Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Standing apart from the system these days we’ve not noticed first hand all of the chaos that has resulted in some of the reorganisations of UK government departments over the last year or two but can only laugh at some of it from afar.

Perhaps the best example is the Child “Tax Credit” and Child Benefit combination.

For political reasons, the Child Tax Credit is called a tax credit although, in all but name, it’s clearly a benefit payment. You claim it exactly like a benefit and it’s paid exactly like a benefit so it’s only the name that differentiates it. And that’s the problem: seeing as it’s been called a “tax credit” then it can’t be integrated with the Child Benefit systems thus saving a fortune on duplication of administrations and reducing the errors being made in payments.

That’s a recent one of course but the National Insurance Contributions have long been separate from Income Tax. The bands at which both are levied have been aligned for quite a while now so there’s no reason to keep them separate other than the political double-speak that called the National Insurance scheme an insurance scheme when in fact it’s merely another tax. If it were an insurance scheme then it would build up some money in the kitty but, of course, it doesn’t as the money is paid out as it comes in.

So when will common sense prevail and such nonsenses be put to an end? Somehow I can’t see it being anytime soon as there are just too many interested parties who it suits to have the current system perpetuated.

Blogging reviews seem to come in two basic flavours: 1) nice ones just to get the link and 2) proper ones that are actually useful.

Much as the first type serve their purpose in getting you a link to your site and they’re the safest ones to go for, they’re pretty much useless except for the linkback that they provide. In practice, they’re not overlly useful for that link either as, for the most part, bloggers with really high PR rarely review those with much lower PR who could benefit most.

The second type can be pretty scary though. After all, who among us has a “perfect” blog? Probably 99% of us have just picked the first reasonable looking template and ran with that so there’s usually a lot of scope for criticism on that front (my current one has been described as “Kermit the frog” for instance). Likewise, sod’s law applying as always chances are that they’ll look at your blog when you’ve just written a bunch of posts that are “less than your best” at best and more than likely they’ll be “total ****” even if all your other posts have been Pulitzer material.

But, that second type is far and away the most useful type to get. Sure, there’ll be things that you disagree with either partially or even entirely, but so what? You’re hardly likely to be writing stuff that people will agree with all the time, are you? On the other hand you’ll almost certainly get some useful ideas that you can implement to improve things. For example, about a year ago one one of the “type 2 reviews” that I got pointed out that it was a pain to have to page through endless posts on how to move to France and that I should collect them in one place, so there’s now a link to a compilation of them under “Series Collections” as you can see.

What a “type 2” review doesn’t have to be is nasty. Yes, you may well get a review where someone basically criticises everything on your blog (unlikely, but possible) but they don’t have to be nasty about it and I’ve yet to see one where they were out and out nasty.

Anyway, if anyone’s interested in a review from me, and will review this blog in return, let me know!

Camera technology is moving so fast these days that it’s getting to be pretty much a lottery as to when is the best time to buy a camera.

For instance, I’d pretty much come to the conclusion that the Pentax Option S10 was the perfect camera to be my next “take it everywhere” camera. Launched in August 2007 it offers good quality 10mp images in a very small package.

However, when I did a search for some more information on it, what did I come across but that yesterday Pentax announced the launch of the S12 which is basically the same camera but with a 12mp sensor. Note that the launch has been announced but not actually happened (it’s due in March) so Pentax have delayed (and possibly lost) a sale to me.

After all, why buy the S10 now when I can get a much better camera in two months time for, probably, the same price? Sure, if I was just about to go on holiday I’d buy the S10 now, but I’m not so I’ll wait.

We’ve not mentioned the Toyota in a long, long time basically because it’s been sitting in the car park for the last couple of years after one of the brake pads stopped working and we just didn’t get around to having it fixed.

It’s not that it’s got a whole lot wrong with it, just that we never got around to sorting it out.

Anyway, although we’ve not been looking for one we may have found a buyer in the form of one of the chimney sweeps.

Well, we have an offer of cash or a swap for his van. I think we’ll be going for the cash somehow.

Over the last couple of years we’ve watched our very own French gite listings site slowly but surely climb the ranks in the search engines.

Now that it’s a middling size site, roughly comparable to the likes of VisitFrance in size it’s great to see that it’s sitting right there in the middle of all the fully commercial sites and, moreover, often towards the top of that list.

What’s confusing though is quite simply: why? After all, several of those commercial sites are spending quite serious amounts of money in promoting their site whilst we spend very little comparatively speaking. We know for a fact that at least one of the middle ranking sites (which we rank much better than) was spending around £3000 per year on marketing up to a year or so ago.

Confusing too is how come we’re not innundated with applications to list on our site in that we charge a maximum of £29 whilst comparable sites are charging around the £100 mark and, for that matter, we even offer a “free forever” listing too whereas others limit their free period to six months.