Alberta Business Marketing

The  International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP) for 8 years has followed the legal route to try to prove that the freezing of about half of expats’ pensions in certain countries, mostly in the Commonwealth, was discriminatory.  This was turned down finally in the European Court of Human Rights in March 2011. 

There has been growing support for the unfreezing of these pensions in Parliament. An early day motion (EDM) calling on the government to end the freezing of state pensions for expats, sponsored by Work and Pensions Committee chair Dame Anne Begg, has attracted 101 MPs’ signatures.  This  affects around 500,000 pensioners.

Now a working group which includes Treasury officials and members of the International Consortium of British Pensioners (ICBP) will investigate the issue.

---

Copyright © 2012 The Other Blokes Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact admin@otherbb.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Post from: The Other Blokes Blog

UK Frozen Pensions Working Group Set Up

Technorati Tags: frozen pensions, government, pensions, UK

Related Posts

• October 4, 2008 -- UK Frozen Pensions And The Moral Debt Of Honour (0)
• May 1, 2012 -- Pension Justice For UK Expats (0)
• December 18, 2011 -- Rapid Response – When is it needed? (1)
• December 4, 2011 -- UK Frozen Pensions – the senseless inequity continues (0)
• April 12, 2010 -- Frozen Pensioners Fight On For British Fair Play (0)

Tags: frozen pensions, Government, living, pensions, society, UK
Posted in Uncategorized | | Comments Off

There is surprisingly little movement on the UK Frozen Pensions issue.  1.1 Million British Old Age Pensioners have chosen to spend their retirement years overseas and in doing so, they save the British Economy over 7 Billion Pounds every year. More than half of these receive the same pension as they would receive if living in the UK.  The other 545,000 pensioners resident mainly in the British Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada have their pensions locked in value at the time they emigrated.

The UK Treasury would benefit from a change in policy and it would correct a moral debt of honour.  However the number of MPs who support this long-needed application of the English principle of fair play grows only slowly.

Some UK Pensioners Can No Longer Afford To Stay Abroad

The effect of this policy can have a devastating effect on recipients of UK state pensions who have emigrated or who are thinking of doing so.

One of the hardest hit groups is those who emigrated many years ago.  Trying to live on a pension whose value was locked in at say a 1985 value gets increasingly difficult, as costs rise including the costs of medications.  Their only recourse is to return to the UK and have their pension restored to its true current level.  At the same time they can then draw on all the social supports and benefits that are available.  The cost to the UK Treasury is significant and they must try to make a new home but what other choice do they have.

Other UK Pensioners Cannot Afford To Emigrate

Another group which is severely affected according to the Telegraph is those people from ethnic minorities who live in the UK and who would wish to return abroad to their country of birth.  The Runnymede Trust, a race relations think tank, has criticised the Government for refusing to inflation-proof the pensions of thousands of Britons.

The report’s author, Phil Mawhinney, said: “It is clearly unfair that people who were encouraged to rebuild the UK after the Second World War… should risk losing their entitlements if they return to the Caribbean, or elsewhere.  The current system of overseas pensions uprating is arbitrary, with no logic behind a pension being uprated in Jamaica but not Trinidad, the Philippines but not India. We therefore call on the Government to uphold fairness and uprate all overseas UK pensions.”

Unfreezing UK Pensions Would Benefit UK Taxpayers

What is particularly surprising about this unfair lack of action is that it costs UK taxpayers to support returning expat UK pensioners and those pensioners who cannot afford to emigrate.  A comment on the Telegraph article cited above explains why.  Peter Morris offered the following facts:

Unfortunately the DWP don’t talk to the Department of Health, who don’t talk to the Department of Communities and Local Government, who don’t talk to Treasury, who don’t talk to the DWP.  If they did they would find out that they could save over £3,000 per pensioner per year, after tax, by encouraging people to migrate.

It is as if the government does not want to save money in  these difficult economic times.

Costing per pensioner per year:

Cost of uprating £1,000
Savings to NHS, Social Services and Housing £8,500
Taxation lost £3,500

Net saving to the Government £4,000

Even stronger logic applies to those who would like to stay abroad but are forced to return to live in the UK.  Undoubtedly the costs to the NHS, Social Services and Housing would be even higher than those averages above, since the returnees would be the older and more needy.

More and more MPs are gradually opening their eyes to this inequity but progress to a resolution is still far too slow.

---

Copyright © 2012 The Other Blokes Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact admin@otherbb.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Post from: The Other Blokes Blog

UK Frozen Pensions – the senseless inequity continues

Technorati Tags: expat, Frozen Pension, state pension, UK

Related Posts

• October 4, 2009 -- UK State Pension Values Confirm The Frozen Inequity (2)
• August 13, 2008 -- 10 Downing Street Twitters While UK Pensioners Freeze (6)
• December 23, 2011 -- UK Frozen Pensions Working Group Set Up (0)
• November 5, 2008 -- Frozen UK Pensions – European Court of Human Rights – Decision (1)
• October 4, 2008 -- UK Frozen Pensions And The Moral Debt Of Honour (0)

Tags: canada, expat, Frozen Pension, living, society, state pension, UK
Posted in Uncategorized | | Comments Off

Will you be celebrating bonfire night this November 5th evening?  That’s likely only if you live in the United kingdom, New Zealand or Newfoundland.  Some call it Guy Fawkes Night and that seems to be catching people’s attention more this year.  Apparently Guy Fawkes has become the face of the Occupy protests around the world.

