pap

You can't imply guilt from Assange's decision to seek asylum in Ecuador. The only thing you can take from that is Assange doesn't want to face trial in Sweden. Let's not forget - Assange is not an ordinary man. Through Wikileaks, he basically arrayed himself against the big guns of the Western world. I'm not sure you get to do that without some kind of response. Put it this way; if he's genuinely innocent and knows that he is - he knows that he'll be going to a show trial.

Yes, that happens. They'll get a criminal conviction if caught. The government even spends money trying to get people to grass them up. Like I said, the private landlord Housing Benefit wheeze is perfectly legal. Property portfolios, paid for by you, me and the rest of the British taxpaying public. I enjoyed your rogues gallery, and I'm up for seeing more - but any you put before me will have the same basic problem. If caught, arrested and charged. A further point: that 26K maximum any one family can claim includes Housing Benefit. It's not like these people are living it up on £500 a week. My initial point is that I think we're paying the wrong people. Slum landlords would be some of those people. I'm really not sure how anyone can defend the practice and it bloody irks me that we spend tax money to line the pockets of speculators and profiteers.

Yes. The ones fiddling the social can be arrested and charged if they get caught. The most benefit they can receive in one year is 26K. It's perfectly legal for landlords to buy houses and fill them with Housing Benefit tenants. Those who have loads of houses make a lot more money than the "cash in hand" crowd too. There is no limit to the amount of money a private landlord can derive from Housing Benefit.

Comments about the bottom of the ladder are spot on. It's always good to keep that in perspective. Personally, think we're paying a lot of money to the wrong people. Stuff like housing benefit going to aspiring property barons really annoys me (and others, I have noted). Don't think it's right that these people are getting rich off the state. Of course, the government will never go after them because they're business men, not scroungers like the people that live in their market rate (and often quite scummy) houses.

I don't think you're selfish or heartless. You're just providing a solution for people in that situation. That is a fair enough perspective. I do worry about whether that's even possible though. Are the second or third jobs out there? A lot of entry level positions have been swallowed up in the Government's shoddy work experience scheme. Another concern centres on the damaging effects of a long hour culture. Having to perpetually work sixty hour weeks just to keep your head above water is a backward step. It's bad for family cohesion, kids often be left to their own devices and it creates stress and anxiety. I think we should be able to say to our citizens "if you go to work and put in a forty hour shift, you'll be able to live". I don't think that's much to ask. I'm not deaf to your points. I accept that a cavalier approach to finances can be a factor in some cases. However, there has been a widening gap between incomes and the cost of living and a genuine feeling among the young that the ladder has been pulled up. That problem isn't going away, and I'm not sure we solve it by changing to an Industrial Age shift pattern.

And deprive you of the chance to stalk me in real life too?

I plan on coming home when done raising the young'uns. Not looking forward to rise in cost of living

Thanks for the advice - I've worked this in. I charged them 15 hours of my time at my hourly rate, plus the money they still owe me.

I've written my covering letter and printed the invoice. I'll send that to Europcar first with a threat of a writ. Apparently, the courts don't like it if you don't try and resolve it normally first.

A good point, and valuable advice for anyone yet to undertake a "comprehensive spending review". What do you say to those that have already done that?

There is an article on the Guardian website which claims that millions of working families are a push away from penury. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jun/18/working-britons-one-push-from-penury I've talked about people being trapped on benefits before. Gotta be worse to be trapped in a low-paying job and still not being able to make ends meet.

Spoke with a solicitor today. He thinks he can rip it apart, but it'd end up costing me loads more than the money they still owe me. Watchdog it is, then.

You are quite right - and tbh, there has been a lot of good advice on this issue on this forum. Another real positive out of this thread was finding out about third party hire car insurance - definitely something I'll be taking in future. But yep. Take photos the minute you receive the car. Take photos the minute you hand it back and as dubai_phil says, do the bloody walkaround! (artistic licence, dp!)

Well, I'm certainly not going to be using them ever again. To put it very charitably, they're a bunch of scoundrels. The narrative they've constructed is so bloody wafer-thin that it might have led to a less chunderous end to Mr Creosote's trip to the restaurant. Given the other supporting evidence ( e.g. shedloads of people complaining about the same thing ) I'm starting to think that trousers has the right of it.

