Back again

Hi everyone.

Just thought I'd pop in to see how you all are, well since i last posted on here I have been on my transatlantic cruise and had a ball . Weather was'nt great there were waves from 12 to 18 foot high but we were fine.

Docked in New York what a sight Manhatten at dawn wow .We spent 3 night's there but it was'nt long enough loved it . Also met some really nice people .

Since I was last on I've hit the big 60 and been to London to meet some twitter friends had a great time all lovely people. Will try to post more often but really life is a bit boring now .

So it finally has happened!

So yesterday I made one of many changes I am in the process of implementing, some of which may not be relevant to you, but they are changes that I must make all the same for myself.

One change is to seperate myself from twitter for a while, it could be for a week, a month, 6 months who knows.

Why am I needing to this, well for starters I have been on twitter for nearly 2 and half years and when I began there were very few people on it, now I have amassed 2400 followers and I am following 1600 of them! Dont get me wrong I love all my followers and I also love the majority of people I am following, but Twitter themselves in my opinion have destroyed what made twitter the success which it has enjoyed the past year, in a few ways.

Retweeting nowadays is just annoying and relentless, the spam bots are taking over, finding new ways to infiltrate your twitter stream and even direct messages. Marketing people are now following me which I thought was great since I am in advertising but when all they do is spam their stuff at you it starts to get a bit grating, the most important thing for me that has changed on twitter is the fact that it is now proving hard to follow conversations between people cause you no longer see tweets that are directed to people you dont follow, this is how I have found a lot of the early people I follow and still do to this day, I found this to be the biggest mistake that twitter HQ made, finally the time spent on twitter for me is insane.

Obviously since you are all on twitter you should be able to understand where I am coming from.

I will also say I will be checking into twitter every now and again so DM me if you need to talk or whatever!

Leisure

William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

The state of the (welfare) nation

The rate of unemployment and the sheer scale of it, has really given me so much to think about this year. Actually its given me a lot to think about. My heart goes out to all those who's situation has changed and they find work is tough (impossible even) to come by. The social plan in Ireland in particular, was so flimsy to start with - the hope always was (in my mind at least) that with a few more years of sustained economic success we could have built a capable society. Even though we never seemed to discuss what our society should be...

Ireland has become so expensive ... and in recent years if you didn't have a money you didn't have a place in society. Houses became so ridiculously overpriced. We've put a whole generation in debt that they can probably never recover from and we don't have the social support mechanism to help them. No doubt the many that will lose their mortgages and deeds will be moved into properties owned by NAMA and rented to them because they can't sell their houses because they owe more now than they're worth. Its just so sad.

I was brought to write this post when I heard that the government wanted to reduce payments because people were tempted to stay on the dole instead of look for a job. I dont want to turn this into a political hijack, so back to my post.

Is this really the best society we could create? I'm not blaming anyone - I refuse to blame property developers, bankers, politicians. I blame us. Too many of us sat back. Too many of us rode the wild waves of the property bubble like sea biscuit. 

We all need our health, food, housing, education, a job and a holiday. With the huge billions we spent over the last few years, I just feel like we really fecked it up. We have more houses than we need ("housing stock oversupply" if you're a central banker) yet we've never had more people worried about losing their (the banks) houses.

Anyway, the situation that so many people find themselves in makes me feel really sad. I don't know how they're going to recover, I wonder how worse it will still get and I fear terribly that it will get worse. What will the health service be like next year? 

I feel like I've cheated the dole queues myself. 2008 and 2009 were not kind to the IT industry, particularly the web industry. I'm self employed and I feel just how fragile a line it is between having an income and not. I dont think the monthly dole payment would meet our mortgage (not because we have a big house but because my mortgage interest is so high because I'm self employed). I don't have all the default standard benefits entitled to regular PAYE people and to be honest, I just don't how I'd survive. 


I really hope this improves and I hope we, the people, can come up with a solution. I dont know how or what but I want to help. Thats gotta be the place to start right?