The Gunpowder Plot

Guy Fawkes is a historical name in Britain since he plotted with twelve other conspirators to blow up Parliament with explosives and assassinate King James the First.  The plan was to install a Catholic monarch in the botched "gunpower plot" in 1605.

Authorities found out about it and caught Guy Fawkes guarding barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament.  He was tried as a traitor and the king's narrow escape is now celebrated every year on November 5th with fireworks and the burning of effigies known as "guys" across the country.

Guy Fawkes as Activist

This year Guy Fawkes Day has a distinctly political flavor, as protesters inspired by the folk hero marched on Parliament — though with somewhat different intentions than the 17th-century activist.

Stylized Guy Fawkes plastic masks — with a clownish, sinister mustachioed smile and features loosely based on drawings of Fawkes — have been worn by hundreds of protesters from the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement from New York to London. And before that, members of the international rogue collective of "hackivists" known as Anonymous had worn the now instantly recognizable masks during protests against the Church of Scientology.

The design of the masks came from the comic book and movie V for Vendetta, which features a violent, anarchist antihero who fashions himself a modern day Guy Fawkes and rebels against a fictional fascist government.

Bonfire Night

Many more people will of course celebrate the typical Bonfire Night.

Preparations for Bonfire Night celebrations include making a dummy of Guy Fawkes, which is called "the Guy". Some children even keep up an old tradition of walking in the streets, carrying "the Guy" they have just made, and beg passersby for "a penny for the Guy." The kids use the money to buy fireworks for the evening festivities.

On the night itself, Guy is placed on top of the bonfire, which is then set alight; and fireworks displays fill the sky.

Rather ironically, some of these firework displays are the work of a descendant of the man who caught Guy Fawkes trying to blow up Parliament.  She is a top fireworks display expert and is one of the country's top pyrotechnicians.  Ellie Turner works for the Manchester-based fireworks company Walk The Plank, which has organised thousands of major firework displays.

A Penny For The Old Guy

Some may remember that phrase as a subtitle for the poem by T. S. Eliot called The Hollow Men.

Perhaps the most remembered part of this is its final verse:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I remember my mathematics teacher, Max Leason, was particularly fond of this and quoted it often.

However life does not need to end that way.  Indeed some have proposed that people's mortal remains could be fired into space or perhaps more reasonably be part of a beautiful fireworks display.  A number of companies such as Angels Flight will arrange this for you.

A final Image of Your Loved One You Will Cherish Forever.

As the music plays, the family looks skyward over the beautiful ocean waters, watching the fireworks carry their loved one’s cremains into the air. Bursting over the ocean in exquisite patterns and colors, the cremains are scattered into the sea.

What a way to go.  No whimper there. It is certainly the way cool seniors like Betty White will make their exit.

---

Copyright © 2012 The Other Blokes Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact admin@otherbb.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Post from: The Other Blokes Blog

Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes and Firework Displays

Technorati Tags: activist, bonfire, exposives, fireworks, gunpowder plot, guy fawkes, occupy

Posts from the Archives You May Enjoy

• September 4, 2008 -- Best Value Conferencing (1)
• July 19, 2006 -- Proudly Canadian (0)
• December 20, 2007 -- Cross The Language Barrier With Google Chat (0)
• March 19, 2007 -- Social Media Support Communities (0)
• April 10, 2005 -- Institutional Furniture Manufacturer Extraordinary (4)

Tags: activist, bonfire, exposives, fireworks, gunpowder plot, guy fawkes, living, occupy, recreation, society
Posted in Uncategorized | | Comments Off

Many of us pride ourselves on our memories.  If someone questions how we remember a given fact, we may even become somewhat irate.  However scientists are now finding out that the power of our memory may well be set at our birth.

Short-Term Memory

In this we are dealing particularly with short term memory.  Here is part of an article from McGill in Montreal that explains how short term memory functions.

In the course of a day, there are many times when you need to keep some piece of information in your head for just a few seconds. Maybe it is a number that you are “carrying over” to do a subtraction, or a persuasive argument that you are going to make as soon as the other person finishes talking. Either way, you are using your short-term memory.

In fact, those are two very good examples of why you usually hold information in your short-term memory: to accomplish something that you have planned to do. Perhaps the most extreme example of short-term memory is a chess master who can explore several possible solutions mentally before choosing the one that will lead to checkmate.

This ability to hold on to a piece of information temporarily in order to complete a task is specifically human. It causes certain regions of the brain to become very active, in particular the pre-frontal lobe.

