Preparedness for when

alfsmum

lyn thinking of you, HWK and dear Docky xxxx

moneyistooshorttomention

armyknife wrote: »

Interestingly, or not, England and The Netherlands have very similar population densities.

I had read recently that Britain now has a greater population density than Holland.

The thing is too that the population isn't spread out evenly - as most of us avoid places if we can that are too mountainous/the weather is too bad/there aren't jobs if we need them/etc and the end result is that there are places where people are crammed in like sardines on the one hand (ie because they have the flatter ground/better climate/better jobs/etc) and others where the population are scattered around very sparsely.

Bit hard for both the human sardines and the ones who don't actually have enough people around, whilst those of us who are free to do so (ie no need for jobs any more) try and find a place to live that is a "happy medium" with enough people/but not too many.

So, overall our overpopulation is meaning more human sardines crammed into our cities and larger towns and feeling like they have to "jostle for space" - of which garden-grabbing is just one symptom. There's also too many cars on roads, too many people trying to also attend any public social events and venues, too many people competing for a school space for their child or an appointment at the doctors surgery, etc.

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FrugalSod - I also get annoyed about all the "hard-working families" rhetoric and sit there thinking "Well...what about us hard-working single people? Don't we count?". The number of times where I read an article talking about "families" and have to mentally substitute the word "household" are legion.

GreyQueen

Oh, but I do consider Mr F to be a demagogoue. A superficially affable and charming one, but they are often the most dangerous kind.

I don't consider myself to be either racist or xenophobic, but I have a very funny feeling in my part of the UK when I walk around the streets in a constant bath of eastern European languages, with a good 30-40% of people being very obviously recent migrants. I rode on a nearly-full Nat Exp coach last weekend and, from hearing the languages being spoken, I think I was the only indigenous Brit on there, which struck me as a peculiar thing.

People joke about moving out of my (southern English) hometown to go live somewhere where English is the first language. A grannie of my acquaintance was furious to have her DGD come home from school saying they hadn't been taught anything that day because 'the translators hadn't come'. Why, grannie fumed, could the English children not have been taught?!

The stories about the bungalow remind me of what happened by my Nan's place, a row of late 1940s bungalows on the edge of a village.

There is a funny-shaped bit of ground at the foot of her and neighbours' back gardens, which belonged to the lodge of the Big House nearby, but was on the opposite side of the driveway to the Lodge, but was its de facto veggie garden. No bigger then an average allotment, but approx diamond-shaped not rectangular.

Then the Lodge was sold and the new owners didn't want it. It was bought by a chancer who put a bungalow on it for their own home. Advance a handful of years, and he applied for permission to build a second bungalow on his garden, one which would be right by the 1940s bungalows' back fences.

People in those bungalows objected and lost. The second bungalow was built, and sold immediately, then the chancer sold the first one, and bought a smallholding ten miles away with the profit, leaving the old neighbours overlooked and congested. Not a popular man, but apparently not losing any sleep over what a bunch of grey-hairs in council bungalows think of his entrepreneurship.

There is far too much shoddy, overpriced, congested building going on, with so-called property developers who are no better than they ought to be. Add in the hot foriegn money (often criminal money) sloshing around from gangster capitalism and out and out fraud, and you have a perfect storm.

If house prices halved, people would scream blue bliddy murder, but it would still only put things back to where they were a few years ago and be a much better thing for most people than the situation we have now.

moneyistooshorttomention

That is news to me that there are translators in some schools. I didn't realise that. I just assumed that classes were held in English and foreign children just have to learn to pick up our language quickly - and its all to the good that it helps them to learn English in the process.

At the least - where is the money coming from to pay these translators and there is the fact that it must slow lessons down for everyone else to have things translated into some other language during them surely? Where I am now, I'm getting used to going to mixed events - but it does take extra time for translations from English to Welsh or Welsh to English (dependant on which language is the most-used one at that particular event) and we all have to wait patiently (and we do..) whilst the other language is being spoken - before we are back to "our" language again.

Here in "welsh Wales" where I now live I would very much doubt there are any translators even for translating lessons from Welsh to English - so to hear that there are translators elsewhere in Britain translating our language into a foreign language is really odd. As far as I've been told children in welsh language schools are expected to manage as best they can with having to speak Welsh there - even though many of them are English and not foreign and don't speak Welsh. As far as I can make out I think they then do learn Welsh .....and then forget it the second they leave school (unless they are after a public sector job).

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

There is far too much shoddy, overpriced, congested building going on, with so-called property developers who are no better than they ought to be. Add in the hot foriegn money (often criminal money) sloshing around from gangster capitalism and out and out fraud, and you have a perfect storm.

If house prices halved, people would scream blue bliddy murder, but it would still only put things back to where they were a few years ago and be a much better thing for most people than the situation we have now.

I agree and I think house prices are seriously over valued. Eventually we could see a serious drop off when the next crisis strikes, which I think is a lot sooner than most economists realise. A few think this autumn the stock markets will have some spasms.

