Tin Foil Hat

Yep I know some. They're returning to cash in hand work or crime to do the minimum to get back to their pre-cut levels of income. All the while I slave like a **** all week to pay for them. They don't want to work - life is too easy for them. What's the story with those you know on benefits?

But haven't you simply said that Spain's upturn in fortune is just due to oil prices? Hardly an economic miracle!

Hi, Mods - can you leave here for a while as this gets the most traffic and I'd like a reply asap My father in law has been in a rented flat in a retirement block for over 12 months and has to sign every 6 months for another contract, so I'm assuming AST, and also has to pay the letting agent a stupid amount (over £100) each time as an admin fee (which is rather a lot for a piece of paper and a retard to file it but that's a separate issue). He now needs to move into a care home asap and although he's "signed up" until the end of July, this current 6 month chunk ends at the end of Jan. He will be going to a care home before the end of the current chunk, so my question is can he be forced to pay for the next 6 months? They also have his deposit in a scheme but the tenancy small print states "professional cleaning" and carpet cleaning at the end of the tenancy which is another rouse to sting the deposit for a sum of money. The flat was a port in a storm, it smelled when he moved in and will do so on his vacating it but I am assuming the vile sharks at the EA will take the deposit one way or another. Any advice that can be stomached by a stressed family who will want to just draw a line under it and move on without paying more than they have to? Cheers, TFH

Just wondered if anyone had inside info on this. All over Twitter the last few days tons of people reporting empty shelves and a Soviet style look. Makes me wonder if their suppliers have stopped supplying perhaps as a result of not paying them? This is pure speculation on my part but the volume of reports makes me wonder if there's something more to this.

The companies were only paid for what they delivered which was a fraction of the total expected cost as they couldn't do what they said they would. So it would probably be a little less time bit I'd imagine labour would find some way to exempt their corporate buddies and make it look they were doing something when they weren't "a la Blair."

It says if rates by 2% AND income by 10%. That's not going to happen in the tory slave economy is it?

Morrison's have gone full Tesco (even have some of their execs I thought). A real shame, my first employer back in the late 80s and was always my backstop for a straightforward supermarket. Now it's a green and yellow Tesco complete with the same tricks and deception, the same lack of care in presentation and stocking up and the same level of unhappy workers. Why on earth they have taken this route when it was so obvious what the end point would be is beyond me. Someone has done some top class bullshitting to get their way (and bonus I'd imagine too).

But nowhere near as good value as two years ago. Then the price vs quantity/quality differences were huge. Now it's just a bit cheaper rather than nearer half the price.

It's all engineered on purpose. The recent health act replaced half a dozen or so health authorities with nearly 300 local commissioning groups. Each group has a board of directors and some GPs giving advice (in return for even more cash). So the bureaucracy has been multiplied many times over and put into place a system of fine when trusts can't perform, mainly due to lack of cash. This forces a never ending spiral of poor performance so they can eventually justify privatisation. On top of this if organisations collaborate to save cost they are stopped under sham anti competition rules. There are some trusts that have less than half a day's liquidity in the coffers. They won't be open about all this though because it's all about imposing ideology.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29983051 So they can continue to reap the profit and pay shit wages. This one is particularly incredulous given the recovereh is going so well.

Aldi is now too expensive for me. Recently they have increased prices and reduced pack sizes again making them more expensive than asda or Morrison's for what I buy. I suspect they have done this to pay for their longer hours, more tills open and now the credit card payments. Asda is cheapest for me at the moment although I haven't tried Iceland or farm foods yet.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. It's the ******** inflation figures that the government must maintain for international purposes. There's no way these high earners would feel the pinch if it really was 3%.

They get 20pc more spending per capita funded from the UK as a whole. Where's that going to come from?

However I noticed some long-term unemployed on the school run this morning. They are perfectly capable of work and just don't want to. There are jobs out there, first rung stuff but that's how you start in most trades, but they prefer to spend my taxes and lounge all day. They will teach their children to have the same zero work ethos and produce generations of dole scroungers as we've seen over the last few decades. IMHO work for dole should be very robust as this will force the lazy ba$tards to find a job that's better paid/easier than the government dole yielding option.

I just hope that Lidl doesn't follow the "lead" of Aldi. It's an opportunity for them to be the only discounter in town and gain market share. I don't get to go to Lidl often so don't really know what's going on there but they want to open one in my nearest town in the next year. Asda is ok but their ready meals are often poor quality and due to working late I need a couple of them a week.

