I think raging is a little OTT. It offends me that people with such wealth are bitching and moaning that someone suggested, suggested, that they probably don't need it and in times like this, is there really a need to pay them such absurd salaries? And, for what it's worth, I really don't see why anyone needs a billion of any currency that has a similar state to dollar/pound/euro. The fact that the majority of the global wealth is held by such a small number of people irks me too. It's off topic, but IMO tax laws around the world need adjusting to make tax havens a thing of the past, and make it significantly harder for people to game the system in such a way that they end up with such absurd piles of wealth. Who, honestly, believes that a place of residence registered under a shell corporation isn't owned by the tax-dodging gimp that lives in it..
Tweet— Twitter API (@user) date Looks like every country has officials saying what to do and then not doing it themselves. NZ not immune to it either.
Simplify the tax system and there are fewer games to play. The special tax help for one sector one year becomes a tax shelter the next. Here they need to merge Income tax and NI and simplify the treatment of dividends and so on.
I don't. Capitalism is meant to be a system of wealth distribution. Instead it is a system of wealth accumulation due to corrupt governments around the world. If this pandemic, and collapsing economy, teaches the world anything I hope it's that the billionaires didn't make their billions, we did.
You do realise there are footballers playing in things beyond the Premier League, right? EDIT: Appears I had misinterpreted the original argument, and the 'proposed' 30% cut only applied to Premier League. Although worth nothing that they were airing similar grievances about why it's only applied to footballers and not bankers.
Um, nope. You can make money by selling stuff people want to buy, as I do, or as some that are billionaires have done. You can also get money by stealing it as some do and as some billionaires have done. This is as true before the coronavirus as after.
Guys, I'm having a real problem dealing with the general public. I try not to the of other people as 'the unwashed masses', but seeing 'them' in action just beggars belief. I get to Tescos today at just after 8AM - the line into the shop is already about ~200m long (so that translates as 100 people, right?) but people being brilliant, rather than the queue following the wall, a couple of bright sparks have queued across a road, meaning that the queue is now along a road rather than a nice, convenient path. Fortunately traffic is light in these times, so no issue. I spend ~15 minutes queuing. Five minutes in, some bigoted older woman starts shouting at someone behind her for getting too close - from what I can see, the person behind her hasn't actually breached the 2m distance, which is marked by tape on the floor. Unsurprisingly, the person has told this woman to '**** off'. This woman then makes a big song and dance and call over security, who have to calm her down. She claims she's been on a night shift and doesn't expect to be spoken like that. Later on, the same braindead woman is marching right by people, ignoring the one way system Tescos are trying to enforce, but never mind, we'll get to that later. Of course, you get to the entrance at last, where the security staff are on the door, meaning they effectively come into contact with EVERYONE. I appreciate that they are there to keep things calm (like with the aforementioned bint) but surely there's got to be a better solution? Anyway, into the store! I follow the one way system, sometimes waiting patiently if someone's in front of me so they can make their selection and move on - of course, most people seem to be in a world of their own and oblivious to the need to be prompt about things. On top of this, people pretty much brush by me, not seeming to understand why I'm waiting. Not to mention that nobody seems to pay a blind bit of notice to the ****ING OBVIOUS ONE WAY SYSTEM ARROWS ON THE ****ING FLOOR THAT THEY ARE TOLD TO FOLLOW BY PEOPLE AT THE ****ING ENTRANCE. So, I gather the shopping I need, carrying around my own bags; no trolley for me as I'm trying to keep the surfaces I touch to a minimum. Time to go to the till. I opt to go to the self service as there's no one using them, plus I feel sorry for the people serving on the tills. Since no one's using the self serve tills, I go to the end one, so if anyone else comes along, I might finish first and they won't have to walk by me. A Tescos employee (an older, died blond hair lady who clearly likes to try to try to throw her authority about) tells me to use the one at the start - meaning everyone else now has to walk by me - which some do. Brilliant. As I'm doing my thing at the till, a chap who looks like a manual worker who is yet to face a day's hard work is trying to buy some breakfast but has more than three of these tiny little cereal bar things (and that's all he's buying). The aforementioned bossy attendant comes over and starts having a go at him - the guy asks for the manager to be called over. All this is happening in the path of my exit, so I patiently wait - then the guy's wife (?) walks right by me to stand by him. I give up and walk by, probably at about 1.5m distance. By the way, the manager let the chap have his cereal bars. What annoys me is despite trying to 'not judge a book by its cover', you can actually tell who's going to be an idiot pretty much by looking at them. This is only enforced by mannerisms. The woman I mentioned early on, the one who caused a commotion in the queue? One look at her and you could tell exactly what sort of person she was. All of this, and what really winds me up is that it's not me who has to be careful about contracting it - it's other people who may catch it off me if I have it. I'll be fine - the poor of health not so much. And despite my best efforts, people still get too close. It's really hard for me not to start flipping out and shouting at people to stay the **** away from me. I'm starting to think this is a plague come for us all that humanity brought it upon itself by tolerating the stupid and rude. ----------------------------------------------------- Apologies if the above offends anyone, but damn it, people don't help the situation.
