BigMouth

Re Wheelsup comment!
That price is understandable when you consider the salaries that CEOs of charities seem to consider
perfectly reasonable.
Apparently the CEO of the Cats Protection League commands a salary of around £140,000 a year. The
SSPCA around £180,000 a year, I could go on.
Charities have lost their way, some without a doubt are a racket.
I would suggest puppies coming from Romania, rescue dogs from Spain, are all part of the same.
Needs to be stopped, and let's make a start here.

Your approaching a zebra crossing, of course you should anticipate people crossing!! No matter day or night, good light or bad!

It’s only unsafe if you’re not paying attention, they even put nice big bumps to warn you that it’s there.

The problem is that the government can change the rules at any time, so the populace can't really plan into the long term. As far as I am concerned we had a contract that allowed me to retire at 65. The government has reneged on that so now I have to work longer. There are less young people paying into the pot. The reason that there are less young people is because a great number of my generation put off having a family to get on the first rung of the property ladder. If they had children, they had them later.
 
A house buying public is great for a government. Tax revenues increase through the purchase of the house, improvements, furnishing etc. It also keeps the population in debt, and therefore productive, creating more revenues through taxation of income and expenditure. When those with houses find themselves with spare cash they invest in more houses, usually to rent out at high rents. Those renting them are in an odd position of being able to afford to pay someone else’s mortgage, but can't get one of their own. They probably work in low paid or minimum wage jobs, finding themselves with little disposable income, and due to their low wage, little going into a pension. Their long term outlook is bleak. They may never retire. Those of us close to retirement either need to count ourselves lucky, or stop the government peeing so much money up the wall on vanity projects such as HS2, garden bridges, nuclear deterrence, etc., and also outrageous costs such as Westminster. We need MPs to sort out the tax laws to stop the wealthy undermining the country by off-shoring their wealth, especially when the homeless die on the streets of Westminster under the noses of our politicians, who drink subsidised alcohol in their bars at work, with their highly subsidised meals.

The problem is that the government can change the rules at any time, so the populace can't really plan into the long term. As far as I am concerned we had a contract that allowed me to retire at 65. The government has reneged on that so now I have to work longer. There are less young people paying into the pot. The reason that there are less young people is because a great number of my generation put off having a family to get on the first rung of the property ladder. If they had children, they had them later.
 
A house buying public is great for a government. Tax revenues increase through the purchase of the house, improvements, furnishing etc. It also keeps the population in debt, and therefore productive, creating more revenues through taxation of income and expenditure. When those with houses find themselves with spare cash they invest in more houses, usually to rent out at high rents. Those renting them are in an odd position of being able to afford to pay someone else’s mortgage, but can't get one of their own. They probably work in low paid or minimum wage jobs, finding themselves with little disposable income, and due to their low wage, little going into a pension. Their long term outlook is bleak. They may never retire. Those of us close to retirement either need to count ourselves lucky, or stop the government peeing so much money up the wall on vanity projects such as HS2, garden bridges, nuclear deterrence, etc., and also outrageous costs such as Westminster. We need MPs to sort out the tax laws to stop the wealthy undermining the country by off-shoring their wealth, especially when the homeless die on the streets of Westminster under the noses of our politicians, who drink subsidised alcohol in their bars at work, with their highly subsidised meals.

The problem is that the government can change the rules at any time, so the populace can't really plan into the long term. As far as I am concerned we had a contract that allowed me to retire at 65. The government has reneged on that so now I have to work longer. There are less young people paying into the pot. The reason that there are less young people is because a great number of my generation put off having a family to get on the first rung of the property ladder. If they had children, they had them later.
 
A house buying public is great for a government. Tax revenues increase through the purchase of the house, improvements, furnishing etc. It also keeps the population in debt, and therefore productive, creating more revenues through taxation of income and expenditure. When those with houses find themselves with spare cash they invest in more houses, usually to rent out at high rents. Those renting them are in an odd position of being able to afford to pay someone else’s mortgage, but can't get one of their own. They probably work in low paid or minimum wage jobs, finding themselves with little disposable income, and due to their low wage, little going into a pension. Their long term outlook is bleak. They may never retire. Those of us close to retirement either need to count ourselves lucky, or stop the government peeing so much money up the wall on vanity projects such as HS2, garden bridges, nuclear deterrence, etc., and also outrageous costs such as Westminster. We need MPs to sort out the tax laws to stop the wealthy undermining the country by off-shoring their wealth, especially when the homeless die on the streets of Westminster under the noses of our politicians, who drink subsidised alcohol in their bars at work, with their highly subsidised meals.

Ower the past few posts, aabody is right in dir own wye!
 
I tink it's important for folk to understand dat how much pension dey get, and when dey'll start getting it, is based on da governments ability to pay rather than a direct link to how much folk hiv paid into da pot.
 
