Be Excellent To Each Other

The UK DOES have a growing population, by a full 350,000 people a year.

Except it already is. There isn't enough available social housing, there isn't enough private housing. School class sizes are way up on what they were 20 years ago.

We're not in danger of outgrowing our available land, but we have already outgrown our available infrastructure. Lots of this is down to investment in infrastructure not matching growth in population (which, accepted, is not just from childbirth), but we're certainly not in a situation where we are short of young people and therefore need to subsidise them.

Hence the earlier car analogy. We don't need your kids, people. If you can't afford one, don't get one.

Of course, the welfare state absolutely should kick in where unforseen circumstances lead to a child not being able to be supported by its parents - illness, divorce, loss of work etc.

Indeed the opposite, I thought? I thought the courts had recently upheld companies' rights to do this, specifically ruling that it's not age discrimination. Yay. Foresight.

Wow. Not sure how they arrive at that conclusion.

God only knows. From the little I heard on the radio it was something to do with companies needing the right to plan their workforce arrangements or something. Bonkers stuff.

To google!

Bizarre. Surely if the only criteria you are using to decide who should be forced to retire is their age, it is pretty much by definition age discrimination.

In which case setting *any* retirement age would be age discrimination, which clearly makes no sense either, though.

I thought you could claim it wasn't descriminating if you could clearly show that at that age rampant decrepitude made it impossible for them to do their job to an acceptable level, which is clearly nonsense at 65 for most non-manual jobs? The same legislation that lets Diamond sell cheaper insurance to women without falling foul of sex discrimination laws.

Setting it at 70 would be more sensible, these days. However, I somehow suspect a lot of us will be working until we drop.

FTFY.

The justification given in the EU recommendation on this the other day was that they do not want individual employers to be able to ask people to retire when the employer decides they are too old to fulfill their role. They feel allowing employers to make judgement calls on this could lead to huge legalised age discrimination, which would have to be fought on a case-by-case basis. Therefore they recommended a blanket retirement age as the lesser of two evils.

However, this is a recommendation from some sort of panel of experts, to be taking into consideration by judges who will make the decision sometime next year. So it's a report, not a ruling.

Ah, that would have been in the first part of the radio story, that I didn't hear. The latter part which I did catch made it sound like a UK court ruling. Fucking Today, honestly. Cretins.

Doesn't everyone in the UK get child benefit? Chavs....

I had an unplanned pregnancy at 16. I was too young to know how hard it would be and I certainly couldn't afford it, I was still at school. Abortion was an option but I didn't want one, my rebellious teenage side decided I could raise a baby no matter what! It was way too hard and we did everything the wrong way round but we are now both qualified professionals and in a few years I anticipate Grim...esque levels of wealth!

I don't understand why anyone would want so many children, I think more than 2 is too many personally. I don't like seeing people with 4 or 5 children squeezed into a small council house with non working parents but that's just because I don't understand that mentality. Why would you be satisfied with that life? I think that is more tragic but you have to hope that the children in that situation would want to better themselves and escape it.

It's a shame they didn't choose 'B' instead of 'J' for their kids' names... we'd have at least three Borts by now.

This would be cruel. Those personalized license plates are in such short supply already

.. and if they'd chosen BJs they wouldn't have had so many damn kids.

That is one of my favorite insults:

"Why could you have just not been a blowjob?"

Can I interest you in a free upgrade to the more vulgar version, 'You're the load your mom should have swallowed'?

Much more rude, doesn't work with Vista or PPC Macs, though.