pap

What a load of crap. It most certainly is playing the race card, which is why racists like yourself love it so much. Sorry if you don't like the label, but after your "vermin" comment earlier in the thread, I feel it's justified. You continue with the "these people are animals" theme in this post. Crawling with illegal immigrants? What are they? Lice? Regardless, it's clear that these people aren't people to you. You've repeatedly tried to militate against their basic humanity. Consequently, I find it almost impossible to take any of your points seriously.

Bill was a conspiracy theorist before the term came to prominence. He was a 1963 coup man, though

The TNG S4 Blu Rays arrived last week. I've been very careful to consume the episodes sparingly. This is, after all, one of the best seasons of Trek ever. So far, I've watched three episodes, all of them corkers. I actually waited for the cliffhanger of Best of Both Worlds, so naturallly, that was first up. What I'd forgotten was the excellent episode "Family", the most un-Trek episode of Trek ever, and quite groundbreaking at the time. One of the guiding mantras of Trek before then was "single episode shows", the notion that 99% of the time, a new viewer could tune in and enjoy the plot regardless. Not so with Family. It's really the unofficial third part of Best of Both Worlds, dealing with the aftermath of Picard's Borgification, and once again, Patrick Stewart nails it. Even the sub-plot, Worf's adopted parents turning up on the Enterprise, requires some prior investment. The prime reason for them being there is related to Worf's S3 exit from Klingon society. With the exception of S2, which Paramount farmed out to an outside supplier, the Blu Rays are magnificent.

Careful now. People, possibly including myself, will accuse you of having no taste, or at the very least, utterly ignorant to the genius of one of the UK's best shows.

Yeah, I saw that. The whole thing is very interesting. We've moved from madman in a cave to terrorist next door, who incidentally happens to question accounts of other atrocities. An attempt to put conspiracy theorists in with the bombers? Fancy that!

Yeah, but Pulis didn't get to bother the first team, let alone the nation.

Good choice of Doctor. Disappointing to have to watch Zoe Ball on telly again. Is there a better example of mediocrity through nepotism?

Nah, it doesn't work like that, and I daren't dismiss anything they said on that basis. But if, and it's a big if, you've got a female in your face arguing the toss over something she'd not normally give a crap about in a stroppy way, I think the question is fair.

I've been prone to occasional stomach aches and have lost quite a bit of weight over the past couple of years. Mind you, the correlation of stomach aches is one-to-one with filling my face in the manner of someone who has just seen food for the first time. Gets you quick, does the pancreatic. I wonder what ol' Bill would have to say about the world today.

His nipper plays for Leigh at the moment, which is one of the reasons he's so into it. I used to play Union at school; it was one of the few sports where being a podgy semi-mobile lump was an advantage, especially if you play without fear ( used to make it a point of principle to take the PE teacher out ). Even before they moved out there, one of my mates from Uni was from Hindley Green, and this is in the days where Wigan were all conquering, so I naturally heard a lot about RL back then. Maybe I should get myself down to a St. Helens game. See what all the fuss is about. It's not cheating. They're the Saints too, right?

It's mostly been footy for me all my life, although I've seen people make long-term switches into other sports. Ms pap's family live in Rugby League land and her brother, once a die-hard scally LFC fan, is now an egg chaser, making numerous comments about it being the best sport in the world. So no, very little else apart from football for me. I have a huge amount of respect for other sports, but not the time, especially as I've been watching football for 30 years and still don't really understand all of that either.

More news on "the racist van" ( hashtag: #TheRacistVan ), as it is now being referred to. First, a decent blog post covering the backfiring nature of the plan:- http://futiledemocracy.wordpress.com/2013/07/29/trolling-racist-van/ One beaut the article pulls from Conservative party history is this:-

I don't call people mucker around here. I just think it's nice and colloquial. I call people "mush" here in an effort to promote Sotonian culture. It was either that or build a bronze statue of Craig David outside the Sefton Arms.

I have no expectations, just pointing out that the ammunition that you're slinging this way is of my own creation. I posted candidly knowing the kind of crap I'd get, so do you honestly think I'm that bothered about a response I knew would happen? I'm an exporter, mucker. I bring money into this country. The government gets what they tax, the economy gets the rest and I play by the same rules as every other small company. I don't qualify for, or take any benefits, and put about 80K into the UK economy each year, more if you count client rechargeables. In 2007, I contributed around 10K to the public purse. Since that year, I've contributed 30K each year. Over six years, that's 120K more that the government have gotten from my economic activity than if I'd remained a permanent employee of a software house. If I'm guilty of anything here, it's the general expectation that one-man companies should be treated the same as an employee. That assertion was flawed from the start. It is, in microcosm, a small business like any other. You have a resource to sell, you sell it and if the quality of that resource diminishes, your customer will buy from someone else, as soon as today if they see fit. I probs mocked the millionaires tax break, but I've never argued for general principle of progressive taxation; I'm a flat tax man and more than anything else, a net contributor.

