Flatpackhamster

MPs don't get a high salary. In real terms it's lower than it was 50 years ago. However, the expenses have grown and grown and yes, MPs can take home £200,000 a year after expenses. That's still much less than the majority of EU politicians. Despite everything we still don't have the same level of corruption as you say in many EU countries. It makes sense to you, maybe. I can't think of anything worse than giving taxpayers' money to politicians. Why the hell should anyone pay for their politics? Doesn't this just reinforce failure? If you can't get enough money from your supporters, you shouldn't expect handouts from the state. Cap donations at £50,000 and make anything over £5,000 public. And ban unions from donating en bloc. Allow union members to choose, every year, whether or not their union donates their cut to the party in question (which will be Labour).

I was making a very specific point here. That point was that claiming that Labour were pure as the driven snow and were only 'corrupted' later is nonsense when you look at the corruption and criminality which defined their administration from the start. Anyway, what was the point of the discussion? Wasn't it that Der Torays Are Evul? I hardly think it's worth 'discussing' that, since it's the product of the Guardian. We might as well pull up an editorial by the Sun and discuss it since it's of the same intellectual calibre.

So if we object to Labour criminality and theft, we're Tories? I suppose it was inevitable that someone so clearly incapable of thinking beyond binary would end up in IT.

What about it? It was a myth in the 80s, 90s and noughties. It's still a myth. And if you've got 60 exercise books to carry, do you really want to put them on the bus or the back of a bike? What do you suggest? Cycling shorts and anoraks to be the Green look du jour? Maybe they don't want to. Maybe they like the house they live in. What you're doing here is taking a particular political ideology and applying it to people and wondering why they don't want to comply with it.

Since you have such a short memory, allow me to refresh yours about the sleaze that positively FLOWED from the Labour party: 1997 - Bernie Eccelstone donation, election fraud (Fiona Jones MP) 1998 - Robin cook nobbing his secretary, lobbying scandal 1, Peter Mandelson's mortgages, lobbying scandal 2, Nick Brown MP hiring rent boys, Lord Irvine's £650,000 redecotration of his office, Ron 'Shagger' Davies. I can do the next 12 years if you like, but that's just a taster. Or, if you prefer you can buy "The Big Red Book of New Labour Sleaze" and remind yourself of those halcyon days.

Maybe they prefer to know that they're going to arrive at school on time with their half-a-hundredweight of paperwork dry and intact.

Sorry, but he's wrong, plain and simple. The cost of debt might be lower now, but the long-term liabilities of public sector pensions costs, state pension costs, bank bailouts and PFI put our debt to GDP ratio at around 400%.

Borgen.

One of the reasons you can't just 'refuse to pay them back' is that large amounts of that debt (which is in the form of government bonds) is owned by the pension companies. The pension companies buy government debt because it represents a long-term investment. If governments default on their debt, the pension companies go bust and people's pensions disappear.

It's hard to decide who are the bigger trolls, the ones below the article or the article writers. The Guardian has really leapt off the sanity rails in the last two years. Mad Pol started it, of course, when she compared capping housing benefits at £20,000 a year to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, but scarcely a week goes by without someone writing an article for the Guardian claiming that Labour Britain was a paradise which has been cruelly smashed by Evul Torays.

It's a wonderful city. It's clean, safe and friendly. We stayed in an ApartHotel which cost about £40.00 per night. Drinks are pricey but food wasn't too bad. Flights are relatively cheap if you book early. The cruise across the Baltic is well worth doing - the ship is more like a night club than a ferry. And did I mention that Finnish girls love British men?

I've organised a couple. For one we flew from London City to Stockholm on Friday, caught the overnight ferry to Helsinki, and flew back from Helsinki. That was a fun weekend. It was June, so we ended up leaving some bar in Helsinki at 2:30am and discovering it was still light. Wierd experience. I really do recommend Scandiwegia for a stag. Finnish girls love British men. The other one I organised, we went up to Duxford on the Friday. I packed a couple of cool boxes, and we sat and drank beer and had pies and sandwiches next to the runway while WW2 aircraft were landing and taking off. Then on the Saturday I took them down to the coast and we went on a heritage railway and went to the pub. I suppose it depends what his interests are and how old you all are.

Why do people surf? Why do they run naked through a field of flowers? Why create ten thousand different styles of shoe? I find the idea that we shouldn't do stuff unless it's got a purpose fundamentally at odds with human nature. That's not how we're built. More whimsy, please. Red Bull sponsor it because they sponsor lots of 'extreme' stuff.

The same reason that you give for climbing a mountain, for going to the bottom of the oceans, and for going to the Moon. Because it's there.

Nice try, but it's none of those. The case definitely looks more like this: Commodore Educator 64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The case was black metal, the key styles and locations, including the four grey function keys, were the same, but it had a separate colour screen.

Just had a quick browse on the intertubes, and this looks vaguely familiar, except it wasn't this: Commodore Educator 64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It had the same style keyboard and case, including that ridge and the peculiar grey function keys down the right hand side. The screen was not built-in.

Since this is the old gits thread, I expect that someone here might be able to help me work out what computer my school had. This was in the early 1990s. One room had RM Nimboids, the other had a computer that I can't identify. The keyboard was built in to the computer, BBC B style. It was a black solid metal case with black typewriter keys. I remember thinking what a bag-o-shite it was even then because it could do almost nothing. I've not got much more to go on than that at the moment. Any suggestions what it might have been?

You're wearing them wrong. It's not that big a deal.

If it makes you feel any better, it's a good demonstration of the failure of an unregulated marketplace. A truly Free Market requires some degree of protection for small businesses to avoid them being snuffed out by corporate monsters. See Hayek.

How do they know whether or not you have children? Do you have to post a picture?

Yep, I remember those days. Windows for Workgroups and Office 3.11 on 15 floppies apiece, Wing Commander 2 on about 12 floppies. And sure as eggs is eggs, about a year after you'd got them and you tried to do a reinstall, it would fail on about disk 9.

Unfortunately he's misdirected his anger.

Can you explain what an enrichment session is? How is it different to a lesson?

It was OK. The plot was fun but I got the sense that they were trying to cram a huge amount in to an hour and were having trouble. I'm worried that it might end up like that rather dismal detective-in-the-tropics. But it was diverting enough for an hour.

You must be baking them right then!