Why is service so appalling in the UK?

One of the many areas in which the USA leads the world is food. At any time I can choose from a huge variety of great places to eat excellent food at reasonable prices served by polite, helpful and pleasant staff, whom my wife constantly complains that I tip too much.

Contrast that to the UK. If you don't fancy Indian, Chinese or Thai, which are mostly excellent, the equivalent of a hundred and fifty dollars gets a barely adequate meal for 4, with the courses arriving at different times, probably not even hot, badly cooked, with long waits, and surly service.

And now thanks to this post we have the reason.

So you have a choice when offered a job worth around £15,500 or less: take it, work hard, earn your own money or do nothing and get the same amount of money. What if you are offered a job for £16,000? You would be better off by £6.63 per week, not £9.61, due to tax. That's not a lot of money for a lot more work. £17,000 makes you £19.90 better off per week instead of £28.85 because of tax.

The State seemingly doesn't want people at the job centre to get jobs (or it would be making them do a lot more), and even if they are offered a job, unless they are offered a good wage (average in the UK is about £25,000) there is little incentive to take it.

If I decide to move into a flat on housing benefit, I will have a large incentive not to take a job unless it comes with a good. So, no bar jobs, no part time waiter work, etc. It just doesn't pay. The same goes for the other 2.38 million people.

And there you have it. Thanks to the caring socialists in charge, it just doesn't pay to do that kind of work. Hence the restaurants can't get enough staff, and those they do get are only there because they can't for some reason get enough benefits, which explains their attitude. No wonder eating out in the UK was always such a hit or miss proposition.

An utter travesty

I saw something in Target the other day which pulled me up short



That's right. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in the bargain bucket for $4.75.

This film is based on the twenty-volume "Master and Commander" series by Patrick O'Brian (1914-2000). I've read the whole series several times, and I enjoy it more each time. The prose is the most beautiful I've ever read; the underlying research would provide material for a dozen PHd theses; I'm sure I will never read anything better in my lifetime; indeeed, the fervour of many devotees approaches religious levels of intensity.

Peter Weir and John Collee therefore had their hands full creating a 2 hour movie based on the canon. I would have said the books were not filmable. I would have expected Hollywood would have added a few sword-wielding pirate queens, for example. But they created a most excellent adaptation, preserving much of the feel of the books, with state of the art special effects, and a wonderful cast. There were very few false notes struck and overall I think the movie was a staggering achievement.

The movie also made me think Russell Crowe is probably the best actor working right now. I could not imagine anybody playing Jack Aubrey convincingly, but Crowe pulled it off.

So I was very sad to see it available at a knock-down price.

I despaired when I saw this on an adjacent shelf.



$4.75 for a cinematic masterpiece where the best acting talent in the world interprets the best work of one of the finest novelists in history;

or $13 to see a piece of furniture with legs spouting dreck written by a Hollywood hack likely off his head on drugs.

A difficult choice.

News Roundup

British Diplomat Filmed With Two Russian Prostitutes. As soon as I saw this the first thing I thought was "The KGB have done it again!". Torquil Leamington-Feltch, 29, a British Diplomat was caught on video with a couple of hookers. Now there's a guy who's never read any John Le Carre. I mean, how could you be so dense as to be a British private school boy in Sverdlovsk and think two lovelies who invited you back to their hotel room for some no strings attached nookie were on the up and up? All he had to do was insist on renting a new hotel room and they'd have disappeared in ten seconds flat. Mind you, he probably thought that Russian women all have the hots for Brits whose accent is so upper class they sound like they have a bunch of plums in their mouth when they talk, and whose mothers still stitch their names on to the lining of their undergarments.

And in other news, in the UK, there are one million people who've not worked since 1997. Actually 1,000,646 if you count members of Parliament.

Bernard Madoff Gets 150 Years

Bernie Madoff gets 150 years in Ponzi scheme

After the sentencing Madoff told his counsel that with good behaviour, he expects to cut that sentence in half.

Invest in Chinese Real Estate

I wonder if people who have put down deposits on the apartments in the two blocks which are still standing will now be entitled to their money back?

Tech Byte

I'm very impressed with the new IE 8.0 - so much so I've now dumped the Firefox 3.0.11 and made IE my default browser once more.

I surf with the default text size blown up to make it easier on my eyes. A recent Firefox update (not sure which one) introduced a bug which caused the text size of the page you're reading to suddenly reset to the default, which is annoying.

I've also noticed that the later versions of Firefox have slowed down considerably. While I'm reading a page, I'll open several links in tabs as I go so that I can have the pages ready in the background when I'm finished with the current one. Lately, it seems like something is hanging so that I frequently find that none of the pages in the other tabs have loaded at all. It happens on enough different sites to make me think the problem is in Firefox. Sometimes I've had to "PSKILL FIREFOX".

Now they've finally gotten round to adding a decent "find" function to IE, it seems to me there's no reason to go back.

Socialism Update

Time for a quick look at how caring Socialist governments are doing lately.

In Illinois the Chicago Tribune has broken a story showing how the University of Illinois was leaned on to accept unqualified candidates who had 'connected' relatives. Even to the Law School.

In return, as these candidates would have a heck of a time keeping up with and passing the course, the U of I had to insist that these people be found jobs in due course so as not to affect the U of I Law School's ranking. The money quote: "Yea I'm betting the Governorship will be open. One of them can have that job. Other jobs in Government are fine, since kids who don't pass the bar and can't think are close enough for Government work." No truer word ever written.

So what happens to lawyers who come up in this way? I have no idea, but it does shed some light on bizarre court decisions which you occasionally get here, like a 250LBS off duty drunken cop caught on video beating up a 125LB female bartender being let off with probation

Meanwhile in the UK it has been emerged that welfare payments will for the first time exceed all the revenue from the Income Tax

I wonder what's going to happen in the UK if productive, intelligent, professional people continue to leave at the present rate? The UK lost many of its best and brightest during two World Wars leaving us with a skewed population, a majority of people who thought Socialism was a good idea. It will be interesting to see if a Thatcher emerges which can reestablish the UK as an independent country with sound economics once again, or if it ends up as a poor province of the EU empire, rather like the poorer states in the USA.