Latest Moan From You and Me 2025

Here lies the problem with much of the work force, I never worked in a place where you got paid if you wasn't there.
Too many people get paid when they are not there.

 

Last time I worked for a company in the UK @pete - late 80s - everyone got statutory sick pay after 3 days - and a doc's note - and had to be paid for the initial 3 days. These days it's 7 days before a doc's note is needed and statutory sick pay is set at £118ish per week for 28 weeks.

Statutory Sick Pay (SSP)

 

They paid Saatchi and Saatchi to make it. Not cheap.


I am about to cancel my John Lewis card after almost 50 years. The company has lost the plot. They are opening, with a great online flourish, a massage parlour for ‘special’ customers to book in their Oxford Street branch (a bit Epstein ish to my mind) while they have closed entire branches that were a vital part of other city centres. Plus, Waitrose managed to lose my delivery the other day. Didn’t tell me that it wasn't coming. Left me to phone up hours after the due time and ask where it was. They hadn’t a clue, but told me that if I rebooked the delivery for the following day they would refund me the delivery charge and send me a little something as a gesture of goodwill. They would also re apply the gift voucher that I had used. I rebooked the delivery and waited for the invoice. The gift voucher had disappeared, the delivery cost was still there, no little something as a gesture of anything, plus the six packs of coffee in the first order were now unavailable. I contacted them re the discrepancies and have had no response. Enough. I can shop elsewhere.

 

I've just come across something which might be of interest to those who say that extra taxes on the rich will make them leave.

Massachusetts introduced a "millionaire's tax", a 4% surcharge on high earners, in 2022. The income threshold above which the surcharge applies, rises each year, linked to inflation, and is currently a bit over $1 million. This year the surtax raised nearly $3 billion in extra funds, which will be used exclusively for education and transport.

Despite fears that the surtax would drive the wealthy out of Massachusetts, the number of millionaires has actually increased.

 

Its gone up then, SSP was around £70 a week last time I had it after my back op in 2019, you waited three day before it kicked in. Nothing for the first three days.

But everyone who works for the government, civil servants, (not sure where they got that name from), and those that work for large companies seem to get paid for months if off sick at full pay.
Last I heard a good percentage of the police force are off on full pay with anxiety.

 

It works as both an air conditioner and a heating unit.

 

Yes, it looks similar to the ones I see, but I wonder how it converts the heat to warm air, I assume a fan blowing through something like a radiator on a car to put it simply.

 

Yes, my large employer will pay full salary for extended periods of sickness. I even heard of one person who was sick for multiple years and still got annual pay rises. Mind you in my office we don't have a lot of sickies, but then it's a pretty cushy job with no dealings with the public.

 

It is not geothermal but operates by extracting any heat from outdoor air, no matter how low the temp, and exhausting that indoors. And the reverse in the summer. It needs a full furnace to back it up in the winter here. Stupid to try to use this expensive electrical device in a fully detached home when you would still need a furnace to keep from freezing.

If you ran your air conditioner on a cool day, you could feel the exhaust much warmer than the intaken air.

 

The long and short of it is heat pumps do not work very well and gas boilers do. Now, electric boilers are a perfectly viable alternative, but the manufacturers must not have the sway over gov that the heat pump makers do and have failed to position themselves front and centre in the market. I replaced my 25 yr old gas boiler last yr. I would have been more than happy to have an electric one and the installation price is similar to a gas one. However, an electric one would cost nearly 4x as much to run because household electricity prices are so much higher than gas ones. If the gov really wants to phase out gas (and petrol cars), they should stop pushing heat pumps (too expensive, not suitable for most houses, noisy, unsightly, etc) and just lower electricity prices. Job done.

 

I would love to not have a gas boiler, but there's just no practical alternative yet.

 

Which seems to apply to most of the new greener ideas, but I'm glad some people are at least being the guinea pigs for the rest of us.
It's mostly cost and effectiveness that is holding things back regarding heating and driving.

 

I'm sorry, @ViewAhead , but it's simply not true that heat pumps don't work very well. A properly installed system, appropriate for the size of the property, in a well-insulated house, works extremely well for very small running costs - though of course it's expensive to install. Maximum efficiency of a gas boiler is 95-98%, and of a heat pump 300%. Obviously they work best and most efficiently in a climate which isn't excessively cold in winter, though we never need additional heaters. Our heat pump maintains 20C in our living room, no problem.

 

You have pretty much outlined the disadvantages there, @Liriodendron. Heat pumps need very specific conditions to work efficiently. Most houses aren't well insulated enough. Heat pumps require expensive adaptations on top of the actual cost, eg replacement radiators. The life span is less than a gas boiler. Servicing is more expensive. They don't work well in the cold.

Plus they take up a fair footprint, especially given the tiny amount of outside space most new builds have, and are noisy, a problem given that housing density is increasing rapidly.

An electric boiler has none of these issues. None. An electric boiler can be easily fitted in any home in place of a gas boiler. An electric boiler is way cheaper than a heat pump, lasts longer, costs almost nothing to service and is close to 100% efficient.

 

We don't have town gas here so our CH is oil but we only get thru 750 to 1000 litres here and that's gone down since extra roof insulation was added under a government scheme which cost us 1€. We have solar panels on the roof but not enough as chappy miscalculated but they keep bills down.

I did have a bottled gas hob but have changed it for an induction hob which is much cleaner and I do have a spare hob in the annex should we have a power cut. The only other heating is a log burner but we tend to use that on feast days - Xmas, NY, birthdays.....

I did look into ground source heating in Belgium but it was prohitively expensive and meant digging up half the garden to install the coils. Not interested in a heat pump either as they're expensive despite subsidies.

All new build houses here have to be carbon neutral which includes insulation and shutters to keep homes cool or warm depending on the season without extra energy consumption. Needless to say we've bought an old, stone built farmhouse...........