Elmbeard

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26525590

The story is that he was taken on 11 months ago on a salary of £3 million a year. During his watch, the Co-op lost a lot of money and will have to sell off their farms. Sutherland is angry that his salary, which was supposed to have been kept secret from the Co-op shareholders, was disclosed. He argues that the Co-op is ungovernable and should abandon the mutual status, upon which it was founded more than a century ago, and should become a conventional business with a board he can control.

Is he right? Is he worth the money? Is his model of business the right one for the future? Should be battle on, despite not being able to rely on his staff being discrete about his salary?

Prime Minister David Cameron's salary is £142,000 per annum. Footballer Gareth Bale's salary is £15.6 million, so the CEO's going rate is somewhere between the two.

The question I asked here on this an hour ago was reported and deleted.

I was taken on nearly a year ago by this fairly rubbish company, but we'd agreed in secret that they'd pay me £3 million a year, so I thought - that's all right, so I accepted the post.

Since then, thanks to the way they are organised, parts of their business lost a lot of money and is probably having to go into administration, but I am quite happy as long as they keep paying my wages.

The other day though, word got out among their shareholders the amount I was being paid. This is most unfair. We agreed this would be secret, and now people are complaining about what should be my entitlement. After all, other people get paid this much just for kicking a ball about, and I am far more important than them.

So I have written a letter explaining what I think about their organisation, and that they should get rid of silly old-fashioned ideas about letting their shareholders make decisions, and just leave it to me and people I can trust to keep important things secret.

Should I have to resign? I need the money.

This perfectly valid question was deleted just now, so it needs to be asked again.

Out of interest, here was the answer I had prepared:

"Maybe the Asker is thinking of someone who finds sexual attraction between those of opposite sexes to be offensive and inappropriate? Quite a few feminists take this stand, which is why the feminist lobby is so keen to promote lesbianism in women.

Other answerers above me point out a broader definition as being repulsed by someone who fails to conform to a set and narrow norm. Taken to extremes, anyone whose uniform or dress code is slightly out of place can be sanctioned or punished. This sort of thing is very common, and many schoolchildren have been bullied for being "different". I know of cases in some Muslim countries where 13-year-old girls have been pushed off their bikes by Muslim imams and beaten until they are crippled for the crime of not having their hijab on straight. I myself was excluded from working in an English county council office because I have a beard and refuse to shave it off. I did not fit in with the corporate image - some of the women took offence at my masculinity in an essentially female-dominated workplace, and therefore my terms of employment were changed so they could sack me. It took a while to get to the bottom of this, but it came out when I discussed it with a council-appointed counsellor they set up to explain the situation to me.

I personally treasure the traditional definition of marriage, making the bedrock of society the condition where sexual and gender opposites must endeavour to live together in harmony, and that future generations must be raised in that spirit. It is what makes humanity so adaptable, and also limits the unfortunate human characteristic of declaring war with its fellows."

I welcome others' definition of this term. If there is such a thing as a "homophobe", why not a "heterophobe"?

I have just heard that thanks to some sloppy coding (I believe NSA have been asking OS companies to slip in some vulnerabilities, so that it is easier to spy on people), Macs are now vulnerable to hacking attack. It means that when going onto a secure site, the encryption is actually turned off, so that hackers can gain access. I went onto a Mac because I knew Microsoft was pulling the plug on XP, and I really cannot stomach Vista, 7 or 8, and haven't yet had the courage to take the plunge into Linux, although that freeby Mint CD is looking tempting.

Apple has issued a patch for Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks, but not Snow Leopard which 20% of macs are on. The problem is that Snow Leopard, like Windows XP, is considered far superior to any of their successors. Something very seriously bad has gone wrong with software writing in the last few years, and it seems to be a trend everywhere. However, even though Snow Leopard is 8 years younger than XP, they have withdrawn security patches on it since last September. XP itself loses its security patches in April.

Mavericks was hailed as Snow Leopard brought up-to-date, but I have been reading horror stories of it trashing external hard drives, running Safari and Finder to a crawl with the eternal spinning beach ball, and being generally bloated and unfriendly. It also insists of transferring things over to a cloud server, which a user has no control over. Losing Quick Time in favour of iTunes is also a great no-no. I'd also have to buy another copy of Parallels Desktop, because PD8 doesn't work on Mavericks, and I use it to run XP and all my beloved legacy software that later versions won't let me run.

Is this unpatched SSL bug only affecting Safari? If so, can I still browse safely on Firefox for now?

We have accepted democratically that our savings, pensions, taxes, employers' assets and cashflow be diverted to pay competitive free market bonuses at the global rate.

What do we get for the money?

We have accepted democratically that our savings, pensions, taxes, employers' assets and cashflow be diverted to pay competitive free market bonuses at the global rate.

What do we get for the money?

We have accepted democratically that our savings, pensions, taxes, employers' assets and cashflow be diverted to pay competitive free market bonuses at the global rate.