The pre-frontal lobe is highly developed in humans. It is the reason that we have such high, upright foreheads, compared with the receding foreheads of our cousins the apes. It is no surprise that the part of the brain that seems most active during short term memory is located precisely in this prefrontal region that is well developed only in human beings.

Improving Your Memory

There are of course a number of ways in which you can improve your memory.  HelpGuide offers suggestions on  how to Improve Your Memory with Tips And Exercises To Sharpen Your Mind And Boost Brainpower

Their list includes the following:

• Don’t skimp on exercise or sleep
• Make time for friends and fun
• Keep stress in check
• Bulk up on brain-boosting foods
• Give your brain a workout - Use mnemonic devices to make memorization easier

There are some excellent suggestions in this detailed article.

Another source of Memory Improvement Techniques is MindTools.  They promise that using them will allow you to avoid frustrating memory loss.  You will be able to retain and recall more information.

Some Memories Work Better Than Others

The latest news is that some of us will never have memories that are as good as those of other people.  Recent research at Cambridge is now suggesting that our memory capability is set at our birth.

A structural variation in a part of the brain may explain why some people are better than others at distinguishing real events from those they might have imagined or been told about, researchers have found.

The University of Cambridge scientists found that normal variation in a fold at the front of the brain called the paracingulate sulcus (or PCS) might explain why some people are better than others at accurately remembering details of previous events -such as whether they or another person said something, or whether the event was imagined or actually occurred.  The research was published tin October 2011 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

This brain variation, which is present in roughly half of the normal population, is one of the last structural folds to develop before birth and for this reason varies greatly in size between individuals in the healthy population.  The researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain.  Interestingly, all participants believed that they had a good memory despite one group’s memories being clearly less reliable.

Dr Jon Simons from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Experimental Psychology and Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, who led the research, said:

All those who took part were healthy adult volunteers with typical educational backgrounds and no reported history of cognitive difficulties.  The memory differences we observed were quite striking.  It is exciting to think that these individual differences in ability might have a basis in a simple brain folding variation.

This is indeed remarkable news and could be the reason why some memories are just not as good as others.

---

Copyright © 2012 The Other Blokes Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact admin@otherbb.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Post from: The Other Blokes Blog

How Good Is Your Memory

Technorati Tags: memory, pre-frontal lobe, retention

Posts from the Archives You May Enjoy

• October 17, 2006 -- Frank And Gordon Fired (0)
• April 15, 2008 -- B.C. Sport Fishing Online (4)
• October 4, 2006 -- Searching With Foreign Accents (0)
• July 31, 2009 -- BWelford’s Monthly Round-Up For July 2009 (0)
• September 8, 2005 -- IBM Canada Offers PLM (0)

Tags: brainware, memory, pre-frontal lobe, Research, retention, society
Posted in Uncategorized | | Comments Off

This model village is like no village you have ever seen before. Don’t look for thatched roofs and quaint gardens. This is a village that has ambitions to be promoted to city-status.

It is featured in the latest issue of the Week In China newsletter, and it's called Huaxi.  It is the richest 'village' in China and it's hard to believe what has been achieved there.

Huaxi has just built a skyscraper taller than the Eiffel Tower. The Zengdi Kongzhong New Village Tower opened earlier this month and stands at 328 metres tall. Topped with what appears to be a golden golf ball, it is hard to miss. it cost Rmb3 billion ($469 million) to construct and all the villagers contributed, since this is a commune. This is the latest in a string of impressive construction projects.

To give local residents a chance to glimpse the “beauty of the world”– as well as to boost tourism – Huaxi has put up replicas of various iconic buildings. These include China’s own Great Wall, as well as the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. But adding an international flavour are somewhat less successful attempts to knock-off Washington’s Capitol Hill, the Sydney Opera House and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Huaxi is 85 miles from Shanghai and houses 60,000 residents with a per capita income seven times the national average. However they achieve this by working seven days a week. As members of the commune, residents must put 95% of their dividends and 80% of their bonuses back into the village.  The assets created belong to the commune not to the individual.

The following video will give you more information on how this remarkable village functions:

---

Copyright © 2011 The Other Blokes Blog. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact admin@otherbb.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Post from: The Other Blokes Blog

Model Village – Chinese Style

Technorati Tags: Arc de Triomphe, China, Eiffel Tower, Great Wall of China, Sydney Opera House, Temple of Heaven

Posts from the Archives You May Enjoy

• May 7, 2005 -- Business Blogging Brings Internet Visibility (1)
• March 23, 2006 -- Brand Montreal – La Ville Vibrante (0)
• March 30, 2008 -- You Don’t Need To Read The Instructions (1)
• July 2, 2009 -- BWelford’s Monthly Round-Up For June 2009 (0)
• May 23, 2010 -- Professional Writers Blog (0)

Tags: Arc de Triomphe, China, Eiffel Tower, Great Wall of China, living, society, Sydney Opera House, Temple of Heaven
Posted in Uncategorized | | Comments Off