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Entry tags:

financial,
politics

Declining retirement prospects

I see many ordinary older people on British television who have retired and are enjoying their lives of leisure. I suspect that many bought their house decades ago, they enjoy some workplace pension provided on rather better terms than any we get now, we still have plenty of working taxpayers left to fund the system, etc.

Given that Britain has been seeing many years of slow growth, cost-of-living crisis, lack of affordable housing, a population that is growing older, etc., I wonder if these happy everyday retirees are a dying breed, if increasingly many people are on course for retirement poverty. If younger people have a hard time making ends meet now and we're shooing all the immigrants away and anything else that might light the tunnel's mouth, how on Earth will people put aside enough to retire on pleasantly?

A bit of searching online suggests that some people hope that their cryptocurrency holdings will help, oh dear.

Entry tags:

Scattershot update

I took a few days off work, I'm back in the office this Friday. My time off has kept me rather busy with all manner of unexpected things, to some extent that looks to continue. To give one example, on the evening before Thanksgiving, with a raw turkey marinating, there is a large puff of smoke, the power breakers trip, and our electric oven appears to die. Fortunately, the top element for grilling still seems to work, with which R. coaxed us a turkey after all. The new oven arrives this weekend, when we'll see if we can replace the fitted oven ourselves or if we fall back to summoning a tradesperson. Also, for making one of the pies: canned pumpkin seems to have largely disappeared from the general supermarkets, we ended up ordering that from Amazon.

Not wanting to bother with VPNs and Peacock and such, I usually find one of the free Thanksgiving parade streams that shows the centre of the action from some other city than New York. I think it may have been Philadelphia or somesuch last year, this year I stumbled upon Chicago's, not the best choice as it turned out to heavily promote some sponsor's product for cleaning up fæces.

Among other things keeping me busy, today I did my office desk booking for the rest of the month, and tomorrow we are to get our SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations: I seem to have found local Moderna which costs us £85 each but the risks are too high to not do this at least occasionally.

Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.