I ken some folk dat think their pension is kinda lik a personal savings account and dunna really understand dat it's more lik a massive joint account!
 
Workin folk pay into da joint account, and older folk tak oot o it. As da UKs population average is gettin older, dir's simplly less workin folk to pay for dem.

State pensions are paid for by those in work.  We have some very wealthy pensioners getting state pension.  Perhaps the time has come to pay higher pensions to those that need it and none, or a reduced sum, to those that don't?

Ah! Data from the BBC. Must be true then. No paedophiles at all, cough cough.
 
Women have many advantages, some due to their sex, but many by the choices they make, stay at home and look after the kids or work in a nice warm office mostly. I am a great believer in equality and would like to see more women out there on building sites etc. I think women are on the whole great, but I hate the growing bunch of whingeing feminists who want equality, but only the nice bits, such as retiring 5 years before men.

It's nearer to 2.7 years axtra for women according to the confidence intervals in the NRS data for Shetland.  Lets just round it up to a neat 3 years and ask women to retire 3 years later.  Those years could be reduced by doing some of the nastier work men do, like freezing their gonads off whilst working to build the new Hjaltland flats opposite Islesburgh.  Not a woman in sight.  Cesspit driver and sludge pumper, essy cart crew, roadie teams, street sweeper, pelagic boat crew, lifeboat crew?

Magno - superb range of ice creams - including parma violet!

As I approached the checkout at the local shop I felt guilty clasping only a box of six eggs in my hand.  The “support your local shop” mantra was going through my head so I picked up a Shetland Times, paid for my shopping and left for the walk home.  At least the faithful shopkeeper would eat tonight.

On arriving home I couldn’t help but notice how thin the Shetland Times has become, 32 pages, barely a thick pamphlet.  I bought the last about ten years ago in a moment of abject boredom.  This edition, a round up of the year’s news, this time over two issues, that old scam of the TV, radio and print media at the years’ end.  So much easier than getting out there and doing something.  Recycling of old stories is de-rigeur.  Back in the last century, across the UK, recycling in the newspaper industry used to be done by passing the unsold newspapers to the local fish and chip shops for wrapping material.

In the noughties I worked for Johnston Press, the then fourth largest producer of local newspapers, which was busily trying to buy up all the local titles.  They would then close down the local offices and report from places no longer considered local by the readership, items written by reporters with no local connection, to feed their presses 24 hours a day.  I remember staff being offered the option to buy shares in the company, “to buy into our futures”.  I was unimpressed by the offer.  I could see the newspaper trying to get it’s material online, but the boat was already sailing away.  The local mindset was “who would want to advertise their local cheese shop/furniture shop/cafe/whatever on the world wide web?”  In those days smart phones weren’t a thing, and your web browser had no idea where in the world you were.

To be called a newspaper there had to be at least a certain ratio of news to advertising.  You couldn’t get away with a couple of sheets of editorial and fill the rest with adverts.  A newspaper makes its money from advertising.  The reporters and sub-editors will try to tell you that people buy a newspaper for news, but the management know that what keeps the money coming in are those column centimetres of advertising whether they be run of paper or classified ads.  The news is mostly incidental to the business model.

Advertising in newspapers was never cheap, but newspapers executives were always looking for ways to screw a little more money out of the hapless customer, who had few places to go in those days.  They took to increasing the number of columns per page, thus reducing the width of the columns, to increase advertising revenue as ad space was sold by the column centimetre.

Worthing is at the opposite end of the country to us in Shetland.  A seaside town, somewhat run-down as a great deal of the south coast is.  Estate agents there were paying the local newspapers so much to advertise their properties for sale each week that they decided a better solution would be to create their own free “newspaper”.  It was a great success, targeted at a specific market, in an area where property was relatively cheaper than surrounding towns, and the paper given away free.

Johnston Press was recently in the news having gone into liquidation, then rescued by the shareholders.  Are they a company manned by people who are trying to hold back the tide of instant, mostly free news?  Bloggers can do the job better, publicising events to a wider world at the speed of light, capturing images, getting the news out there.  Many of them are doing this for free.  There has never been a worse time to be a paid journalist.

The local newspaper is full of week old news.  There are less shoppers in Da Street because people shop online; technology has moved on, and with it the shopping and news-reading experience.  I get the distinct feeling that there are now less people reading the local newspaper as they are getting their news fix online, with an immediacy that print media can’t match.  The Shetland Times adds bulk to its newspaper by advertising it’s printing services, busy book shop, and in this edition an almost quarter page ad for a reporter and trainee journalist.  It wasn’t that many years ago that newspapers would proudly publish their independently audited circulation figures n every copy they printed.  There is certainly no sign of them in the local newspaper these days.

