http://www.theonion.com/articles/yahoo-back-on-top-after-purchasing-millions-of-13y,32497/?ref=auto

Sounds about right even if that is satire

Thats not what I said thou is it. If you want to live in third world conditions expecting a number of your children to die from poverty and disease and hoping enough will survive to maybe take care of you in your old age then maybe you could give that a go maybe even put your children to work from an early age with little in the way of education or opportunity to not have to make those same choices. Actually choices is the wrong word as it isn't a choice but what circumstances dictate.

Thing is though in the western world letting your children starve to death is not an acceptable option. Not saying it is an acceptable option in the third world though most of us seem content to ignore the reality of it. Even the phrase third world is there to separate our fortunate circumstances from those outside of our national borders.

So maybe I should rephrase my original point, that one major reason for a falling western birthrate is the financial pressure to maintain a standard of living. We don't as a rule get to see our children die, we just don't let them be born in the first place.
 

Having kids is one of the biggest expenses you can have, there is only so much you can do to reduce the out going expenses of getting by.

You can cut your energy bills using more efficient devices you can choose a smaller car and pay less on fuel and insurance and road tax, you can give up drinking and smoking and maybe grow some of your own food. You can't do much to reduce the cost of housing or the taxes you pay. As a couple with shared housing energy and food costs you can get by and make the mortgage payments but bring a child into the mix and just see how much harder it is to meet the bills.

Falling birth rate of course it is falling, people can't afford to have children, they don't have the income to support having children!

Do you know which antibiotic, you never know it might have a specific application to this problem.

The Drunker you are the more likely you are not to be taking any girl home. Trust me being hammered doesn't impress women. She is even less impressed when you lose your license and even your job when you get done for dui. You may even feel a certain amount of regret when you get refused insurance or quoted extortionate rates due to the dui.

Wouldn't recommend getting the bus for taking a girl home, but a taxi is perfectly fine shows good judgement and a willingness to spend money on more than just booze. You might get the bus in if it is reasonable to do so (you don't have to say how you got into town).

Maybe you might want to think why she is single and available and willing to get in a car with a drunk, might save you from some difficult times ahead.

Could you do me a favour and go to gardenersworld.com/forum/ and see if you can write a post to the forum and upload an image you will need to request the desktop site or you will not get the toolbar with the image upload icon.
It might just be me but i cannot get a file to upload from android

I found the wired article about Heseldens death after falling from a cliff into a river rather insensitive.

via an app? in a browser uploading files is a problem

It's not an Android thing it's a DRM thing, and not being able to use your hardware properly due to content providers concerns about content that hasn't even been on the device in question.

Take a photo with your device, want to upload it to somewhere other than a pre determined set of sites well tough you can't (try posting a photo or attachment to a forum from a mobile OS.

I wouldn't mind if the app stores were trustworthy but they repeatedly shown to be not. I'm looking particularly at googles play store where the trusted repository can not be trusted. I can only hope there will be a fully functional linux on a tablet this year.

I'm just a little annoyed with some of the 'features' of mobile platform

Yes an adapter "Works" but on android you get a lousy 640x400 ish display as the DRM doesn't like it.
Regular HDMI the display is nice and sharp and hires but via an adapter it is terrible.

I could understand* if it was video playback that it has issues with but everything even the home screen is reduced in quality.

*Still would be quite stupid on video's too as you can just copy them anyway.
 

I'm reminded of something G W Bush senior said "I don't like broccoli, I've never liked broccoli and now that i'm president I still don't want to eat it", or some along those lines.

The point being he felt he should be able to choose what he ate, and why not. The recent horse meat scandal was not so much about eating horse meat as unknowingly eating horse meat. There is nothing wrong with horse meat in of itself in fact it can be better quality meat than the cow it replaced.

Since becoming an adult you have had the right to choose what to eat, even as a child you could refuse to eat some things. Do you look at the ingredient list on foods that you buy, I do and so do many other people, some times it is for allergies, sometimes for quality. Sometimes for ingredients you would rather not consume.

Do you like to drink carva when the label says champagne can you not distinguish between a golden delicious and a granny smith or a bramley apple?

Do you prefer to buy fish or do you want to choose cod or haddock from china or the north sea?

Can't you see it is all about choice. I really don't care if you live off GM food, myself i'd rather pay a little more and buy a quality product with the flavour and texture that it always has had. The genuine article no less.
Unlike george i do like brocolli, but like george i want to choose what i eat.

