Flatpackhamster

What's the difference between an office of 5,000 workers and a secondary school? Those workers mostly have kids, who spread the germs around their parents. @localzuk - The new "Godwin's law for Lefties" includes the phrase 'Daily Mail'. It's an admission that your argument is weak, hence your attempt to caricature my views.

Ask away. By the time I retire, the state pension will be a distant memory for my generation. I'm not prepared to rely on the private pensions scheme either. I'm going to rely on savings. I've been self-reliant all my life and I don't plan to start being dependent on anyone, ever.

It was an example. And no, I am talking about teachers. The job requirements for a teacher who's just started are identical to an experienced teacher. There is no difference in them apart from the amount of time they've been in the job. Overall. Even the Guardian is forced, through gritted teeth, to admit that the public sector does better, although it does its best to couch it in union BS. (Public-private pay gap widest in 10 years | Business | The Guardian) "My longer holidays are expensive to take!" Cry me a river. You don't have to go away. It means that there's chronic skivitis in the public sector. Come on, the public sector culture of long-term sick leave is indefensible. I do wonder just how many people who claim that it's all gravy in the private sector have actually worked there. You don't have low wages! Your access to training is far better too, even if it's not the training you want. Where's the propaganda? I've not made up anything.

First 5 years from what I can see. Take teachers - starting salary £20,000, after 5 years, £29,000. That's a 50% rise in income for 'meeting targets'. I can't think of any jobs I've ever done in the private sector with a 50% rise over 5 years in exactly the same job. Perhaps I was just unlucky? The public sector get it very good indeed. Higher salaries than the private sector on average, longer holidays on average, far more days off sick, lots more training and that big fat pension which, despite the modest trimming, remains a big fat pension which private sector workers can only dream of. It's about time that the over-indulged public sector had a salary reduction.

Ahh, someone's posted and answered that. So it doesn't count as a pay rise because.... ?

Don't public sector workers get more money each year for long service?

A number of my clients are farmers, so their machines are often full of a thin layer of dried, dusty cow dung.

You can produce the balanced meal for the same price. However, what that production requires is a kitchen and trained cooks. The catering companies don't like the expense of trained cooks - it's much cheaper to provide Microwave Monkeys. Not that school dinners were anything to write home about at my first school - the quality was dismal even with 'trained cooks'.

So do I. Sadly the only way to get a good sausage roll is to make it yourself. The 'processed rusk and pig product wrapped in warm cloth' that passes for the commercial sausage roll isn't worthy of the name.

It wasn't so terrible.

Apple already have that patented. They're calling it iBall.

And they say romance is dead.

Did you make it? Tell me more! I made a rabbit curry a couple of weeks ago.

It'll do it now. But perhaps it won't do it in 2 or 3 years' time. Tomorrow I'm off to see yet another client who until about a month ago was running quite happily on XP Pro with 1GB RAM on a Pentium D. Since the most recent batch of Windows updates, the machine is running like a dog. That's the third person with an identical problem in the last few weeks. These installs don't stand still, and software gets bulkier on a month-by-month basis. Adobe Reader updates, Windows updates, Java (unless you can avoid it), Office updates... it all slows the machine down.

What sort of stuff are you going to be doing on the computers? Are they just going to be (essentially) dumb terminals using Citrix or sumfink? It's just that if a 3-year old ex-business PC isn't powerful enough for business then I don't think it'll be fast enough for school needs. Just my tuppence-worth.

Why not something like Wordpress?

It seems that the DM has turned in to a depressing parody of itself.

Gradual collapse in export industries due to overvaluing of the Euro, permanently high unemployment and low productivity, and permanent subsidy from German taxpayers. Although I suppose that some 'nationalists' in Scotland would prefer cash from German than English taxpayers.

I'm in favour of Scottish independence. I don't think the SNP is. If they were, they wouldn't be trying to sign Scotland up to full membership of the EU. We need only to look at Greece and Ireland to see what 'full membership' means for a small country in the EU.

You think it does, but it doesn't. The decision of a farmer to grow crops or rear livestock depends upon the land he's on, first and foremost. Beyond a certain slope angle, you can't grow crops, because you can't get the machinery to go up and down it. Even if the tractor will, the plough won't create even furrows. If the pH is wrong, you need to alter the pH, which means chemicals and a tractor and spraying. If the rainfall is too heavy, crops won't grow. Why do you think that Ireland ate rye bread for centuries? Too wet for wheat. You said you 'know' farmers. Why don't you know this? I don't farm and I know this. If those farming techniques are so vastly different, then how is applying a top-down solution dreamed up by a researcher going to help? What will work for one won't work for another.

I missed it last night, unfortunately. The week before was pears and garlic, and the footage shown was filmed in Tonbridge in Kent, which is where I live. The pears and apples here, of course, are the finest in the country.

Actually, that's only become your point recently. Your early point was that farmers should only farm arable because meat was using up 'too many resources'. We've ended up on this argument because of your relentless refusal to accept that farmers rear livestock on some land because it's no good for crops. You don't seem to credit them with much ability to farm.

It depends on access to water (and irrigation), pH, soil depth, slope, access to machinery, and so on. I didn't say that. What I said was that your blanket assumption that all land being used for animals could be used for crops was wrong. There's a really good reason why farmers raise livestock on some land and arable on others. Nothing trollicious about that statement. You're telling us all here that land management is best understood at a macro level. All well and good, but how does that equate to the micro level which is where the actual farming takes place? Unless your clever men and women with years of experience of university life actually know about farming, all the conferences and pieces of paper in the world won't help them, because they'll get it horribly wrong. No, I'm saying that if you assume that the only people who know anything about farming are researchers with Phds, you are deluded. You remind me of Roderick Spode from Jeeves and Wooster, telling everyone that the whole of Herefordshire would be turned over to the production of beetroot, and that it had all 'been scientifically worked out'. Forgive me if I have more faith in the people who work the land to know what it's capable of. Genuine question - how much time have you spent on farms and around farmers?

Incidentally, I'm fairly certain that the product in feed lots isn't 'big pieces of corn which humans could eat', but is the rendered byproduct of the inedible (to humans) part after the edible (to humans) part has been sent off for processing in to high fructose corn syrup or something ghastly.

Could it? When did you become an expert on what grows on soils and drainage? I do. I can see, for example, that the chalk downland around here which has about 3" of soil is only suitable for sheep grazing. Talk to Welsh hill farmers about how foolish they are and how Snowdon should be used for cabbages. They'll laugh in your face, and rightly so. Oh, definitely. It's not worth talking to the people on the ground who just spend their lives working the soil, best have a conference somewhere warm and write some papers on the subject.