Rioting spreading through London & to other English cities.

I don't see anyone here saying that folk are not entitled to put forward their opinions - surely the reason for participating? There's a difference between have an opinion, putting forward a perspective and merely scoffing or taking pot-shots with malice which I feel some folk have done on this thread.

Then you haven't been paying attention. I invite you to read through prior posts on this thread.

Quote:

Yes, actually living in the nation or city where an event takes place can certainly provide a perspective that enhances discussion concerning the event, but I doubt that you or izzy or anyone not living here in America are prepared to concede that because I have lived here my whole life that my opinions on the events here are more worthy than your own. If, by some miracle, you are, you shouldn't.

Well, IMO, that's just daft.

I agree that it is daft, which is why I made the point.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion on any event.

Actually, I believe some of my opinions of the 'events' here are for me, and of course IMO, more worthy than some of yours - simply because of my own personal experiences in this country, which gives me a greater perspective than you, irrespective of whether or not I was threatened by a rioter. So you may have opinions, but I can't honestly say I would value them more than my own on certain issues.

That's fair. There is no reason why you should value my opinion more or as much as you value your own. To dismiss it out of hand, though, because I don't live in the UK (as some, not you, have done) would be ignorant.

You can have an opinion and your own interpretation about, let's say, parenting issues and the government's role of disempowerment - but, unless you are me and in my circumstances, your opinion is certainly not more worthy than mine based on my firsthand experiences with the government.

You've, in a sense, made my point for me. My comments relative to whose opinions I would value the most pertained only to the question of how someone under assualt would have felt if they had had a firearm. Based on their firsthand experience with the riots, I put greater stake in their opinion of how they would have felt having a gun than that of someone watching the riots on TV, a hundred miles away.

Without some other relevant experiences, neither group's opinion on what caused the riots in the first place carries greater weight.

I think you will agree that not everyone in the UK agrees on what caused the riots, and that some actually agree with me on its origins. The same thing applies to any nation. Not every citizen of a country is of the same mind.

However, I'm actually prepared to listen and seek people's views - and having listened, acknowledging other perspectives, my opinion may change on issues. You, from what I can see, appear not to be willing to listen to what other's are saying or pass off the British perspective as being irrelevant.

In that you are mistaken. I have listened to or read other people's views. Some I agree with and others I do not. Because my opinion on this matter has not changed doesn't mean all of my opinions are unchangeable.

I'm not passing off the British perspective at all, I'm simply arguing that

a) The British perspective is not uniform, and within Britain the personal experiences of Brits can, in some circumstance, lend greater weight to their opinions than those without the same experience. You all live under the same government but you were not all assualted or put in peril by rioters.

and

b) Not living in the UK doesn't disqualify anyone from have a legitimate opinion on this or any other subject concerning events in Britain.

I'm here on a majority American forum - and it does concern me greatly about the world's opinion of my country.

Good for you. Nothing wrong with that.

When other folk, or countries, or people such as Ms Malcolm state
"In a civilized society people would be allowed to defend themselves with guns, not baseball bats."

Well, we (that being the Royal We) the people, disagree with Ms Malcolm.

Nothing wrong with that either except I doubt you are qualified to speak for the entire people of the United Kingdom, anymore than I am qualified to speak for all the people of the United States.

[Of course the Lib-Dems could form a coalition with Labour!
Kidding, just kidding.
By hey, why not?

Will u describe it?
Residential area? or rural ?

Someone told me that it has good strawberry shortcake. Do u agree ?

Will u describe it?
Residential area? or rural ?

Someone told me that it has good strawberry shortcake. Do u agree ?

I can't talk for Izzie's particular locality, but Devon is a popular holiday destination, home of the English Riviera.
It is predominantly rural, but not exclusively so. The term Devonshire tends to be used to describe produce,
Devonshire clotted cream, scones, cream teas etc.

... scones, cream teas etc.

I see; for which holiday??

Yes, bonuses do work – but for fruit-pickers, not City bankers

The justification that banks need to fork out massive payouts to retain top talent is a fallacy


Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian, Tuesday 18 January 2011

Open the business pages at this time of year, and a whole bunch of telephone numbers come tumbling out. An average payout of £233,000 for the investment bankers at JP Morgan. A £9.7bn pot for the swots at Goldman Sachs. And a £2m kiss goodbye for the boss of Lloyds, Eric Daniels, presumably as thanks for bungling the high-street bank's affairs so badly that it now relies on cash from the British taxpayer.