Well, I have been contacted again! Short version. They're not giving the money back. They sent some laughable proof. Slightly longer version blogged (with Vehicle Check In Document linked, official document fans! ):- http://frigsociety.com/2012/06/18/europclowns/ trousers inspired the title* *this may be changed if/when Europcar legal get on the case

Good post, which mirrors a lot of my feelings on the issue. In isolation, there is not a lot wrong with the principle of handing over money to people in exchange for goods and services. Compare and contrast that with barter systems, and it's immediately apparent that the sheer universality of money is extremely handy. The long-term cumulative effects are the problem and inheritance is a huge factor in this. Many people equate money to success. It's a dangerous assumption because like you say, people inherit wealth. Those who inherit a lot can literally do nothing for their entire lives, and still be considered a success because of the amount of money they have. Conversely, someone without those resources can work every day of his or her life and still die penniless. The counter-arguments to inherited wealth often focus on small-scale emotive examples, much like Lord D's. I can understand why he has strong feelings about the achievements his father has made in life, but at the other end of the inheritance scale you have people like the Duke of Westminster, who has an inherited multi-billion property portfolio. If we were to ask the simple question "who was more of a success in life", Lord D's dad or the Duke of Westminster - most people would say Duke of Westminster. Lord D's dad has worked his whole life to get a piece of this Earth. The piece he has would probably small enough to be a rounding error when compared to the Duke of Westminster's holdings. Who would get more respect if they were in a room together? The self-made nightclub entrepreneur or the bloke who inherited a big chunk of Mayfair?

I actually have several, sir - don't update them all as frequently as I'd like. Think you'll need to do slightly better than "comrade pap", me old mucker. I'm as like to take that as a compliment. The bit about "sheer propaganda" is a bit better. Work on that angle.

The problem with money creation is that it isn't free. The US Federal Reserve is a great example. It has sole authority to print money. Every dollar it prints is loaned to the government at a rate of interest, which they can never pay back. Every new dollar that they'd create to pay back the interest would also attract a rate of interest. That's a system that is fundamentally broken, especially since the Federal Reserve isn't part of the US Government. The Federal Reserve Act, which brought the Federal Reserve into being, slipped into law faster than a greased weasel. It essentially placed the supply of US money into the hands of private bankers, putting the US into perpetual never never. I'm not as clued up on the Bank of England, but if the world's largest market's economy is broken, that has serious implications. Even if we work on the premise that money can be freely printed, what does it say about the value of money when we've just created it out of thin air? It isn't earned. Doesn't reflect any skill. It exists because we say it exists, and it has the value we say it has. I can appreciate that you have some affinity with the current financial system, but I'm not really sure that's relevant to my position. I'm calling the entire financial system into question. I'm saying that I don't understand why a country like Greece is going through so much crap because of arbitrary numbers created from nothing, nor do I get why people are losing their collective sh*t over this financial crisis. Hypothetical scenario. Man gets dropped in the wilderness with no way of contacting anyone. Is he worried about money at this point? Nope. He's worried about survival, and is probably contriving ways of using the physical environment to achieve that objective. If the EU goes bust, so what? It still has a physical environment that can support its citizens. Are we going to starve over these "phantom" numbers? Go to war for it? I thought part of our remit of being the dominant species on the planet was getting to make the rules. This system will crash at some point. It already is in some places. Are we to repeat the mistakes of the past, or do we have the wit to be the ones to say "nah, it's all boll*cks - let's try something else"?

You're quite right on the debt part. Take the concept of interest as an example. Let's say I borrow £1000 at an interest rate of 10%. The total repayable amount of the loan is £1100. If one takes the view that there is a finite amount of money in the world, that extra £100 doesn't actually exist. It's just been created out of nothing from an agreement between a bank and a private individual. In order to fulfil my agreement with the bank, I theoretically need to find £100 from elsewhere in the economy. Continuing with this childish assumption that there is only a finite amount of money in the economy, I'd be depriving someone else of the cash. Most of my work is for big corporate, many of which have very decent credit facilities. Much of the time, they're borrowing money to fund projects which ultimately pay me, so they need to find money that doesn't exist. The chain of credit is bewildering as it is incomprehensible. There are two eventual outcomes:- 1) Someone, somewhere will default (hey, that money didn't exist after all) 2) We create more money Interest. The staple of the financial system yet fundamentally broken.

