Making Money Online

I have always wanted to find a nice easy way to make money.

Now, even if I put $10,000 in the bank or even a pretty good mutual fund, I would not really have too much to show after 10 or 15 years. At least that is what I thought until I discovered the investment system being used by stocksmonthly.com

Their investment method is fairly simple and obvious, and they do all the work for you.

If they can perform as well over the next 15 years as they did over the last 15 years then I am not going to worry too much about my blog traffic.

Anger as NHS patient records lost

It has only been a few days since our last post about how incompetent our civil service really is.

However, the recent revelations regarding the loss of NHS data in England and Wales shows systemic failure is rife.

Senior civil servants and senior government ministers really do need to lose their jobs when the level of incompetence reaches such levels.

Remember the Prime Minister is in charge of the Civil Service. Either he needs to act, or he needs to go.

The depatment of administrative affairs, Jim Hacker, and Sir Humphrey whoever these real life mandarins are have truly lost the confidence of the public and Yes Prime Minister's Jim Hacker would appear to be more up for the job than the current incumbent.

W.H. Smith Generous to a fault - Offer Sucks!

Whilst shopping for christmas presents this year, I received a £5 voucher to spend at their sale between 26-Dec-2007 and 6-jan-2008.



I thought, that will be nice, I maybe use it to get a discount on some computer games or DVDs.

That is, until I read the small print on the back of the voucher.

"Offer excludes all CDs DVDs and Games, ie. XBOX 360, PSP, PS2, PS3, NDS, PC, GameCube, Xbox, GBA and Wii, and stamps , tobacco, gift vouchers, phone cards, e-gift cards, book tokens, Day Out Vouchers, Carity Products, iTunes, eTop-UP & National Lottery products. Cannot be used with any other promotional voucher or with customer orders. Only one voucher per transaction."

For those of you who live in the UK and know W.H. Smith, you will also know that after you exclude the above named products that there is not much left.

I think I will just use the voucher to wipe my @rse, and return it to the person who thought up the idea in the first place.

How the British Consumer is being Screwed

(If you are unable to see full image then click on the image.)


Today with the advent of the world wide enconomy and the internet, global companies manufacture and sell their wares all over the world. This christmas I had to shop for friends and relatives in both the United States and the UK. It is frighteneing how much more the British consumer has to pay in comparison to their American Cousins.

I have been careful to compare like for like. Normally UK prices include VAT but US prices exclude sales tax. For the sake of comparison I have deducted the horrendously high 17.5% VAT from the UK prices and compared them with the US (Excl Sales tax) Prices.

The worst offenders are large companies. Microsoft are charging, in some cases, 36% more for their software here in the UK than in the US. Of course, our governement cares nothing about the British comsumer, nor inflation apparently.

The UK £ / US $ exchange rate on 20-Dec-2007 was £1 = $2.032.

If you think that the current situation is fair then do nothing. Remember that we are paid on average aboput 10% less than our American cousins.

However, if you think this is unfair and unacceptable then write, call or email, television channels, newspapers, MP's and local councillors. Let's fight for fairness and let us stop subsidising the rest of the world.

Sources:

Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Cheap iPods
Microsoft
Jaguar

Is the British Civil Service Totally Incompetent?

John Reid, the former home secretary, has already told us that the Home Office is not fit for purpose.

Well the recent fiasco with HM Customs and Revenue losing vital data on nearly half the population of the country started us thinking.

Then we are told just a couple of weeks later that some moron in the Driver and Vehicle Driving Agency in Northern Ireland has lost data on 7,685 vehicles and 6,000 vehicle keepers.

Oh No! It’s not finished yet. Just as we are thinking that it cannot get any worse, we are told another disc containing details of 3 million learner drivers has gone missing. Even worse the data was stored in a foreign country. And to show what complete incompetents this government, their ministers and the civil service really are the latest episode we are told happened six months ago.

Now for sheer cheek and hypocrisy, the Government has fined Norwich Union £1.6M for losing the data of 74 people.

That works out at approximately £21,621 per person.So using the Government figures of 25Million from HM Revenue, and 3,013,685 from the DVLA, then the Data Protection registrar should be fining this Government £605,683,883,385.

No minister has lost his or her job, and apart from the HM Revenue guy who resigned, no civil servant has been fired. Everyone we speak to is running for cover, no one is taking responsibility, and it is fair to say that competence is not something we can have much expectation of from our public servants.

We, the public, pay the wages of these people. We pay good money and should reasonably expect workers who are honest and competent. Should we find that these two attributes are missing, then I’m afraid that there really is no place in public service for those lacking these attributes.

Does any member of the public really believe that no one has received a peerage or a Knighthood for donations to any of the major political parties?

No authority without responsibility should be the rule.

Every project, every policy would have a responsible person and if there is a screw-up then we will immediately know who to look to for the answers.

Lunatics running the asylum are bad enough but we really can’t have them running the country as well.

Free Online Wish List

Christmas gift shopping has been so much easier this year. I got the kids, my nephews and nieces all to create a christmas wish list at http://www.youcouldgetme.com/. When it came time to do my christmas shopping I visited each gift list and bought something that they really wanted this time.

I even tested it out for myself. My birthday is only two weeks before christmas, and I am at that sort of age when nobody knows what to buy me. So this year, about three weeks before my birthday I went on a virtual shopping spree.

I added gifts that I really wanted. Some expensive. Some very modestly priced - makes it easier for my kids to buy me something too :)

Give it a try...