So I have been trying to warn friends to overpay their mortgage while they can.

Cheapskate

In our village, the former vicarage was bought by property developers, who promptly knocked it down and built about a dozen houses on the same amount of land. They're called detached, but if each party leaned out of a window they could shake hands - real little boxes! The back-to-back DH and I bought for £11,000 in 1986, and sold 10 years later for double, is part of a run where houses are now being sold for £90-100K, and they're still only 2 bed B2B on a main road!! :eek:

Having spent the last few months off the wagon, I've clambered back on, horrified and ashamed at how I've overspent recently. We're having our own austerity measures, some of which won't go down well with the adult child and his GF who live with us. At the moment they pay £150 board a month between them, usually a bit more but she is at uni and barely earning through the summer so it's temporary reduced. DH thinks it's funny that I still have the same mindset as when we first married, but that's how we've stayed out of debt and have managed to save, so yah-boo-sucks to him! I have this funny itch at the back of my brain that's telling me to quietly save cash, have a good pantry and improve/invest in more prepping skills - can't hurt even if I'm proved wrong!

A xo

Frugalsod

Re Greece a quote from Steve Keen the economist.

But the Troika institutions seem ever more confident that they have insulated the rest of the Eurozone and isolated the victims of austerity. While the failure of Greece after de facto expulsion may have been accounted for, we wonder whether a recovery might not be more dangerous to the European project. There seem to be a lot of bankers and lawyers in the room when decisions are being made and very few economists. The populations of Italy, Spain and Portugal, among others, are watching with increasing attention.

What he is saying is that if Greece after Grexit has a rapid recovery which is possible without austerity, then the chances are that the remaining nations populations will vote against the current regimes and we could see a break up of the Euro very much sooner.

This will then turn attention to the UK if we are not recovering strongly and we are already outside the Euro, it is down to bad policy here, which would end Tory economic credibility as well.

Frugalsod

Cheapskate wrote: »

DH thinks it's funny that I still have the same mindset as when we first married, but that's how we've stayed out of debt and have managed to save, so yah-boo-sucks to him! I have this funny itch at the back of my brain that's telling me to quietly save cash, have a good pantry and improve/invest in more prepping skills - can't hurt even if I'm proved wrong!

A xo

What you are doing is very practical. Carry on. While some out there are advocating buying gold and silver as a hedge against inflation the real problem will not be inflation initially but deflation. Not being in debt is the first priority. Debts will feel a heavier burden with deflation to pay off, which means more defaults and more bank losses, which is the prime reason why economists (who work for banks) are so against deflation. Secondly cash becomes more valuable with deflation. Great for the small person with small amounts of cash at home and no debts, but bad for the rich who are probably going to have pay negative rates of interest to keep their money in a bank.

If hyper inflation were to ever take off then assets plummet in value and so rents will fall dramatically as a share of income, so really bad for buy to let landlords. Food and clothing become the biggest shares of spending. So if you have years of food in stock you should be able to cope. Plus if things do go all mad max then you can use the food for trading. It is far more valuable than gold and far more practical in those situations.

[Deleted User]

This may not be everyones view but I think the majority of the migrants who have come to this country are what is keeping us going in the main. I may be out of touch, I may live in a part of the country that is still lucky enough to have jobs and is relatively affluent and prosperous but the eastern europeans who get the backlash of everyones anger are the people who are doing the jobs that our younger generations feel are too menial to be done by themselves. If they weren't doing the grwoing and harvesting and packing of food we'd be paying very much more for imports. I saw a couple of Polish families when DD and I went on the bus on Sunday young parents with young children in pushchairs being families, talking to thier children pleasantly and kindly and making sure they were behaving and not too loud, wonderful stuff, the kind of folks I'd like as neighbours.....contrast that with the english parents who were letting thier children run riot while they smoked and were only interested in thier mobile phones click, click, click and shouting obscenities to the smallest ones who were only trying to talk to them. I think we NEED the migrants, it's a very sad fact that our little princes and princesses are not interested in being educated, only in being rich and famous and unwilling in the main to do anything but wait until miraculously that happens without thier doing anything to make it happen, so very sad. We will have to have a massive rethink of values and morals en masse before we are able to do without the hard working and very much necessary migrants won't we?

I've just remembered a conversation I had at the bus stop a while ago in the autumn, a man in hes late 30s asked me in broken english what time the next bus into town was and we got o chatting. He was an Albanian who had been working here for the whole summer on one of the fruit producing farms locally and was going home the next day and wanted to buy presents for his wife and son to take back. He told me that he earned here in 1 hour what would be a whole days pay if he worked at home. There was no work to be had there and he came here because there were jobs and he had to keep his family somehow. He said he's be back again in the spring and work through until after harvest, it was his only way of keeping life and home together and he WANTED to work, not be kept by the government. We need these people, they have the work ethic that we seem to lack!

Frugalsod

How many of you have made provision for storing your pets during a SHTF situation? Here is a possible solution.

http://i.imgur.com/wGFYgwm.gifv