badgerx16

I'm sure that's not what brought Lehman's down, and nearly crashed Goldman Sachs. Some of the financial models were so complicated that nobody really knew how they operated, and they had no idea as to the true content and worth of the 'junk' they exchanged, nor even who ultimately 'owned' responsibility for it.

Yep, let's discount the cost of bailing out Northern Rock, RBS, and the mess that Lloyd's has become, let alone potentially the deepest recesssion since the Wall Street Crash, due the the City and it's trading of non-existent commodities and bundles of debt.

I'm not a fool, but neither am I blinkered. You cannot be a member of a club, and then stand in the doorway trying to destabilise it at every opportunity. Our economy is so tightly bound into trading with Europe that we have to be able to influence what happens with the Euro - as far as the rest of the world is concerned we are 'in' and we will be treated accordingly, regardless of how isolationist we pretend to be. The ONLY solution to this issue is a referendum, but nobody in Westminster is willing to risk this - the Tories for fear of a 'yes' vote, and the LDs and Labour for fear of a 'no'. The only funny thing about the current situation is remembering Alex Salmond's comments on an independent Scotland being able to operate "like Ireland or Iceland, on the edge of the EU".

So Britain's policy is now being determined by a small group of right wing Tory xenophobes. Cameron isn't necessarily acting in Britain's interests, he's acting to try to preserve his own position in a divided party.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16088431 That should cheer TDD up.

This all presupposes that the draw isn't rigged.

What irks is not paying more per se, it's Government ministers publicly admitting that this has nothing to do with addressing the affordability ( or not ) of pensions by pumping the extra funds into the schemes, and everything to do with raising money to assist the Treasury's efforts to trim the deficit.

Remember that at current contribution rates, 6.5% of the Social Worker's salary would have been deducted to cover their contributions, my rough maths puts that at £79k over 40 years, although there is a small NI discount. If only we knew how many years each of us would be drawing our pensions for, it would enable us to draw neat and accurate comparisons !

Taking the LGPS scheme as an example: for all service up to 31/03/2008 you get 1/80 of salary as pension and 3/80 as a lump sum. for service after that date you add 1/60 of salary and no additional lump sum, ( although some pension can be exchanged for lump sum ). Currently this is a final salary scheme, but the Govt want to change it to an average salary, although entitlement already accrued will not be lost ( I think - though how you work it out I'm not sure ). So for any given salary level, it is fairly easy to work out : As far as I can deduce the following are typical 'average' salaries in Local Government, so you should be able to work it out for yourself: Office Administrator £16,700 Social Worker £27,000 Environmental Health Officer £32,000 IT Support Technician £20,800

There is no 100% foolproof way of determining this for any e-mail system if you don't have administrative access to the mail servers and access systems - I could just as easily send an email from my work's email system from a PC at the South Pole as from my desk, it's the access system's that would hold the key identifying data.

The IP address you see in the MIME headers on a mail message is the address of the mail server. With something like Hotmail or GoogleMail you will never see the IP of the sending client PC. (For instance. I have a yahoo.co.uk email account,- if I was in Malaysia and sent a message, the recipient would see a UK based IP ). If, on the other hand, you are looking at the domain portion of the sending mail account, and tracing that via WHOIS, be aware that it is extremely easy to spoof this information so that it looks to have come from somewhere else.

"But he also said the unions had raised some genuine concerns....." "I think there is a genuine issue between the unions and ministers about the pension contributions, which I hope is the subject of further discussion," A solution is in there somewhere, but both sides need to stop posturing and start negotiating.

Jutkiewicz and Maynard have only scored as many as Guly.

There are fans at 23 other Championship teams who would swap league table places with us tonight.

"We are Southampton. We're top of the League!"

She's the tatoo artists girlfriend ( now former gf ). She wanted a tatoo of Narnia, but he found out she was cheating on him !

No it's opinion. There is still more than half a season to go, and whatever opportunity the January window might offer us. I'd rather we had a little slip now and finished strongly than struggle for the last 8 games of the season and flop in the payoffs.

Spudgun, did you know your avatar has been copied ?

Jeez, there's some bloody miserable folk about, and most of them seem to be on here this afternoon.

If it's coming from hotmail, then all you will find is a Microsoft mail server somewhere. If you go to http://geoip.sifavi.com/ip/ and put the IP in the host/IP box on the left hand side, this will show you where the server is accoring to ISP/WHOIS data.

Just seen this mentioned on "Have I Got News For You" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2060908/Tory-MP-Patrick-Mercer-calls-David-Cameron-worst-British-politician-Gladstone.html Comments...........

Now, now, BTF, you know full well that Thatch was infallible in all she did for the greater good of this wonderful, and under her tenure totally united, nation of ours.

I haven't been in a union since 1989.

If you accept that Clarkson is a complete Yorkshire ***t, and everything he says is part of an unpleasant public facade linked to an extremely effective marketing machine, you can pigeonhole him into an appropriate space, and judge him accordingly : he is just an animate 3D edition of VIZ. Yes he says some unpleasant things, but he's very funny when discussing and derogating the French and the USofA. The over reaction is exactly what he wanted -more publicity.

No it isn't. I despair of the glut of sensationalist 'celebrity' magazines, and as for the tabloids - i wouldn't even wipe my arse with them.