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Hullabaloo82

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Posts posted by Hullabaloo82

  1. 20 hours ago, onlooker said:

    Nope, I was a technically skilled person working in the most technical part of the oil industry, where fortunes have been made and lost. Every few years I worked, the industry was transformed by technical improvements.

    I have no confidence in the public sector to get anything right:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13205581/Sacked-council-officer-PTSD-helping-Grenfell-fire-victims-wins-4-6-MILLION.html

    Council officer who got PTSD from helping Grenfell fire victims before she was sacked from her £125,000-a-year role wins £4.6 MILLION in record payout: 52-year-old says six-year legal battle destroyed her life, family and health

    The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham was ordered to pay compensation and damages to Rachael Wright-Turner for disability discrimination and harassment after she was sacked from her £125,000-a-year role.

    The employment tribunal's ruling – which found senior officers in the Labour-run authority had lied in evidence – is believed to be the highest-ever such award against a public body.

     

    Sorry, what is this supposed to prove? You've self certified as a "competent technical person" so that now means everything in the private sector operates on a kai zen principle of constantly improving? Because I can assure you that's nit the case. 

    Similarly, has no private sector employer ever sacked someone unjustly or lost a tribunal ? (Or, say, dumped a few tonnes of effluent or oil into our seas and rivers)?

    This is just dogma. 

  2. 10 hours ago, onlooker said:

    The snowflake generation. Not defending your aggressive boss, I've worked with more than my fair share of those types, but they usually fall down eventually on basic lack of competence.

    No room for incompetence in today's business environment (outside the public sector anyway).

    As long as I live (and i say this as somebody that worked for one of the big 4 as both an auditor and a consultant for several years as well as for a large government department, so has seen the inside of many, many organisations in both private and public sectors) I will never understand the fetishisation of the private sector, particularly in today's world which is full to the brim of examples of private sector incompetence. 

    I've come across extremely competent people in the public sector, I've come across utterly useless ones but I've seen the exact same range in the private sector too, both in terms of clients I've worked for and colleagues. 

    The real issue is, like I said earlier in the thread, technology is increasingly showing people up regardless of who they work for but I get a sense you came up in the "feels over reels" era where a firm handshake and a willingness to chuck everyone else under the bus counted for a lot more than actually knowing what you're doing. 

  3. 11 hours ago, onlooker said:

    No, but I might give them a bollocking for being timid and indecisive. I would add another - The best meetings are held in rooms with no chairs.

    You're honestly coming across like an absolute dinosaur and I'd question what experience you have of "today's business environment" because this is just not how things go down now. 

    How many meetings are you in these days where everybody is in the same room? Good luck enforcing a "no chair" rule when half the SLT are working from home or the holiday place and good luck bullying the "minions" when, in most professions these days, they can pretty much up and move elsewhere at the drop of a hat and have zero qualms about doing so because ultimately they're not really losing much by going. 

  4. 10 hours ago, debtlessmanc said:

    I've posted this before but my son is finally (at 26) working, just a job in Aldi in one of the cheapest parts of the north of England. He is making good money and if he found a partner on the same they could afford a terraced house in the locality.

    but he has to deal day in and day out with scroats who shun work, shop lift or attempt to screw the shop over on 100 different ways (eg damaging packaging and demanding a discount). he also gets told "to get on the bennies" regularly.

    New store still advertising jobs,  no takers. There are also routes into better paid management.

    Personally an education system and media that peddles false hopes to kids is part of it. If your not a celebrity or humans rights lawyer there is not point in working. And yes the over availability of cheap migrants does not encourage anyone to change anything.

    I would not wish a job managing an Aldi on my worst enemy to be honest. 6 days a week, often backbreaking work as managers are expected to muck in when they are inevitably understaffed, all for 45 grand a year and a car and if you can cope with that you might one day break into the full blown sociopath tier of regional management. Sod that. 

    I agree to an extent about managing expectations but I also think technology has made things harder in a lot of ways. People are expected to know and understand so much more in a professional context now and it's so much more possible to hold people accountable yet pay hasn't gone up to reflect that. 

