an added feeling of connection to the water.

If you’re not keen on confronting your neighbour directly (which I can understand, because falling out with people you have to live among is a pain the arse) why not just make a discreet enquiry with the Local Authority to see if parking on the verge is forbidden; they’ll maybe ask who is parking on a verge, and you’ll have no option as a law abiding citizen but to spill the beans. They may then do something about it.
I can understand your annoyance. I’m getting sick and tired of people who think they’re more important than the rest of the world.

what if the future itself came with a neoprene pouch, so if it looked a bit daunting you could put it in the pouch, fasten the velcro strap, put the pouch on a shelf and go and lie in a field and look at the clouds?

Seems I understood it better than you.

Did you only read the first paragraph? This is the bit you needed to get to –

“So the cost of pensions is a quarter of a quarter or about 6% of the whole of council income”

It points out that you can’t extract council tax from the whole council budget, so attempting to work out any percentage of council tax alone is meaningless, and any figures presented on that basis are misleading.

Still, it’s an attention grabber for all of you that see little value in public services, and value the societal contribution of Katie Price. Times like this I wish there was a god, because I’d pray for us…

So 25% of council tax (i.e. the amount I pay every year) does go on pension then?

eh? how did you interpret that from anything in that link?

oh non of the best staff would work for only 150k? as they are allegedly the best of the best then surely they can plough thier own furrow in the private sector for thier real worth

so you’re happy to pay anyone in the private sector as much money as they can possibly get their greedy grasping hands on, and that’s their “real worth”. Is Katie Price “worth” more than a paeditrician? Or a teacher? Or a fire officer?

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and just to reinforce my post above, here’s a left-wing (ish) response to the right-wing drivel. And comparatively fresh, at a mere six months old…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1508474/26pc-of-council-tax-goes-on-public-pensions.html

Hmmm…a six year old story…
The pensions contribution varies from authority to authority – some are 5%. Some may have been 25%, if calculated by a right wing paper’s right wing consultant. Some authorities’ schemes are financially very healthy and require no plundering of the public purse to anywhere near the extent the Tory pedagogues would have you believe.

Wasn’t the iphone4s launched during the current credit crisis

It’s a point, but being a cynic I wonder how many of those phones were bought on credit which the owner can’t really afford, spurred on by advertisers who suggested you’re a duffer if you don’t have one of their overpriced gadgets…

It’s a remarkable position to argue that nothing has changed in the UK since Victorian times but that meritorious achievements were made in the Soviet Union

You’re taking those remarks out of context

Nothing’s changed in this country in terms of the economic hierarchy, in that the rich prosper while the poor suffer. Societally, yes we’ve improved vastly, although those deformed posh kids in charge now seem hell bent on reversing that.

Pish

Pish indeed! Where do they get these facts from?!

Yep, badly mismanaged and failed completely. Makes you wonder why the West was so scared

I don’t decry the Soviet Union’s achievements, but they’ve returned to capitalism. Che Guevara warned that would happen – they based their system on wholly capitalist incentives.
I think we need need a new conscience, not just a new economic and political system. A new moral definition of success, instead of a financial one, is what may save us.

voter for voter apathy is simply wrong

The only people who will ever be blamed for voter apathy are the voters; no-one in power will ever read that as dissent, because it suits them not to.

No aggression intended, honestly! I’m just not very diplomatic in my tone, which is why I’ll never be a politician! It’s all just debate, and I apologise if it sounds personal. Enjoy your day…

redistribute it amongst the world’s (and Britain’s) poor

Yeah why not? They did that in China and Russia

No they didn’t. They ostensibly adopted a system which should have done that but was badly mismanaged and failed completely. Where they do do it more successfully is in the northern European countries, where the gulf between rich and poor is lowest.

konabunny’s right

Victorian period was great if you were Henry St. John Smothington-Smythe of the 2nd Cavalry with colonial campaigns interspersed with the occasional season at your pile in Hampshire. It was a bit less spectacular if you were John Porter, the porter from Portsmouth, toothless and with a gangrenous foot

but extrapolate that to the present age. Nothing’s changed. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the rich have us blaming the chav, the doley, the immigrant when in fact they are the symptoms, not the cause.
We should alleviate the uber-wealthy of their ill-gotten gains, and more importantly, their ill-gotten power, and redistribute it amongst the world’s (and Britain’s) poor and rebuild a land where fairness and not richness is the common man’s dream. The Victorians’ grandeur was built on the back of poverty and exploitation here and abroad – let’s not idolise that.