In reality meanwhile, buying boots has become a regular thing since most boots won't last more than 3 months without falling apart especially when wet. It got especially annoying walking in the rain with with wet feet and boots frothing at every step and a label which said waterproof. That for me was the last straw I drove a 100 mile round trip and bought a 2nd hand pair of para boots, they need re - heeling and the total cost is more than I would pay for a regular pair of new boots however these boots will last for years. Some of the best boots available are around â200 a pair and are sold to military personal yes expensive boots compared to the garbage being sold in general today but repaid many times with the quality of the materials and construction. Proper resoling of boots can cost â80 and in Ireland there are few qualified to do the job but its worth every penny. Thing is I remember a time when buying good quality boots was easy and you would get years out of them. Trainers used to last too, normally the reason for getting rid wasn't because they were falling apart but they stunk from years of sweat.

Not sure if that is true, this winter has been a long one the delay of seasonal weather due to the jet stream having been low longer than usual has caused a few problems. It finally moved northwards about 2 weeks ago.

For cattle and sheep apart from the many sheep dead in the UK frozen to death right in the lambing season there has been problems with grazing, the grass has been fairly dormant leaving farmers in a dire situation without feed or money to buy feed for their herds. In Ireland there has been a help line set up to help farmers who cannot feed their animals. For crops the persisting frosts have put many crops and plants around a month behind. The last couple of years the summer temperature and rainfall has lowered yields too.

It's pretty essential that the jet stream rise northwards for europe to experience its 'normal' climate. Without the warm air keeping back the cold air, you don't get the germination temperatures needed.

Natural selection should favour plants most suited to the climate that they grow in, as they will be the plants that grow to maturity and set seed which can be planted the following year. Wouldn't Monsanto seed policy of not allowing seed collection work against natural selection, so the seed available will be the seed Monsanto has decided has optimal characteristics and if they are wrong well that could be a major problem.

Fairly recently Colmans mustard crops were found to have falling yields and it turned out that they needed diverse seeds to get high yields luckily they do keep seed from past years and were able to reverse the trend but without that they were in big trouble.

I don't think Monsanto has it's GM Seed banned in Europe it just isn't welcomed by Europeans and if a product has GM on it, it is labeled as such and it doesn't sell. Fortunately for Monsanto the FDA refuses to label GM food in the USA, if that changed Monsanto likely would be in trouble as consumers boycotted their products.
why wouldn't it be the same as in Europe?

I don't see how it isn't part of the same issue, why else the phoney (sorry) regulator if not to pretend to address the issue of customers who (quite rightly I would say) thought they were getting ripped off.

I seriously doubt anybody would expect to get anywhere with an industry watchdog if it was just a case of the customer not paying for service received. If the bills were legitimate the real regulator would rule in favour of the company and a real court would rule in favour of the phone company allowing real debt collectors to be used.

At least we agree that the company was very dodgy and has now been shut down .

Not so sure about that being fine, as this below was also in the article.

So you have a contract where you have no coverage or if you do have coverage making more than a 2 minute phone call will generate excess fee's and even if you want to cancel they charge you for that too.

These late payments are not the usual problem of customer not having the money but customers receiving outrageous bills over and above their contracts or not getting the service they were promised.

Mobile phone companies have for years gotten away with charging customers for free phone numbers and not including non geographic phone numbers as part of your bundled minutes. Many big companies use non geographic numbers for their customer support and billing call centres, and usually you are held in a queue paying for it.

However this is a new low even for a mobile phone company, excess charges for day time calls in excess of 2 minutes, would you pay it?

Got to admit even without a contract phone companies still find ways to stitch up their customers.

Three mobile for instance give customers free unlimited data for 30 days and even an extra 10 euro phone credit when a top up of 20 euro is made (topping up twice with 10 euro doesn't count even if the machine will not issue a 20 euro top up).

However day 31 is interesting. last month i had around 25 euro of credit. At 5:30 am i had used about 6 euro of credit on data by 5:34 am a further 12 euro and by 6:30 am my balance had gone.

The key thing to do is to buy a 30 day 500mb add on for 4.99 twice. the 2nd one will get queued. The first one will just expire with no usage and then the 2nd will kick in and probably last for 30 days. As a light user of calls and texts that would leave 5 euro for calls in month1 (typical non free usage) and in the 2nd month I would have 5 euro left but since i wouldn't have free weekend calls and free weekend texts, i'd be out of credit in a week or a fortnight anyway.

Should I be annoyed? well not really I get internet access for 20 euro a month and that is still cheap compared with the other options as landlines have line rental + internet access in the city. The only fast option here is wimaxx which is around 35 euro a month so i'm happy enough with what I have (i'd still have to pay for my mobile as well).

I'm better off than Excites' customers that were suckered into a contract which seemed on paper to be better value than the competition, but with excess usage charges after 2 minutes a day, are in practice more expensive and they have a 2 year lock on the customer
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At least with my provider i am free to change at any time (my sim remains in service even with no credit for receiving calls). So far I haven't found a better deal and I will not go back to contract phones.