Condorosa

A murky, miserable morning here and the news, in general seems to match it.

Mind you, there is the fun and games involved with shoving the ‘right’ bin out in order to avoid local-govern-mental, pension-funding fines!

I’m working on a plan to go away abroad on holiday; to come back as an immigrant and get £25,000.00p + p. a. in umpteen benefits (tax-free of course!)  which make my O.A. pension look like back-pocket change! Or to squat in someone’s house for free – plus of course umpteen benefits, again, tax-free.

Then again all this cash will shortly be required to fund, via a few ‘laundering’ agencies, the eu. They want a trillion as back-up now.

Talking of back-pocket change: watch your coins. New ones, made of cheap steel (magnetic – they have been for years)  won’t fit many machines so the cost will be staggering. Once a machine is changed the old coins won’t fit it! Twenty years back copper coins had to be changed because the metal cost more than coin value!

Meanwhile the recent BBC move to Salford has boosted employment in that area – out of 3,000+ applications 24 local folk have got jobs – nearly all of them now earn £3 or £4 an hour (?) in some dogsbody job or other. ( dole but you work for it) I couldn’t work at the beeb. There’s no challenge…..

 

Had a few probs with PC – on ubuntu now.

All okay – parts cobbled together and it all works!

There is an article in the Mail that really annoys. Grant Shapps (search me?) says us oldies should be helped, by councils, to rent our mansions to families while we move to smaller accommodation.

How nice for a skint government if we did.

We’d have to pay for house upkeep. So the incumbent crew wouldn’t give a monkeys and wreck the place on an ongoing basis.

Plus, as a house renter, we’d have a business to run (oh yes) and, thus, a mountain of daily paperwork as we collect taxation (from our profit, if any) for the tax-man.

But, as always with govern-mental plans, I will if they will.  That attitude keeps ‘em quiet!

 

 

Shoved a new Graphics Card in the machine today. Things are much better – especially….the sound…?

Watch for tax-office strikes – it’s getting interesting.

Cold and clear this morning as The Office for Business (oh yes) informs us that the Met. Office has paid itself £3.36 million in bonuses this year. Last year it was £2,000,000.00p +.
Deficits are made of this eh?

Not content with charging us for over 60% of beeb programmes being repeats, the powers that be want to charge us for iPlayer stuff too! So watch-out for a ‘new’ licence any time. Initially it may have an ‘option’ for iPlayer i.e. an attached optional fee, but then that would be consolidated, after a year or so, into the general licence fee. Strangely the EU has quite straight-forward views on our beeb licence (it’s a tax – there are EU rules about them) so there may be another nail for the coffin of our membership to put with the other fifty million daily nails!

While on the subject of ‘the beeb’, under a ‘Business’ heading there this morning is the news that Obama wants another $1.2trillion dollar lend, from somebody…
Mmm, it’s only small-print yet but…..

From my window, here in the east-wing this morning, I can clearly see the far hills – even pylons that desecrate the summits. It is too cold and this morning skies were violently red.
All of this points to snow and wintry weather.
Where’s me bonus?

It’s decidedly windy today as that High-Speed Rail Link thingy is really upsetting the gentry darn sarf. It looks like it’ll go through, under or over some pretty well heeled gardens, even right through the odd listed building or two…and folk are already asking why anyone should want to travel the route at 200+ M.P.H. anyway. It would be far nicer on a bike.

A pensioner (no less) has been banned from driving for speeding, in his £80,000+ Jag, at 147 M.P.H. (I mean, who needs a friggin’ train?) Dangerous stuff true, but…way to go grandad!
He’s called Mr. Swift. Really.

Murky but dry today as we’re told the High Speed rail Link between London and Brum will go ahead.
It will cost, they estimate, £32 billion and will be up and running in 2026 – with extensions to Leeds and Manchester by 2033.
In China they’d have the lot up, running and profitable next year!
Mind you, with such projects on the cards Heating Allowance for a few pensioners is back-pocket change! Even if they live abroad in the sun.

Bloggers bleat about Blair’s tax farce. Jealousy eh?

