@sawboman
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The Bloomberg lot have hated us because we have turned our backs on their pet love affair subject. The conclusion will have been written and the fact marshalled to met the ending in that order. Our major issue has for too long been the devotion of available funds to lost industrial causes while preventing the development of new vibrant developments. There was a discussion on the radio yesterday complaining that the cheap to run arts students were paying the same fees as the students on the more expensive STEM subjects. Thus providing a subsidy to those students/subjects. Academia loves pointless arguments that go nowhere as it helps to preserve their status quo.
Sadly we develop ideas but manufacturing the goods needs investment and people prepared to get their hands dirty making things, even if it is the on time buildings to house the production facilities. Too many would rather subsidise the dying high cost rump of industries than train, or retrain, clean up and move forward to something newer and better.
I even hear the clamour is for glass bottles, electric floats and an army of milk persons to cut the plastic waste. That should be good for increased CO2 production, I wonder where the glass bottles would be blown?
Good deals take some digging out though with some you need to watch the small print. I now have more monthly data than I will use in a year or two for a pleasingly low price. This time I have nearly reach 100Mb, what a surprise it has never been so high before. The difference is you can get out and about I guess.
The returned items were not for me but as workwear for my elder daughter who is not the tallest item in the bus. She weighed about 3lbs when she was born and though she weighs a bit more now, her daughter is the smallest child in her class. The son, our GS is not yet 8 months old but probably more than half her weight and 2/3rds his sister’s height. He scars the husky rigid now he is crawling. The husky likes him and they nuzzle up to each other, but when he takes off across the floor she retires to her cave under the stairs.
I use Android Pay instead of my card for contactless, the card details used by Android Pay isn’t your actual card details, it’s a virtual set of information.
It takes me too long to dig the mobile out of my inner pocket to ever use it for anything much, I would be driving down the road with chip and pin paid goods before the mobile was out of my pocket. Cash is just as easy for me as the card should the purchase be really small.
As was said we all have different needs profiles, thank god we have choices for the moment.
I bought a couple of pairs of shorts and used them turn and turn about all summer for two summers, so far. They have been far superior to pairs costing twice as much. They are a highly recommended supplier. The returns system works well when items did not fit the intended wearer- they were a gamble as the person has size issues.
Thank you John, you reminded me to check out my copy of ShowBiz% which looks rather different now with Windows 10 than it did as the old ShowbizDVD2. It still appears to do the same things.
I used to use my Camcorder as the A>D converter reading the digital stream in via the IEE1394 port I have kept available but not used in a while.
I suspect that the Showbiz package is now something of an orphan as Arcsoft did not list when I last looked, I would be annoyed if it was lost.
It is how some businesses start, though support and all the darned regulations that have to be met, including avoiding any licensing issues from pond life like ‘Associated Trotters in the Trough’ IP lawyers are all points to ponder.
I’ll admit, contactless cards worry me. A trawl around the ChaosComputing site (a legitimate bunch of EU white hats) reveals that all banks have less than stellar security on their contactless cards and they are vulnerable to electronic pick-pocketing. If such pick-pockets kept amounts small e.g. coffee cup size, then it would be very difficult to spot and very difficult for banks to prove or disprove if the perpetrator had the foresight to set themselves up as some form of street vendor. For that reason I keep my bonk&pay cards in a Faraday caged wallet as I’d anticipate some bank push-back if I disputed more than one or two such payments.
I have also read such comments with even chip and pin not being totally secure in all situations.
Some UK banks have been saying one thing about their contactless while not doing anything at all to control the risks. Lose a card, report the loss and it might still have been buying coffee for months. That is supposed to have been closed off on several different dates. Hopefully it is now stopped. So it was with the wave x times before needing a PIN, that did not always apply, use it x-1 times rest it for a few days, the x counter reset and it could go off on the merry go round once more. It was all done in the interests of helping the customer experience.
The Faraday cage idea has merit but I am rarely out and about so the effort may not be justified, – I hope.
