Does It Pay To Be Honest?

Last week I managed to get some work which amounted to a couple of half-days of painting and decorating through a friends uncle. It was great, I loved it and managed to get a little bit extra cash which covered my bank charges. All's well that ends well one would think.

But no, being of benefits means that if I do any work, be it voluntary or paid, I have to declare it to the people in charge of such payments. So I did, thinking that honesty is the best policy.

Well, for a piddly couple of half days work I had to fill in three different forms, one of which was massively long, about fifteen pages. It took me about half an hour at the Job Centre to explain and fill in everything they wanted. Then I was informed that my benefits would be stopped and restarted, thus meaning that I would most likely not receive anything  to live on this week as all the forms had to be sent off to St.Austell to be processed. 

I actually forgot to ask, but I expect that any extra courses and suchlike I was entitled to after being out of work for over six months will now undoubtedly be no longer available to me.

So, here's the rub, after being honest and upfront about my situation, has it paid off? No, I'm in a worse position than ever, so what is the advantage of declaring any work whatsoever? None as far as I can see.

I was told that I was allowed to work up to 16 hours a week without any penalty, it was not explained that if I do, my benefits would be stopped and re-evaluated. I'm sure once the paperwork has been filed and sorted nothing will have really changed, but was it really necessary?  I could have kept my mouth shut and things would have just kept going as they were. No pain or stress for anyone and certainly no worry for me as to whether or not I will be able to buy food this week or not.

The problem as I see it is that there is no incentive for people on benefits to change their situation. I was penalised for actually doing some work! Rather than punish someone for getting off their arses to better their situation, wouldn't it be better to reward them?

It seems utterly daft to me.

The last time I stopped claiming a few years ago, all my benefits stopped on the day I started work, which meant I had to work nearly five weeks before a paycheque came in. This resulted in me being unable to pay my rent and all I had to live on was £120 for five weeks, most of which went on travelling expenses. 

Now as much as I would love to be able to do that again, I don't relish the thought of doing it. Living for a month on nothing more than bread and water does not do much for your health.

So where is my incentive to get off benefits? There isn't one.

What this government needs to do is extend the signing off period to cover the first month of work so that we can still have some kind of living allowance, it would be lovely for that first month of rent to be paid as well, but I think that would be pushing it. All of the people in my position will have bad debts to deal with once we finally get back into work, so I expect that I will not be able to get back on my feet for at least a year once I start work.  Without this help people don't have the incentive to get back into work. It's simply too expensive to.

However, as much as I piss and moan, my usual payment came into the bank this morning, so I'm very relieved. I was literally down to my last tin of tomatoes and some stale crackers. The worry of trying to eke out that tin of tomatoes for a few days was starting to thin my hairline.

On a good note this has meant that I have been able to clean my fridge and defrost my chest freezer, both being empty made it a good time to do so. So today I'm looking forward to going down to the supermarket to buy as much food as is humanly possible and I intend to stuff my face until I pass out.

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Throwing Money Away

This is getting a bit on my wick now. We in the UK are having to pay for the mess that the financial sector has put us in through terrible management, and now we're being thoroughly screwed by the new government as well.

Announced during the emergency budget a few weeks ago, International Aid was being ring-fenced along with the NHS for no cuts in spending. Whilst I agree that the NHS certainly needs the money, International Aid does not.

The fact is, the UK is paying £7.7 billion to foreign countries in the way of aid every year. To put this in perspective, there was an announcement today that our schools are now facing a building finance cut, which would have cost £6.5bn for this financial year.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather our tax money go to pay for our children's wellbeing and education rather than go to line the pockets of various dictators in Africa.

Also, if you are pro-European, then you are an arse! Britain is paying the equivalent of £40,000,000 a day to Europe. £40million a day!! What do we get in return from Europe? Bugger all, unless you count stupid laws that make no sense.

Surely someone in Westminster is taking the piss. 

We need to look after ourselves first, then if we have a few pence left over at the end of the year, then, and only then, should we consider helping other countries.

