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grimble22350

Listed below are comments made by grimble22350 between Thursday, 23rd April 2009 and Friday, 18th September 2009.

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'Knives out' for SNP budget 11:10am on 18 Sep 2009 Ah Mrbfaethedee, I'm with you in your frustration at the bankers, their greed and incompetence, and the way they have effectively got away with it at our enormous expense. However just stop and think for a minute - if they hadn't managed to persuade the rest of us to borrow from them, they would have had nothing to trade with each other in those increasingly obscure ways.

Of course most individual customers can no doubt justify their individual borrowing - but let's be honest, we all did it because we all want a better house/new car/plasma TV, and if we're offered relatively easy ways to do it, we all jump at the chance. The bankers took advantage of human nature, but I'm sorry, we still weren't forced to do it - we could have stood back and thought "hmm is this really a good idea in the medium term?". Again I say - if someone offers you a tray of sweets, you CAN refuse!
'Knives out' for SNP budget 09:49am on 18 Sep 2009 God there's such a pile of pointless bickering here! The fact is that this is only the start of the pain we'll all have to take in spending cuts as the result of the recession caused by all of us bingeing on cheap credit. Yep the bankers offered us the sweets, but no-one forced us to take them!

Of course it's in the SNP's interests to overstate cuts from the Treasury, and it's in Labour's interests to contradict that.... but that doesn't alter the financial state Scotland, the UK, and the world is in. It would be lovely to have a rail link to Glasgow Airport - and Edinburgh Airport as well (remember that, you "anti-Glasgow" faction?) but I think we can wait a few more years if it means protecting basic services.
Beleaguered Button needs to get back on track 4:20pm on 31 Aug 2009 What irritates me is the way Finns seem incapable of showing emotion - Raikkonen is invariably so po-faced a la Andy Murray, and Hakkinen was just the same. It really spoils the after-race proceedings when the guys finishing 2nd and 3rd seem so much happier than the bloke on the top step.

I thought Fisi "made a point" of saying he was disappointed to finish 2nd in the press conference - he seemed very happy in parc ferme and on the podium! He knows he could have done a much better job of the re-start after the safety car, but once he found himself second he was never going to take a risk to pass Raikkonen, A) to make 100% sure that Force India would get a first podium and B) because the car in front is the sister car of the one he hopes to drive at Monza!

Button's problems are 80% mental - unlike Lewis (who got incredibly stressed anyway towards the end of last year!) he knows that this year is almost certainly the only chance he'll ever get to take the title.
Listening to Mr iPhone 5:47pm on 01 Jul 2009 As an industrial designer myself, I have to say that this kind of ridiculous over-hype does the profession no good at all. #4 Dempsi1997 isn't too far off the truth, though if the Apple projects were typical, then Jonathan Ive will have designed the way the product fits together, also he'll have designed the individual mouldings and other casing components for manufacture, including material selection to give the correct balance of easy mouldability, cost, impact resistance etc etc.

Mr. Ive is a very talented designer, but Apple really is the ultimate triumph of style over substance - strip the marketing nonsense away and the technology is very similar to that available elsewhere. However as long as there's a seemingly endless supply of gullible consumers with unnecessarily deep pockets around, Apple will continue to happily relieve these folks of their hard-earned cash.
I could operate trains 3:22pm on 01 Jul 2009 So no-one at the DfT (or DafT?) thought through the consequences of allowing (or as National Express implies, obliging) franchisees to set up 'special purpose vehicles' to be the legal parties to the agreement?
Just how incompetent can these clueless civil servants be?? It stands to reason that a company of National Express's size will obtain the best possible legal advice, and will have closed-off every liability loophole. Is the government of the UK really run in such a third-rate and amateurish fashion? It beggars belief.
Changes to international pages (3) 11:36am on 21 Jun 2009 When will you idiots get the message? - it was all perfectly fine before, but you just couldn't leave it well alone could you?? You whinge about not being able to use licence-payers' money to allow continued access to audio/video, but what about the waste of money spent making changes to the site which were unnecessary and which have made things worse?

Where's the accountability here? - you've patently p***ed off a large number of your 'customers', so whose head will roll for this? Just what does it take for any of you useless gits to take responsibility for your rampant incompetence?
BT: Self-inflicted wounds 2:29pm on 21 May 2009 Surely there's a major point being missed here - BT, unlike all the other former state-monopoly telecoms businesses in Europe - took the crazy decision to sell its mobile phone business some years ago. I know BT is lumbered with with the fixed line 'public service' requirement, but to exit the mobile voice and data market just as it was taking off surely has to rank as one of the crassest business decisions ever taken!

How large was Vodafone at the time BT was privatised? (for younger readers, this is a trick question of course - it didn't exist). What's the size of Vodafone today relative to BT? End of argument.
Soca and coca 11:34am on 12 May 2009 It's not clear where or under what circumstances the photo accompanying today's News story by Mark was taken (the BBC sometimes seems a hopelessly un-visual organisation, fixated on words with little attention paid to pictures).

However since the flags shown on the blocks of cocaine aren't an accurate representation of the Union Jack one would hope they weren't drawn up by SOCA, as it would be worrying to have people protecting the country who don't even know what the country's flag looks like!
Hobbling hedgies and bashing buyout boys 2:57pm on 30 Apr 2009 Not a point directly relevant to this story, but Robert I'm sure many people are very interested to know your views on one of the big stories today - Chrysler filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US. What strikes many of us non-experts is that this mechanism seems a very useful tool in allowing businesses to attempt to sort themselves out while they have protection from their creditors.

It appears that Chrysler will almost certainly emerge from Chapter 11 largely intact, and with a path forward. Contrast that with the automotive story on this side of the Atlantic, where LDV looks almost certain to fall into administration, whereupon it will be rapidly consumed by its creditors. Can you explain for a general audience why the UK has no equivalent of Chapter 11, and whether it would be possible for something similar to be set up in the UK?
ITV: Change of cast 2:56pm on 23 Apr 2009 Grade has shown at least some understanding that ITV has a future as a major broadcaster only by investing in quality programming aimed at selected aspirational audiences. Unfortunately ITV now shows signs of its traditional knee-jerk reaction to advertising downturns, which is to retreat back to lowest-common-denominator TV, seemingly blind to the fact that this drives away the affluent and aspirational consumers most advertisers are targeting - and so depresses its advertising income further. ITV's core problem seems to be a lack of intelligence and talent amongst its senior and middle management.

On a separate note Robert, can you clear up why a BBC Online story today http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8014489.stm tells us that Lloyds banking Group is "43% taxpayer-owned", when we're continually told it's majority owned by the taxpayer?

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