  5. I was reminded of this stat when I saw another dispiriting news story earlier today;

    https://www.ft.com/content/c6e8c528-47b7-40ae-b06a-f1158af26b36

    I know HPC likes to come at it from the "useless chancers" angle but come on; we are surely getting to a point where there is either going to be a revolution or younger generations will just fully give up because they have nothing to lose so what's the point toiling for 12 hours a day?

    If you want people to participate and be economically active, you have to give them an incentive to do so. There has to be a point to it. That's what's increasingly lacking in western society at the moment and boomers continuing to pull up ladders and close off ways for ordinary people to build wealth isn't going to help. 

    I wonder how much of the current boom in long term mental health issues keeping people out of work is down to that prevailing sense of hopelessness and pointlessness? 

  6. 1 minute ago, Casual-observer said:

    No because you can't run your life or your national economy from an endless list of what ifs......

    If a super volcano blows tomorrow no amount of insurance is going to save the day.  Fundamentally leadership is also about making hard decision's. The practical solution in covid was to prioritise the young and you did that by keeping the economy going. 

    Tough sh1t for the elderly but ce la vie, you've had your innings. 

    We're not immortal beings and I've always said from day one it was the height of pure selfishness to shut down swathes of the economy trying to fruitlessly save the very elderly from their own mortality. 

    Countless societies have always ultimately had to throw their elderly to the wolves eventually to the betterment of the overall clan, it's just a fact of life on this rock. The native Indian elders never demanded their entire clan drag their elderly dead weight around the great plains. 

    This wasn't a "what if" though, was it? Comparing covid to a super volcano is nonsense. Flu like pandemics have basically been an ever present threat for centuries and seem more likely to come about as a result of various factors but principally modern farming methods, increase in demand for meat in rapidly developing countries and the growth of mega cities. 

    Forget the pandemic anyway; there are 2 fundamental issues here which dictated how the government responded;

    - huge numbers of businesses and people had no access to capital (whether through insurance or savings) to sustain them in a crisis

    - huge numbers of people are inadequately housed. 

    Solve those two problems and suddenly any problem which requires people to stay home for a bit looks like less of an issue, whether it is a volcano or a pandemic or whatever. 

    Instead of building the political will to do that though, we've let the lunatics take over the asylum whilst we bicker amongst our selves for crumbs off the table. 

  7. 9 minutes ago, Casual-observer said:

    Disagree frankly. 

    The pragmatic approach during covid was simply this...allow an inflated cohort of the elderly die in the short term. It wasn't to shut down swathes of the economy causing untold economic damage for the foreseeable. 

     The idea businesses should plan for such black swans isn't ever going to be practical. If a genuine equivalent black death plague strikes then at that point we've all got bigger fish to fry anyway than if my local business can remain open during it. 

    Locking down the economy during covid was a f**king waste of time.

    Proper long term planning is to not run your economy on continuous incremental deficit spending  in the first place. 

    Would it have caused "untold economic damage" if we were properly prepared though? If we actually listened to the boring grey suited advisors who, as another poster above reminds us, had been pointing out this risk for the best part of a decade?

    Ultimately all it boils down to is an increased cost of doing business. If we'd had that in place there would have been no need for either "untold economic damage" or throwing the oldies to the wolves. 

    The frustrating thing is, even allowing for a "first time freebie", we appear to have learned nothing. The uncomfortable truth is that covid wasn't even the first pandemic this century and absolutely won't be the last. Instead of recognising our power as a country to change this is limited and trying to set ourselves up to be as comfortable as possible we are continuing to bury our heads in the sand and harp on about "freedom". 

    As for your comments on deficit spending, why? Surely it's quality 9f spend, not quantity that's the issue here. 

  8. 28 minutes ago, MancTom said:

    does such insurance even exist? Usually insurance has get out clauses for things like wars etc.

    https://www.insurancetimes.co.uk/news/wimbledon-set-for-coronavirus-windfall-in-huge-pay-out-from-pandemic-insurance/1433146.article

    It absolutely does exist. That's a high profile example but far from the only one. 

    There's also multiple ways the government could do this in the absence of a market based solution. Lots of examples of public sector bodies paying into "risk pools". 

    There's absolutely no reason that covid support schemes couldn't have gone on the proviso that they would be paid for with higher employers NICs (and yeah, employees too, why not?) in future years as the start of a pandemic risk pool. 