Be careful if you change pet insurance if you have ever made a claim in the past. Any future claim can get classed as a pre-existing condition and get declined I have known of such things happen. Pet insurance is expensive, especially for the drugs, no prize for guessing some of the drivers and rises sharply as dogs age. We found that with our Labrador though to be fair he did generate a few chunky claims before the cancer got him. He used what might be termed my private stash of Tramadol for a while, then ate like only a Labrador can in the evening; during the night things went off and by six he was to all intents gone, no sense of smell sight or responses. All of his useful brain activity was done, just heart and lungs kept on.
You are completely correct that we all have very different needs, risk profiles and the markets are still quite poor in recognising these differences. I am consistent, I have no problem with legal things being available for those who want them, but I do not want to be forced to take, or shoulder unwanted risks and possibly pay for those I do not need or want. I very rarely have a bill small enough for wave pay because of lifestyle issues, its bigger shopping trips or nothing. I only use the non wave and pay credit card when grocery shopping, internet purchases use a different card, but wave a pay does not apply in that case.
Yes he racked up 42 years ‘inside’ and his tale was something to appeal to a limited group and, like you I am not one to turn out for such a show. He started young at 10 years old but he lived to a surprisingly ripe old age of 90 in spite of it all. There is quite a full write-up in various places,. I don’t think he ever served in the forces though he was ‘head hunted’ for the forces once or twice, he never quite arrived with them. Perhaps their gain not getting him was his loss, but given his long life, perhaps not. His last couple of years were neither comfortable nor colourful, I don’t envy him or his family his passing; nor any other part of his life. I knew a few of his stomping grounds later on, before they really changed, though only on a passing through basis – I am glad I did not live there they were not easy places.
An interesting take, I had a card problem years ago in about about 2000. I suspect that the culprit was a shop that was going under. The expenditure was in a gym and various clubs in South London well away from where I live and travelled. Yes it was sorted out, in fact the issuer contacted me before the billing cycle ended, which was good. Apparently I was ‘buying’ in two places at once 80 miles apart – the software gibed at that activity.
My insurance needs are partially circumscribed by circumstances, I had to trawl the market a while back and found very few wrote business that matched my non-standard profile. Most main stream insurers said ‘not us’. Car insurance is more standardised, but our present set up is the best suited and less expensive than all offers I am annoyingly sent. However, insurance has no relationship to the bank account.
All a bank does for me is receive money, pay out on my instruction, keep it safe and send me an account without charging. I am unclear what more I should want to pay for. I admit I do not know the overdraft rate, though since I do not overdraw it doesn’t matter.
One point I will concede, for those who want it they should be able to go ahead; however for those with no interest I feel there should be an ability not only not to extend an invite to third parties, but to specifically lock out Open ‘Service’.
Analysing bills and creating budgets is definitely something I do not need, I have the records on my computer already.
If the Pub was as basic as you suggest with a ‘clientele’ whose lives had not been as stretching as your probably had been to that date, I can understand how anyone could hold their interest. I knew nothing of Frankie Fraser he may well have been as ‘interesting’ (not) as a speaker as you said. I guess one point in his then favour was that he found a better way to earn a crust. A bit of research suggested a long and winding tale of misadventure with several diagnosis of insanity, though a suggestion that he could control himself if there was a point to being careful. Potentially his life should have contained enough of interest to make a good talk, perhaps he held back the juicy bits? He died in November 2014.
I would be interested to hear how you feel open banking would be of benefit as the examples quoted to date appear unlikely to appeal to many. I have negative desire to have people rifle through my account to try to sell me things which has been the sales pitch to date. There is no apparent suggestion that anything else will emerge, but I am open to read anyone with a positive spin. As I said earlier I would prefer to collect interest rather than pay it out so do not borrow. The present interest rates reduce the value of rate chasing, in fact I have just closed a couple of NS&I accounts. The total interest after three years was derisory. That may or may not change with the pick up in international business activity, but at the expense of those who have borrowed. All this will be until at least until the next downturn.
The problem with cash has several strands, which currency to hold and where or how to hold the money? I am aware of the investment threats though the biggest of them all is the threat to my income from pension funds. Anything else is benefit over and above, but if the pension is threatened then the ‘other’ gains a whole new value. In view of the threat from Jeremy and his mixed up cronies, do I try to buy dollars, Yen, the dreadful Euro thing, SDRs or what? How do I avoid alerting the money laundering squad if I go shopping for lumps of foreign currency and how do I hold the cash? One can hardly use a bank as they are likely to be taken over or at very least tightly controlled with the account contents heavily taxed at a punitive rate to pay for disasters McDowell might unleash and over seas accounts are almost impossible to hold these days.
