The shit that does merit its own thread

So about 7% of households then. Yay. Shame about the rest.

1 Like

Are you saying kids cost £500 a month (once floorspace, heating, lighting etc are covered) :grin: ?

Yep indeed, far too few people earn enough for a comfortable life. While it’s optimistic to expect everyone to be at that scale, I think that a substantial redistribution from rich to poor would really help - firstly it would help directly, but also it would greatly increase overall economic activity, which boosts the economy (and tax take, etc) further. Unfortunately our government does the opposite :frowning:

1 Like

I dunno, something like that. And I haven’t included the time cost of ferrying the fuckers around in that, for sure!

Workers in this country don’t get rich, you survive, even towards the upper end of salaries. Only way you get rich is through inherited wealth or your own business. Unfortunately I have neither.

1 Like

If riches and poverty are relative*, rather than absolute, then you’re right. We do badly on inequality (difference between rich and poor) and on social mobility.

Then again, to a large part of the world (I dunno - 60-70%, maybe more ?) ‘surviving’ at any level much above the absolute bottom in the UK looks better than what they’ve got now.

*They are relative - comparing poverty now with poverty in, say, late medieval Europe isn’t very helpful.

Slight edit

Actually, thinking about it, I can think of counter-examples. There are student friends of mine who went into finance in one form or another that I’d have to describe as objectively rich. Not super-rich, but rich all the same.

One, a better than average ‘quant’ in the banking sector, has retired to a million pound flat in The Barbican. He used to own a converted farmhouse in the south of France as well, but sold it as they weren’t visiting often enough to justify the maintenance fuss, and anyway he wanted to buy a boat.

Another spent a short time in the oil industry before getting into energy analysis, again for various banks. As a child he’d always admired a beautiful Georgian farmhouse close to his home town (somewhere in Essex, or maybe Suffolk ?). When he could afford it he approached the owners to ask if they’d be interested in selling it. They weren’t, the family having been there for a couple of hundred years or so. So he bought a plot of land somewhere that suited him slightly better and had a copy built.

Yet another became a corporate accountant for a company large enough that some of us, at least, might have heard of it (I had). He cashed in his stock options and retired before he was 40. When I asked him what he did with his time he said “Oh, some volunteering, and the house has got a bit of an orchard which I’m currently putting to rights”.

Some of the lawyers did decently well for themselves too. But to coin it in on the Geoffrey Cox scale you need to be working for yourself rather than for someone else.

lolz

2 Likes

Don’t tell investment bankers, partners in law or accountancy firms, university bigwigs, or executives in blue chip companies and so on.

Ann Gloag a bus company exec arrested for human trafficking??

That’s their job surely?

5 Likes

Ayethangyeeeeew.

1 Like

1400018167233

1 Like

“Give Lee-Enfields with live rounds to 15 year-olds” they said.

“It’ll be fun” they said.

1 Like

No hope for @Gyroscope

It would be worth getting up and throttling the moralising shyster, just to get him out the gene pool.

Loves me a bit of Satanic Panic do I :metal:

1 Like

Wonder how he feels about Holy Hip Hop?

Or Christian hair metal :laughing:

Lads, lads, what were you thinking?

1 Like

Taking the whole WASP thing far too literally.

1 Like