cheekyboy

a huge non vote would press home our dissatisfaction

We have a huge non-vote every election – somewhere between 50 and 80% generally can’t be a*sed. Since when has that made anyone in power sit up and think?
That specious “let’s all not vote” theory is the laziest, most unproductive argument. Like I say, turn up and spoil your ballot paper – those at least get counted, and if we had 30 million of them…

And I think I can tell what you think from your comments, as I’m pretty sure you can tell what I think from mine.

Aargh! Forget it, someone else can do it

That’s exactly what cheekyboy thinks!

I dont know of a politician that deserves my vote

Well let someone else decide then.

Or better still, turn up and spoil your ballot paper. Staying at home just makes them think you’re one of the embarrassingly vast minority that thinks the X-Factor is more important than the government of their country.

I dont know of a politician that deserves my vote, simple as !

So, to repeat allthepies’ good question, what are you going to do about it..?

So what are you going to do about it ?

Stop voting I believe is the suggestion.

and wait for a good man on a white horse to come trotting over the hill…

Opine less, do more

Brilliant!
That’s the forum equivalent of “Why Don’t You” telling us to turn the telly off and go and do something less boring instead!

We do not have the politicians we deserve

Conversely, we probably have exactly the politicians we deserve – we’re lucky if 30% of us even bother to get off our fat a*ses and vote.

instead of blaming bankers/politicians/unions/immigrants/fat cats

Never seen a problem yet that can be solved without working out what went wrong in the first place…two of those five if you ask me…

Which ones, Flashheart, the ones that teach our kids or the ones that heal our sick, maybe?

Let’s be a lot better than the Victorians were. Let’s reduce the gap between rich and poor, like the more civilised nations on earth, let’s all accept a little bit less, let’s look after our world and all its people, and let’s stop the vile ideologies that money is the reason we exist and that everything else should be subservient to “profit”…

Capitalism will end up eating itself and destroying us all in the process, whoever’s leading the pack. The only sustainably developing country in the world? Cuba. Mojito, anyone?

Only the time I accidentally went to the Blue Oyster Bar accidentally wearing just my lycra shorts. Still, I had a nice evening, even though I had to push the bike home.

I was offered some roadkill stew once – I turned it down but later realised that it must be one of the more ethical ways of eating meat.
I’ve recently stopped eating almost all meat, I have fish now and then and sometimes a guilty relapse with a piece of chicken, but even as a carnivore I could never ethically justify eating meat. It’s bad for the planet, not great for the eater and lousy for the animal. Tastes beautiful, I admit, but there’s something sweet about being able to look a calf in the eye and knowing no-one will be cutting its throat or putting a bolt gun to its head in my name. Problem is, you do a little and everyone’s quick to point out the “hypocrisy” or your failings (leather shoes, fire extinguishers, et al), but I’m quite proud to know that not much has died over the past eighteen months to keep me fed.

isn’t the skin where a lot of the good oils are?

Did you have a stab at answering the OP? A few people have, but the posts tended to get lost in the background noise

Sorry Cougar…my original Che Guevara comment attempted to respond to your OP – sorry if I’ve contributed to the sidetracking. I’ll shut up now!

Zimbo, I wish you would consider your statements before jumping into the fray

More of that comedy gold. You’re wasted on here. How did you know I’ve only just started thinking about religion after I finished today’s lunch?

The “Gospels” and institutional/organised religion are the problem. They are all about bigotry and subjugation. Personal faith, I have no problem with, irrational though it may seem to me.

neither faith nor complete disbelief can be proven by the evidence

Do you want me to similarly disprove the existence of the tooth fairy?

ooh – looks like badnwez is the one with the big chip on his shoulder! Anti-atheist anger always makes me laugh, but “unverifiable atheism”, that’s comedy gold.