My Manifesto

After another day of being annoyed by idiot politicians I thought I'd set out my own manifesto.....

Make voting compulsory
Ban Postal Votes
Set MP's wages at twice the national average wage. Ministers get 3 times. If they think they can do better elsewhere then so be it. Couldn't do much worse.
Similarly cap Civil Servants and senior council empoyees wages.
Prospective MP's must have held non political paid employment before being eligible to stand. i.e. no career politicians.
Remove all perks for MPs and require invoices for all expense claims.
Make all government employees pensions based on contributions effective immediately.
Make all government employees retirement age in line with the rest of the population.
Renationalisation of essential services i.e. Power and Water.
Renationalisation of the railways.
Make the Office of National Statistics independent.
Reintroduce the 11 Plus. Discard all other testing other than the equivalent of O and A Levels. Project work is not to be counted towards exam results.
Flat Car Tax.
Car Insurance must be displayed in vehicle.
Road and Fuel Tax to be spent on roads.
Parking charges capped at the cost of provision.
Remove all speed bumps and traffic calming other than outside schools. Presumption is to be based on the free flow of traffic.
Remove all speed cameras other than outside schools or proven blackspots.
Speed cameras must be visible and have speed limit displayed on the rear of the camera and painted on the road.
Scrap Road Pricing.
Restrict Mortgage lending to proven multiple of earnings.
Abolish inheritance tax.
All outsourcing of NHS services, particularly cleaning, to be abolished. NHS managers to be criminally responsible.
Bins to be emptied weekly.
All Political funding to be transparent. Obvious scams such as Loans to be a criminal offence.
Chief Constables to be elected.
Require return of local police stations and beat officers.
Council Cabinets to be abolished.
No re-evaluation of Council tax.
Council Tax frozen.
Loan Interest rates to be capped. Usurious rates to be legally unenforceable.
Scrap ID card Project.
Government IT projects to be scrutinised by independant review body (not appointed by the goverment)
Reinstate the Lords
Remove the hunting ban.
Automatic assumption of guilt for any intruder in your property. Onus on criminal to prove otherwise.
Postpone any decision on Trident for as long as possible
No increase in TV license for 5 years.
Scrap turn off of Analogue TV signal.
Restore Capital punishment for Treason.
Try Blair as a war criminal.
Withdraw all troops from the Middle East.
All taxation to be transparent and not for social engineering.
Start building nuclear reactors now. We already have the cost of disposing of the waste and a bit more isn't going to make any difference.
Single parenting to be discouraged as a life style option but supported for those that need it.
Make unemployment benefit actually worth something to the real workers.
Apply common sense to all policies.
And for those that say how are you going to pay for this the answer should be "honestly". No stealth taxes, no huge waste, just common sense and an explanation of what the taxes are being used for. If it can't be afforded if can't be done or the tax required and what it will be spent on should be clearly laid out, not just throwing money at a problem.



I'm sure I'll think of some more....

How to tell if Gordon Brown is putting up taxes?

His lips are moving.

There should be some new signs at ports of entry to the UK. These could simply be "Welcome to Tesco Land" and "Give us all your money"

Despite an apparently booming economy you're pretty much stuffed in England unless you work for the government, big co, are a builder or don't work at all. If you have an ordinary job, or are retired (and weren't a state employee)the bit of money you have got left after paying all the bills is on a drastic diet only supported by immense debt and the false illusion of security if you have owned your house for a few years.

And it's not going to get any better.

Dear old Gordy has stoked up the bonfire of state wages and pensions to the point that it would take the bubonic plague to extinguish it. Or I suppose we could conscript civil servants and send them to the Middle East....

If you dare, just jot down the amount of money you have to find every month to pay the bills you don't have any realistic choice about. Notice how the standing charges are so high that even if you never use the phone you still have to hand over a large wodge. Got a TV, give us some more money. Live somewhere? Pay your Council Tax. What, you expect us to actually empty your bin? Got a car? Boy are you in trouble.

NHS? Want a dentist? Not a chance. But we do have the highest paid doctors in Europe. Just don't expect to see them after dark and be prepared to camp out on the telephone line at 0830 to get an appointment.

Sadly Gordon's bill will need to be paid, but it won't be by him. As with every preceeding Labour goverment we will have years of penury paying off the debt and then just when things are looking Ok again the idiot voters will put labour back in power again.

Adsense Revisited

I guess a lifetime in the computer industry possibly tends to make one a little too cynical and my previous post regarding Adsense was probably too broad a canvas. I have no problem with Adwords and Adsense. The technology works well and I just wish the UK Government would contract Google or Ebay to computerise the Health Service.

What I was alluding to were the myriad of "marketeers" who are essentially promoting pyramid selling deals that are extremely unlikely to make any money except for those at the top of the pile. (Pyramid selling is illegal in the UK)

They are all based on getting lots of traffic to a web site, signing up lots of punters and then selling them a system to do the same thing. My concern is that people should understand that this what is what is being sold by the marketeers and just how difficult it is to drive traffic to a web site.

I can see that if you have a "real" web site that Adsense is a genuinely useful way of generating revenue and obviously works to a large extent or the big web sites with huge readerships wouldn't carry adverts. In that respect it's the same as the conventional media such as newspapers and magazines or TV where advertising makes up a large part of the revenue.