Mattresses might become impossibly lumpy very soon.
Sorry that you may not have had the responses you would have liked to this call to arms. I guess you are looking for a checker-collector who would filter stuff onto the ‘Changes’ thread, is this correct?
I have just checked the changes thread is locked so that would not work, how would you like items passed to you?
One issue could be that initially many people do not know if their observation was their issue or more generic and affecting the site. That was certainly my concern about the slow posts issue. I would be reluctant to take on the role alone as family health issues often sandbag me. In a good week, when all piglets get their wings and the rocking horses produce abundant manure I would try to assist as one of a notional small team.
(By the way, posting is still slow from me.)
That was an unfortunate tale.
I was briefly connected to a witness protection job. A phone call came through, it checked out so I put things in train. For once all the bits worked and it was sorted in a couple of hours., it was pure dumb luck.
I only found out after the work went through what the case was, though no other details, I did not want to know as in cases like that it was best not to know.Obviously no audit trail paperwork was created.
I never did collect the pint I was promised, though others did the hard work and took the brunt of the action so that was only right.
Sorry to hear of your 2008 woes. Perhaps we were fortunate in that anything which was tied up at the time was not pulled out so as recovery went ahead so anything locked away and thus unspent remained to come again. I hear what you are saying about banks and quality of service but I have two issues. I see new entrants, assuming they are not of the ‘bag of swag’ kind only going after the higher margin quick return segment, I do not see them offering what I suspect many people might want, cash machines and straight forward accessible basic provisions. I also see them offering mainly niche, perhaps even hipster products to that demographic. Expenditure tracking being one touted ‘service’. If people want to track their expenditure it is easy enough to do already, so I do not see that as a market maker. I don’t object to such services, but equally, I do not see the point either. None of the pre-sales clap trap has in anyway excited my interest. Banks were never as good as they thought they were. I briefly worked for one of them in a branch with an accountant who was sad about the passing of the quill pen, I kid you not. Now they have ‘bank managers’ who have to be driven by a computer. They lack the life skills to manage a complex operation – perhaps that is why it is easier for a money washer to open an account than anyone honest. Hopefully that might change but do not hold your breath.
As for the ‘Nigerian Princesses’, ‘Russian Clerks to oligarchs’, etc. I hear them revving up their slaves to get the emails out.
The expression often used back then was don’t sh*t on your own door step.
It was even more true if it was someone-else’s like the Cray’s patch. They had a reputation for sorting out trouble makers. It is all gone now with all sorts of racial, ethnic and location based groups all warring, so no one is trusted and everyone becomes the enemy.
What scares my is the arrival of so called open banking. That could allow anyone you have dealings with to ransack your accounts – if you are not super careful to prevent them. To be honest I do not care if I could have bought a packet of butter somewhere else and saved tuppence we only buy a couple of packets a year anyway. As for loans, mortgages and the rest we are completely not interested. We paid the mortgage off years ago, doing so as fast as we could and we simply don’t borrow, end off story. Chasing interest rates is usually a mugs game and it generally ends up with half going as tax anyway. We might as well buy things we want, if we want anything, rather than have some halfwit tell us what he thinks we should do. The smaller our attack surface can be made, the better; so for us it is a case of just say no to open banking.
Yes, I agree, though it does not always have to be as bad as Kings Cross. I missed a couple of much safer areas and to be honest safer bets. When the M1 was bing extended some properties plunged in value to the point that I might have been able to buy a flat there. There were programmes on TV about the development blight, I think they were about £3,000 ~ 4,000. Each at the time and almost everyone was up for sale, 58 out of 60 I heard. Double glazing was offered, the job was completed and the places quadrupled in price in something like 18 months. The last time I checked they had continued ever upwards. A major sewage scheme blighted another area of ‘reasonable’ houses. They halved in price, only to bounce back and beyond a year or two later when all was done and dusted – especially the dusted bit! Both were safe bets and probably a faster payback than many. Foolishly or did I hold the moral high ground by holding back ? I had at least a few doubts subsequently.
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