Cloud storage and email

Anybody know of a good and reasonbly priced site where I can store about 100gbs and send and recieve emails?

Energy

Got to thinking again.
Not many years ago, well quite a few actually, I could run a marathon then go out and party the same evening. Now I get out of bed, do a few household chores and I'm knackered. What I want to know is where all the energy goes?

Stars and Planets

Lots of time to think these days, hope its not doing me any harm!
After seeing the article about an asteroid passing the earth recently I started wondering why planets and stars are round but asteroids are all sorts of shapes. Space as far as I understand is a vacuum therefore logically there is little or no resistance exerted on these elements so why are planets round and asteroids not?
Just asking.

Taxes, surcharges and lies and more taxes surcharges and lies.

Got to thinking about why we citizens put up with the lack of fantasy and the lies (perhaps I should say economies with the truth) promoted by politicians.

Every four or five years we go through the same old repetition of politicians promising the electorate the world, better housing, lower taxes, more policing, more schools, better roads etc etc etc in fact anything they think we want to hear. We experience politicians lining up to have their five minutes of fame on the television promising us anything that gets them a sound or video bite. Why do we put up with it?

Why do we put up with our governments using us as bottomless savings banks to dip into in order for them to fiddle around with systems that just don’t function anyway? Why cant they find ways of building roads, schools, increasing policing and allow more building with the funds they already deduct from us? Are they so lacking in fantasy and expertise that they think the only way to do something is to throw money at it and increase government employees? Shell, MacDonald’s, Philips etc etc would have gone bankrupt years ago if they had run their companies the way governments run our countries. We only have to look at Greece, Italy and Spain to see what a mess they have made of things and America ain't that much better either.

In Norway some 3 years or so ago we were “encouraged” by the government of the day to buy diesel driven cars, they were the “in” thing of the day, but no sooner than half the population had done so than the surcharge on them and diesel increased substantially. Now, some three years later they “leaked” a new proposed resolution that would increase the cost of diesel vehicles even more considerably; apparently we should now be driving hybrids, so they are now “encouraging” us to sell our diesels and buy hybrids, but who's going to buy our heavily penalised diesel vehicles? Of course, this gave the press a field day with bold headlines about the injustice and cost of the resolution to penalise diesel vehicle owners. Some days later the government revised their position and modified the amount somewhat. The general population were pacified. But why aren’t we reacting to the fact that yet a new surcharge has been introduced? We were duped into believing that “popular opinion has overcome”, doesn’t anybody realise they sneaked the surcharge in by first leaking an exaggerated proposal and then pretending to listen to the populace for so to introduce the real one? How can we trust, that once the population starts going over to hybrid, a new surcharge on Hybrids is levied as well?

Whilst I do not in any way advocate violence, I admire the French; when they feel an injustice is done to them, they demonstrate en-mass, surely organised peaceful civil disobedience is the only way to make politicians and those sneaky little grey mandarins creeping around government corridors of power understand that they are the servants of the people; put there by us to look after our interests, they are not there to further there own little power agendas.

Some years ago an economist worked out that after paying all our taxes, surcharges etc etc some 90% of every monetary unit we earn goes in taxes! I'm not against paying taxes, but I am against being lied to and extorted by people who don't know their a**e from a hole in the ground!

So why don’t we stand up to these people and say enough is enough? I suppose like me, most of us are waiting for someone else to do it for us?

I only asked.

Baby boom and early retirement, a theory

Got to thinking about my generation the other day and why so many of us are burnt out and retiring early, previous generations didn’t seem to experience this problem.

I'm part of what is called the “baby boom” generation, born in the late 40's. We seem to be an "in between" generation. I came up with a theory which I would love comments on.

When our generation started our careers we were doing a similar type of job as our parents and grandparents did, if it was manual, well it was manual, we used hammers and shovels and carried things on our backs or sat in front of sewing machines or behind counters and what not. Postmen walked their routes. Doctors and nurses still did there job without many technical aids as did lawyers and pilots and a whole range of other professions. When I started my sales career I had a territory, at the days end I would transfer all the sales from a customer card to an order form, bundle them all together and post them next day. At the end of the week I would do a sales return for my boss, toting up all the sales of various products and my calls and send it in the post on Saturday. This in turn would be manually added to all the other sales reps in our area and a league table sent out at the end of the month. It was similar, I am sure for most professions. In addition to this, the baby boom generation was bought up; at least in the UK, learning that men had their place in society and women theirs.