The key here is having a useful product that carries advertising, not trying to do it the other way around which is what most of the get rich quick schemes are proposing.

It's also interesting that it is against Google Terms and Conditions to disclose how many clicks you get on Adsense but it's OK to say how much you get paid.

Adsense, Nonsense

After extensive and expensive research I can exclusively reveal the secrets of Adsense.

The secret is it makes Google a lot of money.

That's it.

It also seems to make some "internet marketeers" a fair wodge but after carefully reviewing their proposals it all comes down to getting people to click on adverts on your web page. Your chances of getting people to your web page in the first place are small to the point of non existence and the chances of a click on the ads once they get there even less so.

If you want to make some money go and get a job. Just don't build your hopes on the Internet and all those Get Rich Quick schemes. They don't work except of course for the authors.

Now I'm not saying that it doesn't work. Adwords, where you pay for keywords, are effective (ish). The secret is that you must appear at the top of the page or it's a complete waste of time. It's just another form of advertising and costs us around £40 per week. From this we might get a couple of sales per month.

As for Adsense, the number of clicks we get is pathetic. We have tried running ads for potentially useful information but it wouldn't pay for a pint.

I'm sure some people get lucky, but you probably won't be one of them.

What's more difficult than getting Pandas to conceive?

Unsubscribing from their mailing list is the answer to the question in the title.

Like the male panda I have tried and tried to achieve a successful liasion with Panda although in my case it was probably the very opposite of what the male panda was trying to achieve.

Telling them to f*** off appears to be impossible. I've clicked a multitude of times on the unsubscribe link but this is obviously a complete waste of time.

The Panda needs to understand that no means no as the female panda seems to have successfully conveyed to the male of the species.

Even if it does mean extinction.

The end of the world is nigh

I've just been for a walk in the glorious spring sunshine with the slightly cantakerous dog.

About half way round I was struck by the thought that things seem to be coming horribly unstuck on so many levels. TV ultimately brought down the russian empire because the serfs (sorry citizens) could see that the rest of the world wasn't completely grey but I think attitude will bring down the western empire (and probably already has - the chicken keeps running for a while after you chop of its head).

I'm 49 now and the work ethic (fear) was built into my upbringing. It's not there anymore. The world is full of BFT's (Big Fat Tarts) with an attitude problem. Don't even think about complaining because they don't have to sit and listen to that.

Every public "service" that you can think of is primarly concerned with its own welfare and survival (i.e. wages and pensions) and the ordinary punter is just going to have to keep paying for it. You might be an OAP with no pension becuase Brown swiped it but rest assured the public sector employees (also known as labour voters) will live very comfortably for the rest of their largely stress free lives. I know they think they are stressed but it is fundamentally impossible to get fired from a public sector job and money, or lack of it, is the main cause of real stress.

Big private companies have largely the same attitude. They have milions of customers and really don't care. The only possible way of dealing with them is to get them bad press when suddenly the attitude will change (at least while anybody is watching)

The underclass don't care because there isn't a cat in hells chance of their benefits being cut. The latest wheeze is to make single mothers get a job once their child is 12. All that will happen is that they will have another one when their offspring reaches 11 years and 3 months of age. and anyway what jobs are available to these people anyway in our so called knowledge economy where every job needs a degree because everyone has got one.

The goverment don't give a stuff. Huge pay packets, stupendous pensions and full of career politicians who have never had a real job. Here's a tip - a checklist or target doesn't make things happen, at least not what you expected. The idiot beauracrats which just manipulate the system to hit the target.

Computer companies like Microsoft and Sage either don't care, are incompetent or cynically manipulating the system (or possibly a combination of all three). The net result for the end user is the same either way.

It's a remarkable coincidence that my XP box has just started to play up like the good old pre Win2k days. I'm sure that is nothing whatever to do with a new OS being available but the only reason anybody upgraded in the past was in the vague hope that you might get something that worked. Once it works why would I want a new one?

As for Sage, I supect that they come under the incompetent category, combined with extreme avarice. I'm not surprised all the original founders have long since run away. They could probably see the writing on the wall.

The west is morally bankrupt and pretty soon will be in a financial sense as well. Better learn Chinese real fast.

And another thing

I seem to have been doing a lot of complaining lately but that's probably because I've been trying to get some work done.

When I was slightly less wise I was stupid enough to develop a couple of applications using Access. But developing things is not so much of a career as a sentence and my once happily working Access database was presumably missing me and decided to throw random errors on just one customer machine.

Anyway, 3 weeks later and more diagnostic code than you can shake several sticks at I tracked it down (cornered it more like) to a Timer event than runs every two hours. Once the event has run, subsequent code fails on a random basis on a subform with Error 91. And just to make life interesting you could only trap the error with a form level error handler.

As we can't reproduce the error, I thought I would try and fool it and rewrote the timer event so it was doing more or less the same thing but in a different way. Unfortunately we now get the same error but also in a slightly different way.

Along the way I discovered some other interesting foilbles like trying to a access a control on a subform when the parent form is minimised doesn't work no matter what syntax you use. Error 2455 in case you are interested.

Searching the internet showed an interesting catalogue of Access woes but predictably I seemed to have scored another world first. (funny how often that happens).

So the upshot is we have turned off the timer for that machine, end of problem, except of course several weeks of time spent trying to fix the problem which we won't be getting paid for.

VB6 sir, that'll do nicely.