Trivial things you don't understand/mildly annoy you

[Samdy Gray]

Making pension contributions by salary sacrifice has the same effect, plus if the employer is prepared to give their NI savings as an additional contribution it can increase your pension contribution too.

With NI savings added, the effective tax relief on a pension contribution for someone earning between £100k to £116k is about 66%.

[Bewster]

Having a kidney stone removed tomorrow with the use of a telescope and a laser. Me thinks pissing will be a bit sore after.

Had the op but they couldn't find the stone. Lots of pain and bood pouring from my cock and pissing not " a bit sore" but vomit inducing agony. Thankfully a cocktail of Diclofenac, tramadol and morphine - goes some way to killing the pain

And to think I'm worried about having the snip.

[jimmy_onions]

[tory apologist]Isn't it to do with being a lot cheaper/easier to administer by checking one person's wages using the same data already collected for PAYE than it would be to ask every household to complete a new form stating their combined income?  If so, that seems sensible to me.[/tory apologist]

You would have thought that the extra savings from CB by taking couples out as well would more than offset this?

Whats equally annoying though is that not a single politician I heard on the radio had the balls to give a straight answer to that question.

[Ardiles]

Cameron completely avoided the question when asked about the unfairness of the £50k single earner criterion by Andrew Marr.  Stock response now.  He knows it's unfair, and has given up trying to pretend it is.  As PG says, it's all about administrative simplicity, and nothing else.

[Ardiles]

It's also a poorly drafted and unnecessarily complicated piece of legislation that you can guarantee is not going to last more than 5 years or so before a future government moves in to correct it.

[Flashheart]

Through a random lack of coordination I just managed to poke myself in my own eye and it really hurts.

[janaage]

BBC Stargazing, don't find it annoying but I just can't understand it. All the fascinating information goes beyond my understanding of the universe.  Brian Cox is one clever mother flipper.

[Samdy Gray]

Equally, having to try and explain it to the wife is annoying me.

[jonny72]

Cost of policing a joint income declaration prohibits it, so sole income taken into account. I think as someone affected by this change I'm about the only person I know that couldn't give a monkeys. Anyone on that kind of money shouldn't receive benefits, nor should others who have a vastly higher joint income, it isnt fair but then again whoever said tax is fair.

What pisses me off about the removal of child benefit is the people the BBC have found to interview about it. They're living in a mansion of a house, with a few high end cars in the drive way, then they moan that it means they're going to have one less holiday a year or that they've lost the equivalent of a weekly shop every month.

Find it concerning that so many people that have money and a very comfortable life style have absolutely zero knowledge of what it's like to be at the bottom of the food chain and even worse, really don't give a fuck about it. One less holiday or having to cash in your loose change to feed your kids, which would you prefer?

[janaage]

Equally, having to try and explain it to the wife is annoying me.

Ha ha, like that. When you've finished explaining it to her, could you pm me the details?  Bending space, wormholes and bog standard time travel, mind blowing.

[Samdy Gray]

Took me a while to get my head around the concept of spacetime, but once you have it then pretty much everything else falls into place.

[Honkytonk]

I found it easiest to explain it when teaching GCSE age kids by using a bedsheet with balls on it. Spacetime is the bedsheet, the balls are astronomical objects. You can fold, bend, deform the bedsheet to approximate what spacetime does. It's not 4D, but it gets the basic picture across and gives you a mental framework.

The best physics is explainable without complex maths I find- obviously you need an understanding of the complex maths if you want to fiddle around with it, but to understand the 'layman' basics of it you shouldn't have to use maths beyond the knowledge of a 14 year-old.

I get where you're coming from trying to explain it though Samdy.

[Samdy Gray]

The bedsheet idea is a good one, as is dots on a piece of paper. If you imagine the piece of paper laid flat as one dimensional plane the dots remain relative to each other (the space dimension), but if you bend the piece of paper about the dots on the paper become closer together or further apart and essentially this is the time (temporal) dimension.

In practice it works differently because space is 3D rather than a 2D piece of paper, but essentially it means you could bend spacetime (in theory at least) so that time travel is possible.

[sonicyouth]

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

[Honkytonk]

The TEF has really been skimping on it's 80% bollocks quota recently hasn't it? There have been rational, logical, intellectual discussions cropping up all over the place.

I'm scared.