Hmm. I'd disagree, but still. One thing you may wish to consider is why I answered Tim's question truthfully in the first place. I could have ignored it, or made something up. It's not like he had evidence one way or the other. I could have said something else and unless Tim happened to be particularly obsessed with proving it ( I believe he has better things to do ) then I'd have gotten away with it, scot-free, and without the predictable ridicule from forum lightweights such as yourself. What can I say? I'm a quality over quantity man. Honesty is an important quality in credibility, and quite honestly, I'd rather be seen as a hypocrite than a liar.

I am actually f**king hopeless at expenses. Haven't put a proper claim in since 2009, don't do any of that w4nkery about marking part of your home as your business ( even though it is ). So yeah, they're all out of personal income too.

And that's a fair enough attitude, but you also have to be pragmatic. What percentage of IT contractors do you think go the full PAYE route? There are other reasons beyond pay. Before I started my company, I was working full PAYE through an umbrella company. Was a complete nightmare for everything except "IR35 peace of mind". I needed to buy a computer then. When I went to do so, they told me that the machine would legally belong to them. Even simple stuff like client rechargeable expenses were a complete nightmare because they put the lot through the PAYE tax relief grinder. I started a limited company for a number of reasons. I'll not deny that the major angle was financial, but there were a ton of other considerations going into the mix, as enumerated above. I simply could not progress without my own company, and once you have your own company, you start running it like one. No company director in his or her right mind would set their salary at 100% of turnover.

Nope, I paid for those out of my own pocket on interest free credit, as I indicated when Bazza was looking for a laptop.

I pay the full rate of Corporation Tax, Batman. Vodafone don't, nor do many other big companies.

I actually work for more than one company, although one big one is my bread and butter. There are loads of other things that you need to do to prove you are not just an employee, such as own hardware, own premises, right of substitution, etc.

I'm getting out of paying a bit of tax, not all of it. The general principle is that you take a lower salary than the income you get. The rest is regarded as profit. You have to pay 20% corporation tax on profits, come what may. The rest of the profit is distributed as dividends to shareholders. I'm the only shareholder in the firm, hence the only recipient. Beyond that, HMRC then look at your total income over the year, taking into account any dividends and salary. This forms the basis of the personal tax calculation. So, money is saved on:- Personal PAYE Employers PAYE Any fixed asset purchase However, they claw most of it back through personal tax which hits every Jan and July.

I don't pay full PAYE, although it's not the whizzer ruse it was in the late nineties. January and July are stinging in terms of personal tax on higher rate earnings. I have to put a quarter of my income away each month to cover it. As Bearsy says, it's a damn good line of questioning, and I'd be doing you an injustice if I answered it dishonestly. Does it make me a hypocrite? Possibly, but I've already 'fessed to that. I will say this before the bloodletting begins. I have no job security, no sick pay and no holiday pay and as a contractor, I pay HMRC the gross salary I had as a permanent employee. That's how I rationalise it anyway. F**k, this honesty thing is inconvenient.

Heh. These people have no transferable skills? Well, it's funny Bazza. One of the depressing little things that's developed during my lifetime is seeing a big f**king lump in almost every doorway. It used to just be nightclubs. You saying there's no work out there for people with their qualities. My contention is that the market for big f**king lumps has never been higher, especially with a recession on!

Actual stuff I've turned down:- 1) A company that had payday loan lenders as clients 2) Private health company looking to take over NHS work

Of course I wouldn't, but I also said that if I won £100M, I'd have no problem giving £95M of it away. I don't need that much money for the rest of my life. In the grand scheme of things, one million quid isn't a great deal of money. It's the new RBS' director's annual salary, or four detached houses. For an individual or family, it'd be life-changing. I know you think you've made some massive point here, but all you've really done is lay bare your simplistic thought processes, and for what? To call me a hypocrite. I've admitted that several times on here of my own volition. As Jack Dee is fond of saying, hypocrisy is rather handy. So no, I would not give a 1M lottery win away, but after a certain point, would I really need the money? Hell, do any of these oligarchs who have billions need theirs either?