Monday 29 August 2011

Fun Online Polls: The 'something-for-nothing' culture and Bank Holiday weather

The results to last week's Fun Online Polls were as follows:

The idea that 'rising house prices make us richer' fuels the 'something-for-nothing' culture:

Agree - 83%

Disagree - 13%
Other, please specify - 5%


I think surely it must, our children are bombarded with images of 'celebrities' who are famous merely for being famous and some teachers say that their pupils tell them they don't need to learn anything because this is how they intend to make a living; all the house price porn we are bombarded with makes us think (in some cases correctly) that we can make more money by speculating in land than by going out to work etc.

What's just as poisonous is the greed of the political class - MPs awarding themselves outrageous expenses claims and quangista being given half-million pound payoffs when they are made redundant, this is exactly the sort of behaviour which makes people resent paying so much tax, because they know that at least a third of it is wasted or stolen. It's a pity that the media appears to be entirely uninterested in the forty per cent of government spending that goes to 'private' businesses, I'm sure that there are some real horrors there, the PFI stuff is but the tip of the iceberg.

Ah well.
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This week's Fun Online Poll: how was the weather for you over the Bank Holiday weekend?

As background, we were very lucky yesterday, we had decided to go rowing (that's when people pay money to sit in a boat and shout at each other). It started drizzling slightly when it was time to go, and I said, sod it, let's just drive there, if it chucks it down we'll just sit in the car and have an ice cream instead. By the time we got there (ten minutes later), it was quite sunny again and we had the usual lovely time arguing about whether to say "right" or "starboard" etc. We duly ate our ice creams while wandering back to the car and it started raining again as we drove home.

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7 comments:

Curmudgeon said...

I just signed the LVT poll. (Obviously I signed the smoking ban one on the day of launch)

The captcha included "Europ School" :-S

Mark Wadsworth said...

C, thanks. I'm assuming that those are the most popular ones in either category, I'm not sure which "Let's have an EU Referendum poll" has got most votes so far.

Curmudgeon said...

This one, by a long way.

WV, appropriately, is "outta" ;-)

Mark Wadsworth said...

C, OK, I'll add that one (it's going to get a bit cluttered!)

Bayard said...

"arguing about whether to say "right" or "starboard" etc."

The advantage of "port" and "starboard" over "left" and "right", is that left and right are dependent on whether you are rowing and hence facing backwards or a passenger and hence facing forwards and port and starboard are not.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, exactly. While we're on the topic, what's the old fashioned word for "port"? They called it something different in Hornblower and I can't remember it for the life of me. Interestingly, on aircraft carriers they use "left" and "right" to refer to the sides of the aircraft to avoid confusion.

Mark Wadsworth said...

"Larboard", I've looked it up. They changed it to "Port" in the mid-19th C to avoid confusion.