    Of course there'd have been the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth but ultimately you'd put the due diligence bit on to borrowers themselves (which is where we went wrong here) and probably seen a far lower anount of spending. As it was it was just free money with the expectation that some other mug would end up footing the bill (which of course was the correct assumption as it always is with the current bunch of crooks running the show. 

    How we've ended up normalising the fact it's council service users and upper middle income employees who should suffer the consequences of parasitical cowboys looting the public finances is just indicative of the kind of deluded double think that's infested this country since 2008. 

  9. On 07/03/2024 at 14:06, ebull said:

    racking up the debt for covid and ukraine were unexpected crisis event driven where a mandate is not usual. ( I dont fully support action taken on either.) Surpised by relative magnitude though .. lockdowns added 290bln to debt pile unsurprisingly, ukraine also a huge 90bln.

    filling the hole is not needed, not taking the hole over a limit where it implodes is.

    I can see this argument but I take issue with the idea that the "unexpectedness" of events like Covid and Ukraine is a get out of jail free card. 

    The lesson we should have taken as a nation from covid is "expect the unexpected". 

    Covid revealed two things;

    1. Thousands, millions of people were (willfully or otherwise) running businesses without adequate risk protection and

    2. Despite protestations to the contrary, that cover does exist and some people did have it in place. 

    At the time there was little else that could be done beyond turn the taps on and spend but that should have been the catalyst for a national conversation on risk. It should have been done on the proviso that, much like everybody who drives in the UK has to be insured to a certain level, businesses (whether multinationals or one man band contractors) should be expected to have arrangements in place for black swan events. 

    More to the point, everybody that took a furlough payment to cover their payroll or claimed self employed covid support (despite continuing to work in many cases) should be paying more in national insurance to cover that cost (after all, claim on your car insurance and your premiums go up, why is this any different?) Similarly the UK should be aggressively pursuing dodgy bounce back loans and defective PPE swindlers. 

    Instead, we've (grimly predictably) ended up at the usual "privatise the gains, socialise the losses" scenario where the usual suspects (the blessed "risk takers", peace be upon them) who benefitted from this largesse are now shunting the responsibility back on to the "squeezed middle" (or more accurately the squeezed upper middle) whilst crossing their arms and somewhat comically trying to blame "wasteful public sector spending" for the situation. 

    The reality is so obvious but the moment anyone points it out the usual pearl clutching useful idiots (a number of whom somewhat bafflingly seem to spend their lives on this forum despite allegedly being massively wealthy small c conservatives) jump out and start screaming "communism!" 

    For a group that is supposedly all about personal responsibility and rugged individualism it never ceases to amaze me how much push back there is to the idea that the people who ran up the bill, who were screaming out for the bill to be run up at the time, should get their wallets out when it's time to pay. 

  10. Are people really panicking massively about these rates? 

    I'll be remortgaging later this year (October) and am expecting my repayments to increase by up to a couple of hundred quid a month vs last deal during the pandemic. Pay has gone up hugely during that time though (as I expect is the case for a lot of people at the earlier stages of mortgage repayment). Energy is trending down now, food prices higher but similarly still not really troubling the amount our household income is up. 

    People who are bricking it are Airbnb types though. Most already suffering as is. I had to explain the changes to my relatives who are in the Airbnb game over the weekend and they couldn't believe it. Classic "can't lose with bricks and mortar" types but I could visibly see the penny dropping. There will likely be a fire sake of crappy 1 bed flats and nicer cottages etc in tourist towns. I expect the demand for the nicer holiday properties will hold up as, like I say, residential borrowers won't exactly be overjoyed about the "new normal" for mortgages but I also highly doubt it's enough to put people wanting to buy a family home off. 

    People who've been playing the "alternative to premier inn" game for stag dos or work trips in market towns and provincial cities will likely lose their hats though. The only demand for a lot of these properties is going to be for social/migrant lets. Cash buyers who absolutely will screw the price down to achieve maximum yield. 

    Also had to laugh at the surprise that Hunt never mentioned "mortgages" once. Reality is, despite all the belly aching, it's still only a comparative minority that are massively over leveraged. Most people have just dealt with it, just like what happened with the energy crisis. There's not a lot of votes to be had any more in property market props and the Tories finally seem to have cottoned on to that fact. 

