Park Life

They're both in the pockets of the banks and the EU anyway, apart from some slight differances it won't really matter who gets in. LibDems will knock id cards on he head though, so I'd vote for them depending on the area you live in. I really don't trust Cameron, he comes across as an airhead.

So you'd want the benefits of Europe without actually contributing to the club. I see. What has the EU ever done for us? - 50 things that are to our advantage - from the Independent. There's a reason even the tories don't want us out of the EU, the benefits far offset the costs. First of all I did not say I wanted the benefits of Europe, my question was more WHAT ARE the benefits of Europe. As for your list I got as far as number 10 and couldnt really see anything on there that is either relevant to today or we couldnt have done without being part of the EU. As for number 3 on the list..... Are you also saying Labour governments need french people to make us make our beaches cleaner????? There is no reason why we couldnt just have the free trade bit. I guess like me, you also have little understanding of the real day to day benefits of being in rather than being out. Its not a particular slight on you btw, its just a fact of we do take a lotta shit for granted without stopping to think about it. I'd get out. But that's another thread.

We all know you'll jiust vote for the best looking one. I wouldn't mind, but I am, and she's a lass.

He says, typing on his computer over the internet, without a trace of irony. To be honest Parky, you've never really demonstrated you understand the principles of science.

Science is rubbish, thought I cleared that up a few years back on here.

We all know you'll jiust vote for the best looking one.

Members of the board of directors of the Economist Group include Sir Robert Wilson, Helen Alexander CBE, Sir David Bell, Lynn Forester de Rothschild and Lord Stevenson of Coddenham. Plum sucking mother fuckers. Imagine what it's like for me having to read a thread like this.

Holy over the top protest Batman! Yeah if only you could de-activate it Robin!!

Renton has it right.

Google engineering gaggle flees Facebook 'When I complain about privacy, I use Google Buzz' By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author Posted in ID, 23rd April 2010 19:26 GMT Free whitepaper – Taking control of your data demons: Dealing with unstructured content Updated A gaggle of Google engineers have expressed their displeasure with Facebook's latest effort to share your data with third-party sites, and many have gone so far as to deactivate their accounts. This includes the Delphic Oracle of the SEO world, Matt Cutts, who announced his Facebook deactivation with a post to Twitter. Cutts didn't say why he deactivated, but the move came just hours after Facebook introduced an "instant personalization" thingy that automatically feeds your Facebook profile data to certain third-party sites when you - or your Facebook "friends" - pay a visit. "When you and your friends visit an instantly personalized site, the partner can use your public Facebook information, which includes your name, profile picture, gender, and connections," Facebook says. Those "connections" include previously private information that Facebook recently forced users to make public or completely delete, including current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests. A banner appears across the top of the page when you visit a site that Facebook is sharing data with, but the onus is on the user to opt-out. And we all know that the average user isn't exactly aware of what's going on. "I just deactivated my Facebook account using the guide at http://goo.gl/rhpE," Cutts wrote. "Not hard to do & you can still revive it later." As noticed by TechCrunch Europe, Cutts was joined by a Greek chorus of other Google engineers, some of whom have left Facebook for good.

Facebook flirts with RFID By Bill Ray • Get more from this author Posted in Developer, 22nd April 2010 15:01 GMT Developers attending today's Facebook conference, f8, are being issued with RFID badges integrated with their Facebook profiles for clocking into site locations. The details come from the All Facebook, which reports that Facebook is being atypically opaque about the data gathered from the radio frequency identification tags. But given the experimental nature of the service that's unsurprising - the point of the conference is to inspire people to create applications, not define their limits. The tags are short-range, so delegates have to make an active effort to have the tag scanned, but doing so will automatically sign them up to a related Facebook group and record their presence for plotting on a wall-screen in the main hall. It's not the first time that a conference has had RFID-enabled badges - it’s de rigeur these days - but connecting the identity to a Facebook profile opens up all sorts of opportunities for linking the online network with the real world, and for Facebook to gather yet more information about its users. ® Looks cool ya'll.

...awesome. If Pedro and Jeffren are rubbish that doesn't help either.

How the fuck do you forget you are still wearing a microphone??

That's the long and short of it. Cut the fuckers loose.

German anger at paying for luxury Greek pensions Mack, Tue 27 April 2010, 11:11am 8 Bild on the Greek bailout - It is only a matter of days until Germany starts handing out billions in aid to the Greeks, according to Chancellor Angela Merkel. But for some experts, Greece is just a bottomless pit. And now anger is increasing in Germany, with many asking why they should pay for things like the luxury Greek pension system. They highlight superior Greek pensions, that German workers will now be paying for - The fact is that in Greece, the employee’s contribution is only 6.67 per cent of the gross wage compared to 9.95 per cent in Germany. The government contributes a subsidy from tax revenues. That means that with a broke Athens seeking outside help, Germany and the rest of the EU aid givers must start pouring cash into the bottomless Greek pension pit… And a handy table that breaks down the differences in detail - Greece Germany Years of work to earn full pension: 35 45 Proportion of wages as pension: 80 %* 46 % Number of pension payments a year: 14 x 12 x Pension increase 2004: 3 % 0 % Pension increase 2005: 4 % 0 % Pension increase 2006**: 4 % 0 % Minimum payment (Euros): 445 ca. 600 Maximum payment (Euros): 2538 ca. 2100 Minimum pension age for men: 65 65–67 Minimum pension age for women: 60 65–67 Average pension entrance age: 62,4 63,2 * for insurance beginning before 1.1.1993, 70% after 1.1.1993, average earner; ** last available figures; sources: Eurostat, OECD, Dt. Rentenversicherung

