saltandsauce

there are 2 things behind this "crisis" 1, banks were allowed to make tonnes of new financial products which weren't allowed before. (de-regulation of the banking sector) these products would have worked as long as the golden rule was never broken- NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES lend more than 2 1/2 times their annual salary which has been broken into a fine powder of quarks. you get pople who clean floors with mortgages over £100,000 (when their salary is £14,000-£9,000) 2, property shows- things like location location location deluded the public that a hovel is worth £100,000 and putting in neutral colours and bland furniture added another £40,000 onto the value of the house. people didn't live in "homes" they lived in "properties" a business asset, collateral and something to make money on which is ludicrous

of course if takeovers and mergers didn't happen so often, AIG could be left to die since it wouldn't own 60% of everything

not the leman brothrs but still related, HBOS got taken over by Lloyds TSB to make some bloated monster bank. HBOS is halifax and the bank of Scotland (not the royal bank of scotland) so basically this new company effectivley owns a controlling share in Britain the shares plummeted so a "volentary merger" went ahead, backed by the government. 40,000 jobs are estimated to be lost in cuts from branches, office jobs etc. economic watchdogs were silenced in this case.

if they make their own OS then it must be better than windows

although there is a lot of electrical teaching, it is never a real substitute for a real teacher, because i have a teacher (i use it in the loosest terms) who couldn't teach his way out of a wet paper bag, all of his students know this and work from the textbooks, but still a large portion of his classes fail because books cannot re phrase things or put them into different context in the way a teacher can, all the digital blackboards are usefull for is saving the teacher writing or having some pretty pictures. plus online courses are open to fraud

Originally posted by: SkiGeek How does that quote go? Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus. quote> quote> umm no all species do that there was that ladybug thing in the 70s and deer in the highlands are like that they have increased so much they starve to death and eaten up forestrey(this hasn't been as good for the venison industry) so quit singling humans out as some unique species that just destroys everything it touches ok besides i have 5 brothers and sisters and it's true, the older kids teach the younger kids and also, i don't know the situation in the US but last time i checked college or university is not compulsory and you can leave high school with good grades and skip out on the boozing/drugs/other college activities. also in the US the healthcare system demands money for healthcare and before the UKs NHS it was "ok mr. Ritchard that will be five shilings...hmm do i die of the flu or starve to death, descisions descisions" which is what the US system incorporates (i don't want to bring healthcare into things) -- edited to fix quoting problem. text unchanged --

the reason there are so many fat people is because work is no longer manual and food is cheap, so people eat more and buurn less you aren't going to run out of breath typing are you

well i suppose these days it's better to be an enemy of the USA than an ally

riiight, russia will tremble because the west is on poland's side

cool, although i think it's a bit scary how they can track everything

there's walking, last time i heard that needs no subsidy from central government

i meant, not public transport (city wide not national or state wide) seems to be ran by private companies, all the buses seem to be owned and run by the city. in the UK, Worstbus (part of Firstgroup) runs the buses for numerous cities and the trains for the whole of Scotland. but there seems to be no equivelant in the USA. no private public transport companies in the US

of course not outsourcing means you benefit from trade since money stays in your country instead of streaming out at the ports

Originally posted by: saltandsauce of course what nobody realises is, that a crap job is better than no job. quote> err . . . that depends. My grandfather started working as a breaker boy in the coal mines when he was 11. Fortunately, that is illegal now. quote> umm i'm sure your grandad would prefer sweating in a coal mine over starving to death in the street, which was the other option then

Originally posted by: Duke87 I guess I should also point out that you simply cannot get your hands on a Toyota Prius nowadays. There's a waiting list over a year long for them. Toyota can't make the batteries for them fast enough to meet the demand, as the resources aren't there. And you do see an awful lot of those cars on the streets. There's also a noticeable rise in people driving motorcycles or mopeds instead of cars. And you know what else is a ridiculously common sight? An SUV or a picup truck parked with a "for sale" sign on it. Everyone's getting rid of them. And nobody's buying them. So if you have one, forget about selling it, it ain't hapenning. You couldn't pay someone to take it off your hands. You might as well fill it with dirt and grow flowers in it at this point. quote> you could extend it into a stretch and put the ceiling up a bit and put some more seats in it and you have a bus, or you could just get it melted down at a scrapyard what is surprising me is that no private companies have built railways and public transport in a long while

