You are currently browsing the The English Guy's Personal Blog weblog archives for April, 2008.

 

Posted by richard

Oh the lamenting can now begin. We have lost our 10p tax rate, to be compensated by the wonderful lowering of the 22p tax rate to the new 20p tax rate. To concrete the issue (and IMHO the gravestone of the Labour party) the PM, Gordon Brown, admitted he’d made mistakes, as the BBC reports:

He told the BBC the government “didn’t cover as well as we should have” losses to low earners without children and pensioners aged 60 to 64.

Mr Brown said he was “listening” and “learning” as prime minister.

Didn’t cover as well? I’ll lose over £300 a year! All because I don’t have children – isn’t that a bonus btw? I’m not cluttering the world with yet more humans, not using materials, not adding to the rubbish we all produce, and I get f***ed because of it.

And I would have thought that by the time you’re PM you have stopped learning and should know how to do the job, or have learned advisors to tell you at least!

I hope that Labour lose the local elections tomorrow, badly. Maybe they’ll realise the big mistake they’ve made.

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Posted by richard

Tonight we have reached an unfortunate state of affairs – £5 a gallon of petrol – that’s $10 a gallon of petrol to Americans. Pricey isn’t it? This on top of the news that the major oil companies here, Shell and BP, have earned billions – not on us purchasing petrol of course but on oil.

And even better, the government is going to add another 2 pence tax in the near future. Thank God I don’t own and run a car or I’d be so far in debt I’d be going to debtor’s prison.

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Posted by richard

Something caught my eye tonight when I was quickly scanning the BBC news page: Jail over £5,500 benefits fraud

As you might imagine, I agree with that. Scam the system, take our money, and pay for it. The thing is, only a few months ago – an MP called Derek Conway did the same thing with a lot more money (something like £40,000 over three years) which he was forced to pay back £13,161.

So from this you can surmise our political system is corrupt. If you’re an MP it’s ok to abuse the taxpayers and take our money for your own lazy son, paying him for work you can’t prove he’s done. If we were a fair and just society, he would be spending about a year in prison right now, don’t you think?

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Posted by richard

The warm weather is returning to this fair land. Thank you!!

Supposedly it’s going to be 25C this weekend, or somewhere thereabouts. If you know England you know how rare that is, even in summer, so 1) I doubt it 2) It’ll probably rain!

 

Posted by richard

There’s a few simple reasons.

  1. No oil.
  2. Only really useful natural resources are: gold, nickel, vanadium, lithium, platinum group metals; none of these are in large quantities, nor is the world short of them…
  3. No major corporate footprint, thus no incentive for corporations to exert pressure on governments for action to protect their assets.
  4. Heavy metal pollution, toxic waste, recurring droughts. Not exactly a pleasant place to go vacation.
  5. 24.6% AIDS rate. Be careful what you touch and with what!
  6. Estimates of 100,000% inflation. Ouch!
  7. And yes, no oil.

Not much going for Zimbabweans is there? No wonder all we see are news reports and no action. If only we had an international organisation that would look out for these things, and organise civil and military expeditions to sort these kinds of disasters out. Oh wait ….

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Posted by richard

Doesn’t it seem blatantly obvious to anyone with more than ten brain cells that having taken this long to not announce the election results and to order a vote recount, that Robert Mugabe has fixed the election and is on his way to becoming President of Zimbabwe? Again. Illegally.

Blaming Britain is fine with me, because no-one in the world believes him. And incidentally, no-one in Britain wants Zimbabwe. Why would we want a run-down corrupt and financially bankrupt country? We already have our own …

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Posted by richard

They called it rubbernecking in the states, a term I grew to love and hate.

It’s when you see an accident, or in the case of this post, hear a siren. You immediately want to know, to find out, your foot raises from the accelerator pedal and the pace suddenly slows. It’s probably the single biggest cause of traffic jams in the world. We go past accidents at a snail’s pace, then afterwards go back to 70mph.

The other day outside work, some guy in a transit van got pulled over by police. (that in itself deserves a post, the police around here are like rocking-horse shit) Three of us in the office stared out the window and chatted about how good it was that someone got pulled over (probably secretly laughing at them -for- getting pulled over).

Rubbernecking in action …

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Posted by richard

Why are credit/debit card pin numbers just 4 digits?

Is it because we are so bad at remembering things that that is the limit to our daily memory allowance? Can we not remember five digits or six digits? Interestingly you will note that many alarm systems are also just four digits – again with the four – what is going on here?

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Posted by richard

My mum’s birthday is on Thursday and I’ve been racking my brains all bloody week for something to get her. She has pretty much everything she could want, so it’s a nightmare trying to find the right thing.

Going into town is useless too, ‘cos the choices are underwhelming to say the least. Lots of things are personal, and better to be purchased by the person rather than buying them for the person (i.e., crystalware, pottery, clothes etc.,).

So I’ve opted to take her to dinner one week, she should be happy with that. I hope.

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