saintfully - I wrote about the long term effects of "right-to-buy" on my blog a little while ago after visiting the homestead (Flower Estates). Covers a lot of similar ground. Linked for your consideration: http://frigsociety.com/2012/05/24/the-long-term-effects-of-right-to-buy/

You do make me laugh, TDD. For clarity though, I'd just like it if house prices were stable and not being artificially inflated to the point where our kids can't buy homes. Our ancestors would laugh their teats off at what we've become. "Not got a house? Why don't you just build one?" Progress, eh?

I think both are going to present massive problems, but one thing I would say in defence of dune's argument is that Spain have been there before, and recently too. I've seen this manifest itself in a few weird ways. Some older Spaniards you speak to will swear blind that the Spanish invented everything. Perhaps that's what they were told during the Franco years. I do agree with you about Greece, though. Those that are still financially able are getting the feck out of Dodge, parties on the extremes of the political system are gaining sway. Will be very interesting to see what happens after Sunday's election.

At least part of the reason that house prices rose so high is because of an unreal amount of credit being handed out to people. Prices rise to what the market will bear, particularly when the commodity is highly sought after. Thanks to the huge amount of credit being chucked about, the market was able to bear quite a lot - a lot more than was sustainable as it turns out. Your second question is an interesting one. How should house prices be assessed? I can't say that I honestly know. They're a complete oddity. Almost everything that we make depreciates in value - they say you take a couple of grand off a car just by driving off the forecourt. Houses just get more expensive. I do a lot of work in manufacturing. Business model there is pretty simple. Bill of materials + labour + profit margin = cost to customer. That wouldn't be a bad start for new builds. Historical stock is the real conundrum. Take the example of a bloke who paid £25K for a house in the 70s. It'd be great if all that house cost now was £25K plus all the years of cumulative inflation, especially if salaries have risen in step. We're in a dip now, but house prices have been rocketed ahead of inflation for years. The bloke wouldn't be able to sell that place at an inflation-adjusted figure even if he wanted to. I accept that those are constraints, but if 2/3rds of the landmass is in the hands of a select few people, that is going to affect the cost of land. Supply and demand. Again. The whole thing is a clusterf*ck, Special K. You mentioned earlier that the housing market was stable. Try raising interest rates to anything sensible, then tell me how "stable" we are.

Some interesting points, and a couple of people have pulled me up specifically on my comments about house prices. I can appreciate that there are homeowners out there that would not do well from a price crash, particularly if they happened to buy near to the top of the market. I can also understand that there are people who bought their homes years ago who have seen their investment grow. I can get why both wouldn't want to see prices fall. That said, on a number of levels, they're just not real. We've talked about the effect the supply of credit has. Another huge factor in house pricing is the supply of land. People would have you believe that there isn't any left - yet 2/3rds of this country is owned by less people than live in Southampton. The supply of land is limited by concepts of inheritance and prior ownership, and the supply of credit went up massively during the boom years. Dangerous combination brought about by greed and irresponsible lending. Should we really be throwing money away to prop up a lie? High house prices are bad for everyone. The youth feel like they can't get a stake in society. Anyone paying an artificially high mortgage to a bank is spending money that could be creating demand in the economy elsewhere. Any potential employer looking to set up here knows that they'll be covering people's rent or mortgages, reflected in people's salaries and making us comparatively uncompetitive in a global economy. It's a fix to fix a fix to fix a fix. The Emperor is not just in the nip - he's dangling his tackle and mandating that we all have a nibble.

They only really started singing properly when they knew they were fecked. We did something similar up at Bloomfield Road this year. At 2-0, the camera panned onto the dancing Spain crowd. Right in the middle of them stood a quartet or Irish supporters, all with arms folded and faces like thunder. The missus and I had a giggle at that sight, remarking that HD was brilliant! In the end though, it's hard to feel too much sympathy for the Republic when it comes to association football. As a country, they've never given much of a crap about their domestic game. The radio stations brazenly play jingles saying "all the English Premiership games" and they put the EPL on RTE on a Saturday night. You reap what you sow, I suppose - and while they were playing the current European and World champions, they truly looked woeful last night.