And blogger extraordinaire, Jezza, had what was probably his best financial year in 2011. He pulled several £million – good gaffe, good gaffe…I wonder how he’d fare without a car for a year? Or a month? Go on then, just a week? Oh, all right, a day? What? Ten minutes?
Now that would make a good TV blog for Top Gear – actually doing without a car, on a motoring programme! It was here first folks!

On the subject of ‘doing without a car’…
I’ve done it a while now and I have noticed, at times, virtually and really, a distinct aversion to folk without wheels. It’s like when you go about with a bad cold. Folk steer-clear.
You get the same if you smoke lately.
And if you don’t drink.
And if you’re entrepreneurial and write – Poetry?!
Even, to an extent, if you work.
Or don’t Facebook.

For some of us then it is indeed a lonely old life!

Rolls-Royce, the car section that is, made and sold over 3500 new cars last year – a record for the company now owned by BMW. I sat in a new Phantom last month and although newly trimmed and equipped, it was still a Rolls-Royce.

Drizzly and dull with grey clouds today as we’re told that ex-PM Tony Blair only pays pennies, in tax, on mega earnings.
He can earn, we’re told, £200,000 for a speech somewhere. Pundits are wondering, what he talks about for that kind of money.
Meanwhile the present PM goes on about catching tax-avoiders.

Yet another ‘study’ into turbines says, in umpteen thousand other words, that they’re rubbish. More £ down the drain.

Up with the pigeons this morning, there’s not been a lark around here for years! Two headlines on one Mail page give an ominous giggle.
1) Bankers bonuses are set to be announced.
2) Quantative Easing is deemed necessary.

Apparently the PM’s Personal Trainer has mounting debts…one wonders whether they’ve been discussing wealth-creation methods, together, while working-out perhaps?

If a High-Speed Train system was viable between London and Birmingham, there would already be one!
Ditto everything else govern-mental.

In the news too today are those eu regulation, impossible to dump when broken, totally rubbish, eco-light-bulbs that no one likes, and, electric cars. Which, having sold only 900 last September. ( ) nobody likes even more!(The cars sold 900, not the bulbs, they sold less as they’re ‘everlasting’, so they’re not viable to make! )
What is it with all this ‘new technology’ hardware that puts folk off buying? Is it the cost?
The bulbs can cost up to a fiver a throw, the old ones were 25p last time I bought one down the market. You can haggle a nice Jag, used, for a grand around here that’ll run five years before rotting away or you run out of cash, whichever comes first. Meanwhile a new lecky job will cost you £25,000.00p and might get you to the end of your street before needing a re-charge.

Despite the simple economics of all this modern stuff that doesn’t seem to work, that never stopped folk buying cars in the sixties say that were often notoriously hard to start and run.
So why don’t we like this stuff?
Could it be that, rather than responding to customer requirements, (likes!) that now stuff is designed to suit parameters of govern-mental direktive?
A coal fire keeps you warm, but it’s far from green – as are most consumers!
And this one now rides a bike, gets up when it goes light and goes to bed when it gets dark.
Holding a candle to the engine of common-sense, perhaps?

Oh it’s cloudy today and there’s still wind about – quite a lot of wind lately, which has, wonderingly, damaged this wind turbine.
Mind you firms have been paid a fortune – to shut down turbines when the wind is too strong…last year £millions!

There is some chat too about housing benefits. Some London ahem, ‘unemployed’s’ are living in council-funded mansio…erm, houses that cost tax-payers up to £2000 per week.
Some London council jobsworth says that this is too high and that perfectly good accommodation can be rented for £400 per week.
It really puts minimal-wage into context eh?
Up here though £400 – £500 a month will get you a modest but live able terraced two, possibly three bedder.

Mmm, nice and sunny here at the moment but with a bit of a chill as researchers at The Centre for Research and Epidimiology and The University College, London, announce that they’ve studied 7,000 folk, over past ten years, to find out how their brains cope as they age.
Some younger researchers found that brains lose power at 45 years of age, not 65 as previously thought. (Which may explain things govern-mental, i.e. paying researchers for ten years?)
While older researchers couldn’t remember, after ten years, what they had started researching!