The General miasma however is wider and the impacts are deeper: The Coming Pan-European Soverign Debt Crisis Banks are the epicenter of the economic crises that face the developed and emerging nations over the last few years. Many appear to have allowed the media to carry the conversation away from the banks and into sovereign debt issues, social unrest etc., but the main issue still resides in the banks. Why, you ask? Well, because every single major country conducts its finances through the banks and when those finances become stressed, the banks will be the first to show it and usually show it in an aggrieved manner since most banks are still highly leveraged. The fact that governments worldwide have made the (generally unwise) attempt to bailout their big banks by transferring bad debts and liabilities from the private sector and bank investors to the public sector and taxpayers doesn’t mean that the problem has been solved or even ameliorated. As a matter of fact, I believe the problem has now been amplified, for now we have effective increased the implicit leverage in the already excessively leveraged banking problems as well as removed the natural firewalls that may have been in place by having the problems in individual financial institution versus sitting on government balance sheets, able to affect all without the need of the “domino effect” that was feared from the Lehman collapse. This leverage stems from the fact that most European sovereign nations are considerably “overbanked”. The levered assets of the banks in many Euro-sovereign nations easily outstrip those nations’ GDP’s. So when the nations’ banks get in trouble from bad banking practices (and a very large swath have), the nations themselves not only are helpless in attempting to truly save the banks (and instead only institute a bait and switch wherein private default risk/insolvency potential is swapped for public manifestations of the same), but are put at risk themselves for the bank is actually more of a sovereign entity than the sovereign is – at least from an economic footprint perspective. This is what happened in Iceland. If one were to take an empirical look at other nations in Europe, Iceland and Greece are merely the tip of the iceberg. I have warned about this over a year ago regarding Spain and the Spanish banks (see The Spanish Inquisition is About to Begin…), and now the chickens are coming home to roost. As it stands now, we have the most developed nations suffering from indigestion after bailing out their oversized banking industry, with many of the allegedly balance sheet bailouts actually being illusory and liquidity-based in nature. The US is case in point here, since most banks still have untold hundreds of billions of dollars of losses still sitting on their balance sheets, and the US taxpayer is stuck with the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in losses simultaneously. Accounting rules have been laxed to give the impression of record profits in lieu of what should be record losses. We also have European countries such as the UK which has nationalized several of their largest banks, taking on significant losses on the taxpayer’s balance sheet, but still facing the drag of a poorly performing banking system that is still too big for the economy as a whole. Just the non-performing assets of just the top banks in the UK amount to nearly 9% of their GDP! That is a very big chunk of dead money floating around in the system that literally invalidates X% of reported GDP. The UK also has nearly $200 billion of exposure to Ireland, whose bank’s NPA’s are roughly 6% of that naion’s GDP, the second highest in all of Europe save the UK (who has the same problem)! The smaller sovereign nations that failed to keep their hands on the fiscal and budget reigns during the global liquidity bubble are also facing issues. Greece is the current poster child for this scenario, having been downgraded by the ratings agencies, money and capital are fleeing from the country in a typical “run on the bank scenario”, their debt being shunned by the markets with CDS exploding and the big market makers in their debt refusing accept their bonds as collateral. This is Lehman Brothers, part deux, which actually makes plenty of sense since the solution to the banks failing was the government taking the failing asset risk onto the balance sheets, hence now the governments are being seen as at risk of failing versus the backstopped private sector. The larger sovereign nations are at risk of either having to bailout their less fortunate brethren or facing the fallout of having the repercussions of a domino effect reverberate across the EU and its major markets/counterparties. This goes deeper than some may suspect. For instance, the weakest sovereigns in the Euro area are still the central and eastern European nations, and the stronger sovereigns are heavily leveraged into these countries through their “overbanked” system. If (or when) these companies start to publicly exhibit cracks, quite possibly due to the domino effect of Portugal, Greece and Spain finally tipping, then you will find the Nordics showing stress through their banking system (the biggest CEE lenders) at a level that the countries may be hard pressed to backstop, for their banking systems are literally multiples of their GDPs." You can see the real desperation behind the bailouts rather than the spun idea of good Governance etc....Whoever wins the election will have hell on with 6 months is my prediction.

I wouldn't like to see one penny of OUR money go to the cheating thieving scum that are Greece. Fuck em.

Let the fucker go down man. Or we're gonna get into a chain with Portugal coming cap in hand.

France, Shaking In Its Culottes, Demands Immediate Implementation Of Bailout Tyler Durden's picture Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/28/2010 08:42 -0500 Gee, what a shock - the country which is most on the hook should Greece blow up is now issuing ultimatums. What is funnier is that the object of the ultimatum is none other than France wartime buddy Germany. From Reuters: "The European Union must immediately implement its previously agreed 30 billion euro ($39.96 billion) aid package for debt-stricken Greece, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Wednesday. "We must immediately put in place the 30 billion euros," Fillon told France's lower house of parliament. He added he had "no doubt" that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would adopt the same position as France, concerning Greece." France has about 75 billion reasons to be terrified that Germany will leave it in the dust. Hey Birnbaum: we are better buyers of French CDS in size. We don't care if Goldman is on the other side of the trade. Wonder why France is so terrified? Here is your answer: exposure by countries to Greece. Note the blue wedge. http://www.zerohedge.com/article/france-sh...ntation-bailout

Agree about Mourinho, but imo he was aided and abetted by a bungling Pep last night. My big worry now is that Bayern will win it with a team full of cunts. Solidly behind Inter now.

he still scored two goals though right? Messi and Xavi missed good chances as well and didn't make up for it by scoring Have to agree with Stevie it's VERY rare that big nose does anything in big games. Face like a hoover.

Still not sure why he is so highly rated.

The worst thing is that Bayern have a chance of winning it now. Fuck!

Come on!!!