Hawking radiation? bullcrap

Originally posted by: NMUSpidey Outsourcing is worth it. When a company outsources jobs to a different country, sure, a few crummy manufacturing jobs will disappear, but this whole "it depends on your point of view" thing is nonsense. So, Company X is making widgets and discovers that by moving their manufacturing overseas to China will cut costs tremendously, and sending tech support hotline jobs to India will also help the bottom line, it is true, Company X is far ahead. Some workers in the USA will complain, "Wah, our crappy factory job disappeared, so did our crappy phone service job!" I worked a phone service job, it sucked. If the Indians want to do it, more power to them (and many of these jobs, even if they look like "sweatshop" jobs to us, you must look at it in context: it's either tough factory work or impossibly difficult, backbreaking subsistence farming or begging).quote> now as my geography textbooks so righteously claim, the shipyards and steelworks in Glasgow have just shut down but work in the technology sector in "Silicon Glen" is rising quickly so they should get jobs there of course that was written in the 70s, the technology industry has came and went (it was gone when i was born). of course these shipworkers were trained in welding and things like that. this was the computing business (computer components) which has NO resemblancies. these workers were left to rot in Springburn (train building works) and Govan (shipyards) but they were told that work was on it's way. These people definatley didn't have the money to re-train and some didn't have the natural ability to work in these jobs. in answer to your statement, companies can afford to make slightly less money and consumers don't care if something costs £10 or £5 after it's bought. you cannot actually comprehend the fact that ANY job is better than NO job at all. and a lot of UK call centres are moving back to the UK because indians couldn't understand some of the accents and dialects and customers were getting pissed off with having to talk to indians instead of BT and Voar_Tok, i was mocking people's obsessions with "market forces" it sounds like the "laws as unbreakable as the physical laws of the universe - we must OBEY"

of course what nobody realises is, that a crap job is better than no job. and the cities in the UK that were industrial are still suffering BADLY from it. we now have the unemployable underclass that has been allowed to rot for the last 50 years. by the way, the only "market force" that exists is the fact that people are all cowards

these are the kind of people that should get the death penatly, for sick twisted people like this. This has little motive and was completley revoulting. where did he get a knife like that?

the "bell diagram" is deceptive it means X number of students MUST fail and usually it ends up with standards lowering gradually with more overhauls during bad years the standard must be set at a level that employers would like employees to have i.e. literate,numerate and competent which is no longer the lowest standard people can get. public education in the UK used to have a test at the end of primary school >60% was a fail and you would have to stay in primary 60%-75% was a regular pass and you could go to a secondary school 75%< was a grammar pass meaning you could go to a grammar school this cut out a lot of disciplinary problems in secondary because a lot of these kids ARE NOT ABLE to cope academically with secondary school since they lack the minimum knowledge also the grammar system was a way for poor students (i mean poor as in, eat bread and dripping the day before the pay type poor not i only have a PS3 and i want an xbox type poor) to climb up the economic ladder

in a LOT of european cities, there are bigger arterial roads leading out of the CBD which lead to other places (originally roads) and no european cities have annoying dead end streets which are a NIGHTMARE if you are new to an area. during the industrial revolution many cities developed areas with grids but with narrow streets and have little traffic even now. of course these grids would grow in clumps and then another blob which means the grid isn't endless (so if you stood and looked along the street you would see a building instead of the horizon)

don't american public schools seperate their classes in secondary?. like the dumb class, then the slow class, then the average, then the bright classes ? and then every class has it's standard set for the ability of it's students. the problem with that is the lower class will be even lower than their actual level if that class is disorderly. and most studies say that boys are more stupid than girls although i you compare someone educated in britain in a: British public school (state) in the 50s did better than the private in a lot of cases and at the highest level British private school (public) in the 50s was close behind very close to the first British private school (public) now ranks a bit behind the 50s schools British public school (state) now is sinking lower and lower and lower and is in it's own league

The reason most people in the UK think modern architecture looks silly is because Britain is an old country. with LOTS of old buildings made of pretty much the same materials and in the same style (if you REALLY generalise) i.e. all old buildings are made of bricks,stone,wood have small, individual windows etc. with a perched roof and are modeled using the rectangle so assemble layouts. whereas modern buildings are made of glass,steel plasterboard and concrete and can be based on a bigger variety of shapes and tend to try to look like things that aren't really buildings e.g. a sail or a nest or a cube filled with bubbles so it looks like somebody blew bubbles in a milkshake. they also can have windows that run the length of a building and often have flat roofs and in a lot of areas are devoid of natural light also most old buildings couldn't really exceed 10 storeys and most had hith to width ratios between 2:1 and 1:5 there will be exceptions as usual though but you find there are a lot of buildings especially in america which exceed 1:10 (big box stores) and 11:1 ratios (skyscrapers)

emos are annoying people who look for problems they don't have when the only one is that they are middle clsss and have no identity God bless mother russia

i would say this is the first generation to think that the previous generation was civilised and the current is not