It really does not make any sense at all to me. As a nation we are borrowing money so we can give it away. How does that make sound financial sense?  I certainly wouldn't take a loan out so I could give the money to someone else and leave myself to pay the interest and repayments whilst they spend it on new cars and holidays! Utter madness!

It's going to get much worse in this country over the next couple of years, more jobs will be lost, more people will slide into poverty and yet a vast amount of money is leaving our shores for no discernible reason.

Surely our government can see this is wrong. Surely….

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On Commenting

I have noticed quite a few people coming over here to read from Twitter lately, thanks to you all, but due to some trolling I am unable to leave my comment door open as I still have to keep a tight hold on what is going on.

Unfortunately that means that if you want to leave a comment you have to sign up to Vox and your initial comment will be filed under the moderation system until I approve of you and give you access rights to some of the juicier posts.

I'm not going to extol the virtues of signing up, there aren't any, other than the kudos of being able to leave a comment and being able to see my private posts which are normally hidden away from the rest of the world, there isn't much more to tell. However, once you have taken the few minutes to sign up, that's it, life should be as easy as pie.

Obviously not many people like signing up to a myriad of sites, I'm pretty much that way, so I wont feel offended if you don't want to go through the rigmarole, besides, you can easily leave a small comment on Twitter anyway. 😀

I used to be a comment whore in times past, now I don't mind so much; the days of having hundreds of comments on my posts are long gone, thank god. I used to find that I spent half of my day reading comments rather than actually living my life or reading other blogs. Sure it was nice to be popular, but there is an extreme end to such things, you tend to attract a lot of arseholes as well as cool people, eventually ending up with various trolls who would rather leave insults instead of contributing to the thread of the post.

As readers of my previous blog at EFx2 well know, things got a little bit out of hand at times over there, so it's lovely to be able to keep things under control here. I certainly don't want to go back to the flaming arguments that raged with unbounded ferocity in the past.

It's also very nice to be able to control which Vox members are able to comment, even this community has its various nutters here and there.

So, there you go, a small explanation as to why things are the way they are. I do hope some of you will take the time to sign up, it's always lovely to get feedback from all you lovely people. 😀

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Where’s My Money!

I'm massively angry with my bank, they have seen fit to charge me £50 for going over my overdraft limit by 95p. I wouldn't mind so much if it was me actually drawing money out that I didn't have, but it was an interest debit that took me over the agreed limit.

I called them up literally begging them not to take the money, but because I don't have a huge amount of money going into my account they decided that they can't help me out this time, so I'm going to have to lump it.

Obviously I didn't take this lying down, I've whittled off a couple of emails to the bank demanding they use common sense, if nothing comes of this I will go to the financial ombudsman and file a complaint.

It might take months for me to get something done about it but I'm fed up to the back teeth of these massive banks being able to rub your face in the shit whenever they choose. 

By simply looking at my finances for the last month you could easily tell that I am really struggling to survive and by taking this £50 away for a piddly little oversight might not seem much to them but for me it means that I will not be able to eat next week.

Luckily for me I managed to get a days work, so I doubt I'll starve, but its the principle of the thing.

I'm sure banks were told to be more understanding when people like myself were in financial trouble, after all, they have been bailed out by the tax payers and now I seem to be paying a huge price for it.

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Football

Or as some heathens call it, soccer.

I pretty much hate football, the hatred runs so deep in my veins that I'd rather murder a small kitten than sit down to watch a game.

It wasn't always like this, as a kid I collected the Panini football stickers to swap with my mates at school, I played a bit, I was a reasonably effective goalie, I even started out supporting Liverpool F.C. before I realised they won everything, so I changed my allegiance to Man Utd as they had a cool looking devil on their badge and less people supported them in our school and I liked to be different.

So what happened? I found rugby.

But a preference of another sport shouldn't make my blood boil each time a match is on. Something much deeper in my psyche is driving my utter disregard for the sport.

