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Did I lock All The Doors This Morning ? - An Airport Lament

  How often have you got half way to work,   and found yourself convinced that you left the front door unlocked, or the gas on ?  Or, or worse still, found yourself well on the way to your holiday destination with the same sinking feeling ? It’s a more common problem than you might think, and it definitely isn’t confined to the elderly… I call it the ‘Familiarity Breeds Amnesia’ (FBA) syndrome, because it arises from our ability to distinguish between individual occurrences of a familiar action which we perform day in, day out. Picture this type of scenario – you’ll probably leave your house at least two or three times every day, and will likely double-lock it each time with a conventional latch and possibly also a mortice key. This simple action is virtually automatic, but isn’t always registered as a discrete event in your memory. The action, and therefore the memory of it, is difficult to recall – precisely because you do it so often. Worse still, the procedure...
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UK Student Loans – SB or BS ?

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Some more bad press surfaced yesterday for the Student Loan scheme - this time in the form of highlighting misleading info supplied by the universities themselves. As you'll see if you read further, the scheme is designed to recoup as much cash for the treasury as possible. Its complexity aids in this by lulling students into a false sense of security about avoiding hefty repayments by virtue of lower salaries. A nasty surprise is to come as thrsholds are kept frozen and salaries rise inexorably.  My advice - avoid them like the plague....or of you really can't, get them paid off as quickly as possible. Please see also recent update of 7.4.26 at the end of this text for interpretation of UK.Gov's announcement on the 6% interest rate cap for Plan 2 loans.  ------------------ UK Student loans, and more particularly the repayment thereof, is a hot topic in the news at the moment.  The student body, both past and present, are all clamouring for more favourable terms, give...
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UK TV Broadcasting – Is the Licence Fee an Essential or just an Anachronism ?

The short answer to this question is that, for the BBC at least, it’s both ..... The licence fee was originally introduced to fund public broadcasting way back in the 1940s after the enforced break in transmissions caused by WW2. It worked reasonably well while the number of channels was small, TV broadcasting was still analogue, and radio retained a significant audience share. While still reasonably priced, it was probably a fair way of funding public broadcasting. Since the dawn of digital TV in the early 2000s, with its plethora of new commercial channels, the BBC’s ‘market share’ of viewer attention has steadily dwindled, while the licence fee has risen nearly 20-fold, from the princely sum of £10 p.a. for a colour licence in 1968 to the current £180 in 2026. The 'Beeb' has fought back to an extent, with introductions of new channels, both on TV an radio, but as we'll see later, these have added to its cost burden considerably, and are likely to be the first to...
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