 Take it from me, local reporting is a soul-destroying task, “being prepared to ask the questions that our readers deserve the answers to”, mostly boils down to ringing the local police stations every morning to ask for information about their incident logs, attending the local courts, attending local council meetings and writing stories about drink driving, wife beating, drugs and petty vandalism, and hoping that one of the local government organisations puts a foot wrong.  There are only 23,000 of us here and that equates to not a lot of news.

The Shetland Times has been around since the 1870s according to its masthead.  It tries to act like a big player with tough-nosed reporters sniffing out the latest hot scoop, but it’s glory days are behind it.  Most of its classified advertising can now be found on Shetlink and Facebook with a thriving sales scene.  Even the newspaper’s attempt at giving away free classified ads could not save its ad revenues.  There was never any real competition here in Shetland before Shetlink and Facebook, and the paper rested on its laurels.  These days it’s dwindling on life support.  Does it need to have DNR painted on the Gremista building? - Do Not Resuscitate.
 

As I approached the checkout at the local shop I felt guilty clasping only a box of six eggs in my hand.  The “support your local shop” mantra was going through my head so I picked up a Shetland Times, paid for my shopping and left for the walk home.  At least the faithful shopkeeper would eat tonight.

On arriving home I couldn’t help but notice how thin the Shetland Times has become, 32 pages, barely a thick pamphlet.  I bought the last about ten years ago in a moment of abject boredom.  This edition, a round up of the year’s news, this time over two issues, that old scam of the TV, radio and print media at the years’ end.  So much easier than getting out there and doing something.  Recycling of old stories is de-rigeur.  Back in the last century, across the UK, recycling in the newspaper industry used to be done by passing the unsold newspapers to the local fish and chip shops for wrapping material.

In the noughties I worked for Johnston Press, the then fourth largest producer of local newspapers, which was busily trying to buy up all the local titles.  They would then close down the local offices and report from places no longer considered local by the readership, items written by reporters with no local connection, to feed their presses 24 hours a day.  I remember staff being offered the option to buy shares in the company, “to buy into our futures”.  I was unimpressed by the offer.  I could see the newspaper trying to get it’s material online, but the boat was already sailing away.  The local mindset was “who would want to advertise their local cheese shop/furniture shop/cafe/whatever on the world wide web?”  In those days smart phones weren’t a thing, and your web browser had no idea where in the world you were.

To be called a newspaper there had to be at least a certain ratio of news to advertising.  You couldn’t get away with a couple of sheets of editorial and fill the rest with adverts.  A newspaper makes its money from advertising.  The reporters and sub-editors will try to tell you that people buy a newspaper for news, but the management know that what keeps the money coming in are those column centimetres of advertising whether they be run of paper or classified ads.  The news is mostly incidental to the business model.

Advertising in newspapers was never cheap, but newspapers executives were always looking for ways to screw a little more money out of the hapless customer, who had few places to go in those days.  They took to increasing the number of columns per page, thus reducing the width of the columns, to increase advertising revenue as ad space was sold by the column centimetre.

Worthing is at the opposite end of the country to us in Shetland.  A seaside town, somewhat run-down as a great deal of the south coast is.  Estate agents there were paying the local newspapers so much to advertise their properties for sale each week that they decided a better solution would be to create their own free “newspaper”.  It was a great success, targeted at a specific market, in an area where property was relatively cheaper than surrounding towns, and the paper given away free.

Johnston Press was recently in the news having gone into liquidation, then rescued by the shareholders.  Are they a company manned by people who are trying to hold back the tide of instant, mostly free news?  Bloggers can do the job better, publicising events to a wider world at the speed of light, capturing images, getting the news out there.  Many of them are doing this for free.  There has never been a worse time to be a paid journalist.

The local newspaper is full of week old news.  There are less shoppers in Da Street because people shop online; technology has moved on, and with it the shopping and news-reading experience.  I get the distinct feeling that there are now less people reading the local newspaper as they are getting their news fix online, with an immediacy that print media can’t match.  The Shetland Times adds bulk to its newspaper by advertising it’s printing services, busy book shop, and in this edition an almost quarter page ad for a reporter and trainee journalist.  It wasn’t that many years ago that newspapers would proudly publish their independently audited circulation figures n every copy they printed.  There is certainly no sign of them in the local newspaper these days.

 Take it from me, local reporting is a soul-destroying task, “being prepared to ask the questions that our readers deserve the answers to”, mostly boils down to ringing the local police stations every morning to ask for information about their incident logs, attending the local courts, attending local council meetings and writing stories about drink driving, wife beating, drugs and petty vandalism, and hoping that one of the local government organisations puts a foot wrong.  There are only 23,000 of us here and that equates to not a lot of news.

