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At the end of a day a chocolate bar should *generally* cost me about the same as it costs you (ie. as a % of your worth if you are in a similar position to me financially). eg. If I earn £3000 (pounds) this month, then if you earnt about $6000 we would be about the same and be able to buy approx the same stuff (give or take). This is a very big approx though, as we all know, for example, we get totally stuffed on IT stuff over here (Isn't the PS3 something like $850 in the UK?) along with a few other items with tax.

Quite. And at least $75 I would have thought. That would just about fill my old car up from a quarter and it is not exactly a huge car (Subaru Impreza), especially not for the US. Not to mention our road tax etc. I mean currently just to have the car on the road it is something like $300-$400 a year I believe (about $500 for a 4x4). And they want to totally up that. I heard that they want to hike 4x4s upto something like $2500 (a year). Basically our government hates drivers. On the other hand we probably don't need so much petrol. I mean you can drive from anywhere to anywhere in the UK in a day (assuming you avoid traffic which is doubtful - I mean 60 million people in a tiny area can get a little jammed at times), and most people can get to the beach within 2 hours. Sucks for commuters though. Oh, and last time I checked it cost about $15 to just get into the centre of London (very big area). Good olde conjestion charge...

Next thing apparently is they want to bring in charging by the mile. Basically make it a law to have a GPS system in your car and they can then track you and post a bill (based on miles, and I assume where you went) to you through the post. Nice. Obviously having access to your GPS at all times will probably mean doing you for speeding while they are at it. Just when I thought the cameras couldn't get any worse (we have thousands all over the place and the latest ones can work out your average speed between 2 points (say 10 miles) so you can't slow down for the camera then boot it all the way to the 2nd one).

Sucks to be a motorist in the UK basically. Apart from the cool challenging roads which I miss. In Cyprus the roads either seem to be nice dual carriageway efforts (boring) or "Ah! I'm going to die! Wish I'd bought a 4x4!" type roads.

Cheers

I don't think all these extreme measures for motorists will come in. The GPS system is lunacy. The only drivers who will not care are mums who do the 5 mile school run and trip to the shops ... mind you, they're the ones who drive massive 89litre V1000 24x24 wheel drives, so they'll be paying around a squillion pounds in road tax.

Basically cabbies, truckies, van drivers, workmen, and medium->long distance commuters will be worse off, and that's probably the majority, so it'd be hard for a government to shaft us like that without getting stoned to death in the following elections.

I remember when our company was took over. Basically 911 put the IT travel market down the tubes for a while. Lots of small to medium companies went under. Ours wasn't big enough and a more wealthy version of ourselves bought us out.

Anyways, their main offices in the UK are now in Slough (round the corner from where they filmed the outside shots of "The Office"). We lived about 40 minutes drive away (depending on traffic) and they decided to relocate us to the Slough office. At the time that was about 80-100 people (interestingly another division in Brighton of about the same amount of people were ok to stay where they are because they had settled there or some such nonsense). So thats 80-100 extra people (vast majority lived in the same town as where they worked) driving down the motorway every day for no real reason (as it turns out). While they were at it they took a government division (we don't just do travel systems in the new firm) of around the same size and moved them from Slough (where most of them now lived) to our old offices. Heh

Now how come we have to come with more and more tax for cars when a company of the size I work for (think they have around 2500 workers worldwide) can add upto 200 commuters for no good reason overnight without any penalties? Well annoying. Similar annoyance that we have to pay import tax for anything we bring in to the country over a certain value, yet companies are allowed to outsource as many jobs as they want to any other country (for no extra charge as far as I know). Why not? After all you are basically getting something into the country that is far cheaper than you could have got here... Grrrr... (our main helpdesk dept. is a bit worried about that one)

Cheers