I don't like the ignorance of the game, in that a huge proportion of the players would cheat to gain an advantage, diving in the penalty box is just an example. The players are a bunch of wankers, highly overpaid and arrogant to boot. They are meant to be role models for youngsters to look up to, but all we see is a bunch of cheating, self-important adulterers who would rather rape and pillage than be knights in shining armour. 

The supporters are another reason to hate football. Football supporters get violent. I'll admit that only a small proportion of supporters are this way and I'm tarring all with the same brush, but the few games I have been to had an air of menace about them, not the family atmosphere you get at a rugby match.

We've all seen the hooliganism associated with football, its sad and mar's the game. Usually fuelled by alcohol and led by gangs that each team seem to have.

I was once on the 'other' side of one of these gangs when a couple of busloads of the Hereford 'Firm' descended on my pub. No end of trouble ensued, a knife was taken off one of them, and it all ended up with the pub getting shut down for the day as about 60 police officers with an armed response unit and dog handlers moved them on. Not one of my better days.

Along with the support comes the chants, mostly hate related, 'Who's That Bastard in the Black' comes to mind, not really something I'd want my ten year old to hear on a Saturday afternoon, plus the drone of the chanting gets on my nerves, a football match has a certain noise about it that really grates my cheese.

For those of you complaining about the vuvuzelas at the World Cup, worry not, for me the drone makes the game sound much better.

What ever happened to good old singing? 

Now the World Cup is here we're getting a huge surge of patriotism from England. This annoys the hell out of me. I'm proudly Welsh 365 days a year, I don't need to wait four years to wave the Welsh flag, I do it anyway.

Ever since I moved to England I have found the English to be un-celebratory about their heritage, I don't know anyone who celebrates St.Georges Day, I doubt very much that most English people even know when it is.

It just stinks of bandwagon jumping to me. 

Some might argue that they don't flaunt the English flag because the BNP have taken it to the heart of their organisation, well who's fault is that? Take it back! Never be afraid of who you are or where you come from, celebrate it every day, not just at World Cup time!

So, so surmise, a greater writer than I once said that football is 'a gentleman's game played by brutes', no truer a statement said, I only wish they'd have added 'and supported ' in the sentence somewhere.

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UK Emergency Budget 2010

Earlier today Mr Osbourne, our new Chancellor of the Exchequer, provided what was arguably the most ball-busting budgets this country has seen in a generation. 

Many U-turns on election promises, but they're politicians, what did you expect? In fact I was surprised they didn't go a bit further with their cuts.

A few things will affect me, most notably the Housing Benefits cuts. I don't yet know if it will touch me at all as I'm at the very bottom end of the scale and from what I gathered it should only curtail people in large houses who will be capped to £400 a week in benefits as apposed to my £397 a month, so I doubt very much they can put mine any lower. If they do cut it even more, I really don't know what I'll do, I'm already paying out between £50 and £70 a month from my dole payments to cover my rent.

VAT rises to 20%. The good news is that school kids will find it easier to calculate the math, the bad news is that anyone wanting to buy anything will have to pay 2.5% more. Bit of a bummer if you want to buy a car or a new HDTV, quite alright if you are buying VAT exempt products like food. Other than alcohol purchases, I'm pretty much unaffected by this rise as over the last two years the largest thing I have bought was a toaster.

On the alcohol front, the duty rise on cider has been revoked, so the planned 10% rise in cider prices will now not take hold, so in a way I'm saving money there, in an odd roundabout way.

The biggest change in the benefits sector will be in Disability Living Allowance or DLA. This is the benefit that longterm work shirkers tend to hide behind. Its a cushy number for them. They claim a bad back or depression, get signed off for 6 months and they earn a shitload of free cash from the state and don't even have to look for work or justify their claim. Most doctors can't be bothered to argue the point and just hand out sick notes and Bobs your uncle.

Under the new system claimants will be tested, and I hope they do it properly. I know way too many longterm bums taking the piss, which really annoys me as they get twice the money I do and do little for it.

Those who genuinely need DLA should have nothing to worry about, so I personally think this is a very good move.