Ask a City executive to justify such huge bonuses, especially as the rest of the country braces itself for the biggest spending cuts since 1945, and you get a brush-off. The financiers have two main justifications for their mammoth handouts. First, bonuses spur on staff to perform better, which in the end is better for both the business and the wider economy. The second defence is the one given by the boss of Barclays, Bob Diamond, to MPs on the Treasury select committee last week. Unless banking chiefs paid out these vast sums, he said, they would lose their best and brightest and oh-so-rare employees: "The other option is that we don't have investment banks located in the UK." (Diamond, by the way, is himself in line for an £8m bonus.)

Well, guess what? I've been through stacks of the research on bonuses, and there is something in what Diamond, Daniels and those other tanned boys in their corner offices say. All the evidence suggests that where bonuses would be most useful is not in finance – but in jobs such as fruit picking and working on supermarket checkouts. The people who should be getting bonuses aren't in the glass and steel office blocks of Canary Wharf, but are further east, getting caked in mud in the fields of Kent.

Take the financiers' first line of defence, about the relationship between pay, targets and performance. In 2005, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a regional branch of the US central bank, published a piece of research called Large Stakes and Big Mistakes. In it, a team of eminent behavioural economists reported on experiments they had conducted with American undergraduates. The students were offered money to tap a keyboard as fast as they possibly could, and also to add up some numbers.

When it came to the simple chore of hitting computer keys, bonuses worked a treat: the more cash on offer, the faster the undergraduates tapped. On the more complex task of doing maths, however, incentives served to worsen performance. "Tasks that involve only effort are likely to benefit from increased incentives," wrote the economists. "While for tasks that include a cognitive component, there seems to be a level of incentive beyond which further increases can have detrimental effects on performance."

In other words, bonuses can spur workers on to do basic mechanical tasks faster and better – clearing a field of fruit before it goes rotten, say, or scanning in multi-packs of Andrex in busy supermarkets. But on more complex tasks, any sum beyond a paltry one is counter-productive. The same results have been shown in other studies. When investment bankers argue that their work is so complex they need bonuses, they are contradicting the research. And of course, they are ignoring the history of the past few years, which shows that bonuses drove an entire industry to pull stupid gambles – with disastrous consequences.

Now for the other argument, that financial institutions need incentives to keep these superstars. That fallacy is neatly quashed by Boris Groysberg in his recent book, Chasing Stars. An academic at Harvard Business School, Groysberg studied 366 Wall Street equity analysts who changed employers between 1988 and 1996. He chose these 366 because they had been rated number one in their field before moving. He found that once these stars swapped banks they were no longer so super: "Their job performance plunged sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after moving to a new firm."

"Moving employer on Wall Street is no big deal," Groysberg tells me. "You hand in your BlackBerry, you pick up your coat, you cross the street and in 45 seconds you can be back in business." But what you leave behind are your colleagues, your bosses, your knowledge of how your company functions – in other words, all the institutional and collective factors that made you a success, but which usually get forgotten in the acclaim for individual achievement.

The mirage of talent is how management writer David Bolchover labels this. He argues that those skills aren't so rare nowadays when China and India are churning out tens of thousands of maths and engineering graduates.

Besides, rewards in financial services are already so high that the City lures in bright young graduates like Camden market draws goths. On the fruit fields of Kent, however, the shortage of talent is real. Employers have to hire migrants from eastern Europe to do the work that others won't do. The same goes for supermarkets, where bored teens sit at tills. Yet most of us would prefer to have fruit and grocery shopping than bad advice on mergers and acquisitions. The solution, I would say, is simple: award the bonuses to the fruit- pickers, the checkout staff and assembly-line workers. We can discuss what to give the bankers later.

OmSigDAVID wrote:

I see; for which holiday??

'Holiday' is English and means the very same what you Americans call 'vacations'.

Summer holidays, you go on holiday when you get time off work. I did enjoy the zoo, not as much as my little boy.

Blackpool, England: Families arrive for a holiday by the sea, where a myriad of rides cast their occupants into the air, high above the promenaders or spin and twist around looping circuits. A display of fancy diving holds the attention of spectators while on the pier couples engage in ballroom dancing.

Stalls dispense traditional seaside food like cockles and mussels, shrimps and whelks, oysters, hot dogs and sticks of rock. A rapt and appreciative crowd watch the Bathing Beauty contest. The winner receives a silver trophy, photographed by a line of photographers.

After a midday siesta, the holidaymakers return to the beach to relax in the sun or play in the sea. As the sun sets Blackpool Tower becomes illuminated. People enjoy the elaborate light displays and the rides of the fair while they remember the happy events of the day.

The term Devonshire tends to be used to describe produce, Devonshire clotted cream, scones, cream teas etc.

Summer holidays, you go on holiday when you get time off work.

I did enjoy the zoo, not as much as my little boy.

The term Devonshire tends to be used to describe produce, Devonshire clotted cream, scones, cream teas etc.

And a duke, who lives at Chatsworth House near Bakewell (in Derbyshire, of course).

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