badgerx16

Seeing as Huffton and Baj have got onto the subject of bikes, any ideas for a 'best buy' roadie, under £1000, ( probably nearer an £800 limit ) ? Looking to upgrade from my current 'cheap and cheerful' Raleigh as I'm tempted by the Pennine fells, which are only 30 minutes ride away, and need a better range of gearing. Currently debating between Specialized, Trek, and Boardman, ( with Scott Speedster as an outside bet ).m

Seems that she ( allegedly ) might be getting some of the same. 'Commando' indeed. All this guff and hype about the Royals is just a smokescreen to deflect from real life - they're just grade C celebrity nonentities.

Of course Nigel Lawson & Norman Lamont had nothing to do with it, creating the environment, and then encouraging companies to take 'contribution holidays' from paying their dues into private sector pension schemes ? http://www.opalliance.org.uk/decline.htm#5billion http://www.ipe.com/news/uk-pension-schemes-took-e26bn-in-contribution-holidays_6717.php http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/article1071505.ece

Younger than my wife, and older than my children. ( And a 'child of the 60s' )

I hope he's in better form than he showed in California a few weeks ago.

72% of FACTs posted on a web forum are made up.

Out of curiosity, where does this unattributed statistic come from ?

And you have the ability to exert control over the 'management' at every local election, but the majority of people don't bother to vote. If your Councillors are letting you down, vote them out.

Well maybe they should take the same helpful advice that public sector workers have been given elsewhere in this thread - move jobs ! Or maybe you have deliberately misquoted a reference that states that they 'get no pension assistance from their employer' ? ( "Data from the Office for National Statistics show that 62.9% of private sector workers are not saving into an occupational scheme" - http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/private-sector-pensions-retirement-planning )

So far this academic year my wife has been bitten, kicked, spat upon, scratched, stamped on, and called a "f'***ing whore" by members of her class of 6 year olds. Yet every morning she goes into work because she feels she is giving them life chances they might otherwise not get a chance of. So why don't you re-evaluate what it is exactly that teachers give to society ?

Because I am content with earning enough to suit my family's needs, in a job I generally enjoy doing, living in the area that I do. Combined with my wife's teacher's salary we have an acceptably comfortable standard of living, and I'm not as avaricious as some others on here seem to be.

I would LOVE you to find 'half a dozen people in the phone book' with the technical expertise, qualifications, and experience of the complex IT systems I manage, plus the legislation and compliance regulations that apply to them, and then ask them to work for a lower salary, LOL ! You know f*** all about my job, and f*** all about what it requires. If I were to be doing the same job in the private sector I know for a FACT that I could earn up to 33% more. So from my perspective I provide excellent VFM for YOUR tax payments, you shoud be grateful. ;-) As for the 'new' public sector workers, they are already on new Ts & Cs, giving them less benefits than people like me who have been in the job for 30 years. And as for the 'greedy piggy' comment, you come across as a pathetic, sad, little, misguided, ***t.

You say 'perks', we say 'contracted terms & conditions', on which we have already compromised twice in the last 4 years, and for which currently I am contributing 7.2% of my salary. The most contentious issue, as has already been pointed out is that the Hutton report does not say the schemes are unaffordable, indeed the LGPS has enough funds 'in the bank' to pay for itself for up to 25 years, and the Government will not provide the teaching unions with a vaulation of their scheme, most probably because to do so would blow a hole in the 'unaffordable' argument. Maybe you could explain how the unions are expected to NEGOTIATE when the Government won't release key data upon which the negotiations need to be based ?

Pretty much what the Public Sector have also gone through. Do you want to start a tit-for-tat comparison of how hard done by we all are ?

Group Policy should override Local Policy. Policies are applied in this order: 1.The unique local Group Policy object. 2.Site Group Policy objects, in administratively specified order. 3.Domain Group Policy objects, in administratively specified order. 4.Organizational unit Group Policy objects, from largest to smallest organizational unit (parent to child organizational unit), and in administratively specified order at the level of each organizational unit. ( Courtesy of Micro$oft )

My contributions are currently 7.2%, so that link is most certainly wrong. The current levels for the LGPS are found here : http://www.lgps.org.uk/lge/core/page.do?pageId=10482871 Please note the MINIMUM is 5%.

British Airways ?????

But you do have a problem with answering straight forward questions when they are put to you.

Workshy Benefits going up in line with the Government's rating for inflation ?

No, you just save it up for threads like this to whinge about the public sector standing up for itself. I hope for your sake you've got good health insurance. live in a low crime area that isn't prone to flooding, don't have any issues with services the local council delivers ( - oh wait, cemetary plots ), and ( for humanity's sake ) that you are unlikely to ever be a 'service user' for Children's Services. Why can't you do something to get that last point ?

Well my wife is also partnered 'with someone in IT', and she is out on Thursday. Yet, as she has had to live with my net salary cut of over 3%, on top of being in the 2nd year of a 3 year payrise freeze, and also downsizing by 20% and having to reapply for my own job. she is also perfectly aware of what 'everyone else has endured'. Go figure.

How many days holiday do you think public sector staff get, ( other than teachers -that's a different argument ) ?

http://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/money/paullewis/PensionsPiggyBankRaid.asp Brown's pension raid The story of Gordon Brown’s 'Pension Raid' is more politics than finance, says Paul Lewis Like whisky, official advice to Ministers matures with age. And the ten-year-old mash that was uncorked on Friday night was a brew to savour. Here at last in 87 pages of confidential briefings to the Chancellor before his 1997 Budget are the figures which everyone knew but the Treasury would not admit. Until it was forced to do so after the dogged use of the Freedom of Information Act by The Times. But the story of Brown’s Pension Raid (Financial Times) is more politics than finance. Yes, in his first Budget as Chancellor Gordon Brown made a complex change to company tax that cost pension funds collectively about £4 billion a year. We knew that. The hit could be absorbed by total surpluses of around £60 billion. We knew they were big. “The pensions industry will complain vigorously….we do not believe these claims are realistic.” So what is new in the revelations of the Great Pensions Heist (Sunday Times) that has filled more than 150 newspaper articles and led news bulletins over the last five days? Well not much really. We can certainly see that Brown’s Tax Raid (The Daily Telegraph) was not made against the advice of Treasury officials. At no point did they warn against it. Rather they made clear that the tax change was supposed to be offset by increases in the pension contributions paid by companies. These were the same companies after all who had saved £18 billion by paying less into pension schemes over the previous ten years and in a desperate bid to keep their surpluses down had increased the pensions promised by nearly £9 billion and allowed employees to pay £1 billion less in. If all that money – nearly £30 billion – was made available over the next ten years it would have easily made up for the £100 billion Stealth Tax (The Times). And who introduced the rules that made them take this money out of pensions? Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson. One voice of sanity in the discussions on Brown’s Pension Fund Raid (The Guardian) has been the respected pensions actuary Stephen Yeo from Watson Wyatt, a former pensions adviser to the Conservatives. He said on Radio 4 that Brown’s Raid on Pensions (Independent) was “not even in the top three reasons” for the current difficulties of pension schemes. Increasing life expectancy, post-millennium plunges in stock markets, and rule changes which meant early leavers left with more and those who stayed on retired with more, were all of greater importance. So it’s politics. Stop Gordon at any price. That may – or may not – be a good thing. But let’s not pretend it’s about Pensions Vandalism (Daily Mail). It isn’t

pot, kettle.

Not an MP though.