Other changes are in Child Benefit. As I gather there will be cuts for those who earn over £40,000 a year, lets face it, if you earn that much you don't need benefits anyway. I haven't looked closely at this yet as it doesn't harm me in any way, but I'm sure a lot of single mothers out there are crapping themselves. 

There was mention of mothers having to go back to work once the child was at school, this will end the free ticket to housing by getting pregnant types getting their free cash I think.

Boosts for businesses are there, I wont go into them, but it does make things look more optimistic than last week, the incentive to hire people is there so hopefully people like myself will get off this benefit wagon sooner rather than later.

The only place I was disappointed was the lack of penalisation for the banking sector.  We're in this shit hole because of them and they still seem to be getting away with it.

Other than making an incentive for smaller banks with good capital to lend, we're pretty much the same as we were. I'd have rather seen the whole sector torn apart and restructured, alas I should have known better, with a Tory government calling the shots, this was never going to happen, even with the LibDems trying to voice their views.

I feel it was a good budget overall, when you get underneath the hysteria and scaremongering the poor are not paying any more than anyone else, it seems to me we're all paying the price for the last decade of disastrous financial government.

Those of you who hark on about the VAT increase hitting the poor, ask yourself when was the last time you saw a poor person buy a new car? Are they likely to buy that new HDTV? No they are not. I'm very poor, I can't afford to buy products that are covered by the VAT increases anyhow, so it doesn't harm me whatsoever. VAT hits Middle England and that is why there is an outcry. Nobody wants to pay more, but at least have the balls to say the real reasons.

Single mothers will still pay the same for children's clothing and food, VAT is for luxuries, the luxuries that those in their Chelsea Tractors will no longer be able to buy because they are poor…. Yeah…

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iBooks for iPhone iOS4

So, the next step for most iOS4 users will be to download iBooks for iPhone, the ebook reader extraordinaire if we are to believe all the Apple Fanboy™ missives. On paper, or digital screen, it sounds great, it supports .epub and .PDF files, what more could you need? Well, I for one would have liked to see .lit files supported as well and a provision to read comic book files like .cbr or .cbz files. Alas it does not.

So we should be ok with .PDF support really, shouldn't we?

Er.. No. iBooks only opens them, it doesn't translate them so you are reduced to seeing the page almost like a photo rather than a written document. This leaves you having to zoom in to read anything which means you have to constantly scroll from left to right just to read a single line of text.  Piss poor Mr Jobs, I expected much better, especially when you have amazing pieces of software out there like Stanza, which pretty much trounces iBooks out of the water, although I must admit the UI of iBooks is lovely.

Being a person with tens of thousands of ebooks in .PDF format this is rather disappointing, more so as Stanza doesn't justify the text very well, sometimes I'm left wondering if a paragraph has ended or a new chapter is starting. I'd rather hoped that iBooks would be my saviour, alas it is not.

So not to be defeated once again, I'm going to trial a program called Calibre in the vain hope that it can decypher my .PDF's into epub's thus allowing me to import my .PDF's into iBooks in a readable fashion.

For me iOS4 has been rather a disappointment so far, for owners of 3G iPhones it's pretty much a non-event. Sure it's nice to have folders, it might save me some RSI on my left wrist, but all in all many of iOS4's features simply wont work on my older model. The digital zoom on the camera is more than useless, all it does is make the photos even worse, which is a huge blooper as the 3G's camera was already shit. I will however admit that whatever the digital mechanisms behind the camera upgrade are, it has made the images better and it is quicker to take a photo.

The one huge omission for me, in all versions of the iOS4, is in the email program. I have been dying to get a 'mark all as read' button, you simply don't understand how useful this is until you use an iPhone. I only have about 50 emails a day that I have to individually go through, imagine if you were a high end business user, I think I'd go mental.

Anyhow, I'm off to play with Calibre, perhaps it will change my mind about iBooks.

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iOS4

The day had finally arrived and like a dedicated Apple Fanboy™ I upgraded as soon as was humanely possible.