Aldi sadly are going into the Tesco mode of shrinkflation and also just plain price increases. I have noticed this step by step over the last few months and on Sunday found many items in my weekly shop up 10% and some items shrunk. An example of shrinkage is the cheese slices of Gouda, Maasdam etc. They used to be very large, enough to cover a slice of bread and now they are little squares. Same price but are now sold as 12 slices or whatever, which is the same as the old one but about a third smaller. They are also opening much later (increasing their costs) and I think they've decided to move to be a mainstream supermarket not a discounter anymore. It's sad as since I was a wee student in the 90's Aldi has been my mainstay but it looks like I'll be an Asda man from now on as it's cheaper there.

The place I'm about to leave has a great scam. What they do is the favored central clique of people retire, agree with so lower minion to cover their job for a month or three, then they get to move on to another tile having been acting up at a higher grade and the retiree come back in an "emergency" capacity as 1k a day contractor. So the retiree gets their pension and a big wedge of income support. Three of them have die it in the last two years. NHS by the way.

PFI and privatised services. This is the reason. Private services all have a chunk skimmed by those who own the companies so services are poorer than the NHS equivalent. And don't get so excited about private hospitals. Death rates are higher for the same reasons but you get a nice room. I'd rather live but share a bay with 5 others.

Yes you are right there. Management is often absolutely shockingly awful. A lot of the time the edicts come from ministry level and have to be implemented despite being more or less impossible, and a lot of the time the people in management are a generations long succession of alpha males (and females) who get given the top jobs because they can talk the right talk yet have no ability to actually manage. Every restructure is a card shuffling exercise where the same crap people change their portfolio and do badly at something else. These people are also very good at blaming everything else and the people above at ministry level (now the SHAs have gone) believe them so they never lose their jobs through crap performance. It is a big problem but having said all this I've also seen pretty much the same thing at private companies.

In the NHS at least there have been no pay rises for god knows how long. Yes there are the annual increments but there are only a set number of spine points to increment up (8 or 10). Even with this it doesn't match real inflation figures on it's own. Most NHS jobs pay less than their private sector counterparts. There is also no final salary pension anymore. It's a career average now for all but the most aged employees. The tories are trying to make the NHS collapse on all fronts - expensively privatise services that do crap work and then the tories can bleat on about how much the yearly deficit is, they close as much as possible and sell the land for shitty little flats to house doleys or fleece unsuspecting proper working people, and they also make it as financially unrewarding as possible by downgrading jobs and pay freezes. You lot need to get a grip on the public sector hate. Your vitriol should be directed at the ministers who are privatising for political reasons and the fat cats who get the contracts and then provide crap care so they can skim off a load of profit.

Oh shit. I can tell you every privatised health service functions has performed way below the NHS equivalent. ******ing tories just don't give a shit as long as their mates make some wedge. *****.

Aldi's becoming a middle ground between Lidl and Asda IMHO. Their packages are significantly smaller than the Lidl counterpart (ie: 40 cleaning wipes vs 80 in Lidl) and they are now not representing the same value for money they did even a couple of years ago. I am looking forward to Lidl coming to my local town so I can once again get proper cheap shopping. The move to this middle ground loses custom as there is little incentive to go with a shop that has only slightly better VFM than a large and well kitted out supermarket like an Asda. As per the thread I posted a week ago, Morrison's are going down the quality cutting and pricing subterfuge that Tesco did a few years ago so they are losing my custom at the moment. I haven't shopped in a Tesco for years and when I do happen to be in one for something I don't see any change for the better yet.

Before the commissioning groups (CCGs) we had strategic health authorities SHAs. There were a handful of SHAs, now we have literally hundreds of CCGs. The staffing increase is astronomical compared to how it was but it ties in with Tory privatisation dogma and somehow they've kept this out go the media. CCGs are going broke at an alarming rate just a couple of years into their tenure and are merging with neighbouring ones so the SHAs are quietly reforming. The only winners in all this change are the private companies who, as said before, leech profits whilst using corporate sleight of hand to provide far worse services yet still meet the poorly worded performance criteria for their contracts. I can expose and prove all I say by the way as an insider but either nobody wants to know or there's a D notice on this disaster for public services. As for the average wage it is because in each CCG there are a few nominal GP leads for various things, who are just taking bags of cash for not much part time work other than turning up to meetings they know little about (and why should they as front line clinicians know about health service management and contracting), a few low grade support staff and then the middle ground which is the managers from the old SHAs and others brought in as there was a massive personnel shortage due to the sheer number of CCGs.

Yes it's just the corporate state people voted for getting even bigger. Just like America.

I wonder if it's me being grumpy. Morrison's cheaper campaign is for me, more expensive. The multibuys of tinned soups are gone having been replaced by a nominal price cut of 5p per can. So my 5 for 2 quid is now approx 2.50. Veg was rubbish yesterday, fruit bruised and nasty, bread aisle half stocked etc. This has an echo of Tesco a few years ago when they tried to increase profit by such trickery and poor produce being left on the shelves. I really like Morrison's but will become a full-time Aldi/Lidl man if it continues. Anyone else?