The Shetland Times has been around since the 1870s according to its masthead.  It tries to act like a big player with tough-nosed reporters sniffing out the latest hot scoop, but it’s glory days are behind it.  Most of its classified advertising can now be found on Shetlink and Facebook with a thriving sales scene.  Even the newspaper’s attempt at giving away free classified ads could not save its ad revenues.  There was never any real competition here in Shetland before Shetlink and Facebook, and the paper rested on its laurels.  These days it’s dwindling on life support.  Does it need to have DNR painted on the Gremista building? - Do Not Resuscitate.
 

Not more laws!  Cyclists are the ultimate losers in crashes.  They're not surrounded by a ton of metal, so they will ride more defensively.  You will always get bad cyclists, the same as you will get bad drivers.  The last thing that we need is to be discouraging healthy exercise for the sake of minor inconvenience to car drivers.  Car drivers can always get the bus, then it will be someone else's problem.  Alternatively they can campaign for better cycling infrastructure, which improves life for everyone.

Christ almighty, we’re speaking about Shetland here, not some major road somewye sooth.
 
We have excellent roads and they’re hardly overrun at any time of the day with either vehicles or cyclists. If the two can’t coexist on the roads here there’s little hope of them coexisting anywhere else.
 
Surely all that’s needed is a bit of mutual respect on both sides?

Another cyclist here.  I would echo that the cyclist has the same rights as anyone else to be on the road, but having said that I will pull in where it's safe and convenient to let people pass when they need to.  Having been a truck and bus driver in the past I know how difficult it is to get past cyclists as you are bearing in mind their safety as well as that of oncoming traffic.  On the whole though I would say that the Shetland drivers are extremely respectful of cyclists, giving them an extremely wide pass.  A couple of knobbers, one in a Berlingo passed within reaching distance 3 times in 18 months, and another in a black Volvo X70 did the same, but only twice.  They are the exception though.
 
Of the car and cycle though, one costs you money and makes you fat, whilst the other saves you money and keeps you fit.
 
If I remember correctly, it has been illegal to cycle on the pavements since the 1830s.

I have found religion in general quite a bizarre phenomenon since I was a bairn. I have never seen any mystery in the questions others seem to turn to religion for (as Ghostrider mentioned) - we are here because of something our folks did, the purpose of life is to live and die, and when we die that's it. Dead. All completely obvious and indisputable.
 
 
What I do find disturbing is the way that certain religious aspects are still allowed in todays society. The legal system is one, and the other, which I expect may raise some discussion, is the imposition of religious beliefs upon children. I really resent the fact I have been brainwashed into being able to recite the lords prayer, yet I am aware I got off lucky by many standards.

Streamline deliver amazon pantry boxes. Contact the office and you can arrange for driver to leave parcel in an agreed place.

There are those on Da Street who were running what was little more than a cartel. Most of what I want is not available, “but we can get it for you sir”. That may have worked in the old days, but it doesn’t work now. Times have changed, I can get a it myself, more quickly and for less.
 
In all my years, many years ago, of serving the retail trade, I never met a poor shopkeeper, neither did I meet one that wasn't grumpy. The only cheerful ones were the antiques dealers.
 
We buy old junk and sell fine antiques. I don't know if that sign ever really existed, but it summed up the trade.

http://www.cuttingyourcaruse.co.uk/carbust37a.htm
 
This says much the same as all the others, but interesting nonetheless.
 
The street is improving with the number of eateries in close proximity. If one is full one moves onto the next. Shops such as Conochies, selling a wide range will be there for many years yet, although I imagine they will have seen a dwindling of sales over the years in magazines and newspapers, the latter because you can get your news instantly online, the former because you can get a subscription delivered to your door usually somewhere around half the price. For the recyclers there is the charity and junk shop sector. We have pharmacies and home wares stores, crafts and sport are catered for, no shortage of hair cutting establishments, once we discount the banks then the majority of the rest appeals to the tourists.

No, it will improve the environment for the shoppers. It can't happen soon enough.

Yes. Ban vehicles and pedestrians will feel safer, will visit the street more, will be more relaxed in a better environment, and will spend more. Wherever retail streets are pedestrianised in the UK the outcome is always the same, more money in the tills. The shopkeepers always moan before though, and hold their hands out for compensation.

No, it will improve the environment for the shoppers. It can't happen soon enough.

For those from abroad, (and possibly me), I have no idea what a chocolatey tarmac swirl on the road actually means.

I think on the whole da street has improved a lot this year with a few new places opening up. The chocolate shop is moving into where the chemist was at the cross and there is supposed to be a barber opening up in the place where the chocolate shop was. Some shops have also had a revamp, so things seem to be looking up. Hopefully it will attract more folk to da street on a more regular basis. Us shop keepers are trying and will welcome you.