The download went swimmingly, took me about fifty minutes or so, not too bad considering the millions of people who were probably doing the same thing. But as soon as it came to the actual installation of the software onto my 3G iPhone, it all went a bit pear shaped.

My update got stuck on the backup cycle; I thought it might be wise to leave it for a while, just to see what would happen, so I left it for four hours and when I checked again the status bar had perhaps moved to 3%. I decided that I needed to use my phone this century so I cancelled the upgrade.

Not to be beaten, I thought I'd try to fool the phone into complying with my wishes. So I un-synched everything and went for a clean restore to factory settings. I did a backup and went for it. When prompted to restore my old settings I did and in the hope that it would boot up with iOS4 installed I awaited with the nervous tension that only skydivers or crocodile blow-job fetishists experience.

That first restart of the phone was agony, I wondered if I had lost all my high scores on my favourite games? Would all the books I'd loaded into Stanza be deleted? Would iOS4 be installed instead of the old version??? Did my gamble pay off? Should I get a job at an Apple store as a Genius of Geniuses???

Well, the best I can say at the moment is that iOS4 installed, its going through another sync to import all my apps onto the phone as I type. Since I have around a hundred Apps it might take a while, especially since it will most likely want to install the music and photos as well….

So if you are like I was, stuck in a backup cycle, do what I did, at least you will get as far as iOS4 installing, it took around 8 minutes. If you are backed up, what have you got to lose? Who needs top scores?

Well I do, my Befuddled word score was 3,966 for the word 'Wolverine' and my high score in Word Warp was 39,595. I doubt I'll be able to reach those giddy heights again!

I'll let you know how I get on….

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Cauliflower Power

Apparently the humble cauliflower is in much decline in the UK, people are just not buying them anymore. According to the people who take notes about the sales of cauliflowers, that must be an interesting job, in the last ten years the sales of the caulie has declined by a third!

Cauliflower

Now who can resist the charm of this humble vegetable? I was once fooled into eating them as a child by being told that they were clouds, personally I thought they looked more like brains and I would have eaten a damn sight more if the gravy was blood red!

That perhaps says more about me than I care to reveal.

I hate to admit to it but I don't buy many cauliflowers throughout the year, it's not because I don't like them, it's because they are so bloody expensive! 

Around my way they are usually priced between £1 to £1.30 each and they are not the huge ones you used to get when I used to be a Greengrocer.

I might perhaps be able to get two meals out of one, so pound for pound I might as well be buying a few pounds worth of gold bullion.

The cauliflower is also rather heavy, not so heavy as you would notice when you pick one up, but when you have one in your rucksack and you are only halfway home, then you appreciate how much extra weight these cloud-like vegetables exert upon your feeble legs. In fact, I reckon a cauliflower is as heavy as a bottle of wine, and I know which one I'd rather carry home.

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Zap!

This, my friends, is one of the best pieces of kit that I have ever purchased. In fact its so handy I implore you all to buy one.

Zapper

What is it I hear one or two of you ask? Its a fly swatter, not a normal one, its charged by a couple of batteries so if any of the wires make contact with anything it sends a hefty little shock to whatever it touches.

Sounds a bit deadly, it is to flies, but it also gives you enough of a spark to be painful.

So why am I blogging about this? Well, it's that time of year where those pesky flies tend to come into the house and congregate in the one place in the house that flies love, the middle of the room underneath the light.

Don't ask me why, I'd assume they would have preferred the bin.

Alas there is one slight design fault with this product which I have now fixed, the safety button. I can understand the need for one, after all, you don't want to accidentally zap yourself, but flies tend to be quicker than my old reflexes and having to press a very stiff safety button and then swat a fly usually ends up with me missing the little blighter.

So by using my nonexistent electronics knowledge, I opened up the casing to reveal the gubbins, taking out the bits that looked vaguely safety button-like and bypassed the area with a bit of wire. Now I have a zapper that is even more deadly as I can get it charged in an instant. 😀

Beware all ye little flying buggers, if you enter my abode prepare to meet your maker!

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