  11. Is it the vaxx or is it lasting damage from covid (or is it actually just a case of "fooled by randomness"?) 

    I dunno. I'm not sure blanket putting every death of a young person down to "the vaxx" unless proven otherwise is any more scientific than the hysteria over covid was though, not to mention a tad bit ghoulish. 

  12. 3 hours ago, kzb said:

    Inflation is the same for everyone.  Even for boomers.

    So now we are expected to feel sorry for the top few percent of the income distribution.  I hope you are not thinking Labour will take pity on you ?

    But have you actually looked at the details of these CARE pensions?  I have an old final salary pension and the acruel rate was 80ths.  The new local authority scheme is in 43rds, the civil service is similar, and the police pension is in 49ths.  In other words if you put the years in you could end up with a pension that is your career average income or more.   They are probably worse for those that climbed the greasy pole, but better for those that didn't.  Whether that is overall "worse" or "better" depends on your outlook.

    It was never about that, which is a much more complicated issue.  The point was that with the NICs cuts, you will be paying less towards the state pension than the boomers did for most of their careers.  I was just pointing out that fact because I bet you are so caught up in self pity you likely think it is the reverse.

    Your last point might be vaguely relevant if it wasn't for the fact retirement at 55 wasn't unusual for the boomer generation, most millennials and below will be lucky to retire at all, and luckier still if there is any form of state pension available. 

    Triple lock, db schemes etc are all generally index linked. You can't compare that to the way under 40s have experienced inflation, having to pay housing costs and squeeze an above inflation raise put of their boomer. 

    As for career average, it was brought in to reign in unsustainable db schemes. Go and look at the various age discrimination cases in the public sector which some people on older schemes brought to prevent being shunted into the new scheme. Not only that, but pay in these positions has been hit by austerity and the lack of headroom as a result of how much of the money in the public sector goes on servicing existing pensions. 

    You may well get a better accrual of your career average but when that salary has been systematically devalued by years of pay restraint and inflation, that's not particularly meaningful, not to mention the fact a lot of the pre 2015 schemes also entitled you to a tax free lump sum at 3/80 of your final salary per year in the scheme. 

    Pointless arguing with a troll though, so I'll leave it there. 

  13. On 01/03/2024 at 16:45, kzb said:

    For someone on £37k, close to median salary, a 3% cut in NI is over £60 a month.  (If they pay pension contribution by salary sacrifice it might be a bit less than this.)

    You can have a DB pension by working in the public sector, and Brexit hasn't cost you a penny.

    Where are you getting 3% from? This time last week, Jezza was on about 1%, now there's some discussion of two. Regardless, I earn more than £50k so 3% would be closer to a hundred quid for me. So what? That will barely make a dent in basically everything else that's sky rocketed and certainly won't make up for the proportion of my income taxed at 40% rising every year (close to half at this point, absurd). 

    You can get a vastly reduced quality db pension compared to what the boomer generation got in the public sector (no tax free lump sum, career average instead of final salary based) but db pensions also existed in the private sector. Those schemes are long closed now but regardless, we are still paying higher contributions than previous generations and suffering reduced pay growth and cuts to services as money gets diverted to servicing ballooning deficits in db schemes as boomers enjoy their three decade retirements. 

    Whether or not brexit has coat me a penny is up for debate but the fact I has cost me the right to live and work on the continent without jumping through a ton of bureaucracy is not  nor is the loss of face internationally from the totally botched implementation of it. 

    Seriously, if you're trying to argue that an extra £60 a month is going to make up for intergenerational inequality I strongly urge you to get yourself into the sea. 

  14. Dunno about the rest of you but I can't wait to start thumbing my nose at my boomer neighbours, lording it up with my whole £30 extra a month off NICs. 30 smackers!!! Count 'em!

    That'll pay for, ooh, maybe a Chinese takeaway once a month for me and the Mrs? Definitely makes up for tuition fees, insane house prices, defined benefit pensions and brexit, shoe firmly on the other foot now. 

    Thanks, Hunty!

  15. 40 minutes ago, Aidan Ap Word said:

    Let's be honest though, new rates and products are introduced daily whereas the MPC meets 7 or 8 times a year. 