Then along came technology, don’t get me wrong I love the new technology and wouldn’t be without it and all the gadgets that go along with it; however from casually writing out orders at the end of the day, salesmen are now on their mobile phones the instant they are out of a customer visit and the order processed instantly and if it's not delivered next day, well that company isn’t keeping up with the times or are deemed efficient. Doctors have to keep up, not only with the latest in medical developments but also technology and the somewhat idiotic bureaucracy that now exists. Bankers and stock exchange no longer have the luxury of a day or two's wait to see how Tokyo or New York are dealing, it's all instantaneous. And so on and so forth. Life went from subsonic to supersonic in just a few years. And of course, from having "a job for life" it suddenly became, which one will get the chop next"?

And so my theory is this. The “baby boomer’s”; men and women alike, have had to make far greater changes in their attitudes, their way of thinking and their way acting than any other generation to date. The baby boomers made the final move from “hunter gatherers” to “technophiles” in just a few short years and that immense change and the striving to keep up with it has taken a massive toll on our physical and mental health and well being. In many respects, it's like starting to train a forty year old person to be a top class athlete, the body just cant cope as well as it once did and ends up with all sorts of “athletic injuries.”

What do you think?

Why?

Why is it that I can buy Norwegian salmon and other Norwegian products in Spain at nearly half the price of what I pay in Norway. Why do we let Norwegian manufacturers get away with it? Just wondering.

Mail hate

This started of a as 2 liner response to emails I receive, but got a bit more involved as I thought more about things.

I got to thinking about all the emails we receive on a daily basis and how many of them are negative. Do we, who receive and send these negative emails, usually about immigrants, once and a while sit back and think them through a little or do we just happily forward them continuing the negativity?

I'm an immigrant; or as we Brits like to say to sugar-coat it a bit, an "ex pat". What ever you call it, I'm still a person living in a country I wasn’t born in and I've done so for over 40 years. Now, does that make me a leech on the society I choose to live in, or is that different because I'm English?

With the Schengen agreement a great part of the population of Europe are now immigrants, wandering from country to country, are they also leeches? And yet these emails pour disdain on certain groups, admittedly because a minority are criminal and ruin it for the majority, but they are still a very small minority.

What we Brits don’t seem to realise is that we have been and still are some of the worst emigrants on this earth. Just look at our history and see the conflicts we have started due to our greed and ignorance.

I've noticed, through the years how many people move to foreign climes and immediately start complaining about the way things are done in the country they have moved to. Having left their own country in the first place because of the situation there!

I personally know Britain’s who have lived and worked in Norway for as long as I have, 42 years and still don’t speak Norwegian. I have now met Britain’s in Spain who have created their own "Little Britain" ghettos, with chip shops, karaoke bars, bowls clubs and goodness knows what else. In fact in some areas its difficult to find Spanish businesses and restaurants. Some of those we have met have lived here for ten years and more and yes you have guessed it, they don’t speak a word of Spanish and haven’t the foggiest idea of what is going on in the country because all they watch is Coronation street and Eastenders on the television.

British, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German and French ghettoes are perhaps a little more affluent than other ghettoes but never the less they are ghettoes; designed to keep the “natives” out and the immigrants in. The majority of these immigrants are of course are law abiding citizens, just as the majority of "other" immigrants are law abiding citizens. But did you know for example that Marbella was and still is; to a large degree, built on British criminal money? Originally in the sixties Spain didn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK so it was a haven for British criminal gangs. Or did you know that most of the burglaries committed in the "Costas" at present are committed by British criminals taking a busman’s holiday?

By all means, I'm not saying we should open our doors to anybody who wants to come in or indeed make naive cash hand outs to illegals and other non deserving cases, but I am saying, lets think a little before we forward some of the rubbish we receive in our in-boxes.

Neither Britain or any other country in the world gives money to citizens of poorer countries without "strings attached", we earn on it in some way, with for example, building contracts, oil deals, weapons deals (just to keep things unstable and more lucrative for us) and loans that many of the countries don’t really need and cant really afford, to do things that they don’t really have a use for, all quietly negotiated by our little grey eminences who sneak around the corridors in Whitehall, making themselves and the country richer.

Admittedly, we don't indiscriminately bomb innocents (well officially not and only some of the time anyway) but our governments have created the problem we complain about. SO; where should we really be pointing the finger of contempt?

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Saludos desde el sol!