Herd instincts?

Oh, sorry, were we keeping you awake?

John

So, how many hours a day do you watch TV?

John

Well, you've already admitted that you're less than a man - what's the count on substitute body parts so far?

Thanks, Rich

I knew a twit like you would miss it. People have for centuries mentioned how many folks yawn at the same time.

I work all day. That takes up nearly twelve hours of my day from door egress to door ingress.

When I am here, I play PC and PS3 games, perform other PC related operations, and SOMETIMES watch TV. My TV is usually used for watching movies.

If you need a clue, those are written by "writers" as well.

snip

OMG, don't you feel guilty, getting "your" money back from the state.

:-)

If you were half as smart as you think you are, there would be jobs thrown at your feet.

...while leaching off your wife.

Oh, so you're leaching off the taxpayer too. You *are* a bum.

I'm sure. You're leaching off the taxpayer *and* your wife. One can live well off two "incomes".

Nah, just some cranky Aussie. Better get back to the dusting, Sloman (do you wear the short black skirt too?). The boss gets home soon.

Hmm, so it's a one way system in your counrty. Guys pay money into the gubberment, but no money out, unless it's to corporations?

In civilised domains, they help out the needy. Mr S. has probably paid a lot of tax.

Maybe it is payback time

Employment Compensation is not a tax funded program, dipshit.

Employment Compensation income gets taxed as normal income as well.

When we moved up to Cambridge in 1982, I was able to choose between two possilbe jobs, which I found pretty remarkable.

I am pretty good at what I do, but that doesn't mean that there are that many people around at any given time who need to hire someone new with my specific skills.

There are occasions when new technology opens up a new market and everybody is trying to develop new hardware, and people with the right skills are inundated with job offers, but it doesn't happen often, and it doesn't last long.

The same bureaucratic system that pays my unemployment benefit also cost me my last job. If that is the way the Dutch want to organise their system, who am I to argue with it?

My wife's income, on it's own, would be perfectly adequate. I resigned from a perfectly satisfactory job in the U.K. so that my wife could take a - very good - job in the Netherlands that paid rather more than we'd been getting from our two reasonably well-paid jobs in the U.K.

We can afford a cleaning lady. She did her fours hours today, as she does every week. There's a guy who does a morning in the garden every week too - like me, he did a Ph.D. in Chemistry, but he moved into gardening rather than electronics.

I used to do the garden when we lived in Cambridge, but we've got half an acre here, and I can't keep up. The trees are a real problem - we finally got hold of a tree-feller a couple of weeks ago, and he cut back the beech the week before last, and took out the dead birch last week.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No one is arguing that Jim doesn't have a good grip of electronics - which is where he's doing his presentations.

He's a less reliable source on the wider world.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's not my problem - quite the reverse. I quite like the way the Nijmegen gemeenteraad works - though it doesn't do anything for me, since we actually live in Goesbeek (the municipal boundary runs along our street).

The woman who was mayor here for the past few years is now Minister for Inland Affairs

She did a Ph.D. in Psychology and took a particular interest in my wife's research group, so I got to meet her. She's obviously a career politician in the Dutch Labour Party, and a pretty impressive character.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And he still can't even spell my name right. How pathetic can you get.

I must say, if I couldn't manage better invective than that, I probably would try to kill myself - but if I couldn't manage better invective than that, Alzheimer's would have to have progressed far enough that I'd have rely on over-eating to do myself in.

How's the diet going Jim? The last photos you posted suggested that you were carrying more excess flesh than I'd want to lug around on a dodgy hip joint ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I suit my style to the company I keep - I wouldn't want to show you up by being excessively polite, but I think that even you would admit that my posts aren't primarily about invective.

You know very well that I do look for work - as I see it the problem is that there isn't a lot of it around for me to find. You will - of course - have your own opinion about the state of the Dutch job market for elderly electronic engineers, but I'm not going to add a new page to my website detailing one hundred and one things a nitwit can do with a 555.

Oh. Really?

Pull the other leg. I've met enough guys who can talk up a storm but can't make anything that works to give the lie to that particular delusion.

Judge and jury, in this particular case. Executioner? Being ignorant is a capital crime, but the universe passes sentence - it's called evolution in action. And it doesn't take a superman to know more than you or Jim.

It's not my problem, it's your problem. And what makes it pretty much insoluble is that you are complacent about it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

As a closet leftist-weenie, Thompson has many problems he has yet to confront. It shows.

Eh, no, what I said was true was my comment about True Socialism -- not the fact that people lie.