    I'm personally interested to see how much the recession announcement will impact the bank's thinking. I believe that's what they've been after for a while; the official stamp which will change behaviour. At the end of the day, rates staying higher for another quarter or so means ****** all when mortgage funding is on a 2 to 5 year timeline in general here. 

    Then again, I applied for a job with a truly outrageous salary and bonus offer today, heading towards American style compensation and not even in London so who knows? Maybe wage inflation is still with us after all. 

  16. 3 hours ago, Si1 said:

    For what it's worth, this 18 year cycle thing is as plausible as any of these theories. 

    I can definitely see another boom over the next 18 months or so; crazy props from the Conservatives, irresponsible lending from banks who don't care as the debt is guaranteed, lack of supply, rates falling, optimism when Sunak and Co eventually get booted out of number 10...... 

    All the signs are there, but as Harrison says it will run out of road eventually. 

  17. Apologies for the double post but hpc won't allow me to amend. Here is a definition of Medicare;

     

    "Medicare is federal health insurance for people 65 or older, and some people under 65 with certain disabilities or conditions. A federal agency called the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services runs Medicare. Because it's a federal program, Medicare has set standards for costs and coverage."

    In other words, you are, for some bizarre reason, trying to compare a select group of people which skews older, sicker and poorer and may well contain unvaccinated people with a blob of unvaccinated folks which likely contains children and young people. You've also apparently ignored any vaccinated person who uses private healthcare or has no coverage. 

    You've also made no attempt to explain how you've arrived at 2.7 as a multiplier.

    Other than that though, fantastic work, really persuasive 👍

  18. 19 minutes ago, Locke said:

    It's just the total number of deaths for each group, scaled so that the start point is the same for both at the start of the time period (2.7x scale for unvaxxed, since there were fewer deaths due to a smaller population)

    If there were no difference between the group, the lines would stay pretty much together. The divergence shows there is a difference. The fact the unvaxxed trends lower than the vaxxed shows that the vax is killing people.

    Total number of deaths from what? All cause? How have you adjusted for other events that may influence that (age, other illnesses in the vaccinated group, for example)?

    Guessing by "medicare", this is for the USA? Interesting that the red line just says "all medicare", not "vaccinated". Isn't medicare just public healthcare over there? Given we know vaccine hesitancy is higher in some minority groups who often disproportionately receive welfare, how do you know you're not double counting some deaths? 

    I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong even, just this chart absolutely does not stand up to any form of scrutiny and your starting assumption that "the vaxx" is the only possible variable between the two groups is, to use a technical term, utter horseshit. 

  19. 1 hour ago, AThirdWay said:

    Did you knock that up yourself, any chance of some context?

    If, as is mentioned above, you think that the chart shows a higher death rate in the vaccinated, well that's hardly a surprise. The elderly and those with underlying conditions have been prioritised. You'll need to knock something up that compares like with like. I.e. Two groups of 20-30 year olds with type 2 diabetes, one group vaxxed the other not.

    Sadly this level of analysis is beyond the average anti vaxxer, which is why they are so easy to con with these little graphs they just pass on without question. 

  20. 16 minutes ago, FANG said:

     No shit sherlock and you will have to trust me on this. 

    The pictures are stills of videos I have filmed 30 minutes apart in the same location.  

     Could you explain the formation of the planes, the emissions and rapid change of the weather   

    As others have pointed out, the traiks could be at different heights. Could all be heading to the same place (I dunno, maybe, error an airport?). 

    Are you really asking me to explain the rain here in the UK? It rained. What's particularly unusual about the sky turning grey here? 

  21. 1 hour ago, FANG said:

    That is fine.

    I too was sceptical but after seeing this event occur with my own eyes and recording it. It is definitely happening. 

                                                                                                              30 minute's later

    image.png.48a03747a4d6fb3c0bc779063f878e2e.pngimage.png.2c8a3a93aced6b76c5d81f5446a9e035.png

    Sorry, what's this supposed to mean and how are the two pictures evidence of anything? You've not included any points of reference or time stamps or anything that might indicate these were taken in the same spot within 30 mins of each and even if they were, so what? This is the United Kingdom, weather is characteristically highly variable. Rain is not unusual here. 

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