What do we get for the money?

I want to protect my home against underground trespass by third parties should the Government remove Common Law protection and ownership of the land under my home, which is likely in the next year or two.

What forms do I need? Are there exemptions, for example, if someone wants to mine coal below my home or dig an underground railway?

I gave a BA about UKIP special advisers just now, and one answer suggested that no woman would go near UKIP.

But they must have women, or they would not be able to breed. What are they like?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2551262/Go...

https://www.facebook.com/bringbackwesty

This is Wolverhampton, not America, so the pupil he shot and his classmates are campaigning on Facebook to have this physics teacher reinstated after he was sacked for accidently injuring a pupil during an experiment on momentum, when an airgun pellet ricocheted off a desk.

I was in Haslemere Post Office, re-employed as a postman delivering mail at the same office I did 30 years ago. I was not sure I would going to get paid. These days, I had no contract of employment and the boss was nowhere to be seen. Always "at a meeting". So I was eager to get going.

Except nobody would tell me what round I was doing. I couldn't find the notice board that normally carried our rotas, nor was there a sign-on sheet any more. People were supposed to remember their times. I remembered from before I had Lion Lane, and Round 9, which was Shottermill, and Round 2, which was the hilly one down the Petworth Road. Nobody around would tell me. The best I got out of them was "the trouble with you before was that you stirred things up too much".

I hung around for a bit, and then reasoned that whatever frame still had a pile of letters on it would be the one I was supposed to be doing. Except there were no letters and no frames. Someone told me they re-organised the office, so there weren't any prep frames any longer. The old sorting office was not used, and was sold off for redevelopment. Our office now was where the bikes used to be stored, a warren of cubbyholes and corridors. Nor, it seems were there any letters.

I hunted around a bit longer and found a pouch with a few dozen letters inside them, which I presumed was my delivery. Except all the letters were addressed to other offices, especially Hazelmere in Bucks. So I got out a red Tempo pen I'd had for years and started writing on them all "Not Haslemere, Surrey" hoping that it would get back to someone important, who might do something to run the office a bit better.

Then I woke up, and of course in real life I have no job. They don't exist for my sort.

Is my dream telling me something about the state of British industry?

I have just had notice of the transfer of all Yahoo!'s European operations to Ireland. That's fair enough.

At the bottom of the email was this statement:

"What do you need to do?

Your continued use of Yahoo services after 21 March 2014 means that you accept the changes to the Terms and Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to them, then you must close your account before 21 March 2014."

I have a nasty memory of the Mail T&C change last year, where I would have to agree to them monitoring my emails and giving them freedom to hand them over unsecured to third parties for targetted advertising, which I would not agree to.

Is this merely agreeing to them moving offices, or is there something more sinister buried in there?

The Transparency of Lobbying, Non Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, which is supposed to clean up the lobbying system in Parliament and restrict the effectiveness of public campaigning has left out Special Advisers. This is calculated. The Lords amended the Bill so that they be controlled, but the Commons has over-ridden the amendment, so Special Advisers continue to act unregulated and in secret.

What do they do?

I answered a question about Party whips: http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201...

In my answer, I implied that UKIP do not have Special Advisers, will therefore represent their constituents' interests rather than those of their secret lobbyists, and are best placed of all the parties free of the Special Adviser system of Government to do something about it.

Is this true?

The Transparency of Lobbying, Non Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, which is supposed to clean up the lobbying system in Parliament and restrict the effectiveness of public campaigning has left out Special Advisers. This is calculated. The Lords amended the Bill so that they be controlled, but the Commons has over-ridden the amendment, so Special Advisers continue to act unregulated and in secret.

What do they do?

I have just answered a question about Party whips: http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201...

In my answer, I implied that UKIP do not have Special Advisers, will therefore represent their constituents' interests rather than those of their secret lobbyists, and are best placed of all the parties free of the Special Adviser system of Government to do something about it.

Is this true?

The Transparency of Lobbying, Non Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, which is supposed to clean up the lobbying system in Parliament and restrict the effectiveness of public campaigning has left out Special Advisers. This is calculated. The Lords amended the Bill so that they be controlled, but the Commons has over-ridden the amendment, so Special Advisers continue to act unregulated and in secret.

What do they do?

I've been reading up on the current story about British Lib Dem veteran campaign organiser Chris Rennard, who has been told how it is not done.

Yet, if you are a lonely middle-aged man, and the pretty girls are not exactly falling over you swooning, how does one get started, and yet still maintain a proper distance and respect?

What are the approved methods than even these four women activists could accept?

I've been reading up on the current story about British Lib Dem veteran campaign organiser Chris Rennard, who has been told how it is not done.

Yet, if you are a lonely middle-aged man, and the pretty girls are not exactly falling over you swooning, how does one get started, and yet still maintain a proper distance and respect?

What are the approved methods than even these four women activists could accept?