Um, yes. The richest person in the world is Jeff Bezos at $117Bn - Did he personally sell every item on Amazon? No, he paid workers a pittance to do it for him, and in return for that pitiful wage they made his billions for him; Not him. The only defence to that is "Ah, but that's just how it works!" which is simply an admission that the current system is based on exploitation. As a small business owner don't take it personally, we all have to find a way to survive within the system while the exponential wealth distribution curve would make even coronavirus jealous.
Bollocks! We have a few shops, we pay people to work in there. I have not forced any of them to take the job any more than we were forced to start the business. If they aren't happy they can and occasionally do leave. When we started the first few years we made less anually than the highest paid employee (who wasn't on a high wage herself). There is now way we got the minimum wage. For years.
I literally said don't take it personally, because I wasn't critiquing you personally, but the system in which we all lie somewhere on its gamut. You didn't force anyone to take the job to survive, the system did. No one encouraged you to start a business, the system did. The same system that allows top-end business owners to have personal wealth of hundreds of billions and at the lower end earning less than their employees. How did you confuse yourself with Jeff Bezos? Don't. Take. It. Personally. Have a snickers and calm down.
True but as you can only control what you do it's not worth getting annoyed at things you have no influence over.
Anyway, there's a pandemic still going on an those that need PPE still have not got it or have been given 'equipment' that is next to useless - From The Guardian:
I think you're missing the point here. You're not Jeff Bezos. You don't own a global online retail distribution network which makes obscene amounts of profit per minute through exploitation of your workforce. @VipersGratitude was not criticising you personally. As you have pointed out, the risks you have taken as a small business owner were your risks to choose. But where you miss the mark is that people don't often have a choice in the jobs they take, because it's either: take that shitty job working for an exploitative company or have your benefits sanctioned and plunge further into economic depravity. Everywhere has its rough areas, I'm sure even Cornwall does, but spend a few years working minimum wage zero hours jobs in a really economically deprived area - like Swansea and its surrounding areas, where there's a large Amazon warehouse - and your opinion will change. My mother is in her late fifties, can't drive (and at this point will probably never drive), and still has to work a cleaning job in a factory. They haven't shut down because the factory makes gluten-free food so they're classed as essential. She had pneumonia at the start of this year; that takes a while to properly get over under normal circumstances, but right now that puts her squarely in a high-risk category for COVID-19. She never learned to drive because my dad always drove everywhere, that's just how she was brought up. He died three years ago and she's never had the time or money to learn to drive - even if she did learn now, she probably couldn't afford to run a car. There is basically no work she can take where she lives, there is no low-paid unskilled work that doesn't already have hundreds of others applying. Moving somewhere else simply isn't an option - my father's life insurance paid the house off and she doesn't earn enough to take out a new mortgage to trade up. The only alternative left is spending hours on a bus every day to commute somewhere else; this isn't really an option because that's fine when you're in your twenties/thirties but it's an entirely different matter when you're 59 and have chronic asthma, arthritis, and are getting over a serious respiratory infection. Oh yeah and bus fares cost more than keeping a car full of fuel would cost. Many do not have a choice in the job they do. They work shitty jobs in shitty conditions because they have no choice; they put up with exploitation and lining the pockets of people like Jeff Bezos because the alternative is destitution.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52198946 David Icke. FFS. I mean freedom of expression is great but spreading rumours about 5G being the cause, and that the plan behind it is to use the cure to distribute nanotech microchips to control people. What the actual fuq is wrong with him?
Have you seem what our cousins across the pond are having to put up with, not to detract from what you're highlighting it's just i saw it on TV last night and had a jaw drop to the floor moment, a hospital in the Bronx's were using bin bags and ski goggles.
That's terrible, unfortunately it's happened here too Coronavirus: The NHS workers wearing bin bags as protection
