Erm......
After twelve months in the semi employed hand to mouth, penniless jobless wilderness, just had my contract extended for another 12 months on a job I still can't believe I got that pays well into six figures in GBP tax free and I love every minute of.......however, I'm working in Africa where I get looked after very nicely thankyou - relatively anyway - I have a driver, get my meals and healthcare and really manage to bank everything every month that I take home..Yay me. What's coming, and what few people are seeing while they fret over their impending bad credit rating or having to give up the lease payments on the car is that a proportionally large section of the worlds population lives on the edge - they don't worry about the superficial stuff but they scrape by on subsistence. They basically feed themselves and their families through their emplyment and that's about it - in the cities it's drivers, street hawkers and cleaners and in the rural areas it's subsitence farmwrs but they all rely on their staple foodstuffs. Basically the price of these (rice for example) is at some point going to proportionally rocket and a lot of people are about to suddenly going to be unable to afford to eat...and that my friends, is where the global wheels are going to fall off for a while. Should what I've said sound a little confusing, go back to your plasma screen, sit on your unpaid for sofa and hope someone else'll come along and sort it out...because if they don't, there's going to be slaughter and famine on an unprecedented scale in what we call the Developing World as they all start scrapping over what they can get.
(Oil Slick, Thu 22 Jan 2009, 20:47, 6 replies)

umm
if there is going to be "slaughter and famine on an unprecedented scale in what we call the Developing World" ... why are you still there?
(haberman is singing in the changes, Thu 22 Jan 2009, 21:27, closed)

errr
"pays well into six figures in GBP tax free"
( ExactlyHowLongDoIHaveToBeHere, Thu 22 Jan 2009, 21:39, closed)

actually...
... 'Oli Slick' may well be Robert Mugabe.
( ExactlyHowLongDoIHaveToBeHere, Thu 22 Jan 2009, 21:40, closed)

Shhh....
Or I'll send the Mrs. 'round to fill you in.


P.S. Wanna buy a farm?
(Oil Slick, Fri 23 Jan 2009, 6:12, closed)

Mainly due to the risk of being shot/ kidnapped/ malaria
etc. Oh, that and the appalling lack of decent interweb access.
(Oil Slick, Fri 23 Jan 2009, 6:22, closed)

Oh, don't worry
When the population of the developing world finally stops being able to graft a reasonable yield of food out of the dwindling non desertified arable land through excessive use of expensive nitrogen rich fertiliser and inadequately replenished aquifer fed water, we'll feel it over here too. The blood's going to run just as freely :)
( Gribbley, Fri 23 Jan 2009, 13:57, closed)