Darude

No point getting excited about either Trump or Biden, they're both economic status quo presidents.

For the sake of my sanity I decided to ignore Boris and my department head's instructions to work from home and went on site today, in the peace and quiet I managed to get some actual work done and am feeling better for it. Turns out there's a reason why most workplaces don't have a bunch of under-5s running around them.

A doctor or nurse isn't going to risk being struck off and possibly see the inside of a prison cell for £50. Falsifying patient data is not a small matter. You might get lucky with a volunteer although as they volunteered they presumably believe in the vaccination program and are not cynical time-servers.

Could we take the bioweapon chat to a separate thread please?

That's what the microchips they implant with the vaccine are for.

Feeling very quitty today, Christ on a bike it has been hard to get motivated this month. Never felt like this before in my entire working life.

The government managed to get up to about 15% of people paying higher income tax and since people later in their careers have higher incomes than those earlier in their careers (a gradient that is much steeper now than it was in previous decades by the way) that would have been significantly more than 15% of Boomers able to top up their pensions late in their careers with 40% relief. In terms of the difference between 25% versus 20% relief it's also worth noting that NI is now over 6 percentage points higher than it was in the 1980s. There is also the effect that real returns were far higher t

The Boomers have nearly finished paying into their pensions tax free so it's time to scrap that policy, GenX+Y+Z are just here to see the Boomers out in the manner to which they are accustomed.

Interesting thread of people trying to identify the protestors who were in the Senate chamber from photographs, click to open it on Twitter if you are interested:

Yes I agree with that, those BT engineers retiring in their 50s on £3k a month pensions will never be repeated.

Well yes, if you switch from mean to median the £ figures get smaller, that is true now and it will be in the future, but it doesn't change the argument about pensioners getting poorer over the next few decades. As your figures show it has already started, the 1930s-40s born pensioners of ten years ago had higher incomes than the 1940s-50s born pensioners we have now and that trend will continue as those with the better occupational pensions pass away and are replaced by people whose working lives were spent in less generous (e.g. defined contribution) pension schemes.

From your second link: "For example, those born in the 1930s received 30% of their income from the State Pension at age 65 rising to 44% by age 74. There is a very similar level of State Pension dependency for those born 10 years later (27% at age 65 and 44% at 74)." What I am saying is that 27-30% of income coming from the state pension at age 65 which people born in the 1930s and 1940s had is going to rise to more like 60% of income at age 65 coming from the state pension for people born in the 1970s onwards. So instead of an average pensioner getting an £8k state pension and a £16k occ

That depends what "it" is. If "it" is a £16k pa averageish private pension then £355k only gets you £10.6k pa or £29/day. Without the £8k pa top up from the state that would be a very modest existence.

You might get to an averageish £16k pa private pension if you include all the legacy defined benefit pensions but it's unrealistic to expect the younger defined contribution generations to finish up with £16k private pensions as that would require £500-600k of assets inside the pension pot. If you divide the total market cap of FTSE All Share (£2tn) by the number of households in the UK (35m) that gets you to about £57k in equity per household, the bond market is about 3x the size so there is maybe £200k total in UK shares and bonds available for each household to purchase which at current yie

The guy with the horns seems a bright fellow with some interesting ideas: