OT; Cwedit Cwunch?

[T i m]

Yup, similar with a carpenter / kitchen fitter mate of mine who's currently sorting out his own house, how much worse can it get! :-(

Another builder mate is really bo**oxed as his nest_egg place in Florida that he hoped was going to rent out to pay for itself is currently costing him a fortune a month .. and places all around his have been up for sale for ages at discount prices and still not selling. :-(

All the best ..

T i m

p.s. One good thing though. From some of my motorcycle connections in the States it looks like quite a few are now doing something about their fuel use at last and moving from gas guzzling cars to more economical cars / motorbikes.

[Huge]

And you fondly imagine that another politician would have done it any differently?

[Tony Bryer]

It's 24 years since I last drove to work, but even then you really noticed the difference even in half term weeks. Somewhere there's probably a formula that confirms that above a certain point small increases in traffic volume have a disproportionate effect on speed.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:

With a Guns"R"Us store on the corner, no doubt.

[Andrew Gabriel]

When I went out there some years back, I wanted a part for my bicycle which had become hard to buy in the UK. There was a giant "3 Sports" shop in the mall. Naively thinking one of these three sports would probably be cycling, I wandered in. That was an eye-opener. The three sports were shooting at things with pistols, shooting at things with rifles, and shooting at things with sub-machine guns.

[tony sayer]

In article , Dave Plowman (News) scribeth thus

Well the coal's still there in the ground it hasn't gone away but aren't we suppose to not use it for all the carbon it produces?.

Well what would we have done with the gas other than not used it?....

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember tony sayer saying something like:

Trouble is, many of the mines are now flooded and collapsed and can't be re-opened. Some might, but most are lost as I understand it. Apparently it's really dodgy to try to re-open a flooded mine that's been abandoned for years.

This is just speculation, but... New shafts would have to be sunk in the known rich coalfields and they'd be continually at risk of catastrophic flooding from old workings that are full of water, because of necessity they'd be close to the old ones. I suppose, if it was really desperately necessary, a method of doing it relatively safely might be devised, and I'm sure there will be someone here with greater experience of minin' 'n stuff.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember [e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) saying something like:

really love their 2nd Amendment, don't they? To be fair though, there's a helluva lot of Americans who don't like it at all.

A giant playground ruined.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Another problem - I just can't see today's young workers being the slightest bit interested in going down a mine. Still, there would probably be no shortage of cheap labour willing to come over here and do it instead.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

One of the many points Scargill made - not that the press ever took any notice of his non union side. He reckoned that so called uneconomic mines which still had access to large reserves should have been maintained even although not actually being worked.

[Arfa Daily]

I'm not really too surprised about the problems that your friend has with his Florida property. We've been going there for years, and also considered buying a place when it was at its peak prior to 9/11. It's very easy to get carried away with the lifestyle and the fantastic property that you get for your money. But even then, when we sat down and worked out the *real* economics of it, it was going to be hard to even cover the costs, let alone make anything at it. We had a holiday booked just after 9/11, and the place was like a ghost town. We had a row of seats each on the plane. In my opinion, it has never really recovered to the level it was. Many businesses went bust as a result of poor trading conditions, and then many more were closed out by the two hurricanes in the space of a couple of weeks, which hit the place a couple of years back. On top of all this, many many holiday homes were being built, which led to a surplus of rentals being available. It also makes resale difficult, because with the glut of newly and recently built models on the market, any model several years old, is going to be a problem to shift.

I can feel for your mate being in that situation, but I'm mighty glad that in the end, we didn't go down the same route.

Arfa

[dennis]

It doesn't matter though, if energy or plastics ever becomes so expensive that digging coal and using it in this "green" world is needed they can dig new mines.

[tony sayer]

In article , Andrew Gabriel scribeth thus

Cheap labour eh?..

Well its cheap labour thats going to be the undoing of the UK if we keep exporting jobs to countries where they work for much less..

And now we're too bloody lazy to go and dig coal when required ..

So just what are the disaffected yoof going to do other then cushy jobs and sponge of the state?..

[Huge]

Sigh. I've been going to the USA regularly for nearly 30 years (my parents live there). I've seen no more gun shops there than here.

[Huge]

You're an idiot.

[Cicero]

=================================== We might need a new generation of 'Bevin boys'. If we really are in as bad a state as we're being led to believe then a national emergency might justify such measures.

Cic.

[T i m]

Fate eh Arfa.

My mate was saying it could actually bankrupt him, that burden in Florida and less work (after being booked solid for the last 15 years).

Another mate is a bit of a wheeler-dealer, has a few properties and keeps telling me that with our house being all paid up we would easily get a loan / mortgage to go out and buy more places. With the rules changing as fast as they are these days and the price of energy going up as fast as it is I'm not sure anything is a certain bet? :-(

All the best ..

T i m

[The Natural Philosopher]

Nothing like an impocversihed country with a fallin exchange rate to make people go back to work again...

starve.

[T i m]

Or more crime?

I think we will see more fuel and scrap stolen, even stuff off peoples allotments.

"Ere, mate wanna buy a cabbage, no questions .. "

All the best ..

T i m

p.s. I saw on the telly last night another pot house busted. All 5 rooms very professionally rigged up for growing the stuff and they suggested that would earn them 25K / week?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Crime.