General Melchett

Yes, you are right. Mergers and acquisitions tend to destroy real economic value. Bankers and their ilk tend to make lots of profits from them, though. http://www.amazon.com/Synergy-Trap-Mark-L-Sirower/dp/0684832550 I went to business school, me.

Doesnt surprise me at all. Except in it's natural habitat of Scotland and Ireland, golf is Evil. Turn speakers off before viewing this page - there's an annoying and loud video at the bottom of it. http://www.antigolf.org/english.html

Presenter and callers really laying into this on LBC radio right now.... Some fabulous, HPC-esque quotes... i feel the tide of meeja and public opinion turning. Presenter just now 'I'm struggling to see any silver linings'

It wasnt just that they couldnt find them: The system was as bureaucratic and inefficient as a moments thought would suggest it was: I was a student at the time and, IIRC, worked out that I moved address, legitimately, keeping the authorities informed, 17 times over that period. They simply couldnt keep up. By the time they had me down on the system as being in one address I was typically 2 or 3 addresses further along. Most students I knew at the time lived in a similarly peripatetic manner.

Yep, plus one. I've done a couple of family holidays in the area and the kids have spent many happy hours building dens. And it really is isolated: They make a big thing about reduced entry fees if you arrive under your own steam, so in my time I've checked out the options to cycle there to and from St Austell. Bear in mind I'm an experienced cyclist both on and off road: Any way you cut it, there are horrendous hills to deal with. Also a fair bit of heavy traffic combined with narrow roads on most options. If you try and avoid the roads as much as possible, you enter into the sort of scenery and challenging trails which I wouldnt recommend a novice or kid try to tackle. Add to that that the weather can close in and make things really unpleasant/scary and slippery under the tyres (even in August) and I concluded that there was no way that any of the routes were suitable for anyone other than an experienced and fit adult cyclist.

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Mentally insert own picture to illustrate my remark.

The sad thing is that the worst that can happen to these parasites really isnt that bad. "You know, you come from nothing - you're going back to nothing.What have you lost? Nothing!"

OK, given that I am not going to be spending 23 minutes of my life watching that video (or reading a transcript of it), would you care to summarize, in 50-100 words, OP?

Well, you know what they say about shit floating to the top.

No, people generally vote for those that promise to steal from others (and give to them). You would think people would have learnt by now that all politicians lie. It's part of the job description. Of course, politicians tend to steal from everyone. It's just a matter of degree, who they think they might get to vote for them and who pulls their strings.

I too had this moment. Approximately 3-6 months into my first proper job. I suspect many never have this life changing moment. For such people, my sympathies are limited, because they are the cause of their own financial destruction.

Quite. I'm a long way from being a FTB, or living in a FTB house. But for the last ten years or so I've looked at the choice between selling myself into slavery to the banks for the rest of my life in order to move to a slightly larger house or staying put and spending/saving the money I would have given to the banks on me and mine. No contest. And yes, I know I'm a lucky *******. It is those youngsters that this is not an option for, because they were born too late, that I feel sympathy for.

This happened in the last HP crash back in the 90s (and probably every HPC since HPCs began). Back then the market was full of new build 'studio flats' or bedsits to you and me. They and many other flats became unsellable, as FTBs just moved straight to 2/3 bed houses. I suspect many of the blocks of bedsits were demolished mid/late 90s, as they seemed to have vanished from the market. That or they fell down of their own accord.

Whilst the fine details of either side of the balance sheet (taxes paid vs cost to the rest of us) are somewhat debatable, there is no question that the taxes paid by the city are a drop in the ocean compared to the cost to the rest of us to keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/163850bn-official-cost-of-the-bank-bailout-1833830.html (2009 - cost ~£850 bn and rising - NAO figures. For sure other figures are out there).

Provided I can sell, I will be trading up/moving away from TOWIEwood in 2013. I will know where the youngest is going to secondary school by then and life is ticking by. 12 wasted years already. Another 12 and my kids will be grown up and I'll be getting old (er/too old).

It is easy, but inaccurate, to say that big pharma spends it all on marketing. In the therapy area I work in, over 90% of the ongoing, post R&D budget goes on clinical trials.... not regulatory trials, but trials looking at things like 'what happens when people take our drug with, say, asprin?' About another 5% goes on the medical affairs staff to set up and run these trials and to answer the customers when they ask 'what happens when our customers take your drug with, say, asprin?' Most of the remaining 5% or so is probably spent on S&M. And is probably only more than that spent by a generic company on S&M because the generic company has nothing to say except 'wanna buy our drug, it's cheaper than brand x?' A generic model allows for none of this. The relationship ends with you buying the drug. Dont go asking the generic company anything - they neither know nor care. Incidentally, there are also academic studies, not funded by pharma, that show that some generic drugs do not have the same activity as the branded drugs they are 'copies' of. Yes I'm a VI. And personally I buy and use generics. If my life depended on it, though, I would insist on a branded drug from an R&D pharma.

No, I'm not confusing anything, BN. They are over interpreting the data and constructing a hypothesis to try to fit and link the data by inserting a number of other observations and speculations between their two data points in order to support their hypothesis. As, sadly, are you BN. I suspect the work underlying this would be returned with the equivalent of a big, fat raspberry if it were submitted to a serious scientific or mathematical academic journal.

I cant speak for anyone else, but I do it solely to annoy you.

These people are so stunningly stupid they do not even seem to realise how stupid they appear by coming up with this 'story'. The correlation between Pirates and Global Warming springs to mind..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

Have you looked at the floorplan? No proper hallways for much of the house, just one room leading on to the next and the next and the next.... Plus, as has been remarked, in the middle of nowhere... 75K seems rather a lot to ask for it, all told.

Why does this not surprise me?

I visited my brother (32, married, living in a rented flat in Colchester, no kids - see a theme here, anyone?) in his big block of flats by the station at crimble. His parking space wasnt big enough for my BMW 3 series.... not just tight, like I've grown used to, actually too small... I spent my time there hoping the neighbours didnt come home and try to park/get narked about me taking up part of their space. An interesting point he made whilts there was that many of the people around him were on benefits, and the rents they could pay put the flats out of the price range to rent of many working people. Dont see him having kids anytime soon. It's not just his generation which is being shafted, it is the generation of kids they are not having, too.

This whole business, all the rip-offs being done already, all the half-arsed attempts to limit it, all the political machinations behind those attempts, makes me angry enough to become a Daily Mail reader. Well, almost. Bottom line: Council housing should only be rented to people who cannot afford market rents. Need for property size and location also needs to be assessed and regularly reassessed. No subletting, no passing on tenancies and regular reviews so that if circumstances (financial, family size,need to live somewhere) change then so does the eligibility. No exclusions, no excuses. FFS, is that really so hard to do?

Nods sagely. One apologised to me on Christmas eve, which took me aback, as there was no queue. As to the tills... its the same in ours... about 10 tills in 3 locations. Never more than 3 tills open, usually only 1 or 2 even at peak times. I often wonder why they installed all those tills. Used to think it was a Somerfield hangover, but seems Coop has the same disease.